James's Text Research Articles

The Drama of Reference in James's "The Golden Bowl"

miliar, realistic world of the novel of manners, a world in which the obscurity of the dialogue results only from the characters' avoidance of the vulgar and the obvious. Such a reading assumes that the novel operates within a fixed ontology that embraces the objects referred to in the text and the selves who discuss these objects. In William's quotation from the outraged readers (and have done with it), the pronoun it stands for an entity that exists independently of language, an entity that could be discussed clearly in another language. In the reading that I propose, the central drama of The Golden Bowl-and a crucial dimension of the Major Phase-is the drama of reference, that is, the designation of an extra-linguistic entity and speculation on the nature of this entity. Since reference is a complicated philosophical issue which has only begun to surface in literary debates, I shall limit my theoretical discussion and concentrate on the role of reference in James's text. His novel illustrates the value of reference for literary criticism better than do abstract generalizations.2 My essay examines the role of reference in the two most important domains of representation for the text: dialogue, where the question emerges most clearly, and the presentation of the individual's experience, where I discuss stylistic features and their consequences for the reading of character.