The Art of Friction: Henry James's Evasion of the Pictorial

Few readers are more wedded to the analogy between word and picture than the critics of Henry James, who find in the world of visual art an assortment of metaphors with which to account for, among other things, idiosyncrasies of style, innovations in narrative technique, and principles of composition. ¹ Though such characterizations are frequently qualified by an acknowledgement of the incommensurability of visual and linguistic mediums, the analogy has always seemed too settled a thing to gainsay. This manner of reading James, though admittedly hard to resist, has always struck me as a too convenient way of coming to grips with one of literature's most notoriously intractable narrative styles. It allays, I think, a persistent anxiety on the part of readers toward all there is in James (and there is plenty) that is elaborately, aggressively discursive and abstract; it is a defense against the perceptual distress, so to speak, that comes of the mind's eye having no object to fix upon, no place of repose. What William James observed of philosophy's failure to grasp the elusive, "transitive parts" of thought itself—"So inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to other purposes" (243, 246)—might well be said of the attempts to get at James through a rhetoric of the pictorial. In our habitual recurrence to such a mode of reading, we would do well to recall (somewhat ironically given his philosophical affinity for the vague) the frustrated William comically grasping at a way to characterize Henry's "method of narration by interminable elaboration of suggestive reference (I don't know what to call it, but you know what I mean)" (Skrupskelis and Berkeley 463).

If writing and the visual arts can be said to "proceed hand in hand in sisterly emulation of aims and means of expression" (Praz 5), they are also rivals whose long history of antagonism W. J. T. Mitchell has neatly characterized as "a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs, each claiming for itself certain proprietary rights on a nature to which only it has access" (43). Just so, in "The Art of Fiction," James asserts that the writer "competes with his brother the painter in his attempt to render the look of things" (53), this after having declared, in an oft-cited passage, that "the analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist is [. . .] complete" (EL 46). On the one hand, James's language here comports with that of the paragone, the tradition of rivalry between literature and the visual arts extending at least as far back as Leonardo's treatise on painting. Yet so emphatic is his declaration of identity with the painter and so ineluctable his subsequent undoing of it—on the grounds, it turns out, of their essential difference—that the matter bears closer scrutiny than it has yet received. ² For James, the analogy runs deeper than rhetoric. With the phrase, "his brother the painter" (53) (less generic than either "the sister art" [46] or "brother of the brush" [50], both phrases he employs at earlier points in the essay), James invokes his vexed bond with a brother who, it had seemed throughout their childhood, was destined to become a painter. Less than a year apart in age, Henry and William James were, "in the searching time of youth [. . .] aesthetic twins, and it was uncertain whether they would go on yoked in that twinship and become artists in tandem," as Howard Feinstein reminds us (307). As with flesh-and-blood twins, the very depth of affinity between "the sister arts" only intensifies the desire for individuation, for staking a claim upon a unique identity.

In what follows, I mean to examine James's subtle unfastening of the ties that...