Caged in Desire, or How to Read an Unreliable Narrator: Anxiety, Projection, and Crushes in Henry James’s In the Cage

I’d like to open this post with some mood music:

There we go.  That sets the stage nicely.

In other words, In the Cage is a stomach-turning read for any fantasy-prone person (re: most of us) who has ever had an unrequited crush.  Let’s think specifically of Chapters 15 through 18, when our heroine comes across Captain Everard in the park.  It is evening; she is released from her barred cage of the post office, and they meet and talk for the first time on the terms that she is a person rather than a service-provider.  It is in these chapters, during this conversation, that we encounter the profound instability in the so-called “young lady.”  Throughout In the Cage, the reader is taken through her inner monologue with the guidance of an omniscent third-person narrator… But it is exactly that the narration is in the third person that gives us just enough distance so that we are inclined to believe it for its sense of objectivity.  We get the sense throughout the text that something in the young lady is a little off– after all, she hardly speaks to the man who has served as a tabula rasa for her ambitious and lovesick fantasies– but it is here, in this section, that she unravels.  The dialogue between them, where it becomes clear that Captain Everard does not “know” that the young lady has been in love with him from afar, and that he is not in love with her back, is not unlike a narrative splash of freezing water.  And it becomes clear that the drama in In the Cage crystallizes as the young lady throws herself against the barriers of the fantasy she created.

As much as I think Lady Gaga does an excellent job at summing up desire’s anxious, sloppy blur between fantasy and reality (and it’s catchy!), I’m going to put on my “literary critic (or something along those lines)” hat and tease this out a little more.  In the Cage writhes with a tension that can be well articulated under the furrowed brows of Jacques Lacan and Otto Rank.

If we are to take Lacan’s notion of desire**– that desire holds space, and is always beyond satisfaction (Thanks @JayClayton for the recent refresher) and blend them with Rank’s notion of doubling, in which the ego is replicated and is encountered by the subject as an endless extension of the self… well.  We get a pretty unflattering, if also not untrue version of what happens when we begin to inflict our desire upon those whom we desire.

What we come to realize in the park is that the only character we really “see” is our caged young lady, as she projects herself upon Captain Everard, and we are meant to bear witness to what nearly becomes her self-sabotage.  The anxiety of her desire, and ultimately the bones of Captain Everard’s character are what drive the story forward.  We reach the end of In the Cage, realizing we were pacing in the same circles as our young lady, but in actuality… we never really moved outside of the cage.

Quoth the prophet Lady Gaga:  I’m your biggest fan, I’ll follow you until you love me.

-AnEyeToward (wink)

**Works Referenced:

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Bruce Fink. 2nd ed. New York/London: Norton, 2004. Print.

Rank, Otto, Tucker, Harry. The Double a Psychoanalytic Study. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina, 1971. Print.

Tweeting from “the Cage”?: Applying Henry James’ Technological Critique to the 21st Century

“It had occurred to her early that in her position—that of a young person spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea-pig or a magpie—she should know a great many persons without their recognizing the acquaintance”—so begins Henry James’ tale of a telegraphist’s slow descent from her own reality into the fictionalized affairs of her wealthy clients. Throughout the story, “the cage” provides a partition behind which the female protagonist can observe the comings and goings of her customers, but it also becomes a barrier obscuring her depiction of their affairs. With every telegram she receives, the telegraphist gets a glimpse into the lives of Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen, but she never gets the entire story—she must fill in the blanks herself. In much the same way, James crafts his narrative, so that we as readers are put in a similar predicament. We too must make meaning out of what is not said. And we as readers are just as likely as our protagonist to draw the wrong conclusions.   In the Cage becomes, as Richard Menke cleverly points out, James’ “own mode of telegraphic realism”; and Menke also points out the possible pitfalls of technological innovations: “however modern these technologies are, they may be as likely to mislead as to extend out ‘direct vision’ and our understanding” (213-214).

Although James’ text explores the impact of a 19^th-century form of technology on an individual’s consciousness, I was struck with how applicable James’ critique is to our contemporary world of social media. A recent poll by Ipsos Open Thinking Exchange (OTX) found that “Americans aged 18-64 spend an average of 3.2 hours per day on social media (See: “Social Networking Eats up 3+ Hours Per Day For the Average American User”). In a sense, we are all “intense observers” peering out from our individual cages–or screens. And how apt that one of the largest of these sites takes as its mascot and symbolic representation of its users a bird. Indeed, Twitter creator Jack Dorsey explains in a recent interview that the service’s name was founded around the ideas of observation and meaning-making—two ideas central to Henry James’ own depiction of the magpie-like experience of the telegraphist. Dorsey explains: “The concept was watching before we kind of switched

it and developed it into ‘following’…on Twitter, you’re not watching the person, you’re watching what they produce.” He goes on: “bird chirps sound meaningless to us, but meaning is applied by other birds. The same is true of Twitter: a lot of messages can be seen as completely useless and meaningless, but it’s entirely dependent on the recipient.” (See: “Twitter creator Jack Dorsey illuminates the site’s founding document. Part I”). Rather than a handful of telegraphic employees mediating modes of communication across space and time, Twitter’s 284 million users are peering at each other from within their individual cages, tweeting their own misinterpretations and meddling into the affairs of those around them. How might we think about James’ early critique of telegraphic realism in the context of contemporary forms of technology?

For more Twitter Stats: http://www.internetlivestats.com/twitter-statistics/

For Twitter mishaps: http://www.businessinsider.com/13-epic-twitter-fails-by-big-brands-2012-2

~Kylie

“Three’s a Crowd”: Queer Networks of Desire in Henry James and Beyond

I thoroughly enjoyed Eric Savoy’s “‘In the Cage’ and the Queer Effects of Gay History,” in which Savoy situates James’s treatment of sexual scandal and class transgression in his novella in the context of anxieties raised by the Wilde trials. (How fitting that M. Savoy shares a name with the infamous hotel where the liaisons took place.) While I found the article to be quite incisive (and I’m always eager to be seduced by Wilde), I want to explore some other avenues of non-normative desire in the text besides cross-class identification and coded homoeroticism.

Obsessive identification with an admired figure is often coded as sublimated homoeroticism – confusion over whether one wants to have or be the desired object. (See “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “All About Eve,” “Single White Female.”)  Since James’s unnamed telegraphist doesn’t fixate on an individual, but the conspiratorial relationship between Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen, I would classify her desire as closer to that of the young tomboy Frankie in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1946). Oppressed by the feeling that she is an “unjoined person,” Frankie longs to cleave to her older brother and his fiancée because “they are the we of me.” This template for desire, which involves inserting oneself into a seemingly exclusive relationship, seems extra pertinent and challenging when explored in the context of telecommunications:  if messages must be transmitted by a human or non-human mediator, the most intimate of “private” conversations becomes (at least!) a ménage à trois by default.

To pursue this idea further, narratives like James’s “In the Cage” or Romanek’s film One Hour Photo (2002) ─ in which lonely photo developer Sy Parrish (the late great Robin Williams) becomes obsessed with a family whose prints he handles ─ suggests that the instrumentalized humans that process “private” moments or exchanges may be particularly vulnerable to urges to seek out “the we of me.” While machines have made many of these jobs obsolete (relocating some of our paranoia about voyeurism onto hackers and data monitors), how might this pattern of desire still affect us as we stride toward artificial intelligence?  Expanding on Turing’s famous test, Searle’s Chinese room thought experiment asks if computers can ‘think’ with insight, but can technology desire? What might “the we of me” mean for a machine? Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) already grants us a vision of a world in which a man and an operating system try to negotiate a sexual relationship via a human surrogate who “wanted to be a part” of their love story (clip in link below, quotation around 6:40).

http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/ccManager/clips/an-inversion-of-the-cinematic-genre-of-cybersex-in

While it is fascinating that, for the surrogate, Theodore and Samantha (the OS) are as compelling as Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen are to James’s telegraphist, their triangulated relationship is still plotted along heteronormative romantic lines. If an OS or another technology was the third term in this equation, how might he/she/it position itself as a participant in human relationships in a way that our cultural scripts cannot accommodate?

-A. M. Lehr

Telegraphic Realism and Modernist Aesthetics

Henry James’ style of writing in his short novel In the Cage at first seems nothing like the compressed, imagist ideals of Ezra Pound. But perhaps examining some of Pound’s essays, including one on James, in conjunction with Richard Menke’s examination of James’s “telegraphic realism,” may help clarify the modernist qualities that Pound praises in James.

Menke examines the characteristics of telegrams that translate into James’s fiction. For example, he quotes James’s meditation in Portrait of a Lady on how people could become extraordinarily adept at eliminating all excessive words from their messages, which could backfire by reaching the point of ambiguity making for misconception. James calls this phenomenon “the telegraphic ‘art of condensation’” (Menke 196). Pound similarly writes that James, even in “his most complicated and elaborate” style, “is capable of great concision”; thus, “if, in it, the single sentence is apt to tum and perform evolutions for almost pages at a time, he nevertheless manages to say on one page more than many a more ‘direct’ author would convey only in the course of a chapter” (299). Certain moments of In the Cage, both visual and psychological, stand out as memorably as some of Pound’s imagist poems: the patch of sunlight on the floor of the PO, the brown fog obscuring the girl and Mrs. Jordan as they part ways, their feeling of “submission and sympathy” paradoxically cast “across the social gulf” (178), her staring at the canal. These moments can stand on their own, but they also invite interpretation—arguably the fundamental call of modernist texts that made close reading popular in the academy for so long. Menke writes, extending the need for close reading to public, commodified language: “In the Cage too treats telegrams as texts that demand intricate interpretation” (196). He considers the actual dependence of telegraphy on sound, quoting Walter J. Ong: “sound has a ‘unique relationship…to interiority’” (206). Pound likewise speaks of poetic sound, “to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase” (3), and emphasizes art’s interiority: “The arts give us our data of psychology, of man as to his interiors, as to the ratio of his thought to his emotions” (48).

Despite these similarities between James’s “telegraphic realism” and Pound’s principles of modernist art, there are many differences that could be discussed, especially the tension in method between the imagist’s means of capturing an ephemeral moment and the telegraph’s annihilation of space and time (Menke 210-211). This is a very destabilizing power: “If the telegraph appealed to the realist imagination […] it also threatened to short-circuit any such stable structure” (210). Though this may be too broad a question to consider for all of “modernism,” and though Pound certainly does not represent the entire movement, it may be interesting to narrow it down to this novel specifically: how do we read the relationship between modernist aesthetics and technology, as played out in James’s In the Cage?

Works Cited

Eliot, T. S., ed. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1968. Print.

James, Henry. In the Cage. London: Duckworth and Co., 1898. Google Book File. Web. 31 Jan. 2015.

Menke, Richard. Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. Print.

 

-S. C.