The Jolly Corner (Annotated)

A novel of the Potteries. The Informer Illustrated Edition. Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign: A Book of Appreciations. Sheridan Le Fanu Fan. The Turn of the Screw. To be Taken with a Grain of Salt. A Slip Under the Microscope. The Woman Question and George Gissing. The Private Life The Fall of the House of Usher. An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House.

Introduction & Overview of The Jolly Corner

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. The Trial for Murder. The Beast in the Jungle. On The Stage And Off. The Abasement of the Northmores Leaves From Leah's Diary. Passing of the Third Floor Back. Lismore And The Widow. The Haunted and the Haunters. The Door in the Wall. The Music of Erich Zann. Watch and Ward by Henry James Illustrated. Ghost Stories of Henry James. Turn of the Screw. The Art of Fiction. The Portrait of a Lady: With 11 Illustrations and a Free Audio Link.

The Wings of the Dove, both volumes in a single file. The Complete Plays of Henry James. With plates, including portraits. Henry James Short Stories Volume Daisy Miller and Other Tales. It is arguable whether or not Spencer had actually become unconscious or whether he had died and has awoken in an afterlife. She had come to the house because she sensed he was in danger. She tells him that she pities the ghost of his alter ego, who has suffered and lost two fingers from his right hand.

But she also embraces and accepts Brydon as he is. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved from " https: Articles with LibriVox links. Views Read Edit View history. Is his art really separate from business, and if not, what is the relationship of art to business?

The scene at the window emphasizes the blurred relationship between these oppositions. It is not enough to open or shut the window as it was to open or shut the doors of the house while tracking the apparition. In opening the window, Spencer addresses the terms through which he reads the world. He will do anything to shake up the system. First he tries to make contact with those he watched from his window. The story takes on a nearly comic note as Spencer struggles to reinvent his vision, to situate himself with a significant difference in relation to the window.

This turn from physical humor into deep despair demonstrates how radically Spencer needs to shift his thinking. In this line of argument, recent critics have looked at the story through different windows asking: Reading the story, one can glimpse shadows of these different perspectives. The subtly packed story is probably his most original and exciting brief narrative, and its many links with other novels and stories show its density, freshness, and some of its sources of power. It relates closely to A Sense of the Past in its themes of historical determination and identify as well as its supernatural fantasy.

Less conspicuously, but significantly, it qualifies and develops subjects and symbols in the last great novels, especially The Golden Bowl, whose flaw it mends, though in the simplicity of fable. To concentrate first on the story itself. James conceives imagination as creative, poetic in the true sense of making something new, capable of radical revision and subversion of the lived life, but at the same time he is clear that the creature which creates is created by its circumstances.

He speaks with crystalline lucidity to the imagination of our own period, where we may be historically knowing, aware of the essentialist fallacy, yet paradoxically cling to a sense of creative power. Putting it another way, we know ourselves passive but feel ourselves active. James resolves the contradiction by making us aware that the process of constructing is a tentative and uncertain process, and is itself something constructed.

The Jolly Corner Summary & Study Guide Description

In his alarmed response to the changed and changing New York at the beginning of the century he is like the James who returned to pay a long visit in and as a consequence wrote The American Scene, but unlike his author, he is not committed to another departure. It is the story of a might-have-been which draws on biographical fact and converts it to fiction. Unlike Brydon, James returned to America to face his might-have-beens, and uneasily accept historical flux, but gladly confirmed and returned to his European choice and life in Rye and London. Brydon imagines and confronts the might-have-been, that alter ego in his haunted family home on a jolly corner in New York.

James imagines his imagination, conceiving it as a fine instrument for scrutinizing and speculating about the power of social circumstance.

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Like so many of the novels and tales, the story begins with a telling title. It joins the over-developed row where Brydon owns another house, undistinguished between similar neighbours, and like them being converted into a high-rise apartment house , with the unnamed or unnumbered avenue which still retains the buildings and spirit of the past.

The developers have their eye on his house on the jolly corner, but Brydon hangs on to it and begins to visit its empty rooms late at night. Like the apparition he meets there, he haunts and walks. The corner site is not only architecturally desirable and different, as corner properties are, but symbolically eloquent. The corner in the city turns out to have seemed sinister but to have been jolly, after all, in this grim story with a happy ending.

So does the corner in the mind, a corner turned by a character in crisis, as Spencer Brydon turns or transforms his consciousness to see the self he might have been, then grasps the nature of his lived identity and dies into a new future where he is able to love. Though not until he turns another corner, helped to revise and elucidate his experience by Alice Staverton, who is mentor as well as lover, like few women in previous fiction.

The image of the corner figures the arrival of the unexpected, a something unforeseen suddenly rounding a corner. It is an image of cornering, apt for a story where the metaphor of hunting is elaborated and varied as both the uncanny alter ego, who has never lived, and the living man, who is committed to history, are cornered in turn. The multifaceted suggestiveness of the corner confirms the total resonance of place, especially the empty house and all its interior, rooms, hall, staircases, landings, doors and windows. The story is a complete exercise in the psycho-dynamics of place.

The empty house is occupied and furnished for Brydon, he declares, by his past, cherished as the family home where he lived and where his parents and siblings died, valued as the place he can afford not to sell because of the other house being developed in the street of skyscrapers. James knows that the liberal man of culture depends on the alter ego he rejects, which is one of several reasons why the ghost has to be seen, and in a way accepted. James himself started his European travels on American money, and benefited from inherited rents, though unlike Brydon, he earned money too.

The alter ego is the most materialist of ghosts, the American successful early twentieth-century man, builder of skyscrapers, the man of power, the man of violence, even a gangster. As an apparition he is terrifying in many ways, not least because of that power and violence, but also because of his vulnerability, since he has been maimed by violence.

What this story suggests are the hazards and threats of potency, not impotence, and the alternative self may endow his weaker rival with his sexual energy, one way or another. He is imagined from the inside, as having interiority, as Brydon feels first his superior power, next imagines a secret sharer, cowering and hunted, then feels a shift in the balance of power , and eventually imagines the powerfully motivated aggressiveness of the violent, inferior, jealous, unlived and unchosen identity.

Like his novelist, whom he represents, and does more than represent, since he is not an artist, Brydon is brilliantly attentive to motive and passion. The alter ego is terrifying because of his powerful physicality, but also, like many of the best ghosts, because of his inhuman indeterminacy. His immateriality is certainly not incompatible with a grossly materialized physical horror, like that of the unseen but imagined mutilated ghost in W.

It came upon him nearer now, quite as one of those expanding images projected by the magic lantern of childhood; for the stranger, whoever he might be, evil, odious, blatant, vulgar, had advanced as for aggression. The story is dazzlingly reflexive, with many facets: It would be hard to find a more genre-conscious and style-conscious story, but like all great literature it is Janus-headed, facing life as well as art. So it conceives Spencer Brydon—and Alice Staverton, the woman in the story—perhaps as types of the artist, but certainly as imaginatively active in a broadly humane way, in a story about the hard business of loving the whole of a person, accepting the gross-ness of the shadow-self, accepting historical construction.

It is a speculative fable pushing at the boundaries of fable, a realist narrative breaking the bounds of realism. There can be fewer more elastic reflexive narratives. How is it narrated? Concentrating on the imagination of Spencer Brydon, his typical third-person sensitive register of consciousness, James almost completely effaces his narrator.

Almost but not quite. His own responses are marked from the start by the rhetoric of qualification, doubt and provisionality: From the start, we are in a twilight zone, or even in the dark, as Brydon is to be on his wanderings through the house, with or without a candle, groping and feeling our way, as Brydon feels his.

The marked stylistic feature—not confined to this story, but given particular effect in it—remains that of qualification and uncertainty: The hesitancy and tentativeness of his sensibility create an idiolect for the guarded observer, who has not chosen to be a man of action, and the perfect register for the imagining of a supernatural apparition and the creation of a ghost from mere potentiality.

He is a ghost even more nebulous than a post-mortem revenant, who has had a mortal existence. Until the last meeting, then, his isolated consciousness is made misty, emphasizing both the introspective and subjective experience and the traditional mistiness of apparitions, though this one is to be grossly solidified. This is a story about the invocation of a ghost, by imagination. I keep forever wondering The haunting by a self-styled alter ego is initiated by his curiosity and desire, his creative fiat. The characters are not artists but their weird stories are thoroughly motivated: K, Alice and Brydon create their own story, urged by passionate desire for knowledge.

In each case something is imagined in advance, then turns out to be authenticated by experience, with a chilling and grotesque sense of sinister but comprehensible coincidence.

K says he is the land-surveyor, and after an apparent hitch, is confirmed in his imagined appointment. Alice imagines going through the looking-glass, then does. James is clearly recalling Lewis Carroll in the eerie traffic through the painting in The Sense of the Past and here too Ralph Pendrel imagines that his alter ego will show his face and he does.

Brydon thinks of a ghost, and sees one. These two entries are in the old tradition of magic: James also overcame his two male seniors, his father and his elder brother, in the two fantasies of the real dream and the dreaming fiction. The beast in the earlier story was not awful or destructive, and neither is the apparent beast in this story, though Brydon thinks he is, and needs Alice to put him right.

This is perhaps the clearest and most satisfying act of Jamesian self-revision. Alice Staverton succeeds where May Bartram, who closely resembles her, failed.

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Brydon catches his beast in the jungle in the nick of time, unlike John Marcher. Brydon tells Alice he longs to know what he would have been like had he stayed in the family house on the jolly corner of New York City, and because this is a love-story as well as a story about imagination, Brydon, unlike K and Alice in Wonderland, is supported by love, or imagination.

His Alice fully understands his wonder, and wonders with him, as good lovers do, attending to the wholeness of the beloved. So it is appropriate that though the initiation is his, it is a collaborative act which transforms metaphor into reality. The coincidence is acceptable both because she gives no description, pressing on our credulity with the lightest possible touch, because it completes the fable, and because—like Jane Eyre, where love is also redemptively telepathic—she is as obsessed as he is with what he might have been: The fable works in Freudian and Jungian terms, as well as being a politically lucid fable of the constructed self by social circumstance.

There is no need to see it in terms of any of the traditional systems: And however we systematize it, the fable is more than a fable because of its emotional trajectory: It analyses as it feels the nature of loving another self. Then he can speak and Alice can accept. It is the subtle Jamesian structure of reversibility, found in The Golden Bowl, with its sub-text of Adam Verver giving Maggie what she is seen as giving him—protective action, silence, and cunning.

It was not for nothing that James had pondered and experimented with shifting sensitive registers of consciousness from the beginning of his career. His shifts in voice are as interesting, if less mannered and conspicuous, as those of James Joyce. It is of course the appropriate form for a story of an alter ego, but it is also a good pattern for the love story.

It begins like Hamlet by moving from generality and neutrality to particularity. Brydon feels a bell ring—as the crude language of cliche would say—when Alice says to him that he would have invented the skyscraper in his alternative American existence: This sentence of generalized forecast is followed by another time-shift, into a generalized past: James had created the extraordinary image of ineffable suspicion when Maggie circled the pagoda and knocked on its doorless surface to hear an echo of her knock, and now recycles the method for the purposes of fantasy.

His ghost stories are familiarized by psychic truths, his self-analysing psychological novels make imagination strange. Here they are imagistic suggestions of the uncanny, more or less unobtrusive on first reading: It had begun to be present to him after the first fortnight, it had broken out with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton wonderment: This speaks for itself. Earlier steps in the building of his fantasy are described less definitely but in suggestive images which accumulate suggestion: The process, and our awareness of process, are stepped up, and the paragraph goes on to anticipate not only haunting and oddness but the future events of opened doors, empty rooms, passages, presence, dusk, and shock:.

This is a summary of what is to come, with small variations. But it is an oblique summary, since it does strike us as metaphor—which it is—so the clue is buried. Thus metaphor becomes reality, though of course a reality in a fiction. Brydon does what artists do, and the story is about itself. But it moves as an excellent ghost-story too.

James knows as well as Shakespeare especially in Hamlet but in Macbeth too that a ghost should enter stealthily and star-tlingly. James does something else like Shakespeare in Hamlet: Brydon, the ghost-seer to whose mind we are so close, thinks he has got free of the haunting. He flees downstairs from the room where he supposes the ghost to be, the room whose closed door makes him and the reader feel the apparition as an objective presence, outside the mind, to the presence waiting in the vestibule to shock him out of consciousness.

He faints and falls on the great black and white marble floor—which first made him conscious of style, a characteristic example of fine small nuance, a bonus for the care James demands and rewards. Love makes the divided self whole in understanding not only the existential self but also the whole potential. The lovers wake to find the dream true, but the woman has to dream for the man, as Penelope has to do the dreaming for Odysseus. Homer and James make the stay-at-home woman a type of negative capability and wise passiveness. Both emphasize intelligence so we should not mistake the location of creativity in the woman as patronizing.

Homer calls Penelope the clever one, and shows her not only as the dreamer but as the analyst of dreams, false and true. This is why her expertise is so valuable for her lover. She has maintained her quiet but ridden the streetcars. It seems likely at the beginning that he wants to be her lover, and at the end it is certain that he is:. A happy ending for Jamesian lovers is rare, though his first novel, Watch and Ward, imagined precisely this, but much less passionately and much less intelligently.

The beauty of these middle-aged happy lovers is that they are old enough to know as well as still young enough to do. In The Ambassadors Strether was not able to marry his mentor Maria, and though James imagined him renouncing her, it is significant that he did not imagine Strether actually loving any of the three women—Mrs Newsome, Maria, and Marie de Vionnet—who seem to solicit his love. Strether is torn between two social constructions, seeing both and choosing neither.

Brydon is Strether more tenderly imagined, and rewarded. The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical other world, and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sigh there The New York alter ego, not Brydon, is the billionaire. It is ungilded, without duplicity, crystalline in lucidity, a medium for light and music, a good omen. It is touch-and-go whether Brydon can accept the old baffled possibilities, after they have more humanly and horribly materialized, but the crystal bowl suggests something of the sanctity of a grail, to counteract the hideousness perceived by Brydon in the encountered stranger.

It is appropriate that James re-imagined the crystal bowl of his last great novel, since the image of the ghost in his repulsive aspect also began in The Golden Bowl. He is also politically significant as these little apparitions are not. Like them, he is endowed with affective life. But he is invoked in order to be understood, pitied, perhaps admired, even loved. It is also why dreaming Alice is so drawn to him, not simply for the nobler reason that she loves the whole man, potential as well as actualized.

It is also why he insists, after waking into full self-consciousness from a long unconsciousness, that he has died. As so often in James, the colloquial register lightens or quietens solemnity, while permitting it. But there is a sense of prodigies, a rite of unspecified passage. The return emphasizes the relaxation after trauma, and after vision: There is a sense of healing and convalescence after the strains, terrors and the vision of the ravaged life.

This gives a particular tone to a traditional ritual of dying into resurrection. The particulars of the return to love are human, not religious, in spite of this language. So too are the particulars of the return to knowledge. It is not exactly understatement but it is a choice of the ordinary, rather than the extraordinary, aspect of the whole experience. James chose not to end with noumenal imagery of death and resurrection and prodigious journey but firmly returns us to the phenomenal world.

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The noumenal imagery is socially grounded. Perhaps one would the after a full lucid sight of historical possibility, which in this case includes a full lucid sight of the self, potential and actual. James is revising this fable after a long interval. In The Sense of the Past, and the scenario-notes for its continuation, James is especially interested in the psychic strain of time-travel, and perhaps one reason for his failure to finish the novel is the sheer difficulty of sustaining the narrative of such an experience at length.

Confronting an historical alternative is an experience more easily dealt with in a short story. It is an experience from which only fictional characters can recover, and only fictional characters can experience. James imagined it, and must have come pretty close to it, as the story suggests. And not only the story. For instance, he told Grace Norton that he felt happier and more powerful after he made up his mind not to marry.

Not that this would be the only glance back at unlived choices.