HAUNTED BY HENRY JAMES

1 8 Y H A U N T E D B Y H E N R Y J A M E S P A U L A M A R A N T Z C O H E N Not long ago, a colleague told me that he had recently tried to read Henry James’s novel The Golden Bowl and found he could not do it. Despite his extensive experience with di≈cult works of literature and philosophy, and despite having enjoyed James’s novels and stories running up through the 1880s, he had hit a wall with work from the so-called major phase of the late 1890s and beyond. Not only couldn’t he read The Golden Bowl, James’s last completed novel, he couldn’t read What Maisie Knew or The Turn of the Screw, shorter and arguably more accessible works from this late period. His response puzzled me. I had always assumed that there is a sort of continuum between early James and late, and that the recipe for appreciating late James is to fortify oneself with a good diet of earlier James and literature in general. My colleague was proof against this theory, and when I thought more on the subject I realized that I was proof against it too, albeit in reverse. For my own first encounter with James had occurred at an early point in my literary education and had been with a work from the major phase. The encounter had happened in an undergraduate literature survey course, where The Spoils of Poynton had been as- 1 9 R signed. Although the course was an intensive seminar for English majors, I don’t think the instructor, an assistant professor of medieval literature, had read the novel before putting it on the syllabus. He had chosen it, I surmise, because it looked relatively short and manageable. When it came time to discuss the book in class, everyone except me was of the same opinion. They pronounced it ‘‘overwritten,’’ ‘‘snobbish,’’ ‘‘a√ected,’’ ‘‘virtually unreadable.’’ Although I was then much shyer than I am now and had had no exposure to the great body of Jamesian criticism, I held out in the face of this abuse. I knew the book was important in ways the others were clearly missing. Let me skip forward to a recent incident that connects to this college experience obliquely. About a year ago, I happened to be invited to a talk on functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging by my university’s biomedical engineering department. The speaker discussed some of the rudimentary studies his team was doing on the way the brain reacts to hearing a story read aloud. Certain kinds of stimulation apparently cause certain segments of the brain to light up – which is to say, to respond in consistent ways. The study, which like much work on fMRI is still in its rudimentary stages, did not distinguish among the subjects doing the listening . However, one of the researchers pointed me to a related study that claimed to be able to distinguish between literate and illiterate subjects in a similar sort of experiment. Not much could be made of the di√erence – all the researchers in that study could say was that the literate and the illiterate subjects responded differently . This led me to postulate a more subtle, but not unrelated di√erence between the brains of those who can and those who can’t read work from James’s major phase. One’s immediate thought might be that the parallel I want to draw is between the ability to read late James and the literate respondents in the fMRI study. But it is the opposite alignment that seems to me more likely: that the readers of late James might in fact be more like the illiterate respondents. I say this for a number of reasons. My friend who couldn’t read The Golden Bowl is a far better reader in a literal sense than I am – faster and more retentive, with a better ability to extract the major points from a text. The same can be said for the other students in that intensive English course I took back in...