Henry James considered as a hippopotamus retrieving a pea

In several essays on Henry James, I’ve found mentioned a duality in his critical description of writing fiction. The process is simultaneously described as projection and reception, as self-expression and recording.

Dorothy Hale:

A superior sensibility is revealed precisely to the degree that it ‘records’ ‘dramatically and objectively,’ without, that is, the self-interest that would interfere with the appreciation of the subject’s virtues. By the same token, the more beautifully—which is to say, vividly and completely—the ‘thing’ is represented, the more it bespeaks its indebtedness to the viewer/artist’s sensibility.

What interests me about this seemingly insoluble cornerstone of the realist aesthetic is the degree to which it resurfaces in discussions on the materialities of inscription in James. In other words, I want to think through the way this toggling between privileged subject and unmediated object resurfaces (and is perhaps better thought through) when one considers, for instance, James’s method of dictation to a typewriter, and the presence of cables and telegrams in his fiction. In Jamesian language, this is a question of “relations”–not only between individuals but between raw materials and their organization–relations between infinitesimal clues given meaning by the particular, “frail structure of wood and wire” of “In the Cage” (1898) or the “wild weed of delusion [that] easily grew too fast, and the the Atlantic cable [that] alone could race with it” in The Ambassadors (1903). Perhaps a bit of a jump, but let’s just see what happens. And, disclaimer, what follows is some provisional rambling.

In any discussion of James, one can’t help but draw on/push against some of the caricatures and complaints about his unwieldy prose style or trivial subject matter. My new personal favorite comes from H.G. Wells, who devoted an entire satirical novel–Boon (1915)–to the topic. “His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle. … It is leviathan retrieving pebbles. It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost even at the cost of its dignity upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den. Most things it insists are beyond it but it can at any rate modestly and with an artistic singleness of mind pick up that pea…”

By the time of his late work, James was almost exclusively composing his novels by dictating to a typewriter (a term which at that time referred to both the machine and its operator, most likely a young woman), and some attribute the peculiarly maundering quality of his sentences to this method of composition. Several bits of biographical history deserve mention here. According to one of his typists, Mary Weld, James’s dictation was “remarkably fluent” and “when working I was just part of the machinery.” According to another, Theodora Bosanquet, James wanted his typists to be “without a mind.” As in James’s Preface to The Ambassadors, the presence of the “author’s vision” fades into the background; it paradoxically “hangs there ever in place like the white sheet suspended for the figures of a child’s magic-lantern” … upon which it is the “charming office” of the protagonist Lambert Strether to project “a more fantastic and more moveable shadow” (again, here we have the unity of projection and reception).

But further testimony from Bosanquet, who, like brother William James, had an interest in automatic writing, reveals a decisive resistance from this apparatus of inscription/projection/reflection/etc.

Indeed, at the time when I began to work for him, he had reached a stage at which the click of a Remington machine acted as a positive spur. He found it more difficult to compose to the music of any other make. During a fortnight when the Remington was out of order he dictated to an Oliver typewriter with evident discomfort, and he found it almost disconcerting to speak to something that made no responsive sound at all.

Interpreting these lines in Bodies and Machines, Mark Seltzer positions James next to “the dream of perfect referentiality in realist writing,” arguing that he seems to feed off the clicking noise of the Remington typewriter as “the concerted response of an ideally responsive and automatized first reader,” rendering the circuit between composition and reception illusory, a “dictatorial practice of writing [which] precisely obviates the conflations of the materialities of writing and technology visible, for instance, in Jack London’s or Mark Twain’s writing as working at the machine, or…” etc. etc.

However, there is obviously something to this breakdown of equipmentality, to the failure of line breaks or keystrokes (whatever the click corresponded to) to make themselves present and thus obstruct the telling of a story. It is important to recognize that, with the expansion of telephone/telegraph networks, public electricity grids, wireless transmission, etc., a rhetoric of technologically mediated immediacy flourished within the same milieu as literary realism, and Seltzer is right to note that “the entire question of the referentiality of later nineteenth-century writing might be reconsidered in terms of such technologies of automatic and immediate registration” (196). But James fell prey to bald fantasies of telepresence no more than he did to some vulgar realist desire for unmediated reality.

Which is why we must return to his strange preservation “superior artistic vision” in the context of such obviously determined relations to practices of composition. Surely similar conditions must obtain for James as for the telegraphist In the Cage: “The men she did track, moreover, she tracked mainly in one relation, the relation as to which the cage convinced her, she believed, more than anything else could have done, that it was quite the most diffused” (187). I’m left wondering, how can we can locate an “art of the novel” in which the autonomous presence of artistic genius, as James would have it, persists among the wired relations with which he works?