Wired love: Pleasure at a distance in Henry James and others

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 74, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 397-427

  Goble, Mark ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 60949874759     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2007.0012     Document Type: Review

References (83)

1. Henry James to the Duchess of Sutherland, 23 December 1903, in Henry James Letters, ed. Leon Edel, 4 vols. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1974-1984), 4:302.
2. Two critics demand special mention on the thematics of communication in James: Sharon Cameron (Thinking in Henry James [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989])
3. and Mark Seltzer ("The Postal Unconscious," The Henry James Review 21 [2000]: 197-206
4. and Bodies and Machines [New York: Routledge, 1992], 47-90, 195-97).
5. Not only are these two of James's best critics, but also two of the most programmatically ambitious, and I will be implicitly and explicitly drawing on both throughout this essay. For Cameron, James's fiction - and The Golden Bowl most of all - proceeds "as if it were deliberating in a rigorous way how communication should work. Meaning placed in speech cedes to meaning placed in thought" (120).
6. Cameron thus traces, through a reading that makes much of James's habitual presentation of internal monologue as spoken dialogue, how thinking is dislocated from the individual's mind and projected onto - and made real by way of - the vicissitudes of language. Seltzer, on the other hand, concentrates on how "James manages the radicalization of the materiality of writing around 1900" ("Postal Unconscious," 200) - a date that coincides roughly with James's increasing reliance on dictation. Seltzer's work, which hews closely to that of Friedrich Kittler and Bernhard Siegert, offers James as a case-study in the effects of media. Where Cameron, for instance, cites James's dictating as "[raising] the question of the mediation of consciousness or, to situate the question as James's work does, of its externalization" (33), Seltzer argues instead that precisely such figurative " externalizations" are primary symptoms of how dictating (and modern technology in general) enforces the identity between literature and its status as material object. It will not be my mission to reconcile these contradictory positions; I am setting out neither to preserve "consciousness" as a central problematic in James (Cameron) nor to reduce James's discourse, as graphically as possible, to the output of a body-machine (Seltzer). My more modest aspiration, in terms of Jamesian criticism at least, is to show: first, that both the "externalization" of mental experience and its mechanization are already crucially situated within the discourse and iconography of communication at this historical period; and second, that these two phenomena are closely tied to the aesthetic project of the Jamesian novel in its late incarnation. That is, a good deal of the reader's investment in late James, I would argue, is precisely in being subjected to moments when some exhilarating, liminal expansion of consciousness is reduced to a hard fact of (an often metaphorical) materiality. Cameron tends to bypass such moments; Seltzer cites them as certain indexes of James's thrall to a "modernist pathologization of reading and writing" ("Postal Unconscious," 202).
7. James, "New York Edition" preface to The Wings of the Dove (London: Penguin, 1986), 36.
8. James, The Ambassadors (London: Penguin, 1986), 48. Hereafter abbreviated A and cited parenthetically by page number.
9. James to William Dean Howells, 29 October 1890, in Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Home (New York: Viking, 1999), 211-13. Correspondence from A Life in Letters hereafter abbreviated L and cited parenthetically by page number.
10. Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (1921; New York: The Viking Press, 1957), 149.
11. James, preface to The Golden Bowl (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), xli.
12. James, The American (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 114, 58.
13. James, The Tragic Muse (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 167.
14. Maxwell Geismar, Henry James and the Jacobites (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1963), 202.
15. Geismar, 221.
16. Saturday 95 (January 1903): 79-80, in Henry James: The Critical Heritage, ed. Roger Gard (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1968), 322.
17. F. M. Colby, "In Darkest James," Bookman 16 (November 1902): 259-60
18. in Henry James: The Critical Heritage, 340.
19. Colby, "The Queerness of Henry James," Bookman 15 (June 1902): 396-97
20. An excellent overview of this topic is to be found in the compilation of essays Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, ed. Jenny Wolmark (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1999).
21. Especially useful in this anthology is a reprint of Claudia Springer's "The Pleasure of the Interface," originally published in Screen 32. 3 (1991): 303-23.
22. See also Allucquère Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995);
23. and Sherry Turkle, Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
24. Of interest as well is Howard Rheingold's chapter on "Teledildonics and Beyond," in Virtual Reality (New York: Summit Books, 1991), 345-77.
25. Two articles by Ellis Hanson have also been of immense help in clarifying certain issues relating to the technologization of sexuality and vice versa; see "The Telephone and Its Queerness," in Cruising the Performative: Interventions into the Representation of Ethnicity, Nationality, and Sexuality, ed. Sue-Ellen Case, Susan Leigh Foster, and Philip Brett (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1995), 34-58
26. and "Technology, Paranoia and the Queer Voice," Screen 34. 2 (1993): 137-61.
27. Springer, 307.
28. See "A Centennial-Telegraphic Romance," in Lightning Flashes and Electric Dashes: A Volume of Choice Telegraphic Literature, Humor, Fun, Wit & Wisdom (New York: W. J. Johnston, Publisher, 1877), 1-11.
29. Hereafter abbreviated C and cited parenthetically by page number. There are two editions of this text, however, both published in 1877. The first is shorter and, according to its preface, was aimed at a professional audience of telegraph operators and others in the industry. (W. J. Johnston published several trade journals in the field. ) The second, which does add some material of interest, is, according to its "Introductory," "intended for the general reading public - for people who have no knowledge whatever of the art or business of telegraphy" (Lightning Flashes and Electric Dashes, 2nd ed. [New York: W. J. Johnston, Publisher, 1877], 3).
30. The specific works I'm drawing on in the discussion that follows include: first and foremost, James's own story about telegraphy, "In the Cage," in Henry James: Complete Stories 1892-1898 (New York: The Library of America, 1996), 835-923;
31. Mark Twain, "The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton" (1878), in The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain (New York: Bantam Books, 1957), 127-43;
32. Brander Matthews, "By Telephone," The Century 36 (June 1888): 305-9;
33. "The Careless Word," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 6 (March 1853): 510-19;
34. Charles Barnard, " - [Kate]: An Electro-Mechanical Romance," Scribner's Monthly Magazine 10 (May 1875): 37-46;
35. [Capt. ] Jack Crawford, "Carrie the Telegraph Girl: A Romance of the Cherokee Strip," The Sentinel, 20 June 1901;
36. and "The Thorsdale Telegraphs," Harper's Monthly Magazine (October 1876): 400-17.
37. From Lightning Flashes, 1st ed. : "Wives for Two; or Joe's Little Joke" (41-45);
38. "A Perilous Christmas Courtship, or, Dangerous Telegraphy" (65-68);
39. "Playing with Fire" (69-71);
40. "A Slight Mistake" (74);
41. and "What Came of Being Caught in a Snow-Storm" (115-17).
42. From Lightning Flashes, 2nd ed. : "Wooing By Wire" (163-67).
43. From Walter Polk Phillips, Oakum Pickings: A Collection of Stories, Sketches, and Paragraphs Contributed from Time to Time to the Telegraphic and General Press (New York: W. J. Johnston, Publisher, 1876):
44. "Love and Lightning" (7-10);
45. and "Departed Days" (116-28).
46. From Telegraphic Tales and Telegraphic History: A Popular Account of the Electric Telegraph - Its Uses, Extent and Outgrowth (New York: W. J. Johnston, Publisher, 1880): "Misplaced (Telegraphic) Affection" (59-61);
47. and "Married by Telegraph" (61-63).
48. See also Barnard, "Applied Science: A Love Story," in Knights of To-Day, or, Love and Science (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1881), 120-208.
49. As the inclusion of some of these titles might disclose, I do not see a strong distinction between stories centered on the telephone as opposed to the telegraph, although questions of voice are crucial in Twain and "By Telephone. " A useful discussion of some later stories incorporating wireless and radio is found in Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000).
50. Some of these later fictions include: Rudyard Kipling, "Wireless," in Traffics and Discoveries (London: Macmillan and Co. , 1904), 213-39;
51. Walter S. Hiatt, "Sparks of the Wireless," Scribner's (April 1914): 502-11;
52. and John Fleming Wilson, "Sparks," McClure's Magazine (May 1911): 140-54.
53. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 78.
54. Ella Cheever Thayer, Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes (New York: W J. Johnston, Publisher, 1880), 255-56. Hereafter abbreviated W and cited parenthetically by page number.
55. The alphabetic play that patterns the relationship between Nattie and Clem at its outset brings to mind two other texts that are well worth considering in this context. In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Elective Affinities, a work that marks perhaps the first attempt to scientifically represent the technologies of love and desire, the dominant metaphors are drawn from the discourse of chemistry, botany, and architecture. Chemistry, for Goethe, involves a range of electromagnetic phenomena, and in trying to schematize the possible affinities within a closed system of desire, the Captain and Eduard offer the following model for Charlotte in the hope of convincing her to summon (her niece) Ottilie from school: "Provided it does not seem pedantic," the Captain said, "I think I can briefly sum up in the language of signs. Imagine an A intimately united with a B, so that no force is able to sunder them; imagine a C likewise related to a D; now bring the two couples into contract: A will throw itself at D, C at B, without our being able to say which first deserted its partner, which first embraced the other's partner. " "Now then!" Eduard interposed: "until we see all this with our own eyes, let us look on this formula as a metaphor from which we may extract a lesson we can apply immediately to ourselves. You, Charlotte, represent the A, and I represent your B; for in fact I do depend altogether on you and follow you as A follows B. The C is quite obviously the Captain, who for the moment is to some extent drawing me away from you. Now it is only fair that, if you are not to vanish into the limitless air, you must be provided with a D, and this D is unquestionably the charming little lady Ottilie, whose approaching presence you may no longer resist. " (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. R. J. Hollingdale [London: Penguin Books, 1971], 56)
56. This attempt to capture the symbolic essence of attraction and sexual connection is oddly echoed - I should say, formally echoed - by the opening paragraphs of Alan Turing's seminal essay in cybernetic theory, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 59 [October 1950]: 433-60). The first stages in the "Turing test," as we now know it, involve not the attempt to discriminate human from machine, but man from woman. Turing describes a scenario which could provide the initial conditions for an experiment in "elective affinities," or for a melodrama of "wired love": The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the "imitation game. " It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A. " (433) Wired Love might be said to occupy a middle-ground between these two dramas of love and information; but it will remain for some other occasion to pursue a full-fledged cybernetics of romance.
57. This passage in Wired Love anticipates a sequence in Abbot and Costello's Who Done It? Frustrated by a telephone operator who can't complete a call that might win several thousands in prize money, Costello aims a seltzer bottle at the mouthpiece and lets fly. We cut to the switchboard, where the operator is sprayed first in the face and then directly in her mouth. There is a charge of sexual violence to this moment which is of course not apparent in Wired Love, but a similar fantasy of visceral communication is the ultimate effect.
58. For more on the emergence and development of female secretarial labor, see Margaret W. Davies, Woman's Place Is at the Typewriter (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1982);
59. and Sharon Hartman, Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1992).
60. Both of these works provide excellent overviews of the historical context in which this discussion of secretarial labor, technology, and sexuality could be placed. In drawing attention to an admittedly perverse set of meanings, I do not intend to slight the importance of this historical context or overlook the lack of agency that is strikingly apparent in these illustrations. Closer to my interests here, Pamela Thurschwell, in Literature, Technology, and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), makes a series of brilliant arguments about the secretarial implications and work-place dynamics of James's scene of writing that have inspired me here. More generally, this illustration serves as a wonderful example of the "discourse network" of 1900, as described by Friedrich Kittler in Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), 347-68.
61. James, preface to The Ambassadors, 41.
62. Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998), 136.
63. James, preface to The Golden Bowl, xli.
64. OED, 2nd ed. , s. v. "remote control. "
65. See Seltzer, Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984);
66. and Jennifer Wicke, Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988).
67. Laurence Bedwell Holland, The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964), 272, 230.
68. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 163, 167.
69. I take particular inspiration on these matters from Wendy Graham, whose work has illuminated the world of erotic options - as opposed to prohibitions - in which James seems to have lived. This is not to say that James's sexuality, and more importantly the representation of sexuality in his work, is not a matter of occasionally tortuous displacements and occlusions. But it is also clearly the case that James was fluent in several dialects of sexual representation, and, as Graham argues, we are rewarded if we start with these, and their historical contexts, as opposed to feeling that James must first be extracted or saved from his own carefully wrought self-fashionings before we may say anything of substance about what, and how, sex signifies in his career. See Wendy Graham, Henry James's Thwarted Love (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999).
70. See Harry Levin, introduction to The Ambassadors, 7-29, esp. 12-13.
71. See Graham, 8-51;
72. and Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), 202-57.
73. James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881; New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), 460.
74. Graham, 47.
75. As Graham notes, the tenor of James's correspondence changes with the death of Andersen's brother, becoming more overtly erotic and suggestive; see Graham, 47-49.
76. James to Hendrick Andersen, 30 April 1903, in Henry James Letters, 4:269;
77. James to Andersen, 10 August 1904, in Henry James Letters, 4:310.
78. Edel cites Wharton's account, found in her A Backward Glance, of James's late fondness for Whitman and speculates that an affinity with the homoerotic elements of Leaves of Grass is partly to credit for this change in James's tastes. See Edel, Henry James: The Master, 1901-1916 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1972), 255.
79. James to Andersen, 31 May 1906, in Henry James Letters, 4:406;
80. James to Andersen, 16 August 1911, in Henry James Letters, 4:580.
81. Graham, 26.
82. James, The Middle Years (1917)
83. in Henry James: Autobiography, ed. Frederick W. Dupee (New York: Criterion Books, 1956), 548. Hereafter abbreviated M and cited parenthetically by page number.