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  • Baffling Doom:Dialogue, Laughter, and Comic Perception in Henry James
  • John Bruns

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 [End Page 1] 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...

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