Cognitive Confusions and Critical Misapprehensions. Henry James’s »The Real Thing«

Heinze, Rüdiger

doi:10.28937/978-3-7873-4334-8

Cognitive Confusions and Critical Misapprehensions. Henry James’s »The Real Thing«

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Abstract

This essay uses principles and concepts of cognitive psychology and the context of 19th-century visual culture to show that the narrator of Henry James’s »The Real Thing« (1892) is an unreliable narrator – a point which has been made before – not primarily because his judgments are incongruous with those of an implied author (a troubled concept in itself) and reader (as has been argued by critics so far) but rather because the manner in which he perceives and judges is so much d’accord with the way humans tend to perceive and judge: by heuristic processes of selection, projection and generalization. As I will further argue, these processes of cognition also have serious ethical repercussions – a point mostly overlooked so far.