-
“So as Not to Arrive”: The Object-Theater of Late Jamesian Consciousness
- The Henry James Review
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 37, Number 1, Winter 2016
- pp. 64-81
- 10.1353/hjr.2016.0000
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Henry James’s late style in the House of Fiction metaphor and The Golden Bowl elicits a dual reading practice demanding both formal analysis that traces the dematerialization of objects in the fictional world and a reifying attitude that permits these objects a material presence around which scenes are constructed. At key moments, consciousness is simultaneously metaphorized as an object and theatricalized as a scene in which the conscious character interacts with the original object-metaphor. If the materiality and even figurality of these objects are unstable, it is in this phenomenal instability that these moments’ affective intensity originates.