A Possible Lair: "The Tigers in India" and "The Beast in the Jungle"

A Possible Lair: "The Tigers in India" and "The Beast in the Jungle" by H. Lewis Ulman, Ohio State University In a 1901 notebook entry recording the "germ" of "The Beast in the Jungle," Henry James outlines the situation of "a man haunted by the fear more and more, throughout life, that something will happen to him," but he makes no mention of beasts (CN 199). Indeed, nowhere in his published notebooks, letters, or prefaces does James comment on the source or significance of the tale's most haunting image. However, the tale shares the image of the beast with a passage from an essay written by William James in 1894, a passage later entitled "The Tigers in India" when it appeared in The Meaning of Truth (1909). Moreover, the passage contains two key motifs found in "The Beast in the Jungle": faceto -face encounters and experiences of presence in absence. Textual evidence convincingly identifies "The Tigers in India" as Henry's source for the image of the beast and reveals how he wove a psychological thesis into the narrative theme of "The Beast in the Jungle." Documentary and circumstantial evidence establishes a plausible chain of events for this attribution. "The Tigers in India" was originally part of William James's President's Address to the American Psychological Association conference at Princeton University in December, 1894. The entire address, entitled "The Knowing of Things Together," appears in The Psychological Review for March, 1895. Although Henry makes no mention of "The Knowing of Things Together" prior to his work on "The Beast in the Jungle," he does reveal in a letter to William dated 31 October 1909 that he read the piece before it appeared in The Meaning of Truth. His letter also describes the relationship between William's philosophy and his "artistic vision" that we find manifested in "The Tigers in India" and "The Beast in the Jungle," though that relationship does not include Henry's polite self-effacement here:1 You surely make philosophy more interesting and living than anyone has ever made it before, and by a real creative and undemolishable making; whereby all you write plays into my poor "creative" consciousness and artistic vision and pretension with the most extraordinary suggestiveness and force of application and inspiration. ... In short, dearest William, the effect of these collected papers of your present volume [The Meaning of Truth]—which I had read all individually before—seems to me exquisitely and adorably cumulative. (LHJ 141) Unfortunately, no notebook entry or letter reveals exactly when the image of The Henry James Review 12(1990): 1-8 01991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 2 The Henry James Review the beast occurred to James. When he began the story on 1 July 1902, it bore the title "John Marcher" (Edel, The Master 128). According to his secretary's notes, by the time he resumed work on the story in October, the beast had sprung into the title: "October 12, return to John Marcher or The Beast in the Jungle" (Edel, The Master 133).2 In sum, William's essay, "The Knowing of Things Together," predates "The Beast in the Jungle" by more than six years, and we have good reason to believe that Henry read the essay before he composed his tale. To determine whether and how he transformed the thesis of his brother's essay, we must turn to the works themselves. In "The Tigers in India," William James outlines two ways of knowing: intuitive and representative. In the first instance, we encounter the world "face to face." "To know immediately, then, or intuitively," James writes, "is for mental content and object to be identicaF' (202). "Thought-stuff and thing-stuff," he claims, become one (201). This definition is not ontological but psychological; it defines a way of knowing in which there is no dissonance between perception and cognition, at least not of the sort that exists when we entertain ideas of absent objects such as the tigers in India.3 Illustrating his point through reference to the pages of a book (the paper, not the text), James argues that "the paper is in the mind and the mind is around the...