Dialogical Discourse in "The Jolly Corner": The Entrepreneur as Language and Image

Dialogical Discourse in "The Jolly Corner ": The Entrepreneur as Language and Image by Annette Larson Benert, Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales At a desperate moment in Henry James's late tale, "The JoUy Corner," the hero throws open a third-story window. Before him, "great builded voids, great crowded stiUnesses put on, often, in the heart of cities, for the smaU hours, a sort of sinister mask, and it was of this large coUective negation that Brydon presently became conscious—aU the more that the break of day was, almost incredibly, now at hand" (JC 470). As critics have recognized, the passage reflects many things—Spencer Brydon's private history and present fears, New York's public history and present style, James's own late ambivalent repatriation. I would like to suggest that the sentence embodies not only these contradictions and concerns but also their source in James's intensely serious response to the modern American scene, particularly to its principal male actors. We can best see that response, I believe, by considering the language and structure of the tale in three different ways. First, Brydon's mute appeal to the world "human actual social" and its ambiguous response (the silence, the malignancy , the dawn) participate in the complex dialogue with which the story opens and closes and that the reader more than Brydon himself can be expected to understand. James creates structurally a "conversation" that is both interpersonal and intrapsychic, a conversation that also reflects America's ongoing argument with itself. Second, the "builded voids," "crowded stillnesses," and "collective negation" imply a conflictual way of looking at the world that the reader of the tale wiU by now have come to identify with Brydon. His "charming monocle" sees America, New York, his property, his life, in terms of polarities. His is explicitly a "romantic" view that the structure of the tale, however, implicitly questions. Third, the negative imagery—void, stillness, negation—reflects not only Brydon's projection but to some extent James's own vision of his country, especially its commercial capital, at the turn of this century. We can best understand aU three, however—the dialogue, the polarities, the void—as aspects of a gendered discourse that shows more clearly than the narrative itself the possibilities America offered for masculine experience as James saw, and rejected, them. Both the stylistic complexity and the melodramatic imagery convey James's almost anguished sense of what America has, and has not, made of itself. The tale thus represents the "real," what James defines in his preface to The American as "the things we cannot possibly «orknow" (AN 31). It demands, in anthropological terms, such as those delineated by Qifford Geertz (3-30) and by James himself, a "thick" reading of the tale that goes beyond the "thinness" of the imagery and of the hero's mentality. As James's preface to The Altar of the Dead indicates, Volume 8 116 Number 2 The Henry James Review Winter, 1987 the "objective" report of a "prodigy" wiU almost certainly "run thin," whereas we "want it thick, and we get the thickness in the human consciousness that entertains and records, that amplifies and interprets it" (AN 256 xix). Particularly in the late fiction, that human consciousness must also belong to the reader. The recently translated critical insights of Mikhail Bakhtin, particularly "Discourse in the Novel," as reprinted in The Dialogic Imagination, and The Problem of Dostoyevsky' s Poetics, provide useful means to such a reading. As Bakhtin would have been quick to notice, James constructed "The JoUy Corner" in three parts, the ghost story proper providing only the second and longest. The primary or frame narrative consists of prolonged conversations between protagonist Spencer Brydon and his old friend AUce Staverton. The basic form of the tale is thus not a ghost story but a dialogue, a form that Bakhtin elaborates into the essence of all modern fiction. He defines the novel as "a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice," by which he also means that it "subverts" other genres (in this case, the shadow tale) and that its artistic organization "orchestrates" various themes, objects, and ideas through its...