BEYOND THE TWILIGHT OF REASON
415
I think just the other way. I don't know whether I succeed in expressing myself,
but
I
know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any
measure of me; on the contrary, it's a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary
one. Certainly, the clothes which,
as
you say,
I
choose to wear, don't express me;
and heaven forbid they should!
"You dress very well," Madame Merle interposes.
This little conversation is not in any strict sense philosophic, though
it engages a topic common to many philosophers, the nature of the self.
The discussion is at least as interesting as several polemical essays I have
read on the question by philosophers, psychologists, and diverse sages
over the past several years. But it is still not a formal essay in philosophy.
Our
interest, like James's, is not in the theme as such, the nature of the
self, but in the differences between Madame Merle and Isabel on the is–
sue. It tells us a good deal about Madame Merle that she should see the
self and its envelope of circumstances as inseparable.
It
tells us a good deal
about Isabel that she should insist upon the autonomy of the self, despite
the fact that she has no evidence to support this prejudice and no experi–
ence, as yet, that would justifY it. The theme is there merely to
distinguish the women, one from the other, to move them a little apart so
that we may see each of them more clearly. The lines of demarcation are
not to be blurred. Nor is there to be a fusion of their personalities. The
issue is not ontology or epistemology. The issue is difference, which in
the fullness of the novel will become an ethical difference of great conse–
quence.
I am not implying that this is the entire interest of fiction. The several
forms of fiction are related to various philosophical theories, or to the
subversion of them. But I am claiming that Levinas's values are more fully
recognized in fiction than in philosophy: the radical acknowledgement of
persons, the ethical imperative, the scruple according to which an imag–
ined person in fiction is not allowed to become an object and reduced in
that capacity by the epistemological insistence of another. Kafka's novels
may be thought not to answer to this description, but they come from the
far side of Levinas's values. They present individuals whose destiny it is to
be denied the acknowledgment that Levinas describes and bears witness
to.
The claim that fiction testifies to the indissolubility of persons might
not amount to much, except that there are many forces in the general
culture tending to dissolve them or otherwise reduce them. Indeed, my
reference to the indissolubility of persons should not be taken to mean
that personhood, even in fiction, is still accorded its proper range and
