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Acolyte, v. 3, issue 4, whole no. 12, Fall 1945
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the arm of the chair within a few inches of the floor, he felt on the back of it just the slightest touch of a surface of hair, and stretching it out in that direction he stroked and patted a rounded something. But the feel of it, and still more the fact that instead of a responsive movement, absolute stillness greeted his touch, made him look over the arm. What he had been touching rose to meet him.... The non-committal, matter-of-fact way in which that unpleasant situation is introduced is used also in the episode in the well in "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas", the archdeacon's sensations while feeling the carvings in "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral", and at considerable length in "Casting the Runes" where it leads up to Dunning's reaching for his watch in the pitch-black room: "So he put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow: only, it did not get so far. What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being." In circumstances such as these, James's characters do not linger around for closer inspection; they bolt for safety with unaccustomed speed and often faint after reaching it. James does not in the least mind emphasizing the terror of his uncanny visitants, as long as he can do so inferentially, by suggestion. But the most outstanding characteristic of his tyle--the personal seal he sets on all his fiction--is irony. It is present from the beginning to the end of the James canon--a dry, sardonic irony that is perfectly adapted to the describing of ghosts and horrors. He seems to stand apart from all his creations, to regard them with the amoral, Olympian eye of a scholar who has learned too much to take any human activity very seriously. "His narrative," says Fleming, "has always a kind of dry naturalism which lends perspective to the action. He shows at times some of the same imaginative adaptability, the same power of suddenly bringing home the implications of an abnormal situation by reference to the trivial, which Swift showed when he made Gulliver notice the Brobdignagian pores." (15) Irony is implicit in all the techniques of suggestion and obliqueness described above, such as the practice of having an uneducated character describe the ghost in an insensitive, uncomprehending way. Often, too, when James as narrator is depicting a scene from the point of view of the hero, he will describe supernatural horrors with an air of ingenuous guilelessness that carries an obvious double meaning. Such is the passage in "Lost Hearts" in which the boy listens to the murder of his elderly cousin by the ghosts in the study: "His repeated knocks produced no answer. Mr. Abney was engaged: he was speaking. What! why did he try to cry out? and why was the cry choked in his throat? Had he, too, seen the mysterious children? But now everything was quiet....." Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys' sarcastic comments in "Martin's Close" are of course loaded with irony, and Mr. Anderson's observations of the occupant of "Number 13" are a set of rather grimly amusing misinterpretations: "He seemed to be a tall thin man--or was it by any chance a woman?--at least, it was someone who covered his head with some kind of drapery before going to bed, and, he thought, must be possessed of a red lampshade--and the lamp must be flickering very much. There was a distinct playing up and down of a dull red light on the opposite wall." The pedantically pious obituary in "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral" carries much implicit irony in its innocence of the true character of the archdeacon and his death, as does the mention that Canon Alberic, who had been promised he would die in bed, did indeed so die but "of a sudden seizure" whose nature can easily be inferred. Sometimes the irony is gentle, like that in "After Dark in the Playing Fields": "You -- 20 --
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the arm of the chair within a few inches of the floor, he felt on the back of it just the slightest touch of a surface of hair, and stretching it out in that direction he stroked and patted a rounded something. But the feel of it, and still more the fact that instead of a responsive movement, absolute stillness greeted his touch, made him look over the arm. What he had been touching rose to meet him.... The non-committal, matter-of-fact way in which that unpleasant situation is introduced is used also in the episode in the well in "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas", the archdeacon's sensations while feeling the carvings in "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral", and at considerable length in "Casting the Runes" where it leads up to Dunning's reaching for his watch in the pitch-black room: "So he put his hand into the well-known nook under the pillow: only, it did not get so far. What he touched was, according to his account, a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being." In circumstances such as these, James's characters do not linger around for closer inspection; they bolt for safety with unaccustomed speed and often faint after reaching it. James does not in the least mind emphasizing the terror of his uncanny visitants, as long as he can do so inferentially, by suggestion. But the most outstanding characteristic of his tyle--the personal seal he sets on all his fiction--is irony. It is present from the beginning to the end of the James canon--a dry, sardonic irony that is perfectly adapted to the describing of ghosts and horrors. He seems to stand apart from all his creations, to regard them with the amoral, Olympian eye of a scholar who has learned too much to take any human activity very seriously. "His narrative," says Fleming, "has always a kind of dry naturalism which lends perspective to the action. He shows at times some of the same imaginative adaptability, the same power of suddenly bringing home the implications of an abnormal situation by reference to the trivial, which Swift showed when he made Gulliver notice the Brobdignagian pores." (15) Irony is implicit in all the techniques of suggestion and obliqueness described above, such as the practice of having an uneducated character describe the ghost in an insensitive, uncomprehending way. Often, too, when James as narrator is depicting a scene from the point of view of the hero, he will describe supernatural horrors with an air of ingenuous guilelessness that carries an obvious double meaning. Such is the passage in "Lost Hearts" in which the boy listens to the murder of his elderly cousin by the ghosts in the study: "His repeated knocks produced no answer. Mr. Abney was engaged: he was speaking. What! why did he try to cry out? and why was the cry choked in his throat? Had he, too, seen the mysterious children? But now everything was quiet....." Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys' sarcastic comments in "Martin's Close" are of course loaded with irony, and Mr. Anderson's observations of the occupant of "Number 13" are a set of rather grimly amusing misinterpretations: "He seemed to be a tall thin man--or was it by any chance a woman?--at least, it was someone who covered his head with some kind of drapery before going to bed, and, he thought, must be possessed of a red lampshade--and the lamp must be flickering very much. There was a distinct playing up and down of a dull red light on the opposite wall." The pedantically pious obituary in "The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral" carries much implicit irony in its innocence of the true character of the archdeacon and his death, as does the mention that Canon Alberic, who had been promised he would die in bed, did indeed so die but "of a sudden seizure" whose nature can easily be inferred. Sometimes the irony is gentle, like that in "After Dark in the Playing Fields": "You -- 20 --
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