The Golden Bowl, A/theology, and Nothing

In God there is neither being nor the act-of-being, because nothing is formally present in both the cause and that of which it is the cause.

--Meister Eckhart

Nothing is without ground. Being and ground: the same. Being as grounding has no ground, but as the abyss plays that game which as mission, plays to us Being and ground.

--Martin Heidegger

"Know at least something? Oh about him I can't think. He's beyond," said Fanny Assingham.

"Then do you yourself know?"

"How much--?"

"How much."

"How far--?"

"How far."

"I've told you before that I know absolutely nothing."

"Well--that's what I know," said the Princess.

--Henry James, The Golden Bowl

Henry James's The Golden Bowl is a novel about knowledge and a novel that refuses to be known. Any traditional interpretation will necessarily overstate the coherence of a novel critics have placed at the "very limits of novel form" (Bradbury 124). James himself, for example, characterizes it by saying, "[t]he Prince, in the first half of the book, virtually sees and knows and makes out [. . .] everything that concerns us [. . .] the function of the Princess, in the remainder, matches exactly with his" (GB 20-21). But the novel is not this neatly contained. The experience of reading is more one of questions, confusions, and frustrated expectations, as we, to put it in the language of the novel, constantly try to locate just "where" we are. Critics have continually tried to describe the way The Golden Bowl slips out from under them: "Its insanity is beautifully rational. Like an intricate mathematical proof correct in every detail except for the assumption upon which it is based" (Sears 181).

In addition to the novel's difficulty and its unknowability, its title, central metaphor, language, and themes lead to questions of epistemology and theology. My aim is to allow theology and the novel to co-exist and circle around each other, not trying to "explain" anything, but seeing how they interact both "in" the novel and intertextually. All traditional interpretations are, in a sense, theological, for as Lévi-Strauss (and then Derrida) says, to be theological we do not need a God, only a totalizing force of some kind. ¹ But if the impulse to restore order--to find a pattern beneath the chaos--is a theological one, perhaps we can also look to theology to resist this rage for order.

The constant tension between the quest for knowledge and the denial of it is one of the things that gives the novel its theological feeling. On a more literal level, the book also invites religious or theological interpretations: the father is named Adam and wears the robes of a saint, Maggie is compared to the Virgin, and religious language is used throughout the novel: Amerigo and Charlotte speak of the "sacred," characters seek "salvation," the ultimate action of the book is a "sacrifice." The bowl itself echoes the Bible, ² the Holy Grail, and the rituals of Mass and Communion.

So let us start with the golden bowl. An object? A book? A collection of words? A metaphor? A symbol? The title of a book? What does it "contain"? Critics often point to the bowl as a symbol of the multiple relationships between the four main characters. They point out that to outward appearances it is a beautifully gilded crystal cup, and yet beneath the gold lies a deep flaw that each character either symbolically sees or can potentially become aware of. They point to the tension between the square that the four main characters form and the perfect circle that is the bowl. But more than a perfect geometric shape, the bowl forms a hermeneutic circle that denies closure. It has a deeper significance: a theological presence that is formed by negativity and a central nothingness. This negativity and nothingness is seen in the way that each character appears to...