Henry James's "organic form" and classical rhetoric

6 Covering a period of some two hundred years, from 90 B. C. to 95 A. D., this corpus comprises the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, the rhetorical treatises by Cicero, and the Institutio Oratoria by Quintilian (Albaladejo Mayordomo 29).

7 In the Oxford Latin Dictionary, the term excogitatio is precisely defined as "[t]he action of thinking out."

8 It is worth noting that the classification of the world into loci or topoi carried out by rhetoric is a conventional formalization of experience prior to the inventive activity leading to the composition of a particular discourse (Albaladejo Mayordomo 95). For example, according to Beach, the area of experience mainly pre-formalized by James's tastes and interests as a man before his evaluation of it as a writer "is the radical opposition of the American and the European ways of taking life " (14).

9 A formalist critic like Eva Schaper defines the pictorial inventio in terms remarkably similar to those used by James: "For us these painters tried to capture what mattered in the world around them by isolating forms from the flux of intertwined happenings"(40).

10 Vivien Jones agrees with Beach when she speaks of "the intervening consciousness of the artist" (170) or expounds her version of James's creative process: "An inexplicable subconscious motive provides the 'germ'; the quality of the artist's consciousness then dictates both what is made of it and the moral value of the ensuing novel" (174). C. F. Burgess, however, surprisingly reverses this process and argues for a conscious apprehension of the donnee and for its unconscious development into a full-blown story.

11 The research leading to the preparation of this essay was made possible by a grant from the Conselleia de Cultura, Educacio i Ciencia de la Generalitat Valenciana.

WORKS CITED

Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. London: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Albaladejo Mayordomo, Tomas. "Aspectos del analisis formal de textos." Revista Espanola de Linguistica 11 (1981): 117-60.

--. Retorica. Madrid: Sintesis, 1989.

--. Teoria de los mundos posibles y macroestructura narrativa: analisis de las novelas cortas de Clarin. Alicante: Secretariado de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alicante, 1986.

Allott, Miriam. "Form Versus Substance in Henry James." Review Of English Literature 3 (1962): 53-66.

Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Gerald F. Else. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967.

Beach, Joseph Warren. The Method of Henry James. Philadelphia: Albert Seifer, 1954.

Blake, William. Complete Writings. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Burgess, C. F. "The Seeds of Art: Henry James's Donnee." Literature and Psychology 13 (1963): 67-73.

Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.

Chico Rico, Francisco. "La intellectio: notas sobre una sexta operacion retorica." Castilla 14 (1989): 47-55.

Dijk, Teun A. van. Some Aspects of Text Grammars. The Hague: Mouton, 1972.