SPECTRAL HENRY JAMES * Henry James and the Supernatural. Edited by ANNA DESPOTOPOULOU and KIMBERLY C. REED

Abstract

In his preface to ‘The Turn of the Screw’ Henry James offers an apology, of sorts, for the flimsiness of his material. The story had come to him, abbreviated and indistinct, from the archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson, who'd got it second- or even third-hand. ‘He himself could give us but this shadow of a shadow’, James reports, repeating a phrase used by the governess of his tale in reference to Mrs Grose: ‘She herself had seen nothing, not the shadow of a shadow’. It is of course a mock apology that James makes, since the genesis of his tales depends upon just such shadow-play – upon caught glimpses and overheard snatches, the scantier the better. This preface is a plea for the art of ‘adumbration’: for suggestiveness over obviousness, restraint over prodigality, the oblique rather than the direct view. Beckoning from the shadows, the ‘shade’, or more aptly still the ‘spectre’ (with its Latin root specere, ‘to look, see’), is the perfect figure for Jamesian creation – and appreciation. The spectre beckons in the middle distance, and must be met half-way.