henryjames's organic form and - ua · the influence of joseph warren beach and percy lubbock....

JOSE ANTONIO ALVAREZ AMOROS

HenryJames's "Organic Form" and

Classical Rhetoric

M ANY INTERPRETATIONS and reconstructions, mostly con-

tradictory, of Henry James's narrative ideas have been at-

tempted 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 ofJames's critical writings, particularly the Prefaces, with only a tenuous notion of what they were fac-

ing. 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 elo-

quent piece of literary criticism in existence"' 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.

One of these aspects, to which few discussions ofJames'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 howJames conceived of the composition of artistic discourse. In this essay, I argue for the existence of a curious anal-

1 Introduction to The Art of the Novel xvi. I shall refer to this work as ANin the text. For similar comments by lesser critics see Maini 194.

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JAMES'S "ORGANIC FORM"

ogy 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 commit- ment.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 byJames 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 form- lessness. 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 im-

ages 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" (AN233) 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" (AN265). In these two passages we have, in a more prosaic style, whatJames elsewhere calls the "mystic process

2 See Abrams 213-17 on unconscious invention.

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

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) In this fragment we come across a plain rejection of mechanism in the "imputed act of transplanting" the actual hint for a fictional figure in the writer's creative imagination, so as to construct the ad-

equate personality in accordance with the compositional needs of the story. We can also note characteristic instances of transcendental

vocabulary ("mystical"), a number of words connected with cooking ("simmering," "cauldron," "pot-au-feu," "savoury") and, above all, the notion that the "morsel" or initial germ is subject to a process whereby it loses its original nature and becomes a new entity, in which the germ is dissolved and cannot be discerned as a part of the

resulting whole. The same principles are called upon when, by means of a traditional metaphor, James identifies the starting point of com-

position with "a single small seed" (AN 119) appropriately developed only if "transferred to the sunny south window-sill of one's fonder attention" (AN 127). Furthermore, there are in the Prefaces a few hints at literary self-generation that, as we will show later, appear to be somewhat inconsistent with the rational conscientious image usu-

ally projected byJames. In dealing with "The Beast in the Jungle" he comments on "the clearness and charm with which the subject just noted expresses itself" (AN 248), as if the imposition of form were a natural operation that takes place "out there" independently of the artistic will of the author. A similar picture emerges in the Preface to The Ambassadors when he explains "that the steps, for my fable, placed themselves with a prompt and, as it were, functional assurance. .. These things continued to fall together, as by the neat action of their own weight and form, even while their commentator scratched his head about them" (AN315).

James's penchant for organicism is not, however, confined to the use of more or less transparent images in the description of his own

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creative practice. He expressly voices his delight "in a deep-breathing economy and an organic form" (AN 84) and, eschewing metaphors altogether, offers a straight definition of the novel as "a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is

something of each of the other parts" ("The Art of Fiction" 392). Other less memorable, though still explicit, references to organicism abound in James's writings (AN 219, 305), frequently intermingled with definite theoretical statements on the inseparability of form and content in the narrative work (AN 115-16, "The Art of Fiction" 399- 400). All this evidence tends to justify Ren6 Wellek's claim that 'James has an excellent hold on the concept of organic form"

('"James's Literary Theory and Criticism" 317), a claim that simply echoes the received critical classification of James as a notable organicist.

However, side by side with this proclamation that the content or initial subject necessarily determines the process of artistic expansion and, eventually, the expressive form of a novel in such a way as to make the shaping role of the author almost negligible, we encounter numerous assertions that surprisingly challenge the organic dogma. This fact gives rise to a latent contradiction that surfaces from time to time as a debate between the advocates of a formalistic James and those who, in agreement with his famous dictum that the "only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life" ("The Art of Fiction" 378), think that his fundamental goal is

merely representational." These two attitudes can be considered another manifestation of the duality between a mechanistic conception of the creative process and its organic counterpart. Within the or-

ganic framework of literary production, the form of a novel is a function of its content, for a novel acquires artistic excellence only if it naturally evolves from a meaningful core that, in the case ofJames, is of a representational nature. In this way, the expressive form is subject to the expressible content, and its sole value derives from the fact that it represents life, and not from intrinsic or "formalistic" reasons. On the contrary, when James is in a formalistic mood, form and content do not become fused in order to reach the most adequate and faithful expression, but the former is imparted from without and de-

I As a mere instance of this debate, we can mention the opposing views held by Vivien Jones and Timothy P. Martin. According to the former, James's position is markedly formalistic since the representation of reality gives way to technique and method. Conversely, the latter argues thatJames puts his mimetic ideals above everything else, and ascribes all elements of formalism to his interpreter Percy Lubbock.

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velops independently of the latter, thus obliterating the representational goal and supporting Vivien Jones's opinion that in "the Pref- aces no less than in the novels method is matter" (173). Passages em-

phasizing this formal autonomy are not rare with James. There is, for

example, his retort to a friend who had asked "where on earth" he had found his "supersubtle" characters: "'If the life about us for the last thirty years refuses warrant for these examples, then so much the worse for that life"' (AN 221-22), as well as his refusal to attune the

apparitions in "The Turn of the Screw" to a conventional pattern, lest it should spoil the compositional effect he was seeking (AN 174-75). In both cases, the process of artistic expansion of a representational germ is not guided by the internal necessity of "making the most" of such a germ, but by the imposition of external criteria of literary taste, narrative impact, and so forth.

This contradiction is sustained not only by the existence in the Prefaces of countless allusions to the rational and conscious nature of the creative process that conform to the Jamesian stereotype, but also

by his unequivocal propensity for all kinds of technical difficulties and problems. Even in the fragments quoted above to illustrate his

organic bias, one can find broad hints at the crucial role played by "the projector's mind" (AN 128), notwithstanding his occasional

lapses into self-generation. There are continuous references to a

"process" by which either "the small cluster of actualities" (AN 249) or the "material" (AN312) comes to be expressed, and the author is

consistently held responsible for such a process, since the "execution

belongs to the author alone; it is what is most personal to him, and we measure him by that" ("The Art of Fiction" 385). Similarly, James's predilection for solving technical dilemmas takes him right into the domain of mechanical form. For him, any "craftsman... to be worth his salt... must take no tough technical problem for insoluble" (AN 137) and, therefore, his "main merit and sign is the effort to do the

complicated thing with a strong brevity and lucidity-to arrive. .. at a certain science of control... the question of how to exert this control in accepted conditions and how yet to sacrifice no real value" (AN 231). It seems obvious that, in speaking of "accepted conditions," James views the creative practice as a kind of challenge. Thus, al-

though he dislikes being given a word limit in the composition of a commissioned story, as with "The Middle Years," he also relishes the technical difficulties that arise from this fact. He feels that a certain

subject calls for a particular treatment and an appropriate textual

length, but he enjoys denying that subject its organic development. His design is to obtain, through the external imposition of form, a

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literary product whose perfect finish and harmonious arrangement do not betray its true mechanistic origin. This attitude, described by Miriam Allott as the "indulgence of technical virtuosity to the point where it distorts the valuable material which it pretends to serve"

(66), and the unexpected pseudo-organic attributes of the resulting product constitute the key to the contradiction noted above.

The inseparability of form and content is another important point at issue. Although James frequently asserts that in a well-executed novel there is an intimate union of form and content, his recurrent theoretical allusions to this subject (together with his ignorance of it when it comes to critical appreciation) lead us to suspect the solidity of his conception. He usually resorts to an excessive and naive di-

chotomy of form and content (AN 233, 234, 324), and even consid-

ers, in the best tradition of mechanism, the independent pre-existence of these two notions-"They are separate before the fact," he states (AN 115)-and the idea of form as a mere receptacle where content is poured-"the receptacle (of form) being so exiguous, the

brevity imposed so great" (AN 240). None of these notions contributes to promotingJames's image as an authentic organicist.

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 ar-

gue that the origin of this apparent contradiction lies in the coexist- ence of two different ideas within the organic doctrine from its earli- est formulations, an essential distinction that has gone unnoticed in the case ofJames. 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 neces-

4 Orsini considers this passage by Plato a milestone in the evolution of literary criticism: "Plato made an important contribution to aesthetics in the Phaedrus when he enunciated the principle of the organic unity of composition, which was to become the keystone of later systems of criticism. Plato definitively affirmed its value for the judgement of poetry, and not only for oratory, as has been thought" ("An- cient Roots" 20).

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sarily 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 insuffi- cient awareness of the ontological discontinuity between the referent and its figuration, and, as a consequence, have applied such compari- sons in a literal way. Instead of saying with Plato that a poem is like

(a7crep) 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

5 See for instance Orsini: "the 'growth' of a poem from its beginning as a mere flash of inspiration" ("Organic Concepts" 5); Beach: "He [James] describes the process indeed as if he had little to do with it other than to record it: 'The steps for my fable placed themselves . . ."' (23, emphasis added). James himself declares that a "novel is a living thing," though he immediately adds "like any other organism" ("The Art of Fiction" 392, emphasis added).

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reflections.

Returning to the theoretical framework established by Plato's com-

parison, it is worth noting that Lord Kames categorically refused "to

accept the analogy of art and nature" on grounds of "the distinction between form imposed from the outside and inner organic form"

(Stempel 90). It seems clear that, literally speaking, it makes no sense to equate the development of a cell or a seed with that of a novel or a

poem. In his Critique ofJudgement Kant draws the same conclusion in

referring to the requisites of a product of nature and presents us with a duality whose importance has not been sufficiently emphasized. He holds that a natural entity, like a work of art, has parts which "(as regards their presence and their form) are only possible through their reference to the whole," but, in contrast to any man-made product, these parts "should so combine in the unity of a whole that they are reciprocally cause and effect of each other's form" (? 65; see also

Stempel 93). This duality points to the existence of two disparate notions coexisting within the received organic doctrine: congruous ar-

rangement of the parts that make up the whole, and self-generation of that whole prior to the occurrence of the parts. The former is

clearly an attribute of the final product, whereas the latter is an attribute of the process that leads to it. I maintain that only one aspect of the organic theory, i.e. the congruous arrangement of parts, can be applied with any degree of accuracy to the verbal work of art. The

question of self-generation does not seem pertinent, since all artistic constructions are the result of a mechanistic process of selection, ex-

pansion, and combination. All attempts at effacing the author from this process are doomed to failure, for the development of the initial intuition of a work of art inevitably depends upon an external im-

pulse governed either by compositional conventions or by the will to evade them. Thus Plato's simile between a discourse and a living creature only holds with reference to the product and not to the process, and this confines all remarks on artistic self-generation to the more or less dignified realm of metaphoric criticism.

According to these considerations, the subject or initial germ of a novel could only express itself if it were a seed instead of being like a seed. Yet if the mechanistic process of artistic expansion is carried out in a careful, studious manner by a gifted individual, it will give rise to a well-constructed work with links so deep and undeniable between form and content that the illusion of self-generation will be

immediately invoked under the spell of tradition. All subjects are

thus expressed by an author, organicism lying exclusively in the naturalness, flexibility, and coherence with which that author attains his

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own expression. James naturally belongs to this category of writers. His works display a perfect organic design obtained through a highly mechanistic process which he proudly exhibits in his Prefaces. It is precisely in the light of these explanations that we can interpret his spo- radic departures from that norm as mere lapses into figurative description and not as a consistent practice.

.Rhetoric and organicism are frequently held to be incompatible. This view arises from the fact that rhetoric, as well as other prescriptive techniques of discourse, is regarded with suspicion by organicists for its allegedly mechanistic nature (see, for instance, Orsini, "Or-

ganic Concepts" 11, 16, 17, 26). They argue that the expressive form

eventually adopted by a rhetorical discourse is determined not by the

spontaneous and unrestrained development of its subject, but rather

by a set of a priori rules carefully assembled over a very long period of time. This kind of artificial arrangement according to "pre-established formulas and prescriptions for composition" was already con- demned by Socrates in the Phaedrus (Orsini, "Ancient Roots" 17) and still attracts criticism in our century. Other shortcomings of rhetoric, if judged from an organic point of view, are "the belief that the parts pre-exist to the whole" and, consequently, "that there are certain kinds of parts that are better than others, and have a special efficacy on the whole," as well as the idea that form and content are separable (Orsini, "Organic Concepts" 11, 17, 26). Nevertheless, if we

apply the above conclusions to the relation between rhetoric and

organicism, we realize that any criticism against rhetoric is once

again founded on a failure to discriminate between the attributes of the result and those of the process. A rhetorical discourse can be or-

ganic inasmuch as its parts are harmoniously interrelated, and, both

separately and together, gravitate towards the global notion of aptum (Albaladejo Mayordomo, Retdrica 52-53). This notion presides over the whole process of rhetorical construction, since pragmatically the value of a discourse can only be measured with reference to its favor- able or unfavorable effect on the hearer, irrespective of the

procedure followed in its composition. However, no rhetorical discourse can be literally organic-in fact no verbal work can be-in the sense that its expression emerges from its content naturally and inde-

pendently of the rhetor's will and of the body of knowledge and tradition within which he or she works. The appearance of harmony and naturalness displayed by a well-constructed work, whether rhetorical or poetical, depends entirely on the artistic skill of its author, though it can be interpreted, if one wishes, as the outcome of an organic process of self-generation.

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A typically Western phenomenon, the science of rhetoric deals with the making of both persuasive and artistic discourse, and its

many links with poetics are explicitly acknowledged by Aristotle. He not only recommends that the orator find in the Poetics additional

stylistic hints, but also argues that the arrangement of a play and that of a speech are founded on the same overall principles (Murphy 28). In a more general way, the idea of ornatus, or verbal embellishment, has always contributed to setting up a connection between rhetoric and poetics since it is shared by both. This connection is further

strengthened by other common factors, such as the third type of rhetorical narratio, which is entirely devoted to the training of orators in the exposition before the court of the facts and circumstances of a case and, therefore, endowed with fictional and literary attributes

(Albaladejo Mayordomo, Ret6rica 128, 90). In recent decades, rhetoric has become the matrix discipline of a general science of dis-

course, in collaboration with classical poetics and other twentieth-

century trends in linguistic and literary thought such as Russian for-

malism, New Criticism, stylistics, European structuralism, and text

linguistics, whose object is the intrinsic study of the text, whether lit-

erary or not (Garcia Berrio). This reactivation has deprived rhetoric of the traditional prescriptive thrust that in the past earned it unre-

lenting censure from organicists, and thus has enhanced its descrip- tive efficacy in accordance with the new function it is now expected to fulfill.

I am particularly concerned with the rhetorical process of con-

structing a speech, since my purpose is to draw a parallel between that process and James's idea of his own creative practice. As is well

known, rhetoric accounts for the global composition and delivery of discourse by means of five operations-inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and actio or pronuntiatio-established in the great corpus of the Rhetorica recepta and handed down to us over time.6 Inventio discovers the appropriate material to argue for a case; dispositio arranges and distributes this material into a solid structural pattern; elocutio furnishes the invented and arranged material with a suitable verbal

style; memoria facilitates the memorization of the speech, and actio or

pronuntiatio provides for the skillful delivery of this speech in front of an audience. A sixth operation, called intellectio and preceding the other five, enables the rhetor to become familiar with the facts and

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).

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circumstances of a case before embarking on the specific discovery of material for the composition of his speech (Chico Rico 50). Needless to say, these six operations have been enumerated in their logical order and from a theoretical perspective, but they frequently overlap in the practice of composition or the analysis of a particular discourse.

However, not all of these operations have acquired and main- tained the same status within the rhetorical system. Whereas inventio,

dispositio and elocutio are the focal points of most treatises, intellectio, memoria and actio or pronuntiatio have sunk into oblivion, although they all form part of the rhetorical process and equally contribute towards the pragmatic goal of aptum. The explanation of this partial neglect lies in the fact that only inventio, dispositio and elocutio lead to the constitution of a textual entity; the other three account for the

preparatory task or the final delivery of the speech before the court

(Albaladejo Mayordomo, Retorica 43, 58). When, with the lapse of

centuries, rhetoric lost its immediate pragmatic utility, i.e. forensic

persuasion, and became a fossilized discipline buried in written texts, the categories most akin to pragmatics melted into the background. A similar process affects both inventio and dispositio, which progressively lost ground to elocutio to such an extent that this sole operation was eventually identified with rhetoric as a whole. One can offer two reasons for this drastic reduction. On the one hand, the appropria- tion of the rhetorical elocutio by poetics via the common idea of

ornatus can explain why this operation did not share the decay of rhetoric and the consequent decline of inventio and dispositio (Albaladejo Mayordomo, Retorica 123-24). On the other, elocutio generates the only concrete, perceptible level of the rhetorical text, in other words, its sentential manifestation as the locus of figurative lan-

guage, whereas inventio and dispositio give rise to mental constructs whose theoretical and analytical treatment calls for a higher degree of intellectual abstraction and insight. The recovery of rhetoric as the matrix discipline of a general science of discourse makes a point both

of redressing the original balance among these three operations and of interpreting them in terms of Morrisian semiotics and modern text linguistics.

In his Ars poetica (23-13 B. c.), Horace formulated a duality between the concepts of res and verba that does not appear to tally with the main rhetorical operations just alluded to. If the notion of res, or referent, is generated by inventio, and the notion of verba, or linguistic arrangement, by elocutio, a third operation remains unaccounted for in the Horatian system. The only solution to this problem is to posit

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the existence of two kinds of res, extensional and intensional, generated by inventio and dispositio respectively (Albaladejo Mayordomo, Retorica 45-47, Garcia Berrio and Albaladejo Mayordomo 175-76). Ac-

cording to this interpretation, inventio provides the rhetorical referent, which is reproduced within the text, or more precisely, within its

deep structure or macrostructure in a process that has been called intensionalization (Albaladejo Mayordomo, Teoria). This operation thus has a dual nature: it is primarily semantic and extensional because it produces a referent, but, owing to the immediate textual orientation of such a referent, it also has syntactic and intensional features. As an accurate image of the rhetorical referent, the textual

macrostructure, or intensional res, is the result of the macrocomposi- tional operations of dispositio, which work at two superimposed levels.

First, they develop and organize the initial topic of discourse to obtain an underlying syntactic-semantic level, equivalent to the Aristote- lian plot or to the Russian formalists' fabula (Aristotle 1450a, 4-5; Toma'sevskij 267-68) and variously known as text semantic representation (Pet6fi 223), sense structure, or base macrosyntactic structure

(Albaladejo Mayordomo, "Aspectos" 124, Teoria 137-39). Second,

dispositio is also instrumental in the artistic manipulation of the semantic elements articulated at this level to achieve the transformational macrosyntactic structure, another textual stage comparable with the concept of sjulet proposed by the Russian formalists (Toma'evskij 267-68). Finally, the microcompositional operations of elocutio supply the Horatian verba by endowing the transformational macrosyntactic structure with the appropriate lin-

guistic arrangement, usually called text-linear manifestation (Pet6fi 223) or microstructure (van Dijk 6, 17). The rest of this essay will be devoted to demonstrating the correspondence between these com-

positional stages and the steps that characterize James's creative method.

In this respect, I have already drawn an analogy between these two

processes that bears not only on their partial stages, operations, or

steps, but also, more decisively, on the general theoretical framework within which they occur. Departing from polar positions such as

James's claims of organicism on the one hand and the alleged accusa- tions of mechanism brought against rhetoric on the other, I have at-

tempted to bridge the apparent gap between these compositional methods. Both a novel by James and a rhetorical discourse enjoy or-

ganic attributes if viewed as carefully wrought verbal products-since this is what "organic" means in James-but not if the inescapably mechanistic nature of their compositional processes is taken into

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consideration.

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 ex-

perience, 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 betweenJames'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. Al- beit 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 participa- tion in it. James describes this process as a kind of fortuitous inventio

whereby the writer is merely an alert receiver of surrounding impres- sions, 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.' 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 donnie... his freedom of choice" (394-95), though he advises

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

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that novelists should prefer those topics rich enough to lend themselves appropriately to brilliant execution.

So far I have not challenged, except for a brief preliminary caveat, either the current terminology of organicism or its conception that

literary creation is a progressive imposition of form on content.

Therefore, I have uncritically reproduced the implication that the initial germ of a novel or poem is a formless entity only expressible when form is imparted to it. This idea is common among organicists, who even apply it to rhetorical operations by asserting that "the traditional distinction in Greek criticism between matter [inventio] and

arrangement [dispositio]. .. will later become that of content and form" (Orsini, "Ancient Roots" 13). This kind of statement sounds

surprising within the organic tradition, since it tends to undermine

organicism's fundamental dogma that form and content are inseparable. Abusing the legitimate conception of both as abstract mental

constructs, the pseudo-organic critic draws limits between formal and contentual elements and operations in a concrete literary work, as

frequently happens in some of the passages by James already referred to. I would not like to consider inventio as generating content and

dispositio or elocutio as imparting form to that metaphysically pure content. In my view, these three operations impose form on two different substances. Working respectively from an extensional and an intensional perspective, both inventio and dispositio isolate from the author's amorphous flux of experience the specific fragments that are to be textualized and elaborated, thus formalizing the substance of content (if we resort to glossematic terms [Hjelmslev 47-60]) in

agreement with the Jamesian notions of economy and choice.8 Elocutio, on the other hand, imposes form on the substance of expression by selecting portions from a phonetic or a graphic continuum in order to match the fragments of experience that have become text.

Consequently, one cannot equate donnee (idea, subject, or germ) to

substance, and verbal expression to form, because all of these elements can only be known and talked about inasmuch as they consist of both substance and form. In this light, it seems inexact-or at least

misleading-to say that "[t]reating a theme that 'gave' much in a form that, at the best, would give little, might indeed represent a

peck of troubles" (AN233) or that " [a] Form that does not fully bring

8 It is worth noting that the classification of the world into loci or t6poi carried out by rhetoric is a conventional formalization of experience prior to the inventive activ- ity 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).

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out its Content, or is in some way inadequate to it, and a Content that is not in keeping with the Form, are both artistic deficiencies" (Orsini, "Organic Concepts" 19). In both cases, theme and content are inevitably composites of substance and form, i.e. extratextual experience textually oriented; the same holds for the plane of expression. Arguably, much of this confusion is due to the fact that the term form is used to designate not only the corresponding member of the pair form-substance but also the expressive medium of any verbal message.

In agreement with James's paradoxical stance, however, one can find grounds in his critical works, as Vivien Jones has done (164, 172), to speak of a true formalistic attitude. See, for example, James's statement that "really, universally, relations stop nowhere [in life], and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so" (AN5); or his remarks, "I feel that in a literary work of the least complexity the very form and texture are the substance itself. . ."

(quoted in Wellek, 'James's Literary Theory and Criticism" 316). The first of these comments appears to describe an inventive process whereby an area of the continuum of extensional experience is de- marcated by its endowment with a textual orientation and an artistic

arrangement through the intervention of an author.' At this point, James seems to be using glossematic terms avant la lettre, or anticipat- ing Mark Schorer's seminal ideas on the novel, namely, that it is tech-

nique that determines content and not, as organicists would claim, content that determines technique (67); that technique does not organize a given content but discovers it (68); and, as a direct conse-

quence, that one can conceive neither of content without execution nor of a writer such as H. G. Wells, who imprudently proclaims his

repudiation of technique (69, 73). The second Jamesian fragment also embodies one of the basic tenets of the Russian formalists' school, specifically, that all elements of form are to be considered elements of content, since form gives shape to content, not the con- verse (Erlich 186-91, Wellek "Concepts" 9).

The emergence of content as a result of the formalization of substance can take place along two different lines profusely attested

throughout the history of world literature. This amounts to saying that there are two types of inventio and, therefore, two types of basic

9 A formalist critic like Eva Schaper defines the pictorial inventio in terms remark- ably similar to those used byJames: "For us these painters tried to capture what mat- tered in the world around them by isolating forms from the flux of intertwined hap- penings" (40).

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cells, germs, or donnies. For example, the Aristotelian dramatic inventio originates a referential core that turns on the idea of action and not of character (1450a, 4-5) in such a way that the development of the former determines the latter. Likewise, Vladimir Propp's analysis of the Russian folk tale is entirely based on the concept of func-

tion, whereas "character" is simply the agent of each of the seven

groups issuing from the classification of the whole range of those functions. In the case of Aristotle, this stress on action rather than on character is probably due to the impossibility of representing the mind of the performer in drama with the same naturalness as in nar-

rative, since any close focus on a fictional being seems to be incom-

plete if there is no psychological analysis. In a similar fashion, Propp lays emphasis on function and de-emphasizes character on account of the mental shallowness typically exhibited by the latter in the folk tale.

James's inventio, however, gives rise to full-blown characters around which a suitable story is developed. In "The Art of Fiction," he criti- cizes Walter Besant's narrow notion that all stories should consist of adventures by asserting that a "psychological reason is, to my imagination, an object adorably pictorial" (402), and highlights the inter-

dependence between character and incident which he considers fundamental: "When one says picture one says of character, when one

says novel one says of incident, and the terms may be transposed at will. What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?" (392). The crucial goal of

James's inventio is first and foremost the generation of character, and

ample evidence for this can be found in his Prefaces, particularly in that to The Portrait of a Lady, where he acknowledges that it was his vision of Isabel Archer that provided him with the starting point of the novel:

Trying to recover here, for recognition, the germ of my idea, I see that it must have consisted not at all in any conceit of a "plot," nefarious name, in any flash, upon the fancy, of a set of relations, or in any one of those situations that, by a logic of their own, immediately fall, for the fabulist, into a movement, into a march or a rush, a

patter of quick steps; but altogether in the sense of a single character, the character and aspect of a particular engaging young woman, to which all the usual elements of a "subject," certainly of a setting, were to need to be super-added. (AN42)

All this is a long way round, however, for my word about my dim first move towards "The Portrait," which was exactly my grasp of a single character ... (AN47)

The point is, however, that this single small corner-stone, the conception of a certain

young woman affronting her destiny, had begun with being all my outfit for the large building of "The Portrait of a Lady." (AN48)

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In the same extraordinary manner, James derives the donnee for "The Pupil" from a conversation with a friend in Italy: "I saw, on the

spot, little Morgan Moreen, I saw all the rest of the Moreens; I felt, to the last delicacy, the nature of my young friend's relation with them .. ." (AN 151). What one finds really compelling in the birth of Isabel Archer or Morgan Moreen is that "[n]o process and no steps intervened" (AN 151). This means that neither character resulted from a verifiable set of compositional stages, but materialized en

disponibilite, a very rich semiotic concept attributed by James to Ivan

Turgenev, whose narratives evolved from the initial vision of several human beings on the verge of becoming full fictional characters, i.e.

disponibles. These beings are conceived of as extensional experience oriented towards their representation in a text and, therefore, formalized. Their textual counterparts do not arise from a pattern of actions in later phases of the process of literary composition, but are "finished" characters from the very moment of their extensional in-

ception. Consequently, an appropriate tangle of actions, relations, and circumstances has to be generated which fits their personalities and brings them out.

In spite of the importance accorded by James himself to this kind of inventio, he also wrote narratives, as for instance The Ambassadors, whose initial germs were situations or incidents. In the Preface to this

novel, he discloses how he came by its initial idea: "A friend had re-

peated to me, with great appreciation, a thing or two said to him by a man of distinction, much his senior, and to which a sense akin to that of Strether's melancholy eloquence might be imputed.. ." (AN308). In this particular context, the representational kernel is not a character en disponibilite but a passionate outburst that is later to become Lambert Strether's address to little Bilham in the second chapter of Book Fifth. The case of The Ambassadors is unique because its initial

germ has a verbal nature and this implies that it can be directly ab- sorbed into the texture of the finished work, thus forming a recogniz- able protrusion that stands "planted or 'sunk,' stiffly and saliently, in the centre of the current, almost perhaps to the obstruction of traf- fic" (AN307). As this germ consists of a dramatic situation whose core is a verbal message, it can be easily reproduced within the linguistic medium of The Ambassadors, and this is how James violates-once

again-the organic dogma by including in the whole a part that

clearly pre-exists. Once James has obtained his initial hint, whether a

character or a state of affairs, he sets out to answer the question "what would be the story to which it [that hint] would most inevitably form the centre?" (AN 311) by means of a process of enlargement and or-

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ganization that, in our view, is parallel to the rhetorical operation of

dispositio. It is precisely in this second compositional stage, variously known

as execution, treatment, or composition, where the analogy between both creative processes is most apparent. This is due to the existence of two theoretically consecutive phases within this stage that are

equivalent to phases identified in the operation of dispositio when viewed in the light of text linguistics. The apprehension of this notable parallel facilitates the recognition of less obvious similarities in other compositional stages, as for instance the dual nature ofJames's inventive process based on the intensional orientation of extensional

experience, which immediately calls up for us the notion of the rhetorical inventio. For James, the skilled organization and development of the textualized material is the authentic touchstone of the novelist and the fundamental part of his office. He derisively denounces the lack of execution in works such as Thackeray's The Newcomes, Dumas

pere's Les trois mousquetaires, or Tolstoy's War and Peace, stating that a

"picture without composition slights its most precious chance for

beauty" (AN 84) and also that "[o]ne's work should have composition, because composition alone is positive beauty" (AN 319). His

early realization that the deft arrangement of material into an artistic structure was the basis of his task as a narrator gained him the reputa- tion of being "the first to write novels in English with a full and fine sense of the principles of composition" (Beach 37).

The organization of the subject according to his immanent sense of the well-made novel is so important for James that he ignores any external remark on the development of an initial topic for fear of

distorting the purity of execution. In the Preface to The Spoils of Poynton, he describes the discovery of the germ for his tale when con-

versing with some friends at a Christmas dinner. He draws particular attention to the fact that he had no sooner taken possession of such a

germ than he refused to hear how it evolved in "clumsy Life" so as to

keep its development within the domain of his imagination and at a considerable distance from the "stupid work" of actual experience (AN 121). Nevertheless, the contradictory nature ofJames's concep- tions stands out even in these circumstances. On the one hand, he

argues that the failure of any novelist unable to make something of an idea "will have been a failure to execute, and it is in the execution that the fatal weakness is recorded" ("The Art of Fiction" 395). On the other, he appears to disallow these words by presenting Balzac's

compositional defects as mere "faults, on the whole, of execution, flaws in the casting, accidents of the process: they never came back to

57




that fault in the artist, in the novelist, that amounts most completely to a failure of dignity, the absence of saturation with his idea" ("The Lesson of Balzac" 76). Despite the obvious existence of a double standard of judgment, however, the emphasis on composition is still

prevalent inJames's critical works. 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 donnie" (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 harmo-

niously evolved to fit an initial portion of formalized experience but

eventually removed from it, asJames liked to assume. One of the most accurate interpretations ofJames's creative proc-

ess has been offered by Beach. He maintains that "[o]nce given the

germ of the story, its motive or mere-idde, the circumstances of the plot are evolved with consistent undeviating logic" (20) in a coherent movement from condensation to distension of information. Natu-

rally, his "consistent undeviating logic" is strictly equivalent to the first set of compositional rulesjust 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

o0 Vivien Jones agrees with Beach when she speaks of "the intervening consciousness of the artist" (170) or expounds her version ofJames'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 donn&e and for its unconscious development into a full-blown story.

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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" (AN312), 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 carries 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" (AN313). The succes- sive 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.

Once all semantic elements have been appropriately developed and syntactically disposed, a second set of compositional procedures comes into operation. Its purpose is to complete the constitution of the textual macrostructure by means of applying further manipulations, which fall into two types: those affecting the narrative rhythm or tempo, and those influencing the "system of observation" or narrative perspective. James is particularly renowned for his consummate skill in making practical use of these techniques in his novels, as well as for his penetrating reflections on them scattered throughout his critical writings. Among the first type of manipulations, his di-

chotomy between scene and picture counts as fundamental. These two concepts remain at the root of all narratological discussions on the temporal structure of fiction (see for instance Genette 86-112, Chatman 62-79). They represent, respectively, an expansion and a

compression of the narrative time in such a way that the rhythm of a novel entirely depends on the right alternation between these cat-

egories in keeping with the author's compositional design. Com-

menting on The Ambassadors, James explains that the novel "sharply divides itself . . . into the parts that prepare, that tend in fact to over-

prepare, for scenes, and the parts, or otherwise into the scenes, that

justify and crown the preparation," and adds that "everything in

it that is not scene ... is discriminated preparation, is the fusion and

synthesis of picture" (AN322-23). Another technique, equally appre- ciated by James, is that of foreshortening ("The Lesson of Balzac"

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82). Commonly viewed as a brilliant attempt to obtain the most economic rendering of a subject without renouncing his well-known dramatic predilection, it consists of "giving the sense of present action without an elaborate scene," in other words, by means of "ani- mated or 'dramatized"' narrative (Roberts 208, 207) and not of a standard scene composed of lengthy dialogue and prolix description and action. Through both foreshortening and alternation of scene and picture, the verisimilar time sequence of the underlying story is

effectively manipulated and defamiliarized. The construction of perspective is beyond any doubt the composi-

tional technique that best characterizes James within the Anglo- American narrative theory. To speak of point of view inevitably means to invoke the position held by James towards the perception of a story through the eyes and conscience of one or several of its participants with the ideological and emotional slant that such a perception entails. James soon gives up the non-focalized God-like perspective in order to favor the internal point of view embodied in certain characters known as "registers or 'reflectors'"' (AN 300); he binds the center of perception to a particular character to such an extent that he can say, with reference to Fleda Vetch in The Spoils of Poynton, that "the progress and march of my tale became and re- mained that of her understanding" (AN 128). This kind of restricted

point of view in combination with the scenic technique or its pseudo- scenic counterpart, i.e. the foreshortened presentation, make up the basis for the Jamesian concept of dramatization. This concept man-

ages to unite within a single structural framework the qualities of the dramatic and the narrative genres: the direct and unmediated perception of the plot by the audience ("showing") and the controlled economic intensity of the novel ("telling"). After this final manipula- tive stage of dispositio, in which the underlying syntactic-semantic level is arranged so that it gives the impression of telling itself, the textual macrostructure is complete and ready to be projected onto a verbal medium.

This leads us to the third step in the composition of discourse. By means of elocutio--the only operation that yields an objective perceptible level-a mental construct is linked with a specific area of the substance of expression, which thus becomes formalized and ac-

quires the possibility of denoting a complex of meaning. In James, as in any other critic, there are abundant references to this final stage of verbal manifestation usually called style or texture. Though these terms do not seem interchangeable, both are clearly contrasted with the architectural sense of form as a large-scale arrangement of com-

60




positional units (Wellek, 'James's Literary Theory and Criticism"

316-17). They frequently occur in any discussion about the level of

adequacy between words and ideas, as in James's essay on The Tempest, where he once more takes up the issue that form cannot be dissoci- ated from content. In his view, Shakespeare "points for us as no one else the relation of style to meaning and of manner to motive ... Unless it be true that these things, on either hand, are inseparable; unless it be true that the phrase, the cluster and order of terms, is the

object and the sense ... the author of The Tempest has no lesson for us" (303). The verbalization of the textual macrostructure can be thus considered an organic operation insofar as it produces a linguistic pattern that throws into relief the expressed content by highlighting the close correspondence between them. It is a critical

commonplace thatJames's later style was perversely intricate because it had to bring out the sophistication of a mature mind (Miller 349-

50). This appreciation seems obvious when one realizes how closely language follows all the nuances and convolutions of a complicated macrostructural layout in any passage of his last works, whether liter-

ary or critical. It is worth remarking, however, that the Jamesian stage of elocutio does not contribute to the verification of the analogy at issue here in the same degree as those of dispositio or inventio. This is

simply because, on account of its close resemblance to equivalent steps in the creative process of many other writers, it is almost feature- less and, therefore, inappropriate to establish revealing parallels upon it.

James's idea of organicism is a mental stereotype rather than a

genuine modus operandi. Once his rigorous logic has ruled out any trace of self-generation or even of arbitrariness in the development of the textual macrostructure, the organic qualities can only lie in the

isomorphous arrangement of the final product. It is not difficult to discover in James formalistic attitudes that run counter to the organic dogma, as for instance when he admits that a certain formal circum- stance may exert a strong influence on the configuration of content or even determine it altogether. On the other hand, James's crucial distinction between the formation of a story by applying a set of rules derived from his idea of the well-made plot, and the further execution of this story under the control of compositional techniques such as narrative time, point of view, or dramatized presentation, provides sufficent grounds to draw a parallel between this stage of his creative

method and the rhetorical operation of dispositio. With reference to this central parallel, we can interpret as analogous the steps that go

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before and after it-namely, the discovery of the initial germ, or

inventio, and the verbalization of the resulting mental construct by means of elocutio.

Although in this essay I have simply described a plausible corre-

spondence without analyzing its motivation two explanatory hypotheses at least could be put forward: direct influence from rhetorical

sources, or manifestation of a more or less universal trend in the mak-

ing of literary discourse. To my mind, the correspondence I have traced does not stem from a direct bearing of rhetoric on James's creative thought, since not a single explicit rhetorical term or clearly identifiable rhetorical notion has found its way into the mainstream of his critical writings. (On the other hand, the references to the or-

ganic doctrine are numerous, though rather perfunctory as I have

suggested.) In addition, the identification of two different phases within the operation of dispositio is a recent achievement; they cer-

tainly existed in ancient rhetorical treatises, but the explicit discrimi- nation between them is the result of looking at rhetoric in the light of text linguistics. Obviously, if the dual character of dispositio is the common factor that makes comparison possible, and this factor dates back only to the 1980s, direct influence is eliminated as the motivation of the parallel examined in this essay. Rather, the homology between the two dimensions of dispositio and the two compositional stages distinguished in James can be viewed as the key link in the

general chain of discourse production, which extends from the dis-

covery of the topic or germ by means of formalizing an area of experience to its final verbalization after it has been adequately expanded and organized. Any attempt at providing evidence to support or re-

ject either of these hypotheses on solid grounds, however, clearly ex- ceeds the scope of this study."

University ofAlicante

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henryjames's organic form and - ua · the influence of joseph warren beach and percy lubbock....

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