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The Postal Unconscious
By Mark Seltzer, Cornell
University
The link between literature and letters could not be more explicit: the novel
originates as private letters made public, or, more exactly, as love letters designed,
or designated, for interception. It is not merely that intimate secrets went to print
(which is to say that intimacy and secrecy—and this is their open secret—
circulated from the start as public discourse). Nor is it merely that the two primary
forms of narrative fiction, the epistolary novel and the detective story, both
depend on the post—delivered, deferred, and (of course) purloined. In these pages
I want to reconsider, albeit very briefly, this radical entanglement of literature and
letters, the novel’s “postal unconscious,”1 as a way of resituating the matter of
“material James.”
To speak of postally sponsored love is to speak of media logics of intimacy
and subjectivity: in effect, the technical protocols of interiority. Hence it may be
necessary to indicate here that I have in mind something different from situating
the man of letters historically. The site-specificity of writing and writers—the
large metaphorics of “situating the subject” or “subject-position,” for example—
is of course by now something of a commonplace. But so too is the anxiety that
attends the dubious topography of situating. This amounts to the internally
conflicted notion that in order to make sense of persons or texts it is necessary to
“situate them historically,” but that situating persons or texts in effect evacuates
them. That is, the person or text, formed, as it were, from the outside in (the large
metaphors here are “produced” or “determined”), becomes nothing more than an
effect of that situation.
Something like this double logic, and the anxiety that underwrites it, has
characterized a range of James studies over the past decade or so. Thus, in short
span in a recent “summary” entry on James, one reads that James was “enshrined
as a high priest of formalism and genteel aesthete”; that “there is an undeniable
and significant measure of truth in the official portrait”; that this significantly
true official image is not true in that it “lacks even a suggestion [. . .] of James’s
profoundly historical imagination”; that, finally, James’s “commitment” is to the
“noncognitive flux of experience. James is immediately assaulted by flux [. . .]”
The Henry James Review 21 (2000): 197–206.
© 2000, The Johns Hopkins University Press
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(Posnock). Noncognitive flux is noise (as the repetition flux flux perhaps already
indicates). The white noise that runs through this contradictory series of statements is familiar enough (and these contradictions are analyzed in some detail in
my Henry James and the Art of Power). It goes, tacitly, something like this: To the
extent that James’s immersion in history is his representation (or “imagination”)
of history, the act of representation opens up an internal and critical and selfconscious distance, such that engagement with the historical becomes the measure
of exactly the opposite, an exemption from the historical. James, the “profoundly
historical” novelist is, on this view, exactly the same as James “the high priest”
of formalism and aestheticism. Moreover, if modernity is imagined as a condition
that “assaults” or shocks or invades the subject, this simply holds intact the
essential pre-modernity of the subject, or interminably mourns its loss. And it is
not hard to see that the mourning of the loss of the Subject is the vocation of a postmodern criticism and an idea of Art, that has, therefore, never been modern. If
noise is in fact the condition, parried or promoted, of modernist writing, then the
communicative conditions of modernity must be taken up along a different route,
for instance, the manner in which writing goes postal around 1900.
Consider then this recent advertisement (fig. 1): what amounts to a promotion of new media technologies as a means of eliminating English literature. The
“terrible loss” for English literature here is, as Bernhard Siegert incisively traces,
nothing less than the loss of English literature, which is also the loss of romantic
love (200–02). What makes it possible to mistake letters for love and love for
letters (the “mistake” that, it will be seen in a moment, becomes utterly explicit
in James’s “The Aspern Papers”) is mapped in high relief in this little drama. For
one thing, there is the matter of handwriting, rigorously anachronized in the
image of quill and scroll: the scene of romantic writing, that is, romantic love. For
another, the juxtaposition of handwriting and portrait holds steadily visible the
“dream” of communication by love letter, the hallucination of the beloved
between the lines and letters of romantic handwriting. What the “mere sonnet”
counts is in turn discounted by techniques of sheer quantification: the “touch” of
handwriting is sundered by a long-distance technology that makes equivalent
numbers and communication and remakes the “heart’s desire” by way of a
statistical stranger-intimacy (“reach out and touch someone,” at a 60/40%
discount).
This needs a bit more unpacking. The metaphysics of handwriting involves
an endless “looping” of hand, eye, letter, and spirit. As one theorist, Angelo
Beyerlin, put it at the turn of the last century: “In writing by hand, the eye must
constantly watch the written line and only that. It must attend to the creation of
each written line [. . .] guide the hand through each movement” (qtd. in Kittler,
Discourse 195). Hence there is a continuous and circular translation from mind
to hand to eye to mind, from a prelinguistic inwardness to the expressive materiality
of writing and back again: the circuit of love to letters to love. This becomes a little
clearer if the metaphysics of handwriting is juxtaposed with the communication
technology that replaces it, the typewriter. As the same theorist continues: “By
contrast, after one presses down briefly on a key, the typewriter creates in the
proper position on the paper a complete letter, which not only is untouched by the
The Postal Unconscious
Figure 1. AT&T long-distance advertisement (Reproduced in Siegert.)
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writer’s hand but is also located in a place entirely apart from where the hands
work.” The typewriter thus unlinks hand, eye, paper, and mind: unlinks writing,
hand, and spirit. Untouched by the writer’s hand, intimacy in handwriting gives
way to the “proper positions” of the standardized letters of a standardized
keyboard. Or, in the next, long-distance, phase, the reach-out-and-touch-someone that replaces romantic love (the love which is love poetry which is the
handwritten letter which is the poetry of love) takes on the form of a new
surrogate sensuality: phone sex.
These episodes in the everyday life of people and machines, analyzed in rich
detail in the media studies of Siegert and Friedrich Kittler that directly inform me
here, can no doubt be dismissed as a species of “technological determinism.”
“Media,” as Kittler puts it up front, “determine our situation” (Gramophone
xxxix). But since technology must be understood as, among other things, one of
the “extensions of man” (in Freud’s phrase: “man is a prosthetic animal”), this
amounts to a dismissal of a radical “self-determination,” a radical humanism. The
double logic of technology as prosthesis—as at once self-extension and selfextinction—is, put simply, irreducible. And this is nowhere clearer than in the
matter of writing as prosthesis, as one version (and not merely one version among
others) of what I have described as the body-machine complex.
I have elsewhere touched on James’s way of inhabiting the body-machine
complex of writing at the turn of the century (see Bodies and Machines 195–97),
and it is necessary to reprise and to extend that account a bit here. I will then turn
briefly to two Jamesian fictions of the postal unconscious: The Turn of the Screw
and “The Aspern Papers.” And I will conclude with an even briefer look, by way
of James’s correspondent William Dean Howells and The Rise of Silas Lapham,
at one further mutation in the life of the man of letters as a man of letters.
“[. . .] having got back to work and to a very particular job, the need
of expressing myself, of pushing it on, on the old Remingtonese terms,
grows daily stronger within me. But I haven’t a seat for the Remington
and its priestess [. . .].” (SL 390)
James’s practice of composition in his later work—particularly, the practice
of dictation—indicates one way in which James manages the radicalization of the
materiality of writing around 1900. I refer, of course, to James’s practice of
dictating to a typewriter (the term referred originally both to the machine and to
its operator, or “priestess”—an occupation, like that of the telephone operator,
rapidly the almost exclusive precinct of young women). According to his typist
Mary Weld, James’s dictation was “remarkably fluent” and “when working I was
just part of the machinery.” The romantic female reader-muse has become an
automatized priestess. According to James’s more famous typist, Theodora
Bosanquet, James wanted his typewriters to be “without a mind.” Not surprisingly, Bosanquet, like William James, was interested in the psychophysics of
“automatic writing”; she practiced, that is, the modernist “discovery” that
writing consists of no less but also no more than twenty-six mechanically
reproduced letters (qtd. in Edel 93–94, 360, 366).
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James in part parries just this automatism in the practice of dictating to a
typewriter. That is, he reincorporates the automatisms of machine-writing in the
practice of oral composition. If the typewriter disarticulates the links between
mind, eye, hand, and paper, these links are rearticulated in the dictatorial orality
that “automatically” translates speech into writing. Hence James, responding to
the suggestion that the typewriter and the practice of dictation affected his style
of writing, insisted on the transparency or immateriality of such writing technologies. As he put it, attention to the machine “soon enough becomes intellectually,
absolutely identical with the act of writing—or has become so, after five years
now, with me, so that the difference is only material and illusory—only the
difference that I walk up and down” (qtd. in Edel 127). Reducing technologies of
writing to the “only” material and the material to the “illusory,” James conserves
something like the transparency of writing in general and its disembodiment: such
that, for instance, the difference of bodily motions—the difference of walking up
and down—makes no difference.
But the modernist writing of writing, and its materialities of communication, register very differently. Take, for example, instances such as this one:
My dear Bernard Shaw,
Your delightful letter is a great event for me, but I must first of all
ask your indulgence for my inevitable resort, today, to this means of
acknowledging it. I have been rather sharply unwell and obliged to stay
my hand, for some days, from the pen. I am, thank goodness, better,
but still not penworthy—and in fact feel as if I should never be so again
in presence of the beautiful and hopeless example your inscribed page
sets me. Still another form of your infinite variety, this exquisite
application of your ink to your paper! It is indeed humiliating. But I
bear up, or try to—and the more that I can dictate, at least when I
absolutely must. (Dictated, SL 376)
Modern technology solicits modern pathology at every point (and not just because
the typewriter was originally an instrument for seeing-loss, the telephone a
prosthesis for hearing-loss). The answering machine of dictation leaves a recorded
message about a self-present being-in-handwriting. And love letters (“Nor custom
stale / Her infinite variety”), which inevitably fold back on the occasion and the
scene of the writing of letters, promise a confidentiality and immediacy that
cannot dispense with a self-reflection on the medium that is felt to compromise it.
Consider, too, Bosanquet’s comments on James’s material practice of composition and the psychophysics of writing it registers:
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. During a fortnight when the Remington was out of order he
dictated to an Oliver typewriter with evident discomfort, and he found
it almost disconcerting to speak to something that made no responsive
sound at all. (248)
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It is as if the “responsive sound”—the familiar “click” of the Remington—
functions as the concerted response of an ideally responsive, and automatized,
first reader-hearer, such that the “absolute identity” of the writing machine and
the “act of writing” makes possible their mutual transparency (writing and
registration immediately indicating each other) and thus makes material differences illusory differences.
This “ghosting” of writing is the subject of James’s The Turn of the Screw,
a gothicization (like its exact contemporary, Dracula) of the epistolary novel—or,
more exactly, a novel in which the epistolary apriori, in pop-Hegelese, arrives at
its truth, realizing itself to the letter. The possibility of taking writing for love and
love for writing is the “dream of a real visible or audible world arising from
words”: “It was the passion of all reading to hallucinate meaning between lines
and letters” (Kittler, Gramophone 14, 10). For this reason, in Turn of the Screw
the modernist pathologization of reading and writing takes the form of an
unremitting reading between the lines which takes the form, in turn, of seeing
ghosts.
The insistence of the letter in Turn of the Screw is if anything (as Poe puts
it in “The Purloined Letter”) a little too self-evident. Hence its immediate translation into something else: literature and love. The manuscript, delivered through
the post, can only be the governess’s unsent letter to the master. The children’s
letters are intercepted by the governess, and of course the intransitivity of these
letters is what turns them into literature: “charming literary exercises.” The
private exteriority of handwriting (“a rendering to the ear of the beauty of his
author’s hand”), that is, the dream of love arising from words, returns to its zero
point, or, rather, to an earnest-schoolgirl copy of it: “a sheet of white paper, a
pencil, and a copy of nice ‘round o’s’” (6, 11).
Psychoanalytic-deconstructive accounts have been most attentive to the
text’s literalness, “the very letter of his text” which marks “precisely” the “text’s
rhetorical, undecidable question.” Thus, it follows that “[w]e could indeed advance
this statement as a definition of literature itself, a definition implicated and
promoted by the practice of Henry James: literature (the very literality of letters)
[. . .]” (Felman 206, 227). This literalism (which is literary business as usual, as
usual represented as a radical departure from business as usual) returns letters to
love. “‘Analytical discourse,’ writes Lacan, ‘indicates that meaning is as such
sexual’” (qtd. in Felman 211). This is immediately retranslated (that is, mistranslated) in this way: “It is thus not rhetoric which disguises and hides sex; sexuality
is rhetoric, since it essentially consists of ambiguity” (210). The drive here is to
equate the sexuality of meaning with sexuality as meaning: the difference between
what Lacan writes and what the literary critic rewrites is the difference between
the “propping” of meaning on sexuality and the identification of sexuality and
meaning. The literary-critical drive here, in short, is to restore the “essential”
logic of equivalence between love and letters.
Deconstruction, which can only acknowledge historical or material conditions by deconstructing them and which can only refer differences in technical
conditions to a general “question concerning technology,” here makes visible the
literalness of the literary. But it does so only to return the literal to the literary as
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analysis undecidable and interminable: to relocate the literary in the intransitivity
of dead letters. Thus, for Derrida, “the end of a postal epoch is doubtless also the
end of literature” (104). That is, literature comes to an end if literature can only
be understood on the model of the postal epoch, which comes to an end around
1900, when literature loses its monopoly on the communication-media of modern
love. Or, as Kittler summarizes it: “The discourse network of 1900 places all
discourse against the background of white noise; the primal soup [the media-data
stream] itself appears in psychoanalysis, but only to be articulated and thus
sublimated via writing proper” (Discourse 288).
The end of this literary media-monopoly is the matter of “The Aspern
Papers,” another case study in epistolary pathology, or, in the story’s idiom,
literary concupiscence and editorial love. The publishing of love letters, which is
the back-story of the Novel, now appears as the story of the novel. This is a story
about postal lust: the epistolary apriori. The “heaven of our literature” (155) is
hedged round by rival media, in “the age of newspapers and telegrams and
photographs and interviews” (157) and at a time when “photography and other
conveniences have annihilated surprise” (185). That is, if the media determine our
situation, this is because the media are our situation. The emergence of the
specificity of the media of representation and communication puts an end to the
“heavenly” idea of art as transcending its medium and its circumstances. Collaterally, the emergence of the material specificity of the medium is the emergence
of the historical specificity, the context, of the text. This is, more precisely, the
yielding of text to context: “It [poetry] is all vain words if there is nothing to
measure it by” (214).
On the one side, the Aspern papers are nothing but papers: “a bundle of
Jeffrey Aspern’s letters,” “more material.” On the other, the papers are nothing
but tokens of the “literary heart” (180): tokens of romantic love, “which is poetry
by definition alone” (Siegert 200). Graphophilic partial objects that record the
Master’s voice (“That voice [. . .] ‘Orpheus and the Maenads!’”) and more
editorial material; the “literary heart” and the “editorial heart” (181), love and
letters, are suspended in relation to each other. And this is not merely because love
and letters become surrogates for each other (“‘She loves them—she loves
them!’”), such that sleeping with letters (“‘In her bed?’” [241]) or marrying for
them (“the only way to get hold of the letters was to unite myself to her for life”
[249]) make up the “plot” of the novel.
Once it becomes possible to write on sheets of paper that can be folded back
on themselves (rather than, say, rolled into a scroll), once it becomes possible for
the handwritten and folded sheet of paper to be inserted in an envelope, sealed,
and posted, the technical conditions of interiority and privacy are in place. That
is, interiority and privacy are in place. The point not to be missed is that it now
becomes possible for the writing of letters to get in the way of letters: for the
technical conditions of intimacy to get in the way of intimacy.
Such is the case not simply because (“as Derrida reminds us”) writing signals
absence (“after writing a note to Miss Tita, to be placed in her hand as soon as
I got clear of the house” [247]). Nor do we need the 101st Conference on the Work
of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproduction to “remind us” that relations are
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always relayed, that mediation is primary: “I was really face to face with the
Julianna of some of Aspern’s most exquisite and most renowned lyrics. [. . .] Then
came a check, with the perception that we were not really face to face, inasmuch
as she had over her eyes a horrible green shade [. . .]” (167). The face (what
Deleuze and Guattari call “the face-system” [168–71], what Simmel called “the
aesthetic significance of the face”) is, of course, always an interface. “Face-toface” communication, like love, can scarcely dispense with the rules and protocols
and systems of communication. The mask-like “green shade” in “Aspern” refers
back to the green shades that Dupin puts on in order to make visible and to take
hold of the love letter in “The Purloined Letter.” The self-evidence of the literary
reference is the self-evidence that (private) letters cannot cease referring to
(literary) letters and that privacy cannot cease referring to its interception. But
there is yet something more at work here.
Aspern, we are told, “had found means to live and write like one of the first;
to be free and general” (186); Julianna, we are told, “had not been exactly as the
respectable young person in general” (184). The person-in-general is the condition of personhood in the print-culture public sphere (see Habermas). It is this
abstraction and generality that make possible such a continuity between life and
letters (“to live and write”) and such a nondiscontinuity between generality (“as
one of [. . .]”) and originality (“[. . .] the first”). This is, in short, the endless loop
between the private and personal exteriority of handwriting and the anonymous
and public exteriority of print (see Kittler, Gramophone 9). For the narrator,
there is “no personal avidity in my desire. It is simply that they would be of such
immense interest to the public” (AP 208). What measures the difference between
print culture (the postal epoch) and modern machine culture (the informationmachine epoch) is not then the narrator’s pathological mistaking of personal for
public motives. It is his rigorous distinction between personal and public motives.
This is the difference between “a public” and “publicity”—a distinction that has
itself come to seem mythical, a species of wishful (that is, for some, Habermasian)
thinking.
I have located this mutation in publicness in terms of the emergence, at the
turn of the century, of a pathological public sphere. One final example may serve
to instance what this pathological public sphere amounts to and how it marks,
among other things, the end of the postal epoch.
There is a small scene in The Rise of Silas Lapham (chapter 8), when “the
summer noon solitude of the place was broken” by a bit of drama that is described
as “a bit of drama” (93–94). It is as if the novel—and this novel everywhere foregrounds rival media of representation and registration (photography, advertising,
newspapers, etc.)—breaks for a moment for what looks like a piece of silent street
theater. What leads up to it is a concise representation of that strange interim
space, neither public nor private, that, post-Bartleby, is the place of dead letters:
the office. This is a place of the becoming impersonal and machine-like of persons
(“feeding them into his mouth in an impersonal way, as if he were firing up an
engine” [92]); of the intimate proximity without intimate relation that makes way
for relation as the circulation of rumors felt on the body (“‘Look at the way he
keeps it up about that type-writer girl of his [. . .]. There isn’t one of us who knows
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who she is. [. . .] I should say that girl had been married’” [93]); it is the place,
above all, of machine writing, the type-writer (“He brought her and her machine
into the office one morning, and set ‘em down at a table, and that’s all there is
about it” [92]). These stranger-intimacies open to this scene, and its sequel:
A man and woman issued from the intersecting street, and at the
moment of coming into sight the man, who looked like a sailor, caught
the woman by the arm, as if to detain her. A brief struggle ensued, the
woman trying to free herself, and the man half-coaxing, half-scolding.
The spectators could now see that he was drunk; but before they could
decide whether it was a case for interference or not, the woman
suddenly set both hands against the man’s breast and gave him a quick
push. He lost his footing and tumbled into a heap in the gutter. The
woman faltered an instant, as if to see whether he was seriously hurt,
and then turned and ran.
When Corey and the book-keeper reentered the office, Miss Dewey
[the type-writer] had finished her lunch, and was putting a sheet of
paper into her type-writer. She looked up at them with her eyes of
turquoise blue, under her low white forehead, with the hair neatly
rippled over it, and then began to beat the keys of her machine. (94)
The small melodrama on the street is a version, in miniature, of the pathological
public sphere. This is a little scene mingling violence and intimacy in public. It is,
more exactly, a gathering of the crowd as spectators of intimacy and violation and
intimacy and violation as public spectacle. It is a strictly generic and endlessly
reproducible scene, “case”-like, typical, and statistical, as the type-writer girl is
a strictly generic and reproducible type and look. There is no connection made
between scene and sequel, which means that the second translates the first: the
street battle of the sexes yields to the new woman beating the keys of her writing
machine. Remington turned his production lines from guns to typewriters after
the Civil War boom in weapons was over. Word counts replace body counts and
women replace men—the priestesses of the Remington, turquoise-eyed like the
Lady of the sonnets, mass-styled and unreadable, everywhere enter the workplace, impassively processing letters. The 1880s novel by “the man of letters as a
man of business” proleptically gives way then, for a moment, to a new mediatechnology, a silent film avant la lettre called “The Type-writer Girl”: the new
love triangle of men, women, and appliances.
NOTE
1
I borrow this phrase from Siegert, Relays, and I draw very directly on this study in what
follows.
WORKS BY HENRY JAMES
AP—“The Aspern Papers.” The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels. New York: Penguin,
1995. 153–251.
SL—Henry James: Selected Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.
The Turn of the Screw. New York: Norton, 1999.
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OTHER WORKS CITED
Bosanquet, Theodora. Henry James at Work. London: Hogarth, 1924.
Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1987.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans.
Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
Edel, Leon. The Master: 1901–1916. New York: Avon, 1972.
Felman, Shoshana. “Henry James: Madness and the Risks of Practice (Turning the Screw of
Interpretation).” The Turn of the Screw. New York: Norton, 1999. 196–228.
Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category
of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge: MIT, 1989.
Howells, William Dean. The Rise of Silas Lapham. New York: Norton, 1982.
Kittler, Friedrich A. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.
———. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
Posnock, Ross. “Henry James.” A Companion to American Thought. Ed. Richard Wightman Fox
and James Kloppenberg. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. 344–45.
Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge, 1992.
———. Henry James and the Art of Power. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984.
Siegert, Bernhard. Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System. Trans. Kevin Repp. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1999.
Simmel, Georg. “The Aesthetic Significance of the Face.” Georg Simmel, 1858–1918. Ed. Kurt W.
Wolff. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1959. 276–81.