ANTONIO
AMOROS
ALVAREZ
JOSE
HenryJames's
"Organic Form"
Classical
and
Rhetoric
M
ANY INTERPRETATIONS and reconstructions, mostly contradictory, of Henry James's narrative ideas have been attempted since they became a critical and theoretical canon through
the influence of Joseph Warren Beach and Percy Lubbock. Critics
approaching this subject have usually found themselves staring
blankly at the ambiguous richness ofJames's critical writings, particularly the Prefaces, with only a tenuous notion of what they were facing. In these circumstances, they could either extol James's capacity
as a superb critic and theorist of the novel or disparage his contribution almost derisively. Thus, Richard P. Blackmur's extravagant claim
that the Prefaces were "the most sustained and I think the most eloquent piece of literary criticism in existence"' contrasts sharply with
D. D. Todd's emphatic conclusion that "in any respectable sense,
there is no Jamesian theory of fiction" (87), though Todd himself
grudgingly admits James's stature as a sui generiscritic. Because it is at
least problematical to extract from James's works something that
could pass for a cohesive and global theory of the narrative genre, as
that ingenuously proposed, for instance, by James E. Miller, Jr., we
must focus instead on specific aspects of James's critical reflections
rather than impose a sense of coherence and totality alien to them.
One of these aspects, to which few discussions ofJames's aesthetics
fail to allude in one way or another, is his organic idea of the creative
process. From Beach (11-23) to mid-century (Harold T. MacCarthy)
and present-day criticism (Wendell P. Jackson), there seems to be a
broad consensus on howJames conceived of the composition of artistic discourse. In this essay, I argue for the existence of a curious anal-
1Introduction to TheArt of theNovel xvi. I shall refer to this work as ANin the text.
For similar comments by lesser critics see Maini 194.
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JAMES'S"ORGANICFORM"
ogy between James's conception of his own creative practice and the
process of composition of discourse par excellencethat has been described by classical rhetoric over a span of two thousand years (and is
subject nowadays to revision and reactivation as the basis of a theory
of the literary text within a general science of discourse; see Garcia
Berrio and Albaladejo Mayordomo's "Compositional Structures," as
well as Garcia Berrio's "Retorica"). My approach clarifies the role of
organicism as invoked by James in several passages of his Prefaces
and in earlier works. It also contributes to a demarcation of his creative stages by juxtaposing them to the categories and operations of
classical rhetoric, particularly inventio,dispositio,and elocutio.
James's creative process is best accounted for by the term "development." This process is obviously not the sudden growth and even less
the writing "from immediate Dictation" of which Blake (823) and
other romantic authors speak with differing degrees of commitment.2 It is rather the rational elaboration of an initial germ or
donnee, derived from external sources and dependent on a skilled
process of expansion in order to attain its appropriate expression.
Naturally, this process is likely to be viewed as a progressive imposition of form on content, an assumption firmly held byJames himself
and by subsequent commentators. It implies that literary content is a
formless entity and that form can only be found in the expression of
such content, thus equating expression to form and content to formlessness. This assumption will be qualified later, since it makes little
sense after the considerable theoretical advance of formalist criticism
in our century.
For James the amplification of the initial idea seems to be governed by the traditional principles of organicism. In the Prefaces he
typically resorts to organic metaphors to emphasize the fact that the
result of the creative effort is an indivisible whole endowed with a
number of qualities that do not coincide with the mere aggregation
of the qualities of the parts (Phillips 417-18). Following the same line
of argument, he presents us with several culinary and vegetable images of the creative process, as when he expounds his compositional
method in "The Middle Years"in terms of "boilings and reboilings of
the contents of my small cauldron" (AN233) or displays his determination in '"JuliaBride" to "season and stir according to judgement
and then set the whole to simmer, to stew, or whatever, serving hot
and with extreme neatness" (AN265). In these two passages we have,
in a more prosaic style, whatJames elsewhere calls the "mysticprocess
2See Abrams 213-17 on unconscious invention.
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
of the crucible, the transformation of material under aesthetic heat"
("The Lesson of Balzac" 75). His most celebrated statement on this
subject occurs in the Preface to "The Lesson of the Master," where
one can find almost all standard elements of organicism in a nutshell:
No such processis effectively
possible,we must hold, as the imputed act of transplanting; an act essentiallynot mechanical, but thinkablerather-so far as thinkable at
all-in chemical, almost in mysticalterms. We can surely account for nothing in a
novelist's work that hasn't passed through the crucible of his imagination, hasn't, in
that perpetually simmering cauldron his intellectual pot-au-feu, been reduced to
savouryfusion. We here figure the morsel, of course, not as boiled to nothing, but as
exposed, in returnfor the taste that it gives out, to a new and richer saturation... It
has entered, in fine, into new relations,it emerges for new ones. Its final savourhas
been constituted, but its prime identity destroyed ... Thus it has become a different
and, thanksto a rarealchemy,a better thing. (AN 230)
In this fragment we come across a plain rejection of mechanism in
the "imputed act of transplanting" the actual hint for a fictional figure in the writer's creative imagination, so as to construct the adequate personality in accordance with the compositional needs of
the story. We can also note characteristic instances of transcendental
vocabulary ("mystical"), a number of words connected with cooking
("simmering," "cauldron," "pot-au-feu," "savoury") and, above all, the
notion that the "morsel" or initial germ is subject to a process
whereby it loses its original nature and becomes a new entity, in
which the germ is dissolved and cannot be discerned as a part of the
resulting whole. The same principles are called upon when, by means
of a traditional metaphor, James identifies the starting point of composition with "a single small seed" (AN 119) appropriately developed
only if "transferred to the sunny south window-sill of one's fonder
attention" (AN 127). Furthermore, there are in the Prefaces a few
hints at literary self-generation that, as we will show later, appear to
be somewhat inconsistent with the rational conscientious image usually projected byJames. In dealing with "The Beast in the Jungle" he
comments on "the clearness and charm with which the subject just
noted expresses itself" (AN 248), as if the imposition of form were a
natural operation that takes place "out there" independently of the
artistic will of the author. A similar picture emerges in the Preface to
The Ambassadors when he explains "that the steps, for my fable, placed
themselves with a prompt and, as it were, functional assurance. ..
These things continued to fall together, as by the neat action of their
own weight and form, even while their commentator scratched his
head about them" (AN315).
James's penchant for organicism is not, however, confined to the
use of more or less transparent images in the description of his own
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JAMES'S"ORGANICFORM"
creative practice. He expressly voices his delight "in a deep-breathing
economy and an organic form" (AN 84) and, eschewing metaphors
altogether, offers a straight definition of the novel as "a living thing,
all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion
as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is
something of each of the other parts" ("The Art of Fiction" 392).
Other less memorable, though still explicit, references to organicism
abound in James's writings (AN 219, 305), frequently intermingled
with definite theoretical statements on the inseparability of form and
content in the narrative work (AN 115-16, "The Art of Fiction" 399400). All this evidence tends to justify Ren6 Wellek's claim that
'James has an excellent hold on the concept of organic form"
('"James'sLiterary Theory and Criticism" 317), a claim that simply
echoes the received critical classification of James as a notable
organicist.
However, side by side with this proclamation that the content or
initial subject necessarily determines the process of artistic expansion
and, eventually, the expressive form of a novel in such a way as to
make the shaping role of the author almost negligible, we encounter
numerous assertions that surprisingly challenge the organic dogma.
This fact gives rise to a latent contradiction that surfaces from time to
time as a debate between the advocates of a formalistic James and
those who, in agreement with his famous dictum that the "only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent
life" ("The Art of Fiction" 378), think that his fundamental goal is
merely representational." These two attitudes can be considered another manifestation of the duality between a mechanistic conception
of the creative process and its organic counterpart. Within the organic framework of literary production, the form of a novel is a function of its content, for a novel acquires artistic excellence only if it
naturally evolves from a meaningful core that, in the case ofJames, is
of a representational nature. In this way, the expressive form is subject to the expressible content, and its sole value derives from the fact
that it represents life, and not from intrinsic or "formalistic"reasons.
On the contrary, when James is in a formalistic mood, form and content do not become fused in order to reach the most adequate and
faithful expression, but the former is imparted from without and deI
As a mere instance of this debate, we can mention the opposing views held by
Vivien Jones and Timothy P. Martin. According to the former, James's position is
markedly formalistic since the representation of reality gives way to technique and
method. Conversely, the latter argues thatJames puts his mimetic ideals above everything else, and ascribes all elements of formalism to his interpreter Percy Lubbock.
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
velops independently of the latter, thus obliterating the representational goal and supporting Vivien Jones's opinion that in "the Prefaces no less than in the novels method is matter" (173). Passages emphasizing this formal autonomy are not rare with James. There is, for
example, his retort to a friend who had asked "where on earth" he
had found his "supersubtle" characters: "'If the life about us for the
last thirty years refuses warrant for these examples, then so much the
worse for that life"' (AN 221-22), as well as his refusal to attune the
apparitions in "The Turn of the Screw" to a conventional pattern, lest
it should spoil the compositional effect he was seeking (AN 174-75).
In both cases, the process of artistic expansion of a representational
germ is not guided by the internal necessity of "making the most" of
such a germ, but by the imposition of external criteria of literary
taste, narrative impact, and so forth.
This contradiction is sustained not only by the existence in the
Prefaces of countless allusions to the rational and conscious nature of
the creative process that conform to the Jamesian stereotype, but also
by his unequivocal propensity for all kinds of technical difficulties
and problems. Even in the fragments quoted above to illustrate his
organic bias, one can find broad hints at the crucial role played by
his occasional
"the projector's mind" (AN 128), notwithstanding
There are continuous references to a
lapses into self-generation.
"process" by which either "the small cluster of actualities" (AN 249)
or the "material" (AN312) comes to be expressed, and the author is
consistently held responsible for such a process, since the "execution
belongs to the author alone; it is what is most personal to him, and we
measure him by that" ("The Art of Fiction" 385). Similarly, James's
predilection for solving technical dilemmas takes him right into the
domain of mechanical form. For him, any "craftsman... to be worth
his salt... must take no tough technical problem for insoluble" (AN
137) and, therefore, his "main merit and sign is the effort to do the
arrive. .. at a
complicated thing with a strong brevity and lucidity-to
certain science of control... the question of how to exert this control
in accepted conditions and how yet to sacrifice no real value" (AN
231). It seems obvious that, in speaking of "accepted conditions,"
James views the creative practice as a kind of challenge. Thus, although he dislikes being given a word limit in the composition of a
commissioned story, as with "The Middle Years," he also relishes the
technical difficulties that arise from this fact. He feels that a certain
subject calls for a particular treatment and an appropriate textual
length, but he enjoys denying that subject its organic development.
His design is to obtain, through the external imposition of form, a
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literary product whose perfect finish and harmonious arrangement
do not betray its true mechanistic origin. This attitude, described by
Miriam Allott as the "indulgence of technical virtuosity to the point
where it distorts the valuable material which it pretends to serve"
(66), and the unexpected pseudo-organic attributes of the resulting
product constitute the key to the contradiction noted above.
The inseparability of form and content is another important point
at issue. Although James frequently asserts that in a well-executed
novel there is an intimate union of form and content, his recurrent
theoretical allusions to this subject (together with his ignorance of it
when it comes to critical appreciation) lead us to suspect the solidity
of his conception. He usually resorts to an excessive and naive dichotomy of form and content (AN 233, 234, 324), and even considers, in the best tradition of mechanism, the independent pre-existence of these two notions-"They
are separate before the fact," he
states (AN 115)-and
the idea of form as a mere receptacle where
content is poured-"the
receptacle (of form) being so exiguous, the
so
great" (AN 240). None of these notions contribbrevity imposed
utes to promotingJames's image as an authentic organicist.
One may certainly wonder what the sources of this contradiction
are. On the one hand, critics have found sufficient grounds in
James's writings to proclaim him an organicist; on the other, he
seems to disown such a conclusion by continually affecting a formalistic or mechanistic leaning in his compositional method. I would argue that the origin of this apparent contradiction lies in the coexistence of two different ideas within the organic doctrine from its earliest formulations, an essential distinction that has gone unnoticed in
the case ofJames. One of the first positive references to a linguistic
construction in organic terms is Plato's: Socrates tells Phaedrus "that
any discourse ought to be constructed like a living creature, with its
own body, as it were; it must not lack either head or feet; it must have
a middle and extremities so composed as to suit each other and the
whole work" (128).4 Aristotle also contributed in the Poetics to the
development of this conception by asserting that the plot of a tragedy, i.e. "the structuring of events" (1450a, 5), should be arranged in
such a way that the removal of one or more of its parts would neces4 Orsini considers this passage by Plato a milestone in the evolution of literary
criticism: "Plato made an important contribution to aesthetics in the Phaedrus when
he enunciated the principle of the organic unity of composition, which was to become the keystone of later systems of criticism. Plato definitively affirmed its value
for the judgement of poetry, and not only for oratory, as has been thought" ("Ancient Roots" 20).
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
sarily imply the destruction of the whole and, contrarily, that if any
part could be eliminated without detriment to' the whole, that part
should be considered
(1451a, 30-36). However,
superfluous
Aristotle, unlike Plato, does not use a simile to describe what he considers an appropriate arrangement of the actions in a tragedy and
accordingly keeps his discussion at an abstract level.
If we return to Plato's statement, bearing this difference in mind,
we will realize that he is simply making a comparison between a "discourse" and "a living creature." The real problem is that, over a considerable period culminating in the romantic age, organic critics and
theorists have adopted this comparison and similar ones with insufficient awareness of the ontological discontinuity between the referent
and its figuration, and, as a consequence, have applied such comparisons in a literal way. Instead of saying with Plato that a poem is like
(a7crep) a living organism, it is plainly stated that a poem is a living
organism. Even when critics fall prey to this practice, however, they
are still vaguely conscious that something is wrong with it. Then they
resort to quotation marks or collateral explanations that allow them
to avert direct strictures without giving up their main point or getting
to the root of the problem.5
The doctrine of organicism flowered in England during the romantic period, thanks to the links Coleridge established between the
German and the English cultural worlds of the day, though it has
been convincingly argued that "the problematic history of organic
form can be traced back beyond Kant to English sources, among others" (Stempel 94). Before Coleridge transplanted German ideas into
England, mechanistic critics were engaged in examining the role of
the poet's mind in the process of literary creation under the powerful
influence of Newton's advances in the field of physics. Only with the
advent of Coleridge was the mechanistic theory of literary creation
replaced by its vegetable counterpart (Abrams 156-77). The vegetable theory reigned supreme for some time, but progressively lost
its original vigor and became a series of grand formulas, devoid of
any meaning, that were applied automatically to the various circumstances of literary creation in such a way that one can speak of an
"inorganic organicism." This is obviously the case in James's critical
5 See for instance Orsini: "the 'growth' of a poem from its beginning as a mere
flash of inspiration" ("Organic Concepts" 5); Beach: "He [James] describes the process indeed as if he had little to do with it other than to record it: 'The steps for my
fable placed themselves . . ."' (23, emphasis added). James himself declares that a
"novel is a living thing," though he immediately adds "likeany other organism" ("The
Art of Fiction" 392, emphasis added).
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reflections.
Returning to the theoretical framework established by Plato's comparison, it is worth noting that Lord Kames categorically refused "to
accept the analogy of art and nature" on grounds of "the distinction
between form imposed from the outside and inner organic form"
(Stempel 90). It seems clear that, literally speaking, it makes no sense
to equate the development of a cell or a seed with that of a novel or a
poem. In his Critique ofJudgement Kant draws the same conclusion in
referring to the requisites of a product of nature and presents us with
a duality whose importance has not been sufficiently emphasized. He
holds that a natural entity, like a work of art, has parts which "(as
regards their presence and their form) are only possible through
their reference to the whole," but, in contrast to any man-made product, these parts "should so combine in the unity of a whole that they
are reciprocally cause and effect of each other's form" (? 65; see also
Stempel 93). This duality points to the existence of two disparate notions coexisting within the received organic doctrine: congruous arrangement of the parts that make up the whole, and self-generation
of that whole prior to the occurrence of the parts. The former is
clearly an attribute of the final product, whereas the latter is an attribute of the process that leads to it. I maintain that only one aspect
of the organic theory, i.e. the congruous arrangement of parts, can
be applied with any degree of accuracy to the verbal work of art. The
question of self-generation does not seem pertinent, since all artistic
constructions are the result of a mechanistic process of selection, expansion, and combination. All attempts at effacing the author from
this process are doomed to failure, for the development of the initial
intuition of a work of art inevitably depends upon an external impulse governed either by compositional conventions or by the will to
evade them. Thus Plato's simile between a discourse and a living creature only holds with reference to the product and not to the process,
and this confines all remarks on artistic self-generation to the more
or less dignified realm of metaphoric criticism.
According to these considerations, the subject or initial germ of a
novel could only express itself if it were a seed instead of being like a
seed. Yet if the mechanistic process of artistic expansion is carried
out in a careful, studious manner by a gifted individual, it will give
rise to a well-constructed work with links so deep and undeniable between form and content that the illusion of self-generation will be
immediately invoked under the spell of tradition. All subjects are
thus expressed by an author, organicism lying exclusively in the naturalness, flexibility, and coherence with which that author attains his
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
own expression. James naturally belongs to this category of writers.
His works display a perfect organicdesign obtained through a highly
mechanistic process which he proudly exhibits in his Prefaces. It is pre-
cisely in the light of these explanations that we can interpret his sporadic departures from that norm as mere lapses into figurative description and not as a consistent practice.
.Rhetoric and organicism are frequently held to be incompatible.
This view arises from the fact that rhetoric, as well as other prescriptive techniques of discourse, is regarded with suspicion by organicists
for its allegedly mechanistic nature (see, for instance, Orsini, "Organic Concepts" 11, 16, 17, 26). They argue that the expressive form
eventually adopted by a rhetorical discourse is determined not by the
spontaneous and unrestrained development of its subject, but rather
by a set of a priori rules carefully assembled over a very long period of
time. This kind of artificial arrangement according to "pre-established formulas and prescriptions for composition" was already condemned by Socrates in the Phaedrus (Orsini, "Ancient Roots" 17)
and still attracts criticism in our century. Other shortcomings of
rhetoric, if judged from an organic point of view, are "the belief that
the parts pre-exist to the whole" and, consequently, "that there are
certain kinds of parts that are better than others, and have a special
efficacy on the whole," as well as the idea that form and content are
separable (Orsini, "Organic Concepts" 11, 17, 26). Nevertheless, if we
apply the above conclusions to the relation between rhetoric and
organicism, we realize that any criticism against rhetoric is once
again founded on a failure to discriminate between the attributes of
the result and those of the process. A rhetorical discourse can be organic inasmuch as its parts are harmoniously interrelated, and, both
separately and together, gravitate towards the global notion of aptum
(Albaladejo Mayordomo, Retdrica52-53). This notion presides over
the whole process of rhetorical construction, since pragmatically the
value of a discourse can only be measured with reference to its favorable or unfavorable effect on the hearer, irrespective of the
procedure followed in its composition. However, no rhetorical discourse can be literally organic-in fact no verbal work can be-in the
sense that its expression emerges from its content naturally and independently of the rhetor's will and of the body of knowledge and
tradition within which he or she works. The appearance of harmony
and naturalness displayed by a well-constructed work, whether rhetorical or poetical, depends entirely on the artistic skill of its author,
though it can be interpreted, if one wishes, as the outcome of an organic process of self-generation.
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A typically Western phenomenon,
the science of rhetoric deals
with the making of both persuasive and artistic discourse, and its
many links with poetics are explicitly acknowledged by Aristotle. He
not only recommends that the orator find in the Poetics additional
stylistic hints, but also argues that the arrangement of a play and that
of a speech are founded on the same overall principles (Murphy 28).
In a more general way, the idea of ornatus, or verbal embellishment,
has always contributed to setting up a connection between rhetoric
and poetics since it is shared by both. This connection is further
strengthened by other common factors, such as the third type of rhetorical narratio, which is entirely devoted to the training of orators in
the exposition before the court of the facts and circumstances of a
case and, therefore, endowed with fictional and literary attributes
(Albaladejo Mayordomo, Ret6rica 128, 90). In recent decades, rhetoric has become the matrix discipline of a general science of discourse, in collaboration with classical poetics and other twentiethcentury trends in linguistic and literary thought such as Russian formalism, New Criticism, stylistics, European structuralism, and text
linguistics, whose object is the intrinsic study of the text, whether literary or not (Garcia Berrio). This reactivation has deprived rhetoric
of the traditional prescriptive thrust that in the past earned it unrelenting censure from organicists, and thus has enhanced its descriptive efficacy in accordance with the new function it is now expected to
fulfill.
I am particularly concerned with the rhetorical process of constructing a speech, since my purpose is to draw a parallel between
that process and James's idea of his own creative practice. As is well
known, rhetoric accounts for the global composition and delivery of
discourse by means of five operations-inventio,
dispositio, elocutio,
in the great corpus of
memoria, and actio or pronuntiatio-established
the Rhetorica recepta and handed down to us over time.6 Inventio discovers the appropriate material to argue for a case; dispositio arranges
and distributes this material into a solid structural pattern; elocutio
furnishes the invented and arranged material with a suitable verbal
style; memoria facilitates the memorization of the speech, and actio or
pronuntiatio provides for the skillful delivery of this speech in front of
an audience. A sixth operation, called intellectio and preceding the
other five, enables the rhetor to become familiar with the facts and
6
Covering a period of some two hundred years, from 90 B.C. to 95 A.D., this corpus
comprises the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, the rhetorical treatises by
Cicero, and the Institutio Oratoriaby Quintilian (Albaladejo Mayordomo 29).
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
circumstances of a case before embarking on the specific discovery of
material for the composition of his speech (Chico Rico 50). Needless
to say, these six operations have been enumerated in their logical
order and from a theoretical perspective, but they frequently overlap
in the practice of composition or the analysis of a particular discourse.
However, not all of these operations have acquired and maintained the same status within the rhetorical system. Whereas inventio,
dispositio and elocutio are the focal points of most treatises, intellectio,
memoria and actio or pronuntiatio have sunk into oblivion, although
they all form part of the rhetorical process and equally contribute
towards the pragmatic goal of aptum. The explanation of this partial
neglect lies in the fact that only inventio, dispositio and elocutio lead to
the constitution of a textual entity; the other three account for the
preparatory task or the final delivery of the speech before the court
(Albaladejo Mayordomo, Retorica 43, 58). When, with the lapse of
centuries, rhetoric lost its immediate pragmatic utility, i.e. forensic
persuasion, and became a fossilized discipline buried in written texts,
the categories most akin to pragmatics melted into the background.
A similar process affects both inventio and dispositio, which progressively lost ground to elocutio to such an extent that this sole operation
was eventually identified with rhetoric as a whole. One can offer two
reasons for this drastic reduction. On the one hand, the appropriation of the rhetorical elocutio by poetics via the common idea of
ornatus can explain why this operation did not share the decay of
decline of inventio and dispositio
rhetoric and the consequent
Retorica
123-24). On the other, elocutio gen(Albaladejo Mayordomo,
erates the only concrete, perceptible level of the rhetorical text, in
other words, its sentential manifestation as the locus of figurative language, whereas inventio and dispositio give rise to mental constructs
whose theoretical and analytical treatment calls for a higher degree
of intellectual abstraction and insight. The recovery of rhetoric as the
matrix discipline of a general science of discourse makes a point both
of redressing the original balance among these three operations and
of interpreting them in terms of Morrisian semiotics and modern
text linguistics.
In his Ars poetica (23-13 B. c.), Horace formulated a duality between
the concepts of res and verba that does not appear to tally with the
main rhetorical operations just alluded to. If the notion of res, or referent, is generated by inventio, and the notion of verba, or linguistic
arrangement, by elocutio, a third operation remains unaccounted for
in the Horatian system. The only solution to this problem is to posit
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the existence of two kinds of res, extensional and intensional, generated by inventio and dispositio respectively (Albaladejo Mayordomo,
Retorica 45-47, Garcia Berrio and Albaladejo Mayordomo 175-76). According to this interpretation, inventio provides the rhetorical referent, which is reproduced within the text, or more precisely, within its
deep structure or macrostructure in a process that has been called
intensionalization
(Albaladejo Mayordomo, Teoria). This operation
thus has a dual nature: it is primarily semantic and extensional because it produces a referent, but, owing to the immediate textual
orientation of such a referent, it also has syntactic and intensional
features. As an accurate image of the rhetorical referent, the textual
macrostructure, or intensional res, is the result of the macrocompositional operations of dispositio, which work at two superimposed levels.
First, they develop and organize the initial topic of discourse to obtain an underlying syntactic-semantic level, equivalent to the Aristotelian plot or to the Russian formalists' fabula (Aristotle 1450a, 4-5;
Toma'sevskij 267-68) and variously known as text semantic representation (Pet6fi 223), sense structure, or base macrosyntactic structure
(Albaladejo Mayordomo, "Aspectos" 124, Teoria 137-39). Second,
dispositio is also instrumental in the artistic manipulation of the searticulated
at this level to achieve
the
mantic
elements
transformational
structure, another textual stage
macrosyntactic
comparable with the concept of sjulet proposed by the Russian formalists (Toma'evskij
267-68). Finally, the microcompositional
operations of elocutio supply the Horatian verba by endowing the
transformational macrosyntactic structure with the appropriate linguistic arrangement, usually called text-linear manifestation (Pet6fi
223) or microstructure (van Dijk 6, 17). The rest of this essay will be
between these comdevoted to demonstrating the correspondence
positional stages and the steps that characterize James's creative
method.
In this respect, I have already drawn an analogy between these two
processes that bears not only on their partial stages, operations, or
steps, but also, more decisively, on the general theoretical framework
within which they occur. Departing from polar positions such as
James's claims of organicism on the one hand and the alleged accusations of mechanism brought against rhetoric on the other, I have attempted to bridge the apparent gap between these compositional
methods. Both a novel by James and a rhetorical discourse enjoy organic attributes if viewed as carefully wrought verbal products-since
not if the inescapably
this is what "organic" means in James-but
mechanistic nature of their compositional
processes is taken into
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
consideration.
James usually admits that the starting point of his novels and tales is
a tiny fragment of information that stirs the creative side of his personality. There are many examples of this process in the Prefaces, but
the birth of The Spoils of Poynton is paradigmatic. In the course of a
conversation, a stray allusion, i.e. a delimited area of the author's experience, is immediately recognized as "the germ of a story" (AN
119), and it is precisely this blend of extensional experience and textual orientation which sets up a link betweenJames's practice and the
inventive procedure described above. Beach likens this method to
that of George Meredith and George Eliot, two English novelists also
"given to the development of an idea or motive" (24), but stresses the
considerable difference between James's aesthetic proclivity and the
moral or philosophical nature of Meredith's and Eliot's donnees. Albeit parallel to the operation of inventio both for its relative position
within the creative sequence and for its dual character, James's acquisition of the initial topic of discourse cannot be assimilated to such an
operation if it is characterized by the author's conscious participation in it. James describes this process as a kind of fortuitous inventio
whereby the writer is merely an alert receiver of surrounding impressions, and experience consists of a "huge spiderweb of the finest
and
silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness,
catching every airborne particle in its tissue" ("The Art of Fiction"
388). The acquisition of the topic of a rhetorical discourse, however,
does not seem subject to contingency, and the very term excogitatio
(employed, for instance, in the Rhetorica ad Herennium to pin down
this procedure) contributes to dispelling any notion that chance
rather than conscious reflection might be the crucial guideline in the
discovery of the extensional materials of a speech.' According to
James, the artistic values of a novel lie neither in his peculiar process
not always
of accidental inventio nor in the representational-though
in
from
but
rather
the
that
results
it,
subsequent
verisimilar-germ
undertaken by the author. For him, art
process of composition
"plucks its material, otherwise expressed, in the garden of lifewhich material elsewhere grown is stale and uneatable. But it has no
sooner done this than it has to take account of a process" (AN 312).
Earlier statements in "The Art of Fiction" can be adduced in support
of this same opinion. He directs his attention to the "standard of execution" and is quite prepared to "grant the artist his subject, his
idea, his donnie... his freedom of choice" (394-95), though he advises
7 In the Oxford Latin Dictionary, the term excogitatio is precisely defined as "[t]he
action of thinking out."
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JAMES'S "ORGANIC FORM"
that novelists should prefer those topics rich enough to lend themselves appropriately to brilliant execution.
So far I have not challenged, except for a brief preliminary caveat,
either the current terminology of organicism or its conception that
literary creation is a progressive imposition of form on content.
Therefore, I have uncritically reproduced the implication that the
initial germ of a novel or poem is a formless entity only expressible
when form is imparted to it. This idea is common among organicists,
who even apply it to rhetorical operations by asserting that "the traditional distinction in Greek criticism between matter [inventio] and
arrangement [dispositio]. .. will later become that of content and
form" (Orsini, "Ancient Roots" 13). This kind of statement sounds
surprising within the organic tradition, since it tends to undermine
organicism's fundamental dogma that form and content are inseparable. Abusing the legitimate conception of both as abstract mental
constructs, the pseudo-organic critic draws limits between formal and
contentual elements and operations in a concrete literary work, as
frequently happens in some of the passages by James already referred
to. I would not like to consider inventio as generating content and
dispositio or elocutio as imparting form to that metaphysically pure
content. In my view, these three operations impose form on two different substances. Working respectively from an extensional and an
intensional perspective, both inventio and dispositio isolate from the
author's amorphous flux of experience the specific fragments that
are to be textualized and elaborated, thus formalizing the substance
of content (if we resort to glossematic terms [Hjelmslev 47-60]) in
agreement with the Jamesian notions of economy and choice.8
Elocutio, on the other hand, imposes form on the substance of expression by selecting portions from a phonetic or a graphic continuum in
order to match the fragments of experience that have become text.
Consequently, one cannot equate donnee (idea, subject, or germ) to
substance, and verbal expression to form, because all of these elements can only be known and talked about inasmuch as they consist
at least
of both substance and form. In this light, it seems inexact-or
much
in a
a
theme
that
that
'gave'
"[t]reating
say
misleading-to
form that, at the best, would give little, might indeed represent a
peck of troubles" (AN233) or that "[a] Form that does not fully bring
8 It is worth noting that the classification of the world into loci or t6poi carried out
by rhetoric is a conventional formalization of experience prior to the inventive activity leading to the composition of a particular discourse (Albaladejo Mayordomo 95).
For example, according to Beach, the area of experience mainly pre-formalized by
James's tastes and interests as a man before his evaluation of it as a writer "is the
radical opposition of the American and the European ways of taking life" (14).
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
out its Content, or is in some way inadequate to it, and a Content that
is not in keeping with the Form, are both artistic deficiencies"
(Orsini, "Organic Concepts" 19). In both cases, themeand contentare
inevitably composites of substance and form, i.e. extratextual experience textually oriented; the same holds for the plane of expression.
Arguably, much of this confusion is due to the fact that the term form
is used to designate not only the corresponding member of the pair
form-substance but also the expressive medium of any verbal message.
In agreement with James's paradoxical stance, however, one can
find grounds in his critical works, as Vivien Jones has done (164,
172), to speak of a true formalistic attitude. See, for example, James's
statement that "really, universally, relations stop nowhere [in life],
and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a
geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear
to do so" (AN5); or his remarks, "Ifeel that in a literary work of the
least complexity the very form and texture are the substance itself. . ."
(quoted in Wellek, 'James's Literary Theory and Criticism" 316). The
first of these comments appears to describe an inventive process
whereby an area of the continuum of extensional experience is demarcated by its endowment with a textual orientation and an artistic
arrangement through the intervention of an author.' At this point,
James seems to be using glossematic terms avant la lettre,or anticipating Mark Schorer's seminal ideas on the novel, namely, that it is technique that determines content and not, as organicists would claim,
content that determines technique (67); that technique does not organize a given content but discoversit (68); and, as a direct consequence, that one can conceive neither of content without execution
nor of a writer such as H. G. Wells, who imprudently proclaims his
repudiation of technique (69, 73). The second Jamesian fragment
also embodies one of the basic tenets of the Russian formalists'
school, specifically, that all elements of form are to be considered
elements of content, since form gives shape to content, not the converse (Erlich 186-91, Wellek "Concepts"9).
The emergence of content as a result of the formalization of substance can take place along two different lines profusely attested
throughout the history of world literature. This amounts to saying
that there are two types of inventio and, therefore, two types of basic
9A formalist critic like Eva
Schaper defines the pictorial inventio in terms remarkably similar to those used byJames: "For us these painters tried to capture what mattered in the world around them by isolating forms from the flux of intertwined happenings" (40).
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JAMES'S "ORGANIC FORM"
cells, germs, or donnies. For example, the Aristotelian dramatic
inventio originates a referential core that turns on the idea of action
and not of character (1450a, 4-5) in such a way that the development
of the former determines the latter. Likewise, Vladimir Propp's analysis of the Russian folk tale is entirely based on the concept of function, whereas "character" is simply the agent of each of the seven
groups issuing from the classification of the whole range of those
functions. In the case of Aristotle, this stress on action rather than on
character is probably due to the impossibility of representing the
mind of the performer in drama with the same naturalness as in narrative, since any close focus on a fictional being seems to be incomplete if there is no psychological analysis. In a similar fashion, Propp
lays emphasis on function and de-emphasizes character on account
of the mental shallowness typically exhibited by the latter in the folk
tale.
James's inventio, however, gives rise to full-blown characters around
which a suitable story is developed. In "The Art of Fiction," he criticizes Walter Besant's narrow notion that all stories should consist of
adventures by asserting that a "psychological reason is, to my imagination, an object adorably pictorial" (402), and highlights the interdependence between character and incident which he considers fundamental: "When one says picture one says of character, when one
says novel one says of incident, and the terms may be transposed at
will. What is character but the determination of incident? What is
incident but the illustration of character?" (392). The crucial goal of
James's inventio is first and foremost the generation of character, and
ample evidence for this can be found in his Prefaces, particularly in
that to The Portrait of a Lady, where he acknowledges that it was his
vision of Isabel Archer that provided him with the starting point of
the novel:
Trying to recover here, for recognition, the germ of my idea, I see that it must have
consistednot at all in any conceit of a "plot,"nefariousname, in anyflash, upon the
fancy, of a set of relations, or in any one of those situations that, by a logic of their
own, immediately fall, for the fabulist, into a movement, into a march or a rush, a
patter of quick steps; but altogether in the sense of a single character, the character
and aspect of a particularengagingyoung woman,to which all the usual elements of
a "subject,"certainlyof a setting,were to need to be super-added.(AN42)
All this is a long way round, however, for my word about my dim first move towards
"ThePortrait,"whichwasexactlymygraspof a single character... (AN47)
The point is, however, that this single small corner-stone, the conception of a certain
young womanaffrontingher destiny,had begun with being all myoutfit for the large
building of "The Portrait of a Lady." (AN48)
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
In the same extraordinary manner, James derives the donnee for
"The Pupil" from a conversation with a friend in Italy: "I saw, on the
spot, little Morgan Moreen, I saw all the rest of the Moreens; I felt,
to the last delicacy, the nature of my young friend's relation with
them .. ." (AN 151). What one finds really compelling in the birth of
Isabel Archer or Morgan Moreen is that "[n]o process and no steps
intervened" (AN 151). This means that neither character resulted
from a verifiable set of compositional
stages, but materialized en
a
rich
semiotic
concept attributed by James to Ivan
disponibilite, very
evolved
from the initial vision of several
whose
narratives
Turgenev,
human beings on the verge of becoming full fictional characters, i.e.
disponibles. These beings are conceived of as extensional experience
oriented towards their representation in a text and, therefore, formalized. Their textual counterparts do not arise from a pattern of
actions in later phases of the process of literary composition, but are
"finished" characters from the very moment of their extensional inception. Consequently, an appropriate tangle of actions, relations,
and circumstances has to be generated which fits their personalities
and brings them out.
In spite of the importance accorded by James himself to this kind
of inventio, he also wrote narratives, as for instance The Ambassadors,
whose initial germs were situations or incidents. In the Preface to this
novel, he discloses how he came by its initial idea: "A friend had repeated to me, with great appreciation, a thing or two said to him by a
man of distinction, much his senior, and to which a sense akin to that
of Strether's melancholy eloquence might be imputed.. ." (AN308).
In this particular context, the representational kernel is not a character en disponibilite but a passionate outburst that is later to become
Lambert Strether's address to little Bilham in the second chapter of
Book Fifth. The case of The Ambassadors is unique because its initial
germ has a verbal nature and this implies that it can be directly absorbed into the texture of the finished work, thus forming a recognizable protrusion that stands "planted or 'sunk,' stiffly and saliently, in
the centre of the current, almost perhaps to the obstruction of traffic" (AN307). As this germ consists of a dramatic situation whose core
is a verbal message, it can be easily reproduced within the linguistic
medium of The Ambassadors, and this is how James violates-once
again-the
organic dogma by including in the whole a part that
clearly pre-exists. Once James has obtained his initial hint, whether a
character or a state of affairs, he sets out to answer the question "what
would be the story to which it [that hint] would most inevitably form
the centre?" (AN 311) by means of a process of enlargement and or56
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JAMES'S "ORGANIC FORM"
ganization that, in our view, is parallel to the rhetorical operation of
dispositio.
It is precisely in this second compositional stage, variously known
as execution, treatment, or composition, where the analogy between
both creative processes is most apparent. This is due to the existence
of two theoretically consecutive phases within this stage that are
equivalent to phases identified in the operation of dispositio when
viewed in the light of text linguistics. The apprehension of this notable parallel facilitates the recognition of less obvious similarities in
other compositional stages, as for instance the dual nature ofJames's
inventive process based on the intensional orientation of extensional
experience, which immediately calls up for us the notion of the rhetorical inventio. For James, the skilled organization and development
of the textualized material is the authentic touchstone of the novelist
and the fundamental part of his office. He derisively denounces the
lack of execution in works such as Thackeray's The Newcomes, Dumas
pere's Les trois mousquetaires, or Tolstoy's War and Peace, stating that a
"picture without composition slights its most precious chance for
beauty" (AN 84) and also that "[o]ne's work should have composition, because composition alone is positive beauty" (AN 319). His
early realization that the deft arrangement of material into an artistic
structure was the basis of his task as a narrator gained him the reputation of being "the first to write novels in English with a full and fine
sense of the principles of composition" (Beach 37).
The organization of the subject according to his immanent sense
of the well-made novel is so important for James that he ignores any
external remark on the development of an initial topic for fear of
distorting the purity of execution. In the Preface to The Spoils of
Poynton, he describes the discovery of the germ for his tale when conversing with some friends at a Christmas dinner. He draws particular
attention to the fact that he had no sooner taken possession of such a
germ than he refused to hear how it evolved in "clumsy Life" so as to
keep its development within the domain of his imagination and at a
considerable distance from the "stupid work" of actual experience
(AN 121). Nevertheless, the contradictory nature ofJames's conceptions stands out even in these circumstances. On the one hand, he
argues that the failure of any novelist unable to make something of
an idea "will have been a failure to execute, and it is in the execution
that the fatal weakness is recorded" ("The Art of Fiction" 395). On
the other, he appears to disallow these words by presenting Balzac's
compositional defects as mere "faults, on the whole, of execution,
flaws in the casting, accidents of the process: they never came back to
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
that fault in the artist, in the novelist, that amounts most completely
to a failure of dignity, the absence of saturation with his idea" ("The
Lesson of Balzac" 76). Despite the obvious existence of a double standard of judgment, however, the emphasis on composition is still
prevalent inJames's critical works.
As argued earlier in this essay, the operation of dispositio gives rise
to the textual macrostructure or intensional res by means of two sets
of compositional procedures, one leading to the constitution of an
underlying syntactic-semantic level and the other manipulating it in
order to attain a final artistic organization. In text-linguistic terms,
the emergence of this syntactic-semantic level or story is the result of
the isomorphous accretion of a representational kernel under the
influence of a set of logical rules. These rules, intuitive in the case of
James and more or less explicit in recent proposals (Garcia Berrio
and Albaladejo Mayordomo 186-89), originate a complete sequence
of events and participants that, according to Wiesenfarth, "realizes
some donnie" (23). Depending on whether the basic material is a
character or a situation, this phase of dispositio generates either the
appropriate chain of events and the rest of the secondary fictional
figures or the suitable characters along with the full development of
this nuclear situation, as for instance in A Portrait of a Lady or The
Ambassadors respectively. When these rules cease to act, there remains
a level constituted by the syntactic arrangement of a set of semantic
units such as events, actions, processes, beings or characters harmoniously evolved to fit an initial portion of formalized experience but
eventually removed from it, asJames liked to assume.
One of the most accurate interpretations ofJames's creative process has been offered by Beach. He maintains that "[o]nce given the
germ of the story, its motive or mere-idde,the circumstances of the plot
are evolved with consistent undeviating logic" (20) in a coherent
movement from condensation to distension of information. Naturally, his "consistent undeviating logic" is strictly equivalent to the
first set of compositional rulesjust mentioned, the quality of the overall process being presented as conscious and rational in sharp
contrast to any idea of self-generation: "Intellectual processes are
plentifully there to guide the evolution of subject into story" (26).10
o0Vivien Jones agrees with Beach when she speaks of "the intervening consciousness of the artist" (170) or expounds her version ofJames's creative process: "An
inexplicable subconscious motive provides the 'germ'; the quality of the artist's consciousness then dictates both what is made of it and the moral value of the ensuing
novel" (174). C.F. Burgess, however, surprisingly reverses this process and argues for
a conscious apprehension of the donn&eand for its unconscious development into a
full-blown story.
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JAMES'S "ORGANIC FORM"
The construction of Lambert Strether in accordance with the compositional needs of the initial situation of The Ambassadors is an excellent
example of how James's logic works. He compares this task to the
sedentary conscientious office of a chief accountant and, although
conceding that it allows for some "gleams of bliss," he strongly advises
the author to "keep his head at any price" (AN312), thus confirming
the rational quality of the process. One of his objects in the Preface to
this novel is "narrating my 'hunt' for Lambert Strether ... describing
the capture of the shadow projected by my friend's anecdote"; and he
carries out his plans by asking himself questions such as "Where
has he come from and why has he come, what is he doing ... in that
galere?"and answering them "as under cross-examination" in order to
justify Strether's figure and his "peculiar tone" (AN313). The successive replies to these questions reveal a set of physical circumstances
and mental traits that make up a "round" character-Lambert
Strether-who
acts in perfect harmony with the values derived from
the initial situation of The Ambassadors, as, in fact, no other character
could have done.
Once all semantic elements have been appropriately developed
and syntactically disposed, a second set of compositional procedures
comes into operation. Its purpose is to complete the constitution of
the textual macrostructure by means of applying further manipulations, which fall into two types: those affecting the narrative rhythm
or tempo, and those influencing the "system of observation" or narrative perspective. James is particularly renowned for his consummate
skill in making practical use of these techniques in his novels, as well
as for his penetrating reflections on them scattered throughout his
his dicritical writings. Among the first type of manipulations,
as
These
scene
and
counts
fundamental.
between
chotomy
picture
two concepts remain at the root of all narratological discussions on
the temporal structure of fiction (see for instance Genette 86-112,
Chatman 62-79). They represent, respectively, an expansion and a
compression of the narrative time in such a way that the rhythm of a
novel entirely depends on the right alternation between these catdesign. Comegories in keeping with the author's compositional
that
the
novel
on
The
Ambassadors,
"sharply
James explains
menting
divides itself . . . into the parts that prepare, that tend in fact to overprepare, for scenes, and the parts, or otherwise into the scenes, that
justify and crown the preparation," and adds that "everything in
it that is not scene ... is discriminated preparation, is the fusion and
synthesis of picture" (AN322-23). Another technique, equally appreciated by James, is that of foreshortening
("The Lesson of Balzac"
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
82). Commonly viewed as a brilliant attempt to obtain the most eco-
nomic rendering of a subject without renouncing his well-known
dramatic predilection, it consists of "giving the sense of present action without an elaborate scene," in other words, by means of "animated or 'dramatized"' narrative (Roberts 208, 207) and not of a
standard scene composed of lengthy dialogue and prolix description
and action. Through both foreshortening and alternation of scene
and picture, the verisimilar time sequence of the underlying story is
effectively manipulated and defamiliarized.
The construction of perspective is beyond any doubt the compositional technique that best characterizes James within the AngloAmerican narrative theory. To speak of point of view inevitably
means to invoke the position held byJames towards the perception of
a story through the eyes and conscience of one or several of its participants with the ideological and emotional slant that such a perception entails. James soon gives up the non-focalized God-like perspective in order to favor the internal point of view embodied in
certain characters known as "registers or 'reflectors'"' (AN 300); he
binds the center of perception to a particular character to such an
extent that he can say, with reference to Fleda Vetch in The Spoils of
Poynton, that "the progress and march of my tale became and remained that of her understanding" (AN 128). This kind of restricted
point of view in combination with the scenic technique or its pseudoscenic counterpart, i.e. the foreshortened presentation, make up the
basis for the Jamesian concept of dramatization. This concept manages to unite within a single structural framework the qualities of the
dramatic and the narrative genres: the direct and unmediated perception of the plot by the audience ("showing") and the controlled
economic intensity of the novel ("telling"). After this final manipulative stage of dispositio, in which the underlying syntactic-semantic
level is arranged so that it gives the impression of telling itself, the
textual macrostructure is complete and ready to be projected onto a
verbal medium.
This leads us to the third step in the composition of discourse. By
means of elocutio--the only operation that yields an objective perceptible level-a mental construct is linked with a specific area of the
substance of expression, which thus becomes formalized and acquires the possibility of denoting a complex of meaning. In James, as
in any other critic, there are abundant references to this final stage of
verbal manifestation usually called style or texture. Though these
terms do not seem interchangeable, both are clearly contrasted with
the architectural sense of form as a large-scale arrangement of com60
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JAMES'S "ORGANIC FORM"
positional units (Wellek, 'James's Literary Theory and Criticism"
316-17). They frequently occur in any discussion about the level of
adequacy between words and ideas, as in James's essay on The Tempest,
where he once more takes up the issue that form cannot be dissociated from content. In his view, Shakespeare "points for us as no one
else the relation of style to meaning and of manner to motive ...
Unless it be true that these things, on either hand, are inseparable;
unless it be true that the phrase, the cluster and order of terms, is the
object and the sense ... the author of The Tempest has no lesson for
us" (303). The verbalization of the textual macrostructure can be
thus considered an organic operation insofar as it produces a linguistic pattern that throws into relief the expressed
content by
them.
is a critical
the
close
between
It
highlighting
correspondence
intricate
because
later
was
commonplace thatJames's
style
perversely
it had to bring out the sophistication of a mature mind (Miller 34950). This appreciation seems obvious when one realizes how closely
language follows all the nuances and convolutions of a complicated
macrostructural layout in any passage of his last works, whether literary or critical. It is worth remarking, however, that the Jamesian stage
of elocutio does not contribute to the verification of the analogy at
issue here in the same degree as those of dispositio or inventio. This is
simply because, on account of its close resemblance to equivalent
steps in the creative process of many other writers, it is almost featureto establish revealing parallels
less and, therefore, inappropriate
it.
upon
James's idea of organicism is a mental stereotype rather than a
genuine modus operandi. Once his rigorous logic has ruled out any
trace of self-generation or even of arbitrariness in the development
of the textual macrostructure, the organic qualities can only lie in the
isomorphous arrangement of the final product. It is not difficult to
discover in James formalistic attitudes that run counter to the organic
dogma, as for instance when he admits that a certain formal circumstance may exert a strong influence on the configuration of content
or even determine it altogether. On the other hand, James's crucial
distinction between the formation of a story by applying a set of rules
derived from his idea of the well-made plot, and the further execution of this story under the control of compositional techniques such
as narrative time, point of view, or dramatized presentation, provides
sufficent grounds to draw a parallel between this stage of his creative
method and the rhetorical operation of dispositio. With reference to
this central parallel, we can interpret as analogous the steps that go
61
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
before and after it-namely,
the discovery of the initial germ, or
inventio, and the verbalization of the resulting mental construct by
means of elocutio.
Although in this essay I have simply described a plausible correspondence without analyzing its motivation two explanatory hypotheses at least could be put forward: direct influence from rhetorical
sources, or manifestation of a more or less universal trend in the makI have
ing of literary discourse. To my mind, the correspondence
traced does not stem from a direct bearing of rhetoric on James's
creative thought, since not a single explicit rhetorical term or clearly
identifiable rhetorical notion has found its way into the mainstream
of his critical writings. (On the other hand, the references to the organic doctrine are numerous, though rather perfunctory as I have
suggested.) In addition, the identification of two different phases
within the operation of dispositio is a recent achievement; they certainly existed in ancient rhetorical treatises, but the explicit discrimination between them is the result of looking at rhetoric in the light of
text linguistics. Obviously, if the dual character of dispositio is the
common factor that makes comparison possible, and this factor dates
back only to the 1980s, direct influence is eliminated as the motivation of the parallel examined in this essay. Rather, the homology between the two dimensions of dispositio and the two compositional
stages distinguished in James can be viewed as the key link in the
general chain of discourse production, which extends from the discovery of the topic or germ by means of formalizing an area of experience to its final verbalization after it has been adequately expanded
and organized. Any attempt at providing evidence to support or reject either of these hypotheses on solid grounds, however, clearly exceeds the scope of this study."
University ofAlicante
Works Cited
Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theoryand the Critical Tradition.
London: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Albaladejo Mayordomo, Tomis. "Aspectos del analisis formal de textos." Revista
Espa"folade Lingiifstica 11 (1981): 117-60.
11 The research leading to the preparation of this essay was made possible by a
grant from the Conselleia de Cultura, Educaci6 i Ciencia de la Generalitat
Valenciana.
62
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JAMES'S "ORGANIC FORM"
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Burgess, C. F. "The Seeds of Art: Henry James's Donn&e."Literatureand Psychology13
(1963): 67-73.
Chatman, Seymour. Storyand Discourse:NarrrativeStructurein Fiction and Film. Ithaca:
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Castilla14 (1989): 47-55.
Dijk, Teun A. van. SomeAspectsof Text Grammars.The Hague: Mouton, 1972.
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Garcia Berrio, Antonio. "Ret6rica como ciencia de la expresividad: presupuestos
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
MacCarthy, Harold T. HenryJames: The CreativeProcess.New York: Thomas Yoseloff,
1958.
Maini, Darshan Singh. "Henry James: The Writer as Critic." HenryJames Review 8
(1987): 189-99.
Martin, Timothy P. "HenryJames and Percy Lubbock: From Mimesis to Formalism."
Novel14(1980): 20-29.
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Murphy, JamesJ. Rhetoricin theMiddleAges:A Historyof RhetoricalTheoryfrom St. Augustine to theRenaissance.Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
Orsini, G.N. "The Ancient Roots of a Modern Idea." OrganicForm:TheLife of an Idea.
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Texts." Studies in Text Grammar.Eds. J.S. Pet6fi and H. Rieser. Dordrecht: Reidel,
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Phillips, D.C. "Organicism in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries."
Journal of theHistoryof Ideas31 (1970): 413-32.
Plato. Phaedrus.Trans. R. Hackforth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.
Propp, Vladimir. Morphologyof theFolktale.Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968.
Roberts, Morris. "HenryJames and the Art of Foreshortening." ReviewofEnglish Studies 22 (1946): 207-14.
Schaper, Eva. "Significant Form." BritishJournalofAesthetics1(1961): 33-43.
Schorer, Mark. "Technique as Discovery." Hudson Review1 (1948): 67-87.
Stempel, Daniel. "Coleridge and Organic Form: The English Tradition." Studies in
Romanticism6 (1967): 89-97.
Todd, D. D. "HenryJames and the Theory of Literary Realism." Philosophyand Literature1 (1976): 79-100.
Tomal'evskij, Boris. "Thimatique." Thdoriede la littirature.Ed. Tzvetan Todorov. Paris:
Seuil, 1965. 268-307.
Welleck, Ren&. "Concepts of Form and Structure in Twentieth-Century Criticism."
Neophilologus42 (1958): 2-11.
---.
"HenryJames's Literary Theory and Criticism." AmericanLiterature30 (1958):
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Wiesenfarth,Joseph, F. S. C. HenryJamesand theDramaticAnalogy:A Study of theMajor
Novels of theMiddlePeriod.New York: Fordham University Press, 1963.
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