John aTTridge
Let us begin with a text and a moral. My text is What Maisie Knew (1897), the fruit of an idea that James first jotted down in 1892, but which he only began to develop three years later, after his unhappy experiment with the theatre had run its course (James 1981: 126-7). And as moral, I propose the following:
to grow up in Henry James is to become aware of mediation. What Maisie Knew is, famously, a virtuoso attempt to chart the development of a child’s ‘small expanding consciousness’ from the child’s own point of view, so that James’s narrative records, not only the farcical erotic pas de quatre that ensues after Maisie’s parents divorce, but also the progressive enlargement of her capacity to make sense of these unedifying phenomena. One of the most striking set-pieces in this latter project is James’s description, in the novel’s second chapter, of how Maisie becomes aware of being used by her parents as an unwitting courier of verbal abuse. Prior to this realisation, her participation in Beale and Ida Farange’s remote exchange of insults had been ingenuous and unconscious, as James underlines by figuring her, not as a sentient message-bearer, but in the guise of a series of objects and tools. Maisie is the ‘shuttlecock’ in a game of emotional badminton, the ‘receptacle’ into which her parents pour their vitriol, and, ultimately, the apparatus of the postal service: her memory receives ‘objurgation[s]’ with the mechanical efficiency of a ‘pillar-box’, and they are later retrieved from this ‘well-stuffed post-bag’ and ‘delivered […] at the right address’ (James 1996a: 22). As this last image makes explicit, Maisie has been used as a medium of communication, a fact that, when it dawns upon her, brings about ‘a moral revolution’ in ‘the depths of her nature’
(22). The nature of this revolution is, doubtless, overdetermined, and surely encompasses a developmental psychology of secrecy and interiority, but the precise circumstances under which Maisie acquires the ability to keep secrets and simulate ignorance also seem to invite a more particular interpretation.
It is important to this interpretation that Maisie’s discovery of her ‘inner self’
coincides precisely with her ‘complete vision’ of ‘the strange office she filled’
– with, that is, her realization that she has been enlisted as a medium (22-3).
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When James tells us that, prior to this discovery, Maisie existed in ‘that lively sense of the immediate which is the very air of a child’s mind’, in which the
‘actual was the absolute, the present alone was vivid’, he is not only, I suggest, citing a commonplace of juvenile time perception, but also saying something particular about the mediation of experience. Maisie passes from a state of consciousness in which everything is ‘immediate’ to one in which experience and knowledge can be mediated (22).
During the course of the same episode, Maisie makes another, related discovery about the ways in which information can be mediated. Quizzing her governess, Miss Overmore, about the meaning of one of her mother’s insults, Maisie is enlightened, ‘not by anything she said’, but by ‘a mere roll of those fine eyes’ – a nonverbal signal which allows Miss Overmore to preserve a discreet reticence while conveying a wealth of unspoken meaning (23). Using the device of subjunctive dialogue that occurs with increasing frequency in the late novels, James translates the ‘unmistakeable language of a pair of eyes of deep dark grey’ into its remarkably subtle verbal equivalent (24). It is this act of communication that sows the ‘seeds of secrecy’ in Maisie’s nature:
interpreting Miss Overmore’s eloquent eye-roll teaches her that she, too, might employ a strategy of discretion – practice the ‘pacific art of stupidity’ – in order to jam the exchange of insults between her parents (23, 63).
The ability to decipher the ‘language’ of looks will prove to be a valuable acquisition. It is, indeed, not too much to say that Miss Overmore’s eye-roll initiates Maisie into the possibilities of encrypted communication and concealed meaning that will preoccupy her for the remainder of the novel.
Reading nonverbal cues is one important way in which she exercises her
‘sharpened sense for latent meanings’: her capacity to infer ‘the unuttered and the unknown’ from the statements and behaviour of her elders (189, 135).
When her father, for instance, attempts to draw a veil of noble self-sacrifice across the ugly fact of abandoning his daughter, Maisie ‘understood as well as if he had spoken it that what he wanted, hang it, was that she should let him off with all the honours’, receiving loud and clear the face-saving instructions he ‘communicated in a series of tremendous pats on the back’
(148). Sir Claude, similarly, is able to explain Mrs Beale’s jealousy of Mrs Wix in a ‘wink’ (162). Earlier, an intercepted ‘quick queer look’ between him and Mrs Wix speaks volumes to Maisie about their complicity, and Maisie is herself able to exchange tolerably precise communications with Mrs Wix in Sir Claude’s presence by means of ‘compressed lips and enlarged eyes’
(78, 83). That the air of What Maisie Knew is thick with such gestural and physiognomic messages is not in itself surprising: nonverbal communication is one of the standard props of nineteenth-century realism. Nonetheless, we should be attentive to the importance James assigns to something as banal as a roll of the eyes in the narrative of Maisie’s psychological development, as well as to the ostentatious gap he inserts between the innocuous gesture and its highly sophisticated meaning. It might be unidiomatic to describe
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Miss Overmore’s face as a medium of communication at this moment, but it would perhaps be less unnatural to say that part of what James wants us to notice about this epiphany is Maisie’s dawning awareness of mediation itself.
Miss Overmore’s eye-roll teaches her that information can be stored without being transmitted (these are the ‘seeds of secrecy’), but also that this is how information circulates: it is mediated, fungible, translatable from one code (looks) into another (words). In short, Maisie leaves the ‘immediate’ world of childhood, becomes aware that she herself has been used as a medium, and learns a lesson about the way the information she craves is mediated, all at the same time.
By beginning with this episode, I want to draw attention to the way that mediums and mediation in James can turn up in unexpected places. As Mark Goble has compellingly shown, the paradoxes of modern connectedness are distributed pervasively throughout James’s later novels, traceable not only in their figuration of new media technologies, but also in the very ‘“indirectness”’
of Jamesian style (Goble 2010: 20). The novels of the so-called ‘major phase’
are shaped ‘as much by the sheer “romance” of connection as by the material conditions of media technology’, and explore the ways that communication at a distance ‘distend[s] and disfigure[s] the idea of proximity itself’ (62, 79).
In what follows, I too want to explore the ways in which technical mediums of communication in James’s novels form part of a larger process of reflection on mediation. Whereas, however, Goble’s argument about ‘the “romance” of connection’ focuses primarily on the displaced ‘pleasures’ and ambient ‘erotic noise’ that James was able to locate in experiences of intimate distantiation (72-3), the structure of feeling that I wish to trace below is not specifically related to eros or desire. One aim of this essay is simply to show that James’s representation of media and communication blurs the line between things that we are accustomed to refer to as communication media and other things – a small child, a glance – that do not at first seem to belong to this category.
More particularly, I will try to trace, within James’s reluctance to equate mediation with any particular medium of communication, a fleeting image in his late novels of a different kind of medium, irreducible to any concrete object or process or event. At these moments, James seems to contemplate the medium as a kind of general condition, above or behind or beyond the world of media as conventionally conceived.
I don’t want to overstate the distinctiveness of this way of thinking about media: to see mediation or mediatedness as a condition that transcends any given medium is scarcely an unorthodox position in the history and theory of media and communications. As its subtitle suggests, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) itself positioned media studies as an aggressively expansionist branch of anthropology, rather than the humble investigation of communication technologies. McLuhan’s definition of a ‘medium’ as ‘any extension of ourselves’ was abstract enough to group obvious media like print, television, and radio together with an eclectic range
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of phenomena not normally considered under this rubric – money, clothing, electric light – while his never-clearly-defined concept of ‘sense ratios’ implies that media must be studied as part of an integrated cultural system (McLuhan 1967: 15, 27, 55). Reflecting on McLuhan’s legacy in Understanding Media: A Popular Philosophy, Dominic Boyer suggests that at least part of McLuhan’s usefulness for contemporary media theorists is historical, as a witness to ‘a rising sense, across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of the presence of what I will term the “medial” dimension of human life’ (Boyer 2007: 25).
What Boyer retains from McLuhan’s project is thus its defamiliarizing strategy of abstraction, which refuses to reduce mediation, or the ‘medial’, to the empirical existence of media technologies.
Thus, while it might seem unnatural to see a facial expression and a telegram, say, as part of the same inquiry into the nature of mediation, the principle that the meaning of media extends beyond the history of technology is a familiar media studies doctrine, of which other examples could be given.
As a further inducement to place Miss Overmore’s eye-roll in the context of a modern media ecology, we might also recall that, as David Trotter has pointed out, one of the senses of the word ‘telegraphy’ refers to just this kind of nonverbal communication (Trotter 2014). This meaning is recorded in the OED (‘To make signs; signal [to a person]’), which dates its first printed appearance to 1818, but more opportune in the context of a discussion of Henry James is the entry for ‘telegraph, v.’ in the Century Dictionary, first published from 1889 to 1891, and reissued in a revised edition ten years later.
The Century illustrates the sense in which to telegraph is simply ‘[t]o signal;
communicate by signs’ with two recent examples, one from Samuel White Baker’s memoir In the Heart of Africa (1884) and the other from Henry James’s 1888 story ‘The Liar’ (Whitney 1889-1891). This latter example of the usage – ‘Besides, I hate smirking and telegraphing’ – is uttered by Mrs Capadose, now married to the ‘liar’ of James’s title but recipient, some years before, of a marriage proposal from the story’s central character, the artist Oliver Lyon (James 1999: 332). It is the unexpected renewal of this association at a country-house party that occasions Lyon’s unsuccessful attempt to attract her attention across the table at dinner, and later her profession of distaste for such non-verbal signals.
The implication of this example from ‘The Liar’ is that ‘telegraphing’, within the highly differentiated spectrum of Jamesian social relations, means not only to ‘communicate by signs’, but more particularly to do so in a gauche or obvious manner. This more specialized sense is also evident in What Maisie Knew, where ‘telegraphy’ describes the habit of silent communication established between Maisie and her governess, Mrs Wix. When Mrs Beale (formerly Miss Overmore) joins this duo unexpectedly at their hotel in Boulogne, she temporarily interrupts their habitual exchange of signals by monopolising Mrs Wix’s attention:
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It struck Maisie even a little that there was a rope or two Mrs Wix might have thrown out if she would, a rocket or two she might have sent up. They had at any rate never been so long together without communion or telegraphy, and their companion kept them apart by simply keeping them with her. (James 1996a: 231) Richard Menke suggests that this passage expresses ‘Maisie’s desire for shared, silent contact’, and that for ‘Maisie as well as for the telegraph’s enthusiasts, the phenomenon of telegraphy suggests the fantasy of telepathy’ (Menke 2008: 206). The conventional sense of ‘telegraph’ recorded in the Century, however, as well as James’s use of the verb in ‘The Liar’, What Maisie Knew, and elsewhere, suggest that ‘telepathy’ may imply a somewhat more exalted picture of interpersonal communication than the one James intended to convey. By contrast with immediate thought transference – certainly, as Menke shows, one of the dreams of Victorian media culture – social
‘telegraphy’ is insistently, even clumsily mediated by physical bodies. That
‘telegraphing’ is a vulgar or ridiculous mode of communication is also the implication of James’s use of the term in The Tragic Muse (1890), where it is the tacky Mrs Rooth who signals ineffectually to Peter Sheringham through the window of the Rooths’ rented house (James 1989: 1200). If, then, like Menke, I do wish to discern in James’s use of ‘telegraphy’ here some residual association with the Victorian electric telegraph, the connotation I want to insist upon is simply that of mediation itself. Far from allowing immediate thought transference, social signalling depends upon ‘smirking’ and other more or less clunky mediations, just as sending a telegram required the intervention of a sophisticated technical process.
Sending a telegram, at least, in the manner permitted by the telecommunication technologies of 1897. At precisely the same moment that What Maisie Knew began appearing in serial form, in January of that year, the imagination of the transatlantic public was seized by a new form of telegraphic transmission, promising even more suggestive affinities with direct inter-mental communication than its predecessor. The possibility of electrical telegraphy without the mediation of conducting wires had been investigated by a variety of scientists and experimenters before Guglielmo Marconi submitted his patent for wireless electromagnetic transmission in June 1896. As early as 1838, the German C.A. Steinheil had successfully transmitted electrical impulses through the earth across a distance of fifty feet, and in 1842 Samuel Morse used the Washington City Canal to complete a telegraphic circuit connecting the opposing banks (Fahie 1901: 3, 10-11).
The crucial scientific breakthrough in wireless communication, however, was the discovery by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1887-1888 of a method for generating high-oscillation, electromagnetic waves – an innovation which ultimately formed the basis for Marconi’s 1896 patent (Hong 2001: 2-9, 17-23).
Marconi’s invention, enthusiastically presented to the public in a lecture by
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the P.O.’s engineer-in-chief, W.H. Preece, on 11 December 1896, precipitated a torrent of popular and journalistic discussion in the early months of 1897.
As the engineer and historian J.J. Fahie observed two years later, 1897 opened with a ‘great flutter in the dove-cotes of telegraphy’, accompanied by a slew of ‘[m]ysterious paragraphs about the New, Wireless, or Space Telegraphy’
(Fahie 1899: xi).
The possibility of communication by means of waves traveling through the ether seemed to provide an even more auspicious analogue for direct telepathic communication than the transmission of signals via electrical
‘fluid’. To take only one example from a voluminous and well-documented discourse, an 1899 Punch cartoon by Edward Tennyson Reed depicts the Leader of the Opposition, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, ‘silently catechizing’ the Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour across the dispatch box, with the aid of antennae protruding from his skull (Figure 1).
A caption explains that question time will, ‘of course’, be transformed by the
‘discoveries of Signor Marconi’. Further elaboration of the cartoon’s premise is considered redundant: any contemporary reader could be expected to make the short conceptual leap from Marconi’s ethereal signalling masts to personal antennae, transmitting not coded messages but thought itself.
To ‘telegraph’ is to ‘communicate by signs’: not to engage in immediate thought-transference. The availability of ‘telegraphy’ to describe both a new communication technology and a mundane feature of face-to-face interaction is significant, in What Maisie Knew, because it invites us to think about this latter source of information as a medium, too. But while Maisie’s social encounters never approach the immediate communion depicted in the Punch cartoon,
Fig. 1. Edward Tennyson Reed. 1899. ‘Wireless Telegraphy’. Punch, April 26: 204.
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there is one scene in the novel in which James seems to dwell upon the possibility of immaterial communication that Marconi’s invention heralded.
Left alone by Sir Claude in their sumptuous seaside hotel at Boulogne, and returning earlier than expected from a day of sightseeing, Maisie and Mrs Wix decide, at the suggestion of their coachman, to fill in the time before dinner with a promenade on the beach. Constantly in the background of this touristic interlude is a prolonged, episodic discussion of Maisie’s ‘moral sense’, and it is in the context of this highly-strung conversation that Maisie imagines the logical endpoint of her growing store of knowledge (214-15):
She judged that if her whole history, for Mrs Wix, had been the successive stages of her knowledge, so the very climax of the concatenation would, in the same view, be the stage at which the knowledge should overflow. As she was condemned to know more and more, how could it logically stop before she should know Most? It came to her in fact as they sat there on the sands that she was distinctly on the road to know Everything. She had not had governesses for nothing: what in the world had she ever done but learn and learn and learn? She looked at the pink sky with a placid foreboding that she soon should have learnt All.
They lingered in the flushed air till at last it turned to grey and she seemed fairly to receive new information from every brush of the breeze. (James 1996a: 216)
This passage offers a kind of abstract mise-en-abyme of Maisie’s whole trajectory in the novel, reducing James’s story to its simplest and most essential schema. If other ‘quickening[s]’ of her ‘perceptions’ have been occasioned by the reception or interception of particular messages, here Maisie’s journey from innocence to experience is figured in its ideal form, as nothing other than the reception of ‘information’ (85).
We need not, perhaps, think of wireless telegraphy when James describes Maisie receiving ‘new information from every brush of the breeze’. But it is reasonable to suppose that at least some of the novel’s first readers would have been struck by this thought, amidst the flurry of articles and interviews that began to appear in 1897. Marconi’s patent had, after all, described a method of conveying electrical impulses through the ‘air’, and the term ‘aerography’
was one of the ultimately unsuccessful neologisms proposed to describe the new invention (Fahie 1899: 296; McGrath 1902: 469). The physical location of this episode might also have led readers to detect an allusion to Marconi’s new discovery. One of the most excitedly contemplated potentialities of wireless telegraphy was the ability to communicate across bodies of water without the expedient of submarine cables, and plans were soon underway to test
was one of the ultimately unsuccessful neologisms proposed to describe the new invention (Fahie 1899: 296; McGrath 1902: 469). The physical location of this episode might also have led readers to detect an allusion to Marconi’s new discovery. One of the most excitedly contemplated potentialities of wireless telegraphy was the ability to communicate across bodies of water without the expedient of submarine cables, and plans were soon underway to test