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JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL RESEARCH

VOLUME 35, 2010

I

LITERATURE, LOGIC AND THE LIBERATING WORD:THE ELUCIDATION OF CONFUSION IN HENRY JAMES

KRISTIN BOYCE

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

ABSTRACT: The literary style of Henry James has attractedthe attention of a number of leading analytic philosophers whoare drawn to make claims for the philosophical signi cance of works of literature. Many of these philosophical commentatorsshare a common approach: namely, they locate the philosophi-cal center of gravity of Jamess style in a philosophical viewthat his way of writing is understood to embody or corroborate.The aim of this essay is to argue that such an approach failsto capture what is philosophically most signi cant about howJames writes. By contrast, the essay works out a comparisonbetween Jamess literary forms of expression and the logi-cally perspicuous modes of representing thought developed byGottlob Frege. It highlights one use to which Frege sought toput his Begriffsschrift : namely, as a tool for the task of clarify-ing forms of philosophical confusion. This comparison helps toilluminate what is philosophically most distinctive and powerfulabout the modes of perspicuously representing human life thatJames develops. These literary forms inherit a time-honoredaspiration of philosophical writing: seeking to represent areaders life to the reader herself in such a way as to allow herto recognize her own confusions in living.

The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in the face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing

is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of therealities, that it also has colour and form and character.

Henry James 1

t is not unusual, when reading a great work of literature, to feel that some-thing of philosophical importance is being achieved. Sometimes the philosophical

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signi cance seems fairly explicit and easy to characterize. In a Dostoyevsky novel,for instance, characters raise philosophical issues by explicitly debating them. In aSophocles play, characters face con icting demands of family and state that explicitlyrequire a reconsideration of central moral concepts such as justice or courage.

For a philosophical tradition that prioritizes what is said while relegating howit is said to the margins, it has been natural to focus upon works of literature inwhich philosophical questions are clearly raised by what happens. 2 This can seemto be anti-literary. For philosophical criticism of this kind, the literary merit of theworkthe painstaking care devoted to crafting how the story is toldregistersat most as adding force or vividness to the philosophical interest of what takesplace. In other words, the philosophical interest and the literary merits of a work are treated as largely separable from and irrelevant to each other.

But there are some works of literature whose literary virtuosity and philosophi-cal interest are not so easily prized apart. The novels and tales of Henry James area case in point. Its dif cult to read Jamess novels as anything but experimentsdesigned to push what happens as close as possible to nothing, while amplify-ing and elaborating the importance of how it is depicted to the furthest possiblelimit. 3 It wouldnt be quite right to say that nothing happens that could occasionphilosophical re ection, 4 although the way James writes often seems calculatedto interfere with our capacity to determine what has happened at all. 5 But evenwhen it is possible to settle with con dence upon what has happened, much of itsphilosophical interest simply evaporates if one separates it from the complexity,precision and nuance of how James presents it. If one insists upon bracketing at-tention to how James writes, it is dif cult not to feel that one has simultaneouslyobscured from view those dimensions of Jamess work that recommended him tothe philosopher in the rst place. The philosophical interest of these works seemsto lie in the cerebral, contemplative quality of Jamess writing, and in the kinds of demands it makes on its readers. One way to phrase this is that there is a density,precision and sheer intellectual dif culty to Jamess writing, especially in his majorphase, that invokes comparison with the density, precision and dif culty of the bestphilosophical writing. The philosophical interest of these works is primarily, notsecondarily, a matter of how James writes.

This would seem to make James an unlikely and dif cult interlocutor for a philo-sophical tradition that has relegated the question of how something is written to thephilosophically extraneous. And yet, despite this, much of the recent philosophicalinterest in literature within this tradition has centered upon his novels and tales. 6 I think this is precisely because James presents a problem: our habitual ways of understanding philosophy make it dif cult to account for the persistent sense thatthere is something of deep philosophical interest about James. In order to do justiceto this sense, a more adequate philosophical self-understanding will be required, onethat might perhaps make more available the best possibilities of that tradition. 7

Cora Diamond (one of Jamess best philosophical interpreters) brings this dif-culty into focus in her discussion of the work of Martha Nussbaum (another of