The Princess Casamassima: "a dirty intellectual fog"

World was in the face of the beloved—,but suddenly it poured out and was gone:world is outside, world can not be grasped.

Why didn’t I, from the full, beloved faceas I raised it to my lips, why didn’t I drinkworld, so near that I could almost taste it?

Ah, I drank. Insatiably I drank.But I was filled up also, with too muchworld, and, drinking, I myself ran over.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus

In one of his fits of reflection Hyacinth Robinson finds himself fumbling “blindly, obstructedly, in a kind of eternal dirty intellectual fog” which has cast a vague cloud over what he sees as an “irresistible reality” (281). What one comes to see through the “fog,” James suggests, is how much what we take as reality is actually a secondary and incomplete version constructed by the epistemological systems we invariably use as forms of mediation between what is and how we understand what is. The important work of perception then, James argues throughout The Princess and other texts, is to remain open to one’s impressions as impressions, to never confine experiences within the artificial strictures of an interpretive system such as an aesthetic or political apparatus. His novels, The American or The Portrait of a Lady or The Ambassadors, like The Princess Casamassima, challenge our unreflective reliance on the bedrock evidence of empiricism by forcing us to examine why we feel comfortable with our experiences. In forcing a confrontation between the reader’s interpretive routine and Hyacinth Robinson’s sense of things, The Princess takes away the ground on which interpretation normally occurs. A conceptual rift appears in which the reader is cut loose from the coerciveness of interpretive paradigms and forced to make his or her way through the political and aesthetic experiences of the text individually.

The consequences for The Princess Casamassima, for the novel as a genre, and for critical examinations of fiction are profound. In foregrounding and exposing the hermeneutic failure that seems to be a default mode in almost every act of perception, James allows the individual and the aesthetic to escape into an incredibly wide and powerful freedom which can bring one up against the very boundaries of reality. The event of this interpretive renegotiation reinvests the notion of subjectivity with some measure of critical force because it shows how the subject is socially constituted, but shows too how the subject, through its participation in the world, is also open to individual changes and developments. The artist’s challenge, James indicates over and over throughout his fiction, is to embrace this task, which includes rendering oneself susceptible to the almost overwhelming force of perception such openness introduces. The dangers, James also shows, are multiple: think of the narrator of The Sacred Fount or the anonymous young woman in the London telegraph office in the novella In the Cage. In these instances James shows how indistinguishable the compositional nature of interpretation is from fiction and how easily it can become pathological. The Princess Casamassima, to some extent, is the site on which James faces the risk and danger associated with interpretation and explores what those risks and dangers mean to us as well as what they say of the artist who faces them head on at every moment of every day. Not surprisingly, the novel shows Hyacinth Robinson’s tragic failure just as it sharply defines James as particularly unique and successful.

The preface to The Princess Casamassima invites us to read Hyacinth Robinson’s experience as an approximate representation of the youthful Henry James’s initiatory encounter with the London world. But while Hyacinth demonstrates the passion of a Jamesian figure, he falls far short of the sublimity. ¹ Nevertheless, James’s invitation to regard Hyacinth as representative of himself raises a larger autobiographical question: how is Hyacinth, a hyperaesthete, actually like James? And, what’s more interesting, how is he not? Hyacinth Robinson doesn’t just approximate James’s sensibilities; he also embodies everything James felt he’d outgrown as an artist. A child-like romantic, Hyacinth is...