Henry James’s Data

Sierra Eckert • Wesleyan University

November 3rd @ 5pm • Room 100 of The Frank Center for Public Affairs

This talk examines the aesthetics of evidence in Henry James’s “données” –– a borrowed French term James used to refer to the real-world anecdotes or minimal units of narrative social “data” that he amassed in his notebooks. For literary critics, the novel’s sociological imagination has long been located at the level of character and plot. Yet in James’s writing, narrative’s capacity to produce social knowledge emerges not through the carefully crafted scene, but through schematic summary: the routinized collection, collation, and condensation of social facts as short linguistic fragments (“données”), whose structural logic relies on both the brevity and brutality of the fact. In works like The Portrait of a Lady and What Maisie Knew, as well as critical essays (Notes on Novelists), James displaces the pressures of the sociological donnée from the realm of character into the space of style. Situating the donnée within other nineteenth-century protocols for documenting social life, this talk will show how James’s stylization of compact sociological data stages the fantasy of externalized demographic fact present in the evidentiary practices of tabloid journalism, social fieldwork, and older practices of sensational crime writing.

Genres of Proof
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