56
LEO BERSANI
"no mystery" in James, "no secrets" - in
L'Immoraliste
and
La
Porte etroite)
is spare not simply as a technique of mystification,
but rather because of a recognized incompatibility between expres–
sive possibilities and the sources of behavior. An inadequate, hope–
lessly clear language thus
refers
to a psychology of obscure, inex–
pressible motive (distinct from the Jamesian "finely-mingled" mo–
tive). Whatever is said - in Gide, Constant or Mme. de Lafayette -
can merely be designed to violate as gently as possible the necessarily
unsaid, to "tremble" from the pressure of a psychology which mocks
all intelligible distinctions and priorities of intention. Psychological
density in French classicism and in certain Greek tragedies lurks
behind a language both ominously allusive and defensively decorous.
In James, on the other hand, density is what we move toward. With
time we will have all there is to have, whereas, say, in Euripides and
Racine both time and language, instead of creating motive, merely
postpone the explosion of motive into act. And that explosion could
have taken place before the illusory action ever began: the work of
art is a delayed time bomb, and an exquisite language both enter–
tains and excoriates our suspense.
The essential difference is of course in the imagined relation
between meaning and expression. In both classicism and the kind
of realism which James renounces, language is not strictly necessary
to the subject of art. The self (in Racinian tragedy) and society (in
realistic fiction) are either beyond or behind or prior to the work.
And this fundamental premise can accommodate such superficially
antagonistic manifestations as the art of the
litote,
the naturalist's
exuberance at the prospect of making art a scientific copy of life,
and the literature of suicidal silence as the ultimate deference to
an ineffable or inexpressible "real." What J ames asks us to do in
his later fiction is to detach the notions of reality and probability
from all such external references - which is to say that he would
encourage us to believe that our range of experience can be as great
as our range of compositional resource. In short, compositional play
need not be merely tangential to being; and, in the immense faith
in time and language which this gamble implies, James works
toward a richly superficial art in which hidden depths would never
ironically undermine the life inspired by his own and his characters'
"mere" ingenuities of design.
