James & Experience

ELT 44 : 4 2001 tets as love poetry and serves as a work that helps initiate Eliot's quest for his own "vita nuova in divine Love." Another explicit reworking of a conventional idea about Eliot occurs in Chapter Seven, which offers an intriguing and ultimately successful recontextualization of the poet's moral criticism of the 1930s through the figure of Baudelaire. Typically dismissed as irrelevant, distracting, and even embarrassing reflections of Eliot's religious and moral orthodoxy, this later prose is reexamined through Baudelaire's idea of blasphemy. Schuchard finally sees Eliot positioning "moral" work against the entirely "imaginative," a dichotomy that fits in with Eliot's life-long habit of establishing hierarchies as a method of valuation. In the 1930s, this vocabulary allowed Eliot to measure literature with instruments that did not limit themselves to the literary but that could accommodate the larger questions of "truth" and "greatness," two words that had preoccupied the poet throughout his critical and creative careers. This prose, then, served to enlarge Eliot 's critical perspective rather than limit it, which is how many readers have typically viewed this body of writing. My complaints about the volume are few and far between. In one or two instances, I had hoped Schuchard could have offered more extended commentary on an Eliot quotation he cites other than to remark that "we nod knowingly." In light of Schuchard's biographical approach, it is surprising how infrequently the major biographies of Eliot—those by Ron Bush and Lyndall Gordon, for example—make an appearance. I would have liked to see an explicit and comprehensive placement of Schuchard's version of Eliot within (or outside of) those readings. Having said that, it's also fair to point out Schuchard's major strengths: his capacity for tracking down and employing evidence in absorbing and original ways; his ability to contextualize Eliot's life and work within a variety of biographical and literary frameworks; and his talent for charting influence within Eliot's work. A virtual paradigm of the rich potentialities inherent in biographically oriented criticism, Eliot's Dark Angel goes a long way toward not only highlighting the intersections of life and art but helping reinvigorate the presence of the life in the art of this major modernist artist. Richard Badenhausen ______________ Marshall Universiy James & Experience Colin Meissner. Henry James and the Language of Experience. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ix + 237 pp. $59.95 520 BOOK REVIEWS THIS NEW phenomenological study of James seeks to "give an account of James's hermeneutics in his own terms." His is a "hermeneutics of experience"; and against still-influential critical narratives that have constructed James as a pristine formalist or apolitical aesthete, Jamesian experience is for Colin Meissner resolutely social in its repercussions and implications. Specifically, "the coercive force of capital is the politics of experience in James's texts," and Meissner's readings of The American, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Ambassadors examine those novels' critiques of the reifying epistemologies that are imposed and naturalized by modern consumer culture. Far from enforcing a complicitous continuity between power and narrative form, as Mark Seltzer claimed in Henry James and the Art of Power (1984), Meissner's different Foucauldian James exposes and interrogates invisible and repressive perceptual structures. Following Gadamer, Meissner sees Jamesian experience as an ongoing dialectic in which the protagonist's successive failures of understanding make possible provisional new constructions of the world. Jamesian experience is thus negative in character because it overturns our interpretive categories and "always takes away something we heretofore had accepted as understood." The narrative innovation of the center of consciousness, which depends on "a notion of a flexible self receptive to experience and the opportunity for liberation which experience offers," both formally realizes this receptive self and dramatizes James's conviction that the novel aims ultimately to "make the mind as aware of itself as possible" ("The New Novel," quoted in Meissner, 29). For Meissner, The American is programmatically Jamesian in its dramatization of the conflict between "acquisitive" and "revisionary" approaches to experience. Christopher Newman, the novel's American millionaire protagonist, exemplifies an acquisitive model in which experience is understood in terms...