The Dramatics of the Unspoken and Unspeakable in James's "The Beast in the Jungle"

Abstract

The Dramatics of the Unspoken and Unspeakable in James's "The Beast in the Jungle" by Herbert Perluck, Brooklyn College Everything fell together, confessed, explained, overwhelmed; leaving him most of all stupefied at the blindness he had cherished. The fate he had been marked for he had met with a vengeance—he had emptied the cup to the lees; he had been the man of his lime, the man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened. Thai was ihc rare stroke—that was his visitation. These Unes in the conclusion of Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle" are almost invariably taken as an obvious pointing of the moral of the story, a final judgment of the protagonist, John Marcher—the author's own definitive explanation of the fiction.1 The standard reading of "The Beast in the Jungle" thus sees it as involving a manifest instance of what Caroline Gordon and AUen Tate call "classical irony" (149): a predictive, gratifying reversal. Consumed by the "sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to [him]" (BJ 71), thinking of it often as a "beast" that would inevitably overwhelm him, Marcher selfishly rejects the life and love that, over a long relationship, May Bartram holds out to him. With her death his "beast" appears to spring at last, there at her graveside, or, as Marcher himself thinks, to have already sprung at their last meeting when she had reached out her hand only to sec him "but stupidly stare at the escape she offered him" (BJ 126). Here in the cemetery he recognizes, in the ravaged face of a passing stranger, the authentic and possibly healing grief that his failure to have loved now denies him. Having waited only for that "rare stroke," forthat something to "happen" in his life that would distinguish it from aU others, Marcher comes to the devastating discovery that, among men, in his time, he has been the least distinguished of all: "the man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened." In this view, James's tale about wasted opportunity and aUenating egotism ends with the tragic self-revelation, the ironic "justice," The Henry James Review 12 (1991): 231-54 ©1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 232 The Henry James Review presumably conveyed in these culminating lines.2 Yet as morally and estheticaUy satisfying as I might want to find this version of "The Beast in the Jungle," my experience of the text as a whole works against a full acceptance. A troubling sense of an inequality or inconsistency between the manifest closure and the textual obduracies leading up to it serves, in fact, more to open the work than to close it. The prevailing interpretation seems to me too readily to allegorize a narrative that, even granting its abstractness and almost deliberate avoidance of dramatic specification, until the end strongly resists allegorical interpretation. Much of the densely textured rhetoric of implication and contradictoriness of the work, in particular the almost impenetrable conversational exchanges, simply cannnot be read in the light of its presumably obvious meaning, which possibly explains why so little of the text is ever actually adduced in the commentaries. Gordon and Tate, for example, claim that the "first important scene" does not occur until Part IV. Thus, while praising "The Beast in the Jungle" as the "greatest of the James nouvelles ... one of the great stories in the language," ihey nevertheless fault it for the overwrought, essentiaUy non-dramatic preparation of the foreground and middle passages. "It may be questioned," they write, "whether the long complication is justified, since in it nothing 'happens.'" In slighting the scenic effect, it is possible that James has violated one of his primary canons: the importance of rendition over statement." Accordingly, "The Beast in the Jungle" suffers from having "too much of the elaborate voice of James" in it, too much, recalling Edmund Wilson's phrase, of the characteristic "Jamesian gas," and thus too few reaUy "scenic" moments that might help to make the characters "visible" (150-51). Thus, for all the talk about its "greatness," "The Beast in...