Henry James and the Heightening of the Illusion of Reality in the Novel Form

Abstract

The argument as to whether the serious idea of the novel appealed to no one among the English novelists before Henry James ventured into the novel form is a familiar one in the development of the novel as an art form. The received impression in a number of literary circles at the time James came into the scene was that the novelists before him were mere chroniclers who paid no attention to technical innovations that truly make a novel pass for a serious work of art. Indeed, the orthodox narrative was believed to be damagingly preoccupied with carefully developed illusion of sequentiality and formal characterization. In the light of this, James came to be widely believed to be the first English novelist who took the novel form seriously. This paper delves into this argument with a view to establishing its veracity or otherwise. It pays detailed attention to the innovations that James introduced to the novel form and juxtaposes them with what prevailed before him. The paper considers the difference between the ways the innovators represented by James told their story and how the earlier novelists like Daniel Defoe told theirs. However, while crediting James with a number of technical innovations that took the novel form to a new height, the paper recognizes at the same time that the novelists before James operated according to the dictates of the mode in their age and time and cannot therefore be dismissed as unskilled artists.