‘Art is the apotheosis of solitude’, wrote Samuel Beckett while on the subject of Marcel Proust. In the case of Henry James the jury is still hung (up) on the question of whether his art is the apotheosis of solitude or of sociality: whether he harboured the most exquisite social sensibility ever, or the most exquisitely antisocial; whether his fictional characters learn to separate and individuate in order to become psychologically whole, hale, and hearty, or rather remain agglutinated in one vainglorious metaphorical psychomachy; and whether we are to understand James's narrative and aesthetic ‘mastery’ in terms imperial, colonial, or psychosexual. It seems to me that how we answer each of these questions, whether we think of them as primarily political, psychological, ethical or aesthetical, hinges on how we interpret the construction of ‘interiority’ in James; whether indeed we think there is such a thing as interiority, and where, if anywhere, we might locate ‘exteriority’, or whatever might represent the ‘world’ (that which is not ‘just’ language or reflexive subjectivity).

In this chapter I shall argue that one reason why it is so difficult to locate what is not ‘interior’ in Henry James is that in his fiction the topography of knowledge is, as it were, backward; or, better, it constitutes the rejection avant la lettre of interiority as Freud will define it.