JAMESIAN LIE
59
they constantly and somewhat breathlessly confirm. But seeing can
be dangerous as well as thrilling. James's fiction is full of visual
shocks which constitute crucial turning points for his heroes and
heroines. Isabel's "sense of accident" dies on the day she enters her
drawing room and, in "a sudden flicker of light," sees her husband
and Madame Merle in an attitude of "familiar silence"; the way
they have of being together in private strikes her as "something
detected." "Their relative positions" (Osmond seated, Madame Merle
standing), "their absorbed mutual gaze" give Isabel her first glimpse
into their intimacy. Hyacinth Robinson finds something "inexpres–
sibly representative" - of the degree of Paul Muniment's intimacy
with the Princess Casamassima and of the change in Hyacinth's
own relation with her - in
his
vision, through the fog, of his two
friends getting out of a cab, talking on the Princess's doorstep, and
then reentering her house. In "a wave of anxiety" during which
Hyacinth "felt his heart beat insanely, ignobly," he has "a very
exact revelation of the state of feeling of those who love in the
rage of jealousy." And in
The Ambassadors,
Strether's recognition of
Chad and Mme. de Vionnet in their boat, and their recognition of
him,
make for "a sharp, fantastic crisis that had popped up as if
in a dream" and which has only to last for a few seconds to make
Strether feel it "as quite
horrible."
Finally, "lighting up the front
of the great black house with an expression that quite broke the
monotony, that might almost have shocked the decency, of Portland
Place," Charlotte and Amerigo offer their splendid and intimately
conjoined presence to Maggie who, seeing them on the balcony from
the street below, thinks again "of how the pair would be at work,"
of
how securely and masterfully they have organized their betrayal.
Each of these scenes is interpreted as a betrayal, and the
betrayal takes the form of an intimacy which excludes the seer. The
violent, traumatic nature of these sights is not always immediately
explicit (the language in the scene from
The Portrait of a Lady,
for
example, is comparatively mild), but they haunt the consciousness
of the Jamesian hero as images of a hidden and threatening truth
from which, for what usually turn out to be sinister reasons, he has
been excluded. James of course uses such scenes as an economical
way of moving his heroes from one stage of awareness to another:
a process of awareness is compressed into an instant of packed vision.
