The all-powerful authorial imagination, capable of translating its vision directly to the page, is only one possibility Ozick presents in “Dictation.” The fictional Theodora Bosanquet’s plot succeeds, which means Ozick’s James is unable to recognize Conrad’s style woven into The Jolly Corner, just as Ozick’s Conrad fails to recognize James’s style hidden in The Secret Sharer. What then of style’s connection to a supremely personal consciousness? The fictional Henry James is surrounded not only by other creative minds, but by a textual mode of production that exerts some force over the text he
produces. Perhaps the shift from handwriting to dictation altered James’s and Conrad’s styles in a similar way. Ozick suggests the influence of cultural powers on a larger scale as well, a force that inspired both James and Conrad to write stories at the same time about the same theme. When Ozick’s Bosanquet explains that James’s current project is about “a double, a man appalled by the encroachment of a second self,” Hallowes responds with awe: could it be a coincidence that Conrad is similarly embarked, or is a larger force at work?340 The success of Bosanquet’s plot suggests the author has a much
smaller degree of control over the work of art than Ozick’s James and Conrad would like to believe. Instead of the almost infinitely-powerful mind containing the world and controlling style, perhaps the mind itself is a text, written upon by much larger cultural forces that may shape or even erase the subject.
“Dictation” and The Jolly Corner are both products of the pressures that
surrounded their composition. In Discourse Networks 1800/1900 German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler offers a new mode of literary scholarship that discounts interiority and suggests that literature – and indeed the subjects that produce and consume it – are the products of external factors like technology and institutionalized pedagogy. In a brilliant foreword David E. Wellbery explains that this approach “replaces the
foundational notion of praxis (the materialist version of subjective agency) with that of training. Culture is just that: the regimen that bodies pass through; the reduction of randomness, impulse, forgetfulness; the domestication of an animal.”341 The power to
limit options, in that case, does not belong to Spencer Brydon or to Henry James, but to the culture that “domesticated” them.
Ozick writes about the influence of technology on her own experience and within the textual world of “Dictation.” In her lifetime Ozick experienced two distinct
technological cultures: the first the aural culture of the telephone and television, and the second the ephemeral and isolating culture of the computer. Technological nostalgia seems to propel her narrative backward to explore the impact of the typewriter on James and Conrad, a technology so powerful that in the novella it pulses with an otherworldly magic. Kittler suggests that in James’s time the individual himself was a machine designed to run machines, and the brain is a delicate instrument capable of
malfunctioning. Within The Jolly Corner’s fictional world it is easy enough to identify competing cultures and the influence they exert on the individual. The heart of
determinism in James’s novella, however, is a moment of trauma that sparks repetitions outside Brydon’s – and arguably James’s – control. My second reading of The Jolly
Corner asks whether both Spencer Brydon and his creator might suffer from some
malfunction that forces them to return, unwillingly, to an original site of trauma that echoes outward in an expanding ring of uncanny textual and real-life repetitions.
In this reading, individuals are not controlling authors; now they are machines run by larger forces, or they are texts written upon by something else. In The Jolly Corner, as Brydon acknowledges the impact of experience on himself and his friend Alice
Staverton, he compares people to texts: “They had communities of knowledge, ‘their’ knowledge (this discriminating possessive was always on her lips) of presences of the other age, presences all overlaid, in his case, by the experience of a man and the freedom of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity, by passages of life that were strange
and dim to her, just by ‘Europe’ in short, but still unobscured, still exposed and cherished, under that pious visitation of the spirit from which she had never been
diverted.”342 James describes character as a book, each new experience a tissue-thin page
that “overlays” but barely obscures the text beneath. Brydon and Alice Staverton are no more than the sum of influences; though they share the early chapters, Alice Staverton stopped adding pages long ago and is only a thin pamphlet beside Brydon’s thick tome.
In “Dictation,” Joseph Conrad believes the bodies and faces of the two typists are pages written clearly in black and white: that even to glance at them is to see into the private thoughts of the authors they serve. James and Conrad are doubles because they are opposed equals, but Lilian Hallowes is Conrad’s double because she duplicates his spoken words in print, such an intimate process that his language is inscribed on her body; she thinks the voices of Conrad’s characters ”were in her ears, in her throat, in the whorls of her fingers.”343 The reader that Conrad fears, of course, is Henry James. If
Mrs. Hallowes is the medium that translates Conrad’s thoughts into print, perhaps, he worries, she may also be a medium that translates Conrad’s thoughts into James’s mind, as the famously observant master reads her like a book. Hallowes is a machine as well; when Bosanquet kisses her, Hallowes finds that she has “a hidden lever at the back of her brain that she could raise or lower, nearly at will,” which changes her friend into her beloved employer.344
Ozick’s Bosanquet manipulates the mode of production that shapes the text and her own life, taking advantage of her access to James’s proofs and her authority over the typewritten page, but she uses her agency not to bolster her inner subjectivity or to “make
a name” for herself, but to ensure an anonymous textual afterlife. Ozick’s final sentences confirm that history will forget not only the meeting between Bosanquet and Hallowes, but that they ever existed at all. James’s fictional typist would be pleased to hear it, for her “radical” plot is concerned only with the immutable text.345 This
Bosanquet is a modern woman: she has a love affair with Virginia Stephen (before she becomes Virginia Woolf), haunts bohemian ateliers and admires the latest Fauvist artists. Henry James is a voice tied to the past, but Bosanquet has a vision of the future. The author is old news: now, only the text matters. Bosanquet’s priorities do not necessarily help us understand the 1908 Henry James any better, but they do speak to Cynthia Ozick’s concerns in 2008. If the early twentieth century was a moment to consider the threatening double, the early twenty-first century is a moment to consider Henry James. Ozick has to alter the historical record to construct her tale – she has set it in 1910, the date Conrad published The Secret Sharer, though James published The Jolly Corner in 1908 – but “The Year of Henry James,” 2004, was a striking real-life coincidence. That year, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, Colm Tóibín’s The Master, David Lodge’s
Author, Author! and a reprint of Emma Tennant’s Felony (2002) competed in the literary
marketplace, and Michiel Heyns sought a publisher for his own novel of James and his amanuensis, The Typewriter’s Tale (2005).
Ozick looks back from 2008 to James’s lifetime with nostalgia for a lost set of values. As much of her writing betrays, Ozick is infatuated with James, but her novella mourns a lost culture, not a lost man. Her essay “The Question of Our Speech” betrays this nostalgia, though it describes America in 1985, a culture that would again change
monumentally by the time she wrote “Dictation.” Ozick argues that 1980s America had returned to an aural culture: “the telephone (a farewell to letter-writing), the radio, the motion picture, and the phonograph, speeded up by the television set, the tape recorder, and lately the video recorder, has by now, after half a century’s worth of technology, restored us to the pre-literate status of face-to-face speech.”346 This change is a loss,
Ozick suggests: a loss of letters exchanged between writers, a loss of marginal notes and drafts, and most troubling a widespread loss of mental rigor – the work of reading, as she calls it347 – and the work of imagination that film adaptations make obsolete. Ozick
wonders why James’s Bryn Mawr commencement address asks its listeners to search for aural models for style rather than textual ones; she suggests in the textual era of 1905 James could afford to be free and easy about reading because he took it for granted: “He lived in a sea of reading, at the highest tide of literacy, in the time of the crashing of its billows. He did not dream that the sea would shrink, that it was impermanent, that we would return, through the most refined technologies, to the aural culture.”348
In 2008, Cynthia Ozick could perhaps look back at herself twenty years earlier and see that she had done the same thing. Before personal computers had become ubiquitous, before the first iPhone launched in 2007, how could one worry that “face-to- face speech,” eye contact or the sound of a human voice might be temporary? As Ozick wrote “Dictation,” a new set of pressures shaped authors and readers. Many Americans were reading more words on computer screens than on paper, and when Ozick imagined reading as work she did not have Buzzfeed lists in mind. The solidity of the printed text had evaporated into a digital ether as black ink on a white page became pixels on a
constantly-changing screen. Most of the text we read was ephemeral: old drafts vanished every time we hit the “save” button, and each new email, tweet or Facebook post pushed the past off-screen, out of sight. It is in this cultural context that Ozick wrote of a
fictional Theodora Bosanquet who celebrates the sacred printed page. Henry James, who welcomed many of the technological advancements of his own time, may not have been as conservative as Ozick appears to be. If James were around today I can imagine his eagerness to understand and record the new relationships and habits of mind that our technology engenders. Ozick suggests technological change has a palpable and inevitable impact on style, whether we interpret that impact as an advancement or regression.
In “Dictation,” the influential mode of production is the typewriter, which
demands a typist at the keys, which demands words be spoken aloud. Ozick introduces it through her fictional Joseph Conrad’s paranoid perspective. The “innovation,” as
inevitable as electric light, looks to Conrad like a “strange and repulsive” regression, waking primitive fears of powers he cannot understand.349 He refuses to name it, calling
it “the thing” or “the Machine,” and it looks to him like “the torso of a broken god,” or “the totem of a foreign civilization.”350 The typewriter is a machine but its strangeness
and palpable power make it seems alive; it is the latest technology but it inspires a primal fear. Ozick characterizes a new external muse made of metal and glass, not a gentle angel but a violent ancient god. As the novel sight affronts Conrad’s senses the machine rises up in disconnected pieces: its black body, its stadium tiers, its round keys. The “broken god” is also a disabled body, uncannily incomplete: “it stood headless and
armless and legless – brute shoulders merely.”351 Conrad’s sense of the typewriter as a
disabled body is particularly appropriate in light of the technology’s origins, since the earliest typewriter was designed as a tool for the blind.352 Henry James turned away from
the pen toward the typewriter because of chronic pain in his wrist; for him, the technology was a prosthesis.353
The typewriter’s origins continue to manifest in its widespread use, as the
technology acts upon the body, training it, asking the hand to loosen its grasp on the pen and to spread its fingers over a keyboard, asking the eyes to look ahead rather than down. In the cases of James and Conrad, the typewriter demands the interior voice be spoken aloud, that the quiet seated writer stands up, paces and gestures and even shouts. At the scratching tip of the pen, mind and page had converged in silent simultaneity; the typewriter disconnects them. Conrad fears the “inconceivable separation of hand from paper.”354 Media theorist Mark Seltzer has described “the relays that allow for the
circular translation from mind to hand to eye to mind (the translation between prelinguistic inwardness and the expressive materiality of writing, such that the eye guides what the hand does that the eye reads).”355 Angelo Beyerlen, the founder of the
first German typewriter company, explains the typed letter “not only is untouched by the writer’s hand but is also located in a place entirely apart from where the hands work.”356
In fact, from the first usable typewriter’s development around 1867 (a “writing ball” designed by Malling Hansen for use by the blind) until the “view typewriter” was introduced by John T. Underwood in 1898, the typist could not see the letters as she typed, and the lines became visible only after the fact.357 Ozick dramatizes the separation
between the writer and the text by interposing the plotting amanuensis in the resulting space. In the early twentieth century the typewriter required a specially-trained operator, a figure tied to the machine, who necessitates even greater distance between the author and his text. When the real Theodora Bosanquet began to work for Henry James in 1907 she was not yet a very efficient typist, but James deferred to her as the technical expert.358
The fictional Bosanquet’s intentional tampering with the text hinges on its author’s physical and temporal alienation from the page, and her success highlights a corresponding alienation from his voice.
The late style of The Jolly Corner was shaped, at least in part, by technology: Henry James switched from writing by hand to dictating in February 1897. In her memoir Henry James at Work, Bosanquet stresses the connection between style and the typewriter:
“I know,” he once said to me, “that I’m too diffuse when I’m dictating.” But he found dictation not only an easier but a more inspiring method of composing than writing with his own hand, and he considered that the gain in expression more than compensated for any loss of concision... “It all seems,” he once explained, “to be so much more effectively and unceasingly pulled out of me in speech than in writing.” Indeed, at the time when I began to work for him, he had reached a stage at which the click of a Remington machine acted as a positive spur. He found it more difficult to compose to the music of any other make.359
Bosanquet, in a perhaps unconscious act of self-aggrandizement, suggests technology is not a neutral aid to James’s method: the Remington typewriter “pulls” James’s speech into his diffuse style. If, as Bosanquet says, dictation made James’s written style more like “free, involved, unanswered talk” then the typewriter allowed James to unify previously distinct written and spoken voices into his one distinctive late style.360
“Dictation” dramatizes the plot of the typist, shifting the focus from James to his medium, from the creative mind to the mode of production. In his foreword to Kittler’s
Discourse Networks, Wellbery explains the argument that technologies, pedagogies and
discourses – rather than individuals – produce meaning, by reducing the infinite “noisy reservoir of all possible writing constellations” to a limited range of possibilities: “In Kittler’s view, such technologies are not mere instruments with which ‘man’ produces his meanings; they cannot be grounded in a philosophical anthropology. Rather, they set the framework within which something like ‘meaning,’ indeed, something like ‘man,’ become possible at all.”361 Kittler’s short section on James addresses many of the same
preoccupations as Ozick’s “Dictation,” but it goes further, to characterize the master himself as a technology:
[Bosanquet] became indispensable: whenever the pink noise of the Remington ceased, James would have no more ideas.
….The writer who engaged a medium in 1907 in order to shift his style to “Remingtonese” was felled by a stroke in 1915. Sheer facts of literary history realize an epoch’s wildest phantasm. The blood clot in the brain did not deprive James of clear dictation, but it did claim all prearranged meanings. Paralysis and asymbolia know only the real. And this real is a machine. The Remington, together with its medium, were ordered to the deathbed in order to take three dictations from a delirious brain. Two are composed as if the emperor of the French, that great artist of dictation, had issued and signed them; the third notes that the imperial eagle is bleeding to death and why it is bleeding.362
In this passage Henry James is a body, and the body is a machine. In order for that machine to think it needs to hear “the pink noise of the Remington,” and when the brain is injured the body’s functions change: it is paralyzed, dissociated from its own pain, delirious, and, most importantly, it takes on a new personality. For Kittler, neither this
James nor this Bosanquet possess an interior subjectivity per se; he suggests they are the tools that allow the machine to work, rather than the other way around. Kittler describes only the last and largest malfunction of James’s body. There are, of course, many other ways that culture or injury can break the mind, or, to put it more mildly, ways they can leave their mark on the mind, as letters on a page. My first chapter describes the impact of systemic addiction or abuse, a shaping family culture that powerfully limits the
possibilities of discourse, as I showed in the Verver family “domestication” of the Prince and Charlotte. The pattern at work in The Jolly Corner is that of trauma: the powerless mind returns, in spite of its wishes, to replay a terrifying moment over and over in waking flashbacks or in a dream. Thinking about The Jolly Corner as the tale not of a sovereign mind but a broken brain alters the significance of Brydon’s choice to reject his double. The Jolly Corner is a novella inspired by a dream; Spencer Brydon’s nocturnal
hunt is figured as a dream; it is reflected in Alice Staverton’s dreams.363 After Brydon
meets his double face to face and falls into a deep stupor, he awakens in Alice
Staverton’s lap and slowly his memory of the night comes back to him; he immediately decides the experience has been meaningless. He thinks, “It came to resemble more and more that of a man who has gone to sleep on some news of a great inheritance, and then,