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The American Scene

The cyborg is a socio-political concept. At stake is not just the recording of individual experiences of the machine - the construction of subjectivities. Also at issue are key processes of modernity, such as bureaucratisation, urbanisation, fordism, mediatisation and consumerism.

"In the Cage" focuses on personal relations and eschews direct socio-political comment. A somewhat more overt site for reading James as cultural critic is The American Scene (1907), as Ross Posnock argues in The Trial of Curiosity (1991). The American Scene does not directly report on factory work or criticise the theories of scientific management. Instead it shows subtle processes of control masquerading as forms of social and personal opportunity. Two examples:

• At the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, the guests and employees are like an "army of puppets" subject to the control of "master-spirits of management" (444). They are unaware of their strings being pulled and instead revel in their apparent freedom.
• American women appear to enjoy advantages of social freedom compared to their European counterparts, but these advantages are actually a form of disenfranchisement. American women thus constitute "a new human convenience" comparable with "ingenious mechanical appliances, stoves, refrigerators, sewing-machines, type-writers, cash-registers" (639).

These examples point beyond the relatively individualised focus of "In the Cage" to a more directly socio-political level of analysis. They indicate a limited basis for extending the idea of the cyborg in James's work beyond technologised subjectivities. They don't make such a task easy, however.

Disguising the machine
In Bodies and Machines (1992), Mark Seltzer argues that James's dictated texts work hard to disguise the presence of the machine - in particular the typewriter. This presence therefore needs to be excavated through careful analysis of the tone, style, and structure of James's work.

Seltzer's observation is part of a theorisation of James's switch in compositional method in the late 1890s to the use of dictation. Leon Edel suggested in the final volume of his biography of Henry James (1972) that the switch to dictation contributed to the development of the late style. In Friedrich Kittler's Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (1990), Mark Seltzer's Bodies and Machines, and Pamela Thurschwell's Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 (2001), the switch to dictation becomes a socially, aesthetically, and psychologically complex change to James's scene of writing:

• The switch becomes a professional response to rival media, such as cinema and journalism.
• The change is gendered by the woman's role as medium and by James's own self-preservation (in common with other men in privileged social positions) from direct contact with the machine.
• The presence of the machine in the writing process is repressed rather than displayed overtly.

There is a growing critical interest in James's relationship with photography across a wide range of his writing. By contrast, "In the Cage" is often treated as sui generis in its direct response to communications technology. This tale could instead provide a starting point for investigating across James's fiction subtle, internalised responses to late nineteenth-century media and technologies.

Style and the management of attention
If the machine is internalised in James's writing after the switch to dictation, then his readers undertake a kind of work at the machine-like interface of the text.

With its semantic ambiguity and ethical complexity, James's late style has been read as offering its readers a particularly active, free role as interpreters and constructors of meaning. At the same time, the late works increasingly place intense demands upon the reader in terms of concentration and stamina. Not for nothing is late James dubbed "difficult." Works such as The American Scene control the reader's attention through a sustained pressure of semantic and syntactic complexity.

The intensification of James's demands upon his readers after 1900 can be explained in terms of a turn-of-the-century cultural matrix comprising factors such as:

• the burgeoning power of advertising and journalism as cultures rivalling the traditional status of literature;
• the increasing importance of visual culture, reflected in spectacular entertainment on screen, stage and showground;
• theories of crowd and consumer psychology, cultural degeneration and the unconscious, emerging alongside social science disciplines.

These are aspects of cultural history integrated, for example, in Jonathan Crary's study of attention, Suspensions of Perception (1999) or Daniel Pick's Svengali's Web (2000), a study of George du Maurier's 1894 novel Trilby. "The machine" is not isolated or reified in these studies, nor should it be in studies of James's writing. Instead it is internalised and synthesised among a rich array of contemporary cultural contexts.