Henry James's "organic form" and classical rhetoric

One may certainly wonder what the sources of this contradiction are. On the one hand, critics have found sufficient grounds in James's writings to proclaim him an organicist; on the other, he seems to disown such a conclusion by continually affecting a formalistic or mechanistic leaning in his compositional method. I would argue that the origin of this apparent contradiction lies in the coexistence of two different ideas within the organic doctrine from its earliest formulations, an essential distinction that has gone unnoticed in the case of James. One of the first positive references to a linguistic construction in organic terms is Plato's: Socrates tells Phaedrus "that any discourse ought to be constructed like a living creature, with its own body, as it were; it must not lack either head or feet; it must have a middle and extremities so composed as to suit each other and the whole work" (128).(4) Aristotle also contributed in the Poetics to the development of this conception by asserting that the plot of a tragedy, i.e. "the structuring of events" (1450a, 5), should be arranged in such a way that the removal of one or more of its parts would necessarily imply the destruction of the whole and, contrarily, that if any part could be eliminated without detriment to the whole, that part should be considered superfluous (1451a, 30-36). However, Aristotle, unlike Plato, does not use a simile to describe what he considers an appropriate arrangement of the actions in a tragedy and accordingly keeps his discussion at an abstract level.

If we return to Plato's statement, bearing this difference in mind, we will realize that he is simply making a comparison between a "discourse" and "a living creature." The real problem is that, over a considerable period culminating in the romantic age, organic critics and theorists have adopted this comparison and similar ones with insufficient awareness of the ontological discontinuity between the referent and its figuration, and, as a consequence, have applied such comparisons in a literal way. Instead of saying with Plato that a poem is like (Characters omitted) a living organism, it is plainly stated that a poem is a living organism. Even when critics fall prey to this practice, however, they are still vaguely conscious that something is wrong with it. Then they resort to quotation marks or collateral explanations that allow them to avert direct strictures without giving up their main point or getting to the root of the problem.(5)

The doctrine of organicism flowered in England during the romantic period, thanks to the links Coleridge established between the German and the English cultural worlds of the day, though it has been convincingly argued that "the problematic history of organic form can be traced back beyond Kant to English sources, among others" (Stempel 94). Before Coleridge transplanted German ideas into England, mechanistic critics were engaged in examining the role of the poet's mind in the process of literary creation under the powerful influence of Newton's advances in the field of physics. Only with the advent of Coleridge was the mechanistic theory of literary creation replaced by its vegetable counterpart (Abrams 156-77). The vegetable theory reigned supreme for some time, but progressively lost its original vigor and became a series of grand formulas, devoid of any meaning, that were applied automatically to the various circumstances of literary creation in such a way that one can speak of an "inorganic organicism." This is obviously the case in James's critical reflections.