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Henry James's "organic form" and classical rhetoric
Comparative Literature, Winter 1994 by Alvarez Amoros, Jose Antonio
Many interpretations and reconstructions, mostly contradictory, of Henry James's narrative ideas have been attempted since they became a critical and theoretical canon through the influence of Joseph Warren Beach and Percy Lubbock. Critics approaching this subject have usually found themselves staring blankly at the ambiguous richness of James's critical writings, particularly the Prefaces, with only a tenuous notion of what they were facing. In these circumstances, they could either extol James's capacity as a superb critic and theorist of the novel or disparage his contribution almost derisively. Thus, Richard P. Blackmur's extravagant claim that the Prefaces were "the most sustained and I think the most eloquent piece of literary criticism in existence"(1) contrasts sharply with D. D. Todd's emphatic conclusion that "in any respectable sense, there is no Jamesian theory of fiction" (87), though Todd himself grudgingly admits James's stature as a sui generis critic. Because it is at least problematical to extract from James's works something that could pass for a cohesive and global theory of the narrative genre, as that ingenuously proposed, for instance, by James E. Miller, Jr., we must focus instead on specific aspects of James's critical reflections rather than impose a sense of coherence and totality alien to them.
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One of these aspects, to which few discussions of James's aesthetics fail to allude in one way or another, is his organic idea of the creative process. From Beach (11-23) to mid-century (Harold T. MacCarthy) and present-day criticism (Wendell P. Jackson), there seems to be a broad consensus on how James conceived of the composition of artistic discourse. In this essay, I argue for the existence of a curious analogy between James's conception of his own creative practice and the process of composition of discourse par excellence that has been described by classical rhetoric over a span of two thousand years (and is subject nowadays to revision and reactivation as the basis of a theory of the literary text within a general science of discourse; see Garcia Berrio and Albaladejo Mayordomo's "Compositional Structures," as well as Garcia Berrio's "Retorica"). My approach clarifies the role of organicism as invoked by James in several passages of his Prefaces and in earlier works. It also contributes to a demarcation of his creative stages by juxtaposing them to the categories and operations of classical rhetoric, particularly inventio, dispositio, and elocutio.
James's creative process is best accounted for by the term "development." This process is obviously not the sudden growth and even less the writing "from immediate Dictation" of which Blake (823) and other romantic authors speak with differing degrees of commitment.(2) It is rather the rational elaboration of an initial germ or donnee, derived from external sources and dependent on a skilled process of expansion in order to attain its appropriate expression. Naturally, this process is likely to be viewed as a progressive imposition of form on content, an assumption firmly held by James himself and by subsequent commentators. It implies that literary content is a formless entity and that form can only be found in the expression of such content, thus equating expression to form and content to formlessness. This assumption will be qualified later, since it makes little sense after the considerable theoretical advance of formalist criticism in our century.
For James the amplification of the initial idea seems to be governed by the traditional principles of organicism. In the Prefaces he typically resorts to organic metaphors to emphasize the fact that the result of the creative effort is an indivisible whole endowed with a number of qualities that do not coincide with the mere aggregation of the qualities of the parts (Phillips 417-18). Following the same line of argument, he presents us with several culinary and vegetable images of the creative process, as when he expounds his compositional method in "The Middle Years" in terms of "boilings and reboilings of the contents of my small cauldron" (AN 233) or displays his determination in "Julia Bride" to "season and stir according to judgement and then set the whole to simmer, to stew, or whatever, serving hot and with extreme neatness" (AN 265). In these two passages we have, in a more prosaic style, what James elsewhere calls the "mystic process of the crucible, the transformation of material under aesthetic heat" ("The Lesson of Balzac" 75). His most celebrated statement on this subject occurs in the Preface to "The Lesson of the Master," where one can find almost all standard elements of organicism in a nutshell:
No such process is effectively possible, we must hold, as the imputed act of transplanting; an act essentially not mechanical, but thinkable rather--so far as thinkable at all--in chemical, almost in mystical terms. We can surely account for nothing in a novelist's work that hasn't passed through the crucible of his imagination, hasn't, in that perpetually simmering cauldron his intellectual pot-au-feu, been reduced to savoury fusion. We here figure the morsel, of course, not as boiled to nothing, but as exposed, in return for the taste that it gives out, to a new and richer saturation...It has entered, in fine, into new relations, it emerges for new ones. Its final savour has been constituted, but its prime identity destroyed...Thus it has become a different and, thanks to a rare alchemy, a better thing. (AN 230)
