The Author as a Conscious Authority

The Author as a Conscious Authority

著者（英） Masumichi Kanaya

journal or

publication title

Doshisha studies in English

number 77

page range 67‑86

year 2004‑03‑01

URL http://doi.org/10.14988/pa.2017.0000004611

The Author as a Conscious Authority

Masumichi Kanaya

I Introduction

One of the most lively currents in Victorian discussion of novelistic technique was, as Kenneth Graham points out, provided by a critical battle between the novel of character and that of plot or incident (97). This conflict between the static description of character and the narrative artifice of plot seems to have been intensified during the late nineteenth century, all the more because some writers related this conflict to the debate between the idea of the loss of authorial creative control and that of authorial rhetoric full of conscious artistry. In this paper I will investigate some of the writers who were involved in this battle between the idea of the loss of authorial control and that of authorial rhetoric, and discuss why the notion of the loss of authorial control was supported especially in the late nineteenth century. I shall also demonstrate the limitations of the notion of the loss of authorial control and verify the status of an author as a conscious authority by referring to the observations made by such writers as Thomas Hardy and Henry James.

II

My representative of a writer of the novel of character who respected the idea of the loss of creative control is Anthony Trollope. My choice of Trollope may well sound odd. Especially since Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction

praised the Jamesian approach to the novel privileging showing over telling, mimesis over diegesis, or impersonal narration over intrusive narration, Trollope’s work, full of the most blatantly artificial rhetoric, has often been criticized for making us feel the presence of a manipulative author. In the Autobiography, however, Trollope explains the conflict between the novel of character and that of plot, which began heating up during the 1870s in the form of the debate between advocates and opponents of the sensational novel, and then acknowledges that he has earned the reputation of being a writer of the novel of character:

Among English novels of the present day, and among English novelists, a great division is made. There are sensational novels and anti- sensational, sensational novelists and anti-sensational; sensational readers and anti-sensational. The novelists who are considered to be anti-sensational are generally called realistic. I am realistic. My friend Wilkie Collins is generally supposed to be sensational. The readers who prefer the one are supposed to take delight in the elucidation of character. They who hold by the other are charmed by the construction and gradual development of a plot. (226-27)

Trollope then tries to resolve the conflict between realistic, anti-sensational novels of character and sensational novels of plot by saying that “[a]ll this is . . . a mistake” (227). Trollope, however, does not imply the interdependent relationship between character and plot. He only suggests that a “good novel”

involves a good elucidation of character as well as a good construction of plot: “A good novel should be both, and both in the highest degree” (227).

Elsewhere in the Autobiography Trollope emphasizes the difference between his fictional aesthetic and Wilkie Collins’s by implying that his creative process is, unlike Collins’s, intrinsically dysteleological: “When I

sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not very much care, how it is to end. Wilkie Collins seems so to construct his that he not only, before writing, plans everything on, down to the minutest detail, from the beginning to the end; but then plots it all back again, to see that there is no piece of necessary dove-tailing which does not dove-tail with absolute accuracy” (256-57). Indeed, in the Autobiography, Trollope often places his fictional aesthetic squarely in opposition to that of the novel of plot, and demonstrates the fictional principles governing the novel of character: “I have never troubled myself much about the construction of plots, and am not now insisting specially on thoroughness in a branch of work in which I myself have not been very thorough. I am not sure that the construction of a perfected plot has been at any period within my power. But the novelist has other aims than the elucidation of his plot. He desires to make his readers so intimately acquainted with his characters that the creations of his brain should be to them speaking, moving, living, human creatures” (232). Trollope argues here that the novelist’s aim is not to entertain the readers with a contrived plot but to make the reader “intimately acquainted with” or “sympathize with” (229) the characters. Trollope further argues that to do so the novelist must “know,” or achieve “intimacy” with, the characters: “This he can never do unless he know those fictitious personages himself, and he can never know them well unless he can live with them in the full reality of established intimacy” (232-33). For Trollope, thus, Thackeray’s The Virginians and Philip turned out to be unsuccessful on account of the lack of this authorial intimacy with the characters: “in The Virginians and in Philip the reader is introduced to no character with which he makes a close and undying acquaintance. And this, I have no doubt, is so because Thackeray himself had no such intimacy”

(245). Trollope suggests that to “know” the characters the novelist must always

be with his or her characters: “They must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams” (233). He also suggests that the novelist sometimes needs to let the characters determine the course of the narrative by deferring to the appeals from them: “He must argue with them, quarrel with them, forgive them, and even submit to them” (233).

Trollope did not stand aloof from other writers in his insistence on this kind of creative experience. For example, a writer for The Speaker (1891) argued that such great novelists as Cervantes, Thackeray, Balzac, Fielding, Dickens, and Turgenev, were to be praised for neglecting plot, and he believed that most of them began their stories without a notion of how they would end (Eigner and Worth 14). In “Candour in English Fiction” Thomas Hardy argues that he “had not foreseen the thing” before writing in order to leave the characters “alone to act as they will” (SPNP 258). Hardy’s interest in the lack of the novelist’s teleological design preceding the narrative did not diminish till his last novel, Jude the Obscure. When Hardy asked Harper’s Magazine to cancel the contract to write a serial story, eventually to be called Jude the Obscure, he shifted the responsibility for its immoral contents onto the spontaneity of the story: “I have some misgivings as to whether my story will suit the magazine. . . . Unfortunately novels will take shapes of their own as the work goes on, almost independently of the writer’s wish” (Life 287). In a letter written in response to Edmund Gosse’s review of Jude, Hardy suggested that he had abandoned the initiative to the characters at a certain point: “It required an artist to see that the plot is almost geometrically constructed––I ought not to say constructed, for, beyond a certain point, the characters necessitated it, & I simply let it come” (CL 2: 93).

So far critics have paid little attention to Hardy’s insistence on the loss of authorial control. This is probably due to the fact that as in Trollope’s case,

many critics, more or less, have felt the presence of a manipulative author in Hardy’s authoritative rhetoric, such as authorial exegesis, summary, and commentary. David Lodge gives an elucidation of Hardy’s unique mode of writing invented at a time when a mode of telling rather than showing became predominant with the rise of modernism: “Hardy hedges his bets, equivocates, qualifies or contradicts his own authorial dicta, uses tortuous formulae to avoid taking responsibility for authorial description and generalization” (37- 38). Nevertheless, as Lodge argues, Hardy, together with Forster and Lawrence, could not sever his ties with diegetic rendering completely. What critics have often regarded as his weakness also seems to have contributed to making the presence of a controlling authorial hand felt. Peter Widdowson summarizes the “faults” critics have discovered in Hardy’s work: “Hardy’s

‘faults’ are said to be: his tendency to ‘melodrama’; the excessive use of chance and coincidence in his plots; his ‘pessimism’; his parading of ‘ill- digested’ ideas; his at times pedantic, awkward, mannered style; and, over and above all these––indeed subsuming them––his tendency to ‘improbability’

and ‘implausibility’; in other words, his failure to be ‘realistic’. . . ” (“Introduction” 5). For many critics, thus, Hardy was on the side of plot, and, as shown in their criticism of his overuse of chance, coincidence, improbable incidents, and melodramatic or sensational action, which does risk betraying an authorial imposition upon the narrative, he was very poor at constructing and developing it.

Both Trollope and Hardy, as we have seen, have often been associated with “inartistic, merely rhetorical, telling” (Booth 27), but for some critics, their aesthetics were far from each other. R. H. Hutton, for example, wrote a review of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, to which Hardy probably responded in

“Preface to the Fifth Edition”: “Mr Hardy has written one of his most powerful

novels, perhaps the most powerful which he ever wrote, to illustrate his conviction that not only is there no Providence guiding individual men and women in the right way, but that, in many cases at least, there is something like a malign fate which draws them out of the right way into the wrong way” (Clarke 184). In “Preface to the Fifth Edition” of Tess Hardy stresses the absence of controlling ideas by objecting to “those who seek only their own ideas in a representation, and prize that which should be as higher than what is” (TD 463). For Hutton, it was probably Trollope who, from an aesthetic point of view, stood opposite to Hardy. In 1862 he wrote in Spectator:

“There is nothing, apparently, of the agony of meditated travail about his mind. . . . In short, Mr Trollope does not give us so much the impression of conceiving his own conceptions, as of very accurately observing them as they pass along the screen of some interior faculty. In this respect he differs from almost all his greater brother artists” (Eigner and Worth 4). Although Hutton praised Hardy for having imposed his a priori fatalistic views upon Tess, the aesthetic he aimed at for the novel was, indeed, akin to that of Trollope, in that they both, arguing in favor of the idea of the novelist’s submission to the autonomy of the characters, regarded their creative process as intrinsically dysteleological.

III

One may notice, however, that the idea of the novelist’s deference to the autonomy of the characters may reduce the function of the author to “the passive medium through which something or someone else” speaks (Miller 49). J. Hillis Miller argues that in her preface to Wuthering Heights Charlotte Brontë tries to exculpate Emily from any responsibility for the disturbing qualities of the novel by asking the reader to see her sister not as a creator but

as a passive medium: “the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master––something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. . . . Be the work grim or glorious, dread or divine, you have little choice left but quiescent adoption. As for you––the nominal artist––your share in it has been to work passively under dictates you neither delivered nor could question––that would not be uttered at your prayer, nor suppressed nor changed at your caprice” (xxxvi-xxxvii).

This association of the novelist’s act with that of a passive medium, whose power seems to be concerned less with the intellectual reasoning faculties than with the instinctive psyche, would undermine the status of an author as a self-conscious authority. However, there are benefits to be gained by this abnegation of a controlling authorial hand, and it is these benefits that helped the idea of the loss of authorial control to win great popularity in the late nineteenth century. One of the benefits is that the novelists can reject the demand for concessions from conservative editors and readers by shifting the responsibility for the contents of their stories onto the characters of their imagination. It is no wonder that in the late nineteenth century many novelists were attracted by this benefit, because at that time, as seen in Hardy’s provocative statements concerning Jude, the hampering effect of Grundyism upon the novel was becoming a grave issue. The abnegation of authorial control was also favored in the late nineteenth century because at that time there was a tendency to follow such German writers as Spielhagen and Auerbach, who described “the novelist’s goal in transcendental terms, such as Beauty, or Truth, or Essence” (Graham 38). Insofar as the novelists claim that they trust the characters of their imagination enough to give them carte blanche to direct the course of the narrative, it may be difficult for the novelists to appeal to any other authority than that of instinct or intuition to claim the

legitimacy of their representation of the characters. Such an appeal to the authority of instinct or intuition, which seems to steer clear of any historical, ideological, or discursive circumstance, was beneficial for some writers in favor of the notion of the transcendental ends of art, because it gave them theoretical justification for expressing their artistic aims in transcendental terms such as “Eternal Truth” or “Essence.” Hardy, who was introduced by Kenneth Graham as a model example of the late nineteenth-century English writers preoccupied with the transcendental ends of art (38-40), implied in

“The Science of Fiction” that the essences of things are achievable through

“sympathy,” a basic imperative for letting the course of the narrative be dictated by the characters:

a blindness to material particulars often accompanies a quick perception of the more ethereal characteristics of humanity, experience continually shows.

A sight for the finer qualities of existence, an ear for the “still sad music of humanity,” are not to be acquired by the outer senses alone, close as their powers in photograph may be. What cannot be discerned by eye and ear, what may be apprehended only by the mental tactility that comes from a sympathetic appreciativeness of life in all of its manifestations, this is the gift which renders its possessor a more accurate delineator of human nature than many another with twice his powers and means of external observation, but without that sympathy.

To see in half and quarter views the whole picture, to catch from a few bars the whole tune, is the intuitive power that supplies the would-be storywriter with the scientific bases for his pursuit. (SPNP 263-64) Of great importance is that “sympathy,” the source of knowledge of “the more ethereal characteristics of humanity” or “human nature,” is associated

here with the novelist’s “intuitive power”––power to have immediate noninferential apprehension without the use of reason. Thus the authority was, for Hardy, submerged in the realm of the unconscious, whose inexplicability helped to avoid the issue of the novelist’s subjectivity and consequently validate his essentialist truth-claim.

IV

My representative of a writer whose position is, in terms of aesthetic, as far removed as possible from such writers in favor of the idea of the loss of authorial control––especially Trollope––is Henry James. Like Trollope, James was often regarded as a devotee of the novel of character. In “A Humble Remonstrance” Robert Louis Stevenson argues against the novel of character which, requiring “no coherency of plot” (216), subordinates dynamic narrative action to static, descriptive representation of character: “It [The novel of character] turns on the humours of the persons represented; these are, to be sure, embodied in incidents, but the incidents themselves, being tributary, need not march in a progression; and the characters may be statically shown”

(216-17). Stevenson’s example of a writer of the novel of character is James.

For Stevenson, James only “treats, for the most part, the statics of character, studying it at rest or only gently moved” (216-17).

Indeed James, like Trollope, sometimes argues in favor of the idea of novelists’ submission to the appeals from their characters. This is illustrated in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady, where he speaks about Ivan Turgenev’s account of his experience of narrative creativity: “It began for him [Turgenev]

almost always with the vision of some person or persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active or passive figure, interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what they were” (2: 1072). What

Turgenev needed before he began writing was, according to James, a “dossier”

on each character, or “a sort of biography of each of his characters, and everything that they had done and that had happened to them up to the opening of the story” to “make clear to himself what he did know” (2: 1022) about their nature. It is this knowledge of the characters alone that determine the course of the narrative: “With this material in his hand he was able to proceed;

the story all lay in the question, What shall I make them do? He always made them do things that showed them completely” (2: 1022). Turgenev’s influence on James’s own creative process also seems to be implied in his preface to The Golden Bowl, where mimetic fidelity to the consciousness of the characters is equated with a disavowal of the authority of “authorship”:

It’s not that the muffled majesty of authorship doesn’t here ostensibly reign; but I catch myself again shaking it off and disavowing the pretence of it while I get down into the arena and do my best to live and breathe and rub shoulders and converse with the persons engaged in the struggle that provides for the others in the circling tiers the entertainment of the great game. There is no other participant, of course, than each of the real, the deeply involved and immersed and more or less bleeding participants; but I nevertheless affect myself as having held my system fast and fondly, with one hand at least, by the manner in which the whole thing remains subject to the register, ever so closely kept, of the consciousness of but two of the characters. (2:

1323)

One may notice, however, that, as implied in such words as “system” and

“manner,” James here is speaking of narrative technique very similar to Stanzel’s “figural narration” or Genette’s “internal focalization.”

Indeed James, whom Virginia Woolf saw as being “born conscious of

everything” (509), for the most part, was concerned not so much with the idea of the loss of authorial control as with a rhetorical dimension that cannot be escaped even when novelists assert that their characters, in their absence, guide the course of the narrative. James wrote “The Art of Fiction” in response to Stevenson’s “A Humble Remonstrance.” James’s purpose was, however, not to argue back standing on the side of the novel of plot, but to dissolve the distinction between the novel of character and that of plot: “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? . . . It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way; or if it be not an incident I think it will be hard to say what it is” (1: 55). In his essay on Trollope, James also dissolves the distinction between the novel of character and that of plot, and implies that a rhetorical dimension pervades all fiction: “Character, in any sense in which we can get at it, is action, and action is plot, and any plot which hangs together, even if it pretend to interest us only in the fashion of a Chinese puzzle, plays upon our emotion, our suspense, by means of personal references” (1: 1336). One may be reminded here of Gérard Genette’s attempt to dissolve the distinction between “narration” and “description” in his

“Frontiers of Narrative.” The former, according to Genette, is to do with

“actions and events,” the latter with “objects or characters” (133). Genette encourages us to embrace description within the notion of narrative by saying that the study of the relations between the narrative and the descriptive amounts “to a consideration of the diegetic functions of description, that is to say, the role played by the descriptive passages or aspects in the general economy of narrative” (134). For James, too, to describe the characters statically is to impose upon literary work the form of narrative or the structure of its actions, arranged and ordered to achieve particular artistic and emotional

effects such as “suspense.”

V

Though he often showed his respect for the autonomy of the characters, Hardy, too, admitted that no matter how much novelists take it upon themselves to represent faithfully––or passively––their own personal impressions or experiential realities or the consciousness of the characters of their imagination, no literary work can escape a rhetorical dimension. A good example occurs in “The Science of Fiction,” where Hardy attempts mainly to disprove naturalism’s claims to scientific status: “The most devoted apostle of realism, the sheerest naturalist, cannot escape, any more than the withered old gossip over her fire, the exercise of Art in his labour or pleasure of telling a tale. Not until he becomes an automatic reproducer of all impressions whatsoever can he be called purely scientific, or even a manufacturer on scientific principles. If in the exercise of his reason he select or omit, with an eye to being more truthful than truth (the just aim of Art), he transforms himself into a technicist at a move” (SPNP 261). Hardy implies here that all modes of representation including one adopted by “the withered old gossip over her fire” cannot be entirely freed of a rhetorical dimension.

Hardy often spoke unreservedly about his interest in rhetoric rather than the inescapability of a rhetorical dimension, but rarely did so when he raised the issue of the loss of authorial control. Interestingly his approval of consummate skill was often accompanied by his censure of a kind of art that seeks to attain absolute representational accuracy, as illustrated in his note on art in Bible narratives:

They are written with a watchful attention (though disguised) as to

their effect on their reader. Their so-called simplicity is, in fact, the simplicity of the highest cunning. And one is led to inquire, when even in these latter days artistic development and arrangement are the qualities least appreciated by readers, who was there likely to appreciate the art in these chronicles at that day?

Looking round on a well-selected shelf of fiction or history, how few stories of any length does one recognize as well told from beginning to end! The first half of this story, the last half of that, the middle of another. . . . The modern art of narration is yet in its infancy.

But in these Bible lives and adventures there is the spherical completeness of perfect art. And our first, and second, feeling that they must be true because they are so impressive, becomes, as a third feeling, modified to, “Are they so very true, after all? Is not the fact of their being so convincing, an argument, not for their actuality, but for the actuality of a consummate artist who was no more content with what Nature offered than Sophocles and Pheidias were content?” (Life 177)

Hardy here pays attention to the effect of the Bible narratives on their readers––the effect of convincing the reader that they are “true.” The effect is, Hardy argues, achieved not by these narratives’ factuality or their likeness to “what Nature offered” but by “the actuality of a consummate artist” who is able to make them so “impressive.”

Hardy’s interest in the rhetorical effects of art upon the reader is also apparent in his eulogistic note on Turner’s watercolors :

each is a landscape plus a man’s soul. . . . What he paints chiefly is light as modified by objects. He first recognizes the impossibility of really reproducing on canvas all that is in a landscape; then gives for

that which cannot be reproduced a something else which shall have upon the spectator an approximative effect to that of the real. He said, in his maddest and greatest days: “What pictorial drug can I dose man with, which shall affect his eyes somewhat in the manner of this reality which I cannot carry to him?”––and set to make such strange mixtures as he was tending towards in “Rain, Stream and Speed,” “The Burial of Wilkie,” “Agrippina landing with the ashes of Germanicus,”

“Approach to Venice,” “Snowstorm and a Steamboat,” etc. Hence, one may say, Art is the secret of how to produce by a false thing the effect of a true. . . . (Life 225-26)

In this note Hardy is not concerned with the art of enhancing verisimilitude, which is artifice in itself, but with the effect of art that leads the audience to perceive that the representation is true. Hardy’s affirmation of consummate skill to affect the reader seems to restore the status of an author as a self- conscious authority. To achieve “the effect of the real,” in fact, Hardy self- consciously presided over his works by using what critics have regarded as his “flaws,” which are of a highly mediated kind. William Heinemann remarked to Hardy that some words in Tess would “anticipate the drift of the story” (CL 1: 274). Hardy admitted in a letter that these words would risk betraying an authorial imposition, but he also insisted that these were indispensable to the novel: “However, such a premonition may affect the plot of ‘Tess’ it sometimes is in accordance with true artistic effect” (CL 1:

274). Thus these words, for Hardy, serve a higher purpose––the purpose of achieving an effect. In the same letter Hardy also expressed his irritation at Heinemann’s remark that “the person who saw the pair wandering at night is superfluous to the story,” which he himself admitted as “apparently irregular modes of narrating” (CL 1: 274). However, such “apparently irregular modes

of narrating,” intrusive authorial voice, and seemingly awkward plot-design were, for Hardy, all rhetorical constructs, which work together to achieve an effect.

VI

James, too, was interested in the artistic effect of convincing the reader that the story is true. Nevertheless, James’s case is more difficult to deal with than Hardy’s because James’s avowal of an artistic effect often coincides with what seems to be his denial of artistic arrangement or selection. In

“The Art of Fiction,” for example, he wrote: “Catching the very note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose strenuous force keeps Fiction upon her feet. In proportion as in what she offers us we see life without rearrangement do we feel that we are touching the truth; in proportion as we see it with rearrangement do we feel that we are being put off with a substitute, a compromise and convention” (1: 58). James’s stress on “life without rearrangement” that allows us to feel that “we are touching the truth” appears to downplay the importance of the mediation of art. One may notice, however, that here James uses “rearrangement” in a pejorative sense. It means artistic––or, rather, inartistic––mediation that may cram narratives into conventional molds––so conventional as to allow the reader to perceive their own fictionality. Thus “life with rearrangement” in the fiction may foreground its status as an artifact.¹ By referring to “life without rearrangement” James is drawing our attention to the necessity of “an elaborate rhetoric dissimulation” (Booth 44) that would not arouse any sense of artistic arrangement or selection in the readers.

That James does not see “life without rearrangement” as a product of the loss of artistic mediation is also evident in his essay on Zola: “Quarrelling

with all conventions, defiant of them in general, Zola was yet inevitably to set up his own group of them––as, for that matter, without a sufficient collection, without their aid in simplifying and making possible, how could he ever have seen his big ship into port? Art welcomes them, feeds upon them always; no sort of form is practicable without them. It is only a question of what particular ones we use––to wage war on certain others and to arrive at particular forms” (2: 896-97). James implies here that no matter how much the novelists take it upon themselves to be unconventional to prevent narratives from being molded into conventional forms that may lead the audience to perceive the novel’s own fictionality, the form of narrative is inevitably imposed upon literary work.

One of the novelists who often attached a risk of “an eternal repetition of a few familiar clichés” (1: 58) to the narrative was, for James, Zola. In “The Lesson of Balzac” James explains Zola’s defects:

His idea had been, from the first, in a word, to lose no time––as if one could have experience, even the mere amount requisite for showing others as having it, without losing time!––and yet the degree in which he too, so handicapped, has achieved valid expression is such as still to stagger us. He had had inordinately to simplify––had had to leave out the life of the soul, practically, and confine himself to the life of the instincts, of the more immediate passions, such as can be easily and promptly caught in the fact. He had had, in a word, to confine himself almost entirely to the impulses and agitations that men and women are possessed by in common, and to take them as exhibited in mass and number, so that, being writ larger, they might likewise be more easily read. He met and solved, in this manner, his difficulty––

the difficulty of knowing, and of showing, of life, only what his “notes”

would account for. (2: 129-30)

For James, Zola “simplified” life by confining himself to what he knew from his limited experience––“the life of the instincts, of the more immediate passions.” It is this authorial knowledge based upon experience that allows his novels, unlike unconventional ones, to be “easily read.” In “The Lesson of Balzac” James insists on the importance of extravagant, free imagination, which prevents narratives from being molded into conventional forms: “But it is in the waste, I think, much rather––the waste of time, of passion, of curiosity, of contact––that true initiation resides; so that the most wonderful adventures of the artist’s spirit are those, immensely quickening for his

‘authority,’ that are yet not reducible to his notes” (2: 130). (This appears to be James’s denial of an author as a self-conscious, rational being, but he argues here that the authorial choice of this apparently spontaneous mode of production quickens the “authority” of authorship. Thus the authority of authorship, for James, is not to be rescinded even when he advocates the loss of authorial control, for the author is vested at least with the authority to leave authority to extravagant, free imagination independent of the imaginer’s control.)

In “The Art of Fiction” James’s emphasis is sometimes laid blatantly upon artistic mediation: “Art is essentially selection, but it is a selection whose main care is to be typical, to be inclusive. For many people art means rose- coloured window-panes, and selection means picking a bouquet for Mrs.

Grundy. They will tell you glibly that artistic considerations have nothing to do with the disagreeable, with the ugly” (1: 58-59). When James speaks of a fairly common notion of the purpose of selection, that is, making the narrative agreeable to the Grundyist, the word acquires a pejorative ring. However, selection, which is certainly indicative of the mediation of art, becomes

indispensable if it is used to bring about “the typical.” As “the effect of the real” which Hardy believes is achievable by Turner-like rendering consists of a synthesis of the superficial and the deeper reality (“the two united are depicted as the All” [Life 192]), “the typical” which James believes to have the power to make us “feel that we are touching the truth” exhibits a complex structure, composed of the general and the particular. For James, thus, an authorial activity serves the double purpose of achieving an effect and preventing the narrative from displaying its own fictionality––both of which are indispensable to the aesthetic of James, “born conscious of everything.”

VII Conclusion

In the late nineteenth century the debate between the idea of the loss of authorial creative control and that of authorial rhetoric full of conscious artistry sometimes grew into a fierce disagreement. This is, as we have seen, partly because the idea of the loss of authorial control was supported by those who wanted to maintain their uncompromising antagonism toward Mrs. Grundy or express their artistic aims in transcendental terms. However, no matter how much novelists take it upon themselves to abandon the initiative to the characters, no literary work can escape a rhetorical dimension. As such writers as Hardy and James implied, the proposals for the spontaneous growth of the narrative independent of authorial control have their limitations, and the status of “authorship” should be conferred on the “author.”

Notes

01 That James thoroughly detested this exposure of the fictionality of a story or its status as an artifact, which may unsettle the reader’s conviction that the story is true,

is evident in his objection to Trollope’s aesthetic. James’s objection to Trollope’s aesthetic was not that he argues in favor of the loss of authorial control, but that he self-consciously exposes the fictionality of a story or its status as an artifact: “He took a suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, a make-believe. He habitually referred to the work in hand (in the course of that work) as a novel, and to himself as a novelist, and was fond of letting the reader know that this novelist could direct the course of events according to his pleasure” (1:

1343).

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