Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I READING THE FOURTH DIMENSION
- Part II READING THROUGH THE FOURTH DIMENSION
- Chapter Four Four-Dimensional Consciousness: The Correspondence between William James and Charles Howard Hinton
- Chapter Five H. G. Wells's Four-Dimensional Literary Aesthetic
- Chapter Six Exceeding ‘the Trap of the Reflexive’: Henry James's Dimensions of Consciousness
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter Six - Exceeding ‘the Trap of the Reflexive’: Henry James's Dimensions of Consciousness
from Part II - READING THROUGH THE FOURTH DIMENSION
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I READING THE FOURTH DIMENSION
- Part II READING THROUGH THE FOURTH DIMENSION
- Chapter Four Four-Dimensional Consciousness: The Correspondence between William James and Charles Howard Hinton
- Chapter Five H. G. Wells's Four-Dimensional Literary Aesthetic
- Chapter Six Exceeding ‘the Trap of the Reflexive’: Henry James's Dimensions of Consciousness
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the preface to his short story ‘The Pupil’ (1891), Henry James claimed,
All I have given […] is little Morgan's troubled vision of [his family] as reflected in the vision, also troubled enough, of his devoted friend. The manner of the thing may thus illustrate the author's incorrigible taste for gradation and superpositions of effect; his love, when it is a question of a picture, of anything that makes for proportion and perspective, that contributes to a view of all the dimensions. Addicted to seeing ‘through’ – one thing through another, accordingly, and still other things through that – he takes, too greedily perhaps, on any errand, as many things as possible by the way. It is after this fashion that he incurs the stigma of labouring uncannily for a certain fulness of truth – truth diffused, distributed and, as it were, atmospheric.
James's explicit statement of interest in refracted perception, on looking through multiple lenses of consciousness, is implicitly supported by the complex structure of the sentences here. Writing of Henry James's later style, Hazel Hutchison argues that while his ‘late novels are primarily concerned with problems of expression and form, and should be read through the lens of Modernism […] this position confines James's work to the trap of the reflexive and limits its ability to inform or explain anything outside itself’. At issue here is the problem of how to combine the transcendental with the material: if there is nothing outside of text, is there any way to rise above the surface of textuality, to see through? In James's formulation above, ‘a view of all the dimensions’ would perhaps allow ‘a certain fulness of truth’ to be obtained by the author. Here James was writing about a story from his middle period, where it is specifically the author who is allowed the privilege of viewing through multiple lenses of consciousness; in his later fictions, he attempted to dramatize the experience – through his central characters’ developing consciousness – of possessing a view of all the dimensions.
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- Before EinsteinThe Fourth Dimension in Fin-de-Siècle Literature and Culture, pp. 167 - 194Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2017