Excavating Henry James

EXCAVATING

HENRY

JAMES

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MODERNISM

F.R.LEAVIS

JAMES’ CRITICAL HISTORY

Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.”

Complicated prose: multiple subordinate clauses linked by semicolons

JAMES’ PREOCCUPATIOMS

HENRY JAMES IS Professors who still bleat on about "the life of mind" … absolve themselves of responsibility for what happens to graduate students by saying, distantly, "there are no guarantees." But that phrase suggests there's only a chance you won't get a tenure-track job, not an overwhelming improbability that you will.Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb. 2012

So how do we reconstruct Henry James’ reputation?

Look at how he has been reinvented in American popular culture

Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress (1949)

Or British popular culture

Helena Bonham Carter in The Wings of the Dove (1997)

James wrote a popular play Guy Domville (1895)

But it was soon replaced by Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest

His novels are suitable for radio adaptation

In radio the word matters, not the image

Radio appeals to the imagination … … and the life of

the mind

Henry James is the third most recorded author in the BBC Radio archives

No. 1

No. 2

Guess Who?

What about the novels?

In James’ novels, the characters reflect on their motives & reactions in their

minds

As denoted by commas or semi-colons …

“In short, my good man, what I want to put to you in a word is this: supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have) driven past the turn down to the railway station (which, in that case, by the way, would probably not have been on our left hand, but on our right), where are we now in relation to…”

A Jamesian Road Direction (as quoted by Edith Wharton)

How do you ‘read’ Henry James?

Let his words wash over you

Understand the characters’ state of mind ….

His novels might not have a lot of action

But they can help us to understand ourselves

Through empathy and reflection

.. .which lies at the heart of ALL forms of education and learning