Hello readers,
A few weeks ago, I posted to this website an essay entitled ‘Henry James’ Solution to the Novel Problem’. Its main ambition was to consider the arguments put forth by Henry James in his essay ‘The Art of Fiction’ in a broader literary historical context, and to consider how, in the process of rebutting Walter Besant’s attempts to impose a constitution onto the process of novel writing, James also grappled with the problem inherit in trying to illustrate objective, infinite reality in a subjective, finite art form. As all of his writings are, James’ essay was so densely packed that it would’ve been impossible to address all of his many points in one singular post (let alone a post that the reader could get to the bottom of without keeling over), but there was one specific facet in his argument that I would like to investigate in a little more detail here— not least because it prompted another notable author of the time to write his own ‘Humble Remonstrance’ to it.
I used the word ‘illustrate’ a few sentences ago, but Henry James, if he were still able, would likely endeavour to politely alter it to ‘compete’. In ‘The Art of Fiction’, James insists that to claim that the novelist simply illustrates or imitates life is to do them a disservice, for the novelist must always struggle against the perception that they are simply ‘making believe’. Instead, they should summon their courage and write ‘with assurance, with the tone of the historian’, standing toe-to-toe with reality and claiming that their own, fictional series of events is equal to those that happen in the real world. As the realist painter does not apologise for offending reality by offering a particular depiction of it on canvas, so James demands that the novelist should not need to humble themselves for daring to produce a narrative entirely out of their own imagination. To do so would be to discredit the entire art of novel writing.
Robert Louis Stevenson, acclaimed author of such works as Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, zeroed in on this particular nuance in James’ essay in his own response, entitled ‘A Humble Remonstrance’. Specifically, he balked at the notion that any work of art, let alone fiction, could claim to compete with the richness of life itself. After all, he writes, life ‘goes before us, infinite in complication […] appealing at once to the eye, to the ear, to the mind’; how could a novelist, armed simply with pen and paper, even begin to try to ‘compete with the flavour of wine, the beauty of the dawn, the scorching of fire, the bitterness of death and separation’? James argues of the ‘sanctity of truth’ to the novelist, that they should write as if they were doing so of true events, but Stevenson responds that no art can be ‘true’ in that it cannot hope to properly portray every facet, every colour, every shade of real life. Instead, the novelist is occupied with making stories that are not true, but ‘typical’; their works do not ‘capture the lineaments of each fact’, but instead goes about ‘marshalling all of them to a common end’, excluding every detail that does not serve their specific narrative. Far from the constant surprise of life, the novelist’s work proceeds along an expected train; far from the diverse wilds and wildernesses of the world, the novelist’s universe is a neat, pleasing but entirely unremarkable garden court in comparison.
Stevenson’s criticism of James’ position that the novel should ‘compete’ with life clearly made an impact, for James would later revise the word to merely ‘represent’ in subsequent editions. And yet, it seems that in doing so, James did himself a misjustice; like the novelists whom he tried to spur into courageous competition, his courage faltered just as he was to take the leap. For, while Stevenson is entirely right that art cannot hope to capture the endless multiplicity of existence within itself, that is not what James is claiming, either. Indeed, Stevenson uses the word ‘life’ in a very different way to how James seems to; the English novelist seems to regard it more as existence in its entirety, whilst for the American author it is the internal, the psychological, the actual life living the reality. It is true that a novel cannot hope to do justice to the plurality of general human experience; to do so would be like the Spartans electing to confront Xerxes’ army head on, with one plucky Greek facing one hundred Persian soldiers each; and yet the battleground where it can hope to compete with reality is in the representation of an individual’s singular life. James’ A Portrait of a Lady, for example, provides a far greater insight into the mind of a young woman in her particular time and place than reality itself could provide; had Isabelle Archer really existed in the same capacity, even her closest friends could not have been in confidence of the inner workings of her mentality so completely as we are after reading the novel. Over the 500-odd pages of the novel, we live as she does, we experience life as she does, and most importantly, we feel as she does. There are many instances in the novel, as in all good novels, when what Isabelle strongly believes is true is actually far from it. Sometimes, the narrator even does us the courtesy of letting us know that she is of error. And yet, this does not seem to matter— nobody in their right mind would sling the book down with the injured sense of having been lied to— because as far as Isabelle, and the reader, are concerned, it is the development of her knowledge of the truth that feels far more real than what is objectively true.
As such, the novel does not need to compete with the taste of wine, or the colour of the sunset, for that is entirely the wrong arena for it to stake its claim. Instead, it can elucidate an understanding of those things through the eyes of an individual, and allow us a glimpse into a character who, if the author is skilled, can emerge in more blistering and undeniable detail than most of the people we will meet in our own lives. We pass countless people in the street each day, all of whom are technically more ‘real’ than the individuals found in a book— but the reader, who has committed great time and energy into following the progress of a character, emerges from a book with a far more detailed appreciation as to the inner workings of that fictitious individual than they likely do any of the real people whom they encounter in their day-to-day, external lives. When the novelist dares to write as if they were a historian, they are able to draw upon the raw material of real existence, and sculpt coherence and meaning out of it; an ideal, someone for whom the reader can hold up against themselves and compare their own understanding of reality to, and in turn, hopefully, emerge enriched and enlightened.
After all, just because something doesn’t exist, doesn’t mean that it can’t be real.
Thank you for reading,
The Watchful Scribe.