Author: staceymeeker

Utopia’s much too big for one small head
I’ll float it as a Company Limited!

Gilbert & Sullivan, Utopia Limited

Introduction: When Worlds Collide, or Political Hope and Philosophical Irony

Dubbed “Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism” by David L. Hall, Richard Rorty, one of the most prominent figures on the American philosophical scene, is gaining notoriety on the political stage as well. Rorty’s latest book, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, advocates pragmatism in the form of New Deal-style political activism. Rorty enjoins American intellectuals (synonymous with the Left, “the party of hope”) to take the fight for social justice out of the ivory tower and back into the streets of America. Rorty would rehabilitate an increasingly pessimistic and theoretical liberalism, for which “[h]opelessness has become fashionable…” (Achieving 37), as a viable motor for social change. He affirms that “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement” (3). In order to make meaningful political contributions, the Left needs to “kick its philosophy habit” (91).

Whether interventionist speaking the plain language of “tough love,” political stumper/analyst, or theologian of the religion of democracy, Rorty has chosen the role of actor rather than that of passive spectator (Achieving 9). Although Rorty’s multi-purpose rhetoric may be extremely tricky to contextualize, it is nevertheless consistent with Achieving‘s promotion of intellectual crossover from the contemplative to the politically active and necessary to his basic intellectual program in which “the traditional tasks of moral philosophy should be taken over by literature and political experimentation” (Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy).(1) As a philosopher, Rorty has staked out the territory of pragmatism, where truth-as-correspondence, epistemology, and religion (as witness his mantra “truth is not out there” [Contingency 5]), are conceptual personae non gratae and contingency “goes all the way down,” obviating any possibility of a transcendental ego.(2) Rorty’s notion is that cross-over thought is mutually beneficial for all parties involved. As he says in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, “philosophers help provide a redescription for political liberalism, but political liberalism also helps provide a redescription of their [philosophical] activity” (54).

However, his resolute and persistent identification with a liberal/leftist political position–he proposes that we eliminate the distinction (Achieving 42)–places him in a camp that privileges a particular set of values for human interaction; it defines him not as one who continually redescribes existing vocabularies but one who has already redescribed them and must now defend the position created by that redescription. As Gianni Vattimo asks, “is Rorty’s distinction between epistemology and hermeneutics itself epistemological, that is, argumentative, or is it hermeneutic and ‘poetic’?” (Beyond 99). This juxtaposed geography may weaken both Rorty’s philosophy and his politics, but it paradoxically continues to drive forward his project of reorganizing the way we think and solve problems in a world without metaphysical foundation by provoking prolific response and debate. However, if Rorty’s position is between here and somewhere else, his reader’s position is likewise problematized, for any attempt to situate Rorty’s self-styled politico-philosophico-artistic discourse can be construed as a demonstration that one lacks the intellectual cosmopolitanism, daring, and flexibility this thought calls for. It seems that Rorty is everywhere–and nowhere–at once.

To be sure, Rorty acknowledges the problematic position that he has created for himself in his attempts to bridge the gap between philosophical theorizing and political activism, but this concession is just as much an invitation to his reader to enter the labyrinth of his intricately wrought oppositions as it is an admission of conceptual inadequacy. He justifies his compromises as problematic precisely because they constitute redescription in a new mode (Contingency 54), one which cannot be verified in the present. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, he offers to “make this abjuration of philosophical neutrality in the interest of political liberalism more palatable” by reminding us that “a new vocabulary … will have its utility explained only retrospectively” (55). We will know only in the future. One is reminded of the early nineteenth-century Stendhal’s recurrent remarks that he would be understood in 1930. The unspecified and ever-receding future serves as a guarantee of the unfalsifiability of present hypotheses.

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The future is no mere rhetorical alibi for Rorty; it is a fundamental principle of his thought. For him, those who change the world are models of human existence, and the “strong poet” is a hero (Contingency 53). When he declares that “the creative artist, in a wide sense that includes critics, scientists, and scholars, provides the paradigm case of a career whose conclusion leaves the world a bit different from what it used to be” (Achieving 122), he implicitly makes a case for himself as firebrand philosopher and standout in the spheres of art and politics, and a preemptive strike against his would-be traditional philosopher critics. Rorty affirms the possibility of “intellectual and moral progress,” which he envisages “as a history of increasingly useful metaphors rather than of increasing understanding of how things really are” (Contingency 9).

Rorty’s own metaphor of choice for exploring a world that has come to grips with the “contingency” of its ideas is that of utopia–a term that, curiously, the scholarly Rorty does not contextualize within the considerable scholarship on the subject. Always on the horizon of his thought, utopia would in fact be the motor of history, “the realization of utopias, and the envisaging of still further utopias, as an endless process–an endless, proliferating realization of Freedom, rather than a convergence toward an already existing Truth” (Contingency xiv). Indeed, in his introduction to Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Rorty asserts that what he sees as “most worth preserving” in the work of John Dewey, his intellectual forebear, is his notion of the change from our sense of dependence on the past “to a sense of the utopian possibilities of the future…” (17). In Achieving Our Country Rorty declares that “Whitman and Dewey tried to substitute hope for knowledge. They wanted to put shared utopian dreams–dreams of an ideally decent and civilized society–in the place of knowledge of God’s Will, Moral Law, the Laws of History, or the Facts of Science” (107).

This characterization could just as easily describe Rorty’s own project, whose telos is utopia as substitute for illusory metaphysical Transcendence. Rorty’s gravitation toward utopia as a metaphor reveals that he still feels the pull of foundational philosophy. Jürgen Habermas characterizes Rorty as a disappointed convert from traditional metaphysics who compensates the grief of his reluctant farewell to metaphysics by dramatizing the farewell “at the moment of its [metaphysics’] fall” (Habermas 346-47).(3) Habermas goes on to claim that nostalgia prompts Rorty to arrive at an “adapted Hegelianism” with a perspective on everyday practices (Habermas 347-48). Vattimo has also diagnosed these “romantic” tendencies and their resulting overly oppositional rhetoric (End149).

Rorty’s affinity for the idea of utopia is troubling on the eve of the millennium. The persistent unproblematized use of a term that has acquired in this century such strong connotations and undergone such definitional permutations suggests an outlook that is not only nostalgic but rigid and severely limiting. Rorty’s insistence on utopia as a goal, a methodology, and a value points to the need to rethink (or redescribe) utopia in new terms.

A World “Other”

Rorty’s substitution of utopia for the epistemological frustrations of theory suggests that it functions as much as a mask as an alternative and cannot be considered an innocent figure, even in his own vocabulary. The tangle of definitions and subsequent implications of utopia does not unravel easily. For Judith Shklar, “by now utopia stands for political hope” (41); utopia serves as a horizon that is necessary “if we are ever to look beyond an unacceptable actuality” (55, referring to Benhabib). In this view, history is asymptotic to utopia, for it pursues the utopian horizon in hopes of gaining incremental improvements. This was not the case, she points out, in More’s and Rousseau’s utopias, which they never expected to become realizable and which served as reflective critiques of contemporary society (44). However, as both Shklar and Vattimo emphasize, the scientific progress of the nineteenth century inspired a new kind of utopian thought. Whether driven by a faith in technology as an answer to humanity’s ills or faith in the escape from (or overthrow of) technology and a return to previous agrarian (read hierarchical) forms of social organization, this new conception of utopia was one of attainability. As Shklar writes, “The utopia of the nineteenth century is a blueprint for a planned new society” (47). One could revel in the rapid scientific advancements like the Saint-Simonists, or peacefully retreat to one of many utopian communities inspired by the likes of Fourier, or develop an ideological stance worth fighting for against the deleterious effects of technology.

Hence the muddle when we consider the question of utopia today. Impossible critique or horizon of hope? A simple glance at the table of contents of Manuel and Manuel’s History of Utopian Thought in the Western World indicates that the arc of utopia’s history does not exclude either possibility but is rather the story of their permutations, from Plato’s Republic to Freudo-Marxism. In his famous Ideology and Utopia, Karl Mannheim maintains a distinction between the two terms on the basis of the class that thinks them: ideology is the province of the dominant groups while utopia is the territory of the oppressed (40). This is a neat binary opposition: the dominant class is interested in the status quo and hence blinded to any elements that would threaten their dominance, while the oppressed groups are focused on the elements they wish to negate (40). However, the revolutionary vs “conservative” aspects of these distinctions become blurred as the relative dominance of the groups changes, and it is crucial to note that Mannheim’s distinctions date from before the watershed of the Holocaust and the Cold War. As the conception of utopia becomes more entwined with history as historicity,(4) its practical consequences–either failed hopes or violent approximations of realizations–tend to implicate utopia, strangely enough, in the vocabulary of not only impossible but negative projects. Mannheim’s binary distinction between ideology and utopia maintains itself with difficulty in our own fin-de-siècle cataloguing of twentieth-century good intentions gone horribly awry.

Louis Marin’s later analysis reflects these historical modifications by emphasizing the structural homology of utopia and ideology. According to Marin, utopia is the ideological critique of the dominant ideology of the historical moment of its formulation (10), or an ideology in figural form. But Rorty’s utopia is recalcitrant to such labeling: Rorty would hold fast to the idea of utopia while denying the very possibility of a distinction between ideological and nonideological: “Calling a story “mythical” or “ideological” would be meaningful only if such stories could be contrasted with an “objective” story” (Achieving 11). Rorty’s denial of the possibility of an operational articulation of the terms “ideology” and “utopia” makes Shklar’s question, “What is the Use of Utopia?” yet more pertinent.

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Gianni Vattimo adds a useful new dimension to the definitional problem by privileging the categories of “dystopia” and “heterotopia” alongside utopia. While Rorty’s thought regularly turns toward an idealized traditional felicitous utopian figure, Vattimo has argued that “the salient feature” of twentieth-century utopia is its formulation as anti-utopia, dis-utopia, or counter-utopia (Transparent Society 76). In Vattimo’s vocabulary, utopia can be characterized as “an optimal reality by way of rational design, whether it be oriented metaphysically… or technologically” (79). Dystopias or counter-utopias, on the other hand, “retain the ‘optimizing’ character of utopia… they imagine a reality in which what are at present only possibilities are realized in all their most extreme implications… a total and irremediable unhappiness” (76). Vattimo suggests that the emergence of the prominence of dystopia is the epochal change occasioned by the “discovery of the counter-finality of reason” (81), that “the rationalization of the world turns against reason and its ends of perfection and emancipation, and does so not by error, accident, or a chance distortion, but precisely to the extent that it is more and more perfectly accomplished” (78). Along with the weakening notion of rational progress comes the end of a “unilinear” concept of history (81) and the proliferation of heterotopia, or images of progress that are not all-encompassing but local. In other words, he sees a “strict connection” between the histories of modern rationalism and utopia-dystopia-heterotopia (78), and when conceived within the context of the history of rationalism, the distinctions among utopia, dystopia, and heterotopia are intelligible and useful.

For Vattimo there is yet another twist in terminology: many late twentieth-century dystopias are better characterized as “post-apocalyptic utopias,” for once the onerous possibility of destruction has been lifted by the catastrophic consequences of the rationalization of technology, a vision of returning to a happier state of nature, a la nineteenth-century utopias and the “flower power” of the sixties, becomes possible. Vattimo prudently confines his argument to a vision of the “topias” tied most closely to the history of rationalism. But if we consider the broader implications of the terms “happiness” and “irremediable unhappiness,” the very distinction between utopia and dystopia seems impossible to maintain. To distinguish dystopia from utopia on this basis relies on the subjective privileging of a moment either of happiness or unhappiness in the “topian” text. A work like The Turner Diaries that accomplishes the fictive expulsion of a resented enemy (Jews, non-whites) viewed responsible for societal woes falls into the dystopian or utopian category according to the perspective of the reader. Conversely, a work like Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, cited by Rorty as a work of “self-disgust” (Achieving 4), turns the race tables against the white-anglo-imperialist society that has unjustly dominated the real native Americans. Is the novel a dystopia or a utopia; are these categories even valid in discussion of this novel? In his introduction to Heterotopia, Tobin Siebers contends that utopian desire cannot be distinguished from dystopian desire for “utopian desire has both hopeful and pessimistic sides: it yearns for happiness but only because it is so unhappy with the existing world” (3). In terms of the resultant (relative) happiness or unhappiness, we might be better advised to follow Vattimo’s historical model and say that the distinction depends on the presence of a narrative that allows different moments of the text to be differentially even if subjectively privileged.

This differentiation is crucial to understanding the broader implications of “heterotopia,” a term introduced into the modern theoretical corpus by Foucault.(5) Kevin Hetherington proposes that we understand the ongoing development of modernity as a result of the interplay between utopia and heterotopia. For Hetherington, heterotopia is an “in-between space” that implies a process of differentiation which defines modernity itself:

Heterotopia do exist, but they only exist in this space-between, in this relationship between spaces, in particular between eu-topia and ou-topia. Heterotopia are not quite spaces of transition–the chasm they represent can never be closed up–but they are space of deferral, spaces where ideas and practices that represent the good life can come into being, from nowhere, even if they never actually achieve what they set out to achieve–social order, or control and freedom. Heterotopia, therefore, reveal the process of ordering to be just that, a process rather than a thing (see Law 1994(6)). (Hetherington ix)

Like utopia, dystopia and heterotopia are far from innocent terms that imply not only modes of thought but their cultural products. The history of the definition of the genre of science fiction, from its roots in H.G. Wells and his “ambivalent” attitude toward utopia(7) to the huge variety of SF products now available, largely depends on whether one considers dystopia a form of science fiction or science fiction a sub-genre of dystopia.

Artists and Carpenters

By the logic of the active anti-spectatorial stance Rorty takes in Achieving, the active imagining of utopia is a key tool in the analysis of social practice as well as a goal worthy of Dewey and Whitman. In Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth Rorty states that, “My own view is that it is not much use pointing to the “internal contradictions” of a social practice, or “deconstructing” it, unless one can come up with an alternative practice–unless one can at least sketch a utopia in which the concept or distinction would be obsolete” (16). Deconstruction (in the broad sense) is therefore useful only in the presence of its constructive correlate. Yet, while Rorty’s active, dare we say positive, method implies a proposed course of action, the result of his effort at construction remains an ideal product rather than a concrete plan, for, as he admits, “we cannot tell ourselves a story about how to get from the actual present to such a future. We can picture various socioeconomic setups which would be preferable to the present one. But we have no clear sense of how to get from the actual world to these theoretically possible worlds, and thus no clear idea of what to work for” (Contingency 182). Nonetheless, Rorty advocates “a general turn against theory and toward narrative” for the “historicist and nominalist culture of the sort [he] envisage[s] would settle instead for narratives which connect the present with the past, on the one hand, and with utopian futures, on the other” (Contingency xvi).

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Rorty’s repeated recourse to this figure of utopia without analysis of its raison-d’être suggests a late twentieth century romantic faith–unironic in Rortyian terms–that utopian thought is a legitimate way out of the dilemmas of traditional philosophy. Ironically, utopia for Rorty is less a heuristic filter for the process of redescription than a mold into which his ideas are poured and hardened. That Rorty is aware that utopia is an impossible proposition is a given dispensed with at the beginning of Contingency, but this circular recognition makes the status of his own utopia ambiguous. His repeated caveat is that in this ideal liberal society, general acceptance of redescription will create a situation in which the thorny questions of maintaining certain distinctions as we know them will become obsolete. His claim in Contingency that “This book tries to show how things look if we drop the demand for a theory which unifies the public and private, and are content to treat the demands of self-creation and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable” (xv) seems to invite the disassembly of his utopian apparatus, for it not only asserts that clear conceptual distinctions persist (in the equally valid demands of self-creation and solidarity) but it in fact creates and fixes these distinctions firmly in place rather than, as he prescribes, rendering them “obsolete” (16).

Rorty’s utopian discourse is not so much about utopia per se and its function as about the detailed contents of his own imagined utopia. Like More’s Utopus, Rorty carves his utopia out of already existing territory, a jumbled landscape of public-private, ethical/moral- pragmatic formations. The Rortyian utopia is a unique man-made island of delicate balance between the public and the private that is effected by their fictitious and rigorous separation. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity he attempts to describe at length what he terms a “liberal utopia”: a polity peopled by liberals, those “who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do,”(8) cum ironists, imaginative people who realize “that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed” and who do not take themselves too seriously (Contingency 73). These “liberal ironists” are able to segregate their private ambitions for autonomous selfhood (personified for Rorty by “ironist” figures such as Proust and Nabokov) from their public responsibility to society (according to models of liberals like Orwell or Derrida).

According to Rorty, the ironist fulfills three conditions:

(1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to her reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one’s way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old. (Contingency 73)

The goal is to see the other “as one of us.” In Rorty-speak, the question of who “us” is remains unclear (or perhaps remains all too clear), for the set of ironists is not coterminous with that of private persons, but only a subset of it. Irony is defined in contradistinction to its other, “common sense” (Contingency 74), and these qualities in turn define the people who bear them. “In the ideal liberal society, the intellectuals would still be ironists, although the nonintellectuals would not. The latter would, however, be commonsensically nominalist and historicist” (Contingency 87). Clearly the division between private and public is insufficient to characterize his ideal society; in Achieving, the pertinent distinctions are set forth in terms of both political orientation–Left or Right–and of “career.” The intellectuals and nonintellectuals of Contingency morph into artists vs carpenters:

The reason I cite poets, critics, and painters, rather than dentists, carpenters, and laborers, as having careers is that the former, more typically than the latter, are trying to make the future different from the past–trying to create a new role rather than to play an old role well. The difference is obviously not hard and fast, since there are such things as hack poetry and creative dentistry. But the creative artist, in a wide sense that includes critics, scientists, and scholars, provides the paradigm case of a career whose conclusion leaves the world a bit different from what it used to be. (Achieving 122)

Careers of “artists” are likened to a “sociopolitical campaign” in that they “can be seen to have succeeded or failed–or, or more frequently, to have succeeded to a certain degree while still falling short of its initial aims” (Achieving 121-22). But the definition of “artist” still depends on the success or failure of his/her career; a failed artist might as well have been a dentist.

Because the same denial of metaphysical foundations that is crucial to Vattimo’s “weak thought” underpins Rorty’s own thinking, one might assume that his notions of individual autonomy and self-creation would lead him to express his views in terms of something like Vattimo’s concept of heterotopia. Why does Rorty steadfastly privilege the utopia of the liberal ironist over a heterotopic vision and not directly address the question of differences of utopia when he clearly advocates the dynamics of democratic conversation and compromise? The answer lies in his regular reflexive return to binary distinctions, constituents of what Marin would call his “simulacrum of synthesis” (26).

In spite of Rorty’s caveat entre-deux of “hack poetry and creative dentistry,” his evolving description of utopia is constructed from unproblematized binary opposites. In Achieving Our Country, Rorty’s belief in a starkly delineated Left and Right never seems to be in doubt. Nor is the Right’s role presented as in opposition even in the academy; academic Leftists “have collaborated with the Right” in substitution of “cultural politics” for “real politics.” According to Rorty’s definitions, “The Right never thinks that anything much needs to be changed: it thinks the country is basically in good shape, and may well have been in better shape in the past. It sees the Left’s struggle for social justice as mere troublemaking, as utopian foolishness. The Left, by definition, is the party of hope. It insists that our nation remains unachieved” (14). In Rorty’s narrative, the Left is portrayed as a chevalier errant that must find its way back to court by accomplishing honorable deeds and the Right is cast in the role of the dragon. The Left is future-oriented and is responsible for provoking essential dialogue; it is in fact the motor of political life. Rorty never discusses the good in terms of values in which both sides can actively participate. Sides must be chosen: “Insofar as a Left becomes spectatorial and retrospective, it ceases to be a Left” (Achieving 14). Maintaining strict separations of incompatibles is essential to Rorty’s utopia.

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Rorty affirms, “My defense turns on making a firm distinction between the private and the public” (Contingency 83). But in order to separate them effectively for his picture of liberal utopia he must freeze-frame them as if by fiat in order to resolve the tension between the two. He has noted rather tellingly that Dewey expended a great deal of effort trying to reinsert philosophy into history (Achieving 14), but in his own liberal utopia, he must eliminate the temporal aspect of the relationship of give and take that in fact allows democracy to function more or less along the lines that he advocates. This conceptual stasis recalls the figural aspect of utopia signaled by Marin: utopian text is paradoxically “quasi-iconic” (87) and as such can be read as a sign in a larger discursive context. The choice of the word “iconic” is doubly apt in Rorty’s case, for this particular sign is one that stands in the place of the metaphysical transcendence that he has had to deny and that Habermas suggests he still mourns. Or to borrow a phrase from Gans, it implies “presence as an absolute coincidence of sign with referent, as a moment of absolute peace and communion in transcended and annulled desire” (End of Culture 126).

Measure twice, cut once

The telos of Rortyian thought as designated by the figure of utopia is the elimination of desire. If we construct, as Rorty suggests, a “narrative” from Contingency‘s utopia to Achieving‘s less explicit one, we discover that the concept that must be made obsolete is that of conflicting, converging–mimetic–desire. Behind its liberal mask, Rorty’s utopian construction is a symptom of the lingering virus of metaphysics and betrays a fundamental dependency on representational metaphors much stronger and more pervasive than he has been willing to admit. Rorty would deny that he wishes to eliminate desire altogether. However, if we understand desire as mimetic, then we know that desire is mediated by others and will tend to converge conflictually on like objects, both concrete and abstract.

Gianni Vattimo has suggested that for a critique of metaphysics to be truly radical, it must take into account both the violence that metaphysical fictions–human attempts to impose order–have exercised on thought itself (Violence et métaphysique 57) and the conflictual violence that is revealed with the “fall” of metaphysics, for in the absence of metaphysics “there is no longer anything to limit the conflictiveness of existence, the struggle between the weak and the strong for supremacy” that knows no other criterion than force (58). Beyond the failure to justify his own redescriptive prescriptions that Vattimo associates with the “irrationalism of hermeneutics” (Beyond Interpretation 99) lies Rorty’s failure to come to grips with the conflictual reality of existence that metaphysics and religion help to control. Rorty does not wish to deal with the fundamental realities of human interaction and the role that representation and the sacred play in mediating this interaction. It is not insignificant that Rorty’s ironist-artist hero focuses on private ambitions rather than on a relationship to the public and its recognition or rejection. Liberals like Orwell who wish to change the world function for the general good in the public sphere, where private ambitions for success would be out of place. In Achieving the liberal is an artist and the artist is a liberal.

Although unaware of its relationship to desire, Rorty is not unaware of the danger of violence, which he defines rather as a quality of individual action than as a collective phenomenon. This quality goes by different names in the progression from Contingency to Achieving. In Contingency‘s liberal utopia, “cruelty” is the destructive force threatening solidarity that must be kept at bay. As anyone who has read René Girard knows, “cruelty” is another word for the violent manifestation of mimetic desire. In ritual societies, violence is checked by sacrificial rites that focus a diffuse violence on a central victim. Rorty’s implied notion that sanctioned inequality is the cause of the violence is erroneous. As Girard has demonstrated, the more highly differentiated the society, the greater the control over the contagion of violence.

Lacking any notion of or respect for sacrificial mechanisms or the sacred, for these would be part of the unenlightened past, Rorty’s secularized, de-divinised liberal utopia faces in cruelty an unresolvable problem, one with which his anti-foundationalist thought is unprepared to cope in the absence of a notion of the self “that goes all the way down.” For this reason, Rorty displaces the focus of violence-avoidance from the private in Contingency to the public in Achieving. If in the first book the avoidance of cruelty was the basic principle of utopian social organization, now the problem of cruelty, which he now calls “sadism,” is overshadowed by an overt commitment to doing away with the effects of selfishness–as he admits, government can in some ways correct selfishness, but not sadism (Achieving 99). Rorty relocates his society of “free consensus” within a larger conception of social justice based on the elimination of “castes or classes, since the kind of self-respect which is needed for free participation in democratic deliberation is incompatible with such social divisions” (Achieving 30), and he nods in agreement with an idea of a civic religion centered around “substituting social justice for individual freedom as our country’s principal goal” (Achieving 101). Social justice à la Rorty is ultimately the other side of the cruelty coin, for the liberal sees social justice in terms of equality, even at the expense of individual freedom. But alas, once again, this is simply trading one problem for another, since lack of individual freedom critically infringes on the private ambitions of the ironist.

Rorty’s movement toward equality implies that desires frustrated in the hierarchical system will be fulfilled in the “democratic” system, his new guiding light. Yet Gans’s examination of Pericles’ Funeral Oration makes clear the that the founders of the first democracy were acutely aware of the resentment generated by broad access to positions of privilege.(9) “Contrary to what might appear at first glance, fairness is inversely proportional to objectivity. The fairer one wants to be, the more specific the evaluation one must make for the specific task at hand, and the more unpredictable the results…. Hence the fairer the society, the more an individual who is not chosen for a particular task is likely to disagree with the society’s judgment” (2). An equal society is not a resentment-free society; on the contrary. The more “social justice” as a guiding value prevails, the more the less capable are likely to be humiliated and the more capable to become resentful.

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The shift from the emphasis on cruelty to that of social justice reveals the weakness of a model of society conceived on the basis of a single and ambiguously defined value. The formula for Rorty’s hypothetical social glue is faulty; Rorty assumes that individual efforts at optimal self-creation do not conflict (Contingency 84), that they will not be predicated on limiting others’ chances or on publicly humiliating others through redescription. Rorty’s ironist hero Proust created bitingly accurate portraits of many of his contemporaries who were deeply offended to recognize their own traits in Proust’s composite characters. Rorty’s coda that “peace, wealth, and certain ‘bourgeois freedoms’” are necessary for this to occur begs the question. Even Rorty’s impossible utopia–still peopled by human beings after all–must have a mechanism for expelling or deferring cruelty.

Since neither version of his utopia provides Rorty with a means of controlling either cruelty or inequality, the logic of this shift bears closer examination. Both models implicitly rely on a rational self that can recognize and intellectualize its own cruel and selfish impulses. In the first vision, cruelty emerges as the principal vice to be conquered, an end to be accomplished primarily by trying to see the other “as one of us” in hopes that the resulting compassion will cause us to work toward solidarity in our public lives.(10) Yet seeing the other as one of us does not necessarily have a positive valence and it offers no principle of practical social organization. Cruelty does not rein itself in just because it is the worst thing we do. Rorty’s shift in emphasis from cruelty on the bottom of the list (the worst) to social justice on the top of the list (the best) suggests that he believes cruelty to stem from social inequalities that must be corrected.

Those who are in pain, for example, are humiliated because they do not have the language to speak and must rely on the liberal to speak for them. Yet, as Rorty acknowledges, “The redescribing ironist, by threatening one’s final vocabulary, and thus one’s ability to make sense of oneself in one’s own terms rather than hers, suggests that one’s self and one’s world are futile, obsolete,powerless. Redescription often humiliates” (90). Rorty’s response to this problem is to attempt to implicate metaphysics in the negative effects of ironism: “But notice that redescription and possible humiliation are no more closely connected with ironism than with metaphysics” (90). Rather than dealing with the unhappy realities of liberal-ironist redescription-humiliation, Rorty merely alleges that this same combination exists in a world of metaphysical foundations: the metaphysician, who is not an ironist, redescribes too, and implicitly, the metaphysician’s redescription can humiliate.

But as Rorty himself admits, the ironist arouses special resentment because “when [the ironist] claims that her rediscription is better, she cannot give the term “better” the reassuring weight the metaphysician gives it when he explicates it as ‘in better correspondence with reality’” (91). Since ironic redescription is the intellectual’s own medium for private self-actualization, Rorty cannot deny that it gives him a privileged means to cruelly humiliate anyone he chooses to redescribe. Rorty builds a structure of humiliation and resentment into his utopia in the division between the intellectuals, who are ironists and redescribers of others, and the nonintellectuals, who are commonsensical–by definition not ironic–and, we presume, liberal. One group is plainly equipped to dominate and humiliate the other group. Even if we look at the matter realistically and understand the infinite incremental variations that are bound to exist between these two categories, we still must cope with the hierarchization of society without a theoretical mechanism to help us.

“May God, or the ironic contemplation of his absence, save us from the utopian search for final solutions.” (Signs of Paradox 74)

Rorty’s notion of moral and intellectual progress clearly implies the opposition between a more primitive past and a more enlightened future. As he sees it, we are moving beyond the need for metaphysics, beyond the need for religion and, we hope, beyond a world of cruelty and obdurate thinking. The future society Rorty seems to have in mind is what Vattimo calls an “accomplished nihilism” in which the stable structures of Being are weakened, but unlike Rorty, Vattimo recognizes the potential for violence that accompanies this weakening. In contrast, the only explanation we can extrapolate from Rorty’s writing as to why ritual societies were more cruel than modern society is simply that modern society knows better. From the perspective of originary thinking, such a vision of history neglects the most important (and interesting) aspects of human existence, the evolution and proliferation of strategies for creating the representations that defer violence. What Rorty reads as modernity’s greater understanding is rather the omnicentrsm of the mature market system in which desires are generated and deferred in a continual process of exchange of both goods and representations.

Rorty’s belief that religion becomes increasingly less necessary neglects the diffusion of the sacred in its concentrated form into circulating heterotopias. As Vattimo has suggested most recently in a criticism specifically aimed at Rorty’s redescription, the secularization of Western thought should not be misread as the decline of religion, for which art becomes a suitable substitute (Beyond 56-57), since any such substitute only “mirrors, expresses, repeats and interprets this [that of metaphysics] experience of transcendence” (53). For Vattimo, “a different and more powerful type of global theory continues to stand in opposition to that modeled on the plurality of the artistic ‘openings,’ namely, the world of religious doctrines and churches” (56). It is impossible to think modernity without thinking the sacred, for it is the very secularization of Christianity that has liberated “the plurality of myths” and relegitimated religion (54).

Vattimo’s critique allows us to understand, as Rorty does not, the inextricable dependency of Western utopian thought on Christianity. Originary thinking allows us to develop a still sharper notion of utopia by understanding it as a function of remembering toward the horizon of the future rather than, as Rorty uses the term, simply thinking whose telos is the future. The originary event is the origin of utopia. As Gans says, “Because the scene of representation solved the problem of averting conflict over the appropriation of the central object, its reproduction made it appear as the model of a world without conflict, a momentary golden age” (End of Culture 126). All subsequent representational acts are attempts to recover this originary moment, which can only be re-enacted and never definitively established as Rorty would like. This moment of perfect reciprocity, which establishes our notion of the moral and hence the impulse toward fairness, is the only “true” utopia, the model of the always-already that deconstruction seeks to avoid. As Marin has indicated, it is precisely in the unnatural neutrality of utopian space that the supplément of utopian discourse reveals itself: utopia exists only as a figure of the transcendence of all figuration. Rorty’s reliance on “supplementary” redescription prevents him from recognizing either the originary connection of this ur-figure to the metaphysics of presence or its denial of mimetic anthropological reality.

7

Marin justifies his choice of utopian texts for analysis–from the 16^th to the 18^th century–because this is a period of historical break between the feudal and capitalist (10) economies. It is Marin’s contention that the contradictions between nascent capitalism and dying feudalism are figured in these utopias but that they are not theorized and do not reach the level of a concept. Rorty’s two conceptions of social organization–before and after the fall of metaphysics–correspond roughly to Marin’s distinction, or to Gans’s opposition between ritual and market society. These two types of organization are not just political but economic as well, yet for all of his talk about conversation, in no meaningful sense does Rorty ever deal with other modes of exchange. The essential change between the feudal and capitalist modes is the proliferation of centers of significance prompted by the Christian revelation and the modern heterotopia. The ubiquity of mature consumer society reveals the exchange-relation at the heart of every human interaction. Hence Tobin Siebers’ suggestion that “the new model of community is based on the romantic couple” (9). Within the omnicentric market, this minimal configuration offers the closest approximation to the ideals of nonmimetic desire formerly represented in utopias. Elena Illouz’ Consuming the Romantic Utopia makes explicit the interpenetration of individual desire in the couple’s “producing” and “consuming” one another. Gans sees this as a model that can function without a third party through the mediation of desire within the configuration of the couple:

The phenomenon of romantic love as we know it since the feudal era extends to the erotic sphere the Christian revelation of the equivalence between divine and human personhood. In love, the object of desire is revealed as not simply a troubling otherness that attracts our desire by withdrawing from it, but as an other subject. The so-called overestimation of the sexual object is not an illusion but, on the contrary, a realization that the structure of desire is essentially interpersonal rather than objectal. The erotic couple attempts to expel the mediating other from the scene of representation, to substitute a dual reciprocity, a mutual mediation, for the circulation of the mimetic triangle. Triangularity haunts erotic desire as its origin and inevitable temptation, but it is not the structure of the erotic in itself. (Signs of Paradox 114)

Utopia and Linguistic Truth

We are now prepared to address the question of the usefulness of distinguishing utopia, dystopia, and heterotopia in an anthropological vocabulary. Whereas Vattimo rightly sees utopia and dystopia as the represented consciousness of different moments in the history of metaphysics, examination of these categories in the light of mimetic theory allows us better to understand their critical relationship to society.

Classic utopias are situated outside of narrative. We may visit there or hear tales of visits there, but typically there is no means for us to emigrate there. Similarly, Rorty tells us where he thinks we would like to go and what he thinks it would be like there, but he offers us no viable method for getting there. The reason for this impossibility is not that an imagined society cannot reconcile apparently irreconcilable opposites, but that not even an imagined society of human beings can eliminate mimetic desire. The lesson of the originary hypothesis is that humanity itself is a function of mimetic desire and of representation’s capacity to defer–not end–violence. As Gans points out, “In the nonviolent utopia of universal love, there would be no means available to carry out the essential cultural operation of différance: deferral through differentiation” (Signs 166). Or as Siebers posits in his introduction to Heterotopia, ” Utopian desire is the desire to desire differently, which includes the desire to abandon such desire” (3). Expressed more explicitly in the vocabulary of mimetic desire, to desire differently is to desire unmimetically, but when all desire is one, there is no alternative to mimesis. However, Siebers’ contention that utopian desire cannot be distinguished from dystopian desire (3) bears further exploration in light of the generative model. The definition of utopia as happy and dystopia as unhappy is not only ultimately too subjective and variable a criterion to be useful, but it fails to address the desire at the root of all utopian and dystopian thought. If we speak in terms of desire and all desire is one, then matters of sentiment are largely irrelevant. The question is not whether we are “happy” or “unhappy,” but to what degree culture is successful in deferring violence.

Vattimo’s definition of dystopia as a scenario of “irremediable unhappiness” is perhaps less useful than the post-apocalyptic examples he cites, like Blade Runner and Planet of the Apes. In these films, as in Rorty’s examples of 1984, Snow Crash, Almanac of the Dead, and The Fire Next Time, we see a world radically changed that is nonetheless, at bottom, recognizable as at least partly human. These worlds are thinkable in a way that utopia is not: as optimal rationalizations of existing potentialities. There is always a sense that this could happen here. Rorty emphasizes this in both Contingency (184-85) and Achieving (87), where he warns that these scenarios are not altogether far-fetched. These dystopias, however improbable, do not suffer from the immovable contradictions upon which utopia is built. The topographical problem posed by dystopia is not how to get there, but how to get back to a world previously known. This potential of either return or forward movement gives the dystopia narrative possibilities missing in the utopia, which cannot budge by creating a temporal space.

This is made evident in the respective consumption of the two genres; utopia is typically “boring” while the dystopian film and novel attract an enthusiastic public. Fourier was never a best-seller and More’s Utopia has never been made into a film. The public is able to identify with dystopian desire in a way that is structurally impossible in utopia; a “suspension of disbelief” or, as Gans would put it, an indefinitely deferred question of truth maintains the dystopia as an esthetic object whose experience can be renewed. The dystopia is fiction, but as such, it is not subject to verifiable truth conditions beyond its ability to perpetuate itself as an object of desire. The public is able to experience the horror of a maximal manifestation of mimetic desire and put itself in the place of the dystopian hero.

In contrast, the utopian construction is neither narrative nor concept nor even plausible hypothesis but a figure of unrealizable desire. Deleuze and Guattari note in What is Philosophy? that utopia is a “bad concept” (110), and Gérard Raulet has argued that it is the “simulacrum of a concept.” In Gansian terms, it dwells neither in the world of the signifier or the signified, but tries unsuccessfully to straddle the two. Utopia is a figure, dystopia is a narrative. Dystopia is an anxious consciousness of mimetic desire, and utopia its illusory elimination. The esthetic experience of utopia can only be akin to the soulless uniformity thematized by dystopia.

8

Vattimo’s historical tracing of the movement of utopia, dystopia, and heterotopia reveals the mimetic grounds of these concepts. Just as Marin’s 16th-18th century utopias reflect the contradictions of the transition from a feudal economy to a capitalist one (10), the utopian movements characteristic of the nineteenth century are a form of overt or implicit romantic resistance to the contaminated, manufactured desires of burgeoning consumer society. Both retreats from this society (Fourierism) and movements toward a new world (Saint-Simonism) are governed by a vision of absence of conflict; desires either attain satisfaction through simplification or are made obsolete by technology. If, as Vattimo claims, dystopia becomes more prevalent as metaphysics weakens, this process coincides with the growing awareness of the realities of mature market society: no one is immune to mimetic desire and the structural dynamics of the market pervade every aspect of our lives. As an expression of fear of the self’s disappearance in a world of enforced conformity, dystopia represents and confronts the extrapolated consequences of the ubiquity of the market. The increase in dystopias reflects a prise de conscience of mimetic desire unavailable within a utopian context. At the same time, the continued generation of new mediations for desire and the increased degrees of freedom brought about by mature market society enable the proliferation of personally-scaled heterotopias that marks the late twentieth century.

After the Holocaust: Utopian visions, dystopian representations

According to Gans’s view of history, the Holocaust is a watershed in the understanding of the Christian ethic and its representational possibilities. The Holocaust is the logical reductio ad absurdum of utopian thinking:

The horror of the camps is their scenelessness; for the first time in history, a central policy of violence is deliberately excluded from the scenic structure of culture … Thus, what makes the Holocaust exemplary of a newly radical category of evil is not the multiplicity of its victims, but their lack of esthetic exemplarity … Like a carnivore killing off the species it feeds on, the Nazi model was not meant to express antisemitism, but to abolish the need for it. The more Nazi society revealed its mimetic obsessions with “ugly images,” whether of Jews or of “decadent” art, the more desperately it sought the final expulsion of these images, after which its obsessions would presumably be lifted. This was history’s most radical attempt to expunge the Pauline revelation of the centrality of the victim in the cause of reserving the center for the positive figure of Aryan exemplarity.
(Signs of Paradox 164)

After the Holocaust, each is obliged to figure himself in the place of the arbitrary victim. But the overwhelming realization that to be the victim is also to be the center of significance makes the representational insufficiency of utopia even clearer. The previously tentative and ambiguous mutation of utopia into dystopia becomes formalized in the figure of the Holocaust as exemplary anti-utopia. Utopia having been turned into its horrible opposite, the dystopian text, structurally sounder in its narrative possibilities, becomes the locus of the renewed identification between public and central victim. Ironically, Rorty’s ideal poet-hero is not realized in his liberal utopia but is in fact generated as an oppositional figure within dystopia.(11)

If Rorty’s own utopia is difficult to imagine, the dystopias that he analyzes from Contingency to Achieving are quite vivid to the mind’s eye. They are intelligible within the originary post-Holocaust model. His choice of 1984 in Contingency conforms well to Vattimo’s definition of utopia/dystopia as “optimality by way of rational design,” for, as Rorty says, “Orwell thought of our century as the period in which ‘human equality became technically possible’” (169), providing the necessary conditions of possibility for totalitarian repression. Rorty claims that in thinking about Orwell, it is not useful to consider 1984 as having stripped away appearance to show reality but that it should be read “as a redescription of what may happen or has been happening” (173), as an alternative perspective. The world of 1984 is “dangerous” and “possible” (176). Rorty titles his chapter “The Last Intellectual in Europe: Orwell on Cruelty” (Contingency 169), a play on Rorty’s observation that “The provisional title of 1984 was The Last Man in Europe (170). But Orwell was the “last intellectual” precisely because he alone of Europe’s intellectuals refused the current version of the utopia of the Left.

In Achieving Rorty makes a distinction between an earlier generation of socialist novels–The Jungle, An American Tragedy, and The Grapes of Wrath–and a second generation, Snow Crash and Almanac of the Dead. The earlier generation represent hope based on the possibility of transformation “necessary because the rise of industrial capitalism had made the individualist rhetoric of America’s first century obsolete” (Achieving 8). The second generation are “descriptions of what America will be like in the twenty-first century… written in tones of either self-mockery or of self-disgust” (Achieving 4) and symptomatic of the critical immobility of the late-twentieth-century intellectual. In Snow Crash, Rorty’s example of “self-mockery,” government gives way to business in an America in which the market has become all-powerful. Rorty notes that this novel capitalizes on the belief that corporations and government “now make all the important decisions” (5). In Almanac of the Dead, a work of “self-disgust,” racial-ethnic identities become the focus rather than consumer society. The white race is seen as a plague whose destiny is to be squelched by the descendants of the America’s native peoples in the riotous chaos of the collapse of the US government.

Admittedly, these are dark views, but views that become more clearly outlined when considered in terms of the resentment that inspires and drives them. As implicit acknowledgments of resentment, they also are able to work through their own phobias, which is ultimately healthier than utopian denial. For example, Snow Crash explores our fear of the market and provides a necessary contrast between those who have mastered the market (the former Americans) and the Raft people. The structural instability of the scenario provides what is ultimately, for the reader, hope for change in the possible open-endedness of history. Almanac of the Dead is a sacrificial novel in which resentment is purged in the destruction of the central victim–the white American. As representations of resentment, these works ironically do more to defer violence than to provoke it.

9

Similarly, James Baldwin’s novel, The Fire Next Time, incidentally the source of the title of Rorty’s Achieving (12), offers an example of a “process of decision,” in which “we raise questions about our individual or national identity as part of the process of deciding what we will do next, what we will try to become” (11). In this narrative the prophet Elijah Muhammad represents in the extreme the unwillingness, shared in part by Baldwin, to forgive white America for its sins, whose only explanation can be that the “white people started out as homunculi created by a diabolical scientist” (12), while Baldwin’s ultimate decision is not to forgive but to look forward toward solidarity of the races despite the huge obstacles that must be overcome. Baldwin’s novel offers a choice between a past-oriented and a future-oriented vision of history. The future here is not cast in utopian terms; history conceived as future is history whose course must be forcibly changed. As Baldwin says, “we may be able… to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world” (Achieving 13).

While Ernst Bloch’s view of utopia is consistently one of hope and ultimately revolution, his understanding of the “artist” self, what Vattimo calls his “reappropriated subject,” is modeled on the clown (End 39) and based in the end on irony. Bloch’s preferred vehicle for the discourse of hope is colportage, which his translators and editors describe as “the genre of popular literature comprising adventure story, picaresque tale and thriller…” (1: 352). Unlike Rorty’s ironist, Bloch’s colporteur tells a tale that overtly reveals the utopian nature of his own desires. This narrative conception of the extremities of desire, realized by playing against other discourses of desire, thematizes utopian desire rather than trying to actualize it. Quite tellingly, Rorty comments on one of his favorite ironists and his relationship to his ideas: “Nabokov’s best novels are the ones which exhibit his inability to believe his own general ideas” (Contingency 168).

* * * * *

Utopia Limited, a little-known Gilbert and Sullivan opera first performed at the Savoy in 1893, relies on irony that thematizes its own impossibility. Paramount, King of Utopia, presides over a ritual structure of government in which his word is absolute and his subjects have no need to desire on their own, for he defines their desires. He is the absolute ruler in the center of Utopian society, but like Frazer’s sacrificial kings, he is accountable to two Utopian judges who can have him exploded by the Public Exploder at their whim. Paramount desperately wants his country to emulate the English in every way possible, and he enlists his daughter, who has studied in England, to assist him with her imported advisors, the Flowers of Progress. British clothes and manners are introduced, but the most significant addition is the concept of the limited liability joint stock corporation. When each Utopian declares his worth and becomes a corporation, the King becomes free from the ritual system of order, for the judges do not have the power to explode a corporation. But all is not well in Utopia, for the complete prosperity and peace brought about by Anglicization has put many Utopians out of work. All that remains is to add the missing ingredient: government by party. This sharp satiric narrative does what Rorty’s description of utopia cannot: it puts its own seriousness into question.

Perhaps Habermas is correct that Rorty’s protean efforts to elaborate a convincing liberal utopia can best be characterized as a romantic nostalgia-resentment for a metaphysics that has disappointed and disillusioned him. But the impact made by his work suggests a more focused explanation.

Rorty’s utopian vision is so close to garden-variety left-liberalism that one is tempted to ask: “Why all this talk about utopia? The society you are calling for is pretty much the one we have already, one that includes political mechanisms for solving the problems you remain upset about. Why insist on unworkable utopias when your program is essentially that of the dominant wing of the Democratic party?” But Rorty is not speaking to an audience of politicians, or even of political scientists. His base in the academic world is in the Humanities, and professors of the Humanities remain largely on the far Left, hostile to capitalism and American democracy. Rorty’s influence comes from his ability to speak the language of this group. In Achieving Our Country, he makes what despite its philosophical vagueness is ultimately a useful attempt to sell to his audience as utopia the dystopia that is American democracy–the “worst form of government imaginable, except for all the others that have been tried so far”(13). At the end of the twentieth century, dystopia is the only structure of hope.

10

Even depravities and moral failings often bear, for all that, some features of the sublime or beautiful, at least so far as they appear to our sensory feeling without being tested by reason… The amorous inclination (coquetterie)… in an otherwise decorous person is perhaps reprehensible but still beautiful, and usually is set above the respectable, earnest bearing.

Kant, On the Feeling of the Beautiful And Sublime

I

In his last complete novel, The Golden Bowl (1904), Henry James outdoes himself in piling up his insistent lexicon of crisis-saturated and sacrificial terminology. The words “sacrifice,” “scapegoat,” “martyr,” “victim,” and their many variants occur, especially in Volume Two, even more frequently here than in The Bostonians (1886) or The Princess Casamassima (1886): somewhere, that is, between forty-five and fifty times or about once every ten pages over the narrative as a whole.⁽¹⁾ (Similar vocabulary registers with much less frequency in The Tragic Muse [1890] and The Wings of the Dove [1902] although these belong also to the major phase.) Once again, in The Golden Bowl, as in those earlier “sacrificial” novels, James explores the way in which even the smallest and seemingly most sophisticated human sodality tends to establish and maintain itself through the expulsion – the sacrifice – of a guiltless hence quite arbitrary victim; and in the present instance, in what by consensus critics take as his magnum opus, he pares down the sodality to a genuine, to a clinical, minimum – to the Verver household with its complicated family romance and the extrafamilial married pair Fanny and Bob Assingham. While other late novels likewise confine themselves to a small number of character-agents, one feels that the Ververs et al present an especially isolated case. So susceptible is the billionaire milieu to the lapse into scapegoating that, its refined modernity aside, it begins to resemble a primitive setting in which everything is driven by the charisma of the alpha male, ensconced in a precarious centrality, on which all mimetically converge. James shows, then, how mediated desire (the longing, it matters not for what, copied from another) drives the crisis of marriage-in-dissolution, turning models into rivals and forcing bootless confrontations that can only humiliate the initiator. But James likewise demonstrates, through the moral discretion of his central character, “how to re-establish a violated order” (477) without submitting a scapegoat (even a genuinely guilty one) to public and spectacular “humiliation” (552). The response to adultery, in this studious scenario, is not the “brutal domination of others” (The Cambridge Companion to Henry James 223), as Margery Sabin has recently concluded, nor the “rise to a connubial authoritarianism” (Henry James and the Jacobites 332), as Maxwell Geismar put it thirty years ago; but rather the careful, if determined, resettlement of two disrupted marriages.

In its peculiar way, The Golden Bowl thus differs rather starkly from (even while resembling) The Bostonians, with its direct and psychologically violent rivalry between Olive Chancellor and Basil Ransom over Verena Tarrant, and The Princess Casamassima, with its culmination in Hyacinth Robinson’s suicide by pistol-shot; for despite the plenitude of violent metaphor which it shares with those two earlier novels, The Golden Bowl exhibits indeed only one moment of overt, and arguably “sacrificial,” violence. That is when Fanny Assingham, who has abetted the adulterous transgression (and not altogether unwittingly), learns that the Princess, formerly Miss Maggie Verver, at last knows that her husband and Charlotte Stant (a childhood friend now, by odd happenstance, Maggie’s step-mother) have in secret consummated a romantic involvement, which they recklessly and destructively sustain. The deceitful partners even reason to themselves that they are “a perfectly passive pair” whom others have forced, as “victims” and “against their will into a relation of mutual close contact that they had done everything to avoid” (244).⁽²⁾

The symbolically charged Golden Bowl of the novel’s title – an ungainly objet-d’art which probably possesses its prototype in a certain cracked urn in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun – has, by its baroque agency, brought forth this revelation. Some time before, when they made their first illicit foray together on the very eve of Maggie’s marriage to her groom, Charlotte and the Prince had entered a Bloomsbury shop; Charlotte had found fascination in the golden bowl, but, as the Prince declared it flawed, left without buying it. Much later – the time is four years after the wedding – Charlotte casually alludes to the antiquarian interest of Bloomsbury and thereby plants a “seed” in Maggie’s “romantic” (432) imagination: For, as James divulges, the Princess always attended closely to her step-mother’s speech and “always so long retained… any observation of Charlotte’s, however lightly thrown off” (432). (In prior times, James adds in order to mark the fact, “Maggie had no use for” what the Prince calls “the antiquarii” [109]; it is Charlotte’s interest that stimulates Maggie’s own.) Wandering through London one afternoon, Maggie thus not entirely by coincidence finds herself in the same odd shop as the adulterous pair and, like Charlotte, quickly settles her delight on the alluring titular object; only our dear naive Maggie, fooled by appearances and lacking a better judge to advise her, shies not from its ostentation but buys the thing on impulse. She guesses not at all, as the Prince cannily discerned and as Charlotte learned from him, that the bowl, while superficially integral, contains a concealed fracture. Its beauty extends but a gilded layer deep.

The shopkeeper, however, in a fit of commercial remorse, pays Maggie a visit to confess having cheated her. In the parlor, he notices photographs of Charlotte and the Prince and remembers aloud having seen them on his premises on that past occasion (461). A long-simmering suspicion on Maggie’s part – an “outbreak of the definite” (441), James calls it – now boils over as, undeceived, she understands the worst, including importantly her own prior refusal to see the obvious. These details will bear revisitation. The immediate point to be made here is Fanny’s reaction, when Maggie has at last painted the full picture for her, to the revelation of marital perfidy. Fanny, says James:

who had been casting about her and whose inspiration decidedly had come, raised the cup in her two hands, raised it positively above her head and from under it solemnly smiled at the Princess as a signal of intention. So for an instant, full of her thought and of her act, she held the precious vessel, and then with due note taken of the polished floor, bare fine and hard in the embrasure of her window, dashed it boldly to the ground, where she had the thrill of seeing it lie shattered with the violence of the crash. She had flushed with the force of her effort as Maggie had flushed with wonder at the sight, and this high reflexion in their faces was all that passed between them for a minute more. “Whatever you meant by it – and I don’t want to know now – has ceased to exist,” Mrs. Assingham said. (447-448).

Fanny’s rashness, all at once decisive, oblique, and futile, seeks to effect what one might best refer to as a magical goal, or rather several magical goals intertwined; the phrase “casting about” is exceptionally telling, as it connotes a desperate concession to any contingent ploy that might show itself in the diminishing instant.

In the first place, Fanny attempts, through so melodramatically smashing the object-catalyst of Maggie’s new consciousness, to efface the knowledge around which that consciousness has so implacably crystallized; it is as if Fanny would suppress the revelation of perfidy by superimposing an arbitrary violence which absorbs the specific and damning knowledge into its own scenic abruptness: the act, so Fanny must intend, will permanently divert Maggie’s attention from the troubling discovery. In its audacious transgression of every bourgeois canon, the act certainly invokes a type of sublime in the Burkean sense of an abrupt enormity producing “astonishment” so that “the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it” (A Philosophical Inquiry 53). One thinks back to the “wonder” (Mull) that Maggie appears to invest in the Prince in the novel’s first half, and of the awe that the Prince experiences in his contemplations of Adam. In any case, the precipitation of the bowl conveys a “thrill” to the perpetrator, and makes both women momentarily mute. Earlier, in Book Fourth, Maggie had thought of her father’s blithe trust in the rightness of things specifically as a “sublimity” (353). Two types of sublimity thus confront one another: That of transgression and that of the remote noninvolvement of something that excludes one from it – from imitating it or appropriating it. Adam blandly trusts; while Fanny’s precipitating the bowl constitutes an essay in diverting discovery back into ignorance when trust has slipped beyond possibility. Thus, in describing Fanny as “full of her thought and her act,” James reveals not lucidity but a state of panicked self-accusation which can utter itself only through a displaced annihilation.

In the second place and quite paradoxically, then, Fanny would express and expunge, by her tactical iconoclasm, the weighty moral case mounting up against her for her own role in the affair, for she (Fanny) has undeniably aided the adulterers by protecting them, and has several times lied to Maggie in order to dissimulate nagging suspicions and more-than-suspicions of her own; in this sense, the act is merely petulant and self-serving, as though guilt and complicity could be expiated by destroying the fetish that represents them. In doing so, Fanny fulfills her expostulation to her husband, in Book Third, that no matter what the suspect couple might have done: “I shall never know. Never, never – because I don’t want to and nothing will induce me” (305). Fanny at once knows and wills herself not to know, just as the Prince and Charlotte must when they argue to themselves that others have made them do it. In myths and fairytales, as Walter Burkert points out in The Creation of the Sacred (1998), this type of “magical flight” from danger, either real or perceived, is common. The “swift adversary,” corresponding here to Maggie’s implacable insistence on the unpleasant facts, can only be stopped by means of a magical object or gesture: “Throw a comb and it will grow into a forest or a mountain range” (44); throw a piece of flint and it “grows into a cliff” (45). Fanny behaves as though she existed in a fairytale world and could avert unpleasantness by magic; Maggie has left the fairytale world and Fanny’s magic does not affect her.

A third goal implied by the smashing of the bowl consists of Fanny’s wanting to seem, in Maggie’s eyes, to underscore a reasoned argument with an instrumental gesture of phatic import. Indeed, in a prior moment, as Maggie brought forth, bit by bit, what she had learned, Fanny had “inwardly blushed” (435) at her own prior reticence about the affair, the “abysses of confidence” (55) in which she has consigned herself first by match-making the marriage and then by reintroducing the otherwise forlorn Charlotte to the Verver milieu. Shortly afterward, the Prince will see himself trapped in the “labyrinth” (454) of his own mendacity. Both terms imply victimary status – radical isolation and entrapment under threat – but neither Fanny nor the Prince is a victim. Maggie is the victim. Fanny fails to redeem her “cowardice” (435), however, by coming clean about the facts; she indeed extends and compounds cravenness by making speciously exculpatory asseverations on the Prince’s behalf; when Maggie asserts that Charlotte and the Prince have known each other intimately “more than I ever dreamed” (435), Fanny lamely interposes the quibbling question “of what one considers intimate” (435-36). She insists that she still believes (442) in the Prince and urges loudly to her interlocutor that “your husband has never, never, never – !” (447), when she knows quite well that he indeed has done precisely and calculatedly what she cannot bring herself to utter. Fanny’s stuttering denial inevitably breaks off, indicating by its very incompletion that the truth is still damningly there. Maggie, increasingly convinced of the Prince’s perfidiousness, deflects Fanny’s “easy glosses” (447), whereupon Fanny, yielding to her desperate and specious “inspiration,” seizes that offending piece of “evidence” (448) the bowl and consigns it to would-be oblivion. James takes us swiftly from the broken utterance to the breaking of the gold-plated curiosity that has so wondrously arranged all the hidden facts in revealing clarity all about it.

One can further fill out the character of Fanny’s strategy by saying that she is trying to induce Maggie to share, to imitate, her own pretence of blithe ignorance and trust. (And it is, by this point, a pretence merely.) For a bare instant, James suggests, that hopeless result might actually be achieved, for Fanny “had flushed with the force of her effort as Maggie had flushed with wonder at the sight, and this high reflexion in their faces was all that passed between them for a minute more.” In the unspecifiable because absolutely compact emotion generated by “the violence of the crash” and reflected in their mutual coloration, the two women momentarily become one, their union expressed paradoxically by their dilatory silence. Fanny, if but crudely, has called forth a type of sublimity in which the forensic clarity of the case, the true disposition of moral differences and the full assignment of causes and effects, transiently returns to its pre-articulate compactness – that mere and aphonic suspicion of offense. But the Prince, breaking in on the silent awe, dispels the speechless unanimity and by his appearance – in every sense of the term – verifies to both women his now indisputable implication in the betrayal.⁽³⁾ In James’s Hawthornesque metaphor, Maggie sees “the red mark of conviction flaming there in his beauty” (450) and finds in it the corroboration of her surmise. “Murder will out” (418), as Colonel Assingham, Fanny’s husband, had recently predicted. But Fanny’s hope that Maggie can be manipulated into denying what the facts – circumstantial though they might be – tell her does not stem from nothing. For as long as Fanny has known Maggie, the latter has exhibited a willingness to be impressed by others, a susceptibility to influence exemplified by her having peregrinated into the antiquarian’s shop in Bloomsbury in response to a casual word dropped by Charlotte. Until the sacrificial moment of the shattered bowl, Maggie has in fact hardly ever been herself; she has been, on the contrary, the blank creature of others, taking her cues from them and molding herself to please them. Fanny’s precipitation of the gilded cup produces, in this way, a real if unforeseen consequence: An authentic and autonomous Maggie who coalesces in the very instant when the cup breaks into three great slivers on the hard floor. The Prince himself suddenly perceives that Maggie has become “deep” (463) and Maggie agrees that, for the first time in her dutiful and naive life, she possesses “real knowledge” (463). Without design, then, Fanny’s deed has “redoubled… beyond its intention” (450), giving rise to what she designed it to prevent, namely the grim matriculation of Maggie’s long stunted acuity.

It will be productive to borrow an insight from Eric Gans, who has noted on many an occasion that resentment, entailing a consciousness of one’s emissary status, can actually be constitutive of the self; expulsion entails the sudden perception of ontological equivalence between one individual and another and the simultaneous perception that, existentially, such equivalence has suffered a disruption. In The End of Culture, discussing the breakdown of pre-modern society, Gans notes that “resentment may be defined as the scandal of the peripheral self at the centrality of the other which transforms the equality of the original scene of representation into an absolute polarity of difference” (174). Maggie’s expulsion from her own marriage – or rather her discovery of that expulsion – certainly seems to produce such an effect, although it should quickly be added that her resentment is transient and itself quickly undergoes a transformation. In any case, a certain“Imperium” (43), on which the Prince meditated in The Golden Bowl’s opening paragraph, has suddenly and decisively passed from the Prince to his Princess, from the cynical manipulator to the moral adjudicator, and the former possessor shall not regain it. (“Imperium” perfectly fits the “absolute polarity of difference” to which Gans alludes in the passage just quoted.) The key terms by which Amerigo formerly thought of Maggie – “pursuit” and “capture,” he the pursuer and she the captive (44) – now by reversal apply to him. The true sublime of moral conviction informed by direct and certain knowledge here replaces the false sublime of ignorance, in which thinking comes to a stop in the diverting contemplation of some impressive but vague object.

II

The filiations of mimesis in The Golden Bowl twist about one another in complicated strands and they occasionally tighten into fantastic knots; the convergence of multiple parties on singular objects, the contention of plural persons for unique status, the constant fishing by one character after the thoughts, dispositions, and preferences of another to satisfy a want of authentic motive: these repeatedly provoke crises, major and minor, which in their complexity constitute what James labels both “the mysteries of mimicry” (160) and “the mysteries of pride” (528). When James first reveals the Prince, for example, at the beginning of Book First, he puts him strolling in Bond Street in a “restless” (43) state, pausing now and then to gaze at the goods, “the loot of far-off victories” (43) as he imagines, that the shopkeepers have set on display in their windows. The Prince’s impending marriage appears to him as a “crisis” (54) in the sense that it forecloses the erotic “possibilities in faces” (43) that he sees about him as he meanders and observes. (One should not underestimate the predatory character of the Prince.) The shop-windows, past which Amerigo peers, signify those external barriers to impulse and appropriation – marriage being the case in point – which libido can only regard under the enemious figure of “the iron shutter of a shop… rattl[ing] down at the turn of some crank” (52-53). Such an aversion to exchange, to the market, will establish itself as a recurring theme in the novel; moral judgments will turn on whether one can assimilate oneself to the old principle of do ut des. The Prince both wants his marriage (not least for its cash value) and yet fears it as a “monster” (58) which must, under its Imperium (rather than his), foreclose all other possibilities. In this state of indecision (this balking before the demand to forsake all others), he requires guidance, a word from some source that will indicate what he should do. Despite his imposing effect on others, he lacks a satisfying fund of inner conviction. Such is the fragility of charisma. He makes his way, therefore, to the one who has already managed so much for him.

The Prince’s interview with Fanny Assingham, in her home in Cadogan Place, (Book First) suggests Amerigo’s not so subtle mimetic dependence on this lady-mentor. Fanny stands as mastermind behind the nuptial arrangements: “You had the conception,” the Prince says to her, “you had it first [and] you had it the most” (60). Again, the Prince says that “I can do pretty well anything I see” and then quickly adds that he has nevertheless “got to see it first” (61); the unstated corollary of this admission is that the Prince experiences difficulty in originating his own desires, or at least in specifying them. Seeing through Fanny’s eyes – James ascribes the metaphor to his character – will teach the Prince not only what he should like but what he “mayn’t like” (62); and such knowledge will help him settle into what Maggie had earlier referred to as his “particular self” (47). It is the case, however, that the Prince has not yet sufficiently made out what others, particularly his father-in-law-to-be, expect of him; he has discerned only a “large bland blank assumption of merits” (56). The Prince, says James, “wouldn’t know himself” (56) until he had somehow resolved that “blank assumption” into its particulars. (When he does so, it will be cynically parti pris; it will entail taking but no giving and will therefore violate do ut des.) Charlotte for her part, as Fanny says to her husband, “wants to be magnificent” (98), the model of magnificence for this girl in “want of means” (77) being the Verver household, particularly her friend Maggie. Fanny herself, as her machinations attest, lives a good deal through others, finds her being elsewhere than in herself. She once divulges that she is wholly “mixed up” (100) with others, a phrase which commingles semantically with the idea of adultery as a form of adulteration.

James more than hints, by opening the novel amidst the shop-windows of a London street, that The Golden Bowl will treat the world-at-large, the modern world of the consumer and the producer, as founded in a separation, or at least a perceived separation, between the wanting state and a being displaced into an elsewhere of yearning and humiliation. The great question concerns how one might come to terms with such an inherent frustration; how, so to speak, one might negotiate the market of esteem without violating its well-founded rules. How wrong Geismar is when he asserts that James’s novel has “nothing to do with the modern world” or “with any conceivable world of social reality” (323). That world, non-hierarchical and predicated on negotiation by autonomous parties, lies everywhere at hand and forces the representatives of the vestigial medieval world, especially the Prince, to accept its terms. One must give, therefore, if one would later get. Symmetrical exchange is the profoundest of laws. James will make the case emphatically that it is the refusal of the market – and of the principle of reciprocity which informs the workings of the market – that stokes frustration and leads to a corrosively antinomian “pride” (541). The “currents of the market” (143) operate according to mimesis, and thus establish the pervasive mimetic background for the novel’s action.

Yet the primary, perhaps one should call it the originary, mimetic case in The Golden Bowl is oddly a negative one, the absence of the mother who might otherwise have provided for Maggie a useful model of feminine autonomy. In the case of the deceased mother, the problems of mimesis and of displaced and inaccessible being come together. One might recall that a similar lack in an earlier James novel, Washington Square (1881), leads protagonist Catherine Sloper to the disaster of embittered spinsterhood; but Adam Verver, Maggie’s father, corresponds – fortunately – to a somewhat different species than the grim and reserved Austin Sloper, despite the fact that both qualify as self-conscious aesthetes. Sloper stood close to his deceased wife but remains distant from his daughter; Adam Verver stood distant from his deceased wife but remains close, rather too close, perhaps, to Maggie. Sloper withholds his largesse, or at least threatens to do so; Adam spreads his freely around. In enjoying Adam’s magnanimity, however, all the partakers in it enjoy indirectly what one might call a troubling relation to the deceased first wife and mother. This relation deserves to be examined in some detail, for it concerns the origin of the sublimity which endows Adam with his powerful and attractive charisma; the relation is nevertheless not sinister, but merely fortuitous – and yet it remains generative of an array of important effects.

One might begin by underscoring the fact that the death of the wife, like the smashing of the bowl, generates unforeseen and ironically positive results. As Milly Theale says to Susan Stringham in The Wings of the Dove, speculating on the certainty of her own death: “You’ll never really know where I am. Except indeed when I’m gone; and then you’ll only know where I’m not” (183). In The Golden Bowl, once one becomes aware of her having existed, one remains aware of just how conspicuously the first Mrs. Verver is absent. Not stemming from old money, Adam must have produced his fortune during the period of his first marriage, so that elementary fairness of judgment would necessarily attribute to her a measure of shared credit in the making of it. “Behind every great man…” as the cliché puts it (and not without cause). Adam indeed not only owes some part of his fortune to the original Mrs. Verver; he owes his defining sense of himself as a genuine initiate of the arts to her death – a grim and perhaps unrepayable debt. If Adam now ranks as “equal somehow with the great seers, invokers and encouragers of beauty,” it remains the case that “he had been nothing of the kind before” (140). In Book Second, meditating alone in the billiard room of Fawns, his retreat in the English countryside, Adam Verver arrives at a sudden understanding of the causation by which he has become, in his own estimation, nearly “infallible” in aesthetic judgment and a man than whom none other “in Europe or America, he privately believed, was for such estimate less capable of vulgar mistakes” (139).

A self-made billionaire (57) from the Midwest, Adam has given himself over, in early retirement, to the obsessive acquisition of painting, sculpture, luxurious ornament, and architectural fragment. He thinks to himself that:

apart from the natural affections he had acquainted himself with no greater joy of the intimately personal type than the joy of his originally coming to feel, and all so unexpectedly, that he had in him the spirit of a connoisseur. He had, like many other persons, in the course of his reading, been struck with Keats’s sonnet about stout Cortez in the presence of the Pacific; but it was probable that few persons had so devoutly fitted the poet’s grand image to a fact of experience. It consorted so with Mr Verver’s consciousness of the way in which at a given moment he had stared at his Pacific that a couple of perusals of the immortal lines had sufficed to stamp them in his memory. His ‘peak in Darien’ was the sudden hour that had transformed his life, the hour of his perceiving with a mute inward gasp akin to the low moan of apprehensive passion that a world was left him to conquer and that he might conquer it if he tried. (139)

James adds that “the light, in his mind, had so broken” only “during his first visit to Europe after the death of his wife” (140 [emphasis added]). Adam attributes his prior obtuseness to the undue influence of the deceased helpmate, whose “flutter had been mainly that of ribbons, frills and fine fabrics” (140). In the days of her presence, Adam “had ‘bought’” (140), but only on his wife’s pattern, through her eyes, so to speak, and according to her taste: “He sometimes even wondered what would have become of his intelligence, in the sphere in which it was to learn more and more exclusively to play, if his wife’s influence on it hadn’t been, in the strange scheme of things, so promptly removed” (141). In his bereavement, he became “violently aware” of “the dormant intelligence” within him that only awaited its proper occasion to stir from slumber and mark him with its power. So the disappearance of the encumbering companion – the disruption of the marriage by death – while accidental or providential (the latter, as it seems, from Adam’s perspective) nevertheless yields a boon and conforms therefore to the same sacrificial pattern observable in Fanny’s performance with the bowl. Both entail violence; both induce what a certain subject – Adam in one case and Maggie in the other – understands as a positive metamorphosis from dormancy to awareness. Adam refers to the “intelligence,” “Genius,” and “Taste” as opposed to vulgarity (140) that his awakening has granted him, and Maggie repeatedly to “knowledge” (422) and judgment (440, 450) as opposed to ignorance (446) and belief (442). Yet while the oppositions are formally congruent, the categories differ significantly and contribute to the intellectual counterpoint of the narrative: Adam’s pertains almost exclusively to beauty considered in an extra-moral sense (even to the extra-moral considered, as in Kant’s phrase from my epigraph, as beautiful) and Maggie’s to justice considered in such a way as to subordinate merely aesthetic considerations; but this is not to say that Maggie’s sense of justice pays no tribute to aesthetic notions such as proportion or seemliness – for it does indeed account for these. Maggie’s view of things does not predominate, however, until the denouement; Mull has written of the “near-Platonism” (144) of Adam’s thinking, and for most of the novel Adam, through pure effulgence, ordains the aesthetic criteria governing how, in his world, things shall be.

He does so by appearing to embody, in various forms, the being that others fear to lack in themselves and so seek to acquire mimetically by the closest possible association with their model. (When James transcribes Adam’s self-assessment, Maggie’s father is, in fact, hiding out from a crowd of women who have settled in as indefinite guests at Fawns.) Adam’s charisma stems in part from his wealth, but in larger part from his having succeeded in making the impression, however insubstantial, of “a real galantuomo” (45 [emphasis in original]), as the Prince names him – an embodiment of reality.

Surrounding himself with an ever accumulating mass of beautiful artifacts, Adam achieves the effect, on others, of an “essential pulse of flame, brought to the highest point, yet extraordinarily contained” and impresses those around him with an “acquisitive power” that implies “the necessary triumph of all operations” (131). Flame can warm or illuminate or it can burn; the metaphor is the quintessence of the mythopoetic-sacrificial genus. And if “everyone had need of one’s power,” Adam nevertheless “dread[s] the imputation of greed” (133), of not wanting, that is, to share that “power.” These statements imply that Adam, too, by a peculiar splitting of consciousness, is subject to his own quasi-sacred status. Like every priest or quasi-sacred creature, he has an appearance to keep up. True, his inveterate culling of the art-market carries with it the mark of generosity, for most of the stuff will eventually find its way into the Museum that this great patron intends to endow back in “American City” (49); but it also hints at a certain desperation, a haunted sense that the glamour might vanish should he cease the forward motion of his accumulative career. Adam resembles nothing so much as a Melanesian big-man, who, in his pre-civilized setting, as Eric Gans remarks in The End of Culture (1985), “attains communal significance by monopolizing the exchange-system function of distribution – by converting it, at least at periodic intervals, into a personal redistribution” (154). The big-man’s “cultural centrality is founded on economic centrality” (154) but can by no means be reduced to mere economics. Wealth, as such, interests the big-man far less than the prestige that he gains by giving his wealth away, so much so, as Gans reminds us, that he provides the likely prototype of kings in the pharaonic style: “What specifically distinguishes the big-man is [not his wealth but] something else: his individual and non-prescribed role in the creation of… surplus. Because the big-man’s difference [from everyone else] does not circulate among the other members of the community… a permanent disequilibrium emerges between his function as producer/(re)distributor and the role of consumer to which the beneficiaries of his generosity are relegated” (Science & Faith 35).

At the time of his great self-revelation, James writes, Adam “was a plain American citizen staying at an hotel where sometimes there were twenty others like him: but no pope, no prince of them all had read a richer meaning, he believed, into the character of the Patron of Art” (146). A certain self-inflation, our novelist adds, might well have gone “to our friend’s head” where “what could it do but steadily grow and grow?” (146). Others see Adam as a protean “personage” who might be “a Pope, a King, a President, a Peer, a General, or just a beautiful Author” (185). James only unambiguously, in Book Fifth, reveals how Adam, deep down, perceives himself; but in Books First through Third, the several iterations of the metaphor of burning one’s ships (192, 195) suggest a personality determined to cut itself off, somehow, from its own past – perhaps even from the foundationally deceased first wife. On one occasion Adam thinks back on “the sacrifice of burning his ships” (173 [emphasis added]). The textual nearness of Adam’s thought about his departed uxor and his mental invocation of the conquistador’s radical gesture make the last plausible. Early in Book Second, Adam even wonders, thinking back on it, whether his first marriage “deserved the name” (144), a thought which tends to confirm his sense of his own Emersonian self-creation.

Maggie will later think of her father as “the ‘successful’ beneficent person, the beautiful bountiful original dauntlessly wilful great citizen, the consummate collector and high authority” whose “quietness,” “originality,” “modesty,” “exquisite public perversity,” and “inscrutable incalculable energy” (513) mark him off as the ultimate source and model for those around him, a genius of conjoined opposites, and the origin (she thinks it twice) of everything around him. Of course, Adam’s current plenitude of passive being disguises the fact that before he could be in this quasi-sacred way he had first to do, to create the fortune that now endows him with benign majesty. One of the problems which Maggie faces, and which she will finally overcome, is that being resists imitation, which is the primary form of doing. As Gans puts it, “to be present in the center of the scene is to be uniquely significant precisely because it is to be absent from any project of action” (Signs of Paradox 92). All of Adam’s numinous endowments make him an overwhelming factor in the minds of those who surround him; they also render him useless as the instigator of positive mimesis. The absent mother plays a role in this: For if she were present, she would pose a counterbalance to Adam, humanize him, reveal his resemblance to ordinary mortals like Colonel Assingham, and implicate him more effectively in the immediate social world; she might even rebuke him for his runaway self-inflation.

All that glitters, then, is not gold, and while Adam possesses enough wealth to make a pharaoh envious, what people see in him is his “form” (44) and his “way” (46), terms the very vagueness of which suggests the auric, the numinous, the mysterious, the inaccessible. To marry into the Verver family means, for the Prince, not only his arrival in “the golden isles” (60), that mythic never-never land of appetitive superabundance, but the near-miraculous redemption of his fallen family’s historical cumulus of monetary debt; Amerigo indeed understands Adam’s free and serial reclamation of these “long-estranged… properties… encumbered with unending leases and charges” as a series of “sacrifices” (156) made by Adam to him. As the young man knows that his father-in-law regards him as possessing some “hereditary privilege,” some “secret” stemming from his ancestry (184), and as he also understands that Adam values the addition of this quality to the Verver household, he feels himself attached through a “principle of reciprocity” (44) to the “spell” (57), the “thickness of white air,” and the “dazzling curtain of light” (56) which emanate from his in-law benefactor, quite as though he were a god or an angel in permanent epiphany.

This phenomenon depends, moreover, on “no mere measurable medium” (267). The object of desire loses its objectality and volatilizes into the nebulous idea of redemptory plenitude, within whose transforming glow all deficiencies of the subject will be made good. Immeasurableness is, moreover, a feature of the sublime as it is described both by Kant and Burke. When we contemplate vastness, Burke says, “we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated” (63); “the sublime,” Kant tells us, “is sometimes accompanied with a certain dread” (47). The Prince’s attribution to him of magic immensity invokes for Adam the hypsotic [sic: ?= sublime] category.

Others, besides the Prince, heed the magic as well. In Book Third, during the soirée at Matcham, Adam exudes among his guests a “pervasion” of “quantity” (267):

Every voice in the great bright house was a call to the ingenuities and impunities of pleasure; every echo was a defiance of difficulty, doubt or danger; every aspect of the picture, a glowing plea for the immediate, and as with plenty more to come, was another phase of the spell. For a world so constituted was governed by a spell, that of the smile of the gods and the favor of their powers; the only handsome, the only gallant, in fact the only intelligent acceptance of which was a faith in its guarantees and a high spirit for its chances. (273)

The Prince thinks that conditions around Adam resemble “the state of our primitive parents before the Fall” (275), a thought that echoes Maggie’s remark from Book First that “the happiest reigns… are the reigns without any history” (47), yet another reference to the Arcadian atmosphere generated by Adam’s inestimable means. No one, confronting Adam, it seems, can avoid the immediate conviction that being lies elsewhere – in Adamo – and that insofar as one possesses it oneself one does so by way of an influx, an “influenza” (218), from that august individual. Maggie enjoys such influence by virtue of her filial tie; the Prince enjoys it by virtue of his espousal to Maggie. Charlotte, who knew Maggie when both were children, and who knew the Prince only a short time before, in Italy, feels left out. Early on in the narrative, James records “her recall of her birth in Florence and Florentine childhood” (78); he alludes to the “shabby” quality of her natal milieu and to the “poor convent” (78) where she took instruction. The implied poor/rich or shabby/genteel contrast verges on the overdetermined. When the Prince, implying that she is Italian in appearance, speculates on the possibility of “some strictly civil ancestor” (78), Charlotte can only admit that she knows of none. She will continue to feel left out, different by origin, perhaps quite unoriginal, even after she marries Adam. It miffs her when Maggie telegraphs congratulations not to both of them but only to her father (205). But that is to skip ahead.

Hearing of the imminent nuptials, Charlotte appears (quite uninvited) at the Assinghams, whereupon Fanny mediates the reacquaintance of the young woman and the Prince. Charlotte definitely qualifies as the outsider in the Verver milieu; she declares herself not “absolutely a pauper” but still “too poor for some things” (105), and yet she does, like Adam and indeed like Amerigo, lay claim to a certain charm of her own. While “nothing in her definitely placed her,” she nevertheless strikes the Prince as “a rare, a special product,” marked off from other women by “her singleness, her solitude, her want of means,” and exhibiting in her very deficiency “an odd precious neutrality” (77 [emphasis added]).

Yet, for the Prince, Charlotte’s “mystery” (78) now suddenly partakes retroactively in the Verver enchantment: he believes that Charlotte once represented for Maggie “the liveliest emotion she had known before the dawn of the sentiment inspired by himself” (77). Where there is no directly observable relationship to endow someone with Verver magic, then one must, in the logic of imitation, imagine such a relationship. The Prince and Charlotte, as noted, knew each other previously, but James’s prose leaves readers to suppose that, at the time, the Prince had yet to meet the Ververs (something which Fanny would stage-manage) and that Charlotte herself made no mention of them. So she formed, for him, merely another affair; and he, too, for her. If, as Fanny puts it, the Prince “had to have money,” so, it seems, did Charlotte, for they mutually “gave each other up” (89) in the lack of it. In renewing his former interest, then, the Prince has in effect taken a cue from his wife-to-be. Part of the Verver magic has passed from Adam via Maggie to Charlotte. She is now more alluring than she might have been before; but her “want of means” additionally enables the Prince to stand to her as Adam stands to him: it enables him to imitate Adam, to exercise a similar apparently magnanimous being in respect to Charlotte.

Charlotte seeks “existence” (80), as she tells the Prince during their first conversation in Cadogan Place, repeating the word three times. She means marriage, of course, but neither merely nor exclusively. Later, as a guest at Fawns, invited by Adam himself, she proves to have “existence” of a sort already, and to exert an “influence” (176) on others all her own. As earlier noted, Adam finds himself genially besieged at Fawns by a swarm of female suitors, the bachelor-ladies Lutch (two of them, evidently) and the widow Rance, from whom he persistently and comically escapes. In short order, Charlotte, in Fanny’s words, has “cleared them out” (175). Says Fanny: “One saw the consciousness I speak of come over the poor things, very much I suppose as people at the court of the Borgias may have watched each other begin to look queer after having had the honour of taking wine with the heads of the family” (177). Charlotte indisputably boasts “the real thing” (178) and the others, fatalistically acknowledging the quality, leave the field; Charlotte adds up singularly to “exactly what those women themselves want to be” and “her effect on them is to make them recognise that they never will” (178). Having banished her rivals, she turns her attention to the object of her desire, Adam himself. For his part, Adam gravitates to the girl, and for a reason which fits the already several times reiterated pattern of the novel: Charlotte represents for him a “secret,” like that which he perceives in his son-in-law; and he even discovers himself wondering, at one point, if that secret “had come to Charlotte, who had unmistakably acquired it, through [Amerigo’s] having passed it on” (184). He thinks that Amerigo might have “coached” or “incited” Charlotte in some way, so that she might imitate the Prince’s “personal system” (184). In gold-digging coquetry, of course, the Prince has, in effect, so “coached” her, but Adam remains for the present in ignorance of that fact.

Charlotte has not only been spiralling closer to Adam, repelling rivals as she nears him; she has been imitating his “way,” or attempting it, since the moment she became reacquainted with the Prince under Fanny’s arrangement. When she and Amerigo enter the Bloomsbury shop in Book First, her errand putatively entails making the purchase of a wedding-gift for Maggie (82), or, perhaps, of what she calls a “ricordo” (116) for the Prince which honor, however, he (more or less out of petulance) refuses. She wants to buy something beautiful to bestow on the daughter (Maggie) of the “personage” known for his extravagant and tasteful buying of endless beautiful things, or upon her former lover, now made more interesting than previously by his imminent espousal of the radiant Ververs; she too by such a gesture would gain the appearance of being a centrally positioned redistributor of largesse.⁽⁴⁾ (Maggie, by contrast, until she imitates Charlotte in making the round of the Bloomsbury antiquarian shops, remains a recipient rather than a giver of goods.) After Charlotte finds herself alone with Adam, and when he begins to test her for a wife, she accompanies him from Fawns to Brighton to complete the acquisition of a set of rare tiles of Syrian origin. The dealer, a certain conspicuously Jewish Gutermann-Seuss, welcomes the couple to his house. “Our visitors,” writes James, “found themselves introduced, by the operation of close contiguity, to a group of ladies and gentleman older and younger, and of children larger and smaller, who mostly affected them as scarce less anointed for hospitality and who produced at first the impression of a birthday party, or some anniversary gregariously and religiously kept, though they subsequently fell into their places as members of one quiet domestic circle, preponderantly and directly indebted for their being in fact to Mr Gutermann-Seuss” (190). (Some anticipatory irony might well be assigned to the supernumerary character of the Guterman-Seusses, to their fecundity, for Adam by his first wife had but one child, and his child produces likewise but one offspring, while he, with Charlotte, through no want of trying, produces none.)

The exchange – Adam’s cheque for Gutermann-Seuss’s “infinitely ancient… amethystine” (191) tiles – occurs, then, in the context of an intact community, a veritable Old Testament “tribe” (192); it is also paradigmatically an affirmation of the market. Gutermann-Seuss at one point tells Adam that he has long known of and has long wanted to meet “the great American collector” (190). As the praise builds up Adam before himself, so it also builds him up before Charlotte, who can bask, as it were, in the radiation. Guterman-Seuss’s attention to Adam proves, for Charlotte, that her companion incarnates “the aesthetic principle” (179). Adam notices, all throughout the transaction, how Charlotte appreciates the “mystic rite” (192) of the purchase; and he begins to think of her in terms of the “sacrifice” (193) of “burning his ships” (191), a metaphor drawn from those exploits of Cortez alluded to in Keats’s sonnet and one which signifies a renewal of romance. There is something odd and perhaps even morbid in this, however, for Charlotte excites in Adam at this moment the reawakening of the sense of a new existence that had followed the death of his first wife, Maggie’s mother. Adam himself betrays no awareness of the irony. He shortly proposes to Charlotte, who speaks of her desire “to have an existence” (194), and, after a coquettish deferral of a few days, accepts.⁽⁵⁾ The deferral concerns her communication with the Prince – not with the Prince and Maggie, as she leads Adam to believe – in which she discerns that she shall not only have her “existence” but that she shall have her Prince too. “A la guerre comme à la guerre then” (244), the Prince has written. The announcement of impending marital union thus occurs almost simultaneously with the announcement of war. With the image of the Guterman-Seusses, the large and stable household, still hovering, the intention to sunder such an image constitutes a treacherous tie between the two conspirators. As the Guterman-Seusses represent the market, with its implicit rule of equivalent exchange, the declaration of bellicosity also signifies an intention to violate that rule. James opposes war to the market.⁽⁶⁾

III

In Book First, Well before Adam’s espousal of Charlotte, Fanny and the Colonel between them sum up the gathering crisis in the figure of plural “cases”: “There’s Maggie’s and the Prince’s, and there’s the Prince’s and Charlotte’s… there’s Charlotte’s and the Prince’s… there’s Maggie’s and Charlotte’s… and there’s also Maggie’s and mine. I think too that there’s Charlotte’s and mine” (94). Fanny, who does most of the adducing, represents the Verver milieu as one of shifting pairs. In fact, each one of her pairs is a trio, with Fanny herself forming the third party in all, not merely in two, of them; for Fanny arranged the engagement of Maggie and the Prince, and has already begun to encourage the re-pairing of the Prince and Charlotte. (Later, Adam will make the third party in some of these combinations: the “case” of Adam, Charlotte, and the Prince will unite the adulterous pair at the expense of the husband; the adultery indeed produces two interlocking triangles.) But something of the truth clings to Fanny’s myth, so to speak, of the merely dyadic “cases”: Maggie and the Prince, as husband and wife, constitute an intact pair only to the extent that all others remain excluded from the marriage; and should the Prince and Charlotte constitute a pair, it will only be through the treacherous exclusion of Maggie from the sanctity of her bond with Amerigo – now all the more sanctified through the birth of the Principino, their son. In many of the instances where James, almost always through one of his characters, deploys the term sacrifice (or a variant), the term refers to the problem of exclusion; at other times it has a rather more casual definition. Finally, sacrifice will refer to the opposite of exclusion. When the Prince defines Adam’s redemption of various mortgaged properties as a sacrifice (156), he is thinking casually. This, once again, is the big-man establishing solidarity by giving his goods away (while at the same reinforcing resentment against his unique capacity to eradicate debts); it is the purely material type of sacrifice. Adam, in conversation with Maggie about the way in which her marriage to the Prince excludes him, playfully refers to himself as a “martyr” (163); but Maggie later quite seriously thinks that, in marrying, she has “sacrificed a parent” (185). When the truth of betrayal has dawned on Maggie and she has resolved to put Charlotte out of the picture by packing her and Adam back to America, because she does not want to embarrass Charlotte publicly, she resolves herself to play the role of “scapegoat” (487) for the sake of familial placidity. She could, she thinks, “have yearned for it, for the straight vindictive view, the rights of resentment, the rages of jealousy” (489), but the idea of histrionics disgusts her and she has no desire to compound injuries. In effect, she sacrifices the right to retribution.⁽⁷⁾

Maggie’s handling of her knowledge – her treatment of Charlotte – deserves examination, but her behavior will only make sense if one first distinguishes certain of her predispositions from certain of the Prince’s and Charlotte’s. James cannily arranges his story so that the two adulterers and then the betrayed wife visit that Bloomsbury shop and transact with the shopkeeper. If one were to ask, from where, in this narrative of endlessly circulating imitative desire, the ethical revelation comes that fixes the promiscuous players once again in the ordered pattern called marriage, then one would have to answer that it comes from the Italian-speaking purveyor of antiquities. Consider Charlotte and the Prince during their visit to the antiquarian. James tells us that Charlotte came away from the shop “full of impressions” and that the chief of these concerned the shopkeeper himself who struck her as “the greatest curiosity they looked at” (114). The Prince says laconically that he “hadn’t looked at him” at all whereupon Charlotte notes:

how, below a certain social plain, he never saw. One kind of shopman was just like another to him – which was oddly inconsequent on the part of a mind that where it did notice noticed so much. He took throughout always the meaner sort for granted – the night of their meanness, or whatever name one might give it for him, made all his cats grey. (114)

Charlotte sees the man, to be sure, but remarks him mainly because she imagines that “he cared – well, so for them” (114), that is, for Charlotte herself and her companion. She tells the Prince later that the man could not take his eyes off them and that this proved that he possessed “taste” (114), the quality unanimously attributed to the sublime Adam, who constitutes the metaphysically predominant model in James’s narrative scheme. “We’re beautiful, aren’t we?” (114) Charlotte asks rhetorically, thus illustrating to perfection René Girard’s comment on coquetry in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World: “The coquette seeks to be desired because she needs masculine desires, directed at her, to feed her coquetry. She has no more self-sufficiency than the man who desires her, but the success of her strategy allows her to keep up the appearance of it, since it offers her a form of desire she can copy” (370). Charlotte’s idea that the man notices her, sees in her a being that he does not possess himself, but can nevertheless recognize, strategically complements her sense that the Prince does not notice him – that Amerigo possesses, that is, the very being that the man lacks and therefore keenly remarks when it appears in another. In this hopeful but self-contradictory analysis of the moment of desire, Charlotte succeeds in convincing herself, but only precariously, that she radiates the same type of auric desirability which draws her to someone who has been designated by another as desirable. (The Prince has been designated by Maggie, or perhaps, through her, by Adam.) The analysis remains self-contradictory and precarious, however, because it depends simultaneously on the authority of the shopkeeper as a discerner of beauty and on his contemptibility as one “below a certain social plain.”

Notice the emissary structure of the situation: Charlotte – in her imagination, at least – forges solidarity with the Prince by participating in his contempt for the antiquarian. In a word, she imitates him, imitates the disdain that makes him loom before her as self-sufficient. Notice also that another exclusion, more critical from Charlotte’s perspective, exists underneath the immediately visible one: Maggie’s exclusion from her impending nuptial sodality with the Prince. All of Charlotte’s terms in her rehearsal, to Amerigo, of the Bloomsbury excursion are invidiously comparative, and Maggie, although of course never mentioned, must bear the detrimental burden of Charlotte’s envy. Charlotte’s position in her (falsely) suasory treatment with the Prince thus strangely resembles Fanny’s position in her (falsely) suasory treatment with Maggie, when she picks up the bowl and hurtles it to the floor: neither one dares mention what is really going on and both must fall back on evasion and non-sequitur to convince their respective interlocutors. There is, as James puts it elsewhere in the novel, a “danger of advertising subtle processes” (397), especially where the subtlety involves elaborate concealment of one’s own ontological insecurity. Charlotte’s argument, when reduced to its impossible essence, takes the form of an enthymeme: I have been designated by an ugly and undesirable party, therefore I am beautiful and desirable.

The one real element in this abyss of desire and self-deception is Amerigo’s distaste for the man, the shopkeeper, to whom Charlotte paradoxically attributes the quality of “taste.” A short time after the smashing of the bowl, trapped by Maggie in his lie, he lashes out at the man. He remembers the shopkeeper only “as a horrid little beast” (460); earlier, to Charlotte, he described the man as “the swindling Jew who understood Italian” (292), an epithet which Charlotte, on the occasion, mimics contentedly verbatim. Maggie, by contrast, tells the Prince that, in the shopkeeper, she has found “a friend [who] took an interest in me” (460). Maggie chooses her words carefully, for the phrase took an interest denotes exactly what the Prince has failed to do with regard to his wife – worse than failed. Maggie believes that she “inspired” the shopkeeper “with sympathy” (460), as she reports, remarking what “an oddity of… chance” it was that she “should have been moved… to go precisely to him” (460). (I have shown that it was not a matter of “chance” at all, but Maggie’s mimetic response to Charlotte’s suggestion.) Maggie can, she tells her husband:

“only think of [the shopkeeper] as kind, for he had nothing to gain. He had in fact only to lose. It was what he came to tell me – that he had asked me too high a price, more than the object was really worth. There was a particular reason which he hadn’t mentioned and which made him consider and repent. He wrote for leave to see me again – wrote in such terms that I saw him here this afternoon.” (460)

The shopkeeper “had nothing to gain” so that his act indicated no taint whatsoever of the mercenary. From the moment of that visit, Maggie has immersed herself in learning how to be, in James’s phrase, “a mistress of shades” (423). In the first shock of discovery, she had wondered to herself “who… would inevitably… in the gust of momentary selfishness, be sacrificed” (422) in atonement for the adulterous offense; now, however, drawing her ethical lesson from the reviled shopkeeper’s decent act, she thinks in terms of kindness, consideration and repentance. The shopkeeper’s knowledge of “how easily the bowl could be broken” (461) pricked the fellow’s conscience and “worked in him” (461). If Maggie’s language, like Fanny’s a short time before, operates by its obliquity, it seeks a very different goal, however, than Fanny’s: revelation, namely, with the intent of reconciliation rather than concealment with the intent of sustaining a betrayal. Yet Maggie’s plan entails no simple forgiveness, as if nothing had happened, for she is now too much attuned to what she knows (not just about the Prince and Charlotte, but about human relations in general) to make a pretence of naivety in Polly-Anna-ish hopes for the best. The Prince and Charlotte will together have to endure a type of probation, a compensation by equivalence for their delinquency, but the erotics of exclusion will then at last be closed and the married pairs will be permanently and stably paired off as they should. Maggie takes care, above all, that Adam, if he does not already know, shall learn nothing of the sordid affair; she would preserve unruffled and unsullied the “sublime” equanimity of his “happiness” (502).

Maggie’s method for carrying out what she now knows that she must do worthily solicits our critical examination, but one must first say more about the shopkeeper and his bourgeois conscience.

The shopkeeper is a Jew. It is worth recalling that the Prince’s younger brother had married “a wife of the Hebrew race” (53), and that Amerigo thinks of this, in Book First, in terms which are aptly described as cynical and which thus converge with his supercilious, if not downright bigoted, reaction to the antiquarian. Judaism thus occupies a special, an unobvious but nearly central, position in this novel about the decadence of Christendom at the close of the nineteenth century – it provides the source of morality and the model of stability. The Prince would, not implausibly, agree with the Marxian dictum in “On the Jewish Question,” that “Exchange is the true god of the Jew” (Early Writings (239), and that both the Jew and the custom of exchange deserve contempt for this reason. James, on the other hand, might plausibly be read as taking issue, not with Marx’s formal analysis, but with the value extracted by Marx from that analysis. Exchange is a formalization of reciprocity and reciprocity is the essence of morality. It is worth noting that a peculiar sentence in The American Scene (1907) prophesies not that the Jews will corrupt the ethical matrix of the New World but that it would likely fall out the other way around: A “portentous element” in the Yankee brew that James tasted in New York when he visited there after writing The Golden Bowl “reduces to inanity any marked dismay as much as any high elation” (101) on the part of immigrant incursions. Thus, while the Jews represent an alien presence, James places no obvious moral stigma on their alienness; the Jews, writes James, possess an “intensity” and “an unsurpassed strength of race” (100), characteristics which contrast with the corruption and decadence predicated of the Verver milieu. One symptom of these qualities of Jewry is the “blaze of shops” (103) in the Jewish neighborhoods, which returns us to the notion of an intact ethos based on exchange, hence on reciprocity. In the broken world for which the Verver household’s broken marriages stand as symbol, and amidst blatant immorality on the one hand and timidity in response to it on the other, the familial solidity of the Guterman-Seusses and the scrupling conscience of the Jewish antiquarian appear as beacons in the murk. This contrast should strike readers as all the more significant given the explicitly Roman Catholic affiliation of the Verver milieu. During the outing that initiates their renewed affair, under the pretence that they want a gift for Maggie, Charlotte describes the Prince’s wife-to-be not merely in terms of an enviable self-sufficiency (“she does everything herself”) but as a paragon of selflessness. The Prince agrees, remarking that Maggie’s goodness has something “terrible” about it, which is perhaps why he regards the imminent ceremony as a “monstrosity.” Terrible in just that sense Maggie truly is, Charlotte readily and perhaps a bit censoriously admits:

“… unless one’s almost as good as she. It makes too easy terms for one. It takes stuff within one, so far as one’s decency is concerned, to stand it. And nobody… is decent enough, good enough to stand it – not without help from religion or something of that kind. Not without prayer and fasting – that is without taking great care. Certainly… such people as you and I are not.” (111)

The function of the Verver’s (including Charlotte’s) nominal Catholicism, then, is to be attenuated and nonfunctional. Nothing suggests this moderate Potemkin-morality of false fronts more than the priest, Father Mitchell, who appears at Fawns at that critical juncture in the narrative when Maggie must act on her resolve to maneuver all and every back into lawful matrimonial settlement. The priest exhibits no quality or office that would distinguish him in any way from the other card-players at the gaming table where we find him; “good holy man” he might be, but Maggie has “found her way without his guidance” (531), and while she ponders moral action he merely prattles (532) over the salmon mayonnaise at dinner. The Prince’s personality partakes in the same adverse judgment. Back in Book First, Amerigo admits to Maggie that his people, the Vespuccis, figure in the histories mainly for their “doings” and “marriages” and “crimes” and “follies” and “boundless bêtises,” not to mention for their “infamous waste of money” (47). Maggie sees Amerigo as “a creature [of] the cinquecento” (49), which she intends, as she utters it, to be a compliment, but which readers must revisit on the basis of later developments with an increasing sense of irony. (When Charlotte drives the other contenders for Adam’s hand away from Fawns in Book Second, for example, James drops references to the Borgias and their penchant for poisoning [177]; the Prince himself, in Book Third, makes reference to “the dagger” and the “insidiously [prepared] cup” [261].) James lets pass, likewise in Book First, that Charlotte’s expatriate parents, although “from the great country,” were “already of a corrupt generation” (78). The very name Fawns, with its nod to Hawthorne, conjures the Pagan world of classical myth, to which James makes more than one explicit allusion. When Adam contemplates his proposed Museum in solitude at Fawns, he thinks of it in terms of a “Greek temple” whose steps he ascends at last to oversee “the final rites” (143). The new Arcadia cannot be pristine, nor can it be genuinely pre-moral; because it represents the collapse of that which succeeds the classically moral, it can only be willfully immoral. The notion of bêtise, with its connotation not just of stupidity but of the bestial, forms a telling pair with the name Fawns: Together they describe the emergence of the primitive amidst the modern, of the faunic amidst the human; and they portend the recrudescence of voracity amidst restraint. It is not for nothing that, long before we meet the Israelite shopkeeper, James qualifies the meddling Fanny by the otherwise incomprehensible negative of her being, despite “her richness of hue, her generous nose, her eyebrows marked like those of an actress,” not “a Jewess” (64). Nor is it for nothing that James can describe Maggie as “a flit of a creature in an alien age” (172 [emphasis added]) haunted by “the ghost of the anomalous” (387). If the law of Fawns be adultery and deceit (“à la guerre comme à la guerre then”) as long as one can get away with it, then Maggie qualifies as thoroughly “anomalous.”

One might indeed speculate that Maggie’s deceased mother possessed, whatever her deficiency of high taste, a foursquare sense of morality, and that Maggie, inheriting something of it, is indeed an “alien” presence surrounded by degeneration; her liking for the golden bowl, a flawed and grotesque object according to the novel’s aesthetes, might legitimately be said to tie her to her mother by her lack of connoisseurship in comparison with others. We know that Maggie takes her religion seriously in a way that her Amerigo and Adam do not. When at Fawns, she “induce[s] her husband, not inveterate in such practices, to make with her, by carriage, the… pilgrimage to the nearest altar, modest though it happened to be, of the faith – her own as it had been her mother’s, and as Mr. Verver himself had been loosely willing always to let it be taken for his – without the solid ease of which, making the stage firm and smooth, the drama of her marriage mightn’t have been acted out” (147). I read the final clause of this curiously broken sentence as a prolepsis. In light of the Prince being “not inveterate” in his adherence to his nominal faith, furthermore, one should recall a particular imprecation which he utters during his visit to the Bloomsbury shop: “Per bacco!” (123) – “by Bacchus!” – an etiquette noticeably Pagan and entirely in keeping with the revealed ethos of Fawns.

But what is beautiful and what is ugly? From the romantic perspective, the consummation of the lovers’ affair ought to be beautiful. It takes place at Matcham. “It’s sacred,” the Prince says to Charlotte:

“It’s sacred,” she breathed back to him. They vowed it, gave it out and took it in, drawn, by their intensity, more closely together. Then of a sudden, through this tightened circle, as at the issue of a narrow straight into the sea beyond, everything broke up, broke down, gave way, melted and mingled. Their lips sought their lips, their pressure and their response and their response their pressure; with a violence that had sighed itself the next moment to the longest and deepest of stillnesses they passionately sealed their pledge. (259)

Later, in a musical metaphor in Book Fifth, Maggie thinks of the two as “Wagnerian lovers” (519), a reference either to Tristan and Isolde or to Siegfried and Brunnhilde (it matters little); the latter pair’s love has as its background the dissolution of a world and is perhaps the more apt of the two possible allusions. The reference to Wagner establishes a dichotomy with an earlier musical citation in the novel, for during the soirée at Eaton Square in Book Third, Fanny finds herself momentarily distracted by the “genius” of a Brahms quartet, “moved,” in fact, “beyond what she could bear” (269). That remark bears on the Prince and Charlotte alone at Matcham in this way: Brahms figures in cultural history as the great bourgeois composer, the defender of traditional forms, and the string quartet – with its four players always in contrapuntal movement under a harmonic order which requires resolution – can serve as the symbol of what the Verver household ought ideally to be. The term “genius,” moreover, with its connotations of positivity and productivity, contrasts with the idea of “degeneration” (318) which Fanny applies jocosely to herself a short time later; it also contrasts with James’s remark that Charlotte’s parents belonged to a “corrupt generation” (78). It is at Eaton Square that the Prince and Charlotte first attract attention as a pair apart from their respective sposi, so that what Fanny so strongly notices in her transient musical rapture amounts to a sharp moral contradistinction. Whether, later on, Maggie thinks of the Liebestod or of the finale from Die Götterdämmerung, the name of Wagner signifies the dissolution of traditional forms, his lovers being all either adulterous or incestuous; the Wagnerian eros belongs not to the Judaeo-Christian but to the Pagan or neo-Pagan dispensation. Fawns will later remind Maggie of “an old German forest” (519). In this sense, James seems to consign the Prince and Charlotte, too, to such an order, as their mutual invocation of the “sacred” as the mark of their transgression so strongly suggests. That James endows their embrace with the rhetorical indicators of sublimity only strengthens the suggestion: “Everything broke up, broke down, gave way, melted and mingled”; the lovers’ passion exhibits the telling quality of “violence.” Fanny’s later smashing of the bowl echoes the necessarily disintegrative nature of what the contemporary euphemist might call an improper relationship. One ought note as well the co-presence at Matcham of Lady Castledean, who, like the Prince and Charlotte, carries on an adulterous affair. Even the Prince regards the Castledeans as belonging among “inferior people” (288), which puts them in the same category, for him, as the shopkeeper. By association, the Prince and Charlotte have enmeshed themselves in the very “bondage of ugliness” (143) that Adam, by pursuing his career of connoisseurship, hoped to escape.⁽⁸⁾

The bowl itself – I have hinted at this parenthetically – maintains a direct connection with the faunic. James discovered the well-known and, so to speak, actual prototype of the bowl during a 1902 visit to Lamb House in Sussex: an authentic golden bowl given as a christening gift by King George I to a newborn child of the Lambs; as Leon Edel puts it, “King George’s bowl… became a symbol for the theme of the novel which [James] had begun early in 1903” Henry James, Vol. 4 209). Virtually every commentator on The Golden Bowl rehearses this story. But the Georgian bowl, while it no doubt impressed James the aesthete deeply, lacks key features of its supposed fictional counterpart. The real bowl was, by the account, of solid plate, while the novelistic object covers its crystal with mere gilt; the real bowl was intact, while the novelistic object hides beneath its surface an invisible and disfiguring rupture. The Georgian bowl, finally, assumes its context in the explicitly Christian ceremony of the christening, while Maggie’s bowl partakes of the breakdown of the Christian – more properly the Judaeo-Christian – moral structure that James illustrates by his tale. The real, and the telling, prototype of the bowl may be found in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860),
in the chapter (XXVII) where Kenyon visits Donatello in the latter’s ancestral keep.  Walking in the Tuscan hills, the two come across a statuary fountain probably of Roman antiquity, “a marble basin… all covered with moss and shaggy with water-weeds” over which presides, “with an urn in her arms… a marble nymph” (243):

In former days (it might be a remote antiquity,) this lady of the fountain had first received the infant tide into her urn, and poured it thence into the marble basin. But now, the sculptured urn had a great crack, from top to bottom; and the discontented nymph was compelled to see the basin fill itself through the channel which she could not control, although with water long ago consecrated to her. (243)

The nymph represented by the statue, according to Hawthorne’s pseudo-myth, fell in love with a mortal youth. When her lover once “flung himself down, and washed his hands and bathed his feverish brow in the cool, pure water” of her pool, “there was the sound of woe… The water shrank away from the youth’s hands”; this came about because the lover “had tried to wash off a blood-stain” and, in his guilt, “had polluted the water” (246). The crack in the urn signifies the rupture engendered by the deceit perpetrated on that “fatal noontide” (245) so long ago.

In Book Second of The Golden Bowl, Adam, meditating on his daughter’s character, thinks of her as “a figure… ‘generalised’ in its grace, something shyly mythological and nymph-like” (172). Maggie moreover resembles another nymph-like character in The Marble Fawn, Hilda, and in a peculiarly relevant way. Hilda, a prideful New England Puritan in Rome, learns a reluctant but important moral lesson from a Roman Catholic priest during a despairing visit to the Vatican; Hilda, the Protestant, stands to the Catholic priest as Maggie, the Catholic, stands to the Jewish shopkeeper. In a generalized way, The Marble Fawn and The Golden Bowl tell the same basic story: The intrusion of evil into a seemingly idyllic world and the necessity for characters to come into consciousness in response to a forced separation from the cherished naivety of “the deluded condition” (484). The anodyne of delusion cannot issue from its own delusory interior; it must come from without. Where non-reciprocal and deceitful relations constitute the norm, some external agent must post notice of their inadequacy. “Non-reciprocal relations may be perfectly ethical,” Gans writes, “and consecrated as such in ritual, but they are not moral. This intuition is the fundamental source of the Jewish contribution” to modernity (The End of Culture 172). Says James of the shopkeeper, in Book Fifth: “The partner of [Maggie’s] bargain had yearned to see her again… had wished ever so seriously to return to her a part of her money” (480); and he had gone on, when Maggie refused restitution, to hope that “she hadn’t, at all events, already devoted the crystal cup to the beautiful purpose so kindly and so fortunately named to him” (480). The flawed cup would not be a meet gift from daughter to father, for that is precisely a “beautiful purpose” which should not be unintentionally subverted. Whatever James’s attitude toward Judaism elsewhere (it is not, I think, as clearly disdainful as commentators make out), in The Golden Bowl it is positive.

IV

The bowl, which the shopkeeper describes on first producing it as “of a lost time” (121), serves as a metonymy for Fawns (“wide wooded Fawns” [136]), and for the faunic ethos that prevails there until Maggie forcibly imposes a more decisive moral control. Outwardly brilliant and alluring, inwardly the bowl suffers from the fracture of its crystalline matrix. Fawns as a place is, like the bowl as an aesthetic object, timeless, as witness the cyclic reconvention there at every season of the same old company, even, in the end, the competing ladies whom Charlotte had previously driven away. But Maggie’s initiation into the moral view, punctuated by her scene with Fanny, culminating in the fragmentation of the novel’s eponymous bibelot, has inaugurated a temporal dimension and has apprised Maggie of just how crucial is “the business of cultivating continuity” (381 [emphasis added]). That term, “business,” again associates the moral with the commercial, and reminds us of the centrally mimetic role of the shopkeeper for Maggie. “The silver mist that,” James says, “protected” Maggie and her husband, and that “had begun to grow sensibly thin” (358), is of a substance with the airy radiance, the illusory “beauty of appearances” (491), which has hitherto permeated Fawns.⁽⁹⁾ Things will now be altered and roles will be exchanged. The former “flagrancy” (273), “hilarity” (274), and “the air of mere iridescent horizons” (273) presided over by “an infant king” (267), now yield to a grimmer atmosphere and prospect: Fawns now constitutes for Maggie a “figural void” (518), a “darkness of prowling dangers,” and a “beast-haunted land” (532). Maggie herself has become “the watcher” (532) over the dangerous premises and, as such, still labors under the burden of an exclusion from the sodality. Watching the evening’s card-game, she confronts:

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. (486)

Cynically throwing to the winds the moral model offered by the shopkeeper is a gesture that occurs to Maggie in a series of “vertiginous moments” in which she contemplates “the fascination of the monstrous” and during which she knows that “she might sound out their doom in a single sentence” (487). The possibility presents itself as a “temptation” (487). (For the Prince, in Book First, marriage appeared as monstrous; now, for Maggie, revenge qualifies under that term.) Yet our protagonist also recognizes that each person present exists in “a relation with herself, which would spare the individual the danger” (487). In formulating it that way, Maggie, or rather James through Maggie, describes the essential link between the sacrificially excluded party and everyone else – unanimity minus one. Maggie fills the role of victim anomalously (she has been “speciously eliminated”), however, because she no longer really conforms to it; she now acts as a victim who has miraculously rejected her victimage, who, in refusing to submit, confounds the plot against her and so charges herself with a charisma quite equal in quantity to that wielded by Adam in the previous stages of the narrative while being, at the same time, of a different quality: focused rather than diffuse, moral rather than aesthetic, merciful rather than cynical. The sodality faces “the whole complexity of their peril” (487), a phrase which the notion of “her father’s wife’s lover facing his mistress,” with its blurring of otherwise decisive categories, perfectly illustrates; and only Maggie can deliver them from it, or “thus they tacitly put it” (487). She might, she thinks, “charge herself” with the responsibility as did “the scapegoat of old, of whom she had once seen a terrible picture,” but she will not go “into the desert to sink under his burden and die” (487). Against the background of deceit, duplicity, and dissimulation characteristic of the milieu at Fawns (of the faunic itself); against the multiplication of cases, to recall Fanny’s term, Maggie envisions herself as called by all, on the grounds of their proven moral incompetency, “to simplify” (487).

The simplification has already begun in her confrontation with the Prince, once “a proud man,” now “reduced to abjection” (483); but Maggie must now address the other factor in the adulterous equation, namely Charlotte. In confronting Charlotte, moreover, Maggie must deal with what James, throughout the novel, has referred to as romance, a term which I gloss as the ideology of transgression, including especially adulterous transgression. The Prince, in Book First, attached the idea of transgression to Adam, whose opulence suggests “Alexander furnished with the spoils of Darius” (54). The suggestion involves an error which the Prince must know, for Adam has produced his wealth, not plundered it from someone else; and yet Adam did at one time dream, when he awoke to his mission of connoisseurship, of “rifl[ing] the Golden Isles” (140). The nostalgia for a lost Arcadian order, outwardly idyllic while secretly predatory, informs the romanticism of The Golden Bowl’s characters, as does the willingness of Fanny and others to dissimulate immoral behavior when they see it; and these things, in their turn, partake in the argument made by the paramours for themselves and by others for them that they are beautifully “beyond” (261) those who surround them, that Fanny, for example, who has facilitated their assignations, now “doesn’t matter” (257). They are, from their own perspective, jenseits von Gut und Böse. Fanny, for her part, excuses the visible commerce of Charlotte and Amerigo on esthetic grounds: “They’re wonderful” (298), “they’re beautiful” (299), and “we’re in presence” (309), she says of them romantically. At Portland Place, the other guests see the Prince and Charlotte as “truly superior beings” (393). Having elected themselves into the extra-moral company, they begin to dispense with others, just as the Prince earlier dispensed with the shopkeeper by not seeing him. Such secondary betrayals, the Prince himself is made to divulge by James, belong among “the services that by all romantic tradition were consecrated to affection quite as much as to hate” (261 [emphasis added]). In this sentence, James conflates the notions of romance and the sacred, hence of sacrifice. When he tells us that Maggie’s decision to visit the Bloomsbury shop on Charlotte’s unintentional instigation has about it the air of “romantic opportunity” (432), he alloys to his notion of romance a mimetic element. Romance, as one puts these pieces together, amounts to an enabling myth for those who, out of resentment against it, wish to violate the moral norm of reciprocity; romance is the ideology of trespass and transgression, which endows vice with the attributes of virtue and gilds the mugwort, so to speak, to make it out for a lily. Those who adopt romance, in this sense, as their creed can only do so by a deliberate act of unknowing, by what René Girard long ago named mensonge romantique. Fanny does exactly that when she smashes the bowl: she attempts to unknow what she knows. But when upheld for a long time, romance impairs the judgment of the romantic and becomes a moral atavism. James says almost offhand of the Prince in Book First that he had read Poe as a boy and still takes delight in Pym. In his essay on Baudelaire, James lets this remark drop in passing: “An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection” (French Poets and Novelists 5). James’s term, “primitive,” allows us to recognize that the romantic and the faunic, as I have been calling it, are one and the same.

By indirectly letting the Prince know what she knows (“Find out for yourself!” [465]), Maggie has guaranteed his silence with respect to Charlotte and has thus isolated her from the knowledge of what is going on; Maggie has, in effect, reduced the complexity of the adulterous triangle back to the simplicity of the hymeneal dyad. But Maggie has meanwhile concluded that two more things must be achieved in order to preserve her marriage against a relapse into, as we might now say, romance. Charlotte must receive notice, as subtly yet as powerfully as Maggie can manage it, that she has been found out, and she and Adam must take themselves back to America. Despite the fact that, in the persons of the Prince and Charlotte seated at the card-table, Maggie sees “evil… where she had only dreamed of good,” she cannot, out of feelings for the totality of her family, “give them up” (489); she cannot expel them from the family structure – as they had expelled her – by humiliating them before others. Maggie does not join the game. She hovers distantly, whereupon her detached gliding at the edge of things draws Charlotte, full of a false “dignity” (493), to her. Maggie indeed fears Charlotte at this moment, worrying that “her [i.e., Maggie’s own] head was already on the block… whether or no the axe had fallen” (493). After a short period of mutual hesitation, however, Charlotte reveals her plight in the form of a question to Maggie: Has anything happened, Charlotte wishes to know, “for which I’m in any degree responsible?” (496). She then unnecessarily expatiates on the idea in a mendaciously self-exculpating little speech. Maggie carefully feigns ignorance. She embraces Charlotte at a moment when the card-players have risen and come into the room where the feminine transaction has just occurred. As far as they can tell, Maggie has, in a manner, played the role of scapegoat, accepting the “abasement” (498) of a non-invidious reconciliation with her mother-in-law in order to prevent – as one might say remembering the image of the Guterman-Seusses – the scattering of her tribe. This is not to say that, “if [Maggie’s] mood in fact could have turned itself at all to private gaiety it might have failed to resist the diversion of seeing so clever a creature [as Charlotte] so beguiled” (518).

Three days after the reconciliation (false on Charlotte’s part, witting and sincere on Maggie’s), the Princess joins Adam outdoors at Fawns. They sit together observing the weather. In a great, unfurling sentence typical of the late style, James gives us the following: “They had meanwhile been tracing together, in the golden air that toward six o’clock of a July afternoon hung about the massed Kentish woods, several features of the social evolution of her old playmates, still beckoned on, it would seem, by unattainable ideals, still falling back, beyond the sea, to their native seats, for renewals of the moral, financial, conversational – one scarce knew what to call it – outfit, and again and forever reappearing like a tribe of Wandering Jewesses” (502). The effect of this sentence is to place Maggie at a decisive remove from the cyclicism (another way to name the mimeticism) of Fawns. The phrase “Wandering Jewesses” might strike one as odd until one reflects that Ahasuerus, the original “Wandering Jew,” is a man cut off from all traffic with his fellow men, doomed to roam the world nomad-fashion until the Judgment Day. The actual Jew of James’s narrative, the shopkeeper, is not a wanderer, but a settled participant in the market; he is one of those people about whom, to take a page from James’s Italian Hours, “you can complain… only if you never cross their thresholds” (38). (The reference is to the Jewish antiquarii of Venice.) Maggie has crossed a “threshold” in many ways; her “old playmates” remain locked within the charismatic order signified by the word “ideals.”

The conversation that Maggie now pursues with Adam concerns the abandonment of “ideals” and the espousal, so to speak, of a realistic view of their condition. Maggie asks Adam whether she has been “fatuous” (502) and then, rephrasing the question, substitutes “sublime” (502) for the former term: “Have we been sublime in our happiness,” she asks, “as if looking down from a height?” (502). The “as if” qualifies the sublimity which is fatuity as pure illusion, best abandoned; the notion of “a height” meanwhile carries back to Adam’s sense of his having once stood, in the instant of his supposed self-awakening, on his own “‘Peak in Darien.’” It develops that the primary illusion consisted of Adam’s hoping to penetrate English gentryhood, to secure a “place” (503) rather as Charlotte had sought to secure an “existence.” So Adam, too, has humbled himself before a model which transformed into a rebuffing rival, an inassimilable being, every time he approached it; Adam’s sublime is the class-bound, ultimately and archaically monarchic society of the Mother Country which has, in effect, expelled him simply by not admitting him.  Not only has his attempt at admission to gentryhood failed, but he has, by default, surrendered his “reputation” to his countrymen back in American City for them sparagmatically “to tear to pieces” (509). This, of course, was always a possibility – even an inevitability – for the one who concentrated so much golden charm into his personage. What is a king, an imperator, after all, but a victim whose execution has been deferred? Murder will out. The king must die. To the folks back home, Adam must appear no more than rich, eccentric, and obsessive; if his conoisseurship means anything objectively, it will nevertheless mean nothing, save as a kind of pretence, to the uncultured. Yet this difference, between the august and the vulgar, the high and the low, is part of the illusion now under dispersal. In counterpoint with this topic runs another: Maggie’s nagging sense of sacrifice and victimhood in connection with her father. Maggie paints Adam as a “victim” because he has devoted his whole life to her; he answers that he has merely sustained “the feelings of a father” (509). Maggie nevertheless insists, as she says, that “I sacrifice you” (509); and a moment later, she discerns that Adam “was practically offering himself, pressing himself upon her, as a sacrifice” (510). What Adam offers is to remove himself and his wife from the scene: “We should ship”; “we will ship” (512). The figure reverses an earlier one, that of burning one’s ships, which invariably marks Adam’s assertive and ambitious – his sublime – moments in the romantic sense.

If the retreat to America be a “sacrifice,” then it is the opposite of the expulsory kind; it is of the ascetic and magnanimous kind of the sort the shopkeeper may be said to have made when he offered to compensate Maggie for shoddy goods not altogether honestly sold. Where the Prince and Charlotte expel their spouses unilaterally and to the detriment of the emissary parties, Adam voluntarily quits the scene for the benefit of another. Adam will now appear to Maggie, glimpsed from afar before he departs back to his native shore, under the thoroughly humanized figure of “the little meditative man in his straw hat” (522). Charlotte, in a second meeting with Maggie, out of the sight of the familiar entourage, will pretend, from the motive of “pride” (541), to have originated the idea of shipping. Maggie knows, however, that Charlotte now passes through life with “a long silken halter looped about her neck” (523), captured by Adam – and even more by the introjection of a renewed moral structure into the scene.⁽¹⁰⁾ The “golden flame” of Charlotte’s affair with the Prince has turned to “a mere handful of black ashes” (553).

***********To nay-say “the importance of the moral quality of a work of art,” James writes in a discussion of Flaubert, “strikes us as, in two words, very childish” (French Poets and Novelists 64). But the work of art – no matter how modern or how secular – no doubt also boasts an ineradicable sacred quality, whose importance it would be equally childish to deny. (In denying with such vehemence the sacred element in the aesthetic – in denying, for example, that there is any such thing as literature, or that one work is indeed greater than another – contemporary critics paradoxically affirm it.) The Golden Bowl illustrates, and indeed it makes a theme of, the necessary tension between these two qualities. I write of the polar repulsion between the “sacred” and the “moral” rather than between the “aesthetic” and the “moral” because the aesthetic, in the literature of the turn-of-the-century, tends to stand transparently – as it does in Huysmans, for example – for a no-longer-available transcendence. But in A rébours, the figurality is Huysmans’ or, through him, his narrator’s. In The Golden Bowl, the figurality is rarely directly the narrator’s; almost always it stems from one or another character. The Greek temples, Palladian Churches, pagodas, golden baths, coruscations of solar and purple light; the red blaze of galleons aflame, the invocations of Io, Ariadne, Tristan and Isolde: all these metaphors of sublimity, culled from the stock-in-trade of French poets and romanciers, signify the pandemic vanity and vertiginous confusion of Fawns. When the adulterers stay on at Matcham, they offer as their cover-story that they intend to travel the next day to visit the nearby cathedral; their mendacity reduces the religious edifice to one more image in the narcissistic passion that they refer to as “sacred.” Of the novel’s moral catalyst, the shopkeeper, I note here that he bears only the simple figures of verbal slight and casts them off as soon as he comes into contact with Maggie, for whom he is “kind.” The simple adjective by itself suffices. Following up her fateful meeting with that gentleman, Maggie, as we have seen, comes to grasp her milieu as a “figural void,” a place divested of the dissimulating motifs of unchecked desire.

Harold Bloom, in The Western Canon, argues that what distinguishes great literature from mediocre and literature generally from all other species of language is its “uncanniness” (3), a phenomenon linked, in Bloom’s thinking, with the sublime and necessarily at odds with the moral. When we read a masterwork, Bloom argues, we go “from strangeness to strangeness” (3). James, in The Golden Bowl, makes us cognizant of the fact (which Bloom never admits) that morality is just as strange as beauty – perhaps even a great deal stranger. (Keeping faith with a married partner is much more contrary to the human being than taking advantage promiscuously of sexual happenstance.) Let us remember, in closing, the Prince’s sense of the shop-windows in the novel’s opening scene. These transparencies, like the rules of faith, obligation, and reciprocity, stand between the libidinous ego and the immediate exercise of that ego’s will. Restraint is strange to the natural, the predatory, being. For the Prince, at that moment, the window can only serve as a reminder of the metal cages that clatter down at the turn of a crank to keep out thieves at night. But does that association not imply that, deep down, he knows his own thievish – antinomian – character? The contemporary School of Resentment, as Bloom names it, certainly rebels against beauty, just as he says it does; but it rebels equally against morality (despite its own language being righteously moral), which is why no contemporary critic of James finds anything supportive to say about Maggie, la Principessa, née Verver. Defend marriage against adultery? Acknowledge the relevance of Hebrew morality to the postmodern present moment? Admit that a dead white male got something right? But I cede the last word to James himself, quoting again from his judgment of Flaubert: “To count out the moral element in one’s appreciation of an artistic total is exactly the same as it would be (if the total were a poem) to eliminate all the words in three syllables… [a moral element] is in reality simply a part of the essential richness of inspiration” (64, 61).

Tom Bertonneau’s article on The Golden Bowl, a companion piece to his analysis of James’ The Bostonians in Anthropoetics I, 1, was written for a collection of essays on American literature. Matt Schneider’s text is a selection from the book he is currently finishing on the Beatles and the lyric tradition. Richard van Oort’s study of Coriolanus is adapted from a term paper for the GA seminar in Spring 1997. Stacey Meeker’s article on Richard Rorty and utopia is adapted from a seminar paper.

About our Contributors

Tom Bertonneau, an original member of the GA seminar, received his Ph.D. from UCLA in Comparative Literature in 1990. His dissertation applied GA to the study of the modern epic: William Carlos Williams’ Paterson and Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés…” Since then he has published and presented papers on Williams, Wallace Stevens, Charles Olson, and other American authors, as well as on theoretical topics (and science fiction). Tom has also written for Heterodoxy, Chronicles, Academic Questions, and National Review, and is well known in Michigan for his controversial writings on college English teaching. He is Executive Director of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.

Matthew Schneider, also a founding member of the GA seminar (who has managed to attend some portion of the seminar every year it has been given) holds an MA from Chicago and received his PhD in English from UCLA in 1991. The author of Original Ambivalence: Violence and Autobiography in Thomas De Quincey (Peter Lang, 1995), Schneider has also published articles on Jane Austen, John Keats, and critical theory. He is associate professor of English and Chair of Literature at Chapman University (Orange, California).

Richard van Oort is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of California, Irvine. He is writing a dissertation on comedy and originary aesthetics. His most recent publication is “Three Models of Fiction: The Logical, the Phenomenological, and the Anthropological (Searle, Ingarden, Gans)” which appears in the 1998 summer issue of New Literary History.

Stacey Meeker, a member of the Anthropoetics Editorial Board, holds an M.A. in French from the University of Kansas. She is currently working on a doctoral dissertation on Marcel Proust at UCLA.