THE CAUGHT IMAGE.
By Robert L. Gale'42. Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1964. 266 pp. $6.00.
This is a book with a modest aim, and a modest achievement. Professor Gale, who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh, has laboriously counted 16,902 images in the 4,189,800 words of Henry James's fiction and arranged them in categories of reference. His aim, he assures us, is no more than to make the general reader aware of the rich imagery in James's stories and to "provide other scholars with evidence for more specialized studies of aspects of James."
The major categories of Jamesian imagery described are six: water, flowers and gardens, animal life, war and weapons, the arts, and religion. In addition, there is a miscellany of figures involving such other references as fire, metals, cups, jewels, America, money, wine, circuses, sex, and toothaches and dentists. Following the general discussions of image groups, there is an appendix of tables. Here one can discover, for example, the number of images per thousand words in each of James's 135 works of fiction, the density of images in each decade of James's career, the density of images in unrevised and revised works, and the percentages of images by decades for each of the major categories.
Professor Gale does not offer any striking discoveries; one is not surprised, for instance, to learn that the arts are the largest single source of imagery for Henry James. What he does is to remove the guesswork. Future analysts of Jamesian imagery will have in this book a ready reference for numerical evidence. It might have been helpful if Professor Gale had expanded his study to include at least some of James's non-fiction (the Prefaces and the letters are as full of images as the stories), but the difficulties would have been formidable. Within narrow limits, then, The Caught Image is a worth-while contribution to scholarship. One wonders, however, what The Master would have said on being told that approximately eight per cent of his images concerned water.
Professor of English
