Lola ScobeyProfessor David Scott ArnoldThe James Brothers INT 510AMarch 15, 2011

At A Loss for Words

A Reflection Paper on Potential Thesis Topics

Originally, my intention for this paper was to reflect on the “loneliness” that presents

itself peculiarly rampant in the James family. (Late in life Henry James wrote: “ . . . the

essential loneliness of my life . . . the port, also, in sooth, to which my course again finally

directs itself. This loneliness (is) deeper than my ‘genius,’ deeper than my ‘discipline,’ deeper

than my pride, deeper, above all, than the deep counterminings of art.” Kazin 217). Such

loneliness, expressed by all five of the James children, often and often with wrenching

vividness, appears, in a likewise peculiar way, antithetical to their father’s spiritual philosophy.

Ironically Henry Sr.’s theology held that genuine good emanated only from solidarity,

brotherhood and community, as opposed to individualism. For the perversely persistent

individual, “the void did not vanish when the creation was completed,” Alfred Kazin writes of

Henry Sr.’s ethos, “we feel it still in our aloneness.” (214)

While acclimatizing to this darkly compelling but rather dank topic, I was upended.

Pericles Lewis swam into my ken, soon followed by enticement into the realms of gold of

Richard Poirier. Off I tumbled into a state of wild surmise. These two scholars (aka DSA

“worthies”) were making provocative comments about topics on the table for my thesis.

Therefore, this paper redesigned itself to set forth – in broad sketch on a quite large board --

several of these topics/questions as a prelude selecting an actual thesis subject, while sketching

around the borders of our class “The James Brothers.”

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At essence -- if Giles Gunn in his Introduction to Pragmatism and Other Writings

describes it right – then I must be a modernist at heart. Or, at least, my heart is with the

modernists, rather than given to the postmodernists or even surrendered to my much-adored

existentialists and their thrilling exacto knife responses to a reality utterly without purpose.

Gunn says the James brother’s era of modernism was one “in which belief in life’s fundamental

unity and coherence has been seriously eroded, or at least fundamentally questioned, without

a loss of a nostalgic desire for its recovery” (xii). I find this sort of nostalgic desire alive in myself

and believe it is a desire that remains large, cultural, and shared by many.

Recently The Oregonian reported the death, in a downtown Portland apartment, of

William Hamilton, the theologian who declared God dead in TIME magazine in 1966. Of the

theological and metaphysical task that ensued, Hamilton said, “We needed to redefine

Christianity as a possibility without the presence of God.” Gradually, I am seeing this was taken

on as a central task by many of modernism’s leading writers.

God’s resurrection is presumed hopeless in most current intellectual circles. Gunn

highlights two responses to this hopelessness – one from the poet Wallace Stevens and one

from French philosopher and literary critic Jean-Francois Lyotard.

Stevens finds the “consolations” formerly provided by religious faith in secular forms

such as literature, painting, dance and philosophy – even in subtly aesthetic moments like a

woman combing her hair. These, Gunn writes, have the power to mediate “a reality not their

own, a ‘something ‘wholly other,’ as Stevens refers to it in Opus Posthumous, ’by which the

inexpressive loneliness of thinking (and feeling) is broken and enriched” (Gunn xii). (Stevens

“loneliness” gives pause in evaluating the James family’s pervasive personal loneliness-es.)

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Lyotard, however, views such “spiritual substitutes” as “ineffective at best, self-

deceiving at worst” (xiii). Lyotard sees nothing left to us in the realm of metanarrative except

the endless recirculation of outmoded images from such narratives in stories that merely

portray the outcome we would like life to have. This brings to mind the Kultur film on Virginia

Woolfe recounting how she introduced guests at her home to other guests with totally fictitious

introductions because she “liked to describe things as she thought they ought to be rather than

as they were.” (Thereby revealing herself a spiritual cousin of both Strether and Fleda.) But, to

make the desired point, in Lyotard’s analysis we find an integration of storytelling with cultural

self-deception.

Hopefully, these initial comments set a stage for three potential thesis topics of personal

interest that the above writers and thinkers delve into, or touch upon.

(1) Self Deception

Self deception engages me as an intellectual, psychological and spiritual concern. How

does one deceive oneself? It seems a blatant contradiction in terms. How does one look into

a mirror daily and envision there someone other than one’s actual self? Yet self-deception is

utterly prevalent in the human condition. Only the rarest of saints can be deemed thoroughly

“authentic.”

Self-deception interests me along the spectrum ranging between the outright and

obvious telling of lies to oneself (obvious, most often, to others), versus more or less legitimate

psychological projects which reach beyond “the given” and into the realm of possibilities --

projects typical of those gifted with being a “visionary.” When is “having faith” an asset in

leading others into a beneficial arena of possibility or hope rather than a detrimental solipsistic

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self-serving faith in oneself, the kind of ego-inflating self-deception often employed to

manipulate others?

“Homo duplex, homo duplex!” Pericles Lewis quotes French novelist Alphonse Dauder

indicting his own behavior at his brother’s death, when he found one aspect of himself grieving

his brother’s passing and one aspect critiquing the events surrounding the death from a

theatrical perspective (252). What sort of double consciousness does self-deception require?

Exploring this, I would like to look at the book Self Deception by Herbert Fingarette as

well as Sartre’s concept of “bad faith” and Emerson’s reference to “the two lives, of the

understanding and of the soul” (Poirier 148), not to mention Henry James vivid depictions of

characters who embrace a double consciousness.

(2) Storytelling to the Self

Aligning self deception with the notion of self-creating a theatrical or dramatic self, as

both Poirier and Lewis depict Jamesian characters often doing, I would like to explore the role a

personal story plays in the formation of the self. Like many others, I continually tell stories to

myself about myself. How does that story – or those many stories -- function in my life? What

happens when a critical story is undermined, as was Strether’s self-conceived drama about

Chad and Madame Vionnett which scripted a leading heroic role for himself? Although Strether

was able to acknowledge and integrate the collapse of his romantic story, are some stories

woven so deeply into the self, that the undermining of them causes the self itself to collapse?

Studying this could look at self-stories whose very foundation is self deception, including

the psychological formation of a “false self” as described by psychologist Donald Winnicott, as

well as the milder creation of “a world of theatrical possibility” which Poirier depicts causing

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Jane Austen’s character Emma “to forget who she is” and to hurt another woman in the thrill of

self-dramatization (176). Across this spectrum, one again encounters the visionary and the

function of narratives and metanarratives in validating the visions of those who have, as Poirier

describes Strether, the ability to conceive “of what life might be” (142). Poirier here elevates

Strether into quite significant company – such as the authors of the U.S. constitution, Karl Marx,

Walt Disney, and even self-published utopians like Henry James, Sr. – indeed all others who

have aggressive, wistful or idealistic ideas of what life might be.

And how do these stories -- fictions or visions -- play out over time? Does “telling tales”

to oneself about the self and/or about one’s world promote self-transcendence (the ability to

act for the benefit of others in addition to the self or in preference to the self). Or does it tend

to end in self-imprisonment that traps the authentic self and its capabilities? For both Fleda

and Strether, the stories they told themselves about themselves clearly established limits and

boundaries on their behavior (i.e. set an “atmosphere” or realm of otherness for their lives)

and, thereby, constrained their life prospects, as conventionally conceived.

Yet, as James’ novels illustrate, convention itself can have an elusive role in self stories.

For the person exercising imagination on their own behalf, convention and social success may

not be the final arbiter of success. What appears to others as self-defeating rigid rule-following

of social or moral standards may actually be an actor playing out their self-assigned role in their

own imaginative story – in which they have scripted themselves as a socially or morally heroic

figure. So, to “do the right thing” and relinquish conventional fulfillment (marriage, money,

status) may, in fact, not be deemed a deprivation but a deep fulfillment – from living up to

one’s satisfying heroic self story. Hence, richly rewarding.

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But, to complicate the self-deception, this rewarding fulfillment is often portrayed in

literature not as true virtue, but as a form of pride. The successful self-story teller may exude

that aroma of pride (arising from satisfaction with the self, from dedication to the purity of the

self) that makes self-righteous or rigidly moralistic people so vaguely nauseating. Although

Strether is not an unsympathetic figure, his pompous “there you have it” without regard to the

evident feelings of Maria Gostrey is offputting. And the catch-22 of self deception is that it is

generally allied with some form of inner or outer bondage. So, just when our storyteller walks

forward to receive their standing ovation, they find their authentic self -- the only self capable

of living life “to the full” -- vanishing behind the curtain.

The thrill of these self sagas can birth figures like intriguing author and notorious liar-

about-himself, Bruce Chatwin, described by a friend as one who “tells not a half truth but a

truth and a half” (Sexton). Self sagas can be a complex component in a highly productive life.

it was William James who, after attending a play, shared that “my own real circumstances were

richer and fuller of cosmic elements than any play I know,” and William who likewise made an

accusation concerning the family’s “Celtic doubleness of nature” which he felt had bred a

“deficient in simple family affection” (R.W.B. Lewis 502-504).

One very intriguing case of “truth and lie” swirls around the mother of the James

children, Mary Walsh James. Stories one tells oneself about one’s family are often metastories

about the self. Jean Strouse, biographer of sister Alice James, notes that “what the James had

to say about themselves and each other was so opaque, elusive and confusing that it practically

needed a translator” (174). In particular, she points out that “the grown James siblings

described their childhood as pure paradise.” William, Henry and Alice all effusively evoked

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their mother in angelic terms. Yet, the evidence exhibited that “All five of her children suffered

most of their lives with crippling emotional troubles. Depression, nervous breakdown,

alcoholism, and various psychosomatic ailments . . . . “ In actuality, Strouse says, “Mary James

seems to have been a cold, practical, supervisory mother, who had little sympathy for any sign

of weakness and no patience for the frequent illnesses that plagued her children” (175). She

also notes Leon Edel’s observation that the mothers in Henry James novels are “grasping,

selfish, demanding, often terrifying creatures. At least two of them resemble vultures or

vampires, feeding off the spirits of their innocent children” (177).

On the unpacking of self-deceptive storytelling, Strouse notes that “the myth of family

divinity . . . . shouldn’t be discounted as mere propaganda: it serves as an important guide to

what the Jameses wanted or were supposed to believe about their lives, and that in itself tells

us a great deal about them” (177-178). What do such children have in common with Strether

and others whom Poirier says greatly gift the world by portraying what does not exist, or does

not yet exist as a real possibility; the upholders of hope in times seemingly hopeless?

And surely one must also ask: how does this storytelling proclivity position a person

living in a world that William James described as a “real fight” and not just “private theatricals”?

(240). We look at Strether, whose personal project is built on self-deception as well as lying by

other members of the American set in Paris, and feel compelled to ask if somewhere in all this

duplicity he lost the “real fight” – his own freedom to really live.

(3) The Spiritual Imagination

Most importantly, in terms of a thesis, how do self-deception and storytelling relate to

the spiritual life and the religious “enterprise?” How do we conceptualize and communicate our

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own spiritual lives? How have seminal figures of spirituality and religion conceptualized and

communicated their spiritual lives?

Books introduced in David Scott Arnold classes indicate that self deception, storytelling

and the spiritual life may conjointly relate to what Lynn Ross-Bryant and others call “the moral

imagination.” Currently I am not clear what this term really means (but see that opportunity

arising in the upcoming “Ways of Knowing.”) Meanwhile, for purposes of this paper, I will call

this factor the “spiritual imagination.”

R.W.B. Lewis directly connects Henry James sense of the theatrical to whatever spiritual

imagination -- religious or moral vision -- one may conceive James to have. “It remained only

for Henry James to carry the scenic method beyond the social and stagily comic realm . . . for

him to arrive at the larger and ultimately the religious vision that characterized his major

phase” (506). (Not to mention that Henry himself called the scenic method his “only

salvation.”) Lewis later unpacks this a bit, writing that James “succeeds almost uncannily in

begetting a mystic consciousness and a religious experience out of the irredeemably human and

earthbound modern Anglo-American world.” The methodology here seems to be Henry’s

artistic imagination suggesting to the reader’s own imagination what brother William called

“union with something larger than ourselves” (513).

William also insisted that this mystical sense of union “defies expression and no

adequate report of its contents can be given in words” (513). Which leads me to ask: when the

human spiritual realm is advanced by the personal mystical experience of a significant figure

(Buddha, Jesus, St. Paul, Mohammed, St. Francis, others), how is that transmitted to culture?

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I entirely agree with William that “The mother sea and fountain-head of all religions lie

in the mystical experiences of the individual” (R.W.B. 502). But how has the “spiritual

imagination” (or “moral imagination”) been brought into play in communicating that individual

mystical experience to others? In terms of cultural impact, myriad questions arise about how

such experiences are communicated, i.e. sent out by the “experiencer” to be received by initial

followers and, from them, transmitted to millions of adherents.

Additionally, why do so many of these seminal figures have no original writings of their

own – the “writing down” being left to devoted disciples? What’s “written down” then

typically morphs into the foundational document of an institution, thereby becoming subject to

a motley crew of ennervating institutional distortions. This is where American culture seems to

sit today regarding religion – going down for the third time in a sea of unfulfilling institutional

distortions of seminal mystical experiences.

Within a framework of these three topics -- self-deception, storytelling, and the spiritual

imagination -- I could raise various interrelated questions and concerns in a thesis.

For example, what role does imagination play in constructing a spiritual life that is valid

yet not self deceptive? Or is self deception an inherent property of religion and spirituality as

Freud maintained? I take it William James would hold that, so long as a person’s spiritual

beliefs foster positive outcomes in their life, then those beliefs would not be deemed precisely

self deceptive, even if they are “factually” wrong. Or, more accurately, James might hold that

self-deception is irrelevant on the scale of pragmatic value, i.e. can it be “wrong” if it “works”?

On another note, Pericles Lewis suggests that Strether possesses a pragmatism

necessary for those living in a world without God – evidenced by his willingness to “accept the

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fictions of others with whom one is thrown” and “the necessity of shared illusion as the only

faith on which an action can be based” (258). This reiterates the idea that self deceptive beliefs

may be somehow essential to life functioning and, therefore, self-validating in that sense.

But where does perceived “truth” factor in? Ultimately, can imagination only reach us

if tethered to some consensual truth or when it provides pragmatic value for our daily lives?

This may be Poirier’s project in elevating Henry James beyond the reach of mere literary

criticism into status as a mentor to life. Where do truth/reality (morals) and the theatre of

possibility/vision (art) intersect in a dynamic with the power to genuinely move existential

situations forward? Where do they disastrously collide due to an excess of imagination?

Scientific American recently used Steve Jobs and his cancer diagnosis to ask: at what point does

unrelenting optimism become self-destructive self-deception? (Which may have affinities with

the question of when the imagination of a genius becomes insanity.)

In terms of spirituality as enterprise aka “religion,” it’s worth exploring whether there’s

a third way forward in planetary religious development other than the two frequently cited

options: tolerant pluralism or syncretism. Contra Lyotard, could a third option emerge in the

form of a story more encompassing than any currently in play that suddenly takes the world by

storm? Of course, should such a thing happen, this would be a direct counterthrust to the

whole momentum of “post-modernism.”

But, in spirituality, will ultimately “the best story win?” Best accommodating the

apparent scientific realities of human existence? Best papering over existential realities with

vain hopes? Best conjuring up “not yet” possibilities that excite and motivate the human heart

into action? Or perhaps a story so imaginative that daily living becomes a pale and irrelevant

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alternative? Versions of these have been adopted by diverse crews from existentialists to video

gamers.

However, one of the most intriguing of these lines of thought might come from

combining insights from William James and Richard Poirier.

James held that (1) the origin of all religions lie in the mystical experiences of the

individual, (2) that “personal religious experience has its root and center in mystical states of

consciousness,” and (3) that mystical experience “defies expression . . . no adequate report of

its contents can be given in words” because it leads to “states of insight into depths of truth

unplumbed by the discursive intellect,” to “illuminations” and “revelations” (R.W.B. 512-513).

Place this alongside Poirier plus Leo Bersani’s foreword to A World Elsewhere and

observe how they position the use of language in American literature. Their depiction seems

analogous to religious development as it takes flight from an original mystical experience.

Bersani writes, “Literature perhaps ‘takes place’ as a certain kind of break in experience, as a

more or less deliberate failure of communication . . . . certain parts of the work reenact the

discontinuity from which the work was born. . . . (Poirier’s) tribute to that ‘something’ outside

the text – or, in other words, to the writer’s moving if vain effort to transcend his work as an

artist and to deny the finality of texts. . . . Which is to say that these moments always are, to

use the Lawrentian phrase frequently cited . . . a ‘struggle for verbal consciousness’”(xiv-xvii).

This also relates to the description Lyotard gives in his appendix to The Postmodern

Condition of the avant garde in art, in which he says that modern art is emblematic of a

“sublime sensibility” that is, a sense “that there is something non-presentable demanding to be

put into sensible form and yet overwhelms all attempts to do so” (Alysworth). This

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“unpresentable” thing seems what Poirier is trying to get at when analyzing the dilemma Mark

Twain encounters in portraying Huck Finn. Huck could even be called “postmodern” as Poirier

depicts Twain’s struggle, in that Huck expresses Gary Alysworth’s distinction between modern

and post-modern art: “But where modern art presents the unpresentable as a missing content

within a beautiful form, as in Marcel Proust, postmodern art, exemplified by James Joyce, puts

forward the unpresentable by forgoing beautiful form itself, thus denying what Kant would call

the consensus of taste” (par. 9).

It is easy to discern Huck Finn’s “unbeautiful form” for which no consensus exists by

comparing Huck to the human forms prevalent in the fiction of Henry James – Madame de

Vionnet as acclaimed by her peers, for example. In fact, James’ critique of Hawthorne uses

James’s perception of America’s lack of beauty of form as one of its primary thrusts (Poirier).

Spiritually, this brings to mind the passage in Isaiah anticipating Christ, that simply says “they

found no beauty in him.”

Overall, I feel this analogy -- between Twain’s difficulty portraying Huck Finn without

doing so within the very conventions he is resisting, and the dilemma of how to translate

seminal mystical experiences and their “dangerous uniqueness” (Poirier 202) into something

culturally vital without killing them off in conventions and language of religion – deserves a

paper all of its own.

American culture is in the midst of a religious meltdown with nothing yet on the horizon

to replace it. On a popular level, Western society shows a plague of meaninglessness, addictive

consumerism, mindless entertainment and desperate art that attempts to fill that void.

Modernism seeks to perpetuate the “cash value” of religion without a God and without the

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supernatural. Postmodernism perpetuates nihilism and divisiveness. Yet, beyond the

“atmosphere” of academia, mystical experiences are happening all round and individuals are

perceiving themselves to be in relationship to God. Clearly, as William James tells us, a “real

fight” is going on. If we can’t preserve the message of the seminal voices purporting to be in

communication with God, if we can’t receive them in near essence rather than under severe

distortion, how are we going to win?

Culturally, we are suffering the plight of Twain and his novel. As Poirier says,

“Huckleberry Finn is an instance of what happens to a novel when society, as the author

perceives it, provides no opportunity, no language for the transformation of individual

consciousness into social drama” (193). Conversely, we are a society that can hardly imagine a

respected literary work providing an opportunity or language for transforming mystical

consciousness into social drama. Twain, Poirier says, could not conceive of a society that

offered alternatives to artificiality. We, likewise, increasingly cannot conceive an accepted

public discourse that offers alternatives to secularism, that conceives the spiritual and

supernatural as respectable. In sophisticated circles, we have become accustomed to thinking

of any strong conviction as coercive. What’s a mystic to do? Other than jump on a raft with

Huck and go down the river searching for a vocabulary?

I speak for the mystic and receiver of visions and dreams as Poirier speaks of American

writers adopting a “seriousness about literature as an institution” because of their sense of “the

country’s having been betrayed by its other institutions”(x). Certainly, those who have known

direct religious experiences deserve to adopt a “seriousness” about their excluded position –

about being used by religious institutions which betray their experience and then toss them

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outside the camp as hopelessly unrealistic. Repeatedly, the church has integrated its theology

with current science, only to have the whole edifice overturned when the science is

disconfirmed. It is time to go back to the datum of religious experience and build from there.

From that starting point, can a mystic’s authentic communication be found in a text as

we know it? Can they share Poirier’s belief that, “The great works of American literature are

alive with the effort to stabilize certain feelings and attitudes that have, as it were, no place in

the world, no place at all except where a writer’s style can give them one” (xi).

Or should they launch out with Poirier to farther shores in the “struggle for verbal

consciousness”(210). “Struggle” is a worthy word with a fine spiritual lineage that runs straight

through the meaning of “Israel” as “one who struggles with God.” Should their struggle to

communicate something authentic to their experience embrace what Bersani describes as “the

efforts to escape from itself, from the condition of being merely literary” because the mystical

revelation is, indeed, a “tribute to that ‘something’ outside the text”, an “experience of

rupture” calling him or her to “deny the finality of all texts” (xvi).

If so, what would such a communication look like? Where can the spiritual imagination

take us?

In my thesis, my hope is to travel out and bring back perspective with value to the

spiritual imagination. The lantern under my jacket will be Poirier’s sense of “gift to the general

human consciousness” softly shining as an unattainable but luring icon. Trekking forth into the

dark wilds of thesis, I am seeking input, feedback, guidance, reading recommendations, and

maps of focus points in the reading already recommended.

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Works Cited

Aylesworth, Gary. “The Postmodern Condition.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy -

Postmodernism. 30 September 2008. Web. 2 February 2012.

Bersani, Leo. Foreword. A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature. By

Richard Poirier. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. ix-xviii. Print.

“Famous Authors Virginia Woolf, Novelist.” Prod. Dir. Peter Hort for Kultur. West Long Branch,

NJ: Scan Productions. Video.

Gunn, Giles. Introduction. Pragmatism and Other Writings. By William James. New York:

Penguin Books, 2000. vii – xxxii. Print.

Haught, Nancy. “’God is Dead’ Theologian Dies.” The Oregonian 11 March 2012: B5.

James, William. Pragmatism and Other Writings. New York: Penguin Books, 2000. Print.

Lewis, Pericles. “James’s Sick Souls.” The Henry James Review 22 (2001): 248-258. Print.

Lewis, R.W.B. The Jameses: A Family Narrative. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991.

Print.

Poirier, Richard. A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature. Madison: The

University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Print.

Sexton, David. “Bruce Chatwin: Letters from a Fallen Angel.” London Evening Standard, 25

August 2010. Web 27 Feb. 2012.

Strouse, Jean. “The Real Reasons.” Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American

Biography. Ed. William Zinsser. New York: Book-Of-The-Month-Club, 1986. 161-195.

Print.