Inceptions

The beginning is both internal and external to the text it initiates, and that non-coincidence points to the text’s vexed relation with its outside. Hence the non-trivial self-reflexivity of any textual beginning, which must bear witness to the self-grounding quality of the literary work—its inability either to comprise its inception or to externalize it in an authorizing exteriority. In a different but related way does the fact that they must render our lives and our desires opaque to us; what Freud called “latency” marks not only sexuality but human thought with a self-division shaped by asynchronicity. From Henry James’s New York Edition prefaces to George Eliot’s epigraphs, from Ovid’s play with meter to Charles Dickens’s thematizing of the ex nihilo emergence of character, from Wallace Stevens’s abstract consideration of poetic origins to James Baldwin, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty’s descriptions of queer childhood, writers repeatedly confront the problem of inception. Most explicitly for James, for whom revision, a striving to keep the work perpetually at the border of its emergence, was a fundamentally ethical practice, attention to inception is a commitment to human freedom; a similar commitment is legible in all the writers examined here. To experience this vibrancy, the sense that the work might have been, might still yet be, otherwise, it suffices, James reminds us, to reread it. Inceptions traces an ethics of reading, that follows from perceiving, in the ostensibly finished forms of lives and texts, the potentiality inherent in their having started forth.

Revision, Origin, and the Courage of Truth

Henry James’s New York Edition prefaces contain multiple accounts of the genesis of the novels and tales that the edition collected: Some anecdotes tell of how the idea for the novel came to him, while others tell of the material circumstances of the text’s composition (where he was, for example, as he wrote). More often, the prefaces tell of the disappearance of the moment of genesis: of its having been forgotten, or there being no moment when the idea wasn’t somehow present in his mind. In the unrationalized relation among these different accounts, James implicitly theorizes the relation between art and life. Linking the prefaces to the autobiography, therefore, the chapter thus considers “revision” as a practice that maintains the potentiality of inception, seeking, in rereading, to return each text to incipience. Comparing James’s account of revision to Michel Foucault’s late turn to parrhēsia (as a mode of truth-telling) and to Gilles Deleuze’s account of the “act of creation,” the chapter links this potentiality to terms of ethical exhortation with which James ends the prefaces. Turning, finally, to James’s “The Middle Years,” the chapter ends with that story’s imagining of a life lived in the potentiality of revision.

Henry James Reads Walter Scott Again

This article reassesses Henry James’s attitude to the historical novels of Walter Scott in light of James’s observation, made early on in the First World War, that the current global situation “makes Walter Scott, him only, readable again”. Scott’s novels were strongly associated for James with young readers and a juvenile, escapist mode of reading; and yet close attention to James’s comments on Scott in his criticism, notebooks and correspondence, and examination of a recurring image of children as readers and listeners to oral stories in the work of both authors, indicate that James engaged with Scott’s presentation of the historical and personal past more extensively and in more complex ways than have hitherto been suspected. Scott’s example as a novelist and editor notably informs James’s practice in several late works: the family memoir Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), the New York Edition of his novels and tales (1907–1909), and the unfinished, posthumously published novel The Sense of the Past (1917).

“You Will Be Surprised that Fiction Has Become an Art”: The Language of Craft and the Legacy of Henry James

As some scholars have noted, the technical principles that modern creative writing workshops identify as “the craft of fiction” owe a great deal to Henry James and the prefaces to the New York edition of his novels, later published in a single volume as The Art of the Novel. However, James, far from setting out to help aspiring writers to develop their technical knowledge, was in fact fairly hostile to the very idea of craft, famously declaring that he “cannot imagine composition existing in a series of blocks.” The prefaces were instead intended to provide a sort of Cliff’s Notes to his own work, naming the tricks of his trade for the edification of his most dedicated readers, and it was these readers, most notably including Percy Lubbock, Joseph Warren Beach, and Caroline Gordon, who adapted James’s principles in some of the first literary handbooks used in the creative writing classroom. Though Lubbock, Beach, and Gordon borrowed significantly from James, they balanced his emphasis on aesthetics with the more accessible and egalitarian approach of earlier authors of fiction-writing handbooks, including the work of Walter Besant. This essay argues that a scholarly examination of the historical development of the discourse of the craft of writing serves not only to correct an over-emphasis on James’s influence, but also to address the equally erroneous assumption that principles of technique are eternal and universal, and thus exist apart from subject position and historical contingency.

James’s Late Theory of the Impression

Chapter 4 explores the theoretical uses to which James puts the impression in the prefaces to the collected New York Edition of his work (1907–9). It serves as a preface in its own right to the final three chapters of the book, in which James’s fictional treatment of the impression in the three celebrated novels of the major phase is examined. James’s impression uneasily accommodates both empiricism and aestheticism. What James does with these uneasy accommodations is to make them the narrative focus of his late novels and, in the prefaces, to theorize the novels’ interest in these terms. The novel is still an impression, then, but of a different kind: thanks to James’s increasing use of restricted point of view, it is now, first and foremost, the impression of an individual character which lies at the heart of the novelist’s drama of consciousness.