LEO BERSANI
know through appreciation and not perception; knowledge is a kind
of seeing which can dispense with the objects of vision. Thus the
possible shock of seeing disappears when, having emphasized the
obvious fact that to see creates a relation between the seer and the
thing seen, James identifies the latter with the
activity
of the fonner
and implicitly challenges us to locate the exact point at which ap–
preciation or conjecture violates the truth. The problematical quality
of the correspondence between our mental possessions of reality
and reality itself makes the obsession with reality an unnecessary
restriction of freedom. There is no truth to tell, only, as James
writes in the preface to
What Masie Knew,
"truth diffused, dis–
tributed and, as it were, atmospheric." The reality of a thing de–
pends on the quality of the treatment it gets - a position we find
acceptable enough when James uses it to defend the novelist's right
to choose his subject, but which we tend to balk at when it is followed
through with the rigorously explicit consistency of James's later
fiction.
III
We are perhaps right to feel uneasy. For one thing, the view
I have just outlined has important consequences for the social at–
titudes dramatized in
The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima
and
The Tragic Muse.
James treats the energetic projects of revolu–
tionaries and social reformers with the distrust he reserves for all
foTInS of direct pursuit. And in a way parallel to his redefinition of
"doing" as "feeling" in personal relationships, he deflects the per–
ception of historical fact to the artistic, politically passive apprecia–
tion of history. But the invalidation of political activism implied by
the Jamesian epistemology is perhaps
our
loss; for James himself
the dangers seem to have been of another order. We see them most
clearly in
The Turn of the Screw
and
The Awkward Age.
The
fonner can certainly be read as James's least "psychological" story.
It
is,
I think, a study in pathology, but the sickness depicted is one
of pure consciousness, of a lucidity intense enough to create life
from a violation of life's probabilities. This "excursion into chaos,"
as James calls
The Turn of the Screw
in his preface, is at the same
time the novelist's experiment with the fairy tale, the governess's
