632
RICHARD POIRIER
James's international novels, both early, in
The Europeans
J
and late,
in
The Ambassadors.
In summary, Cooper describes conditions which
in Emerson fostered a myth of newness, a myth that gets enacted
humanly by Huck Finn, a character whose consciousness exceeds the
"styles" to which the book as well as Huck are ultimately forced to
surrender.
Recognizing the chasm between a fully developed consciousness
of self and the socially accepted styles by which that self can get ex–
pressed, Henry James developed a style which pays almost no defer–
ence to what we recognize as the language of ordinary social inter–
course. It is a style that instead gives credence and support to ex–
traordinary, almost grotesque expansions of consciousness, grotesque
in the sense that the consciousness thus rendered is very often a
mix–
ture of James's own intrusive sensibility and the generally more
limited ones of the characters of his later books. But even James was
not able wholly to protect such heroes from questions prompted by
the reader's commitment to a society and a language existent outside
of James's books. There have, as a result, been endless debates about
the significance in psychological and social terms of the renunciations
of any customary forms of happiness at the end of nearly all
his
novels, noticeably at the end of
The Portrait of a Lady, The Spoils
of Poynton, The Wings of the Dove
and
The Ambassadors.
The
problem is evidence of the distinctive American quality of James. The
crisis
in
the most interesting American works often occurs at those
moments when the author tries to externalize the inner consciousness
of his hero, tries to insert it, to borrow William James's metaphor,
into social and verbal environments that won't sustain it. And the
crisis is confronted not only by the heroes but also hy their creators
when it comes to conceiving of some possible resolution to the conflict
of inner consciousness or some suitable external reward for it.
Describing the situation in images which most often embody it
in American literature, we can say that American writers are at some
point always forced to return their characters to prison. They return
them to "reality" from environments where they have been allowed
most "nakedly" to exist, environments created by various kinds of
stylistic ingenuity. They "clothe" them and subject them to questions
of a social and sexual nature which it has been their and their creator's
intention to avoid. When Isaac, in Faulkner's
The Bear,
enters the
