The centrality of consciousness:

‘O the mind, mind has mountains’

Here again is the sentence from ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ quoted near the end of last week’s article:

“What Marcher was at all events conscious of was in the first place that the image of scarred passion presented to him was conscious too - of something that profaned the air; and in the second that, roused, startled, shocked, he was yet the next moment looking after it, as it were, with envy.”

Style and command

It is appropriate that the word ‘conscious’ occurs twice here, because it is precisely ‘consciousness’ that holds the key to James’ later style.

''How well Lawrence expresses the conflict of motives and emotions occurring in Ursula’s mind. His prose explanation helps us to understand it, but it is through his poetic ability that we feel the intensity of her passion, the anguish of her confusion''

In ‘The Portrait of a Lady’, written over twenty years before ‘The Beast’, James’ gracefully expansive style and his command of social context made him seem the natural successor to Jane Austen. But even here James had begun to turn his attention from the outer drama of events to the inner drama of the mind. In the great 42nd chapter Isabel Archer sits far into the night reviewing her marriage to Osmond and realising the full horror of its consequences. This awakening of Isabel’s consciousness as to the meaning of choices already made, actions already taken, is the actual denouement of the novel. Its tragic climax thus takes place within the mind of the heroine: “Nothing could be a pleasure to her now; how could anything be a pleasure to a woman who knew that she had thrown away her life?”

Centripetal

The style here is straightforward enough. But as James developed his view of the paramountcy of the consciousness as the source of moral value in his stories, he found that charting the complex territory of the mind necessitated a corresponding development of style. In the process his style itself grew increasingly complex.

And this is where James played a pioneering role. Previously the novelist’s approach to character had been, as it were, centripetal, presenting it from the perspective of the external world which was the novel’s traditional milieu. With James the portrayal of character became centrifugal, the character’s own perspective of events, its own understanding of reality providing the main thrust of the story. This was how James conceived of his key characters as being ‘vessels of consciousness’.

Until then the consciousness had been primarily the domain of poetry, particularly with the dawn of the Romantic era ushered in by Wordsworth. We have referred before to the latter’s proclamation of ‘the mind of man’ as being ‘the main region and haunt of my song.’ And it is significant that his long autobiographical poem, ‘The Prelude’, is sub-titled ‘Growth of a Poet’s Mind.’ When the modern era started in 1914 and individual disorientation set in, poets like Eliot led the way in delving further into the territory of the consciousness. Thus Prufrock with his ‘hundred indecisions, visions and revisions’ and Gerontion with ‘the chilled delirium of a thousand small deliberations.’

But now a new generation of novelists began to venture into the realm of the mind. And it is as the minds of their characters, rather than their actions, came to the fore that these novelists had to face the challenge implied by the words of the Hopkins sonnet that ended our previous article:

“O the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall; Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne’er hung there.”

Event and action

This was an entirely new creative challenge. It was as if the novelist had left behind the level plain of event and action and was now gazing into the Grand Canyon of the consciousness. The exploration of this previously ‘unfathomed’ territory represented not only an imaginative challenge, but a technical one. In meeting it the major novelists devised their individual techniques, ranging from in-depth soul-searching as in DH Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’ to impressionistic stream of consciousness as in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’. Here is an example of the first:

“Mostly her heart was closed in this hidden, unconscious strain of contemptuous ridicule. She thought she loved, she thought she was full of love. This was her idea of herself. But the strange brightness of her presence, a marvellous radiance of intrinsic vitality, was a luminousness of supreme repudiation, nothing but repudiation. Yet, at moments, she yielded and softened, she wanted pure love, only pure love. This other, this state of constant, unfailing repudiation, was a strain, a suffering also. A terrible desire for pure love overcame her again.”

How well Lawrence expresses the conflict of motives and emotions occurring in Ursula’s mind. His prose explanation helps us to understand it, but it is through his poetic ability that we feel the intensity of her passion, the anguish of her confusion. And here is an example of the second:

“She had reached the Park gates. She stood for a moment, looking at the omnibuses in Piccadilly. She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young, at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time she was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxicabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had that feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fraulein Daniels gave them she could not think.”

Here again, it is Woolf’s prose that enables us to follow Clarissa’s thought process, but it is her poetry that captures for us the sheer impressionism of her reverie.

Mental exploration

What does this demonstrate? That if prose is effectively to express the workings of the consciousness it has to borrow from poetry? Undoubtedly, but conversely too, surely, that poetry for the same reason needs to be buttressed by prose. The kind of mental exploration seen in the above passages could not have been achieved by poetry alone. Nor could prose have brought it off without resorting to the poetic.

And this is where we come back to the later style of James as featured in ‘The Beast in the Jungle.’ Let’s look at the dawning of Marcher’s consciousness regarding the significance of his fellow mourner’s expression as described shortly after the sentence quoted at the start of this article:

“He had seen OUTSIDE of his life, not learned it within, the way a woman was mourned when she had been loved for herself: such was the force of his conviction of the meaning of the stranger’s face, which still flared for him as a smoky torch. It hadn’t come to him, this knowledge, on the wings of experience; it had touched him, jostled him, upset him, with the disrespect of chance, the insolence of accident. Now that the illumination had begun, however, it blazed to the zenith, and what he presently stood there gazing at was the sounded void of his life.”

Smoky torch

The scales have finally fallen from Marcher’s eyes. His great expectation of being marked out for something special is fulfilled in the shocking realisation that nothing is ever to happen to him due to his failure of love. The illustration of the smoky torch works as in poetry to suggest the unsteady light in which he begins to make out his destiny. But it is the elaborate prose, with its qualifications and regressions, that captures the way his mind gropes towards the terrible conclusion. Once it is reached poetry lights it up with the returning image of the torch now ‘blazing to the zenith’

Thus, with its overarching symbolism of the beast as the destiny finally to devour Marcher, with its nightmarish revelation of the cruelty caused and the self-defeat inflicted by self-love, ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ is a moral fable that has the power associated with great poetry. But it is a poetic effect that could only have been achieved by means of the unique prose of James’ late style.