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The ‘Much Finer Complexity’ of History in The American
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
A great deal of criticism has celebrated Henry James's historical imagination or his lack of it; very little criticism has explored with any precision the sophisticated grasp of history that James exhibits in his novels and the various uses to which he puts his sense of history. Henry James himself had a passion for history and he sought it everywhere. Early in his writing career, in his biography of Hawthorne, James pointed out that ‘it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature’. Much later in his career, in The American Scene, James described his own ‘Hunger for History’ explaining that ‘history is never, in any rich sense, the immediate crudity of “what happens”, but the much finer complexity of what we read into it and think of in connection with it ’. In its underlying form The American is not the kind of novel to compel one to reflect upon the ethos of a civilization or the social history of a culture, certainly not in the ways that Balzac's La Comédie Humaine or Tolstoy's War and Peace does. Nor is it the kind of novel that calls our attention to large historical trends. Yet to grasp the full stringencies of the story one should possess a strong historical awareness; for this novel provides an interesting example of how well James understood the historical implications of his subject.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972
References
1 Several critics have commented in passing on the relationship of Henry James's fiction to history. Ezra Pound showed an early appreciation of James as a cultural historian in his recognition in James's work of ‘the whole great assaying and weighing, the research for the significance of nationality, French, English, American’ and in his casual remark that James ‘has written history of a personal sort, social history, well-documented and incomplete’. ‘James, Henry’ [1918], Literature in America, ed. Rahv, Philip (New York, 1965), pp. 233–8Google Scholar. W. C. Brownell's remarks that James's works betray little evidence of interest in ‘the course of history’ and that James himself lacked ‘historic fancy’ (American Prose Masters, New York, 1929, pp. 384–91Google Scholar) were taken up and refined by Newton Arvin who observed that Henry James ‘was almost wholly wanting in historic imagination, though he had plenty of historic fancy’. ‘Henry James and The Almighty Dollar’, American Pantheon (New York, 1966), ed. Aaron, Daniel and Schendler, Sylvan, p. 155.Google Scholar
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