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J. N. Sharma. The International Fiction of Henry James. New Delhi, India: Macmlllan, 1979. 129 pp. Rs. 50.00. J. N. Sharma's book is a workmanlike study of the International theme in five James novels: The American, The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. In his first chapter, Sharma argues for the central ity and complexity of the International theme In James's fiction. The presence of this theme in the first two novels, Sharma says, simply reflected James's early preference for the realistic mode of fiction, his view that the novelist should be saturated in the fictional world he depicts, and his own international education. After the long hiatus of the "British" novels and the theater fiasco, James, In the last three novels, returned to the International theme; but he did so with the understanding that his earlier, rather rigid scheme of America versus Europe (innocence vs. experience, morals vs. manners, youth vs. age, ahistorical experience vs. ancient tradition) could no longer contain his Interest In various fictional characters as un I versa I human types. As Sharma puts it, the International motif functioned less as allegory and more as an objective correlative for a radically subjective, impressionistic rendering of theme, character, and setting. Having virtually exhausted the international theme in both its crude and sophisticated forms, James left little for later novelists of manners to develop. In chapter two, Sharma begins his analysis by examining the international theme as such in the five novels mentioned above. At first, Sharma says, James's international novels depicted characters wholl· contained within a rigidly conceived idea of national type; later, the nat iona I Ity of characters mattered much less than those characters' unique embodiments of the traits of un I versa I human nature. Thus, we are told, The American is almost a pure allegory of American innocence betrayed by European complexity, and little more. Sharma concludes that in this novel "few generalizations about human nature emerge" and "no general problems of the human condition are emphasized" (p. 14). (Surely, some readers of James will question this view, which reveals Sharma's implicit judgments, first, that type characters and the allegorical mode are inferior fictional devices, and, second, that the encounter between naivete and subtlety or between a new and an old culture is not universal, simply because James places these experiences within the specific, nineteenth-century historical context.) Sharma distinguishes Christopher Newman's rigid typicality as the American Innocent from Isabel Archer's greater Individuality and complexity. (Sharma's implication—that type characters are simplistic and bad whereas unique characters are complicated and good—is debatable). Isabel's innocence may be American, we learn, but the problem she faces, that of the desire for free choice in action versus the recognition of one's destiny, is more universal than Newman's. Isabel's tragedy and moral heroism, it seems, derive essentially from personal, not national, character. In The Ambassadors, the theme of the "lived life" overshadows the international theme throughout. Strether, unlike both Newman and Isabel, more fully comprehends the aesthetic richness and moral evasiveness of Europe, but in doing so he equally understands the moral shallowness of the American Chad and, in Sharma's opinion, the humane unselfishness of the European Madame de Vionnet. Therefore, Strether transcends the flat national types of The American, and more vestigial Iy, of The Portrait. In both conscience and consciousness Strether is the crucial link between the earlier international novels and the later ones in which both the historical Europe and the historical America begin to fade away In favor of a radically subjective milieu fusing the "Europe" and the "America" of the earlier novels into a "world" in which character and moral choice could be examined (not without risk) in a state of utmost purity. Thus, Sharma argues, In The Wings of the Dove, MIIIy Theale's tragedy of the betrayal of love and trust is a "moral parable" (p. 25), a "fable" of universal significance, in which nationality is incidental to the question of moral choice. As Sharma asserts, "The Wings of the Dove is a story of treachery...

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