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PARTISAN REVIEW
merely to indicate a preestablished order whose meaning could
be exhausted in the act of being referred to. Only by paying
attention to the manifold distinctions connoted by words did
James feel he could create characters who
feel
and
think
about
themselves and others very hard. And he wanted them to feel
and think very hard in order to express his sense that the most
important arena of life-the place where the crucial events of our
lives take place, and where we have the potential to demonstrate
to the highest degree courage, intelligence, and integrity-is the
arena of our personal and social relations. James felt that we live
only to the degree we "exceed" ourselves, only to the degree we
invest our hearts and minds in the hearts and minds of others
and undergo a process of revolutionary self-transformation. He
did not disvalue the life of adventure in an external sense, but he
wanted to make clear where he felt one's highest priorities
should lie: what he felt was the center of life from which outward
"adventure" and day-to-day life gained (or lost) its value. In
The
Middle Years,
James says, "Frustration's only life ... it's what
passes." What does not pass is the passion, beauty, and glory of
life as captured in tragic art.
I think that this is essentially what Nietzsche was trying to
convey through his concept of Eternal Recurrence. The concept
restores to life the eternalizing capacity which romantic aesthet–
ics had claimed for art. But as Heidegger, Deleuze, and Strong
have all argued, Eternal Recurrence is not cyclical. It does not
posit a self-contained element that disappears and returns; there is
no distinction between what a person is and what a person does.
Rather, character is fate, ripeness all. Eternity subsists in the con–
tinually recurring acts that affirm character and consciousness
in the face of annihilation. These acts constitute art and art is
nothing more than life at its most intense, at its most fully felt
and thought. Eternal Recurrence thus posits an eternity without
underlying
reality, ungrounded in certainty or even sanity. As
James has his artist-hero say in "The Middle Years": "A second
chance-that's the delusion. There never was to be but one. We
work in the dark-we do what we can-we give what we have.
Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is
the madness of art."
