Lecture 4 The Awkward Age.docx

1、Lecture 4 The Awkward AgeMODERNIST FICTION: LECTURE 4Henry James: The Awkward AgeIn last weeks lecture, I mentioned Jamess 1884 essay The Art of Fiction. As I said last time, in that essay, James was keen to present novel-writing as one of the fine arts, and he did that, in part, by using the analog

2、y of painting. Through this analogy with painting, James was able to make claims for the novel and for a serious consideration of the aesthetics of the novel. Thus, he notes at one point, it is not expected of the picture that it will make itself humble in order to be forgiven, implying, of course,

3、that the novelist is expected to adopt this posture. He begins the essay in quite the opposite vein.He observes at the start: Only a short time ago it might have been supposed that the English novel was not what the French call discutable. Then he explains what he means by this term: It had no air o

4、f having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it of being the expression of an artistic faith. James is clearly aiming to remedy this lack. Again it is worth noting in passing the indebtedness to French literature: how French literary culture is providing a precedent for this ser

5、ious engagement with the art of the novel. It is worth remembering also that one of Jamess earliest publications was a critical book, French Poets and Novelists, published in 1878, in which, through a series of essays investigating the practice of a range of contemporary French poets and novelists,

6、he can be seen developing his own critical position on the nature and art of the novel. He goes on: Art lives upon discussion, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints. And, in this spirit, he offers his own contribution to the on-going di

7、scussion.I mentioned last time, Jamess assertion of the freedom of art, the freedom of the novel, in its choice of subject and its treatment of that subject. He affirms: The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel is that it be interesting. He elaborates on this later in the essay: W

8、e must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donnee: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it. At the same time, against Besants attempt to lay down laws for the novel, James asserts: The ways in which it is at liberty to accomplish this result (of interesting us) strike me as innu

9、merable They are as various as the temperament of man, and they are successful in so far as they reveal a particular mind. This insistence on the temperament of the writer is derived partly from discourse about the novel in France, but it also echoes what we have seen in Pater. In his essay James wo

10、rks systematically through the various points that Besant made in his lecture. Thus, James also questions Besants assertion that the novelist must write from experience by interrogating that word experience. He observes: Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibi

11、lity, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue. What is interesting in this image is how it moves from experience to the sensibility of the person experiencing. James gives an example to inter

12、rogate further the notion of experience: Thackerays daughter, Anne Ritchie Thackeray, wrote a novel about French Protestant youth; the experience from which she wrote the novel was the glimpse of a group of young Protestant men seated at table in a house in Paris. James observes: The glimpse made a

13、picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience. Experience, for the artist, depends upon this power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern. So Jamess advice to the young artist is Try to be one of the people on

14、 whom nothing is lost!James also picks up on Besants opposition of description and dialogue to argue instead for organic form. He notes: I cannot imagine composition existing in a series of blocks, nor conceive, in any novel worth discussing at all, of a passage of description that is not in its int

15、ention narrative, a passage of dialogue that is not in its intention descriptive. As we will see in The Awkward Age, this becomes what James calls really constructive dialogue. In similar vein he goes on in his essay to challenge another distinction between the novel of character and the novel of in

16、cident. He argues: What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the determination of character? We might productively address these questions to The Spoils of Poynton.Finally, he returns to that question of the freedom of the artist. He asserts that the province of art i

17、s all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision. He challenges Besants assertion that art has to have a conscious moral purpose and counters with the assertion that questions of art are questions (in the widest sense) of execution; questions of morality are quite another affair. In other words,

18、 it is the artists technical decisions in their treatment of the subject that are the proper object for critical attention. Not only does the novel not have to have a conscious moral purpose; it should not be expected to conform to conventional moral values. From this position, he goes on to attack

19、the moral timidity of the usual English novelist; with his (or her) aversion to face the difficulties with which on every side the treatment of reality bristles. As he notes, this leads to a cautious silence on certain subjects subjects, of course, which James cant mention explicitly. Instead, he ob

20、serves that there is a traditional difference between that which people know and that which they agree to admit that they know, that which they see and that which they speak of, that which they feel to be a part of life and that which they allow to enter into literature. As this suggests, there were

21、, in nineteenth-century England and America constraints on what could be said and what could be said in literature. As this also suggests, these constraints also produce an allusive style (as in these passages) where all those in the know know exactly what is being alluded to, while those not in the

22、 know are kept in the dark. James in his fiction, as we saw with some of his short stories and The Spoils of Poynton or in novels like What Maisie Knew and The Golden Bowl, brought into fiction things which his adult readers knew but didnt necessarily allow into literature. At the same time, James h

23、ad to negotiate the official constraints on what could be included in literature: he could not be as explicit, for example, as Flaubert and Zola. As we have seen, this had implications for his technique and his writing style. It is also an important context for The Awkward Age.I. The Preface to The

24、Awkward AgeJames wrote his Prefaces to accompany the New York Collected Edition of his works that came out in 1907: they did not accompany the novels when they first appeared. One of the ambitions of serious novelists like James and Conrad was to have a Collected Edition of their work. This was one

25、of the signs of legitimation, of recognition. The publication of Jamess Collected Edition, like the later publication of Conrads, was also an opportunity for the writer to revisit earlier work and to reflect upon it. From the publishers perspective, the authors Preface (in Jamess case) or Authors No

26、te (in Conrads) was also a way of adding value to the volume a further inducement to the reader to buy the edition. It is comparable to the DVD with out-takes or additional material. What the authors Preface also offers is an account of fiction, as James notes in The Art of Fiction, from the point o

27、f view of the producer rather than the consumer. If we read through Jamess Prefaces in chronological order what we also see is a process by which he explores his ideas about fiction, where ideas might be started up in one Preface and then picked up and developed further in a later one. The Prefaces

28、were published separately from the novels in 1934 as a book called The Art of the Novel. Like Percy Lubbocks The Craft of Fiction, which came out in 1921, the publication of the Prefaces as a separate book, reads like an attempt to set up Jamess explorations of his practice as a novelist as a prescr

29、iptive model for fiction which is quite contrary to the spirit of Jamess own work (as we saw in his essay The Art of Fiction) and didnt succeed.The Preface to The Awkward Age is one of those most oriented to matters of technique. James begins, easily enough, with the germ. As in The Spoils of Poynto

30、n, the germ was a social phenomenon, a product of Jamess social life in London - in this case, the difference made in certain friendly houses and for certain flourishing mothers by the sometimes dreaded, often delayed, but never fully arrested coming to the forefront of some vague slip of a daughter

31、 and the resulting account to be taken, in a circle of free talk, of a new and innocent, a wholly unacclimatized presence. Again, as with The Spoils of Poynton, we have to think about the social customs of the upper-classes: in this case, the separation of children and parents within the household a

32、part from carefully controlled visiting times, and the problem then of deciding when to allow the young adult to join the social circle of the parents. What we also have to bear in mind as a factor here is the perceived need, in this period, to protect female children indeed, unmarried young women - from certain kinds of knowledge. In his Notebook entry for 4 March 1895, James begins his outline of the germ for the novel by referring to The idea of the little London girl who grows up to “sit with” the free-talking modern young mother and the problem