60
LEO BERSANI
But it would be foolish to pretend we can avoid "going behind"
James's interest in these pictures. His preference for
this
technique
of compositional compression makes us feel, inevitably, that com–
position profits here from some obsessive memory, a memory of
glimpsed intimacy interpreted as both violent and treacherous. And
it's perhaps an inability - or, for reasons we can naturally never
know, an unwillingness - to recuperate from the impact of that
vision which explains the exasperating avoidance of fact and direct
statement in the late fiction. A dismissal of fact, as we shall see, can
be liberating; but there is also a kind of playing with
it
in its ab–
sence which allows James's characters both to keep fact out of sight
and yet to be constantly teased by it. James increases the power
of traumatic scenes - or, more generally, of "truth" - by the flut–
tering verbal evasiveness which surrounds them. The absorption of
his characters
in
the margins or the implications of facts makes the
unmentioned facts all the more ominous. And perhaps nowhere
is
the violence of fact so complete as when the curiosity or terror of
it precludes its actual appearance - as if the brutal nature of cer–
tain situations could best be shown by their blinding effect on the
persons most determined, afraid and finally unable to see.
But if seeing can spell catastrophe for James's characters,
it
also satisfies a frequently cruel curiosity. The two sides of the visual
coin may be distributed in different characters, but the intensity of
suffering and the intensity of pleasure in the single act of seeing sug–
gest a dialectical unity in the act beyond its division into various
personae. Observation, Mitchy remarks to Mr. Longdon in
The
Awkward Age,
is the "most exquisite form" of "pursuit," and the
cruelty of Dr. Sloper in
Washington Square
consists exactly in
his
curiosity about how far Catherine will go with Morris Townsend, in
the entertainment he finds in spying on her character. Even Ralph
Touchett, James curiously remarks, has "an almost savage desire" to
make Isabel complain about Osmond so that he may directly see her
suffering. A "psycho-critical" case, admittedly neglectful of qualify–
ing contexts, could, I think, be made for a skeletal psychology of vision
in James's work. There is a tortured identity and contrast between
masochistic and sadistic "moments" in the act of seeing, between
seeing as punishment submitted to and seeing as punishment in–
flicted. And at some point in its telling of a fantasy story
not
told by
