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Secondary Thinker and an Incomplete Artist Vision and Revision: The Perceptual Modes of Henry Ja1nes by Kevin R. Allen A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida December 1992 Vision and Revision: The Perceptual Modes of Henry James by Kevin R. Allen This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Dr. Howard Pearce, Department of English and Comparative Literature. It was submitted to the faculty of The Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the degree of Master of Arts. SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: Thesis Advisor ~ Q--cL. ¥GUL. Chairpe on, Department of English and Comparative Literature ~~\(~ Dean, The Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities 1= /)JU..~ I 11 1L Dean of Graduate Studies Date 11 ABSTRACT Author: Kevin R. Allen Title: Vision and Revision: The Perceptual Modes of Henry James Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Howard Pearce Degree: Master of Arts Year: 1992 For Henry James, artistic vision is essentially revision. It is a process of transfom1ation: of literal experience to "felt life," of pictorial presentation to dramatic representation, of the past to the present. This process is a central element of James's fiction. The "meaning" of stories such as "The Real Thing" and "TI1e Middle Years" and novels such as The Ambassadors depends on a growth of vision. Their protagonists must be able to overcome the limits of their imaginations. They must be reflective, both intellectually and mimetically. In demanding a finer kind of artistic perception, James pointed the way for a younger generation of writers and critics. James's vision was broad enough to encompass classic critical ideals and artistic goals that would be achieved years after he struggled with them. 111 Table of Contents I. Introduction . 1 II. The Synthesis of Perception in James's Fiction . 6 III. The Limits of Realism in James's Dynamics of Perception .... 25 IV. TI1e Critical Context for James's Perceptual Modes .... .... 39 V. Conclusion ..................................... 44 Notes ...................................... 46 Works Cited .................................... 48 lV I. Introduction TI1e magical, elusive process of art, said Henry James, lies in the artist's ability to "guess the unseen from the seen" (Partial Portraits 389). This simple expression of James's artistic intentions in no way can sum up the volume of James's work, the depth of his prose, and most significantly, his own constant re-evaluation and revision in both his fiction and commentary. In a useful way, however, this phrase serves as a kind of formula for James's process of artistic perception. For James, perception is a two-part process consisting of the actual physical world the artist has seen and the unseen world of imagination. Art is the guesswork, the synthesis of these two modes of perception into a heightened form of experience. The crucible of this mysterious process is reflection. Art is both a mirror-like reflection of the physical world and the artist's cognitive reflections on that world. James's vision then is essentially revision, in the sense both of re-visiting past experience and re-creating that perception through imagination. Supporting this view is James's most direct statement of his artistic philosophy, "The Art of Fiction," in which he compares the creative writer with the historian: To represent and illustrate the past, the actions of men, is the task of either writer [of fiction or history], and the only difference that I can see is, in proportion as he succeeds, to the honour of the novelist, consisting as it does in his having more difficulty in collecting his evidence, which is so far from being purely literary. It seems to me to give him a great character, the fact that he has at once 1 so much in common with the philosopher and the painter; this double analogy is a magnificent heritage. (Partial Portraits 347). This dual character of fiction, the combination of characteristics of visual art and philosophy, run throughout James's theories of literature and is expressed in a variety of paired terms: the scenic and the pictorial, imitation and imagination, perception and feeling. The duality is central to James's ideas about literary technique, particularly in regards to point of view, narrative voice, authorial intrusion, and dramatic representation. "Re-vision" is also the core of his aesthetic theories. For James, fiction is like visual art because both the writer and the painter must choose details to create "a direct impression of life," the value of which lies in its degree of intensity. There is no intensity "unless there is freedom to feel and say" (Partial Portraits 384). James's requirement of intensity asks for much more of the pictorial nature of literature than a mimetic reflection of reality. The writer of fiction must also be a philosopher because he must develop "precepts" with which he can interpret the past through his cognitive powers. Reality and imagination merge in this process to form experience. "Experience is never limited and never complete," James says in "The Art of Fiction." "It is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airbome particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind. It takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations" (Partial Portraits 388). Thus experience, the never-complete 2 synthesis of the pictorial and the imaginative, is for James the motive of art. Joseph Conrad, also recognizing the risk of over-generalizing James, wrote in "Henry James, An Appreciation," that "Mr. Henry James is the historian of fine consciences" (Conrad 17). "In the body of [his] work there is no suggestion of finality, nowhere a hint of surrender, or even probability of surrender, to his own victorious achievement in that field where he is a master" (Conrad 11 ). James's compulsion to revisit the past is demonstrated nowhere more clearly than in his 1909 New York Edition, in which he painstakingly revised about half his body of fiction and supplied prefaces detailing the events that originally inspired many of his stories and novels. Christof Wegelin points out that while James frequently revised his stories for incorporation into books after they had originally appeared in magazines, the changes were minor compared to those he made for the New York Edition (Tales 435). Wegelin cites "TI1e Madonna of the Future" as a typical example. For its inclusion in a collection of stories in 1875, James made just five minor changes in the first eight paragraphs of the text that first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly two years before. But for the New York Edition thirty years later he made fifty-one changes, many of much greater significance (Tales 435). According to Wegelin, James intended the New York Edition to represent his life's work and he included only what he could still approve or make acceptable. "Revising now meant not just mending and polishing but re-imagining, re-seeing his material" (Tales 435). 1bis re-vision naturally focused on James's earlier work, because, as James points out in his preface to The Golden Bowl, his perceptions had changed (Art of the Novel 344-45). Thus, says Wegelin, "Revising his early work, therefore, became a process of reassessing the old 'matter' and 3 of registering the result of these 'renewals of vision'" (Tales 436). Beginning most notably with F. 0. Matthiessen's 1944 examination of the revisions in The Portrait of a Lady, much of the criticism of James's fiction in the last fifty years has examined the changes in the New York Edition. In his introduction to James's Prefaces, R. P. Blackmur observes that James revised "as a rule, only in the sense that he re-envisaged the substance more accurately and more representatively. Revision was responsible re-seeing" (Art of the Novel xxvi). But as Philip Home points out, revision in James's work goes far beyond merely editorial fine-tuning. In Home's broader definition, revision for James involves two "visions" of the same object or situation, one in the past and one in the present. These visions may involve two texts, but they may also involve James reconsidering his past work or that of another writer. In some cases the revision may be performed by characters in a story. Often, Home says, both the character and the author are engaged in the act of revision (358). How these various acts of revision create the synthesis of pictorial and imaginative perception will be the focus of the remainder of this examination. Chapter II will look at how this dynamic is constantly at work in James's fiction. First, it wiJl discuss James's revision of "The Real Thing." Most significantly, it will argue that a recurring change of the verb "to perceive" to "to feel" is a systematic change that mirrors both the action and structure of the story. The second part of the chapter will look at "The Middle Years," which depicts a dying author's revision of his last work, the intervention of a young admirer with a fresh vision of the author's work, and the resulting changes in the author's perceptions on life as well as art. Finally, the chapter will review James's narrative technique in The 4 Ambassadors showing how James attempted to dramatize the synthesis of vision in what he considered his finest novel. Chapter III will examine how James's ideas about artistic perception influenced his judgment of his contemporaries.
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