HENRY McDONALD
404
sciousness, "Henry James" accomplished his own self-construc–
tion. The framework of tragedy is the locus of the making of self.
This self is enacted, not explained; it is a pure positivity, un–
grounded in negation and gaining its power and freedom from
its submission and constraint. As Nietzsche said, artists know
"only too well that precisely when they no longer do anything
'voluntarily' but do everything of necessity, their feeling of free–
dom, subtlety, full power...reaches its peak... that necessity and
'freedom of the will' then become one in them." The source of
the "active" morality embodied in James's tragic heroines and
heroes is the self-submitting, self-creating artistic action of James
himself.
Such artistic action has a special quality. In the preface to
The
Golden Bowl,
James enunciates a notion of art as a form of "doing,"
a doing that is not
essentially
different from other kinds of conduct
(as aestheticists would have it) but relatively better in certain re–
spects: "Our literary deeds enjoy this marked advantage over
many of our acts, that, though they go forth into the world and
stray in the desert, they don't to the same extent lose them–
selves...our really 'done' things of this superior and more appre–
ciable order [are] ...essentially traceable ...All of which means for
him [the artist] conduct with a vengeance, since it is conduct
minutely and publicly attested."
Here we uncover the heart ofJames's persistence in a use of
language that exasperated his contemporaries and still mystifies
many today. I mean less his so-called "convoluted" style than
his tendency to keep the reference or object of what is being said
in abeyance-to continually defer meaning. This practice can be
compared to James's refusal, in
The Ambassadors,
to name the
industry on which the Newsome fortune is based. James did not
want to cut off a potentially rich source of associations by fixing
his meaning in some arbitrary object denoted by a name. He
was apparently convinced that to fix the particular economic
"cause" of the Newsomes' kind of life and way of thinking
would distract attention from the more encompassing social,
cultural, and psychological description he wished to give. One
may be skeptical of such a view (as I am), but it at least illumi–
nates a crucial motive behind James's stylistic practice of keeping
the "reference" of his sentences fuzzy. He wanted to create
meaning, to contribute to "that more appreciable order" of art, not
