‘The dreadful done’: Henry James’s style of abstraction

Scott, Rebekah

Abstract

Since the 1990s, when the late novels of Henry James became a touchstone for the ethical turn in literary criticism, ethical critics of different persuasions, such as Martha Nussbaum and J. Hillis Miller, homed in on certain complex terms and ambiguous avowals in James’s prose in their efforts to hold him up as an ‘exemplary’ writer, committed to ‘ethical’ values such as particularity and singularity. In doing so, these critics overlooked the prospect that at this point in his career James was testing a new sort of literary abstractionism. Like painterly abstraction, literary abstraction makes room for the material and the particular at the same time as it denies them. To illustrate this, I examine a cluster of Jamesian keywords–‘do/doing/done’–from The Golden Bowl (1904) and elsewhere, to dispute the view that James systematically shuns abstraction. Instead, I propose that abstraction–depending for its effect on absorption, entanglement, and bewilderment–be read not as a withdrawal from life into ‘the vague’, cerebral, imaginary, or purely aesthetic realm, but a move to create deep involvements between characters and between readers and texts, and as such should be regarded as a central motivation of James’s evasive late style.

Citation

Scott, R. (2021). ‘The dreadful done’: Henry James’s style of abstraction. Textual Practice, 35(6), 941-966. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236x.2021.1936773

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jun 2, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Jun 25, 2021
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2021
• Deposit Date: Jul 5, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 5, 2021
• Journal: Textual Practice
• Print ISSN: 0950-236X
• Electronic ISSN: 1470-1308
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 35
• Issue: 6
• Pages: 941-966
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236x.2021.1936773
• Keywords: Literature and Literary Theory
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/5756862
• Publisher URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0950236X.2021.1936773