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LIONEL TRILLINtP
and limit the ways in which the pleasures of the world may
be
seized, and to the moral sensibilities which propose the circumstances
in which the pleasures of the world- perhaps the world itself-must
be surrendered. The credence he gave to pleasure and the credence
he gave to moral sanction together define James's certitude that the
world is
there:
the unquestionable, inescapable world; the world so
beautifully and so disastrously solid, physical, material, "natural."
And I think that it is because the world is so very much there for
James that our interest in his work has receded from the high point it
reached two decades ago. It does not move us now as it once did to
hear him say, "Live as much as you can; it's a mistake not to."
Whatever Paris and Gloriani's garden and a free and happy sexuality
may mean to our practical consciousness (perhaps everything!), to our
literary or spiritual consciousness they now mean but little.
If
we
can imagine a novelist of our own moment who matched James in
genius, we cannot easily suppose that he would give anything like
james's credence to the good "thereness" of the world, to the necessity
of having one's life in the terms of the hedonism that James seems to
celebrate. By the same token, we cannot easily suppose that he would
give anything like James's credence to the moral sanctions which
control and limit the ways in which the pleasures of the world may be
grasped. These two credences, as I say, are the ground of James's art,
constituting as they do his acceptance of the world's reality. They
make the element of his work that tends to alienate it from the
contemporary consciousness, that allows us to wonder whether we must
not judge James to have been touched with the Philistinism of his
epoch and therefore misled in his judgment of Hawthorne.
Our contemporary feeling about the world, alien from that of
James, is much in accord with that of Franz Kafka. Everything about
Kafka is still in dispute, perhaps even more than it formerly was,
now that our response to him has become more precise and discriminat–
ing. But almost everyone will agree that Kafka's work gives very
little recognition,
if
any at all, to the world in its ordinary actuality,
as it is the object of our desires and wills, as we know it socially,
politically, erotically, domestically; or,
if
it recognizes the world at all,
it does so only through what it perceives of the radical incompatibility
of world and mankind. The lively little study of Kafka by Gunther
Anders seems to me especially satisfying because it responds so fully
