Prefiguration in “The Beast in the Jungle”

Studies in American Fiction 101 polite nigger voice,” and then says the next indented line, “Good. Well, good-bye, Mister Adams. Good-bye and good luck!” (The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, p. 138). There are additional examples in other works, too. It is likely, for example, that near the beginning of Book II of The Sun Also Rises, Brett says both, “Might” and the next indented statement, “I needed that” (The Sun Also Rises, p. 83). 1 3 A s all critics have agreed, it is clear that at one point in the original text the younger waiter says, “His niece looks after him,” and the older waiter replies, “I know. You said she cut him down.” The question about these lines has never been how they should be read, but only if they are correct as they are printed, for if they are correct then it is clear that Hemingway does ignore dialogue conventions in “ A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” 14lnformation in a letter to the author from Charles Scribner, Jr., April 5, 1971. PREFIGURATION IN “THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE” Randall H. Waldron Ohio Wesleyan University Allen Tate has criticized the opening of “The Beast in the Jungle,” questioning whether the first two sections are justified, being only “foreground or ‘complication’” that James was unable to render dramatically.1 Krishna Vaid gives James somewhat more credit, noting that from the beginning each of the story’s six sections is organized in reference to an important scene that indeed “dramatizes” a stage in John Marcher’s progressive obsession.2 In the first section, the dramatic scene is Marcher’s conversation with May Bartram at Weatherend, during which they reminisce about their previous meeting ten years earlier, speak the name of the “beast” that constitutes the unique bond between them, and agree to watch for it together. It is not enough, however, to say that the function of this scene is to define Marcher’s obsession and establish the partnership between him and Miss Bartram.3 The meeting and conversation at Weatherend is a subtle and dramatically ironic pre­ figuration of a crucial later scene, and of all that is to happen (and not happen) between these two partners. What needs first to be noticed is the location of the meeting in medias res, looking back on Marcher and Miss Bartram’s previous “occasion missed” and forward to their extended and far more 102 Notes momentous one. As they (and especially Marcher) strain, delicately but intensely, to invoke something from the past that will “do” to charge the present meeting with promise for the future, they act out in word and thought a little drama that reflects in both temporal directions the theme of temps perdu. The scene is like a two-sided mirror, drawing the theme from the past into its one side, and from the other projecting it, much enlarged, into the future. The burden of the early part of the scene-before Miss Bartram reminds Marcher of the one important event of their previous meeting-is that for him that meeting had been without any singular significance: “the present would have been so much better if the other, in the far distance, in the foreign land, hadn’t been so stupidly meagre” (p. 66).4 The point, of course, is that something singular had happened, which Marcher has-one is tempted to say “stupidly”-forgotten. Thus the first point in préfiguration: Marcher’s faulty recollection of their brief earlier encounter is prophetically parallel to his impercipience in the long relationship to come. Moreover, what was lacking, for Marcher, in the previous acquaintance was something adventurous and unique, “some passage of a romantic or critical kind” (p. 67), that would have made their experience distinctive and memorable. What he wishes had happened in the past, then, corresponds in small to what he awaits in the future: the “beast” unique and prodigous that will render that future extraordinary. But the parallel extends even further, for the substance, as well as the nature of what he has “lost” regarding the previous meeting, is the same as that he is to lose in the years to come. At Weatherend...