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  • What Henry Gave to William
  • Hannah Wells

Upon reading William James’s Pragmatism in 1907, Henry James wrote to his brother, “I was lost in the wonder of the extent to which all my life I have unconsciously pragmatised” (qtd. in Perry 428). Expressing more adoration than consent, Henry’s praise of his brother’s work seems to outpace his comprehension of it. “I can’t now explain,” he writes, “save by the very fact of the spell itself (of interest and enthrallment) that the book cast upon me; I simply sank down, under it, into such depths of submission and assimilation that any reaction, very nearly, even that of acknowledgment, would have had almost the taint of dissent or escape.” Noting this correspondence, Ralph Barton Perry provides a pithy summation of the intellectual relationship between the two brothers: “Henry let William do his philosophizing for him” (429). Two years later, after reading William’s A Pluralistic Universe, Henry would again write to his brother: “It may sustain and inspire you a little to know that I’m with you, all along the line—and can conceive of no sense in any philosophy that is not yours!” (qtd. in Perry 428). Suffused with awe, Henry’s praise is both an affectionate act and a statement of submission, a gift of himself that also gives philosophy to his brother. This confessional stance is a consistent feature of Henry’s work. The younger brother communicates with the elder less through reciprocal dialogue than through narratives given, stories of the self.

Appropriating Henry’s most affirming statements about William’s philosophical work, a number of scholars read the fiction of Henry in the light of William’s pragmatist philosophy. Framing pragmatism as a formative impulse for literary innovations of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, these critics tend to present Henry’s fiction as a practical extension of William’s pragmatism. Ross Posnock’s The Trial of Curiosity, most notably, identifies a pragmatist aesthetic exemplified by The American Scene.1 In addition to this work’s groundbreaking reading of Henry’s late prose, Posnock’s study provides a critical lens through which the praxis of pragmatism might itself be understood as an aesthetic. The result (in Posnock’s work and [End Page 34] elsewhere) is an increasingly refined description of Henry’s aesthetic engagement with modernity that doubles as a description of the liberatory potential associated with pragmatist philosophy. Extending this logic, more recent scholarship incorporates work by writers as diverse as Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Wallace Stevens, finding in pragmatism a philosophical matrix that is especially useful for isolating formal continuities in American literary history while dispensing with those older models of literary inheritance that seek to streamline and consolidate national and cultural traditions through the implication of homogeneity.2 Emphasizing pragmatism’s embrace of the particular as a mode of resistance to ideological certainty, identity politics, and imperialist aggression, these projects tend to elaborate on Posnock’s original claims. Henry, the argument goes, is a more pragmatic pragmatist than his elder brother, fulfilling William’s call by abandoning William’s nostalgia for a willful, cohesive self.

What if we were to reverse this narrative, focusing instead on what Henry gave to William? Rather than reading Henry’s most experimental prose as fulfillment of the impulse that inspired philosophical pragmatism, what if we were to find in Henry’s prose a more self-conscious, even critical, response to the philosophical conclusions of his brother? To do so is to raise questions about pragmatism and its legacy as well as the younger brother’s aesthetic practices. Rather than using one to account for the other, this line of inquiry places Henry’s prose and William’s philosophy in contemporaneous and generative relation to one another. It also makes visible the extent to which many of the protagonists of Henry’s late short stories, particularly the ones he wrote in the decades before and after The American Scene, have at least as much resemblance to William as they do to Henry. Posnock’s reading of Henry’s embrace of modernity is masterful, particularly its emphasis on the...

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