JAMESIAN
LIE
57
For James himself this meant a certain indifference to the ex–
perience he brought to his work. Recognizing, in the preface to
Lady
Barbarina,
the recurrence of the Europe-America theme in
his fiction, he somewhat impatiently grants the inescapability of
his
history as well as its artistically neutral value:
The great truth in the whole conne:xion, however, is, I think,
that one never really chooses one's general range of vision - the
experience from which ideas and themes and suggestions spring:
this proves ever what it has
had
to be, this is one with the very
turn one's life has taken; so that whatever it "gives," whatever
it makes us feel and think of, we regard very much as imposed
and inevitable. The subject thus pressed upon the artist is the
necessity of his case and the fruit of his consciousness; which truth
makes and has ever made of any quarrel with his subject, any
stupid attempt to go behind
that,
the true stultification of criticism.
"To go behind" the determined range of vision is to make of art
a tautological expression of personality. A certain kind of psych–
ologically interpretative criticism is therefore stultifying because it
aims at nothing less than the erasure of the work, its absorption
and disappearance in its origins.
If
we find it logically necessary to
fix such origins in order to articulate an implicit path of coherence,
we should also recognize the incommensurability of the whole design
to those meager points of departure. "The thing of profit is to
have
your experience - to recognize and understand it, and for this almost
any will do; there being surely no absolute ideal about
it
beyond
getting from it all it has to give." By moving from causes to com–
position rather than from composition back to causes, James insists
on the fact that fictional invention is neither evasive nor tautological;
instead, it
constitutes the self.
By retracing the structural opportunities (for roundness, for an–
tithesis, for producing illusions of mass without illusions of extent)
which allowed each of his works to take shape, James provides the
model for a critical complicity with the novelist's experiment. His
technical interest in the expanding surface of each work illustrates
his sympathy with the most profound intentions of
his
fiction. For
the recurrent Jamesian subject is only superficially the international
theme, or the confrontation of innocence and experience, or the
conflict of acquisitive and self-renouncing impulses. His subject is
