Baffling doom: dialogue, laughter, and comic perception in Henry James.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Texas Studies in Literature and Language

Publication Date: 22-MAR-05

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For the critic, the comic in Henry James is a specific difficulty. Nearly four decades ago, Richard Poirier lamented the fact that "[t]he extraordinary amount of published criticism on the works of Henry James does not encourage the idea that the element of comedy in his novels is either strong or pervasive" (7). His book, The Comic Sense of Henry James: A Study of the Early Novels, tries to demonstrate how "attention to comic expression in James's early novels can, in fact, lead us through the language to his most vitally personal meanings" (7). As these words from the preface suggest, however, the "comic expression"--so often ignored in James criticism--is nevertheless subordinated by Poirier to other meanings, including "qualities of style" and the "psychological identity of the author" (7). In other words, the comic expression itself is not an object of study. Recognizing this, Leon Edel complained that Poirier failed "to give us a working definition of the comic sense or to attach James's comedy to a tradition" (87). Though it is true that Poirier gives little evidence to suggest that James's achievements owe anything to writers in the comic tradition--the occasional reference to Twain or Shakespeare doesn't help--it is clear that there is a definition of comedy at work in his book, one that has worked for us for years. Poirier claims that James's comedy has been ignored because it is "usually on the very surface of the action and language" (9). The assumption is obvious: comedy is superficial, and readers who disregard the superficial in favor of "the supposedly deeper realms of meaning" will necessarily overlook it (10). James's comedy, it seems, is a purloined letter, and Poirier is our Dupin.

As admirable as they are, Poirier's efforts to include the comic in the overall "meaning" of James's writings rely on the trite association of comedy with "the simplest forms of excitement and entertainment" (10), and on the assumption that James's comedy (or comedy in general, for that matter) reveals itself only at the most "obvious" moments--moments where the reader is most amused, excited, or pleased. We are led to think that a great deal of critical effort is required to encounter meaning in James, whereas very little is required to encounter, as in The Europeans, "the excitement of overhearing some of the wittiest dialogue in James's fiction" (8). The central problem, of course, is not that one has to be carefully selective when pursuing the comic in James, that one must necessarily exclude the difficult, later writings. Rather, the problem lies with the inadequacy of our definition of comedy. Ronald Wallace suspects as much in the opening pages of his book-length study of comedy in Henry James, Henry James and the Comic Form. He argues, as Lionel Trilling does in his study of E. M. Forster, that "[t]he lack of any extended critical discussion of James's comic manner and affinities with a comic tradition arises from a misunderstanding of the comic seriousness" (3). What James teaches us about his own comic sense differs little from what Bakhtin teaches us about folk humor and the carnivalesque: it may include the serious and become what Bakhtin calls "true open seriousness"--a critical philosophy that dates as far back as Socrates (Rabelais and His World, 121). "In world literature," claims Bakhtin, "there are certain works in which the two aspects, seriousness and laughter, coexist and reflect each other, and are indeed whole aspects, not separate and comic images as in the usual modern drama" (122). Here Bakhtin briefly quotes Euripides, but he will revise and expand on this idea using the work of Dostoevsky. "True open seriousness" will later be known as "reduced laughter"--a critical feature of Dostoevsky's work. It is also a critical feature of James's work, and emblematic of his comic seriousness. It's a deliberately self-critical attitude, highly expressive and uncompleted.

Borrowing from James's own comments in The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama, Ronald Wallace proposes that comic seriousness "suggests little connection with high animal spirits. It seems a matter of invention, of reflection and irony" (4). It is the middle term that I'd like to take up as important to our understanding of James's comic sense: the activity of moral reflection--a theme which I find to be thoughtfully worked out by Martha Nussbaum in her writings on James and moral philosophy, and, to a greater degree, by Bakhtin in his writings on Dostoevsky and the dialogic principle. To associate comedy with something as sober as philosophy is an admittedly odd and even deceptive critical maneuver, but what this essay will show is that, when defining James's comic sense, it is also a necessary one. "The Beast in the Jungle" is a fine starting point for two reasons: first, it has so many elements that we commonly associate with the Jamesian, not the least of which is the story's theme of the unlived life; second, and more important, the plot or action of the story is not only found in the dialogue, the plot is the dialogue. One could say that "The Beast in the Jungle" is made up of a series of conversations taking place over the span of some years. To be precise, the story is characterized by dialogue on the threshold--that is, conversation that takes place at "the gates of the other world," of another, other way of Being (Morson and Emerson, 60). John Marcher, of course, presumes there will come a moment in which he will "have got across" to the other side and discover the real truth about himself (251). That this moment never arrives--or arrives as its own failure to arrive, as a missed opportunity--is what makes "The Beast in the Jungle" so typically Jamesian. But it is also what makes the story typically Bakhtinian. In his book on Dostoevsky, Bakhtin describes the threshold moment as "the moment of crisis, the decision that changes a life (or the indecisiveness that fails to change a life, the fear to step over the threshold)" (The Dialogic Imagination, 248). John Marcher and May Bartram seem to live not in biographical time, but in threshold time. Yet the two are not always in step. Quite the opposite: Marcher and May understand the threshold in very different ways. In the broadest sense, Marcher understands it as tragic, May as carnival. Or, in more precise terms, the one sees the threshold as fate, the other as possibility. That we read James's story (and much of James in general) only from the tragic point of view and not from the carnival point of view, I argue, is the single most important obstacle to understanding James's comic sense. In this essay, I will turn an ear to Marcher and May's dialogue in search of reduced laughter, or what Martha Nussbaum calls in her essay on Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, "smiling conversation" (280)--a term which signifies both openness and flexibility (in the figure of the smile itself), as well as the absolutely essential Other and the achievement of community (in the activity of conversation). In James, reduced laughter is a means of critical reflection; it is a form-shaping, meaning-bearing attitude, and not (merely) a literalization of an expressive response ("Ha!"). This is not to say laughter is always reduced in James (it rings out quite frequently in what James called his "ugly little comedy," What Maisie Knew), but this essay asks that we understand laughter a certain way, because it seldom reaches the level or condition of being heard. If we are to understand anything about James's comic sense, it's that it is extremely quiet. So rather than associate laughter with the atmosphere of the carnival or marketplace, we might instead associate it with a certain mode of moral and philosophical reflection, one which understands that the world is essentially open and incomplete, and that we, as social beings, must remain open to others. (1)

By doing so, we will be attaching James's comic sense to the unlikely but convenient tradition of the carnivalized novel. Unlikely because critics usually associate the modern carnivalized novel with Joyce or Pynchon, with heteroglossia, excremental imagery, and orgiastic excess. Convenient because when one speaks of carnivalization in the novel, one speaks of "a vision of humanity and culture as they really are: responsible to the core, creative at every moment, and, above all, unfinalizable in their very essence" (Morson and Emerson, 90). Only a genuine appreciation of dialogue permits this vision, and it is in James that one finds this appreciation. But if, in Dostoevsky, Bakhtin finds the dialogic principle idealized, it is in James one often finds the inverse. (2) The oddness of a story like "The Beast in the Jungle" is that it dramatizes the spectacular failure of dialogue to bring about change in Marcher's consciousness, and for this reason might be misread as a striking example of how un-comic James can be. But meaning in James often finds its fullest expression in things not happening, in failures, flaws, finitude, incompleteness, and (particularly in "The Beast in the Jungle") the "tragically necessary blindness" of characters. (3) David Lodge, in his preface to The Spoils of Poynton, reminds us that James's style is "much concerned with consciousness, with representing mental acts of perception, speculation and inference" and that the typical Jamesian plot "is conveyed through the consciousness of a single character whose understanding of the actions and motives of others is necessarily limited and often unreliable" (130). For this reason, a close study of James's work means attending to hesitation, fragility, and extravagant but untimely epiphanies as bearers of meaning. That so many Jamesian characters fail to reach the heights of their potential testifies to James's persistent preoccupation with unfinalizability, responsibility, and creativity.

The focus of our attention, then, should not be Marcher's "Beast," but his dialogues with May Bartram. And although we know little about her--Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick concludes that "we are permitted, if we pay attention at all, to know that we have learned very little" about her ("The Beast in the Closet," 199)--I argue that it is possible to know as much about May's consciousness--not just what it understands but how it understands--as we know about Marcher's. We should begin by suggesting that May is something much more than a witness to Marcher's secret, a mirror to his thoughts and ideas, complicit with them in every way. Unless we do allow for her expansion, we risk losing sight of the idea that May Bartram's consciousness functions quite differently than Marcher's. May Bartram understands consciousness in terms of its potential, its freedom and openness, and (in Bakhtinian language) its unfinalizability. She struggles to baffle Marcher's doom by performing what could be called a comic reading of his predicament: there are no "Beasts"--only other people. May Bartram, if understood in the terms I set out in this essay, may be read as an ideal Jamesian agent--one whose "finely aware and richly responsible" character, whose comic distrust of falsifying abstraction, and whose gift for intimate dialogue, can shed light on other potentially ideal Jamesian agents who, for now at least, exist only in the margins of our readings. Better still, May Bartram can be our guide to a fuller understanding of what one may call comic perception in Henry James.

I

"The Beast in the Jungle" is a tale that can be summed up with any verbal formula: it is a love story, a mystery, a Freudian case study, a Hegelian fable, an illustration of Lacanian sublimation, an allegory of homosexual panic, a portrait of the philosopher's compulsion to turn life into a riddle, and so on. It is not unique in this respect. The story is a fine example of James's late style, one marked by a conscious suspension of meaning that demands "a little extra attention" of the reader (Gard, 3). The Turn of the Screw (1898) is perhaps James's most popular story in this tradition, and it's in the Preface to the New York edition of 1908 where James defines his motive for this aesthetic experiment: "it is a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation, an amusette aimed at catching those not easily caught" (120). That's us James is referring to, by the way--the readers not easily caught. Each of the narrative elements that go into James's piece of "child's play"--all of which, James tells us, were wrought with "pains, as indeed great pains were required"--are nothing more than "blanks" upon which a "created expertness" (us again) might "proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures" (123). It's no wonder that "The Beast in the Jungle"--which is, along with The Turn of the Screw and "The Figure in the Carpet," a successful experiment with this form--has been puzzled over more than any other of his works. So much so that one can't help but imagine, as Sedgwick says in reference to Lionel Croy, that "[t]he interpretive paths by which any sense is to be made ... are completely paved" (Tendencies, 79).

What I'd like to suggest is that there remains a story to be told about "The Beast in the Jungle"--a path to be paved, marked out, or traced; a different point of departure that might lead us to some fuller understanding of James's comic sense. To begin with, one might assume that there is...

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