Abstract
Henry James’s late novels suggest a world of talk which is morally ambiguous because epistemologically unstable. James’s early and late dialogues are radically different: in the late fiction, talk becomes a process of imaginative collaboration, and language virtually creates the conditions under which perception is possible. In The Ambassadors, Parisian talk educates Strether even as it seems to dissemble. And in The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, conversation shapes the terms in which certain actions will be possible; talking together, characters create a world that fits the shape of their desires. Jamesian talk is at once hypocrisy and art: lying becomes a mode of vision. But if James’s liars are artists, his artists are also liars. We prefer Maggie Verver to Charlotte Stant not because she is more honest, but because her language makes for the most harmonious and inclusive order.
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