7b
LEO BERSANI
even imagines an entirely different novel, one in which she would
have been in love with the Prince herself) and just as willing to
take nothing seriously (if she breaks the bowl, adultery ceases to
exist, as
if
Charlotte and the Prince existed only in Fanny's mind).
Maggie's speculative entertainments, on the other hand, have a very
different kind of insignificance. The major difference between
The Wings of the Dove
and
The Golden Bowl
is that plot is
not
resolved by appreciative speculation in
The Golden Bowl.
Maggie
is constantly imagining what people might have said or thought,
but, interestingly enough, these conjectures are generally set apart
from the "real" text in quotation marks, like a warning to the text
not to let itself be seduced by its own suggestiveness. Maggie's spe–
culations really produce nothing; they are simply a way of filling
time while she, as we shall see in a moment, is standing outside of
time. She does absolutely nothing but wait for the single fiction she
promotes - that of her own and her father's happy marriages–
to stifle every other way of living the story. Her art includes
dis–
criminations but it doesn't depend on them; indeed, it seems to
depend on her stubbornly presenting again and again her original
design. The novel - both in its events and in the style which relates
them - is constantly entertaining implications and deductions (often
within an extravagant metaphorical logic), but Milly's purpose
checks James's apparent complicity with the body of his work.
Intelligence fills
The Golden Bowl,
but its moral value is made
extremely ambiguous by the fact that Charlotte and the Prince
deduce their love affair from an ingenious but authentically intel–
ligent view of their situation. Maggie, so to speak, pays no attention
to their "argument"; she receives it without accepting it. Instead of
entering into a critical relationship with their logically defensible
understanding of what she has intended, she defeats that under–
standing with the interrogative stillness of a finished work of art.
Maggie lies, and waits to see what time will do. She drama–
tizes more convincingly than any other character in literature the
concrete meaning of our cliches about great art ,as "eternal." The
so-called eternity of art has nothing to do with its universality; it
refers to the historical persistence of objects about which nothing
final can ever be said, around which conjectures multiply, compete
and usually disappear. And perhaps the only way we know that
