Two by Henry James

There are intriguing similarities between Henry James's The Princess Casamassima and 'The Beast in the Jungle.' Both are about young men who are committed to an life-altering future event which will happen in a form and at a time they cannot predict. Hyacinth in The Princess Casamassima has contracted himself to a radical underground organization to carry out a terrorist act when so instructed. John Marcher in 'The Beast' privately and secretly awaits a tremendous experience (an experience which takes the form of a 'law' as he understands it) which will also happen at some moment and in some form that he can't foresee. Both characters gain distinction and singularity by their submission to a major contingency; both attract women by virtue of it. The call to violence is indeed made to Hyacinth, though, having lost his faith in revolutionary politics he commits suicide rather than carrying it out. And Marcher's experience—the Beast in the Jungle—reveals itself in a very unexpected form indeed. He realizes that it is his indifference and selfishness to May Bartram, the woman who has for years shared his secret and loved him, that has marked him out and leapt at him. He has been the "man to whom nothing on earth was to have happened:" his experience is his realizing that at last and too late.
From a certain point of view, these are stories about the possibility of experience (the constructive role of anticipation, choseness and accident in sharpening experience and in shaping individuality: there's a kind of grace at work here). And they are also stories of triumph over what Forster in Howards End called "sameness", even if that triumph, because it makes its home in the pathologies of the imagination, inhabits nullity and flight. From another point of view "The Beast in the Jungle" in particular is about the impossibility of experience when it is thought as a break from the mundane and the expected. It is important that in his Preface to The Soft Side, James talks of Marcher's assessing his experiences as they come to him, and his failure to mark out the one that counts.

My interest in this is focussed on how these fictions might be used to think about the kind of literary criticism (Leavism) that thinks of literature as assessing and expanding the experiental. What these stories tell us: is not that the capacity to have experience belongs to the imagination, whether collectively or individually. Rather the will to experience is unsatisfiable. Even so, that means that there's an important sense in which experience does not belong outside literature itself. To judge experience is to make a literary judgement.