Text and Countertext: The Golden Bowl

Abstract

The Golden Bowl, James’s last completed novel, represents the apparent triumph in his art of form as content. It is a dominion achieved, for the most part, by style. Yet both James and his heroine face at the end the painful irony that even so highly wrought a form may not be adequate to what it seeks to contain.

It helps us ever so happily to see the grave distinction between substance and form in a really wrought work of art signally break down … the sacrament of execution indissolubly marries them, and the marriage, like any other marriage, has only to be a ‘true’ one for the scandal of a breach not to show.

(Preface to The Awkward Age)