Thesis (Ph.D)--Boston UniversityHenry James regarded as "definitive" the selected edition
of his Novels And Tales in twenty-four; volumes which he prepared
for publication by Scribners in 1907-1909, not only because of its
revisions and its prefaces but equally because he implied, through
the order of its fictions, an interpretation of his artistic "case."
The edition (involving, James said, "illuminatory classification,
collocation, juxtaposition and separation throughout the whole
series") builds an architecture; but this architecture is not, as
Mr. Leon Edel has suggested, modelled on Balzac's divisions within
La Comedie humaine, although James's sequence does have a relation
to what for him was "the lesson of Balzac." James orders his series
much as he composes his fictions: so that each unit makes a certain
"germ" progressively clearer, or better-enforces the same (often
intricate) idea. For this exfoliating type of design James often
used the term "story." It is important to recognize this characteristic
order in the "New York Edition" not for its complexity but because
the design enforces James's interpretation of an aesthetic and an
extra-aesthetic significance of his own "case." External evidence
is limited and is not conclusive on the purpose of the architecture
in the edition. This dissertation examines mainly internal evidence:
James's preface statements and their sequence, and especially both the
structural and the thematic features of each of the included fictions.
By identifying an artistic "case," which he thought any
critic's main task, James always means relating salient characteristics
of the artist's production to the artist's prominent and
enduring "conditions" of work. The volume divisions of the "New
York Edition" are itsfundamental units, and groups of volumes
comprise four major units: Volumes I-IX, X-XII, XIII-XVIII,
XIX-XXIV. The arrangement of fictions within single volumes and of
volumes within each of the major units unfolds the same meaning
that the succession of major units also exfoliates. The order
pervasively demonstrates what is James's "case" and that it evinces
a "continuity" equally with a "growth." That is, James grew in the
sense of intensifying his awareness of the same endeavor, or in the
sense of "cultivating" his stable "operative consciousness" of
difficulties always arising from the interplay of four of his
enduring conditions. These conditions were: (1) his aim to write
fiction such as would genuinely "represent" and represent.the human
comedy in his time, (2) his command of details from but a limited
number of areas of experience and from areas he considered peripheral
(especially to the society--America--where lay his deepest roots),
(3) his tendency to pursue all the relations between the details he
did command, his sense that relations "end nowhere," (4) his necessity,
for publication of his fiction, to compress it into briefer space than
the ideal of artistic economy indicated, and to address an audience
resistant to his understanding of worthwhile "life" or of "free spirit."
The design of the edition stresses (a) that James's "case"
was a successful one of having converted obstacle into aid through
cultivating his awareness that difficulty was his "operative
condition," (b) that this "case" shows composition of raw material
to be any fiction writer's primary "resource" for representing
"the real" and the human comedy, (c) that James's pursuit of
thoroughness of composition enabled him to articulate a particular
theme of great "civic use"--the theme that "free spirit" is
inherently contagious and expansive through exchanges of
consciousness in inter-personal relations.
Perceiving that the design of the edition unfolds James's
view路 of his "case11 and of its importance solves many problems: for
instance, why he has not placed all of his novels and nouvelles so
as to trace his exact course of technical development; has not
brought together all the fictions which use the supernatural;
nowhere has juxtaposed sub-groups of his international stories;
has ignored chronology so greatly and has not grouped by genre in
Volumes X-XVIII; has combined a group of fictions including "Daisy
Miller" with another group including "The Real Thing" in Volume XVIII;
has pointed in the prefaces to classifications he might have employed;
and has retained the publication order of The Wings of the Dove and
The Ambassadors. [TRUNCATED
