Time Plus Change
What started out irony-free in a literary work can become heavily invested with irony later on. Enough time plus societal change of equals the birth of irony. Such is the case here which illuminates the degree to which the status of the novel as a literary form has evolved:
“During the period I have alluded to there was a comfortable, good-humoured 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.”
What James Knew
In one of the many critical analyses of his works, James gives an overview of the origin, conception, and evolution of the narrative trek and thematic pursuit of his novel What Maisie Knew. Although it can be difficult to parse it out of James’ typically dense and florid prose, the entire essay is an explanation of irony was utilized to transform an admittedly sad but essentially uninteresting anecdote of an actual case divorce involving parents exploiting a child for their own petty gain. The story James tells is that what lifted his transformation of this anecdote into something meaningful based on the ironic element of the exploitation of the child of divorce actually serving to make her a better person than she would likely have been had her parents stayed married.
Ghost Story
Go to any search and type in something about the ten best ghost stories ever written and one of the surest bets you can make is that James’ The Turn of the Screw will be somewhere on that list. It is one of the ghost stories that defines the entire genre itself. And so it with no small amount of irony when James himself writes of his ghostly stars of his creation:
“I recognize again, that Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are not ‘ghosts’ at all, as we now know the ghost, but goblins, elves, imps, demons as loosely constructed as those of the old trials for witchcraft.”
Content without Content
In an essay title simply “Criticism” James puts his sharp pen to paper to explore specifically the nature of literary criticism. But his title is entirely accurate because the satirical irony is directed toward criticism of writing that is not actually literary criticism. More precisely, he is going after periodicals which, in order to fulfill expectations of length of content, often do so as the expense of content of content:
“Periodical literature…is like a regular train which starts at an advertised hour, but which is free to start only if every seat be occupied. The seats are many, the train is ponderously long, and hence the manufacture of dummies for the seasons when there are not passengers enough. A stuffed manikin is thrust into the empty seat, where it makes a creditable figure till the end of the journey. It looks sufficiently like a passenger, and you know it is not one only when you perceive that it neither says anything nor gets out.”
Hawthorne
The ironic thrust of the biographical overview of the life and writings of Hawthorne runs counter to almost every conception of what is required to become a literary legend. Writing is, after all, storytelling and the basis of storytelling is imagination and exploration. James argues that it was precisely the fact that Hawthorne’s imagination was not stimulated by external exploration that allowed him to become the first American writer to actually live the dream of making a living as a writer:
“It seems to me then that it was possibly a blessing for Hawthorne that he was not expansive and inquisitive, that he lived much to himself and asked but little of his milieu. If he had been exacting and ambitious, if his appetite had been large and his knowledge various, he would probably have found the bounds of Salem intolerably narrow.”
