JAMESIAN LIE
63
If
she lied she would say the opposite of what she means, but "be–
tween" her words and her meanings lies the
prospect
that the bene–
ficently strenuous conjectures of another mind may offer some views
of her meanings rich enough to make a relation seem appealing.
With Eugenia James dramatizes the possibility of an intentionality
unsupported by motive, that is, of a self so responsive and so indefi–
nite that it is created entirely (but never limited) by the responses
to its performances.
There is nothing "profound" about Eugenia, which perhaps
explains the discomfort James clearly feels with her. The idea of
her fibbing hides her psychological originality (her emptiness) in
the unflattering but novelistically safer image of a character bent on
deception. She exchanges, as it were, the moral benefit of not lying
for the ontological benefit of having a character. James hesitates to
deprive her entirely of the definiteness which a specific motive gives
her; and his moral opinion of Eugenia reflects the uncertainty of
his
creative conception. As Poirier also says in the best discussion we
have of the early novels, it's Felix who most conveniently distracts
James from his unsettled opinions with regard to Eugenia. Easy,
charming, open and honest, Felix provides a more conventional
image of civilized urbanity which saves James the trouble of de–
ciding just how far he will go in proposing a civilized artfulness
both indifferent and superior to the Wentworths' moral sincerities.
James thus manages to evade making Eugenia's dishonesty either
completely irrelevant or completely sinister.
Eugenia is nonetheless central in the imaginative progression
I'm speaking of. She suggests the possibility of identifying charac–
ter with the appreciation of character, the possibility, ultimately, of
both limiting and infinitely expanding reality by defining it only
as
(and not merely through) an interested version of it. James moves
slowly and hesitantly toward an epistemological position implicit in
his defense of the center-of-consciousness method in the preface to
The Princess Casamassima:
"What a man thinks and what he
feels," James writes, "are the history and the character of what he
does .. . ," by which James really dismisses the independent im–
portance, and perhaps even the existence, of what he does: "I then
see their 'doing,' that of the persons just mentioned, as, immensely,
their feeling, their feeling as their doing...." What we know we
