Weird James
Sharon Cameron’s Thinking in Henry James pointed up the weirdness of how consciousness works in his novels. She cites this example from The Portrait of a Lady, in which the subject of Isabel Archer’s reverie suddenly appears: “The effect was strange, for Madame Merle was already so present to her vision that her appearance in the flesh was like suddenly, and rather awfully, seeing a painted picture move.” In Mark Fisher’s account, “the weird is constituted by a presence – the presence of that which does not belong. In some cases [...] the weird is marked by an exorbitant presence, a teeming which exceeds our capacity to represent it.”