Featured White Papers
- Oct. 14th: Simplified IT with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) (ZDNet)
- PCI DSS therapy for the smaller retailer (McAfee)
- The rise of Web commuting (Citrix Online)
Content provided in partnership with
Henry James's "organic form" and classical rhetoric
Comparative Literature, Winter 1994 by Alvarez Amoros, Jose Antonio
James usually admits that the starting point of his novels and tales is a tiny fragment of information that stirs the creative side of his personality. There are many examples of this process in the Prefaces, but the birth of The Spoils of Poynton is paradigmatic. In the course of a conversation, a stray allusion, i.e.
a delimited area of the author's experience, is immediately recognized as "the germ of a story" (AN 119), and it is precisely this blend of extensional experience and textual orientation which sets up a link between James's practice and the inventive procedure described above. Beach likens this method to that of George Meredith and George Eliot, two English novelists also "given to the development of an idea or motive" (24), but stresses the considerable difference between James's aesthetic proclivity and the moral or philosophical nature of Meredith's and Eliot's donnees. Albeit parallel to the operation of inventio both for its relative position within the creative sequence and for its dual character, James's acquisition of the initial topic of discourse cannot be assimilated to such an operation if it is characterized by the author's conscious participation in it. James describes this process as a kind of fortuitous inventio whereby the writer is merely an alert receiver of surrounding impressions, and experience consists of a "huge spiderweb of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue" ("The Art of Fiction" 388). The acquisition of the topic of a rhetorical discourse, however, does not seem subject to contingency, and the very term excogitatio (employed, for instance, in the Rhetorica ad Herennium to pin down this procedure) contributes to dispelling any notion that chance rather than conscious reflection might be the crucial guideline in the discovery of the extensional materials of a speech.(7) According to James, the artistic values of a novel lie neither in his peculiar process of accidental inventio nor in the representational--though not always verisimilar--germ that results from it, but rather in the subsequent process of composition undertaken by the author. For him, art "plucks its material, Otherwise expressed, in the garden of life--which material elsewhere grown is stale and uneatable. But it has no sooner done this than it has to take account of a process" (AN 312). Earlier statements in "The Art of Fiction" can be adduced in support of this same opinion. He directs his attention to the "standard of execution" and is quite prepared to "grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donnee...his freedom of choice" (394-95), though he advises that novelists should prefer those topics rich enough to lend themselves appropriately to brilliant execution.
