ABSTRACT
The truth that the doctrine reflects is that the art is not a mimesis of the life, if mimesis is understood as correspondence. Leon Edel's Henry James should be particularly illuminating in this respect. Edel's Henry James wants to be read as a work of novelistic art. The five volumes are the product of an extraordinary devotion to, an unsurpassed exercise in empathy with, the life of the novelist. Henry James is a biography of saturation. Edel never produces a laundry list, so to speak, the vice of so many "monumental biographies", but there is an almost deliberate retardation of narrative movement, a marking time, which seems to have as its aim a mimesis of the life as actually lived: an inconsequence of days, of dinners, of letter writing. Edel has remained true to the extraordinary disproportion between the life and the art—that is, between that thinness of life and the richness of the art.
