Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Jamesian thinking and philosophy as story-telling
- 1 What Maisie Knew: the challenge of vision
- 2 The Ambassadors: observation and interpretation … passion and compassion
- 3 The Wings of the Dove: self and society
- 4 The Spoils of Poynton: experiments in subjectivity and truth
- 5 The Golden Bowl: the complex of shaping relations
- Conclusion: Henry James's version of the philosophical novel
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion: Henry James's version of the philosophical novel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Jamesian thinking and philosophy as story-telling
- 1 What Maisie Knew: the challenge of vision
- 2 The Ambassadors: observation and interpretation … passion and compassion
- 3 The Wings of the Dove: self and society
- 4 The Spoils of Poynton: experiments in subjectivity and truth
- 5 The Golden Bowl: the complex of shaping relations
- Conclusion: Henry James's version of the philosophical novel
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In 1904 Henry James returned to America after an absence of twenty years, and was almost overcome by the magnitude and complexity of the changes which he perceived. The American Scene records his attempts at describing and coming to imaginative grips with a homeland made strangely new and alien. What this volume of travel sketches displays with peculiar vividness, according to Sharon Cameron, is the power of an assertive consciousness to dominate objects, or even to ‘dispense’ with them, so that the focus of the commentary becomes something like Jamesian consciousness itself. While this reading seems to me neatly over-ingenious, it does cast light upon James's intense struggle – both with himself and with various cultural or demographic phenomena - to make sense of the rush of bewildering experiences which assailed him. His treatment of the Jewish ghetto in New York, for instance, presents a curious compound of surprise, aversion and penetrating social analysis. Some of his remarks savour of unrelieved prejudice:
There are small strange animals, known to natural history, snakes or worms, I believe, who, when cut into pieces, wriggle away contentedly and live in the snippet as completely as in the whole. So the denizens of the New York Ghetto, heaped as thick as the splinters on the table of a glass-blower, had each, like the fine glass particle, his or her individual share of the whole hard glitter of Israel.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Henry James and the Philosophical Novel , pp. 222 - 231Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993