Henry James, Cartographer: Charting the Hologram of Venice in Italian Hours

Abstract

The focus of this article is on the Venetian essays of Henry James’s travelogue Italian Hours. Although critics of James, as well as the writer himself, have relegated his travel writings to the margins of his canon, this article reconsiders James’s travel writing as a literary cartography, a primary site in which the author is actively theorizing his concept of the “direct, artistic impression.” A central argument is that the Jamesian impression is structurally and functionally similar to a hologram, a three-dimensional, extrarepresentational form that affords James’s map of Venice its unique ability to capture fleeting moments, point-of-contact experience, and the immediacy of wonder. A rhizomatic organizing pattern allows James's literary cartography to function as a true hologram and enables the text to chart impressionist potentialities of Venice rather than geographic certainties, favoring obscurity over cartographic clarity. Subverting traditional cartographic practice of the nineteenth century, James’s map of Venice defamiliarizes landmarks, disorients the reader, and converts known space back into an ill-defined state. A geocritical approach allows the Jamesian impression to be read as both an observed state of wonder and a self-expressive textual subject, a performance of a new space rather than a representation of one known. Thus, James’s impressions are not static representations of place but rather emergent processes, allowing the travelogues to be read as a type of critical human geography where the boundaries between material space and acts of representation are blurred.