Reading Style

by Jenny Davidson

  The Prince, indeed, has himself been described by Maggie at one point as a “morceau de musée” (33), and the boundaries between objects and people are as often blurred as those between objects and verbal metaphors. Charles Sainte-Beuve criticized Flaubert for itemizing the different parts of a woman’s appearance so as to blind the reader to her totality rather than help him apprehend it, and James does something rather similar in a curiously nonrealistic or nonnaturalistic mode of representation. Here are the sentences in which Charlotte Stant is described upon her first appearance (the narration is in the third person, but the character who provides the lens through which she is viewed is the Prince himself):

  Making use then of clumsy terms of excess, the face was too narrow and too long, the eyes not large, and the mouth on the other hand by no means small, with substance in its lips and a slight, the very slightest, tendency to protrusion in the solid teeth, otherwise indeed well arrayed and flashingly white. But it was, strangely, as a cluster of possessions of his own that these things in Charlotte Stant now affected him; items in a full list, items recognized, each of them, as if, for the long interval, they had been “stored”—wrapped up, numbered, put away in a cabinet. (58)

  Where does the marking “stored” come from? Is it the Prince’s emphasis or the narrator’s? Or could it be more usefully thought of as the narrator’s visual registering, on the page, of something marked in the unspoken language of the Prince’s thoughts? It seems to be a habit of the narrator’s to mark words in this way, calling to mind Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” (“Style sees everything in quotation marks”).4

  I ask the question not to invite a definite answer but rather to direct the attention to this odd feature of James’s style. The itemization of the parts of a beautiful woman’s face inevitably recalls the Renaissance trope of the blason, though that is at odds with the clinical quality of James’s prose (consider the singling-out of the tendency to protrusion in the flashingly white teeth). Beyond that, the passage’s central metaphor can be said to display a curiously shimmering aspect. It is rendered unstable by the ambiguity surrounding the question of whether these items exist in a list or in a cabinet, i.e. whether they are to be thought of primarily as written words on a piece of paper or curios stored in the drawers of a piece of furniture. The marked word “stored” does some special work here, or rather the quotation marks let the word work as a hinge between items as items-on-a-list and items as actual physical artifacts. Of course, both are metaphors, but by the time we have become embroiled in all of this business, we are inside rather than outside, thinking rather than looking.

  Questions of language are constantly foregrounded. The Prince, his consciousness one of only two that filter events for the reader, has been told that he speaks English too well, and whatever that means exactly, the excellence of his English is such that he finds the language “convenient, oddly, even for his relation with himself” (29). This is convenient for James as well, of course—a coincidence of interests to which the novelist perhaps gestures with that coy modifier “oddly,” but the attention to the linguistic texture of human thought is unusual and striking. We are constantly asked to attend, for instance, to the artifice of systems of notation: in the secluded country garden where Maggie and Adam Verver converse together, there is a door with “a slab with a date set above it, 1713, but in the old multiplied lettering” (142), the detail about Roman numerals reminding us by extension that the system of alphabetic transcription is also merely a convention. When the Ververs settle, shortly thereafter, on a bench, the narrator continues: “They knew the bench; it was ‘sequestered’—they had praised it for that together before and liked the word.” The word sequestered has migrated from the Ververs’ consciousness—their self-conscious consciousness—into the narration, the borrowing marked by the quotation marks and lingered upon in the narrator’s singling-out of the characters’ fondness for the word. The boundary between the language of narration and the language of each character’s internal consciousness has been rendered highly permeable, with the vocabulary and registers of the narrator regularly sliding into those of characters and vice versa.

  Consider this description of Bob Assingham, who “could deal with things perfectly, for all his needs, without getting near them”:

  This was the way he dealt with his wife, a large proportion of whose meanings he knew he could neglect. He edited for their general economy the play of her mind, just as he edited, savingly, with the stump of a pencil, her redundant telegrams. The thing in the world that was least of a mystery to him was his Club, which he was accepted as perhaps too completely managing, and which he managed on lines of perfect penetration. His connexion with it was really a masterpiece of editing. (74)

  Fanny’s meanings, in their copiousness (the slide between singular “play” and plural “telegrams” is almost a solecism), are a gabby and hyperbolic text to be pruned by Bob’s stringent pencil: the stumpiness of the pencil is a sign of his frugality, as is his insistence on keeping telegrams short in an era when such communications were paid for by the word. Fanny and Bob’s conversations are replete with the presence of things not said. James’s characters sometimes talk about things one should not talk about, but they also refuse to say what one might think should be said, and the prose is often driven by the force of this tension between euphemism (periphrasis, beating about the bush) and the explicit.

  More generally, though, the novel provides an extraordinarily elaborate language for talking about knowledge: Charlotte and the Prince, contemplating the Ververs, conclude that this father-and-daughter duo “knew…absolutely nothing on earth worth speaking of…and they would perhaps sometimes be a little less trying if they would only once for all peacefully admit that knowledge wasn’t one of their needs and that they were in fact constitutionally inaccessible to it” (271). The Ververs are holy innocents, the Prince and Charlotte are sullied by experience, the novel retells the story of the Fall: its true subject is the vicious game played first by the experienced with the innocent and then, as the tables are turned, by the innocent with the experienced. It is Maggie who precipitates her father’s decision to marry, once she explains how her own marriage to the Prince has rendered Adam Verver vulnerable to the husband-seekers formerly dispelled by Maggie’s presence at his side: “It was as if you couldn’t be in the market when you were married to me. Or rather as if I kept people off, innocently, by being married to you. Now that I’m married to some one else you’re, as in consequence, married to nobody. Therefore you may be married to anybody, to everybody. People don’t see why you shouldn’t be married to them” (151). The language used to describe this psychosocial subtlety is involuted indeed, as Adam Verver realizes (the narrator here closely follows Adam’s thoughts):

  They had made vacant by their marriage his immediate foreground, his personal precinct—they being the Princess and the Prince. They had made room in it for others—so others had become aware. He became aware himself, for that matter, during the minute Maggie stood there before speaking; and with the sense moreover of what he saw her see he had the sense of what she saw him. This last, it may be added, would have been his intensest perception hadn’t there the next instant been more for him in Fanny Assingham. Her face couldn’t keep it from him; she had seen, on top of everything, in her quick way, what they both were seeing. (138)

  This sentence marks the end of the chapter and also displays many of the traits that James’s contemporaries found tiresome or even ludicrous in his prose style (Max Beerbohm wrote a very good parody of the late James style in a little piece called “The Mote in the Middle Distance,” and there are countless other parodies—James must be one of the most immediately recognizable sentence-writers in the history of the English language). But James is hardly unaware of the outrageous nature of what he’s doing here, and the next chapter opens with a wonderful defense of the choices he’s just made:

  So much mute communication was doubtless all this time marvello
us, and we may confess to having perhaps read into the scene prematurely a critical character that took longer to develop. Yet the quiet hour of reunion enjoyed that afternoon by the father and the daughter did really little else than deal with the elements definitely presented to each in the vibration produced by the return of the church-goers. (139)

  This sort of signal of self-awareness, often consequent upon a particularly extravagant or baroque gesture, can be seen throughout: “The little crisis was of a shorter duration than our account of it,” observes the narrator after a scene especially fraught with exchanged glances and words unspoken (60).

  Also striking in this novel is the tendency to render material the ineffable processes of human perception (James’s brother William was one of the pioneers of empiricist psychology, the teacher of Gertrude Stein, among others, and the person whose work popularized the notion of the “stream of consciousness”). Look at the metaphor James uses here, and the persistence with which the passage sticks with it (it would perhaps be more conventional to retreat from the image to the lived reality, but that doesn’t happen):

  Fanny Assingham had at this moment the sense as of a large heaped dish presented to her intelligence and inviting it to a feast—so thick were the notes of intention in this remarkable speech. But she also felt that to plunge at random, to help herself too freely, would—apart from there not being at such a moment time for it—tend to jostle the ministering hand, confound the array and, more vulgarly speaking, make a mess. She picked out after consideration a solitary plum. (215)

  “The sense as of”: the whole image here is oblique, metaphorical, secondary. But even in the third sentence a “plum” can still be picked out, a plum wholly imaginary but given strange solidity (it is almost caloric) by the act of naming. (The consonant combination “pl” is itself acutely sensory, even aside from the scent and chewiness and color associated with the fruit; it is probably something more like a prune, a date or a raisin than the fragrant fresh fruit—a sugarplum.) Here is another of these extravagantly sustained metaphors (it is impossible to convey their workings without quoting at length):

  [Fanny] felt now that she wouldn’t have interrupted [the Prince] for the world. She found his eloquence precious; there wasn’t a drop of it that she didn’t in a manner catch, as it came, for immediate bottling, for future preservation. The crystal flask of her innermost attention really received it on the spot, and she had even already the vision of how, in the snug laboratory of her afterthought, she should be able chemically to analyse it. There were moments positively, still beyond this, when, with the meeting of their eyes, something as yet unnameable came out for her in his look, when something strange and subtle and at variance with his words, something that gave them away, glimmered deep down, as an appeal, almost an incredible one, to her finer comprehension. What, inconceivably, was it like? Wasn’t it, however gross such a rendering of anything so occult, fairly like a quintessential wink, a hint of the possibility of their really treating their subject—of course on some better occasion—and thereby, as well, finding it much more interesting? If this far red spark, which might have been figured by her mind as the head-light of an approaching train seen through the length of a tunnel, was not, on her side, an ignis fatuus, a mere subjective phenomenon, it twinkled there at the direct expense of what the Prince was inviting her to understand. Meanwhile too, however, and unmistakeably, the real treatment of their subject did, at a given moment, sound. (230)

  The chemical metaphor, sustained in part by the word quintessential with its alchemical overtones, is never retracted, even as the image of the light in the tunnel is introduced; it only “might have been figured in [Fanny’s] mind,” and there is no definite commitment to its having happened.

  The golden bowl is itself the instrument of Maggie’s coming into knowledge of her husband’s sexual entanglement with Charlotte Stant, and the breaking of the bowl represents a dramatic culmination of one line of the novel’s development. The difference between objects and ideas is that while the bowl can be broken, the knowledge the bowl has introduced into Maggie’s mind cannot be dispelled merely by destroying the object. Maggie’s consciousness becomes the focalizing tool for volume 2 of the novel, as the Prince’s has served to focus much of volume 1, and here James explores Maggie’s position in a long passage that again uses metaphor with unusual self-awareness:

  Moving for the first time in her life as in the darkening shadow of a false position, she reflected that she should either not have ceased to be right—that is to be confident—or have recognized that she was wrong; though she tried to deal with herself for a space only as a silken-coated spaniel who has scrambled out of a pond and who rattles the water from his ears. Her shake of the head, again and again, as she went, was much of that order, and she had the resource to which, save for the rude generalizing bark, the spaniel would have been a stranger, of humming to herself hard as a sign that nothing had happened to her. She hadn’t, so to speak, fallen in; she had had no accident nor got wet; this at any rate was her pretension until after she began a little to wonder if she mightn’t, with or without exposure, have taken cold. (329–30)

  The first sentence of the paragraph is bold indeed. “As in the darkening shadow of a false position”: the false position is both real and insubstantial, the shadow a mere metaphor but one so ominous it bursts into a simulacrum of something like life. The ante is raised again after the semicolon. The spaniel is already an extravagant metaphor, and the dog is vividly and texturally rendered at the outset (“silken-coated,” rattling drops of water, with the shake of the head providing the link between young woman and dog), as well as continuing to lurk throughout the subsequent lines of the passage, if only in negative (Maggie has not fallen in to the water, unlike the notional spaniel). But there is more to come:

  She could at all events remember no time at which she had felt so excited, and certainly none—which was another special point—that so brought with it as well the necessity for concealing excitement. This birth of a new eagerness became a high pastime in her view precisely by reason of the ingenuity required for keeping the thing born out of sight. The ingenuity was thus a private and absorbing exercise, in the light of which, might I so far multiply my metaphors, I should compare her to the frightened but clinging young mother of an unlawful child. The idea that had possession of her would be, by our new analogy, the proof of her misadventure, but likewise all the while only another sign of a relation that was more to her than anything on earth.

  It is not surprising that the narrator should perceive a need to offer an apology in advance for the multiplication of metaphors. Maggie is also something like the mother of an illegitimate child, the idea of her husband’s infidelity—the tenor of the metaphor—signifying at once the utmost passion (“a relation that was more to her than anything on earth”—as far as the metaphor’s vehicle goes, it is the woman rather than the man who has found passion outside marriage) and the utmost shame (“the proof of her misadventure”). It is farfetched; it draws attention to itself, particularly in the way it so quickly follows on the tail of the spaniel, as it were, and the drama is to that extent conceptual (internal, linguistic) rather than relying on developments in the external world of living breathing characters.

  The narrator refers at one point during The Golden Bowl to “the final sharp extinction of the inward scene by the outward” (335), and at times we even hear words that turn out not to have been spoken: “some such words as those were what didn’t ring out,” the narrator adds after a passage of dialogue that is in no respect differently marked from the book’s other conversational exchanges, “yet it was as if even the unuttered sound had been quenched here in its own quaver” (338). Indeed, James does the exact opposite of the writing-workshop cliché of showing rather than telling: “[Maggie] couldn’t have narrated afterwards—and in fact was at a loss to tell herself—by what transition, what rather marked abruptness of change in their personal relation, their drive came to it
s end with a kind of interval established, almost confessed to, between them” (371). This is quite literally a description of a scene in which nothing happens: nothing happens, nothing is confessed, Maggie can’t tell herself or anybody else in what this change resides or what exactly prompted or facilitated it, and yet a period has somehow been established in Maggie’s relationship with her husband, despite the absence of words for it. This sort of human exchange is exactly what James’s fictional language has the wherewithal to notate. Look at this description of Maggie watching the foursome that includes her father, his wife Charlotte and the Prince (Charlotte’s lover, Maggie’s husband) playing cards, and being struck by

  the fact of her father’s wife’s lover facing his mistress; the fact of her father sitting, all unsounded and unblinking, between them; the fact of Charlotte keeping it up, keeping up everything across the table, with her husband beside her; the fact of Fanny Assingham, wonderful creature, placed opposite to the three and knowing more about each, probably, when one came to think, than either of them knew of either. Erect above all for her was the sharp-edged fact of the relation of the whole group, individually and collectively, to herself—herself so speciously eliminated for the hour, but presumably more present to the attention of each than the next card to be played. (495)