62
LEO BERSANI
The basis for escape from the cruel shock of vision is radical
casting of doubt on the objects of vision. And the question of what
there
is
to see naturally generalizes itself into a skeptical view of
truth. The truth-seekers in James are usually the betrayed Amer–
icans, but they are betrayed less because they are Americans than
because they believe in the truth. James's criticism of this belief is
of course hesitant; and the texture of his dialogues profits from his
inability to shake off easily his own intellectual and moral commit–
ment to truth. We see that commitment in the difficulty he has dis–
sociating artfulness from evil. Expression itself in James often seems
to be intrinsically suspect and, most melodramatically, it's equivalent
to hypocrisy and betrayal. Throughout James's career (notable ex–
amples are
The Portrait of a Lady
and
The Wings of the Dove),
we find an almost necessary deduction of dishonesty from the art
of appearances. The problem, we might say, is to find an alternative
to Isabel Archer different from Madame Merle. Or, to put it an–
other way, James has to recuperate Madame Merle morally by in–
corporating her into Isabel- that is, by creating a character whose
intentions coincide exactly with his or her fictions.
The success of this project, which seems to me fundamental in
James, involves taking enormous risks with the definitiveness of
novelistic plot and character. In the middle ground between vic–
timization by fact and the triumph of fiction, there is only suspense.
Being and acting are delayed and suspended as either unspecified
possibility or uncontrolled conjecture. Eugenia in
The Europeans
lives the novelistically dangerous life of a character whose reality
depends on the willingness of other characters to expand their own
natures by inventing one for her. Of Eugenia James writes: "There
were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said,
and there was what she meant, and there was something between
the two, that was neither." The essentially narrow honesty of Robert
Acton - which, James suggests, would impress us like carrying an
agreeably perfumed but occasionally inconvenient bunch of flowers -
finally settles for the vulgar view that Eugenia "is a woman who
will
lie"; the other view would be that she is a woman incessantly
open to interpretation. Eugenia's "dishonesty," as Richard Poirier
has indicated in
The Comic Sense of Henry James,
is the margin
she leaves for her own and for other people's absorbing possibilities.
