ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

and the objective world. Instead, Maggie’s epistemological problem is a problem of
thought—set between the mind and itself.
Having established the new prominence of Maggie’s thoughts, Part First
concludes with a series of statements on what will not take place in Book Second.
First, Fanny declares, this will not be a tale of actions: “Nothing—in spite of
everything—will happen. Nothing has happened. Nothing is happening” (294). This
declaration goes beyond a euphemism demanding silence regarding a sexual act. The
Golden Bowl seems to parody at this moment, through Fanny’s mouth, its length, its
structure, its plotting. In a Jamesian novel of the major phase, Fanny says, echoing
any number of bored readers, nothing happens. If you expect that the novel is about to
get moving, for action to speed it to a denouement, you will be disappointed. But
Fanny goes further still. What action that seemed to occur in Book First did not, in
fact, occur. Small wonder that so many readers seem to regard Book First as mere
prelude in Maggie’s story, then, when the novel’s ficelle herself declares Book First
null and void. Having erased both past and future, Fanny is still unsatisfied: not only
does The Golden Bowl lack past and a future, but it lacks a present as well. One of the
classical epistemological problems associated with modernism, and particularly with
stream of consciousness technique—the problem for the reader of determining what
is happening in the novel’s objective world when that knowledge is filtered through a
particular character’s consciousness—is also null and void. There is no present action
to know. Indeed, Fanny declares, “We know nothing on earth” (294). Taken directly,
of course, this series of nothings is merely a vow of silence between the Assinghams,
and Bob himself points this out—nothing is happening, Bob says, “For us” (294). We
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