The Disease of Temporality; or, Forgetful Reading in James and Lubbock

A characteristic moment in Henry James's criticism--the attack on amnesiac novel readers who want nothing more than to follow absorbing plot sequences--points us to James's key differences from earlier physiological Victorian novel theory, which was largely based on investigating, and treating as standard, such reader responses. James therefore initiates the tradition of spatializing the novel rather than treating it as a temporal form, a procedure carried on by Percy Lubbock, whose version of James's criticism paradoxically reinvents a forgetful reader who needs the novel to perform acts of prosthetic remembrance.