Structuralism and Its Aftermath in the Fiction of Henry James

A dimension of the later style of the fiction of Henry James is a deep concern with images and appearances. It typically pictures the character in in-between situations where he is recognized not as he really is but as he appears, as he shows himself in the projected situation. Another aspect of the later style of James is the magnificence of these appearances, because they are the outcome of reciprocal spaces which in turn signify vivified and productive relations. These facades of James's fiction render it a space for a new mode of realistic representation which depends on a kind of language that takes the story into its service, that depends on consciousness dramatization, and on a new kind of verisimilitude. And the watershed of the Jamesian verisimilitude is mainly the work of successive centers of consciousness from where the tale is narrated. To show the deepest layers of the human soul, James's narrator can occasionally go beyond the frontiers of language and takes use of the non-verbal structures of culture also. In this mode of fiction, consciousness is dramatized in a process of evolution, and "the real" shown as psychological, relational, and as the product of reading.