ABSTRACT
The dislocations which create the internal tensions of James's major fictions have certain classic forms. In certain fundamental ways the inherited coordinates of life have vanished, receded into background. A normal circle of family and friends is replaced by an alien world ± as we have seen with the Prince ± which involves understanding both of that world and of the self. The sequence of errors and understandings, adjustments, shifts of perspective and of focus provides a vast repertoire from which the words and tales draw in permutations whose variables are proof against formulaic repetition. For the slightest change in the `combination' produces the unpredicted complication of the `affective interest' in the `attaching case'.
