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James's Idea of Structure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

J. A. Ward
J. A. Ward*
Affiliation:
Rice University, Houston, Texas
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Extract

James's youthful ideas about the form of fiction are the germs of the principles expressed in the late prefaces. But his earliest dicta, in comparison to the late, are arid and formalist—dogmatically proclaimed, not experimentally discovered. They hint of an American Gallophile, infatuated with the rigid lines and harsh economy of the well-made play and the well-made novel. In 1874 James announced: “We confess to a conservative taste in literary matters—to a relish for brevity, for conciseness, for elegance, for perfection of form” (LRE, p. 139). He never renounced such a taste; “brevity” and “perfection of form”—more frequently “economy” and “composition”—are as prominent, indeed as hieratic, in the prefaces as in the earliest reviews. But if James seems to have acquired his literary standards artificially and to have begun his career with a set of a priori principles to guide him, it was not long before he was to make these ideas his own by fully understanding their relevance to the craft of fiction. The early assumptions are not repudiated, but tested, clarified, and deepened. There is a remarkable balance in James's mature criticism between the general principle and the pragmatically discovered insight. Though the insistence on economy and order is never relaxed, the concepts become increasingly more flexible; with ease they accommodate notions of fiction that seem contradictory. James repeatedly exults in the freedom of the novelist: “the Novel remains still, under the right persuasion, the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms” (AN, p. 326). Indeed to James it is plastic enough and prodigious enough to allow for the reconciliation of the art of Scribe with that of Balzac, and of the principles of Coleridge with those of Flaubert.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 80 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1965 , pp. 419 - 426
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965

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References

1 For brevity the following initials are used to cite volumes of James's criticism: AN: The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, introduction by Richard P. Blackmur (New York, 1934); SL: Selected Letters of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (London, 1956); LRE: Literary Reviews and Essays, ed. Albert Mordell (New York, 1957); SA: The Scenic Art, ed. Allan Wade (New York, 1957); FPN: French Poets and Novelists (London, 1919); FN: The Future of the Novel, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1956); N: The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York, 1955); NN: Notes on Novelists (London, 1914); VR: Views and Reviews, ed. LeRoy Phillips (Boston, 1908).

2 René Wellek, “Henry James's Literary Theory and Criticism,” AL, xxx (November 1958), 316.

3 The Structure of the Novel (New York, 1929), p. 48.

4 At times James means other things by the term “architecture,” such as an involved plot, an accumulation of detail, and a novel of extreme magnitude and variety.

5 See Richard P. Adams, “Architecture and the Romantic Tradition: Coleridge to Wright,” AQ, ix (Spring 1957), 46–62. The relation of the organic theory of architecture to literary practice is implied in the following essays in Lewis Mumford's anthology, Roots of Contemporary American Architecture (New York, 1959): Horatio Greenough, “Form and Function,” pp. 32–56; Louis Henri Sullivan, “Towards the Organic,” pp. 74–82; Lewis Mumford, “The Regionalism of Richardson,” pp. 117–131. James's own endorsement of organic architecture is suggested in his letter to the sculptor Hendrik Andersen: “Cities are living organisms that grow from within” (SL, p. 230).

6 See, for example, John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Everyman's Library (London, n.d.), ii, 163: “it is one of the chief virtues of the Gothic builders, that they never suffered ideas of outside symmetries and consistencies to interfere with the real use and value of what they did. [They were] utterly regardless of any established conventionalities of external appearance, knowing (as indeed it always happened) that such daring interruptions of the formal plan would rather give additional interest to its symmetry than injure it.”

7 Henry James and the Jacobites (Boston, 1963), p. 243.

8 Joseph Wiesenfarth, F.S.C, Henry James and the Dramatic Analogy (New York, 1963).

9 Notes to The Ivory Tower, ed. Percy Lubbock (London, 1917), p. 268.

10 Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge, Eng., 1962), writes that “in James the philosophic, analytic passion is all of a piece with the poetic and the intuitive: they can be distinguished but never divided” (p. 413). To Professor Krook this quality accounts for the peculiarities of James's late style (pp. 390–413).

11 Viola Hopkins, “Visual Art Devices in Henry James,” PMLA, lxxvi (December 1961), 561–574, shows that “The irresoluteness of James's endings is suggestive of the Mannerist style—the struggle to repose which lacks a final triumph” (p. 573).

12 What Mark Schorer says of The Good Soldier applies as well to James's late novels: “the mechanical structure … is controlled to a degree nothing less than taut, while the structure of meaning is almost blandly open, capable of limitless refraction”—“An Interpretation,” The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (New York, 1957), p. vi.

13 The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James, p. 399.

14 Many of James's literary principles can be traced to the matters that he valued in living. The ideal of “intensity” is a reformulation of the belief in the importance of “felt life,” of being one on whom nothing is lost. Similarly the tension between fullness and economy is a recasting of the moral problem faced by many of James's protagonists. Like the artist, the James hero or heroine seeks a synthesis between freedom of mind and spirit and the restraining order of civilization. Also there exists a tension between the desire to impose rigid symmetrical patterns on life and the acceptance of the disorder of experience. This conflict underlies The Sacred Fount, “The Altar of the Dead,” The Golden Bowl, and other works.