MHS

I spent the last three days reading and finally finishing Henry James's The Wings of the Dove. While this isn't meant to be a criticism of the novel, it has to be one of the slowest reads in literary history.

One of the more amusing obstacles to understanding James's prose are his metaphors. As many people are aware, this is the register of language at which he's most comfortable, at least in his later works. In fact, it's pretty uncommon to stumble upon a description that describes an object or person directly. If one's not careful, reading James can result in an attack of Metaphor Hallucination Syndrome, a syndrome, which I'm just going to treat as a real thing, where the victim imagines metaphors everywhere. For instance, whenever characters in a James novel find their actions and behavior directed by someone else, James likes to employ the metaphor of a carriage, as in, "being in the carriage," (or "brougham," or "cab") of someone else. The problem arises when a character really does get into a carriage, and the reader, if that reader is me, spends a minute or two wondering whose sinister plan the character has just accidentally stepped into.

This is not to say that James, if you have the time, isn't rewarding. In no other writing that I can think of are the significances of events so thoroughly investigated. If James can teach us anything, it's how to be mindful of our experiences. Or as he liked to say, to be the kind of person on whom nothing is missed.