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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Toward the incalculable :a note on Henry James and organic form

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In "The Art of Fiction" Henry James writes: "A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts" (EL 54). Written in 1884, the essay addressed Walter Besant, a Victorian critic and novelist who promoted the idea of the novel with a moral purpose. It is quite possible that contemporary readers, preoccupied with James's refutation of the Victorian argu- ment about the didactic imperatives of art, overlooked this sentence. Today, with our knowledge of the writer's notebooks and in the context of the celebrated prefaces he added to the volumes of the New York Edition, we should read the passage as central to Henry James's understanding and practice of the novelistic genre. The symbolism of germ, organism, and natural growth is not only unavoidable in any discussion of his style, it also hints at the paradoxical character of the idea of organic form that, disrupted by the same analogies it is based on, prepares the way for questioning the concept of the novel as autonomous, self-contained, and complete. The quite complex story of the novelist's preoccupation with organicism as a key principle governing the structure and rhetoric of the novel shows James as both fully aware of the insufficien- cies of nineteenth-century realism and anticipating, even if not quite ready to accept, the modernist agenda for literature as discontinuous and incoherent. That James used an organic metaphor as a key statement for his aesthetics of the novel is hardly surprising. Since the end of the eighteenth century, organicism had provided one of the main frames of reference in discussions of the psychology of the creative process and such related categories as imagination, fancy, and association. The new ideas, set forth and propagated by Goethe, the Schlegel brothers, Schelling, and Coleridge, to mention just a few names, resulted from the strong belief that the mechanist worldview offered by Enlightenment thinkers missed an important point and did not give justice to the complexity of the psychological and phenomenological