They were given the choice of becoming kings or kings’ messengers. As is the way with children, they all wanted to be messengers. That is why there are only messengers, racing through the world and, since there are no kings, calling out to each other the messages that have now become meaningless. They would gladly put an end to their miserable life, but they do not dare to do so because of their oath of loyalty.
                                            —Franz Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks (2 December 1917)

By 1914 reality became violent and so remains. This much ought to be said to make it a little clearer that in speaking of the pressure of reality, I am thinking of life in a state of violence, not physically violent, as yet, for us in America, but physically violent for millions of our friends and still more for millions of our enemies and spiritually violent, it may be said, for everyone alive.
                                            —Wallace Stevens, "The Noble Rider & the Sound of Words" (1942)

At some point in the nineteenth century, it became clear that "nothing was left for writers to do but become media specialists themselves" (Siegert 204). The typical employee in the commercial world had become a media specialist. Without access to that world as an employee, the artist was falling behind. A new widget had become more exciting to the public than a new book. Previously, the artist had been in charge of invention, of creation. The painters and writers had run and were the patent office. But now the result of invention was mass production. Even more, invention became the result of mass production. Poets had whinged when literature went to market in the eighteenth century, fearing, not without reason, that once everyone could read poetry everyone would want to write poetry. As far as the modern world is concerned (ignoring the Greek world), this moment—when literature became something people bought—saw the birth of the critic. Readers would pay to be told what exactly to buy and read. Words and money thickened the air. A distinction between the artist and critic developed, with the critic now in charge of the patent office. The critic took over the patent office from the artist by the beginning of the nineteenth century, and in response we see Shelley’s "A Defence of Poetry" (1821). But by the end of the nineteenth century neither the artist nor the critic was culture’s media specialist. At that point Wilde’s The Critic as Artist appeared, in 1888, which was a defence of criticism, and might thus be called, A Portrait of the Critic as a Young Man. But if the ordinary reader presented the challenge in the eighteenth century, by the nineteenth century it was the ordinary worker.

        Young unmarried women presented the clearest challenge to the old guard of the patent office. They were the most efficient machine operators. Noting what Kafka says about a world with no kings, but only messengers, the young women who operated the offices of the new media also ran the patent office—new media like the telephone and the telegraph. They and their bosses were all messengers—merely passing, not sending—and, in other words, machines. Literature rather suddenly became just one of many language machines.

        Victorian writers fashioned stories after these new media specialists. On this subject in 1877 Anthony Trollope published a story, "The Telegraph Girl," and an essay, "The Young Women at the Telegraph Office"—two pieces almost indistinguishable in title and in content. In them women worked well at their position in the office until they married, and the skills they learned and practiced made them good wives. These women spent the day talking, but this constant communication was harmless because the talking was just talking, and not a talking to. All day they talked to no one. They were not addressed and they addressed no one. The domestic sphere it seems was expanded to include the offices of the new media. According to Trollope, when young women went to work they stayed inside the domestic sphere. Like the home, the (patent) office was a cage.

        In 1898 Henry James published In the Cage. Like Trollope’s, James’s story ends with the telegraphist’s marriage, but the life James’s heroine leads in the cage seems instead to lead her outside. Her life as a telegraph girl, as a messenger and media specialist does not groom her to be a good wife. But outside to what or to whom? In James’s 1903 "The Beast in the Jungle," John Marcher waits for Godot, the beast who never comes. "Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and turns of the months and years, like a crouching beast in the jungle" (76)—"something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible" (71). Marcher thinks the jungle is the public world, so he ignores what happens in his private domestic world. He waits for something to jump him outside, or from the outside, and is blind to the beast inside. The image here of the twisting years is the image of the corkscrew. A corkscrew burrows into blank matter, touches the unseen. A cork separates the outside and inside. The screw, after James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), has become the screw of interpretation, a gauge of how far you are willing to read. At the end of In the Cage, the narrator says of the telegraphist, "There were twists and turns, there were places where the screw drew blood, that she couldn’t guess. She was more and more glad she did n’t want to" (483). Internal bleeding. She will leave the cork in—in her and in that outside life. To pull it out from the inside, as she has to do, she would have to get outside.

        It used to be that you and reality were different, that the closer you moved towards reality the more immense the difference. Different from you this reality was someone you could talk to. This reality would desire you and need you to notice it and tell its story. Up close its history and its difference would assert themselves. Its origins were a different time and place. You could never know this reality since reality was history. An historical reality bears the traces of its ancient production. Up close you are as intimate and as separate as two things could be. An immense intimacy. An ethics.

        Modern reality is no longer historical, but something reproduced that remains always flat and utterly immanent. The closer you move towards the modern effect of reproduction the more it resembles you, and the more you resemble it—the more, then, that you are moving toward yourself. We experience the terror of never being able to leave ourselves behind. Stevens suggests that as reality becomes the same for everyone, reality is us and we are violence. A violence, an energy and a fuel—the perfect worker. Reality, Stevens argues, does not need you. It does not look at you, or desire you—or, if it does, desires only to hurt you.

        The telegraphist might have said, "I want reality to be different from me." As Kafka will, she feels that everyone has become the same, a messenger, except for her—she is different. The narrator tells us that it "was one of her most cherished complaints and most secret supports that people did n’t understand her" (372). She didn’t want anyone to understand her because to understand is to make the same. In this she is the artist. She hates the critic, who understands and make the same. She wants more than anything an immense intimacy with people, the space to talk to and be different.

        I want to turn now to an essay I found, "In the Cage," written apparently by James at the same time as the story, but unpublished—a secret, if you like. It has three sections. The pages of the manuscript are in three columns, one for each section. A synchronous prose. In the first, "A Defence of Poetry," James discusses Shelley’s manifesto. Next, in "A Defence of Criticism," James looks at Wilde’s treatise. Finally, in "A Poetics of Defence" James refers to his story of the same title, thereby writing—if we look at them together—as both critic and artist. It seems he regarded the telegraphist as a figure, a bit like Dorian Gray, who was both a picture and a person, a thing of art and a thing of life. The telegraphist is a figure of the late nineteenth-century writer, a critic and artist in an age when both figures were, in Wildean terms, out-of-fashion, replaced by the average worker and consumer, the everyday reader and media specialist.

"In the Cage": An Essay By Henry James

I. A Defence of Poetry

In 1821, Shelley saw that poetry was under attack from the critics. The critics wanted readers, Shelley says, to believe that poetry was not the result of instinct and intuition, but the result of labor and study. In other words, according to the critics, the poet had become a critic. Shelley wanted the two professions separate. Shelley’s poet is passive, like a harp, whose "delicate sensibility" registers the play of the spirit of the age. Only if in tune with this spirit will a poem become "the image of life expressed in its eternal truth." "Poetry is not like reasoning," Shelley cautions, "a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will." Poetry is instead something you wait for, something that comes from outside you, like a beast that pounces on its prey in the jungle. The poet is that prey, vulnerable. Poetry is an animal, a wild animal, not a domesticated pet or zoo creature, and may take you violently. The critics, Shelley warned, wanted to tame poetry—put poetry in the cage. The critic wanted to be the beast, and pounce.

        Emerson understood better than almost anyone that poetry happens in prose. A page of prose could be wall-to-wall poetry. [I guess James is thinking of this in contrast to an area rug of poetry.] This I also attempt in my writing. Mr. Oscar Wilde has said of Browning that he "used poetry as a medium for writing in prose." It could be said that I have used prose as a medium for writing in poetry. Emerson wondered whether it was possible anymore for poetry to exist outside the context of prose. He suspected that after the development of journalism, novels, literary criticism and all that filled out the forms at the patent office of Literature—that contemporary poetry had to pass through the gates or walls or margins of prose—and be quoted. "The adventitious beauty of poetry," he offered, "may be felt in the greater delight which a verse gives in happy quotation than in a poem." In other words, poetry for Emerson truly becomes poetic inside prose, as quotation in a critical essay. Emerson believed that poetry was quotation, and that quotation was poetry. "Original power," he said, "is usually accompanied with assimilating power, and we value in Coleridge his excellent knowledge and quotations perhaps as much, possibly more, than his original suggestions. If an author give us just distinctions, inspiring lessons, or imaginative poetry, it is not so important to us whose they are." No form of language absorbs light better than a quotation. Quoting puts pressure on language to say something out of the ordinary—like poetry does. Quoting pressures reality.
 

II. A Defence of Criticism

Mr. Wilde has remarked that "When people talk to us of others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting." So let me talk about myself, but not as myself. That will be interesting. The modern couple in my stories is often a split self. Not myself and a dark half, a shadow projection—that Romantic beast—but the fractures that result from being a creature of language in language. I am beside myself when I write. Wilde was right, in that critics can be dull when they talk of others, but he was wrong because when I talk of others I talk of myself. I am both, like the telegraphist from In the Cage. She is most herself when she counts the words of others and sends their messages. Not only does she realize what it means to be other than herself—and have other identities—but what it might mean to be other to herself—and know that even to herself she is unknown. She knows that writing puts her close to and terribly far from what lives on the edge of herself, that a writer can feel an "immense intimacy" with herself. Simultaneously in her position in the cage she touches her client and is extended, through the telegraph machine, its lines—extended from sender to recipient and so is both at once. She is different from everyone she knows, including herself.

        Mr. Wilde understands this writing under masks and in many voices. He knows that writing is not about expression, but impression, something that comes from the outside. Shelley had wanted to defend poets from the critics, and Wilde has defended critics from poets—from poets like Shelley. In The Critic as Artist, Wilde has argued that the basis of art is the critical faculty, a faculty or spirit that we have, if we are good readers, inherited from the Greeks. All creative work, he suggests, is the result of this critical spirit. It is this spirit "that invents fresh forms. The tendency of creation is to repeat itself." The aesthetic critic he distinguishes from the journalist. The aesthetic critic’s "sole aim is to chronicle his own impressions." Never does the aesthetic critic concern herself with the intention of the artist whose work he regards, nor with resemblance. This critical writing occupies "the same relation to creative work that creative work does to the visible world of form and color, or the unseen world of passion and of thought," but unlike creative work is "never trammeled by any shackles of verisimilitude." The aesthetic critic "deepens the mystery"— "a mystery it is his province to intensify"—rather than explains. Finally, in an example I find compelling, Mr. Wilde points out that the "actor is a critic of the drama." By analogy, art provides the materials, the script, and the critic performs them.

        Mr. Wilde knows also that artists have—like critics—gathered their impressions not from nature but almost entirely from other works of art. When the artist consciously does this she is a critic. Looking at art develops the critical faculty. We make ourselves modern by developing the critical spirit. The critic, then, is best able to remind us that art is a living thing. "For the real artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion." Most importantly in his defence of criticism, Wilde has agreed that "most modern criticism is perfectly valueless"—this criticism is journalism—but he points out that "most modern creative work" is equally valueless as well. Trollope’s story is journalism too.
 

III. A Poetics of Defence

Shelley defends the poets, and Mr. Wilde defends the critics—so what of the act of defence itself? In my story the lack of someone to talk to has given the telegraphist the impression that she is different from everyone she knows. She appears concerned that she not become like everyone else. She wants to defend her difference. She learns, though, that difference is not something a person has and can protect or not; difference is instead produced by the act of defence itself.

        The telegraphist is a figure for the modern writer, a critic and an artist. She works in a telegraph office. New mediums of writing such as the telegraph are making writers anxious. Telegraph technology offers customers an instant and secret form of communication. Telegrams move one "letter" at a time, not in the jungle of the mailbag. They move at the speed of thought, and are written on preprinted forms. This promise of efficiency makes writers nervous.

        In the cage the telegraphist has the power only of imitation, not creation—but, as Mr. Wilde notes, creation limits while contemplation widens the vision. She contemplates Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen. They become her characters. When a writer makes characters she becomes other than herself. But when a character announces to a writer that he has done things outside her narrative, she becomes other to herself. The telegraphist must remain unnamed simply because she is a narrator too. If when you write you borrow the impression of characters from elsewhere, they will return to that elsewhere when they are not needed. In that sense a writer can never know her characters. The closer you become to them the different they appear to you: "it fed her fancy that no form of intercourse so transcendent and distilled had ever been established on earth. Everything, so far as they chose to consider it so, might mean almost anything. The want of margin in the cage, when he peeped through the bars, wholly ceased to be appreciable. It was a drawback only in superficial commerce. With Captain Everard she had simply the margin of the universe. It may be imagined therefore how their unuttered reference to all she knew about him could in this immensity play at its ease."

        The writer meets one of her characters outside the frame of the cage, however, in the park. They sit on a bench and talk. "The evening had thickened now; the scattered lamps were red; the Park, all before them, was full of obscure and ambiguous life; there were other couples on other benches whom it was impossible not to see, yet at whom it was impossible to look." This moment in the park for a writer and her character is either different or the same as it is in the cage. "It’s quite the same," she argues. He disagrees. The difference—being outside the cage is to risk being seen. Being looked at by your own writing, by an historical reality, opens an immense uncertainty. He was different from her, he realized—and she must as well. "He blinked with a new uneasiness; it might have begun to come to him, through her difference, that he was somehow different himself." Those "other couples on other benches," as I see it, in the thickening light, represent modern writing—something "it was impossible not to see, yet at which it was impossible to look."
 

P.S.

What blood the screw of writing draws we may not know, but draw blood it must. When a writer imagines the extent of the screw but cannot see it, the scene may appear blank. For the telegraphist, "Blurred and blank as the whole thing often inevitably, or mercifully, became, she could still, through crevices and crannies, be stupefied, especially by what, in spite of all seasoning, touched the sorest place in her consciousness, the revelation of the golden shower flying about without a gleam of gold for herself" (388). In an age of preprinted forms, we wonder whether writing is anything more than a filling in, whether anything matters except the signature and the date. The universal soldier’s post card suggests that writing only moves from a scene of war to the home, that writers are war correspondents. An unfilled form remains blank, we say. In that case, blankness is ...
 

P.S.

In 1939, the Partisan Review asked Stein what value she placed on criticism of her work. Stein’s writing might be characterized as having an "immense immediacy." Her answer: "After all if it is written and presumably what you write is written before it is criticised then criticism is bound to come too late always" (55). In this the critic comes after the artist. And if blankness is the result of being outside, and blankness is a common experience for a writer, then writing, we could add, is not only after but outside. But should writers attempt to be inside and on time? Which genre best allows for difference? Which genre produces an immense intimacy?