THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM
zor-backed and black and bristling—but you have no right to take liberties with his recognised anatomical structure—draw any kind of a pig you choose, so long as it remains a pig. In other words, you have no right to profess to be working in a certain recognised literary form, and then so distort the leading characteristics of that form that it becomes something entirely different. "The confusion of kinds," says Henry James, "is the inelegance of letters and the stultification of values."
It does not by any means follow that an author is not free to invent new literary forms or varieties, if he has the inventive power. There is no rule in art forbidding the unusual, the new or even the grotesque. There is no reason why we should not have, from time to time, something undreamed of in the philosophy of literary form, any more than there is a reason
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