JAMESIAN LIE
65
adventure and the reader's confrontation with a story in which the
very question of what is "true" is made irrelevant by the
conse–
quences
of an agitated imagination. The questions of the ghosts'
reality and of the governess's repressions are unanswerable simply
because
The Turn of the Screw
raises no questions at all. Rather,
it illustrates the power of questions (those which the governess asks
Mrs. Grose and the children) to produce events by the very in–
tensity and consistency with which they are asked. The governess
is
the Jamesian character idealized to the point of parable, that is,
to the point where the essentially conventional distinction between
character and author disappears and the character, released from
the obligation of having to operate within a clearly and distinctly
given world of fictional events, assumes the function of novelizing.
The governess is in pursuit, but she is, quite literally, in pursuit of
the story itself. There is nothing to know about in
The Turn of the
Screw,
there are only conjectures to be imposed, conjectures which
the governess makes catastrophically credible. We have no analysis
of her psychology; we never "go behind" the children's behavior;
no one authenticates the ghosts' appearance for us. We simply see
- and this is the purity and the power of the story - a conviction
about the ghosts strong enough to destroy the children. And, anec–
dotically, this ghost story is a perfect representation of novelistic
power as effective in life as it can be in art; the spookiness of
The
Turn of the Screw
is the spookiness of consciousness
persuad–
ing
tragedy to be born from its own insubstantial but nonetheless
contagious fantasies.
The governess creates at Bly a tightly knit drama in which each
of
her moves contributes to the realization of her fears. Her imagin–
ation builds a structure of inexorable events perhaps more frighten–
ing than the "chaos" we imagine when the mind is no longer con–
strained by a secure peroeption of truth. Composition, as James
demonstrates in
The Turn of the Screw,
isn't threatened when the
mind
is
liberated from the superstition of truth (or the conventions
of realistic fiction); but composition by itself is morally neutral.
The ethic of fiction is thus menaced by this unqualified commit–
ment to fictions. A world without truth accommodates anguish
and cruelty just as easily as a world in which truth provides a basis
for hypocrisy and betrayal. The most difficult J amesian enterprise
