The Future of the Novel by Henry James - A Brief Note

The Future of the Novel- Henry James

Henry James (OM) [Henry James, throwing his moral weight into Britain’s struggle in World War I, James became a British subject in 1915 and received the Order of Merit (OM) from King George V] was an American novelist and critic (1843-1916), who became a British citizen in the last year of his life. During his lifetime, he wrote 20 novels, 112 tales and 12 plays in addition to several volumes of travel writing and criticism. Today he is the best remembered as the author of the novel “The Portrait of the Lady” (1881) and the novella “The Turn of the screw” (1898).

He was the great figure in the transatlantic culture. His fundamental theme was the innocence and exuberance of the New World in clash with the corruption and wisdom of the world, as illustrated in such works as Daisy Miller (1879), The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians (1886), and the Ambassadors (1903).

The Future of the Novel was written by Henry James on April 11, 1900 in an essay in New York Times on the future of the novel.

His contemporary author David Lodge wrote a novel about James’s life titled as “Author, Author”. In that work, Lodge suggests that James’s prose is “Designed to defeat paraphrase”. In this essay, James classified the future of the novel into three categories. His essays are like a fine spun web, flexible and delicate. The novel’s future is designed to catch the meaning rather than to express it.

You have to negotiate the web, spread yourself over it, and experience it to get the meaning. To get the meaning, one should stand back from the web and can hardly trace its structure. It’s thread are so fine; try to condense it and risk destroying it.

STILL I’M TRYING TO GET THE EXTRACT OF THE ESSAY BECAUSE THE ESSAY’S PRINT IS SO SMALL. AND SMUDGED, NOT TO MENTION CONSIDERABLY CRAMPED IN ITS FINAL PARAGRAPHS, PERHAPS THE TURN OF THE CENTURY REMEDY FOR AN OVERLY LONG ARTICLE? BUT AS I READ ITS CONTENT, I COULD ABLE TO ASSUME THOSE THREE CATEGORIES AND HIS EXPLANATION UPON IT.

Comparing James to Kipling, James’s essays must be read slowly. Gallop at the peril of our own understanding and reading pleasure!

James classified the future of novel into three steps or elements present in novel. They are,

• v  On the rise of the Novel,
• v  On the important role to be played by unmarried women
• v  On the Seductive charms of fiction
• v  On sex in fiction.

i) ON THE RISE OF THE NOVEL                                                                                              The flood at present swells and swells, threatening the whole fields of letters, as it would often seem, with submersion. It plays, in what may be called as passive consciousness of many persons, a part that directly marches with the rapid increase of the multitude able to possess itself in one way and another of the best.

ii) ON THE IMPORTANT ROLE PLAYED BY UNMARRIED WOMEN

Nothing is so striking in a survey of this field, and nothing to be so much borne in mind, as that the larger part of the great multitude that sustains the teller and the publisher of tales is constituted by boys and girls: and girls in special, if we apply the term to the later stages of the life of the innumerable women, who under modern arrangements, increasingly fail to marry- fail, apparently, even largely to desire to. It is not too much to say many of these that they live in a great measure by the immediate aid of the novel- confining the question for the moment to the fact of consumption alone.

 

iii) ON THE SEDUCTIVE CHARMS OF FICTION

when we do respond to the appeal, when we are caught in the trap, we are held and played upon; so that how in the world can there not be a future, however late in the day, for a contrivance possessed of this previous secret? The more we think of it the more we feel that the prose picture can never be at the end of its tether until it looses its sense of what it can do.

      It can do simply everything and that is its strength and its life. Its plasticity, its elasticity, are infinite; there is no colour, no extension it may not take from the nature of its subject or the temper of its craftsman.

      It has the extraordinary advantage- a piece of luck scarcely credible- that, while capable of giving an impression of the highest perfection and rarest finish, it moves in a luxurious independence of rules and restrictions.

 

iv) ON SEX IN FICTION

James says that he cannot so much as imagine dickens and Scott without “lovemaking” left, as the phrase is, out. To his perception they were absolutely right from the moment, their attention to it could absolutely be perfunctory practically not to deal with it.

      The difficulty lies in the fact that two of the great conditions have changed. The novel is older and so are the young… it is certain that there is no real for any art. He adds, “I am not speaking, of course, of any mere industry- that does not move a step in advance of its furthest follower.”

 

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