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Reading into Henry James
Criticism, Wntr, 2004 by Jonathan Flatley
Ironically, achieving the "sense of communication" requires actually that one fail to communicate in the usual sense of that word. There must be just enough noncomprehension for "reading into" to happen, since it is the breakdown of clear understanding that motivates one to guess at meanings. Such speculation involves an imaginative imitation of the writer, "getting behind" (as James liked to put it) the writer so as to see the world as the writer does. As part of this mimesis, the reader must also create or project that person behind the text with whom he or she will identify. This is why Paul de Man insisted that prosopopoiea, the creation (poiea) of a face or person (prosopon), is the master trope of reading. Strictly speaking, in de Man's view, because texts in themselves do not produce meaning, reading (in the sense of fixing a meaning) always requires first that you imagine a person having thoughts and feelings which the text itself leaves undecidable, to authorize your reading. To produce "a reading," for de Man, always requires an extratextual intervention in a moment of specular, mimetic "mutual reflexive substitution" with that person we have pictured. (15)
This act of imagination and imposition on the part of the reader creates a moment that is peculiarly ripe for the appearance of powerful emotions. The phenomenon is analogous to the reenactments of past emotions Freud observed in the scene of analysis that he called "transference." Noticing intense, seemingly unmotivated appearances of both positive and negative affects during analysis, Freud came to realize that his patients were transferring feelings from past objects onto the person of the analyst, substituting the analyst for the past object on the basis of some real or imagined similarity. At first this seemed to be a problem because this hallucinatory repetition of past emotions distracted the analysand from remembering and recounting, therefore acting as a kind of barrier or stalling tactic ("resistance"). Freud soon realized, however (and here I am schematizing and simplifying what was for Freud a long, characteristically complex engagement with a basic problem), (16) that the transference was the key to the cure because it was perhaps the only way these affects made it into the scene of analysis.
In order to aid the perceptions of similarity that facilitated the transference, Freud recommended that analysts be relatively unemotional in therapy sessions. (17) Assisting further is the classic analytic scenario with the patient on a couch and the analyst behind him or her, requiring the patient to imagine the face of the analyst. As the analysand spoke, he or she would have to guess at the analyst's emotional responses: Is the analyst pleased, surprised, saddened, embarrassed? With no actual face distracting our mimetic faculties, the imagination has more room with which to create the face that would allow those non-abreacted affects that have been buried or otherwise lost to reappear. Two things happen here at the same time and seem to require each other: on the one hand, the prosopopoetic imagination of the other (who can substitute for a past other), and on the other, the appearance of the affect itself. Thus Benjamin's aphorism: "No imagination without innervation." (18)
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