The
Henry James Society: The James Family
Convenor and
Chair: Peter Rawlings
University of the
West of
rawlings2000@aol.com
The aim of this session is to consider some of the
complex intersections between William, Henry, and Alice James and their father.
The first paper will re-examine aspects of the literary and philosophical
relations between William and Henry James partly from the vantage-point of
Henry James Senior’s commitment to Swedenborg. In particular, it will argue
that a version of Nietzsche’s perspectivism,
refracted through denied aspects of their father’s thinking, is the common
ground occupied by both brothers. The second paper focuses on the education of the James
children, its reflection of their father’s temperament, and the children’s
various reactions to it. Some contact will be made with other infamously
unconventional educations (Henry Adams, and John Stuart Mill, for example) and
Rousseau’s Emile. The preoccupation
of the third paper will be with William James, illness, and exceptional mental
states. It will also deal to some extent with Alice James.
“On a Certain
Blindness”: John Locke, William and Henry James, and Pragmatism
Peter Rawlings
University of the West of
Since Richard A. Hocks’ groundbreaking study Henry James and Pragmatistic
Thought there has been a widespread acknowledgement of the close
relationship between William James’s pragmatism and Henry James’s theory and
practice of fiction. This paper reassesses this relationship within the context
of both writers’ attitudes towards perspective and points of view. It argues
that in addition to anticipating existentialist and situationist
approaches to phenomenology, as they draw on aspects of Henry James Senior’s Swedenborgianism, what has been overlooked is the common
debt to each in what might be described as the repository of pragmatism’s deep
structure: John Locke’s Essay Concerning
Human Understanding. Locke’s Essay,
together with aspects of Jonathan Edwards engagement with it in his Mind, is at the core of my discussion.
Metaphysical and concrete senses of the “visual” will come into play as William
James’s “On a Certain Blindness” is intercalated with Henry James’s neglected
short story “Glasses.”
A
Prosthetic Aesthetic: Henry James, Sr. and the Cosmopolitan Education of
William and Henry James
Peter Kuryla
In one of the
brief, intermittent bits of commentary interspersed in his compilation of
selections from the writings of The James Family, the literary critic
F.O. Mattheissen suggested in passing that during
William and Henry’s childhood the family lived largely in urban areas because
of the relative ease of the paved streets on Henry James, Sr.’s prosthetic leg.
In Mattheissen’s reading, the father comes off as a
sort of Swedenborgian Melville, with the apparent
figure of Ahab lurking somewhere just behind the critic’s interpretation.
Driven by his insistence that Henry and William have a worldly, cosmopolitan
education, Henry Sr. left his sons passionate, but at least early on their
adult lives, often indecisive and insecure. In my paper, I contend that the
idea of prosthesis: loss, synthetic replacements for loss, and of course, the
problem of authenticity, lent itself, in this unique case, to a type of
aesthetic or way of encountering the world especially telling for the novelist
and the philosopher. Investigating the peculiarities of their familial bonds, I
consider the peripatetic (intellectually and geographically) transatlantic
education of William and Henry, Jr., the brothers’ incomplete or compromised
sense of their own vocation in early adulthood, and finally, the character of
William and Henry’s evaluation of each other’s work, relationships whimsically
suggested by Henry James Sr.’s wooden leg.
A Mass of Floating Matter’: William
James, Alice James and Exceptional Mental States
Martin Halliwell
This paper will
examine philosopher William James’s ‘missing text’, the 1896 Lowell Lectures on
Exceptional Mental States, only published in draft form. These lectures provide
a useful link between James’s early academic work on psychology and his later
freewheeling discussion of religion and therapy. I am interested particularly
in the nature of ‘exceptional mental states’ and James’s emphasis on
therapeutic techniques available to individuals with complex bodily and psychic
ailments. James described such states as a ‘mass of floating matter’, difficult
to pin down, extremely subjective, and not readily open to analysis. To give
shape to these themes I offer two approaches in the paper: (1) contextualising James’s work within the contemporary New
England framework of ‘mind cure’ and the early work of Freud and Breuer in
Central Europe on hysteria, and (2) using his sister Alice James’s illness narrative,
The Diary of Alice James (pub. 1934),
which covers the period leading up to the Lowell Lectures, 1886-92, as a test
case for exploring the tensions in William James’s thought. In doing so, the
paper will reflect the conference theme of ‘High & Low Culture’ by playing
off academic ideas against popular cultural currents about mind-cure of which
William James was interested but also wary. Although Alice James was diagnosed
as a ‘neurasthenic’ (a catch-all term in the 1890s), her Diary reflects a much more complex set of medical and social
experiences than this label suggests