Henry James vs. A.I.

I find it pretty hard to get through late Henry James. I’ve read “The Beast in the Jungle” and “The Jolly Corner,” and while I don’t regret reading either of them, I have to admit that I bit my fist, shaking and crying, the entire time. Neither of these stories seem to take place in the actual world. All the “action” (the wrong word) takes place in consciousness with a maddening degree of excessive subtlety. Our awareness of day to day life has a lot going on, sure—and I’m all for subtlety. But when I read certain authors, like Tolstoy or Conrad, I feel like I’m developing a heightened sense of the real world, being tossed into the realm of the hyper-real. With Henry James, I feel almost the opposite. I feel like the entire realm of sensual, physical reality has been bleached out, and I’m now trapped in a realm of total mind, of subtle little nattering thoughts. Maybe I’m too coarse-meated for The Master’s refined style, but I think my instincts are backed up by Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote, “Despite the scruples and delicate complexities of James, his work suffers from a major defect: the absence of life."

I was explaining what irks me about James to someone the other day, and I searched through The Wings of the Dove, at random, to prove my point. I will now do so again:

“There was no such misfortune, or at any rate no such discomfort, she further reasoned, as to be formed at once for being and for seeing. You always saw, in this case, something else than what you were, and you got, in consequence, none of the peace of your condition. However, as she never really let Marian see what she was, Marian might well not have been aware that she herself saw. Kate was accordingly, to her own vision, not a hypocrite of virtue, for she gave herself up; but she was a hypocrite of stupidity, for she kept to herself everything that was not herself. What she most kept was the particular sentiment with which she watched her sister instinctively neglect nothing that would make for her submission to their aunt; a state of the spirit that perhaps marked most sharply how poor you might become when you minded so much the absence of wealth.”

Reading this makes me feel like a drooling idiot—like the people against whom I tried defending The Great Gatsby on Twitter a little while back. I literally do start drooling, re-reading each sentence four times, brain turning into lukewarm oatmeal. And this isn’t even one of his more difficult paragraphs! This is comparatively easy Late Henry James. Is what he’s saying as complex as it seems? Or is it actually simple? So simple that it’s not worth re-reading each sentence to figure out what it means?

I hate these questions. And so I leave them unanswered.

But I realized something. A.I. could never come up with Henry James’ late style on its own. It could be trained on Henry James’ books and could parody or imitate his late style—but it would never figure out how to write like this if Henry James had never existed. I predict that it will never invent a literary original style anywhere near as radically deviant and torturous as Late James’. But the real Henry James managed to do precisely that!

If we are to believe the A.I. people, an original style should be impossible. Everything has to be a recapitulation of the past. But what, after all, is a style? A style doesn’t subsist in the words themselves, but in their arrangement, the shape of the whole. It is imposed from above, as it were, by the writer’s mind. It grows out of an attitude, out of the strange, intimate relation of a peculiar body, mind, and spirit to the world. AI, in its processes, does the opposite. It works backwards from the parts to generate the whole. It cannot impose a whole on its parts, so to speak, in the same manner we can. It can only simulate the process in reverse (if that makes sense). It has no choice. It’s a program. That’s what a program is: parts. Partial.

A genuinely new style or “voice” is far more mysterious than the derivative productions of A.I. How does one author manage to distinguish himself or herself from every other author? What makes style possible? What makes all of us not sound the same? I am content to leave the answers where they should be left—in the realm of the soul, the realm of the unsayable. Like Henry James himself, “I reach beyond the laboratory brain.”

But we as a culture have tried to make the realm of the unsayable sayable, have put the right brain into left brain terms. The sorcerer’s apprentice is running amok, and the sorcerer is due for a check in.