John H. Pearson
The Prefaces of Henry James: Framing the Modern Reader
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. Pp. 168. $28.50
Reviewed by Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso

Although Henry James is among the most important modern American theorists of the novel, book-length studies on this side of his production are strangely infrequent. To my knowledge, only two studies, Joseph Warren Beach’s The Method of Henry James (1918) and John Carlos Rowe’s The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James (1984), have tackled James’s literary theory in a comprehending and efficient way. These are the most outstanding contributions to the study of James as a pivotal theorist in the transition from nineteenth-century realism and naturalism to the literary theory of Anglo-American modernism. However, the reason for such scarcity cannot be that these analyses have already exhausted their subject, since a sizeable portion of James’s theoretical prose-notably his views on drama and on his contemporaries-has not yet attracted the attention of critics. Not even his most celebrated critical writings have been subjected to meticulous scrutiny in terms of their comprehensiveness as literary theory, with the exception of the aforementioned studies. Many times the problem lies in the complexity of James’s theoretical thinking and his style. As a nonfiction writer, he was often elaborate and fanciful, sometimes complex to the point of provocation.

John Pearson’s book contributes to the knowledge of James’s famous prefaces to the New York Edition of his narrative works, which-as the recent collection edited by David McWhirter demonstrates-remain James’s most outstanding and controversial statements on the nature and method of fiction-writing. Taking the notions of “frame” and “framing” as his main point of departure, and using a broadly semiotic approach, Pearson tries to demonstrate how James’s work is a challenge to (and an intrusion into) the conventional separation between author and fictional world. The prefaces, for Pearson, are an attempt to construct an appropriate receiver for the monumental edition of his work. James therefore carries out a process of “aesthetic education,” largely in formal terms, in which he tries to shape the mind of his potential readers so that they can understand the structural fabrication of his narrative. In other words, James instructs and indoctrinates his audience into the modernist novel.

This disruption of the conventional separation between author and reader, Pearson argues, takes place in the prefaces, but renders the rest of his novelistic work as a self-conscious oeuvre, one of whose main objectives is to show the novel as a process of becoming. Using the early work of Fredric Jameson, Pearson argues that “[t]he memory that traces origin [of aesthetic creation] ...is itself the aesthetic memory of what James calls the ‘seeking fabulist,’ the author engaged in literary creation. The moment that the suggestion of the extraliterary world sparks creation of the literary world, James as observer of the real life becomes James, the author of the fictive world and of aesthetic experience” (49). In this vein, Framing the Reader constructs a new (postmodern, I would say) Henry James that crosses the boundaries between his work, on the one hand, and his life and aspirations as a novelist, on the other. The result is a new picture, one in which James advances the theoretically self-conscious thrust of modernist fiction.