In Defense of the Novel
Henry James stepped to the plate to swing a big bat for Team Novel at a time when it still widely viewed as a literary form with disdain. The time spent and mental faculties required to make one’s way through a novel could, it was widely viewed by critics, be much better spent on other pursuits. And those critics did have a point: a great deal of 19th century novels were absolutely disposable entities which left the reader with barely a memory after completion. James calls for the full potential of the novel to be unleashed by freeing it from conventions and expectations and allowed it to evolve as writers approaching it saw fit. Much of what James calls for regarding the evolution and potential of the novel marked the move away from sentimentalism and toward realism and modernism which followed in the wake of his criticism.
Promoting Realism
James wrote many critical reviews on his way to becoming one of the foremost literary critics as well as a writer of fiction himself. Along the way he, he continued pushing an agenda which rejected sentimentalism in favor of realism. A fervent supporter of those who indulged in the realistic depictions of the seamier side of life often deemed obscene or unworthy of publication—writers from Balzac to Zola—James views the novel as the ideal form by which literature can recreate reality and it is buy recreating reality that it can illustrate and speak to certain truths about society which society may not necessarily really want to hear.
Defining the Role of the Critic
The history of James as a writer of criticism is long and expansive and reveals within his review of the works of other writers, especially, an evolution in his view of the role that a critic should play. Initially, his criticism attempts to be purely objective in its role as what one might term a typical reader who coming to a book looking for guidance on the worthiness of expenditure of time. Over the years, however, this objectivity becomes muddled until the idea of a critic has transformed into one of almost co-equal status with the creative writer; or, at the very least, that the relationship is symbiotic.
His conception of the critic begins from the perspective that the creator is a figure positioned in dominance to the critic, but he winds up arguing that part of the critic’s job—all too often one that is failed to live up to—involves inspiring the creative act through interpretation that finds the subconscious directives which the author’s conscious mind failed to detect. The later criticism of James unleashed ability the possibility of interpreting that which is organic to the literary work itself but not planned or intended by the writer. This view of the role of the literary critic within the whole of the creative process paved the way for much of the revolutionary schools of 20th century critical theory.
