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PAJUISAN REVIEW
Freud," a notion that still prevails. Indeed, so insistent is the emphasis on
negation in discussions of
The Ambassadors
-
the hero does nothing, there
is no subject matter, no unconscious - that one is finally reminded of
Freud's understanding of negation as a way of saying "This is something
which I should prefer to repress."
The notoriously complex late style is an expression not only of high
civilization and intelligence but of unconscious conflict as well, at once
revealing and concealing its meaning. To read
The Ambassadors
at all is to
interpret ambiguous language. In teasing out its various implications, we
are doing no more than Strether himself as he attempts to decipher the
cryptic utterances of his Parisian friends, trying to understand what they
mean by such words as "virtuous," "free," "beautiful," and so on.
Ambiguity is the essence of the novel, the mystery confronting both
Strether and the reader as we move with him through its "maze of
mystic closed allusions."
The recognition scene occurs in Book XI, when Strether leaves Paris
for a day in the country. The very form of this episode makes it a kind
of emblematic reduction of the larger action, which is also an excursion,
from Strether's home in Woollett, Massachusetts to Paris in search of
Chad Newsome and the truth about Chad's friendship with a married
woman. The shorter journey, however, is undertaken without any spe–
cific goal. Strether gets off the train at a spot "selected almost at ran–
dom" - where, oddly enough, he stumbles within a few hours onto the
very truth that has eluded him for months in Paris . The excursion is a
journey into the unconscious, a search for something lost to repression.
At some level Strether knows exactly what he 's looking for : " ... he
could alight anywhere ... on catching a suggestion of the peculiar note
required. "
That note is an atmosphere reminiscent of a painting, a small Lambi–
net landscape, seen years before in a Boston gallery, for sale at "a price
he had never felt so poor as on having to recognize ... as beyond a
dream of possibility." Strether's poverty here suggests not only his lack of
money but also the impoverishment of his experience, the deficiency of
circumstance or character that he senses so keenly in Gloriani's garden.
The subject of the painting, a scene of trees, rushes, and river, is described
as "a land of fancy ... the background of fiction, the medium of art,
the nursery of letters." Thus the Lambinet canvas is identified with the
rich aesthetic and sensuous experience of French life, which both attracts
and frightens Strether. He suggests its psychological significance when he
calls it "a land of fancy." The picture contains a fantasy - of aesthetic
and sensual fulfillment, a "dream of possibility." The excursion, then, is
undertaken not really at random, but under the influence of a very old
wishful fantasy. Strether gets out of the train "as securely as if to keep an
