Henry James and Joseph Conrad: the pursuit of autonomy

In the final chapter of The English Novel (1930), Ford Madox Ford suggests that “when the dust of The Yellow Book period died away” after the trial of Oscar Wilde, there nevertheless remained in the public mind “some conception that novel writing was an art” and that “the novel was a vehicle by means of which every kind of psychological or scientific truth connected with human life and affairs could be very fittingly conveyed.” The three names Ford invokes for this moment are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Joseph Conrad – two Americans and a Pole, who at that moment were neighbours in Kent. For James and for Conrad (as for Ford), the conception of the novel as art comes from Flaubert: this means not only attention to verbal precision ( le mot juste ) and freedom regarding subject matter, but also “the doctrine of the novelist as Creator who should have a Creator's aloofness, rendering the world as he sees it, uttering no comments, falsifying no issues and carrying the subject – the Affair – he has selected for rendering, remorselessly out to its logical conclusion” (123). Moreover, as Pierre Bourdieu argues, the Flaubertian commitment to style and form (and the logic of “the Affair”) also has an impact upon the professional milieu in which it operates: it is a pursuit of artistic autonomy that cannot overcome the forces of the marketplace, but that nevertheless establishes a separate realm of literary production and aesthetic value.