'The way this knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the world'

‘The Turn of the Screw’, Henry James, (1898)

How we come to know something takes a while to work out. Knowledge can settle in through experience; it isn’t the only way to know something, but perhaps we see something more clearly through a framed perspective, a delineated outline. We might call this frame experience, which is always limited, and perhaps without it we might not feel the same conviction. Henry James’s sentence, spoken here by his self-assured governess, is very strange indeed. I’m not sure if this is experience speaking or a willed form of knowledge.

‘The way this knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the world —the strangest that is, except the very much stranger in which it quickly merged itself.’

This strange knowledge is gathered as the governess-narrator sits looking out upon a lake which she, as teacher, has declared to be ‘The Sea of Azof’. It is convenient for her to say so because she needs a symbolic representation of the geography she is currently teaching. How strange that a teacher can suddenly rename a lake. How frightening.

All hypotheses are potentially frightening because they leave behind the concrete, the real, and ask for an imaginative substitution. It is a strange process, but we rely on hypotheses day to day in order to assess future possibilities, potential risks. And so we frequently abandon what is already quite strange for something ‘stranger’.

This sentence puzzles me. I’ve read it over and over; I’ve read it over and over with a student. We have puzzled over it together. Something peculiar - strange even - occurs after ‘that is’, in the clause that sets itself apart from the rest of the sentence:

‘except the very much stranger in which it quickly merged itself.’

James is very fond of adverbs of quickening states, and ‘quickly’ and ‘suddenly’ are to be found all over this strange gothic tale. Gothic fiction relies upon a sudden and strange overturning of reality, usually because family members or familial equivalents are lost or missing, and so new members must be found. It is an anxious business.

These are the circumstances: before this governess there was another who apparently died. What is important is that the governess narrating here by the lake is the substitute for the dead one. She is the stranger, the outsider, the very much stranger because she is not family. Gothic fiction likes to merge real and unreal, first and second forms of representation, family members with ghosts. James is reminding us that all forms of knowledge are but a merging of older forms - things we already know but would like not to know - the fact that someone has died.

Along the way we forget what ‘it’ might be because it merges with something else: whatever we choose ‘it’ to be. James’s sentence reminds us that we are obstinate alterers of reality, constantly tampering with the original form. What we gather to ourselves and call knowledge is partly of our own devising, and although our narrator would like to convince us that the ‘it’ of her imagination is doing its own strange work upon ‘itself’, in truth, this moment of seeing and re-seeing is of her own making: her willed desired to see something other than what lies before her. Humans can bear very little reality, as the poet once said, and so we tamper and alter and move away. Move on.

Ning - this sentence is for you.