The Art of Not Saying It: Joyce and James on the Work of Not Knowing

James Joyce wrote Dubliners in fifteen short stories, the longest of which runs to forty pages. Henry James wrote The Golden Bowl in five hundred. Joyce stripped his sentences down to almost nothing. James, who dictated his late novels to a secretary, built sentences that run for paragraphs, qualified and re-qualified, pronouns drifting free of their antecedents, meaning floating just out of reach. In method, the two writers could hardly be further apart. They are working the same territory.

Both books are about what people choose not to know. Both are built on the gap between what characters understand and what they are willing to say. Both locate their deepest moral argument in that gap, in the question of whether not-knowing is cowardice or wisdom, paralysis or survival. Read together, through John Banville’s Rebind commentary on Dubliners and Garth Greenwell’s on The Golden Bowl, they make an argument about human consciousness that neither book makes alone.