ABSTRACT
If we wish to try to measure the conflict between dark tonalities and romance in the conclusion of The Golden Bowl we can see both the abyss of discrepancy and the clear perfection of formal unity. Nowhere else in James are questions of void and value, of what may define the civilized, so fully integrated into the literary form. The loss and the triumph are fused, are part of each other, logically, emotionally, narratively. But we are still free to ask whether such a fusion creates an intolerable imaginative conflict. Such a demand is to live with the triumph and terror, to see them fully in their incompatibility and to feel the pull between them. The question is whether this falsifies James's project of formal arrangement, by which the complete effect of the novel is to be apprehended, and whether `the whole chain of relation and responsibility' is stretched beyond endurance. Is contradiction so deeply part of the Bowl's character as to create what Paul de Man would have called an `unreadable' novel?
