The Art of Fiction, pt. 2

My goal with this blog is to revel in the literature rather than criticise to death. It's not always easy, especially when the subject matter is itself critical—as in The Art of Fiction. I know I've already been guilty in several other posts, but I'm going to be especially careful from now on.
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James writes that the work of fiction is to catch "the very note and tick, the strange irregular rhythm of life." Yet these irregularities do often seem to be beneath the surface, because the plots of his novels rarely contain anything too far out of the ordinary, as far as I've seen. I think earlier we touched on the idea of "the happy ending at any cost." James avoids this—but life often does too, so his plots don't strike me as being too strange.

Here's a humorous selection of James' own thoughts on those who consider art in terms of rainbows:

For many people art means rose-coloured windowpanes, and selection means picking a bouquet for Mrs. Grundy. They will tell you glibly that artistic considerations have nothing to do with the disagreeable, with the ugly; they will rattle off shallow commonplaces about the province of art and the limits of art till you are moved to some wonder in return as to the province and limits of ignorance.

James a sample... (read: James is classic...)

To me, Henry James' charm is that he fills in the interstices between conversation tags. According to Annie Dillard, "there are no events but thoughts." Therefore, it is in the mind that any occurrence becomes an event. James echoes this himself in his preface to The Portrait of a Lady when he writes, "but what is truer than that on one side—the side of their independence of flood and field, of the moving accident, of battle and murder and sudden death—her adventures are to be mild? Without her sense of them, her sense for them, they are next to nothing at all; but isn't the beauty and the difficulty just in showing their mystic conversion [...] into the stuff of drama?" This "sense for them" is what transforms the incident into the event, and it is just this sense that James succeeds in illuminating.

I’ve certainly always considered Henry James to be the most dramatic of all writers. But when I’m able to get outside myself, I believe that I’m able to see how others might consider him boring. I’ve actually heard it expressed. As an undergraduate while in the dorm computer lab I once overheard someone say, “Jane Austen’s books are so-o boring.” And while I was in the middle of feeling as though a stake were being run through my heart, her companion replied, “Yeah. And have you read Henry James? He’s even worse!” Needless to say I needed oxygen by that point. I didn’t get up to note the faces of the heretics; hatred is unchristian. But after thinking about it—and at times even while reading James, I distinctly get the impression of how a person could come to such a perfidious conclusion. If it weren’t for my peculiar interest in a subject’s sense for his experiences—however mundane—I’d never be interested in the text. So while it is inaccurate to say nothing happens in the stories, the truth is that the events occur so slowly that it is no doubt an interest outside of the plot that propels me as reader.