"The Art of Fiction" and Other Critical Writings Literary Elements

Literary Criticism

The setting of these literary works of criticism exists primarily as a place in time in which the judgment of literature was undergoing a major revision as the novel was just beginning to be taken seriously and sentimental romance was rapidly losing ground to realism.

First-person narrator indisputably recognized as the author himself. The point-of-view that James tries to maintain throughout is that of objective detachment. At many points throughout, however, subjectively manage to overcome this intent.

The tone of James’ writing is always formal and sophisticated, but the mood is often surprisingly lighthearted.

Specifically in “The Art of Fiction” the antagonist is critic Walter Besant and his theories on fiction while the protagonist is James and his oppositional views.

The major conflict between Besant and James in “The Art of Fiction” is a divide of opinion between the two over the elements of writing fiction which should be considered of the highest value: plot versus characterization, experience versus imagination, moral instruction versus unrestricted subject matter.

James admits that he quite consciously left the last topic mentioned above to be the final subject for debate addressed in “The Art of Fiction.” The climax of this particular essay is explicit: “No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.”

James was writing his literary criticism at a time when the novel as a respectable literary form was once again under attack as inferior to poetry and drama after having risen from its original outside punk status. Throughout his critical writings, James writes of the novel as literary form which foreshadows its toppling of poetry and drama as the signature form of expression for the last century.

The state of the novel is formulated with understated humor: “there was a comfortable, good-humored feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that our only business with it could be to swallow it.”

James is a writer of such density and attention to detail that is far more likely to reference something directly by name than hint at it through allusion. Thus, the allusions which actually are made in his critical writings tend to be within the subject matter itself as examples of his highly developed intellect and appear in the form of pointing out allusions made by other authors: “But I remember well the little flush of conviction, the seriousness, with which he once said, in allusion to a novel which had just been running through the Revue des Deux Mondes, `If I had written anything so bad as that, I should blush for it all my life’."

The unvarnished truth about the writing style of James is that one could almost literally randomly open to any page and point to any paragraph and therein find densely constructed imagery. He even uses imagery to a massive degree when it is not necessary at all: “While society was frank, was free about the incidents and accidents of the human constitution, the novel took the same robust ease as society. The young then were so very young that they were not table-high. But they began to grow, and from the moment their little chins rested on the mahogany, Richardson and Fielding began to go under it.”

The entire essay on the success of Nathanael Hawthorne as the first eminent American men of letters is fraught with paradox which begins with this observation of his unlikely success: “Hawthorne’s history is a proof that that it was possible, fifty years ago, to write a great many little masterpieces without becoming known.”

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Throughout his critical writing, James shows a propensity to use the very common metonym of “pen.” One notable example among many: “It is true that shortly before his death he had encountered a change of fortune; he had married a rich woman and he was in a position to drive his pen no faster than his fancy prompted.”

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