Leo Bersani, Terrence Malick’s Witt, and Henry James: A Future Past for Astyanax?

Leo Bersani’s A Future for Astyanax argues that Henry James’s fiction strains against the conventions of literary realism but does not successfully free itself from aesthetic realism’s ideological shortcomings. Despite Bersani’s consequent consignment of James to the cultural past, however, Bersani’s later writing, especially his analysis of the character of Witt in Terrence Malick’s film The Thin Red Line, suggests that Bersani might yet number James among the companions of Astyanax. It is possible to see in Bersani’s emphasis on Witt’s capacity for passively registering experience and being, penetrated by it, a potential for a closer convergence of James’s art with Bersani’s thought.