401
PARTISAN REVIEW
their essential negativity, their inactiveness, can goodness, truth,
and beauty be, in Kantian and Schopenhauerian fashion,
"disinterested." The very notion of a self standing apart from its
conditions and circumstances is the product of slave morality–
the product of a fear to take the plunge into the flux of life. For the )
later Nietzsche, by contrast, tragic affirmation is active and
"interested"; it must therefore embrace that "spiritualization of
cruelty" we call culture and history. That is why Nietzsche in–
sists that even suffering and death be affirmed: they are a part of
life and life is all there is. Tragic affirmation, in sum, is a pure
positivity, one that does not rely on grounds outside itself but
makes its grounds, lays down a new soil of meaning, by the
very acts through which it becomes manifest.
It is just this tragedy of affirmation that is reflected in
James's late novels. As Maggie Verver of
The Golden Bowl
puts it,
"...when you love only a little you're naturally not jealous...But
when you love in a deeper and more intense way, then you are,
in the same proportion, jealous...When, however, you love in the
most abysmal and unutterable way of all-why then you're be–
yond everything, and nothing can pull you down." There is
neither foundation nor ceiling to Maggie's love. It does not have a
goal, a beginning or end point outside itself to which it could re–
fer. The act of loving is all.
A less sentimental, less romanticized love is scarcely imag–
inable. Maggie's is a constructed, a performed and artistic love, a
love which constitutes a sort of truthful illusion that carries the
force of passion and life. It is a love that reminds us of "the deep
human expertness in [artist] Gloriani's charming smile-oh the
terrible life behind it" in
The Ambassadors.
Following the presen–
tation of Maggie's ahistorical and romantic Americanism,
The
Golden Bowl
enacts the intimate intrusion, the slow-motion on–
slaught of evil, duplicity, and sensuousness upon her character
and imagination. Maggie is invaded by history, by what both
James and Nietzsche regarded as the "cruelties" and "rapacities"
on which "the fabric of civilization" is based. What we witness is
Maggie opening herself up to such forces, taking them into her–
self, and using them to weave the fabric of a new truth, a new
good, a new beauty. By receiving evil into herself, she simulta–
neously shields it from others, accomplishing what Milly
Theale, in
The Wings of the Dove,
does in a different way: the carv-
