JAMESIAN LIE
73
James proposes a kind of sincerity absolutely divorced from truth;
the fictions which Maggie rather ruthlessly imposes on everyone
else
in the novel leave no room for truth - they create reality
instead of hiding it. She brings Eugenia of
The Europ'eans
to the
fruition of a definite and major lie; but the lie itself leaves an even
greater margin for other people's freedom than Eugenia's elaborately
evasive manners. At the same time Maggie's own freedom to com–
pose
reality, unlike the governess's freedom in
The Turn of the
Screw,
is
disciplined by what she suffers as a result of her early
efforts at composition. Reality in
The Golden Bowl
consists in the
novelistic arrangements of the first half; the second half gives us
the correction, the unashamed, radical revision which Maggie then
makes of her own work and which James, speaking in the preface
to
The Golden Bowl
of his own revisions for the New York edition
of
his
novels, defines and defends as "re-perusal, registered," as "the
particular vision of the matter itself that experience had at last made
the only possible one."
We couldn't hope for a more exact summation of
The Golden
Bowl.
In it human relations are seen entirdy in terms of their com–
positional appeal. The only drama in the novel is the conflict be–
tween Amerigo's and Charlotte's defective reading of the Ververs'
composition in the first half, and Maggie's successful resistance to
their interpretation in the second half.
As
James says of himself in
the preface, Maggie doesn't consider for a moment the possibility of
"re-writing"; she simply "registers" the "re-perusal" of her work made
imperative by the adultery which has, with some appearance of
coherent appreciation, been inferred from her work. We accept
the prestigious morality of Maggie's insisting on "not, by a hair's
breath, deflecting into the truth" because the only status given to
the truth she denies is that of a compositional invitation which
she has merely to withdraw. It's not that the facts which Maggie
defeats are obscure; indeed, Maggie's success - and the success of
The Golden Bowl-
depends on a complete lack of ambiguity about
how the Ververs' ingenious arrangements for keeping everyone happy
have been exploited by Charlotte and the Prince. We know what's
going on, which
is
not the case in
The Turn of the Screw,
where
the only clear ev,ents are those willed or at least imagined by the
governess; furthermore, there is no convenient death, as in
The
