The Caught Image: Figurative Language in the Fiction of Henry James

Abstract

Book-length criticism of Henry James tends to be either adulatory or spiteful; there seems to be little room for compromise between extreme views of James as an infallible genius or as a windy equivocator. It is hard to imagine, for example, that recent studies by Dorothea Krook and Maxwell Geismar are really about same novelist. Mrs. Krook is totally committed to the depth, breadth and intensity ... of Henry James's mature vision of while Mr. Geismar sees him as a prurient neurotic and a snob. Where Mr. Geismar finds James's novels to be full of pathetic confusion, Mrs. Krook compares them favorably to Shakespeare's plays. Which critic is right? The truth is that neither is right; each exaggerates in a way that is typical of his critical school. Testing fiction against a criterion of realism and normality (by which he seems to mean a composite picture of Freud and Marx), Mr. Geismar inevitably falls into an exercise in sarcasm. The inner life of James's art is not bound by narrowness of his social attitudes, and critic cannot be complaining about that narrowness and simultaneously showing what really goes on in fiction. Yet adulatory critic, who does have patience and dedication to accept James's peculiar form of intensity, is no less handicapped than iconoclast. Like Mrs. Krook, he characteristically overrates James's involvement with life, his objectivity as a social observer, and his magnanimity as a moralist. By seeing novels through lorgnette of Prefaces, he tends to overlook fundamental ironies which may not have been fully appreciated by James himself. For James often introduced psychological complication into portraits that were intended to endorse his own taste for disengagement, and grand renunciations with which his novels almost always conclude invite