JAMESIAN LIE
61
James, such an approach might suggest the willfulness of the osten–
sibly imposed visual shock. The advantages of suffering betrayal
(or of inviting it) perhaps lie in the peculiar sort of intimate detach–
ment which betrayal creates. It gives the right to accuse which we
can use to break a relation while secretly continuing it. Thus, on
the one hand, a kind of general snooping may constitute a desperate
claim for independence, a means of breaking away from figures who
threaten to engulf the self. But at the same time the evidence of
betrayal assures the durability of superficially broken bonds within
the protective and ambiguous terms of resentment - or forgiveness.
In such a scheme,
The Golden Bowl
would represent this harmony
between betrayal and the security of unbroken attachments: the in–
timacy between Charlotte and Amerigo is the beneficent treason
which transforms the intimacy between Maggie and Amerigo from
an illusion into a reality.
But let's reverse the interpretative direction, proceeding from
this point of departure to more of the novelistic surface which I have
been ignoring in my conjecture about psychological depths. In
James's fiction the connection between vision and betrayal is less
interesting as something to be explained than as a novelistic provoca–
tion. I call it a point of departure (one could undoubtedly choose
others) not because it's where he begins chronologically, but be–
cause, throughout James's career, it frequently recurs as that stroke
in the design from which it's both most difficult and most impera–
tive to "depart." Psychological explanations alone account poorly
for the departure since they excavate the reasons for taking pleasure
in the point of supposed origin. They tend, in other words, to de–
nounce the psychological obscurantism of the text instead of repeat–
ing its psychological initiative. The availability of such criticism as
a weapon against literature is made painfully clear by Maxwell
Geismar's use of the obvious voyeurism in James to clinch his vin–
dictive assault against
Henry James and the Jacobites.
But the
novelist, closer in this respect to the psychoanalyst than to the psycho–
analytically-minded literary critic, exploits the frustrations of a re–
current pattern in order to compel
his
imagination to invent
other
pleasures. Thus we shall see James's characters exploiting - often
unsuccessfully - the possibilities of what might be called a luminous
blindness.
