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· 33 ·· CHAPTER 1 · Writing Queerness: Zeugma and Syllepsis in The Golden Bowl Henry James’s style is perhaps nowhere more importunate than in his 1905 novel The Golden Bowl. The novel’s redoubtable linguistic texture—especially the densely metaphorical language of narrator and characters alike—and the formalism of its structure can cause one momentarily to forget its startlingly lurid premise: its plot has a billionaire and his daughter (Adam and Maggie Verver) each marry other people, the better to sustain their own incestuous relationship. Or, from the perspective of the victims, a couple (Prince Amerigo and Charlotte Stant), whose poverty leaves them unable to marry each other, marry instead a billionaire and his daughter—partly for the money but partly to transform their commonplace affair into one bordering on incest: marriage allows the Prince to have sex with his wife’s stepmother, and Charlotte, with her husband’s son-in-law. (Were gay marriage able to make such things possible , one might be tempted to embrace it.) The affair, however, soon gives way to—or reveals the story as always having been—a closet drama. The novel’s plot often boils down to the striving of variously embattled characters to refrain from speaking of what they know (about, in particular, what others know)—and to the implications of that effort in the registers of desire and power. Betrayal refers not principally to the violation of marriage vows but to the “giving away” of knowledge: betrayed spouses are of less interest to the story than betrayed secrets. The text could have been subtitled “Epistemology of the Closet,” and its plot—insofar as it has one—is a paranoid one, a “vicious circle” centered on the unspeakable. The recessive, elliptical quality of James’s late style makes it particularly well suited to such a story; however, the relation of plot to style extends beyond any accord between medium and message. In a novel focused largely on the deciphering of secrets and on the consequences—thrills, terrors, pleasures—of their detection or betrayal, the potential for the 34 WRITING QUEERNESS characters’ predicaments to redound on a reader faced with the novel ’s linguistic complexity is one of many ways that the novel challenges boundaries and forms of differentiation upon which meaning—and style’s instrumental relation to plot or sense—rests. Most generally, it is less the case that the style befits the plot of The Golden Bowl than that its style simply is its plot. If I argue for the queerness of this overlap, it is, in part, to counteract a traditional reading of James’s style as an evasion of sexuality.1 In this view, the complexity of the novel’s style compensates for an author whose sexual inhibition left him no more able to represent sex in general than to express “his” sexuality in particular. The relation of style to sex in The Golden Bowl, however, is not that of sublimation. Reading the novel as evidence of sexual inhibition is dissatisfying not only because it must proceed by means crudely psychologistic and reductive, and not only because such a psychologizing reading implicitly discounts the more or less brutal, more or less state-sponsored sanctions levied against any expressed desire outside procreative heterosexuality that greeted James’s contemporaries—and, to a slightly lesser extent, still greet our own—by understanding sexual reticence as a mere (pathological ) reflex of individual psychology. Such a reading is dissatisfying also because the novel is not, finally, sexually inhibited. To argue for the novel ’s “sublimation” of sexuality into style is to perform for oneself much of the diagnosed sublimation—while knowingly tittering at an author who could inadvertently name a character Fanny Assingham. The passages in The Wings of the Dove about Densher’s all-but-physical pain at finding himself aroused without sexual release are almost matched here by the explicitness—the narrator’s, Fanny’s, and Maggie’s—about the affair, for instance, and by moments such as the discovery, by the guests at Fawns, of Maggie and Charlotte kissing to “make up,” which leads them to separate “as if they had been discovered in some absurdity.” “Any spoken or laughed comment,” the text continues, “could be kept from sounding vulgar only by sounding, beyond any permitted measure, intelligent.”2 The intelligence threatening to peep out bears, most immediately, on Maggie’s specific grounds for resentment, but the alternative proposed relies on a formulatable sense not only of the affair but of...

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