Henry James and the Creative Process

Abstract

Creativity as a process may be said to constitute a particular mode of experience and to own a specific phenomenology which can be described, compared, and evaluated. Creativity can be viewed as a cultural practice whereby contextual factors, with the environment that lies outside the brain, must be considered beyond the exclusive biological and neural foundations of aesthetic experience. The work of Henry James presents a writer’s continuous attempt to come to a deeper understanding of the creative process at the center of his art, driven by an understanding of human experience as essentially based and grounded in creativity. Looking at James’s notebooks, his prefaces, and also some of his works, we can trace the creative process in all its complexity, as a particular mode of experience and also as a “method” or strategy to stimulate and sustain the creative state. James shows us that there are distinct features of “creative states” which are not exclusive to literary creativity. The diversity and innovativeness of human experience is a creative factor in itself, so that “everyday” little-c contributes to big-C. James’s thorough exploration of the creative process may be compared to more recent attempts in the sciences to understand creativity in cognition in general and literature in particular.