Henry James and the Media Arts of Modernity
TENTATIVE WORKING
Chung, June Hee. Henry James and the Media Arts of Modernity: Commercial Cosmopolitanism. New York and London: Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group), 2019.
The literary feud (1915 and thereabout)[1] between Henry James and H. G. Wells[2] was once well known in literary circles and could rouse passions even fairly recently[3] — and we will avoid discussing it. But the existence of the feud can underline how far Henry James and June Hee Chung's book are outside SF and SF criticism, and thereby underline as well the potential usefulness for criticism of finding in James's works concerns that appear in SF (and elsewhere), and appear with increasing frequency in SF of the 20th century.
Note that a number of James's important works[4]come in the period between the notable narratives of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) and E. M. Foster's important long story, "The Machine Stops" (1909) — and is succeeded fairly closely by the commercial take-off of US pulp SF with the start of Amazing Stories (April 1926)[5] and the appearance of technological themes and images in, e.g., Kafka's "In der Strafkolonie" ("The Penal Colony," 1919) and D. H. Lawrence, with his concern with "the organic principle" vs. "the inorganic or mechanical principle" in, say, Women in Love (1920): see the discussion by Joanna G. Semelks of Lawrence and technology in her "Sex, Lawrence, and Videotape" (and note a somewhat related argument in Richard D. Erlich's "Catastrophism and Coition: Universal and Individual Development in Women in Love," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 9.1 [Spring 1967]: 117-128).[6]
See also Mark Seltzer's Bodies and Machines (1992) and Richard Menke's "Telegraphic Realism," cited by Chung.
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Both Chung and James use references to mechanisms, including with people figuratively within mechanisms — people up the social and employment scale from Lawrence's miners and other working class workers: note the common move in satire and SF of literalizing such figures of speech, as, arguably, in "The Machine Stops. Chung can refer (figuratively) to prosthetics.
In The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl the rising popularity of decorative objects among American plutocrats also reveals an aestheticized machine culture that produces a collage-like mode of representation to parallel white-collar employees' consumption of mass print media illustrations. (Chung 5)
In the transition between the 19th and 20th c.'s ("the fin-de-siècle") and into the 20th (all page references in Chung unless otherwise noted):
[...N]ew mass technologies encouraged workers to think about art as a tool for transforming perceptions, whereas visual media facilitated this treatment of this art as techne. [...] Thus, the permeability between the spheres of work and play figures beyond just the effects of rationalization from mechanization as a distinctive cultural influence of the corporation. (pp. 11-12)
In Bodies and Machines, the American economy's reliance on technological innovation for its material success accustomed the public to representations as a mode of manufacture that erodes the boundaries dividing persons from things. Seltzer looks at examples from realist literature that imagine the couplings of bodies and machines to show how they familiarized consumers with words as prosthetics or techne, that is as object extensions of the body. (p. 13)
[...W]ealthy Americans in the 1870s and 1880s used their collections as souvenirs to represent themselves in the public sphere. The ornaments are prosthetics, physical extensions of the owner's self. (p. 24)
Thus, as critical and anxious as James could be of the pressures of mechanization and the state of mass-produced literature [... he] was [...] also fascinated by what he saw as technology's influence on literary style. (p. 28)
Chung goes on to apply N. Katherine Hayles on "'inscription technologies' — such as photography, cinema, telegraphy and phonographic sound recorder and reproduction — in contrast to older visual art forms such as painting and theater" (p. 29). This relates to the significance of things and "remediation" in the sense of "re-media-ation," transferring from one medium to another. "The material arts as doubly remediated in theatrical performance and public museums offer access to new emotions and experiences via an embodied cognition in which interior decoration functions prosthetically to enhance the mind's activities" (p. 29).
Like media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan, James foresees the threat of a machine culture that simultaneously looks to machines to mediate distances and create a sense of a global community at the same time that it depersonalizes the relationship between the senders and receivers of communication. (p. 50)
— In "The Machine Stops," such "machine culture" becomes The Machine, which does both "mediate distances" on a global scale and depersonalizes — as we come to see — relationships.
In "The Death of the Lion" (1894, with title punning on "lionized" celebrities), the "ringleader of the media circus" (in Chung's formulation) "played her victims against each other with admirable ingenuity, and her establishment was a huge machine in which the tiniest and the biggest wheel went round to the same treadle" (James, using figurative language, pp. 298-90 in the 1986 collection, ed. Frank Kermode, The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories).
In the 1903 novella The Papers, examining the "New Journalism" of interviews and commodification of authors, James, in Chung's words, "argues that these interviews betray the impersonality of their content because the celebrities lose their distinctiveness when they are" figuratively "transformed into interchangeable units of a publicity machine" (p. 67; see also Chung 73, 75). However, Chung asserts, James "resists concluding that the sole aesthetic impact of the newspaper is to mechanize modern society and instead anticipates a transformation away from commodification, reification, and standardization" (p. 68). Still, Chung presents out of the novella a brief but dense series of analogies in which the newspaper industry is or is seen by its workers as a "corporate structure" figured "as a hierarchical ladder" — cf. and contrast Silverberg's The World Inside — that is also, in James's words, "a receptacle owing its form to an instinct more remarkable, as they held the journalistic, than that even of the most highly organized animal," a receptacle that in a dying metaphor can have dropped in it "odds and ends, all grist to the mill" (The Papers. Complete Stories: 1898-1910, ed. Denis Donoghue, p. 543). Chung comments, "By comparing the newspaper business to living animals" — birds in the full quotation — "James emphasizes the institutions's unnaturalness in its mechanical impersonality," but capable of absorbing/incorporating workers: "For example, Maud Blandy is introduced as a product of the newspapers," in the sense, Chung has it, "that her individual identity is dependent on this anonymous, collective entity [...]." In her case, "The worker is conflated with the product she manufactures [...]" — cf. and contrast the image of the workers at the Moloch Machine in Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS (1927; see below).
Chung's chapter 3 is titled "Writing Machines." In her discussion of James's 1902 story "Flickerbridge," Chung asserts that "As a symbol of a corporatized publishing industry," the character "Addie embodies the traits of a machine in a factory by identifying herself with her work and internalizing her occupation's values [...]" (Chung p. 97), becoming "a kind of mechanical amanuensis or typewriter" (p. 98).
RDE, Initial Compiler, 23Dec19/13Jan20 f.
