Abstract

I argue the need to reexamine the notion of experience as it functions in James's work. In contrast to interpretations which define experience in terms of empiricism, I claim Jamesian experience must be rethought as a dialectic of bewilderment and enlightenment. I show how Jamesian experience is a fundamentally negative process in that James's texts dramatize a collision between competing fields of knowledge and forms of subjectivity. Going against a body of traditional James criticism, I argue that this redefinition of experience allows us to read James's aesthetics in terms of action and Jamesian perception as destructuring and recreative. Read this way Jamesian perception proves itself a refined engagement with the world and should be seen as fundamentally demystifying and recreative. This attitude is best expressed through the basic structure of James's narrative technique which depends upon a notion of self as detached and fluid so as to be always open to the possibilities of experience and the opportunity for liberation experience offers. What James reveals in his works is that experience invariably breaks down one's conceptual framework and ultimately leads to an emancipation from the constraints of a cultural and subjective history. ;Using Hans-Georg Gadamer for conceptual clarification, I argue that central to James's hermeneutics is the understanding that experience is, primarily, an event of deprivation. I show how James dramatizes the consequences of experience by highlighting the tension between an understanding of the self as permeable and the requirements of expected social behavior. In doing so, James's texts expose not just the social construction of knowledge and forms of subjectivity by making visible competing versions of understanding, but the dynamic of estrangement and release produced by the consequences of experience. For James experience exposes the existence of various repressive mechanisms and forces the perceiving subject to reconceptualize his or her understanding of self and world. I show how for James's characters, as for himself, the consequences of experience lead one to a worldly displacement, to a position of living in between worlds, to an understanding that resolution is always premature.