That is what James’s fictional language—his system of notation—is for, so to speak: transcribing “the sharp-edged fact of the relation of the whole group, individually and collectively,” to each of its members.
One of the many interesting things about James is that he is at once an immensely copious writer and a great novelist of omission. I want to illuminate this paradox of Jamesian style by invoking a contrast drawn by Alan Hollinghurst between Proust’s novelistic technique and that of the celebrated—the notorious—stylist Ronald Firbank. In terms of interests and subject matter, Proust and Firbank have a considerable amount in common, Hollinghurst points out, but where Proust is a novelist of almost unprecedented copiousness (I have already suggested that Clarissa is the only earlier European novel that can claim to match the scope, richness and intensity of the narrative interiority of In Search of Lost Time), Firbank leaves almost everything out:
Where Proust, at just the same time, was expanding the novel to unprecedented length to do justice to his narrator’s complex world and his complex consciousness of it, Firbank had arrived at an aesthetic which required almost everything to be omitted. Where Proust, a fellow observer of upper-class society and sexual ambivalence, worked by the endlessly exploratory and comprehensive sentence, the immense paragraph, the ceaselessly dilated book, Firbank laboured to reduce—not merely to condense but to design by elimination. “I am all design—once I get going,” he wrote. “I think nothing of filing fifty pages down to make a brief, crisp paragraph, or even a row of dots.” He constructed in fragments, juxtaposed without any cushioning or explanatory narrative tissue.5
Indeed, the texture of Firbank’s fiction is extremely peculiar, skewed by a preference for leaving out what would seem most pertinent. I like this paragraph, from the odd opening chapter of Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli—the failure to identify the object, of which we have learned only that it is not a child despite the fact that we are at a christening, is highly characteristic:
Beneath the state baldequin, or Grand Xaymaca, his Eminence sat enthroned ogled by the wives of a dozen grandees. The Altamissals, the Villarasas (their grandeeships’ approving glances, indeed, almost eclipsed their wives’), and Catherine, Countess of Constantine, the most talked-of beauty in the realm, looking like some wild limb of Astaroth in a little crushed “toreador” hat round as an athlete’s coif with hanging silken balls, while beside her a stout, dumpish dame, of enormous persuasion, was joggling, solicitously, an object that was of the liveliest interest to all.6
Proust’s manuscript was rejected by any number of publishers, one of whom wrote scathingly that he didn’t “see why a man should take thirty pages to describe how he turns over in bed before he goes to sleep.”7 It is not surprising, perhaps: Proust worked in a relatively unorthodox format, writing a book of roughly three thousand pages in an unusual first-person voice that arrogated to itself some of the traits of an omniscient narrator, self-evidently autobiographical and yet also unmistakably fictional rather than factual. The term roman-fleuve, used to describe the sort of novel that flows on like a river from one volume to another, is supposed to have been coined by the novelist Romain Rolland, and it is regularly invoked to describe Proust’s work as well as other multivolume sequences, such as Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Writing in the first person, Proust responds to a different set of technical and emotional challenges than James does, but the things he is able to do with the first-person narrator owe a great deal to the nineteenth-century novel’s third-person voices, which is one reason I wish to consider him alongside James. Just as much as in James’s writing, the characters in Proust are outlined for us as creations of other characters’ cognition. As Marcel describes Swann’s visits to his great-aunt, consider the movements back and forth between simple description and metaphysical speculation (the translation here is by Lydia Davis, who hews as closely as possible to the contours of Proust’s sentences):
No doubt the Swann who was known at the same time to so many clubmen was quite different from the one created by my great-aunt, when in the evening, in the little garden at Combray, after the two hesitant rings of the bell had sounded, she injected and invigorated with all that she knew about the Swann family the dark and uncertain figure who emerged, followed by my grandmother, from a background of shadows, and whom we recognized by his voice. But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call “seeing a person we know” is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part. In the end they swell his cheeks so perfectly, follow the line of his nose in an adherence so exact, they do so well at nuancing the sonority of his voice as though the latter were only a transparent envelope that each time we see this face and hear this voice, it is these notions that we encounter again, that we hear. (19–20)
Elaborating this conceit, Marcel observes that Swann’s “corporeal envelope” has been “so well stuffed” with memories of the time they have all spent together in the country
that this particular Swann had become a complete and living being, and I have the impression of leaving one person to go to another distinct from him, when, in my memory, I pass from the Swann I knew later with accuracy to that first Swann—to that first Swann in whom I rediscover the charming mistakes of my youth and who in fact resembles less the other Swann than he resembles the other people I knew at the time, as though one’s life were like a museum in which all the portraits from one period have a family look about them, a single tonality—to that first Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the smell of the tall chestnut tree, the baskets of raspberries, and a sprig of tarragon.
One of the things that intrigues me most here is the pacing. Not once but repeatedly the narrator swerves from description to airy speculation, and the generalizations about memory and human cognition are inseparable—or at any rate they couldn’t be excerpted without losing a great deal of their power—from the sensory details (“the smell of the tall chestnut tree, the baskets of raspberries, and a sprig of tarragon”). That block of sentences beginning “But even with respect…” floats on its own plane, a complex set of lines tethering it to the passage’s other levels.
The first section of Proust’s immensely long novel describes a coming-into-consciousness, the transformation of the narrator’s relationship with the past by way, famously, of the taste of the madeleine. Without that moment, the novelist would never have excavated his own past and allowed it to spring up again to life within himself. “Since what I recalled would have been supplied to me only by my voluntary memory, the memory of the intelligence, and since the information it gives about the past preserves nothing of the past itself,” says Marcel, “I would never have had any desire to think about the rest of Combray. It was all really quite dead for me” (44). Recognizing “the taste of the piece of madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea” that his aunt used to give him, though,
immediately the old gray house on the street, where her bedroom was, came like a stage set to attach itself to the little wing opening onto the garden that had been built for my parents behind it (that truncated section which was all I had seen before then); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square, where they sent me before lunch, the streets where I went on errands, the paths we took if the weather was fine. And as in that game enjoyed by the Japanese in which they fill a porcelain bowl with water and steep in it little pieces of paper until then indistinct which, the moment they are immersed, stretch and twist, assume colors and distinctive shapes, become flowers, houses, human figures, firm and recognizable, so now all the flower
s in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water lilies of the Vivonne, and the good people of the village and their little swellings and the church and all of Combray and its surroundings, all of this which is acquiring form and solidity, emerged, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. (47–48)
It is not just form and solidity these scenes acquire; within the image that the narrator introduces here, they are also united by a distinct sensibility insofar as the “firm and recognizable” flowers, houses and figures that appear in the case of the Japanese game are united, not because the objects themselves form part of the same broader category (people are quite different from flowers and buildings) but because they are formed within the same representational sensibility, or in this case with the same technology.8 It is a sensibility interested in sudden changes of scale; the stage set is scaled almost more like a doll’s house, and the bird’s-eye view Marcel invokes has the effect of miniaturizing what he describes, reminiscent of the way that tilt-shift photography uses the tactical blurring of selective focus to give, say, a life-sized train in a real-world train station the appearance of being a tiny scale model.
The metaphors in the last section of The Golden Bowl continue to be immensely rich and vivid. When Maggie and her father slip off together, “it was wonderfully like their having got together into some boat and paddled off from the shore where husbands and wives, luxuriant complications, made the air too tropical” (511); Maggie tells Fanny Assingham that she wants “a happiness without a hole in it big enough for you to poke in your finger,” which inevitably recalls the bowl of the title “as it was to have been…. The Bowl with all our happiness in it. The bowl without the crack” (483–84). The word that Maggie uses for how she makes things the way she wants them is “humbugging”—an act of imaginative creation, the willful overpowering of reality by thought in a fashion reminiscent of novel-writing, but also, in the context of nineteenth-century American usage, a way of conveying the sense of deliberate deception or manipulation, the tricks of a snake-oil salesman or flimflam man.
Perhaps the most devastating image in the entire novel is the one used to describe Adam’s response to Maggie’s revelation, and the nature of the hold he thereby gains on Charlotte; it is mediated through Maggie’s consciousness, and it is an extraordinarily vivid and unpleasant simile. In practical terms, the solution that Maggie asks her father to devise involves Charlotte returning to provincial American City with her husband (it is the last place in the world she would have chosen to go, despite the wealth and status that await her there as Adam’s wife). Maggie is watching Adam and Charlotte walk about reviewing the items in his collection:
Charlotte hung behind with emphasized attention; she stopped when her husband stopped, but at the distance of a case or two, or of whatever other succession of objects; and the likeness of their connexion wouldn’t have been wrongly figured if he had been thought of as holding in one of his pocketed hands the end of a long silken halter looped round her beautiful neck. He didn’t twitch it, yet it was there; he didn’t drag her, but she came; and those betrayals that I have described the Princess as finding irresistible in him were two or three mute facial intimations which his wife’s presence didn’t prevent his addressing his daughter—nor prevent his daughter, as she passed, it was doubtless to be added, from flushing a little at the receipt of. They amounted perhaps only to a wordless, wordless smile, but the smile was the soft shake of the twisted silken rope, and Maggie’s translation of it, held in her breast till she got well away, came out only, as if it might have been overheard, when some door was closed behind her. “Yes, you see—I lead her now by the neck, I lead her to her doom, and she doesn’t so much as know what it is, though she has a fear in her heart which, if you had the chances to apply your ear there that I, as a husband, have, you would hear thump and thump and thump. She thinks it may be, her doom, the awful place over there—awful for her; but she’s afraid to ask, don’t you see? just as she’s afraid of not asking; just as she’s afraid of so many other things that she sees multiplied all about her now as perils and portents. She’ll know, however—when she does know.” (535)
“The smile was the soft shake of the twisted silken rope”: no meaningful distinction can be maintained between the metaphor (really present only in language or consciousness) and the smile itself, and once the two have been wrought together, so they will remain. The image is developed even further in the novel’s final book:
The thing that never failed now as an item in the picture was that gleam of the silken noose, his wife’s immaterial tether, so marked to Maggie’s sense during her last month in the country. Mrs. Verver’s straight neck had certainly not slipped it; nor had the other end of the long cord—oh quite conveniently long!—disengaged its smaller loop from the hooked thumb that, with his fingers closed upon it, her husband kept out of sight. To have recognized, for all its tenuity, the play of this gathered lasso might inevitably be to wonder with what magic it was twisted, to what tension subjected, but could never be to doubt either of its adequacy to its office or of its perfect durability. These reminded states for the Princess were in fact states of renewed gaping. So many things her father knew that she even yet didn’t! (568)
A noose, a tether, a lasso: each term has its own resonance and meanings, layered on top of each other by James (or put in apposition) in an exquisite process that amplifies comprehension rather than producing confusion or blurring the particularities of the situation. It is an interior exteriorizing, a way of tendering those “purely internal states” that Proust, too, deemed the highest and most rewarding subject for the novelist, in a register that is strongly though also always only notionally three-dimensional, dynamic, pictorial: Maggie sees “the picture” as a sort of frozen tableau, even as the tether creates a motivated sense of before and after, of people with a relationship that changes through time.
To return to Proust, Marcel is an advocate for the ethereal over the physical, the representation over the reality, to the extent of wishing to argue that a reader’s relationship with characters in books is likely to be richer, fuller, more vivid than any relationship with a living breathing human being encountered in daily life. These are the words developing this line of argument:
When I saw an external object, my awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation. In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and the beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be. (85–86)
These afternoons of reading, Marcel continues, “contained more dramatic events than does, often, an entire lifetime”:
These were the events taking place in the book I was reading; it is true that the people affected by them were not “real,” as Françoise said. But all the feelings we are made to experience by the joy or the misfortune of a real person are produced in us only through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist consisted in understanding that in the apparatus of our emotions, the image being the only essential element, the simplification that would consist in purely and simply abolishing real people would be a decisive improvement. A real human being, however profoundly we sympathize with him, is in large part perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, presents a dead weight which our sensibility cannot lift. (86)
This passage reveals t
he extent to which Proust was concerned to develop a language for notating interiority. The novelist induces in the reader an intense physiological experience, one in which the novel’s characters and incidents occur within us “as we feverishly turn the pages of the book, the rapidity of our breathing and the intensity of our gaze”:
And once the novelist has put us in that state, in which, as in all purely internal states, every emotion is multiplied tenfold, in which his book will disturb us as might a dream but a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer, then see how he provokes in us within one hour all possible happinesses and all possible unhappinesses just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them (thus our heart changes, in life, and it is the worst pain; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality it changes, as certain natural phenomena occur, slowly enough so that, if we are able to observe successively each of its different states, in return we are spared the actual sensation of change). (87)
Look at the complexity and yet the absolute ease and suppleness of that last sentence: one might think of the parenthetical corollary with which the sentence concludes as bearing some family resemblance to what Flaubert does with the introduction of the aphorism, only in Proust’s hands there is no satirical turn; the sentence spirals back over the same ground rather than diverting at a right angle and forging out in a new direction.
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