Henry James: Perspective and Geometry
Lapoujade, David
Henry James: Perspective and Geometry - 2006.
37
The purpose of this analysis is to show that James’s novels are governed by compositional rules similar to those of projective geometry. James’s perspectivism exceeds the scope of “focalisation” to which it has been reduced by structural narratology. Indeed, taken as a totality, James’s work is animated by the logic of a motion involving games of projections, splittings, metamorphoses that are typical of this “perspectivist” geometry. Characters are submitted to rotations or torsions which testify to a genuine geometric physics. Ultimately, could not James’s work be regarded as a vast combinatory system in which fictions answer one another according to the continuous metamorphosis of some central themes?
Henry James: Perspective and Geometry - 2006.
37
The purpose of this analysis is to show that James’s novels are governed by compositional rules similar to those of projective geometry. James’s perspectivism exceeds the scope of “focalisation” to which it has been reduced by structural narratology. Indeed, taken as a totality, James’s work is animated by the logic of a motion involving games of projections, splittings, metamorphoses that are typical of this “perspectivist” geometry. Characters are submitted to rotations or torsions which testify to a genuine geometric physics. Ultimately, could not James’s work be regarded as a vast combinatory system in which fictions answer one another according to the continuous metamorphosis of some central themes?
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