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Introduction
 
CYBORG
 
HYPERTEXT
 
VIRTUALITY
 
References
Acknowledgments
 
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"The Papers"

This sourly comic novella marks a distinct exaggeration of awareness in James's fiction of the challenges made to established interests and traditional hierarchies of discourse by what Richard Salmon calls a "culture of publicity." For Salmon, "The Papers" conjures an extreme, farcical vision of a world in which publicity has become "a well-nigh universal ontological condition" (139). The mediating power of newly incorporated newspapers displaces any possibility of direct access to the self or the world:

The tale constructs the actual world of newspaper production as an offstage space from which the narrative's main characters and its readers are excluded. We wander the Strand, with its paperboys hollering headlines, but enter none of its offices. They are centres of power reaching out across information space, as if through the very ether.

Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P is a phantom character who exists only inside this information space. He is reported to have been found dead in a hotel room in Frankfurt, having shot himself rather than face a sexual scandal, but then turns up unharmed. He thus undermines the credibility of any future possible report of his death and thereby becomes "immortal" (634). He disappears into the publicity system as into an afterlife. By contrast, the narrative emphasises the physicality of desperate publicity-seeker Mortimer Marshall and then condemns him to a living death of obscurity when his one chance of fame - an exclusive about Beadel-Muffet's death - vanishes. Like Gibson's hacker-addict in Neuromancer, Marshall experiences death as exclusion from the system.

The two central characters, Maud Blandy and Howard Bight, are aspiring journalists. They are also defeated by Beadel-Muffet's resurrection. The tale ends with them renouncing their barely begun careers and deciding to marry. The happy-ever-after gesture of the ending can't undo their contamination by journalism, however. The tale has shown the power of publicity operating as circuits of desire, exposure, and obscurity always already inside the characters and their social relations. These circuits cannot be excised by a simple act of renunciation. There is no longer a private, interpersonal "reality" safe from the logic of publicity powered by corporately-run mass media.