WORLDS OF STYLE
633
woods as a boy of ten, for example, it is, we are told, as
if
he is going
back
in
time, leaving any historically formed environment. He feels
that he is witnessing his own birth, "the wagon progressing not by
its own volition but by attrition of their intact yet fluid circumam–
bience, drowsing, earless, almost lightless." This image is contrived
to imitate the movement of a baby out of the womb and into the
world, the hero's imagined denudation being a prelude not only to
his eloquent later choice of what he calls "dispossession," but to the
necessities which accompany that choice: of a lonely, sexless, childless
life.
In a companion story to
The Bear, Delta Autumn,
Faulkner
gives a savage rightness to the question asked of Isaac, now an old
man, by the mulatto mistress of his nephew: what, she asks, can he
know about love. The issue Faulkner recognizes here, and
has
the
genius to exploit, is nearly everywhere a tension in American litera–
ture: the tension of bringing into conjunction the environment of
nakedness, where there is no encumbrance to the expression of the
true inner self, and the environment of costume, of outer space oc–
cupied by society and its fabrications. The utter simplicity of Gatsby's
room is another example of what one might call the environment of
inner space, intended to show the meaninglessness of the festooned life
that Gatsby presents to the world. The configuration in Fitzgerald has
already been anticipated, of course, in the nakedness enjoyed by Huck
and Jim, when Huck does not have to go out in the disguises by which
he "fits into" society. Similarly, a return to "nakedness" is also for
Emerson the virtue of the woods: where "a man casts off his
years
as a snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a
child," even while his own style has often a contrasting, sometimes
debilitating "dress" and elegance. And while Thoreau is not gen–
erally credited with having had an influence on Henry James, it seems
likely that in
The Portrait of a Lady,
Thoreau's disquisition on
"Clothing" was on the periphery of James's satiric intention when,
to Madame Merle's belief that "we are each of us made up of a cluster
of appurtenances," he lets Isabel respond that
"I don't know whether I succeed
in
expressing myself, but I know
that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any
measure of me; on the contrary it's a limit, a barrier, and a per-
