58
LEO BERSANI
freedom - but we must understand that word in the sense of inven–
tions so coercive that they resist any attempt to enrich - or reduce -
them with meaning. In his Prefaces James asserts that freedom much
more confidently than in his fiction. His passionate geometry and
his refusal "to go behind" constitute a triumph of composition over
depth which is more often an aspiration than an achievement in
his novels. The novels dramatize the difficulties of living by im–
provisation: the incompatibilities among different ways of compos–
ing life, the absence of determined values by which to discriminate
morally among various compositions, the need to develop persuasive
strategies capable of imposing personal ingenuities on the life of a
community, and, finally, the nostalgia for an enslaving truth which
would rescue us from the strenuous responsibilities of inventive free–
dom.
The novels are thus a complex critique of the approach to the
novels proposed in the Prefaces. The purity of James's structuralist
approach to his fiction depends on an indifference to some of the
hesitations and conflicts which complicate his characters' efforts to
see how living by compositional coherence alone can be made morally
workable. The novels are a constantly dramatic struggle
toward
the
security of the Prefaces. The latter therefore belong in the design
of James's whole career, and it will not be violating the spirit of his
own criticism to retrace the dramatic "germs" from which it grew.
For the adequacy of structural or compositional motive, contrary to
what is often argued today, is itself a
position
on human expression
no less subject than other positions to historical or phenomenological
analysis. Without, for example, reducing the Jamesian geometry to
psychological pressures which could hardly accommodate the im–
pressive structures of his fiction, we can nevertheless investigate the
function of structure itself in a self-revolutionizing psychology. Hope–
fully, we will then be suggesting a way of covering james's fiction
even more adequately, of placing the interest in composition within
an often violent, occasionally lurid drama involving the mutation
of lies into redemptive fictions.
II
"I see. I see." Apparently nothing is more stimulating, more
exhilarating for James's characters than that act of recognition which
