Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction (review)

Taking a genealogical view of James’s theory of fiction and its relation to history, Roslyn Jolly analyzes the complications of the idea of history for both James and his characters. In his earliest critical writings on the subject and in his early fiction, James saw history as the epistemological model to which the novel should aspire. Jolly, however, traces a number of transformations in and complications of this view. What remains constant, she claims, is the writer’s “panic...that fiction will ‘give itself away’, or be ‘given away,’ as not history, and the novelist’s whole enterprise will be thereby invalidated” (v).

The first part of chapter one rehearses the nineteenth-century debates about the moral status of fiction and then examines James’s response to those debates: for James, “the realignment of ‘truth’ with ‘reality’ was to be achieved by appealing to the cultural prestige of modern historiography” (19). In the second part of the chapter, Jolly defines the “new historiography”—new theories of epistemology, causation, and representation informed by scientific and legal models—and considers the influence of this ideal on James’s defense of fiction. The literary criticism from the 1860s to the 1880s repeatedly suggests “ways in which the technical attributes of historical narrative could be used to enhance the realism and cultural standing of fiction” (24).

The paradox of this commitment, however, is clear: to achieve a greater status for the novel, fiction writers should imitate the methods of historians, and yet their imitations, if successful, worked in service to illusion, not the “truth” history was supposed to provide. Jolly also notes that James’s developing theory of the realism of literary impressionism further challenged the presumptions of objectivity on which the historicist model depended. But these conflicts among incompatible models of fiction do not just inhabit James’s critical writing: they are also “expressed technically, structurally, and dramatically in the early novels”; indeed, Jolly claims, the conflicts expressed in these works generate “new narrative techniques and new theories of fiction which lead the later novels into radical departures from James’s early commitment to history” (35).

Chapters two and three examine works from the early and middle period to demonstrate how they both manifest and challenge the anti-romance position. The novels from 1870 to 1890—Washington Square, The American, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Princess Casamassima—pose contests between narrators who seem to embody the authority and tactics of the historian and characters whose “plots...are arbitrary, and must be defeated lest the narrator’s story should also appear so” (38). The apparent difference, however, between the narrators’ realism and the characters’ unwarranted faith in their own power to determine their histories depends precisely on the novelist’s construction of that difference. Thus, the novel achieves its authority only by “containing” its other, the unpersuasive romance plot of the character whose defeat is itself scripted by the novel. Not surprisingly, the novels embodying these contests expose the similarities between characters’ and author’s activities.

But Jolly also identifies texts from this period in which James permits his characters somewhat greater freedom; in Roderick Hudson, The Europeans, and The Tragic Muse, she reads a less anxious and more ironic perspective on both fiction and the imagination in which James presents the possibility of moving beyond the static opposition between history and fiction, truth and falsity. This possibility underlies James’s later and more sophisticated treatment of these tensions in The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl.

To complicate her own apparent narrative of James’s “progress” here, however, Jolly identifies a rupture in the writer’s optimism about overcoming these oppositions. The works from 1895 to 1901 record the absence of any productive collaboration between the transformative impulses of the imagination and the determinative power of history, delineating instead worlds where fiction-making of all kinds is condemned. Jolly links the pessimism and hostility of these tales to unhappy shifts in James’s relation to his own audience and to the broader...