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Embarrassments and Predicaments: Patterns of Interaction in James's Writer‐Tales
Author(s) -
Barry Peter
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.1991.tb01907.x
Subject(s) - enthusiasm , perfection , skepticism , literature , feeling , friendship , aesthetics , ideal (ethics) , art , philosophy , sociology , epistemology , social science , theology
In this tales about writers Henry James reproduces the same basic scenario many times, using a narrow range of motifs, characters, and situations. These can be formulated and formalised in the manner of Vladimir Propp's morphology of the Russian folk tale. The tales can then be studied as reworkings of vital pre‐occupations concerning the writer, art, and society. But when juxtaposed and examined in this way the tales offer no support for views often attributed to James about the necessary separation between art and life, the need for artists to dedicate themselves totally to art, and the lamentable timidity and short‐sightedness of editors and the public. Instead, what emerges is a pervasive uncertainty on these issues. The stories place a high valuation on friendship and human contact, and express scepticism about impersonality as an artistic ideal. They also query the value of a unifying thread or ‘secret’ which endows an author's opus with formal perfection, expressing enthusiasm instead for what is fragmentary and spontaneous rather than crafted. The spirit of the tales then, is more akin to the warmth of feeling seen in James's accounts of his relations with Turgenev, Flaubert, and other writers than to the urbane convictions expressed in the prefaces.