By Collin Meissner
Collin Meissner examines the political measurement to the illustration of expertise because it unfolds all through James' paintings. For James, event was once a dialectical approach that registered and expressed his attention of the exterior international. Meissner indicates how James' realizing of the method of attention isn't really easily a side of literary shape yet inherently political, requiring an energetic engagment with the whole complexity of social fact. The civic worth of paintings resided in an interactive approach within which the reader turns into conscious of the cultured event as fast and engaged.
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Extra resources for Henry James and the Language of Experience
Sample text
Autobiography, 191). And though ``not yet aware of style,'' he readily admits he was ``on the way to become so,'' for the Louvre's exhibitions ``simply overwhelmed and bewildered'' him (195). Years later, in recounting his nightmare, James explains how he made the transition not only to an awareness of style, but to the development of a personal style which would take its place along side those which initially overwhelmed and bewildered him. The dream-memory presents a number of events which appear over and over in James's ®ction, most importantly perhaps the initial resistance followed by aggressive assertion, and a sudden, ``®nal recognition'' which brings about a tremendous expansion of understanding.
We can see this distinction at work in The Sacred Fount, which stands out as James's most problematic venture into the confusing realm of interpretation. '' Much to the narrator's alarm, he believes he is witnessing vampiristic behavior among the couples present and eventually builds an interpretive house of cards in order to support his observations. Individuals who at ®rst appeared aged have become remarkably young, while their more youthful counterparts have seemingly aged at an accelerated pace; the same holds for the intelligence of others, for the more dull have become keen and the keen more dull.
It is for this reason James refused to con®ne ®ction within the arti®cial constraints of omniscient narration. 12 Rather, a novel, James believed, should give the ``air of reality'' (``Art of Fiction,'' 53). Such an atmosphere required the absence of overt authorial control, and that absence allowed the reader to step into the text and join the character in the active process of coming to understand the various experiences included in the novel. It may not be going too far here to apply the language of modern technology as a way of describing an encounter with a Jamesian text, for in many ways reading James is like an experience of virtual reality.