200
PETER BROOKS
James's moral manichaeism is the basis of a vision in which the social
world is made the scene of dramatic choice between heightened moral
alternatives, where every gesture, no matter how frivolous or in–
significant it may seem, is charged with the conflict between light
and darkness, salvation and damnation - where people's destinies
and choices of life seem finally to have little to do with practical
realities of a situation, and much more to do with an intense drama
in which consciousness must purge itself and assume the burden of
moral sainthood. The theme of renunciation which sounds through
James's novels - Isabel Archer's return to Gilbert Osmond, Strether's
return to Woollett, Densher's rejection of Kate Croy - is incom–
prehensible and unjustifiable except as a victory within the realm
of a moral occult which may be so inward and personal that it ap–
pears restricted to the individual consciousness, predicated on the
individual's "sacrifice to the ideal."
As
Jacques Barzun has emphasized in his essay in "Henry James
Melodramatist," James always creates a high degree of excitement
from his dramatized moral dilemmas, partly because of
his
preoc–
cupation with evil as a positive force ever menacing violent conflict
and outburst. Balzac did an apprenticeship in the
roman noir,
nour–
ished
himself
from Gothic novel and frenetic adventure story and
invented cops-and-robbers fiction. These are modes which insist that
reality can be exciting, can be equal to the demands of the imagina–
tion, its play with large moral conflicts. With James, the same
in–
sistence has been further transposed into the drama of moral
COD–
sciousness, so that excitement derives from characters' own dramat–
ized apprehension of clashing moral forces. A famous sentence from
the Preface to
Portrait of a Lady
suggests James's intent. He
is
de–
scribing Isabel's vigil of discovery, the night she sits up and makes
her mind move from discovery to discovery about Gilbert Osmond.
"It
is,"
says James, "a representation simply of her motionless
seeing,
and an attempt withal to make the mere
still
lucidity of her act as
'interesting' as the surprise of a caravan or the identification of a
pirate." The terms of reference in the adventure story are mocked;
yet they remain the terms of reference: moral consciousness must
be
an adventure, its recognitions must be the stuff of a heightened drama.
The excitement and violence of the melodrama of consciousnes!
are obviously and derivatively Balzacian in
The American.
Newman's
