"Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue"
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James turns “experience” into a nervous system: not a résumé of events, but a hypersensitive apparatus tuned to the slightest tremor. The spider-web metaphor is doing double duty. It flatters the novelist’s vocation (only a writer, James implies, has the patience to spin such filaments) while also insisting that the self is porous, constantly being revised by what drifts in. Experience isn’t a closed archive you consult; it’s a living surface that keeps receiving impressions, often beyond your conscious control.
The intent is polemical, even if the prose is plush. James is defending the realist novel against the idea that fiction should deal in tidy morals or limited “big” subjects. In the prefaces and essays around his fiction, he argues that the artist’s job is to attend: to register “air-borne particles” others ignore, then make meaning out of that accumulation. The web catches everything: the overheard remark, the social slight, the mood of a room. That’s James’s whole aesthetic of consciousness and nuance, his belief that the drama is frequently microscopic.
Subtext: experience is not democratic. Not everyone’s web is spun the same way. Some people, James suggests, move through life with coarse netting; the serious artist suffers (and benefits) from finer threads. “Never complete” is also a quiet rebuke to certainty. In James’s modernity, there are no final takes, just ever more data snagged in the mind’s tissue, demanding interpretation.
The intent is polemical, even if the prose is plush. James is defending the realist novel against the idea that fiction should deal in tidy morals or limited “big” subjects. In the prefaces and essays around his fiction, he argues that the artist’s job is to attend: to register “air-borne particles” others ignore, then make meaning out of that accumulation. The web catches everything: the overheard remark, the social slight, the mood of a room. That’s James’s whole aesthetic of consciousness and nuance, his belief that the drama is frequently microscopic.
Subtext: experience is not democratic. Not everyone’s web is spun the same way. Some people, James suggests, move through life with coarse netting; the serious artist suffers (and benefits) from finer threads. “Never complete” is also a quiet rebuke to certainty. In James’s modernity, there are no final takes, just ever more data snagged in the mind’s tissue, demanding interpretation.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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