Henry James thought good historical fiction was impossible because its author cannot imagine the character’s horizon of knowledge, the mind that knows nothing of the events, styles, attitudes or language of the intervening years.45 Few novelists attempt to
capture the consciousness of the past, though Colm Tóibín comes closest with his remarkably quiet James, who resists anachronism by remaining almost silent. Instead, most acknowledge the impossibility of capturing it. But their reticence about James’s inner life does not mean that contemporary authors are uninterested in the mind; in fact, a fascination with consciousness drives novelizations like The Master, “Dictation” and The
Line of Beauty. Cynthia Ozick has explained James’s pull: “Mysteriously, with the
passing of time, James becomes more and more our contemporary – it is as if our own sensibilities are only just catching up with his. We can recognize him now as a powerful symbolist, one of the supreme literary innovators of consciousness.”46 Contemporary
authors are drawn to the final decades of Henry James’s life not only because of dramatic events like Constance Fenimore Woolson’s suicide, the failure of Guy Domville, and James’s late-in-life flirtations with younger men, but also – perhaps more importantly – because James’s late prose has become the archetype for psychological mystery, setting
the standard of sensitivity and complexity for any later writer who may hope to describe the inner workings of the mind. Tóibín, Ozick and Hollinghurst continue James’s experimentations in consciousness, imagining the unknowable other, the unknowable self, the inclusive artistic mind and the interpersonal or impersonal controlling mind. Though they build upon their predecessor’s treatments of identity, contemporary authors are more anxious and cynical than James, who accepted the mind’s power with
enthusiasm.
James’s own fiction suggests that understanding another person may be almost impossible, even when both figures occupy the same moment. Some characters learn the depth of their misunderstanding in a moment of revelation, such as when Isabelle Archer recognizes the relationship between Osmond and Madame Merle, or Lambert Strether witnesses the intimacy between Chad and Madame de Vionnet. Other characters are already aware that they do not understand the people closest to them: the governess, Maisie Farange and Maggie Verver all struggle in their very different ways to fathom the secrets of their loved ones, and such certainty evades them.
James reproduces his characters’ experience as he asks readers to navigate complex prose in search of the inner lives of his protagonists. The works of the major phase are filled with stylistic choices that betray a secret is being kept. Ellipses
illuminate an unvoiced thought, and aposiopesis, when a character abruptly cuts off her speech, more dramatically illustrates the line between what can and cannot be said.
Preterition, which occurs most famously in “The Beast in the Jungle,” conspicuously
obscures, as Seymour Chatman has noted, by using abstract subjects, nominalizations, and psychological verbs that surmise the activity within another’s mind. James’s late style provides a formal framework appropriate to address how impossible it is to know another.47 Historically, stylistically and ontologically Henry James evades certain
knowledge.
The preoccupation with James’s sexuality tends to reinforce one perfectly valid view: each individual is divided into a private self he hides and a public self he shows to the world. Identity in this case is hidden, constricted. But such a view fails to do justice to James’s complex and contradictory treatment of consciousness in the major phase. James also believed consciousness is defined by excess, by its infinite potential to absorb, analyze and manipulate the world. He describes this version in his 1910 metaphysical essay “Is There a Life After Death?”: the artistic mind is ravenously curious, joyfully infinite, luxuriously wasteful, and in touch with the spiritual sources of the universe.48
For Ross Posnock, the distinction between a secretive, constricted James on one hand and a curious, expansive James on the other is the distinction between repression and
sublimation. Posnock claims Henry James sublimated his libido into curiosity; in other words, he suggests, James’ curiosity is itself sensual, as the author pressed Hendrik Andersen, Hugh Walpole and Jocelyn Persse for more and more detail in their letters, or as he traveled through America in 1904 and 1905 as “a Whitmanesque figure” in thrall to an “orgy of the senses.”49 This compulsively curious James rejects the binary model of
an identity divided into “inside/outside, essence/appearance, or authenticity/
James novelizers are riveted by the narrative potential of both versions of James. The repressed author promises the drama of a double life: a truth is hidden beneath
appearances, threatening exposure. The sublimated author promises the drama of
creation, the ideal of imaginative genius to which the contemporary writer might aspire. In James’s late novels, some characters possess creative minds so powerful that they can manipulate and even create the epistemologically-uncertain worlds in which they live. Ruth Bernard Yeazell argues that some characters in the novels of the major phase “possess, artist-like, the power to make the terms of their world,” but she
acknowledges that the mind must give way to concrete facts in the end. Yeazell suggests, for example, that while Charlotte Stant may create a narrative (convincing to others and to herself) in which she and the Prince have been thrown together by Maggie and Adam’s childlike desire to spend all their time together, nevertheless her adulterous affair affects other characters in a very real way.51 Sharon Cameron offers a more radical reading of The Golden Bowl, in which characters’ thoughts and speech are not simply persuasive but
powerfully prescriptive. In the late novels, characters sometimes imagine they can read one another’s thoughts; James records such mind-reading in direct quotations that make speculated thoughts look like speech, giving them a misleading narrative immediacy. Cameron argues these moments are neither wishful thinking nor telepathy, but mind- control: when Maggie seems to imagine what her husband is thinking, she creates those thoughts and imposes them on the Prince.52 Cameron’s reading suggests the extreme
power of the fictional Jamesian consciousness, which controls perceptions, narratives and other selves. For all his imaginative power, the actively curious version of James that
Posnock describes is not a simple humanist subject capable of exerting mastery over himself and over the world; if James dissolves the binary model separating inside from outside, he also breaks down the boundary that separates discrete selves.53 Yeazell and
Cameron suggest the boundaries among James’s fictional characters may blur as well, as they coerce, manipulate and control one another.
The Master, “Dictation” and The Line of Beauty all experiment with the potential
and the limits of consciousness, but while James found the power of the creative mind empowering, contemporary novelists focus on the threat of such a power. Especially in a surreal world like the one Cameron describes, empowerment and disempowerment are the recto and verso of the same coin; if one mind is controlling then another is being controlled, and recent fictions shift the focus to the vulnerable figure. In “Dictation” the powerful author erases the consciousness of his amanuensis in the moment of
composition, controlling the movements of her mind and her body with his voice. James’s typist Theodora Bosanquet is the medium that connects the author to the page, but she is also an occult medium that allows the invading ghostly voice to take the place of her own. In “Speaking in James” I show that Bosanquet and the Boston-area medium Leonora Piper, who worked extensively with the James family, both dramatically
illustrate that the Jamesian ideal of the expansive and permeable consciousness comes at a price, at least for women, and the price is self-annihilation. James’s Alice Staverton offers a hopeful alternative, as a female psychic whose permeability empowers her.
The Master and The Line of Beauty take these topics into the real world, where
novels describe families defined by alcoholism, addiction and abuse: Tóibín’s James is afflicted by a multi-generational family legacy of alcoholism, and Hollinghurst’s Nick Guest leaves his dysfunctional family of origin to seek a place in three other abusive families.54 Tóibín’s James and Hollinghurst’s Nick are so pathologically afraid of
conflict they fantasize about manipulating others through mind-control, but in fact both men are controlled by the powerful family patterns they help reinforce. In both novels, consciousness exists between or among characters as they work together to create and sustain a community of meaning.55 Tóibín aims for moral neutrality: all members of the
community are equally guilty or equally innocent, since they are implicated in a shared system. Hollinghurst, however, suggests that Nick is culpable for his choices, because a thorough understanding of Henry James and his fictions would have allowed Nick to recognize and reject the dysfunction that surrounds him.
The Jamesian consciousness may be repressed, expansive or shared, and it may even escape agency. Posnock and Cameron have argued in different ways that the works of late James evade or exceed identity. Posnock describes the James that emerges in The
American Scene as dynamic, fluid, liminal, marginal, receptive. The narrator “hover[s]
between identities” and seeks childlike sensory shocks rather than the intellectual arguments.56 By resisting the ossification of his identity, the narrator resists totalizing
ideologies and remains permeable to the sensory impressions that assault him. Sharon Cameron’s vision of “nonidentity” is different. Rather than imagining the narrator of The
American Scene being encroached upon by impressions, Cameron argues James’s travel
meaning. The consciousness she describes is similar to that which James describes in “Is There a Life After Death?,” with one important difference. For James, the all-powerful mind is personality, his own “particular personal adventure.”57 For Cameron, the
consciousness on display in The American Scene is detached from psychology and not limited by an agent: consciousness itself is the protagonist.58
As contemporary fictions explore non-entity and the non-psychological mind, they focus again on vulnerability and disempowerment. Cynthia Ozick’s treatment of the literary mode of production – James’s shift from writing by hand to dictating his prose to an amanuensis at the Remington typewriter – suggests that the author, for all his mastery, does not control the text he produces. In “Dictation,” literary texts are not the result of an author’s personality but of non-psychological influences like technology and the body. Henry James becomes a machine, and his narratives are trauma symptoms. Alan
Hollinghurst’s Nick, like Posnock’s James, is a fluid, liminal figure that hovers between identities. But while James resists totalizing philosophies, Nick seeks them out, and he remains unformed because of his simultaneous loyalty to conflicting ideologies.
Tóibín, Ozick and Hollinghurst are all attracted to the inner lives of James’s richly-drawn fictional characters and to the potential of James’s own creative mind, but all challenge the assumption of a unified subject: they speculate about a consciousness that can invade and be invaded, a consciousness that is enmeshed in and to some extent determined by a larger controlling system, a consciousness that is divided against itself. Critical treatments of James characterize his experiments in identity as liberating and empowering, but novelizations offer a more cynical view; they draw upon James as
model and ideal, but they betray more anxiety about the temptations and power of technology and culture.