Henry James's Idea of Consciousness

Abstract

QN A NUMBER OF OCCASIONS, Henry James indicated what he believed to be the essential subject matter of fiction. One of the most important of these pronouncements occurs in The Future of the Novel (I899). In that essay, he wrote: The novel is of all pictures the most comprehensive and the most elastic. It will stretch anywhere-it will take in absolutely anything. All it needs is a subject and a painter. But for its subject, magnificently, it has the whole human consciousness.' While James was conspicuously concerned with the phenomenon of consciousness in all of his writings, he never defined it. Perhaps this was because it seemed an extremely difficult phenomenon to define. Even William James, who approached the subject philosophically and scientifically, admitted of great difficulty in this matter: When I say every thought is part of a personal consciousness, 'personal consciousness' is one of the terms in question. Its meaning we know so long as no one asks us to define it, but to give an accurate account of it is the most difficult of philosophical tasks.2 Henry James's idea of consciousness has to be harvested, for the most part, from a widely scattered crop of metaphors which surround his use of the term. For example, in an essay on Balzac, he drew the following relationship between and life: Literature is an objective, a projected result; it is that is the unconscious, the agitated, the struggling, floundering cause.3 Through his description of life in this passage, together with the antithetical structure of the statement, the reader is invited to infer that James regarded literature as somehow bound up with the phenomenon of consciousness. He does not say that is conscious, but