Henry James and the Language of Experience

Yearbook of English Studies, Annual, 2002 by Peter Rawlings

Henry James and the Language of Experience. By Collin Meissner. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 1999. ix 237 pp. 37.50 [pounds sterling]; $59.95.

Lambert Strether of The Ambassadors, with his `dynamic of living forward and understanding backward' (p. 164) typifies, for Collin Meissner, James's centres of consciousness in The American, The Portrait of a Lady, and elsewhere, a dynamic culminating in James's retrospective construction of his own subjectivity in the autobiographical writings. Everywhere contested in James's fiction is the imposing of a `static form upon [...] a fluid and ever-modulating reality' (p. 163). Meissner's fervour is for the explanatory power of the `hermeneutic circle' and its ramifications, especially as propounded by Hans-Georg Gadamer. Interpretation is `always already influenced by one's expectations', and these expectations `invariably lead to a moment of destabilizing bewilderment' during which `the character', and possibly the reader, project `hypotheses in an attempt to grasp the whole of reality' (p. 163).

`Experience is something one lives through and suffers', and if there is a `recovery from the inscription of cultural hegemony' (p. 5), it allows a movement from `bewilderment' to `enlightenment' (p. 2). The rift between `a subject's private reflections on any given event' (Meissner has faith in such things) and the `social discourse that inscribes' them are `specifically produced by modern culture's unswerving attention to the acquisition of material goods' (p. 7). Within this analytical framework, two incompatible theories of experience are identified in James: the `cumulative [...] which understands experience as something to be acquired' (p. 12), and the transformative (rather than affirmative) `open and revisionary mode' (p. 37). Newman and Strether in Paris, together with Isabel Archer in Rome, represent an orchestrating of `deeply involved' participations in `alien worlds whose cultures and language force the visitor into a radical self-examination' and the development of a `subjectivity which is permeable' (pp. 16, 17). There are times when Meissner drifts into a discourse of quasi-evangelical dogmatism as he enthuses over breaking `free' and escaping `into an understanding of self, other, and culture' (p. 24); then, the impression is of novels which have become merely illustrative of a priori critical obsessions. Henry James and the Language of Experience occasionally veers towards crossing the thin line between offering a telling juxtaposition of James's corpus and one hermeneutic spin among many, and the disabling application of an idee fixe.

The treatment of Isabel Archer is a case in point. Isabel and Ralph are construed as being a `powerful testimonial for the need to recognize freedom as a primary requisite for originary artistic production' (p. 85), James `recognizing in Isabel's struggle for independence the very struggle he felt characterized his own life' (p. 89). Moreover, Isabel exemplifies `art under threat' (p. 85) and the exigency of a `practical wisdom [...] intimately associated with a process of disillusionment' (p. 81). What Isabel achieves, an experience the text is seen as urging on the reader, is an apprehension of `the consequences of perceptual constriction' consonant with James's aesthetic position as a whole. Yet, contrary to this view, the novel can be read as deconstructing the organicist theories of character-generated plot and artistic freedom on which it is nominally predicated. James's plan, inherent in his very conception of the novel, was to dramatize the material, destructive imperatives of an inevitably transitive and transient imagination, challenging the validity of coercive categories such as `freedom' other than in ideal, imaginary, realms. Meissner overlooks the notebook entry which stipulates, from the outset, that Isabel is to be `ground in the very mill of the conventional', James going on (as he conspires, metatextually, against readers of whom he was less fond than Meissner supposes) to salivate over `the art required for making' Isabel's `delusion natural' (The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. by F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 15).

Despite expressing a belief in the possibility of returning `"consciousness," "subjectivity," and "experience" to critical discourse without either essentializing, reifying, or psychologizing them' (p. 12), Meissner in effect recuperates these mystifying categories. Paradoxically, that `permeability' of character which this book abstracts as one of James's main goals eludes Meissner when he fails to acknowledge the limitations of his own position. If Gadamer's mission was to attack `"the tyranny of [...] prejudices" that colour our horizon' (p. 94), he first needed to consider the difficulty of postulating an achromatic world.

PETER RAWLINGS
UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST OF ENGLAND