54
LEO BERSANI
of the consciousness of but two of the characters," James admires
how the Princess both feels "everything she has to" in the story and
acts as a lucid conductor of meaning, how she "duplicates, as it
were, her value and becomes a compositional resource, and of
the finest order, as well as a value intrinsic." We can go a step
further and say that for James the two are really indistinguishable.
As
I will show later in more detail,
The Golden Bowl
dramatizes
precisely the validity of "intrinsic" values literally coerced into being
by an intense interest in "composition." James's characters enact
the psychological adequacy of their creator's compositional motives.
What is most interesting about James's structurally functional
view of character is that a certain devaluation of what we ordinarily
think of as psychological interest is perfectly consistent with a realistic
ambition redefined but never abandoned by James. It's as if he
came to feel that a kind of autonomous geometric pattern, in which
the parts appeal for their value to nothing but their contributive
place in the essentially abstract pattern,
is
the artist's most successful
representation of life. Thus he could perhaps even think, by the
time of the Prefaces, that verisimilitude - a word he liked - has
less to do with the probability of the events the novelist describes
than with those processes, deeply characteristic of life, by which he
creates sense and coherence from
any
event. The only faithful pic–
ture of life in art is not in the choice of a significant subject (James
always argued against that pseudorealistic prejudice), but rather in
the illustration of sense-, of design-making processes. James proves
the novel's connection with life by deprecating its derivation from
life; and it's when he
is
most abstractly articulating the growth of
a structure that James is also most successfully defending the mimetic
function of art (and of criticism). His deceptively banal position
that only execution matters means most profoundly that verisimili–
tude, properly considered, is the grace and the truth of a formal
unity.
But each artist's circle
is
drawn "by a geometry of his own,"
and the crucial question raised by James's work has to do with the
relation between structuring processes and personality in art. The
question is particularly relevant to James just because his interest
in the compositional motive creates a striking superficiality of psy–
chological motive. His fiction is notoriously dense in what I suppose
