Woke

I read that Oppenheimer during his persecution had read and was deeply affected by Henry James’s novella, “The Beast in the Jungle.” I decided I would read the story. It is not that Henry James was foreign to me: I had studied most of the major novels, even The Golden Bowl, and had even recently reread and was thoroughly enthralled with The Portrait of a Lady. I do not recall having read “The Beast in the Jungle,” but there were annotations in my handwriting in the text’s margins, so obviously sometime in my reading past I had studied this James’s work. The text I owned was in a collection titled The Short Fiction of Henry James. I am not sure to what “short” refers here because a novella is certainly meant to be longer than a short story but considerably shorter than a novel. Anyway, I was wondering what there might be about Oppenheimer’s interest in the novella that had provoked my present curiosity in the text. I wondered if in my reading of “The Beast in the Jungle” I attempting to be J. Robert Oppenheimer, or did I want to know what Oppenheimer knew(minus the theoretical physics and quantum mechanics that I had tried to understand more than once and could not do so). According to the biography, American Prometheus Oppenheimer was deeply affected by James’s story. Or did I in the reading hope to gain some insight into the man by reading what he had read. I had long been interested in Oppenheimer, and even had taught at Great Neck North High School the play, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by the German dramatist Heinar Kipphardt to the class.
            There are various theories concerning the identity and/or nature of the beast in the jungle. May Bartram, the woman with whom John Marcher had maintained a strictly platonic relationship and whom after years he meets again, reminds him that he once told her that he had experienced “from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and the conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you.” I think it was this identity that Oppenheimer experienced as his persecution by the Kangaroo court investigation probed unmercifully into his loyalty and character. The result did not go well for Oppenheimer, and he was ruined by this inquisition. I think in his reading of “The Beast in the Jungle” that Oppenheimer might have identified with the persecutory character of the beast. It would destroy him, as if the beast had entered into him and was not identical with him. But it might also be true that the beast was inseparable from him and was essential to his sense of self and world. And like for Marcher it could be known as Oppenheimer’s egotism, his aloofness and perfunctory attention to too many others with whom he came in professional and academic contact.
            I have thought that for Marcher the beast in the jungle was his failure to actually engage in life, to experience a great passion. The narrator says, “No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant; he had survived, maundered and pined, but where had been his deep ravage?” Marcher had not lived because he had not allowed himself to experience passion; so it was that in the end when he visited May’s grave Marcher observes another visitor whose visit to a grave and in whose face he views Marcher recognizes “the raw glare of his grief.’ Marcher wonders “what wrong what wound it expressed, what injury not to be healed. What had the man had, to make him by the loss of it so bleed and yet live?” Whatever it was, Marcher understands that he had never had it, and he falls prostrate onto the grave of May Bartram who might have loved him. Marcher, recognizing his emotional death-in-life, lies on a grave. He had never thought of May Bartram outside of his own egotism and an awareness of how she might be used for his benefit. This fatal flaw was the beast in the jungle and the awareness of it changes forever Marcher’s life.
            That beast, acknowledges Marcher would be something he would have had to “meet, to face, to see suddenly break out in my life; possibly destroying all further consciousness, possibly annihilating me; possibly, on the other hand, only altering everything, striking at the root of all my world and leaved me to the consequences however they shape themselves.”  Awareness of the beast was a revelation, an insight, a knowledge of something. Marcher is horror-stricken at this revelation. He had awakened and it had terrified him. “The horror of waking—this was knowledge, knowledge under the breath of which the very tears in his eyes seemed to freeze.” It is this waking, the awareness to learn things one had avoided or dismissed, that appalled Marcher. But at least Marcher comes tragically to realize his beast as perhaps did Oppenheimer. But I realized that this reference to “waking” had application today, to the hordes promoting the anti-woke movements that are attempting to tear down our democracy. They are kept safe in their ignorance and protected in their somnolence. The decision to eliminate those who offer another perspective; the decision to eliminate every reference to diversity; to deny to libraries books that offer positive images of alternative lives; to deny to classrooms voices that had been silenced and lives that had been disappeared is to choose ignorance over awakeness, to remain safe from the beast in the jungle but be in bondage to it. And I think now that the anti-woke crowds that continue to support proto-fascists such as Trump and DeSantis and Taylor Greene and McCarthy are governed by this fear of waking, of having to acknowledge their hateful behaviors as evidence of their willed ignorances.
            I think that perhaps what attracted Oppenheimer to The Beast in the Jungle was the recognition of how his own personal demons and failures had been ultimately a source of his troubles. And Marcher’s realization provoked Oppenheimer’s own self-understanding.