| James's first novels used conventional
narrative techniques: explicit characterization, action which related events in
distinctly phased sequences, settings firmly outlined and specifically
described. But this method gradually gave way to a subtler, more deliberate,
more diffuse style of accumulation of minutely discriminated details whose total
significance the reader can grasp only by constant attention and sensitive
inference. His later novels play down scenes of abrupt and prominent action, and
do not so much offer a succession of sharp shocks as slow piecemeal additions of
perception. The curtain is not suddenly drawn back from shrouded things,
but is slowly moved away. Such a technique is suited to James's essential subject, which is not human action itself but the states of mind which produce and are produced by human actions and interactions. James was less interested in what characters do, than in the moral and psychological antecedents, realizations, and consequences which attend their doings. This is why he more often speaks of "eases" than of actions. His stories, therefore, grow more and more lengthy while the actions they relate grow simpler and less visible; not because they are crammed with adventitious and secondary events, digressive relief, or supernumerary characters, as overstuffed novels of action are; but because he presents in such exhaustive detail every nuance of his situation. Commonly the interest of a novel is in the variety and excitement of visible actions building up to a climatic event which will settle the outward destinies of characters with story-book promise of permanence. A James novel, however, possesses its characteristic interest in carrying the reader through a rich analysis of the mental adjustments of characters to the realities of their personal situations as they are slowly revealed to them through exploration and chance discovery. |