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LEO BERSANI
will be the search for the morality of a strictly structural coherence.
Is composition, in short, amenable to moral discriminations?
The Awkward Age
makes an even stronger case against the
liberated imagination than does
The Turn of the Screw.
The latter
gives us the melodrama of consciousness, and while it has been
received as a model of mystification, both its simplicity and its
originality are apparent, I think, once we stop assuming that such
a story has to have a hidden subject, that there must be either real
ghosts or real neuroses.
The Awkward Age
is a much more difficult
work; in it the critique of appreciation and conjecture is made not
through a sensational image of their power to destroy, but rather
through the subtle display of a corrupting fineness of appreciation.
The Awkward Age
is about the naturally promiscuous nature of
talk, about a taste for talk so cultivated and yet so uncontrolled
that the passion for conversation has affected the capacity for
passion. It's as if the interest of Mrs. Brook and her friends in
intelligent chatter had revealed the impersonal nature of what
makes talk
purely interesting.
Conversational discriminations are
self-promoting, and, in its most refined and satisfyingly designed
state, language entertains personality out of existence and, as it
were, continues to chatter on its own steam. Nanda is the moving
victim of that extremity in
The Awkward Age,
and Vanderbank
provides a troubling image of a man nostalgic for distinctions more
personal than verbal, but no longer able to find in himself a per–
sonal pressure which would limit and humanize his intelligence. He
is nonexpressive, extraordinarily civilized, and spiritually dead. He
is in fact nothing but talk; but the subject of
The Awkward Age
is
talk, and the novel's perfection consists in precisely that scenic
form which may at first strike us as so artificial. Or rather, its very
artificiality is the novel's point. James
has
given us what he
calls
in the preface "really constructive dialogue, dialogue organic and
dramatic, speaking for itself, representing and embodying substance
and form." The world of
The Awkward Age
is
one in which only
artful dialogue exists; and its profound subject is the superficially
non-Jamesian theme of a civilization destroyed by its superior enter–
tainments, that is, by what might almost
be
taken for its art.
The Turn of the Screw
and
The Awkward Age
dramatize the
dangers to civilized life in fictions released from a shared if conven-
