Toward the Incalculable: A Note on Henry James and Organic Form

Central to James's understanding of the novelistic genre was his assumption that the work of art should be organically coherent and unified. However, his prefaces to The New York Edition are informed by a sense of ambiguities permeating the concept of organicism and imply a possibility that the novelistic language contains virus-like qualities that disrupt its unity. James questioned the organic form in the name of what he called the “incalculable art” of the novel and concluded that the artistic process has to take into account the author's and the readers' capacities to interpret the same story in different ways.