![]() ![]() Sargent, I shall argue, whose “faculty of brooding reflection” James admired (1989 227), is the specular double of the “brooding analyst” (134, 335) of The American Scene-or, with a slight yet significant adjustment of the rotating mirror, for there always is one, of the author himself-and the portrait of Higginson a reflective image of James’s text. Doing so also has the advantage of enabling me to set the stage for my treatment further on of a key scenario in The American Scene, the presentation that unfolds in Harvard Hall of Sargent’s portrait of Major Henry Lee Higginson, in the book’s first chapter. ![]() Since all the ways of not reading The American Scene seem to turn around a compulsion either to ignore what James, back in his earliest days as a writer, called the “fatal obliquity of vision” (1975 47) or to devise “theoretical” (ideological) strategies for getting around it, getting back to the naked eye (empirical reality) through variously contrived conceptions of mediated immediacy-“theatrical,” “performative,” “pragmatist”-, it seems a good idea to begin by focusing attention on the painter’s eye. In The American Scene, one of his most overtly referential works, he employed the phrase “naked eye” only between quotation marks (190-191). Henry James never suffered the illusion of pure perception. ![]() To the Memory of Ralph Introduction: Brooding ![]()
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