The Golden Bowl

[Personal notes on The Golden Bowl recorded in December 1997.]

In The Golden Bowl, James records sensations and only occasionally actions; the texture of the novel varies in just a few places, notably where Fanny Assingham makes an appearance, but overall this novel is a slow, sometimes lugubrious trip through the conscious minds of its characters. James doesn’t simply tell us that Maggie felt this or that, he marries idea to sensation in a complex weave of metaphoric language that refers to the processes at work within Maggie’s mind and only secondarily references (by way of the medium of her consciousness) the world outside that mind. In this way, James creates many levels of “impressions” that reverberate throughout the book. It’s a wonder that anything happens at all in this story, given the method of narration, because we are constantly bombarded by these impressions, but we do witness the slow transformation of each character from one state of being to another as these changes are rendered in meticulous metaphoric detail.

The most interesting thing about James’ method is that it is so precise. The Jamesian stream of consciousness doesn’t manipulate or remold language to achieve an effect, nor does it employ unique voices to distinguish the world “inside” from the world “outside.” The Golden Bowl is itself an amalgam of impressions, of recorded sensations that cannot be reduced to a simpler thing, but these impressions are built up so carefully, with such incredible control over the language employed and the meaning inferred, that we’re able to duplicate those inner feelings while we divulge the idea, recognizing each impression as it is experienced in a slightly different, nuanced way.

James is able to pull this off because he’d refashioned Realism into a form of writing with a new purpose and a new agenda by the time he wrote The Golden Bowl. His psychological version of Realism duplicates (or attempts to duplicate) individuated states of Being, that is, the force that makes Being dynamic and changeable. It isn’t the thing-in-itself that he’s concerned with but the nearly indescribable conscious sensation that accompanies the act of Being. Traditional Realism, on the other hand, tries to recreate the surface aspects of Being, to make a photograph of Reality that is empirical in nature.

In The Golden Bowl, as the world drops away, so does our concern for verisimilitude. We know next to nothing about the world the Ververs live in; there are only a few descriptions of characters’ appearances, and only a few more of settings. It seems certain that there is a world outside of Maggie’s head, but we hardly ever get a glimpse of it.

We might be tempted to reduce the book to a series of symbols, to make an allegory of the whole thing, but the few material objects that populate the plot are merely props: a staircase, a cigar, a mislaid book—small reminders that these characters do actually inhabit a world that can felt and touched and experienced. And if we reduce Maggie to her innocence, the Prince to his self-inflicted vulnerability, Charlotte to pure evil, Mr. Verver to his blind fidelity, what are we left with? A small comment on the only method of combatting avarice in the modern world? If this is the case, then the impressions that created these characters out of thin air seem somewhat puerile, even useless.

Which is one of the reasons why The Golden Bowl resists reduction. The title is itself apt not so much because the bowl is the nexus that joins the two halves of the story together but because it’s the most graspable metaphor in the book. The gilt, the suspected crack, the revelation that it is made of leaded crystal—these aspects of the bowl also succinctly describe different states of consciousness that exist within each of the characters. Certainly the bowl is symbolic, but in the end it doesn’t carry the kind of weight we expected it to. Which is precisely the point.