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Typewriter Psyche: Henry James’s Mechanical Mind

Matthew SchillemanClemson University

In this article, I show that the mental model found in Henry James’s late works derives from his switch to typewritten dictation. While dictating to the typewriter, James says that words are effectively and unceasingly “pulled out” of him by what he calls the “music” of the machine. The “click” of the Remington actually acts as a “positive spur” to his speech, resulting in a diffuseness that makes keeping any text within the length specified by the publisher virtually impossible for him. Critics have left these material effects of the writing machine largely unexamined. But through careful investigation, it can be demonstrated that the properties of typewritten dictation play a crucial role in forming the dynamic system of drives, compulsions, repetitions, and displacements for which James’s late works are famous.

Keywords: Henry James / typewriter / media studies / unconscious / modernism

Critics of Henry James have long observed the unusual syntax of the author’s late style and its correspondence with the elusive psychical depths that his literature plumbs.1 But rarely have they drawn out any connections

between this aspect of his work and its coincidence with his adoption of typewrit-ten dictation as his chief means of composition. It is hard to say why this is, but it might have something to do with a certain embarrassment the investigation might produce for the alleged mastery of the “master.” For instance, Peter Brooks’s assertion that the “very rhythm and punctuation” of James’s sentences belong to his ability to make “darkness visible” (178–79) becomes somewhat ironic when we learn from James’s amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, that the “click” of the Remington acted as a “positive spur” to the author’s speech. Words were “pulled out” from James in this manner, she says, “effectively and unceasingly.” Bosanquet makes it clear that James had little control over this process. During dictation, the author found it impossible to keep any texts within the lengths specified by publishers. Only by reverting to handwriting could he find recourse to limiting his word count. This is because, as Bosanquet says, the “music of the Remington,” and not James’s preplanned intentions, actually guided his thought throughout the act of composition. Indeed, the sounds of the machine became such an integral part

Henry James’s Mechanical Mind 15

of James’s writing that he could not do without them. When the Remington was temporarily replaced by a silent Oliver model, James found dictation impossible and had to suspend all work until the old clanker was returned from the repair shop (Bosanquet 34–38).

Now, when we add to the above the corroborative account of Bosanquet’s predecessor, Mary Kathleen Weld, who took dictation for The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl, that it was a “wonderful experience” “sit-ting there tapping out a sort of accompaniment to [James’s] beautifully dictated phrases” from which any “hesitation of speech, noticeable when he was address-ing a stranger [. . .] was entirely absent,” the putative status of the master stylist becomes all the more tenuous (The master). For in her account and Bosanquet’s, the picture that begins to emerge is not that of a great man, but of a great man and a typist whose writing machine produces, in a sense, the very shape and structure of the author’s prose.

My aim in this essay is to chart out this bond between man and machine in detail, and in doing so, to raise certain questions about the nature and location of the late Jamesian mind. I argue that by marginalizing James’s relationship with the typewriter, critics have not just left unexamined an important source of the author’s stylistic evolution, but they have also overlooked a technological dimension of his work that actually produces many of its psychological properties. Behind the vision of mind as a dynamic system of drives, compulsions, repeti-tions, and displacements that emerges in James’s fiction, is a reconfiguration of the author’s thoughts in accordance with the inscriptive, material structures of typewritten dictation. Replacing his own conscious intentions with the rhythms of his writing machine, James refashioned himself into precisely the kind of authorial subject that would produce the representations of mind for which he was famous. Psychical “depths” and rhythmic flows, underlying “pressures” and darknesses made visible, did not arise independently of mechanico-inscriptive supplementation.

TOWARDS A MATERIAL ACCOUNT OF JAMES’S DICTATION PRACTICE

This reading departs substantially from recent criticism on the typist and dicta-tion in general, on James and media in particular. On the subject of James and media, John Carlos Rowe, Richard Menke, Mark Seltzer, Pamela Thurschwell, and Mark Goble have all offered interpretations, but by and large, their readings have tended to avoid James’s work with the typewriter, or at most, make passing references to it. Mark Goble, for example, in a reading of The Ambassadors, asserts that “James all but perfects a certain language of mediated experience in his later fiction, where experience itself is, by definition, circuitous and indirect” (399). The technological connection that Goble draws out in relation to this claim, however, is not the typewriter but the telegraph. Indeed, he only mentions James’s use of the writing machine for dictation once, as a cursory biographical remark (421). Similarly, John Carlos Rowe argues that James’s late fiction negotiates “anxieties”

16 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 36, Number 3

about a “new class” of technicians upon which the ruling class must rely on for the transmission of information, and he uses In the Cage as his primary text for this reading. But in his analysis, Rowe remains focused on the figuration of telegra-phy in the story, and only passingly notes that there are “remarkable similarities” between James’s practice of dictation and certain scenes of In the Cage, namely the mediation of the stenographer’s “shorthand” and telegraphist’s Morse code (157).2

A number of other examples could be drawn up here. Richard Menke does not mention the typewriter in his media-centered reading of In the Cage.3 Mark Seltzer relegates James’s use of dictation to a footnote in Bodies and Machines (159). Pamela Thurschwell’s work on James and Bosanquet is perhaps the one exception to this trend in that it makes the typewriter a key term for its investigation of In the Cage. But in Thurschwell’s analysis, the typewriter remains a generalized cultural figure for modern mediation, on par and fungible with the telegraph. As she writes, the text of In the Cage and James’s interaction with his amanuensis both show “how intimacy comes to be mediated through teletechnology around the turn of the century, and how new communication technologies such as the telegraph and the typewriter are instrumental in creating transgressive fantasies of access to others” (86–87). What the material differences between these tech-nologies might be or what the specific effects of typewritten dictation might be for James’s literature, however, are not discussed. Rather, Thurschwell’s reading of Bosanquet and the work of the typist is largely subordinated to her reading of the telegraphist in In the Cage. And indeed, the frequency with which media-centered readings of James have made In the Cage their primary text, as the review above has indicated, shows the extent to which the figurative elements of that narrative have dominated the critical reception of James’s dictation practice.

It is worth noting here that the same reduction of the typewriter to a figural or cultural status also guides recent critical studies of the secretary and typist more generally. In his essay, “The Cultural Work of the Type-Writer Girl,” Christopher Keep examines the construction of the female typist as an erotic object in adver-tisements and literary texts such as Clara Del Rio’s Confessions of a Type-Writer (1893), and argues that this process of sexualization was used as a means to miti-gate men’s fears of being usurped by their female coworkers in the office (405). Through a reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Jennifer Fleissner relatedly argues that the development of the character Mina from typewriting vampire hunter to pregnant wife offers a reassuring moral about the life of the modern typewriter girl, situating her firmly in a hetero-normative structure of maternal reproduction (64). Alternatively, Leah Price has emphasized the lingering tensions that type-writing produces for the prestige of male authorship, and has analyzed the ways in which abasing representations of the typist, as a mere machine or unthinking recording mechanism, are symptoms of this cultural angst (1).

None of this criticism gets at the effects of the typewriter on writing in general or on James’s literature in particular. Thus my reading of James and the typewriter, by contrast, grows out of Friedrich Kittler’s analysis of the discourse network of 1900.4 As Kittler argues, typewriting introduces a radical break from


the inscriptive technics of the past. Whereas with the pen or stylus, conscious vision and writing were united in the task of tracing letters, the typewriter disar-ticulates this relationship by making writing into something unseen, automatic, and unconscious. Citing the royal stenographer of Württemberg and the first typewriter dealer of the Reich, Kittler observes:

In writing by hand, the eye must constantly watch the written line and only that. It must attend to the creation of each sign, must measure, direct, and, in short, guide the hand through each movement [ . . . ] By contrast, after one briefly presses down on a key, the typewriter creates in the proper position on the paper a complete letter, which is not only untouched by the writer’s hand but also located in a place entirely apart from where the hands work [ . . . ] the spot where the next sign to be written occurs [is] precisely what cannot be seen. (203)

With the typewriter, Kittler goes on, “the act of writing stops being an act of reading that is produced by the grace of a human subject” (203). Because the typewriter performs writing mechanically, in the absence of conscious inten-tion, it liquidates the “media-technological basis of classical authorship” as an act of inward expression. Instead, people acquire a newfound proficiency of “écri-ture automatique” whereby writing is done automatically and involuntarily, on a subliminal level of reflexive response (204).

To situate James’s use of the typewriter in the Kittlerian discourse network is thus to challenge both the status of his authorship and the purported interior-ity of his thought process. Kittler does provide his own brief account of James’s late writings in this context. Summing up Bosanquet’s description of James at work, Kittler calls the author’s literature a product of the “short circuit between brain physiology and communications technologies” that typewriting historically instantiates, effectively “bypassing humans” altogether (216).

I would alter this relation, however, to one of psychical supplementation, a displacement of human mental representation into a technological system of inscriptive reproduction. To begin to unpack this notion, we can take the example of James’s revisions for the New York edition of his collected works. A passage from Four Meetings in 1879 consists of fairly direct and clear statements:

At this moment, Caroline Spencer came out of the house bearing a coffee pot on a little tray. I noticed that on her way from the door to the table she gave me a single quick vaguely appealing glance. I wondered what it signified; I felt that it signified some sort of half-frightened longing to know what, as a man of the world who had been in France, I thought of the Countess. It made me extremely uncomfortable. I could not tell her that the Countess was very possibly the runaway wife of a little hairdresser. I tried, suddenly, on the contrary, to show a high consideration for her. (Qtd. in Bosanquet 43–44)

The same material, when dictated, is nearly tripled in length and becomes a fine example of the late Jamesian manner. In a fundamental way, this transforma-tion embodies the “free, involved, unanswered talk” that Bosanquet attributes to


James’s trance-like adherence to the ticking of the typewriter (34). For rhythm, compulsivity, and the fluidity of speech are precisely the mechanisms that elaborate and extend the original into its new form.

Our hostess moreover at this moment came out of the house, bearing a coffee-pot and three cups on a neat little tray. I took from her eyes, as she approached us, a brief but intense appeal — the mute expression, as I felt, conveyed in the hardest little look she had yet addressed me, of her longing to know what as a man of the world in general and of the French world in particular, I thought of these allied forces so encamped on the stricken field of her life. I could only ‘act,’ however, as they said at North Verona, quite impenetrable — only make no answering sign. I couldn’t imitate, much less could I frankly utter, my inward sense of the Countess’s probable past, with its measure of her virtue, value and accomplishments, and of the limits of the consideration to which she could properly pretend. I couldn’t give my friend a hint of how I myself personally ‘saw’ her interesting pensioner — whether as the runaway wife of a too-jealous hairdresser or of a too-morose pastry cook, say; whether as a very small bourgeoise, in fine, who had vitiated her case beyond patching up, or even some character of the nomadic sort, less edifying still. I couldn’t let in, by the jog of a shutter, as it were, a hard informing ray and then, washing my hands of the busi-ness, turn my back for ever. I could on the contrary but save the situation, my own at least, for the moment, by pulling myself together with a master hand and appearing to ignore everything but that the dreadful person between us was a ‘grande dame.’ (Novels and Stories 273–74)

In the passage above, we can see the material consequences of typewritten dictation’s musicality for James. On the one the hand, there is a move towards a more fluent mode of delivery corresponding to the rhythmic stimulus of the typewriter’s click. Colloquialisms and oral formulas added to the text, such as “as it were” and “so to speak,” as well as “washing my hands of the business” and “turn my back,” exemplify a less self-conscious mode of composition superseding the more restrained and formal one of handwriting. At the same time, there is a sys-tematic switch from the formal forms of “could not” and “must not” to contracted forms of “couldn’t” and “mustn’t,” a change that shows up in all James’s revisions of his pre-dictation works for the New York edition. But most significantly, extemporaneous thinking, guided by the music of the Remington, takes over to significantly expand and elaborate the original phrasing of the text. Compulsive rhythm, the tick that spurs James to speech, transforms flat descriptions such the “little hairdresser” into a sing-song line about “a too-jealous hairdresser or of a too-morose pastry cook,” and the “thought of the Countess” into a repetitive, chant about the “inward sense of the Countess’s probable past, with its measure of her virtue, value and accomplishments, and of the limits of the consideration to which she could properly pretend.”

This added fluency on the side of the dictator does not translate into greater clarity on the side of the reader. On the contrary, the numerous extensions, interruptions, and refinements that occur have the overall effect of submerging


meaning under ever-forming layers of abstraction. In the sentence beginning, “I took from her eyes, as she approached us, a brief but intense appeal,” the fixation of a rhythmic syntagm, involuntary and trance-like in its repetition, obscures signification by putting it off in favor of prolonging its own tempo. And indeed, as the sentence progresses, the rhythmic force at work within this utterance continues to delay intention, producing considerable ambiguity by the time the sentence is finished — “the mute expression, as I felt, conveyed in the hardest little look she had yet addressed me, of her longing to know what as a man of the world in general and of the French world in particular, I thought of these allied forces so encamped on the stricken field of her life.” Compared with the handwritten version’s “what [. . .] I thought of the Countess,” the conclusion of the dictated version, “what [. . .] I thought of these allied forces so encamped on the stricken field of her life,” the initial concreteness of the original has been lost in its mechanical reproduction.

At times, the rhythm of the dictatorial transcription can evacuate intention from James’s writing almost completely. For example, the sentence, “I couldn’t let in, by the jog of a shutter, as it were, a hard informing ray and then, washing my hands of the business, turn my back for ever,” is an entirely new invention for the dictated version that does not extend a pre-existing sentence. Perhaps for this rea-son, it is one of the most mechanical and autonomous productions of the revised text. In effect, it is a string of clichés. Just as in everyday speech, the function of these formulaic phrases is not so much one of imparting meaning, but rather, to use a linguistic designation of Roman Jakobson’s, “phatic,” i.e., a pre-articulate sounding used to maintain contact during communication. This function is par-ticularly important to technologically mediated forms of communication, such as the telephone, where one must periodically check that the connection is still live, e.g., “I see,” “Oh,” “Ummm” ( Jakobsen and Rudy 24). In James’s case, however, there is no human interlocutor on the other end, only the machine, the type-writer’s click (the typist, during dictation, was to be “without a mind,” “ just part of the machinery,” giving no commentary nor indicating any opinions) (Edel 5: 360, 94). This repeatedly prompts its own kind of sound checking (“as it were,” “wash my hands,” “turn my back”) to reaffirm the speaker’s connection to the writing machine. As a result, moments of repetitive empty sounding occur, as it does in the sentence quoted above, that render the tick of the Remington into a mental tic of the dictator.

In James’s late manner, many of these material effects of dictation become crucial attributes of thought as such. Contrary to Seltzer’s passing observation that James’s late manner “rearticulate[s]” “the links between mind, eye, hand, and paper” that typewriting initially “disarticulated,” in a way that “makes mate-rial differences illusory differences,” typewritten dictation, as the revisions to Four Meetings show, makes displacement, fragmentation, and automatism deeply embedded components of James’s work. Rather than acting as an “ideally respon-sive” “first reader,” the click of the Remington constructs a kind of mental abyss or void of meaning, of which James’s involuntary, mechanical, repetitive speech


is both the cause and the effect (Seltzer 195–96). This relationship is a pervasive constituent of all of James’s dictated literature. It forms, in a critical way, the material basis of the bottomless “sounding” (and one should keep in mind the frequency with which James’s uses this term for his psychical exploration) for which the author’s major phase works are known.5

THE “TALKING OUT” METHOD

The generative process of dictation begins with what Bosanquet calls James’s “talking out” method. The technique consists of the author talking to himself for days about the plans of a story, all of which his typist would dutifully record. His amanuensis functions invisibly throughout the process, giving no commentary nor indicating any opinions. Only the rings and clicks of the Remington respond to his thoughts, leading him on towards further connections and associations. For James, this preliminary procedure is essential for getting “behind the scenes” of consciousness and into the “concealed channels” of the mind (Bosanquet 37). But on a deeper level, this compositional process engenders the very hiddenness and concealedness that James purports to explore.

An example of the talking out method for James’s unfinished novel, The Sense of the Past, is found in the Houghton Library’s Henry James collection. The draft, typed by Bosanquet, is preceded by a note in which she states that it was “dictated in the absence” of any manuscripts or outlines. The text, as she puts it, represents rather “a groping about for the development of the tale,” “an attempt to get back into the atmosphere” of its narrative. Accordingly, the dictation begins with an effort to recollect the feelings and sensations that had accompanied his original efforts:

The idea of trying if something won’t still be done with it has come back to me within a few days, under pressure of our present disconcerting conditions and yet the desire, combined with that pressure, and forming indeed part of it, to try and get back to some form of work adjustable in a manner to one’s present state of con-sciousness. I put the old beginning away, under frustration at the time, with a sense that there was something in it, a good deal in fact, of its kind, and it now rises a bit confusedly, and even dimly before me, as matter for possible experiment. ( James, Sense of the Past: notes)

In these opening lines, a dynamic model of memory is advanced. The author describes his consciousness as being under “pressure” from some undisclosed source. Out of this pressure, “something,” he reports, “now rises a bit confusedly” and “dimly” before him, which James names, rather vaguely, “it.” In psycho-analytic parlance, one might be tempted to describe this as the emergence of repressed content, as indeed Eve Sedgwick, Slavoj Žizek, and others have argued.6 Doubtless, James himself means to describe a purely intrapsychical phenomenon. Crucially, however, this inner process is manufactured by the outward, material properties of typewritten dictation. Memories and recollections that come back


to James during dictation do so primarily in the fashion that the writing machine pushes him toward:

I remember both the interest with which it inspired me and the sense of an intimate difficulty connected with it, which it would be yet, splendid, however, to overcome, and how I just groped my way into it, a certain number of steps over the threshold, as it were, after a somewhat loose and speculative, perhaps also somewhat scepti-cal fashion. It was complicated — I remember that I felt that, which however more inspired than discouraged: the beauty of it was just that it was complicated, if it shouldn’t prove too much so to become splendidly clear, that is to give out all its value of intention. With the somewhat treacherous, or at least considerate, failure of further backing from Rottingdean, I remember suddenly coming to a stop — the thing was too difficult to try on a mere chance, and it appeared to be only in the name of a mere chance, after all, that I had been set in motion [. . .] as I seem to find now with a fine, fine little silver thread of association serving to let it dangle in the chamber of the mind (Sense of the Past).

The form and function of mnemic recollection in this passage is underwritten by the very inscriptive process that records and draws James’s thought out into the open. Rhythm, repetition, and the automatic orality of typewritten dicta-tion prolong and sustain thinking, while at the same time delaying and thereby obfuscating its intentional content. For example, the statement that articulates the struggle between two psychical forces, “I remember both the interest with which it inspired me and the sense of an intimate difficulty connected with it,” is itself a balanced, rhythmic utterance that repeats its own cadence back-to-back: “the interest with which it inspired me” and then “the sense of an intimate difficulty connected with it.” As the passage goes on, the typewriter continues to push James’s thought along in this manner. Paratactic additions and qualifications (“and how I just groped my way into it, a certain number of steps over the threshold, as it were, after a somewhat loose and speculative, perhaps also somewhat sceptical fashion”) show James’s composition as a production of autonomatized formulas induced by the compulsive pull of the writing machine. Empty clichés and stock phrases (“as it were,” “so to speak”) sustaining and extending the passage fall into this category too.

The sense of mental evasiveness that enters into this dictation is no less a product of the machine. James describes his recollections as stemming from a kind of “pressure,” a dyadic struggle between the desire to remember and the seemingly unbridgeable distance between that desire and the act of representation, or as he puts it, the “interest with which it inspired me and the sense of an intimate dif-ficulty connected with it, which it would be yet, splendid, however, to overcome.” James alternatively alludes to this process as following a “fine, fine little silver thread of association” that “dangle[s] in the chamber of the mind.” Both descrip-tions point to the ever-present difference between the author’s intentional mind and the mechanical tempo of his writing machine. A mental action is obliquely alluded to in an opening clause (“I just groped my way into it”), but its meaning,


“its” referent, is repeatedly withheld by the syntactic patterns of rhythm and for-mula (“loose and speculative,” “perhaps also somewhat,” “as it were”) that dicta-tion interjects into James’s writing. James’s thoughts are repeatedly fragmented, delayed, and redirected in this manner by the constant intrusion of compulsive utterances, creating obscurity out of the suspension of meaning.

This last point is best expressed through the author’s heavy use of the deictic “it.” Jamesian critics have taken the prevalence of this deictic term and others in the author’s late writings to be an indication of their link to unobserved and unconscious processes of the mind. As Vernon Lee writes, the Jamesian “it” is “the most elusive” of the author’s psychological abstractions. Its frequent presence in late James, she argues, marks the degree to which the author’s work is imbri-cated in psychical depths (qtd. in Chatman 54). Similarly, Slavoj Žizek argues that the “it” of late James is part of the author’s examination of repressed content and associates it with the Lacanian object of desire (299). Within the context of James’s dictation practice, however, the “it” has a more basic grammatical func-tion. As Seymour Chatman explains in his stylistic analysis of late James, “it” and other deictic terms such as “thing,” “something,” “anything,” “nothing,” “item,” “matter,” “deal,” “another,” “quantity,” “occasion,” and “element” constitute a pro-found shift away from language governed by extra-textual reference towards one in which signs have only a “pointing function, referring backward (or forward) to other words” (54). Such a structural shift represents the material demands of typewritten dictation. Speaking compulsively in pace with the writing machine and in excess of one’s immediate grasp of the sentence requires a language whose intentions and directions are indeterminant. “It” and similar words achieve this by serving as unspecified place-holders. They are the aide-memoirs of a conscious-ness whose intentions do not yet exist, but are in the process of being assembled. James, it should be kept in mind, has no mnemonic for retaining the logical order of ideas in his passages other than the occasional request to have his amanuensis read back to him a sentence or two. Deixis fills in (or more aptly, covers over) the remaining deficit, functioning as the indispensable resource for an author (like James) who knows not where or whence he speaks.

Thus, the repressive forces at work within James’s prose could be said to be technical effects of his dictation practice. Concealed channels and hidden pres-sures figure the process of composing through the typewriter, which, as long as it plays its melody, pulls unforeseen thoughts from the author. Countless examples of this technologically manufactured occlusion can be found in James’s literature proper. For example, in James’s revision to Roderick Hudson, the force of abstrac-tion is equally evident when the relative concreteness of metaphor in the original line, “And yet he strongly felt her charm,” becomes through dictation an indefi-nite account of “elements:” “And yet these elements in her were in themselves an appeal to curiosity” (qtd. in Chatman 54). But what is most important to grasp, as we conclude our examination of the talking out method, is that the inscriptive condition that it materializes for James as a preliminary mode of psychological investigation serves as a base of operations for all the subsequent psychological


representations that we find in his literature. After his initial probes, James would begin the dictation of the novel proper. Whenever he found himself stuck at a difficult point in the narrative, he would commence once again with his talking out method to work through the mental forces at work within his characters (Bosanquet 37). In this back and forth, however, there is no break or rupture in manner or process. Just as thought is pulled from James by the typewriter, so is it unceasingly extracted from his characters by forces beyond their conscious control. Just as the rhythms and movements of the typewriter give his prose a certain pace that can wind thoughts into Gordian knots, so are his characters’ psyches driven and pushed towards an ever finer elaboration of unsolvable mysteries. And thus, as it turns out, the two actions, dictation and character psychologization, are virtually identical.

CASE EXAMPLE: THE AMBASSADORS

The “prompt” and “functional” process of “links multiplied” that governs the mental journey of The Ambassadors, as James describes it in his preface to the text, is a recapitulation of the writing technics at work behind the text’s composition (Ambassadors 40). As James goes on to say in the preface, the novel’s subject is “planted [and] ‘sunk,’ stiffly and saliently, in the centre of the current, almost perhaps to the obstruction of traffic” (1). “Buried for long years in dark corners” its “germs” begin to sprout, just as they do in James’s warm-up for The Sense of the Past, through an extensive process of mental “groping” that takes up one path, then another, searching for something “vaguely pathetic” (62). Typewritten dictation propels this process through the syntactic structures of thought it places around James’s mind. Paratactic addition, colloquial interjection, rhythmic repetition, and sudden digressions keep thought moving ineluctably toward a referent cloaked in thingness. Practically every aspect of typewritten dictation enters into the process of thinking in this novel, even the sound of the bell denoting the end of a line.

As an emblematic moment of the relationship between typewriting and thought that runs throughout the novel, we can take the scene in which Lambert Strether dines with his acquaintance Maria Gostrey. In the scene, Strether is described as having his mind driven by “uncontrolled perceptions.” Like James the dictator, his thinking is compulsive. One thought leads to another and another, and the connection between each is, one might argue, purely associational. The process engenders a sense of psychological depth, with something excluded com-ing into consciousness through the forceful accumulation of ideational links. And indeed, important revelations do emerge over the course of Strether’s thought-train, e.g., “It came over him that never before — no, literally never — had a lady dined with him at a public place before going to a play” (43). But, fundamentally, the structures that propel Strether’s mind are typewritic:

Miss Gostrey had dined with him at his hotel, face to face over a small table on which the lighted candles had rose-coloured shades; and the rose-coloured shades and the


small table and the soft fragrance of the lady — had anything to his mere sense ever been so soft? — were so many touches in he scarce knew what positive high picture. He had been to the theater, even to the opera, in Boston, with Mrs. Newsome, more than once acting as her only escort; but there had been no little confronted dinner, no pink lights, no whiff of vague sweetness, as a preliminary; one of the results of which was that at present, mildly rueful, though with a sharpish accent, he actually asked himself why there hadn’t. There was much the same difference in his impression of the noticed state of his companion, whose dress was “cut down,” as he believed the term to be, in respect to shoulders and bosom, in a manner quite other than Mrs. Newsome’s, and who wore round her throat a broad red velvet band with an antique jewel — he was rather complacently sure it was antique — attached to it in front. Mrs. Newsome’s dress was never in any degree “cut down,” and she never wore round her throat a broad red velvet band: if she had, moreover, would it ever have served so to carry on and complicate, as he now almost felt, his vision? (42)

“[A] small table on which the lighted candles had rose-coloured shades; and the rose-coloured shades and the small table and the soft fragrance of the lady,” is a rhythmic, repetitive sequence. It ascends and then descends a musical scale of ide-ation, just as James’s speech harmonizes with the movements of his Remington. Likewise, the repetitious form of Strether’s recollections, e.g., “no little confronted dinner, no pink lights, no whiff of vague sweetness,” is another instance of the trance-like chanting that dictation pushes James towards. Strether’s thoughts are carried onward in this way by the automatisms of machine writing — parataxis (“to the theater, even to the opera, in Boston, with Mrs. Newsome, more than once”), clichés (“face to face”) — after some mystery, whose elusiveness and unrep-resentability, we might add, derives from the very interminability of this writing process that presses James past his intended word counts. As the author himself writes, “All sorts of things in fact now seemed to come over him [Strether], comparatively few of which his chronicler can hope for space to mention” (43).

The relationship here between thought and inscription extends to the very particularities of the Remington’s typewriterly music. For cognitive displace-ments and psychical redirections in the text, such as “a small table on which the lighted candles had rose-coloured shades; and the rose-coloured shades and small table and the soft fragrance of the lady,” appear to be determined by the bell announcing the end of one line of type and the beginning of a new one. A syn-copated thought — “a small table on which the lighted candles had rose-coloured shades” — prompted by the music of the Remington, without which James could not dictate, extends itself until the sounding place of the carriage return bell, a moment which James’s text could be said to mark typographically with the semi-colon after the first “shades.” When the bell chimes, it acts as a kind of punctua-tion, terminating an associative chain that could go on listing items forever. After this, like the descending of a musical scale, James’s speech follows the rhythm of the typewriter back down the passage of thought already constructed by it: “and the rose-coloured shades and small table and the soft fragrance of the lady.” With


the next ring of the bell, the chain is broken off again, typographically signaled this time by an em dash “ — ,” and a new rhythmical sequence is inaugurated, structured around another carriage return and marked by another dash: “ — had anything to his mere sense ever been so soft? — were so many touches in he scarce knew what positive high picture.” Strether’s thought is shuttled back and forth in this manner, line by line, as so many textual fragments of psyche compiled and computed by the musical program of James’s Remington.

This connection between writing practice and psychological representation approaches a kind of crescendo at the end of the passage, in a moment of role reversal captured in the figuration of Gostrey’s “ribbon.” The ribbon is said to act as a stimulus to Strether’s thoughts, to “carry” and “complicate” his “vision.” This effect is involuntary and irresistible for Strether. For though it “would have been absurd of him to trace into ramifications the effect of the ribbon,” Strether cannot help but be led on by the movement it starts up in his mind. He is “given over to uncontrolled perceptions.” The psychological significance of Gostrey’s ribbon for Strether thus corresponds with the material significance of the typewriter’s rib-bon for James, which similarly carries and complicates the author’s vision. And in this way, author and character momentarily switch positions. For what begins as James’s description of Strether’s thought suddenly becomes legible as Strether’s account of James’s writing.

What was it but an uncontrolled perception that his friend’s velvet band somehow added [. . .] to the value of every other item — to that of her smile and of the way she carried her head, to that of her complexion, of her lips, her teeth, her eyes, her hair? (42)

The ribbon that is said to have “somehow added” to the “value of every other item” in Gostrey’s appearance, “to that of her smile and of the way she carried her head, to that of her complexion, of her lips, her teeth, her eyes, her hair,” does so in the very manner of paratactic operation instantiated by James’s typewriter and its ribbon. That is to say, Gostrey’s ribbon propels Strether’s mind mechanically for-ward by adding, through a repetitious rhythm, more words, more associations, in a description that cannot restrain itself, just as the typewriter’s ribbon moves James’s writing towards description that cannot restrain itself. This adding prompted by the ribbon continues, “frivolous, no doubt, idiotic, and above all else unexpected,” throughout the passage, and indeed, throughout the text of The Ambassadors, as Strether, in “fresh backward, fresh forward, [and] fresh lateral flights” chases after the unspeakable (42). But in the moment of reversal between James and Strether, the moment when the material effect of the ribbon becomes thematically urgent, the novel’s secret, “planted [and] sunk,” effecting a veritable “obstruction” to communication, suggests itself to be the machine that literally constitutes its narrative. For the effect of Gostrey’s ribbon is indistinguishable from the effect of the Remington’s, just as, it might be added, Gostrey’s relationship to Strether is the same as the amanuensis’s relationship to James. Repeating the words of her male interlocutor, like James’s amanuensis would read back the last line dictated


to the typewriter when the author became too lost in his thoughts, she also serves as part of a mechanical recording device for the thoughts of another, “taking it in,” as James often puts it, without restrictions or resistance, to explore the hidden depths of the mind.

The unfathomable interiority of James’s character Strether — the ruptures, diversions, repetitions, and circumlocutions that create the aura of an impen-etrable mystery sunk within his mind — arises this way as the products of an interchange between James’s dictation manner and the description of his charac-ter’s mental process. Free, indirect discourse doubtless facilitates this exchange, as when James’s dictatorial tendency to interject becomes indistinguishable from Strether’s train of thought: “It came over him that never before — no, literally never — had a lady dined with him at a public place before going to the play” (43). The material properties of dictation impose such exchanges by repeatedly extracting colloquialisms and other formulaic utterances from James while he is in the midst of laying out Strether’s thoughts. And by repeatedly flipping James’s thought from one mode to the other, from typewritic reverie to psychological description, the writing machine produces both his and his character’s unlimited mental reserve. Metaphors of “surfacing” or emergence belie the technicity of this operation. Rather, what we have is a kind of intermixing, a loss of distinction, between writer and literary subject, within the material technics of the writing machine.

MEDIUM AND MIND

Such moments as the one from The Ambassadors cited above raise the question, as I have been doing all along, of the locus of thought in James’s late writings. I have been arguing that this thought, both of James and his characters, is bound up with the materiality of the typewriter and dictatorial process it creates for the author. To a significant degree, the Jamesian mind is its product. Conceptions of techno-logical influence or imitation are insufficient explanations here. The medium is not a tool. It is not even the “message.” Up against all these prior notions, something else comes into focus: the medium as a part of the mind.

This is illuminated in an astonishing way by the afterlife James’s oeuvre has in the hands of Bosanquet. Bosanquet, by several accounts, was James’s most brilliant and insightful typist when it came to appreciating the master’s style. Her “intelligent and observant” typing is a refreshing departure from the “apparent lack of comprehension of what [he] was driving at” demonstrated by the previ-ous amanuenses on occasion (Edel 5: 362). This is borne out, for instance, in her ability to create expert parodies of his work, a good example of which is her short piece, “Afterwards,” from 1915 (Bosanquet 6). More impressively, she can use the same talent to perform astonishing alterations to James’s prose. This is the case in her editorial work on James’s preface to Rupert Brooke’s Letters from America. In December 1915, after James had been incapacitated by the first of a series of strokes that would end his life, Bosanquet was approached by Edward Marsh, the


book’s editor, for help with a troubling passage. Three-quarters of the way into James’s preface was a whole page whose contents, Marsh worried, would provoke a libel suit. The passage was, in Marsh’s words, too “deeply embedded in the context [. . .] to suggest a mere elision.” Bosanquet set to re-typing it and was able to transform the page into a single forty-word sentence in which “no seam shows and the stream of James’s prose flows steadily on.” Even Mrs. William James, who was no friend of Bosanquet’s, admitted that “Henry would never know he hadn’t written it himself ” (18–19).

But perhaps most profound of all in the afterlife of James’s oeuvre are the dictated passages that Bosanquet claims to take from the author from beyond the grave. Bosanquet became interested in spiritualism during her time working as James’s amanuensis, and visited at least one notable medium (110). After James’s death, she converts this interest into practice through a series of automatic writ-ings, dictated by James’s ghost, which she uses to complete unfinished works and begins new projects for the author. Bosanquet has, as she lets James profess for her, after “transcribing his words correctly” and “taking mental notes” for so many years and in such intimate settings, also imbibed his very style and manner as well. The dictator’s need for his faithful amanuensis in the afterlife is based on the same technological terms that constituted their relationship while he was living. His purpose is “Just to produce an instrument when that instrument is as efficient as my secretary’s typewriter” (qtd. in Thurschwell 109). Like the dictation she received from the living James, the posthumous communications take the form of an unrestricted speech that wanders from point to point, repeating, halting, and deferring its content for long stretches of time. For example, on 20 March 1933, Theodora Bosanquet records the following automatic communication with the ghost of James:

Yes, he knew you would recognize the words that he used to use so often in his letters to his friends but he means it with a very different kind of love and greeting now for he loves you now and he did not in the least then, for he thought that you were a very uninteresting young woman who had a marvellous gift for transcribing his words correctly, but he finds now that all the time you were observing his style and taking mental notes and that afterwards you wrote a little book about him which he has never had the courage to look at, but he thinks he will have to now if you don’t mind. (109)

Pamela Thurschwell is the first and perhaps only critic thus far to give an extended reading of these dictated passages, which are held in the Society for Psychical Research archive in Cambridge, England. In her argument, the spiri-tualist communications between James and Bosanquet represent new technology-inspired fantasies of access to others who would otherwise remain inaccessible “because of gender and class barriers, or that even more difficult to negotiate bar-rier between the living and the dead” (86–87). This reading is emblematic of how the typewriter, as a secretarial tool, has been read in relation to authorship and literary production. Critics such as Bette London, Leah Price, and Victoria Olwell


have all presented one version or another of Thurschwell’s reading by locating the ultimate significance of the writing machine as an ideological one challenging the place and privilege of the male author. Examining representations of typewriter error at the turn of the century, Olwell writes that the machine “marked a rela-tion between upper and lower classes, employers and employees, businessmen and clerical workers, authors and copyists,” which typos “exposed” to be a “fused class and gender relation” (51). London makes a similar, albeit more general, claim in context of Georgie Yeats’s mediumship and secretarial labor when she say that it contends against the “conventional narrative of male precedence [and] its feminist revision” (Writing Double 192).

Bosanquet’s various reincarnations of the late James, however, also raise a different set of questions and concerns for authorship. Rather than asking how the inscriptive connection between author and typist troubles the issue of who writes, whether this is viewed through the lens of class, gender, or race, one might ask instead what writes. As the analysis of James’s dictation practice above has suggested, at a fundamental level, there is a whole range of effects of typewritic mediation upon James’s prose that cannot be understood through dyads such as male and female, master and servant, but rather require an examination of the technicity of its inscriptive operation, an effect that is neither cultural nor ideo-logical but technological and material. Bosanquet’s continued work with James, after the author’s biological death, could be argued to be at least as much, if not more, a function of this historico-technological dimension of his literature as it is of the culture of the modern office. For, in a way, what Bosanquet resurrects and brings back to life in her secretarial labor, spiritual and earthly, is not simply James, but rather, James qua writing machine.

Automatic writing and the spirit world it connects to are testaments to the rhythmic, mechanical, and repetitive mode of psychical representation that typewriting disseminates and historically makes integral to literary production. A “good automatic writer,” says Hester Dowden in Life Eternal, should be “as serviceable as a good typewriter” (qtd. in London 105). Dowden expresses here the well established phenomenon of secretaries turning into mediums, and mediums who style themselves as “secretaries of the dead,” which defines modern spiri-tualism. By reproducing the properties of typewritten dictation, by engaging in a writing that forcefully precedes and outpaces the time and space of conscious reproduction, the séance becomes, like a late Jamesian novel, a space of concealed channels and psychical revelations.7 It was such a mechanized mode of inscription that arguably produced the late Jamesian the mind in the first place. Thus it is fitting that the ghost of James would pin his continued work as an author on “an instrument [. . .] as efficient as my secretary’s typewriter.” In a profound sense, the author is such a machine. The Jamesian mind is a typewriter psyche.

Unlinking the writing hand from the eye and displacing thought into auto-mated structures of inscriptive technics creates a literature of endless repetitions and rhythms, drives, pressures, and compulsive utterances. This, as Kittler writes, is how the “typewriter and its female operator produced the modern American


novel,” and by extension, one might argue, the modernist novel as such (216). At the heart of literary innovation lay a mechanical core of media invention that transformed thinking. Neither simply inside nor outside, the medium became the mind.

Notes

1. Cf. Cameron 32.

2. Rowe’s reference to shorthand here, however, is an erroneous attribution in regards to James’s dictation practice, which never employed shorthand transcription but always direct recording on the typewriter.

3. See Menke, “Telegraphic Realism: Henry James’s In the Cage.”

4. For a useful comparison of Kittlerian and Anglo-American approaches to modern media, cf. Winthrop-Young; Parikka; and Chun.

5. Cf. James, The Wings of the Dove Chapter 12.

6. Cf. Žizek’s “Kate’s Choice, or, The Materialism of Henry James” in Lacan: The Silent Partner; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies 102; and Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins 157.

7. For more on spirit mediums and writing machines, see Lawrence Rainey, “Taking Dictation: Collage Poetics, Pathology and Politics.”

Works Cited

Bosanquet, Theodora. Henry James at Work. Ed. Lyall. H. Powers. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. Print.

Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1995. Print.

Cameron, Sharon. Thinking in Henry James. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Print.

Chatman Seymour B. The Later Style of Henry James. Oxford: Blackwell, 1972. Print.

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “Did Somebody Say New Media?” Old Media, New Media. Eds. Wendy Hui Kyong and Thomas Keenan. New York: Routledge, 2006. 1–10. Print.

Edel, Leon. The Life of Henry James. 1953–72. 5 vols. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1969. Print.

Fleissner, Jennifer L. “Dictation Anxiety: The Stenographer’s Stake in Dracula.” Price and Thurschwell, Literary 63–90.

Goble, Mark. “Wired Love: Pleasure at a Distance in Henry James and Others.” ELH 74.2 (2007): 397–427. Web. 12 Oct. 2010.

Jakobson, Roman and Stephen Rudy. Selected Writings. Gravenhage: Mouton, 1962. Print.

James, Henry. The Ambassadors. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1994. Print.

———. Novels and Stories of Henry James. Ed. Percy Lubbock. London: Macmillian, 1923. Print.

———. The sense of the past: notes. c. 1914–1915. TS. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

———. The Wings of the Dove. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1978. Print.


Keep, Christopher. “The Cultural Work of the Type-Writer Girl.” Victorian Studies 40.3 (Spring 1997): 401–426. Web. 8 Feb. 2011.

Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999. Print.

London, Bette. “Secretary to the Stars: Mediums and the Agency of Authorship.” Price and Thurschwell, Literary 91–110.

———. Writing Double: Women’s Literary Partnerships. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. Print.

Menke, Richard. “Telegraphic Realism: Henry James’s In the Cage. PMLA 115.5 (2000): 975–990. Web. 4 May 2011.

Olwell, Victoria. “The Body Types: Corporeal Documents and Body Politics Circa 1900.” Price and Thurschwell, Literary 48–62.

Parikka, Jussi. “Operative Media Archaeology: Wolfgang Ernst’s Materialist Media Diagrammatics.” Theory, Culture & Society 28.5 (2011): 52–74. Web. 28 Oct. 2012.

Price, Leah and Pamela Thurschwell. “Invisible Hands.” Price and Thurschwell, Literary 1–12.

———, eds. Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2005. Print.

Rainey, Lawrence S. “Eliot Among the Typists: Writing The Waste Land.” Modernism/modernity 12.1 (2005): 27–84. Web. 6 Mar. 2012.

Rowe, John Carlos. The Other Henry James. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998. Print.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. Print.

Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.

Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.

Thurschwell, Pamela. Literature, Technology, and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print.

Weld, Kathleen M. The master or a glimpse of Henry James. MS. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. “Cultural Studies and German Media Theory.” New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory. Eds. Clare Birchall and Gary Hall. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006. 88–104. Print.

Žizek, Slavoj. Lacan: The Silent Partners. London: Verso, 2006. Print

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