In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • What Does James Show His Readers in The Wings of the Dove?
  • Kristin Boyce

Henry James is famous for distinguishing the “mere platitude of statement” from “vivid,” “artful” representation ( FW 1154). In so doing, he anticipates a distinction between “saying” and “showing” that came to be important in both philosophical and literary contexts. As he initially draws it, the distinction at issue is one between two different ways of conveying a single content. But in some places in his later work, the emphasis shifts to a distinction between two kinds of content: “effable” content that can be stated or “said” and “ineffable” content that exceeds the limited resources of language and can only be gestured at or shown. Thus, in “Is There Life After Death?” James characterizes the task of the artist as that of “carrying the field of consciousness further and further, making it lose itself in the ineffable” (Matthiessen 611). This second parsing of the distinction has gained traction. For example, J. Hillis Miller attributes to James the “impossible task” of “reducing the infinite to the finite,” that is, of attempting to express it in “finite form” (109). Similarly, John Bayley interprets him as aspiring to express with the “closest compression of form” a subject that “cannot be clearly stated” (47, 209, 210). In philosophical contexts, this distinction has played a central role for interpreters of Wittgenstein. When the topic at hand is the troubled relation between philosophy and literature it takes on an added importance. It appears to track a natural division of labor: literature shows those truths that philosophy, limited as it is to the mere platitude of statement, cannot say.

From a philosophical perspective, there are good reasons to be uneasy about parsing the say/show distinction, at least as it figures in Wittgenstein’s work, as marking a contrast between effable and ineffable truths. 1 Some recent interpreters have argued that it is best understood instead along the lines of the distinction between “knowing that” and “knowing how”: one says that something is the case but shows someone how to do something. 2 Robert Pippin has recently brought the “knowing that”/”knowing how” distinction to bear in order to illuminate What Maisie Knew: [End Page 1]

Maisie has to learn something: how one might speak for oneself. She has to learn how to “know her own mind,” even how “to come into possession” of her own mind . . . James, in other words, is not treating “knowing one’s own mind” as a perceptual turn inward but as involving a number of practical abilities.

(127)

In other words, what Maisie knows at the end of James’s novel is not propositional knowledge (effable or ineffable) but know-how: a set of skills that is the condition for the possibility of becoming an adult.

It is no small step from a reading like Pippin’s (about what one of James’s protagonists comes to know) to a claim that what James shows his reader is not ineffable truths but some form of “know-how.” It would, I think, be productive to attempt such a reading, but I will pursue a different possibility, one suggested by some remarks of Mary Mothersill’s. In the context of discussing the special pleasures and frustrations of “getting to know” a work of art, Mothersill argues that philosophers have focused too exclusively on “knowing that” and “knowing how” to the exclusion of a third and distinct form of knowledge, “knowledge of an individual”:

Philosophical concern with knowledge has focused largely on thought and on action, hence on knowing “that p” or on knowing “how to Ø.” Knowledge of individuals has been slighted—which is odd since most of us care more about persons (including ourselves) and about things (including our possessions) than we do about acquiring information and mastering skills.

(332)

One might pause to wonder how philosophy, which in some moods still prides itself on being a footnote to the great writings of Plato, could find itself so indifferent to that form of knowledge without which there is no possibility of leading an examined life. But although James at least appears to be more ambivalent about the value of such a life...

pdf

Share