Unit 7 DB: Perspectives in Prose: Exploring Point of View (POV) and Emotional Connection to Literature

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Abstract

This essay considers the role of Jamesian point of view in the cultural struggle waged during the interwar years to legitimate the novel as an art form. Starting with Percy Lubbock’s famous formulation of point of view, it examines the different positions writers, critics, and other consecrating agents took with respect to it as point of view became the defining formal device of the modernist novel. This new perspective on point of view prompts us to reconsider its critical usefulness and sheds light on the role of realism in the critical naturalization of the novel as a world system.

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Most critics would agree that the novel as we know it today owes much of its cultural prestige to Henry James. Some critics might follow the trail of the novel’s cultural capital back to James’s own works, especially his late novels, which are, if nothing else, the best examples we have of virtuoso novelization, of novels for novels’ sake. Others might argue that the consolidation of the novel within the field of literary production was already inscribed in James’s critical work, which, both in his stand-alone essays and in his prefaces to the New York Edition of his works, famously advanced an argument for considering the novel as a work of art as distinctive as music, painting, and architecture. Yet, without trying to minimize the force and efficacy of James’s own writing in the construction of the novel as a symbolic repository for literary culture’s standing in the world, it is also important to acknowledge the role played by editors, publishers, translators, reviewers, academics, biographers, and the reading public in creating the conditions that made possible the novel’s dominant position in the cultural field. These “consecrating agents,” as Pierre Bourdieu calls them, contributed to the production of the value of the novel and, crucially, to the production of the belief in its value, especially during the interwar years, a period whose cultural impulses are conventionally acknowledged to have been directed against the sort of realism James championed (229). The cultural logic of modernism is not the subject of this essay, but the pressure it exerts on the rather more circumscribed confines of novelistic style that directly concerns me here must be understood at the outset as being both constitutive and contextual. However, I want to focus instead on the immediate afterlives of one specific stylistic element in which James and those who followed him invested an inordinate amount of symbolic capital: point of view.

The term is no longer much in use, having been supplanted among narratologists by the more technophilic but less evocative term focalization,¹ yet, for all the air of obsolescence that surrounds it, “point of view” provides a valuable perspective, a point of view, as it were, on the cultural status of the novel in the interwar years. The prestige of the novel, I will argue, was achieved by virtue of the varying positions different agents took with respect to point of view in the literary field. And there is perhaps no one more visibly responsible for the consecration of point of view as the defining characteristic of novelistic art during this period than Percy Lubbock, James’s most able champion in the struggle for the novel’s cultural legitimacy. In The Craft of Fiction (1921), as is well known, Lubbock attempts to give methodological shape to what he calls the “shadowy and fantasmal form” of the novel, that immaterial literary quality that distinguishes the novel-as-art from popular forms of fiction whose shape, presumably, can be readily grasped (1). Drawing extensively from the critical vocabulary James himself had developed in the prefaces, Lubbock constructs an argument that begins with a general claim about the “different substances” that go into the making of the novel—the “various forms of narrative, the forms in which a story may be told” (20)—and advances progressively from considerations of the “subject”—the craft of fiction begins with the “novelist’s eye for a subject” (23)—to the various methods novelists employ to capture a “reflected picture of life” (120). Across a series of extended, patient readings of canonical works by Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Thackeray, Lubbock makes two interrelated distinctions, familiar to readers of James’s critical writings, in order to describe how novelists avail themselves of either “scenic” or “panoramic” formal methods in order to “show” rather than “tell” their “matter.” These distinctions, however, are motivated by a single purpose: they are the means a novelist uses “to dramatize the seeing eye” (117). In his reading of James’s The Ambassadors, Lubbock shows how the “seeing eye” does not in fact belong to Strether, its protagonist, nor yet to James, the author, but is rather dramatized as a problem in its own right since it is a novel whose narrative resolution is centered on an act of seeing that alters our sense of what it means to perceive. Lubbock does not put it this way, but it might be worth noting in passing that, like the Hans Holbein painting from which James borrows his title, the novel is an exercise in anamorphic perspective. The Ambassadors, Lubbock writes, “is a story which is seen from one man’s point of view, and yet a story in which that point of view is itself a matter for the reader to confront and to watch constructively” (184). Lubbock’s analysis of the craft of fiction culminates with a formulation of point of view: “The whole intricate question of method, in the craft of fiction, I take to be governed by the question of point of view—the question of the relation in which the narrator stands to the story” (251).

Though not the first,² Lubbock’s formalization of point of view was crucial in establishing the perspectival authority (or, rather, the authority of perspective) in Jamesian criticism. Writing in 1931 on James’s prefaces, Leon Edel goes so far as to say that point of view is the compositional principle at the center of all of James’s novels:

The first stage in the construction of a novel, for James, was always the determination of the point of view. Who is to tell the story, or see it? From what angle is the subject to be approached? How are its “values” to be realized? In whose consciousness are we to follow the incidents? Who is to be the “center”?

(71)

But, however indebted to James’s own critical and novelistic practice, Lubbock’s formulation had a much broader range of applicability, soon becoming something like a novelistic algorithm or shibboleth that both determined and identified point of view as the “question” of the novel. In criticism, point of view was soon incorporated into the New Critical armamentarium where it had a long and productive life in literary anthologies and teaching manuals (consider, for instance, its use in Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature) before finding, in however refracted a form, a new home in narratology. Writing in 1955, Norman Friedman could confidently assert that point of view was “becoming one of the most useful critical distinctions available to the student of fiction today” (1161).

The impact point of view had on novelistic practice during the interwar years is harder to gauge, in part because modernist novelists, with the possible exception of Virginia Woolf, who read and, at least initially, appreciated The Craft of Fiction,³ were rather more reticent than James in reflecting upon their own practice. More important, modernist novels themselves can be said to be extensive experiments in point of view, which renders the “question of point of view” moot or at best rhetorical since it is understood to be constitutive of novelistic practice as such. Indeed, during the years between the wars point of view becomes a crucial “structuring structure” in the literary field, Bourdieu’s useful term for describing how practices and the perception of practices organize the struggle for legitimacy in a given cultural field. For Bourdieu, the struggle for cultural legitimacy has three stages: the position occupied by the literary field within the larger field of power over a given period of time, the structure of objective positions occupied by agents competing for legitimacy at any given moment, and the different producers’ habitus, by which is meant an agent’s practical dispositions in specific situations. From this perspective, James’s efforts to legitimize the novel as an art form, together with Lubbock’s attempts to elevate point of view as the sine qua non of novelistic art, form part of a larger struggle to consolidate the literary field as a field of power in the first decades of the twentieth century. The emergence of avant-garde art (Bürger), the advent of mechanical technologies of reproduction (Benjamin), the impingement of the accelerated, magnified, and fragmented experience of urban life on an increasingly taxed sensorium (Simmel)—in short, the arrival of modernism proper after the First World War—altered the objective positions of the different agents in the cultural field and pitted the literary field itself against competing cultural forms (cinema, genre fiction, glossy magazines, popular entertainment, etc.) that were beginning to make cultural gains against the once dominant novel.

Bourdieu does not explicitly mention point of view in his analysis of the literary field, or at least not in the way James and Lubbock use the term—that is, as a predominantly formal category—but one can nevertheless argue that the stylistic signatures of most of the consecrated modernist authors still read today can be understood as resulting from the “objective positions” taken by them with respect to point of view in the field of modernist literature. Proust’s intermittently self-directed voice, Woolf’s lyrical stream of consciousness, Joyce’s prosaic stream of consciousness, Hemingway’s telegraphic style, Dos Passos’s roving camera eye, and Faulkner’s multi-perspectival narratives (the list could go on) are all stylistic choices made within a rarefied cultural field in which point of view has accrued the required cultural capital to act as consecrating currency.

But we can take full measure of the legitimating power of point of view by briefly considering its value to positions within the field that are not taken with the aim of legitimating the novel-as-art but rather of maximizing profit in a literary market that had global reach in the interwar years. Consider in this context the different points of view that characterize the popular forms of genre fiction: the panoptic gaze of detective fiction, the otherworldly perspective of ghost stories, the “foreign” or exotic locales of adventure fiction, Mars as a radically alien point of comparison in science fiction, the alterity of the colonial other in imperial romances. All these genres employ recognizable narrative models to focus attention on invisible, imagined, or distant worlds that are inaccessible to our perception but which nevertheless invite comparison to our everyday worlds. They are narrative forms, in other words, that are generically encoded to perform perspectival sleights-of-hand while remaining within the realm of realistic representation.

It is no doubt excessive to argue that the stylistic choices of the novel-as-art and the narrative stances of generic fiction owe their cultural legitimacy to Lubbock’s formalization of point of view, yet it is important to note that Lubbock is taking a position within the same literary field, and at the same time, as the novelists who take positions within it. And they are all taking their positions with respect to, or as a function of, point of view within the larger field of cultural production. Each agent has a point of view about point of view and takes a position within the literary field accordingly. It is to this sense of “point of view” that Bourdieu refers when he discusses a writer’s “habitus,” that is, the various dispositions that inform the taking of positions within the field. In his essay, “Flaubert’s Point of View,” Bourdieu analyzes the ways in which Flaubert not only represents the field of literary production in his novel Lost Illusions, a novel whose subject is literary apprenticeship, but also in writing the fiction positions himself explicitly within it. For Bourdieu, Flaubert’s point of view is equivalent to the positions he adopts within the space of possibilities available to him within the historically constructed field of power he inhabits. Flaubert, Bourdieu writes, “put himself so to speak in the position of pushing to their highest intensity all the questions posed by and in the field” (558). It is not a question of originality, genius, or inspiration: Flaubert’s uniqueness rests on his ability, not always conscious, to confront and struggle with the different possible positions available to him and to thereby objectify his own position within the field.

I have been arguing that point of view, as practiced by James and formalized by Lubbock and other consecrating agents, was objectified into a series of distinct positions within the literary field during the interwar period. These positions, following Bourdieu, can be described as points of view regarding point of view, or point of view’s points of view, which we can now profitably equate with the novel as such during the period under discussion. But what are we to make of the dominant position point of view occupies in the modernist novel’s field of production when we so strongly associate point of view with James as to treat it as a problem of realism? The question is of critical as well as literary historical interest. From the perspective of point of view, our tendency to view realism and modernism as across a chasm might need to be revised, or at least nuanced, to entertain the possibility of a more contingent history of struggle and appropriation in which literature is both the vehicle and result of social relations. The point is not of course to claim James for modernism, nor Woolf for realism, nor yet science fiction as high art, but rather to dispute the historical narrative of progress that subtends our attempts to periodize cultural production into discreet, internally coherent units that flow predictably along a course mapped by aesthetic advances within the horizon of national literary histories. 

We might consider the historical development of point of view as a series of local struggles for legitimacy within an ever expanding field of literary production whose reach during the interwar period had become global in scope. Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters offers a scalar realignment of literary history to describe position-taking in a world literary space in which the struggle for domination occurs both in the center and at the periphery of a global system whose field of power overlaps but does not coincide with dominant geopolitical configurations. In this context, point of view can be said to not only act as novelistic currency determining the position taken by specific novelists but also as a point of entry into the world literary space. Consider Machado de Assis’s Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (translated as Epitaph of a Small Winner), a Brazilian novel written in 1880 whose narrator views his life from beyond the grave, an unusual point of view that simultaneously marks the novel as a work of art within the local literary field (it did not sell well) and lends it legitimacy in the world republic of letters, where it makes itself visible by rejecting predictable and conventional positions with respect to point of view. More generally, point of view is arguably what allows the novel to become a world system, not only in that to take a position within the field, to have a point of view within it, is to have something to say about point of view but also in that to do so is to already view the field as an expansive terrain.

For James, point of view is an aesthetic principle as much as a cognitive or perceptual apparatus, allowing him in practice to lay claim to the novel’s legitimacy within the literary field but also enabling him to elaborate his distinctive “international” theme as a problem of point of view. His preferred subject, an American in Europe, presents, if nothing else, a perceptual challenge since it demands as a condition of its dramatic possibilities that there be at least two different, incommensurate, and perhaps incompatible points of view for every situation, character, or event depicted. The conceptual limit of point of view (a point of view is by definition limited) has the paradoxical effect of broadening the scope of perception by virtue of its very limitations, which must henceforth be problematized, multiplied, inverted, refracted, mirrored, and so on, in order to be “narratable,” to use D. A. Miller’s term. The “prose picture,” James writes in “The Future of the Novel,”

can never be at the end of its tether until it loses the sense of what it can do. It can do simply everything, and that is its strength and its life. Its plasticity, its elasticity are infinite; there is no colour, no extension it may not take from the nature of its subject or the temper of its craftsman.

(AC 246)

It does not in the least surprise, then, that in distilling the craft of fiction to the question of point of view Lubbock, a comparatist avant la lettre, should refer to Russian, French, and English novels indistinctly as though they all formed part of a single field. Point of view in James is what makes the novel a capacious “international” art form for which “anything goes.” Point of view, moreover, is arguably what allows the novel to travel, its portability proving that national languages are to the novel what the book is to its “fantasmal” forms. The emergence of “magical realism” in the latter half of the twentieth century shows that, when transplanted to regions of the world that had remained outside the literary field of power and trained on local realities, modernist experiments with point of view could both transform the way these regions perceived themselves and were perceived by the metropole (Paris in Casanova’s scheme) and simultaneously globalize the scope of the literary field as a whole.

From this perspective, Frederic Jameson’s contention that point of view is an ideology of individualism is correct but misplaced. To be sure, the history of point of view, or, rather, the history of points of view about points of view, is also a history of a position taking, which is one way of describing politics. The semantic difference that obtains between Lubbock’s (and James’s) sense of point of view, which is eminently novelistic, and Bourdieu’s, which is presumably applicable to any field of production, may be described as the difference between aesthetics and politics. The latter is perhaps more closely aligned to ideology than to habitus, even though in Bourdieu’s account of the literary field it is not always easy to tell the difference between the two. To the extent that position-taking is an individual act, however conditioned by our beliefs, tastes, interests, and sundry other “dispositions,” it is also a “point of view.” That is, it is limited to our individual perceptions. To argue, as Jameson does, that point of view is a “law” or “norm” more at home in creative writing classes than on the streets and “erected as a hegemonic ideology under the authority of Henry James and by innumerable literary censors, who scan texts for its infringement, which they might as well have discovered on every other page of Tolstoy or Zola,” then, is to forget, or occlude, the perspectival possibilities of multiple, diverse, and socially engaged representations offered by point of view in the “plastic” and “elastic” discourse of the novel (164).⁴

Jameson’s counterexample, in the long argument of which this point of view on point of view is merely an aside, is Zola, whose work, in a reversal of Lukács’s polemical distinction between descriptive naturalism and narrative realism, Jameson valorizes precisely because it is descriptive, because, that is, it lacks a point of view. James, who knew Zola personally and followed, however briefly, the naturalist ethos,⁵ would not have disagreed, at least initially, with Jameson’s characterization: “It was the fortune, it was in a manner the doom, of Les Rougon-Macquart to deal with things almost always in gregarious form, to be a picture of numbers, of classes, crowds, confusions, movements, industries. . . . The individual life is, if not wholly absent, reflected in coarse and common, in generalised terms” (877). Yet, to the extent that Zola, in his pseudo-scientific attempts to trace the effects of family heredity and social environment on individuals, focuses on what he repeatedly calls the “human animal,” he is also providing a particular point of view on the reality of his day.⁶ Naturalism is a plea made by means of the formidable representational resources of the realist novel to consider social agents that have been heretofore neglected by the novel: the working classes, the lumpenproletariat, and the various urban subcultures that are not normally visible to the novel’s point of view. Indeed, James himself, in what can seem like an argument right out of Bourdieu, realizes that the most important aspect of Zola’s art is not his depiction of the “coarse and common” but rather the position he takes in the literary field with respect to them:

We get it [fineness] in the very history of his effort, the image itself of his lifelong process, comparatively so personal, so spiritual even, and, through all its patience and pain, of a quality so much more distinguished than the qualities he succeeds in attributing to his figures even when he most aims at distinction.

(FW 878) 

Zola’s point of view, like James’s, blurs the distinction we routinely make between a formal “inside” of the novel and a political “outside,” between an aesthetic point of view and an ideological one. Point of view is not necessarily unitary, stable, and totalizing. It can be multiple, variable, and incomplete. Like writing in general, point of view may well privilege the individual, but it is also capable of offering perspectival correctives that open up the space of representation to impersonal, collective, ghostly, inanimate, nonhuman, and otherworldly worlds. If nothing else, this is the lesson James imparts to his modernist heirs. As Lubbock renders it at the end of The Craft of Fiction, “[The narrator] tells it as he sees it, in the first place; the reader faces the story-teller and listens, and the story may be told so vivaciously that the presence of the minstrel is forgotten, and the scene becomes visible, peopled with the characters of the tale” (251).

Mario Ortiz-Robles

University of Wisconsin, Madison

notes

1. The term was first coined by Gérard Genette in 1972: “To avoid the too specifically visual connotations of vision, field and point of view, I will take up here the slightly more abstract term focalization . . .” (189). Bal defines it thus: “Focalization is . . . the relation between the vision and that which is ‘seen,’ perceived” (100).

2. Writing in 1918, Beach claims that “[t]here is no matter in which James has shown greater care for technique” than in developing point of view (56).

3. Woolf’s mention of Lubbock’s book appears in her essay “On Re-Reading Novels,” where she notes that it is “a book which is likely to have much influence upon readers and may perhaps eventually reach the critics and writers” (123).

4. In a separate set of comments on Henry James, Jameson introduces, via Bakhtin, the term “alien speech” to describe “the secret presence of French within James’s peculiar style” (297). The “infiltration” of a language by the syntax of another does not correspond to the formal aspects of point of view, but it does belong to the set of dispositions Bourdieu associates with a writer’s habitus. Under this head, Jameson argues that James’s psychic drive can be reduced to his “voyeurism,” a term that extends across, but does not cover, the two senses of point of view I have been discussing. Point of view, pace Jameson, is not particularly ironic in this context, even as the oscillation between the two senses destabilizes a fixed perspective.

5. McGurl calls James’s The Princess Casamassima an “experiment in literary naturalism” (80).

6. It is instructive in this context to reflect upon what Jameson calls James’s “fundamental historical achievement” at the level of the sentence, the discovery of what he (Jameson) calls the “sub-conversation,” the subtle and silent positionings that occur among interlocutors in any encounter; “the kind of strange circling with friendly or hostile others that more visibly characterizes animals’ behavior with their own or other species, rather than what can be seen from the outside in the exchanges of human speakers” (301). Whatever its connection with the animal perspective of naturalism proper, this discovery is also an elaboration of point of view.

References

AC—The Art of Criticism. Ed. William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 

FW—French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition. New York: Library of America, 1984. Vol. 2 of Literary Criticism. 

Word count: 4041

Copyright Johns Hopkins University Press Fall 2018