6 - Jamesian Consciousness: Mind, Morality, and the Problem of Truth

Summary

The novel is of all pictures the most comprehensive and the most elastic. It will stretch anywhere — it will take in absolutely anything. … For its subject, magnificently, it has the whole human consciousness.

— Henry James, “The Future of the Novel”

IN HIS OWN TIME, James's interest in his characters' minds seemed a shortcoming to readers who failed to identify with men and women who intellectualized — felt and observed — rather than acted. During the James renaissance of the 1940s, however, critics increasingly focused on James's attention to the mind. Osborn Andreas, for example, in Henry James and the Expanding Horizon (1948), called James “the novelist of consciousness,” for whom thinking was an act of freedom and creativity. Indeed, Andreas wrote, “creative awareness of things” was, for James, the greatest good (1). By the 1960s, many scholars decided that James's preoccupation with consciousness ranked him with such modernists as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf. If James had been a writer ahead of his time, as H. G. Dwight had asserted in 1907, then by the middle of the twentieth century, his time had come. In the past few decades, as critical perspectives increasingly have drawn upon philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies, a focus on consciousness has become central to James scholarship.

A few questions recur to inform this scholarship: How do we know reality? What of reality can we know? Is the self a transcendent entity or is it socially constructed?