ABSTRACT
The power of substitution has turned life into art, and indeed into the cultural artefacts which are to embellish American City. Thus the triumph of life also points the way to the triumph of death. For death itself is subject to arrangement and codification, its shadow present from the earliest moment of The Golden Bowl, as when Maggie suggests to the Prince, ever so lightly, the equation of burial and American City. So too the victory of `love' tears the word from the context in which it poses a danger, reshaping the patterns of desire. These transformations run in double harness until at the end they pull apart, in a terrifying sense of consequence.
