- Henry James and the Philosophical Novel: Being and Seeing
Merle A. Williams’s book is a welcome addition to the growing library on James and philosophy. The book’s title is somewhat misleading: for one thing, Williams focuses exclusively on James’s late fiction. Furthermore, if there is a tradition indicated by the phrase “the philosophical novel,” it is neither examined nor even referred to here. Instead, Williams offers a fresh look at the relationship between James’s late fictional methods and phenomenology. Unlike others who have written on this subject, Williams focuses primarily on James’s affinities with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, while offering occasional forays into what she describes as the phenomenological existentialism of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, de Beauvoir, and Sartre. Williams also includes a few brief excursions into William James’s and even Henry James, Sr.’s proto-phenomenology and a brief but important consideration of Marthinus Versfeld’s distinction between morality and moralism, a distinction which clears the way for the crucial link between what Williams presents as James’s phenomenology and his moral vision. In addition, Williams repeatedly links Merleau-Ponty’s richly dialectical phenomenology to such key Derridean motifs as différance, the fold, the trace, and the re-mark.
The most convincing philosophical reflections here are those centered on Merleau-Ponty. Williams brings many striking parallels to light, emphasizing the dialectical subtlety which sees authorial (or perceptual) control as always being [End Page 197] countered or modified by a posture of receptivity that marks the limits of any such control. This perspective informs Williams’s skepticism toward recent approaches to James that conflate the Master’s literary mastery with a totalizing, imperial will. Unfortunately, the references in this regard come too little and too late. To the extent that there is a case to be made for this kind of subtly dialectical imagination, that case is not given quite the prominence it deserves.
To some extent, this is because Williams often complicates matters more than she should. The constant insistence on the relevance of Derrida’s work to James’s fictional phenomenology is singularly unconvincing. Even if the mutual relevance of phenomenology and deconstruction can and should be established, the many detours here into Derridean terminology do very little to illuminate James’s particular brand of phenomenological narrative. Writing about The Ambassadors, Williams at one point claims that “the qualifying operation of différance suggests the need for repeated differential contrasts and puzzled deferments” (62). Chad, she notes, may be a “gentleman,” as Strether at one point declares, but he is also a “Pagan,” as he elsewhere concludes. “Although Strether steadily augments and modifies his stock of interpretative images,” Williams notes, “no fixed and final solution can be reached” (63). This seems to me an accurate characterization both of James’s conception of character and of his practice of narrative unfolding, but the easy melange of phenomenology and deconstruction dulls the edge of each. Deconstruction says something more than simply that there are no fixed and final solutions: it teases out internal contradictions in order to demonstrate that even tentative solutions cannot hold, that they are always split from within, that there is no coherent language with which even to begin to build an apt characterization. Phenomenology and deconstruction may indeed be ripe for a thorough-going reconciliation, but their hybrid product is not convincingly set out in these pages.
If Williams’s many efforts to draw Derrida into her argument are both distracting and unconvincing, her treatment of Merleau-Ponty is, by contrast, almost always illuminating. Williams does not attempt to present Merleau-Ponty’s work in anything like systematic fashion. Instead, she turns to concepts or passages from Merleau-Ponty as they prove useful in drawing out the logic of James’s representational methods in his late fiction. There is often a very fine balance between the discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of language and perception and the discussion of James’s fiction. The book is best, though, when the phenomenological vocabulary is loosely fit, as when Williams...