ABSTRACT
For the critic, the comic in Henry James is a specific difficulty. His book, The Comic Sense of Henry James: A Study of the Early Novels, tries to demonstrate how “attention to comic expression in James’s early novels can, in fact, lead us through the language to his most vitally personal meanings”. Ronald Wallace suspects as much in the opening pages of his book-length study of comedy in Henry James, Henry James and the Comic Form. Borrowing from James’s own comments in The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama, Ronald Wallace proposes that comic seriousness “suggests little connection with high animal spirits. It seems a matter of invention, of reflection and irony”. If we are to understand anything about James’s comic sense, it’s that it is extremely quiet. So rather than associate laughter with the atmosphere of the carnival or marketplace, we might instead associate it with a certain mode of moral and philosophical reflection.
