Risking the Cracks: The Mystic Self in Henry James's The Golden Bowl

Whether or not he had any direct exposure to mystical texts, it seems clear that he was exploring, in his own genre, some of the same issues with which mystics grappled in theirs: in particular, the sense of "secret" knowledge that is not accessible to language but which is experienced (if not revealed) in an ineffable exchange between lovers. In conceiving of such an exchange, James repeats and in some cases reworks, in his own, secular context, the Christian mystic's attack on the conventional understanding of identity. The Christian mystic explicitly works against the defining characteristics of identity: instead of seeking self-determination, self-sufficiency, and the rights and powers of individual will, she seeks to empty herself of "self" in order to be filled with God. The mystic soul, writes thirteenth-century mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg, must "love the naughting, / And flee the self" (17). The mystic actively seeks possession by another - to be drained of her will, her identity, even her life. In a vision with clear vampiric overtones, Mechthild offers Christ, in the form of "a bleeding lamb," her own heart's blood: "the pure Lamb laid itself on its own image in the stall of her body and sucked her heart with its tender lips. The more it sucked the more she gave herself to it" (36). But this does not make the mystic simply a "vampire's" eager "victim," caught up in helpless, masochistic abjection. She also seeks actively to possess and absorb her beloved. Hadewijch, describing the joy of possessing her divine lover, writes: "While desire pours out and pleasure drinks, / The soul consumes what belongs to it in love / And sinks with frenzy into Love's fruition. . . . Thus is the loving soul well fed by Love alone" (qtd. in Jantzen 136). In a frenzy, she drinks and feeds on her lover, and finds "fruition" in this consumption. Again, in one of Angela of Foligno's visions, Christ thrusts Angela's "spiritual sons" into the bleeding wound in his side: "The redness of his blood colored the lips of some, and the whole face of others" (246). If the mystic is drained by her lover, she also drinks his blood, sipping from his "sacred fount" as she sips from the communion cup, transforming him into herself.

Rather than a tale of the vicious violation of the boundaries of the self (like that the narrator of Fount sets up with his everlasting "poor Briss"), the mystics tell of a loving self who is defined through a passionate, joyful relationship of exchange with her beloved. The mystic defines her self not as fixed and inviolable but as fluid: she overflows the boundaries of the self in order to become part of her lover, and this "flow" is both spiritual (intangible, in the "soul") and physical, in and of the body.(4) Thus Hadewijch writes of

how wondrously sweet the beloved dwells in the other beloved, and how thoroughly one dwells in the other, so that neither one nor the other knows themselves apart. But they possess and rejoice in each other mouth in mouth, heart in heart, body in body, soul in soul, and one sweet divine nature flows through them both, and both are one through themselves, yet remain themselves, and will always remain so. (qtd. in Vanderauwera 194)