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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.
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