Henry James’s Perpetual Mediation

Starting with a reading of James’s lesser-known tale “The Special Type” (1900), this essay explores how James sustains and inhabits “types” as recognizable objects for readers to think and feel against. The construction of types in James’s fiction provides a dialectical mechanism of making abstractions that I would call “perpetual mediation”—an unfinishable and unpredictable process that indexes a potentially collective existence or a categorical space through an individual character, but the connection between the character and the category remains perpetually subject to questioning and re-making.