We develop unevenly as readers. I remember feeling furious, at age fifteen, when the father of one of my brothers’ friends (a psychology professor at Temple) questioned my ability to understand the novels of Dostoevsky. It was not that he doubted my cognitive capacities; rather, he didn’t credit me with the emotional experience and maturity to really comprehend the matters with which Dostoevsky is concerned. I thought he was wrong then, and I still think he’s wrong now, though for somewhat different reasons. It is my observation that the novels of Dostoevsky (and, for different reasons, of Tolstoy as well) are peculiarly suited to the emotional and intellectual range of teenagers. The novels celebrate raw painful forms of emotion and emotionally intense forms of political and religious commitment that will resonate very fully with people between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. Of course, not all books open themselves up so readily at that stage of life. I remember reading two essays by Hume (one of them must have been “Of the Original Contract”) for Judith Shklar’s lecture course on political obligation, at age twenty or so, and finding them obscure, opaque, dare I say boring compared to the more obviously literary works on the syllabus (Richard II, Heinrich von Kleist’s Prince Friedrich of Homburg, Murder In the Cathedral); three years later, with a much fuller knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political thought, the same essays had become extraordinarily lucid, not just comprehensible but magically clear, as clear and easy to read as I had found Orwell’s essays at sixteen. It was as though someone had pulled a trick on me and switched the texts: I could have sworn I was reading an altogether different sequence of words this time around.
There is something to be said for waiting to read a given book until one is truly prepared to plunge into its depths. I read Moby-Dick on my own, the summer after my first year of graduate school (a year in which the book that most struck me with the force of revelation was Paradise Lost, which, strange to say, I had never read before); I had previously avoided Herman Melville’s novel on the mistaken belief that it was a sea story along tedious and vaguely Conradian lines. (I have always been immune to Joseph Conrad’s charms, though I make an exception for The Secret Agent, which, along with Dostoevsky’s Demons and James’s The Princess Casamassima, seems to me to capture perfectly the ways in which the later decades of the nineteenth century eerily anticipate the romance of terror in the first decade of the twenty-first.) Nothing could have been further from the truth: like the opening books of Paradise Lost, Moby-Dick is electrifyingly strange, mesmerizing, lovely (I now saw where Pynchon had gotten so many of his effects). I loved Moby-Dick so much that part of me was angry that nobody had told me sooner how genuinely great it was, great in the colloquial sense rather than the canonical one, although it might be that if I’d encountered it sooner, I wouldn’t have been so well primed to fall in love with it.
It is George Eliot and Henry James, I think, out of all the great canonical English-language novelists, who are better read in one’s twenties or beyond rather than in one’s teens. I remember reading Middlemarch the summer I turned sixteen and finding it worthwhile but very slightly tedious for reasons that had nothing to do with length: I had devoured Bleak House almost in a single sitting a few years earlier and would drink down War and Peace over a few addictive days two summers later, but Middlemarch felt sticky, slow, ponderous. The same thing goes, only even more so, for The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. The German critic Theodor Adorno, writing of Beethoven’s late style, observed, “The maturity of the late works of significant artists does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation. They lack all the harmony that the classicist aesthetic is in the habit of demanding from works of art, and they show more traces of history than of growth.”1 Like Beethoven, Henry James is often said to have a “late” style: a way of writing sentences that would become increasingly baroque to the point of being sometimes bizarre, laying bare the conventions that governed his earlier works in a fashion that renders the late novels deeply strange. Part of that transformation is attributed to James’s adoption, late in his career, of dictation as his main mode of composition, a practice that allowed his sentences to spiral into ever-more-intricate constructions whose complexity is more readily parsed by eye than ear but that owes much to a cognitive dimension opened up by means of the speaking voice. His biographer, Leon Edel, notes that the sound of the spoken voice is very strong in James’s later manner, “not only in the rhythm and ultimate perfection of his verbal music, but in his use of colloquialisms, and in a greater indulgence in metaphor.”2
First published in 1904, The Golden Bowl was James’s last major novel, and its sentences display a virtually unprecedented subtlety and complexity, indeed to a degree that many readers have found maddening. James performed extensive revisions on the typescripts of his novels, including a massive wholesale rewriting of his entire oeuvre for publication in the famous New York Edition: an authoritative, multivolume edition of his own fiction. He wrote a preface for the republication of The Golden Bowl in that edition that gives some clues as to his concerns, and I will single out two particular points from it before plunging into the thickets of the novel itself for what it shows about how language mediates perception and what possibilities exist for the notation of various forms of cognition in sentences and paragraphs. I should warn the reader in advance that partly because I follow James’s difficult novel closely, and perhaps for other reasons as well, this chapter is probably the hardest to read in the entire book, and it will not represent a failure of spirit on the reader’s part to skip ahead to the next one.
First of all, James notes in the book “the still marked inveteracy of a certain indirect and oblique view of my presented action.”3 By “inveteracy,” James refers to a trait that is ingrained or deep-rooted, habitual, and the unusual word choice is highly characteristic of his style more generally, as is the hint of archness in the locution “a certain.…” Amplifying this point further, James observes that he prefers to see the incidents of a story “through the opportunity and the sensibility of some more or less detached, some not strictly involved, though thoroughly interested and intelligent, witness or reporter, some person who contributes to the case mainly a certain amount of criticism and interpretation of it.” Again, the syntax is highly rhetorical, the tag some giving the sentence energy as the verbal momentum builds, then repeated to give the sentence a second kick after it has built to the nouns witness and reporter; the term case, too, suggests that there is something forensic or medical about the story. Another way of describing this habit, some lines further on, is to say that the novel “remains subject to the register, ever so closely kept, of the consciousness of but two of the characters” (4): register is a noun here, of course, implying the sort of record maintained by a shopkeeper or any other kind of chronicler or historian, but its use in this context brings with it the echo of the associated verb, in which we “register” things precisely because they come into our consciousness. Thus we can see a sort of “working backward,” in which James tugs “register” back from its metaphorical usage as a relatively common verb to its root meaning as a noun, thereby showing us something new about the very language we use to pin down and conceptualize the phenomena of perception.
The other point I want to mention from the novel’s preface concerns the relationship between written and spoken language, language taken in through the eye versus the ear. In one sense, James can be thought of as a highly writerly literary stylist, one whose sentences may be more effectively decoded by the powerful eye than by the emotionally sharp but less cognitively acute ear (at least it is commonly conceived to be so). James, though, explodes that distinction as nonsensical, despite the fact that the language he uses to make the point would present to most auditors a challenge beyond comprehension (even the sharpest-eyed reader may need to move the eyes several times over some of the phrases here—“viva-voce,” by the way, simply means “by mouth” or “by word of mouth,” and is also used in the British educational system to describe what Americans would more likely call an oral exam):
It is scarce necessary to note that the highest test of any literary form conceived in the light of “poetry”—to apply that term in its largest literary sense—hangs back unpardonably from its office when it fails to lend itself to viva-voce treatment. We talk here, naturally, not of non-poetic forms, but of those whose highest bid is addressed to the imagination, to the spiritual and the aesthetic vision, the mind led captive by a charm and a spell, an incalculable art. The essential property of such a form as that is to give out its finest and most numerous secrets, and to give them out most gratefully, under the closest pressure—which is of course the pressure of the attention articulately sounded. (20)
James likes the trick of apposition, joining by a comma two words or phrases that are thus deemed equivalent (“the mind led captive by a charm and a spell, an incalculable art”) even as the exact nature of the equivalence cannot be specified. Sounded, these sentences do not soar in the elegant, unclotted forms associated with elocution or classical rhetoric; they wind back upon themselves, making what is open secret and vice versa.
The Golden Bowl is full of objects: the American father and daughter, Adam and Maggie Verver, who are two of the novel’s four main characters (the other two are the Prince, whom Maggie will marry, and Charlotte Stant, who will marry Adam), are in Europe to purchase beautiful objects for the American museum Adam has made his monument, and the novel’s title immediately directs our attention to the artifact that will become the instrument of knowledge and revenge. The episode in which the golden bowl is initially discovered represents the culmination of the novel’s first book. It is a condensed and telling scene in which Charlotte and the Prince (the pair of whom Fanny Assingham has wishfully asserted, to her curious husband, that “nothing” has taken place between them, “except their having to recognize that nothing could” [76]) converse intimately in a highly idiomatic Italian that they assume gives them absolute privacy but that turns out to be fully comprehensible to the antique shop’s owner.
The Prince, indeed, has himself been described by Maggie at one point as a “morceau de musée” (33), and the boundaries between objects and people are as often blurred as those between objects and verbal metaphors. Charles Sainte-Beuve criticized Flaubert for itemizing the different parts of a woman’s appearance so as to blind the reader to her totality rather than help him apprehend it, and James does something rather similar in a curiously nonrealistic or nonnaturalistic mode of representation. Here are the sentences in which Charlotte Stant is described upon her first appearance (the narration is in the third person, but the character who provides the lens through which she is viewed is the Prince himself):
Making use then of clumsy terms of excess, the face was too narrow and too long, the eyes not large, and the mouth on the other hand by no means small, with substance in its lips and a slight, the very slightest, tendency to protrusion in the solid teeth, otherwise indeed well arrayed and flashingly white. But it was, strangely, as a cluster of possessions of his own that these things in Charlotte Stant now affected him; items in a full list, items recognized, each of them, as if, for the long interval, they had been “stored”—wrapped up, numbered, put away in a cabinet. (58)
Where does the marking “stored” come from? Is it the Prince’s emphasis or the narrator’s? Or could it be more usefully thought of as the narrator’s visual registering, on the page, of something marked in the unspoken language of the Prince’s thoughts? It seems to be a habit of the narrator’s to mark words in this way, calling to mind Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” (“Style sees everything in quotation marks”).4
I ask the question not to invite a definite answer but rather to direct the attention to this odd feature of James’s style. The itemization of the parts of a beautiful woman’s face inevitably recalls the Renaissance trope of the blason, though that is at odds with the clinical quality of James’s prose (consider the singling-out of the tendency to protrusion in the flashingly white teeth). Beyond that, the passage’s central metaphor can be said to display a curiously shimmering aspect. It is rendered unstable by the ambiguity surrounding the question of whether these items exist in a list or in a cabinet, i.e. whether they are to be thought of primarily as written words on a piece of paper or curios stored in the drawers of a piece of furniture. The marked word “stored” does some special work here, or rather the quotation marks let the word work as a hinge between items as items-on-a-list and items as actual physical artifacts. Of course, both are metaphors, but by the time we have become embroiled in all of this business, we are inside rather than outside, thinking rather than looking.
Questions of language are constantly foregrounded. The Prince, his consciousness one of only two that filter events for the reader, has been told that he speaks English too well, and whatever that means exactly, the excellence of his English is such that he finds the language “convenient, oddly, even for his relation with himself” (29). This is convenient for James as well, of course—a coincidence of interests to which the novelist perhaps gestures with that coy modifier “oddly,” but the attention to the linguistic texture of human thought is unusual and striking. We are constantly asked to attend, for instance, to the artifice of systems of notation: in the secluded country garden where Maggie and Adam Verver converse together, there is a door with “a slab with a date set above it, 1713, but in the old multiplied lettering” (142), the detail about Roman numerals reminding us by extension that the system of alphabetic transcription is also merely a convention. When the Ververs settle, shortly thereafter, on a bench, the narrator continues: “They knew the bench; it was ‘sequestered’—they had praised it for that together before and liked the word.” The word sequestered has migrated from the Ververs’ consciousness—their self-conscious consciousness—into the narration, the borrowing marked by the quotation marks and lingered upon in the narrator’s singling-out of the characters’ fondness for the word. The boundary between the language of narration and the language of each character’s internal consciousness has been rendered highly permeable, with the vocabulary and registers of the narrator regularly sliding into those of characters and vice versa.
Consider this description of Bob Assingham, who “could deal with things perfectly, for all his needs, without getting near them”:
This was the way he dealt with his wife, a large proportion of whose meanings he knew he could neglect. He edited for their general economy the play of her mind, just as he edited, savingly, with the stump of a pencil, her redundant telegrams. The thing in the world that was least of a mystery to him was his Club, which he was accepted as perhaps too completely managing, and which he managed on lines of perfect penetration. His connexion with it was really a masterpiece of editing. (74)
Fanny’s meanings, in their copiousness (the slide between singular “play” and plural “telegrams” is almost a solecism), are a gabby and hyperbolic text to be pruned by Bob’s stringent pencil: the stumpiness of the pencil is a sign of his frugality, as is his insistence on keeping telegrams short in an era when such communications were paid for by the word. Fanny and Bob’s conversations are replete with the presence of things not said. James’s characters sometimes talk about things one should not talk about, but they also refuse to say what one might think should be said, and the prose is often driven by the force of this tension between euphemism (periphrasis, beating about the bush) and the explicit.
More generally, though, the novel provides an extraordinarily elaborate language for talking about knowledge: Charlotte and the Prince, contemplating the Ververs, conclude that this father-and-daughter duo “knew…absolutely nothing on earth worth speaking of…and they would perhaps sometimes be a little less trying if they would only once for all peacefully admit that knowledge wasn’t one of their needs and that they were in fact constitutionally inaccessible to it” (271). The Ververs are holy innocents, the Prince and Charlotte are sullied by experience, the novel retells the story of the Fall: its true subject is the vicious game played first by the experienced with the innocent and then, as the tables are turned, by the innocent with the experienced. It is Maggie who precipitates her father’s decision to marry, once she explains how her own marriage to the Prince has rendered Adam Verver vulnerable to the husband-seekers formerly dispelled by Maggie’s presence at his side: “It was as if you couldn’t be in the market when you were married to me. Or rather as if I kept people off, innocently, by being married to you. Now that I’m married to some one else you’re, as in consequence, married to nobody. Therefore you may be married to anybody, to everybody. People don’t see why you shouldn’t be married to them” (151). The language used to describe this psychosocial subtlety is involuted indeed, as Adam Verver realizes (the narrator here closely follows Adam’s thoughts):
They had made vacant by their marriage his immediate foreground, his personal precinct—they being the Princess and the Prince. They had made room in it for others—so others had become aware. He became aware himself, for that matter, during the minute Maggie stood there before speaking; and with the sense moreover of what he saw her see he had the sense of what she saw him. This last, it may be added, would have been his intensest perception hadn’t there the next instant been more for him in Fanny Assingham. Her face couldn’t keep it from him; she had seen, on top of everything, in her quick way, what they both were seeing. (138)
This sentence marks the end of the chapter and also displays many of the traits that James’s contemporaries found tiresome or even ludicrous in his prose style (Max Beerbohm wrote a very good parody of the late James style in a little piece called “The Mote in the Middle Distance,” and there are countless other parodies—James must be one of the most immediately recognizable sentence-writers in the history of the English language). But James is hardly unaware of the outrageous nature of what he’s doing here, and the next chapter opens with a wonderful defense of the choices he’s just made:
So much mute communication was doubtless all this time marvellous, and we may confess to having perhaps read into the scene prematurely a critical character that took longer to develop. Yet the quiet hour of reunion enjoyed that afternoon by the father and the daughter did really little else than deal with the elements definitely presented to each in the vibration produced by the return of the church-goers. (139)
This sort of signal of self-awareness, often consequent upon a particularly extravagant or baroque gesture, can be seen throughout: “The little crisis was of a shorter duration than our account of it,” observes the narrator after a scene especially fraught with exchanged glances and words unspoken (60).
Also striking in this novel is the tendency to render material the ineffable processes of human perception (James’s brother William was one of the pioneers of empiricist psychology, the teacher of Gertrude Stein, among others, and the person whose work popularized the notion of the “stream of consciousness”). Look at the metaphor James uses here, and the persistence with which the passage sticks with it (it would perhaps be more conventional to retreat from the image to the lived reality, but that doesn’t happen):
Fanny Assingham had at this moment the sense as of a large heaped dish presented to her intelligence and inviting it to a feast—so thick were the notes of intention in this remarkable speech. But she also felt that to plunge at random, to help herself too freely, would—apart from there not being at such a moment time for it—tend to jostle the ministering hand, confound the array and, more vulgarly speaking, make a mess. She picked out after consideration a solitary plum. (215)
“The sense as of”: the whole image here is oblique, metaphorical, secondary. But even in the third sentence a “plum” can still be picked out, a plum wholly imaginary but given strange solidity (it is almost caloric) by the act of naming. (The consonant combination “pl” is itself acutely sensory, even aside from the scent and chewiness and color associated with the fruit; it is probably something more like a prune, a date or a raisin than the fragrant fresh fruit—a sugarplum.) Here is another of these extravagantly sustained metaphors (it is impossible to convey their workings without quoting at length):
[Fanny] felt now that she wouldn’t have interrupted [the Prince] for the world. She found his eloquence precious; there wasn’t a drop of it that she didn’t in a manner catch, as it came, for immediate bottling, for future preservation. The crystal flask of her innermost attention really received it on the spot, and she had even already the vision of how, in the snug laboratory of her afterthought, she should be able chemically to analyse it. There were moments positively, still beyond this, when, with the meeting of their eyes, something as yet unnameable came out for her in his look, when something strange and subtle and at variance with his words, something that gave them away, glimmered deep down, as an appeal, almost an incredible one, to her finer comprehension. What, inconceivably, was it like? Wasn’t it, however gross such a rendering of anything so occult, fairly like a quintessential wink, a hint of the possibility of their really treating their subject—of course on some better occasion—and thereby, as well, finding it much more interesting? If this far red spark, which might have been figured by her mind as the head-light of an approaching train seen through the length of a tunnel, was not, on her side, an ignis fatuus, a mere subjective phenomenon, it twinkled there at the direct expense of what the Prince was inviting her to understand. Meanwhile too, however, and unmistakeably, the real treatment of their subject did, at a given moment, sound. (230)
The chemical metaphor, sustained in part by the word quintessential with its alchemical overtones, is never retracted, even as the image of the light in the tunnel is introduced; it only “might have been figured in [Fanny’s] mind,” and there is no definite commitment to its having happened.
The golden bowl is itself the instrument of Maggie’s coming into knowledge of her husband’s sexual entanglement with Charlotte Stant, and the breaking of the bowl represents a dramatic culmination of one line of the novel’s development. The difference between objects and ideas is that while the bowl can be broken, the knowledge the bowl has introduced into Maggie’s mind cannot be dispelled merely by destroying the object. Maggie’s consciousness becomes the focalizing tool for volume 2 of the novel, as the Prince’s has served to focus much of volume 1, and here James explores Maggie’s position in a long passage that again uses metaphor with unusual self-awareness:
Moving for the first time in her life as in the darkening shadow of a false position, she reflected that she should either not have ceased to be right—that is to be confident—or have recognized that she was wrong; though she tried to deal with herself for a space only as a silken-coated spaniel who has scrambled out of a pond and who rattles the water from his ears. Her shake of the head, again and again, as she went, was much of that order, and she had the resource to which, save for the rude generalizing bark, the spaniel would have been a stranger, of humming to herself hard as a sign that nothing had happened to her. She hadn’t, so to speak, fallen in; she had had no accident nor got wet; this at any rate was her pretension until after she began a little to wonder if she mightn’t, with or without exposure, have taken cold. (329–30)
The first sentence of the paragraph is bold indeed. “As in the darkening shadow of a false position”: the false position is both real and insubstantial, the shadow a mere metaphor but one so ominous it bursts into a simulacrum of something like life. The ante is raised again after the semicolon. The spaniel is already an extravagant metaphor, and the dog is vividly and texturally rendered at the outset (“silken-coated,” rattling drops of water, with the shake of the head providing the link between young woman and dog), as well as continuing to lurk throughout the subsequent lines of the passage, if only in negative (Maggie has not fallen in to the water, unlike the notional spaniel). But there is more to come:
She could at all events remember no time at which she had felt so excited, and certainly none—which was another special point—that so brought with it as well the necessity for concealing excitement. This birth of a new eagerness became a high pastime in her view precisely by reason of the ingenuity required for keeping the thing born out of sight. The ingenuity was thus a private and absorbing exercise, in the light of which, might I so far multiply my metaphors, I should compare her to the frightened but clinging young mother of an unlawful child. The idea that had possession of her would be, by our new analogy, the proof of her misadventure, but likewise all the while only another sign of a relation that was more to her than anything on earth.
It is not surprising that the narrator should perceive a need to offer an apology in advance for the multiplication of metaphors. Maggie is also something like the mother of an illegitimate child, the idea of her husband’s infidelity—the tenor of the metaphor—signifying at once the utmost passion (“a relation that was more to her than anything on earth”—as far as the metaphor’s vehicle goes, it is the woman rather than the man who has found passion outside marriage) and the utmost shame (“the proof of her misadventure”). It is farfetched; it draws attention to itself, particularly in the way it so quickly follows on the tail of the spaniel, as it were, and the drama is to that extent conceptual (internal, linguistic) rather than relying on developments in the external world of living breathing characters.
The narrator refers at one point during The Golden Bowl to “the final sharp extinction of the inward scene by the outward” (335), and at times we even hear words that turn out not to have been spoken: “some such words as those were what didn’t ring out,” the narrator adds after a passage of dialogue that is in no respect differently marked from the book’s other conversational exchanges, “yet it was as if even the unuttered sound had been quenched here in its own quaver” (338). Indeed, James does the exact opposite of the writing-workshop cliché of showing rather than telling: “[Maggie] couldn’t have narrated afterwards—and in fact was at a loss to tell herself—by what transition, what rather marked abruptness of change in their personal relation, their drive came to its end with a kind of interval established, almost confessed to, between them” (371). This is quite literally a description of a scene in which nothing happens: nothing happens, nothing is confessed, Maggie can’t tell herself or anybody else in what this change resides or what exactly prompted or facilitated it, and yet a period has somehow been established in Maggie’s relationship with her husband, despite the absence of words for it. This sort of human exchange is exactly what James’s fictional language has the wherewithal to notate. Look at this description of Maggie watching the foursome that includes her father, his wife Charlotte and the Prince (Charlotte’s lover, Maggie’s husband) playing cards, and being struck by
the fact of her father’s wife’s lover facing his mistress; the fact of her father sitting, all unsounded and unblinking, between them; the fact of Charlotte keeping it up, keeping up everything across the table, with her husband beside her; the fact of Fanny Assingham, wonderful creature, placed opposite to the three and knowing more about each, probably, when one came to think, than either of them knew of either. Erect above all for her was the sharp-edged fact of the relation of the whole group, individually and collectively, to herself—herself so speciously eliminated for the hour, but presumably more present to the attention of each than the next card to be played. (495)
That is what James’s fictional language—his system of notation—is for, so to speak: transcribing “the sharp-edged fact of the relation of the whole group, individually and collectively,” to each of its members.
One of the many interesting things about James is that he is at once an immensely copious writer and a great novelist of omission. I want to illuminate this paradox of Jamesian style by invoking a contrast drawn by Alan Hollinghurst between Proust’s novelistic technique and that of the celebrated—the notorious—stylist Ronald Firbank. In terms of interests and subject matter, Proust and Firbank have a considerable amount in common, Hollinghurst points out, but where Proust is a novelist of almost unprecedented copiousness (I have already suggested that Clarissa is the only earlier European novel that can claim to match the scope, richness and intensity of the narrative interiority of In Search of Lost Time), Firbank leaves almost everything out:
Where Proust, at just the same time, was expanding the novel to unprecedented length to do justice to his narrator’s complex world and his complex consciousness of it, Firbank had arrived at an aesthetic which required almost everything to be omitted. Where Proust, a fellow observer of upper-class society and sexual ambivalence, worked by the endlessly exploratory and comprehensive sentence, the immense paragraph, the ceaselessly dilated book, Firbank laboured to reduce—not merely to condense but to design by elimination. “I am all design—once I get going,” he wrote. “I think nothing of filing fifty pages down to make a brief, crisp paragraph, or even a row of dots.” He constructed in fragments, juxtaposed without any cushioning or explanatory narrative tissue.5
Indeed, the texture of Firbank’s fiction is extremely peculiar, skewed by a preference for leaving out what would seem most pertinent. I like this paragraph, from the odd opening chapter of Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli—the failure to identify the object, of which we have learned only that it is not a child despite the fact that we are at a christening, is highly characteristic:
Beneath the state baldequin, or Grand Xaymaca, his Eminence sat enthroned ogled by the wives of a dozen grandees. The Altamissals, the Villarasas (their grandeeships’ approving glances, indeed, almost eclipsed their wives’), and Catherine, Countess of Constantine, the most talked-of beauty in the realm, looking like some wild limb of Astaroth in a little crushed “toreador” hat round as an athlete’s coif with hanging silken balls, while beside her a stout, dumpish dame, of enormous persuasion, was joggling, solicitously, an object that was of the liveliest interest to all.6
Proust’s manuscript was rejected by any number of publishers, one of whom wrote scathingly that he didn’t “see why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before he goes to sleep.”7 It is not surprising, perhaps: Proust worked in a relatively unorthodox format, writing a book of roughly three thousand pages in an unusual first-person voice that arrogated to itself some of the traits of an omniscient narrator, self-evidently autobiographical and yet also unmistakably fictional rather than factual. The term roman-fleuve, used to describe the sort of novel that flows on like a river from one volume to another, is supposed to have been coined by the novelist Romain Rolland, and it is regularly invoked to describe Proust’s work as well as other multivolume sequences, such as Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Writing in the first person, Proust responds to a different set of technical and emotional challenges than James does, but the things he is able to do with the first-person narrator owe a great deal to the nineteenth-century novel’s third-person voices, which is one reason I wish to consider him alongside James. Just as much as in James’s writing, the characters in Proust are outlined for us as creations of other characters’ cognition. As Marcel describes Swann’s visits to his great-aunt, consider the movements back and forth between simple description and metaphysical speculation (the translation here is by Lydia Davis, who hews as closely as possible to the contours of Proust’s sentences):
No doubt the Swann who was known at the same time to so many clubmen was quite different from the one created by my great-aunt, when in the evening, in the little garden at Combray, after the two hesitant rings of the bell had sounded, she injected and invigorated with all that she knew about the Swann family the dark and uncertain figure who emerged, followed by my grandmother, from a background of shadows, and whom we recognized by his voice. But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call “seeing a person we know” is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part. In the end they swell his cheeks so perfectly, follow the line of his nose in an adherence so exact, they do so well at nuancing the sonority of his voice as though the latter were only a transparent envelope that each time we see this face and hear this voice, it is these notions that we encounter again, that we hear. (19–20)
Elaborating this conceit, Marcel observes that Swann’s “corporeal envelope” has been “so well stuffed” with memories of the time they have all spent together in the country
that this particular Swann had become a complete and living being, and I have the impression of leaving one person to go to another distinct from him, when, in my memory, I pass from the Swann I knew later with accuracy to that first Swann—to that first Swann in whom I rediscover the charming mistakes of my youth and who in fact resembles less the other Swann than he resembles the other people I knew at the time, as though one’s life were like a museum in which all the portraits from one period have a family look about them, a single tonality—to that first Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the smell of the tall chestnut tree, the baskets of raspberries, and a sprig of tarragon.
One of the things that intrigues me most here is the pacing. Not once but repeatedly the narrator swerves from description to airy speculation, and the generalizations about memory and human cognition are inseparable—or at any rate they couldn’t be excerpted without losing a great deal of their power—from the sensory details (“the smell of the tall chestnut tree, the baskets of raspberries, and a sprig of tarragon”). That block of sentences beginning “But even with respect…” floats on its own plane, a complex set of lines tethering it to the passage’s other levels.
The first section of Proust’s immensely long novel describes a coming-into-consciousness, the transformation of the narrator’s relationship with the past by way, famously, of the taste of the madeleine. Without that moment, the novelist would never have excavated his own past and allowed it to spring up again to life within himself. “Since what I recalled would have been supplied to me only by my voluntary memory, the memory of the intelligence, and since the information it gives about the past preserves nothing of the past itself,” says Marcel, “I would never have had any desire to think about the rest of Combray. It was all really quite dead for me” (44). Recognizing “the taste of the piece of madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea” that his aunt used to give him, though,
immediately the old gray house on the street, where her bedroom was, came like a stage set to attach itself to the little wing opening onto the garden that had been built for my parents behind it (that truncated section which was all I had seen before then); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square, where they sent me before lunch, the streets where I went on errands, the paths we took if the weather was fine. And as in that game enjoyed by the Japanese in which they fill a porcelain bowl with water and steep in it little pieces of paper until then indistinct which, the moment they are immersed, stretch and twist, assume colors and distinctive shapes, become flowers, houses, human figures, firm and recognizable, so now all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water lilies of the Vivonne, and the good people of the village and their little swellings and the church and all of Combray and its surroundings, all of this which is acquiring form and solidity, emerged, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. (47–48)
It is not just form and solidity these scenes acquire; within the image that the narrator introduces here, they are also united by a distinct sensibility insofar as the “firm and recognizable” flowers, houses and figures that appear in the case of the Japanese game are united, not because the objects themselves form part of the same broader category (people are quite different from flowers and buildings) but because they are formed within the same representational sensibility, or in this case with the same technology.8 It is a sensibility interested in sudden changes of scale; the stage set is scaled almost more like a doll’s house, and the bird’s-eye view Marcel invokes has the effect of miniaturizing what he describes, reminiscent of the way that tilt-shift photography uses the tactical blurring of selective focus to give, say, a life-sized train in a real-world train station the appearance of being a tiny scale model.
The metaphors in the last section of The Golden Bowl continue to be immensely rich and vivid. When Maggie and her father slip off together, “it was wonderfully like their having got together into some boat and paddled off from the shore where husbands and wives, luxuriant complications, made the air too tropical” (511); Maggie tells Fanny Assingham that she wants “a happiness without a hole in it big enough for you to poke in your finger,” which inevitably recalls the bowl of the title “as it was to have been…. The Bowl with all our happiness in it. The bowl without the crack” (483–84). The word that Maggie uses for how she makes things the way she wants them is “humbugging”—an act of imaginative creation, the willful overpowering of reality by thought in a fashion reminiscent of novel-writing, but also, in the context of nineteenth-century American usage, a way of conveying the sense of deliberate deception or manipulation, the tricks of a snake-oil salesman or flimflam man.
Perhaps the most devastating image in the entire novel is the one used to describe Adam’s response to Maggie’s revelation, and the nature of the hold he thereby gains on Charlotte; it is mediated through Maggie’s consciousness, and it is an extraordinarily vivid and unpleasant simile. In practical terms, the solution that Maggie asks her father to devise involves Charlotte returning to provincial American City with her husband (it is the last place in the world she would have chosen to go, despite the wealth and status that await her there as Adam’s wife). Maggie is watching Adam and Charlotte walk about reviewing the items in his collection:
Charlotte hung behind with emphasized attention; she stopped when her husband stopped, but at the distance of a case or two, or of whatever other succession of objects; and the likeness of their connexion wouldn’t have been wrongly figured if he had been thought of as holding in one of his pocketed hands the end of a long silken halter looped round her beautiful neck. He didn’t twitch it, yet it was there; he didn’t drag her, but she came; and those betrayals that I have described the Princess as finding irresistible in him were two or three mute facial intimations which his wife’s presence didn’t prevent his addressing his daughter—nor prevent his daughter, as she passed, it was doubtless to be added, from flushing a little at the receipt of. They amounted perhaps only to a wordless, wordless smile, but the smile was the soft shake of the twisted silken rope, and Maggie’s translation of it, held in her breast till she got well away, came out only, as if it might have been overheard, when some door was closed behind her. “Yes, you see—I lead her now by the neck, I lead her to her doom, and she doesn’t so much as know what it is, though she has a fear in her heart which, if you had the chances to apply your ear there that I, as a husband, have, you would hear thump and thump and thump. She thinks it may be, her doom, the awful place over there—awful for her; but she’s afraid to ask, don’t you see? just as she’s afraid of not asking; just as she’s afraid of so many other things that she sees multiplied all about her now as perils and portents. She’ll know, however—when she does know.” (535)
“The smile was the soft shake of the twisted silken rope”: no meaningful distinction can be maintained between the metaphor (really present only in language or consciousness) and the smile itself, and once the two have been wrought together, so they will remain. The image is developed even further in the novel’s final book:
The thing that never failed now as an item in the picture was that gleam of the silken noose, his wife’s immaterial tether, so marked to Maggie’s sense during her last month in the country. Mrs. Verver’s straight neck had certainly not slipped it; nor had the other end of the long cord—oh quite conveniently long!—disengaged its smaller loop from the hooked thumb that, with his fingers closed upon it, her husband kept out of sight. To have recognized, for all its tenuity, the play of this gathered lasso might inevitably be to wonder with what magic it was twisted, to what tension subjected, but could never be to doubt either of its adequacy to its office or of its perfect durability. These reminded states for the Princess were in fact states of renewed gaping. So many things her father knew that she even yet didn’t! (568)
A noose, a tether, a lasso: each term has its own resonance and meanings, layered on top of each other by James (or put in apposition) in an exquisite process that amplifies comprehension rather than producing confusion or blurring the particularities of the situation. It is an interior exteriorizing, a way of tendering those “purely internal states” that Proust, too, deemed the highest and most rewarding subject for the novelist, in a register that is strongly though also always only notionally three-dimensional, dynamic, pictorial: Maggie sees “the picture” as a sort of frozen tableau, even as the tether creates a motivated sense of before and after, of people with a relationship that changes through time.
To return to Proust, Marcel is an advocate for the ethereal over the physical, the representation over the reality, to the extent of wishing to argue that a reader’s relationship with characters in books is likely to be richer, fuller, more vivid than any relationship with a living breathing human being encountered in daily life. These are the words developing this line of argument:
When I saw an external object, my awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation. In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and the beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be. (85–86)
These afternoons of reading, Marcel continues, “contained more dramatic events than does, often, an entire lifetime”:
These were the events taking place in the book I was reading; it is true that the people affected by them were not “real,” as Françoise said. But all the feelings we are made to experience by the joy or the misfortune of a real person are produced in us only through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist consisted in understanding that in the apparatus of our emotions, the image being the only essential element, the simplification that would consist in purely and simply abolishing real people would be a decisive improvement. A real human being, however profoundly we sympathize with him, is in large part perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, presents a dead weight which our sensibility cannot lift. (86)
This passage reveals the extent to which Proust was concerned to develop a language for notating interiority. The novelist induces in the reader an intense physiological experience, one in which the novel’s characters and incidents occur within us “as we feverishly turn the pages of the book, the rapidity of our breathing and the intensity of our gaze”:
And once the novelist has put us in that state, in which, as in all purely internal states, every emotion is multiplied tenfold, in which his book will disturb us as might a dream but a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer, then see how he provokes in us within one hour all possible happinesses and all possible unhappinesses just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them (thus our heart changes, in life, and it is the worst pain; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality it changes, as certain natural phenomena occur, slowly enough so that, if we are able to observe successively each of its different states, in return we are spared the actual sensation of change). (87)
Look at the complexity and yet the absolute ease and suppleness of that last sentence: one might think of the parenthetical corollary with which the sentence concludes as bearing some family resemblance to what Flaubert does with the introduction of the aphorism, only in Proust’s hands there is no satirical turn; the sentence spirals back over the same ground rather than diverting at a right angle and forging out in a new direction.
The novelist and critic André Aciman (himself an exceptionally gifted stylist) observes that
the sentence, as conceived—or as practiced—by Proust, was not only a vehicle for speaking his melancholy yearning for things that were, or never were, and might never be again; the sentence was also a medium for decrypting and unpacking, layer after layer, clause after clause, the Russian-doll universe that people turn out to be, Marcel included. The sentence is how Proust sees, or rather how he reveals, that universe. Revelation is key. Description is only interesting insofar as it leads to recognition and surprise.9
That, I think, is a very apt way of talking about the effect the previous passage seems to aim for, a sort of sharp poking or prodding of the reader (with no qualms about indulging in repetition or recursivity) into a situation in which insight must be experienced. James is not so much (or not primarily) a novelist of melancholy yearning, but the other observations Aciman makes here might be as persuasively applied to James as to Proust. The other thing about the sentence is that it is a microcosm, or rather we might say—to use a more modern vocabulary—that it partakes of fractal properties, serving as a miniature emblem or replica of the work as a whole. For Austen or Flaubert, the sentence takes on a peculiar force and sharpness that is qualitatively different from what it possesses in the hands of contemporaries such as, say, Sir Walter Scott—for Austen—or Balzac and Émile Zola—for Flaubert. For James and Proust, furthermore, the sentence (or perhaps the paragraph-length block of prose) becomes the unit in which not just the sensibility but also the shape and goals and effects of the whole work of art can most clearly be discerned.