The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James (review)

The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James. Mark McGurl. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Pp. ix + 221. $55.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

We don't read "art-poems," or listen to "art-symphonies," or view "art-paintings." The very existence of Mark McGurl's favored term, the "art-novel," reveals how ambiguous that genre's status was in the early twentieth century, as modernists struggled to distance their own highly crafted productions from the best-sellers consumed by the literate (but not literary) white-collar masses. In the Anglo-American tradition, Henry James virtually invented "the art of fiction," especially in his later novels, which emphasized intellectual distinction in his characters and aspired to produce—and reward—such distinction in his readers. Drawing on a range of literary and sociological approaches, and inspired most clearly by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, McGurl argues that James's novels do more than simply represent the workings of consciousness: they provide a means of evaluating consciousness, of distinguishing the intelligent reader from the stupid one. With an eye to preserving increasingly blurred class distinctions, they reinscribe those distinctions within a hierarchy of intelligence. McGurl draws upon the multiple meanings of surface and volume, matter and mass, to map the social geometry that James seeks to escape through "restricted avenues of access to a higher dimension, a higher consciousness, where a more reliable form of distinction could take place" (76). It's surprising, given McGurl's topological, tropological wordplay, that he does not introduce the term "density," which is what is revealed when the mass of American readers is divided by the volume of The Golden Bowl (1904). But density is not merely the sad social fact against which modernists define their own intelligence; it is also, as McGurl observes, central to the American art-novel after James.

Why did a generation of novelists so obsessed with intellectual distinction create characters who are naïve, uneducated, even retarded? In his transition from James's art-novels to those of Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner, McGurl has some difficulty in confronting the awkward fact that James, unlike those later novelists, has no interest in simplicity, much less subnormality, as a quality of mind. He cites James's international theme, "which juxtaposes 'sophisticated' European and 'simple' American culture," but his defensive quotation marks say it all (8). The modernist fascination with the simple-minded cannot really be said to originate in James, whose idea of a "stupid" character is Charlotte Stant. McGurl can only allude to more marginal (and unnamed) "simpletons" who provide a contrast to James's luminous examples of consciousness. He argues, interestingly, that in the modern art-novel these peripheral simpletons take center stage, where they serve as foils to their own creators rather than to their fellow characters: "Thus situated, they begin to generate the complexity not of a thoughtful protagonist embodied in the fictive world of the novel, but of the entire fictional utterance" (130). If James announces his intelligence in large part through his creation of intelligent characters, later writers rely less on fictional surrogates—what McGurl calls "the 'smart character' alibi"—and more on the ironic disparity between their virtuosic prose styles and their characters' sharply restricted points of view (131). For McGurl, this phenomenon is epitomized by Faulkner's use of Benjy Compson in The Sound and the Fury (1929). In a distinctly modern version of pastoral, American novelists represent simplicity in order to highlight their own complexity, making use of "the masses" even as they distance themselves from mass culture.

McGurl is a meticulous close reader, and his detailed analyses of works by James and Stephen Crane, especially his provocative reading of James's 1907 Preface to The American, are of significant literary interest. The second half of The Novel Art has a broader appeal. McGurl has a real talent for making sense of complicated cultural dynamics...