HEIRESS OF ALL THE AGES
243
dramatise.
By means of this compositional economy the story
is so organised that it seems to tell itself, excluding all material
not directly bearing on the theme. This despite the "complication
of innuendo and associative reference," as William James called
it, by which the author communicates the vital information needed
to understand the action. Complications of this sort so confuse
some readers that they see nothing but surplus-matter and digres–
sion where, in fact, everything is arranged in the most compact
order. Nor is the occasional wordiness and vagueness of James's
prose germane to our judgment of his novelistic structure. Even
the thoughts of his characters are reproduced along exclusive
rather than inclusive lines, as in
The Golden Bowl,
where the
interior monologues of Maggie and the Prince are in reality a
kind of speech which no one happens to overhear, showing none
of the rich incoherence, haphazardness, and latitude of Joyce's
rendering of the private mind, for example.
The principle of free association is incompatible with the
Jamesian technique, which is above all a technique of exclusion.
One can best describe it, it seems to me, as the fictional equivalent
of the poetic modes evolved by modern poets seeking to produce
a "pure poetry." In this sense the later James has more in
common with a poet like Mallarme than with novelists like Joyce
and Proust, whose tendency is to appropriate more and more
material and to assimilate to their medium even such non-fictional
forms as the poem and the essay. In Proust the specific experience
is
made use of to launch all sorts of generalisations, to support,
that is, his innumerable analyses-by turn poetic and essaystic–
of memory, love, jealousy, the nature of art, etc. In Joyce this
impulse to generalisation finds other outlets, such as the investing
of the specific experience with mythic associations that help us
to
place it within the pattern of human recurrence and typicality.
James tightens where Joyce and Proust loosen the structure of
the novel. In their hands the novel takes on encyclopedic dimen–
sions, surrendering its norms and imperialistically extending it–
self, so to speak, to absorb all literary genres. It might be claimed,
in
fact, that
the rwvel as they write it ceases to be itself, having
been
transformed into a comprehensive work from which none
of
the
resources of literature are excluded.
Not that they abandon
the
principle of selection; the point is rather that they select
