James as Magician: Deception and the Moment of Truth

By what magic does a writer create a picture in a reader’s eye? James, wanting to create “a state of hallucination” in the reader, imagined himself a conjuror. This essay examines how James achieved one of his most marvelous and improbable tricks: the revelation of Chad and Madame de Vionnet to Lambert Strether, as they appear to him boating in the countryside in The Ambassadors. My purpose, however, is not to dissuade or debunk James’s magic but to praise the truth he allows us to envision. Contrived by all his arts, his trick is to reveal the falsehood of Chad and Madame de Vionnet, to lay bare their deception in a moment of truth, and thereby to give a moral fable, worthy of Hawthorne himself, about human deceit.