HJ "The Art of Fiction"

[Mark Kohut]

Perhaps even more influential than HJ's "The Art of Fiction" were
the prefaces he wrote to The New York (definitive) edition of his 
works.....in those prefaces, he criticized and elaborated on all of 
his own fiction, rereading it all. Lots of the pov stuff is here.....
techniques analyzed and defined often for the first time for "the novel".

See the elided narrator, used by so many writers since, including Pynchon. D. Johnson's Vietnam novel was misread in a famous negative review of major forwarding (in The Atlantic) because this was not understood, imho..[name escapes me and I am not bothering to look up...too much to do]

And, definitely EVEN more influential in the intellectual discussion of the novel was James' critic/teacher friend, Percy Lubbock, who sorta codified James' NY edition analyses into his "The Craft of Fiction"....
that book went through edition after edition.....everyone important who wrote on fiction in English after it (for decades)E. M. Forster with Aspects of the Novel, others, wrote with it in mind----because they got James AND MORE......Lubbock came to be seen as narrowing the generous James of "the Art of Fiction essay by, contra James, inevitably prescribing...narrowly wanting James-like psychological density in fiction judged the best, and implicitly dissing counterworks, so to speak----the whole Fielding tradition, as James Wood, puts it, a leading Pynchon anti-fan (largely).....putting TRP in the Fielding tradition.

Lubbock's arguments helped keep Dickens out of the canon until, say, the 60s-70s.....(R. D. Leavis did not elevate him until his later rereading and 1970 book on Dickens...)

Carry on.







--- On Mon, 7/20/09, Campbel Morgan <campbelmorgan at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Campbel Morgan <campbelmorgan at gmail.com>
> Subject: HJ "The Art of Fiction"
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Monday, July 20, 2009, 7:18 AM
> On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 10:31 PM,
> Michael
> Bailey<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
> wrote:>
> 
> a) again, welcome to the list, good to see a fresh email
> header !
> > b) what is it with Henry James, anyway?  Philip Roth
> quotes him a lot too!
> > c) where is it written in stone that a novel shouldn't
> express political views?
> > d) where in Pynchon can we be sure that we do really
> see the author
> > expressing his own heartfelt beliefs, rather than
> putting views in the
> > mouths of characters for them to be refracted and
> often refuted by
> > other characters and plot developments?
> 
> a)HJ is hot right now. Why is that? Several reasons,
> including the
> movies that have been produced from his works. In the
> critical world,
> everyone quotes HJ because he is one of the most
> influential and
> important American/English critics/novelists of the last
> 100 years or
> so; the art of writing/reading fiction is the subject of so
> much of
> what is being written about fiction by the critical
> industry;  and  of
> course, this is owed, in part,  to the fact that this
> subject is an
> important one in  modern and postmodern fiction. I quoted
> James
> because I think an author must have the freedom to write as
> he or she
> pleases. We can expect and we should welcome
> experiementation. If
> Thomas Pynchon writes a parody of his own masterwork, Mason
> & Dixon,
> we can complain that it's not what we wanted, we can
> critique its
> prose style, its poor character development, its recycled
> and worn out
> tropes and the like, but we shouldn't ruch to judge a work
> on the form
> the author chooses. Let them choose; authors, like Angels
> and Adams
> must be free to Fall. Also, there are critical essays on
> James's
> influence in/on AGTD and the influence of American
> Pragmatism
> generally on Pynchon. Thought it might ring a bell. Also,
> it seems
> there is a debate about the irony and humor and satire of
> the works
> and how the anarchists and the capitalists are treated in
> AGTD. It
> seems rather obvious that the novel alludes to HJ, Conrad,
> Upton
> Sinclair ...others on this subject and reading these others
> augments,
> even if it doesn't end, the debate.
> 
> c) I thought it was "written in/on whatever it is that they
> write it
> on/in up there" (Zappa). In other words, it's just yellow
> snow. Of
> course novelists write about politics and express their
> political
> views in their works. There is a fairly good argument that
> if one
> doesn't write about politics/history, the Nobel is out of
> reach (see
> Thomas Foster's How to Read Novels Like a Professor).
> 
> d) not easy to pin things down in modern and postmodern
> fiction, but
> surely any sensitive reader can not fail to understand the
> heartfelt
> beliefs of this author; progressive modernist pragmatist;
> not too
> difficult to discover in his essays and so on. What readers
> feel in
> their hearts as they read is another matter; a more
> important one by
> far. That is, if they can explain what they feel/think.
> 
> Have a nice day,
> 
> Campbel
> 
>