The James Family: Psychoanalysis and Fiction

Selected Papers on Henry James, 1987-88 Editor's Note: I had the good fortune in 1987-88 to attend four meetings that saw the presentation of memorable papers on Henry James. These were the Henry James Society sessions at the 1987 and 1988 MLA meetings; the NYU meeting on the James family and Italy, co-sponsored by NYU and the Enciclopedia Italiana in April, 1988; and the symposium "From Text to Performance" held in conjunction with the world premiere of Dominick Argento 's opera The Aspern Papers and co-sponsored by the Dallas Opera and SMU. The papers from the NYU meeting are being gathered in a book under the editorship of James W. Tuttleton. In this issue we offer a selection of papers from the other three meetings just mentioned; unfortunately, space permits only a selection from among the many excellent papers presented. A number of persons spoke at all three meetings, but no one except Leon Edel is represented more than once in our selection, and some speakers who spoke several times are wholly omitted—we have not included, for instance, the remarks I made in San Francisco, Dallas, and New Orleans. In the interest of including as many pieces as possible, moreover, these papers have not been expanded, and they have been stripped of scholarly apparatus, so that, with very minor revisions, what you read below is what the people attending the meetings heard.—DMF James Society Meetings: San Francisco, 1987 Editor's Note: The James Society meetings in 1987 were arranged and presided over by Adeline R. Tintner and were dedicated to Leon Edel on his eightieth birthday. The first session was titled "The James Family"; the second, "The Late James." Included here are papers from the first session by Richard A. Hocks, Alfred Habegger, Gloria Fromm, Jane Maher, and Leon Edel; and, from the second, papers by Bonney MacDonald, Carol Holly, and Donald D. Stone, as well as some further brief remarks by Professor Edel. Richard A. Hocks—The James Family: Psychoanalysis and Fiction My title today alludes in part to a subject of long-standing interest, inasmuch as I have written on the relation between Henry James's later fiction and William James's later thought. But it more truly refers to a specifically remarkable and 78 The Henry James Review memorable conference in Chicago a number of years ago on "Psychoanalysis and Biography," hosted by the Institute for Psychoanalysis and focusing on the James family. I shall return to that conference in a moment and then stay with it, for I am certain very few members of this audience attended it, one conspicuous exception being of course Leon Edel, who was its central figure and raison d'être. First, however, I wish to make an observation about James criticism over roughly the last decade from the perspective of one who reads and assesses it for the Henry James Review and, more recently, for American Literary Scholarship. Psychoanalytic studies abound, and Edel's always pervasive impact seems to me particularly strong in the re-evaluation of James's autobiographical works. At the same time, I am greatly struck by the fact that, though Henry James conceived himself a realist and my academic generation generally thought him a psychological realist, criticism now decisively focuses more and more not on his realism or truth about life but on his transcendence of the limitations of realism. If one can judge from recent interpretive studies—meaning articles as well as books—James's work is generally thought to be neo-romantic or, most frequently, modern and postmodern. Much of this arises from contemporary critical theory, which is on the whole inimical to nineteenth-century realism, psychological or otherwise. While this has occurred with Henry James studies, it is interesting to glance over at William James for a moment and discover that the same year that produced John Rowe's brilliant Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James also produced Howard Feinstein's meticulously researched psychobiography, Becoming William James, a book notable for such narrative mêmes and motifs as these: William's psycho-transmitted vocational struggles in the light of remarkably similar ones by Henry Sr.; William's conflicts...