The Nouvelle of Henry James in Theory and Practice (review)

221 Lauren T. Cowdery. The Nouvelle of Henry James in Theory and Practice. Studies in Modem Literature. No. 47. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1986. 136 pp. $39.95. At a time when short stories became increasingly popular in American magazines, the "beautiful and blest nouvelle," as James called it, offered him an escape from editorial demands for brevity. James adopted the term from the French writers he met during his early year in Paris, the "heirs of Balzac," the French naturalists. In a passage from the prefaces to the New York Edition he speaks of the "wise and liberal support" they could count on to receive from their editors. Professor Cowdery's first chapter on "Fellow Writers of the Nouvelle" gives us a summary of what James learnt about short fiction from his French contemporaries as well as from Hawthorne, Kipling, and above all Turgenev, whom he also knew in Paris. James had long admired Balzac, and the lecture on "The Lesson of Balzac," with which he travelled up and down the land when he revisited the United States in 1905-6, serves Professor Cowdery as a source, in importance second only to the prefaces to the New York Edition. But it was the enthusiasm for Turgenev expressed by the French critic Hippolyte Taine, in a conversation, that moved James to cultivate the form of the nouvelle. The younger French writers impressed him with their fierce critical intelligence, but he felt closer to Turgenev. With him James shared not only an international point of view (since both were expatriates) but also a preoccupation with ethical questions and a sense of die mystery of life, a conscious concern with craft, too, of course, but free from the excesses of French systematizing. "Underlying his claim for Turgenev," Professor Cowdery writes, "is a fundamental qualification of the importance of literary theory itself." This conviction is in harmony with the substance of her second chapter, on "James's Theories about the Nouvelle: 'The Vanity of A Priori Wisdom.'" For, as she says, James was "not the man to write with a strict program or aesthetic ideology, but he was just the man to spin out generalizations and speculations as he looked back over his work in preparing die New York Edition." His theoretical statements are neither systematic nor prescriptive but simply describé in retrospect what he has done. Any attempt to summarize James's theories about the nouvelle, therefore, "is not only bound to be reductive, it risks becoming tendentious in a way James specifically deplored." In die process of speaking about specific works, James invented and borrowed a set of terms and then reiterated diem in other contexts without straining for consistency. He opposed the nouvelle to what he called die "anecdote," for instance, yet at the same time proposed that the "'anecdotic' and the 'nouvellistic' principles [both] govern the structure of the nouvelle." He liked such paradoxes, Professor Cowdery maintains, but they are possible only because his theorizing was "occasional and thus partial," that is, fitted to the specific work or subject under discussion. As a result, though he produced a large body of theoretical writings, often as "an expression of feeling," it is difficult to find his 'Theory." Essentially, he had none, one is tempted to say, although Professor Cowdery would perhaps not wish to go as far as that. What she does suggest is that James's high regard for Turgenev accorded witii his impatience of the rigidity of French abstractions. And she quotes him from Partial Portraits: With Turgenev "one breathed an air in which cant phrases 222 The Henry James Review and arbitrary measurements simply sounded ridiculous." Professor Cowdery's argument in this second chapter is sometimes difficult because the growth of Jamesian concepts and terms is dense. In addition to the pairs mentioned above, she discusses story/subject, real truth/romantic truth, anecdote/picture, anecdotal treatment/development, storytelling/ development, and others. (One of the most useful distinctions she draws is between the center of consciousness and the center of the subject, useful because commentators on James have sometimes conflated them.) A "perfect definition of terms," James said, "is not of this muddled world," and so a...