"Framed in Death": The Sense of the Past and the Limits of Revision

"Framed in Death": The Sense of the Past and the Limits of Revision by Susan L. Marshall, California State University, Stanislaus It was for all die world as if his interpretation grew, under this breath of a crisis, exactly by die lapse of theirs, lasting long enough to suggest that his very care for them had somehow annihilated diem, or had at least converted diem to die necessarily void and soundless state. (SP 210) Throughout his novels, Henry James imposes an aesthetic order on experience , demonstrating that the artistic vision can provide a mode of moral action for his protagonists. In his later novels, however, James's characters find it increasingly difficult to sustain illusions of harmony as their predicaments become more complex: what had seemed a "very straight path" (PL 490) to Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, becomes for Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl similar to a chamber "the doors of which opened out into sinister circular passages"^/? 493). Despite early confidence in their skill as aesthetic manipulators, true success for Jamesian heroes lies in settling for life as a révisable structure, rather than as a perfect (or perfectible) artifact. Reading the fragmentary The Sense of the Past, we can discern that the same rule for novelistic success began to hold true for Henry James himself: he was losing faith in art's ability to structure life. He demonstrates the failure to reconcile conclusively art and reality in The Sense of the Past, in which he abandons his attempt to merge a character with his double in a portrait, in spite of that character's belief in the magic of art. Nevertheless, although James intuits the limitations of the artistic vision, he still finds a "mitigated midnight" (GB 317) in the attempted process, which affords him die illusion of success, if not that success itself. Finally, however, in his abortive fragment, James retreats from his attempt to merge the imaginative and the actual, implicitly admitting the split between the two realms that no artistry can disguise. James's inability or unwillingness to complete The Sense of the Past can be interpreted either as a retreat from a bold, strangely literal attempt to erase the distinction between life and art, or as a renewed discovery of die uneasy truce between creator and created. In the unfinished novel James and die reader become aware that no controlled improvisation will be powerful enough to extricate Ralph Pendrel from his predicament: Pendrel has gone too far into the realm of art, and James cannot save him by having Ralph renounce, sacrifice, reflect, or even assume compositional control. None of the conventional Jamesian solutions wdl do, and James seems powerless to reduce Ralph to "the necessarily void and 198 The Henry James Review soundless state" that artistry demands of its object. In fact, James cannot end the novel. In The Sense of the Past James approaches, yet retreats from creating an almost Joycean stream of consciousness in Ralph Pendrel, abandoning him, in fact, in mid-sentence. Examining the incomplete work as if it were finished, as critics have in the past, imposes a frame on a fragmentary novel with which James was by no means done. In The American Scene James insists that it is "the prime business and die high honour of the painter of life always to make a sense—and to make it most in proportion as the immediate aspects are loose and confused" (AS 273). In James's late novels many aspects are "loose and confused," and a character such as Maggie Verver can only make a sense through a paradoxical process: alternatively improvising as a "blank, blurred surface ... that cease[s] to signify" (SP 462), and objectifying others with her "conceived design for not letting them escape" (SP 322). Even though she maintains a precarious balance, her victory remains personal and all but incomprehensible to others. Her intention seems to her husband, she tiiinks, "like some famous poetic line in a dead language, subject to varieties of interpretation" (GB 531). In The Sense of the Past Ralph Pendrel shares Maggie's dream of making sense of a life that not only resembles "a famous...