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LEO BERSANI
other realistic novelists intent, unlike James, on imposing plots as
definitive versions of reality. But "what happens" in the Jamesian
novel
is
nonetheless appropriately used to reinstate a necessary re–
sistance of "reality" to pure consciousness, or, more exactly, of
novelistic fact to the theoretically limitless capacity of the imagina–
tion to expand. The uninteresting situations of the later fiction
create relations for consciousness which limit its play and make its
achievements socially and morally workable. Milly Theale, we might
say, has to die from her creator's poverty-stricken sense of reality in
order to convince us that reality is both catastrophic and unim–
portant.
But James seems still tempted to minimize the importance of
the resistances, although now in ways more complex than in the
ways just prior to the "major phase."
The Wings of the Dove,
for
example, might lead us to believe that fictions can have the kind of
power James wants them to have only when the world is reduced to
a single, depersonalized consciousness. There is a merging of narra–
tive perspectives in the novel which gives some point to Quentin
Anderson's approach to James's work as moral allegory, although
the specific references (derived from the Swedenborgian system of
James's father) which Anderson brings to the novels generally make
them unrecognizable. On the one hand, we have in
The Wings of
the Dove
a social drama involving distinctly different individuals.
But their distinctness is threatened by the resemblances among the
various narrative blocks: all the principal centers - first Kate, then
Milly and finally Densher - seem to be reenacting the moral choice
of the mind from whose point of view the story is really being
enacted. It's as if we had three imag;es of the self confronted with
the alternatives of the world
of
the lioness and the world of the
dove. And when Kate has chosen the former and Milly the latter,
they allegorically become their choice for the final and most crucial
spiritual performance, which is of course Densher's.
How do we recognize this mutation of personality into alle–
gorical function? First of all, the records of consciousness hover
between what seem to be the characters' actual thoughts and the
narrator's sensitivity to the compositional appeal of (his or their?)
mental sequences. James's habit of giving us the consequences and
the implications of a thought or a fact before giving us the thought
