WORLDS OF STYLE
635
cern passes to him from Emerson (and James's father) through the
whole body of American literature.
To a degree that forces on us a critically retrospective look at
American literature, James recognizes the impossibility of "naked"
self-expression, the illusion that, like Emerson's
Poet)
one can "turn
the world to glass." In one sense his novels are about the disaster of
assuming that within the environments provided by society there can
be
any allowance of space for the free expansion of the inner self.
Opposed to any such translations and metamorphoses of the self are
realities represented not only by the fashion of wearing clothing.
Standing in opposition also are the fashions of language, the elemental
social necessities of life implicit even in the agreement to use language
in its inherited and publicly accepted forms.
There are two characteristics of language and of literature that
are at odds with the Emersonian ideal of building a world of one's
own. First of all, there is the acceptance by any writer, and con–
spicuously by Emerson himself, of certain decorums in his address to
an imagined audience, of certain shared suppositions-"this is how
an essay sounds" or "this is an acceptable voice for a novel." The "I"
that is heard in the voice is therefore unlikely to be the same "I" that
is projected by images of the liberated self or the Artist. Second, there
is the convention in nineteenth-century fiction of dialogue, even if
the dialogue is sometimes wholly recollected or imagined in a single
mind. Subscription to the convention of dialogue means that in Amer–
ican fiction certain ideas that sound absurd in anything but mono–
logue or soliloquy become the subject of conversation. Such dialogue,
notably in Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville, is quite often pointlessly
stilted and literary.
It
is as
if
these writers felt that dialogue was
forced upon them. In some measure it was, since dialogue presupposes
an accommodation to aspects of reality for which these writers have
an evident distaste: the necessity of social intercourse, the acceptance
of literary and social conventions in the definicion of the Self, the ac–
ceptance of other selves
as
other. Cooper and Melville, for instance,
want to believe in the possibility that the self can expand not merely in
the presence of natural force but also in tile company of other people,
that the same self can carry on polite conversations and be, in one
form or other, something as nonhuman as a "transparent eyeball."
