James was probably too subtle for his correspondents, but the idea of “extension” makes sense to me because art and the world can’t be as easily divided as we sometimes imagine. One comes from the other, and they intermingle in the consciousness we as readers meet on the page. Art can and does make life, as James says, because when we encounter a great work of art it creates feeling, and that feeling in the reader, the viewer, or the listener is finally what the work means. I have lived with James’s characters and stories for many years, and they do not leave me. They have become part of who I am, and I can’t help but feel that their creator, who worried over his paltry sales and lack of popularity with the reading public, would have been very happy to know how I feel. He would have been glad to know that his work has lasted and grown in importance and that I am only one of many people who have been permanently altered by his books.
In its range and variety, its plasticity and liberality, The Bostonians is an embodiment of James’s nonprescriptive idea about what a novel should be. Through a story that delineates the power of words to obfuscate, exploit, and distort human reality, Henry James offers his own nuanced, precise, and sensitive prose in opposition to the dead phrases that stream from lecture halls, line the pages of newspapers, and float from one speaker to another in that arid climate that was Boston. That city has changed and the United States has changed since James wrote his American novel, but dead phrases, empty rhetoric, clichéd thought, as well as ready-made opinions and just plain nonsense proffered to the public by the press show no sign of abating anytime soon.
I believe it’s impossible to read The Bostonians without at least wondering about the ways we use language or language uses us. Moribund and idiotic political statements continue to influence and sway us because of the manner in which they are spoken or written. Even the most sincere declaration of devotion to a noble cause may be born from private venom or personal misery. There is always a gap between what we feel and what we say. Henry James knew that it was heartbreak-ingly difficult to capture the flux of experience in words, to articulate the riddle of human feelings and actions, but this was precisely his ambition, and I, as one of his faithful readers, love him for it.
2004
Charles Dickens and the Morbid Fragment
“WHENEVER I AM AT PARIS, I AM DRAGGED BY SOME INVISIBLE force into the Morgue. I do not want to go there, but I am always pulled there.” Charles Dickens gave this sentence to his narrator in The Uncommercial Traveller, but he used the same words to describe his own compulsion to look at dead bodies: “I am dragged by invisible force to the morgue.” In 1847, this unseen power lured Dickens again and again to the Paris morgue, and on one of those visits he found himself enthralled by the disfigured, bloated body of a man who had been drowned. Sixteen years later, Dickens would begin a novel about drowning, Our Mutual Friend. It was to be the last book he finished before he died. The image of that nameless dead man lying on a slab in the morgue must have stayed with Dickens over the years like a ghost waiting for a story. The tale he came to write attacks the problem of the corpse with a full arsenal of verbal weaponry — humor, irony, and pathos. The dead body was Dickens’s muse, the catalyst that generated the writing of Our Mutual Friend, the abject thing that launched a torrent of words to do battle with the truth every person faces: The corpse is my future. I will die.
The closer I find myself to death, the more threatening it becomes. The time I saw an open wound on an operating table, I fainted. A few years ago, I was in a car accident. Right after the crash, my vision blurred, I was overcome with nausea, and although I managed to retain consciousness, I went into shock. Even after I had been released from the hospital and sent home with the knowledge that I was only banged and bruised, I woke up with a start for several nights in a row to the impact — the sudden terrific blow that shattered the windshield and crushed the car around me. I felt it in my body as if it were happening again exactly as it had happened, and in my terror I was jolted awake. This dream image had no relation to other dreams I’ve had; it was brief and isolated — a reenactment of the moment the van hit us. I suspect that this “dream” was closer to traumatic memory. Soldiers in wars and victims of crimes or disasters may suffer from these unwanted memories for years — gruesome fragments of experiences that can’t be digested because they don’t make sense. The mind resists categorizing horror — it doesn’t know where to put it — but traces of the incomprehensible may linger nevertheless; no longer fully conscious, they seem to float outside of place and time.
Dickens’s traveler is drawn to view a body in the morgue, and then after he has seen it, he begins to imagine it everywhere. He goes to the baths and has a fantasy of the “large dark body” bobbing toward him. When he accidentally gulps down some bathwater, he recoils, thinking he senses “the contamination of the creature in it.” Still later, “that very day, at dinner, some morsel on my plate looked like a piece of him.” Although the body the traveler saw in the morgue was whole, he is haunted by a corpse that is both leaking and falling apart, a loathsome object that threatens to enter him as bacteria or food. His repulsion comes from an anxiety that the protective barrier between him and it will shift, fall, or crumble. Horror movies play on this fear all the time — that the dead are, well, not dead but moving about in the world, usually chasing some howling young woman. Although fantastic, these films don’t lie. Eventually, death catches up with all of us.
Early in Our Mutual Friend, the reader encounters the first of several drowned bodies. A police inspector has taken charge of the corpse, but he has trouble knowing how to refer to the thing in his custody. He first addresses the dead man as “you”; then a little later, he announces to a bystander, “I still call it him, you see.” Mr. Inspector is the first of a number of characters to have pronoun difficulties. What does it mean to call someone you or him? When does he turn into it? These are ultimate questions, and they are posed relentlessly in the novel. When I defended the dissertation I wrote on Dickens at Columbia University in 1986, Steven Marcus, the Dickens scholar and author of From Pickwick to Dombey, asked me if I thought Dickens knew what he was doing, if he knew that his work was metaphysical. I said, “No,” and he agreed with me. But in art, knowing isn’t everything — the unknown often pushes its way to the surface. In recent years, neuroscience has demonstrated that Freud was surely right in this sense: A huge part of what the brain does is unconscious. And every novelist can tell you that while writing, things happen. You don’t know why the characters or their words appear to you or where they come from, but there they are, and often these peculiar ghosts and their voices, rising up from nowhere, are exactly the ones that are most crucial to the story.