JAMESIAN LIE
55
we have to call psychological detail, but it is remarkably resistant
to an interest in psychological depth. This is especially true of the
later fiction. While it's obvious, for example, in
The Bostonians
that
Olive's politics idealize her Lesbianism and that her Lesbianism
energizes her politics, and while it's at least possible to detect
"behind" Isabel Archer's unfocused appetite for experience a terror
of sex made fairly explicit in her scenes with Caspar Goodwood,
the grounds for what we might think of as "vertical" motive (plung–
ing down "into" personality) eventually disappear from James's
fiction. There is no reason to believe that any "obscure" motives
enter into Vanderbank's refusal to marry Nanda Brookenham in
The Awkward Age,
or that an inability to be active with women in
any way explains Stretcher's adventures in
The Ambassadors
or that
Maggie and her father have an "unhealthy" attachment to each
other in
The Golden Bowl.
It's not that such criticism is intrinsically
cheap; no motive, after all, is vulgar when the work can be shown
to provide interestingly enough for its discovery. But in James's late
fiction the narrative surface is never richly menaced by meanings
it can't wholly contain. Complexity consists not in mutually sub–
versive motives but rather in the expanding surface itself which,
when most successful, finds a place in its intricate design (the design,
ideally, is also a moral hierarchy) for all the motives imaginable.
We can easily be misled by the numerous passages where James's
characters, burdened by their sense of the portentous, retreat into
exclamation or expressive groans. What they renounce trying to
express is generally not an intuition that would expose the ambiguity
of all efforts to understand, but rather a richness of understanding
which would expand the dialogue to monstrous proportions. This
richness is in fact allowed to bloat the surrounding narrative in
which an indirectly presented lucidity almost submerges the ellip–
tical, "pictorially" provocative talk of James's characters.
Nothing could be further from Jamesian conversation than the
cl~cal
litote.
His characters' interjections and half-completed sen–
tences are either a comment on analysis or an invitation to analysis,
but their allusiveness suggests nothing of the verbal dead-end, that
is, they don't refer us to a surplus of meaning which any formula–
tion would be bound at least partially to betray. Classical language
(the best modem example is Gide - who complained of finding
