Henry James Takes his Sweet Time

For me, the greatest challenge of reading Henry James is keeping alert--staying with him--the whole time. He, of course, makes this very difficult with his exhausting suspensive sentences that meander a whole lot and eventually settle on what feels like a thankless detail. In the scheme of James, however, I can see how his sentence endings have deeper resonance in relation to the whole story. As we discussed in class a few weeks ago, James is representing a sort of hands-off stream of consciousness, portraying thoughts as they come and go from his characters' minds, typically at a leisurely pace. In the confines of this short story, he tends to go back and forth between longer sentences explaining thoughts or feelings, and every now and then he slips into a mode that feels like regular fiction prose that just lays out the plot for you (through dialogue, a comparatively short sentence, and so on). If it weren't for these seemingly "faster" moments in the writing, I don't think we could get through it in one sitting.

The suspension bears a blatant rhythmic quality that, for whatever odd reason, when read, reminds me of the way we recite the Pledge of Allegiance:

"They met her eyes for the first time, but in a moment, before touching them, she knew them as things of the theater, as very much too fine to have been, with any verisimilitude, things of the vicarage. They were too dreadfully good to be true, for her aunt had had no jewels to speak of, and these were cornets and girdles, diamonds, rubies and sapphires. Flagrant tinsel and glass, they looked strangely vulgar, but if, after the first queer shock of them, she found herself taking them up, it was for the very proof, never yet so distinct to her, of a far-off faded story." (85).

James takes the time to explain to us the precise moment in which Charlotte understands the jewelry's sentiment. This particular realization of jewels being of the theater and of a marriage, after all, fuels the whole story. The beginning and ending sentences are structured similarly, both with seemingly anti-climactic yet sentimental points waiting at the end of all the qualifications and crucial details.

His nearly-one-paragraph-long sentence also has many of the same symptoms:

"Charlotte was conscious of a mind divided and a vision vaguely troubled, at once more she took up two or three of the subjects of this revelation; a big bracelet in the form of a gilt serpent with many twists and beady eyes, a brazen belt studded with emeralds and rubies, a chain, of flamboyant architecture, to which, at the Theatre Royal, Little Peddlington, Hamlet's mother, had probably been careful to attach the portrait of the successor to Hamlet's father." (86).

It's remarkable that James thought it was to his advantage to keep these varied thoughts as a single sentence in this scene, and yet his ideas come across pretty clearly, despite the amount of time it takes for them to be fully realized. It's as if his sentences, loaded with both mundane details and big ideas, are often times meant to capture the entirety of a thought, starting at the psychological connections that the character makes, then heading to the physical sensations of the moment, and ending up with something relating to social rank or status. With that, James gives us the fullness of an experience by stretching it out over the length of a suspended sentence that is motivated to express something meaningful.