History, Realism, and the Work of Henry James

Abstract

H I S T O R Y , R E A L I S M , A N D T H E W O R K O F H E N R Y J A M E S J. M. CAMERON University of Toronto I t seems to follow from our knowing that imaginative literature consists of things that are made up, that questions about how far this or that fiction is “realistic” can have no sense. What is imitated or referred to or rendered by a fiction? What could be meant by claiming that an account of a battle or a love-affair in a fiction is true (or untrue), faithful (or unfaithful), or “real” (or unreal) ? It seems to follow from something’s being a fiction, and not a report, that there is nothing of which it could be a true or false account. Tourists may be eager to see the place where Mr. Pickwick got into the wrong bedroom — after all, isn’t the Great White Horse still there in Ipswich? — or where Sherlock Holmes had his duel with Professor Moriarty; but this we feel to be an amiable weakness of mind, a tribute to the bright hallucinations contrived by the expert framer of fictions. Someone once put as an epigraph to a novel: “ I am not I; he is not he; she is not she.” One could falsely claim that something was a fiction and use the claim as a cover for libel — a lying account is not the same kind of thing as a fictional account. Since World War II there have been some silly plays in which the recently dead are portrayed with gross malice as murderers or poltroons; it seems wrong for the author to defend himself on the ground that what he has written is a fiction. This is like courting a woman and going through a marriage ceremony with her, and then at the end of it all saying It was only a joke. Such a claim wouldn’t exempt a man from prosecution for bigamy. But these are borderline cases. Barsetshire, Hardy’s Wessex, George Eliot’s Loamshire, Scott’s Louis xi, Trollope’s Plantagenet Palliser, James’s Isabel Archer, are all equally fictions no matter what geographical and historical references may exist in the intentions of the author and the mind of the reader. But fictions have sense. If they don’t involve, in the same way as do his­ torical accounts and geographical descriptions, reference to the world, how do they appear to have such reference? The states of affairs the writer of fictions feigns to describe are possible, that is, we know what would be the case if this or that description were true. Plainly it is possible for a man to English Studies in Canada, x, 3, September 1984 smother his wife out of jealousy, or for husband and wife to conspire to kill the king; and it is also possible for the hero to kiss the princess out of a hundred-year-old sleep and for the queen of the fairies to be infatuated with an ass. The case of the sleeping beauty, the case of Titania and the “trans­ lated” Bottom, these are possible in the Humeian sense: that whatever we can imagine is possible. What limits this sense of possible is a difficult ques­ tion. We are inclined to think it is not a possible description if we say that that the square roots of numbers are falling in love with the roses; but then we remember what Lewis Carroll is able to do in the two Alice books. Even what is in a more extreme sense than the fairy-story sense not possible may be treated as possible in a fiction. This we call nonsense. I mention it to bring out the broadness of the category of fiction. We are still faced with this problem: all fictions have the form of accounts of states of affairs, but they are not accounts of states of affairs that exist independently of the fiction. Some are accounts of states of affairs we should be inclined to say are naturally impossible (the kind of thing we say doesn...