by Emily Vanston

In his seminal 1884 essay “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James complains that “[c]ertain accomplished novelists have a habit of giving themselves away which must often bring tears to the eyes of people who take their fiction seriously.” He specifically denounces the English novelist Anthony Trollope for his “want of discretion in this particular,” grousing that in a “digression, a parenthesis or an aside, he concedes to the reader that he and this trusting friend are only ‘making believe.’” Trollope, says James, “admits that the events he narrates haven’t really happened, and that he can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best. Such a betrayal of a sacred office seems to me, I confess, a terrible crime” (Partial Portraits 379). One is surprised, then, to find James’s corpus—from early works such as Daisy Miller to later novels such as The Ambassadors—littered with authorial digressions, parentheses, and asides: to find James “giving [himself] away” with abandon. In James’s 1881 masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady, for example, his proxy-narrator confesses that heroine Isabel Archer “would be an easy victim of scientific criticism if she were not intended to awaken on the reader’s part an impulse more tender and more purely expectant” (45). In this James seems to be guilty of the same charge he levels against Trollope: admitting that Isabel is a fictional character created for the reader’s pleasure, conceding that he and the reader are “only making believe.” As James says of Trollope, “[t]hese little slaps at credulity . . . are very discouraging, but they are even more inexplicable” (Partial Portraits 116). James is widely celebrated as a paragon of authorial remove and a key figure in the transition away from Victorian-era editorial omniscience—why, then, does he intrude into his own narratives so frequently?

In a 1958 essay, John Tilford, Jr., asserts that James’s authorial asides are unwitting “deviations from his ideal technique” which demonstrate “evidence of his struggle . . . to master the art of his craft” (161, 164). This claim, while audacious, raises the question: are James’s moments of self-reference really unconscious “inconsistencies in his method” (161)? Are they violations of the very principles he appears to champion? Or are they deliberate artistic gestures—and if so, to what end? Closer investigation reveals that, in fact, James’s digressions are actually strikingly unobtrusive, particularly by the standards of his age, and do not actually violate his own edicts. Despite the widespread belief that James decries authorial omniscience of all kinds, in truth he “opposes only the particular kind of omniscience employed by Thackeray in Vanity Fair and by Trollope in general” (Martin 24): that which undermines the impression of the author as an objective historian. A careful review of James’s work suggests that, far from struggling “to master the art of his craft,” James in fact skillfully and deliberately employs authorial intrusion to further his ultimate artistic goals.

Authorial intrusions—also known as authorial digressions, interventions, or asides—are present-tense extradiegetic commentary (Genette 94 n12) offered by a “coherent narrative persona who serves as a proxy for the author” (Dawson, The Return 54). The narrator of The Portrait of a Lady, for example, repeatedly refers to himself in the first person, both individually (“I give this little sketch” . . . “as I have said” . . . “that Thursday of which I have narrated some of the incidents” [James 273, 279, 350]), and in congress with the reader (“We know” . . . “after we cease to follow” . . . “as we have touched on the point, we may return to it” [ 278, 188, 79]). He addresses the reader directly (“if you had seen her there, you would have admired” [399]) and indirectly (“It will perhaps seem to the reader” [351]). Throughout the novel he refers to Isabel as “our heroine” no less than thirty times, and demonstrates authoritative knowledge of her situation (“she was nearer losing it than on any occasion on which we have had the pleasure of meeting her” . . . “those who judge her severely may have the satisfaction of finding that, later, she became consistently wise only at the cost of an amount of folly which will constitute almost a direct appeal to charity” [357, 79]). We “might give many more specimens,” as James says of Trollope (Partial Portraits 116), from James’s extensive body of fiction, including his novellas Daisy Miller (“I hardly know whether” . . . “Our youth was silent” [26, 37]) and The Beast in the Jungle (“our gentleman” . . . “Our point” [434, 435]), his novels The Awkward Age (“his chronicler takes advantage of the fact” [212]) and The Bostonians (“I suspect we should find” [284]), and numerous other stories. While James criticizes Trollope’s “suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader” of his story’s fictionality (Partial Portraits 116)—lauding instead those authors for whom “the drama is quite uncommented; the poet never plays chorus; situations speak for themselves” (James, “Iwan” 341)—James himself seems to remain strikingly present in his own work.

In his aforementioned essay, John Tilford, Jr., claims that James is helplessly swept up in Victorian stylistic currents, “still so close to the conventions of nineteenth-century fiction that he could never quite eschew their besetting manners and methods” (164). Tilford takes particular umbrage with the popular assertion that James’s novel The Ambassadors is told entirely from its focalizer Lewis Lambert Strether’s perspective, representing “the Master’s supreme example of the single point of view” (157). Such “unqualified critical claims,” Tilford grumbles, “clearly need toning down. The author has not completely withdrawn” (164). James interjects in the first person throughout The Ambassadors and refers to Strether as “our friend” more than sixty-five times—deviations from Strether’s point of view which Tilford claims are unconscious technical lapses on James’s part (158). Tilford criticizes James’s “highly intrusive editorial chit-chat” and his “frequent appearance as the editorially omniscient author,” going so far as to claim that at times “James is almost as affably omniscient as Thackeray, however slovenly it might be” (162, 158-59).

Editorial omniscience, according to Norman Friedman, is an unlimited, “godlike vantage point” from which the author’s voice “dominates the material”: it is distinguished by “the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of the author himself; he is free not only to inform us of the ideas and emotions within the minds of his characters but also of his own” (1171). The approach is illustrated in a sample passage from William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 novel Vanity Fair:

If, a few pages back, the present writer claimed the privilege of peeping into Miss Amelia Sedley’s bed-room, and understanding with the omniscience of the novelist all the gentle pains and passions which were tossing upon that innocent pillow, why should he not declare himself to be Rebecca’s confidante too, master of her secrets, and seal-keeper of that young woman’s conscience? (183)

Here Thackeray holds forth for several lines in his own authorial person, identifying himself as the novelist and boasting of his all-seeing knowledge of his subject. Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel Tom Jones provides another example of garrulous omniscient narration:

Reader, I think proper, before we proceed any further together, to acquaint thee, that I intend to digress, through this whole history, as often as I see occasion; of which I am myself a better judge than any pitiful critic whatever. And here I must desire all those critics to mind their own business, and not to intermeddle with affairs, or works, which no ways concern them. . . . (10)

Here Fielding speaks in his own distinctive voice, claims a special and superior judgment, and carries on for some time—so extensive, in fact, is Fielding’s commentary in Tom Jones that it comprises separate essayistic chapters within the novel.

James’s authorial voice, by contrast, does not dominate his work, and he does not offer those “generalizations about life, manners, and morals” (Friedman 1171) that distinguish true editorial omniscience. James’s authorial appearances are comparatively sporadic and his voice relatively neutral, as demonstrated in the following passage from The Portrait of a Lady: “Isabel came back to Florence, but only after several months; an interval sufficiently replete with incident. It is not, however, during this interval that we are closely concerned with her; our attention is engaged again on a certain day in the late spring-time” (222). Or, similarly, “But, as I say, it was not till the winter during which we lately renewed acquaintance with our heroine that the personage in question made again a continuous stay in Rome” (278). In these moments (and others) James speaks in the first person, but only to comment fleetingly on sentences that otherwise maintain his characteristically objective third-person remove. While he sometimes enjoys the nineteenth-century convention of companionably addressing the reader, such minor interventions are a far cry from the extravagant authorial omniscience demonstrated by Thackeray, Fielding, and their ilk.

Tilford’s labeling of James’s authorial asides as “highly intrusive,” furthermore, begs the question of what qualifies an author’s presence as “intrusive” (much less “highly intrusive”), and if/why it is necessarily problematic. Such positions are largely a function of personal taste: as Paul Dawson says, “there are two types of people in the world: those who like authorial intrusions, and those who don’t” (“From Digressions” 145). Many readers today still enjoy the cozy, omniscient authorial voice of Victorian-era fiction, which “implies an amiable understanding between the candid narrator and his gentle reader” (Tilford 158). Some, too, maintain that authorial intrusions can make a novel feel more authentic by acknowledging that it was written by a human hand, thus avoiding the feigned objectivity of “art which claims to be artless” (Higgins). Those that dislike intrusions typically share the attitude, prevalent since the twentieth century, that they disrupt the narrative and its “illusion of fictional truth,” breaking the spell of story world and “shift[ing] the deictic orientation of readers from the fictional world to their own” (Dawson, “From Digressions” 145, 153). A. A. Mendilow suggests that authorial intrusions “jolt [readers] out of the fictive present into their actual present. By stepping out from behind the imaginary frame of the novel to address the reader in person, [authors] recall him from the ‘Relative Now’ of the characters to his own ‘Absolute Now’” (267-68). “It is,” says Ford Maddox Ford, “an obvious and unchanging fact that if an author intrudes his comments into the middle of his story he will endanger the illusion conveyed by that story” (141).

All of these critiques echo the assumption that authorial commentary vertiginously disturbs readers’ sense of narrative immersion. The idea that readers can lose themselves in a fictional world, however, and the concomitant potential for interruption of that reverie, are not fundamental principles but reflections of the literary zeitgeist: authorial asides were “not considered to disrupt the illusion of truth, and hence foreground the fictionality of a work, until theories of immersion became prevalent in novelistic criticism” in the mid-late nineteenth century (Dawson, “From Digressions” 154). Only when theories of fictional transport or illusion gain prominence do critics begin to use the word “intrusion” to refer to authorial commentary breaking the dramatic spell of a novel (158). In fact, it is only in the twentieth century that the term “authorial intrusion” meaningfully enters the critical lexicon—part of a “broad terminological shift . . . in which the common rhetorical practice of digression, or turning away from a narrative, came to be characterized as an intrusion into a narrative” (145-46).

Although the factors that inform this transition from authorial omniscience to authorial self-effacement are numerous and complex, Henry James is near-universally acknowledged as a driving force in the movement: James’s ideas about “style and form moved the novel forward from the Victorian to the Modern period” (Miller 21). Among James’s many contributions to the theory of fiction, perhaps the most significant is his espousing of the “modernist impersonality” of the “third-person narrator who does not comment on the action, and tells the story solely from a character’s perspective, revealing only what that character could know” (Dawson, The Return 3). As James says in his 1908 preface to The Portrait of a Lady, “‘Place the centre of the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness . . . put the heaviest weight into that scale, which will be so largely the scale of her relation to herself’” (9). James revolutionizes the technique of telling a story through the eyes of its characters rather than those of an all-seeing narrator: Edith Wharton lauds James’s skill at creating characters for the “purpose of revealing details which he could not otherwise communicate without lapsing into the character of the mid-Victorian novelist chatting with his readers of ‘my heroine’ in the manner of Thackeray and Dickens” (67). “This is the great outstanding feature of technique since the time of Henry James,” says Joseph Warren Beach in 1932: “that the story shall tell itself, being conducted through the impressions of the characters” (15-16).

The impact of this departure from “the old loquacious ways of telling a story” (Booth 25) cannot be overstated: “In a bird’s-eye view of the English novel from Fielding to Ford,” says Beach, “the one thing that will impress you more than any other is the disappearance of the author” (14). “No author,” Ford declares sniffily in 1930, “would, like Thackeray, to-day intrude his broken nose and myopic spectacles into the middle of the most thrilling scene he ever wrote, in order to tell you that, though his heroine was rather a wrong ‘un, his own heart was in his right place” (137-38). According to Ford, modern novelists seek to immerse readers in a fictional world so completely that they forget they are reading at all (138): a feat achieved by keeping “themselves, their comments and their prejudices out of their works” (137).

James clearly does not keep himself out of his work, however—and as Booth indicates, to those who assume that “James sought a surface cleansed of all traces of the author, regarding an air of impersonal narration as an end in itself, such intrusions are self-evidently weaknesses” (59). Such attacks, however, misapprehend James’s true position. According to Booth, “James’s interest in realism never led him to the notion that all signs of the author’s presence are inartistic. . . . [H]e would never have suggested that the reader must entirely forget the guiding presence of the author. His interest is not negative—how to get rid of the author—but positive: how to achieve an intense illusion of reality” (50). This illusion of reality is one of James’s primary aims: in his 1883 essay “Alphonse Daudet,” James declares, “The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life—that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience” (Partial Portraits 227-28). In “The Art of Fiction” he states that “the air of reality . . . seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel,” and that this impression depends on “the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life” (Partial Portraits 390).

For James, this illusion is achieved not by approaching the work as a storyteller spinning a yarn, but as a historian documenting reality (Martin 23). “It is impossible,” James says, “to imagine what a novelist takes himself to be unless he regard himself as an historian and his narrative as a history. It is only as an historian that he has the smallest locus standi” (Partial Portraits 116). James admires “the magnificent historical tone of Balzac” while suggesting that Trollope’s frequent self-references “[imply] that the novelist is less occupied in looking for the truth . . . than the historian” (Partial Portraits 117, 379-80). James sees the characters that populate these histories, furthermore, as fully autonomous individuals, each a “breathing person” (James, “Miss Prescott’s” 271, emphasis original). According to James Miller, Jr., James believes that characters live their own lives, and that to impose one’s own views and beliefs upon them is a violation of their human freedoms (7). As James says in his 1905 essay “The Lesson of Balzac,” “It comes back, in fine, to that respect for the liberty of the subject which I should be willing to name as the great sign of the painter of the first order” (177). James is not an authorial puppet master, ventriloquizing his creations—he is documentarian, bearing witness to the activities of a distinct and autonomous other (Hale 93).

This attitude is evident in The Portrait of a Lady, in which the narrator repeatedly refers to the story he’s telling as a “history” (James 15, 31, 38) and to himself as Isabel’s “historian” and “biographer”: “The admission costs her historian a pang” (198) . . . “Meanwhile her errors and delusions were frequently such as a biographer interested in preserving the dignity of his subject must shrink from specifying” (44). He speaks in carefully couched terms that concede his lack of prescience: “Our heroine’s biographer can scarcely tell why” (83) . . . “The working of this young lady’s spirit was strange, and I can only give it to you as I see it” (218) . . . “Whether or no she found in this phrase all the meaning he had put into it I am unable to say” (309). Often the information that the reader does glean from these asides comes not from the narrator’s knowledge, but from observation of physical evidence: “at the end of three days she wrote to Lord Warburton, and the letter belongs to our history” (88) . . . “It is our privilege to look over her shoulder, and if we exercise it we may read the brief query” (313). James relates his characters’ thoughts and actions, but he does not claim to have created them, and does not claim to control them. His aforementioned statement that Isabel “would be an easy victim of scientific criticism if she were not intended to awaken on the reader’s part an impulse more tender and more purely expectant” (45) can be read as an admission that James’s description of Isabel’s intrinsic nature is intended to effect tenderness, not a confession that he has created Isabel to that end. Similarly, seemingly omniscient statements such as the aforementioned “later, she became consistently wise” (79) reveal only that the historian knows what is to come, not that he can “direct the course of events according to his pleasure” (James, Partial Portraits 116).

James’s commentary, when it appears, does not reflect the “muffled majesty of irresponsible ‘authorship’” (James, The Golden Bowl vi), but merely the testimony of an objective onlooker. This goes far in explaining why James is comfortable making the occasional authorial aside in his novels, despite his commitment to creating the illusion of reality: as Booth explains, “it did not matter to [James] if the visible structure of the work was ‘marred’ with obvious signs that the work was written by a human being. So long as it was clear that this human being could not modify the facts of the story to suit his purposes, he could even comment quite freely on his story and his methods” (58). Since James is writing as a historian, not a peddler of make-believe, his authorial presence does not destabilize the reality he is relating.

The slow calcification of this flexible narrative approach into the doctrinaire insistence on absolute authorial effacement so often attributed to James can largely be traced to the author’s own admirers: “Consider what has happened to James,” Booth laments, “in the hands of Jamesians” (58). In his 1921 book The Craft of Fiction, for example, James’s immediate disciple Percy Lubbock (“‘more Jamesian than James’” [Martin 20]) reduces James’s wide-ranging literary theories to the single directive that a novel show, not tell (Lubbock 62). Over time, readers begin to attribute Lubbock’s attitudes to James himself, and critics begin to “quote James’s own precepts, codified and elevated a notch or two, against the master” (Booth 59)—leading detractors such as Tilford to misconstrue James’s authorial intrusions as blemishes on his technique. The deviations in point of view that Tilford identifies in The Ambassadors, for example, offend Lubbock’s formalist sensibilities—but they are perfectly consistent with James’s vision of an objective historian.

James states unequivocally: “Hard and fast rules, a priori restrictions, mere interdictions . . . never strike an energetic talent as anything but arbitrary. A healthy, living and growing art, full of curiosity and fond of exercise, has an indefeasible mistrust of rigid prohibitions” (Partial Portraits 286). James’s own methods vary considerably: even in his later work he continues to explore narratological possibilities. As Miller points out, “in The Wings of a Dove he used a series of successive reflectors; in The Ambassadors he reveled in the economy, unity, and intensity achieved through the use of a single ‘centre’; in The Golden Bowl he found the material most amenable to the use of ‘two registers,’ one in each half of the novel” (17). The idea of a single “Jamesian” approach to fiction offends James’s cherished belief that “the house of fiction has ‘not one window, but a million,’ and that there are, in fact, ‘five million’ ways to tell a story” (Booth 23-24).

James’s authorial intrusions, in fact, add a layer of thematic complexity to his narratives, and can be seen as perhaps an essential component of his art. Many of James’s works explore the act of seeing, objectifying, projecting onto, and attempting to understand others. By occasionally interjecting in the first person, James startles readers out of the impression that they are witnessing events unfold directly and reminds them that the narrative is actually reaching them through several layers of mediation. James’s 1898 novella In the Cage, for example, is a study in scrutinizing others, focalized by an unnamed telegraphist who imagines her clients’ lives based on the telegrams they send. James refers to the telegraphist as “our young lady,” or some variation thereon, thirty-four times throughout the seventy-page novella: roughly once every other page. Each time, readers are reminded that they are not observing, for example, the object of the telegraphist’s fascination, Captain Everard—they are observing James (or his implied authorial self) observing his proxy narrator, observing his protagonist, observing Captain Everard. Direct addresses to the reader, furthermore, prompt readers to consider that they are performing the same acts of interpretation upon a novel’s characters that those characters perform upon each other. When in Daisy Miller James refers to Daisy and her admirer Winterbourne as “our two friends” (55), we realize that we, as narratorial conspirators, are projecting our assumptions onto Daisy as much as Winterbourne is; when in The Portrait of a Lady James refers to Isabel as “our heroine” (351), we realize that we are complicit in her portraiture. Authorial intrusions remind us that, in literature as in life, one can never truly perceive another person directly: as James says, “[h]umanity is immense, and reality has myriad forms” (Partial Portraits 387-88).

If James has no apparent qualms about revealing himself in his work it is perhaps, finally, because he recognizes the impossibility of an author ever truly doing so: even if James scrubbed every authorial self-reference from the page, his “very presence, his spiritual presence, in his work” would remain (James, “The Lesson” 179). James asserts that “the projected light of the individual strong temperament in fiction . . . more or less unconsciously suffuses [the writer’s] picture” (“The Lesson” 172): Guy de Maupassant, for example, “is remarkably objective and impersonal, but he would go too far if he were to entertain the belief that he has kept himself out of his books” (James, Partial Portraits 259). James understands that the embodiment of authorial identity in a novel eclipses the sporadic aside: an author can intrude just as conspicuously through stylistic choices as through overt digressions (Hale 89). Paul Dawson relates Richard Aczel’s argument that, rather than “first-person pronouns, addresses to a reader, reflexive statements and overt commentary,” the narrator can be located in “lexical, syntactic, and rhetorical elements of style.” James’s presence, therefore, “is clearly audible in the style of narration, and this is far more important to the voice effect of the narrator than the occasional intrusive comment which can be found in James’s work.” Particularly in James’s later novels, “stylistic evidence” of his authorship lies heavy on the page: his asides hardly announce his presence more than his (in)famously “ornate circumlocutive sentences” already do (Dawson, The Return 113). As James says of Balzac, “his intensity is recorded for us on every page of his work” (“The Lesson” 173).

Clearly, Tilford’s characterization of Henry James as a highly intrusive, editorially omniscient author—much less his assertion that James’s intrusions suggest methodological inconsistencies, shortcomings, or hypocrisies—is unfounded. The notion of intrusiveness itself is highly subjective and subject to prevailing conventions, and while James does occasionally speak in the first person, he is by no means a classically omniscient narrator, moralizing and philosophizing and looming over the stage in the manner of his contemporaries. The popular belief that, because James repeatedly admonished Trollope, he felt that the author should disappear from the page entirely both misassumes that such a feat is possible and misinterprets James’s capacious ideology: as Booth states, James’s “persistent enemy” is “intellectual and artistic sloth, not any particular way of telling or showing a story” (57). James envisions the novelist not as a puppeteer manipulating his papier-mâché creations, but as a historian, conveying all the psychological complexities of a fully realized human life—and he can therefore “intrude” into his historical accounts with impunity. Such intrusions, in fact, constitute a vital aspect of his art, as they assist in furthering James’s perennial exploration of perception and of the fundamental unknowability of other people. Ultimately, in the hands of the Master, authorial intrusion is revealed as a literary technique wielded as intentionally and as artfully as any other. As John Fowles says in his 1969 novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman (a metafictional response to nineteenth-century editorial omniscience): “I have disgracefully broken the illusion? No. My characters still exist, and in a reality no less, or no more, real than the one I have just broken” (106).

Works Cited

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———. The Return of the Omniscient Narrator. Ohio State UP, 2013.

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Friedman, Norman. “Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept.” PMLA, vol. 70, no. 5, Dec. 1955, pp. 1160-84.

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———. “The Beast in the Jungle.” Lyon, pp. 426-61.

———. The Bostonians. 1886. Dial Press, 1945.

———. “Daisy Miller.” Lyon, pp. 26-74.

———. Preface. The Golden Bowl, by James, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909, pp. v-xxv.

———. “In the Cage.” Lyon, pp. 314-84.

———. “Iwan Turgéniew.” Review of Iwan Turgéniew’s Frühlingsfuthen. North American Review, vol. 118, Apr. 1874, pp. 326-56.

———. “The Lesson of Balzac.” The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 96, Aug. 1905, pp. 166-180.

———. “Miss Prescott’s ‘Azarian.’” Review of Harriet Elizabeth Prescott’s Azarian: An Episode. North American Review, vol. 100, Jan. 1865, pp. 268-77.

———. Partial Portraits. Macmillan and Company, 1894.

———. The Portrait of a Lady. Edited by Michael Gorra, W. W. Norton and Company, 2018.

———. “Preface to the New York Edition (1908).” James, The Portrait of a Lady, pp. 3-13.

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