go to The Henry James E-Journal and The Henry James Scholar's Guide to Web Sites


Introduction
 
CYBORG
 
HYPERTEXT
 
VIRTUALITY
 
References
Acknowledgments
 
Print versions:
MS Word
/ PDF

Simulating James

H.G. Wells's parody of James's late style in Boon (1915, under the pseudonym of Reginald Bliss) is so effective because the style is so distinctive a target. Thus a computer programme could well simulate this style too, though not as humorously as Wells does. Max Beerbohm similarly caricatured James in a series of cartoons which seek to establish the power of a simplified, repeated representation of the author over the complexity of his written works.

James himself began to take greater interest in his public persona and posthumous image during the last decade of his life. Sargent paints his portrait. Visiting America in 1904-5, James gives celebrity interviews for the first time, and Katherine McClellan takes a portfolio of flattering photographs. Together with family snapshots, these photographs provide the means for photographic manipulations of James's image, for example using standard software such as Adobe Photoshop.

James notoriously resented the intrusion of biographers into the private lives of writers. "The Aspern Papers" (1888) and a host of other stories revel in the ambiguities of the writer-biographer relationship - including James's complicity with the dastardly investigator. The New York Edition, the autobiographies, and two bouts of burning personal papers (but not the Notebooks) are further evidence of James's attempt to control his posthumous reputation. Michael Millgate groups these attempts together, in his study of James, Hardy and Browning, as biographobic "testamentary acts". Or we can see them as founding contributions to the iconography of James the Author.

Many virtual Jameses
There are many different versions of James in James studies. Computer simulations of his figure could likewise be numerous.

Example - a 3-D model of James's head could be constructed as an interface to an artificial intelligence system. The system might be based on an expert system model, so as to simulate James the "Master". Natural language processing could be added to enable user interaction, on the model of chatting to a bot. The system could be a case study in developing a computational model of creativity, so that the virtual James could author new works. Each of these aspects of AI is, of course, highly contentious.

(An expert system is a branch of artificial intelligence focussing on providing the user with a simulated consultation with a human expert; knowledge is gathered from experts and coded into a system, for example for medical diagnosis. A chatterbot is a system that mimics written interaction with a human user; a famous example is Alice. A computational model of creativity aims to understand the constituent processes of human creativity through developing computer systems to generate, say, poetry or a musical composition. The image of James is a manipulation in Adobe Photoshop of a photograph taken in 1913 by F. Hilaire d'Arois as a preparatory study for a bust by Derwent Wood. The photograph is reproduced in Kaplan's biography of James and can be found at Houghton Library [Portraits - H James, Jr. Pf MS Am1094].)

 
(113k)

An interactive 3D simulation, available online or installed via CDROM, would provide a literal example, using today's technology, of Pamela Thurschwell's remark in Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking that "[h]owsoever dead the authorial body may appear, technological resuscitation is always possible from the end of the nineteenth century onwards: phonographs and automatic writing assure that spectral authors can always re-emerge" (4).

An online computer graphic simulation of James might constitute a virtual shrine, taking its place among the diversity of memorials to James, including the grave in Cambridge Cemetery, Lamb House, and the plaque in Westminster Abbey. Any interactive online simulation of James's figure would raise numerous ethical, aesthetic and political questions about the representation of the dead.