The Master

Typically when I "teach" I avoid lecturing--I prefer to ask questions and try and engage students with the material at hand. When it comes to big unpleasant and overly academic writers like Henry James and James Joyce, however, I do lecture for most of a class period before we discuss the text, spending more than the usual 50 minutes on these two dead white dudes. Despite the fact that no one outside of academia reads these guys anymore, and very few of those who do read J. and J. read them for pleasure, their importance in the canon is such that we can't ignore them in Tradition and Form in Western Fiction. So today I lectured for about 25 minutes straight on James, his biography, his aesthetic, and his major themes and works. I actually felt professorial and completely confortable with my material, which is rare these days. I used "The Art of Fiction" to discuss James' elevation of the novel from mere "entertainment" to an art form (...there was a feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that our only business with it could be to swallow it.), and his concern with Truth, and representing the world as it is and not as it ideally should be, and how he hoped to erase from the text all authorial intrusion, leading to dramatic innovations with POV--but above all he was concerned with recreating in fiction the effects of consciousness. Getting a roomful of teens to care about this at 9am is hard enough, but getting them to understand it entails further difficulties. I used Van Gogh as an example--his paintings reflect the world as he SAW it, filtered through the lens of his epilepsy and madness; each of us has a unique experience of the world, and only shabby, imperfect tools (words) to try and compare our experience to others. The world we experience, while based on perceptions of external reality, is wholly subjective, and even perceiving the classroom in which we were trapped during my lecture, I said, was tricky to describe as process. The classroom we inhabit is NOT reality, but a reflection recreated within our skulls after a variety of input has been accepted, processed, and filtered--and we typically blend in emotional and judgmental responses in that recreation at a pre-conscious level.

James himself: Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider web of the finest silken threats suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind...

Old Henry was concerned with crafting fiction in which the characters all had consciousness which grew truthfully out of their personal experience--and the latter certainly helps form the former, complicating things further.

Of course, often his theoretical and aesthetic concerns resulted in the absence of STORY and PLOT and an over-emphasis on technique and character. This, however is a matter of taste, and in looking at the evolution of fictional form in the Western tradition, we can't focus on taste; we have to look at representative examples of changes and innovations and cover as many trends and major figures as we can in 14 weeks. And I told the students frankly that it's ok to hate James--most readers do, and they avoid his work in droves. But his effect trickles down through everything done since, whether or not he was or is liked.

So we have The Turn of the Screw, which is a good example of James playing elaborate games with POV: the story is narrated by a nameless gentleman who first heard the tale told at a fireside by his acquaintance Douglass, who was in possession of a handwritten manuscript given him by the woman who experienced first hand the events in the story. There are shells and layers and onionskins of narrative here, in effect distancing us from the events numerous times. In discussing the tale, we must ask why James decided to use this structure; what does it mean that the Governess wrote the story later and ommitted certain details that Douglass tells the narrator second-hand? There are two schools of criticism about this novella (and more has been written about this story than any other), one claiming that it is an actual haunting, the other claiming that the ghosts are hallucinations of a disordered mind. I asked them to consider these options as they finish the story for Wednesday, and then showed them a part of The Innocents, an early 60s film adaptation penned by Truman Capote, who used the latter critical trend in his adoptation, focusing on the perverse and the Freudian elements (which James stringently disavowed).

My latest take on the story is that James is giving us, in his Governess, a portrait of the hyperanalytic, intuitive, author he so tried to be--but gone completely off the deep end. In his "The Art of Fiction," James argues that writers should not stick to "what they know," but should be free to write of any subject or type they desire, using their imagination and consciousness and experience of the world as a guide in filling in the gaps. "...the artist is a much greater source of strength than any accident of residence or of place in the social scale..."(keep in mind the Governess's humble beginnings as the daughter of a poor country parson, and her ambiguous "troubles" at home, and her resultant over-stimulation in the grand expanse and lavish situation at Bly)"The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it--this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education." He goes on to lambast those who think "experience consists of impressions," because, as far as James is concerned, "impressions are experience."

A very democratic view of fiction; liberating the country bumpkin with authorial aspirations to write about the city, and vice-versa. James counters the old adage "Write from experience and experience only" with his own advice: "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost."

In the Governess, however, James confronts us with an author who reaches too far, whose consciousness is perhaps skewed or even diseased, and her "guess," her attempt to "trace" implications, and to "judge" the whole from the pattern lead to horrid delusion and finally woeful tragedy. James had wisdom enough to see his own aesthetic theory had need of limits, and The Turn of the Screw and The Sacred Fount certainly demonstrate this concern. James is also perhaps judging himself and his morbid proclivities in these tales of obsessive characters who read into the smallest actions volumes of hidden material.

So after The Master I'll deliver the knock-out blow Friday with my James Joyce lecture. Poor students. Then we'll read "Araby" and "The Dead."

Here is someone's doctoral thesis outlining the history of criticism on Turn of the Screw. I may be on the right track, if I ever get the gumption to write a thesis.