Realism and Imagination in the Thought of Henry and William James: A Conversation

In the fall of 1996 on the James Family “listserv,” an Internet discussion group, ¹ Jonathan Levin and I carried on a brief and lively discussion concerning the influence of Immanuel Kant on Henry James’s “imagination.” The editor of this journal, Susan M. Griffin, suggested we continue our conversation with an eye toward eventual publication, but the discussion lapsed until the spring of 1997 when an observation by Harvey J. Cormier started us up again. Cormier asked for reactions to a hypothesis he was exploring—that Henry and William James shared a perspective which might be characterized as “literary realism.” In his preface to The American, for instance, Henry James had contrasted his realistic fiction with the “romances” written by Hawthorne and others:

The balloon of experience is in fact of course tied to the earth, and under that necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable length, in the more or less commodious car of the imagination; but it is by the rope we know where we are. . . . The art of the romancer is, “for the fun of it,” insidiously to cut the cable. . . .

(FW 1064)

I posted an enthusiastic concurrence, but commented that for Henry James, at least, realism was of a particular Kantian moral sort.

Jonathan Levin responded, and this conversation followed. I hope that Cormier will not mind the use we have made of his informal suggestion, with which we both agree and for which we thank him. Jonathan and I left the bulletin board and carried on our exchange privately. We have only lightly edited our remarks for print.—SMN

Levin: I find myself wondering if your sense of Kant’s influence isn’t too general and wanting especially to trot out some of William James’s amusing dismissals of Kant. To a former student: “Pray contribute no farther (having hereby proved your capacity) to philosophy’s prison-discipline of dragging Kant around like a cannon-ball tied to its ankle.” As James once said, philosophic progress lay “not so much through Kant as round him” (qtd. in Perry 716). By the time William James finally got around to reading Kant, his basic affinities were well established, and those affinities were much more on the side of Locke and Hume than Kant.

What matters to me about William’s response to Kant is the extraordinary heat with which he felt it. James admired Kant enough to read him seriously (albeit dismissively), but what he especially could not abide was the neo-Kantian, neo-Hegelian influence among his contemporaries: all forms of what he called absolutism or absolute monism. Kant offended James’s empiricist and pluralist sensibility. And my own sense is that Henry, too, shared William’s distrust, that when he finally acknowledged that he had been unconsciously pragmatizing all along, he was identifying with both the heat and the substance of his brother’s reaction to absolutizing habits of mind.

We seem to agree already that Henry is trying to conceptualize a realist imagination, but I am struck by the extent to which this realist imagination is always a matter, for Henry James, of ever finer perceptions of empirical detail. The flush of imagination, to coin a Jamesian phrasing, is always a matter of an infinite accumulation of detailed perceptions, a super-fine discriminating attentiveness that amounts, I think, to an irreducible plurality of perceptions. When James is trying to distinguish “the air of romance” from “the element of reality” in the preface to The American, he runs into the problem of determining just what constitutes the felt difference: what is there, finally, to put one’s finger on, as it were. “It is a question,” he writes, “no doubt, on the painter’s part, very much more of perceived effect, effect after the fact, than of conscious design—though indeed I have ever failed to see how a coherent picture of anything is producible save by a complex of fine measurements” (FW 1061–62). What is striking to me here in the context of our discussion is the reduction...