American Theorists of the Novel: Henry James, Lionel Trilling, Wayne C. Booth (review)

This is a complex and finely structured work of criticism. It brings together for discussion three complementary and at the same time different American theorists of the novel on the ground that “[t]he ethics of reading and writing and the moral consequences of formal and technical decisions are central concerns” for them: “James, Trilling and Booth focus not only on what texts are, but also on how they are brought together or on what it is about their organization that makes them tick” (3). Rawlings avers that they “occupy common ground; but they often do very different things in it” (112).

[James] made at least two enduring contributions to the theory of the novel: he succeeded in establishing it as a worthy object of critical attention by lifting it to the level of an art; and . . . he helped to initiate discussions about structure, narrative method, representation, moral thinking, and interpretation that continue to exert a powerful influence on contemporary literary criticism. Lionel Trilling built on the moral and social dimension of James’s writing to foster a role for himself as a cultural critic at a time when the New Critics were becoming obsessed with form and technique. These are the two strands that Booth attempts to re-unite in The Rhetoric of Fiction.

(129–30)

This conclusion is reached through a meticulous and perceptive discussion of their general views and their “key ideas” on such topics as realism and representation (sect. 2); authors, narrators, and narration (sect. 3); points of view, and centers of consciousness (sect. 4); readers, reading, and interpretation (sect. 5); and moral intelligence (sect. 6).

James’s critical and theoretical work is rightly seen as “the culmination of later nineteenth-century explorations of the craft of fiction and the beginning of twentieth-century ways of thinking about the novel” and as “one of the progenitors” of Trilling and Booth (119). In “The Art of Fiction” (1884) he challenged dismissive views of the novel and advocated its status as one of the “fine arts” (a far from accepted view at the time): giving the novel an “air of reality” would allow it to “compete with life.” This was James’s response to the contemporary debate on realism: an adherence to social aspects combined with imagination and formal awareness would provide the necessary “illusion of reality.” Fiction was based for him on the organic principle (“A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism,” he wrote in that essay). While needing no externally imposed or conscious moral purpose, the cultivation of intelligence in author and readers would provide its moral quality and foster responsible behavior.

Fiction would thrive on selection and rearrangement of the data of experience, on impersonality, and benefit greatly—but not always—from the perspective of a restricted, rather than omniscient, point of view: a center of consciousness or narrator involved in the action, with all its good and frustrating consequences, including uncertainty and unreliability of meaning. In particular cases, such as “The Turn of the Screw,” Rawlings writes, “misunderstanding is the very fuel of action” (69). “The old certainties were giving way to considerable uncertainty” (84): James himself had warned that centers or “vessels of consciousness” should not be “too interpretative of the muddle of life” (qtd. in Rawlings 84).

James’s 1907–09 prefaces are extensively presented as acts of repossessing and revitalizing his novels and tales and as a monument to the writer’s need of aesthetic control in balancing “realism, the illusion of realism, and the formal demands of art” (89), whose implied achievement of a “moral” sense, as James famously wrote in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady and similarly elsewhere, depended “on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it” (106). He defined “moral consciousness” as “stirred intelligence” and equated it with the artistic sense (115). For him, Rawlings writes, novels “should not transmit moral principles and rules...