In the preface to his short story ‘The Pupil’ (1891), Henry James claimed,

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.