74
LEO BERSANI
Wings of the Dove,
to dissipate antagonisms in an allegory of
posthumous reconciliations. Betrayal does take place in
The Golden
Bowl,
and it causes great suffering. But what James suggests is that
this
reality - so ominously final elsewhere in
his
work - is not a
fact prior to artfulness but, like all human activities, is rather a
possible development of some artful design and can be replaced by
other possible developments. This is the profound justification of
James's refusal "to go behind": because experience is never without
design, it's impossible to locate an original design, that is, an absolute
fact or motive which could not itself
be
recomposed, whose nature
would not be changed by changes in its relations.
In
a sense, it's irrelevant in
The Golden Bowl
that Amerigo
and Charlotte were in love before the story began. Their past is a
weak concession on James's part to an order of psychological proba–
bility which the novel in fact dismisses; what's important is that
they make love as a result of the arrangements contrived during the
time of the novel itself. It's as
if
the geometry of human relations
implied
what we call human feelings into existence. The feelings
are real enough, but they are, so to speak, the elaborations of sur–
faces - they have no depth. Conflict in James means the conflicting
implications of designs; to revise life may be agonizing, but revision
can remain strictly superficial. And what we may find lacking in
James is the reconciliation of this compositional view of experience
with a sense of depth - a reconciliation attempted by Proust, who
manages to account for the unconscious not as a formless source
of designs but as a kind of persistent compositional "theme" recog–
nizable in all our compositional variations. It's therefore more diffi–
cult for James to imagine how some relations can be more difficult
to avoid than others. On the one hand, he can, as we have seen,
imagine the freedom of consciousness as unlimited. On the other
hand, when he imagines resistances to the free imagination, the
resistances either 1:a.ke on the prestige of an implacable reality which
destroys
his
characters' taste for life (as with Isabel and, I
think,
Strether) or they are overcome (as in
The Golden Bowl)
by stra–
tegies which depend on certain religious assumptions for their power.
There
is
a religion of
art,
overworked as the expression may
be,
and
The Golden Bowl
defines it very precisely: it assumes that the
observation of forms is sufficient to produce a conversion of being.
