Narration and the Face of Anxiety in Henry James’ “the Beast in the Jungle”

Abstract

In his fascinating essay on James’ stories, Tzvetan Todorov says, “The secret of the Jamesian narrative is the existence of an essential secret, of an unnamed, of an absent and overpowering force. The Jamesian movement is double and apparently contradictory ...: on the one hand, he deploys all his forces to attain the hidden essence, to unveil the secret object; on the other hand, he endlessly distances the object, protects it until the end of the story, if not beyond .... The essential is absent, and absence is essential”.² I would reformulate Todorov’s narratological statement in philosophical terms. The unnamed is a hole in the metaphysics of substance that is experienced by the Jamesian subject as a lack. This is Jamesian bewilderment, a term he explains in the Preface to The Princess Casamassima: “... if we were never bewildered there would never be a story to tell about us. We should partake of the superior nature of the all-knowing immortals whose annals are dreadfully dull so long as flurried humans are not, for the positive relief of the bored Olympians, mixed up with them”.³ In “The Beast in the Jungle”, we find a character who tries to write himself out of bewilderment, out of the human lack, to abstract himself from time, otherness and subjectivity.

“Anxiety in the face of death is anxiety ‘in the face’ of that potentiality-for-Being which is one’s ownmost....”¹ Martin Heidegger