所有の現象学 : ジェイムズの『ねじの回転』における注意

This essay examines the role of attention in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898). I argue that James carefully describes the workings of attention in order to illustrate the way in which possessive individualism provides the basis for the invasion of the self by an external agent. As Jonathan Crary has recently shown, the problem of attention became increasingly important in the late nineteenth-century human sciences, particularly in the field of physiological psychology. In The Principles of Psychology (1890), William James devotes a whole chapter to attention, describing it as something without which "the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness." William James's definition of attention as "taking possession" of objects offers a useful framework for understanding the function of attention in The Turn of the Screw, a story about the governess's desire to dispossess Miles and Flora of the ghosts and possess the children herself. Her growing desire to possess them entails her transformation into an attentive subject, as she constantly keeps them under observation. In challenge to the dominant psychoanalytical criticism which tends to neglect the novella's concern with (phenomenological) temporality, I investigate how attention (as "taking possession" of things) mediates two seemingly independent issues: the governess's perception of time and memory, and the novella's violation of the normative relation between teacher and children. I begin with a discussion of how the governess's relation with the children inverts the disciplinary logic of control and surveillance implicit in William James's account of attention. James observes that the teacher must overcome the "mobility" of the children's attention, a mobility which makes them seem to belong to the attended objects rather than to themselves. In The Turn of the Screw, the governess interprets Miles and Flora's apparent absorption in their task as a sly performance intended to divert her attention, believing that their very attentiveness serves as a sign of their being possessed by the ghosts. Meanwhile, the narrative foregrounds the way in which the governess fails to protect (and possess) the children because of her distraction. I suggest that her struggle to be an attentive subject paradoxically transforms her into an inattentive subject. James's description of the governess's distraction brings us to the issue of her perception of time. Whereas she forgets to "measure" time when she is absorbed in Miles's piano, she insistently asks herself "how long" her confrontation with the ghosts "lasted." In The Principles of Psychology, William James asserts that "duration" forms the basic unit of our perception of time, which in turn constitutes our memory. Attention plays a vital role in this formation since only the experience to which "I agree to attend" can be registered as "my" past. By analogy, I propose that the governess's concern with duration indicates her anxiety not only about the credibility of her own memory, but about the extent to which her memory might be defined as her own. I consider her incapacity to possess her own memory in terms of the non-coercive power of the "master," whose utter indifference strikingly contrasts with the governess's effort to be attentive.