WORLDS OF STYLE
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aspirations. Their imagination of the self-and I speak now especially
of heroes
in
Cooper, Melville, James-has no economic or social or
sexual objectification; they tend to substitute themselves for the world.
Initially and finally at odds with "system," perhaps their best defini–
tion is Henry James, Sr.'s description of the artist as hero. In a pas–
sage where he affirms a parallel between the writer, struggling to ex–
press himself in language, and the defiant hero, contending with the
recalcitrant materials of reality, the artist is described as "the man of
whatsoever function, who in fulfilling it obeys his own inspiration and
taste, uncontrolled either by his physical necessities or his social obliga–
tions." The artist-hero may be, as he often is in American literature,
an athlete, a detective or a cowboy, his technical skills being as disci–
plined as the skills of art.
James's description might as easily come from Emerson, specifi–
cally from his essay "The Poet." It reflects a transcendentalist idea of
style-not that style should mediate between the self and society but
that it should emanate from the self as a leaf from a tree, expanding
itself naturally to nourish, color and become the world. Emerson him–
self,
as "transparent eyeball," is only the first of the many similar
figures in American literature who thus "swell" into shapes or defy the
realities of space and time.
In works where this expansion of self occurs there is less a ten–
dency to criticize existing environments-for that one would read
Howells or Sinclair Lewis-than an effort to displace them. So that
even at the moment of worldly defeat the hero has managed to create,
like the exiled Coriolanus, at least the illusion of "a world elsewhere."
Works like
Moby Dick
or
The Ambassadors,
for example, are designed
to make the reader feel that his ordinary world has been acknowl–
edged, even exhaustively, only to be dispensed with as a source of
moral or psychological standards. They are written so as finally not
to be translatable into those standards, and their extravagances of lan–
guage are an exultation in the exercise of consciousness momentarily
set free. We can say of two American writers as different as Melville
and James that both are quite willing, for themselves and for their
heroes, to accept the appearance of failure in the interests of this
free exercise of consciousness.
To make an environment in language that thwarts any attempts
to translate that language into the terms of conventional environments
is
to write with a complexity that few even now are willing to allow
