Henry James's "organic form" and classical rhetoric

As argued earlier in this essay, the operation of dispositio gives rise to the textual macrostructure or intensional res by means of two sets of compositional procedures, one leading to the constitution of an underlying syntactic-semantic level and the other manipulating it in order to attain a final artistic organization. In text-linguistic terms, the emergence of this syntactic-semantic level or story is the result of the isomorphous accretion of a representational kernel under the influence of a set of logical rules. These rules, intuitive in the case of James and more or less explicit in recent proposals (Garcia Berrio and Albaladejo Mayordomo 186-89), originate a complete sequence of events and participants that, according to Wiesenfarth, "realizes some donnee" (23). Depending on whether the basic material is a character or a situation, this phase of dispositio generates either the appropriate chain of events and the rest of the secondary fictional figures or the suitable characters along with the full development of this nuclear situation, as for instance in A Portrait of a Lady or The Ambassadors respectively. When these rules cease to act, there remains a level constituted by the syntactic arrangement of a set of semantic units such as events, actions, processes, beings or characters harmoniously evolved to fit an initial portion of formalized experience but eventually removed from it, as James liked to assume.

One of the most accurate interpretations of James's creative process has been offered by Beach. He maintains that "[o]nce given the germ of the story, its motive or mere-idee, the circumstances of the plot are evolved with consistent undeviating logic" (20) in a coherent movement from condensation to distension of information. Naturally, his "consistent undeviating logic" is strictly equivalent to the first set of compositional rules just mentioned, the quality of the overall process being presented as conscious and rational in sharp contrast to any idea of self-generation: "Intellectual processes are plentifully there to guide the evolution of subject into story" (26).(10) The construction of Lambert Strether in accordance with the compositional needs of the initial situation of The Ambassadors is an excellent example of how James's logic works. He compares this task to the sedentary conscientious office of a chief accountant and, although conceding that it allows for some "gleams of bliss," he strongly advises the author to "keep his head at any price" (AN 312), thus confirming the rational quality of the process. One of his objects in the Preface to this novel is "narrating my 'hunt' for Lambert Strether...describing the capture of the shadow projected by my friend' s anecdote"; and he carried out his plans by asking himself questions such as "Where has he come from and why has he come, what is he doing...in that galere?" and answering them "as under cross-examination" in order to justify Strether's figure and his "peculiar tone" (AN 313). The successive replies to these questions reveal a set of physical circumstances and mental traits that make up a "round" character-Lambert Strether--who acts in perfect harmony with the values derived from the initial situation of The Ambassadors, as, in fact, no other character could have done.