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casparb's review against another edition
an amazing little narrative this one seems to come up all the time in crit theory, Derrida talks a bunch about it, it's huge for Plath, & recently Ngai has been using it in an AMAZING essay in Theory of the Gimmick (which she claims took her twenty years to write). I LOVEd James' style already but I think Ngai's reading just elevates this
also such a beautiful & delicate & amusing! way of exploring queer relationships
also such a beautiful & delicate & amusing! way of exploring queer relationships
nanamsm's review against another edition
quero ler de uma vez só em algum momento, não estava conseguindo me concentrar
mwevelan's review against another edition
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
An introspective look at what it means to really live one’s life.
cvall96's review
5.0
Absolute perfection. All atmosphere—one of anguish, of the frozen inability to let your body slip into that painful freefall: Risk, Love, Beauty, Change—call it what you will. Lord knows we've spent ages trying to figure out whatever the hell it is—and we *still* haven't gotten to the bottom of it. It's about radically staking out that Truth (you know the one) which is all we long for in this world, but of which we are terminally afraid, and which (James suggests) we will all go to our graves having neither exhausted nor known.
"There was something, it seemed to him, that the wrong word would bring down on his head, something that would so at least ease off his tension. But he wanted not to speak the wrong word; that would make everything ugly."
To make love, to make art, to write a novel—these are really all the same project: the doomed-to-fail search of "the lost stuff of consciousness," around which we're all fated to swirl. James's anguish is like on another dimension; how much this man must have suffered. . .
"There was something, it seemed to him, that the wrong word would bring down on his head, something that would so at least ease off his tension. But he wanted not to speak the wrong word; that would make everything ugly."
To make love, to make art, to write a novel—these are really all the same project: the doomed-to-fail search of "the lost stuff of consciousness," around which we're all fated to swirl. James's anguish is like on another dimension; how much this man must have suffered. . .
cattytrona's review against another edition
Nasty, cruel story (complimentary). Builds with a real urgency and fear, that make it feel full of life, despite the point being the emptiness . James is so good at stillness and silence.
mariafernandagama's review
5.0
This story has echoed in me another brilliant short story that I love dearly, and that has moved me to tears like no other story has ever since I first read it many years ago: "Rothschild's Violin", by Tchekhov. Although they have very different premises, I feel that they both have a similar vein that explores themes that never fail to strike a chord with me: loss, regret, and that terrible feeling that maybe once you held something really special in your hands, but that somehow it slipped from your fingers and now you're destined to feel the lack of it forever. Of course I loved this story. How could I not? Maybe it takes a little while to get going - I'll admit it was difficult to keep engaged with it at the beginning, but I'm glad I have stuck with it, for I have been well repaid. I have the impression I'll revisit it from time to time, and that pieces of it will pop up in my mind when I least expect it. I'm looking forward to that.
capodoglio's review against another edition
4.0
The Jamesian Reread #1
Jamesian studies in my department were so strong that three courses of my curriculum dealt with Henry James, of which one was monographic and a second analyzed American history and institutions through the works of the James Bros. (I shan’t dwell). As a consequence I developed a barely-concealed and equally strong dislike for the novelist. I still can’t stand his novels, and some of his novellas. On the other hand, years afterwards I still maintain a fond memory about his short stories. Which brings me to the current and long-postponed re-read.
James was an American master of the short story, the worthy heir of Poe and Hawthorne. His stories, besides, have the not secondary quality of offering the complexities and subtleties of his prose in a manageable measure. The Beast on the Jungle, for instance, was conceived and composed at the same time as James’s celebrated major phase, and published in 1903, the same year as The Ambassadors. The story shares the source of inspiration, and has many themes in common, with the first novel of the trilogy to be published, The Wings of the Dove (more on this point later on).
It is the story of John Marcher, a man who has “the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen” to him (7): a mysterious event he refers to as the Beast in the Jungle of his life. During a visit to an English aristocratic country house he is re-acquainted with May Bartram, a young woman he had met ten years before in Naples. On that occasion he had told her about the Beast. As they talk about it, May confesses she has never forgotten his revelation, and proposes to ‘watch’ with him the coming of “the thing”.
The tale accordingly becomes breathy, as it spans the years of their lives: a lifelong wait for something momentous that never happens. Through James’ prose, a magnificence of sensitivity and delicacy, it becomes clear that while May’s unswerving dedication implies deeper feelings than the friendship they develop, John’s self-obsession prevents him from finally seeing beyond curiosity and firmness. The ‘watch’ is his only concern, and it makes him incapable of serious commitment: “a man of feeling doesn’t cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt” (13).
As Leon Edel has pointed out, the inspiration for the story, the ‘seed’ to use the author’s terminology, was autobiographical. James had been deeply affected by the death of his friend and fellow novelist Miss Woolson, who killed herself in 1894 while in Venice. James was fond of her, but had not understood the real nature of her feelings towards him. So deep was the mark that the event left on him that nearly a decade later he adapted it as the climax of The Wings of the Dove. In the novel as in the real event, the heroine dies alone while her friend is in London. For The Beast in the Jungle, though, written in four mornings just after The Wings of the Dove was finished, James decided to give the characters the chance for a final confrontation before the death of the woman—what he did not have with Miss Woolson.
At this point in his career, James had refined his prose into an instrument capable of recording and rendering the subtlest emotion, the least variation of a feeling, with a precision that makes my jaw loose and my brows fly. James’ late style is both infamously convoluted and greatly admired for its psychological accuracy, “closer to Joyce than to Balzac” * as one of my professors used to say—before adding that readings of James as a Modernist ante-litteram only make sense in retrospect, from our point of view. The truth is James hated Modernism. Yet, at sixty, he anticipated it with his 20th century trilogy, his major phase according to F.O. Mathiessen’s career-defining definition. And, guess what, his short stories are only 40 pages long rather than 400.
Besides, there’s more. James’ skills in weaving his texts is always impressive. One example among many would be the many references to the seasons, starting with the characters’ own names: May, Marcher (and if you think James wasn’t prone to play with names, you’ve never read such works as The Beldonald Holbein). When Marcher and Bartram meet at the country house it is autumn. Their final encounters at her London house, instead, take place in the spring: “she was presented to him in that long fresh light of waning April days which affects us often with a sadness sharper than the greyest hours of autumn” (26). In between, the cold and sterile winter that is their entire acquaintance, a long wait for a blooming that never takes place—not even belatedly. And then there’s the Jamesian touch, the tiny detail that goes unnoticed at first reading: the country house where they meet is called Weatherend.
The Beast in the Jungle is justly held as one of James’s finest short stories. It is NOT, however, a ghost story, not even one without a ghost. James called it one of his 'ghostly tales', which is quite another matter, since he was more interested in the psychology of a character convinced of the existence of supernatural presences, than in ghosts per se. And the guy knew what he was about.
* The laborious progress from Naturalism to Modernism reminds me of Pirandello, who similarly moved from Verga to Ionesco.
Jamesian studies in my department were so strong that three courses of my curriculum dealt with Henry James, of which one was monographic and a second analyzed American history and institutions through the works of the James Bros. (I shan’t dwell). As a consequence I developed a barely-concealed and equally strong dislike for the novelist. I still can’t stand his novels, and some of his novellas. On the other hand, years afterwards I still maintain a fond memory about his short stories. Which brings me to the current and long-postponed re-read.
James was an American master of the short story, the worthy heir of Poe and Hawthorne. His stories, besides, have the not secondary quality of offering the complexities and subtleties of his prose in a manageable measure. The Beast on the Jungle, for instance, was conceived and composed at the same time as James’s celebrated major phase, and published in 1903, the same year as The Ambassadors. The story shares the source of inspiration, and has many themes in common, with the first novel of the trilogy to be published, The Wings of the Dove (more on this point later on).
It is the story of John Marcher, a man who has “the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen” to him (7): a mysterious event he refers to as the Beast in the Jungle of his life. During a visit to an English aristocratic country house he is re-acquainted with May Bartram, a young woman he had met ten years before in Naples. On that occasion he had told her about the Beast. As they talk about it, May confesses she has never forgotten his revelation, and proposes to ‘watch’ with him the coming of “the thing”.
The tale accordingly becomes breathy, as it spans the years of their lives: a lifelong wait for something momentous that never happens. Through James’ prose, a magnificence of sensitivity and delicacy, it becomes clear that while May’s unswerving dedication implies deeper feelings than the friendship they develop, John’s self-obsession prevents him from finally seeing beyond curiosity and firmness. The ‘watch’ is his only concern, and it makes him incapable of serious commitment: “a man of feeling doesn’t cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt” (13).
As Leon Edel has pointed out, the inspiration for the story, the ‘seed’ to use the author’s terminology, was autobiographical. James had been deeply affected by the death of his friend and fellow novelist Miss Woolson, who killed herself in 1894 while in Venice. James was fond of her, but had not understood the real nature of her feelings towards him. So deep was the mark that the event left on him that nearly a decade later he adapted it as the climax of The Wings of the Dove. In the novel as in the real event, the heroine dies alone while her friend is in London. For The Beast in the Jungle, though, written in four mornings just after The Wings of the Dove was finished, James decided to give the characters the chance for a final confrontation before the death of the woman—what he did not have with Miss Woolson.
At this point in his career, James had refined his prose into an instrument capable of recording and rendering the subtlest emotion, the least variation of a feeling, with a precision that makes my jaw loose and my brows fly. James’ late style is both infamously convoluted and greatly admired for its psychological accuracy, “closer to Joyce than to Balzac” * as one of my professors used to say—before adding that readings of James as a Modernist ante-litteram only make sense in retrospect, from our point of view. The truth is James hated Modernism. Yet, at sixty, he anticipated it with his 20th century trilogy, his major phase according to F.O. Mathiessen’s career-defining definition. And, guess what, his short stories are only 40 pages long rather than 400.
Besides, there’s more. James’ skills in weaving his texts is always impressive. One example among many would be the many references to the seasons, starting with the characters’ own names: May, Marcher (and if you think James wasn’t prone to play with names, you’ve never read such works as The Beldonald Holbein). When Marcher and Bartram meet at the country house it is autumn. Their final encounters at her London house, instead, take place in the spring: “she was presented to him in that long fresh light of waning April days which affects us often with a sadness sharper than the greyest hours of autumn” (26). In between, the cold and sterile winter that is their entire acquaintance, a long wait for a blooming that never takes place—not even belatedly. And then there’s the Jamesian touch, the tiny detail that goes unnoticed at first reading: the country house where they meet is called Weatherend.
The Beast in the Jungle is justly held as one of James’s finest short stories. It is NOT, however, a ghost story, not even one without a ghost. James called it one of his 'ghostly tales', which is quite another matter, since he was more interested in the psychology of a character convinced of the existence of supernatural presences, than in ghosts per se. And the guy knew what he was about.
* The laborious progress from Naturalism to Modernism reminds me of Pirandello, who similarly moved from Verga to Ionesco.