JAMESIAN LIE
71
individual - it has gained in significance and lost in particularity.
Ideally, criticism is an exercise with no subject behind it; its ex–
treme logic is to be a kind of laborious babble, an organized fonn
of play in which the critic renounces more personal perfonnances in
order to recapitaluate the activity of a mind he must finally recog–
nize as inaccessible. The nature of criticism is to be between per–
sonalities, and in that unidentifiable "position" it discovers the some–
what sickening richness of disinterested conjecture. The current
fashion, especially in France, to speak of such things as a "silence" as
the origin of literature, or the incessant murmur of an impersonal
language, is accompanied, significantly, by an unprecedented promi–
nence of critical writing and an equally unprecedented aspiration
in literature itself toward the suicidal inclusion of its own criticism,
toward the replacement of a personal voice by a voice which seeks
to compose conjectures about what it
might
express. The menace
of criticism, in short, proceeds from its very freedom of apprecia–
tion.
If,
on the one hand, it liberalizes art by "respeaking" it in a
less insistent, more abstract language, it also proposes a passionless
indulgence in the possibilities of design. Art is final and without
significance; criticism is tentative and, within the limits of coherence,
an
inexhaustible inventor of meanings.
We can now see the deceptive psychological reticence of James's
Prefaces in a new light. They are pure criticism in what they avoid
precisely those aspects of James's fiction which would limit and con–
strain their own responsiveness to the appeals of composition. And
their reticence about meaning is deceptive in the sense that by in–
sisting almost exclusively on structural ingenuities, they propose the
further (unexploited) ingenuity of a criticism in which the psycho–
logy of the work itself could be inferred from the structures of the
criticism. James's Prefaces ,are a resume of the history of criticism's
inevitable violations of art; they celebrate the privilege, which criti–
cism appears to enjoy less polemically and less anxiously than
art,
of
an
expression not expressive of a
self.
But in his novels James tests
the viability of this critical freedom for the representation of life
in art. And in
The Turn of the Screw
he gives us the nightmare of
criticism; in
The Awkward Age,
a society appreciating itself, we
might say, out of its capacity to subordinate smart
talk
to personal
feeling; and in
The Wings of the Dove,
a drama of blurred identi-
