The explication of an encounter with beauty mobilizes and refines concepts demanded by the imaginative synthesis involved in the experience of an artwork. Justifying displeasure is less rewarding. The lack of a unifying sense of beauty is a poor topic: confirmed by the discovery of inconsistencies, its criterion can only be a schematic sense of unity. Since the ideal novel, from whose perspective the real one appears lacking, is our own construction, we remain trapped within our own concepts. Rather than finding our world-view enriched by the ideas of a novel that doesn’t please us, we would correct it according to our own past experience. Negative criticism can be amusing, but it is self-referential. It might be useful for literary politics or help to mark out theoretical positions, but it doesn’t make a contribution of its own.

James leaves one with a sense of incompletion equal to his finesse. The lacuna is consistent: in style, plot, characterization, and conception of society, to the point that one has a presentiment there of a virtue: the dramatic staging of the precariousness with which we apprehend the meaning of human situations. Kafka would be the exemplar. His characters have an insufficient sense of the way their world works, and this insufficiency, together with the perplexity and above all the fear that this causes, is the content of his prose. A world that is both intelligible and worth relating — the basis of the classic novel — is put into question, and this impossibility is the theme of post-realist fiction. But the lack of both magnitude and transparency is a negative state, and it has to be presented as such to be true. The presentation of negative life must not lose the contrary, positive referent — even if this is only implicit, in the form of a horizon, of an anxiety — that reveals the damage it entails. Lacking this, the presentation of immediate life is prattling self-indulgence, a lack of importance portending nothing. The reference to an absent plenitude, a sense of distance, is therefore essential to such fiction. It can express itself in hatred for its own subject matter, in bafflement before it, in doubt — all of these forms of narrating do justice to the lack of meaning as a lack. If that distance disappears, the presentation of incompleteness remains incomplete. The integrity of meaning, its full immanence, is not merely an attribute of the literary school known as realism. As a presence or as a present and sensible absence, it is fundamental for comprehension. In relation to it, as the logic that governs The Portrait of a Lady will show, James’s position is ambiguous.

The social structure implied in Portrait of a Lady is complex: we are presented with aristocrats and an American industrialist; retired Americans living in comfortable seclusion in Europe; a beautiful woman, without money or scruples, ambitious for her illegitimate daughter; an aesthete; and finally, the American girl, suddenly transformed into an heiress: the figure, that is, of a life worthy of being lived and novelized. Just a glance is enough to suggest the categories and conflicts that would tend to emerge from the composition of this group: American democracy and European traditions; access to life or exclusion from it, through inheritance or lack of money; personal quality, linked or opposed to work or leisure; social conventions seen as limitations or as aesthetic object; the moral implications of luck or cunning, and so on. Our reading of the book, however, will show that none of these notions are developed with any rigor — even though all of them present themselves at one opportunity or another. They, and with them the situations in which they take part, don’t reach a degree of definition and crisis sufficient for their meanings to crystalize. Could it be said, then, that social structure is only incidental, inessential to the book? Perhaps James is interested in a form of psychology that has nothing to do with social positions, which are then only present in the novel as a resource to give texture and variety to its cast of characters. But if we reimagine the book along these lines, stripped of everything social, as though all the relations in it were exclusively personal and resolvable in terms of individual psychology, the result would not account for the text. The characters and their acts seem, on the contrary, to define themselves in relation to money, tradition, and the rest. We arrive at a paradox: social relations are peripheral and essential at the same time. To say that the book is without value because it lacks a minimum of internal coherence is false in the face of our experience of it: Portrait is nothing if not coherently elaborated. We need then a second response capable of interpreting the paradox. What does it mean, then, to confront social determinations only to proceed as though they did not exist? In real life it could be cluelessness, generosity, cunning. The literary text, however, is nothing but construction: where every gesture is intentional, the question is more tenacious.

If the paradox is more than a contradiction, there must be some meaning in constructing social determinations only to deny their validity. Social structure, as disregarded, is essential to the book. To produce it precisely as the determination to ignore it is to stage the gesture of apparent liberty; the correlate of apparent liberty is the impotent consciousness that knows itself to lack a basis for action. These two attitudes permeate the great moments of the text, whose physiognomy they determine. These modes of falsity and impotence deliver the one-sidedness of the world in James from being a mere flaw; they give a falsified representation its truth. They insinuate a corrosive into the proclamations of inner life, which wants to be independent of objective determinations. By means of the precariousness they introduce into the narrative tone, these modes guarantee a sustained criticism of the very content of the narration. Even so — and here is the ambiguity — they don’t do so with the necessary force and penetration. It’s true that affected small talk, subtle and negligent, rings false. But in the end its false liberty imposes itself on the theme: money and social position appear as though really secondary, natural appendices of so much finesse. Neither have the scenes of impotent consciousness the necessary profundity to clarify the tissue of human relations that the book mobilizes. As we shall see, James doesn’t satisfy his own famous demand, according to which the novelist must “know as much as possible” about the substance of his art.

Seated at the hearth, alone, a young woman becomes aware of the sinister nature of her relationship with her husband; two people, measuring one another across a tactical dialogue, judge the force of their respective positions, in order to act according to the balance of power between them, which has been concealed until this moment. These scenes, typical of James, are his best. Free, fluttering consciousness is forced to recognize its real possibilities and conditions: apparent liberty is reduced to impotent consciousness. We are accustomed to saying that the fundamental experience of James is one of liberty. But it would be truer to say that it is a progressive sense of confinement between empty alternatives.

The realist writer advances us from the present to the future. The situation as given appears to its characters as a limit, but it is also the concrete field of their liberty. The physiognomy to come depends on what they do to confirm or transform their situation and themselves: their alternatives have content. James’s scenario runs from the infinite possibilities projected by apparent liberty to the consciousness of limitation. The acts that gave form to the present are in the past. The Jamesian moment takes place in the aftermath, in a dead time when what is important has already taken place; all that remains is to take stock. One might insist that on the contrary Portrait of a Lady unfolds in time and cannot but project a future. Nonetheless, scenes of momentous decision, in which the dimension of openness to the future is experienced, are carefully omitted; they appear only as already consummated, when characters evoke and analyze them. Skipping over the moments of choice in which new features configure themselves, James creates a temporal sequence articulated not by actions, but by passive moments in which what has already come to pass is recognized, and suffered. The future is composed like a sophisticated but mechanical expiation of the past. This is the foundation for the strange Jamesian education that is accomplished in the submission to reality as it is. As the consciousness of the characters grows, with it grows the certainty of impotence. If this dialectic, taken to the extremes of irresponsibility that it permits, were freed from the limitations imposed by decorum and common sense, it would reveal the cannibal fatalism behind stoical refinement; it would lead to a profound portrait of the world presented and therefore to its symbolic liquidation; it would be its own natural critique. James, however, detesting whatever smacks of stridency (the horror Dostoyevsky caused him is well known), concentrates instead on the beauty proper to lucidity itself, detached from its active reach. Thus the vileness of the final pages: there can be no destiny, no meaning for a consciousness that doesn’t unfold itself in action and suffer practical consequences.

Discussing the contradiction we are pointing to, Richard Chase presents a solution so simple it would be perfect if it were true:

The conscious assimilation of romance into the novelistic substance of The Portrait took place in two different ways. It was assimilated into the language of the book and produced a general enrichment of metaphor. It was also brought in in the character of Isabel Archer, the heroine, who is to a considerable extent our point of view as we read. Isabel tends to see things as a romancer does, whereas the author sees things with the firmer, more comprehensive, and more disillusioned vision of the novelist. Thus James brings the element of romance into the novel in such a way that he can both share in the romantic point of view of his heroine and separate himself from it by taking an objective view of it.1

Chase extends tendencies of the book in the direction of a structure that would sustain novelistic integrity. For this to be true would require a narratorial standpoint critical of Isabel. Such narratorial presence is downplayed rather than accentuated. Nonetheless, Chase poses the central problem: the conflict between an ingenuous notion of social categories, which pertains to romance, and a realist vision.

As the novel begins, the narrator is a well bred gentleman intimately acquainted with the pleasures of English high society. His characteristic narrative gesture is that of the insider: he presents the situation as a whole, like an old familiar scene whose nuances he will teach us to appreciate by pointing out a few details. The scene is visualized as a unity of atmosphere, and requires synthetic apprehension more than understanding. The acceptance of the whole, which is necessary for the comprehension of details, is not up for discussion; the gesture allows no room for critical distance. Neither do we take any, since its generously aristocratic presuppositions prompt complicity. We too are subtle, and require no tiresome explanation of what is so obviously in good taste. The seductive capacity of James encounters comic testimony in his critics, who soon enough abandon prose for coloratura.

“Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea” (1). The sentence is a gesture whose content is more or less indifferent; its importance is in the lifestyle it presents and in the relation it establishes with the reader. Under certain circumstances (they are particular, but we do not know them and must therefore put our trust in the narrator), there are few hours in life (he assures us of their rarity, suggesting that his judgment has foundations that we do not suspect) more agreeable than the ceremony known as afternoon tea (the name is only a name, a pale evocation through which we enviously view the garden). Though excluded (we don’t know a great deal about afternoon tea) we are included (what little has been said we also know). The solution is divisional: included, my neighbor excluded, I find myself an aristocrat. This little masterpiece of seduction, innocent and charming because it speaks of tea, rehearses a procedure that will reveal its shabbiness in the context of more important matters, when a sense of initiated belonging is no substitute for comprehension. The exclusive and flattering gesture of this prose crystalizes in a technique that will be used a great deal in the novel, and criticized to a certain degree: but, as we shall see, in insufficient form.

In his first encounter with Isabel, in Florence, speaking of the girl’s American aunt, Osmond says “Oh, she’s an old Florentine; I mean literally an old one; not a modern outsider. She’s a contemporary of the Medici; she must have been present at the burning of Savonarola, and I’m not sure she didn’t throw a handful of chips into the flame.… Indeed I can show you her portrait in a fresco of Ghirlandaio’s” (372). Lines later, Osmond will be lamenting the vulgarity of his sister. We have already analyzed this seductive technique, but now we see its potential dishonesty. The strategy embodied in the prose consists in the opposition between initiate and outsider, taste and vulgarity. It invokes a certain moonshine about authenticity, as opposed to modern rootlessness (“literally an old one, not a modern outsider”); it mentions various names, to demonstrate intimacy with the arts and with the spirit of the place; it hints, with gallant doubt, at the vividness of its historical imagination (“I’m not sure she didn’t throw a handful of chips into the flame” — a delicate suggestion, something like a dessert). These fancies of Osmond’s establish him along with Isabel as a privileged spirit, “one of the cleverest and most agreeable men … in Europe.” James understands the strategy perfectly well, as he shows in his masterful construction of the reaction of the girl. She fears

exposing — not her ignorance; for that she cared comparatively little — but her possible grossness of perception. It would have annoyed her to express a liking for something he, in his superior enlightenment, would think she oughtn’t to like; or to pass by something at which the truly initiated mind would arrest itself. She had no wish to fall into that grotesqueness — in which she had seen women (and it was a warning) serenely, yet ignobly, flounder. She was very careful therefore as to what she said, as to what she noticed or failed to notice; more careful than she had ever been before. (379)

Through Isabel, we feel the tyranny of a sense of taste that doesn’t condescend to explain itself. There is only one way to avoid disappointing a spirit who deigns to consider us at his level of refinement and good breeding, and that is never to disagree with him. To have good taste is to agree: disagreement would break the intuitive and unquestionable identity accepted as the basis of admission into the elect. The paralysis of judgment that besets Isabel corresponds to the manner in which Osmond affirms himself, to the irrational substance of a superiority that requires either rebuff or unconditional acceptance. Osmond doesn’t define himself by this or that positive feature, but only negatively, as not being the usual sort, as an uncommon person (his description says that he is neither this nor that nationality, a rare thing, bears an unusual aspect — distinctions of a purely negative character). This non-identity that does not, because it has no positive content, constitute a determinate difference, is the very structure of snobbism. Its characteristic gesture proposes a fraternity above the existing world, to which it opposes, however, nothing concrete that would permit the comparison. The snob is sterile. As arbiter of taste and of truth he must be unquestioned — and yet he would not know how to respond to any question. Therefore he decries reason as in bad taste. The submission he requires is irrational and total, an exercise in identification in which the structure of the model is reproduced. To recognize the invisible difference is, already, to be among the elect; Isabel senses this. The slightest doubt about the substance of this difference, however, attacks the integrity of the whole. Incapable of demonstration, it can only be affirmed.

Our characterization is directed primarily at Isabel and Osmond, and at the seductive tone of the narration; but it also applies to the logic of apparent liberty described above. The pose of privilege, which affirms difference and quality without demonstrating them, both permeates the book and is skeptically illuminated within it. Osmond is criticized for the empty and destructive impact of his style on Isabel. She herself is touched by this critique, as is the general tone of the book — shades of Peeperkorn, promising treasures of naughtiness and complicity, capable of awakening our sense of profundity, but not of satisfying it. It remains to be seen whether the novel manages to absorb what it demonstrates between Osmond and Isabel, whether it comprehends to the root the nature of this gesture of privilege, of snobbism — its theme and its tone — in such a way as to reveal its fatuousness, but also its peculiar validity. Seduction, no matter how duplicitous, depends on anxieties that preexist it.

Seated before the fire, already married to Osmond, her spirit alert from the glimpse she had caught of the intimacy between her husband and Madame Merle, Isabel recomposes her past in a long meditation.

She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken the measure of her dwelling. … Osmond’s beautiful mind gave [her] neither light nor air… He took himself so seriously; it was something appalling. Under all his culture, his cleverness, his amenity, under his good-nature, his facility, his knowledge of life, his egotism lay hidden like a serpent in a bank of flowers. She had taken him seriously, but she had not taken him so seriously as that…. She was to think of him as he thought of himself — as the first gentleman in Europe…. It implied a sovereign contempt for every one but some three or four very exalted people whom he envied… But this base, ignoble world, it appeared, was after all what one was to live for; one was to keep it for ever in one’s eye, in order not to enlighten or convert or redeem it, but to extract from it some recognition of one’s own superiority…. [S]he had never seen any one who thought so much of others…. When she saw this rigid system [Osmond’s traditions] close about her, draped though it was in pictured tapestries, that sense of darkness and suffocation of which I have spoken took possession of her; she seemed shut up with an odour of mould and decay. She had resisted of course; at first very humorously, ironically, tenderly; then, as the situation grew more serious, eagerly, passionately, pleadingly. (196-99)

The succession of images that emerge to fix the contours of Isabel’s consciousness is very fine. Despite being a great scene on its own, this passage is intended to illuminate the book as a whole. But does it have the power to do so? Isabel reconsiders her husband, whose indifference to the world appears now as carefully studied and ostentatious; the revision is astute, and elucidates the character of Osmond. For the ensemble of problems that the novel puts forth, however, the reach of this evocation is modest. From the standpoint of the book as a whole, it is a great scene of lucidity rather than a scene of great lucidity. The intensity of these passages owes less to the clarifying force of its intuitions than to the distinctness of the emotions that accompany them. We learn little about the relations between beauty, sterility, and oppression, of whose synthesis we get nothing more than a presentiment. Instead of deepening this unity, without which the terror of the novel remains opaque, James composes subtle and convincing images of the states of body and soul that accompany such lucidity. These animic states, promptly recognized, substitute for knowledge, which is promised and withheld. Their physiognomic justice aims only to hit the mark, not to illuminate. We all feel what it is to be without light nor air; we too find self-seriousness appalling and hidden egoism sinister. We too would flee from the suffocating tapestry of tradition, and we follow Isabel anxiously as she resists “at first very humorously, ironically, tenderly; then, as the situation grew more serious, eagerly, passionately, pleadingly.” Once again, the scene would be a masterpiece on its own. It is full of penetrating details that transmit the nervous, physical quality of human relationships: “Isabel could easily imagine how his ears had scorched on his discovering he had been too confident.” In the context of the novel, however, it is just one more example — probably the best — of the crafty seduction that is James’s technique. Since we feel the scene in our skin, throat, and ears, we do not need to understand. The principle of physiognomic identification — “yes, that’s exactly how it feels” — turns the search for reasons behind the situation superfluous. The effort aims only at mimetic precision. This astonishing precision is, in fact, the great pleasure in reading James.

The value placed on recognition is tied to the novel’s retrospective method. Isabel is engaged in the process of discovering what happened, and her curiosity does not go far beyond establishing a correct picture of what has taken place. She takes stock rather than understands. By way of contrast, consider the realist novel: meaning emerges from the sequence of facts, even if a particular character happens to catch on to it. A movement among possibilities that are given and objective is at the same time a movement from past to future. Hesitating between, for example, honor, money, and love, the hero is defined by the choices he makes; his biography, meanwhile, defines the system within which he is forced to choose. Money, honor and love will have gained meaning in the course of the biography; they will have revealed themselves through what they do to a character. They will not be simply recognized and nothing more. Honor, for example, might show itself to be its own opposite through the economic extortion that it serves, and so on. Only by unifying contradictory possibilities in his life will the character attain the complex destiny, corresponding to the latent complexity of his world, that James aspires to. The individual biography, a singular interiorization of objective and contradictory categories, illuminates its society, which is not a backdrop but the very substance of individual experience. In the realist novel, psychology is immediately social. The categories mobilized in the plot are those that form the basis of the novel itself, which therefore constructs the plot with materials proper to it.

Portrait, on the other hand, principally aims at Isabel’s consciousness. The movement from fantasy to realism that the course of her experience describes might contain a thousand peripeteias, but it remains relatively exterior to its object, to the substance of the conflict. The infinite subtlety with which James composes the stations of Isabel’s consciousness does not require apprehension of her object, since to lose one’s illusions and to comprehend reality are not the same thing. In its essentials, and despite scenes of emerging consciousness, the world of the Portrait will remain opaque to the end; in a moment, Osmond will be our example. If the observer herself, Isabel, is moved by categories — for example, those of self-interested and disinterested life, along with the others mentioned above — that assume concreteness neither in her consciousness nor through her actions, then the complexity of her consciousness cannot save the novel from inadequacy and a certain arbitrariness. Because it doesn’t mobilize the categories within which it moves — a mobilization that would necessarily clarify its measure and reach — the complexity becomes somewhat pointless.

The most apposite example is one the critic himself invents for the purpose. Let’s imagine a Jamesian story, like the one suggested in his notebooks on the pages dated March 18, 1878. We will see how James’s famous method — the point of view of characters as the ultimate instance of reality — favors the concentration on the epiphenomenal.

A subject — The Count G. in Florence (Mme T told me the other night) married an American girl, Miss F., whom he neglected for other women, to whom he was constantly making love. She, very fond of him, tried to console herself by flirting with other men; but she couldn’t do it — it was not in her — she broke down in the attempt. This might be related from the point of view of one of the men whom she selects for this purpose and who really cares for her. Her caprices, absences, preoccupations, etc. — her sadness, her mechanical, perfunctory way of doing it — then her suddenly breaking it off and letting him see that she has a horror of him — he meanwhile being very innocent and devoted.2

Before taking up the point of view of the young man who will transmit the story, let us tarry a moment with Miss F., our virtual heroine. Neglected by her husband, whom she loves, she has immediate evidence of the potential mismatch between reciprocal feelings. Being married, however, and seeing in marriage a contract of affective equivalence, she reestablishes equilibrium by flirting as well, in imitation of her husband. Soon enough she will feel the horror of the self-negation implicit in this conventional response. The right to imitate her husband is given from the outside, as a contract, while the evidence of her love for him is interior. Her problem will be intelligible, we suppose, in terms of the opposition between bourgeois convention and immediate sentiment, or some equivalent formulation.

Turning to what the story would be according to James’s method, we will imagine narrating it from the perspective and limitation of Miss F.’s young consort. Her inconstancy, as she oscillates between depression and manifest affection, will appear to him temperamental and mysterious. Because he has no access to the motor that drives the situation — the more negligent the husband, the more necessary the flirtation — the boy will see in the violence of these caprices the spontaneous movement of Miss F.’s complex and tortured consciousness. A more or less petty, vengeful tactic is draped with an air of tragedy. The youth can’t understand the girl because he has no access to the categories that unify her comportment, which therefore remains mysterious. His love will be born in the effort to captivate this unpredictable woman. Note, however, that the complexity of the attempt to understand the unpredictable object of his pursuit does not correspond to any complexity in the object; it corresponds only to the unhappy position of the youth. Not even the pursuit can be really complex; any complexity would only be contingent, since rigorous connections among the manifold conditions and entailments of an action can only appear by dint of a rich problem. This possibility is excluded from the outset, since the narrator is defined as simply ill informed. The situation is analogous to Isabel’s struggle for truth; the two share a common structure, implicit in the Jamesian limited point of view. The tale concerns itself more with choreography than with comprehension. As we have seen, the reflections of the young man — we are to have nothing other than these — move in a field defined by irrelevance: they say little about their object, to which they are tied by relative ignorance. Nor can the effort of discovery acquire real weight, since it is basically silly in the face of a simple, perfectly soluble situation. Mystery originating in accidental ignorance is material for a comedy. Not for James, who would compose exquisite descriptions of the anguish that accompanies uncertainty. At the end, when the youth discovers that the whole thing was a feint on Miss F.’s part, the inconsequential grand proportions that she had assumed need not be deflated, because his consciousness would have had the opportunity to grow in the process. The lost time becomes a gain. The tendency toward the unimportant would be, thus, integral to James’s method.

The logic of our argument so far consists in the attempt to explicate the rules of construction underlying the Portrait, in order to interrogate their concrete deployment. In James’s terms, we have explored the novelist’s knowledge of his novel. If the argument has been correct, it has demonstrated that Portrait is constructed around a situation that is problematic because it remains untouched by the central development of the book. The scenes of nascent consciousness, beautiful in themselves, don’t reach the kernel of the matter on which they feed; the proof of this affirmation must be sought in the form of opaque remnants, central notions that are never clarified.

Osmond is a mystery. As we have seen through Isabel, “under his good-nature, his facility, his knowledge of life, his egotism lay hidden like a serpent in a bank of flowers.” As seen by Ralph, Osmond

always had an eye to effect, and his effects were deeply calculated. They were produced by no vulgar means, but the motive was as vulgar as the art was great. To surround his interior with a sort of invidious sanctity, to tantalise society with a sense of exclusion, to make people believe his house was different from every other… [U]nder the guise of caring only for intrinsic values Osmond lived exclusively for the world. (144)

How does the crafty derogation of one’s fellows comport with good nature and cheerfulness? facility with calculation? culture with vulgarity? disinterest with its opposite? Similarly, the beauty of Osmond’s life is associated with emptiness. How are we to understand these contradictions? It would not do justice to our experience of the book to say simply that the bad side counterbalances and annuls the good. Osmond retains his beautiful side, despite what we know of him. If we do not want to reduce him to one side or the other, to good or evil, how do we comprehend his unity? If we remain within the terms established by the novel, this contradiction is the end of the line. There is no explanation; all we can say is that Osmond is just like that. Therefore it must be on his own account that he is stylized and empty, cultivated and narrowminded. If these categories do not appear to be linked by objective necessities, they can only be united by an act of subjective will; we are led to a monstruous subjectivity. To a lesser degree the same takes place with Isabel concerning her intense interest in disinterest; since real reasons do not appear, she would appear to be in the grip of some sort of mania. (When such an excess of will is not intended, as it is not in James, it can be ascribed to the method of omitting the action in favor of the evocation. In an active situation it might be impossible, say, to make money and to have style at the same time; to choose money or style would be to accept as its complement the negation of the other. Meanwhile, for the retrospective vision — which does not take in the necessary mutual exclusion of the alternatives because it does not involve the experience of practical impossibilities — a human being is the ecstatic conjunction of her attributes, which coexist side by side but unattached. Objective conditions are encountered only as incorporated into the subject — the result is a hypertrophy of will). Even Ralph’s analyses, the liveliest of the book, only consider Osmond from the subjective side: this is dissimulated, but it is so. Nobody asks after the conditions under which Osmond’s comportment makes sense, why his disinterestedness is impossible but desirable. What must be true of the world in which Osmond acts in order for his calculations to have effect?

The cultivation of intrinsic values can tantalize only those who experience their absence as a lack.3 Disinterest can only arouse interest when the world is self-interested. To collect is notable when everyone else both buys and sells. To specialize in conserving integrity makes sense when conserving it has become a specialty. One hastens to add that the question is not one of style in general, since the refined Lord Warburton, Osmond’s rival with Isabel, has it by birthright; to count as style, style must be personal. We have arrived, it appears, at the utopian figure of the nineteenth century, the artist: mindful of his individual rights like any other bourgeois, the artist is excused from commercial life. However interested in what he does, he is thought of as disinterested. As the market progressively subsumes social life — as, in ever more areas of life, value is expressed as extrinsic value, namely money — the artist, a person whose profession it is to preserve fidelity to himself and to “the honour of a thing” (Osmond), becomes ever more a utopian figure. Thus, the more life is subject to the market, the fewer materials it will offer the artist, to whom it remains to express the integrity of his sensibility in the negation of the dishonored world. Flaubert is the exemplar. On the other hand, one cannot forget that the artist also lives in the world and makets himself. If he doesn’t inherit a living or acquire a sinecure, the beauty of his soul is his stock in trade. His reward thus increases with his risk. The wages of authenticity are certainly a privilege, since others spend ten hours of their day negating themselves in work. However, the identity of person and work, privilege of the artist in mercantile society, is also his greater risk. Someone who detests his work can distance himself from it. The artist puts his own person, embodied in his work, on the market. Artistic dishonesty therefore has intrinsic consequences: it transforms the “I” into a mere commodity. Where artisanal rigor can signal distrust for the market, marketable polish will represent itself as integrity — but it is the most radical confirmation of the order it aims to negate. It does not open any prospect. The cunning lies in echoing your audience, in an elegant key no less, before it has even spoken.

These ideas, it appears to me, clarify the figure of Osmond. They establish the intelligible nexus of the mutual exclusion of beauty and social life, of style and work, of interest and integrity. More generically, everything that is marketable, everything that exists without its own immediate reason, appears despicable. Without this commercial context, Isabel’s investment in disinterest would make no sense. Within it, however, it is meaningful through and through. Sophisticated good taste disposes of money as if it were on the same side as merit. In its bad faith lurks a legitimate and utopian element of shame and hope: the desire that things should exist for themselves rather than for the market — a desire for integrity that explains the extraordinary prices fetched by artistic workmanship and hand-finishing. Osmond’s baser side can likewise be understood in terms of the horizon of the market. The profession of disinterest — as hobby or source of income — presupposes a moneyed atmosphere that is both bourgeois and disavowed: that is, a population anxious to soften the proofs of phantasmal impersonality that are its possessions.

Though it emerges from questions suggested by the text, our approach does not correspond to the real development of the novel. If it is indeed the case that only a schema like ours can render intelligible the categories that organize the novel, Portrait is not a self-sufficient work. James’s mimetic talent has created a credible surface of great interest and grace, but has proven insufficient in the critical articulation of that surface. Minutely attentive to the timbral quality of his characters, James falls victim to their limitation, which is then revered as a principle of taste and delicacy, as a kind of precept. The maieutic counterweight represented by scenes of emerging consciousness does not cast sufficient light.

1. Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (New York: Doubleday, 1957) 119.
2. The Notebooks of Henry James, Ed. F.O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) 14.
3. Cf our description of the narrative gesture: it tantalizes by exclusion and inclusion, by promise of profundity and omission of arguments.