* The research leading to the publication of this paper was made possible by grant no. PB98-0181of the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología.

1 This topic has given rise to many generalizations, but also to detailed analyses; see Fogel 1984 andFogel 1990.

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Henry James and Mikhail Bakhtin on the Art of Fiction

José Antonio Álvarez AmorósUniversidad de Alicante

Abstract

The object of this paper is to draw a parallel between Henry James’s and Mikhail Bakhtin’sviews of narrative art by considering how they reacted in this specific field to the generalatmosphere of relativization that signalled the onset of the Modernist revolution. I will try toargue that the Jamesian idea of epistemological limitation and the Bakhtinian faith in novelisticdialogism —both powerful antidotes to the roundly stigmatized notions of omniscience andmonologism— are simply two idiosyncratic manifestations of the philosophical principle thatthe nature of the self is relational rather than substantial. Thus, James underlines theindividual, psychological and perceptual side of human personality and its mimetic correlationin the fictional character, whereas Bakhtin opts for the social paradigm and its stress on voices,linguistic intercourse, and the emphatic rejection of mental solipsism, in agreement with theMarxist root of his thought.

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Ever since Joseph Warren Beach and Percy Lubbock published their pioneering studies in1918 and 1921 respectively, Henry James (1846-1916) has been looked upon as the essentialforerunner of the technical feats of strength that characterize Modernist narrative.* Countlessscholars have scrutinized his critical and literary works with a view to determining hiskinship with later writers who, like Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, or James Joyce, hadan unquestionable bent for the well-executed and artistically rigorous novel.1 As we all know,English Modernist narrative can be, and has been, described from a great many theoreticalperspectives. If looked at from a psychological angle, its concern and fascination for theworkings of the fictional mind have to be emphasized. This interest naturally led in time tothe introduction and perfection of techniques such as the interior monologue and stirred upmuch discussion about the role of language in the shaping and representation of novelistic

2 For another parallel between James and Bakhtin, this time founded on the notion of “socialformalism,” i.e. the common ground shared by formalist and cultural-ideological approaches to thenovel, see Hale 1988.

3 See for instance Craige 1982; Mikhail Bakhtin is surprsingly absent from both her discussion andher final bibliography.

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consciousness. If viewed through the prism of stylistics, Modernist narrative becomes thelocus of systematic linguistic foregrounding, and tends to exhibit a highly polished surfaceand a textural elaboration nearing that we have come to associate with lyrical poetry. Stylebecomes moreover a functional component that, skilfully manipulated, can provide tacitcomments on plot and character of a kind incomparably more subtle than those furnishedby the traditional omniscient narrator. Another touchstone contributing to thecharacterization of Modernist narrative is plot, or rather its absence in conventional form.The new novel is thus distinguished by its openness, by the indetermination of incident andcharacter, by its almost pathological avoidance of a consistent story-line and of a finalrounding-off of events. Lastly, if Modernist fiction is analyzed from a narratologicalviewpoint, it becomes the chronicle of a progressive constraint on what James himselfmemorably called “the mere muffled majesty of irresponsible ‘authorship’” (1984: 328) or,in other words, the weakening of narrative authority as a necessary step towards the dramaticnovel.

All of these perspectives have been instrumental in illuminating the technical nature ofModernist narrative, but, to my mind, none of them can exhaustively account for such acomplex literary body. What one would ideally need is a general feature or common factorthat could be discerned, in the ultimate analysis, at the core of Modernist fiction. Difficultas it is to work within the realm of abstraction, it seems reasonable to assume the hypothesisthat this common ground is the intense relativization of reality occurring in this kind ofnarrative. There is relativization in subordinating the presentment of events to the shiftingquality of the mind on which the narrative is focused, in the ambiguous interplay of stylesand voices that casts a doubtful ironic light on the elements of the represented world, in thelooseness of plot that tends to turn Modernist narratives into sequences of scenesinterconnected by elliptical gaps to be filled in according to the reader’s individual response,and also in the lack of an authoritative frame of reference capable of giving unwaveringsignificance —moral or otherwise— to the characters themselves and to their deeds. Inagreement with this overall hypothesis, and with the many qualifications to be discussedlater, the purpose of this essay is to draw a parallel between Henry James’s mature views ofthe narrative art and Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of the novel.2

Modernist fiction, however, is not the only field in which the idea of relativization tookroot at the turn of the twentieth century. It can be argued that both the arts and the sciences—as well as the general cultural atmosphere— were largely affected by this principle.3 Thepsychological discoveries made by Sigmund Freud and published under the title of TheInterpretation of Dreams (1900) and Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) subverted thenineteenth-century common-sense assumptions about the workings of the mind and, stillmore importantly, introduced the distressing notion that human behaviour is subjected to

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uncontrollable forces. But it was in the field of physics where the idea of relativizationbecame explicitly articulated. In 1905 Albert Einstein put forward his special theory ofrelativity, whereby reality only exists in conjunction with a specific standpoint, and later, in1916, he revised this hypothesis and published the final version of his general theory ofrelativity. In 1927 Werner Karl Heisenberg formulated his principle of uncertainty, accordingto which any act of observation is intrinsically inaccurate because it is distorted by theconditions in which it occurs. The charges against the common-sense view of reality alsoextended to the field of philosophy, since it was maintained that what we take for actual issimply the outward projection of mental categories and, therefore, the constitution of the“real” world may be as fictitious and changeable as that of a novel.

However, the greatest twentieth-century theorist of relativism in the field of thehumanities is the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), whose work —discoveredin Western Europe in the late sixties— ranges over the whole breadth of philological thoughtand has been repeatedly acclaimed as the foundation of modern pragmatics or, more exactly,of a “pragmatically oriented theory of knowledge . . . that seek[s] to grasp human behaviourthrough the use humans make of language” (Holquist 1990: 15). Bakhtin has bequeathedmemorable notions and terms to contemporary literary theory and criticism, such as hisbewildering concept of the novel, his Einsteinian idea of the chronotope as the basis of ahistorical poetics, the crucial role of otherness in the definition of the subject, the importanceof concrete placement in the formation of experience, and his opposition between sentenceand utterance as the minimal units of linguistics and translinguistics, or pragmatics,respectively. At the heart of Bakhtinian thought there is a sense of everlasting struggle, ofcontinuing dialogue between self and other that precludes the existence of any kind ofabsolute meaning enclosed in itself and independent of a specific frame of reference.Characteristic of the early years of the twentieth century and superbly articulated inBakhtin’s philosophy, this persistent relativism is also embodied, I believe, in Henry James’sviews on the novel and in his later narrative practice. Consequently it seems appropriate toengage both James and Bakhtin in dialogue with each other in order to discover and analyzeareas of coincidence and disagreement and see the critical views of the former in the lightshed by the latter. I will try to show that they can be taken to represent, in spite of glaringdiscrepancies, Western and Eastern views of the same cultural climate that provided a contextfor the development of Modernist fiction in Britain.

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To find Henry James and Mikhail Bakhtin placed side by side in the prolegomena to thisessay immediately gives a very broad hint of its theoretical context. On the one hand, Jameshas always been pointed out in the Anglo-American world as the originator of a new noveland a new way of looking at it both critically and professionally; on the other, Bakhtin isusually considered the remote ancestor of today’s post-structuralism and cultural criticism,even though his philosophical foundation is purely neo-Kantian and his long working lifecovers more than fifty years, from his early philosophical writings to the final revisions he

4 See Holquist and Clark 1984; here they examine the role of M. I. Kagan in the introduction ofneo-Kantianism in Russia, a school that first developed in Germany as a reaction to nineteenth-century positivism. Neo-Kantianism and Bakhtinian thought share a taste for idealism, as well as thebelief that ethics and axiology are at the root of all philosophical activity, and that time and space arethe basic categories of the human mind; on the contrary, they dislike rationalism and the abstractworkings of pure logic. For a full account of Bakhtin’s life and his intellectual context, see Clark andHolquist 1984.

5 Tilford (1958) pulls down the myth that The Ambassadors is consistently narrated from Strether’sinternal perspective, and he does so by drawing attention to the patronizing way in which theprotagonist is referred to (“poor Strether,” “poor man,” “our hero,” “our friend”), the occasional frankpresence of a first-person narrator well above Strether’s knowledge of the situation, the existence ofprolepsis and comments on the unfolding of discourse, and the frequent shifting of perspective fromStrether to an omniscient observer and backwards.

6 This thesis is maintained in Bock 1979, where she asserts that “it is not true that he [James] totallyrejected the omniscient narrator technique and those who employed it or that he disliked the use ofan ‘intrusive narrator’ . . . Nor would James have agreed with Percy Lubbock that the use of the‘recording and registering mind of the author’ . . . has an ‘inherent’ tendency to make the novel weakor thin . . . James greatly admired many novelists for the very way in which their thoughts andreflections helped to broaden the scope and meaning of their story and so to increase their value”(1979: 260-61).

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made just before his death in 1975.4 Beach and Lubbock, two of the earliest reverberators ofJames’s views, tend to hail him as the fountain-head of a so-called Anglo-American theoryof the novel and, although it is true that James can be seen as the patriarch of Modernistnarrative both in theory and practice, his role is not so absolute and unchallenged as we havebeen given to believe. For instance, James’s opposition to narrative omniscience is strongerin his critical statements than in his novel-writing activity, and overwhelming evidence canbe mustered to that effect simply by comparing the degree of the narrator’s presence in TheAmbassadors and in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, two novels commonly held asparadigms of dramatic narrative.5 Likewise, James’s rupture with the Victorian novel is notin the least violent, but cautious and progressive. James particularly retained a penchant forthe occasional deployment of an omniscient narrator in order to clarify for the reader somesituations in the plot which might well surpass the character’s powers of understanding.6 Healso used to foreshorten the presentation of irrelevant events so as to economize on novelisticspace without giving up his much cherished dramatic inclination (Roberts 1946). In additionto this, James’s role as the founding father of an Anglo-American theory of the novelformulated round the concept of narrative perspective is, to my mind, seriouslymisinterpreted. For many decades, as I have tried to show elsewhere (Álvarez Amorós 1994),the study of the novel within the Anglo-American critical tradition had failed to distinguishbetween two radically different narrative roles, that of the speaker and that of the observer,and this gave rise to critical readings that, to say the least, do not appear particularlypercipient upon close consideration. This “composite” idea of point of view —whichcomprises such different concepts as voice and point of view proper— has been prevalenteven in the works of reputable critics, and allegedly can be traced back to Henry James’s

7 See Mark Shorer’s almost glosematic view of the novel in his 1948 seminal essay “Technique asDiscovery.”

8 For a partial English translation of his 1972 work, see Genette 1980; of particular interest to mypoint here are pp. 185-211 on focalization and perspective.

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critical writings and narrative practice under the widely employed denomination of“Jamesian theory of point of view” or words to that effect. After analyzing James’s prefacesto the New York edition of his novels and tales and Lubbock’s comments in his The Craftof Fiction, it was concluded that the “composite” conception of point of view, an essentialelement in the study of the Anglo-American novel commonly attributed to James, has a veryfeeble connection with his critical views on this literary form and rather derive fromLubbock’s dogmatic interpretation of them.

The fact that James is only relatively at the head of a so-called Anglo-American theory ofthe novel does not mean, of course, that this theory is non-existent. There is a series offeatures shared by critics such as James himself, Lubbock, Beach, Schorer, or Booth —tomention only outstanding examples— that allow us to see them as integrated in a largerwhole. Their main distinctive feature is a strong leaning towards technical and formalisticapproaches to the novel and, more often than not, for relying on purely aesthetic standardsin judging the quality of a narrative work.7 They are also very much concerned withquestions of narrative transmission, rhetoric, and textual construction, though their area ofcoincidence is more reduced here. The discrepancies between Lubbock and Booth on theaesthetic and ethical values of the dramatic novels became a critical commonplace severaldecades ago; nevertheless, the arguments and counter-arguments put forward by each side indefence of their respective positions are simply divergent points of view within the samenarrative system. This Anglo-American tradition of novelistic study can be likened to othertheoretical developments in continental Europe. Precisely on the grounds of its formalisticstress and its belief that narrative technique is an element of paramount importance, thistradition has much in common with the work of early Russian formalists such as Shklovsky,Tomashevsky, or Eikhenbaum, and also with that of their Western heirs, the Frenchstructuralists. Among the latter, one has to mention Gérard Genette, who devised in 1972a powerful narrative model that advocated the separation between the speaker and theobserver,8 improving considerably on the rather confusing treatment given to this questionby Anglo-American critics and returning —perhaps unwittingly— to James’s original schemedominated by the reflector, or centre of consciousness, to the detriment of the narrator.

This well-established formalistic climate was disturbed in the late sixties by the discoveryof Bakhtin’s works in Western Europe. The first noteworthy mention of Bakhtin outside thecircles of Slavonic specialists came from Julia Kristeva (1980). Originally published in 1967,her essay “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” is a general exposition of the most characteristicaspects of Bakhtinian literary theory, namely the dialogue between texts and voices, theambivalence of cultural practices, the concept of dialogism versus that of monologism, thecarnivalistic rites, the social dimension of verbal activity, and the novel as the most subversiveof genres. Knowledge and appreciation of his works gained ground very slowly, but, by theend of the eighties, he had become such an influential figure in Western Europe and the

9 For a discussion of this phenomenon, see Morson 1986.10 This dispute over authorship is not closed yet. Among others, Clark and Holquist (1984:

[146]-70) maintain that Bakhtin was the author of these three works, which were published underdifferent names for a variety of reasons (mainly political reasons), while Tzvetan Todorov (1984: 6-11)argues that both Medvedev and Voloshinov played a very important role in the composition of thesebooks and suggests, as the best way to solve the problem, the statement of a joint authorship,Medvedev/Bakhtin and Voloshinov/Bakhtin. See also Perlina 1983, and Bennett-Matteo 1986.

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United States that few literary studies written within the bounds of current intellectual“pluralism” failed to quote him or adhere —somewhat mechanically— to his proposals.9 Onewonders, however, why several decades had to elapse before Bakhtin’s works were circulatedin translation, particularly if one bears in mind that his earliest writings (1919) were almostcontemporary with James’s last ones (1915). This considerable delay was due to severalreasons; among them, the very adverse circumstances in which he wrote his main works (theaftermath of the Russian civil war and the Stalinist period), his ponderous abstract styleprobably due to the German roots of his education that rendered problematic the translationof his works, his tendency to ignore the conventions of Western literary history, therecurrence in his essays and books of exotic examples and allusions to almost unknownwriters, and, of course, the intrinsic difficulty of the Russian language (Holquist 1992:[xv]-xvi). In addition to this, there is a heated controversy over the authorship of someBakhtinian writings produced between 1925 and 1930. Leaving aside nine minor works (eightarticles and one review), Bakhtin seems to have composed three major essays, The FormalMethod in Literary Scholarship (1928), Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (1927), and Marxism andthe Philosophy of Language (1929), which appeared under the names of two of his disciples,P. N. Medvedev and V. N. Voloshinov.10 Bakhtinian textology is not at issue here, but it iscurious to note that the authorship of a significant part of his work is affected by theambivalence and indetermination that he always championed in his philosophy. All of thesefactors conspired to keep his writings in obscurity, until late revisions of his extensive essayson Rabelais and Dostoevsky were translated into English as Rabelais and His World andProblems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics in 1968 and 1973 respectively.

The range of Bakhtin’s works is impressive. In the early twenties he adopted a firmphilosophical position based on the relations between mind and world, self and other, andused it as a frame of reference to approach a large variety of topics over more than fifty years.Before 1926 he had produced several works of a general theoretical or philosophical naturein the great German tradition of neo-Kantianism; from 1926 to 1929 he published hismethodological and critical writings, heavily influenced by Marxism and signed by Medvedevor Voloshinov, in which he attacked the Russian formalists, Freudian psychology, andstructuralist linguistics; from 1929 to 1935 he carried out his research on the nature ofutterance and novelistic polyphony, which yielded his book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poeticsand his celebrated essay “Discourse in the Novel,” i.e. Bakhtin’s best-known face to Westernintellectuals; from 1936 to 1941 he reinterpreted the history of the novel according to hisguiding idea of the chronotope; from 1942 to 1952 he published nothing, but was involvedin an intense scholarly activity and in the political controversy aroused by the defence of his

11 For a comprehensive bibliography of Bakhtin’s works, revisions and translations, see Clark andHolquist 1984: [353]-56.

12 See Bakhtin 1990a and Bakhtin 1993; these translations of early Bakhtinian writings foregroundthe philosopher —rather than the literary theorist— working in the wake of German philosophy.

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doctoral dissertation on François Rabelais; finally, from 1953 to 1975 he revised some of hisearly works —for instance, his book on Dostoevsky’s poetics— and returned to the greattheoretical and philosophical subjects of the twenties.11 What seems really surprising is thatover this long period there is almost no development in Bakhtin’s work; he may havechanged his focus or even the way of formulating a particular problem, but, in Todorov’sopinion, “from his first to his last text . . . his thinking remain[ed] fundamentally the same”(1984: 12).

Bakhtin’s work is so multifarious that, since it was discovered in the West, scholars ofmany different persuasions have tried to appropriate him for their own intellectual ends. SoBakhtin can be viewed as a literary theorist, a philosopher, a sui generis linguist, or anideologue, and this decomposition of his image into several diffractions can be attributed tothe appearance of successive translations of his works into Western languages. Until veryrecently it was impossible for a non-speaker of Russian to see him whole, and so scholarstended to pin him down on the evidence of those works that were accessible to them at agiven moment. As indicated above, Bakhtin was generally considered a theorist of thedialogical novel, but the appearance of later translations contradicted and enriched this rathersimplistic image.12 Two methodological lines can be distinguished in the assessment ofBakhtin’s works as carried out in the West. First, he has been viewed as a prominent memberof the Russian post-formalistic school, on a par with Yuri Lotman or Boris Uspensky. Thosewho favour this perspective consider Bakhtin a narrative theorist exclusively concerned withthe compositional dimension of the artistic text, a scholar who has devised a panoply ofsubtle instruments for the analysis of narrative works. This reductive approach originates inartificially restricting the scope of his work to his reflections on the novel, particularly tothose contained in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics and in the four essays of The DialogicImagination. The philosophical, sociological and ethical aspects of this author are thusconfined to the background or altogether ignored, as when Jonathan Hall equates “theconcept of the ‘dialogic’ in fiction” to “an extreme form of reported speech,” or the idea ofdialogism —a whole philosophical system— to that of polyphony —the manifestation ofdialogism in the novel (1981: [109]-10).

The second methodological line was developed later and entailed the reinstatement ofideology and ethics within the text in stark opposition to the mere compositionalmanipulation of meaningless entities. This is precisely the Bakhtin whose proposals subvertthe order of the humanities and, by extension, the social infrastructure reflected by thatorder. Ken Hirschkop, for instance, denounces what he calls the “domestication” of Bakhtin,i.e. the transformation of a subversive doctrine endowed ab initio with a concrete socialdimension into a series of analytical algorithms deliberately emptied of political significance.Hirschkop names Michael Holquist, Katerina Clark, Gary Saul Morson, and Caryl Emerson—all of them distinguished Bakhtinian scholars— as members of a bourgeois conspiracy bent

13 For some books written or edited in this vein, see Hirschkop and Shepherd, eds. 1989; Gardiner1992; Bauer and McKinstry, eds. 1992.

14 Roger Fowler underlines this same point from his own methodological perspective: “AlthoughBakhtin refers liberally to ‘voices’ and the ‘word’ as components of polyphony, he is very reluctantto provide precise linguistic descriptions for the voices in dialogue” (1981: 144).

15 For a discussion of the viability of a structuralist criticism as applied to the elucidation ofindividual works, see Todorov 1973: [73].

16 See Miller 1972; this book is simply a compilation of fragments on narrative theory culled fromJames’s writings.

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on stripping Bakhtin of his ideological aspects “so that he may be securely placed in thepantheon of Western liberal thinkers” (1986: 77). For Hirschkop the terms “dialogic” and“monologic,” instead of denoting a technical opposition, revolve “around the connection ofcriticism to the advocacy of larger social and political values” (1986: 85). This politicizedimage of Bakhtin has been readily adopted by neo-Marxist criticism, new historicism,women’s studies and cultural theory, and is a welcome complement to the compositionalperspective examined above.13

No matter which Bakhtinian image one may assume, he seems fated to remain a rara avis,at least by Western standards. If we choose to focus on his facet as a narrative theorist andcritic, we immediately notice that he does not care about individual novelists or individualnovels. He never performs systematic close readings of the texts he mentions and, even in thecase of his Dostoevsky book, he always flees from detailed linguistic analysis and fromconcrete falsifiable conclusions.14 The reader gets the impression that Bakhtin’s doctrineinhibits any approach to the uniqueness of a narrative work, promoting instead all kinds ofgeneralizations about the cultural atmosphere in which it is engendered. This procedure isnaturally reminiscent of the working methods of European structuralism, since this schoolprescribed the use of inductive thought in order to discover the abstract structure thatunderlies all specific manifestations, i.e. the langue vs. the parole if we resort to strictlylinguistic terms.15 According to Emerson, Bakhtin “is after the creative force, the genericimpulse that a novelist or a novel embodies. He then uses that force as a prism through whichto focus a philosophy of language . . . or an understanding of a particular cultural period”(1985: 68). Bakhtin’s notorious unsystematism is also proverbial: we have, for instance,Anthony Wall’s statement that “[t]o arrive at our schematic picture of how Bakhtin viewedthe concept of character, it was necessary to paste together passages scattered about indifferent contexts of Bakhtin’s multifarious interests” (1984: 52). Curiously enough, thisquality contributes to aligning him with Henry James rather than to emphasizing theirdivergences: James himself has been considered a very unsystematic critic, and the methodfollowed by James E. Miller to piece together his so-called “theory of fiction” may also bedescribed quite faithfully in Wall’s words.16

The following discussion is placed astride the fields of the Anglo-American theory of thenovel —as broadly characterized in the preceding paragraphs— and of Bakhtinian thought.Two concepts drawn from the former field guide my approach: on the one hand, that ofnarrative control; on the other, that of epistemological restriction. By narrative control I mean

17 His prefaces and notebooks give ample evidence of this painful laborious process; see, forinstance, James 1984: 219-20, and also his Complete Notebooks (James 1987: 91, 95, 123, and passim).

18 The most comprehensive stylistic analysis of this fiction can be found in Chatman 1972.

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the rigorous imposition of form on the materials that caused James to cut out superfluitiesand squeeze the verbal development of his données into the spatial limits set up by hiseditors.17 This, of course, led to the stylistic elaboration that distinguishes his later fiction.18

Since much was to be expressed in few words, the notions of economy, selection andintensity became assets of the new novel espoused by James in opposition to the structuraland stylistic looseness of the Victorian novel. He argued that “[a]rt is essentially selection”(James 1970: 398), and invoked as its “main merit and sign . . . the effort to do thecomplicated thing with a strong brevity and lucidity —to arrive, on behalf of the multiplicity,at a certain science of control” (James 1984: 231). But this idea of narrative control cannot beimplemented arbitrarily. The writer needs a point of reference in order to make coherentdecisions about which material is essential and which dispensable, and, in James’s case, theinstrument that effects this epistemological restriction is the fictional mind in any of itspossible manifestations. Risking a generalization, one could say that the main contributionof Bakhtinian thought to the concept of epistemological restriction in the novel is to havedisclosed for us its vast relativizing potential.

III

To my mind, the first stage of the dialogue to be established between James and Bakhtinconsists in pointing out and assessing their discrepancies, which should not be obscured bythe fact that the same abstract principle appears to animate their respective concepts ofnarrative. To begin with, James is a novelist first and foremost, whereas Bakhtin is a thinkerand a scholar without any known literary activity. For this reason, James’s criticism and,above all, his theoretical statements are simply byproducts of his novel writing and do notenjoy the consistency one would expect from scholarly work. This is obviously the case withhis prefaces to the New York edition of his novels and tales, which arose well after the factas mere introductions to the eighteen volumes of this edition supplying information on theorigin and development of the narratives collected therein. James’s critical and theoreticalwritings have generated, however, contradictory opinions. In his introduction to James’sprefaces, Richard P. Blackmur calls them “the most sustained and I think the most eloquentpiece of literary criticism in existence” (James 1984: xvi), whereas D. D. Todd sets out todemonstrate in a 1976 essay that James never devised anything that could pass for a coherenttheory of fiction. Bakhtin, on the contrary, was a scholar and, though he treated his ideas andwritings in a cavalier unsystematic fashion, his activity was directed towards a single goal andhe ultimately achieved a coherent body of doctrine —albeit through uncoordinated methods,as has been widely recognized.

This difference between James and Bakhtin is just methodological and, to some extent,superficial. There are, however, other divergences —deeply ingrained in their respective

19 This is not at all new; it is widely assumed that expression and perspective go side by side in thenarrative text, and that the former is an excellent index to determine the latter. See, for instance, BorisUspensky’s analysis of naming as a clue to point of view (1973: 27-32), as well as Graciela Reyes’sassertion that “[l]a apropiación expresiva acarrea la apropiación de una perspectiva (espacio-temporal,psicológica, ideológica)” (1984: 139).

20 See Bakhtin (1992a: 328): “As soon as another’s voice, another’s accent, the possibility of another’spoint of view breaks through this play of the symbol . . .”; see also Bakhtin (1986a: 94): “World views,trends, viewpoints, and opinions always have verbal expression.”

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Weltanschauungen— that determine their views on what mechanisms novels deploy to carryout the relativization of represented reality. In this respect, the guiding opposition is thatbetween the individual and the social aspects of human activity. For James, the individual andhis mind is the focus of interest, the organizing pivot on which the structure of his narrativeturns. He believes in character as a unique mental essence and, what is more, he admits thatmany of his works originate in the vision of a finalized character en disponibilité, for whomhe must make up a suitable plot, rather than in a tangle of events or a specific situation (James1984: 42, 47, 48). Bakhtin, on the other hand, has the social as his prime referent. The verybasis of dialogism is the unceasing struggle between self and other, and this precludes theexistence of a self-contained notion of individuality. Nothing exists in itself; nothing canacquire meaning if it is not confronted with otherness. Even the innermost core ofpersonality —i.e. the workings of the mind— “is nothing more than what . . . we call theinternalization of externality, the suffusion of the social into the supposedly personal” (Polan1983: 149). And, of course, this friction between self and other can only literally take placein the realm of society and not in the field of individual psychology. It is precisely along thisline that Bakhtin’s arguments moved in the severe attacks made against Freudian psychologyin the 1927 book Freudianism: A Marxist Critique.

As a result of their respective alignments with the individual and the social sides of humanactivity, James emphasizes matters of perception and understanding in his comments on thenarrative art, relegating the speaker and his discourse to a secondary position; for his part,Bakhtin constantly refers to voices or speakers and very rarely to technicalities of perceptionor comprehension. It is obvious that mental processes primarily occur within the bounds ofindividuality, whereas vocal communication requires an interpersonal context. We know,however, that both aspects are closely connected in the narrative text,19 and so it seemsreasonable to say that both James and Bakhtin approached the same phenomenon ofnarrative mediation from different angles. Furthermore, Bakhtin himself appears to authorizethis interpretation because he often mentions the terms “voice,” “accent,” “world view,”“viewpoint,” and “point of view” as denoting the same idea, or closely related ideas.20

Another area of significant contrast between James and Bakhtin is the delimitation ofcharacter and author, which can be viewed as a specific case of the general oppositionbetween art and life. For James the frontier between both is very clearly marked, and twotypes of evidence can be adduced in support of this basic formalistic attitude. First, Jamesconsistently rejects any breach of the fictional illusion, any encroachment made by externalreality upon the represented world. Since he believes in the existence of a radical

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discontinuity between these realms, he cannot suffer a novelist like Anthony Trollope who“[i]n a digression, a parenthesis or an aside . . . admits that the events he narrates have notreally happened, and that he can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best”; toJames “[s]uch a betrayal of a sacred office” seems “a terrible crime” (James 1970: 379). Hisscrupulous frame of mind abhors any confusion between two spheres of existence he deemsincompatible, though he occasionally indulges in minor inconsistencies that critics havepointed out in the most circumspect of manners (Tilford 1958).

Secondly, his creative method also discriminates rigorously between these two domains.As I will indicate later, James’s narrative art is basically representational or mimetic, but thisquality can only be applied to the earliest stages of the process whereby he obtains his donnéeor novelistic germ. Once his sensibility —that “huge spiderweb of the finest silken threadssuspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue”(James 1970: 388)— has apprehended the initial hint for a narrative work, he refuses todiscover how it developed in reality and subjects its elaboration to a logic of its own, remotefrom “clumsy Life again at her stupid work” (James 1984: 121). In James’s opinion, it is thecentral idea of selection and control that differentiates art from life, since the latter “has nodirect sense whatever for the subject and is capable, luckily for us, of nothing but splendidwaste. Hence the opportunity for the sublime economy of art . . .” (1984: 120). We can seethis process at work in two of his prefaces: when he recalls the composition of The Spoils ofPoynton and when he comments on the treatment of real-life characters in the preface to “TheLesson of the Master” (1984: 119-39 and 217-31, respectively). In the first case, he recountshow he came by the germ for the Spoils at a Christmas Eve dinner and how he endeavouredto close his senses so as to ignore the actual growth of “the excellent situation —excellent . . .if arrested in the right place, that is in the germ” (1984: 122), and thus be able to expand itaccording to his a priori standards of the well-made novel. In the case of the real-lifecharacters, James presents himself as a thorough formalist by asserting that the purpose of artis not to reproduce life but to improve upon life, and so “[i]f the life about us for the lastthirty years refuses warrant for these examples [i.e. his ‘supersubtle fry’: Neil Paraday, RalphLimbert, or Hugh Vereker], then so much the worse for that life” (1984: 222). It would bearduous to find, at the turn of the century, a more final statement of autonomy for thenarrative art.

In Bakhtin’s writings this unequivocal frontier has never been drawn. He rather seems torevel in the existence of an unusual continuity between life and art, real world and fictionalworld, author and hero. This blurring, or even erasure, of frontiers is essential on two counts:on the one hand, because it turns Bakhtinian thought into a perfectly contemporary issue;on the other, because it facilitates the intercourse between the author and his character, i.e.two figures usually confined, under the formalistic dogma, to incompatible modes ofexistence. Bakhtin’s stress on the authorial role, his conviction that “the author is as mucha category of literature as of real life” (Weststeijn 1992: 463), originates in his desire to removeall obstacles lying in the way of a dialogical relationship of author to literary hero, which heconsiders a manifestation of the universal intercourse between the categories of self and other.This erasure of frontiers between life and art is deeply rooted in Bakhtin’s neo-Kantiandoctrine that ethics and axiology should be the cornerstone not only of art but of scholarly

21 In Zylko’s interpretation of Bakhtin, the hero “is independent of the purely artisticact” (1990: 70) and not only pre-exists the literary work in which he appears but also the author’screative effort; the author does not “invent” the hero, but rather “discovers” him in real life.

22 I think it is legitimate to use the more comprehensive expression, because James’s most eloquentessay on this topic bears the general title of “The Art of Fiction” (not “The Art of the Novel”) and theprinciples upheld herein were equally applicable to his tales, novellas and full-length novels, as hedemonstrated in his narrative practice. As to Bakhtin, his denomination roman “novel” is even lessprecise by our standards than the Jamesian reference to “fiction” in the title of his essay.

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activity as well. Bakhtin’s works have been generally considered “an outstanding example ofhow literary theory . . . contributes to an understanding of humanity” (Zylko 1990: 67), andalso of how “problems of literary theory are linked with the basic issues of human life”(Weststeijn 1992: 462).21

The two main divergences between James and Bakhtin just sketched (i.e. individual vs.social, and discontinuity vs. continuity between art and life) will reappear later in connectionwith two important issues. First, the dichotomy between the individual and the social aspectsof human activity will arise again as I examine the means whereby the notion of placementis realized in both authors; secondly, the opposition of discontinuity vs. continuity betweenart and life will become pertinent when discussing the status of the Bakhtinian character asan instrument of narrative relativization. I will try to make clear that these two divergences,important as they are, do not affect the fundamental affinity that exists between James andBakhtin.

IV

Both James and Bakhtin had many an occasion to discourse on the subject of the novel —or,more inclusively, on the subject of the narrative genre.22 James developed his ideas in tunewith the so-called Anglo-American theory of the novel, and even when he held viewsopposed to those of his fellow practitioners or critics (as is the case with Walter Besant) hewillingly remained within this system and engaged his adversaries on easily recognizablegrounds. Bakhtin, on the contrary, offers highly idiosyncratic arguments and definitionswhich, instead of developing within a given context, seem to create their own frame ofreference, their own tradition, and at the same time provoke diametrically opposed reactions.There is one point, however, on which agreement can be taken for granted: the novel,whatever its limits and nature, is an artistic genre and should be respected as such. For bothauthors, the novel is not sheer entertainment or a vehicle for pure moralizing, but a trueartistic work on an equal footing —to say the least— with poetry. James argues that “fictionis one of the fine arts, deserving in its turn of all the honours and emoluments that havehitherto been reserved for the successful profession of music, poetry, painting, architecture”(1970: 380), and insists that “the novel seems to me the most magnificent form of art”(1970: 402). It should be pointed out that James’s protestations are not to be viewed as a meredisplay of wishful thinking. One can actually describe his novelistic career as a succession of

23 A full bibliographical account of James’s critical works can be found in Veeder and Griffin, eds.1986: 491-502.

24 See James 1984: 135, where James explains his invention of the Moreen family in “The Pupil.”

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efforts to endow the narrative genre with an artistic status and a rigorous poetics based onthe ideas of narrative control and epistemological restriction mentioned above. Bakhtinexpressed like opinions very often. We have for instance his constant use of the adjective“artistic” when offering definitions of the novel (Bakhtin 1992a: 262, 300, 361, 415, andpassim), as well as his antagonism against what Pomorska calls “the outdated idea . . . that thenovel, in contradistinction to the organized structure of poetry, represents a ‘randomness’of structure and is concerned primarily with a ‘message’” (Pomorska 1978: 381). In his essay“Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin formulates the methodological dilemma of stylisticsconcerning the artistic status of the novel: either this genre is definitively dismissed from thearea focused by stylistics due to its lack of structural interest, or this discipline has to modifyits methods and assumptions as to what kind of discourse merits close study (1992a: 267).Naturally, this dilemma was solved long time ago by the advances of formalism,structuralism, and the contributions of the Anglo-American theory of the novelistic genre.

James articulated the main body of his early opinions on the novel in his much quotedessay “The Art of Fiction” (1884). He also aired maturer views in his prefaces to the NewYork edition of his novels and tales and in countless reviews and studies of contemporarynovelists.23 But “The Art of Fiction” remains his programmatic statement on the narrativegenre, and the straightforwardness of its theoretical message is not marred by theresponsibilities of the reviewer towards the work under scrutiny —either his own work inthe prefaces or somebody else’s in his reviews. In this essay, he responds to a homonymouslecture delivered by Walter Besant, and its consequent polemical, rather than scientific, toneseems to exclude the existence of comprehensive definitions, since the author confines histask to commenting on selected aspects of the art of fiction in order to neutralize WalterBesant’s arguments.

According to this essay, the main features of the narrative genre are its mimetic orrepresentational purpose and the organic quality of the finished product, i.e. the narrativework. As regards the first of these features, James is categorical. He staunchly maintains that“[t]he only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life”(1970: 378) and also that a “novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impressionof life” (1970: 384). In his opinion, the supreme virtue of a narrative work amounts to its “airof reality (solidity of specification)” (1970: 390) and he unabashedly likens the novelist’s taskto that of the historian not only because their respective callings are equally serious but alsoby reason of the fact that “the novel is history” and “must speak with assurance, with thetone of the historian” (1970: 379). Obviously, the close relation that James establishesbetween fiction and history can be interpreted as part of his attempt at bestowingrespectability on the former.

This over-mimetic view of the novel is not, however, free from massive reservation. Onthe one hand, James is easily carried away by the sense of reality given off by his charactersand by the situations he makes up for them;24 but, on the other, he refuses to let his données

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grow as they would in “clumsy Life,” and prefers to deal with them in isolation according tohis compositional logic. Not only does he decline to accommodate his narration to the wayin which the donnée for The Spoils of Poynton developed in actuality, or to give up his“supersubtle fry” (James 1984: 221) in favour of true-to-life characters, but he even sets up abold dichotomy with reference to the apparitions in “The Turn of the Screw.” For him, thereare “true” ghosts and “artistic” ghosts and, as one can expect, both types are incompatible.This is how James puts the matter in the preface to “The Turn of the Screw”:

I had to decide in fine between having my apparitions correct and having my story “good”—that is producing my impression of the dreadful, my designed horror. Good ghosts, speakingby book, make poor subjects, and it was clear that from the first my hovering prowlingblighting presences, my pair of abnormal agents, would have to depart altogether from therules . . . so that, briefly, I cast my lot with pure romance, the appearances conforming to thetrue type being so little romantic. (1984: 174-75)

We can note here how he manipulates his materials to arrive at a preconceived narrativeeffect, which could be spoilt by adjustment to real life standards —or rather to acceptedconventions for preternatural phenomena. He opposes the ideas of “having my apparitionscorrect,” “[g]ood ghosts” and “true type” to those of “having my story ‘good,’” “producingmy impression,” “my designed horror” and “depart . . . from the rules.” On the one hand,we have the values derived from the observance of conventionalized principles, and, on theother, the necessity of ignoring these values in order to attain an artistic effect. Suchcontradictions between mimetic and formalistic procedures are very common in James’swritings. One could venture to explain them as the result of an evolution from the mimeticideas exhibited in “The Art of Fiction” (1884) to the obdurate formalism of the prefaces(1907-09), but the scope of this essay does not leave space for a detailed verification of thishypothesis.

The second central feature of the narrative genre is the organic character of the verbalwork of art. In “The Art of Fiction,” James adheres —with frequent inconsistencies— to theorganic doctrine of literary creation, and consequently he assumes that novels develop fromrepresentational germs in the same way as plants grow from seeds, without any mechanisticor external imposition of form and with a strong emphasis on the harmonious arrangementof parts. For him, a “novel is 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 issomething of the other parts” (1970: 392). This conception of the narrative work leads himto contemplate the novel as a whole and not as a mere combination of detachable parts, andto argue, in full organic vein, that

[t]his sense of the story being the idea, the starting-point, of the novel, is the only one that Isee in which it can be spoken of as something different from its organic whole; and since inproportion as the work is successful the idea permeates and penetrates it, informs and animatesit, so that every word and every punctuation-point contribute directly to the expression, inthat proportion do we lose our sense of the story being a blade which may be drawn more orless out of its sheath. (1970: 400)

25 James’s notebooks are again irrefutable proof that his theoretical statements were put intopractice in his creative task.

26 See the preface to “The Author of Beltraffio”: “The merit of the thing is in the feat, once more,of the transfusion; the receptacle (of form) being so exiguous, the brevity imposed so great. I undertookthe brevity, so often undertaken on a like scale before, and again arrived at it by the innumerablerepeated chemical reductions and condensations that tend to make of the very short story, as I risk againnoting, one of the costliest, even if, like the hard, shining sonnet, one of the most indestructible,forms of composition in general use” (James 1984: 239-40, my italics); this is hardly the discourse atrue organicist would use to describe the creative process. For a full discussion of this topic, seeÁlvarez Amorós 1993.

27 “The term in current usage that would correspond best to Bakhtin’s aim probably is pragmatics,and one could say without exaggeration that Bakhtin is the modern founder of this discipline”(Todorov 1984: 24); see also Trevor Pateman 1989.

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This idea of organicism is complemented, quite naturally, with that of self-generation, for,in James’s opinion, “the subject just noted [i.e. the donnée] expresses itself” (James 1984: 248).The adoption of this metaphor of the creative process is, however, beset with contradictions.For James, the two essential components of the narrative work are the donnée orrepresentational germ and the artistic execution of this donnée. He grants the novelist arelative freedom in selecting this germ from his flux of experience, but, inflexible as to thequality and conscientiousness of the execution, he asserts that “[t]he execution belongs to theauthor alone; it is what is most personal to him, and we measure him by that” (James1970: 385).25 Of course, this view of the creative process is antagonistic towards the idea ofspontaneous self-generation, but, surprisingly enough, one can find both side by side in “TheArt of Fiction” and later in the prefaces, particularly when he recalls the compositionalcontortions to which he submitted his subject in order to accommodate it within apreviously given word limit or within the accepted confines of the short story.26

One last point in James’s essay is his firm opposition of artistic qualities to mereentertaining or moralizing purposes in the narrative genre. He stands against the notion that“[l]iterature should be either instructive or amusing,” and he believes that “there is in manyminds an impression that these artistic preoccupations, the search for form, contribute toneither end, interfere indeed with both” (1970: 381). This is obviously another attempt atimparting artistic prestige to the narrative work, but James becomes even more explicittowards the end of his essay. Having stated that a novel is like a picture, he wonders if “apicture can be moral or immoral” (1970: 404) and, in a typically formalistic delimitation ofart and ethics, he insists that “questions of art are questions . . . of execution; questions ofmorality are quite another affair, and will you [Walter Besant] not let us see how it is thatyou find it so easy to mix them up?” (1970: 405). It is easy to see the sharp contrast betweenthis aseptic position and Bakhtin’s emphasis on the axiology and utilitarianism of art.

After having skimmed over the Jamesian conception of the narrative work, Bakhtin’sideas on the same issue emerge as strikingly different. Instead of drawing attention to therepresentational or organic nature of narrative, he emphasizes the linguistic and vocal sideof this phenomenon, though he seldom gives precise analyses in support of his views, as Iindicated above. Bakhtin is usually considered the founder of pragmatics and the creator ofthe sociolinguistic study of narrative,27 and, in accordance with his sociological background,

28 For a detailed account of this process, see Kershner 1986.

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he defines the novel “as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity oflanguages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (1992a: 262), and alsoas “an artistically organized system for bringing different languages in contact with one another”(1992a: 361, Bakhtin’s italics). At least two aspects of these definitions deserve commentary.First of all, the recurrence of the adjective “artistic,” which was pointed out as evidence ofBakhtin’s high opinion about the aesthetic value of narrative. Secondly, the bewildering anti-canonicity of these definitions to be discussed in more detail later: a novel is anything thatfulfils the condition of allowing the artistic interaction of a variety of registers and languages,and, as will be seen below, it need not even be a prose work, let alone an instance of what wemay recognize as a classical Western novel.

It is a basic tenet of sociolinguistics that languages are not homogeneous either from asocial or a spatial perspective; they are internally stratified into dialects, professional jargons,languages of generations, etc. Bakhtin argues that the novel’s main distinctive feature isprecisely its capacity to incorporate this linguistic multifariousness into its structure, and thusbecome a “microcosm of heteroglossia” (1992a: 411), i.e. the locus of an unceasingconfrontation of languages and voices. For him, “the novel must represent all the social andideological voices of its era, that is, all the era’s languages that have any claim to beingsignificant” (1992a: 411). Characters in the novel possess their own distinctive languages thatenter into dialogue with one another and also with the authorial voice, as if they were on thesame ontological plane. This is one of the foundations of Bakhtinian general relativism: sinceevery language embodies a belief system or Weltanschauung and since one can only knowone’s own language as it reflects and refracts in someone else’s speaking habits, one cannotlook at the world and comprehend it from an absolute vantage point, but in close relationto, and dependence on, the concept of otherness. Of course, if a narrative work had to bementioned to exemplify this process, it would be Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a YoungMan (1916), in which intellectual maturity is explicitly reached by constant confrontationwith the language of the other.28

Given that the narrative work is a system of different languages, it is pointless to analyzethe style of a novelist or of a particular novel: by definition neither one nor the other havea single style. According to Bakhtin, “the author utilizes now one language, now another, inorder to avoid giving himself up wholly to either of them” (1992a: 314). There is no suchthing as the style of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or of Ulysses —not even of HardTimes or The Mill on the Floss, two less obvious cases— but rather a linguistic multiplicity thatveils the novelist’s stylistic face, much to the contrary of what happens in lyrical poetry. Inthe same way as the novel cannot be said to have one single language or style, it is verydifficult to pin down the precise nature of the genre to which it gives its name. Although weintuitively refer to the narrative genre, and this denomination provides us with a sufficientlyoperative frame of reference, when it comes to a strict scientific definition we find that thenovel “is denied any primary means for verbally appropriating reality, that it has noapproach of its own, and therefore requires the help of other genres to reprocess reality”(Bakhtin 1992a: 321). So narrative appears to be a kind of composite genre —and the Modernist

29 In “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” Bakhtin comments on the structuralflexibility of the novel to the effect that “[y]ou may publish your own real-life diary and call it anovel; under the same label you may publish a packet of business documents, personal letters . . .”(1992b: 161).

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novel supplies many an excellent example— or, in other words, a “secondary syncreticunification of other seemingly primary verbal genres” (Bakhtin 1992a: 321),29 lacking inintrinsic identity and thus lending itself very well to the principle of narrative relativism, toa “certain linguistic homelessness . . . which no longer possesses a sacrosant and unitarylinguistic medium for containing ideological thought” (Bakhtin 1992a: 367).

While James concerned himself with mimesis and the representation of life in thenarrative work, while he advised his fellow novelists to “select none but the richest” donnéesamong a variety of them (James 1970: 396), Bakhtin can only be said to have a single generalsubject, the speaker and his discourse. He insists that plot, situation, and character —eithertaken en disponibilité from life or developed according to a strict compositional logic— aresubordinated to the representation of linguistic variety in narrative discourse, and it isprecisely in this way that one can interpret the usual dictum that the only protagonist of themodern novel is its language —or rather its languages, if we adhere to Bakhtin’s view of thisphenomenon. For him, the “novelistic plot must organize the exposure of social languagesand ideologies” (Bakhtin 1992a: 365), and this exposure becomes the universal and only validdonnée of narrative discourse. Consequently, he rejects the “novel of pure adventure,”because what he calls “naked plot” or “brute adventure” cannot aspire to be the “organizingforce in a novel” (1992a: 390), but rather a secondary means to the end of representing asystem of languages and voices in unresolved conflict. The novel is, for Bakhtin, the mostsubversive of genres, its principal purpose being the exposure of conventionality through therelativization of all social practices as they are couched in their respective languages andregisters.

By traditional Western criteria, this Bakhtinian conception of the novel seems ratherextravagant, particularly if we look at it in its temporal context, that is, in the context of thethirties, when the Anglo-American theory of the novel was dominated by James —asinterpreted by Beach and Lubbock— and the Modernist ideal of the dramatic novel. It iscurious to note that Bakhtin never uses what we have learned to regard as basic assumptionsabout this genre such as “prose work,” “fictional,” “presence of plot, however tenuous”“length between 60-70,000 words and 200,000,” and so on. In addition to this, he exemplifieshis theoretical inferences by means of the most unexpected and exotic texts, which we canhardly identify either with novels or even with shorter narrative works. This uncertainty asto whether Bakhtin coincided with our current idea of the novel when he used the termroman has originated two divergent critical positions: those who think Bakhtin wasinconsistent and rather capricious in his formulations, and those who believe he was perfectlycoherent and thus blame our Western centredness for failing to read him in his own culturaland intellectual context.

The concept of the novel is so crucial to Bakhtin that, in Todorov’s opinion, “it escapeshis own rationality” and becomes “an attachment of a primarily affective nature, that does

30 Schlegel states, for instance, that the novel is “a romantic book, a romantic composition, whereall the forms and all the genres are mixed and interwoven,” qtd. in Todorov 1984: 86 (my italics).

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not bother about the reasons of its fixation”; it is precisely for this reason that he censuresthe “not very coherent, and ultimately irrational, character of Bakhtin’s description of thegenre of the novel” (Todorov 1984: 425 and 86, respectively). Similarly Morson qualifies thisgenre as no more than “a ‘valorized category’” applicable “to whatever embodies the world-view Baxtin approves of” (1978: 425); hence its unstableness and relativism. Todorov arguesthat Bakhtin’s idea of this genre arises from an uncritical and inorganic borrowing of theRomantic conception of the novel held by Goethe, Hegel, or Friedrich Schlegel, and hequotes the latter to evince that many features of the Bakhtinian novel can be traced back tothe end of the eighteenth century.30 From this perspective, Bakhtin’s view of the novel is notso original or revolutionary as we have been let to think; it is rather a poorly digestedappropriation of earlier notions, and this fact —and not the workings of a subversive will—might explain its almost perverse indetermination, which, in Holquist’s witty reductio adabsurdum, does allow us to call The Waste Land “a distinguished novel of the Modernistperiod” (1992: xxviii), simply because it is an eminent example of heteroglossia. Quitepossibly, Bakhtin’s ambivalent views on narrative might have been formed under the anti-canonical influence of the nineteenth-century Russian novel. On the one hand, there is thefiction by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, midway between the novel proper and the philosophicalor historical treatise, and, on the other, we have a progressive rejection of these “large loosebaggy monsters” (James 1984: 84) in favour of more concentrated narrative products likethose cherished by James himself. It seems reasonable to say, as Morson has suggested, thatBakhtin’s conception of the novel “implicitly constitutes a retrospective justification ofRussian literature,” and would sound “less idiosyncratic to a Russian audience than to aWestern one” (1978: 424).

There is, however, another critical position which makes an effort to assume Bakhtin’scultural background before judging his concept of the novel. Those who, in order to readBakhtin, try to overcome their a priori cultural notions —for instance, a novel is a prosefiction in the range of 60-70,000 to 200,000 words— do not need to blame him for notconforming to these notions. This is the course taken by Hirschkop, who draws attentionto the fact that the generic boundaries between poetry, narrative, drama, expository prose,etc. are conventional constructs that can be changed simply by applying new criteria(1986: 78). And this is precisely what Bakhtin does when he resorts to linguistic multiplicityto define the novel, instead of adhering to alternative standards. It should be noted, however,that controversy over the novelistic or non-novelistic nature of a specific work does onlyextend to doubtful border-line cases. There is a common core of novelness that practicallypermits critical discussion in general and the existence of this essay in particular.

In his eagerness to turn the novel into the locus of linguistic diversity, Bakhtin endangersthe conceptual definiteness of literature. The novel absorbs all genres —whether literary ornot— and all types of social registers into its structure, and thus erases frontiers which weredeemed permanent. Moreover, it foregrounds this multiplicity which other genres, such aslyric poetry, have usually sought to suppress. Bakhtin’s conception of the novel is so wide

31 This second consciousness of which Emerson speaks is essential in any meaning-making process.For instance, “Penelope,” the last episode of Ulysses, exhibits the verbal unfolding of a singleunmediated consciousness and is doubtlessly one of the most original literary pieces of the twentiethcentury, but its compositional value and its density of meaning are immeasurably lower than anyfragment from, say, “Calypso” or “Nausicaa,” in which several consciousnesses contend by paradingtheir characteristic languages, or mind-styles. Viewed from this relational perspective, and isolated

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that it covers a vast number of texts from antiquity to our day and age, and this, accordingto Holquist, is a great advantage because it allows him, more than anyone else, to see thenovel as continually new (1992: xxvii). In order to understand Bakhtin’s views, we shouldstop thinking of the novel as a literary product —a static ergon— or even as a genre in thesense of a collection of such products. “Novel” is rather the denomination Bakhtin appliesto “whatever force is at work within a given literary system to reveal the limits, the artificialconstraints of the system” (Holquist 1992: xxxi). This is precisely the reason why the idea ofthe novel is so unstable and relative: because it will be one thing or another according to thedifferent periods or systems whose limits or conventions must be exposed and renewed.

V

Before focusing on how James and Bakhtin approach the concept of narrative relativizationfrom a concrete textual angle, it seems convenient to define this phenomenon and discuss itsphilosophical bases given its essential importance in the development of this paper. Therelativization of reality in the narrative genre is just a consequence of the relational natureof the self, which can only be conceived as a function of the other and never in solipsisticisolation. This emphasis on the relational status of the self certainly smacks of structuralismand, if transferred to the field of linguistics, at once invokes a typically Saussurean view oflanguage. There are, however, ample discrepancies. While Saussure consistently opposed thenotion of system to that of its concrete realization, and confined the meaning-making processto the play of relations and differences within the system itself, Bakhtin pragmatizes linguisticthought by enlarging the limits of this process. For him, relations occur not only within anabstract langue, but, more importantly, among the actual users of the code, and this isprecisely the basis of his linguistics of the utterance or translinguistics —as opposed to thelinguistics of the sentence— and the main disagreement with structuralist thought.

It is not hard to realize that the relational conception of the self —which lies at the heartof Bakhtinian thought— is highly congruous with the methods employed by Modernistnarrative to perceive and represent fictional reality by means of shifting fields of referencedivested of absolute authority. Nothing can be known in itself, from within, and this basictenet has been differently formulated by Bakhtin’s interpreters. According to Holquist, “[a]nevent cannot be wholly known, cannot be seen, from inside its own unfolding as an event”(1990: 31), whereas Emerson asserts that “we cannot form authoritative images of ourselvesfrom within,” that “the very fact of expression . . . requires a second consciousness to supplyboundaries and impose external integrity” (1985: 70).31 Bakhtin’s philosophy of literature is

from the preceding episodes, “Penelope” is an uninteresting monological text, something whichcannot be said of “Calypso” or “Nausicaa,” even in isolation. “Penelope,” of course, recovers itsundeniable polyphonic nature when read as an organic part of Ulysses.

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thus founded on a principle which, worded in a homely way, runs “it always takes at leasttwo to make one.” But this general principle of outsideness is occasionally made explicit, asfor instance in his celebrated “Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff”(Bakhtin 1986b). Here Bakhtin takes culture as the arena of exotopy and formulates theseeming paradox that “[i]n order to understand [a foreign culture], it is immensely importantfor the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creativeunderstanding —in time, in space, in culture,” because “outsideness is a most powerful factorin understanding” and “[i]t is only in the eyes of another culture that foreign culture revealsitself fully and profoundly” (1986b: 7). In this way, Bakhtin flies in the face of the common-sense notion that, in order to comprehend a foreign culture, we must forget our own mentalhabits and, immersing ourselves in this foreign culture, look at the world through new eyes.This, for Bakhtin, “would merely be duplication and would not entail anything new orenriching” (1986b: 7). Naturally, his injunction that cultural differences must be preservedat all costs as the best way to mutual understanding and his position against an absolutecultural absorption place him at the forefront of certain branches of cultural studies floweringnowadays in countries with a deep-seated racial diversity. His sympathy towards culturalcreolization is apparent in his statement that “verbal-ideological decentering will occur onlywhen a national culture loses its sealed-off and self-sufficient character, when it becomesconscious of itself as only one among other cultures and languages” (1992a: 370). Obviously,to be confronted from the outside with an unabsorbed foreign culture gives the observer a“surplus of seeing,” in Bakhtinian phrase, a wider frame of reference that throws into reliefa whole set of cultural automatisms invisible to those fully identified with this culture.Needless to say, the notion of cultural outsideness, or exotopy, would be an excellentmethodological guideline to help us to examine Henry James’s tales of two cultures, that is,those narratives in which there is a confrontation between European and American world-views. How James apprehended the dialogue between Europe and America, how he himselfrealized it in his works, how the surplus of seeing generated by exotopy contributes tomutual understanding —all of these questions can certainly benefit from a Bakhtinian reading.But this is obviously the subject for another piece of research.

The idea of outsideness is also essential if we are to understand the intricacies of artisticcreation and artistic apprehension. As far as the narrative genre is concerned, Todorovconsiders the existence of two successive phases in every creative act: first, an empatheticstage wherein the author identifies himself with his character and looks at the world throughthe latter’s eyes; second, a process of detachment that leads the author to occupy his originalposition vis-à-vis his fictional materials, since, as has been noted, full and permanentidentification leaves no space for a differential of perspective (Todorov 1984: 99). This processof detachment should not be absolute either. In order to keep a true two-way dialoguebetween author and character, the surplus of seeing of the former with respect to the lattershould not be excessive, for this circumstance would contribute to the finalization and

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closure of character. It is precisely when we come to deal with this kind of dialogue that theerasure of frontiers between art and life examined above acquires full significance. Obviously,these two phases are also necessary in the act of apprehension: understanding should not befull empathy, but a relational process that combines identification with estrangement in orderto obtain a reasonable surplus of seeing, a play of differences that creates meaningfulness. Themethod is, of course, analogous to that of understanding a foreign culture.

The notion of outsideness —and the surplus of seeing originated by it— is inseparablefrom the dialectic between self and other already mentioned as the neo-Kantian basis ofBakhtinian philosophy. This relation, however, is not at heart dialectical but dialogical. Theaim of dialectic thought is to reach a static synthesis out of contradictory positions and, sinceBakhtin abhors anything definitive or static, his ideal is to preserve contradictionsperpetually, as remote as possible from a final unification, and it is in this sense that he speaksof “Hegel’s monological dialectic” (qtd. in Todorov 1984: 104). At the very moment stasis isreached or identification obtained, the surplus of seeing disappears and flat empathy reignssupreme. For Bakhtin, nothing is in itself and, therefore, existence can only be defined as theso-called event of “co-being” (Holquist 1990: 25 and 41): the endless reciprocal relationbetween self and other.

In the narrative genre, the pivot of this relation is, of course, the character. He entersinto dialogue with the author, but also with the fictional world to which he belongs and withother characters. It is only by this continuous friction that all of them can exist, but at thecost of losing their essentiality in a vast web of interdependence and of becoming relativeentities. Both James and Bakhtin emphasize the concept of character, the former by makinghis characters the basis of his creative method to the detriment of action or adventure, thelatter by turning them into the key figures of polyphony in the narrative genre. Charactercan be thus considered the common denominator of James and Bakhtin, the point ofconvergence of their respective —and very different— methods of relativizing therepresentation of reality. Character for James is basically a psychological essence, whereas forBakhtin this essence is, by definition, impossible, since consciousness is not unique and self-contained but relational and interactive. Bakhtinian character is never finalized or objectifiedby the author; it rather achieves a notable degree of emancipation resulting from the surplusof seeing he has obtained at the author’s expense.

“No self, not even our own, can be controlled or created from within; we can only becompleted from without,” says Emerson paraphrasing Bakhtin (1985: 74). And, naturallyenough, this question leads to a discussion of the representation of death in literature, sincethe relationship of self and other is made impossible by the annihilation of consciousness.Bakhtin establishes a fundamental difference between Tolstoy’s author-centred world andDostoevsky’s character-centred world, and argues that, while in Tolstoy death consummatespersonality because the surplus of seeing is largely in favour of the author, in Dostoevskydeath accomplishes nothing because the cessation of consciousness on the part of the dyingcharacter prevents the continuation of dialogue. The Tolstoyan surplus of seeing with respectto character is immense; in fact, it is larger than the surplus anyone can enjoy in ordinary life.This means that the author knows more about the character than the character himself, andso the former can cross the frontier between life and death without the collaboration of the

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latter. This is not the case in Dostoevsky. Since the characters of his narratives are notobjectified by the author’s superior knowledge, death cannot be apprehended in an authentictwo-way dialogue and remains an event only for the other not for the self, whoseconsciousness is on the way to extinction (Emerson 1985: 74).

In order to close these remarks on the Bakhtinian notion of relativism, I would like tolay emphasis on the ethical implications of outsideness and the related idea of dialoguebetween self and other. If philosophy and literary theory must be useful and deal with humanissues, dialogism is best suited to this task for two reasons: on the one hand, because it tendsto erase the conventional boundaries between art and life; on the other, because it promotesa feeling of “scientific” humility based on the conviction that nothing exists in itself andeverything needs the collaboration of otherness in order to occur. The abolition of mentalsolipsism that follows from Bakhtinian thought is indeed a large contribution towards anethics of art founded on human solidarity.

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Up to this point I have examined the master discrepancies between James and Bakhtin—which will re-emerge presently— and have argued that they are only different methods ofmanifesting the same abstract principle; I have briefly reconstructed their respective viewson the narrative genre, indicating contradictions and inconsistencies, and hypothesizing theirprobable sources; finally, I have inquired into Bakhtin’s notion of outsideness and into itsgenerating force —the perpetual and relativizing dialogue between self and other. In thissection I propose to explain how James articulated the idea of Bakhtinian relativism in hisnarrative works by means of the instruments and notions he himself developed or had at hisdisposal within the Anglo-American literary tradition. The first step in this direction will beto introduce the so-called “law of placement” and assess its bearing on the subject in hand.

The true theoretical core of this paper and the common ground for both James andBakhtin in questions of narrative relativization is the law of placement. It is founded on theunceasing dialogue between self and other, on the ontological dependence of the former onthe latter, and establishes that every phenomenon “is perceived from a unique position” andso that “the meaning of whatever is observed is shaped by the place from which it isperceived” (Holquist 1990: 21). Of course, the application of the law of placement to the fieldof narrative technique plays havoc with traditional omniscience, i.e. with the belief thatfictional reality can be apprehended from an abstract, universal, inaccessible frame ofreference. The perception of any object is essentially incomplete unless the conditions ofobservation are specifically stated, unless the self is defined from without in relation tootherness; and if these external conditions are modified the self will change accordingly,because it is nothing substantial in itself, only a relational notion. Obviously the so-calledinternal point of view, which is all-pervasive in Modernist fiction, is simply the projectionof the law of placement onto the structure of the narrative text. The scientific revolution thatcontextualized the formulation of the law of placement and its application to the humanitieswas briefly touched upon at the beginning of this essay. Newtonian physics set up a universal

32 Bakhtin’s theory of the utterance as a unit of translinguistics, or pragmatics, is formulated in“The Problem of Speech Genres” (1986a).

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standard —a sort of god-like perspective— that was valid to describe all phenomena, and thusthings were right or wrong according to this absolute scheme. After Einstein, the descriptionof every phenomenon must state from what point of view, among many, it has been made,and the phenomenon in question will be actually different according to the selected point ofview.

Bakhtinian thought is heavily influenced by the situatedness of all experience. He is, forinstance, the remote founder of pragmatics, precisely as a reaction against the abstractness andsystematism of structural linguistics. He claims that “[e]very discourse has its own selfish andbiased propietor; there are no words with meanings shared by all, no words ‘belonging to noone’” (1992a: 401), and emphasizes the “social concreteness of living discourse, as well as itsrelativity” (1992a: 331). For him, language cannot be studied in itself, but only as a functionof its specific users, in an identifiable context, and with reference to a concrete situation. Ifthese elements change, the language will be an entirely different thing, because no word isneutral, i.e. devoid of professional, ideological, generic, or contentual overtones. The parole,dismissed by Saussure as an object unfit for scientific study, is, according to Bakhtin, the onlycomponent of language that merits analysis on account of its rootedness in a specificsituation.32

From a critical angle, this same relativistic thrust of Bakhtin’s philosophy is manifestedin his celebrated study “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism:Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel” (1986c). When discussing Goethe’s fictionalworlds, he stresses that “there are [in them] no events, plots, or temporal motifs that are notrelated in an essential way to the particular spatial place of their occurrence, that could occuranywhere or nowhere” (1986c: 42), and, in addition to this, he sets up man as the basicstandard for fictional evaluation. This ideal of man as homo mensura leads him to dislike theabstract notion of locality when separated from human activities or needs, and to state that“the locality can be understood only from the standpoint of man the builder” (Bakhtin 1986c:35). Bakhtin’s craving for a specific yardstick against which to measure and comprehend allexperience, either physical or spiritual, is also formulated in theological terms by Emerson.In the mystery of incarnation she finds proof that abstract authority, however great orabsolute, is unknowable unless concretely embodied and subjected to the law of placement.In this way, Christ becomes what Emerson calls “a symbol of the necessity for enfleshment”of all experience (1985: 71). Accordingly, she stresses the fact that soul and body areinseparable “not because the body has a soul but because souls must have bodies” (Emerson1985: 72).

Of all literary genres, the law of placement can be best realized in the novel because ofits highly indirect nature, which means that its internal structure of fictional addressers andaddressees can reach a considerable degree of complication. Whereas the author of lyricalpoetry is supposed to wear a very thin mask, or no mask at all, and characters in drama areleft to speak out on the stage with a minimum of mediation, the novelist has a whole gamut

33 Some of these figures are the implied author, several narrators placed on different levels,focalizers, arrangers, characters, narratees, and implied readers.

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of discursive figures at his disposal to play one against the other,33 creating variousperspectives, counter-perspectives, alternative exotopies, surpluses of seeing, and hiding hisauthorial face in the process. “The novelistic perception of the world is deeply relativistic,”says Morson (1986: 419), and this relativization is precisely achieved by holding the fictionalworld at several removes from the ultimate interpreter —the reader— and interposingsuccessive screens between them, each with its own relativizing potential. The result is theabsence of an unequivocal reality shaped a priori with reference to an abstract system ofcoordinates.

The law of placement can be realized differently in the narrative genre according tovarious frames of mind or Weltanschauungen, as is the case with James and Bakhtin; itremains, however, a fundamental principle shared by both. In the preceding section I referredto the character as the basic area of coincidence between them and as their prime relativizinginstrument; needless to say, character also counts as the textual vehicle for the law ofplacement. I have already spoken of James’s character-oriented inventio, of Bakhtin’s erasureof frontiers between art and life, or, in other words, between character and author, and ofthe correlation between these two figures as a specific case of the general dialogue betweenself and other. But we can also come across interpretations of the Bakhtinian character thatcould be easily viewed as purely Jamesian. Wall, for instance, argues that Bakhtincontemplates character as “essentially the literary incarnation of a field of vision,” and,further on, he claims that “[c]haracters can also be the organizational centre of the novel”(Wall 1984: 47 and 48, respectively). It is surprising to realize the coincidence of the twofunctions attributed by Wall to the Bakhtinian character with the two guiding conceptsdrawn from the Anglo-American theory of the novel in the initial paragraphs of this essay,and with James’s reasons for his interest in a theory of compositional centres to be mentionedlater. Whereas the fact that characters stand as organizational centres of narrative works linksup directly with the notion of narrative control and the rejection of inorganic superfluities,the embodiment of a field of vision in a character implies the existence of an epistemologicallimitation commensurate with the perceptive powers of this character —not only physical(i.e. spatio-temporal) but also ideological and psychological. I will elaborate on this below,when dealing with James’s compositional centres as instruments of relativization.

A token of the importance of character in Bakhtinian literary theory is the longmonograph “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” (1990b) devoted to this figure in theearly twenties. Here Bakhtin presents his idea of character and, in a memorable initial sectioncalled “The Problem of the Author’s Relationship to the Hero,” casts doubt on thetraditional frontier between life and art by arguing in favour of the existence of a true non-metaphorical dialogue between author and character as one aspect of the general dialoguebetween self and other. This is not the place to expound Bakhtin’s theory of character atlength, but it is worth drawing attention to two points in particular: first, to the compromisereached by Bakhtin between positivistic and formalistic views of character; second, to hisclassification of character and the illuminating links that can be established between his

34 For a percipient analysis of the differences between the views of character respectively held byBakhtin in his essay “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” (1990b) and by Seymour Chatman(1983), see Don Bialostosky (1983). Chatman liberates character from the Aristotelian bondage toaction, but, as he confines him to the story and the narrator and narratee to the discourse, hesubordinates the former to the latter since he does not envisage the existence of a common field inwhich they can effectively enter into dialogue and confrontation. Bakhtin, on the contrary, nevercared much for this formalistic differentiation of levels (e.g. story vs. discourse), or for discoursefigures such as the narrator, but rather saw author and hero as occupying dialogical positions onshared grounds.

35 Please note that in the following discussion I give the term “character” between invertedcommas only when it translates Bakhtin’s denomination for a particular type of novelistic hero; thesame term without inverted commas retains its ordinary meaning.

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categories of confessional and autobiographical hero and those of consonant and dissonantnarration, respectively, as put forward by Dorrit Cohn within the Anglo-American theoryof the novel in the late seventies.

Bakhtin rejects both the idea that characters can be looked at “as remnants of a writer’spast, as mere appendages to his thought” (Wall 1984: 42), and also the excesses committed byformalists and structuralists when they claim —in almost Aristotelian fashion— that characteris simply a precipitate from event or, more technically, the specific agent of a particularcategory of actions, absolutely devoid of personality or individuality in isolation from theseactions. It is true that, for Bakhtin, the hero enjoys what Zylko terms “extra-aestheticexistence,” because “the author does not invent or contrive his or her hero, but finds ordiscovers him or her in reality” (1990: 71-72). This does not entail, however, an unqualifiedsupport of the “autobiographical” view of character held by positivists; it is rather indicativeof Bakhtin’s consistent movement towards emphasizing, by all the means at his disposal, theontological continuity between the realms of author and hero. Neither does he share theformalists’ disregard for character as a simple by-product of action; instead he turns him intoone of the interlocutors who participate in the great novelistic dialogue on the same footingas the author, particularly in what he calls the Dostoevskian or polyphonic novel, i.e. thekind of novel in which characters have become emancipated from the author’s monologicalinfluence through the confrontation and relativization of voices, registers, styles, socialdialects, etc.34

Bakhtin’s classification of character into categories such as confessional hero,autobiographical hero, lyric hero, “character” (whether classical or romantic),35 type, andhagiographical hero (1990b: 138-87) immediately recalls Borges’s transcription of a zoologicaltaxonomy attributed to a Chinese encyclopaedia: neither of these classifications is guided bywhat we usually assume to be coherent criteria. Nevertheless, it seems worthwhile toexamine the two first categories in the light of the distinction between consonant anddissonant narration (Cohn 1978: 145-61). For Bakhtin, the presence of a confessional hero ina narrative work implies the exclusion of the other, the self-objectification of the “I,” and,more importantly, the fusion of character and author in the pure form of confession(1990b: 138-50). This fusion can be likened to the full identification of narrator and character—or, in other words, of “the reporting self and the experiencing self” (Riquelme 1983: 100)—

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described by Cohn for first-person consonant narratives, in which the temporal gap betweenthese two figures is almost non-existent.

In works of this type the reporting self tends to be obliterated: there is no dialogicalconfrontation between narrator and character, no privileged judgement on the representedworld from the reportorial stance, no vocal contrasts, and we can even come across theadoption by the narrator of the character’s spatio-temporal system of coordinates, a fact thatcan be textually attested by the occurrence of the well-known combination of past-tenseverbal forms and “present-tense” spatio-temporal deictics. In autobiographical narration, onthe contrary, the organizing pivot is not the idea of the isolated, self-objectified “I,” but ratherthe dialogical relation between author and hero (Bakhtin 1990b: 150-66). The self is nowobjectified from the position of the other —i.e. the author from the vantage point gainedthrough the passage of time— originating the existence of an important surplus of seeingtextually manifested by means of judgement and commentary (occasionally essay-likecommentary), vocal differences, and even transgressions of the temporal boundaries in theform of anticipatory or proleptic accounts. This is precisely what Cohn calls dissonantnarration. Of the other categories mentioned above, only that of “character” deserves furtherattention (Bakhtin 1990b: 172-82), because it is remote from the attribute of passivity usuallyassociated with other types of heroes. According to Weststeijn, “characters” become “activeopponents of the author and try to free themselves of his influence” (1992: 468). Bakhtin callsthese “characters” classical or romantic (1990b: 174): classical when their behaviour isdetermined by fate, and romantic when they take matters into their own hands, being theembodiment of an idea and not of mere fate.

So far I have argued that character as an instrument of narrative relativization is thecommon ground for both James and Bakhtin, but it is also the point at which their respectivemethods begin to diverge widely. As I indicated earlier, they tend to project the law ofplacement on the concreteness of the narrative text through different aspects ofcharacter —whereas James relies on his individual and psychological side, Bakhtin resorts tohis social dimension. So their essential relativistic impulse can be realized either as thesuffusion into the novel of a variety of social voices, whose mutual and reciprocal refractioncreates the sense of placement and, consequently, a set of conflicting surpluses of seeing, oras one of the fundamental tenets of Modernism, i.e. the “reliance upon individualconsciousness as the source of ‘truth’” (Chapman 1990: 10). and the inevitable subordinationof all events in the represented world to the subjectivism of the fictional mind. The crucialquestion is, of course, to determine how James comes to grips with the challenge offered bythe law of placement, and also to describe his particular view of the dialogue between self andother occurring in the narrative genre. As a preliminary clue, I would like to suggest thatJames adopts the process known as inward turn to found on it the relativization of realitythat distinguishes his narrative works.

The expression inward turn is borrowed from Erich Kahler’s renowned book The InwardTurn of Narrative, in which he argues that the “direction of the interacting development ofconsciousness and reality is shown . . . to be a progressive internalization of events, anincreasing displacement of outer events by what Rilke has called inner space, a stretching ofconsciousness” (1973: 5). Kahler surveys the history of narrative from antiquity to the end

36 This circularity is expressed thus by Strother B. Purdy: “The central problem of the observer,whether he be cosmic or novelistic, is that of dealing with the terms of his own observation”(1977: 87).

37 Similar classifications offering their respective terminologies are proposed by Morrison 1961:250; Wiesenfarth 1963: 42; and Isle 1968: 9.

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of the eighteenth century through the prism of subjectivization, but, to my mind, the termhe uses to characterize this process is best suited to the Modernist period, because it isprecisely at the turn of the twentieth century when the focus is sharpened upon theindividual consciousness as the source of reality on account of the severe discredit sufferedby objectivistic philosopy. For James, the fundamental dialogue between self and other isarticulated in terms of a consciousness contemplating the world, rather than in terms of a setof voices addressing one another and providing, in the process, the appropriate backgroundsfor reciprocal relativization.

In preceding paragraphs, I have discussed the view that reality does not exist in itself andfor itself, but only in perpetual dialogue with the other; in a more specific way, I have arguedthat novelistic reality does not exist except as a function of a concrete and describablestandpoint situated within the fiction itself. This is precisely James’s mature attitude towardsthe question in hand: the represented world does not exist until it is reflected and refractedin the mind of character, and, since this character is part of the represented world and sharesthe same logical mode of existence, there is a circular trajectory, a referential self-containedness, that casts uncertainty on whatever is denoted by denying its authenticationin an external, a priori frame of reference.36 Furthermore, the act of contemplating a worldin James is signally deficient, to the extent that, according to Wallace, “[f]aulty vision is arecurring theme of Henry James’s art” (1975: 52). This vision is usually limited and limiting,for James loathes capricious omniscience as much as Bakhtin abhors monological dogmatism.For this reason, James’s observers are not paradigms of perceptiveness, but rather instancesof what Richard Blackmur called the “correct proportion” between intelligence andbewilderment (James 1984: xxiv), and this fact obviously increases the indeterminacy of thenarrative representation carried out through their minds and senses.

Arguably, James articulated his particular concept of the dialogue between self and otherby means of what is widely known as his theory of compositional centres, a theory that canbe pieced together out of materials collected from his prefaces to the New York edition ofhis novels and tales. James’s interest in these centres —generally embodied in the characters’minds— is based on their two main roles of narrative control and epistemological restriction,which were mentioned above with reference to Wall’s dual interpretation of Bakhtiniancharacter. It is precisely the controlling and organizing function performed by these centreswhich prompted James to give them this denomination. One can distinguish, however, twotypes of centres. Charles W. Mayer speaks, on the one hand, of a centre of interest or “singleaspect of theme, plot, or character to which our attention is drawn,” and, on the other, of thecommanding centre or the “point within a novel (necessarily the mind of a character) fromwhich the action is dominated and ruled” (1976: 98).37 The problem is, of course, the largevariety of terms usually applied to these two concepts either by James himself in his prefaces

38 For a more detailed discussion see Álvarez Amorós 1994: 49-50, especially.

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or by later critics. The thematic focus of a narrative work, on which the reader’s attentionis concentrated, is known either as centre of interest, citadel of interest (taken from James1984: 126), interest-centre, or compositional centre; while the character’s consciousness whichcontemplates and thus relativizes the presentation of novelistic reality is called eithercommanding vision, central intelligence, centre of vision, or central consciousness. In anearlier attempt to clarify the terminological confusion surrounding these two ideas of centre,I put forward the notion of transitivity, and tried to stick consistently to the expressions“intransitive centre” and “transitive centre,” which, being more descriptive thanmetaphorical, I thought better equipped to resist the arbitrary use to which many otherexpressions have been put in the past.38

The intransitive centre is known in the prefaces as “centre of interest” (James 1984: 16),“centre of the subject” (1984: 51), and “citadel of interest” (1984: 126). It is a kind of opaquemedium which attracts the interest of author, reader, or fictional observer, and it can be, forinstance, an incident, a character, or a particular situation. Obviously, however, theintransitive centre is not the instrument whereby narrative relativization is obtained: it israther the object undergoing this process. The medium James used to effect the relativizationof narrative reality is the character’s consciousness in the role of a transitive centre, adenomination which originates in its capacity to focus on the other and not to remainenclosed in itself, thus facilitating the dialogical friction and, consequently, the generation ofoutsideness and perspective. The law of placement is realized in the same way. Everythingis contemplated from a unique position within the fictional world itself, and not from theabstract, indescribable stance of an omniscient observer, who would divest the story of allits latent indeterminacy by applying to it his undifferentiated monological powers of vision.James always maintained that “the only significant subject for a novel turns on someone’sconsciousness of something” (Wiesenfarth 1963: 37), and this recurring duality of object plusconcrete perspective endows his thought with a distinct Bakhtinian flavour some time beforeBakhtin himself began to publish his philosophical reflections of the early twenties.

Apart from the many names given by critics to the transitive centres, James called them“registers,” (1984: 300), “reflectors” (1984: 300), and even “analytic projector[s]” (1984: 228).Their role in presenting fictional reality as a function of individual consciousness is profuselyattested in the prefaces. James was never interested in things in themselves, but in things asperceived and relativized from the particular standpoint of a character’s consciousness, andthe occurrence of numerous assertions to that effect leaves little room for doubt. Forinstance, when explaining Christopher Newman’s role in The American, we have hiscomment that “the interest of everything is all that it is his vision, his conception, hisinterpretation” (1984: 37). In the preface to The Princess Casamassima he also emphasizes that“clearness and concreteness constantly depend, for any pictorial whole, on some concentratedindividual notation of them” (1984: 69), thus subordinating the function of the transitivecentre to the attainment of his ideal of narrative economy and control. This same prefacecontains equally clarifying statements, in which he confesses that he never saw “the leadinginterest of any human hazard but in a consciousness (on the part of the moved and movingcreature) subject to fine interpretation and wide enlargement” (1984: 67), or that “the figures

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in any picture, the agents in any drama, are interesting only in proportion as they feel theirrespective situations; since the consciousness, on their part, of the complication exhibitedforms for us their link or connexion with it” (1984: 62); and further on he praises “the effortto show their [the characters’] adventures and their history . . . as determined by their feelingsand the nature of their minds” (1984: 70).

Likewise, when referring to “The Turn of the Screw,” he argues that there is nonovelistic horror unless it is exerted on a “human consciousness that entertains and records,that amplifies and interprets it” (1984: 256). And in the same vein, he highlights thetransparent, relational nature of the transitive centre when, in the preface to The Ambassadors,he admits that “Strether’s sense of these things, and Strether’s only, should avail me forshowing them; I should know through his more or less groping knowledge of them, since hisvery gropings would figure among his most interesting motions” (1984: 317-18). Finally, Iwould like to quote James’s view of Fleda Vetch’s role in The Spoils of Poynton when he saysthat “the progress and march of my tale became and remained that of her understanding”(1984: 128), as well as his “preference for dealing with my subject-matter, for ‘seeing mystory,’ through the opportunity and the sensibility of some more or less detached, some notstrictly involved, though thoroughly interested and intelligent, witness or reporter . . .”(1984: 327). The evidence adduced thus far —and much more that could be easily culled fromthe prefaces— presents James as the perfect supporter of the principle that novelisticperception must be concrete and specifically placed in the mind of a character, which issimply a literary manifestation of the relativistic opinion that experience is onlyapprehensible as a fact of consciousness.

But James was not satisfied with the mere narration of “external” events —albeit throughthe relativizing prism of the fictional mind— and in his later works he tended to make bothtypes of centre coincide in one single consciousness. His inclination to develop his narrativesout of mental germs or données is made clear in his essay “The Art of Fiction,” in which hesets up a full refutation of Walter Besant’s position that “a story must, under penalty of notbeing a story, consist of ‘adventures’” (James 1970: 402). For James, the term adventureencompasses more meanings than the obvious one of “external, physical incident.” So heclaims that “[i]t is an adventure —an immense one— for me to write this little article; and fora Bostonian nymph to reject an English duke is an adventure,” and concludes that a“psychological reason is, to my imagination, an object adorably pictorial . . .” (1970: 402). Inaccordance with these theoretical statements, what James did was to fuse the centre of interestand the centre of observation in a character’s mind. The world surrounding this characterstill matters, but the reader feels it as a mere pretext to display his inherent mental values, aswhen the Princess in The Golden Bowl “duplicates, as it were, her value and becomes acompositional resource, and of the finest order, as well as a value intrinsic” (James 1984: 329).This fusion of centres can give rise to serious problems when one comes to determining theprotagonist of a certain narrative, since it is difficult to decide whether this distinctioncorresponds to the main character —he of whom the story is told— or to the observer’sconsciousness, whose quality and subtlety are painstakingly analyzed against the relativizingbackground provided by the main character.

One of the best-known consequences of the inward turn of the novel and of the resultingrelativization of reality is narrative impressionism. The idea of “impression” is in itself

39 In the case of Bakhtin, I can only judge terminological matters by the translation into Englishof the original Russian text. But, given the fact that Bakhtinian works have been published in widelyacclaimed scholarly editions, I have no reason to doubt the consistency of the translations.

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transitive, since one can hardly conceive of an impression which is not exerted on somebody,and so the duality of object and observer is once more actively present. Many narrativeauthors of the Modernist period have been labelled as impressionist, particularly if they tendto focus on the inner life of character rather than on external reality. James Joyce, MarcelProust, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf are frequently called impressionists, andtheir occasional theoretical manifestos —as well as their narrative practice— generally confirmthis epithet. In her widely read essay “Modern Fiction,” Woolf, for instance, likensexperience to atoms falling on consciousness and creating a seemingly “disconnected andincoherent” pattern (1975: 190), whereas an early reviewer of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artistas a Young Man states that “[t]he brushwork of the novel reminds one of certain modernpaintings in which the planes interpenetrate and the external vision seems to partake of thesensations of the onlooker” (Deming, ed. 1970: 1: 115). Here we have again the combinationof externality and internality, of object and observer, that generates a relativized reality. Thestructure of impressionistic narrative works is typical: it consists basically of a succession ofscenes (dialogic or descriptive) separated by indeterminate gaps, plus a large proportion ofdirect modes for the reproduction of the character’s mental activity and a low influence ofthe narrative agent in terms of generalization or comment. Since represented reality is createdout of the dialogue between fictional world and fictional mind, without the imposition ofexternal a priori patterns, the criteria of reliability are self-contained and do not depend onany universal or absolute frame of reference.

When narrative theory gradually developed new instruments and notions, the theory ofcompositional centres I have just sketched gave rise to what has been generally known as theAnglo-American —or even Jamesian— theory of point of view. However, a set of conceptsthat originally dealt only with matters of perception —and of relativization, according to myview of them— became fused with the idea of narrative voice in a kind of “composite” notionof point of view that can be said to have dominated Anglo-American criticism of the novelfor several decades. The term “point of view” has very limited meanings both in James andin Bakhtin.39 In neither of them does it refer to any systematic theory of fictional perceptioncomprising different categories or modes (i.e. its current technical sense), but rather to thevaguer ideas of personal attitude, outlook, opinion, intention, or worldview. For instance,in his much-quoted letter to the Deerfield Summer School, James writes: “Oh, do somethingfrom your point of view; an ounce of example is worth a ton of generalities; do somethingwith the great art and the great form; do something with life. Any point of view is interestingthat is a direct impression of life” (1957: 46). None of the occurrences of “point of view” inthis fragment has any precise technical meaning; they are rather allusions to the authorialattitude towards the artistic representation of life. In “The Art of Fiction,” James alsoemploys this term with a similar meaning when, discussing the pertinence of mentaladventures as the basis of the narrative genre, he sees “dramas within dramas . . . andinnumerable points of view” in the fact that a Bostonian nymph might reject an English duke(James 1970: 402). Here again the expression “point of view” simply means either “attitude”

31

towards, or “mental outlook” on, a particularly stirring adventure, as James himself chose todescribe it.

Bakhtin also adheres to this non-technical usage of “point of view.” For him, the termin question generally means “worldview” or “attitude,” and, to the best of my knowledge,it is never used in any other sense that might suggest its integration in a theory —howeverrudimentary— of fictional perception. Examples abound, but I will only quote a few casesdrawn from the two main essays of The Dialogic Imagination. In his discussion of theinfluence of the idyllic chronotope on Rousseau’s sentimental novels, he speaks of “thedevelopment of society and consciousness from a point of view that was contemporary toRousseau and others working in his spirit, a point of view in which such time and suchmatrices had become the lost ideal of human life” (Bakhtin 1992b: 230), and further on hesays that “even Rousseau himself had no single point of view on this” (1992b: 230). In the firstinstance, “point of view” simply means “perspective” or “viewpoint,” whereas in the secondit denotes the idea of “opinion.” In “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin argues that “[e]verylanguage in the novel is a point of view” (1992a: 411), of course, in the sense of aWeltanschauung or worldview, and, when insisting in the necessary concreteness ofexperience, he writes that “any point of view on the world fundamental to the novel mustbe a concrete, socially embodied point of view” (1992a: 412).

This does not mean, however, that the idea of fictional observation is absent fromBakhtin’s narrative system —as it is not from that of James— simply because neither of themused the expression “point of view” in the currently accepted technical sense. In addition tohis well-known emphasis on textual voices, Bakhtin was also concerned with the perceptionand narration of private life in the narrative genre —albeit in a more limited manner.Bakhtin’s thesis is articulated round the fact that, when literary works gave up the exclusiverepresentation of the heroic, external, public aspect of man and began to focus on private lifein the Hellenistic era, some system of observation was needed to carry out the inevitable“spying and eavesdropping” (1992b: 124), and thus solve the contradiction between the publicnature of the literary work and the private status of its content. This necessity was satisfiedin several ways: by setting up a covert observer, whose presence would not lead the othercharacters to modify their usual behaviour (as in Apuleius’ The Golden Ass), by creating thefigure of the outsider, adventurer, or rogue, who does not “participate internally in everydaylife . . . yet who at the same time pass[es] through that life and [is] forced to study itsworkings,” as is usually the case in the picaresque novel (Bakhtin 1992b: 124), or by resortingto the character of the servant, who enjoys easy access to the protagonist’s secrets. Accordingto Bakhtin, the “novelist stands in need of some essential formal and generic mask . . . todefine the position from which he views life” (1992b: 161), and also to determine “how andfrom what angle he . . . can see and expose all this private life” (1992b: 160). It is precisely thecreation and refining of this mask that constitutes one of the most fascinating artisticprocedures depicted in James’s notebooks.

James’s theory of centres deals essentially with the fictional observation of a fictionalworld —hence the circularity and relativism of the procedure. But a few years after his deathin 1916, we already encounter a definition of point of view made by one of his disciples andcontaining a narrative figure almost non-existent either in James’s or in Bakhtin’s theoretical

40 Although Genette (1980: 243-48) conclusively proved that the traditional terms “first-personnarrator” and “third-person narrator” are meaningless, I use them here for the sake of consistencywith the vast majority of James’s commentators.

41 So much so that I have used the first-person option as a formal criterion to define the canon ofJames’s tales of literary life in Álvarez Amorós 1996.

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reflections: the abstract, non-personalized, third-person narrator.40 That definition was givenby Percy Lubbock, for whom point of view meant “the relation in which the narrator standsto the story” (1921: 251), and it is precisely the origin of what I have previously labelled asa “composite” notion of point of view, since it combines aspects of perception and aspectsof voice, and thus requires at least an elementary conception of the immanent narrative agentthat James was not in a position to provide. For him, there is no such figure as thestructuralist narrator, that is, a textual stance posited to set in motion what Chatman (1975)has called the structure of narrative transmission. When James speaks of the narrator, heeither refers to the real-life author whose job is to write narratives or to himself in propriapersona. There is, however, one important exception: the first-person narrator, i.e. thenarrator who is part of the represented world and tells his or her own story, embodyingsimultaneously a concrete perceptual position vis-à-vis that world with all the relativizingconsequences already discussed. Apparently, James was unable to reach abstractions thatnowadays are very common in narrative theory. He needed to anchor the abstract principleof narration to some tangible being, whether a real life person or a well-defined characterwithin the fictional world. Towards first-person narrators, however, he maintains a dualattitude: in his critical statements he disparages “the terrible fluidity of self-revelation” (James1984: 321) attributed to this formal option, but consistently uses it in his short narratives,particularly in his tales of literary life.41 At first sight, he appears to do so because this“terrible fluidity” can be restricted and channelled better in the short story than “in the longpiece,” as he puts it (1984: 320). Yet it seems to me that James’s abhorrence is not directed atthe long first-person novel, but rather at narratives —whether long or short— in which theprotagonist tells his or her own story, i.e. in which there is explicit “self-revelation” and,consequently, a strong dose of structural solipsism resulting from a lack of dialogicalconfrontation between the main character and the narrator. It can be easily ascertained thatJames’s first-person narratives usually feature two separate figures, a protagonist —the self—who remains at the centre of fictional world and a marginal narrator-witness —the other—who, standing on the periphery of plot, contributes to the creation of exotopy and to thedefinition of the protagonist from without. At times, the latter becomes so obtrusive andmanages to command the reader’s attention to such an extent that the attribution of theprotagonist’s role becomes a problematic issue (Álvarez Amorós 2000).

VII

After having related Bakhtin’s conception of relativism to James’s narrative ideas and creativemethods, I have reached the conclusion that both novelistic monologism and omniscienceare in fact kindred notions that were consistently rejected by two radically different

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intellectuals working in contrasting cultural contexts, who, on the contrary, enthusiasticallyupheld the related ideas of dialogism and epistemological limitation. I have briefly examinedand assessed the nature and import of their dissimilarities, their conception of the narrativegenre, the philosophical bases of relativism, and the instruments James used to articulate thisprinciple within the Anglo-American theory of the novel. In all these fields, one can noticea line of consistency springing not from their respective working methods —quite wayward,as we know, at least superficially— but from the underpinning conviction that the self cannotbe apprehended except in perpetual conjunction with the other. Or, if we look at it from theangle of the Jamesian infatuation with artistic propriety, the self is not worth apprehendingunless relativized and thus problematized and rendered complex by the fond contemplationof the other.

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