Creating a Home Theater: Voice and Intimacy in Henry James
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I was inside a silence that was not an absence of noise so much as the living presence of everything. … When I stepped into the little cell where I was to sleep, I was brought to such a state of attention … I was alone with my senses, the stars above me, the winding road above the sea. I'd disappeared inside the stillness all around me. … Every writer knows an outline of this richness: it's what's called being "in the zone."
—Pico Iyer, "Out of the Cell," Granta (2017)
Pico Iyer, world-wide traveler, essayist, and novelist, who has long resided in Nara, one of Japan's most culturally significant cities, writes above about his experience at a retreat in California. He reflects on how he "unplugged" himself from his digitally and electrically driven life in order to become conscious of his creative urges again. At the retreat he stayed in an isolated cubicle and immersed himself in a world of silence and solitude. He describes his state of mind as being "in the zone" that he asserts is known to "every writer." In this state, Iyer frees himself from his reckless schedule, leaving his smartphone and other devices behind. This frenetic life is familiar to many of us in the twenty-first century. We awaken to find our virtual mailbox overflowing with messages that we allow to rule our day. Iyer's experience of rising instead to a morning of facing himself, listening to silence and nature's murmurs, enables him to hear his own inner voice. More enthralling still is his claim that his power as a writer is fully recharged. Silence, in other words, stimulates his acute listening ability, which subsequently refreshes his other senses. Confronting oneself in silence seems to hold the key—a condition that Henry James also deemed necessary to sustain a wholesome, creative mind at the turn of the nineteenth century. "The Great Good Place" (1900), [End Page 31] the focus of this article, dramatizes precisely this sort of "in-the-zone" experience, a story of a fantastic adventure into the undiscovered territory of the unconscious during sleep. There the protagonist, a writer, learns to listen to his inner voice. This close reading of James's text, however, first begins with an examination of James's interest in sound and voice as revealed in his works of the 1890s.
Voice
The decade preceding "The Great Good Place" proved to be a watershed in James's life as a writer. In the early years of the 1890s, James envisaged a greater opportunity in the theater on account of a fairly successful stage production of The American. Even so, he was anxious that his voice would not reach his audience or readers. He wrote to Robert Louis Stevenson, "I have had to try to make somehow or other the money I don't make by literature. My books don't sell, and it looks as if my plays might" (qtd. in Edel 16). But James was not without worry about the theater either. His 1892 short story "Nona Vincent," for example, reveals his anxiety. A dramatist James named Allan Wayworth writes a play of the same title as the story and conveys that he enjoys reading it aloud to a Mrs. Alsager, whom he admires. But when Wayworth's play is staged, it fails due to the poor performance of a young actress, Nona Vincent. Mrs. Alsager, meanwhile, secretly mentors Nona, who finally succeeds on stage.1 James even writes a happy ending for the tale, marrying off the actress to the dramatist. Still, James was aware of the gap between the dramatist's ideal and his actual stage production. In his December 29, 1893, letter to his brother William, James wrote:
The whole odiousness of the thing lies in the connection between the drama and the theatre. The one is admirable in its interest and difficulty, the other loathsome in its conditions. If the drama could only be theoretically or hypothetically acted, … form would be unimpaired, and one would be able to have the exquisite exercise without the horrid sacrifice...
