James, pragmatism, and the realist ideal

Albert Einstein once said that the most important question facing humanity is whether the universe is a friendly place. For William and Henry James, the universe is decidedly unfriendly, especially in terms of satisfying the dreams and desires that individuals imaginatively create but are unable to realize. This gulf between desire and actuality constitutes the defining tension of both Jamesian pragmatism and Jamesian realism, a tension that is best described by William James in Pragmatism (1907): “Is all ‘yes, yes’ in the universe? Doesn't the fact of ‘no’ stand at the very core of life?” At their most fundamental level, pragmatism and realism are ways to explore the psychological, social and philosophical consequences of a world that says “no.” In 1896, Henry James wrote to his friend A. C. Benson, “I have the imagination of disaster and see life as indeed ferocious and sinister.” This baleful perspective when translated into James's fictional world has a tragic and at times a comic dimension, leading to a situation in which the protagonists are robbed of precisely what they desire, namely a profound intimacy with another. Whether it is Christopher Newman's romantic rebuff in The American (1877), or Isabel Archer's miserable marriage in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), or Milly Theale's terminal illness in The Wings of the Dove (1902), James repeatedly constructs a fictional world that withholds intimacy from its major characters. When William Dean Howells chides James for not ending The American with the marriage of Christopher Newman and his French fiancee Claire de Cintre, James admits that such an ending would have been “prettier,” but Newman and de Cintre, he insists, represent an “impossible couple.