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COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press
Narcissus similarly ignore or excise Ganymede's attempted "homosexual" seduction of Narcissus. By taking himself as his own object, Narcissus therefore rejects both heterosexual and homosexual relations. Similarly, while Dorian's final rejection of Sibyl Vane suggests his resistance to heterosexuality, Wilde maintains a pregnant silence over the second (homosexual) possibility. To this extent, the charge of narcissism is misplaced, and may be used to elide the oblique difficulty of homosexual seduction, which, I am suggesting, is marked elliptically on the painting.
23 Freud, "A Note Upon the 'Mystic Writing-Pad'" (note 12), 19:227-34.
24 Lacan likened the structure of unconscious fantasy to a "scar" (Lacan [note I: THE DESIRE AND TRUTH IN PAINTING
Consciousness, indeed, is quite inadequate to explain the contents of personality. It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves.
Oscar Wilde(1)
The truth, then, is no longer itself in that which represents it in painting, it is merely its double, however good a likeness it is and precisely other by reason of the likeness.
Jacques Derrida(2)
There is no truth that, in passing through consciousness, does not lie. But one runs after it all the same.
Jacques Lacan(3)
How can literature represent a lie when its procedures involve duplicity? When applied to the fiction of Henry James, this question troubles the meaning and authenticity of his characters. A reader's struggle to distinguish between James's accounts of truth and deceit requires investigation into his understanding of character and knowledge, which asks us in turn to consider how turn-of-the-century literature represents personality, fantasy, and desire.
I want to examine the problem of desire in James's fiction by arguing that he uses desire as an intermediary category between knowledge and personal truth. The meaning that circulates between and among his characters cannot answer or resolve their enigma, or render their truth stable and legible. Despite their promise of coherence, James's narrative conclusions raise as many questions about his characters' ontology as they successfully close down. Specifically, they represent an indeterminacy about objects of desire and their gender that takes the reader beyond his narratives' resolution.(4) What meaning can we therefore attribute to enigma and sexual dissimulation in James's fiction? Are James's tropes of artistry, masquerade, and interpersonal deceit able to suspend the significance his narratives attach to friendship, physical desire, and even same-gender intimacy? Finally, is there a relation between James's protagonists' fantasies, taboo elements of homosexuality, and restrictions on masculine roles in turn-of-the-century literature and society?
"The Liar" (1888), one of James's most intriguing and little-discussed short stories, may serve as an introduction to this discussion because it offers a dynamic of sexual deceit, enigma, and apparent resolution.(5) Sir David Ashmore, an aging gentleman, commissions the artist of this tale---Oliver Lyon--to paint him at his country house in Hertfordshire, England before he dies. Sir David's temporary absence at a dinner-party in his house gives Lyon an opportunity to scrutinize the other guests to see whether they would make appropriate subjects for painting. Across the table, he observes a former lover and her husband, Colonel Capadose, and their subsequent introduction renews emotions that he must veil from the colonel and other guests. Under the gaze of the public eye, Lyon and Mrs. Capadose interpret the change that has taken place in their relationship, and accept the impossibility of admitting their desire or resuming their intimacy.
This conflict generates interest for the reader and the guests of the party when Lyon realizes that Mrs. Capadose has married a man who is incapable of telling the truth. Indeed, the colonel's tendency to distort and exaggerate events, both real and imaginary, indicates a self-deception that borders on pathology. Curious about the colonel, and desirous of his wife, the painter falls into a drama as he struggles to understand the colonel's mendacity and his wife's concealment of each preposterous untruth. By acknowledging the extent of her complicity, Lyon reaches an understanding of his own, and is able to relinquish her as his memory's haunting object.
Before the painter sees Mrs. Capadose, Lyon considers his status as an unaccompanied bachelor (a fact of considerable importance to the colonel) as well as each guest's potential to be painted. This moment of observation is significant because it hinges on the painter's interest in his portrait candidates, his ability to capture their external role, and on the measure of artistry that a transposition from interest to figuration entails--that is, the shift that occurs when the painter poses an individual as a "subject," before transforming him or her into a figure on canvas. In each substitution, the painter focuses on what each subject exhibits of him or herself and what he or she is able to hide. The public correspondingly measures the painter's skill by his ability to read each act of concealment, and the fantasy that a subject maintains between his or her external appearance and idealized self-representation. By observing himself watching others, Lyon is thus able
to lose himself in his favourite diversion of watching face after face. This amusement gave him the greatest pleasure he knew, and he often thought it a mercy that the human mask did interest him and that it was not less vivid than it was (sometimes it ran its success in this line very close), since he was to make his living by reproducing it. (J, 386)
James writes frequently from an observer's point of view--Rowland Mallet in Roderick Hudson (1875) and Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors (1903) are notable examples. His observers' interest is determined largely by their shift from detached outsider to embroiled mediator, a shift that accompanies their movement from mystification (enigma) to discovery (epiphany) when they finally pass judgment.(6) Art is especially useful to this process because it obstructs and foils James's characters' designs with an intermediary project.
Rather than establishing the subject's truth, art appears to indicate the discrepancy between one truth and another, and the variance of meaning in different spheres of representation--from the literary to the figurative and the fantasmatic. I want to emphasize this split between James's subject and its representation because the split does not always correspond to the project of James's tale, or agree with his broader definition of fiction: it produces meanings that each narrative is unable to explain or contain since their field of meaning--particularly sexual meaning--is not subject to authorial or narrative control. "The Liar," for example, consistently undermines the mimetic strategy advanced in "The Art of Fiction," in which James describes painting as a faithful copy of life: "The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life. When it relinquishes this attempt, the same attempt that we see on the canvas of the painter, it will have arrived at a very strange pass."(7) This impasse often resonates in "The Liar" as an excess of meaning that develops from intrigue and speculation about different characters.(8) Painting veils and discloses the erotic intrigue of "The Liar" because the subject of painting defines its personality by deciding what qualities to adopt, exaggerate, and conceal.(9)
The colonel is significant in this regard, and troubling to his painter, because whenever he lies his public character and speech differ dramatically from his self-representation. Since Lyon is a reader of "the human mask" (J, 386), he exposes the colonel as an anomaly because the colonel's persona points too obviously to dissimulation; it is not a laudable role through which he can artfully realize his character. The result is a visible duplicity that foregrounds the colonel's indifference to maintaining an important social distinction for his friends between a "player and the part he represent[s]."(10) For the purposes of my reading, this indifference accentuates the masculine subject and its social and sexual symbolization at the turn of the century by indicating a deceit of which the colonel is only the most visible symptom. Lyon's fascination often exceeds him because the dinner-guests' tacit support for the colonel's mendacity throws their own definition of truth awry. This further indicates the difficulty of reading someone else because the factors that confirm or discredit public identity--speech and facial expression--are notoriously opaque and inscrutable:
Arthur Ashmore [Sir David's son] would not be inspiring to paint . . . ; even if he had looked a little less like a page (fine as to print and margin) without punctuation, he would still be a refreshing, iridescent surface. But the gentleman four persons off [Colonel Capadose]--what was he? Would he be a subject, or was his face only the legible door-plate of his identity, burnished with punctual washing and shaving--the least thing that was decent that you would know him by? (J, 386)
The surface of the face is comparable to a piece of writing because it is legible and "punctuat[ed]" by meaning, though Lyon is doubtful whenever he ruminates on what is beneath that surface--the illegible and unwritable text of personality. Although he understands that the face can elicit or inhibit desire, he fails to note that the subject's speech can also sustain deception when it artfully agrees with its persona's truth.
When Lyon renews interest in the colonel's wife, he exposes the colonel's duplicity because the art of seduction tests and draws on a similar manipulation of truth and appearance--displaying what one wishes known, for instance, and postponing what one would rather leave unsaid. In other words, seduction encourages a temporary suspension of character by performing an ideal that the lover invariably betrays. Lyon admits that an individual's projection of honesty--though difficult to maintain--creates more intrigue when it flirts with a certain economy of truth without falling into cultivated dishonesty: "Do you mean I like people in proportion as they deceive?" "I think we all do, so long as we don't find them out" (J, 391). The colonel's most amusing problem is that he is spectacularly found out each time he describes his past and ruling passions. On the one hand, he is the least interesting character insofar as he is the most obvious liar; on the other, his manipulation of truth is so egregious that it veils the dissimulation of others with outrageous effect: the guests at the dinner-party acquiesce in his lies to maintain their own secret dramas. Lyon, for example, resumes a discreet intimacy with Mrs. Capadose under the pretext of painting the colonel. By representing the colonel's falsehoods on canvas, Lyon clarifies his reason for lying and simultaneously conceals his own desire to understand--and even seduce--the colonel's wife.
This gap between subjective and social truth makes the colonel's motives difficult to establish. As Sir David suggests, the colonel's compulsion is intermittent, so his stories cannot all be dismissed as outright lies. Instead, the infrequency of his lies requires considerable vigilance on his listener's part because the colonel is likely to evince...
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