Henry James and the Pursuit of Consciousness: A Psychostylistic Study of the Beast in the Jungle

The present study is an attempt to investigate the nature of stylistic choices that markedly appear in the literary discourse of Henry James in order to exemplify the desired aims of the author embedded within these choices along with the impressions these stylistic choices create on the mind of the reader in a comprehensive framework of Psychostylistics. The surfacing of interest to enquire James in the background of Psychostylistics stems largely from Postmodernist focus on the author’s consciousness that encompasses all mental activity. Since James is such an hypnotic icon in modern American fiction whose narratives do not propose any incontestable and overtly precise interpretation, thus not only entail universal appeal but the process of construing the language structure in terms of style positing a challenge for the critic or the researcher. This literary orientation is essentially the crucial one to which the argument of this oeuvre has been directed. The formal design of the study is based on Roger Fowler’s theory of ‘mind style’. Practical analysis has been done by applying the properties of Bocketing (1994)’s model of Psychostylistics eclectically and homogeneously, which draws upon the theoretical underpinnings and critical insights provided by the theory of mind style. A three-fold perspective resulting from characteristic stylistic choices and narrative tripartite position in terms of the narrator, the narrated and the narratee has been followed to make the research more practical and applicable. From Psychostylistic perspective, The Beast in the Jungle is thoroughly an exhilarating tale of unspeakable misery and uncanny hollowness, which predominantly embodies the deep insights emerging from the vestiges of the modern world experiences encountered by the consciousness of James. The atypical setting, the chaos and the flux is the characteristic of James’ artistic world, which authorizes him to be more experimental with the conventional narrative structure in The Beast in the Jungle in relation not only to the love and loss of love but also the realization of that loss. Therefore, as an experience, James’ narrative reflects to “be the product of a highly self-conscious mind” (Ravichandran, 2005, p. 14). Moreover, it can best be defined as an exceptionally stylistic 38 Pakistan Journal of Social Sciences Vol. 31, No. 1 apparatus to represent the subversion of ideas, nostalgia for reticent, and, above all, the psychodynamics of love and desire, of life and death, of spirituality and modernity, and of self and perspicacity in words in a manner that appears to be distinctive from traditional features of style. Thus, in James: We move from the physical world to the conceptual world. From a given experience of love or hatred, rationality or irrationality, we conceptualize the universality of these feelings and then articulate them in specific discourses. The purest and the simplest form is realized in a given configuration but this artistic configuration does not reduce the universality to specificity. (Gill, 1993, p. 25) Keeping with this thesis, the literary style of James tends to reflect the conscious, subconscious and unconscious sources that appear to take the form of a set of stylistic patterns and represent the author’s predisposition and idiosyncrasies for “seemingly arbitrary actions or thoughts can be explained through a painstaking reconstruction of unconscious motives” (Fowler, 1977). The psychological mapping of these stylistic domains enables James not only to vivify action but also produce certain thematic propositions and psychodynamics, and establish characteristic state to demonstrate them in the form of psychostylistic collage. As Castel and Lacassagne argue that the “psychic structures directly or indirectly emit, feel, project, certain kinds of behavior which are rooted in interaction with the world of outer appearances which is translated by the production of signs” (1992, p. 148). In this relation, the hallmark of James’ narrative world is his astounding consciousness abounded in literal and semantic codes for the manipulation of psychological reality. James’ world is symbolic of two directions, of which “one direction is outward or centrifugal. The other direction is inward, or centripetal, in which we try to develop from the words a sense of the larger verbal pattern they make. In all literary structure the final direction of meaning is inward” (Frye, 1957, p. 73-4). The inward direction in James leads us to a world of consciousness where he artistically unfolds the mystery of human existence in relation to varied dimensions of love, life, death and time displaying an intimate knowledge of human psyche that he appears to transmit to the reader as Murry (1975) avows that the style institutes itself through a number of factors that in other hands might fork out to be counterproductive and