JAMESIAN LIE
67
tional belief about the nature of reality. To believe that certain
things (like time and death) are absolutely resistant to the persua–
sive powers of fiction naturally provides a basis on which to make
a moral hierarchy of fictions: we can at least begin to "place" them
ethically by referring to those aspects of life which no fiction can
violate. I think that James did go so far as to conceive even of time
and death as merely our most privileged fictions
(think,
in addition
to
The Turn of the Screw,
of
The Great Good Place, The Sense
of the Past
and the essay "Is There a Life After Death?"); but a
view of life as wholly obedient to a willed consciousness of life could
hardly make for untroubled optimism. It's frivolous to see in James
only a limitless faith in the civilizing powers of intelligence, or to
think
of his trust in consciousness as a naively hopeful dream of
escape from the constraints of experience. Society and personality
are more likely to be
victimized
by the autonomy of an intelligence
responsive only to its own discriminatory logic. Perhaps the ultimate
difficulty in contemporary searches for a theory of fiction
is
not in
the prospect of our having to postulate a mind unstructured by
reality. Consciousness and language appear, after all, to be struc–
tured "before" being enacted as particular experience. But how can
we reconcile the compositional appeal of the mind's fictions (and
by "fiction" in
this
most general sense I of course mean any pic–
torial or verbal syntax in consciousness) with both the appealing
variety of particular experiences and the need to make
moral
dis–
criminations not necessarily deducible from logical structures? How,
in
short, can life be saved from the fictions which make life for us?
Only
The Golden Bowl
indicates at least the possibility of a
satisfactory answer to that question. It's a work immensely different
from
The Ambassadors
and
The Wings of the Dove,
although the
questions which it succeeds in making irrelevant give it a thematic
continuity with the two earlier novels. Now the realism of all three
works is the necessary condition for the triumph of fiction over
truth. Fictions in
The Awkward Age
and
The Sacred Fount
don't
triumph; they merely proliferate. But now James makes an ulti–
mately illusory but crucial regression to a novelistic mode he had
almost abandoned. The plots of
The Ambassadors, The Wings of
the
Dove
and
The Golden Bowl
are neither shadowy nor improb–
able; they are simply inferior, corny plots compared with those of
