PARTISAN REVIEW
203
other such matters, is either a magnificent lurid document or the
baseless fabric of a vision. The great wonder is that, as I rejoice
to put it, we can never really discover which, and that we feel as
we read that we can't, and that we suffer at the hands of no other
author this particular helplessness of immersion. It is
done
-
we
are always thrown back on that; we can't get out of it;
all
we
can
do is to say that the true itself can't be more than done and that
if
the false in this way equals it we must give up looking for the
difference. Alone among novelists Balzac has the secret of an in–
sistence that somehow makes the difference nought. He warms
his
facts into life - as witness the certainty that the episode I just
cited has absolutely as much of that property as
if
perfect match–
ing had been achieved.
If
the great ladies in question
didn't
be–
have, wouldn't, couldn't have behaved, like a pair of nervous snobs,
why so much the worse, we say to ourselves, for the great ladies
in question. We
know
them so - they owe their being to our so
seeing them; whereas we can never tell ourselves how we should
otherwise have known them or what quantity of being they would
on a different footing have put forth. ["Balzac," in
Notes on Nov–
elists]
James's somewhat baffled admiration here seems to
arise
from a
per–
ception of "surreality" in Balzac's representation of the episode: , the
fact that its hyperbolic mode and intensity make it figure more per–
fectly than would an accurate portrayal of manners what
is
really
at stake for the characters, and in their relationships.
If
reality does
not permit of such self-representations, he seems to say, then so
much the worse for reality. By the doing of the thing, we know the
characters; we are,
if
not in the domain of reality, in that of truth.
James poses the alternative of judging Balzac's episode to
be
"either a magnificent lurid document or the baseless fabric of a
vision," to conclude that we cannot tell which it
is.
This
alternative,
and the admission of defeat in the attempt to choose, strikes close to
the center of the problem of melodrama. I would suggest that the
melodramatic imagination writes magnificent lurid documents which
are founded on the void, which depend for their validity on a kind
of visionary leap. When Balzac pressures the details of reality, at the
start of
La Peau de chagrin,
to make them yield the terms of
his
drama,
when he insists that gestures refer to a parabolic story; or
when he creates a hyperbolic version of Lucien de Rubempre's
social
