Thinking in Henry James (review)

Abstract

208 The Henry James Review scholars devoted to a version of reader-response theory usually associated with Paul Ricoeur. Hutner's use of Freud is simply too unreconstructed to satisfy critics trained in more recent forms of symptomatic analysis, and many others may be troubled by die assumptions that underwrite Hutner's second avowed purpose: to develop a "paradigm" that will "contribute to a norm for reading Hawthorne" (15). From one perspective, this desire accounts for the weakest aspects of Hutner's book. Hutner is remarkably untroubled by his frequent appeals to some "ideal" reader, as in the following statements regarding The Scarlet Letter: "The reader is less a Daniel reading die handwriting on the wall than a member of a community" (63). Such appeals, of course, allow Humer to challenge biographical and orthodox psychoanalytic interpretations, but therefore require tiiat he claim for himself the position of the "ideal reader," who, in this argument, is somewhat inexplicably situated to promote Hawthorne's "real" project by "uncovering" the determinate intentionality of a given text. "The text means to shape this society," he continues, "by presenting and reproducing the anxiety of reading, first in the actions of the characters and the interests ascribed, then in the fiction of Hawthorne's reading Surveyor Pue's documents" (63). Thus, while one may agree with the above comments on The Scarlet Letter, in a poststructuralist critical environment Hutner's self-legitimizing tactics are at best immodest and at worst belie a problematical desire for containment and closure. Moreover, insofar as his interpretations are dependent upon assigning a single (and surprisingly self-consistent) motivation to individual works, Hutner is, despite his warnings to otiier seemingly more traditional critics, perhaps more implicated in a romantic tradition of hermeneutics than he would care to admit. These qualifications aside, Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne's Novels is an ambitious and often original book tiiat should make a meaningful contribution to Hawthorne studies. Lucinda Cole University of Southern Maine Sharon Cameron. Thinking in Henry James. U of Chicago P, 1989. 200 pp. $29.95. pb $12.95. Sharon Cameron's Thinking in Henry James presents itself neither as a thematic study of selected James texts nor solely as a study of James's conception of consciousness but as a challenge to the interpretive practices that govern the understanding of die representation of consciousness in the Anglo-American novel. The book consists of four chapters focusing on The American Scene, the prefaces, The Golden Bowl, and The Wings of the Dove. Arguing against the prevalent view among critics that identifies consciousness with psychology and characterizes James as a psychological realist, Cameron advances a phenomenological approach that attempts to chart the act of thinking in both its internal and external representations. The confrontation between consciousness and tiie otherness of the world, including other minds, is both the subject of the study and die principle behind her methodological argument. Despite its tide, Cameron's study is really about self-reflexive consciousness and not necessarily about thinking. What is presented here is not what James conceived thinking to be but the translation of literary representation into a descriptive phenomenology thematizing the process whereby mind constitutes itself in positing the other: "In James's fiction the conflict between consciousness and the other it would appropriate isn't resolved and it isn't turned away from. It isn't resolved because nothing could count as resolving it" (30). Otherness can be annihilated, as it is in James's late fiction, but "consciousness and its object are never permitted to be die same thing" (31). Book Reviews 209 This disjunction or difference between consciousness and its object not only characterizes consciousness but is its definitive act as well, for in positing difference or otherness, consciousness constitutes itself; it exists as the contesting of die very otherness of otiier minds. Consequendy, consciousness and power are inextricably linked in James because tiiought is embattled "to free itself of the given" and establish itself as, I will argue, absolute reflection, die diinking that bends back upon itself and, in making itself its own object, unites itself with its opposite. Contrary to the claims of James's prefaces...