The Function of Slang in the Dramatic Poetry of "The Golden Bowl"

Abstract

IN The Golden Bowl, Henry James demonstrates the mastery of his technique by presenting polished solution of problem which vexes every serious novelist: how to construct narrative which will not display the marks of craftsman's tools. The usual affecta. tion of omniscience has sometimes seemed to novelist like hood, assumed for the sake of anonymity, which has the of obscuring the vision; so he abandons his story to single observer in an autobiographical novel, or interpolates narrator as his agent. After disengaging himself from the scene with greater and greater success in earlier novels, James, in The Golden Bowl, entrusts the entire exhibition of his own manifold delicate things, the shy and illusive, the inscrutable, the indefinable . . .' to his characters. The effect of representation, [his] irrepressible ideal, is to reach the reader through a consciousness highly susceptible of registration, rather than through the mere muffled majesty of irresponsible 'authorship.'' The author leaves the stage, and the novel is in the hands of his actors, from whom directly come those perceptions and judgments which are to be as much part of the fiction as the events. The novelist allows himself only play.