William James's Narrative of Habit

Style, Spring, 1999 by Renee Tursi

It is in a kind of poetics of habit that he makes what he can of the whole experience. He writes to Alice that as "memory and sensation all whirled inexplicably together," he felt the experience would be "worth repeating year by year, if repetition could only procure what in its nature I suppose must be all unplanned for and unexpected" (77). He believed that in such a habit-related idea he understood what a poet is: "a person who can feel the immense complexity of influences that I felt, and make some partial tracks in them for verbal statement." A month later, in an address delivered at Berkeley, he was able to make the more confident pronouncement that poets and philosophers are both "path-finders" in that respect, and that the articulation of such an uncanny "boulder of impression" has something to do with habitual canny-making narrative properties (Pragmatism 258). In The Varieties of Religious Experience, he describes how this poetic task evolves in the human spirit. A "sick soul" will recognize "the profoundest astonishment" at his own unsatisfactory state and will say to himself:

The strangeness is wrong. The unreality cannot be. A mystery is concealed, and a metaphysical solution must exist. If the natural world is so double-faced and unhomelike, what world, what thing is real? An urgent wondering and questioning is set up, a poring theoretic activity, and in the desperate effort to get into right relations with the matter, the sufferer is often led to what becomes for him a satisfying religious solution. (128)

Thus his habit-driven narrative again reveals in its language the desperate human need to banish metaphysical homelessness.

Moreover, it is not without significance that James remarks on the Americanism of his New Hampshire experience. If in the course of his life James's narrative of habit banished a certain amount of his own metaphysical homelessness, he seems to find here another kind of home in the inevitable habits of his own Americanness. He emphasizes that a good part of its poetic "appeal" was "its everlasting freshness and its immemorial antiquity and decay; its utter Americanism, and every sort of patriotic suggestiveness, and you [his wife, Alice], and my relation to you part and parcel of it all" (Letters 2: 76-77). A real anchor of hearth and home, expressed in strong nativist terms, emerges here, and when one considers the opening of his first Edinburgh lecture - where he reflects historically on how little American intellectuals have talked while Europeans listened, when the contrary has so prevailed - one can hear the legacies of Emerson and Whitman in this philosophical poet very much at home in the confident, narratable habits of his "native wilderness" (Varieties 12).

Another revealing, albeit less spiritual, example of just how habit allows James's own writing to unfold can be found in his reflections on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the effects of which he experienced first-hand during a semester spent lecturing at Stanford University. His acquaintance Charles M. Bakewell, a Yale philosophy professor, had sent James off to the West Coast with the uncanny wish that "'they'll treat you to a little bit of an earthquake while you're there'" (Letters 2: 248). In recalling his reactions later in "On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake," James claims that, after the earthquake's impact had jolted him involuntarily upright in his bed, what he felt foremost was an "emotion" consisting for the most part of "glee" and "admiration" (a chronology that supports his physiologically-based idea that emotions follow actions, not vice versa) (Essays in Psychology 332). He explains that this feeling of delight arose in him at the "vividness which such an abstract idea or verbal term as 'earthquake' could put on when translated into sensible reality and verified concretely."