JAMESIAN LIE
79
passion of the design. And if that hope is a sustaining fiction of
religion, it is also, as James shows us, the truth of an artistic passion
so intense that it works, most deeply, to destroy the very manifesta–
tions, the history, the text of its designs.
Maggie triumphs in
The Golden Bowl
because she has james's
faith that her work
will
come back to her; it
depends
on her. The
most intimate movement in the creation of her design
is
beyond
its display, and it is pointed to when Amerigo, no longer the fine
crystal, the
objet d'art
around which Maggie and her father can
walk admiringly, participates in the
work
of
art.
He renounces the
observation of forms in order to embrace them passionately. But
The Golden Bowl
has, of course, been all display, and the com–
paratively simple but poignant sacrifice of the work itself
is
the
condition of Amerigo's redemption, of the sexual union introduced
in the novel's conclusion. James's passionate fiction is sustained by
the hope, finally realized in the last lines of
The Golden Bowl,
that
the passion can dispense with the fiction. Perhaps only then
is
fiction invulnerable to the interpretations of criticism, for it has
made a definitive retreat from the interpretative medium in which
art is realized. The reward of that retreat, as Amerigo says,
is
that
there is no longer anything to see beyond a love which the heavily
appreciative text of
The Golden Bowl
has naturally been unable to
express directly. Thus we see the inescapable ambiguity of a fiction
so utterly released from the comfortable superstition of truth. The
strength of James's uncompromising ethic of fiction finally requires
a renunciation of that faculty to see (to criticize and to subvert)
which, after all, protects us - and not simply in relation to art–
from the tyranny of any community united in its assent to a single,
insistent passion.
