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Information to Users INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be fix)m any type o f computer printer. The quality of this reproduction Is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back o f the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Ifigher quality 6” x 9” black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howell Infonnaticn Compaiy 300 North Zed) Road, Ann Arbor MI 48106-1346 USA 3I3/76M700 800/521-0600 The Limits of Doubt: A Critique of Representational Scepticism in the Late Novels of Henry James by Kevin Michael Kohan LL.B., University o f Saskatchewan, 1988 B.A., University of Regina, 1990 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of English We accept this dissertation as conforming to the required standard Dr. T. A. Fosha; îp^tm ent of English) Dr. E. M. Cobley, Departmental Member^Department of English) Dr. L. Carson!, Departmental Member (Department of English) Dr.. R. B\Jaa^kgf70utsideE N ^ j^ k erT b ^tsi Member (Department of Political Science) Dr. R. G. Seamon, External Examiner (Department of English, University of British Columbia) © Kevin Michael Kohan (4^8 University of Victoria All rights reserved. This dissertation may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopying or other means, without the permission of the author. Supervisor: Dr. Toby A. Foshay ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the epistemology of poststructuralism, particularly deconstruction, in order to explain and defend the implicit epistemology in Henry James's The Ambassadors, The Wings o f the Dove, andThe Golden Bowl. Although James is recognized as a master of indirection and ambiguity, these novels stress the importance of accurate interpretation and the dangers of suppressing our ability to represent the truth. James here criticizes anti-realist scepticism as absolutist and self-serving, and ± e target of his analysis bears a consistent and telling resemblance to deconstruction. The first chapter argues that a deconstructionist epistemology was historically available for James's scrutiny because its arguments are essentially those of traditional scepticism, recast in the language of a theory of representation. In the hands of Derrida and his followers, this translation results in a dynamic form of idealism, according to which any claim to ground interpretation in the pre-textual is an illegitimate attempt to escape representational mediation and stabilize the inherently disruptive forces of signification. Deconstruction can generate its explosive interpretative effects, however, only by clinging to the necessity of an absolute standard of certainty, a standard that can never be realized, and by exaggerating the applicability of its text-metaphors. James's own position is critical realist—an epistemological stance similar to William James's pragmatism, but wary of its tendency to assume subjectivist, constructivist forms—in contrast to the anti-realist orientation of both deconstruction and the sceptics and exploiters in James’s novels. Ill The first chapter establishes the theoretical viability of a critical realist epistemology through an analysis of deconstruction s fundamental assumptions about the nature of perception, time, and the interpretative flexibility of experience. These topics are also addressed from a perspective arising from debates in the philosophy of science; particular use is made of evolutionary theory, which permits a recuperation of the notion of linearity—an essential structure of intelligibility underlying our experience of the world, not a spurious construct of debunked Enlightenment science. Perception can then also be understood as a fallible but reliable method of access to objective conditions that is not necessarily, as it is on the Derridean textual model, overdetermined by the powers of representation. After considering the influence of deconstruction on contemporary readings of James's last three completed novels. Chapter 2 argues that although James, inThe Ambassadors, certainly counters a rigid rationalistic epistemology with one that is more fluid and open-ended, the latter perspective, thought by many critics to be compatible with poststructuralism—and endorsed because of this compatibility—is itself finally rejected as too extreme. Strether reads Chad’s transformation correctly only he realizes that Woollettian linearity and causality underpin the texts of Paris. Chapter 3, onThe Wings o f the Dove, uses Derrida’s account of metaphor to characterize the exploitation of Milly. whose translation into the present/absent centre of a society defined by its scepticism and its rapacious desire is the key element in James’s denunciation of extreme doubt as a strategy of domination. Chapter 4 readsThe Golden Bowl as a double game of epistemological subversion: Charlotte and the Prince deconstruct the Ververs’ "miraculous forms.” but their idealist challenge to the idealist system prepares the ground IV for Maggie’s full exploitation of Verver representational power. The inversion and revision of Adam’s structure results in tyranny. Examiners: Dr. T. A. Foshay, Simervisor (Deparohent of English) Dr. E. M. Cobley. De;j^tmenW Member (Department of English) Dr. L. Carsqi^, i^^arim ental Member (Department of English) Dr. R. Outside Member (Department of Political Science) Dr. R. G. Seamon, External Examiner (Department of English, University of British Columbia) Table of Contents Title Page i Abstract li Table of Contents v Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2; “In Some Measure According to its Measure” I: Introduction 21 II: Derrida’s Reading of Husserl: The Absolute Standard, Atomistic Time, and Representation’s Conquest of Perception 26 HI: Everything is Text: The Metaphor that Consumes the World 38 IV: Critical Realism and Scepticism 49 V: Critical Realism, Pragmatism, and James 75 Chapter 3: Extreme Texts and Closed Books in The Ambassadors I: Absolute Delegations 96 II: Subverting Causation and Linear Time: Woollettian Continuities and Parisian Ruptures 99 III: What Strether Knows: “Things Must Have a Basis” 116 Chapter 4: Victims of Metaphor in The Wings o f the Dove I: Dead Center 133 II: Milly as Derridean Metaphor 138 ni: From Perpetual Error to Inaction: Civilization’s Gentlemen Beasts 147 rV: Thought Consumed by Text 159 V: The Specified and its Sign: Return of the Pre-Text and the Triumph of the Absolute Image 169 Chapter 5: System and Dissonance inThe Golden Bowl I: Inversion and Revision: Deconstructing the Naive 183 H: Logocentric City 191 EH: Deconstructing the System 199 VI IV: Thinking in the Deconstructed System 207 V: Miraculous Descent of Proof 217 Chapter 6: Conclusion 236 Bibliography 245 Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION “The real represents to my perception the things we cannot possiblynot know, sooner or later, in one way or another, it being but one of the accidents of our hampered state, and one of the incidents of their quantity and number, that particular instances have not yet come our way” (Preface to The American). I Henry James’s last three completed novels— The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, andThe Golden Bowl (the novels of the “major phase,” as Matthiessen called James’s mature period)— represent not only the crowning achievement of his own oeuvre, but also the highest pitch of formal complexity in the development of the novel prior to its more extreme radicalization in the modernist period. Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, Conrad, and Lawrence seem, to many readers, to have been writing fiction of an entirely different order than James had been; but, on the other hand, James is also recognized as their necessary predecessor with his serpentine language and subtle handling of ambiguities: Joyce’s and W oolf s stream-of-consciousness writing, for instance, owes something to James’s intensely involved analysis of the subtle shifts of motivation and impression. And there is little denying that James helped usher in a new level of self-consciousness to the craft of fiction. But with the wave of post-structuralist or postmodernist criticism of the last twenty or thirty years, a serious effort has been afoot to accommodate James’s novels to post­ metaphysical theory, and no wonder, given James’s highly wrought, densely written texts, which seem to emphasize a kind of radical uncertainty not only in their subjects, but even through the fabrics of their construction. A writer of such agonizing qualification and acrobatic syntactical ingenuity, and of such
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