James and the Originary Scene

Abstract

James's mature art is above all an art of the sacred. His work is neither philosophical nor political, ideologically engaged nor culturally transgressive, except as a means to engage his primary question: what is the relation of art to the sacred, and of both to the well-lived life? This question emerges from religion rather than philosophy, in the sense that it does not look to practically disengaged reason for a response, reason in the form of sustained theorizing. T. S. Eliot was right 1 --James's fiction is hostile to ideas, that is, to ideas isolated from an intensely realized pragmatic context. Despite the phenomenological, deconstructive, and ideological readings James's work has tolerated, none can claim more than that the fiction permits those readings, that the theory's conclusions or procedures have some analogue in the writing. But there are very few passages in James of overt philosophizing or the kind of speculative digression we see in modernist and postmodernist works. What is in the fiction, however, is a concentration-- especially at moments of crisis and resolution--on the language of the sacred: on the theater of sacrifice and violence, on the performance of ritual, and on the meaning of the term "sacred" itself. James is not "religious"; his art does not serve a transcendent entity, or glorify a righteous cause, or try to see through the mere phantom of life to the mystic essence behind it. But his work does persistently ask whether art can provide what religion once could--a sense of the enduring significance of our experience, a medium through which we awaken our deepest resources of consciousness--or whether these yearnings are fundamentally dangerous, inspiring a self-absorbed neglect of the everyday, the ordinary facts of life.