ART OF FICTION
Henry James is regarded as one of the key literary
figures of the nineteenth century literary realism. He is an American novelist
and critic born in New York in April 15, 1843.He spent some of his childhood
years in Europe and in later life moved to London, often visiting Italy and
France. He had close personal contact with the writers of the day including
William Dean Howells, Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant and Emile Zola.
He never wished to confine himself
to the American literary scenario and sought to make his mark on the American,
English and European literary scenes. He was an explorer of cultures. His
passion for this fusion of cultures is evident in his works. A Passionate Pilgrim
(1871) deals with social and cultural challenges faced by an American visitor
in Europe. His works also include travel writings like Transatlantic
Sketches(1875). Other works include Roderick Hudson(1876) The
Europeans (1878)The American(1877) Daisy Miller(1879) The
Portrait of a Lady(1881), Washington Square(1886)and The Turn of
the Screw(1897). His critical books include French Poets and Novelists(1878)
and Hawthorne (1879). He authored twenty novels and about a hundred short
stories and novellas apart from his literary criticism, plays, travelogues and
reviews.
Like Arnold, James to believe that
criticism has the ability to prepare and enhance the context for creative
writing. James was deeply influenced by Arnold’s criticism. Other critics who
influenced him include Edmond Scherer and Charles Augustin Sainte Beuve. His
organic conception of literary form and the exalted view of the literary
vocation have its roots in Romanticism. His concern for taste and judgment
echoes the eighteenth century writers David Hume and Edmund Burke.
It was in April 1884 Walter Besant delivered
his lecture on Art of Fiction. It initiated a discussion in the field of
literary discussion. Besant’s essay was also published in pamphlet form and
also reviewed by some of the magazines including Pall Mall Gazette and The
Spectator in London. James stepped into the discussion through his Art of Fiction published in the Longman’s in September 1884. James was
an already accomplished novelist when the essay was published. It gained prominence as an inquiry into a
novelists' craft. According to the scholar James E. Miller, it is the most
popular and the most influential brief statement ever made in theorizing fiction.
Through the essay he expresses his critical principles and defends his
novelistic endeavor. The Art of Fiction is considered to be written as a
response to a lecture and pamphlet of the same name by Walter Besant. In the essay
he treats novel as a serious art form worthy of serious discussion and insists
that the novelist should be allowed to pursue his artistic experiments freely
without any restrictions. He himself described it as ‘a plea for liberty’. The
liberty which he points out is the liberty given to the writer to choose his
subject and to experiment with his work. He should also possess the freedom to
assent or dissent to the conventional standards.
The Art of Fiction is sometimes
considered as a prelude to his final three novels including The Wings of the
Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904). In essay he
states that art lives upon discussions and experiments. He also believes that
criticism is fertilizing when they are frank and sincere.
James tries to contradicts the view that ‘’the novel is a
novel as a pudding is a pudding’’ by taking the position of a creator with
complete knowledge of what he is involving in (855). He was against the view
that literary production should be apologetic in tone as it is something which
is ‘make belief’. He claims that the novelist should speak in a tone of
assurance. Then he presents the analogy between a painter and a novelist.
According to James the inspiration behind the art of a painter and the art of a
novelist is the same that is both are trying to represent reality. James’s
concept of art thus echoes Aristotelian concept art as a form of imitation. He
had a mimetic conception of reality. He claims that novel is mimetic as well as
objective in its own way. He wants fiction to create a magnificent heritage,
hence he analogize it with those three liberal arts which were seen with
respect.
James also comments upon ‘the old superstition ‘which
considers literature as something wicked and having a corrupting influence on
the readers and also to the popular dictum that “Literature should be either
instructive or amusing”(857). In fact the wickedness of art is a topic of
debate from the time of Plato who conceived art as something which distorts the
truth. So, when James argues that the novelists and the novel should be free,
he also means the liberation from moral constraints as well.
Being a literary realist he believed that the only reason
behind the existence of novel is the fact that it represents real life. He
refers novel as the most magnificent form of art and suggests a broad
definition for novel. For him novel is a personal direct impression of life,
the value of which depends on the intensity of impression. James’s this definition
of novel gives more importance to the subjectivity of the author, which is in
contrast to his insistence for an objective or mimetic novel. Thus he
establishes the subjectivity of the author in the novel. He considers the
reality as the supreme virtue of a novel. It is on this merit all other merits
of fiction submissively depend. And the success of the author depends on his
ability to produce the illusion of life. He adds that there would not be any
intensity or value unless the writer is given his freedom. It is difficult to
measure the amount of reality present in a novel because humanity is immense
and reality has myriad forms of expression. The only thing one can say is that
some flowers of fiction have the odour of reality and others don’t have. Besant
asks the novelist to write from his experience but James finds that it is
inexact to ask the novelist to write from experience, because experience is
never limited and complete. According to him, experience ‘’is an immense
sensibility, a kind of huge spider web of the finest silken threads suspended
in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air borne particle. It is
the very atmosphere of mind...’’ (860).
According to him the preoccupation with form restricts
the writer’s freedom in the creative process. He perceives it as something
secondary. For he says, ‘’the tracing of a line to be followed, of a tone to be
taken, of a form to be filled out, is a limitation of that freedom and a
suppression of the very thing that we are most curious about’’ (859). Yet he
does not totally deny the form. For he says that, the story and the novel, the
idea and the form are like needle and thread. Like the tailor for whom the
needle without the thread and the thread without the needle is useless, idea
without form and form without idea is useless for an author. He believes that
there should be unity between the descriptions, dialogues and incidents of a
work. He considers them as ‘’intimately associated parts of one general effort
of expression’’. This resembles the idea of organic unity which is one of the
main ideas of New Criticism. According to the principle of organic unity the
form is inseparable from a text’s content and meaning, that is, all the
elements contribute to create an indivisible whole. Hence he considers the
novel as ‘’a living organism, and in proportion...in each part there is
something of each of the other parts.’’ That means element is dependent on the
other.
James argues that the artist must be given the freedom to
choose his subject or idea and the application of criticism should analyze what
he makes of it. And the motive behind the selection of the subject should be
experience. He believes that the execution of a work solely belongs to the
author. He says that, ‘’ the province of art is all life, not only those
elements which are beautiful and noble’’ (865). Fiction must catch the strange
irregular rhythm of life without rearrangement so that we feel that we are
touching the truth. As an executant the writer is free to experiment. This
right of execution is at the same time an advantage as well as a torment and
responsibility on the part of the novelist. In this regard James totally
disagrees with Besant’s view that the ‘’laws of fiction may be laid down and
taught... with precision and exactness...’’ (859).
In the opinion of Henry James the strength of an artist is
the ability to convert even the vaguest of ideas into concrete images that is
‘’the power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of
things and to judge the whole piece by the pattern...’’ (861).
Finally in the essay James argues against Besant’s claim
that the novel must have a conscious moral purpose. But according to James the
novel should be free from all obligations including the moral one, because for
him questions of art are questions of executions and questions of morality are
quite another affair. The only condition is that the purpose of art should
remain artistic. The English literary critics of his time gave more importance
to the moral effect that a work makes upon its readers. Thus by freeing novel
from its moral obligations James is actually attacking the very foundations of
English literary criticism. The essay remains as one of the important pieces of
literary criticism made in the history of English literary criticism.
Works Cited
Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary
Terms. Wadsworth: Cengage, 2012. Print
Nagarajan, M.S. English Literary Criticism and Theory; An Introduction. Hyderabad:
Orient Blackswan, 2008. Print
James, Henry. ‘’Art of Fiction’ ’The
Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leitch B Vincent. New York:
W.W Norton and Company Ltd, 2001, Print.
Davidson, Rob. "James' "The Art
of Fiction" in Critical Context." American Literary Realism
36.2 (Winter, 2004): 120-47. University of Illinois Press. Web. 7 Nov. 2015.
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