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PETER BROOKS
more "behavioristic" novelists who, from Flaubert onwards, have sug–
gested that there are not more things on earth than can be represent–
ed exclusively in terms of the material world. The melodramatists
refuse to allow that the world has been drained of transcendence;
and they locate that transcendence in the struggle of the children
of light with the children of darkness, in the play of ethical mind.
It comes down, finally, to that alternative between the "magni–
ficent lurid document" and the "baseless fabric of a vision" which
James posed about Balzac. To make the fabric of vision into a docu–
ment, to make the document lurid enough so that it releases the
vision, to make vision document and document vision and to per–
suade us that they cannot be distinguished, that they are necessarily
interconnected through the chain of spiritual metaphor, that reson–
ances are set up, electrical connections established whenever we touch
any link of the chain, is to make the world we inhabit one charged
with meaning, one in which interpersonal relations are not merely
contacts of the flesh, but encounters that must be carefully nurtured,
judged, handled as if they mattered. It is a question, finally, of that
attention to the significant in life that James captured in a famous
line of advice to young novelists: "Try to be one of the people on
whom nothing is lost." To be so sensitized an instrument, one upon
whom everything leaves a mark, with whom everything sets up a
correspondence, is not simply to be an observer of life's surface, but
someone who must bring into evidence, even bring into being, its
moral substance. So that the task of the writer is like that assigned by
Balzac to the exiled Dante in his tale,
The Proscribed
(X, 344): "he
closed himself
in
his room, lit his lamp of inspiration, and surrencl–
'ered himself to the terrible demon of work, calling forth words from
silence, and ideas from the night."
