Henry James

Yea he really doesn't seem to value rich progressives too much in Portrait of a Lady either but he doesn't really go beyond finger-wagging for most of the book. And his sentence structure is really hit and miss for me. Sometimes there will be pages that are golden and others that just get bogged down in overly convoluted run on sentences that just impede the flow and I'll end up reading the same paragraph like five times over because James wanted to have more filler for his novel. If he managed to trim the novel some of the novels redundancies it might've been pretty good

*trim some of the novels

Yea it's decent in some parts because the conversations between the character somehow manages to still be humorous but the rest of the novel seems to just be James telling you exactly how the characters feel without much nuance

Just get through it. The first 2/3rds of it is beyond bland, but if you can make it past it, the story gets really interesting, really fast

He's an English author, just read him in the greatest language in the world pleb

I'm currently reading through Turn of The Screw.

The plot's seems interesting and the dialogue is good, even if the prose is meh.

Just finished the Portrait. Would've been a truly phenomenal book if it were not so tepid. Do finish it though. Chapter 42 is what gave the book it's acclaim and from that chapter on the weight of all the details ceases to be inertia against motion and becomes inertia against stopping. The end is really remarkable.

If literature casts light, James is noteworthy more for the shadows he reveals in others than his own brilliance. Portrait

a) sharply clarified the failings of Middlemarch (another phenomenal and dull book)

b) lent a lot of weight to the charge that Dickens' humor diminishes his characters. This may seem irrelevant on a board were no one reads Dickens (big fucking mistake, by the way), but it's a literary defect that was only magnified in modern Dickens-posers like DFW and Zadie Smith. Reading James makes clear just how non-real Samad Iqbal and Avril Incandenza are.

James shows clearly what it takes to create real characters - and maybe in doing so shows us that it isn't a good task for literature.

Thoughts maybe a little messy - still haven't sorted out how I felt about Portrait. It was a great change after White Teeth (which wasn't very good) and it was better than James' short stories by orders of magnitude.

I love his work. I've only read The Golden Bowl (which I would place in the top 50 of all time), the Turn of the Screw, and The Pupil. I think his prose style is unique in its baroqueness. But I think his strength is his odd use of narrative perspective/point of view. It's a perfect mediation between the external social novels of the 19th century (Austen, Glaskell, Dickens) and the more internal romances such as Jane Eyre and modernism's internal monologue. The balance he strikes develops a kind of psychological cubism that stands out for me.

Only on Ch. 20 but reading your description of the book makes it seem like it gets pretty interesting later. My only problem with the book so far is the need for him to directly characterize every character instead of allowing for their actions to convey their motivations and thoughts. I mean he'll pretty much spoon feed you the protagonist's reactions and emotions which tends to become a little tedious.

The narrator in the Portrait of a Lady is one of the things that can frustrate the fuck outta me but can also be quite poignant...it's a weird halfway point between unreliable omnipresent narrator and pure stream of consciousness. Like it functions as some sort of character in itself that can encapsulate social views about the characters and their inner thoughts at the same time. Pretty impressive but again would much rather have a flowing novel that doesn't get impeded by multiple perspectives that only serve to impede rather than highlight the novels thematic structure.

I honestly can't say I agree about the whole humor thing though...I mean a lot of this book so far is actually quite clever. Doesn't really seem like he's refuting Dickens but more or less refining his approach to humor and making it more realistic in the process. But I do agree that his decision to stick to rather benign characters makes the book sluggish. I do think that Smith does a better less preachy job of depicting women than James does, who's views seem to be more fatalistic than Smith's do. And Wallace might get kicked around on this board but he can create much more exciting albeit usually highly unlikely and exceptional characters and a desire to keep reading much better than most realist authors like Flaubert or James can. Which probably isn't their primary focus but having something to cling onto through a novel helps.

Spoon feed is a strong term. James describes the conscious thoughts of his characters (limited in large part to Isabel and occasionally her cousin), but their thoughts don't reveal their all. The thoughts we think are as much expressions of something more essential as our actions.

Eliot uses the same vanishing-narrator technique in Middlemarch. If it does anything, I'd say it continues the sense that conscious thought and action are both observable by the writer (when they want to look - hence James repeatedly saying "not to the purpose of our narrative"), but both can only suggest, not state outright, what Isabel really is.

No need for James to be humorless to be refuting Dickens brand of humor and method of building character - big, hyperbolic leitmotifs (Pancks the steamboat, Millat the gangster-film-fanatic). Those kind of characters are memorable, but more as satire than anything else. Dickens usually gives these characters smaller roles and has them stand-in for whole classes of people (Mr. Pumblechook, the British petit-bourgeois); Smith and Wallace give those characters larger roles and use theme and ideology to decide the leitmotifs that relate them (Avril the OCD, agorophobic clean-freak somehow an inveterate casanova; Archie the coin-flipping, nouveau-Hamlet). In either case, the characters become mere caricature - of a class of people or a class of ideas.

Isabel surprises us because she surprises herself. Samad surprises us because he's poorly rendered.

To see what I mean, just imagine Dickens writing Ralph or Lord Warbuton (either of who might very well be Dickens characters). Then imagine Zadie Smith doing it (both are slightly more out of place in Smith's universe, but not entirely). Either author could do it, but they'd come out as cartoons.

James acknowledges that very often people really do behave like one of Dickens caricatures (Henrietta and to a certain extent Osmond), but his writing gets at something more that I'm not sure Dickens ever really got to.

That said I'd rather read Dickens over James any day.

>"Henry James is good but boring"
>"Portrait of a Lady is good but boring"

Get these fucking plebs out of this fucking board jesus christ go shit up Veeky Forums you inbreds. Literature does not have to yell at you to be interesting; learn to interact with it on a more subtle level than your sesame street education dictated, and you'll have fun reading Henry James, and Dickens, too.

I've yet to read The Golden Bowl, which is apparently his magnum opus--so I do say this with some reservation--but from my experience reading his other works, I didn't care much for him. In general, I think English literature before the Modernist movement in the late 19th/early 20th centuries is basically an awkward, stunted version of what was being produced in Russian and French. I think the language required a few generations of artists becoming acquainted with the form of the novel, building upon each others' ideas, engraving its syntax into their marrow, before it could produce anything great.

get over yourself. The criticism that James is lifeless has been made forever, by such plebs as Borges, Woolf and even EM Forester, another writer of famously dull books.

Being too patrician to dirty your hands actually turning pages, you'd probably never know

Most people here don't enjoy works with even a hint of romanticism, so that rules out a significant number of authors from discussion.

Victorian literature is shit

What?

>3 famous people said this thing so it must be true

almost an argument

>never read Henry James

Get this fucking pleb out of this fucking board jesus christ go shit up Veeky Forums you inbred

>lent a lot of weight to the charge that Dickens' humor diminishes his characters. This may seem irrelevant on a board were no one reads Dickens (big fucking mistake, by the way), but it's a literary defect that was only magnified in modern Dickens-posers like DFW and Zadie Smith. Reading James makes clear just how non-real Samad Iqbal and Avril Incandenza are.

I never understood this criticism of Dickens. Characters of his that are faulted with this seem to be written so deliberately, they're meant to be larger than life grotesque caricatures. Dickens does also have more 'realistic' characters that aren't downplayed by the humor. As far as I remember he used the humor to contrast and ground those characters, I wouldn't say that diminishes those characters in any way.

Also, Dickens was basically raging against most of the common place atrocities of his time that a good chunk of people simply ignored. Not having that humor to offset the seriousness would've made Dickens far too tedious. Can you imagine reading Bleak House without the humor? The entire thing is basically a rant against the legal profession and the inefficiency of the chancery system.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that while Dickens does have memorable characters and maybe slightly less realistic characters than his critics would've liked they seem to ignore that his works generally pushed his agenda, had he not used the humor his works would not have had the lasting power that they do have due to being incredibly tedious and stuck in their time period.

read one story of his, about a slut in Europe. it sucked. I don't know why he's so popular

but i dont want to! I am fluent in english, but i like my language much more

Sanskrit?