78
LEO BERSANI
Densher and to Amerigo has a beauty as terrifying as the spiritual
luxury given to men by Christ's repudiation of the Law's constraints.
The convenience of the world's laws
is
that they allow us to fabricate
a self (and its relations) from our concessions and resistances to
moral or material necessity. But a gift of total freedom - in James,
the gift of mildness and money from his heroines - perhaps creates
no terms for a relation except those
of
betrayal or emulation. The
conquering passivity of Milly and of Maggie, their passion of sacri–
ficial love, doesn't make any provision for the dialogue which in–
evitably compromises intimacy: Densher
is
never closer to Milly than
when he can no longer
speak
to her, when, after her death, he
trains himself in the quality of her spirit by trying to write the
letter he
will
never see.
Milly's death, like Christ's crucifixion, announces the specta–
cular power of an embodied fiction celebrating human love, but it
does so at the very moment when the body of love is removed from
the world of human forms.
The Golden Bowl,
unlike
The Wings of
the Dove,
succeeds in eliminating the crucificial aspect from the
imitatio christi.
The success, however, depends on what might
be
called the novel's strained unity of composition. Its plot, it's true, does
not submit to the pressures of narrative speculation (as do elements
of plot in
The Wings of the Dove),
but the conflicts among char–
acters in
The Golden Bowl
are minimized by the excessive analogies
they present with James's relation to his material. What we must per–
haps finally see as the necessary defect of James's compositional
ethic
is
the very coherence and unity into which those analogies
between his fictional world and the process of creating it allow
him
to organize life. Conflict can be resolved in
The Golden Bowl
because
of the
derivation
of conflict from the design which it threatens. The
novel's theological bias
is
profoundly connected to james's imagina–
tion of life as a product of art: the "work" of the Ververs' marriages,
like human history divinely inspired and controlled, returns to the
original plan of a single creator. The accidental, the inessential and
the incoherent are eliminated, and the "story" of human life finally
appears secondary to the inspiration at its source.
If
human sin is
nothing but a flaw introduced into the Creator's design, history itself,
because it can never escape the logic of that design, may finally
assent to stop being history and simply reenact in "eternity" the
