Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States. Published by Palgrave Macmillan Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote By Thomas Fahy Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics By Steven Salaita Women and Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison By Kelly Lynch Reames Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity By Sam Halliday

Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James Thinking and Writing Electricity

Sam Halliday

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HAWTHORNE, MELVILLE, TWAIN, AND JAMES

© Sam Halliday, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7672–7 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7672–4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Halliday, Sam. Science and technology in the age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James : thinking and writing electricity / Sam Halliday. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 1–4039–7672–4 (alk.paper) 1. Science—United States—History––19th century. 2. Technology––United States––History––19th century. 3. Electricity––United States––History––19th century. 4. Literature and science––United States––History––19th century. I. Title. Q127.U6H265 2007 509.73⬘09034––dc22

2007061160

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To my parents, Tim and Carolyn

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P e r m i s s i on s

I would like to thank L’Harmattan for permission to republish portions of my essay, “George Beard, Electricity, and the Nervous Body in the Nineteenth-Century,” first published in Homo Orthopedicus: Le corps et ses prosthèses à l’époque (post)moderniste, ed. Nathalie Roelens and Wanda Strauven (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 76–86, and Oxford University Press for permission to republish portions of my article, “Deceit, Desire and Technology: A Media History of Secrets and Lies,” first published in Forum for Modern Language Studies, 37: 2 (2001), 141–54.

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Content s

List of Illustrations

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction Thinking and Writing Electricity Vitality, Sociality, and the Idea of Ideas The Sources of Electrical Thought: Science and Technology The Dialectic of Old and New; The Organization of the Book

1 1 3 6 10

1

Time and Space Introduction “Annihilating” Time and Space Railroads, Time, and the Logistical Sublime Intimacy, Love, and Simultaneity Powers of Mind Ghosts of Electricity Electro-Historicism: Henry Adams Powers of Tradition Coda: Inventing the “Medium”

17 17 20 24 30 34 39 44 50 56

2

Individual Difference and Self-Representation Introduction “Training,” Telegraphy, and Time “The Physiology and Psychology of the Telegraphic Language” Difference, Intersubjectivity, and Meaning Habits, Speed, and Automatism “Training,” and the Medium “Resembling Oneself,” and Portrait Painting “In-One-Another” and “After-Each-Other”: Bodies and Machines Misrepresentation and the Voice Distance, Sound, and Sense

59 59 60 65 68 72 76 77 81 85 90

x

CONTENTS

3 Sympathy and Reciprocity Introduction God, Reciprocity, and the Spirit of Music Mediums, Mesmerists, and “Sympathy” From “Sympathy” to Slavery Mesmerism and/as Slavery Illness, Intuition, and the Electricity of Young Girls Ether versus Flesh Coda: God’s Body, and the Ultimate Life

95 95 98 106 109 112 115 118 123

4

Connection and Division Introduction The Nineteenth-Century Nervous System (1) Sex, Disease, and “Civilization” Polarity, Perversity, and “Father-Stuff” The Nineteenth-Century Nervous System (2) Coda: Connection through Division

127 127 129 132 142 151 158

5

Inclusion and Exclusion Introduction Phenomenology of Secrets Publicity, “Detection,” and Adultery: Telegraphy in Henry James “Underground” or “Mute” Telegraphy, and “Race” The End, and the Coming of a “Crisis in God’s Realms”

163 163 167 177 183 189

Notes

197

Index

237

List of Illustrations

1.1 2.1 3.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 5.2

Anatomical Cast of Chang and Eng Bunker Samuel Morse’s Original Telegraph Transmitter “Animal Magnetism. The Operator Putting His Patient into a Crisis” Francois Dumont’s Planned Telephone Exchange Sally Beauchamp’s Personalities, Early Stage of Analysis Sally Beauchamp’s Personalities, Late Stage of Analysis American Telephone Exchange, 1885 Alexander Graham Bell with Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, 1894 Map of the Underground Railroad

18 67 108 153 156 156 157 164 186

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Ac knowled gment s

My interest in some of the topics of this book first emerged when I took Ann Lane’s class, “Technology and American Culture,” at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1996. I subsequently worked with two exemplary research supervisors: first, Peter Messent, at the University of Nottingham, and second, Tim Armstrong, at Royal Holloway, University of London. I am grateful to them for their support—both at the time and ever since—and to the Arts and Humanities Research Board (now Council) for funding my postgraduate research. Others who lent encouragement and help along the way include James Massender, Peter Nicholls, and Peter Rawlings. Ian F. A. Bell and Steven Connor made constructive comments on my PhD thesis. I owe a huge amount to past and present colleagues at Queen Mary, University of London, including Michèle Barrett, Julia Boffey, Markman Ellis, Rachael Gilmour, Annie Janowitz, Daniel Pick, and Morag Shiach. Marc Perkins went out of his way to secure a crucial Xerox at an early stage. More recently, Linda Wagner Martin, Farideh Koohi-Kamali, and Julia Cohen at Palgrave have been helpful and supportive. The book was written in Hackney, east London, and largely researched at the British Library: both places have been inspirational. The book is dedicated to my parents, Tim and Carolyn, and could not have been completed without the love, solidarity, and wit of Matilde Nardelli.

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Introduction

Thinking and Writing Electricity In 1843, a bill was presented before the U. S. Congress proposing that the sum of thirty thousand dollars be given to Samuel Morse, towards the construction of an “electro-magnetic” telegraph from Baltimore to Washington, DC.1 Many congressmen were enthused by this plan, for which Morse had been gathering support for several years. Others, however, considered it a hare-brained and implausible scheme, that, having—they thought—no compelling precedent or scientific rationale, was bound to fail. During the congressional session at which the bill was debated, Congressman Cave Johnson of Tennessee, one of those who opposed Morse’s plan, proposed that if the Congress were to encourage such experiments, they should also consider funding mesmerism, another novel and controversial doctrine then gaining support throughout the United States. Mesmerism taught that human beings were pervaded by a superfine magnetic fluid, an “animal magnetism” that was analogous to or even identical with mineral magnetism and electricity. By placing subjects in “rapport”—attuning them to their own animal magnetic state—mesmerists claimed to be able to effect great changes within the mind and body. Johnson’s suggestion was a facetious one, and by making it, he sought to damn Morse’s invention by associating it with something he considered equally pretentious and disreputable. But in making an implicit link between the telegraph and mesmerism on the basis of their shared electromagnetic foundation, Johnson was saying something that advocates of either might have agreed with. Electricity and magnetism had, after all, been strongly identified with one another since Hans Christian Oersted’s (1777–1851) discovery of electromagnetic induction in 1820.2 If either were to be successfully applied in Morse’s telegraph, this might suggest that mesmerism, too, was no less credible. Thus it was that the congressman presiding over the debate of Morse’s bill—either failing to perceive, or ignoring, Johnson’s facetiousness—declared: “it would require a scientific analysis to determine how far the magnetism of Mesmerism was analogous to that

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to be employed in telegraphs.”3 The equivalence between telegraphy and mesmerism could not be assumed, but neither could it yet be ruled out. Combined in this story, then, are two great strands in the history of electricity and electromagnetism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On one hand, there is the rise of communication technologies, from Morse’s telegraph onward. On the other, there is the presence of electricity in the body and the mind. In the literary, scientific, and popular culture of the period, these strands are spun out and interwoven in a huge variety of ways: these, and the ideas they sponsor, constitute the subject of this book. As the deliberations over Morse’s bill suggest, it was a period in which electricity, magnetism, “animal magnetism,” and a host of other real or imagined phenomena came to be seen as profoundly (if sometimes obscurely) interlinked. The safe passage of the bill, and the eventually spectacular success of the telegraph, further intensified the way such links were thought about. But in addition to being thought about, this study argues, electricity was used to think with; and it is this, as much as its direct application, that constitutes its cultural significance. In the years surrounding Morse’s invention, electricity was invoked in discussions of love, sexuality, fraternity, and many other bodily or mental dispositions. It also featured in discussions of immortality, literary genius, punctuality, and many other seemingly disparate topics. Electricity was thus deployed in discursive contexts far removed from those in which it was technologically applied, and where science could scarcely demonstrate its actual presence. Technology and science provided electricity with a vocabulary and set of concepts, but did not circumscribe the imaginative uses to which these were put. Through such usage, electricity became a leitmotif of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture. The fact that people thought and wrote about it made it easy to think with, just as its use to ponder “other” subjects—such as love, immortality, and so on—stoked further interest in electricity itself. Thinking and Writing Electricity thus designates a twoway process, neither side of which can be fully dissociated from the other; and by taking this process as its subtitle, this book signals its understanding of electricity as both a means and end of thought: simultaneously a means of representation, and an object of representation in its own right. This is not to say that the cultural significance of electricity can be attributed solely to such thought and writing, or that either of these can be understood in isolation from technological and scientific developments. On the contrary, and as I seek to show throughout, such developments constitute the essential ground in which electrical thinking must be located if it is to be fully understood. But rather than focusing on electrical technology and science themselves—as others, including Carolyn Marvin,

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David E. Nye, Iwan Rhys Morus, Laura Otis, and Linda Simon have done in previous studies—this book focuses on literary and popular cultural appropriations of science and technology, and the conceptual resources that science and technology made available.4 In this respect, this book is in the vein of other recent studies by the likes of Tim Armstrong, Pamela Thurschwell, Sara Danius, and Roger Luckhurst.5 But whereas such writers focus on incipient or fully fledged brands of modernism, this book concentrates on earlier writers of the American Renaissance, such as Hawthorne and Melville, and their late nineteenth and early twentieth-century successors, such as Twain and Henry James. In addition, I consider related American literary figures, from Poe and Whitman to Frank Norris; nonliterary writers, such as the dietary reformer Sylvester Graham, the phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler, and the celebrity disability rights campaigner Helen Keller; and non-American writers such as Hardy, Stoker, and Kipling. The rationale behind each of these, and other, selections is made clearer in the course of this introduction; first, though, we must look more closely at the topics electricity was used to think and write about, and with.

Vitality, Sociality, and the Idea of Ideas One of the most important ideas with which electricity was associated was, in fact, the idea of ideas.6 Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, electricity was regarded as a model of the intellect, a metaphor for thinking, or, in some cases, as the actual source from which ideas are borne. Thus Hazlitt, in an essay of 1826, writes of “electrical particles of wit and fancy,” while Hawthorne, in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), has a character describe electricity as “the all-pervading intelligence!”7 Less grandiloquently, though no less emphatically, William James, in The Principles of Psychology (1890), writes: “When an idea stings us in a certain way, makes as it were a certain electric connection with our self, we believe that it is a reality.”8 Each of these remarks specifies a slightly different relation between electricity and ideas, be it one of identity (Hazlitt), origination (Hawthorne), or effect (James), but all agree in positing equivalence between them. James’s account, meanwhile, suggests that in addition to ideas, electricity may be used to think about the way that selves relate to them. “Connection” is obviously the salient term in this regard, for it is this that specifies how self and idea are related as well as distinct. Such relations represent a further object for electrical thinking, and could as easily be discerned between different ideas (as in George

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Eliot’s “two associated facts which might show a mysterious electricity if you touched them incautiously”) as they could between ideas and selves, but proved especially useful in describing how the same idea, or species thereof, becomes a means of relating different selves with one another.9 This is the burden of Melville’s tribute to Hawthorne, in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850): “confessing him, you thereby confess others; you brace the whole brotherhood. For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.”10 The electric “shock” alluded to here thus locates Hawthorne in a planetary continuum, translating James’s “sting” into the realm of interpersonal affinities. Here, then, an electrical conception of ideas yields to a conception of ideas as socially cohesive. Ideas, in this sense, constitute the “brotherhood” of genius, just as Melville’s “recognition” of this genius is bound up with an emerging sense of his own affinity with Hawthorne.11 It is to Hawthorne’s own work, however, that we may look for prime examples of how sociality itself came to be thought of as electrical; for this, in turn, represents one of electricity’s major significations. In The Marble Faun (1860), Hawthorne writes of an “electric line, stretching from the throne to the wicker-chair of the humblest seamstress, and keeping high and low in a species of communion with their kindred beings.”12 In “Ethan Brand” (1850), this bond extends beyond a single sex to the species as a whole, via “the magnetic chain of humanity.”13 And in The House of the Seven Gables, “natural magnetism” is again said to bind one to “the great centre of humanity.”14 Such bonds are more affective than conceptual, and more instinctual than volitional, constituting an essential core of solidarity in which all contingent social ties are rooted. In The Scarlet Letter (1850), meanwhile, such ideas are recapitulated in a more intimate setting, and in the process, provided with a somewhat different rationale. By joining hands, Hester, Pearl, and Dimmesdale form an “electric chain”: an image that recalls both “Ethan Brand” and Melville’s “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (all three texts were published in the same year).15 But whereas Melville, as we have seen, has something literally ideal in mind, Hawthorne is thinking of something quite material. As the three join hands, Dimmesdale feels “a tumultuous rush of new life . . . hurrying through all his veins, as if the mother and the child were communicating their vital warmth to his half-torpid system.”16 “Life” is thus aligned with electricity, as are the physiological processes with which life corresponds. This association of electricity with life designates a further discursive field in which electricity featured, and another of its major significations.

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Throughout the scientific discourse of the period, in fact, as well as in its literary imaginary, electricity was thus held responsible for the “vital” functions of the organism. This belief, in turn, helped foster a widespread association of electricity with procreative functions such as sexuality, as in much of Whitman’s poetry, or the work of his acquaintance, the phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler (1809–87).17 A similar train of thought led Margaret Fuller to interpret sexual difference itself in terms of male and female quotients of electricity.18 Others, such as George Miller Beard (1839–83) and Alphonso David Rockwell (1840–1933), detected differences between the electrical susceptibilities of different “races.”19 As The Scarlet Letter shows, however, perhaps the major consequence of associating electricity with life was to make the latter seem amenable to interpersonal transactions. This idea is conventionally ascribed to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—itself a likely influence on Hawthorne—in which life appears as both renewable and fungible.20 In her preface to the novel’s second, revised edition (1831), Shelley recalls a series of discussions between Percy Shelley and Lord Byron that lent plausibility to his idea. Here, she invokes the experiments of Luigi Galvani (1737–98), in which electricity was applied to animal and human body parts and found to cause life-like convulsions: various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated. . . . Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated, galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.21

Though “life” itself is not explicitly aligned with electricity, it here assumes its salient characteristics: existing independently of its local manifestations; transferable between these manifestations; and capable of being artificially contrived, and put to work. In the process, electricity becomes associated with yet another term, “communicat[ion]”—which is itself here poised between two designations: “life,” and knowledge of it. This use of electricity to represent abstract concepts thus designates a further tranche of significations, which may function alongside, or in tandem with, its use to think about specific themes or objects. Electricity may thus suggest excitement or exaltation, as in Twain’s recurrent references to “electric surprise.”22 It may indicate economy or circulation, as in the “circuit” made by “genius” in Melville’s “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” And because its own identity appears equivocal, perhaps, electricity may mediate between opposing poles of conceptual pairings, as in Emily Dickinson’s poem number 1431 (c.1877), where “during its electric gale— / The body is a soul—.”23

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As Dickinson’s example also shows, the discursive power of electricity sometimes lay less in its clear identification with any one particular object than its capacity to flit between them: its intransitive character, rather than any fixed semantic value. In addition to the body-soul distinction, then, electricity complicated distinctions between oppositions such as life and death, matter and spirit, physical and metaphysical, abstract and concrete, natural and artificial, and functioned as a sign for paradoxical amalgams in each instance.24 In a related way, electricity could suggest complex alignments of otherwise discrete ideas, as in Melville and Hawthorne’s notions of an electric “chain”; both of which, as we have seen, invoke consanguinity (via Melville’s reference to “brotherhood,” and Hawthorne’s to “kinship”) in order to depict nonsanguineous relations. And, as the conflation of this idea with that of “vital warmth” in The Scarlet Letter shows, the major significations of electricity may be superimposed in any given instance: the social and the sentimental here coinciding with the somatic. Finally, then, all of these examples show how electricity signified at different semantic levels. For if Melville’s “shock of recognition” represents a figurative (and tacit) use of electricity, Hawthorne’s “electric chain” may— at least potentially—be taken literally. Contemporaries noticed such distinctions, but did not invariably observe them, and perceived that in any case, such different uses were hardly incompatible. Describing the effects of galvanism on a corpse in “Some Words with a Mummy” (1845), Poe writes: “Morally and physically—figuratively and literally—was the effect electric.”25 In what may be the canniest example of electrical thinking seen so far, Poe condenses much of what we have been saying: uniting two distinct concrete discursive objects (morality and physicality) with two distinct signifying modes (figurative and literal); binding them all around an abstract concept (efficacy); and even hazarding some idea of how “literal” and “figurative” are interlinked. Here, then, in a nutshell, is the power of electricity to signify, and do so fast—losing nothing in economy or force through what it gains in versatility.

The Sources of Electrical Thought: Science and Technology But how did electricity come to signify, and what commended it for those particular significations it acquired? What, in other words, made electricity available to think and write “with,” and how was this connected to what people thought and wrote “about” it within the same, and preliminary, period?

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The two main answers to this question are, of course, the two things elided by Cave Johnson’s objection to Samuel Morse’s proposed telegraph: electrical science and electrical technology. Without the rise of these, the discursive uptake of electricity seems inconceivable, and would surely have forfeited its ease of comprehension and its prima facie plausibility. Many of the examples of electrical thought we have considered so far thus involve implicit or explicit references to science, technology, or both. A second look at these examples, alongside new ones, helps make the nature of these references clear. Both the electric “chain” of Melville’s “Hawthorne and His Mosses” and that of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter are, in fact, rooted in a famous series of experiments conducted separately by Jean Antoine Nollet and Pierre-Charles Le Monnier in the 1740s, where electric current was passed around chains of hand-holding volunteers, thus causing them to “jump” in unison.26 To provide electric current for his experiments, Nollet used a Leyden jar, a device invented separately by Ewald Jürgen von Kleist and Pieter van Musschenbroek in 1745 and 1746. This device was the first that allowed electricity to be stored, and earns a mention of its own in Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), where Captain Ahab attempts to communicate his will via “the Leyden Jar of his own magnetic life.”27 And because it made electricity amenable to experimentation as never before, the Leyden Jar went on to play a crucial role in much subsequent electrical research. One of those who used it was Galvani, whose own work, as we have seen, is explicitly cited as a source of inspiration in Shelley’s preface to Frankenstein, and referred to again in Poe’s “Some Words with a Mummy.” Other such references are legion, and testify to the enduring popularity of electrical experiments involving corpses: a subject touched on in Poe’s “The Premature Burial” (1844), Melville’s Mardi (1849), and Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889).28 Other references to electricity bear still clearer signs of their adherence to a particular scientific theory, and so help mark changing conceptions within electrical science itself. In Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s Two Years before the Mast (1840), a lightning storm causes “electric fluid” to run over the ship of which Dana is a crewmember, rehearsing the widely held belief that electricity was itself a kind of liquid.29 In other contemporaneous accounts, however, electricity is treated not as a special kind of matter but as a property pervading it, in accordance with the more avant-garde “field” theories of Michael Faraday (1791–1867) and others.30 Oersted’s unification of electricity and magnetism in 1820 influenced Faraday himself, so setting the seal

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on an already strong tendency to run the properties of each together. Benjamin Franklin’s (1706–90) distinction between “positive” and “negative” forms of electricity, meanwhile, underwrote numerous accounts of bipolar sexuality, including Beard’s theorization of the difference between hetero- and homosexuality.31 Nowhere is this appropriation of “pure” science seen to better effect, however, than in relation to another of electricity’s major, though as yet unmentioned, significations: speed. The first attempts to measure the speed of electricity emerged from Le Monnier’s experiments with human chains, and estimated it at over thirty times the speed of sound.32 A little less than a century later, Samuel Morse told the secretary to the U.S. Treasury that more recent experiments showed electricity to travel “two hundred thousand miles in a second.”33 Morse was incorrect in this assertion, but stood on firmer ground in his account of his initial inspiration: one of Franklin’s experiments, in which electricity was passed along a wire laid across the Philadelphia river, “in a time not appreciable,” (so Morse reports) “but apparently instantaneous.”34 Such experiments lay behind a commonplace association of electricity with near or actual instantaneity that had already taken hold in Franklin’s lifetime, but which acquired still greater currency in the wake of Morse’s own invention. And it is in relation to the telegraph, indeed, that the discursive fortunes of electricity take a further turn, through their convergence with those of lightning: another naturally occurring phenomenon, itself identified with electricity since Franklin, that numbered rapid or absolute speed among its cultural significations.35 In 1845, Cave Johnson—the very congressman who had ridiculed Morse’s proposal two years earlier––described the telegraph as an agent vastly superior to any other ever devised by the genius of man for the diffusion of intelligence, which may be done with almost the rapidity of lightning, to any part of the republic. . . .36

By echoing the association of electricity with ideas (or here, “intelligence”), Johnson elides electrical technology and its meteorological correlative. In doing so, he also allows us to identify two further themes: the use of electrical science to “think about” and “with” technology, and the use of electrical technologies to “think about,” and “with,” in their own right. By averting to “lightning,” Johnson binds his understanding of the telegraph to “natural” electricity, and a post-Franklinian view of electricity’s propensities. But by averting to the “diffusion of intelligence,” he also hints at the emergence of the telegraph itself as (in James Carey’s

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words) “a thing to think with, an agency for the alteration of ideas.”37 If electricity was used to think and write with, in other words, then so were its technologies: indeed, the latter often functioned as a means whereby the former was pursued. To see this, we may briefly consider the circumstances conditioning Cave Johnson’s change of heart. Having ridiculed Morse’s proposed telegraph two years earlier, he found himself responsible for running it, when appointed postmaster general by President Polk in 1845.38 Johnson’s belated homage to the telegraph was, in fact, part of an attempt to preserve this state of affairs, in the face of calls by other members of the cabinet for his department to release the potentially costly new technology into private ownership.39 Though this attempt was unsuccessful (in fact, the American telegraph became the only major service of its kind to operate outside a government monopoly), it seems to have had a lasting effect on Johnson’s thinking, to judge by his penultimate annual report as postmaster general (1847): As our country expands, and its circle of business and correspondence enlarges, as civilization progresses, it becomes more important to maintain between the different sections of our country a speedy, safe, and cheap intercourse. By so doing, energy is infused into the trade of the country; the business of the people enlarged and made more active, and an irresistible impulse given to industry of every kind; by it, wealth is created and diffused in numberless ways throughout the community, and the most noble and generous feelings of our nature, between distant friends, are cherished and preserved, and the Union itself more closely bound together.40

Though Johnson’s subject in this passage is the postal service, his language is the language of telegraphy, recapitulating both the rhetoric (“diffus[ion]”) and substance (speed, and its attendant virtues) of his tribute to that “agent” two years earlier. Despite the shift in subject matter, this displacement suggests substantial continuity between one mode of communication and another. Through its cooption of electrical thinking, then, no less than its novel contribution to such thinking, the telegraph became used to think beyond itself; not the least, as we have intimated, by becoming central in conceptions of “communication” as such.41 In the process, it also became associated with situations in which it played no actual part, not only recapitulating electricity’s own identification with phenomena in which its presence was unproven, but also making a still more powerful equation between technology and the supposedly nontechnological capacities, activities, and social arrangements of human beings.

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In Melville’s Typee (1846), for example, the communicative needs of Polynesian islanders are served by a “vocal telegraph,” the “inconceivable rapidity” of which recalls the rhetoric of Morse or Johnson in a context where the object of that rhetoric is missing.42 Similarly, in Henry James’s “The Real Thing” (1892), an exchange of glances is described as “mute telegraphy.”43 Again, technological effects are inscribed within a context where there is no corresponding apparatus. This process of displacement, whereby people “take on” technological attributes, is a major theme throughout this book. It appears not only in relation to the telegraph, but also later technologies, such as the telephone and radio. But though the simplest, and, in some ways, most persuasive, explanation for these displacements lies with the “impact” of these technologies on those societies in which they appeared, this is not the whole story.44 Other causes—and other chronologies—are involved as well.

The Dialectic of Old and New; The Organization of the Book Samuel Morse had, in fact, always envisaged the electric telegraph as an addition to the postal service. In the same letter to the U.S. Treasury secretary in which he notes the speed of electricity, he adds: it would seem most natural to connect a telegraphic system with the Post Office Department, for, although it does not carry a mail, it is another mode of accomplishing the principle object for which the mail is established.45

Cave Johnson’s later sense of the affinity between the two technologies was thus hardly an anomaly. But there is something more to the relationship between these two “modes” of accomplishing a single object, besides their institutional configuration. As Richard R. John writes, “it would be hard to isolate a single bit of figurative language that commentators used to describe the electric telegraph . . . that had not already been deployed to describe the postal system.”46 Even before the telegraph, moreover, “[a] surprising number of contemporaries compared the transmission of information through the postal system with the movement of electricity.”47 These considerations cause us to modify our earlier estimate of Johnson’s 1847 report, in which the language of telegraphy was said to act as a gloss upon the postal service. For while this interpretation still holds true, it should be added that such language preceded the telegraph in some respects,

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and may even be said to have helped prepare the way for it. It is not enough, in other words, to say that the association of electricity with “diffusion of intelligence” was simply due to the electric telegraph: one must also say that the telegraph helped ratify an existing association, by supplying it, as it were, with a material correlative. Here, then, is evidence of what Walter Benjamin calls the “law that new advances are prefigured in older techniques.”48 Just as the telegraph augmented an existing postal service, the postal service prophesized the telegraph. Johnson’s re-imagining of the postal service in the wake of telegraph’s success, meanwhile, exemplifies a countervailing tendency, which Wolfgang Schivelbusch has called the “impact of newly created technologies on old ones.”49 And in fact, the postal service was partially transformed by the existence of the telegraph, not made redundant or extinct.50 Analogous developments in recent years have prompted contemporary commentators to speak of “media ecologies”—so foregrounding the interdependence of media of different vintages—an insight traceable to Marshall McLuhan’s interest in “the interpenetration of one medium by another.”51 And it is for all these reasons that a similar approach informs the present book, where due attention is given to the use of electrical technologies to “think through” the nonelectrical, and vice versa. Related points might well be made of science. Despite the siren-like appeal of the “epistemological break” as a historiographic concept, such breaks are rarely clean in the fields of literary and popular culture, where competing or successive scientific paradigms are frequently confounded, or even knowingly deployed in atavistic ways.52 In the case of electricity, indeed, such “atavisms” might even be said to play an important role in science itself, the notion of electric “current,” for example, continuing to operate in electrical theory long after the expiry of the “fluidic” paradigm from which it sprang.53 Such considerations are compounded by the fact that scientists often disagreed over what electricity was, and bequeathed this uncertainty to other parties. The frequent identification of electricity as an “imponderable” substance by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century investigators, for example, doubtless contributed to its advancement as an emblem of the imponderable in much late nineteenth-century spiritualism, and discussion of the paranormal.54 This is not to say, of course, that some contributions to electrical science were not considerably more significant than others. But although such differences matter greatly in the history of science as such, they are of relatively small importance in a literary and cultural study such as this. Error, pretension, and sheer vagueness were quite as much part of electrical thinking as the masterful assimilation of cutting-edge research,

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and often considerably more so, in a period when science and so-called pseudo-science were hard to parse, and the very notion of a “scientist” was an emergent, rather than a dominant one.55 If “science” was a far more circumscribed affair by the beginning of the twentieth century than it had been a century earlier (when “natural philosophy” held the field), this did not entail the automatic disappearance of anterior modes of thought.56 This dialectic of the old and new, with respect to both technology and science, makes it hard to tell the history of electrical thought and writing in terms of successive epistemes or epochs. Rather than follow a chronological course, then, this book is arranged thematically, with each chapter focusing on a different pair of concepts, and the social practices these designate. This allows the book to note continuity as well as change, stress affinities as well as contrasts between its protagonists, and illuminate electricity’s diverging and sometimes contradictory significations across a wide range of registers and genres. In chapter 1, “Time and Space,” I consider the wideranging reappraisal of these two categories that occurred within the period, and the centrality of electrical thinking to this process. Beginning with the “Siamese twins” Chang and Eng Bunker, I show how relations between “normal” people came to be measured against the decidedly un-Siamese twin-like norms of time- and space-distanciation. I then consider texts by Norris, Thoreau, Stoker, Twain, Kipling, Pound, and others, in relation to telegraphic correspondence, railroad travel, interpsychic communication, radio, ghosts, historicity, and the “electrical” status of literary works. The chapter also shows how “mediumship” emerged as a major paradigm of personhood within the period. In chapter 2, “Individual Difference and SelfRepresentation,” the latter theme is taken up in relation to professional telegraphers, and the interest shown in them by experimental psychology. I show how the measurement of individual difference within such psychology mirrors the fashioning of self-representations in fiction by Melville, Twain, and Hardy, by considering how these authors’ interests in the telegraph and telephone enter into a complex dialectic with their more “traditional” novelistic concerns with physiognomy and portrait painting. In chapter 3, “Sympathy and Reciprocity,” I focus on electricity’s association with the social. The chapter proceeds via a detailed account of Hawthorne’s theory of interpersonal “sympathy,” cognate texts by Melville and Marie Corelli, mesmerism, slavery, and spiritualism, and the identification of electricity with “life.” The chapter concludes with a discussion of materiality and embodiment, as conceptualized by the mesmerist theologian John Bovee Dods, and in Poe’s writings on mesmerism and physics. Chapter 4, “Connection and Division,” sustains

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the theme of embodiment by showing how health, disease, and sexuality are conceptualized by Graham, Beard, Whitman, Morton Prince, and others. In addition to its identification with the nervous system, I consider the less-known identification of electricity with blood and sperm. Here, too, I show how the connective and divisive properties of physiological systems were seen to interact with those of electrically configured social systems, a point elaborated in Helen Keller’s writings on society and culture. Finally, in chapter 5, “Inclusion and Exclusion,” I complete the book’s analysis of electrically configured sociality. Despite a widespread hope that new technologies would foster greater social integration, I argue that they often sponsored the creation of small, secretive communities based on insider knowledge, featuring in such profoundly linked scenarios as criminal and political conspiracies, and love affairs. To show this, I consider Keller’s friendship with the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, fiction by James, Harte, and the inventor of the espionage novel, William Le Queux, use of the “underground telegraph” by African American slaves, Samuel Morse’s largely forgotten writings on foreign conspiracies, and Daniel Paul Schreber’s paranoid extravaganza, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903). * * * As this study treats a large and potentially inexhaustible subject, I have had to be selective in my choice of materials. This may lead to problems of omission, where material germane to my account is overlooked. In view of these potential problems, I conclude this “Introduction” by offering the following note on the principles governing my selection. Among the authors, texts, and themes that I do not discuss are some that may seem especially ripe for consideration. These include Emerson’s interest in Faraday, Dreiser’s electrical conception of desire, Villiers de L’Isle Adam’s novelistic evocation of the electrical inventor Thomas Edison, L’Eve Future (1886), and, more broadly, such themes as electric lighting, and state electrocution via electricity. All of these subjects, as it so happens, have been accounted for elsewhere.57 Depending on taste or expertise, the reader is likely to find such omissions more or less egregious. In any event, he or she must also decide whether they are justified by the attention they have allowed me to turn elsewhere. As a corollary of the above, I have selected texts not only on the basis of their intrinsic interest—though this, of course, has always been the overriding consideration—but also where I have found they can perform “double-” or “triple-duty” within different chapters. Thus, the reader

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will find Stoker’s Dracula discussed in chapters one and (briefly) two and five, Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in chapters one, two, and five, and Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean in chapters two, five and (briefly) three. In addition to helping to connect the different chapters of the book at a formal level, such recurrences are intended to underscore the complementary nature of the thematic foci of these chapters, and thus the role of electricity in uniting these themes themselves. Finally, some explanation is due for the sprinkling of British and other European texts throughout a study more generally concerned with American literature and culture. This is in keeping with a wider trend in contemporary Americanist literary studies, especially associated with Paul Giles, in which the cross-examination of American literature by other national literatures (especially British) is seen as a necessary corrective to still-prevalent assumptions of “American exceptionalism.”58 In this respect, my recognition of affinities between American and nonAmerican writers counteracts any attempt to annex the salient features of either to the contingent facts of nationality. But the best justification for this approach comes from the period itself. The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century century world that electricity helped construct was one in which, in Frederick Douglass’s words, Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. . . . Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated.—Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are distinctly heard on the other.59

Electrical technologies played a major part in making all this happen, as Douglass notes, through his Cave Johnson-like use of “lightning” as figure for the telegraph. But technology was not the sole determinant of such intellectual exchange. This was, after all, a period in which Hawthorne used Italy as his setting for The Marble Faun, Melville gleaned scientific knowledge from the Edinburgh Review, Twain based A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (in part) on his experiences in Britain, and James famously took up residence in England, ultimately becoming a British citizen.60 Three of these four writers (Hawthorne is the exception) lived long beyond the opening of the Atlantic telegraph in 1866, which as it were “materialized” such

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intellectual links, and which James, in particular, both wrote about and used. Such is the intellectual topography this book surveys, and such, as a consequence, are the transatlantic leaps it makes in order to survey it. It will have achieved some measure of success if it can approximate the sense of linkage that Douglass here so vividly evokes.

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CHAP TER

1

Time and Space

Introduction In November 1829, the “Siamese twins” Chang and Eng Bunker (1811–74) arrived in London.1 They had already appeared in New York City and Boston, where astonishment had been aroused by the living band of tissue uniting their bodies (see figure 1.1). But now, in London, they appeared before “the most eminent professors of Surgery and Medicine in the Metropolis,” in order that the precise nature of this union might be ascertained.2 One of those examining the twins was Dr. Peter Mark Roget (later to be famous for inventing the thesaurus), whose mode of experimentation partook of the contemporary vogue for galvanism. But rather than bringing corpses into “life,” as in other such experiments—or even fabricating “life” as such, as the preface to the revised edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1831) would soon suggest—this experiment turned on the phenomenon of bimetallic galvanism. According to one of those present, George Buckley Bolton, a silver teaspoon was placed on the tongue of one of the twins, and a disk of zinc on the tongue of his brother: when the metals thus placed were brought into contact, the youths both cried out “Sour, Sour!” This experiment was repeated several times with the same result, and was reversed by exchanging the positions of the metals, when a similar effect was produced.3

As Bolton concludes, “These experiments prove that the galvanic influence passes from one individual to the other, through the band which connects their bodies” (181). But what, in turn, could this be said to “prove?”

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Figure 1.1 Anatomical Cast of Chang and Eng Bunker. Courtesy, Mütter Museum, College of Physicians of Philadelphia

For Bolton, the twins were best regarded as two distinct individuals, “subject to certain distempers in common,” but nonetheless discrete unto themselves (ibid.). Others, however, suspected a more radical connection, uniting mind as well as body. “Wonderful as is the connection between the bodies of the twins,” one author wrote, “the mysterious sympathy existing in their minds calls forth still greater surprise.”4

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Mark Twain agreed, declaring: “The sympathy existing between these two brothers is so close and so refined that the feelings, the impulses, the emotions of the one are instantly experienced by the other.”5 And it was in this spirit that Melville wrote to Richard Henry Dana Jr., not of Chang and Eng themselves, but of his own relation to that writer: after my first voyage, I for the first time read [Dana’s] “Two Years Before the Mast,” and while so engaged was, as it were, tied and welded to you by a sort of Siamese link of affectionate sympathy. . . .6

Several things commend this passage for attention. In the first place, it bears a marked similarity of tone to Melville’s other literary homage of 1850, “Hawthorne and His Mosses”—in which, as we have seen, literary identification is cast as an electric “shock of recognition.” Second, it chimes with Hawthorne’s own conception of “sympathy”; which, as we further see in chapter 3, is strongly linked to his view of electricity itself. But most remarkable of all, perhaps, is the way that “sympathy” here becomes detached from its properly “Siamese” context—the spatiosomatic link between the twins—and identified instead with spatiosomatic dislocation. The scene of Melville’s reading is, by definition, distinct in space and time from that of Dana’s writing. Yet “sympathy” (precipitated through the authors’ shared experience of sailing) unites the parties nonetheless. This union takes on a certain paradigmatic significance, furthermore, when considered in light of the book to which Melville pays tribute. In Two Years before the Mast (1841), the chronicle of a sea voyage from Boston to California, Dana refers to the receipt of newspapers from home, which he considers “almost equal to clairvoyance” in their ability to carry him “back to the spot.”7 This is despite the fact that up to six months have elapsed since they were sent, thus piling temporal dislocation on top of the spatial displacement this experience both makes plain and yet belies. Newspapers, then, represent a further way in which space may be “comparatively annihilated,” as Frederick Douglass puts it in his own meditation on sea travel, composed just two years after Melville’s; in a text equally concerned, as we have just seen, with transoceanic consciousness (though more specifically with the electric telegraph). For Douglass, himself a newspaper editor, such phenomena were all of a piece in their cultivation of trans-spatial intellectual exchange.8 And yet, as Dana clearly specifies, such exchange is always articulated within—and in relation to, if not in spite of—time. These, then, are the concerns of the present chapter: people’s relations over time and space, and how time and space relate to one another.

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Chang and Eng proved strangely useful in representing how this happened, for as Melville indicates, and as we further see, the twins have a surprisingly sustained history of association with relations over time and space that theirs would seem to least resemble. That time and space were themselves substantially re-imagined over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been amply demonstrated in Stephen Kern’s classic study The Culture of Time and Space (1982).9 But the special role of electrical technologies and concepts in this reimagination deserves particular attention, appearing as they do in such diverse contexts as ghost stories and stories about love affairs, scientific tracts concerning the paranormal, the literature of time-travel, academic theories about history, and literary theories of linguistic value. Throughout the period itself, time and space were understood as being radically related, though opinion varied as to the precise nature of this relationship. Thus Marx (echoing Douglass) describes the effects of railroads and telegraphy as an “annihilation of space by time,” H. G. Wells’s time-traveler, in The Time Machine (1895), declares that “Time is only a kind of Space,” and Emerson imagines contemporary and future technologies making “time out of space, and space out of time.”10 Each of these contentions identifies a different relationship, or order of priority, between time and space, but all agree in seeing them as essentially reciprocal categories that not only mutually define but can also, in certain circumstances, be assimilated to one another. Nowhere are these circumstances clearer than when conditioned by the telegraph and railroad; two technologies acclaimed, by one writer, in 1913, as the “Siamese twins of commerce.”11

“Annihilating” Time and Space These “Siamese twins” are also, in fact, the two things Marx had in mind when speaking of the “annihilation of space by time.” In his analysis, the telegraph and railroad were both consequence and cause of the wholescale social, cultural, and economic shifts transforming nineteenth-century culture. These transformations, in turn, form the major subject of Frank Norris’s planned trilogy, the “Epic of the Wheat.”12 Written early in the twentieth century, the two novels Norris completed cast light on representations of the telegraph and railroad from throughout the period this book considers. In so doing, they also illustrate one of Marx’s key ideas: that in the mise-en-scène of capitalism, production, distribution and consumption form an integrated unity of “moments” that produce, complete, and reproduce each other.13

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In The Octopus (1901), the first novel of the trilogy, Norris is primarily concerned with a community of ranchers: Harran and Magnus Derrick, Buck Annixter, Osterman and Broderson. These ranchers’ livelihoods depend upon the burgeoning global trade in wheat, and subsequently upon the railroad—the “octopus” of the title—to whom they are beholden both for land and transportation of their produce. In a set-piece expository scene, Norris represents the concatenation of transactions through which the ranchers’ fortunes are determined. In the office of the Derricks’ ranch, Los Muertos, the telegraph receiver, is “no doubt, the most significant object,” for it is via this that the ranch is connected by wire with San Francisco, and through that city with Minneapolis, Duluth, Chicago, New York, and at last, and most important of all, with Liverpool. Fluctuations in the price of the world’s crop during and after the harvest thrilled straight to the office of Los Muertos, to that of the Quien Sabe, to Osterman’s, and to Broderson’s. During a flurry in the Chicago wheat pits in the August of that year, which had affected even the San Francisco market, Harran and Magnus had sat up nearly half of one night watching the strip of white tape jerking unsteadily from the reel. At such moments they no longer felt their individuality. The ranch became merely the part of an enormous whole, a unit in the vast agglomeration of wheat land the whole world round, feeling the effects of causes thousands of miles distant—a drought on the plains of Dakota, a rain on the plains of India, a frost on the Russian steppes, a hot wind on the llanos of the Argentine.14

The telegraph brings the Derricks almost instantaneous information from every major trading center, linking the wheat-growing areas of California with their markets in Europe. Through these contacts they can further feel the “effects of causes” even more remote, alerting them to conditions in every wheat-growing sector of the globe. This convergence of effects upon a single point, however, results in a peculiar psychological effect, as the watching Harran and Magnus feel their “individuality” absorbed within the immensity of space the telegraph abridges. The paradoxical effect of this contraction of distance is thus to make the Derricks’ own location seem abstract: the ranch becomes a synecdochic emblem of a global “whole” whose overcoding power is writ on strips of telegraphic tape. In The Pit (1903), the second novel of the trilogy, attention switches to the “flurries” of the Chicago wheat market itself. Here, Norris’s earlier portrayal of those (literally) on the receiving end of market information is complemented by a description of the same sort of information being sent. As trading opens for the day on the stock

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exchange, there is a sudden rush of activity, and “on the instant the hundreds of telegraph keys scattered throughout the building began clicking off the news to the whole country, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Mackinac to Mexico.”15 The idea of the market’s diasporous effects is thus retained, although here the representational frame is shifted from the margins of the marketplace to its center. Again, Norris is struck by the telegraph’s long-distance effects, but whereas in The Octopus these leach away at regional autonomy, they now embody Chicago’s command of the far-flung vicinities surrounding it. The final, unwritten novel of Norris’s trilogy was to have completed his portrayal of economic processes by focusing on the consumption of wheat in Europe. Norris died before undertaking this task, but had already offered a condensed account of his contemporaries’ consumption habits in The Octopus. Here, he is concerned not with wheat, but the luxurious fare enjoyed by Mrs. Gerard, the wife of a wealthy railroad magnate: “We get all our asparagus from the southern part of the State, from one particular ranch . . . We order it by wire and get it only twenty hours after cutting. My husband sees to it that it is put on a special train” (611). The “wire” and railroad are thus made to work in tandem, with each being called upon to produce its special effects: the telegraph to execute an order over distance; the “special train” to freight goods in as little time as possible. This episode allows us to make two general points. First, one notices the emphatically temporal dimension of the space-effacing procedures the episode describes. The point of using the telegraph, in other words, is the speed with which it caters to Mrs. Gerard’s wishes, while the salient fact about the chartering of a “special train” is not so much the distance it has to travel as the time it takes to do so. This figural reduction of distance to an interval of hours is exactly what Marx has in mind when referring to the “annihilation of space by time,” although here we may prefer to say instead that time and space contract together. In any event, we may conclude that where the railroad, telegraph, and other such technologies are concerned, effects in time and space are strictly correlative with one another. The second general point is more historical in nature, and concerns the institutional convergence of the two technologies Mrs. Gerard utilizes. Her order of asparagus is exemplary in this respect precisely because the histories of the railroad and the telegraph are so closely connected. A brief consideration of these interlocking histories will show not only how and why this was so, but also grant a firmer purchase on the question of how time and space relate to one another,

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and how the telegraph and railroad together brought them into new alignments. The telegraph and railroad were, in fact (and as their characterization as “Siamese twins” suggests), deeply implicated in each other throughout their early histories.16 Early railroads were afflicted by the apparently intractable problem of how to correlate the movements of trains with one another, and thus avoid the accidents that besmirched their early reputation.17 In the absence of such a facility, the need for safety led to the adoption of such measures as the sending of brakemen on foot ahead of their trains to ensure that nothing else was occupying a track; a time-consuming process that obviously meant trains could not proceed at anything approaching the rate of which they were technically capable.18 The telegraph, on the other hand, was initially hampered by the fact that there seemed no obvious need for its existence. Other measures, from the optical telegraph pioneered in France to the letter post and carrier pigeons widely used elsewhere, seemed adequate to most peoples’ communication needs, until the growing desire for railroad safety created what Brain Winston calls a “supervening social necessity” for just the sort of rapid signaling system the telegraph provided.19 The two technologies would subsequently grow in parallel, constituting what Wolfgang Schivelbusch calls a “machine ensemble,” in which the telegraph maximized the efficiency of the railways while the railways acted as a showcase for the telegraph.20 This convergence of telegraphy and railroad travel is neatly expressed in their shared association with the term “annihilation.” As we have seen, both Douglass and Marx use this term to designate the effect of such technologies on time or space (or both), though such usage was already commonplace by the time they did so.21 By the beginning of the twentieth century, meanwhile, this rhetorical crossover had been complemented by a more general identification of the two technologies based, as it were, on their phenomenological concurrence. In the early pages of The Octopus, the poet Presley is able to tell where the railroad lies by looking at the line of telegraph poles that mark its course (13). Later, the noise of a telegraph key indicates that Presley is nearing a railroad station; the same noise then punctuates his conversation with the engine driver Dyke (16, 19). For Schivelbusch, the visual coincidence of the two technologies is especially important to railroad travel, during which “the outer world beyond the compartment window is mediated to the traveler by the telegraph poles and wires flashing by.”22 In Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), such “flashing” indicates the speed at which trains travel,

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thus helping to contrast the technical achievements of British rule in India against the more dilatory modes of transport (especially walking) associated with its “native” inhabitants.23 And in The Octopus, the same phenomenon is used to practical effect, Dyke requiring just a “glance” at the telegraph poles around him to tell that the engine he has hijacked is traveling at fifty miles an hour (477). Sherlock Holmes uses a similar technique in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Silver Blaze” (1894).24 But if the telegraph helped coordinate the internal workings of the railroad, this was not itself sufficient to coordinate the movements of passengers with trains. For this to happen, it was first necessary to introduce the timetable, which in turn helped prepare the ground for a global shift in the organization of time that few people before the advent of the railways could either have envisaged or desired.25

Railroads, Time, and the Logistical Sublime Railroads strove for punctuality from the outset, and always tried to operate according to a schedule.26 This is noted by Thoreau in Walden (1854) with a characteristic mixture of antipathy and fascination.27 “Have not men improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was invented?” he asks: “Do they not talk and think faster in the [railroad] depot than they did in the stage-office?”28 If there is something “electrifying in the atmosphere of the former place,” as Thoreau then suggests, it indicates both the manner by which such punctuality is achieved (the telegraph), and way commensurate psychological effects are inspired among the users of the railroad: to be “electrified,” in this context, is to live according to the railroad’s schedule (79–80). However, while Thoreau sees nothing wrong with this in principle (the discipline, he says, has made lives “steadier”), he cautions against too strict an adherence to this regime. Comparing the railroad to Atropos, goddess responsible for death in Greek mythology, he advises: “it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track” (80). Despite Thoreau’s impressions, most of the initial efforts to produce comprehensive and reliable timetables were compromised by the lack of standard time across the areas the railroads covered.29 This meant that any given train might pass through a multitude of different times, all set locally according to such ancient means as looking at the sun. A train leaving at its allotted time at one end of its journey would thus arrive either late or early in terms of the time set at each point where it halted; a discrepancy that became more and more

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pronounced as the distance and speed of train journeys increased. In the United States and Europe, this led to the publication of compendious “books of hours” that sought to correlate the various times of different routes and operating companies with one another: the title of Henry James’s travel books English Hours (1905) and Italian Hours (1909) commemorate such efforts.30 However, it was not until the introduction of standard time across whole nations—set centrally and transmitted simultaneously to each region via telegraph—that railroad companies could offer a definitive account of when their services would operate. In Britain, the adoption of national standard time was a fait accompli by 1848, although the nation as a whole would not officially embrace it until 1880. In the United States, meanwhile, a system of national time zones was agreed on by the railroads in 1883, and then adopted by the federal government in 1918.31 In 1884, meanwhile, the International Meridian Conference in Washington DC adopted Greenwich Meantime as its transnational standard, carving the world into twenty-four time separate time zones. Twenty-five countries adopted this standard immediately, with countries such as Germany following only after a few years. France was the major power that resisted this Anglo-American imposition the longest, holding out against it until 1911.32 By the century’s end, then, it had become possible to learn exactly when a given train was due to run within the parameters of any given national railway network, especially in the more industrial areas of the United States and Western Europe. The railroads had enabled this by coordinating wholesale changes in the social organization of time; a role for which they were uniquely suited both by the existence of a compelling motive to make such changes and the economic and political clout to push them through.33 With its “intricate synchronization” via schedules and timetables, the railroad thus became an emblem of the “unalterable fate” to which the individual is subject (as Thoreau had warned), as well as what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls an equally unyielding “contingency” with respect to people’s “needs and expectations.”34 The paradox here, as Gumbrecht goes on to note, is that railroad scheduling appears to be as unalterably fixed as it is random in effect, because whether a train will be available when needed has nothing to do with what circumstance dictates.35 The trick that Gumbrecht misses, however, like Thoreau, is that trains do not invariably run to schedule. On the contrary, the dread phenomenon of the late, delayed, or cancelled train ensures a further element of contingency that may consist in any given experience of railway travel. The text that best explores each of these possibilities, from the

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significance of timetables to the problems caused by unpunctual trains, is Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).36 Dracula begins with an account of an itinerary: “Left Munich at 8.35 p.m. on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6.46, but train was an hour late.”37 The writer, Jonathan Harker, is on his way across the Carpathians to visit Count Dracula, for whom he is to act as a solicitor. As a result of this encounter, Harker’s interest in “the correct time” (7) will become a near-obsession, as it will also be for Mina Harker, Drs. Seward and Van Helsing, Arthur Holmwood, Lord Godalming, and Quincey Morris, all of whom become united in a campaign against the Count. The novel’s opening sentence sets a precedent, for Dracula’s concern with contrasting expectations about time and ways of using it is closely linked to the great many train journeys that feature in the novel. It also anticipates the way that the novel’s geospatial movement from West to East entails a lessening of temporal exactitude. “It seems to me that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains,” reflects Harker: “What ought they to be in China?” (9). The action does not take us this far, but in the final pursuit of Dracula back to Transylvania, Van Helsing notes sadly that trains in the East cannot be expected be as swift as those in the West (435). In the event, the pursuers’ train arrives at least three hours late (444), which though not late enough to ensure the Count’s escape, contributes to the suspense of the novel’s final pages. Dracula himself embodies many of the novel’s most interesting temporal effects. “ ‘Time is everything with him’ ” (311), as Quincey Morris observes—a statement that accurately conveys not only the constant haste he and his fellow conspirators are obliged to exercise in their efforts to defeat him, but also the way that the Dracula himself rather luxuriates in time. “Festina lente [hasten slowly] may well be his motto” (389), as Van Helsing says, and in fact the Count is conspicuously unhurried throughout most of the novel, while all those against him dash around incessantly. As a vampire, Dracula is of course “undead,” and has thus been “alive” for centuries; a fact that exempts him from the normative temporal criteri on of the lifetime, while also perhaps explaining why he seems to have such time to spare. Van Helsing is certainly of this opinion, arguing, “a man who has centuries before him can afford to wait and to go slow” (389). Dracula’s undeadness is just one of the things that goes into making him an anachronism, in every possible sense of the term. By all the normal standards of human mortality, he is misplaced in time, having outlived his own lifetime by consuming that of other people. The Count

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is also, in a more figurative sense, an anachronism by virtue of his geographic origins; for in the oppositional system that structures the novel, his area of Eastern Europe is meant to seem “backwards” in comparison with the West (as, indeed, we have already seen from the example of its unreliable railways). Dracula’s nobility, meanwhile, aligns him with the feudal social order that has vanished from the West: a fact that he explicitly acknowledges when explaining to Jonathan Harker that a knowledge of the English tongue will help him exchange the honored status that he enjoys in his homeland for the anonymity of London (31–32). In the novel’s most direct reference to the epochal conflict around which it revolves, the solicitor reflects that his diary, because written in shorthand, is “nineteenth century up to date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill” (51). Modernity can kill them, though, as the eventual death of Dracula proves. Harker’s words thus serve to emphasize the fact that killing Dracula will, in a very real sense, prove to be a matter of killing time: the superfluity of time incarnate in the Count’s person, and the feudal time that has outlived its “proper” historical location.38 Dracula’s association with heterodox time is, as we should by now be beginning to expect, accompanied by an ability to induce strange effects in space. But unlike, say, a railroad train, Dracula does not so much “annihilate” the space he travels through as modulate the way in which he is embodied in it. Thus he infiltrates Dr. Seward’s lunatic asylum in the form of a thin white mist, and is known to penetrate even the most tightly sealed tomb (359). As Van Helsing says, “He can, when once he find his way, come out from anything or into anything” (308). Perhaps the best example of vampiric tampering with space, however, relates not to Dracula himself but to his victim and protégé Lucy Westenra. Before ending her vampiric afterlife by driving a stake through her heart, Van Helsing and his associates see Lucy pass into her tomb “through the interstice where scarce a knife-blade could have gone” (273). In view of vampirism’s anachronistic structure, it is highly appropriate that Lucy shares this ability with none other than H. G. Wells’s time-traveler, who in the course of his journey undergoes a similar material trans-substantiation: “So long as I travelled at a high velocity through time . . . I was, so to speak, attenuated—was slipping like a vapour through the interstices of intervening substances!”39 As has been suggested, the campaign against the Count entails a parsimonious attitude toward time that furnishes a clear contrast with the methodical patience and transgressive chronologies of its villain.40 Jonathan Harker’s concern with the “correct time,” and the implicit

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approval with which he deems his own diary “up to date with a vengeance” are exemplary of this desire to observe what one might call the proprieties of time, and this desire becomes an even more urgent imperative when Mina Harker is bitten by the Count.41 In the wake of this episode, the knowledge that Mina herself will become a vampire if the Count is not destroyed means that “Time is now to be dreaded” (404). This dread of time and the need to use it sparingly lie behind much of the telegraphic correspondence in the novel, especially between Seward and Van Helsing. One characteristic exchange involves Seward wiring his colleague in Amsterdam from London with information concerning the ailing Lucy Westenra: “Come at once; do not lose an hour,” the message instructs, with the result that Van Helsing is promptly met from his train the following day (154–55). The promptness of the medium itself is here mimetically redoubled in the very text of Dr. Seward’s message. A later exchange, however, demonstrates that telegrams, like trains, are unfortunately not always so prompt, for when Van Helsing telegraphs Seward from Antwerp with vital information relating to Lucy’s health, its late delivery (by twenty-two hours) fills Dr. Seward “with dismay. A whole night lost, and I know from bitter experience what may happen in a night” (184). A few pages later, Quincey Morris is compelled to join the two doctors at Lucy’s bedside by a telegram he receives from Arthur Holmwood, and although his donation of blood ultimately proves futile, he can declare, “I think I came just in the nick of time” (193). These three telegrams and their respective effects provide a composite representation of the telegraph that both recapitulates and complicates some of our earlier observations about trains. This should come as no surprise, for as we have now repeatedly seen, use of telegraphy and trains are frequently coordinated facets of a common plan of action: just as they are in the example just cited, when Van Helsing catches a train as a result of what Seward has told him by telegram. Quincey Morris’s arrival at Lucy’s bedside reinforces this point, being part of a wider pattern in which communications between characters either prompt or make reference to their movements in space. The pursuit of Dracula with which the novel concludes features a particularly good example of this; for here, information relating to the Count’s movements is sent ahead of those following him, in order to take account of their own corresponding movements. Thus, Lord Godalming instructs the shipping insurers Lloyds of London to wire him whenever Dracula’s vessel is recorded at port; he then obtains these messages by applying at the vice consular offices in every town through which the pursuing party travels (431, 434, 446). The delay of Van Helsing’s telegram from Antwerp, however, is a reminder of the unforeseeable perils and contingencies that so often

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shadow transactions involving telegraphs and trains. Naturally, these perils become especially dire when facing an adversary such as Dracula, whose own prodigious powers of time- and space-manipulation give his opponents little margin for delay. Nonetheless, the eventual success of this campaign, the fact that its members are constantly forced to occupy the “nick of time,” and the various stratagems (such as Godalming’s series of messages from Lloyds) used by the conspirators, all go toward making Dracula a novel of what one might call the logistical sublime; a sublimity that is emphasized by the very technical glitches that occasionally disrupt the best laid plans of its protagonists. Dracula himself is a contributor to this effect: all his plans, as Jonathan Harker realizes, have been “carefully thought out, and done systematically and with precision” (291). It is these words, perhaps, that best register both the type of logistical rigor that Dracula’s opponents must emulate and the magnitude of the task that faces them. And it is Mina Harker, finally, who ensures that they are equal to it, for it is she who assembles the mass of journals, telegrams, and phonograph recordings in which their various dealings with Dracula are recorded, and collates everything in typewritten manuscript. She, too, is the “train fiend,” learning the times of every train between London and Exeter (241), and Varna and Galatz (435). Finally, after her vamping by Dracula, she grants her associates quasi-telepathic access to the Count’s sense impressions (370, 401–02, 430). This last effect, which is ensured via Van Helsing’s use of hypnosis (a subject to which I return in chapter 4), means that Mina can describe the Count’s progress to the rest of the pursuing party. There, the “lapping waves, rushing water, and creaking masts” she reports on consecutive occasions assure them that he is still aboard the ship they are following (430). For Friedrich Kittler, this form of long-distance eavesdropping makes Mina equivalent to a radio receiver, a technology patented by Guglielmo Marconi in the very month and year—June, 1897—in which Dracula appeared.42 One can, indeed, pursue this point further than Kittler does himself, by noting that in the novel, Mina’s hypnotic reports and Lord Godalming’s telegrams from Lloyds are shown to complement each other; the mechanical and the psychological representing only slightly different means of obtaining the same information. It is thus apt that it was none other than Lloyds who obtained one of the first commercially operating radio transmitters, using it for the express purpose of obtaining information about ships off Northern Ireland.43 Not the least impressive temporal effect of Stoker’s novel, then, is its own “invention” of a technology that would arrive, with exemplary promptitude, within a month of the book itself, and that would then

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establish itself in the precise context Stoker had proleptically envisaged for it.

Intimacy, Love, and Simultaneity Another text whose speculative forays prove prescient in the light of future sociotechnical developments is Mark Twain’s short story, “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton” (1878).44 In this tale, as in The Octopus and Dracula, the space-effacing effects of new communication technologies are shown to be inextricably bound up with effects of temporality. Twain’s text concerns the telephone, and is inspired by the emergence of this technology in the years immediately prior to its composition.45 Its prescience therefore concerns not so much the existence of a new technology as the way in which its use is represented. As Claude S. Fischer has shown, in its early years, the telephone was typically used much like the telegraph—as a means of conveying short, action-orientated pieces of information—and was not regularly used for informal, intimate, or lengthy conversations until the early twentieth century.46 However, it is exactly the latter way of using the telephone that Twain takes as his subject in the story. The tale can thus be used to facilitate our own shift of emphasis away from the meansorientated, “business-like” use of time and space technology represented in Dracula—where the paradigmatic verbal artifact is the short telegram, providing specific information or instruction—and toward the use of such technology to establish intimacy. This is a term I use here to signify an affective likeness or affinity between two or more people, irrespective of any other bond between them.47 Though this shift might be seen as one from the logistical to the intimate, it is preferable to say that it means rather a true appreciation of the logistics of intimacy itself. Within the framework of this chapter, then, this means considering the temporal and spatial conditions that must be met in order for intimacy to be possible; and failing these, the types of technical or psychosomatic adjustments that are necessary in order to retrieve or create anew an intimate relation. “The Loves” is especially suited to an introduction of this topic because it centers on intimacy created in defiance of every spatial and temporal barrier. It concerns two lovers, Alonzo and Rosannah, who meet, court each other, and eventually marry over the telephone, without ever physically meeting. Despite its obvious centrality to the story as a whole, Twain carefully avoids mentioning the telephone directly until several pages into the story, and renders the couple’s initial meeting without any clear indication that it does not occur

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within a shared space. Instead, in an inspired stroke of theoretical intuition, he allows their spatial dislocation to appear obliquely, through the representation of time. At the end of this first conversation, Rosannah’s glance alights upon a clock: “Five minutes after eleven! Nearly two hours, and it did not seem twenty minutes! Oh, dear, what will he think of me!” At the self-same moment Alonzo was staring at his clock. And presently he said: “Twenty-five minutes to three! Nearly two hours, and I didn’t believe it was two minutes!” (167–68; emphasis in original)

In fact, the two occupy entirely different local times, and live on opposite sides of the continent: Alonzo in Maine, and Rosannah in California. The delayed revelation that they are speaking via telephone, however, means that this spatial removal first becomes legible as temporal difference. The telephone, by annulling the physical distance between the two characters, thus conjures this difference away, producing a “self-same moment” that is equally present in both places. The telephone is unmasked as a kind of time machine, and distance measured by a pair of clocks. I consider the substance of the couple’s interviews in the following chapter, along with the related but by no means identical question of how the lovers “represent” themselves to one another. Here, however, I wish to concentrate instead on what Twain calls the “self-same moment.” This moment is not specific to either of the places the characters inhabit, but precisely by virtue of this fact, is able to unite them. It belongs, therefore, to the temporal category of simultaneity: the identity in time of more than one event, irrespective of any difference in the location at which these events occur. As Stephen Kern has emphasized, an intensified consciousness of simultaneity is one of the most enduring and ubiquitous psychological effects associated with the advent of telecommunications technologies in the nineteenth century.48 Twain’s tale demonstrates exactly how one such technology, the telephone, creates this sense of simultaneity through the circumvention of distance, while also beginning to suggest the importance of this temporal coincidence within the context of intimacy. The care taken over establishing the idea of the “self-same moment” within the context of the beginnings of a love affair might, in other words, provoke the intuition that simultaneity is the very time of love. This, at least, is the conclusion to be drawn from the work of Orson Squire Fowler, one of the preeminent American theorists of health and sexuality of the early nineteenth century. Fowler’s ideas about love play an important and intriguing part within

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his thought, and like Twain in his short story, develop the notion of simultaneity via the discourse of telecommunications. Fowler was an avatar of the omnivorous and restless reformist impulses that affected all aspects of American life following the Jacksonian democratic reforms of the 1830s.49 These impulses, which mobilized socialists, women’s rights advocates, spiritualists, mesmerists, and vegetarians (offices that often coincided) had as one of their outlets a vigorous campaign for sexual education and hygiene.50 Fowler, one of the principal theorists of this movement—and, along with his brother, Lorenzo Niles Fowler (1811–96), one of the principal exponents of phrenology, the study and manipulation of supposed “organs” in the brain—based his recommendations on the widely accepted idea of an electromagnetic “life force,” which he gave a pronounced “erotic” inflection.51 Here, for example, he declares that FALLING IN LOVE is perfectly explainable on [the basis of] this magnetic theory, but on no other. Two meet at a party, in church, on steam-boat, and instantly, on sight, mutually become perfectly “smitten,” “smashed,” “electrified,” “enamoured,” “Love-struck,” “dead-in-Love.” Mutually ‘delighted’ is too tame to express their passion; for their delight in each other is ecstatic. Each electrifies the other from head to feet, physically and spiritually . . . Their very proximity thrills each other, because their electricities are interchanged through air . . . 52 (Emphasis in original)

The crucial point to take from this is the importance of “proximity” as the geospatial context in which two become “electrified”: lovers meet at parties—not (contra Twain) over the phone. The interplay and modulation between the respective energies of each lover is also important, for as Fowler goes on to explain, “Love is composed of their two sexual magnetisms blended, which thus establish a spirituo-telegraphic rapport between them” (243; emphasis in original). If the initial process of falling in love is thus dependent on the spatial coincidence of the two people concerned, the subsequent state of being in love suspends this precondition, and is even, in a sense, defined through this suspension. Lovers hence enjoy a “telegraphic” bond that, as the term suggests, is capable of transcending or overleaping distance. Therefore, Those who love often find themselves actually thinking upon the same subjects at the same instant, and speaking the same words at the same time . . . However far their bodies may be separated, perfect Love keeps their spirits in rapport. (241–42)

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Here, again, the “instant” is the temporal index against which the sublimity and power of love is measured. Though their bodies may be widely separated in space, lovers share the same thoughts and speak the same words at precisely the same time. In other words, they think and feel the same things simultaneously. Fowler’s lovers thus achieve a similar intimacy to that of Alonzo and Rosannah in Twain’s story, although they do so in the absence of any enabling technology. Here, too, Fowler adopts the Twain-like trick of showing how love’s defiance of space allows it to traverse the North American continent: [when two people] experience the highest phase of Love, what though she is on the Western prairie, and he in busy, bustling New York; if she falls sick, so as to really need his presence, her spirit holds that perfect intercommunion with his which draws on his till he feels that he really must break from pressing business, and rush home, half-crazed to be at her side. (242)

How is the anguished lover to accomplish this prodigious feat of rapid transportation? In the nineteenth century, he must clearly take the train. Warming to this theme, Fowler quotes the case of a man who remembers [t]aking the afternoon train, without intending to go home, and coming to a junction where one train would take me to my appointment, the other home. Just as both trains began to move, something “came over me,” and as it were, drew me out of my train, and impelled me to spring upon the other. I obeyed this “still, small voice within,” and reached home to find that a sudden sickness had that day struck down my poor wife, and laid her at the point of death; but my coming saved her life. (243; grammar amended)

Nothing better indicates the powerfully felt mixture of routine and contingency—the strict adherence to a schedule, on one hand, and the sudden, almost inexplicable decision to defy it, on the other—that adheres to railroad travel, and which here makes the decision to travel in a given direction the matter of a moment’s decision. But to Fowler, of course, what the story illustrates is not so much this as the extraordinary long-distance power of love itself. “JUST WHAT DREW HIM OUT of this train, and pushed him into that?” he asks (ibid.; emphasis in original). “Love” is his inevitable answer, a conclusion clinched by way of an analogy with none other than the Siamese twins, Chang and Eng: As in the Siamese twins, hurting Chang instantly hurt Eng in the same place and way; so this sympathy made him in the cars feel her state at

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their home. Her spirit drew on his, and drew him to her bedside. (Ibid.; emphasis in original)

Chang and Eng, those paragons of “sympathetic” intimacy, are thus used to represent a social bond transcending each of conditions out of which their own was constituted: consanguinity, embodiment, and, as a corollary of the latter, their ineluctable and unbroken proximity in space.

Powers of Mind As we have now seen on a number of occasions, what one might think of as technological qualities, relating to the circumvention of time and space, are not always confined to technologies themselves, but may also appear in people. Love, in Fowler’s reckoning, is clearly an example of this: its spatial reach is described as “telegraphic,” but it does not require actual use of the telegraph for one to enjoy its effects. On the contrary, the whole burden of Fowler’s argument is that love occurs entirely “naturally,” and has no need of anything so prosaic as a complex of machinery to bring it into being. Thus, while Fowler’s theory is certainly conditioned by the existence of the telegraph, the telegraph itself does not directly feature in it. Mina Harker’s ability to receive radio-like signals from Count Dracula provides another example of this; although here, one cannot possibly speak of Stoker’s novel being “conditioned” by the existence of the radio, because it is precisely this technology that Stoker anticipates. This is one reason why Claude S. Fischer is right to say that the significance of new technologies cannot be explained solely in terms of “impacts.” Rather, such “impacts” are themselves heavily circumscribed by existing technologies, imaginary forms, and social expectations.53 Thus, what the example of Dracula really shows is that something like the idea of radio communication existed in advance of its realization: an idea that was no doubt strengthened by the existence of other technologies, like the telegraph, the telephone, and so on.54 This, after all, is unsurprising, for if it were not so, it is hard to see how anything like the radio could ever have been invented in the first place. Moving beyond these cases, we arrive at others in which people “take on” the properties of new technologies. As suggested in my “Introduction,” the “vocal telegraph” in Melville’s Typee (1846) represents a classic instance of such thinking. Even here, however, it is hard to isolate the “impact” of one technology from that of others; for while the “inconceivable rapidity” of the Typee’s communications may well be modeled on that of Morse’s telegraph, Melville may also have been thinking of the optical telegraph: an older, non-electrical

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system of communications, at that time widely used at sea.55 For a more unequivocal demonstration of how electrical technologies bequeath their properties to human beings, then, we must turn to Mark Twain’s “Mental Telegraphy” (1891), in which telegraphic powers are ascribed not to articulate speech but to the inner recesses of the mind. Twain’s essay is a tour de force of electrical thought and writing, which, besides showcasing such arguments, advances a theory of technological invention itself.56 Twain’s essay begins with an attempt to explain a certain curious epistolary effect: “We are always talking about letters ‘crossing’ each other,” he says, “for that is one of the very commonest accidents of this life.”57 Not only this, but “We are always mentioning people, and in that very instant they appear before us” (74). Indeed, the frequency of these and other “accidents” is such that Twain feels obliged to offer an alternative explanation: “the theory that minds telegraph thoughts to each other”; an occurrence he believes to be “as common as dining” (72, 84). All the salient features of mechanical telegraphy are thus displaced onto the human mind, but the need for any mechanical component is suspended. Time and space can be effaced by sheer force of intellect, as in the case of a “friend, whom I had not seen and had hardly thought of for eleven years, [who] was able to shoot his thoughts at me across three thousand miles of country, and fill my head with them, to the exclusion of every other interest, in a single moment” (77–78). Once again, the “moment” is an important criterion here, uniting the idea of simultaneity with that of suddenly abolished distance.58 The same is also true when Twain reaches for an analogy we have last seen used by Fowler. Describing the simultaneous activity of two letter writers, whose respective labors are bound to “cross” each other, he maintains that one must nonetheless go on writing . . . because if you get up from your table and postpone, that other man will do the same thing, exactly as if you two were harnessed together like the Siamese twins, and must duplicate each other’s movements. (73)

Once again, Chang and Eng—whose “sympathy,” as we have seen, Twain had written of before—are invoked in order to represent a category they cannot be included in: a form of instantaneous communication or coordinated action that works in spite of, rather than in strict accordance with, the confines of spatial contiguity. Unlike Fowler, however (whose ascription of “telegraphic” properties to love goes unelaborated), Twain presents a clear idea of

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how mental telegraphy relates to its mechanical equivalent. In his account, machines like the telegraph provoke, as it were, their own imaginary supercessions. Twain imagines that the phenomena of mental telegraphy actually interacts with the technology from which its name is taken, via: the experience of receiving a clear and particular answer to your telegram before your telegram has reached the sender of the answer. That is a case where your telegram has gone straight from your brain to the man it was meant for, far outstripping the wire’s slow electricity. (84; emphasis in original)

The very speed for which electricity is typically renowned is here ironically displaced on to its competitor. What is more, the wire’s “slow electricity” and its mental correlative are fundamentally indissociable; for although the phenomenon that Twain credits himself with discovering is far speedier than the telegraph itself, it is still necessary for the latter to be used. “The only necessary thing is to cable—that is all,” he advises, for only then will the desired mental transmission be forthcoming (79; emphasis in original). Twain’s embrace of contemporary technology is, however, somewhat grudging (in this essay at least), and does not prevent him from envisaging a future in which it can finally be abandoned. “The telegraph and the telephone are going to become too slow and wordy for our needs,” he forecasts: “We must have the thought itself shot into our minds from a distance; then, if we need to put it into words, we can do that tedious work at our leisure” (82; emphasis in original). For this, it is necessary to imagine the invention of a new technology, the “phrenophone,” whereby the presently unpredictable phenomenon of mental telegraphy will be “reduced to certainty and system” (81–82). The success of this proleptic drive for new technology is thus guaranteed in advance, as it were; for in a reflexive turn that situates his own text within a continuum of mental telegraph correspondence, Twain declares, “While I am writing this, doubtless somebody on the other side of the globe is writing it, too” (82). The advent of the phrenophone is thus a near-certainty, for the idea of it is already abroad; witness: that curious thing in the history of inventions which has puzzled every one so much—that is, the frequency with which the same machine or other contrivance has been invented at the same time by several persons in different quarters of the globe. . . . Is it not possible that inventors are constantly and unwittingly stealing each other’s ideas whilst they stand thousand of miles asunder? (76)

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Twain clinches this point with a specific example that brings a delightful circularity to his argument: “The world was without an electric telegraph for several thousand years; then Professor Henry, the American, Wheatstone in England, Morse on the sea, and a German in Munich, all invented it at the same time” (ibid.). Twain’s own theory of mental telegraphy is thus used to explain the emergence of the technology inspiring it. Though they are marked by an autotheoretical genius that makes them exceptional, Twain’s remarks about mental telegraphy are not at all unusual in terms of basic subject matter. Indeed, as Twain himself describes in the “Note to the Editor” with which the published essay begins, the possibility of interpsychic communication without the use of any of the “normal” channels was taken seriously by many contemporaries (71). By this time, there were indeed several institutions of high repute, both in Europe and North America, dedicated to systematic investigation of just this possibility. The most famous of these was the English Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which Twain mentions in his opening pages, along with the society’s most enduring contribution to Anglophone culture, the word telepathy.59 Indeed, this particular designation and that of “mental telegraphy” itself, are, in Twain’s opinion, merely different ways of referring to “the same thing” (71). In the remainder of this section, I briefly trace the appearance of telepathy and other related concepts in the work of Freud, a corresponding member of the SPR, and an occasional reader of Twain.60 These turn out to have curiously close relationship to Twain’s own essay on “Mental Telegraphy,” and reconfirm more general points—especially the close association between telepathic communication and communication via new technology—raised throughout this chapter. In his New Introductory Lectures of 1933, Freud defines telepathy as the alleged fact that an event which occurs at a particular time comes at about the same moment to the consciousness of someone distant in space, without the paths of communication that are familiar to us coming into question. It is implicitly presupposed that this event concerns a person in whom the other one (the receiver of the intelligence) has a strong emotional interest.61

Twain, one notes, had rejected this last presupposition, claiming on the contrary that mental telegraphy often occurs between people who have no idea of the other’s existence, and thus no emotional attachments whatsoever. Freud’s own account, however, is far more representative in this regard, reflecting both the popular view of telepathy and that of its early investigators.62 It is here that one

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glimpses the secret continuity between the theory of telepathy and that of love formulated by Fowler earlier in the century. The “telegraphic” powers the latter had attributed to love are now annexed to a discrete psychological faculty, simultaneously more general and more specific. Freud, meanwhile, following Stoker’s line of thought, calls telepathy “a kind of psychical counterpart to wireless telegraphy,” as well as of the slightly older telephone.63 Freud then goes on to recall a story about telepathic dreams also told, in greater detail, in “Dreams and Telepathy” (1922). In this story, Freud’s correspondent reports having a dream in which his wife gives birth to twins. He then receives, the following morning, a telegram informing him that his daughter has given birth to twins herself. Calculating “backward” from the time at which the telegram arrives, the writer then concludes that his dream has occurred simultaneously with the birth of his grandchildren, with the former acting as a kind of spontaneous proclamation of the latter.64 As in Twain, one of the most striking things about this form of intelligence is both its resemblance to and ultimate superiority over technology, with the dream again, as it were (as Twain would put it), “far outstripping the wire’s slow electricity.” However, as Freud goes on to point out, the salient fact about this dream is that it is not, in fact, telepathic at all. Despite its close resemblance to events in the life of his daughter, it does not entirely coincide with the facts as related by the telegram: the writer’s wife, and not his daughter, is the protagonist of the dream. However, Freud then goes on to argue that this apparent difference is not “real”; for in imagining his wife giving birth to twins, the correspondent has in fact disclosed his sublimated love for the daughter with whom he would have liked to have had them.65 The crucial analytic point thus concerns the role of dreamwork in producing a discrepancy between the news conveyed by telegraph and its dreamed anticipation. This then allows the dreamer to disavow or misperceive the true significance of the dream itself. Telepathy, or rather belief in it, appears as an effect of this misrecognition; specifically, a failure to identify the signal difference between two versions of the “same” information. Freud’s skepticism about telepathy is, however, tempered, for in the slightly earlier “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy” (1941; composed in 1921), he is willing to “draw the inference that there is such a thing as thought-transference” in order to explain how the recipient of telepathic messages (in this case, a fortune teller) is able to apprehend, and thence distort, the unconscious wishes of her client.66 And in this respect, he has a somewhat unlikely ally in Frank Norris. In

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The Octopus, the time- and space-effacing powers of telegraphy and railroads are mirrored by the mental powers of Vanamee. By means of his “strange compelling power” (153), this character is able to summon people to him over distance; an ability his confidante Father Sarria deems “occult” (139). These quasi-telepathic powers are then displaced, as it were, from space to time, with Vanamee sending his thoughts “across the enchanted sea of the Supernatural” in an attempt to call his murdered lover, Angéle, back to life (382). As a result, Vanamee is visited by what Norris variously calls “the Illusion,” “the Vision,” “the Manifestation,” and “the Answer” (380–81), in a sequence of episodes culminating in Angéle’s full-blown reincarnation. Telepathy thus not only addresses itself toward but actually reconstitutes the object of love—an emotion Norris elsewhere in the novel likens to (echoing Fowler) “an invisible electric fluid” (497). Norris’s thinking here is complex. On one hand, he is at pains to incorporate Angéle’s reincarnation into the wholly “naturalistic” economy of “FORCE” the novel sets out to illustrate (634).67 On the other, his invocation of the “Supernatural” suggests the existence of an alterior ontological space from which dead spirits must be summoned if they are to be part of this economy. Summarizing this distinction, Vanamee declares that he wants Angéle’s “real self” and not her “ghost” (148). This brings us then, more generally, to the subject of ghosts themselves.

Ghosts of Electricity Like the Count in Dracula, a ghost is always an anachronism. Anachronism, indeed, as Peter Buse and Andrew Stott suggest, “might well be the defining feature of ghosts . . . because haunting, by its very structure, implies a deformation of linear temporality.”68 This deformation usually takes the form of someone outliving his or her own lifetime, thereby reintroducing a portion of the past (that which they themselves have lived through) back into the present from which it is receding. For Jacques Derrida, all this is possible because so-called linear temporality is really nothing of the sort: rather, such time is always-already “haunted” from within; past, present, and future continually overlapping and contaminating one another.69 The common sense appeal of this idea is reasonably self-evident, and is obvious in countless ways (for example, memory) that effects of the past perpetuate themselves within the present. What Derrida is really interested in, however, is the far more radical notion of time continually returning to and intersecting with itself, which would allow, say, for the haunting of the present by its own future.

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“[N]o time is contemporary with itself,” as Derrida maintains, precisely because no time is entirely free to be itself at all.70 Instead, a given time can only be itself on the condition that it preserves within it the traces of other times past or yet to come. Derrida’s deconstruction of linear time thus establishes some of the basic preconditions under which ghosts might be said to exist. However, as well as time, ghosts also oblige us to re-invoke the category of space. It is, after all, houses and rooms, castles and graveyards—all specific spaces—that are most often haunted. For Michel de Certeau, “haunting” designates the temporal signification that must necessarily adhere to any given space in order for it to be recognized and included in a socially meaningful context.71 This points toward a revised definition of haunting as the cohabitation of any given space by a multitude of times, or, conversely, the convergence of different times within a common space. This is a definition that electricity and electrical technologies have historically been useful in articulating. Two examples will suffice to show this. The first is Virginia Woolf’s short story “Kew Gardens” (1919). Here, an apparently deranged man is heard to talk “incessantly” about communication with the dead: He was talking about spirits—the spirits of the dead, who, according to him, were even now telling him all sorts of odd things about their experiences in Heaven. . . . He paused, seemed to listen, smiled, jerked his head and continued: “You have a small electric battery and a piece of rubber to insulate the wire . . . All arrangements being properly fixed by workmen under my direction, the widow applies her ear and summons the spirits by sign as agreed.”72

The “widow” here is imagined as being placed in contact with (one presumes) her dead husband by an electrical device; apparently, much like a telephone. The touch given by the speaker’s pause to listen to the ghostly voices is that ghosts themselves impart the instructions necessary to build the device. Rather than simply haunt an existing technology, then, ghosts are explicitly aligned with technological invention. Such an alignment is even more intriguingly suggested in my second example, Ambrose Bierce’s “The Ways of Ghosts” (1905), one of whose subtitles bears the grimly ironic title, “A Wireless Message.” This section tells a story set, with quiet deliberateness, in the “summer of 1896”: the time at which, we will recall, Marconi’s radio was established.73 The tale concerns one William Holt, who on a late-night walk sees a strangely illumined vision of his estranged wife clutching their child (63). By the light of this vision, Holt is able to read his watch and note the time as

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precisely 11.25 pm. Returning home the following morning, he awaits the arrival of “the predestined telegram” that will confirm what his vision has already suggested: that his wife and child have perished in a house fire, their time of death estimated by fire fighters as 11.25 the previous night (63–64). Many things about this story are familiar. What William Holt has experienced, mutatis mutandis, is what Freud’s correspondent believes himself to have experienced in his “telepathic” dream. The difference, of course, is that Freud’s correspondent is “wrong” (at least on Freud’s reckoning), whereas William Holt is sadly right: the vision that he sees is an accurate representation of his family’s death, simultaneous with the actual event. Bierce’s story also shares with Freud’s the detail of a telegram, arriving after a supernatural event, and confirming the intelligence that each seems to portend: the same sort of phenomena that Twain tries to explain in “Mental Telegraphy.” Again, a supernatural accession of knowledge both resembles and outpaces its mechanical equivalent. In Bierce’s text, however, the screw is tightened on this complex of ideas by the nasty joke constituted by its subtitle. “Wireless telegraphy” was the name given to the early radio by virtue of the fact that it operated without the mechanical connections of conventional telegraphy. And though the radio is not directly mentioned in the text of Bierce’s tale, the tale is set, as already noted, at the time of its invention. The “wireless message” of the title therefore refers to nothing other than the vision of William Holt itself, which must accordingly be judged a “spontaneous” equivalent to radio telegraphy. One must thus conclude that in addition to its manifest content (the wife’s and child’s death) Holt’s vision announces the arrival of the very technology of which it is a spectral and most “timely” double. The tale’s conceit, in other words, is that the radio has haunted itself; thrown its own ghost into the world simultaneously with its invention. And in this respect, of course, the text resembles Dracula, which also stages an “invention” of the radio. The only difference is that Holt’s vision is precisely that, a vision, whereas Mina Harker’s impressions of the Count are auditory. This means that the technology Bierce’s tale “really” prefigures is not in fact the radio at all, but a medium of disseminated images: not cinema, which depends upon projection over relatively short distances, but the long-distance broadcast medium of television. I return to the radio, and its haunting powers, in a later section of this chapter. For the remainder of the present section, I wish to concentrate on a text that, at least in its conception, provides a more extended

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treatment than any of our previous examples of ghostliness in relation to time and space. This is Henry James’s unfinished novel, The Sense of the Past (1917), and I refer particularly to its “conception” because, in view of its incompletion, one must rely heavily upon James’s notes in order to discover how it was to have unfolded. Nowhere in these notes, or indeed within the drafted chapters, are electrical or other communication technologies directly mentioned. However, the novel is so profoundly conditioned by such technologies that they may be fairly taken as among its “hidden,” sociotechnical foundations. “The sense of the past,” as James’s protagonist Ralph Pendrel is told early in the novel, is the sense for which he has a special “genius.”74 This is apt, because Ralph is a historian, but in this context comes as an unwelcome remark because its speaker, Aurora Coyne, is in the process of explaining to him why she will not marry him. The year is 1910, and the two are together in New York. However, in the aftermath of this refusal, Ralph decides to visit London in order to take up a house, bequeathed to him by a relative as a result of his reading Ralph’s “An Essay in Aid of the Reading of History” (42). In this book, Ralph has written: “There are particular places where things have happened, places enclosed and ordered and subject to the continuity of life mostly, that seem to put us into communication” with the past (34). And, as predicted by Aurora, it is precisely this sort of place that Ralph’s house turns out to be. Though Ralph’s ancestral home is not exactly “haunted” in the customary sense, it is redolent of the past to an unusual degree. Indeed, on opening its door, Ralph “lets himself into the Past” itself (292). The mediating factor in this temporal transition is Ralph’s haunting, which occurs when he encounters a portrait of one of his ancestors. By turns becoming animated, the painting first transfixes Ralph’s attention and then absorbs his identity, with the effect that Ralph “becomes” the person represented in the portrait. This exchange of identities is further bound up with an exchange of temporalities, in which Ralph is transposed into the “present” of his ancestor: 1820, exactly ninety years prior to the year in which the novel opens. There then begins a curious process whereby Ralph “lives through” the person of his ancestor, and so recapitulates, with some variations, the latter’s history of romantic conquest. James’s narrative breaks off near the beginning of this portion of the novel, but his notes indicate that the discrepancies between Ralph’s own sojourn in 1820 and the “original” career of his ancestor were to have provided the novel with much of its dramatic interest. But of more significance in this context is the “supreme dénoûement” (293) to the

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novel James envisages. This involves Aurora Coyne, back in New York and 1910, and “under a tremendous ‘psychic’ anxiety and distress of her own, which has been growing and growing within her commensurately with Ralph’s own culmination of distress and anguish in his drama” (ibid.; emphasis in original). It is because of this distress that Aurora is provoked into some kind of action (though James cannot specify exactly what) to ensure that Ralph is eventually retrieved from the “dramas” in which he has become embroiled and restored to his own present: that is, 1910. What James envisages, then, is firstly, a form of haunting, and one that is as spatially specific as it is anachronistic. It is to London, and within it a given house, that Ralph must journey in order to travel backward in time. Second, as I have already indicated, Ralph is haunted by his ancestor; moreover, there is also a sense in which he haunts himself.75 It is Ralph’s own exquisite sense of, and investment in, the past, James suggests, that in some way prepares for and induces his removal to it. Finally, it is by an extraordinary and unusual form of telepathy, or something similar, that Ralph is connected to Aurora by a “psychic” bond; a bond transcending not only the transatlantic distance separating them, but also the ninety years between their respective presents. The latter point, in fact, requires further specification, for James enfolds this idea of temporal dislocation within the more familiar, and apparently opposed, idea of simultaneity. Ralph’s sojourn in the past occurs in step with and at precisely the same pace as events unfolding in the present he has left. The time of Ralph’s “plunge or dive” into the past, as James calls it, is thus exactly the real time that has elapsed for those on the surface—some six months being what I provisionally see. The horrid little old conceit of the dream that has only taken half an hour, or whatever, any analogy with that, I mean, [is] to be utterly avoided. The duration is in short the real duration, and I know what I mean when I say that everything altogether corresponds. (293)

Everything, indeed, does “correspond.” The result, in short, is a sublime derangement of time and space whereby 1910 is also 1820, Ralph is also his ancestor, and New York and London are in telepathic contact. The Sense of the Past thus shows, perhaps better than any other literary artifact, just how willing people had become, by the early decades of the twentieth century, to observe the widest implications of Emerson’s prediction that new technologies would make “time out of space, and space out of time.” In doing so, it also shows the generic affiliation of discourses whose relationship it draws into relief. The theme of time-travel

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thus declares its deep affinity with the genre of ghost fiction, as do both with the theme of interpsychic communication. There is, however, another field of discourse that has not hitherto been considered in this context, but which this novel also both incorporates and critically examines. This is the discourse of historicism; which, in the wider context of this chapter, may be conceived of as another way of thinking through and about the category of time. This discourse is one in which technologies and scientific concepts are often mobilized to perform a number of rhetorical and conceptual functions, not the least where historicity is considered in relation to literary texts. The “electrification” of literary value by two early twentieth-century writers, Rudyard Kipling and Ezra Pound, concerns me in the penultimate section of this chapter. Before I discuss them, however, I analyze historicism itself, and its own “electrification” in the work of Henry Adams. Here, it is mediated both by a topical interest in technology and by a methodological interest in the science of thermodynamics.

Electro-Historicism: Henry Adams Historicism means—for the purposes of this discussion—a more or less secularized idea of human progress and/or human perfectibility; the strenuous pursuit of knowledge of the past, involving (though not exclusive to) a burgeoning class of professional historians; the articulation of this knowledge by uncovering supposed fundamental “laws” of history; and, finally, a certain sense of relativism with respect to different historic periods.76 This sense of relativism, however, one should emphasize, does not typically extend (or at least did not in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) to value judgments about the cultural or moral worth of previous ages: on the contrary, mostpeople in the period continued to understand the legitimacy of their own age on the basis of its superiority to its predecessors. Rather, this relativism relates to the perception of fundamental differences between historic periods; differences that emerged with particular starkness when these were systematically contrasted with each other. The generation of such contrasts was an animating principle of time-travel literature, which flourished in this period, and which provides a useful way of identifying further tendencies within historicism itself. We have already encountered perhaps the most celebrated example of this genre in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. But in Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), time-travel is more emphatically configured with geospatial movement. Here, Hank Morgan, the “Yankee” of the title, is sent backward in time from his own

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nineteenth century to the unfamiliar context of sixth century, Arthurian England. After having impressed the Arthurians with what are, to them, incomprehensible powers of prophecy and know-how, Hank proceeds to transfigure his surroundings in the image of his own age. This involves a series of technological innovations—we discuss these in later chapters—that help contrast the assumed supremacy of nineteenth-century culture against the sloth, incompetence, and superstition of Arthurian England.77 We can now recall that a similar set of contrasts helps to structure Dracula; where, as if by inversion of Twain’s schema, antiquity (the Count) is projected “forward” in time to late nineteenth-century London. Unlike Stoker’s, however, Twain’s novel goes on to undermine the very contrasts that sustain it, revealing fundamental continuities between the two epochs concerned. Thus, the existence of slavery in Arthurian Britain allows it to function as a simulacrum of the antebellum South, while Hank’s despotic reign in general—and its murderous denouement in particular—mark the complicity between his own “civilizing” values and that of the regime that he attempts to displace.78 This denouement also helps link Twain’s ideas to those of Adams, by exploiting a “narratological,” as much as technical relation between electricity and death. To protect himself against his enemies, Hank constructs electric fences, powered by a dynamo, which strike whole hosts of Arthurian knights “dead in their tracks!”79 Correlatively, the most famous episode in Adams’ The Education of Henry Adams (1907) sees Adams encountering a dynamo, and being left with his own “historical neck broken.”80 Coming from a professional historian, this break is doubly significant; signaling both a turning point in Adams’s life story, and a methodological shift, away from conventional historicism, toward a science-based alternative whose guiding concepts, it turns out, are directly inspired by the dynamo itself. The dynamo is thus revealed (in James Carey’s words, about the telegraph) as “a thing to think with, an agency for the alteration of ideas.”81 We realize this by focusing on the moment at which Adams meets the dynamo, at the Parisian Great Exposition of 1900. The introduction of this device as a sign of historicity is prefaced by series of disparaging remarks about contemporary historiography. “Historians,” Adams says, “undertake to arrange sequences—called stories or histories—assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect” (382). This assumption is not only dubious, Adams implies, but also presumes a sense of unanimity over the criteria historians should use that does not in fact exist. Thus, where Adams sees “sequence, other men saw something quite different, and no one saw the same unit of measure” (ibid.). Not only are causal relations between phenomena

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thus debatable, but historians also disagree about phenomena themselves, and most especially about the fundamental question of which—if any—of these is truly “historical.” Adams therefore claims to have entered the twentieth century in something of a funk, and decidedly so as far as his profession is concerned. More particularly, he enters the 1900 Exposition declaring himself [s]atisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos . . . (Ibid.)

It is here that Adams’s thinking shows its closest affinity with Twain’s.82 In Following the Equator (1897), for example, Twain similarly defines historical writing as the mere expenditure of “fluid prejudice.”83 But whereas Twain increasingly tended to reject the category of “progress” altogether—in a late fragment, he evolves the Nietzsche-like hypothesis that “everything happens again, and yet again, and still again—monotonously”—Adams aims instead at redefining “progress” in relation to the category of “force.”84 The passage leading to his “broken neck” thus concludes: he turned at last to the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years’ pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new. (Ibid.)

It is here that Adams takes his lead from nineteenth-century physics. According to this tradition, the universe is best regarded as an enormous system of production or exchange, in which various forms of energy or force are incessantly converted into one another.85 The conversions of such forces—including electricity, magnetism, heat, and light—were said to be governed by two basic principles, the two famous “laws” of thermodynamics. According to the first of these, the law of energy conservation, energy or force may be repeatedly translated into different forms without undergoing a fundamental diminution: however often the process of conversion is repeated, the basic sum of force involved will still remain the same. According to the second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, however, all physical systems share the tendency to dissipate energy, and thus invariably tend toward their own dissolution. In any given instance, then, all quotients of force will show a tendency to dissipate, while in the cosmos as a whole, the total sum of force or energy will remain

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constant. Depending on taste, philosophical outlook, and attitude toward contemporary culture, writers applying such principles to human history tended to stress either of the laws, usually at the expense of the other. Wells’s Time Machine, for instance, extrapolates the second law; its chilly vision of the future articulating fears about entropic dissipation.86 Occasionally, however, writers tried to think through both laws at once, and sometimes saw the first law as redemptive of the second.87 Here, then, the emphasis was less on energy’s inexorable loss, than on its capacity to reconstitute itself in new, potentially superior forms. It is this latter tendency that—for all the gloom enshrouding it—the “dynamic theory of history” sketched by Adams toward the end of The Education represents.88 Here, “Progress” is defined as “the development and economy of Forces”; a development, Adams tells us, that has recently seen a pronounced “acceleration,” the “law” of which is as “definite and constant as any law of mechanics” (474, 493). The thermodynamic provenance of these ideas is made even clearer in The Tendency of History (1894–1910), a collection of essays in which Adams makes a more systematic presentation of his views.89 Here, as well as acceleration, force is held accountable to the rule of “phase”; an idea Adams had encountered in the work of an American physicist, Willard Gibbs (1839–1903).90 According to this doctrine, transformations in the status of energy do not proceed in a stochastic fashion (as some believed) but instead follow a determinate trajectory. This sees energy converted into ever “subtler” forms, which might be said to correspond to the progressive “refinement” of matter. Thus, as Adams explains in a chapter on “The Rule of Phase Applied to History,” solids are converted into fluids, fluids into “vapor,” and thence through successive phases from “the electron or electricity” through to “ether,” “space,” and finally “hyper-space” (138–40). The historian must thus become adept at spotting such “phases” in the realm of human history, becoming especially attentive to their modes of transformation: as Adams puts it in the Education, he must “follow the track of the energy . . . find where it came from and where it went to; its complex source and shifting channels; its values, equivalents, conversions” (389). The tenacity with which Adams pursued this line of thought can be seen in his account of human consciousness. It is here, indeed, that his historicist credentials are most in evidence, for he is willing to “assume, as his starting point, that Thought is a historical substance, analogous to an electric current, which has obeyed the laws . . . of Phase” (Tendency, 147). With this important move, Adams brings human consciousness within the fold of “force”; thus begging the question of how it is related

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to those other forces, such as electric current, with which it is aligned. Adams’ thinking on this subject is complex, and can best be approached by way of the following passage from the Education—appropriately enough, on late nineteenth-century physics: Science has proved that forces, sensible and occult, physical and metaphysical, simple and complex, surround, traverse, vibrate, rotate, repel, attract, without stop; that man’s senses are conscious of few, and only in a partial degree; but that, from the beginning of organic existence his consciousness has been induced, expanded, trained in the lines of his sensitiveness; and that the rise of his faculties . . . may be due to the function of assimilating and storing outside force or forces. (487)

Man lacks complete appreciation of the forces that surround him, as his senses lack the subtlety and breadth to apprehend them. However, human faculties are raised by force, as force elaborates itself and thereby lends them provocation. This idea sometimes receives a surprisingly “Hegelian” inflection, with Adams appearing to suggest that force achieves its own form of surrogate “self-consciousness” in humans. The most tantalizing hint in this direction appears in the Education, with Adams searching for an “equation between the discoveries and the economies of force” (381; my emphasis). If discovered, one presumes, this equation would reveal scientific progress to be subject to the self-same laws that constitute its objects: force would thus occasion the enquiries made about it; its “economies” conditioning the pace of intellectual change. This idea, however, does not survive without substantial modification, both because it fails to agree with all the facts as Adams understands them, and because of his skepticism, in the Education, at least, with regard to all such generalizations.91 In particular, it must be modified in order to account for “thoughtinertia”; the “persistence” of which, or so Adams claims, is “the leading idea of modern history” (Education, 484). By this, Adams means that far from keeping pace with force as it emerges in history, consciousness more typically refuses to be led by it, thus leading to an obstinate attachment to outdated ideas. Indeed, this effect becomes all the more pronounced as force continues to accelerate: “The acceleration of movement seems rapid, but the inertia, or resistance to deflection, may increase with the rapidity, so that society might pass through phase after phase of speed, like a comet, without noting deflection in its thought” (Tendency, 20–21). Against his guiding claim that consciousness is trained by force, then, Adams now asserts that “thought” may go untouched for lengthy periods. How might this discrepancy arise and be accounted for?

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In fact, all that Adams wishes to point out is that while consciousness will ultimately be determined by force, the relationship between the two is discontinuous and asynchronous. Changes in the realm of thought will thus tend to lag behind their equivalents in force, though one can expect them to catch up eventually. This argument features in a cameo piece of historical exposition that, by virtue of its technological and scientific subject matter, as well as the principles informing it, epitomizes Adams’s thought. Fittingly, it covers the first three decades of the industrial application of electricity: Society followed the same lines of attraction with little change, down to 1840, when the new chemical energy of electricity began to deflect the thought of society again, and Faraday rivalled Newton in the vigor with which he marked out the path of changed attractions, but the purely mechanical theory of the universe typified by Newton and Dalton held its own, and reached its highest authority towards 1870, or about the time when the dynamo came into use. (Tendency, 155)

Electricity “deflects” the thought of a hitherto recalcitrant society; a testimony not only to the science of electricity itself, but also a subtle pun upon the deflection of needles in mechanical telegraphy. Telegraphy, of course, became a socially significant technology during precisely this period, and although no specific mention of it is made here, Adams surely has it in mind.92 Faraday, meanwhile, despite reforming the science of electricity, finds that his discoveries are largely unappreciated: for the duration of this period, it is Newton and John Dalton’s (1766–1844) ideas that prevail. The dynamo’s invention, however, seem to signal a change in this regard, giving Faraday’s ideas renewed currency by putting them to practical use. “Thought-inertia,” then, is quite consistent with wholesale social and technological transformations, for while technologies help pave the way for alterations in consciousness, these alterations are themselves but hesitant and partial. Ultimately, however, technology succeeds in transforming social consciousness, acting as a showcase for the theories that inform it. It is even more a showcase, furthermore, for the energies and “forces” making it possible, and which the theories of scientists endeavor to explain. Adams’ own encounter with the dynamo thereby takes on a certain paradigmatic significance, for it now appears not only as the defining event in his own intellectual development, but also as an exemplary instance of intellectual change as such.93 The “deflection” of his thinking by machinery, and subsequent reorientation of his approach as an historian, is thus a supposedly self-validating example of how force “expands” and “trains” the human mind.

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Powers of Tradition Adams’s use of electricity as both an object of and a model for historical enquiry raises an even more fundamental question: what is the relation between electricity and time? As described in this book’s “Introduction,” the temporal phenomenon with which electricity is most readily associated is speed, both because of speed’s own longstanding association with the electrical phenomenon of lightning, and the “annihilating” speed for which the electric telegraph became renowned. Fowler’s telegraph-inspired theory of love, as we have more lately seen, also trades on these associations. However, Twain’s reference to “the wire’s slow electricity,” and more obliquely, electrical accounts of haunting, suggest that electricity might also be used to think about contrasting modes of, and ways of occupying time, such as inertia, endurance, and retention. And it is in this vein that Adams, in The Education, declares that in addition to representing the “irruption of forces totally new,” the dynamo represents a “symbol of infinity” (381; my emphasis). Infinity is, of course, a form of time that “knows no time,” and is not normally regarded as passing “with” it. “Newness,” on the other hand (or at least the “totally” new) seems consubstantial with the passing of time; and, unlike infinity, is suggestive of the singular and the nonrenewable. What the dynamo ultimately represents, therefore, is the coincidence of these two opposing dimensions of time: that of inexhaustible duration, and of the singular event that interrupts it. Within the discourse of historicism, broadly conceived, there is a certain field of enquiry where this coincidence of temporal dimensions becomes an object of particular scrutiny. This concerns the historicity of literature; and more specifically, literature’s distribution through canons and traditions. Here, the “traditionality” of literary works may designate both their historical specificity and their transcendence of this specificity: their singularity, in other words, as well as their enduring (if not “infinite”) value. In early twentieth century discussions of this theme, such ideas receive electrical inflections in much the same way as historicity does in the work of Adams. In discussing two examples of such thinking—a short story by Kipling, and the more extensive critical writings of Pound—I look at developments in physical science that decisively inform them: the emergence of field theories to explain electricity, electromagnetism, and the cosmos at large. The advent of such theories is, in fact, one of Adams’s own recurrent themes, as in the passage from The Tendency of History where Faraday’s views are juxtaposed with those of Newton. In the work of Faraday himself, and subsequently that of James Clerk

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Maxwell (1831–79), Heinrich Hertz (1857–94), and others, a fundamental challenge was posed to the Newtonian view of “empty” space.94 Whereas Newton had originally regarded space as a passive medium through which material objects pass, physicists after Faraday saw it as part of these very objects. Field theories, in other words, tend to annul the distinction between material objects and the spaces between them, regarding both as similarly dynamic and, indeed, as interpenetrant. Adams, characteristically, applies such thinking to his own person, defining himself, toward the end of the Education, as “a conscious ball of vibrating motions, traversed in every direction by infinite lines of rotation or vibration” (460). The emergence, in such works, of what Max Nänny calls an “electric field culture” thus represents the extension of field theories and ideas to human beings and their social environment.95 Adams’ own ideas, of course, are not only situated within this culture, but also self-consciously attempt to explain that culture’s emergence; the Education being, among other things, an attempt to explain its own epistemological conditions of possibility. Such self-consciousness is indeed one of the signature features of electric field culture, distinguished by a series of reflections on what, exactly, “culture” is. Within the realm of literature, then, field theory is used to explain both literary production and the perpetuation of literature through canons and traditions. These ideas are ingeniously configured in Kipling’s story “Wireless” (1903).96 Kipling’s story takes its title from the popular name for the radio, and focuses on amateur enthusiasm for the technology in the early days of its use. A kind of ghost story, the tale trades upon apparent correspondences between the technological and the supernatural familiar from our discussions of Norris, Woolf, and Bierce. However, it does so by drawing more explicitly on science than any of these other writers; specifically, the science of Hertz: one of the most intellectually significant, as well as culturally prestigious field theorists, whose discoveries directly led to the radio’s invention. One of the primary functions of this technology, then, both within Kipling’s text and in early radio culture more generally, is to initiate its users into the science making it possible.97 In this respect, of course, it is analogous to Henry Adams’ dynamo, although the “Powers” revealed in this case are not so readily annexed to the realm of “force.” As we discuss, the powers with which Kipling is most concerned relate to language, and more particularly, language as it is arranged within certain literary configurations. It is these privileged literary works—“of which one can say,” as his narrator tells us, that they are “pure Magic”—that are seen as independent of both time and space.98

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“Wireless” is set in a pharmacy, on the southern coast of England, where Mr. Cashell performs radio experiments the narrator observes. Early conversation between these two characters allows Kipling, via Mr. Cashell, to advance the basic scientific principles upon which the radio is based: “. . . the magic—the manifestations—the Hertzian waves—are all revealed by this. The coherer, we call it.” [Mr. Cashell] picked up a glass tube not much thicker than a thermometer, in which, almost touching, were two tiny silver plugs, and between them an infinitesimal pinch of metallic dust. “That’s all,” he said, proudly, as though himself responsible for the wonder. “That is the thing that will reveal to us the Powers—whatever the Powers may be—at work—through space—a long distance away.” (558; emphasis in original)

The apparatus’s primary function, then, is epistemological, for it is the fact that the coherer makes “manifest” these “Powers,” rather than its more utilitarian, message-bearing potential, that most commends it to Mr. Cashell’s attention.99 “Magic,” then, here signifies technology’s capacity to represent what hitherto has not been representable: a “revelation” of the natural by supernatural means.100 Meanwhile, it is “space” through which these “powers” pass; and while pointedly suspending judgment over precisely what these powers may be, part of Mr. Cashell’s suggestion seems to be that it is space that the coherer represents. “I never get over the strangeness of it,” he tells us later: “waves going into space, you know” (564). For the narrator, too, it is the fact that Hertzian waves can be detected “a long distance away” that first intuits him to the radio’s significance: “How wonderful!” he exclaims, to be “eavesdropping across half South England” (572). By lingering over space in this way, “Wireless” recalls the way in which mechanical telegraphy is represented in The Octopus; where, as we recall, the apparent abolition of distance by technology creates an intensified consciousness of distance itself. Here, however, space is imagined in a somewhat different way, for if, in Norris’ novel, effects are seemingly projected over “Newtonian,” empty (or, as Marx and Douglass would have it, “annihilated”) space, the space of Kipling’s tale is thronged by Mr. Cashell’s “Powers.” “It’s a funny thing, this Marconi business,” the narrator is told in the opening lines: “Nothing seems to make any difference . . . storms, hills, or anything” (553–54). Hertzian waves are not impeded by the vagaries of weather or the accidents of topography: they permeate all space and every “solid” object in it.

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The first words in “Wireless” are spoken by Mr. Shaynor, the assistant in the pharmacy where the story takes place. As well as being a pharmacist by trade, Mr. Shaynor is involved in an unhappy love affair, whose desperation is heightened by the fact that he suffers from (apparently terminal ) tuberculosis. Shaynor shares each of these characteristics with a literary figure, John Keats, whose stand-in he at length becomes. And it is through the apparent possession of Mr. Shaynor by Keats’s ghost that we encounter the motivating theme of Kipling’s tale, which is that “radio” effects occur not only in space, but also in time.101 In the room next to Mr. Cashell’s radio, Mr. Shaynor falls into a trance, during which he unwittingly transcribes Keats’s poem “St. Agnes Eve.” Since the chemist has no prior knowledge of this text (as the narrator later verifies), it seems that he has become a kind of literary medium: a reproducer of texts he does not himself originate. Deprived of true authorial agency by his unconscious state, he becomes a conduit for ghostly texts, transmitted from the grave. The broad insinuation behind all this, of course, is that the “Powers” governing Mr. Cashell’s radio set (or something like them), are also responsible for the reproduction of Keats’s poem. Field theory here becomes the means by which both sets of phenomena are gathered under the same explanatory rubric. Thus, in his account of Mr.Shaynor’s trance, the narrator reproduces, term for term, the potted lecture on field physics that he has just heard from Mr. Cashell: the “professional environment” Mr. Shaynor shares with Keats helps to make the reproduction of the latter’s poem as “inevitable as induction”; while the disease both men suffer from is rendered as a “Hertzian wave of tuberculosis” (566, 567). Elsewhere in the tale, we find other punning associations between the radio experiment and the pharmaceutical trade, Mr. Shaynor telling the narrator, “Electricity isn’t my prescription” (560). It is, of course, as the story shows, but it is one of Shaynor’s functions in the story to explicitly deny the very interrelations between field theory, the paranormal, and technology his own unconscious actions manifest. Thus, at the conclusion, he declares, “mediums are all impostors” (573), even as Mr. Cashell, beginning to receive signals from the radio, is said to be “in the presence of spirits” (565). It is thus possible to venture a provisional answer to Mr. Cashell’s question of “what . . . the Powers may be.” If Cashell’s capitalized appellation applies, in the first instance, to the physical world—especially as it is revealed by field theories such as Hertz’s—then Mr. Shaynor’s experience suggests that it must also be extended to the psychic. The “psychic,” meanwhile, must be understood both in its literal sense of designating mental activity, and via its more familiar connotation of the occult. “Powers,” in this latter sense, are both psychological and, more

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properly, parapsychological, for they testify here to the reality of ghosts. And if Mr. Cashell’s coherer is sufficient to reveal the spatiality of powers, then it is the ghostly recurrence of “St. Agnes Eve” that reveals their temporality. Keats’s poem persists in time, in other words, just as the Hertzian waves of radio pervade and move through space. What this account has hitherto not taken sufficient notice of, however, is the privileged status of the literary in Kipling’s tale. In fact, the literary is a “Power” in its own right: the one that “snatch[es]” Mr. Shaynor and inspires his composition (570). Kipling and his narrator are both clear in indicating that this power is not simply inherent in language, but a function of specific verbal artifacts. It is “St. Agnes Eve,” in other words, and not any other text, that Shaynor reproduces, because this text in particular has “reproductive” power. The temporal recurrence of Keats’s poem is thus an index of its literary value, as the narrator makes clear when he asks us to Remember that in all the millions permitted there are no more than five—five little lines—of which one can say: “These are the pure Magic. These are the clear Vision. The rest is only poetry.” (Ibid.)

“Magic,” then, is a companion term for “Powers,” but one that modifies the latter by aligning it with rarity. And as an aesthetic value, such “Magic” allows certain works to operate across time and space; making of literature itself—at least in its most privileged forms—a kind of time machine. Just as Mr. Cashell’s radio effaces spatial distance, literature effaces time; Keats’s “past” recurring in (and as) Mr. Shaynor’s “present.” “Wireless,” of course, is a work of fiction, and one that does not purport to be a comprehensive theory of literature. But taken seriously, it is strikingly congruent with the critical writings of Ezra Pound—which represent, in this respect, an elaboration on the tacit claims of “Wireless.” Take the following passage from the 1910 preface to The Spirit of Romance: All ages are contemporaneous. It is B.C., let us say, in Morocco. The Middle Ages are in Russia. The future stirs already in the minds of the few. This is especially true of literature, where the real time is independent of the apparent, and where many dead men are our grandfather’s contemporaries, while many of our contemporaries have been already gathered into Abraham’s bosom, or some more fitting receptacle.102

The “real” time is thus a palimpsest of present, past, and future. Literature, meanwhile, enjoys a privileged status in relation to this principle, for it is here that real time is detached from the “apparent.”

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This has the effect of depriving the “contemporaneous” of any necessary connection with the present, allowing it instead to be distributed through “all ages.” And in this respect, Pound inverts the emphases—if not the sense—of Derrida’s claim about contemporaneity, for if no time is contemporary with itself, this may not preclude the possibility of disparate times being contemporaneous with one another. All that needs to happen for this to occur is for the contemporary to be reattached, not to the present, but to the simultaneous; an ideal correspondence or unity in time. And it is precisely simultaneity that literature allows; for, in Pound’s account, literature again becomes itself a kind of time machine, allowing readers to move between the “ages.” If we now turn to the texts in which Pound develops these ideas, we will discover how explicitly he aligns them with electrical technology.103 The epistemic profile of any given period can be derived from a “few dozen facts,” which, Pound says, are “swift and easy of transmission. They govern knowledge as the switchboard governs an electric circuit.”104 This knowledge is deposited in canonical or traditional literature, the greatest of which is “simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”105 The process of poetic composition itself consists of this “charging,” and the poet must accordingly look to the tradition for the ready-charged materials he or she needs.106 Thus, individual words are “charged with a force like electricity . . . some radiating, some sucking in”; a “peculiar energy” also identified with the “power of tradition.”107 Tradition, then, for Pound, is a term embracing not only the power of certain works, but also the historic power of language itself. Electricity thus signifies both power and persistence, becoming a figure for the historical specificity of words, as well as their capacity to remain potent over time. And it is precisely this potency that the modern poet must exploit, and who must accordingly become a kind of electrical engineer. Thus, he or she must “juxtapose” the “vertices” of individual words, ensuring that their energies “augment” without “neutralizing” one another.108 The finished poem will therefore resemble an electrical machine; a replica and map of the intelligence flowing through the “switchboard” of each epoch. And it will also be a kind of time machine, for by mobilizing the still active consciousness of previous epochs, it momentarily aligns them with each other, allowing them to reveal their mutual contemporaneity. Poems and poetic composition are not the only things for which Pound finds electrical analogies. They are also extended to people, as in “Psychology and Troubadours” (1916), where Pound considers the human body as a “pure mechanism . . . rather like an electrical

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appliance, [with] switches, wires, etc.”109 People, then, have a structure that is isomorphic with the special “knowledge” of each literary epoch, which is governed in its own case by an electric “switchboard.” Like words, people too contain their “positive and negative charges,” and much like radio receivers, they have a “charged surface” by which to register “movement in the invisible aether.”110 The aesthetic faculties thus constitute what Pound elsewhere calls the “junction of tactile and magnetic senses”; a formulation that conjoins the Newtonian idea of solid bodies meeting contiguously with a newer, field model of pervaded and dynamic space.111 There is, however, a developmental snag here—much as in Adams’s conception of “thought-inertia”—for as the mind “becomes a heavier and heavier machine, a constantly more complicated structure, it requires a constantly greater voltage of emotional energy to set it in harmonious motion.”112 Hence the importance of the electrical voltage deposited in tradition, and the necessity for new poems to release its latent energies. Reading a poem, then, our native energies come into contact with those possessed by words, forming a wider circuit in which poetic “charge” flows into the reading self, infusing it with verbal energy.

Coda: Inventing the “Medium” By attending, in their different ways, to acts of authorship, Pound and Kipling return us to a context first mapped out for us by Twain. In “Mental Telegraphy,” as we have seen, Twain’s analysis of the way in which “minds telegraph thoughts to each other” is introduced via discussion of the accidental “crossing” of letters. However, in suggesting that such “accidents” are really nothing of the sort, but rather the result of parapsychological processes, Twain is attempting to soothe an anxiety that relates not so much to such cases in themselves, but the far wider question of literary composition and originality. Put simply, Twain is worried by the prospect of plagiarism, which bothered him throughout his career.113 In “Mental Telegraphy,” he therefore moves swiftly from the case of crossing letters to that of “those strange coincidences which have from time to time occurred in the literary world,” whereby two authors, apparently acting independently, produce substantially the same work (77). This leads, in the scenario Twain glosses, to one of the author’s being charged with plagiarism, with all the social opprobrium that follows. Twain then suggests that such opprobrium is undeserved, proceeding as it does from a failure to recognize both the fact and ubiquity of mental telegraphic interactions. All such cases of apparent plagiarism are thus

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recast as “blameless cases of unintentional and unwitting mental telegraphy” (77). The specter of deliberate intellectual theft is vanquished. The signal feature of this argument, for us, consists in this conflation of the “blameless” with the “unintentional” and “unwitting.” By depriving plagiarism of its sting, and so suggesting that awareness does not feature in such cases, Twain does much to suggest that authorship itself has no intrinsic connection with originality: indeed, originality may merely be a “misrecognition” effect of mental telegraphy itself. Thus, the writer will have a kind of constitutional oblivion about the sources of his or her own inspiration, as in Twain’s own self-description of the authorial process, mechanically putting ideas “to paper, under the impression that they were my own original thoughts” (78). The consequence of neutralizing the threatening idea of plagiarism is thus, in a sense, to universalize it, and so make all acts of authorship subordinate to the idea of the reception and reproduction or already existing ideas. The writer thus becomes a kind of medium, much like Kipling’s Mr. Shaynor. Shaynor is also a writer, of course, and one way of reading Kipling back through Twain would be to say that for the latter, Shaynor simply represents the “truth” of writing. Twain thus renounces Kipling’s (and Pound’s) insistence on the privileged status of the literary object, suggesting instead that literary production is not discrete from, but rather thoroughly implicated in, the quotidian economy of thoughts and information. What, then, of mediums, and the social contexts in which such persons are embedded? In “Wireless,” even before he falls into his trance, Mr. Shaynor is described as making “mechanical movements” as he stamps a letter (561). Later, while transcribing Keats’s poem, his head moves in a “machine-like” way (565). This suggests a metonymic link between the druggist and those professions directly concerned with the distribution of information, such as the postal service (to which Shaynor’s letter-stamping relates), and especially to those industries (such as telegraphy) where machinery features as an integral part of this process. And that is not all, for in describing the way in which Keats’s poem is reproduced, Kipling invokes another set of socio-industrial referents, relating in the mechanical reproducibility of art. Thus, when Shaynor first begins to write, his lines offer but a distant echo of Keats’s original, “as a vile chromo recalls some incomparable canvas” (565).114 By the end of this process, however, the poem appears “as it is written in the book” (569). By foregrounding the way in which a “machine-like” person produces increasingly accurate copies of a ghostly text, Kipling thus locates the

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theme of mediumship within a wider industrial context of information distribution and reproduction, in which distribution itself is increasingly mechanized, and reproduction made increasingly prolific. In focusing on this context more directly in the next chapter, I am also highlighting a suggestion made by Pound, for whom the human being is itself a quasi-industrial product; the body a “pure mechanism,” the mind a “machine.” As we see, the institutional matrix of the communications industry was one arena in which such ideas became especially compelling.

CHAP TER

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Individual Difference and Self-Representation

Introduction It is true that Frankenstein once succeeded in manufacturing a man, but, working in an amateurish way, this inventor failed to provide a mate, and the machine-made race perished. A century later, human intellect in triumphant progress has perfected cheap production, reproduction, and distribution. These improvements straightway facilitated diffusion of knowledge and culture as imparted in public schools; likewise they have developed the department store (as a social and intellectual factor), the up-to-date newspaper and inexpensive, genteel magazine. These in turn, instead of temporarily animating one lay figure, are successfully putting upon the world myriads of human beings who enter life with almost no handicap upon their passion for resembling one another. —Mary Moss, “Machine-Made Human Beings” (1904)1

The latter half of the nineteenth century in North America and Europe saw the consolidation of factory-based production methods using vast amounts of labor and machinery. As Mary Moss indicates, this led to an unprecedented increase in the generation of manufactured goods, from newspapers to the wares sold in department stores, which in turn helped transform every aspect of life, from education to commerce to leisure. Moss fears that given the ubiquity of this machine-based production system, her contemporaries are themselves “machine-made,” or may as well be, so relentlessly do they “resemble one another.” Unlike the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—a singular and “homeworked,” rather than mass-produced and factory-created being—such people have surrendered their uniqueness.

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This erosion of uniqueness by mechanical (re)production is also, of course, the subject of Walter Benjamin’s classic essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936).2 Here, Benjamin argues that prior to the epoch of advanced capitalism, artworks possessed a singularity, or “aura,” not unlike that which Moss implicitly assigns to pre-industrial human beings. However, Benjamin argues, this aura has now entered a phase of inexorable decline, as modern methods of production make it possible to generate a limitless number of identical art-objects, each of which has an equal (and thus empty) claim to be “original.” This process obviously parallels that which Moss detects in the “production” of people. And again, she holds machinery responsible. Technology is for both the enemy of individuality, the former’s rise directly linked to the latter’s decline. Benjamin’s text has provoked an enormous quantity of writing since it was first published, much of it, like the essay itself, notably optimistic about the cultural effects of mechanical reproduction. Likewise, Moss’s lament has been echoed and extended on numerous occasions, though more often in pessimistic (as well as supercilious and reactionary) ways. Rarely, however, have the preoccupations of either writer prompted the following question: is it not possible, regarding people, for one’s “aura” or individuality to be mechanically reproduced? In other words, are there not cases where technology can be used not to drain people of their precious uniqueness, but rather to preserve, record, and encode it, projecting it through time and space? This chapter answers these questions affirmatively, by considering literary and scientific accounts of two electrical communication technologies, the telegraph and the telephone. These show personal uniqueness to be oddly durable in the face of technological developments widely assumed to have imperiled it. But this does not mean that Moss’s account, any more than Benjamin’s, can be simply refuted. As later sections of this chapter show, such technologies catered to people’s “passion for resembling one another” in ways that Moss herself might not have suspected.

“Training,” Telegraphy, and Time In his book Crowds (1913), the popular American writer Gerald Stanley Lee made the following prediction: The fate of civilization turns on men who recognize the nature of machinery, who make machines serve them, who add the machines to

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their souls, like telephones and [the] wireless telegraph, or to their bodies, like radium and railroads . . . They are the Machine-Trainers. The men who understand people-machines, who understand iron machines, and who understand how to make people-machines and iron machines run softly together.3

Lee had traveled some distance to arrive at such conclusions. A former congregational minister, he began his writing career with Moss-like jeremiads against the incorporative, industrializing drift of antebellum America.4 In Inspired Millionaires (1908), the book that made his name, he advises industrialists that the less they allow workers under their control “to be like the machines they work with,” the more benefits they will derive from workers and machinery alike.5 But in Crowds, a more positive attitude toward technology emerges. Arguing that the human body is itself “a kind of factory,” Lee welcomes the way in which machines such as the telephone have “change[d] the structure of the brain”; allowing people to “live in wider distances, and think in larger figures, and become eligible to nobler and wider motives.”6 To see the rationale behind this change of heart, we must first consider the intertwining strands of intellectual and social history to which Lee’s words bear witness. The idea that one should understand people as “machines” was hardly novel to the early twentieth century. As early as 1748, the renegade French philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie had published his spirited affirmation of this premise, L’Homme Machine.7 However, the idea was given a considerable boost in the early-to-middle decades of the nineteenth century when it was elaborated in great detail by a pioneering cohort of academic physiologists, including Johannes Müller (1801–58), Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818–96), and Hermann Helmholtz (1821–94). As Anson Rabinbach has shown, their work proceeded in harness with the emergence of the factory system, and elaborated conceptions of the human body—as an apparatus that expends and consumes energy, with greater or lesser efficiency—cognate with contemporary machinery.8 As the century wore on, this conceptual link between bodies and machines was increasingly expressed at an institutional level. By the turn of the twentieth century, laboratories existed in Europe and the United States in which engineers and physiologists worked side by side, thus marking, in Bernhard Siegert’s words, the “symbiotic coalescence of two entire research disciplines.”9 Such research was often funded by telecommunications companies, and reflects both the rise of the telecommunications industry itself and a gravitation of interest among scientists toward the senses. Here, work

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concerning thresholds of perception, the ways in which stimuli are received and acted upon, and states of attention and distraction, were naturally of interest to companies whose machines functioned by interacting with the ear, hand, and eye.10 In the United States, this internal shift within physiology was closely associated with the emergence of the so-called new psychology.11 This loosely constituted school, whose prime movers included James McKeen Cattell (1860–1944), traced its intellectual roots to the physiological tradition of Müller, Du Bois-Reymond, and Helmholtz, the more recent (if ultimately, to the new psychologists, more problematic) “psychophysics” of Gustav Fechner (1801–87), and the “physiological psychology” of Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920).12 All these antecedents had placed a premium on the precise measurement of physical states, meaning that while the ontological relation between mind and body received diverse interpretations among practioners, the new psychology as a whole tended to see mental processes in terms of their supposed physiological equivalents. In the context of an experimental methodology bequeathed to psychology by physiology, information about mental processes was inferred from the performance of physical tasks, and it was assumed that every variety of mental experience would correlate with measurable physiological states. These assumptions were further reinforced by the institutional objectives of the business leaders and industrialists among whom many of the new psychologists found work. These saw the quantitative methods developed in the pure sciences dragged directly into the arena of production, under the rubric of “efficiency.” The new psychology thus found itself aligned with scientific management, whose principal representative Frederick Winslow Taylor brought together decades of research in his seminal Principles of Scientific Management (1911).13 Such researchers occupied the space, conceptually and socially, between industrialists, on the one hand, and academic psychologists, on the other. They were, in fact, the “MachineTrainers” of whom Lee speaks, as Lee himself makes clear in Crowds, via an extended—not to say bizarre—comparison between Taylor and Jesus Christ.14 And though Taylor and his acolytes showed surprisingly little interest in “iron machines” (as opposed to their human counterparts), the changes wrought by him and his followers meant that by the 1910s, in many workplaces, the tenets of scientific management had, as David Montgomery writes, “to an astonishing degree . . . been incorporated into the machinery itself.”15 Such, then, were the guiding assumptions of the human sciences in the decades leading up to Lee’s intervention. Bodies were seen to

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function like machines, and the latest physiological research was factored into the design of new technology, especially in the communications industry. Given that prevailing concepts of mind subordinated psychology to physiology, and that a significant amount of experimental psychology took place in technologically mediated situations, it is evident that mind, machine, and body were seen as interactive, interdependent, and mutually intelligible entities. The mind itself was thus absorbed into the “body-machine complex”: one of the key constructs, as Mark Seltzer has shown, of nineteenth and early twentieth-century American culture, and a major concern for novelists, no less than scientists, throughout this period.16 One of Seltzer’s key exhibits is Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889), first considered in our previous chapter, and a brief reconsideration of this novel will further elucidate the terms that concern us here. In his novel, Twain’s narrator Hank Morgan (himself a foreman at a factory) makes the famous claim that “training is all there is to a person.”17 The key term here is “training,” which is seen as both formative and, more radically, constitutive of persons. Hank’s argument, in effect, is that all one’s “own” attributes and opinions are the effect of custom and indoctrination, compounded by heredity.18 The signal feature of this argument, within the present context, is its inversion of the emphases that normally obtain in the relation between producer and product. For if the goal of production is usually regarded as the finished article, to which the efforts of workers are subordinated, Connecticut Yankee treats the product as a more or less arbitrary pretext for the production of people. The labor process, then, becomes an end in itself, and despite an early reference to “labour-saving machinery” (36), the novel as a whole displays little interest in such devices, placing its heaviest ideological investments in what are frankly designated as “man factories” (130).19 Connecticut Yankee thus raises a possibility that haunted late nineteenth century America, and which, in Seltzer’s account, is continually avowed and disavowed in the fiction of this period: the possibility that people are, in a radical sense, artifactual beings, generated by a machine-based production system whose logic has rewritten all aspects of social activity, up to, and including, human nature.20 Human beings, on this account, are no less fabricated than any other industrial product, and are as functionally interchangeable with such products as they are with one another—the very fear raised by Mary Moss. The most pressing anxiety with which this idea was associated, as Moss again reveals, was the fear that individuality was being

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stripped of its prestige, if not its actual existence. And it is in relation to this anxiety that the investigative techniques of Francis Galton (1822–1911) assume particular significance. Galton was another key influence on the new psychology, especially as developed by Cattell.21 (He also attracted a sizeable lay readership, including Twain.22) Through his studies of reaction time and other variables, Galton developed a range of techniques for measuring “individual differences,” at the very time when these differences appeared imperiled.23 Of these techniques, graphology—the study of handwriting—is exemplary. As Tamara Plakins Thornton has written, handwriting “sits astride the cusp of mind and body.”24 The way in which it was investigated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thus exemplifies the interconnection of physiology and psychology that governed research throughout the period. But it was the idiosyncrasy inherent in any given person’s handwriting that caused a link to be articulated between handwriting and selfhood. As Thornton explains, this identification was itself a consequence of technological change, namely the advent of mechanical typesetting: It was print that endowed handwriting with its own, new set of symbolic possibilities; script emerged as a medium of the self in contradistinction to print, defined as characteristically impersonal and dissociated from the writer. Handwriting thus became a level of meaning in itself, quite apart from the sense of the text, and the sense that it transmitted took as its subject the self.25

As textual production became mechanized, in other words, the locus of individuality was shifted to another register. Handwriting, finding itself in opposition to print, gained a wholly new prestige, becoming an avatar for social investments in individuality unseated from their previous locations by the advent of new technology. This compensatory mechanism, whereby individuality finds new articulations with each technological advance, will become familiar to us. And it is in relation to electrical technology that it features in a remarkable pair of texts that will in turn occupy us for much of the remainder of this chapter. These are two experimental studies by the American psychologists William Lowe Bryan and Noble Harter, concerning what they call, in the title to their first paper, the “Physiology and Psychology of the Telegraphic Language.”26 Published in 1897 and 1899 respectively, these texts give concrete expression to the constellation of intellectual currents, working practices, and cultural concerns I have been describing. As they state in

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their first paper, the authors offer a Galton-esque study of “individual differences” (27), and do so by comparing examples of a new form of technologically mediated writing, the transcripts produced by telegraph operators. Taking this coupling of persons and machines as the occasion for their studies, Bryan and Harter assume the further correlation between physiology and psychology evident in the title of their initial paper. This correlation, as we see, is facilitated through technology, being immanent to the working procedures of the telegraph office itself. This, and the fact that the research was commissioned by the owners of the telegraph office in question, aligns Bryan and Harter’s interests with those of scientific management.27 This becomes especially clear in the second study, where the authors address themselves to one of Taylor’s central concerns: the amount of time taken by each worker to perform a given task, and the means by which workers’ use of time may be made more efficient. As Bryan and Harter say, “There is scarcely any difference between one man and another of greater practical importance than that of effective speed” (374). Time, as we see, emerges in their studies as a category of central importance, from which some of the most interesting implications of their work emerge. Bryan and Harter’s studies thus furnish an excellent opportunity to test Twain’s hypothesis that “training is all there is to a person,” alongside Moss’s related claims about “Machine-Made Human Beings.” Twain’s position, in particular, is, of course, an extreme one, but it is arguably this very extremity—and the fact that his is a fantasy about working practices, rather than an empirical study of them—that makes it such a useful reference point from which to assess Bryan and Harter’s own, more representative, contributions. In examining their studies, I am interested in the ways in which the individuality of experimental subjects is correlated with the writing they produce; and further to this, the various relationships their studies trace between the medium of telegraphic writing and the messages it conveys. I also ask what conceptual and procedural steps are necessary to ensure that that “iron machines” and “people-machines,” as Lee would put it, “run softly together.” Since the answer to the latter question bears on each of the others, we turn to it first.

“The Physiology and Psychology of the Telegraphic Language” Bryan and Harter’s experimental subjects are telegraphers who have attained a high level of expertise, who can decipher Morse code

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messages with a high degree of speed and accuracy, and who can relay them to their destination with equivalent speed and accuracy. Their initial study begins with a brief phenomenology of the telegrapher’s craft, and if we pick our way through this account, we can isolate the various ways in which apparatus and operator interact, bringing first the latter’s perceptive faculties, then the cognitive, and finally the motor faculties into play. Telegraphers receive incoming messages by ear, via a sounding device that converts them into an audible set of signals. These correspond to the famous “dots” and “dashes” of the Morse alphabet. Transmission follows, ideally speaking, immediately upon reception, and the degree to which this ideal is approximated depends on recognition of these sound groups as intelligible words and sentences: When a considerable degree of speed in receiving is reached, the space between the letters of a word becomes so small that one ceases to recognize it consciously, the letters seem to blend together, and the word is recognized as a sound whole. Thus, expert operators read words from their instruments . . . [Later still] these group themselves into larger wholes, so that the sentence becomes the conscious unit, much as in the reading of printed matter. (28; emphasis in original)

Eventually, the authors conclude, the “telegraphic language becomes so thoroughly assimilated that thinking apparently resolves itself into . . . telegraphic short hand . . . One thinks in telegraphic terms” (32; my emphasis). If such “assimilations” represent a regulatory ideal, the novice telegrapher still experiences disjunctions between the different faculties that his activities draw into play. Therefore, [t]he language which comes to the ear of the learner seems to him far more complex than the language which he has to write. When he wishes to write the letter e, he must have in mind only the making of one quick snap with his hand. When he hears the letter e, he hears two sounds . . . and must take note of the time between them to distinguish the dot from the dash. (49–50; emphasis in original)

For the novice, then, the perceptual, cognitive, and motor faculties are still distinct from one another, but this distinction is increasingly elided as proficiency increases. Telegraphic proficiency thus increases as the temporal gap between perceptive, cognitive, and motor faculties diminishes; until, at the upper limits of proficiency, a telegrapher may transmit up to forty-nine words a minute, a feat requiring them to

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make over seven hand movements a second (34). Signals pass directly from the sounder to the operator, who having made sense of them feeds them back into the apparatus by hand, whence they are sent toward another operator, and so on. This is a vision of sublime prosthesis, in which technology and bodily disposition are mutually attuned (“one quick snap” of the hand) and consciousness itself assumes technological form (“one thinks in telegraphic terms”). But as yet, we have no clear idea how this fusion of faculties and agencies has been achieved. Upon what theoretical grounds can it be explained, and under what experimental conditions can it be demonstrated? The answer brings us to a crucial point. Bryan and Harter’s first paper, as I have noted, is a “study of individual differences”—these corresponding to the relative expertise of different telegraphers. These differences can be measured because each operator’s transmissions are recorded on a roll of paper, carried on a revolving wheel (see figure 2.1). As the operators manipulate the needle of the transmitter, a series of marks is left upon the paper, which provide a record of the transmission complete in every detail. In addition to the individual differences, these measure the growing proficiency of each operator over time, repeated transcripts of the same message revealing an increase in speed and accuracy, and so enabling, in the experimenters’ words, the “quantitative study of apperception” (52; my emphasis). The latter term, especially associated with Wundt, was

Figure 2.1 Samuel Morse’s Original Telegraph Transmitter. Engraving by an unnamed artist in Das Buch der Erfindungen, 3 (1843). MEPL

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widely used by late nineteenth-century psychologists to designate something like attention: the mind’s dedicated focus on external stimuli.28 The differences Bryan and Harter measure, in other words, involve mental processes, both over time and between different individuals. That this is possible at all is due to telegraphy itself, both as a “language” and as an apparatus. As Bryan and Harter put it, “no other language used by man can be so completely translated into exactly measurable symbols; while on the other hand, the manifold personal differences in the operators are shown by investigation to be represented in those symbols” (36). Morse code, in other words, mediates between operators and the messages they transcribe, allowing each to be “read off” from the other. Each string of code is, at one and the same time, the bearer of a certain message, and an index of the individual who transcribes it. The homology thus created between message and messenger is remarkable enough, as we discuss in subsequent sections of the chapter. But the immediate consequence is to reveal the relationship between body, mind, and machine, as outlined above, as an effect of experimental design. Thus, a body moves a machine, leaving a mark on paper, which in turn is used to measure the body. This somatic measurement, however, is straightaway interpreted as an index of mind, and one that “thinks in telegraphic terms.” My point is not so much that such connections between body, mind, and machine do not exist, but that they exist within these texts because of a silent interpretative jump, a heuristic inference on the experimenters’ part from bodily movement to conscious event. The logistics of telegraphic writing—reception, recognition, and transmission—and Bryan and Harter’s account of machines, minds, and bodies interacting form a self-enclosed and reciprocally defining circle. Each informs the other, tautologically. There is more to be said about Bryan and Harter’s account of consciousness, and how it relates to unconscious, bodily, and machine processes. As we observe, this relates to their particular understanding of the “training” process. For the moment, however, we can turn our attention more fully to their discussion of individual difference.

Difference, Intersubjectivity, and Meaning We have already seen how, from an objective standpoint, individual differences are encoded in the “exactly measurable symbols” of the Morse alphabet. This objective difference has a subjective or rather an intersubjective counterside that emerges as soon as we consider telegraphy as a social activity. As Bryan and Harter write, “Every operator develops a distinctive style of sending so that he can be recognized readily by

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those who work with him constantly” (34). Twain also mentions this phenomenon in Connecticut Yankee. When Hank uses the telegraph to communicate with his assistant Clarence, he receives in reply “a click that was as familiar to me as a human voice” (343). The telegrapher, then, is not to be imagined in prosthetically mediated self-absorption, for his instrument is the gateway to a wider, social world. This in turn suggests that the qualities of intimacy and copresence are not external, but intrinsic, to telegraphic practice. As Bryan and Harter put it, “Operators are keenly alive to the presence of those with whom they communicate, so that they do not feel alone, even though no one is physically present” (31). As in Fowler’s telegraphically informed account of love, or Twain’s “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton,” discussed in the previous chapter, physical separation does not vitiate socioaffective bonds, but becomes the very medium through which these bonds may be articulated. The observation that telegraphers feel “keenly alive” to one another may be extended into a microsociology of the telegraphic community. Here, Bryan and Harter recall Gramsci’s dictum that “new methods of work are inseparable from a specific mode of living and of thinking and feeling life.”29 Thus, the authors explain the etiquette that governs telegraphic life; for example, the taboo against “breaking,” the interruption of an incoming message, which is seen as a humiliating betrayal of incompetence (29).30 This motivates the use of deliberately confusing “trick” messages to force breaking and thus chasten the “obnoxiously smart” (ibid.). Here, we also learn that it is best to learn telegraphy young, in virtue of its difficulty, but that young telegraphers “have a peculiar way of grouping the letters of words, which gives the impression of some one walking unsteadily as when partially intoxicated” (35). Prevailing gender norms are easily detected behind the claim that operators can “generally recognize a woman by her style of sending” (ibid.). Telegraphers suffer from a variety of medical complaints, from “Severe headaches” and “writers’ cramp,” to what was widely seen—as we see in chapter 4—as the most characteristic ailment of the age, “nervous” illness (ibid.). The stresses of the trade may also become apparent in the manner of its execution, with “fear, anger, [and] excitement” making expert operators “more fluent in the use of the telegraphic language” (31). However, telegraphers also know moments of repose, although not always to their colleagues’ convenience: “The anger flutter, a whir made by rapid alternate strokes of the first and second finger, is also employed with good effect to awaken sleeping telegraphers” (32).

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In every case, be it the expression of anger or the betrayal of one’s gender, the nuances of telegraphic communication can be traced back to a single factor: the rate at which messages are transmitted. Thus, Bryan and Harter note that expert operators approximate the inflections of speech by varying the speed at which a character or word is keyed (44). But elsewhere, we read of the debutant, overawed by the presence of his physically absent colleagues, who “writes very slowly, and yet . . . cannot think of enough things to say” (31–32). Thus afflicted, and put, quite literally, to the test of time, telegraphic speech decomposes into what Bryan and Harter call “spasmodic or meaningless sound” (32). When we compare the expressiveness of the expert, and the stammerings of the novice—considering that in each case, their performances depend on the rate at which they transmit—we discover what is perhaps the most remarkable feature of telegraphic writing: that meaning, in a perhaps unprecedented way, is a function of time. At one end of the semantic scale, an expert operator may convey a message in pristine condition, with superadded emphasis to boot. At the opposite end of the scale, however, an inexperienced operator can convey the same message, but with such hesitancy that it dissolves into a series of dissociated clicks, signifying nothing. The medium remains, but the message is no more. How does this happen, and what conclusions follow from it? It will be recalled that the Morse language commends itself for quantitative study because it is composed of “exactly measurable symbols,” and that the individual performances of operators may be differentiated by these symbols. Now, it may be added that these symbols are themselves differentiated from each other on the basis of temporal difference. Thus, a “dot” is equal to “one unit of time . . . the dash, [to] three units of time . . . the short space between the parts of a letter, one unit of time,” and so on (38). If these ratios represent the ideal standard against which individual deviations are measured, the same ratios are also meant to regulate the internal logic of the standard itself. The same criteria, in other words, must determine both the difference between letters “b” and letter “c” (for example), and the accuracy with “b” and “c” are transmitted by individual operators. The classic Saussurean distinction between langue, a given linguistic system, and parole, the utterances that this enables, becomes extremely unstable on this basis, and a brief engagement with Saussure himself will make things more interesting and complicated still. For Saussure, as is well known, languages are structured by the differences between each of their constituent elements, or “signs.” These differences are furthermore entirely “negative”: no sign possesses

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a pure or “positive” difference, but owes its value to the particular dissimilarity it bears toward each of the other signs in a given linguistic system.31 In telegraphy, this principle of negative differentiation is reproduced within each sign: thus, the letters “b” and “c”—to say nothing of the words one might make of them—are composed of temporal units whose differences are entirely relative. A “dash” is equal to three units of time, but cannot exist at all in the absence of “dots” that are a third as long, spaces between words that are twice as long, and so on. We might thus say that in Morse code, difference is temporalized. But this is not all, for Bryan and Harter add that “there are constant differences between the times required for the same character in different parts of the sentence or even of the same word” (38). Difference is not only temporalized, then, but also multiplied; for not only is the identity of each character dependent upon difference, but this difference itself must be “different” on each occasion. The semantic value of the characters is thus “determined at once by their difference in the series to which they belong, and [again] by the difference of their difference from one series to another.”32 Telegraphy may well aspire to a “complex equilibrium of terms holding each other in mutual juxtaposition” (as Saussure puts it), but such an equilibrium can hardly be assured, given that its internal constitution is so unstable.33 These claims are not as fanciful or anachronistic as they might at first appear. Bryan and Harter actually foreshadow this quasi-deconstructive turn themselves, and in fairly explicit terms. To see this, we must turn to the message they use to test the telegraphic aptitude of their subjects. This is the sentence: “Ship 364 wagons via Erie Quick”; a sentence chosen, the experimenters say, “because it contains almost every sort of difficulty which the telegraphic language presents” (36). As the authors go on to explain, “ ‘Erie’ is by far the hardest word in the sentence. By a little change in the time relations, one would get oye, erc, sic, [or] eeye” (36). All the implications about semantic value in telegraphy I have been tracing can be derived from this statement. Below a certain threshold, a telegrapher may exploit temporal variation to add emphasis to a message. Beyond this threshold, however, departure from the correct “time relations” will render “Erie” as some inaccurate approximation. The very basis upon which Morse code is constructed thus allows letters to permeate and exchange identities with each other, whenever the competence of the operator drops below the level that maintains their proper dispersion. The words of which letters are part are altered in consequence. In a radical sense, then, the semantic content of all telegraphic messages is contingent upon their rate of transmission. The homology between message and messenger, which the Morse “language” enables, thus leads, once pushed to its limits, to a parting

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of the ways between them. For if, as has been shown, the message can be vacated from the medium, there is no necessary “end” to the calibration of individual difference by telegraphic writing: one’s performance will be recorded with no less accuracy whether one transcribes with perfect accuracy, or produces “spasmodic or meaningless sound.” Bryan and Harter’s paper restages, then, a culturally significant shift, noted by Thornton in her discussion of handwriting. Individual script becomes “a level of meaning in itself, quite apart from the sense of the text,” and this level corresponds to the writing self. The individuality of each telegrapher, in other words, easily survives the destruction of their messages, just as the “experimental study of individual difference” is not impeded by the relative “failure” of some of Bryan and Harter’s subjects as telegraphers. I return to this theme when I conclude my discussion of these studies; but now, I wish to turn to what Twain might call the “training” of telegraphers.

Habits, Speed, and Automatism Thus far I have concerned myself almost exclusively with Bryan and Harter’s initial paper, “Studies in the Physiology and Psychology of the Telegraphic Language.” Their second paper builds upon the first, and attempts to draw general conclusions about the learning process from their telegraphic studies. The result is a theory called the “Hierarchy of Habits,” from which we can extract the authors’ assumptions about the nature of consciousness, and complete our account of how mental activity relates to the complex of machinery, physiology, and psychology operative in telegraphic writing. This in turn allows us to test Twain’s claim that “training is all there is to a person” against the account of consciousness that emerges in Bryan and Harter’s work. As was said in the initial study, “When a considerable degree of speed in receiving is reached, the space between the letters of a word becomes so small that one ceases to recognize it consciously, the letters seem to blend together, and the word is recognized as a sound whole.” Later still, “the sentence becomes the conscious unit,” as the individual elements of telegraphic language group themselves into ever-larger wholes. In their subsequent investigation, Bryan and Harter try to account for this process, whereby “one learns to think in telegraphic terms.” The key term in this account is repetition, which, in their view, stands revealed as the motive principle of all learning and acculturation. The discussion builds on the somewhat surprising claim that “[t]he chief subjective effect of an act is doubtless its tendency to

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establish the habit of repeating that act” (366). And in this respect, Bryan and Harter are surely guided by the influential account of habit offered by William James. In his chapter on the subject in The Principles of Psychology (1890)—itself a key text for the new psychology (though one that is ultimately irreducible to its tenets)—James defines habit as “the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent.”34 Locating its origins in the “plasticity” of neural matter, he explains habit as a crypto-electrical (or crypto-hydraulic) “current,” wearing progressively deeper ruts across the nervous system: for “nothing is easier than to imagine how, when a current once has traversed a path, it should traverse it more readily still a second time.”35 A habit, then, is a rubric gathering together the initial act and its subsequent repetitions, along with each variation in the “readiness” with which these are accomplished. We already know the characteristic form that these variations take in Bryan and Harter’s studies: the speed at which the telegraphic act is executed. It is increasing speed, it will be recalled, that causes individual units of telegraphic language to group themselves into larger wholes. We can thus compare Bryan and Harter’s following statement on “habits” with the passage quoted earlier, on how “conscious units” of language group themselves into ever-larger wholes: A habit of any order, when thoroughly acquired, has physiological and, if conscious, psychological unity. The habits of lower order which are its elements tend to lose themselves in it, and it tends to lose itself in habits of higher order when it appears as an element therein. (361)

Habits accrete, forming a hierarchy as they do so, just as individual letters “lose themselves” in ever-larger linguistic units such as words and sentences. We can already sense a provocative equation between verbal units and “habits”; an equation made more provocative because the “conscious” status of both is as yet undecided. Yet this already jumps ahead of Bryan and Harter’s argument. When can one say that a habit has “unity,” and why does this depend upon its constituent parts “losing themselves?” Though they do not say so explicitly, Bryan and Harter clearly imply that unity is achieved when a “habit” can be executed at or beyond a certain speed. The constituent elements of a habit “lose themselves”; in other words, whenever they become too fast for “apperception,” thus passing above (or perhaps “below”) the threshold of consciousness. This theory of consciousness, and by implication, its relation to unconscious processes, is, as Roger Shattuck has noted in another context, both

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beguiling and surprisingly unfamiliar; for rather than imagining them as two distinct faculties, it places consciousness and unconsciousness at different points on a single continuum: “one entity, once faculty, one process. But of different velocities.”36 What is present to consciousness, in any given case, will simply be the habit that is still slow enough to be (or to require) thought. The presence of this model, albeit implicitly, throughout their work, might then explain why Bryan and Harter feel able to pass so readily over the distinction between the “physiological and psychological” unity of habits: the difference is purely “subjective,” of degree rather than of kind, and in any case largely irrelevant to the central question of how telegraphy is learned. In any case, though Bryan and Harter do not refer to the “unconscious” execution of habits, they do use a term that distinguishes it from conscious activity just as well: the automatic (369, 375). This is what it means for the “habits of lower order” to “lose themselves” in higher ones: they become automatic. And in the case of telegraphic writing, this automaticity extends from the words transmitted to the feelings they evoke: A grammatical construction often used to express a certain feeling . . . comes to be automatically associated with that feeling, apart from any particular sentence, so that either instantly and effortlessly suggests the other, to serve as one of the many elements in the reading or making of a new sentence. (366; emphasis removed)

It is at moments like these that the affinities between Bryan and Harter’s account and Twain’s remarks on “training” seem greatest. Telegraphic fluency derives from repetition, and correlatively, “an operator can repeat the same action more exactly the more expert he is” (43). Expertise, furthermore, is coefficient with speed, for as we recall, “[t]here is scarcely any difference between one man and another that is of greater practical importance than that of effective speed.” Now, it seems, repetitious, speedy, and efficient acts are “automatically associated” with the appropriate “feeling.” We have an unbroken set of connections, or so it appears, between training regimes, workplace routine, and the subjective states of telegraph operators. If “one thinks in telegraphic terms,” and these larger or smaller “conscious units” themselves correspond to unconscious “habits,” with automatically induced affective responses, then telegraphers would indeed seem to represent—in Bryan and Harter’s own account—the artifactual person; a Taylorized sequence of preprogrammed actions. And yet, summarizing their conclusions, Bryan and Harter make the

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startling claim that “[t]here is no freedom except through automatism” (369; emphasis in original). How is this explained? Taken on their own terms, Bryan and Harter simply mean that freedom is a function of “higher” habits, and that these can be acquired only after the lower ones have become “automatic.” As they elsewhere explain, automaticity places no limit upon spontaneous and original behavior, as “every bodily or mental process . . . through dissociation and reassociation may appear in innumerable other actions” (367). However, there is another kind of freedom that emerges, in a prodigious dialectical reversal, as the other side of automatism, in its most egregious, “dehumanizing” form. Thus Gramsci writes, in his account of “Taylorism,” [Mechanization] is not the spiritual death of man. Once the process of adaptation has been completed, what really happens is that the brain of the worker, far from being mummified, reaches a state of complete freedom. The only thing that is completely mechanicised is the physical gesture; the memory of the trade, reduced to simple gestures repeated at an intense rhythm, “nestles” in the muscular and nervous centres and leaves the brain free and unencumbered for other occupations.37

As the integration of man and machine reaches its apotheosis, the “brain of the worker” makes an unexpected escape. What this “complete freedom” really amounts to is perhaps open to question, but my concern here is rather with the connection made between freedom and automaticity. Significantly, when Bryan and Harter themselves consider a similar form of “freedom,” they too refer to it under the rubric of a “tendency to automatism” (33). The highly proficient telegrapher, they explain, when absorbed in his task, and without ceasing to perform it effectively, may yet become completely intellectually detached from it: How thoroughly the telegraphic language is mastered in some cases is illustrated by the fact that expert operators “copy behind” three or four words; sometimes ten or twenty words; that is, the receiving operator allows the sender to write a number of words before he begins to copy. It is then possible for him to get something of the sense of the sentence in advance. The operator is thus able, not only to punctuate and capitalize, but also to keep run of the grammatical structure. Yet, while he would detect an error, or notice that a word was not appropriate in the connection used, and be able to suggest to the sender what the word should be, the language of the message as a whole may have little or no meaning to him. (32; my emphasis)

Once again, pushed beyond a certain limit, meaning drains away from the telegraphic language. Within the context of Bryan and Harter’s

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initial study, we have seen how meaning vacates the medium itself, as a result of its dependence on the rate of transmission. In the latter study, meaning deserts the messenger by virtue of the very “automatism” that ensures his expertise. Again, but this time from the operator’s perspective, telegraphic language splits into its various elements, and is detached from its referents in consequence.

“Training,” and the Medium What conclusions, then, can be drawn from Bryan and Harter’s studies, especially concerning Twain’s hypothesis about the artifactual status of persons? To be sure, their studies often seem invested in precisely this hypothesis; and by appearing to equate cognitive development with the acquisition of habits, seem to suggest that “training” is, indeed, “all there is to a person.” However, as we have also seen, their studies show how the person, qua telegrapher, may inscribe his individuality via the idiosyncrasies of the telegraphic “voice,” and retain this voice even while failing in his telegraphic duties. In other words, the fact that personhood is encoded in “spasmodic or meaningless” script, no less than its intelligible equivalent, is a sign that it cannot be simply equated with the disciplinary, habit-forming regimes by which such skills as telegraphic aptitude are acquired. The fact that even expert telegraphers—precisely where behaving with the greatest “automatism”—may nonetheless fail to understand the messages they process lends further emphasis to this point. For here, precisely where one’s “training” is most in evidence, one’s thoughts (and “freedom”) may already be elsewhere. These points may usefully be restated with regard to the medium, the type of person invoked at the conclusion of the previous chapter. As we saw, quintessential mediums such as Kipling’s Mr. Shaynor and Twain’s mental telegram-receiving author are distinguished by their apparent lack of agency over the words they reproduce; their status as conduits, rather than as originating sources, of textual production. And, in a sense, the logistical imperatives of the telegraphic profession— to reproduce messages like “Ship 364 wagons via Erie Quick” as quickly and as accurately as possible, and to do so without “breaking” or otherwise betraying one’s own presence—seem to locate telegraphers squarely within this paradigm. In another sense, however, the way that telegraphers inflect the messages they reproduce, whether with the signs of their gender, their competence, or mood, means that their status as mediums is always qualified, and never “pure.” Furthermore, the way in which the “telegraphic language” itself almost invariably encodes the identity of its users suggests that the meaning of any given

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message may be shadowed by a sort of “surplus” or excess; a surplus that may augment, but might just as well undermine, its signifying value. I return to this suggestion at the end of this chapter. Ultimately, then, the conjunction of “people-machines” and “iron machines” within telegraphy does not necessitate the reduction of the former to the latter. Contrary to Moss’s fears, the “training” of humans by machinery does not entail the making of humans by machinery, in this context, at least. And in this respect, it is worth pointing out that Lee’s appreciation of “Machine-Trainers” makes similar allowance for the preservation of individual differences. Arguing against the elision (rather than mutual alignment) of “iron machines” and “people-machines,” he writes, “Everything in a social machine, if it is a machine that really works, is based on the profound and special study of individuals.”38 Thus, the increasing absorption of such individuals within supra-individual “crowds”—whether these be in the Taylorized workplace or, à la Moss, via public schools, department stores, and magazines—should not be seen as a struggle between two opposing principles, but rather as a process of mutual accommodation from which each principle draws strength: What this means with regard to the typical modern man is, not that he does not think, but that it takes ten thousand men to make him think. He has a crowd soul, a crowd creed. Charged with convictions, galvanized from one convention to another, he contrives to live, and with a sense of multitude, applause and cheers he warms his thoughts.39

Lee thus invokes the Frankenstein-esque trope of “galvanism” to argue almost precisely the opposite case as Moss, via her own invocation of Shelley’s novel. In a textbook instance of electrical thinking, galvanism becomes a sign, not of monstrosity, but exaltation.

“Resembling Oneself,” and Portrait Painting Bryan and Harter’s studies have focused our attention on one of the late nineteenth century’s most urgent preoccupations: the ways in which individuality is inscribed and embodied; how it is measured; and the means necessary to ensure its verification. Telegraphy, as our discussion has shown, ensures a near-perfect adequation between the messages each operator sends and the singular, individualizing features of each messenger. This accounts for the way in which telegraphers recognize each other as easily as if by “voice”: the comparison made in Bryan and Harter’s initial study and echoed by Twain in Connecticut Yankee. It also

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explains the suitability of telegraphy to Bryan and Harter’s Galtoninspired objective, the experimental study of “individual differences.” Now, taking these studies as a kind of test case, in which the inscription of individual difference proceeds without impediment and with the greatest possible fidelity, I wish to turn my attention to nineteenth-century fiction. Here, the advent of communication technologies causes a series of crises in procedures whereby the individuality of persons is recorded and maintained. In order to stress the degree to which nineteenth-century fiction is concerned with these problems, and to indicate the principal means whereby peoples’ individuality is recorded within it, I return to Seltzer’s Bodies and Machines. Seltzer argues that the realist novel of the nineteenth century can be defined by a particular “duty” or “imperative” each of its characters is charged with fulfilling: the “imperative of resembling oneself.”40 The apparent tautology of this imperative—for is it not inevitable, and self-evident, that people will resemble themselves?—may again be illustrated by Bryan and Harter’s telegraphers. Each of their subjects “resembles himself” simply by virtue of what he does, and without the need of any additional effort: inscription of their distinguishing features is consubstantial with telegraphy itself. Seltzer clarifies the issues at stake by saying that, in general, the inscription of personhood or individuality is dependent on “the possibility of representation and imitation” (93). Holding aside, for the moment, this suggestive reference to “imitation,” we can say that characters in the realist text fulfill the obligation of resembling themselves through self-representation; or, as Seltzer puts it, “The duty of the subject of realism is to fashion a character that corresponds to its representations” (89). We have then, on one hand, “character”—the inner core of a person’s being, the essential individuality he or she possesses—and on the other hand, one’s “representations”—the outward displays and figurations of this individuality, the means by which it is judged and authenticated by others. The underlying trajectory of the realist text, then, in this interpretation, sees the “character” and the “representations” of its inhabitants travel toward each other, so that ideally, in the course of any given novel, there will be a perfect match between them, each character resembling, authentically and without flaw, his or her true self. How do realist characters, or their authors, set out to achieve this? The predominant means whereby most characters in realist novels resemble themselves is undoubtedly physiognomy, the influential “science” of human nature formulated by Johan Caspar Lavater (1741–1801) and others in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.41 In Kant’s useful definition, physiognomy is the “art of investigating the human

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interior through external, involuntary signs.”42 Physiognomy, we can therefore say, assumes the legibility of the body, and grounds the possibility of judging character in the body’s availability for inspection. And though the scientific credentials of physiognomy were often queried—Kant, in fact, dismisses them—its assumptions continued to inform artistic and literary practice long into the nineteenth century.43 As late as 1900, for example, a character in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) carries the “imprint of all his innermost thoughts upon his features,” and one could multiply similar examples almost endlessly.44 Throughout nineteenth-century fiction, then, characters typically “represent themselves” and are represented to the reader by means of their bodily appearance: the stances they adopt, and the expressions on their faces. As Kant indicates, this method of character assessment depends especially on “involuntary” signs, for only those signs that are beyond conscious control can be held as a reliable gauge of character.45 The practice of physiognomy, in other words, takes account of the fact that people may deliberately deceive one another; and, indeed, exists in part in order to compensate against this tendency.46 More generally, it is precisely because people try to deceive one another that the “imperative of resembling oneself” is not the selfevident tautology it first appears to be. In realist and other novels, then, not to mention life outside them, people constantly seek to avoid resembling their true selves—or alternatively, as Mary Moss puts it, try to “resembl[e] one another.” The most self-conscious writers are not only aware of this, but sense that this human proclivity for misrepresentation has profound implications for their own craft, which is precisely the fashioning of representations in which readers will be willing to believe. The ways in which nineteenth-century novelists represent their characters thus occasionally contain autotheorizations of the dialectic of truth and deceit, credence and suspicion, and disguise and revelation that the imperative of self-resemblance sets in motion. Many such cases center on the subject of portrait paintings, where the artifice involved in fashioning representations is placed in the foreground.47 A brief consideration of one such case will indicate the general issues at stake here, before disclosing how electrical technologies such as the telegraph become implicated in the mechanisms of self-representation. In Herman Melville’s Pierre (1852), we find the following observation on the art of portrait painting: [T]he portrait of any man generally receives, and is indeed entitled to more reverence than the original man himself; since one may freely clap

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a celebrated friend on the shoulder, yet would by no means tweak his nose in his portrait. The reason whereof may be this: that the portrait is better entitled to reverence than the man; inasmuch as nothing belittling can be imagined concerning the portrait, whereas many unavoidably belittling things can be fancied as touching the man.48

Here, an apparently irreducible gap is opened up between the character one really is, and representations fashioned of it. This gap is widest where the greatest number of “belittling things can be fancied as touching the man,” as opposed to the representations made of him, which by contrast inspire “reverence.” The importance of this passage in the context of Melville’s novel is that Pierre’s dead father, although “revered” by his son and widow as a paragon of virtue, has in fact committed a terrible sexual sin, secretly fathering an illegitimate daughter, Isabel. This fact is disclosed by a discrepancy between two portraits of the man, one an image of propriety, the other a testimony to his secret shame.49 In the scene where Pierre becomes aware of this, he hears the voice of his father instructing him: “In mature life, the world overlays and varnishes us, Pierre; the thousand proprieties and polished finenesses and grimaces intervene, Pierre; then we, as it were, abdicate ourselves, and take unto us another self, Pierre; in youth we are, Pierre, but in age we seem” (83; emphasis in original). It is exactly this opposition between actuality (“we are”) and representation (“seeming”) that, in Seltzer’s account, the subject of realism has a duty to abolish. Moreover, in his account, it is precisely the subject’s fashioning of self-representations that is meant to effect this abolition. Melville, on the other hand, argues exactly the opposite: the further we enter into the world of representation, his text suggests, the more our being is overlaid by “seeming.” Self-representation thus slides into misrepresentation, both in principle and in fact. Hence the radical skepticism of Melville’s all but final novel The Confidence Man (1857), where, as one character programmatically declares, “Nobody knows who anybody is.”50 By now, the complex of anxieties surrounding “the imperative of resembling oneself ” should be clear. It may be far from clear, however, how this has anything to do with the telegraph, or indeed any other communication technology. The connection does exist, however, and again, Pierre allows us to locate it. In one of the first interviews between Pierre and his half sister Isabel, the latter reproaches the former for the looks he casts upon her, and the feelings these betray (an inference, incidentally, grounded in the logic of physiognomy). Pierre answers that these looks do not represent him as he

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truly is but correspond instead to “vile falsifying telegraphs” (157). Melville alludes here to a practice that had, by the middle of the nineteenth century, become sufficiently prevalent to attract attention: the use of telegraphy for the dissemination of lies.51 By virtue of the very time and space-effacing qualities that made it useful, it was discovered that the telegraph lent itself easily to “falsification,” since it could convey information, and inspire action based upon it, before this information could be empirically verified. The telegraph thus became a technology of deceit; or, in Pierre’s words, a means of “falsifying” people, and thus more particularly a technology of misrepresentation. With this in mind, it is easy to see how the advent of such technologies might impinge upon the imperative of self-resemblance governing nineteenthcentury fiction. In fact, as we see, telecommunication technologies provide the means for turning this imperative against itself, much as Melville’s novel does through portrait painting. Thus, Pierre’s remark about “falsifying telegraphs” serves as a forewarning of the confusion that follows when communication technologies become involved in the traffic of selves and representations set in motion by realist and other nineteenth-century texts. Before I turn to a text in which this confusion is especially apparent, I must first briefly return to Bryan and Harter’s studies of telegraph operators, in order to clarify a relationship upon which subsequent discussion pivots: the relationship between what Seltzer calls the imperative of resembling oneself and what he calls the “body-machine complex.”

“In-One-Another” and “After-Each-Other”: Bodies and Machines Physiognomy and portrait painting, two of the predominant techniques for ensuring adequation between self and representation in nineteenth-century culture, share an obvious similarity: their dependence on the body. As I suggested earlier, each assumes not only this, but also the body’s legibility, or ability to be “read” by an observer. It is possible to identify a number of parallels between these means of self-representation and those that emerge in Bryan and Harter’s studies of telegraphy. There, as in physiognomy itself, data about mental processes is inferred from the performance of physical tasks: it is the hand that moves the telegraph apparatus, but the acquisition of mental habits that Bryan and Harter detect behind its movements. Likewise, Bryan and Harter attach great significance to the automatic, unconscious, and involuntary aspects of telegraphy, and it is from these that they read the secret history of an operator’s life, the

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acquisition of his telegraphic fluency. Finally, we must recall how the “individual differences” of operators are recorded. These differences emerge in telegraphic script as an effect of the body-machine relationship telegraphy instantiates: as the telegraph machine is operated, the operator’s movements are copied onto the telegraphic script, which in turn results in his individuality being inscribed. This, then, in Seltzer’s terminology, is how the telegraph operator “resembles himself,” or produces self-representations. Again, there is a kind of physiognomic logic in the way that (involuntary, unconscious) movements of the body are viewed as expressing the subjective life of the operator. Where this differs from orthodox physiognomy is in the intervention of machinery between “inner life” and external manifestation. And it is precisely this intervention that Melville invokes when Pierre tells Isabel that “falsifying telegraphs” destroy the equivalence between the way he looks and the way he feels. The only difference is that, whereas in Bryan and Harter’s studies, machinery completes the circuit between body and mind, ensuring its graphic representation, the case of Pierre invokes machinery destroying this circuit, ensuring that body and mind no longer match each other. In the first case, machinery ensures the possibility of self-representation; in the second, it ensures the misrepresentation of self. To clarify this distinction, let us attend more closely to the body’s relationship with minds and machines. In Bryan and Harter’s work, and in nineteenth-century psychology more generally, mind, machine, and body are seen as interactive, interdependent, and mutually intelligible. To use an expression of Siegfried Kracauer’s, their relationship can be described as “in-one-another.”52 However, with his allusion to “falsifying telegraphs,” Melville gestures at a different relation between mind, body, and machine, in which this articulation is interrupted, if not entirely undone. Here, the coarticulation of body, mind, and machine is—again, in Kracauer’s words—“reduced to a sequence,” and rendered “after-each-other.”53 This “after-each-other” structure, I suggest, defines the relation between selves, bodies, and machines that emerges once communication technologies are introduced into the systems of self-representation of the nineteenth-century novel. There, we find a kind of rhythmic oscillation whereby character is expressed through the body in some instances, and through machinery in others, but never through both simultaneously. Thus, in novels where communication technologies feature strongly, characters may represent themselves in one or other of these two ways, or both alternately, but never both at the same time. The reason for this is simple. With the advent of communication technologies, people become able to interact with each other in the

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absence of each other’s bodies. More specifically, people are faced with the need to ascertain the truth about other people, and their sincerity or lack of it, who may be many miles distant, and whose palpable, physical being is unavailable for inspection. It is obvious that such technologies suspend the operations of those physiognomic rules that govern the correspondence of persons and representations in the realist text. One consequence of this, to which we return shortly, is that alternative means must be found to verify the truth of people in the absence of such visible cues. To see the perils with which this is associated and the potential for duplicity it creates, we can turn to one of the most penetrating treatments of the telegraph in nineteenthcentury fiction, Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean (1881). The events of Hardy’s novel are set in motion by George Somerset’s decision to “follow the lead of the [telegraph] wire” to the semiruined castle owned by Paula Power.54 Telegraphy exercises a powerful influence throughout the book, promising a purity of contact between these and other characters that is, however, repeatedly deferred.55 When Paula fails to appear when Somerset expects her, for example, he reflects that “Miss Power was bent upon disappointing him in the flesh, notwithstanding the interest she expressed in him by telegraph” (46). This theme of thwarted expectation epitomizes the text as a whole, concerned as it is with a romance between Somerset and Paula that is stalled until the final pages. Of more immediate significance, however is the fact that this sentence reflects the basic rhythm of the text; a rhythm set by what I have called the oscillation between embodied and technologically mediated forms of self-representation. Thus, Miss Power is present “in the flesh,” and via telegraph, but these two forms of presence, here and throughout, fail to coincide. Furthermore, they contradict each other, as Paula’s absence in the flesh, and the interest she expresses by telegraph carry, in Somerset’s view, diametrically opposed meanings. This, then, to recapitulate, is the logic of the body-machine relationship that the text articulates: no longer “in-one-another,” they are “after-each-other,” reciprocally conditioning but mutually exclusive. In part, this is a function of the fact that throughout large portions of the novel, Somerset and Paula are in different places, communicating first by letter and later only by telegraph: “I have resolved to communicate with you only by telegrams,” Paula writes to Somerset at one point; “Please reply by the same means only” (240). Like Dracula, then, as discussed in the previous chapter, A Laodicean is deeply concerned with logistical questions; although unlike other

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authors discussed earlier, such as Fowler, Hardy focuses on logistical obstacles to (rather than ways of furthering) love. However, the problems this causes for Paula and Somerset’s relationship are nothing as compared to those created by the villainous Dare. This character tries to thwart the couple’s romance at every turn, in order to advance the suit of Somerset’s rival (and Dare’s own father) Captain De Stancy. The means he takes to do this include photography and the telegraph, and are thus profoundly connected to the question of technology, and its use in the fashioning of self-representations. By systematically exploiting the distinction between these and embodied forms of self-representation—and, indeed, ensuring that the two show a discrepancy—Dare directs us to the question of deception and misrepresentation, which, as suggested earlier, acts as a kind of internal limit on the imperative of self-representation. As we see, the way that Dare himself flouts this imperative is one with an implicitly technological character. However, we must first see how he misrepresents others, especially Somerset, by sending Melvillean “vile, falsifying telegraphs” and creating photographic images that travesty Somerset’s character. In the first of these incidents, Dare sends a telegram to Paula in Somerset’s name, begging money from her in order to settle a debt incurred while gambling (254). Though Dare’s primary intention is to secure the money for himself, its supplementary effect is cast aspersions on Somerset’s integrity. Thus, to his rival De Stancy, it appears a “self-humiliation which a lover would have avoided at all costs” (256). It is not in fact a self-humiliation, of course, because Somerset has lost control over the means by which he is represented. Again, technology allows this to happen, ensuring that, in Seltzer’s terms, representations and character are thrown out of alignment. In the second incident, involving photography, Dare’s conduct is all the more cunning for the fact that he surreptitiously explains it to Somerset in advance: as he says, he has “invented a new photographic process, which I am bent upon making famous” (46). This process, it transpires, makes it “possible for photographs to represent people as they had never been” (336). As in the earlier case, Dare uses this technique against Somerset in order to devastate Paula’s opinion of the latter’s character. Here is how the photograph Dare shows her is described: It was a portrait of Somerset; but by a device known in photography the operator, though contriving to produce what seemed to be a perfect likeness, had given it the distorted features and wild attitude of

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a man advanced in intoxication. No woman, unless specially cognisant of such possibilities, could have looked upon it and doubted that the photograph was a genuine illustration of a customary phase in the young man’s private life. (281)

Dare’s imposture, then, is constituted by his misrepresentation of Somerset; his use of technology to interrupt the “proper” relation between a man’s character and its representation. However, this leaves untouched the question of how Dare might himself respect the “imperative of resembling oneself.” In fact, Hardy’s descriptions of Dare make it clear that this is nothing less than the constitutive impossibility of his character. As a corollary to his misrepresentation of others, Dare is unable to resemble himself. Upon his first appearance in the novel, he reveals himself as a person quite out of the common. His age it was impossible to say. There was not a hair upon his face which could serve to hang a guess upon. In repose he appeared a boy; but his actions were so completely those of a man that the beholder’s first estimate of sixteen as his age was hastily corrected to six-andtwenty, and afterwards shifted hither and thither along intervening years as the tenor of his sentences sent him up or down. (45)

Through this indeterminacy with regard to his age, Dare reveals his inability to resemble himself. His appearance is internally contradictory, with “his actions” seeming older than his face. Most significant is the contribution of the voice in rendering our assessment of him uncertain. As one listens to him, our judgment of his age is sent “hither and thither” by the changing inflections of his speech. Apart from the ambiguous nature of his physical appearance, then, it is the voice that ensures Dare’s internal nonequivalence, his ability to dissemble himself. Thus, though Somerset finds him “visually a little too assured,” he is “civil enough verbally” (46). And later, in a passage that makes explicit the link between vocality and deception, Dare’s voice takes on the “flawless politeness of a man whose speech has no longer any kinship with his feelings” (253). To further specify the link between vocality and deception—and in so doing, show how this is related to technology—we must now turn to what Georg Simmel calls the “Sociology of the Senses.”

Misrepresentation and the Voice In his essay on the senses, Simmel argues that when we behold another person visually, we see “the lasting element of the person’s

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nature, the precipitation of their past in the substantial form of their features.”56 By contrast, in beholding others by ear, “What we hear is a person’s momentary character, the flow of their nature” (115). Of course, Simmel adds, people are usually present to each other through both the senses simultaneously. However, there are cases in which the “mutual supplementation” (ibid.) of ear and eye is not possible. The example Simmel gives is blindness. “For the blind person,” he contends, “the other person exists only in succession, in the temporal succession of their utterances” (114). Furthermore, and for just this reason, “it is much easier to lie to the ear of a person than it is to their eye” (ibid.). It is striking how easily these remarks about blindness can be applied to Dare. The way that our estimate of his age is sent “hither and thither” as the “tenor of his sentences” sends it “up or down” make him change with “the temporal succession of [his] utterances.” As Elaine Scarry says, in another context, “The physical and the verbal run side by side, one above the other, as two distinct or at least distinguishable horizontal ribbons of occurrence.”57 This disjunction implies, if we take Simmel at his word, that Dare’s dissembling qualities amount to a simulation of blindness, or some of its effects. And sure enough, Dare is twice described, when introduced to the novel, as an “invisible stranger” (41, 45). Given the fact that he misrepresents Somerset through photography and the telegraph, I now wish to suggest that he dissembles himself by simulating the effects of another technology, closely associated with the problem of blindness: the telephone. Telephony, if we follow Simmel’s account of the senses, cannot fail to resemble blindness. Being unable to see the person we are speaking to, we are deprived of the “lasting element of a person’s nature,” and must rely instead on their “momentary character, the flow of their nature.” And if it is “much easier to lie to the ear of a person than it is to their eye,” this should make the telephone an ideal tool for fashioning misrepresentations. This possibility is explored in a text already considered in the previous chapter, Mark Twain’s “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton.” As that discussion indicated, this story concerns a pair of lovers who meet via the telephone, and go on to conduct their romance without ever physically meeting. Unlike A Laodicean then, the tale suggests how meetings “in the flesh” might be deferred, perhaps indefinitely, in ways that not only “fail” to undermine romance but also, in so doing, represent romance’s very possibility. However, just as Dare attempts to ruin the relationship between

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Somerset and Paula in A Laodicean, Twain’s lovers are plagued by a villainous intruder who exploits technology for duplicitous purposes. And, again like Dare, the villain does this by misrepresenting the hero. When Alonzo begins to court Rosannah, he incurs the wrath of another suitor, Sidney Algernon Burley. Burley’s charms, Rosannah tells us, consist solely in “his single little antic talent of mimicry.”58 Here, we should recall that Seltzer nominates “imitation” among the means whereby characters in realist texts resemble themselves. By implication, this is also a way in which they might resemble other people. Thus, like Dare, when acting on De Stancy’s behalf, Burley deploys this talent in an effort to destroy a rival lover’s suit: he impersonates Alonzo, interrupting a conversation with Rosannah and assuming “a voice which was an exact imitation of Alonzo’s, with just the faintest flavor of impatience added” (172). Burley thus adopts Alonzo’s identity in order to misrepresent the latter’s character, for by leavening his impersonation with this “faint flavor” of impatience, he offends Rosannah to such an extent that she breaks off all contact with the misrepresented man. Since she must judge the identity and sincerity of her caller solely on the basis of his voice, and in the absence of his body, she is entirely taken in by Burley’s deception. In this respect, she resembles Paula in A Laodicean, who automatically assumes the authenticity of the telegram sent by Dare in Somerset’s name.59 Burley’s strategy, conversely, is effectively the same as that of Dare himself; for again, he uses telecommunications to misrepresent an enemy whose identity he assumes. His conversations with Rosannah are, one might say, “vile falsifying telephone calls” whose purpose is to destroy Rosannah’s opinion of Alonzo’s character. It is another case of technologically mediated misrepresentation. The apparent absurdity of this scenario should not deter us from taking it seriously, for as he often does (and as we saw with this story in chapter 1), Twain here uses “antic” means to say important things.60 In this story, what Peter Sloterdijk calls the “dialectic of the authentic and the alien” is pushed to an extreme, in which the two change places as readily as a telephone receiver changes hands.61 Alonzo and Burley are, like Somerset and Dare, implacably opposed; but how, on the telephone, are these two exemplars of the authentic and the alien to be distinguished? The faint flavor of impatience that Burley insinuates within his “exact imitation” of Alonzo’s voice would appear to announce the presence of the alien inside the authentic, although the reader knows (as Rosannah does not), that in this case the “authentic” is really not so. The mechanisms ensuring that “individual differences” emerge unfailingly and unflawed in the

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writing of Bryan and Harter’s subjects have thus broken down—or rather, been hijacked. The telephone, or so Twain appears to be saying, makes it all too easy for individual differences to be usurped, exchanged, abused, and confused. The irony here is that Twain himself, as we have already seen, alludes to the voice in explaining how Clarence identifies himself to Hank in Connecticut Yankee, and how infallibly the telegraph betrays the identity of its operator. When it comes to real voices, however, and the technologies conveying them to distant auditors, one can apparently have no such certainty. In fact, we are back with the problem identified in Melville’s The Confidence Man, where “nobody knows who anybody is.” Such, at least, in Twain’s account, is the predicament that inheres in telephonic love. As suggested by Mary Moss in “Machine-Made Human Beings,” anxieties about the erosion of individual difference were widespread in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture, and in one respect, Twain’s tale represents a variation on this theme. However, as I have argued throughout this chapter, this anxiety does not represent the whole story, for the idea of an imperishable individual identity was also strengthened in the period, which developed a multitude of techniques for recording and measuring it. New technologies were often involved in this, as Bryan and Harter’s studies show. And it is in this context that I earlier mentioned a “compensatory mechanism,” whereby individuality finds new articulations with each technological advance. One of the special virtues of Twain’s tale, in fact, is its revelation of this mechanism at work. Or better still, one might say that his tale is this mechanism, being a kind of thought-experiment in which individuality is placed under extreme pressure by a new technology, only to be redeemed by and through this very technology. For in fact, having shown how telephony enables people to misrepresent others at will, Twain then shows its ability to preserve the speaker’s inalienable singularity, and make it available to others for authentication. Let us now see how this happens. During their courtship, Rosannah announces her presence on the telephone by singing a particular song, the “Sweet By-and-By.” This song holds a special value for Alonzo because of the idiosyncratic manner in which it is sung. “There was a blemish in the execution of the song,” Twain writes, “but to Alonzo it seemed an added charm instead of a defect. This blemish consisted of a marked flatting of the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh notes of the refrain or chorus of the piece” (165). This “blemish,” in Alonzo’s view, identifies Rosannah as a “divine singer” (ibid.), and the song becomes the means by which the lovers greet each other on the phone. The

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blemish, then, is what individuates Rosannah, for in it is contained that elusive trace of singularity that nineteenth-century culture prizes so highly. This is why the song is so valued by Alonzo, and considered important in his and Rosannah’s rituals of love. Burley shrewdly grasps this fact, for when he impersonates Alonzo, he deprecates the song to Rosannah, telling her instead to “try something modern” (172). It is precisely because this song has become identified with Rosannah’s unique personal essence that she deems this an insult sufficient to end all contact with Alonzo, and she is subsequently engaged to Burley himself. Alonzo, however, sets out to reverse this misfortune, again relying on the blemish in Rosannah’s voice. After a period of convalescence after Rosannah’s desertion, he sets off across America to find her, armed with a portable telephone set with which he eavesdrops on conversations. Eventually his search is successful, and he finds Rosannah singing her signature song. Again, the individualizing blemish is all important: recognizing Rosannah, Alonzo exclaims “It is! it is she! Oh, the divine flatted notes” (175). The symmetry of the story is then complete: telephony, by enabling identities to be mistaken, initially causes the lovers to part, but as the flaw in Rosannah’s singing cannot be mistaken, its telephonic transmission eventually brings the couple back together. As Avital Ronell puts it, “telephonic logic means . . . that contact with the Other has been disrupted; but it also means that the break is never absolute.”62 Rosannah’s voice only assumes this mantle of individuation because she and Alonzo never see each other; that is, because their bodies are not mutually available for inspection. This absence of each lover’s body from the other returns us to the “after-each-other” structure of A Laodicean, where embodied and technologically mediated forms of self-representations are seldom if ever allowed to coincide. It might appear that Twain’s story does not conform to this structure, since the two lovers never physically meet, and thus that embodied self-representation does not feature in the text at all. However, this is not quite the case. When Alonzo is first introduced to Rosannah, Twain has him “bowing and smiling all the while, and motioning imaginary young ladies to sit down in imaginary chairs” (166). This is obviously absurd, but it illustrates an important fact: self-representation is fundamentally an embodied behavior. Communication technologies do not circumvent this fact by displacing the body; on the contrary, they disclose it. Thus, Alonzo’s posturing with “imaginary ladies” is actually rather profound, showing yet another “compensatory mechanism” at work: as soon as

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the body is made absent, it is immediately re-invoked and sought in surrogate forms. It is therefore not surprising to find that Alonzo and Rosannah send each other photographs of their faces, to study in the absence of their real ones. Rosannah says of Alonzo’s photograph: “I knew you must have a noble face, but the grace and majesty of the reality beggar the poor creation of my fancy” (169). With this reference to the “noble face,” we are in fact returned to physiognomy; for here, the identification of such moral or heredity qualities as nobility with physical features was often at issue. This “return” of the body in technological forms of selfrepresentation, furthermore, can also be seen in cases where physiognomic reasoning becomes essential to the interpretation of these representations themselves. We have seen an intimation of this already, in the prestige assumed by Rosannah’s voice in signifying her individuality: here, one might say, the telephonic voice acts as a place holder for a role to which the body would normally be assigned. But perhaps the clearest example of this sort of thing appears in Dracula. Here, Dr. Seward uses a phonograph in order to record his case notes—notes that also, inadvertently, provide an ongoing record of his emotional vicissitudes. Mina Harker, transcribing these recordings, tells the doctor that his phonograph “is a wonderful machine, but it is cruelly true. It told me, in its very tones, the anguish of your heart.”63 Here, the voice leads back, via the machine, to what is literally the heart of the body. In Seltzer’s terms, what Mina tells us is that Seward has succeeded, with the aid of his machine, in resembling himself, and so in fashioning a representation of his inner being. This, in turn, tells us that despite their frequent cooption for deceptive purposes, communication technologies are sometimes superior to the body in revealing the truth about people, even in the face of their attempts to conceal it. For Seward, an archetypal stoic, has no intention of revealing the “anguish” of his heart. And indeed, this is where Mina’s reading carries a trace of physiognomic reasoning, for her method, as in Kant’s gloss on physiognomy, depends on signs that are “involuntarily given.”

Distance, Sound, and Sense As we saw in the chapter 1, one effect with which new technologies such as the telephone were often associated was the so-called annihilation or abridgment of space. In social terms this meant that relationships could be conducted over large distances with a level of intimacy that may otherwise not have been possible. Twain’s tale of telephonic romance,

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however extravagant, represents a kind of limit-case in this respect, with intimate relations being established in defiance of great spatial dislocation. However, the difficulties faced by Somerset in his relations with Paula in A Laodicean suggests that the space-effacing qualities of such technologies should not be seen in isolation from other, countervailing qualities. Indeed, technologies such as the telegraph and telephone may amplify, rather than diminish, a sense of distance between people, and may do so even in the act of uniting them. In concluding this chapter, I wish now to explore this theme in relation to “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton.” There, distance is represented through sound, which in virtue of this fact becomes affectively charged. As we have seen, an important feature of Alonzo and Rosannah’s romance is their mutual alienation from each other’s bodies. As well as creating an increased emphasis on the voice as an object of romantic desire, it may be argued that this has a certain “productive” role in their relationship. One can compare this to the contemporary phenomenon of phone sex. In Allucquère Rosanne Stone’s account, the frisson of phone sex lies, for each participant, in the absence of the body of the person they are “having” sex with.64 In this situation, participants compensate for this lack by generating idealized fantasies about their missing partner. The absence of the body, in other words, paradoxically induces an accession of desire. The lower the quality or the “bandwidth” of the signal, the more ardent and creative such fantasies become.65 Though there is (of course) no phone sex in Twain’s story, this insight about how low fidelity communications become freighted with erotic or romantic energies is corroborated, mutatis mutandis, in the tale. This may be seen from the episode where Rosannah and Alonzo are reunited, following the discovery of Burley’s trickery. Here, Twain exploits a contrast of degree between the emotions of the couple and the quality of the signal on their telephone line. Here is Rosannah’s reaction upon hearing that Alonzo, maddened by love, has been confined to an asylum: “An agonizing shriek came buzzing to Alonzo’s ear, like the sharp buzzing of a hurt gnat; it lost power in traveling five thousand miles” (175). The irony here is that the most intense feelings, due to technological constraints, are “travestied” by the medium through which they are transmitted. These technical constraints, furthermore, are explicitly aligned with distance, with the result that most sublime emotions are converted by the telephone into the puniest of sounds. This contrast corresponds to what Nietzsche refers to as the “pathos of distance,” whereby the value

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invested in one of two opposing objects will appreciate as the distance between it and its counterpart increases.66 Thus, in Twain’s story, Alonzo’s thrill at discovering Rosannah seems to gain intensity from the very weakness of the telephonic link between them: a faint, sweet strain, the very ghost of sound, so remote and attenuated it seemed, struck upon his ear. His pulses stood still; he listened with parted lips and bated breath. The song flowed on—he waiting, listening, rising slowly and unconsciously from his recumbent position. At last he exclaimed: “It is! it is she! Oh, the divine flatted notes!” (175)

Again, Rosannah is identified by the vocal idiosyncrasy of “flatted notes.” And again, Twain lingers over the contrast between the passion these notes inspire and the strength with which the telephone can reproduce them: what Alonzo hears is but the faintest trace of Rosannah’s presence, the “very ghost of sound.” It is in this sense that the story resonates with Stone’s observations on phone sex. Once more, passions are expended in inverse proportion to a lowering in the quality of signal. A similar contrast obtains in cases where sound is sundered from sense, a process previously examined in relation to the “spasmodic or meaningless sound” produced by novice telegraphers in Bryan and Harter’s studies. In the case of telephony, in Twain’s story, this discrepancy again appears as an effect of technological constraints, and as a trace of the distance that telephony abridges. When Rosannah answers Alonzo, he initially hears only faintest sound, subsequently “framing itself into language” (175). Just as in telegraphy, the telephone injects an element of contingency between what is heard and what is meant. To recall Kracauer’s terms, meaning and sound are no longer “in-oneanother,” but rather “after-each-other.” Twain examines the implications of this discovery more fully in Connecticut Yankee. Traveling through the “Valley of Holiness,” where he has been performing “miracles,” Hank meets one of his agents, who keeps in regular contact with Camelot via telephone. To his surprise, the agent has no knowledge of these miracles, despite the fact that Hank has kept Camelot apprised of them via the very telephone system the agent is administering. It then becomes clear that the agent has heard of the miracles, but has misheard the word “holiness” as “hellishness.” As Hank reflects, That explains it. Confound a telephone, anyway. It is the very demon for conveying similarities of sound that are miracles of divergence from similarity of sense. (218; emphasis in original).

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The telephone may enable communication to take place over vast distances, but there is always a price to be paid. In “The Loves of Alonzo and Rosannah,” telephonic love is almost scuppered by Burley’s misrepresentations. In Connecticut Yankee, the identity between sound and meaning, inseparable in unmediated speech, is lost; the telephone literally “confounding” them, making a travesty of the speaker’s words, thus turning one meaning into its opposite. As we have seen of telegraphy, in Bryan and Harter’s studies, telecommunication is here shadowed by the specter of nonsense; for, as Friedrich Kittler puts it, “the very channels through which information must pass emit noise.”67 I have said that telegraphy is an essentially social activity, in which there are always, in varying degrees, qualities of intimacy and copresence between operators. However, an examination of nineteenth-century fiction in which communication technology features has shown that the social relations of these technologies are fraught with antagonisms and misunderstandings. Lying, cheating, and hurting: this is what telecommunications make possible, on a continental scale (and notwithstanding the occasional romance).68 Yet people continued to invest enormous amounts of emotional and ideological energy in concepts such as intimacy, “sympathy,” and interpersonal “magnetism,” as well as more elaborate dreams of social and communicative transparency. Electricity and its technologies were seen as offering explanations of these states, and of providing the means for their perfection. This is the subject of the following chapter.

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CHAP TER

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Sympathy and Reciprocity

Introduction Toward the beginning of A Laodicean, as George Somerset follows the lead of the telegraph wire to Paula Power’s castle, Hardy says that this machine “may be said to symbolise cosmopolitan views and the intellectual and moral kinship of all mankind.”1 This kinship forms a favorable contrast with the “stolid antagonism to the interchange of ideas” and “deadly mistrust of one’s neighbour” that Hardy identifies with feudalism, represented by the castle itself (ibid.). The historical vision outlined here, with its identification between technological advance and progress—the realization of social harmony, moral virtue, and intellectual sophistication—is a familiar feature of nineteenthcentury thought. Modernity, in this view, will bring an end to antagonism, and hostilities of all kinds will seem increasingly atavistic as the social conditions that cultivate them are consigned to the past. The telegraph was often regarded in this way, as a metonym of modernity and progress. An exciting invention, it was representative of technical modernization in general, but more particularly, and as a means of communication, had a still more immediate role in the “interchange of ideas” that was supposed to lead to the “moral kinship of mankind.” This type of thinking was especially prevalent in the United States, where the rise of telegraphy was seized upon “as a means of recasting all history in terms of the growth of communication. . . .”2 As one observer put it, in what amounts to a paraphrase of Hardy, “It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for an exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth.”3 This “communications” philosophy of history is an important variant of the well-known nineteenth-century progress narrative, embodied in such notions as American “manifest destiny,” the hopedfor “completion” of scientific knowledge, and so on. It is a historic vision in which human progress, and perhaps even human perfection, is

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identified with increased communication, and the technology that makes this possible. The hyperbolic nature of such assertions is, of course, self-evident. As we saw in the previous chapter, A Laodicean is itself involved in undermining the assumption that telegraphy necessarily leads to the abolition of conflict: on the contrary, as Dare shows, it can be used as conflict’s means of prosecution. One can even read the novel as a whole as a veiled critique of the ideology of technological kinship invoked in its opening pages. What concerns me here, however, is not so much the poverty of this philosophy of history as its contours and constituency. What are the hopes and fears invested in it? To what social and epistemological conditions, in addition to its obvious technological base, is it bound? We can begin to answer these questions by analyzing the famous speech about the telegraph delivered by the train-bound Clifford Pyncheon in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851). This episode is typical of the countless paeans to the telegraph delivered in the decades following its invention. It also has the virtue of showing how such celebrations were embedded in a wider set of concerns, not only about communication, but also about the physical world, the cosmos beyond it, and mankind’s place within both. By distinguishing the various threads within Clifford’s discourse, I delineate the principal themes of this chapter.4 Clifford praises the telegraph as an “almost spiritual medium,” which “should be consecrated to high, deep, joyful and holy missions.”5 This association between telegraphy and “holiness” foreshadows more elaborate attempts to combine the two themes we consider later on. Clifford then reflects on the romantic opportunities afforded by the new technology, much as Twain does with the telephone in “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton,” before declaring that thanks to the telegraph, when somebody has died, “his distant friend should be conscious of an electric thrill, as from the world of happy spirits, telling him—“ ‘Your dear friend is in bliss!’ ” (264–65). As an “almost spiritual medium” (264), the telegraph thus foreshadows dialogue with the dead. This aligns telegraphy with the spiritualist movement that swept through America from the late 1840s onward; a movement also alluded to a page earlier, when Clifford speaks of “rapping spirits . . . the messengers of the spiritual world, knocking at the door of substance” (263–64). And it is at this point that Clifford also mentions mesmerism, asking his interlocutor if this will “effect nothing . . . towards purging away the grossness out of human life?” (263). The exact relation between mesmerism and spiritualism,

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and that of telegraphy to both of these phenomena, occupy us later in this chapter. But here, we can note that both, for Clifford, constitute a challenge to the physical world: spiritual messengers, “by knocking at the door of substance”; and mesmerism, by purging the “grossness out of human life.” This brings Clifford back to telegraphy, or rather electricity, its operative principle: electricity;—the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all pervading intelligence! . . . Is it a fact—or have I dreamed it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it? (264)

Whether a dream or not, the idea is clear enough: telegraphy promises the dematerialization of the world, the conversion of “substance” into “thought.” It is possible to guess, even at this early stage, what the “grossness” of human life might consist of: embodiment, or physical incarnation. For it is the idea that human existence might be “purged” of its dependence on the body that gives belief in the paranormal—in “electric thrills” from the “world of happy spirits”—its perennial appeal. Clifford’s imagined “cerebration” of the world is thus linked, in ways that remain to be explored, with a desire to escape the human body. And not only telegraphy, but also mesmerism, spiritualism, and the question of how “matter” and “spirit” relate to one another, are bound up with this desire. In this respect, Clifford’s discourse, however extravagant, delineates a field of phenomena that were intimately related throughout the nineteenth century. Mechanical telegraphy became associated with a range of “spiritual” occurrences, and was often used to explain the latter. This identification was strengthened because both depended (or seemed to depend) upon electricity, whose presence in living organisms, and relationship to magnetism, was under constant review in the physical and life sciences. Peoples’ interest in technology, the occult, and science was also mediated by their interest in human sociality, and their desire for sociality’s perfection. Was this perfection to be found in technology, the supernatural, or as Clifford suggests, in the divine? And if so, how did this entail new ways of thinking about the body? In exploring these questions, I am concerned most with Hawthorne’s fiction, especially The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance (1852). I read these texts alongside those of other writers,

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from Hawthorne’s close friend Herman Melville to Edgar Allan Poe, and the English popular novelist Marie Corelli. Each of these writers rings different variations from a shared set of beliefs and imaginative possibilities. This does not mean that they are all in agreement, or that such beliefs and possibilities did not change within the period. But it is useful to emphasize their similarities, and to draw the implicit as well as explicit connections between them, for it is this that allows the full extent of their investment in electrical thinking to be shown.

God, Reciprocity, and the Spirit of Music Throughout the nineteenth century, as I strive to show throughout this book, electricity possessed an almost inestimable charisma. In part, this was due to its application in new technologies, of which the telegraph was for a while the most prominent example. But before this, it was principally due to the perception that it played some fundamental if obscure role in organic life. This perception was fed by a number of sources, including, as we have seen, Luigi Galvani’s work on what became popularly known as “galvanism.” Galvani himself preferred the term “animal electricity,” which he used to refer to the motive principle of the nervous system he thought he had discovered.6 Though such theories were eventually discredited, the life-sustaining powers of electricity became an article of popular belief, on which all manner of extravagant hypotheses were erected. Some went so far as to consider electricity as the source of life itself, a kind of urkraft from which all organisms were ultimately derived.7 The keen interest and speculation inspired by electricity were also strengthened by developments in the physical sciences. In 1820, Hans Christian Oersted found that electric currents induce a magnetic field, confirming the fundamental relationship between these two “forces” and inaugurating the modern science of electromagnetism.8 Discoveries such as these encouraged the belief that the entire universe, organic and inorganic, was governed by a number of correlated forces, investigation of which would unlock the secrets of the universe.9 Speculation of this kind was also a feature of German Naturphilosophie, which affirmed both the integration of mind with the universe and the fundamental solidarity between all of nature’s manifestations, humankind included.10 As such, it was exemplary of the wider Romantic movement in art and letters, which sought a “kind of double projection of man into nature and nature into man.”11 As phenomena that seemingly held sway over (and within) all forms of life, electricity and magnetism acquired a key “tactical” role in mediating these two terms, and providing their

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affinity with some kind of rationale.12 And, as we have seen in this book’s “Introduction,” via Melville’s account of Hawthorne’s “genius,” it could play this role just as well with respect to the affinities of men with one another. This brings us back to Hawthorne himself, who writes, in The House of the Seven Gables, that “sympathy or magnetism among human beings is more subtle and universal . . . than we think; it exists, indeed, among different classes of organized life, and vibrates from one to another” (174). This vibration of magnetic energy among life forms is thus equivalent, in human beings, to “sympathy” between them: physical law is transcoded as social bond. Hawthorne was fond of this figure of thought, paraphrasing it in Seven Gables as “the whole sympathetic chain of human nature” (141), and again (as we have seen) in “Ethan Brand” (1850) as “the magnetic chain of humanity.”13 I say more about his conception of “sympathy” later, but must first turn to the more general question of how electromagnetic concepts are used to evoke affective solidarity and social alignment. To examine this question, I turn again to Melville’s Pierre (1852), where electromagnetism plays a key role in accounting for the bond between Pierre and his half sister Isabel. On the “first magnetic night” of their acquaintance, Pierre is bound to Isabel by “an extraordinary atmospheric spell—both physical and spiritual.”14 Responsibility for this spell is assigned to Isabel’s “extraordinary physical magnetism,” for to Pierre she seems “to swim in an electric fluid; the vivid buckler of her brow seemed as a magnetic plate” (151). There, too, a “strange electric glory” plays over her hair, causing it to be “suddenly and wovenly illumined” (152, 150). Isabel’s innate electromagnetism is supplemented by a “magical guitar” (150), emitting “unintelligible but delicious sounds” freighted with “infinite significancies” (126).15 By playing this instrument, Isabel relates to Pierre the details of her life story, explaining: “All the wonders that are unimaginable and unspeakable; all these wonders are translated in the mysterious melodiousness of the guitar. It knows all my past history” (125). Isabel’s affinity with her instrument is thus one of reciprocity, involving a projection of human qualities onto the guitar and a corresponding instrumentalization of the human. Recalling her discovery of the guitar, Isabel even tells Pierre that “The guitar was human,” and that she has sung to it in guitar-like accents of her own (125).16 This relation of reciprocal influence between Isabel and her guitar is then extended to that between her and her brother, uniting their sensibilities even when they are physically apart: by touching “the secret monochord within [Pierre’s] breast, by an apparent magic, precisely similar to that which

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had moved the stringed tongue of the guitar . . . The deep voice of the being of Isabel called to him out of the immense distances of sky and air” (173). This confluence of electromagnetic imagery with the figure of the magical guitar thus allows Melville to evoke a relationship in which each party enjoys total knowledge of the other, and where emotional states display the most profound correlation. For Pierre, Isabel has a “marvelous power” over his “most interior thoughts and motions” (151), while for Isabel, Pierre possesses a “heavenly magnet” that draws “all my soul’s interior to thee” (157). While some of Melville’s ideas seem deliberately extravagant—for many readers, Pierre is profoundly subversive of many, if not all of the ideas it contains—they exemplify a widely entertained fantasy of his time, identified by Mark Seltzer as the “fantasy of pure reciprocity.”17 But whereas Seltzer locates this desire for reciprocity in the domain of “bodies and objects” and of “persons and things,” I wish to bring attention to a different set of equations.18 These concern affective states, and approach perfection in the absolute identity of sensation or thought between two or more people. This is the fantasy invoked by Clifford’s speech in Seven Gables, when he speaks of a “world of happy spirits,” and implicit in Hawthorne’s recurrent appeals to the “sympathetic chain of human nature.” Clearly, this is the fantasy circulated by Pierre, and we are now in a position to distinguish its constitutive features. The association between electromagnetism and emotional states should now be sufficiently clear. The potency of such feeling is measured by its projection over “immense distances of sky and air”—much as in Fowler’s theory of love, or Twain’s “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton,” discussed in chapter 1. In Pierre and Isabel’s case, such distance is also an index of emotional solidarity, or subjective correlation. Electricity and magnetism thus mediate between the “intrapsychic” and the “intersubjective,” allowing writers such as Melville and Hawthorne to negotiate between them.19 The role of technology in this mediation, explicit in Clifford’s speech, is more obliquely registered by Isabel’s guitar, foregrounding a dialectic between innate potencies and technological supplements, each depending on electromagnetism. This dialectic, too, is found in many versions of the fantasy of perfect reciprocity (just as it is in Twain’s theory of “mental telegraphy,” discussed in chapter 1). Isabel’s guitar, meanwhile, focuses attention on the role of music in this fantasy, and here Melville’s account demands further scrutiny. The sounds of this guitar are pregnant with “infinite significancies” that are “delicious,”

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yet “unintelligible.” The delicacy of this sound and the delight it inspires are somehow bound up with its evocation of things beyond comprehension. Here, Melville’s vision of reciprocity is distinguished by a preference for intuition over intellection; an intensity of feeling that bypasses, and is superior to, cognitive reflection. Music thus sustains a desire for “significancies” without signifiers, an argument pioneered by Schopenhauer, and echoed in Nietzsche’s contention that “music cannot be exhaustively interpreted through language, because it symbolically refers to the primal contradiction and the primal suffering within the primal Oneness, and thus symbolizes a sphere beyond and prior to all phenomena.”20 We can dispense with this reference to “contradiction” and “suffering,” but retain the link between music and the ineffable, which is also here primal; essential but unspeakable.21 Melville gestures at this unspeakable realm throughout Pierre, whose subtitle (The Ambiguities), of course, refers to the “ever-creeping and condensing haze of ambiguities” within it (151). The presence of magical guitars, sublime and unearthly music, and irresistible electromagnetic forces in the novel are thus all part of an attempt to conjure an atmosphere of wonder before hidden, but ubiquitous and primordial powers. The very vagueness with which Melville handles electromagnetic imagery is therefore motivated; functioning in the description of Isabel and Pierre’s relationship as a kind of “explanation that is not one,” since this, and perhaps nothing that really matters, can finally be explained. And the proper name for something that explains everything, but cannot itself be explained, of course, is “God.” There are a number of references to the divine in Pierre—late in the novel, for example, Pierre feels that “some strange heavenly influence was near him” (337–38)—but nothing resembling a fully blown theological system. This is not, however, for lack of precedent: throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a string of writers built such systems around precisely the sort of electromagnetic phenomena Pierre so luridly describes.22 For a prime fictional example of this, we can turn to Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds (1886). Unlike, perhaps, Pierre, this novel has the virtue of expressing beliefs about which its author is palpably sincere.23 It was also, by way of further contrast, astonishingly successful, launching a lifetime of popular (if not critical) success in which its author sold some 100,000 copies of her books per year.24 For both these reasons, it is perhaps an even better document than Melville’s novel for showing how passionately fantasies of reciprocity were invested in throughout the period. By examining this novel, we can return to the interlocking

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subjects of how people “feel together,” how technology helps them to do so, and how this is associated with music. A Romance of Two Worlds is a monument to the pan-electricism of the nineteenth century. It presents a cosmology in which electricity is simultaneously the seat of divinity, the bearer of messages, and a medicinal agent. The novel itself consists of a putatively authentic memoir, written by an unnamed female musician. At the start of the book, she is attempting to recover from some obscurely defined nervous malady. This condition brings her to the attention of Cellini, a charismatic artist, who in turn introduces her to Heliobas, therapist, mystic, and all-round sage. In Cellini’s words, Heliobas is a “physical electrician,” who owes his therapeutic power to an “electric creed” imparted to him by divine agencies (95, 307; emphasis in original). As Heliobas later explains, “Each one of us walks the earth encompassed by an invisible electric ring—wide or narrow according to our capabilities. Sometimes our rings meet and form one, as in the case of two absolutely sympathetic souls” (149). Since he is endowed with especially wide capabilities, the healer is able to cultivate relations of “sympathy” at will, and it is from this that his therapeutic powers derive. Heliobas’s techniques rely to some extent on the electric properties of the nervous system, here described—as was then conventional, as we see in chapter 4—on telegraphic lines: “wires on which run the messages of thought, impulse, affection, [and] emotion” (69). Elsewhere, Corelli refers approvingly to use of electricity within contemporary medicine (69), but in fact her true interests lie not with this but with electricity’s thought-bearing properties. As Cellini explains, one gauge of Heliobas’s power is his ability, without speaking, to “suggest his own thoughts to other people who are perfect strangers, and cause them to design and carry out certain actions in accordance with his plans” (94). This is the “occult” power utilized by Vanamee in Frank Norris’s The Octopus, known as telepathy by Corelli’s contemporaries in the Society for Psychical Research (and Freud), and referred to as “mental telegraphy” by Twain—all of which we have discussed. But whereas Twain, as we saw, believes these powers to be “as common as dining,” Corelli has no such desire to relegate them to the everyday. Her concern is rather with the “other” world, to which only very privileged mortals may gain access. This brings us back to the divine, from which all of Heliobas’s powers are derived. The ninth chapter of the Romance is called “The Electric Creed,” and consists of a pamphlet written by Heliobas on the “Electric Principle

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of Christianity” (307). This explains God as a “Shape of pure Electric Radiance,” at the center of “the Electric Circle of the Universe, from whence are born all worlds” (307, 308). Unfortunately for humankind, the earth lies at a very great distance from the center of the universe, a distance equivalent to that between “America and Europe before the Atlantic Cable was laid” (312). However, as this simile implies, God has abridged this cosmic distance in a manner analogous to man, by constructing a de facto telegraph to the earth, allowing “messages of goodwill [to] flash under the waves, heedless of . . . storms” (312). This “telegraph” is none other than Christ, whose healing powers are accordingly explained by the fact that his “body [is] charged with electricity. Thus He was easily able to heal sick and diseased persons by a touch or a look” (312, 316).25 The Holy Ghost is likewise “an ever-flowing current of the inspired working Intelligence of the Creator” (318). And though Heliobas is not himself God- or Christ-like, his healing and telepathic powers are obviously divine in inspiration. Indeed, as Corelli appears to suggest, they are a form of prayer. Corelli constructs this theory in order to “prove” the solidarity between Christianity and modern science. Accordingly she, or rather Heliobas, cites passages from the New Testament only the latest electrical knowledge can (supposedly) explain. Thus, “It can be proved from the statements of the New Testament that in Christ was an Embodied Electric Spirit. From first to last His career was attended by electric phenomena” (315; emphasis in original). These include Christ’s healing of the sick, his walking on the sea, and the resurrection, all of which are seen as “electric” in more or (typically) less convincing ways. Among initiates, these phenomena are echoed in a particular form of experience that Corelli wants to gather under the sign of divine sanction. This, in turn, represents a further variant on the fantasy of perfect reciprocity. Toward the end of the novel, Heliobas tells the narrator that she will find the exact counterpart of your own soul, dwelling also in human form, and you will have to impart your own force to that other soul, which will, in its turn, impart to yours a corresponding electric impetus. There is no union so lovely as such an one [sic.]—no harmony so exquisite; it is like a perfect chord, complete and indissoluble. (410)

Here, Corelli adumbrates what Melville says of Pierre and Isabel, down to the importance placed on music. Again, mutually adjusted individuals are bound together in a perfect union, regulated by electric

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energy: interpersonal reciprocity is presented as a sublime economy of force. However, Corelli goes further than Melville, claiming that there are “beings in the very air that surrounds us, invisible to ordinary human eyes, yet actually akin to us, with a closer relationship than any tie of blood known on earth” (180; my emphasis). What Corelli seems to have in mind is a sort of “über-reciprocity”; an experience so precious, and a type of communication so pure, that it can be only found in religious experience. And again, this experience is bound up with communications technology. Pondering these “beings in the very air,” the narrator reflects: “Granting human electricity to exist, why should not a communication be established, like a sort of spiritual Atlantic cable, between man and the beings of other spheres and other solar systems?” (221) This hope is realized when the narrator makes a spiritual journey to the center of the universe, the climax of her initiation to Heliobas’s circle of electrical initiates. Finding herself at length in the “Last [electric] Circle” before heaven, she is joined by “Beautiful creatures in human shape,” who whisper “messages as brief as telegrams which must be listened to with entire attention and acted upon at once, or the lesson is lost and may never come again” (257, 258). And here, the truth of Corelli’s fantasy finally reveals itself. Pure reciprocity, in the temporal realm at least, is an impossibility, albeit a “necessary” one—a chimera that she and her contemporaries were condemned to pursue. These telegraphic messages, whispering such precious truths, present a vision of absolute communicative transparency, where the gap between participants has all but disappeared. What Melville designates as “ambiguity” is thus effectively erased. And yet, folded into this fantasy is its constitutive negation, its dialectical shadow; for such messages are also infinitely fragile, their appearance coextensive with their extinction. Fantasies of reciprocity, then, arise in part because communication technologies stimulate a desire that they cannot satisfy. They promise absolute intimacy, social peace and semantic transparency, without noise, antipathy and misunderstanding. However, as we saw in the last chapter, the latter are precisely what such technologies cultivate. Fantasies of reciprocity thus submit machines to an idealizing process of “self-overcoming,” in which their desirable features are displaced onto an imaginary plane where they are unimpeded by technical or sociologistical constraints. This need for machines to be “better” than they really are therefore explains why, in such fantasies, they must acquire supplements: divinity, in the case of Corelli; or “magic,” in the case of Pierre. Enough has now been said of reciprocity, and the generic features of the fantasies invested in it. I conclude this section with some final

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reflections on Corelli’s novel. We have seen that divinity, and communication with it, are compared to the transatlantic telegraph. On another occasion, the narrator argues that “prayers travel exactly as sound travels through the telephone” (290). The association between God and technology does not stop here, for Heliobas’s house, a house of God, is also a house of gadgets. These range from the “electric bell” on his door (103), to “a musical instrument worked by electricity” (137), to another (an organ, “the bellows of which were worked by electricity”) that is “peculiarly sweet in tone, the ‘vox humana’ stop especially producing an entrancingly rich and tender sound” (173). This proliferation of devices is a function of Corelli’s determination to emphasize the sheer good of electricity on every possible occasion. However, the “ ‘vox humana’ stop” on the electric organ deserves closer occasion, for here we find a parallel to the magical guitar in Pierre, where a “technologized” subject is answered by an anthropomorphized piece of technology. And again, this leads us back to music, which in A Romance, as in Pierre, is used as a figure for states of bliss that lie beyond rational contemplation. Following some sorcery from Heliobas, the narrator hears a music transcendentally lovely, but unlike any music I had ever heard. There were sounds of delicate and entrancing tenderness such as no instrument made by human hands could produce; there was singing of clear and tender tone, and of infinite purity such as no human voice could be capable of. I listened, perplexed, alarmed, yet entranced. Suddenly I distinguished a melody running through the wonderful air-symphonies—a melody like a flower, fresh and perfect. Instinctively I touched the organ and began to play it; I found I could produce it note for note . . . (182)

All music—and, in fact, all art, for which this provides the paradigm— is of divine origin, as Heliobas goes on to explain. Musicians do not create music at all, they are merely its conduits: [i]t is a bad sign of poet, painter, or musician, who is arrogant enough to call his work his own. It never was his, and never will be. It is planned by a higher intelligence than his, only he happens to be the hired labourer chosen to carry out the conception; a sort of mechanic in whom boastfulness looks absurd; as absurd as if one of the stonemasons working at the cornice of a cathedral were to vaunt himself as the designer of the whole edifice. (183)

The pious musician, in other words, must become a medium. She (or he) produces nothing, but is merely the agent of music’s reproduction,

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the vehicle of an absent agency. And it is true that such artists resemble “hired labourer[s],” for we have met just such persons via Bryan and Harter’s studies in chapter 2. Corelli’s narrator, sitting at her keyboard, bears a marked resemblance to the professional telegrapher, whose productive life, like the artist’s, is a process of endless mediation, circulating messages that originate elsewhere. “[S]piritual communion with the unseen sources of harmony” (299), as Corelli calls it, is thus nothing other than a religiously inspired valorization of the telegraphic work-regime, which, endowed with divine significance, now leads not to boredom but to ecstasy. Once again, the most liberating experiences are not opposed to, but derive from, “automatism”: the effortless or involuntary operation of electrical machines.

Mediums, Mesmerists, and “Sympathy” Now that musicians and telegraphers have been identified as mediums, it is time to look again at this category of person, and some other of its most significant manifestations in nineteenth-century culture. Perhaps the most famous is the spiritualist medium, who emerged, along with modern spiritualism itself, in the United States in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.26 Spiritualist mediums acted as intermediaries between the living and the dead. One could not choose to become one, as mediumship did not depend on a procurable set of skills; indeed, mediums’ essential qualities were passivity, and a more or less indiscriminate though keen sensitivity to external impressions. They were usually (though not always) women, whose relative docility, when compared to men, was more or less assumed by all concerned. Other qualities supposed to be congenial to mediumship included youth, naivety, and physical infirmity; the “very qualities,” as Ann Braude writes, “that rendered women incompetent when judged against masculine norms.”27 The spiritualist medium thus bore a pronounced resemblance to Corelli’s musician—also female, and also suffering from physical enervation—though oddly not to Bryan and Harter’s decidedly more (or more self-consciously) “masculine” professional telegraphers.28 The communicative powers of spiritualist mediums in fact evoke telegraphy itself, and indeed it is from this technology that spiritualism as a whole seems to have derived much of its inspiration.29 By the time of spiritualism’s first stirrings in 1848, Samuel Morse’s telegraph had been operating for several years. By proving that messages could be received from remote and invisible sources, it fulfilled one of the essential preconditions of spiritualist belief, for this

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was precisely the possibility on which contact with the dead was predicated. Spiritualists frequently drew attention to this fact when debating with skeptics, arguing that telegraphy, before its invention, had seemed no less fantastic.30 The movement’s literature, furthermore, “ran over with mechanical images,” and one of its most prominent theorists, John Murray Spear, called his hypothetical system of divine government the “spiritual telegraph.”31 The dead themselves owed their very mode of expression to telegraphy, the sequence of “raps” or knocks on wooden surfaces made by the earliest spirits clearly echoing—literally, as it were—the staccato soundings of the telegraph needle.32 Another reason for the association of telegraphy with spiritualism was its dependence on electricity, itself identified as a likely conduit through which the dead might speak.33 And in this respect, spiritualism drew not only on telegraphy, but also on the older tradition of mesmerism or “animal magnetism.”34 This first flourished in eighteenthcentury France before spreading across the rest of Europe and into North America in the early decades of the nineteenth century.35 This was, of course, the doctrine alluded to by Cave Johnson during the first congressional debate over Samuel Morse’s mooted telegraph in 1843, and again by Clifford Pyncheon in Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables. Since mesmerism had a considerable influence on much electrical thought and writing, including that of Hawthorne, it is worth briefly considering the ideas of its founder. Mesmerism owes its name to Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), a Viennese medical student whose postgraduate research concerned the supposed gravitational origins of disease.36 There was, Mesmer argued, an invisible and imponderably fine fluid through which all planetary and sublunary bodies moved: this was “animal magnetism,” a subtler and more pervasive form of mineral magnetism. By manipulating this fluid, first by using magnets and then by simply moving his hands, Mesmer found that he could induce “crises” in his patients, and thereby cure all manner of ailments. (These “crises” often coincided with unusual psychological states, such as clairvoyance.) All diseases, he therefore reasoned, resulted from an imbalance in the patient’s magnetism, and the mesmeric cure, accordingly, worked by restoring this fluid to its ideal state. This was effected by applying the innate magnetism of the memerist—known as the “operator”—to that of the patient—known as the “subject”—a process of alignment known as rapport (see figure 3.1). According to Henri F. Ellenberger, Mesmer may have derived this term from contemporary experiments in which electric current was passed around chains of people holding hands: the very experiments, as we have

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Figure 3.1 “Animal Magnetism. The Operator Putting His Patient into a Crisis.” Engraving by Daniel Dodd, 1802. Wellcome Library, London

seen, alluded to in Melville and Hawthorne’s respective accounts of “genius” and “vital warmth.”37 Psychological interaction was thus understood as a mode of physical contact, and it was this transition from physis to psyche that the idea of a superfine fluid was intended to explain.38 It is in Mesmer, then, and the tradition he founded, that we find the ultimate source for Hawthorne’s metaphors of sociality, his

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“magnetic chains of humanity.” Throughout this tradition, social bonds are rooted in physical law. There is, however, one further tradition that must be considered before returning to these metaphors. This is the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, in which the concept of “sympathy” plays a crucial role, and whose influence on American literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has attracted much critical attention in recent years.39 For Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), a key source in much of this criticism, sympathy is the capacity to reproduce in one’s own person the emotions one perceives in others.40 The concern for others this generates is said to lie at the root of moral conduct and social life more generally. Such critics have rightly drawn attention to the influence of such ideas on Hawthorne.41 Others, meanwhile, have discussed his interest in mesmerism.42 But rarely has anyone asked how these two interests might coalesce, despite what we have seen to be the central importance of electromagnetism and mesmerism in Hawthorne’s thinking on sociality, and indeed, within his own account of “sympathy” itself.43 This oversight is all the more unfortunate as it risks obscuring Hawthorne’s interest in coercive forms of sociality, worlds apart from those visions of communal “bliss” evoked by Clifford Pyncheon. For in fact, as I argue later in this chapter, perhaps the most important thing about electromagnetism and mesmerism in Hawthorne’s fiction—the thing that really “fits” them for his purposes—is their provision of a common vocabulary for both these “modes” of sociality, and a conceptual set of tools for understanding their relationship. We will appreciate this all the better for another look at Melville.

From “Sympathy” to Slavery In a letter to Richard Henry Dana Jr. of 1850, first considered in chapter 1, Melville recalls being “welded” to his correspondent by a “Siamese link of affectionate sympathy.” In Moby Dick (1851), the book Melville was writing at the time, this trope is recapitulated in a famous passage where Ishmael is bound to Queequeg by an “elongated Siamese ligature.”44 This bond (in fact, a rope) is then imagined as extending to humanity at large, in a passage that recalls the “magnetic chains” of Hawthorne—another of Melville’s correspondents (and the person to whom Moby Dick, in fact, is dedicated): I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals. (Ibid.)

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But whereas the letter to Dana suggests an essentially benign view of such “connexions,” Ishmael rather worries about their costs, reflecting: “another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death” (ibid.). And this, of course, is pretty much what happens. Through his relentless pursuit of the white whale, Moby Dick, Ishmael’s commander, Captain Ahab, launches himself and his crew into a “disaster” none but Ishmael will survive. Notwithstanding Ishmael’s affectionate links with Queequeg, the crewmembers pay a mortal price for their “connexion.” It is significant then, to say the least, that in describing Moby Dick himself, Ahab should call the whale “a magnet,” and that in describing Ahab, Ishmael should refer to the “fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life” (340, 141). For in fact, Ahab’s entire career in the novel is—like Christ’s, in A Romance of Two Worlds—“attended by electric ” (and, we might add, magnetic) “phenomena.”45 Nowhere is this more apparent than in those scenes where Ahab asserts dominance over his crew, which draw heavily on mesmerism.46 This has profound implications for the more benign views on sociality set out in this chapter—and, indeed, throughout this book. Melville had, in fact, a career-long preoccupation with what he, in Typee (1846), calls “the power that a mind of deep passion has over feebler natures.”47 This “power” takes, broadly speaking, two characteristic forms in his fiction: one connected to oratory or rhetoric, the other to nautical or military rank; both are frequently configured via electricity and magnetism. Thus, in Typee, a speaker produces an “electric” effect upon his audience, while in White-Jacket (1850), “[o]ne large brain and one large heart” are said to be “sufficient to magnetise a whole fleet or an army.”48 But it is in Moby Dick that these two forms of power converge, Ahab standing both for the persuasive power of oratory and the “official” power of nautical command. And it is here, too, that Melville takes an explicit lead from mesmerism, as in the following description of Ahab’s “ascendancy” over his first mate, Starbuck: Starbuck’s body and Starbuck’s coerced will were Ahab’s, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck’s brain; still he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his captain’s quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from it. (176)

Starbuck is in fact, as this suggests, the one crewmember to consistently oppose his captain’s quest. Yet Ahab’s “magnet” is of sufficient strength to force his acquiescence nonetheless. It is then, paradoxically, the very

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fact of Starbuck’s opposition that marks the full extent of Ahab’s power. Others may be “coerced” more thoroughly, but only Starbuck is in such a way that he is turned against his very “soul.” This line of thought is extended elsewhere in Melville’s fiction. In The Confidence Man (1857), for example, a character likens himself to a ship “sailing by a magnetic rock,” and so “cav[ing] in with acquiescence.”49 In Billy Budd (1891; pub. 1924), Claggart’s “mesmeristic glance” makes Billy stand “like one impaled and gagged.”50 So while in Pierre, Melville uses electromagnetism to represent intersubjective reciprocity, he uses it almost everywhere else to represent intersubjective hierarchy, with its contrasting states of mastery and domination.51 Mesmerism is, moreover, bound up with this shift of emphasis. To see this shift negotiated, we must now turn to the literature of mesmerism itself, via Melville’s compatriot James Stanley Grimes (1807–1903).52 Like Melville—and even more, as we see, like Hawthorne—Grimes’s understanding of mesmerism, and the electromagnetic ideas within it, is bound up with the concept of “sympathy,” which (like Hawthorne himself, and Adam Smith)he places at the center of his theory. Grimes proceeds from the assumption that the human nervous system works like an electric circuit, describing the effect of operators upon their subjects as a form of “induction.”53 He then argues that a “natural tendency” causes the mental states of mesmerists to be induced, or reproduced in their patients. “[T]his type of induction,” he explains, “is denominated sympathy, or same condition” (149; emphasis in original). This sympathy is sometimes “so perfect that the very same ideas, thoughts, images, colours, forms, and sounds, which occupy the mind of the operator, are made to occupy the mind of the subject” (163). This interpenetration of minds, at its most perfect, is reminiscent of Isabel’s ability, with the aid of her guitar, to “tell” Pierre her life story. But this comparison is almost immediately subverted by Grimes’s insistence that sympathy must be considered in the context of a concept of his own: “credenciveness.” This term—apparently derived from credence, or belief in something as true—designates a particular faculty, “the impulse to act upon testimony or assertion” (154). A sort of primordial will to believe, credenciveness is linked to sympathy by what would now be called altruism; for it is “a social impulse, and every social impulse gives a tendency to act with reference to others, and for the benefit directly or indirectly of others” (155; emphasis in original). More specifically, credenciveness “is a conforming social propensity. The whole group to which it belongs have this peculiar character, that they all tend to conform to the wishes, feelings, actions, commands, and assertions of others” (ibid.; emphasis in original). A better description

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of Ahab’s crew could scarcely be desired. And with this remark, it becomes clear that reciprocity has given way to something else. In the move from “sympathy” to “credenciveness,” Grimes’s emphasis shifts from states of mutuality, in which influence is shared equally, to states in which whole groups of people are reduced to the most complete obedience, and do not exert any corresponding influence in return. The pure good of mesmerism, for “subjects” at least, now appears somewhat doubtful. For Grimes, “credenciveness” is a cause for celebration: it is our highest faculty, distinguishing “man from the lower animals as much as any impulse, and perhaps more” (156). This is despite the fact that he understands credencive induction as a sort of electromechanical breakdown, resulting from weakness of the subject’s “insulation” (149). In fact, there is even a type of person, the “conforming social,” in whom “the insulation is entirely overcome, so that every motion of the operator is a cause of motion in the subject” (157). And just so that we understand him, Grimes adds that such men become “mere machines in the hands of those whose assertions they believe” (156). For opponents of mesmerism, this was precisely the problem: it amounted to an intolerable violation of the subject’s sovereignty, an imperial occupation of the mind. As one British critic put it, in terms that precisely contradict Grimes’s, mesmerism means, for the subject, “relinquishing every endowment which makes man human . . . a disgusting condition which is characteristic only of the most abject specimens of our species.”54 One does not know what “specimens” this critic has in mind, but for abolitionists, writing in the United States before the Civil War, it was precisely such an abridgment of humanity that constituted slavery. Thus, for Horace Bushnell, slavery extinguishes “every affection that makes life human”; while for William Ellery Channing, the so-called happiness of slaves consists in “giving up the distinctive attributes of a man.”55 These attributes, Channing also says, must be “systematically subdued” if the slave is to become a “manageable, useful tool.”56 Channing’s account of slavery is thus consonant with Grimes’s description of conforming socials, the “mere machines” of those they believe. And if Grimes sees mesmeric susceptibility as the highest human attribute, critics of mesmerism paraphrased Channing, and described it as a form of enslavement. It is this equation between slavery and mesmerism that returns us, finally, to Hawthorne.

Mesmerism and/as Slavery Mesmerism features prominently in both The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, and in each case, is described in terms of

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slavery. In Seven Gables, Alice Pyncheon is mesmerized by Matthew Maule, and so placed “in a bondage more humiliating, a thousandfold, than that which binds its chains around the body” (208). The same scenario recurs in Blithedale, in which Zenobia’s fable of “The Silvery Veil” concludes with its heroine as a “bond-slave” to the “dark Magician” who magnetizes her.57 Significantly, this use of storytelling to frame the equation of slavery and mesmerism is also found in Seven Gables, where the tale of Alice Pyncheon is presented in the form of a manuscript read to Phoebe Pyncheon by Holgrave. This use of a framing narrative allows Hawthorne to hold the equation of mesmerism and slavery “in brackets,” as it were, as if to qualify his own investment in the idea. His next move, however, is to recapitulate each of these narratives at the diegetic level, and so re-posit the equation. Thus, in Seven Gables, Phoebe is herself mesmerized by Holgrave’s narration, while in Blithedale, Priscilla is revealed as the “real life” equivalent of the heroine in Zenobia’s tale, and Westervelt as the equivalent of the “dark Magician.” However, at each of these “second tellings,” the passage from mesmerism to enslavement is forestalled: Holgrave declines to prosecute his advantage over Phoebe out of a “rare and high quality of reverence for another’s individuality” (212), while Priscilla is rescued by Hollingsworth, so retaining her “sanctity of soul” (203). In both cases then, the difference between each rendition of the “same” story discloses precisely what, for Hawthorne, is at stake in mesmerism: the “individuality” of mesmerized subjects; their “sanctity of soul.” This point is reiterated in a famous letter of 1841, where Hawthorne urges his future wife, Sophia Peabody, not to involve herself in mesmeric experiments. If, as he thinks likely, mesmerism consists in the “the transfusion of one spirit into another,” then “the sacredness of an individual is violated by it.”58 This view, he goes on, “is caused by no want of faith in mysteries, but from a deep reverence [for] the soul, and of the mysteries which it knows within itself.”59 The soul, then, is a selfregulating structure whose “mysteriousness” to others is the measure and condition of its sovereignty. Mesmerism aspires toward an illegitimate knowledge of such mysteries, which if successful, destroys the soul’s integrity. This, then, is the peril faced by Phoebe and Priscilla in Hawthorne’s later fictions. It would be easy, on this account, to label Hawthorne’s attitude to mesmerism as one of simple “disapproval.” However, such ethical objections do not rule out an interest in mesmerist ideas, or even an adherence to them: rather, as Samuel Chase Coale indicates, Hawthorne found mesmerism “as psychologically accurate as it was

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morally repellent.”60 This might best be seen from the revised conception of the soul offered in The Blithedale Romance. Here, Coverdale suggests that it is insufficient to think of the soul as a monadic, autonomous structure, along the lines set out in Hawthorne’s letter to Sophia Peabody. In truth, the soul is always, by definition, self-estranged: Our souls, after all, are not our own. We convey a property in them to those with whom we associate, but to what extent can never be known, until we feel the tug, the agony, of our abortive effort to resume an exclusive sway over ourselves. (194)

This paradox, whereby the soul is both “ours” and “not our own,” is a necessary consequence of sociality. The soul must thus be reconceived as both the inalienable kernel of our individuality and a property distributed throughout the totality of social relations into which we enter. Any attempt to regain full possession of our own souls is accordingly doomed to failure, because it is in the very nature of souls to assign themselves to others.61 We are thus returned to what Hawthorne calls the “sympathetic chain of human nature,” and the “magnetic chain of humanity”: formulae that designate an intrinsic sociality, constitutive of humanity as such. What must now be explained is how mesmerism, to which Hawthorne is hostile, can be reconciled with “sympathy,” in which he invests great value. If mesmerism violates the sanctity of soul, how is it to be distinguished from “normal” sociality, in which the soul is always-already annexed by others? The problem emerges, of course, because Hawthorne’s metaphors of benign sociality are derived from electromagnetism, on which the discourse of mesmerism itself depends. In explaining “sympathy,” in other words, he is drawing on the same conceptual resources as the practice he strongly “disapproves” of, and applying them in an area where his ethical and aesthetic commitments are at their greatest. This could, of course, be attributed to a simple inconsistency in Hawthorne’s thinking, of momentary interest, but of no great consequence. One can do better, however, by crediting this paradox with a “positive” theoretical status. Mesmerism, on this reading, establishes the “truth” of human sociality, albeit obscenely. Its obscenity lies not in the fact that it deviates from nature, but in that it penetrates nature too thoroughly, rendering it amenable to instrumental reason. Thus, if we take Hawthorne at his word, it is wrong to see mesmerism as a corruption of “normal” sociality: on the contrary, “normal” sociality is merely a diluted form of mesmerism. This perhaps surprising conclusion forces us to revise our estimation of “sympathy.” In Grimes’s account, as we saw, this term assumes a

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somewhat sinister coloration, designating the subject’s incapacity to insulate himself or herself from outside influences. In The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne moves toward a similar position. Significantly, he does so in describing Blithedale, a socialist community along Fourierist lines dedicated to the deliberate cultivation of mutuality and harmonious sentiment. Reflecting on his disenchantment with life in this community, Coverdale explains that it is precisely because of the sympathy between its members that their life together becomes increasingly intolerable: It was incidental to the closeness of relationship, into which we had brought ourselves, that an unfriendly state of feeling could not occur between any two members, without the whole society being more or less commoted and made uncomfortable thereby. This species of nervous sympathy (though a pretty characteristic enough, sentimentally enough, and apparently betokening an actual bond of love between us) was yet found rather inconvenient in its practical operation; mortal tempers being so infirm and variable as they are. If any one of us happened to give his neighbor a box on the ear, the tingle was immediately felt, on the same side of everybody’s head. (139)

Enmity, where arising, becomes impossible to contain. The very “bond[s] of love” that establish the community’s emotional cohesion ensure the contagion of “unfriendly” feelings, which swiftly invade every relationship. What is found wanting, Coverdale implies, is actually indifference between community members, for when “sympathy” is ubiquitous, social relations become increasingly oppressive. This reference to “nervousness” indicates a new cluster of ideas, hitherto passed over in our discussion. These concern the gendered nature of mesmeric relations, and the way that in Hawthorne, ideas about gender and mesmeric susceptibility are linked to ideas about the body, in sickness and in health. It is to this cluster of ideas that we now turn.

Illness, Intuition, and the Electricity of Young Girls The enslaved parties in Hawthorne’s two fables concerning mesmerism are both women. That women were more susceptible than men to mesmeric influence was an article of faith with most observers, just as in spiritualism, where feminine qualities were regarded as prerequisite for mediums. This association between femininity and receptivity to external influence is posited again in Blithedale, with Hollingsworth’s declaration that the office of “woman” is “that of the Sympathizer” (122).

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As we have just seen, sympathy and slavery form part of a continuum in Hawthorne’s thinking, making Zenobia’s own description of woman as “an hereditary bond-slave” (217) more congruent with Hollingsworth’s than it might at first appear. It is Westervelt, however, who provides this equation between femininity and sympathetic powers with a more explicit rationale. Referring to Priscilla (whom of course, he attempts to enslave), Westervelt tells Coverdale: “She is one of those delicate, nervous young creatures, not uncommon in New England, and whom I suppose to have become what we find them by the gradual refining away of the physical system, among your women”(95). It is the weakness of female bodies then, this “refining away of the Physical system,” to which one must ascribe the “delicacy” of New England women.62 This delicacy encompasses their “nervous” sensitivity, and potential to be mesmerized; their potential, that is, to both feel sympathy and be dominated. Priscilla, as it happens, fully justifies this description of her physical aspect, being of a “wan, almost sickly hue” (27). This enervated bearing, however, is complemented by a particular sort of vitality, manifesting itself in a “great exuberance of gesture, as is the custom of young girls, when their electricity overcharges them” (60). For young girls to behave as is their custom, then—for their very “girlishness” to become manifest— they must be “overcharged.” A change is hereby wrung from the familiar trope of innate electric energy, as developed by Galvani and his successors. For here, it is as an excess of electricity over and against its human host that one’s gender is revealed. Even when it is their “own,” then, the electricity of girls assumes an invasive, overmastering effect upon them. One sees here, again, the proximity of such thinking to that of Grimes, for whom the credencive subject is distinguished by a want of “insulation.” But a more direct allusion can perhaps be detected to the work of Margaret Fuller. Such an allusion is, after all, not unlikely: Hawthorne’s friendship with Fuller is well documented, and he is widely supposed to have used Fuller as a model for Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance.63 But while Zenobia certainly echoes many of Fuller’s key ideas (in particular, her analysis of female subjugation), it is Priscilla who corresponds better to her “electrical” account of sexual difference. This appears in Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), and represents a kind of “trans-valuation” of contemporary (including mesmerist and spiritualist) accounts of femininity. Thus, she writes: “The especial genius of woman I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.”64 Despite some hard-won recognition of this “genius,” however, this has “not been fairly brought out at any period,” both

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because of the intrinsic limitations placed on women by patriarchy, and because what women do achieve is often misattributed to men (285) Thus, Fuller chastises those who privilege the role of (male) operators in the production of mesmeric states, arguing that whatever good may be derived from such states proceeds “direct from the spirit” of their (female) subjects (286). Notwithstanding this, Fuller subscribes to the contemporary belief in women’s physical fragility, noting that “[s]ickness is the frequent result” of women’s “over-charged existence” (286). And in this respect, of course, she concurs with Blithedale’s male protagonists. Within Blithedale itself, however, the relation between physical enervation and “female” intuition does not become entirely clear until they are made to coincide in a male person. Shortly after arriving at Blithedale, Coverdale is stricken by an illness. Here, he describes his convalescence: there is a species of intuition—either a spiritual lie, or the subtle recognition of a fact—which comes to us in a reduced state of the corporeal system. The soul gets the better of the body, after wasting illness, or when a vegetable diet may have mingled too much ether in the blood. Vapors then rise up to the brain, and take shapes that often image falsehood, but sometimes truth. The spheres of our companions have, at such periods, a vastly greater influence upon our own, than when robust health gives us a repellent and self-defensive energy. Zenobia’s sphere, I imagine, impressed itself powerfully on mine, and transformed me, during this period of my weakness, into something like a mesmerical clairvoyant. (46–47)

Here, against the normal run of things, a man is “mesmerized” by a woman. This is made possible by illness, which feminizes Coverdale by robbing him of “energy.” And, just so that we understand this point, Coverdale leaves his sickbed with the reflection that it is “nonsense and effeminacy to keep myself a prisoner any longer” (58; my emphasis). We can thus add illness to the metonymic chain that runs through Hawthorne’s fiction: slavery (or captivity, figured here as “imprisonment”); femininity; and mesmeric susceptibility. Each of these terms designates modes of subjugation analogous to and sometimes interactive with each other. What must now be added is that for Hawthorne, no less than Fuller, these do not simply indicate deficient modes of being, but are also associated with certain cognitive advantages. “Health,” as George Canguilhem puts it, “is organic innocence. It must be lost, like all innocence, so that knowledge may be possible.”65 Thus, in Hawthorne’s variant on this idea, the ill and the effeminate are compensated for their weakness by accession to otherwise hidden

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forms of knowledge. As Coverdale tells Priscilla—having himself by this time been restored to health—“you have spiritual intimations respecting matters which are dark to us grosser people” (142). These “grosser people,” in the first instance, are men, but the nature of their “grossness” must be further specified. We remember that Coverdale himself has had similar intimations when his soul has got “the better of the body.” Grossness, then, is not to be equated simply with maleness, but more specifically maleness as it is embodied; and, in the final analysis, with embodiment as such. This, after all, is what Clifford, in The House of the Seven Gables, declares that mesmerism and spiritualism are to “purge” from human life: the “grossness” of humanity, and its dependency on “matter.” In concluding this chapter, we must therefore reconstruct Hawthorne’s thinking on embodiment, and more fundamentally, on materiality itself. This, in due course, will lead us away from Hawthorne and on to other writers for whom electricity and mesmerism herald a release from the frustrations of embodiment, and eventually, reunion with God.

Ether versus Flesh Taking leave of Blithedale, Coverdale pays a valedictory visit to the pigsty.66 His queasy reaction tells us much about the problematic status of embodiment in Hawthorne. His description of the pigs runs: the very symbols of slothful ease and sensual comfort . . . They were involved, and almost stifled, and buried alive, in their own corporeal substance. The very unreadiness and oppression, wherewith these greasy citizens gained breath enough to keep their life-machinery in sluggish movement, appeared to make them only the more sensible of the ponderous and fat satisfaction of their own existence. (143–44)

What Coverdale finds nauseating is the pigs’ “satisfaction,” their enjoyment of their own physicality.67 Significantly, this enjoyment is rendered through a rhetoric of mortality: “buried alive, in their own corporeal substance,” they are buried alive in themselves. This understanding of the body as a kind of grave suggests that embodiment itself is essentially cadaverous, making the corpse both its “truth” and quintessence. It is in this vein that Walter Benjamin writes: “if it is in death that the spirit becomes free . . . it is not until then that the body too comes properly into its own.”68 Only in death, then, is the “absolute materiality” of the body made manifest.69 The very vitality of Blithedale’s pigs paradoxically aligns them with mortality. So completely are they identified with their bodies that their very lives become a sort of “living death.”

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The issues at stake here become clearer when considering another episode concerning the fleshiness of animals. Entering a saloon, Coverdale comes upon a sequence of still-lives, all representing cuts of meat (175–76). What is significant here is the favorable impression these arouse in contrast with the pigs. Each piece of meat, Coverdale explains, is so perfectly imitated, that you seemed to have the genuine article before you, and yet with an indescribable, ideal charm; it took away the grossness from what was fleshiest and fattest, and thus helped the life of man, even in its earthliest relations, to appear rich and noble, as well as warm, cheerful, and substantial. (176)

The “charm” of these paintings, then, derives from their suppression of “gross” materiality. As representation, meat becomes “spirit”—“and no longer the substance which we deemed it.” Clifford’s Pyncheon’s words, recalled in this context, bring us back to the conjunction of spiritualism and mesmerism. For it is mesmerism, of course, that Clifford applauds for purging the “grossness out of human life.” In our present context, however, this is precisely the function of painterly representation. Bearing this in mind, let us look in detail at representation itself, starting with the still-life genre. What this aspires to, as Seltzer puts it, is a “rewriting of the natural as the cultural, [an] aesthetic rewriting of the body and its needs.”70 This “rewriting,” however, is strictly coefficient with the realism of the painting; its fidelity to the object as it is. By copying nature, then, that very nature is sublated, and its objects recuperated with a purely “ideal” status. The image must thus oppose itself to nature in order to resemble it—a notion advanced by Hawthorne himself in The Marble Faun, where Miriam says of artists: “we think it necessary to put ourselves at odds with Nature, before trying to imitate her.”71 Elsewhere in the novel, the sculptor Kenyon makes a related claim, saying that in “the study of my art, I have gained many a hint from the dead, which the living never could have given me” (182). There is something in the living, then, that thwarts their own mimesis. Not until death is the body made amenable to representation. This returns us to the subject of corpses, of which Blithedale offers us an actual example: Zenobia’s drowned body, “the marble image of a deathagony” (235). Here, in a neat inversion of Kenyon’s formula, art (a marble image) becomes the paradigm for death.72 This affinity between corpses and the work of art hardly seems fortuitous, when we consider death and representation as two responses

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to a single imperative in Hawthorne’s work: that of purging the grossness out of human life. Recalling Benjamin’s observation that the body “comes into its own” in death, one should now emphasize the other side of his claim: in death, the spirit becomes free. Spirit, in other words, is abstracted from matter, just as the image is abstracted from nature in Hawthorne. Zenobia’s body, which is itself an image, does not in fact contradict this conclusion, but confirms it through its subsequent fate: as Coverdale reports, at the spot where she is buried, “the grass grew all the better . . . for the decay of the beautiful woman who slept beneath” (243–44). The corpse returns to nature, then, and ceases to be art. And in a final flourish, Coverdale confirms that it is spirit and not the body that emerges from death as the supreme avatar of value: “It is because the spirit is inestimable, that the lifeless body is so little valued” (244). For one last tilt at this complex of ideas, let us return to Coverdale’s early illness. Here, we remember, the “soul gets the better of the body,” as it may also do when “a vegetable diet” mingles “too much ether in the blood.” In such a state, images are conjured in the form of “vapors” rising to the brain. That abstinence from meat should be a further source of images suggests another way to look at Coverdale’s contrasting attitudes to pigs and still-life paintings. Because they are their bodies, and nothing more, the pigs are on the side of matter and death. But as spirit and art, the flesh takes on an “ideal charm,” redeeming it for “the life of man.” We now discover that a vegetarian diet presents an alternative route to the realm of ideas, but that it represents a still more radical intervention. For by mixing “ether” with the blood, this diet qualifies the body in its own materiality. “Corporeal substance” now becomes the means of representation, and no longer simply its object. The body is “ideal” then, not only because it is an image of itself, but also, more fundamentally, because it is the source from which images originate. We are now in a position to specify the identity of “ether” within this framework of contending principles. It is neither flesh nor spirit, but both at the same time. It is ideal matter, not in the sense of having a purely hypothetical existence, but more fundamentally, because it is the matter of ideas themselves.73 The ethereal, then, designates a realm uniting some apparently disparate phenomena. Vegetarianism, mesmerism, and representation are all aligned within this overarching context: all invoke the ether, and for the very same reason that each applies pressure to the category of matter. In Coverdale’s remarks about the vegetarian diet, then, ether is mingled with the tangible matter of flesh and blood. Likewise, in

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mesmerism, superfine substances are invoked to explain phenomena that otherwise lack an explanatory basis. Representation, meanwhile, is an “etherealization” of material things. The image, if material, is of a different material from the thing represented; it is “ideal” and without “grossness.” What Hawthorne is invoking in each of these cases, I suggest, may be described as “surmateriality.” This term, which I derive from George Bataille, designates matter in a “higher,” subtle form; not opposed to what is spiritual, but itself infused with spirit.74 This category is necessary, as we see, because matter is not something that can simply be repudiated: it must also be recuperated in elevated form. Hawthorne was not alone in pursuing this strategy. But before considering the efforts of others to put this ideal matter on a clear theoretical footing, let us turn to some of the strangely immaterial beings populating Blithedale. This directs our attention to a category of persons discussed in chapter 1: the category of ghosts. In The Blithedale Romance, the prime exemplar of ghostliness is Priscilla. As we have seen, Priscilla’s “sickly hue” makes her an example of female enervation. If to Westervelt, Priscilla’s lack of physical strength is figured as a prelude to spiritual enslavement, it functions somewhat differently in Coverdale’s narration. Here, she is described variously as a “shadow” (125), “a figure in a dream” (168), and as “diaphanous with spiritual light” (129). In the “Faunterloy” chapter (another of those instances in which diegetic action is recapitulated in the guise of a fable), she is not so solid flesh and blood as other children, but mixed largely with a thinner element. [Others] called her ghost-child, and said that she could indeed vanish, when she pleased, but could never, in her densest moments, make herself quite visible. (187)

It is not so much that Priscilla is enfeebled, then—for this implies comparison with a constitutional norm—but rather that her constitution is qualitatively different from this norm, and not the “solid flesh” of which others are made. Though the “thinner element” in this case is not specified, it is clearly analogous to the ether, which we have now defined as the matter of images. Thus, Priscilla is a “shadow” or a “figure” of herself: not an image of a body but the body as an image. Unlike the bodies of pigs, for example, (or the flesh as represented through the art of still-life painting,) Priscilla’s body is intrinsically ideal. Even at its “densest,” it is devoid of grossness. In fact, we must go further, for it perpetually threatens to “vanish”

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altogether, being “never quite visible,” and always on the verge of disappearing. Priscilla can thus be compared with Zenobia, who also becomes an “image” at the moment of her death. But if, in the latter case, death is the prerequisite for the generation of an image, no such fatality is necessary where Priscilla is concerned. She (in this precise sense) is already dead, which explains why it is suitable to refer to her as a “ghost-child.” This leads us on to the other ghosts in Blithedale, whose status concerns the matter they are made of. There are in fact no “real” ghosts in Blithedale, in the conventional sense. Blithedale’s ghosts are rather living ghosts, and the nature of their ghostliness concerns the way they broadcast images of themselves as if they were discarded layers of skin.75 Take Silas Foster, coming in from the rain: “steam arose from his soaked garments, so that the stout yeoman looked vaporous and spectre-like” (18). The effect and its cause are both described as “vaporous,” just like the images arising in Coverdale’s brain during his illness. In the case of Old Moodie, “the wretchedest old ghost in the world,” the reference to images is even more explicit: he is “so very faintly shadowed on the canvass of reality,” says Coverdale, “that I was half afraid lest he should altogether disappear” (179; my emphasis). The ontology of ghosts is thus placed squarely in the realm of representation. However, unlike the “marble images” that sometimes act for Hawthorne as the paradigm of art, ghosts are representations that perpetually erase themselves: thus Fauntleroy, the fabular equivalent of Old Moodie, whose “physical substance . . . melt[s] into vapor” (183). This takes us to the category of matter, whose transubstantiation is rendered concisely here. The conversion of substance into vapor, therefore, can now be defined as a “ghosting” of matter; a virtualization of material form. “Surmateriality,” then, is ghostly, as well as vaporous. Its supreme exemplar, though, is neither ghosts nor vapor, but the mysterious veil worn by Priscilla. This garment, in which she is mesmerized, is supposed “to endow [its wearer] with many of the privileges of a disembodied spirit” (6). It is “without substance,” “impalpable,” and “ethereal,” yet shrouds its wearer “in an impenetrability like that of midnight” (111). The final clause is crucial, as it prevents us from understanding the veil as simply immaterial. It is rather definitely made of something; to wit, a “substance airier than nothing” (115). This astounding formulation pushes matter through the heart of spirit, leaving us with a form of matter more spiritual than spirit itself; more ethereal than “nothing.” Ether, one can finally say, is a version of this matter, as is Priscilla’s body, and that of other “ghosts.” This, then, is the matter that ideas are made of, and ideas in the form of representations.

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It is also, to round off our discussion, the matter of mesmerist and spiritualist phenomena, which is why they are invoked in Clifford’s tirade against the “gross.” But why should such phenomena appear at this historic juncture, and what might their appearance say about history itself ? For there is no doubt that Clifford Pyncheon, at least, identifies the emergence of both mesmerism and spiritualism as historically significant: part of the revelatory process whereby the “world of matter has become a great nerve . . . and no longer the substance which we deemed it.” The vision of the future that Clifford entertains is thus contingent on transcendence of the whole world of substance. The significance of mesmerism, like telegraphy and spiritualism, is to suggest how this might become achievable. Sickliness and ghostliness are therefore to be taken as strangely but emphatically modern phenomena. The surmaterialization of people is meant to be an index of planetary, historic processes. As Coverdale says, summarizing his residence at Blithedale, “It was impossible, situated as we were, not to imbibe the idea that everything in nature and human existence was fluid, or fast becoming so; that the crust of the Earth, in many places, was broken, and its whole surface portentously upheaving” (140). As The Communist Manifesto (1848) famously puts it, “All that is solid melts into air”; and, as José B. Monleón notes, such phraseology was itself very much “in the air” at the time of the Manifesto’s composition.76 Coverdale’s own remarks in this vein are certainly made in a spirit of regret, and are thus to be distinguished from those of Clifford Pyncheon, in spite of their adoption of a similar vocabulary. But despite this difference, both characters share a perception that the category of matter is historically outmoded. Matter, then, is part of a social, as much as natural, order receding from view.

Coda: God’s Body, and the Ultimate Life Hawthorne’s thinking about matter is, of course, not rendered in a systematic treatise on the subject, but mediated by the exposition of character and plot. For this reason, as well as for the intrinsic interest of the texts concerned, I conclude this chapter with a brief analysis of two writers who do provide more systematic treatments of this subject. In so doing, it becomes clear that Hawthorne’s ideas about materiality were not especially idiosyncratic. The two writers in question are Edgar Allan Poe—himself a fiction writer, though hardly an orthodox one—and John Bovee Dods (1795–1872), the one-time universalist minister and “electrical psychologist.”77

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Of all the writers discussed in this book, Dods is perhaps the most enamored of the (supposed) explanatory power of electricity. He first rose to prominence as an American interpreter of mesmerism in the 1840s—becoming so successful that he was invited to give a series of lectures on the subject to the U.S. Senate in 1849. In these lectures, he anticipates Corelli, offering a vision of the cosmos as permeated by divine electric power. Thus, electricity “actuates the whole frame of nature,” and is the “original, eternal material . . . out of which all the tangible substances we see and admire were made.”78 The precise relationship of electricity with “tangible substance” is never very convincingly explained, except insofar as it provides the latter with an ultimate foundation. It follows from this, in Dods’ opinion, that electricity “is the body of God” (85). This body is virtual or ideal, like Priscilla’s body, and the bodies of Blithedale’s other ghosts. Significant here is the fact that God should “have” to be embodied at all, for it would seem easier to envisage Him as entirely immaterial, so as to furnish a clear contrast with mortal beings. But this is not something that Dods can be content with. God must be embodied, so as to explain His omnipresence, only in a way that is not—as Coverdale or Clifford Pyncheon might say—“gross and solid” (86). Hence the conception of a different kind of substance, in this case electricity, like the substances in Hawthorne that are “airier than nothing.” The body, therefore, cannot be done away with. Like the still-life paintings that so appeal to Coverdale, it instead must be invested with an “ideal charm.” This leads us on to Poe, whose extravagant speculations have a Dods-like ring. In “Mesmeric Revelation” (1844), the afterlife, or the “ultimate life,” is revealed to the mesmerized Vankirk.79 In this life, as Vankirk explains, we are divested of the “rudimental body,” but by no means exempted from embodiment (724). Instead, we take possession of an “ultimate body” that “vibrates” in unison with all creation (724–25). This body, unsurprisingly, is materially different from its mortal equivalent, a difference that is clarified by reference to the senses. The mortal senses, Vankirk says, are “adapted to the matter” of which the rudimental body is composed. Our sensory organs, therefore, are “contrivances by which the individual is brought into sensible relation with particular classes and forms of matter, to the exclusion of other classes and forms” (724). These other forms of matter, on the other hand, correspond to that of which the ultimate body is made. In the ultimate life, then the external world reaches the whole body . . . with no other intervention than that of an infinitely rarer ether than even the luminiferous; and to

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this ether—in unison with it—the whole body vibrates, setting in motion the unparticled matter which permeates it. It is to this absence of idiosyncratic organs, therefore, that we must attribute the nearly unlimited perception of the ultimate life. (725)

There is a kind of matter, then, of such exquisite subtlety that living people cannot apprehend it. Since it has no “particles,” it is even rarer than the “ether”; the latter here, again, a concept that finesses that of matter by aligning it with spirit. Dods, incidentally, is close to this opinion, conceding that electricity is “almost unparticled” (69). Poe, correspondingly, sounds a lot like Dods when identifying God as the “perfection of matter” (722). Both writers obviously have high hopes of the afterlife, which for Poe will bring “almost unlimited perception.” Death is thus not the negation of life, but its perfection, greatly enhancing knowledge and sensation. In a similar vein, Dods claims that “dying cannot be a painful process, but one that must afford the greatest pleasure and delight of which we can conceive” (118). Here, he also echoes spiritualism, which in Clifford Pyncheon’s words, sees the afterlife as a “world of happy spirits.” And in this respect, as I have said earlier, Dods can also be aligned with Corelli, for whom electricity is actually divine. Finally, there is a sense in which Poe participates in fantasies of perfect reciprocity. In his prose poem “Eureka” (1848), by far the most exhaustive statement of Poe’s views on physics, the concept of sympathy is invoked once more.80 Every atom, Poe explains, “sympathizes with the most delicate movements of every other atom.”81 This represents “a sympathy so omnipresent, so ineradicable, and so thoroughly irrespective” that it must emanate from these atoms’ “common paternity,” an indivisible God (1286–87). This annexation of the moral concept of sympathy to the physical world of atoms makes matter itself inherently “social.” Here, it is not just mankind that is united by magnetic chains, as in Hawthorne, but the entire universe, at its most fundamental level. Hawthorne’s conceptual trajectory is thus thrown into reverse, for here it is not the social that is grounded in physics, but the physical that is discovered to be social. Perfect reciprocity is now seen as expressing not human but “atomic” affect. Poe goes on in this vein to posit “a desire on the part of Matter . . . to return into the Unity whence it was diffused” (1296). It is because of this diffusion that the world is differentiated into different species, elements, and so forth. However, it is in these very differences that their relations to each other consist. And it is in order to explain the dialectic of difference and relation that Poe introduces his theory of electricity. This, he

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explains, arises “Only where things differ,” before going on to say: “we may as well use the strictly convertible sentence that an attempt to bring together any two differences will result in a development of electricity” (1281–82; emphasis in original). Electricity is thus a function of the “fallenness” of matter; the fact that its original unity has been sundered. However, Poe believes that matter will eventually return to its lost unity. For if “the ultimate design” of God is “that of the utmost possible Relation,” this is not necessarily true for all eternity (1280; emphasis in original). While the “absolute coalition” of matter has so far been prevented, it will be so only “up to a certain epoch,” at which point this coalescence will finally be achieved (ibid.; emphasis in original).

CHAP TER

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Connection and Division

Introduction Shortly before joining Ahab’s crew, in Moby Dick, Ishmael makes a curious offer: “take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.”1 Like Coverdale, Clifford Pyncheon, and many of the other fictional and nonfictional figures considered in the previous chapter, he believes the body to be both less estimable and less essential to him than the “soul.” But in Mardi (1849), published just three years prior to Moby Dick, another of Melville’s characters, Babbalanja, offers a contrary view: “Our souls belong to our bodies, not our bodies to our souls.”2 To illustrate this principle, he recalls the tale of the philosopher Grando, who, like Ishmael, has viewed his body with “sovereign contempt”: seizing a cudgel, he laid across his shoulders with right good will. But one of his backhanded thwacks injured his spinal cord; the philosopher dropped; but presently came to. “Adzooks! I’ll bend or break you! Up, up, and I’ll run you home for this.” But wonderful to tell, his legs refused to budge; all sensation had left them. But a huge wasp happening to sting his foot, not him, for he felt it not, the leg incontinently sprang into the air, and of itself, cut all manner of capers. “Be still! Down with you!” But the leg refused. “My arms are still loyal,” thought Grando; and with them he at last managed to confine his refractory member. But all commands, volitions, and persuasions, were as naught to induce his limbs to carry him home. It was a solitary place; and five days after, Grando the philosopher was found dead under a tree. (505–6)

In response, Babbalanja’s auditor, Media, remarks: “I have heard too, methinks, of what are called reflex actions of the nerves” (507). And it is these, he opines, that explain the story. Not only, then, does this story showcase Melville’s willingness to entertain a range of philosophical positions; it also registers his interest in contemporary physiology.3 For the “reflex action of the nerves” were, in fact, among

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the most hotly debated physiological topics of the day. Effectively “discovered” by Marshall Hall (1790–1857) in 1833, reflex actions were distinguished from other forms of neural activity by their “eccentric” location in the nervous system: their independence from major nervous centers like the spinal cord and brain.4 Whereas other actions were defined as either voluntary, or, where not so, as simple muscular responses to local stimuli, reflex actions were defined as both involuntary, and as extending over large stretches of the nervous system, each of these working in relative autonomy. This, then, is why Grando’s foot seems to take on a life of its own, irrespective of his will. The soul is revealed as both dependent on the body—hence Grando’s death, when the body is damaged—and as strangely incidental to its workings. This episode does not exhaust Mardi’s interest in physiology. Elsewhere, Babbalanja distinguishes the “Cerebrum” from the “cerebellum” (593), notes the experimental application of galvanism to corpses (580), and imagines a Frankenstein-like form of experimentation in which new creatures are assembled from the body parts of those extant (299). But perhaps the most significant of these episodes, for us, finds him again alluding to the nervous system, for here, he takes an explicit lead from electrical technology. In response to Media’s query about the principle of life, he asks: “What keeps up the perpetual telegraphic communication between my outpost toes and digits, and that domed grandee up aloft, my brain?” (538). And though his own answer to this question is extraphysiological (“God”), it draws on a much-cited contemporary analogy between the electric telegraph and the nervous system itself.5 According to this analogy, both the telegraph and its organic counterpart brought harmonious and efficient interrelation to the otherwise isolated regions of the “bodies” they served. And since the supposed discovery of electricity within the “animal” and human body—to which Mesmer and Galvani, among others, had contributed—both agencies seemed equally dependent on electricity. Taken together, these two passages from Mardi adumbrate the major themes of this chapter. Babbalanja’s notion of “perpetual telegraphic communication” suggests the connective properties of the nervous system, as well as other agencies (in this case, God; in others blood, or electricity) reckoned as a binding force within the body. Through such agencies, it was believed, the body achieved otherwise unimaginable degrees of internal solidarity. However, as the story of Grando shows, the nervous system could also be invoked to explain division between the body’s constituent parts, as well as that between the body and the soul. Grando’s self-inflicted injury is less important in this respect than it may first appear, for once the idea of reflex action is taken to heart—once it is accounted for in health, as well as

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sickness—the “soul” appears always more or less estranged from the body on which it must nonetheless depend. Connection and division thus represent two aspects of a single object; or, if one prefers, two conceptual lenses through which that object is perceived. Together, they form the basis of what one might call the “neurological imaginary” of the period: a discursive and conceptual resource drawn from and replenished by literary writers and social theorists, no less than neurologists and other scientists.6 As Babbalanja’s references to the telegraph and galvanism show, this imaginary both drew from and replenished many of the forms of electrical thinking considered throughout this book. To examine the range of variations wrung on “connection” and “division,” the chapter addresses a number of less abstract and more historically specific topics. In early sections, I focus on representations of sexuality, and how these were related to health, disease, and the socio-historic pressures widely associated with modernity. Here, too, and in addition to its more or less well-known identification with the nervous system, I consider the rather less well-known identification of electricity with blood, air, and sperm. Subsequent sections consider hypnotism, the explanatory paradigm and practice into which mesmerism was largely assimilated, and the emergence of “dissociative” personality disorder, a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century phenomenon sometimes explained by reference to the telephone. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the writings of Helen Keller, whose interest in the telegraph and other “connective” technologies was conditioned by her enforced experience of intrabodily division; specifically, her loss of sight and hearing. Here, and at various points throughout the chapter, the respective values placed on connection and division turn out to be rather unexpectedly disturbed. For despite its largely “positive” associations, connection was sometimes associated with malign and pathological conditions, especially where these were identified with social change. Conversely, and despite its no less largely “negative” associations, division sometimes appeared as an enabling condition, especially where it afforded intuitions of interpersonal “connection” no bodily division could destroy. I begin, however, by returning for another look at “sympathy.”

The Nineteenth-Century Nervous System (1) As the previous chapter showed, “sympathy” served eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers as a way of both accounting for and

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characterizing social relations. But in a far older tradition, going back at least as far as Galen (c.130–c.200), the term designates the relations the body has with itself.7 Here, “sympathy” is used to describe reciprocal action between the body’s various organs and regions, especially where these are anatomically distinct and possess no obvious functional connection. Because it was used to explain otherwise anomalous interdependencies, this form of “sympathy” was traditionally associated with disease: in illness, it was thought, the body’s sympathies were hyperactively aroused. This belief, in turn, corresponded with a theory of disease as the acceleration of the body’s normal processes; a theory as we see, that became particularly important to nineteenth-and early twentieth-century theorists of neurological disorder. Agents thought responsible for sympathy included blood vessels, nerves, and the humors posited by classical medicine. Over time, however, the nerves were increasingly favored in this regard, especially as the humor theory lost its appeal over the course of the eighteenth century.8 Galvani’s research on “animal electricity” was crucial in this respect, launching a new era of physiological research, largely concentrated on the nervous system. Indeed, the subsequent elaboration of the extent, constituency, and properties of this system represents one of the great collective achievements of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science. Within such science itself, the fact that Galvani’s conclusions eventually proved untenable—in fact, it soon transpired, there was no such thing as “animal electricity”—was ultimately of less significance than the research methodology he pioneered. The experimental application of electricity to the nervous system continued to be of critical importance in mapping the system’s extent long after the expiry of its original rationale.9 Marshall Hall used such techniques in diagnosing nervous injuries, helping to inspire further electrical research by other physiologists.10 The apparatus used in such investigations also continued to influence conceptual developments: as Timothy Lenoir notes, the instruments used to measure nervous activity “sometimes suggested, and on occasion even functioned as explanatory models for the phenomena under investigation.”11 Among the scientists Lenoir discusses is Emil Du Bois-Reymond, whose conception of body as a quasi-industrial “machine,” along with that of Johannes Müller and Hermann Helmholtz, helped underwrite Bryan and Harter’s research on telegraph operators, as we have seen in chapter 2. And it was the telegraph itself, in fact, which provided Du Bois-Reymond with one of his favorite analogies for how the nervous system worked. As he put it in 1851, the brain “receives dispatches from the outermost limits of

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its empire through its telegraphic wires, the nerves.”12 This, then, directs us to the analogy alluded to by Babbalanja, when he wonders how his “outpost toes and digits” are connected to his brain. Where once such connections had been explained by “sympathy,” they could now be explained via the seemingly more rigorous notion of “perpetual telegraphic communication.” The nervous system–telegraph analogy became extremely popular, especially in the United States. For John Bovee Dods, whose electrical cosmology we considered in the previous chapter, nerves are “so many telegraphic wires,” traversing the “whole arterial system in all its minute ramifications.”13 Given Dods’s governing claim that electricity is “God’s body,” this assertion is more easily squared with Babbalanja’s belief that God controls the human body than one might otherwise expect. For Frederick Hollick, a neurologist writing in 1847, the nerves are again equivalent to quasi-telegraphic “wires,” with the brain serving as a source of “human galvanism.”14 Such comparisons commended themselves for their ease of comprehension and apparent plausibility, while endowing the nerves with some of the glamor associated with the new technology. What Neil Harris calls the “operational aesthetic”—in which aesthetic pleasure stems from explanatory plausibility, as well as functional efficiency—is thus to be found in physiological description, no less than that of the telegraph and other mechanisms.15 What made the telegraph especially admired, in this respect, was its expansion of communicative links across an increasingly extensive and internally differentiated polity. This, in turn, inspired “reversals” of the nervous system–telegraph analogy, with the telegraph modeled on the nervous system, rather than the other way around.16 Thus, William F. Channing, in 1852, celebrated the telegraph as “the nervous system of organized societies . . . [whose] functions are analogous to the sensitive nerves of the animal system.”17 Despite its nonorganic status, then, the telegraph helped establish an organic conception of the nation, becoming a mediating term between the body and the social. As a sort of “body” in its own right, the nation thus became imaginable as “ill” or “healthy,” and consequently as an object of medical scrutiny. This “therapeutic perspective” on the nation was popularized by the various health reform movements that emerged in America from the 1830s onward, hand in hand with other reform movements, such as abolitionism, Fourierist socialism, and spiritualism, considered in other chapters.18 Theorists of these movements traced intimate connections between the nation’s destiny and the health of its citizens, arguing that the latter must be carefully regulated in everything from diet to sexual conduct. Propelling such analyses was

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precisely the conviction that all organic processes were closely interconnected, and that it was the nervous system that established these connections. The literature of this movement thus endeavored to educate its readers about the workings of the nervous system, and to warn them of its more dangerous tendencies. Most dangerous of all, for many, were those tendencies that constituted sexuality, which itself soon came to be regarded as the most emphatically “electrical” attribute of humankind.

Sex, Disease, and “Civilization” Perhaps the key figure in early nineteenth-century American health reform was Sylvester Graham (1794–1851). Now remembered for the invention of Graham Bread, a confection made out of coarsely ground wheat, he was a vociferous advocate for vegetarianism, abstinence from alcohol, and sexual continence, all of which he understood as radically interrelated. These convictions were the result of what Stephen Nissenbaum calls “a coherent and complicated theory of human physiology,” whose fundamentals were derived from the French physiologist Xavier Bichat (1771–1802).19 In Bichat’s view, life possessed two distinct aspects, the “organic” and the “animal,” which were in turn regulated by two distinct systems: the organic pertaining to the interior of the body, the animal to relations with the environment outside it.20 Animal life was directed by the brain and included all the phenomena of sentience, while organic life was regulated separately by ganglionic centers elsewhere in the body. Graham implicitly accepted these distinctions, as well as the more “philosophical” notion that life is perpetually imperiled, and that external stimuli are ultimately fatal.21 This presupposition ensured that the animal nervous system was seen as essentially prophylactic in function, its basic role being to ensure that the least dangerous course was taken in choice of food, habitation, and so on. This is the principle underpinning Graham’s strictures on diet, which involve eating the blandest food possible, so as to minimize its stimulatory effects. Because eating involves the “interiorization” of external elements, this example points toward the obvious question of whether, and if so, how, the organic and animal systems interact. Graham thought, as Bichat had done, that the systems were indeed interactive, and that this interaction was particularly important during certain phases of activity.22 For Graham, the most important of these were those involving sexuality. Sexual desire is defined by Graham as “very analogous to electricity or galvanism.”23 This is due to its capacity to induce “a peculiar and

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powerful excitement and sensation throughout the whole nervous system” (ibid.). Electricity is thus a figure for connection; or, in Graham’s own terms, for the systemic omnipotence of sexual desire— for once induced, there is no region of the nervous system to which desire’s influence may not extend. This idea is also rendered in terms of the distinction between the organic and animal systems, with desire “throw[ing] its influence over the whole domain of the nerves of organic life, as well as . . . those of animal life” (40–41). This fact helps to explain another distinguishing feature of desire, its dual presence in the body and the mind. Physical desire, Graham notes, is often stoked by imaginative reverie, while genital function is productive of sexual images, thoughts, and emotions (36). In this respect, he is echoed by Orson Squire Fowler, the phrenologist whose theory of love was discussed in chapter 1.24 For Fowler, genital function in general, and seminal ejaculation in particular, is “so intimately related to the mind” that it cannot proceed without “the concomitant exercise of its corresponding mental emotion.”25 Thus the way desire “perpetuates and re-augments itself ” the more it is indulged.26 This characteristic, however, is precisely what makes desire so dangerous. As both Graham and Fowler are at pains to point out, desire may swiftly carry to excess, and, if not subjected to stringent regulation, leads directly to nervous illness. Graham’s distrust of desire is thus bound up with his general distrust of stimulation, in whatever form. Stimuli and the nerves on which they operate, on this account, are locked in a perpetual zero-sum game, in which every impulse imparted to the nerves necessarily tends toward their enervation. But among the various classes of stimuli, sexual desire holds the greatest potential for danger, not only for its exceptional potency but also for the systemwide extent of its effects. Thus Graham’s description of orgasm, which if “too frequently repeated, cannot fail to produce the most terrible effects. The nervous system, even to its most minute filamentary extremities, is tortured into a shocking state of debility, and excessive irritability, and uncontrollable mobility, and aching sensibility” (42–43). Desire and its subsequent satisfaction thus set in motion a remorseless spiral of decline in which every physical and mental faculty is implicated. It follows that the maladies to which excessive sexuality leads are among “the most loathsome, and horrible, and calamitous diseases that human nature is capable of suffering” (49). Symptoms listed by Graham include “loss of appetite,” “increased susceptibilities of the skin and lungs to all the atmospheric changes,” “feebleness of all the senses,” “loss of sight,” and “weakness of the brain” (69). Fowler produces a similarly

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grave and wideranging list of symptoms for the condition he defines as “disappointed love.” In stark contrast to the exaltation wrought by love itself, such disappointment “weakens muscular energy . . . unstrings the nerves, fevers the brain . . . plants disease in body and mind, and bears its unhappy victim down into a premature grave.”27 The very lack of any obvious connection between such symptoms and sexual anatomy serves to underscore these writers’ central theoretical claim, which again, is simply that desire operates in all, not just some regions of the nervous system, and therefore induces the most wideranging effects within it. The fact that few untrained observers would suspect, for instance, the link between orgasm and “loss of sight” makes it all the more important that they should heed the physiologically informed advice of those who do. Graham’s insistence that sexual desire is intrinsically debilitating prompts the obvious question of how (or even if) he believes it should be gratified at all. Indeed, so closely does he draw the connection between sexual behavior and nervous pathology that the very idea of “healthy” sexuality may seem a contradiction in terms. But this, in fact, is not quite the case. It is true that Graham defines human health in terms of resistance to external stimuli. But the prevalence of such stimuli, especially where sex is concerned, are attributed, not to our natural state, but rather specifically modern conditions, placing unnatural demands upon the body. “Disease and suffering,” Graham tells us, are “by no means necessarily incident to human life,” but proceed from “violation of the constitutional laws of our nature” (28). If sexual pathologies stalk modern life, then, it is as a result of social trends that are themselves “unnatural.” Thus, the rise in “self-pollution” (i.e., masturbation) and “illicit and promiscuous commerce between the sexes,” both of which are linked to the relative anonymity and individualism of urban life (15, 16).28 The fact that even older, married couples are steeped in such an atmosphere, meanwhile, is shown by rising incidences of “sexual excess within wedlock,” and “adultery of the mind” (15, 51; emphasis in original). Needless to say, each of these supposed “diseases” imply a view of “healthy” sexual behavior as strictly for reproductive purposes, confined to marriage, and above all, as infrequent. But more importantly, perhaps, they imply a broader identification of neural pathology with modern culture; and more specifically, the urban, commercial, and increasingly technological culture of nineteenth-century America. This identification leads us on to the work of George Miller Beard (1839–83), perhaps the preeminent American theorist of nervous disease in the latter half of the nineteenth century.29 There are, in fact, a number of significant parallels between Beard’s ideas and those of Graham. Both men interpreted social change in terms

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of its effects upon the body, and believed physiological specialists best placed to devise strategies aimed at counteracting its damaging effects. Both were thus convinced that such effects were damaging, and this because they impacted directly on the nerves. Beard’s guiding assumptions about the nervous system were also similar to those of his predecessor, emphasizing its “connectiveness,” and the importance of this principle for a correct understanding of disease. As we see, Beard even came to echo Graham’s emphasis on the sexual component of many nervous disorders, though he did so relatively late in his career. By this time, he had already established and widely popularized the theory of neurasthenia, a nervous disorder supposedly endemic to modernity. However, this theory differs from that of Graham in several key respects, not the least in the far greater role it affords electrical technologies. It is with this importance of technology to Beard’s thinking, indeed, that we may best begin discussion of his work. Electrical technology serves three discrete but interrelated functions in Beard’s work: as an analogical model of the nervous system; as a contributory factor in the spread of nervous diseases; and as a prosthetic supplement in therapeutic treatment of the nervous system itself. As we have seen, the idea of the nervous system as analogous to the telegraph was popular with earlier-nineteenth-century writers such as Dods and Hollick. Beard continues in this vein, but “updates” his account by way of reference to a more recently invented technology, Thomas Edison’s electric light bulb.30 Here is Beard’s explanation of the origins and tendencies of modern nervousness: Edison’s electric light is now sufficiently advanced in an experimental direction to give us the best possible illustration of the effects of modern civilization on the nervous system. An electric machine of definite horse-power, situated at some central point, is to supply the electricity needed to run a certain number of lamps . . . If an extra number of lamps be interposed in the circuit, then the power in the engine must be increased; else the light of the lamps would be decreased, or give out . . . In all the calculations, however widely they may differ, it is assumed that the force supplied by any central machine is limited, and cannot be pushed beyond a certain point . . .31

The same is true of the nervous system, which like any machine is of limited power. This power, Beard goes on, can be increased or diminished by good or evil influences, medical or hygienic, or by natural evolutions—growth, disease and decline; but

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none the less it is limited; and when new functions are interposed in the circuit, as modern civilization is constantly requiring us to do, there comes a period, sooner or later, varying in different individuals, and at different times of life, when the amount of force is insufficient to keep all the lamps actively burning; those that are the weakest go out entirely, or, as frequently happens, burn faintly and feebly—they do not expire, but give out an insufficient and unstable light—this is the philosophy of modern nervousness. (99)

Modern life, as Graham had argued, taxes the body beyond its capacities. These capacities are in every case limited, for although they are variable within certain parameters, they cannot be raised beyond a given threshold. The problem with “civilization,” however, is that it lacks any equivalent check on its self-augmentation. On the contrary, it places an ever-greater burden on its members, continually evolving and accumulating “functions.” This burden falls directly on the nerves, whose forces are increasingly depleted in consequence. The result is neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion. Beard everywhere insists on this equation between civilization and nervous disease. “Civilization,” he writes, “is the one constant factor without which there can be little or no nervousness, and under which in its modern form nervousness in its many varieties must arise inevitably” (vi). According to Beard, there are five principal factors distinguishing modern civilization from that of previous epochs: “steam-power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women” (ibid.). Of these, the telegraph is exemplary, being both a boon to intellectual exchange, and, by very virtue of this fact, a potential source of over-excitation. “Before the days of Morse,” Beard claims, businessmen were “far less worried” than today, when knowledge of prices across the world means that “competition is both diffused and intensified” (105). This, we may recall from chapter 1, is precisely the situation of the Derricks in Norris’s The Octopus, “feeling the effects of causes thousands of miles distant” from their ranch. It may also help explain why Bryan and Harter’s telegraphers claim “nervous diseases” among the most common illnesses afflicting them, as seen in chapter 2. For those directly involved in its (re)production, then, telegraphic intelligence is no less exhausting than it is for those consuming it. Technology bedevils the nerves of patients at the same time as serving Beard, like Dods and Hollick, as a model of the nervous system’s functioning. Beard’s equation of modern life with excessive forms of stimulation goes further than it does with Graham, sponsoring a distinctive

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interpretation of both the American national character and America’s historic mission: the spreading of nervousness (along with “civilization” itself ) over the globe. For though “American nervousness” is “at once peculiar and pre-eminent,” it is increasingly found in other countries, as innovations like the telegraph gain ground there (13). However, other factors leading to nervousness cannot be exported, especially those relating to the national climate, with its “extremes of heat and cold” (vii). And it is from this coincidence of civilized virtues and natural endowments that a specifically American “genius” emerges. Thus, the “effect of the nervous organization on our idioms, articulation, or lack or want of articulation” (85). The tendency of Americans not to enunciate the endings of words is, according to Beard, due to the fact that they make more movements of the larynx per minute than Europeans (7). On the other hand, “[t]he same climatic peculiarities that make us nervous also make us handsome” (66). Hence, the “unprecedented beauty of American women” (ix; emphasis removed.) Whether attending to matters such as these (which represent, so speak, the “acceptable” face of neurasthenia) or dealing with its more deleterious consequences, Beard continually emphasizes that it “is a physical not a mental state, and its phenomena do not come from emotional excess or excitability . . . but from nervous debility or irritability” (17). The point required considerable emphasis, as its truth was far from obvious to many of Beard’s contemporaries. The range of symptoms associated with neurasthenia was vast, and included many—such as “pantaphobia, or fear of everything”—of a highly subjective character.32 Nevertheless, all were in Beard’s view ultimately reducible to this basic principle of physical deficiency. Interestingly, some of the most characteristic symptoms of neurasthenia, such as poor eyesight, and a painful sensitivity to changing weather conditions, had previously appeared among the symptoms listed by Graham and Fowler in their accounts of sexual disorder (American Nervousness, 44–45, 148). And indeed, as sexual desire had been for Graham, so neurasthenia was for Beard: a figure of general systemic diffusion, showing the “connective” properties of bodies, especially in disease. “When neurasthenia lays its hands on a man,” Beard writes, “it is liable to leave its impress on every organ and function of the body; from the crown to the toe there is not a fibre that is safe from attack” (Practical Treatise, 45). And to explain this, he draws on the theory of reflex action pioneered by Marshall Hall33: The human body in health is a bundle of reflex actions; every organ, when disturbed or irritated in any way, may set up a disturbance or irritation in some distant part or organ; but, when the system is in a

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condition of neurasthenia, this reflex irritability is often exaggerated . . . the sensitiveness is sometimes so great that the slightest touch on any part of the body, or even the gentlest possible psychical irritation or excitement, may give rise to violent convulsions . . . this exaltation of reflex activity is observed in all types and phases of functional nervous disorder. (Ibid., 125–26)

Reflexivity thus explains not only the diversity of neurasthenic symptoms, but also their sometimes bewildering capriciousness; the way they “come and go, and change about and alternate, appear and disappear and reappear without any clear cause, and sometimes utterly vanish even without treatment” (ibid., 124). The neurasthenic body accordingly dissimulates its own dysfunction, emitting a series of often contradictory signs.34 Through excess “sensitivity,” such bodies paradoxically became far more active in “exhaustion” than they had ever been in health. One of the things Beard believed such bodies to be most “sensitive” to, in fact, was electricity. Beard maintained an interest in the therapeutic uses of electricity throughout his career, writing a textbook on the subject with Alphonso David Rockwell.35 This, then, represents the third and final way in which electricity features in his work, functioning this time less as a conceptual tool (as in his reference to Edison’s light) or as a factor in disease (via the telegraph) than as a material means toward the body’s alteration. Appropriately enough, he found it worked especially well in treating neurasthenia. When applied to patients’ bodies, he and Rockwell write, electricity acts “directly on the part to which the application is made; indirectly through the reflex function of the nerves” (ibid., 204). This indirection is, indeed, its most general feature, making truly local application of electricity impossible.36 Since such systemic ubiquity is also a distinguishing feature of neurasthenia itself, malady and cure emerge as allegories of one another. Moreover, electricity duplicates the disease’s wayward symptomatology, as currents passing from one electrode to another “diffuse themselves into numberless undulatory, diverse currents,” like “so many shuttlecocks, keeping every atom in continuous disturbance” (Medical and Surgical Uses, 117, 177). Beard’s therapeutic writings, then, rhetorically recapitulate his initial descriptions of nervous disease: just as neurasthenia represents the acceleration of normal bodily processes, so electricity simulates the processes of neurasthenia itself. The effects of electricity are, however, not exhausting but beneficial, helping to soothe the anxious and invigorate the torpid. Among the effects with which it is credited are improved nutrition,

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pain relief, and increased muscular power (ibid., 147; Practical Treatise, 203). More lasting effects include the “very marked and sometimes rapid growth of the muscles” themselves (Medical and Surgical Uses, 193; emphasis in original). And it is in relation to these claims, in fact, that the more radical implications of Beard’s work emerge. Though they concede its appeal, he and Rockwell deny the commonplace notion that medically applied electricity is “transformed into nerve force,” or that it “leave[s] any more electricity in the body than it finds there” (ibid., 222, 74). Instead, it causes what Beard elsewhere calls “a change, an alteration” within the body itself (Practical Treatise, 203). Electricity, in other words, causes qualitative changes in organic tissue precisely because it is heterogeneous to this tissue itself. Like neurasthenia, it causes the body to be in excess of its natural condition. The logic of electricity’s therapeutic applications is therefore not a matter of “topping up” lost force, as one might think, but of materially altering the force that remains. Technology does not act as a substitute for nature, but rather facilitates (as David Channell puts it, in another context) those “processes that nature by herself could not accomplish.”37 The success or otherwise of electric treatment is, however, subject to various contingencies. “As a rule,” Beard and Rockwell explain, “females are somewhat more susceptible to electricity than males . . . not that there is any difference of susceptibility . . . but because in civilization woman is more delicate than man” (Medical and Surgical Uses, 251). Feminine delicacy is thus a cultural achievement, and not a natural given. As Hawthorne suggests in The Blithedale Romance, from which such ideas will be familiar, it is also a rather double-edged achievement, associated with a tendency to sickliness, the ideal of refined sensibilities, and even (as in Priscilla’s case) electrical “over-charging.” Beard and Rockwell have more to say along these lines, connecting electrical propensities not only with gender, but also class and nation: There is a great difference in the average susceptibility of different nationalities and of the higher and lower orders of society, with occasional exceptions both ways; the tough, coarse-fibred laboring classes are much less susceptible to electricity . . . than the delicate, finely organized, brain-working classes. (Ibid., 106)

There is also a racial dimension to their thinking: “Some Indians [i.e., Native Americans] and negroes, it is said, can take hold of the electric eel without receiving shocks” (ibid., 175). But if such cases represent the lower limits of electric sensitivity, the upper limit is constantly

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increasing, for as the authors state, “[w]e are further inclined to believe that susceptibility to electricity . . . is subject to the laws of hereditary descent” (ibid., 250). Electrical susceptibilities are thus tied in complicated ways to hereditary, thus to history, and thus again to still more fundamental questions about the very future of “civilization.” So it is that Beard, in his most socially concerned book, American Nervousness (1881), writes: All our civilization hangs by a thread; the activity and force of the very few make us what we are as a nation; and if, through degeneracy, the descendents of these few revert to the condition of their not very remote ancestors, all our haughty civilization would be wiped away. (96)

Despite such warnings, Beard continued to be relatively sanguine about the neurasthenic future, a feeling presumably strengthened by the perceived successes of his therapeutic treatments. Thus, he writes, he often tells his patients that “their very nervousness is likely to save them from what they most fear” (American Nervousness, 16); adding in his last book, the posthumously published Sexual Neurasthenia (1884), that “diseases prevent diseases, diseases cure diseases, diseases are antidotes to diseases.”38 Neurasthenia, the scourge of civilization, will salvage it in turn. Beard’s ideas were widely influential, especially within literary discourse, where they continued to circulate well into the twentieth century. Writers such as Henry Adams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were diagnosed with neurasthenia; others, such as Frank Norris, assigned its symptoms to their characters; while others still, such as Theodore Dreiser, both suffered from the disease and reproduced its corresponding worldview in their fiction.39 But even as such ideas were diffused, their validity was increasingly called into question. In an essay on “Anxiety Neuroses” (1895), for example, Freud attacks Beard for his relentless inclusion of ever more disparate symptoms under the single explanatory paradigm of “neurasthenia.”40 This, he says, makes “any statement of general validity” about the disease all but impossible (35). In “‘ Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” (1908), meanwhile, Freud broadens his attack to contest Beard’s fundamental claims about neurasthenia’s etiology. Though Beard and his European counterparts are right, Freud argues, to attribute their patients’ illnesses to “civilization,” they have so far failed to identify the very features of “civilization” most responsible: If we disregard the vaguer ways of being “nervous” and consider the specific forms of nervous illness, we shall find that the injurious

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influence of civilization reduces itself in the main to the harmful suppression of the sexual life of civilized people (or classes) through the “civilized” sexual morality prevalent in them.41

It is not the telegraph, in other words—or, indeed, any other of Beard’s five key features of “modern civilization”—that should be blamed for nervous illness, but quite simply the “suppression” of sexuality. Beard, to be fair, was not unmindful of sexual malaise among his patients. On the contrary, his last book, Sexual Neurasthenia, as we have intimated, is largely devoted to just this. But whereas Freud’s made the “suppression” of sexuality his etiological lodestar, Beard remained wedded to a Graham-esque equation between sexual pathology and sexual excess. Nowhere is this more evident than his account of sexual “perversion,” a term he uses to designate all those forms of sexual behavior nowadays ascribed to “homosexuality.” So remarkable is this account that it deserves to be quoted at some length: When the prime conductor of an electrical machine is fully charged with positive electricity, it tends to discharge itself in proportion to the tension of the electricity; and the electricity upon it seeks for its opposite, the negative electricity, to equalize itself. . . . reaction follows action, and as a necessary result of action; violent and excessive exercise of any function finds relief only in the opposite condition—in perversion. . . . exhaustion of the sexual organs, through excess or masturbation, brings on at first indifference to the opposite sex, then positive fear or dread of normal intercourse . . . The subjects of these excesses go through the stages of indifference and of fear, and complete the circle; the sex is perverted; they hate the opposite sex, and love their own; men become women, and women men, in their tastes, conduct, character, feelings, and behavior. (Sexual Neurasthenia, 105–6.)

Although in one respect, this account simply recapitulates Beard’s earlier comparison between the nervous system and “Edison’s electric light,” it moves beyond it in another, via reference to bipolarity. Here, the two poles concerned, “positive” and “negative,” signify not only the relation between sexual excitation and satisfaction, but also a normative view of sexuality in which men are attracted to women, and vice versa, as their “opposites.” To investigate this view more fully—and so gain better purchase on Beard’s and others’ views of sexuality itself—we must first return to eighteenthcentury theories of electricity, and the re-conceptualization of sexual difference to which these correspond. This, in turn, will begin to show how the electrically configured body may be thought of as both “connected” and “divided.”

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Polarity, Perversity, and “Father-Stuff” The terms “positive” and “negative” (or “plus” and “minus”) electricity originate with Benjamin Franklin.42 Though others had identified electricity with opposing qualities earlier—in particular, the Newtonian categories “attraction” and “repulsion”—Franklin was the first to identify it with quantitative variables while continuing to hold a unitary (i.e., “one fluid”) view of electricity itself. From the start, however, these quantitative denotations were bound up with distinctly “qualitative” connotations: as J. L. Heilbron points out, Franklin’s own account of “positive” and “negative” electricity is strikingly evocative of an earlier distinction he had drawn between “pleasure” and “pain.”43 And this is not the only such distinction Franklin drew on. In a report on European electrical experiments that helped inspire his own research, mention is made of Georg Matthias Bose’s (1710–1861) distinction between “male” and “female fire.” The former, Bose contended, was more “vigorous” and “violent” than the latter.44 Here, then, something of considerable importance to subsequent electrical thinking becomes apparent: henceforth, electricity would not just be bipolar, but also “sexed.” We have, in fact, seen something of this before. In Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), as the previous chapter showed, Margaret Fuller identifies electricity with the “especial genius of woman.”45 But while this account is thoroughly “Franklinian” in some respects—for Fuller too, electricity is both quantitative and monistic, women simply having more of it than men (285)—it also gestures at a more thoroughgoing dualism with respect to sexual difference. Thus, Fuller states, “Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism”46 (293). In this respect, she bestrides an epistemological divide that, according to Thomas Lacquer, separates ancient and modern understandings of sexual difference itself.47 During the eighteenth century, Lacquer argues, the “one-sex” model of antiquity, in which women were viewed as “lesser” men, gave way to a “two-sex” model, in which “male” and “female” were seen instead as radically distinct. This can be related to contemporaneous developments in electrical science, where the “one fluid” theory of Franklin was confronted by the “two fluid” theories of Charles François de Cisternay Dufay (1698–1739) and his successors. Here, “positive” and “negative” were seen not as aspects of a single substance, but two entirely different things.48 With this in mind, Tim Armstrong, drawing on Lacquer, suggests that modern understandings of sexual difference might be bipolar “on the model

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of electricity and magnetism rather than vice versa.”49 Might this suggestion be corroborated? In practice, it is difficult, if not impossible, to establish clear lines of influence between electrical and sexual science. For a start, each field was internally conflicted, with no clear cut-off point marking the transition from one theoretical paradigm to another.50 What is more, the ultimate “winners” in each instance were, superficially at least, at odds, for whereas the two-sex model prevailed over the one-sex model in the field of sexual difference, Franklin’s one-bipolar-fluid model eventually saw off its two fluid adversaries in the field of electricity. Despite these difficulties, however, it is clear that sex, no less than gender, was identified with bipolarity throughout the nineteenth century (and beyond), irrespective of whether electricity itself was seen as “one” or “two.” In this tradition, then, the opposing pairs male/female, and positive/negative—along with seeming cognates, such as “active”/“passive” and “attraction”/“repulsion”—are strongly identified, if not conflated. This is especially apparent in conceptions of the body where the nervous system is not the sole object of attention, but rather one important system among others. We can begin to see this by returning to Dods. In Electrical Psychology (1850), as we have seen, nerves are likened to “telegraphic wires” on account of their electrical properties. But these are not the only body parts so constituted. Equally “electrical” is the “circulating system,” which Dods describes as follows: the circulating system is in reality two distinct systems. The first is the ARTERIAL SYSTEM, that carries the positive blood . . . The second is the VENOUS SYSTEM, that carries the NEGATIVE BLOOD . . . To these two circulating systems, the heart, with its two auricles, two ventricles, and valves, is exactly adapted, so as to keep the positive and negative blood apart, and to regulate the motion of both.51

What is remarkable about this is not so much Dods’s adoption of Franklin’s bipolar theory of electricity—anyone, by this time, might have done this—but his superimposition of this theory on to physical anatomy. “Positive” and “negative” are literally materialized in flesh and blood. The body is thus divided, and its sundered parts opposed. The blood itself, meanwhile, Dods claims, owes its electrical condition to the air (30–33). This is absorbed into the body by the lungs, where “oxygen and electricity, having a strong affinity for moisture, instantly rush to the blood” (32). Thus rendered “positive,” blood passes through the arteries, “throw[s] off its electricity into the nerves,” and assumes a “negative state” as it passes

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through the veins (35; emphasis in original). The whole body thus partakes of electricity, irrespective of its internal divisions, the “circulating,” nervous, and respiratory systems each complementing one another. Or rather, one might say that it is precisely through these internal divisions that the “external” division between positive and negative electricity is “complementarized” within the body. In Fowler’s work, meanwhile, which we may also now return to, the bipolarity of blood and air is more explicitly aligned with sex. As we saw in chapter 1, Fowler argues that the “electricities” of lovers are “interchanged through air.” But we may now add that this “changing” is in accordance with the way that electricity itself is “sexed”: “the positive corresponding with the male, and negative with the female.”52 Sexual attraction between two people thus recapitulates the bipolar logic of reciprocity-through-opposition that regulates the individual body, and indeed, the cosmos as a whole. Bipolarity thus functions, for both Dods and Fowler, as a kind of conceptual “passport,” allowing its holders to travel to and fro between the individual body (as an object of analysis) and the wider terrain of interpersonal relations.53 Correlatively, it provides a way of understanding interdependencies between the body’s various tissues and subsystems. All these things must be reckoned with in any adequate account of procreation, a process that, for Fowler, represents the raison d’être of love itself. For such an account, however, we must turn to one of Fowler’s (and Dods’s) apparent sources, Lorenz Oken (1779–1851).54 In Elements of Physiophilosophy (1810; trans. 1847), Oken argues that during conception, “the whole male body with all its parts transudes, or passes over in a fluid state, into the female parts” as semen.55 This substance, like female eggs, is thus a distillation of its host. This claim is further grounded in Oken’s wider theory of organic life, according to which all forms of living matter are distilled from or precipitated out of one another. Thus, “blood is the embryo of the nervous system,” while the respiratory tract represents a “higher” recapitulation of the arteries (357). “Galvanism,” meanwhile, is identified as the “principle of life” itself (182). Semen, therefore, may be regarded as “coagulated” galvanism: no longer the “superfine fluid” postulated by so much electrical theory, but a sensibly fluid form of electricity. The air, meanwhile, is charged with what Oken calls “electrism,” a bipolar state of tension from which galvanism is precipitated (180). Again, as we have seen with Dods, the atmosphere is deeply implicated in the body it surrounds. The literary avatar for many, if not all, of these ideas is Walt Whitman.56 In “Song of Myself ” (1855–81), for example, the poet

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claims that “every atom of my blood” is formed from “soil” and “air,” and that he himself thus represents a “kosmos.”57 But just as he is more than just an avatar for these ideas, so his use of them is far from straightforward. Nowhere is this more evident than in his account of homosexuality, an interest he shares with Beard, via the latter’s concept of “perversion.” But whereas Beard, as we have seen, sees homosexuality as a pathological deviation from heterosexual norms, Whitman attempts a more affirmative account, while continuing— albeit somewhat problematically— to uphold these norms themselves. We can begin to see this by looking in more detail at “Song of Myself.” Here, Whitman elaborates a Dods-and Oken-esque “pneumatics” of the self, in which “the pass- / ing of blood and air through my lungs” brings an exultant sense of “health” (29–30). Poetry itself resembles breathing, as in the punning association of “respiration and inspiration” (29). As an agent of “conception,” Whitman “jet[s]” the “stuff” of “arrogant republics” (74). And in a clear invocation of Oken’s “seminal” cosmology, he identifies the “threads that connect the stars” with those “of wombs and of / the father-stuff ” (52).58 The body, meanwhile, is “electrical” (31). As such, it is perpetually attracting other bodies to it: “My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly / different from myself” (57). Such strikes are characteristic of even the most fleeting social relations, as in “Song of the Open Road” (1856–81), where Whitman asks: “What is it I interchange so suddenly with strangers?” (153). The answer to this question—“[t]he efflux of the soul”—is again, as in Fowler, a crypto-electrical substance, whereby “we are rightly charged” (ibid.). In “I Sing the Body Electric” (1855–81) meanwhile, this “charge” is specifically identified with “love”—without, however, making it any less inclusive or accessible (93). On the contrary, Whitman extends his love to “armies,” promising, as he does so, to “charge” their own “electric” bodies with his “soul” (ibid.). This conjunction of the body and the soul—a conjunction echoed by Emily Dickinson’s claim, noted in my “Introduction,” that “during its electric gale— / The body is a soul”—thus designates the very locus of sexuality. As Whitman puts it in “A Woman Waits for Me” (1856–81), “Sex contains all, bodies, souls” (101). This frank acknowledgment of sexuality, of course, constitutes a great part of Whitman’s appeal, both for his own and our contemporaries, and on the face of things, suggests an attitude toward it of unqualified celebration. Thus, in an open letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson of 1856, he rails against “the fashionable delusion of the inherent nastiness of

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sex,” promises “sexual organs and acts” to “prove / you illustrious” in “Starting from Paumanok” (1860–81), and declares, in “Song of Myself,” that “[c]opulation is no more rank to me than death is” (739, 23, 53). In defiance of Sylvester Graham and his followers—at whom, in part, such challenges are surely aimed—Whitman thus insists that sexuality is both dignified and healthy. One might expect, then, to see this view reflected in Whitman’s treatment of his own, now widely documented homosexuality.59 But here, in fact, the record proves distinctly mixed.60 On one hand, the famous Calamus sequence of poems (first pub. 1860) and related texts are clearly suffused with same-sex eroticism, which they present under the rubric of “adhesiveness.”61 On the other, in a now similarly famous notebook entry from 1870, Whitman pledges to “[d]epress” his own “adhesive nature” on the grounds that it is “diseased.”62 The key to understanding this apparent contradiction lies in Calamus itself. In the first of these poems in the published sequence, “In Paths Untrodden” (1860–67), Whitman resolves “to sing no songs to-day but those of manly attachment” (113). This “attachment” turns out to have just as much to do with love and sexuality as friendship. Thus, in “When I Peruse the Conquer’d Fame” (1860–67), he invokes “the brotherhood of lovers,” and in “Not Heat Flames Up and Consumes” (1860–67), “the flames of me, consum- / ing, burning for his love whom I love” (129, 125). In “O You Whom I Often and Silently Come” (1860–71), meanwhile, he posits a “subtle electric fire that for your sake is play- / ing within me” (136). As the last of these examples shows, “homosexual” feeling is closely modeled on its “heterosexual” counterpart (or vice versa)—for here, the Fowler-esque sexology of “Song of the Open Road” and other poems is simply transposed, as it were, into a new erotic context. However, while these “heterosexual” poems typically provide Whitman’s persona with willing female partners, Calamus, crucially, more often leaves him alone and unfulfilled. Thus, in the very poem just quoted, Whitman’s “fire” goes unquenched (ibid.). Similarly, “the brotherhood of lovers” is not something he belongs to, but one whose recollection fills him with “the bitterest / envy” (130). Throughout the sequence as a whole, then— and against the grain of its apparent acclamation of “adhesiveness”— “manly attachment” is governed by a protocol of reticence and yearning. It is in this context, then, that we should understand Whitman’s pledge to depress his own “adhesive nature.” This statement was, in fact, specifically occasioned by his pursuit of would-be lover

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Peter Doyle; a pursuit that he moreover calls “UNDIGNIFIED” and “useless.”63 The problem, then, lies not so much with adhesiveness itself, as the way it has been exercised: because it has gone unreciprocated, it is carried to “excess.”64 And it is this concept of excess, in fact, that finally allows us to trace the links between Whitman’s thought and that of Beard. Throughout his early fiction (itself an oddly Grahamite affair; much of it concerned with the supposed ills of alcohol), Whitman links intemperate behavior to a process of what one might call “sexual exchange,” in which one’s own sex is surrendered and its opposite assumed.65 In “The Last of the Sacred Army” (1842), for instance, he decries “the effeminacy of voluptuous cities.”66 Similarly, in Franklin Evans (1842), his only full-length novel, he decries music-hosting taverns “where the mind and the body are both rendered effeminate together.”67 Whereas Beard associates such changes with “perverse” sexuality (“men become women, and women men”), Whitman associates them with a far more radical process of “unsexing,” whose ultimate consequences, bizarrely, echo those he elsewhere associates with the dislike of sex itself. Thus, in the very letter to Emerson where he protests the “fashionable delusion of the inherent nastiness of sex,” he complains no less vociferously about the prevalence of “neuter[s]” among his contemporaries (739). Similarly, in “Song of Myself,” he promises to “make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men / and women fully equipt” (52). The problem with “excess,” then, is, paradoxically, the same as that which stems from inhibition and aversion. And, in the final analysis, what all such malaises do is “un-equip” one for species reproduction. Whitman’s advocacy of sex thus proves subordinate to that of what “Song of Myself” calls “the procreant urge of the world” (31). And while “adhesiveness” may not be, this is surely grounded in bipolar opposition—for as the next line of the poem specifies, “opposite equals advance” (ibid.). Given this belief, it becomes clear why, private circumstances aside, homosexuality proved hard, if not impossible, for Whitman to unequivocally endorse. For if homosexuality does not actually undermine one’s reproductive potential, it does not obviously enhance it either. Ultimately, then, while Whitman could represent homosexuality as both legitimate and healthy, he remained unable to fully integrate it into an Oken-, Dods-, and Fowler-esque worldview in which it has no “natural” place.68 Insofar as it can be affirmed, homosexuality remains marginal within a “heterosexual”—and thus bipolar—natural order. It was to show the social correlative of this, perhaps, that Bayard Taylor wrote what is almost certainly the first distinctly “gay” American

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novel, Joseph and His Friend (1870).69 Here, in a partial echo of Calamus, homoerotic friendship is placed in direct competition with heterosexual marriage.70 Electrical concepts, including bipolarity, are again used to represent both forms of attachment. But whereas Whitman sees bipolarity in terms of species-wide “advance,” Taylor locates it in the individual body, and shows how it may also lead to impasse and division. The first signs of this appear in an admittedly unlikely context. When a man rides a horse, Taylor writes, “the brute strength under him charges his whole nature with a more vigorous electricity.”71 Joseph’s own horse ride then triggers an epiphany, in which the secret of his long-felt sense of “difference” from others is revealed (22). Electrical forces fill his body “to the last embranchment of every nerve and vein” (49)—a description echoing Graham’s account of too-frequent orgasm, “tortur[ing]” the nervous system to its “most minute filamentary extremities.” And indeed, while Taylor calls them “healthy,” he also concedes that these forces constitute “an element of [Joseph’s] disturbance” (ibid.). At length perceiving this, and thus, apparently, the source of this disturbance itself, Joseph exclaims, “God! I see what I am!” (50). But what is it that Joseph “sees?” In the immediate aftermath of this episode, he pledges passionate love for Julia Blessing, suggesting that the answer lies in an orthodox, though hitherto inchoate heterosexuality. However, on the eve of the journey that sees he and Julia engaged, Joseph again experiences “disturbance,” in terms that complicate this inference: a singular unrest took possession of him. He distinctly felt the presence of two forces, acting against each other with nearly equal power, but without neutralizing their disturbing influence. (67)

If one of these “forces” stems from Julia, then, the other must derive from someone else. In the light of subsequent events, it becomes clear that this “other” is the “friend” of Taylor’s title, Philip Held. He and Joseph first meet on a train from Philadelphia (the city, as Taylor no doubt means us to note, of “brotherly love”), where Joseph’s engagement has been sealed: immediately, the latter feels that “some of his doubts and difficulties had found their solution in the stranger’s nature” (91). But while this may appear to cast Philip in the “neutralizing” role envisaged earlier, it is effectively he who, throughout Joseph’s marriage, forms an antithesis to Julia. The latter, it transpires, is cold, manipulative, and venal. Philip, by contrast, is passionate and generous. And while there is no formal

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contradiction between Joseph’s marriage to Julia and his friendship with Philip (indeed, the two attachments coexist for much of the novel) their juxtaposition in the narrative ensures that they appear as rival articulations of “the same” affective paradigm. With this in mind, it becomes possible to read both Joseph’s horse ride and his subsequent “unrest” as premonitory figurations of a single situation. Thus, while the electrical “charging” of the former certainly indicates some form of sexual awakening, the nature of this does not become clear until we fully explicate the latter. For here, Taylor indicates that just as Joseph’s affections are split between Julia and Philip, so his sexuality itself is “split” along bipolar lines. Not only, then, do the “two forces” represent two different people, they also represent two opposing “modes” of sexual attraction, and thus, ultimately, two different sexes. Moreover, bipolarity again functions, as it had for Fowler, as a conceptual “passport,” allowing analytic travel between the intrabodily and interpersonal. For while the “two forces” passage can be read “physiologically,” in which case it appears as an extension of the horse riding passage, it can also be read “sociologically,” in which case it appears as a commentary on Joseph’s relationships with other people. The two readings are, of course, entirely complementary. In either case, Joseph appears as both internally divided by external forces, and vice versa. Taylor’s understanding of the relationship between heterosexuality and homosexuality thus mirrors Fowler’s view of the relationship between the sexes. But whereas Fowler sees intersexual relations as complementary, Taylor sees relations between heterosexuality and homosexuality as conflictive, and ultimately irreconcilable. If this conflict is to be resolved at all, then, this can only be by abandoning homosexuality altogether and acceding to the heterosexual order. Thus, though Joseph is eventually released from his marital obligations by Julia’s death, this fails to bring about a more fulfilled relationship with Philip. On the contrary, the novel’s final pages see Joseph falling in love with Philip’s sister, Madeline, leading Philip to reflect that he must find a woman too, for “either sex is incomplete alone, and a man’s full life shall be mine” (361). At its conclusion, then, the novel restores a connection between sexual opposition and sexual (or, more broadly, existential) satisfaction it had earlier suspended. Sameness leads to impasse, but, as Whitman might say, “opposite equals advance.” Later nineteenth-century representations of homosexuality continue to mobilize this sameness-opposition dialectic. In Teleny (1893), for instance, a notorious novel sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde, an embrace with Teleny makes the narrator feel “as if our two bodies clinging closely together

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had amalgamated or melted into a single one.”72 Identity, rather than difference, here represents “advance.”73 The novel also dwells obsessively on electricity and blood, both of which it associates with erotic transports: a sign, perhaps, of Whitman’s continued influence, which is evident throughout much of the newly self-consciously “homosexual” discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.74 Such discourse, and such self-consciousness, was also conditioned by the contemporaneous “discovery” of homosexuality by sexual science, which further rooted homosexuality in the body (Teleny is subtitled A Physiological Romance), and evolved a distinctive new vocabulary for understanding it.75 Here, terms such as “inversion” and “perversion” underscored a view of homosexuality as a deviation from heterosexual norms—as we have, indeed, already seen from Beard’s usage of the latter term itself. However, attempts were also made to cast homosexuality in a more positive light, and see homosexuals themselves not as de facto members of the “opposite” sex, but as a “sex” in their own right. Thus, in Imre (1906), written under a pseudonym by the American Edward PrimeStevenson, Oswald declares himself a “super-male”; “a member of the sex within the most obvious sexes; or apart from them.”76 Significantly, however, Oswald’s lover, Imre, finds that he cannot say the same. Instead, he identifies a “psychic trace of the woman in me . . . The counter-impulse, the struggle of the weakness that is womanishness itself.”77 (199) And it is here that we may mark the residual presence in Prime-Stevenson’s novel of the bipolar assumptions that would, in fact, continue to dominate discussions of homosexuality for the remainder of our period. Toward the end of the novel, we learn that Imre has consulted a “great Viennese psychiater,” whom, of course, we understand as Freud (184). For Freud himself, homosexuality is no less “natural” than any other sexual tendency, being derived, like all other sexualities, from “polymorphous perversity.”78 But this does not mean that his understanding of perversity is not bipolar: indeed, in some respects, it represents the ne plus ultra of bipolar thought itself. In his essay on “ ‘Civilized Sexual Morality”—the very text, as we have seen, where he decisively rejects Beard’s etiological account of “modern” nervous illness—Freud claims, “perversions and neuroses stand in the relation of positive and negative” (43).79 No sooner is this said, moreover, than he identifies both pathologies with a second-order bipolarity, this time identical with Fowler’s account of the relationship between the sexes: Quite frequently a brother is a sexual pervert, while his sister, who, being a woman, possesses a weaker sexual instinct, is a neurotic whose symptoms express the same inclinations as the perversions of her more sexually active brother. (Ibid.)

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In the final analysis, then, as in so many other accounts of sexual difference, “positive” corresponds with maleness, while “negative” corresponds with womanhood.

The Nineteenth-Century Nervous System (2) But what of sexuality itself? Famously, Freud considers this under the rubric of libido—of which he has, as Steven Connor says, “a thoroughly electrical conception.”80 This may be seen from the first of his essays to explicitly interrogate Beard, on “Anxiety Neuroses,” where the passage from “visceral” to psychic excitation is explained in terms of neuro-electrical “conduction” (55). Once this has happened, Freud continues: the group of sexual ideas which is present in the psyche becomes supplied with energy and there comes into being the psychical state of libidinal tension which brings with it an urge to remove that tension. A psychical unloading of this kind is only possible by means of what I shall call specific or adequate action. This adequate action consists, for the male sexual instinct, in a complicated spinal reflex act which brings about the unloading of the nerve-endings, and in all the psychical preparations which have been made in order to set off that reflex. (55; emphasis in original)

Sexual release (for men, at least) is thus dependent on what Media, in Melville’s Mardi, calls “the reflex action of the nerves.” Freud’s interest in nervous reflexivity is exemplary in two respects. First, it illustrates the uptake of Hall’s original idea: a defining theme of nineteenth-century physiology, which came to see reflex action identified with many, if not all, bodily functions, and every region of the nervous system.81 Second, and at the time more controversially, it illustrates the identification of reflexivity with “psychical” phenomena. This was a move Hall strenuously resisted, but which subsequent researchers found compelling. In 1853, for instance, William Benjamin Carpenter (1813–85) began working out his influential theory of “unconscious cerebration,” according to which mental life is undergirded by reflex action in the brain.82 And it is here that another fundamental feature of the nineteenth-century nervous system becomes apparent: its increasing implication in the action of the mind. One sign of this was the reinterpretation of a phenomenon previously understood without significant reference to the nerves at all: mesmerism.

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In 1843, this was given a name new, hypnotism, by the Scottish researcher James Braid (1795–1860), precisely in order to differentiate his own theory (according to which mesmeric crises are triggered by “derangement” of the nervous system, leading to “nervous sleep”) from that of Mesmer.83 Subsequent commentators, such as Carpenter, linked hypnotic states to reflex action, while hypnotism itself became increasingly important in the treatment of nervous illness.84 A second sign, meanwhile, was the increased interest shown in reflexivity by theorists of character and motivation. This is especially evident in the novels of Oliver Wendell Holmes, himself a professor of physiology, which systematically deploy the reflex theory in explaining how their characters behave.85 In Elsie Venner (1861), for example, a character argues that “Automatic action in the moral world” must be studied “as Marshall Hall has studied reflex nervous action” in the body.86 Similarly, A Mortal Antipathy (1885) purports to show how “inhibitions” are implanted in the nervous system, much like “a footpath across a field”— a simile much like that invoked by William James, as we have seen, to describe the bedding-in of habits.87 Yet a third sign is related to the first two, and the “decentering,” if not debunking, of the will they imply. This is the advent of a new technological analogy, related to that between the telegraph and nervous system, but better suited to the extension of reflexivity from the nervous system to the brain. This analogy saw the brain related to the telephone exchange. The first such exchange opened in 1878, in New Haven, Connecticut, establishing the technical paradigm most subsequent exchanges followed. But it had already been anticipated some twenty-seven years earlier, by the French engineer Francois Dumont.88 Dumont planned to link up telegraph stations on a novel and, as he thought, more efficient basis: unlike existing “point to point” systems, which strung together stations in a series, this would link subscribers to a central hub (see figure 4.1). From here, individual subscribers could be connected to each other without the need for multiple intermediary connections. This principle is crucial for understanding how the telephone exchange would later function as model for the brain. For here, emphasis fell not so much on “connection”—as when earlier writers had used the telegraph-nervous system analogy—as on the “division” (or, at least, isolation) of the brain’s “subscribers” from each other. Witness Henry Adams’s discussion of “the new psychology” in his Education (1907), which seemed convinced that it had actually split personality not only into dualism, but also into complex groups, like telephonic centres and systems, that might be isolated and called up at will . . .89

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Instead of Babbalanja’s “domed grandee,” the brain is here imagined as a kind of “switchboard,” just as capable of subdivision as the “personality” to which it ministers. And while the “will” continues to be posited as a source of ultimate control, it now appears external to the workings of the brain, no less than those of “personality” itself.

Figure 4.1 Francois Dumont’s Planned Telephone Exchange. From J. E. Kingsbury, The Telephone and Telephone Exchanges: Their Invention and Development (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1915), 78. Author’s collection

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Adams’s account draws from a variety of sources. Most obvious of these is Karl Pearson’s The Grammar of Science (1892), which Adams named a chapter of the Education after, and which contains its own, extended elaboration of the brain-telephone exchange analogy. Here, “senders” and “receivers” are carefully distinguished from each other (as Pearson explains, “sensory and motor nerves do not appear to interchange functions”), as if to underscore the a priori division of the body parts they correspond with.90 The analogy also appears in William James’s The Principles of Psychology (1890) and Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1896), both of which Adams would have known, and both of which draw on recent physiological research, including that on reflex action, in relation to the brain (though only Bergson unequivocally endorses the analogy itself).91 But at the forefront of Adam’s mind was surely Morton Prince’s The Dissociation of a Personality: A Biographical Study of Abnormal Psychology (1906), where the “split[ting]” of “personality” becomes of paramount concern. Prince’s work exemplifies “the new psychology,” which, as we saw in chapter 2, drew strongly on the explanatory power of physiology. Like other psychologists involved in the treatment of “abnormal” mental states, Prince also practiced hypnotism, which he used to particularly notable effect in the clinical case to which Dissociation is devoted. As we see, this text is crucial for understanding how “division” functions in conceptions of the mind. Before considering it, however, we must first review the basic theoretical positions on which it builds. Prince’s earliest book, significantly titled The Nature of Mind, and Human Automatism (1885), rehearses many by now familiar claims of nineteenth-century physiology. The brain, Prince says, is comparable to an electrical apparatus, in which “nerve-cells” act as “batteries,” and the “nerve-fibres” act as “telegraph-wires.”92 All the brain’s activities originate outside itself, and constitute reactions to external stimulation—a dictum popularized, as we have seen, by Sylvester Graham. On this basis, Prince contends that all forms of behavior are, at bottom, expressions of the law of reflex action. This is true no matter how elaborate they are, since from the simplest muscular act, such as the winking of the eyelid, to the most complex muscular actions and trains of thought, there is never a difference in kind, only one of degree . . . we can pass from one to the other by a series of gradations, step by step, and find them all of the same nature, reflex in character. (96)

Where Prince goes beyond his peers is in his application of this principle to “personality.” As he argues in Dissociation, this is merely

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“a mode of reaction of the organism,” tending to coalesce through repetition: the very principle, as we have seen, whereby William James explains the building up of “habits,” or Bryan and Harter explain the acquisition of telegraphic fluency.93 And it is to telegraphers that Prince himself refers, when, in his earlier book, he explains how especially welllearned behaviors, such as telegram transmission, become “automatic” (128). Here, then, is a fully fleshed-out equivalent to Twain’s claim that “Training is all there is to a person,” as discussed in chapter 2. But where this theory really comes into its own is when explaining how a person can be “un-trained” or decomposed. For if personality is simply a concatenation of habits, the same habits, if rearranged, produce a different person. As Prince puts it in Dissociation: “there is no limit to the modes and degrees in which personality may be disintegrated, or to the combinations in which psychical (or cortical) elements may be arranged and rearranged” (444–45). The theoretical ground is now cleared for Dissociation’s central claim: that multiple personalities may coexist within a single individual. The “personality” to which the title of Prince’s book refers is that of Christine Beauchamp, a patient first referred to Prince in 1898, suffering, or so it then seemed, from neurasthenia (14). In accordance with this diagnosis, Prince began to treat her along broadly Beardian lines, only resorting to hypnosis when “conventional methods” proved ineffective (20).94 Through this technique, Prince learned that Beauchamp’s original personality had been split into at least three major parts, all of which were now “capable of considerable independent activity” (18). Hypnosis showed this, on Prince’s account, by recapitulating the process whereby the patient’s “consciousness” had been subdivided in the first place. For the technique, he says, is “nothing more than the dissociation of the personal consciousness, and differs in no way from any state resulting from the disaggregating process” (461). The principal value of the technique, in the early stages of Miss Beauchamp’s treatment, was thus to yield a kind of analytic knowledge; to distinguish personalities from each other, and so identify their distinctive attitudes and traits. This, then, was the procedure Adams had in mind when describing how the new psychology had “split personality . . . into complex groups.” As in Adams’s own telephone analogy, Prince became a kind of switchboard operator, able to “isolate” contending personalities and “call” them “up at will.” To clarify his procedures further, Prince studs his book with diagrams representing relationships between personalities, as revealed at each stage of analysis. In the first example shown here (figure 4.2), broken lines indicate that “BI” and “BIV” become “lesser” personalities when hypnotized—“BIa” and “BIVa”, respectively—while solid lines indicate

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and that all four can be hypnotically derived from another personality, BII. In a second example (figure 4.3), corresponding to a later stage of analysis, no less than seventeen personalities (including the hypothetical “?”) are shown. And it is here, perhaps, that we may find a “visual correlative” to Adams’s telephone analogy. Though Prince did not draw on the analogy himself—likening his diagrams instead to genealogical trees (281)—there is a marked resemblance between his diagrams and contemporary representations of the telephone exchange (see figure 4.4). Both types of illustration feature relatively complex, hierarchical systems, in which certain elements within each system draw others into relation. Both also show how such systems can be subdivided into, or operated along the lines of, different “pathways.” Indeed, in this respect, a “telephonic” interpretation of Prince’s diagrams works rather better than the

Figure 4.2 Sally Beauchamp’s Personalities, Early Stage of Analysis. From Morton Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality: A Biographical Study of Abnormal Psychology (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906). Author’s collection

Figure 4.3 Sally Beauchamp’s Personalities, Late Stage of Analysis. From Morton Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality: A Biographical Study of Abnormal Psychology (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906). Author’s collection

157

Figure 4.4 American Telephone Exchange, 1885. From J. E. Kingsbury, The Telephone and Telephone Exchanges: Their Invention and Development (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1915). Author’s collection

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genealogical one he offers himself; for by his own account, designations such as BIa and BIVa “represent alternating or successive states” (309), as telephone connections generally do, but filial relations do not. The splitting of one personality from another for analytic purposes was not, however, the only task hypnosis was called on to perform. It also served a synthetic, or “re-associative” function, as Prince’s diagrams further indicate via their solid lines, which indicate personalities being merged, “much as one might by a chemical synthesis make a new chemical compound” (403). Here, hypnosis recapitulates not the process whereby personalities are divided, but that which had originally made them. It was thus that Prince attempted to restore the “the real Miss Beauchamp” (represented as “Real B” in figure 4.4), to her original integrity. No sooner had he begun this, though, than he came up against opposition from another of the personalities concerned, BIII, or “Sally.” And it is through this confrontation that we may finally see the two governing terms of this chapter, “connection” and “division,” placed in direct competition. Astonishingly, Prince claims that Sally herself learned hypnosis by copying his example, and that she used the technique to dissociative effect against her fellow personalities. “[T]he more the personalities were disintegrated,” Prince explains, “the easier it was for Sally to make use of them for her own ends” (450). In one amazing instance—surely, one of the most sublime episodes in all psychiatric literature—she “surreptitiously” hypnotizes BIV, tells her she has done so via letter, and then sees Prince inadvertently reproducing this dissociative hypnosis when reading the same letter into a phonograph (like Dr. Seward in Dracula, he uses the device for keeping notes) in Miss Beauchamp’s presence (320). Through this “diabolically clever” scheme, Sally both manipulates her fellow personalities and temporarily makes the doctor her agent in so doing (ibid.). Thus it was that by opposing one another, and through contrasting usages of hypnotism, the pair effectively opposed the two terms governing nineteenth-century conceptions of the nervous system: for what Sally sought to do was, in effect, re- (or pre) divide the very personalities Prince was trying to re-connect. This was not, unfortunately, a confrontation that could be resolved pacifically, for as Prince puts it at the end of his book, having provisionally triumphed over his adversary, “the resurrection of the Real Miss Beauchamp is through the death of Sally” (524).

Coda: Connection

THROUGH

Division

Others, however, would ensure that this need not be (at least for us) the final word. Contemporaneously, another pair of “personalities,” this

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time joined through bodily, rather than mental, disability, was attempting to show how one of their number’s internal divisions had been repaired through connection to the other. The pair was Helen Keller (1880–1968) and her “teacher” Annie Sullivan (1866–1936), the latter the amanuensis, if not coauthor, of the former’s autobiographical writings, and celebrated in them as an integral component of their author.95 As Keller puts it in The Story of My Life (1903), her first and most celebrated book, “My teacher is so near to me that I scarcely think of myself apart from her.”96 Mark Twain, one of her friends, agreed, telling Keller in a letter: “You are a wonderful creature . . . you and your other half together . . . for it took the pair of you to make a complete and perfect whole.”97 Like Chang and Eng, another pair whose “sympathies” he eulogized, Twain considered Keller and Sullivan to have achieved a unity together that neither could have achieved alone. Echoing what Keller says herself, his letter thus suggests that she has found connection not despite, but through division. Keller’s “division” was, more specifically, a consequence of childhood illness. Struck by what her doctor called “acute congestion of the stomach and brain,” she became permanently deaf and blind when she was nineteenth months old.98 This left her all but unable to communicate, or acquire the means to do so, until placed under Sullivan’s care, aged seven. Sullivan taught Keller via a novel technique whereby words were exchanged between them by being “spelled” from hand to hand, and hand to mouth. At length becoming fluent, Keller found that she could “read,” “write,” and “speak,” thus accessing otherwise unobtainable information about the world around her. So adept did she become, that by own account, conversational companions became functionally equivalent to the senses she had lost: It might seem that the five senses would work intelligently together only when resident in the same body. Yet when two or three are left unaided, they reach out for their complements in another body, and find that they yoke easily with the borrowed team. When my hand aches from over-touching, I find relief in the sight of another. When my mind lags, wearied with the strain of forcing out thoughts about dark, musicless, colourless, detached substance, it recovers its elasticity as soon as I resort to the powers of another mind which commands light, harmony, colour.99

Through touch, Keller’s body thus joins up with other, more fully able bodies, becoming “whole” through figurative cooption of their “parts.”100 Although divided from the world, as from herself, by disability, she is nonetheless connected back to both through other people.

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Commentators were understandably astonished by such abilities, and sometimes sought alternative explanations for them. Twain recalled one particularly striking instance—Keller had echoed one of his own remarks before having it manually relayed to her—by invoking his favored theory of “mental telegraphy.”101 Another writer, similarly, referred to “mysterious telegraphic communications” between Keller and Sullivan.102 Both writers were, perhaps, closer to the truth than they knew; for Keller did, in fact, have some familiarly with the material, if not mental, telegraph. As Sullivan recalls: a cousin taught her the telegraph alphabet by making the dots and dashes on the back of her hand with his finger. Whenever she meets anyone who is familiar with this system, she is delighted to use it in conversation.103

Sullivan continues: “I have found it a convenient medium of communicating with Helen when she is at some distance from me, for it enables me to talk with her by tapping upon the floor with my foot. She feels the vibrations and understands what is said to her.”104 Technology, or its “vibratory” equivalent, thus fuses with the other means whereby Keller yokes with “borrowed teams.” Keller would come to feel that the electric telegraph was emblematic of communicative links more generally. What is the technology, she asks, “but the quick hand of the world extended between the nations, now menacing, now clasped in brotherhood?”105 And it is the hand, indeed, that functions for her as the guarantor of social, as well as communicative, connectivity. All communication technologies may thus be regarded as “extensions” of the hand: the very printing press whereby her books are made reduplicates its “many-motioned fingers”; between her own thoughts “and the words which you read on this page,” she therefore tells her readers, “a thousand hands have intervened.”106 So it is that Keller imagines the entire world, potentially at least, in a kind of prosthetically mediated handshake, not unlike the “electric” handshakes of Jean Antoine Nollet’s and Pierre-Charles Le Monnier’s experiments with Leyden jars, the “brotherhood” of “genius” imagined by Melville in “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” or even the community of thought envisaged by Clifford Pyncheon (“a brain, instinct with intelligence!”) in Hawthorne’s own The House of the Seven Gables. But whereas Clifford, at least, as we have seen, opposes technological communication to embodiment, Keller sees technology as an extension of embodiment; and an extension, furthermore, that may compensate for, if not repair, the damage done to her own body.

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By turns, then, we are returned to some of the more celebratory accounts of communication technology considered in chapter 3. Keller’s own account corresponds with these, but introduces the crucial caveat that the body cannot be “abolished,” and must instead be regarded as the rock on which all technology is built. For some of her more physiologically minded contemporaries, it was a short step from here to imagining technologies, including printed books, as physically integral with the body. For Holmes, in A Mortal Antipathy, “Every good librarian . . . finds he has a bunch of nerves going to every bookcase” in his library (77). Accordingly, such persons “come to feel at last that the books of a great collection are . . . as it were, outlying portions of their own organization” (77–78). In this account, the nervous system (“organization”) is not just like a given communication technology—as in both the nervous system-telegraph and braintelephone exchange analogies—but something technologies may graft onto, thereby extending its own structure. A similar conceit, we may now say, lies behind Gerald Stanley Lee’s contention, previously considered in chapter 2, that the telephone “changes the structure of the brain.” For her own part, however, Keller was aware that paeans like Lee’s and other such “utopian” accounts of new technology did not tell the whole story. As her remarks on the telegraph, in particular, suggest, she knew that communication technologies might sponsor “menace” just as well as “brotherhood.” Moreover, she knew that the telephone (as I put it in chapter 2, in relation to Twain’s “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton”) may amplify, rather than diminish, a sense of distance between people, and do so even in the act of uniting them. To see this, we must turn to Keller’s friendship with Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone’s inventor. This, in turn, serves to introduce the next, and final, chapter.

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CHAP TER

5

Inclusion and Exclusion

Introduction The friendship between Helen Keller and Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) was one both parties treasured.1 Evidence of this, on Keller’s part, is obvious the moment one opens her most famous book: The Story of My Life is prefaced by a dedicatory note to Bell, who (it says) “has taught the deaf to speak and enabled the listening ear to hear speech from the Atlantic to the Rockies.”2 As this reminds us, Bell had two careers: the first as a speech therapist to the deaf, the second as inventor of the telephone—the latter of which, of course, Keller’s comments on “the listening ear” refer to.3 But it was his abiding interest in the deaf that first drew Bell to Keller, and kept the pair in intermittent contact throughout the latter decades of Bell’s life. A photograph helps document their friendship (see figure 5.1). Here, the pair is shown sitting between a standing Annie Sullivan; all three converse via the tactile method Sullivan helped pioneer. It is a haunting image: at once celebratory and sad, intimate and formal, showing intimacy itself to be bound up with technique, if not technology. For without the specific technique represented by the manual alphabet, the photograph suggests, no sociality is possible. And yet, it also gestures at a more “primal” (though here, perhaps, suspended) sociality, via the gaze that seems to pass—and yet cannot have done—between Bell’s sighted, and Keller’s sightless, eyes. It is in the context of this image, and Keller’s friendship with Bell more generally, that we should understand Keller’s own remarks about the telephone. In The Story of My Life, the device appears—as one might expect, given the previous chapter’s discussion—as a figure for both “connection” and “division.” Of her education at Radcliffe college, Keller writes, “In the classroom I am of course practically alone. The professor is as remote as if he were speaking through a telephone.”4 Telephony thus designates removal from the world of

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Figure 5.1 Alexander Graham Bell with Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, 1894. Photograph by unknown artist. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-G9Z1-137, 816-A

others, even as it locates one in it. Communication, paradoxically, is both impeded and enabled. This view may, of course, reflect the technical constraints of early telephony, not to mention the more or less total uselessness of telephones for deaf people (a deficiency Bell hoped to see overcome).5 But it may also reflect the sensibility of Bell himself.

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By all accounts a temperamentally lonely man, Bell combined a keenly affectionate nature with a powerfully felt sense of isolation.6 Evidence for this may be gleaned from Keller’s Midstream (1929), in which the pair reflect upon the telephone at greater length. On one occasion, Bell tells Keller: “The telephone is the man Friday’s footprint on the sands of life. Wherever we go, it reminds us that no man can live wholly alone.”7 On another, he tells her that most telephone usage boils down to the repetition of the phrase, “Come here, I want you”; famously, the first words spoken over the telephone by himself, to his assistant, Thomas Watson (119).8 On yet another occasion, Keller reports: One evening when we were waiting for a street car beside a telephone pole, Dr. Bell placed my hand on the weather-smoothed wood and said, “Feel. What do the vibrations mean to you—anything?” I had never put my hand on a pole before. “Does it hum like that all the time?” “Yes, all night. That even singing never stops; for it is singing the story of life . . .” (120)

In this extraordinary episode, Bell draws Keller’s attention to perhaps the one thing in telephony she can perceive: the vibratory “hum” that “sing[s]” the “story” of life. By implication, Keller is drawn into some kind of meaningful contact with the community of telephonic speech and hearing from which she is otherwise excluded. Taken together, then, these episodes illuminate both Bell’s character, and what he thought about Keller and the telephone; in doing so, they also serve to introduce the major topics of this chapter. For in the telephone pole episode, especially, Keller is revealed as both included in, and excluded from telephony. Although Bell’s placement of Keller’s hand is surely meant as an inclusive gesture, it is impossible to read about without concluding that she remains, in relation to the telephone itself, still “practically alone.” More surprisingly, perhaps, Bell’s own attitude toward the telephone seems poised between inclusion and exclusion. On one hand, it appears, the telephone may moderate aloneness by revealing that no one need live it “wholly.” On the other, his reflections on the phrase “I want you” indicate that loneliness as such can never be entirely overcome, and that by giving voice to loneliness itself, the telephone may even throw this sad fact into sharp relief. Correlatively, Keller appears from these passages as a kind of mirror for two countervailing strains in Bell’s own nature. For while her generally successful efforts to overcome disability provide triumphant evidence of

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human solidarity, the abiding fact of her exclusion from the aural world make her a metaphor for social, as well as existential isolation.This, then, is why Bell, in Keller’s company, describes the telephone in such pathetic tones, and why his words take on a melancholy accent, in the very act of acclamation. This might also suggest how Keller became for him not only a suitable interlocutor in discussions of the telephone but also a kind of “double” of the telephone itself. Inclusion and exclusion, then, are here opposed but interlinked. Further ways in which they coincide, enable, or contrast with one another are explored throughout this chapter. As Keller’s “practical aloneness” illustrates, a fusion of inclusion with exclusion may be integral to the telephone, or any other electrical communications technology that unites two people while reminding them that, nonetheless, this unity is partial. But the relation of inclusion to exclusion may also feature within larger social units than the dyad, and it is these, especially, that make inclusion and exclusion both socially efficient and contentious. Take an episode from Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), in which two characters speak in seeming “code” to the bewilderment of the narrator: following this, the narrator reports, “They dropped into direct talk from that speech of the fourth dimension where they had been using me for their telephone.”9 Here, the “fourth dimension” designates a realm of speech the narrator can perceive but not take part in. As such, he is “excluded” from a conversation others are “included” in (moreover, their inclusion is dependent on him, as their “telephone”). A similar episode—though here involving a “real,” rather than figurative, technology—appears in Hardy’s A Laodicean. Here, George Somerset has the strange experience of watching Charlotte De Stancy receive a telegram about him he cannot make sense of, since he does not know Morse code. “There was something curious,” Hardy writes, “in watching this utterance about himself, under his very nose, in language unintelligible to him.”10 Again, inclusion and exclusion are part and parcel of the same experience, but are differentially distributed among the various parties involved, ensuring that the inclusion of some is made legible through the exclusion of another, and vice versa. This “splitting” of inclusion from exclusion, and the differentiation of socially related parties on this basis, is quintessential to several “genres” of relationship to be considered. It may characterize love affairs, especially, though not exclusively, when they are adulterous, and must thus be concealed from other people. It may characterize financial dealings, again, especially, though not exclusively, when these are illicit, and dependent for success on their opacity to others. Certainly, it

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characterizes conspiracies of every kind, whether these be amorous, financial, political, or criminal. And it is for this reason that conspiracies bulk large throughout this chapter, not least because they are more or less defined by the relation of inclusion to exclusion—and thus of insiders to outsiders—they construct. Not coincidentally, many of the conspiracies considered here make use of communication technologies such as the telegraph and telephone, for reasons both The Virginian and A Laodicean make sufficiently clear. For in both cases, these technologies (whether figurative or material) enable secretive forms of communication outsiders may detect but not interpret. From this perspective, Keller’s experience of the telephone pole seems paradigmatic, not just of isolation and exclusion, but of the more mundane reality that communication technologies may just as well be used for “private” as for “public” purposes, and are just as amenable to the construction of social cliques and hierarchies as they are to social and communicative solidarity. It is for all these reasons, finally, that this chapter represents a further critique of—or, perhaps better, a contrapuntal accompaniment for—some of the more optimistic views of technology discussed in chapter 3. In so doing, it also re-examines themes and concepts addressed in other chapters: the “logistical sublime,” from chapter 1 (to which all conspiracies perhaps aspire); the association of technology with fraud and deceit, from chapter 2 (which many conspiracies exploit); and even the physiological concerns (especially the nervous system) of chapter 4. In addition, the chapter takes up themes discussed in my “Introduction,” such as the “vocal telegraph” of Melville’s Typee and the “mute telegraphy” of Henry James, both of which I now relate to “race.” To do this, the chapter examines new material—such as the documentary record of the “Underground Railroad” (the organization formed to traffic runaway slaves in antebellum America), the illicit love affairs that feature in James’s fiction, and the cipher telegrams that helped subvert the 1876 presidential election—alongside now-familiar texts, by authors such as Twain and Hardy. The chapter, and the book, concludes with what is perhaps the ultimate conspiratorial fantasy, Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903). It begins, however, with a more general discussion of secrecy, and its relationship with codes.

Phenomenology of Secrets What is a secret? For Georg Simmel, who writes in 1908 (rev. 1923), it is “one of man’s greatest achievements,” offering “the possibility of

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a second world alongside the manifest world.”11 Moreover, it allows the latter to be “decisively influenced by the former” (ibid.). Not only, then, does the secret entail “an immense enlargement of life”—a sheer proliferation of potential objects of desire and curiosity—but it also affords a conduit between the first and “second” worlds, and, as such, represents a powerful way of manipulating one via the other (ibid.). However, by very virtue of these characteristics, the secret becomes an object (and thus a means) of contestation, creating invidious distinctions between those who might otherwise enjoy equality. In the terms that govern this chapter as a whole, it privileges inclusion over exclusion, and insiders over outsiders, even as it nurtures these distinctions. Accordingly, the secret takes on a “peculiar attraction” to both insiders and outsiders, “irrespective of its momentary content” (332). To insiders, “the strongly emphasized exclusion of all outsiders makes for a correspondingly strong feeling of possession” (ibid.). To outsiders, correlatively, the secret becomes a source of envy and fascination, since everything denied to them appears endowed with “special value” (ibid.). Simmel’s comments are intended to elucidate the supposedly transhistorical characteristics of secrecy. But they also have a historical dimension; history itself being in part, Simmel argues, “characterized by the fact that what at an earlier time was manifest, enters the protection of secrecy; and that, conversely, what once was secret, no longer needs such protection but reveals itself ” (331). Moreover, secrets enter history in more specific way, whenever congealed, as it were, in the form of secret societies, such as the eighteenth-century Illuminati (347), or eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Freemasons. And it is freemasonry, more specifically still, that reveals the possibility of a direct link between secrecy and sociality, one of the major topics of this book.12 In his History and Philosophy of Freemasonry (1868), the American mason Augustus Arnold claims “the wide extension of the secret principle throughout the world” in his own time, as the response to some desire, “universally felt, to which the present organisations of society do not respond.”13 This desire is none other than for “Friendship, Love, and Truth”; which, together with the “idea of equality,” has now found “utterance . . . in the institutions of the American Republic” (72, 7). But notwithstanding the example of America, Arnold finds the contemporary world to be but one “vast masquerade, where each one, seeking a personal interest, veils his real purpose, and appears what he is not; and where no one is certain of meeting a look, or of grasping a hand, which responds in sympathy to his own” (103). The problem, then, is a shortage of what he, like so

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many other authors considered in this book, calls “sympathy.” The solution, in Arnold’s view, is secrecy itself. Several features of this argument deserve particular attention. In the first place, and despite its apparent exemption of American institutions from its critique of modern life, it bears a marked similarity to at least one almost contemporaneous critique of America: Melville’s The Confidence Man (1857). Here, as noted in chapter 2, radical skepticism toward one’s fellows stems from the seeming ubiquity of “masquerade” in social life, and the consequent fact that “nobody knows who anybody is.” For Arnold, then, secrecy provides a way of combating that systematic misrepresentation of the self identified earlier via Melville’s Pierre, and explored further via Hardy’s Dare, and Twain’s Burley. Second, and more generally, Arnold calls to mind Simmel’s distinction between “first” and “second” worlds, and as a consequence, the more orthodox sociological distinction between “public” and “private” spheres so often taken as a signature of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century life.14 Third, and for us more fundamentally, Arnold helps resolve a seeming paradox whereby secrets are said to both create invidious distinctions, as shown above, and express the desire for “equality” and “Friendship.” For what we can now say—along, in fact, with Simmel—is that secrets cement equality and friendship within the ranks of those who share them, even as they lift them “out” of their equality with everybody else.15 Like inclusion and exclusion in the experience of Bell and Keller, equality among insiders, and inequality between insiders and outsiders, are two sides of a single coin. The tendency of history, however, in Arnold’s view, is to abolish this state of affairs, and with it, the very distinction between insiders and outsiders the secret helps articulate. For in future, he predicts, “Society itself, regenerated, shall shower its blessings, with divine impartiality, upon ALL.” (3; emphasis in original). The entire world will be like one gigantic Masonic order. And it is here that we may note a further affinity, not only between Arnold and Melville, but also between both and Hawthorne, or rather the latter’s Clifford Pyncheon. For Melville, in “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” we recall, “genius” forms a planetary “brotherhood,” among whose members a “shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.” Similarly, Arnold likens freemasonry to “a vast family circle spread through the entire world” (99). For Clifford Pyncheon, meanwhile, as we saw in chapter 3, the linked phenomena of mesmerism, spiritualism, and telegraphy foreshadow the end of social conflict, and a corresponding epoch of communicative “bliss.” By echoing this claim, Arnold allows us to identify his vision of the

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future as a further “fantasy of reciprocity,” much like those considered earlier. Moreover, Arnold’s related claim that secrecy “has a mystic, almost supernatural force, and binds men more closely together than all other means combined” (108), brings him close to Hawthorne’s own conception of “sympathy,” and the electric or magnetic “chains” through which this is supposedly distributed. Secrets, then, perform much the same function in Arnold’s thinking as electricity does in that of Hawthorne and Melville, being identified with a quintessentially human form of sociality that privileged relations bring to light. Secrecy, in this account, put simply, is sociality; or at the very least, is the generative matrix from which sociality may spring. What, then, of what one might call the “pragmatics” of secrecy, the ways in which secrets are shared and kept from others? There may, perhaps, be reasons to suppose that electricity has some “natural” relationship with this. As Gerald Stanley Lee points out in Crowds (1913), it is readily associated with the “unseen or intangible.”16 But a more substantive answer can be sought via one of Arnold’s sources, Thomas Carlyle. Arnold’s epigraph, “neither will virtue work except in secrecy,” is taken from Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–34), a key text for Americans of Arnold’s generation (including Hawthorne and Melville), and one that forges a decisive link between the secret and the symbol.17 In a passage Arnold quotes, Carlyle writes: “In a Symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here, therefore, by Silence and Speech acting together, comes a doubled significance.”18 A symbol, then, combines the offices of secrecy and its apparent antithesis, “revelation.” It is available to all in principle, but may be fully interpretable only to a few. (Here, we may recall the narrator in The Virginian, who can hear the words his companions use, but not understand their meaning.) If we accept that symbols, on this account, may or may not be recognized as such, and further, that such recognition may or may not bring with it “revelation” of the symbol’s secrets, it will be seen that the construction and/or successful interpretation of symbols corresponds, at every level, to what is now known as cryptology.19 This term denotes, to paraphrase the above, the construction and/or successful interpretation of codes, and may be further subdivided into “steganography”—where the code in question does not announce itself as such, but rather appears in an apparently uncoded artifact or message—and “cryptography,” where the presence of a code is not concealed, although its meaning, by definition, is.20 This, then, is how “significance” may be hidden, or, as Carlyle has it, “doubled”: by being translated out of “normal” linguistic use, and into code. All one need add is that any sign, on this

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account, may be invested with “symbolic” value. Notwithstanding the more specialized status of the symbol in Carlyle’s thinking, its basic structure may be reproduced whenever any sign is used in ways that make it mean more (or mean differently) to insiders than outsiders. It is against this backdrop that we should consider two significant references to freemasonry in Melville’s fiction. The first of these appears in Typee (1846), and bears a strong resemblance both to the narrator’s use as a “telephone” in The Virginian, and Somerset’s incomprehension of the telegram about him in A Laodicean. Here, as in cryptography, the narrator knows a code is being used, but not (or not yet) to what effect: although hardly a day passed while I remained upon the island that I did not witness some religious ceremony or other, it was very much like seeing a parcel of “Freemasons” making secret signs to each other; I saw everything, but could comprehend nothing.21

The second reference comes from White-Jacket (1850), and concerns the flag-borne signals used by ships. The book in which these are set out, Melville explains, “contains the Masonic signs and tokens of the Navy.”22 By such means, “two American frigates—almost perfect strangers to each other,” can “carry on a very liberal conversation in the air” (ibid.). Whereas the first example defines Masonic signs from the perspective of exclusion, the second defines them from the perspective of inclusion; both, however, make clear that freemasonry is identified with, if not defined by, the use of codes. In the latter instance, furthermore, Melville indicates why it is important to insiders that inclusion and exclusion be kept strictly separate. Because a naval signal book would “be invaluable to an enemy, its binding is always bordered with lead,” to ensure its sinking in case the ship holding it is captured (ibid.). Codes, then, are of use only insofar as their secrecy can be maintained: not only are they used for conveying secrets, but their status as secrets is integral to their nature. And it is this tie-in between secrecy and codes that best explains their shared association with a particular communication technology, of great significance throughout this study (if not, at this point, Melville): the electric telegraph. In a letter to the Secretary to the U.S. Treasury, previously considered in the “Introduction” of the current book, Samuel Morse recommends his invention on several grounds, one of which is that “Communications are secret to all but the persons for whom they are intended.”23 This is because the telegraph depends on Morse’s code, which (or so Morse apparently assumes) will only be

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known to those legitimately on the receiving end of messages. Moreover, this advantage might be regarded as maximizing others, more commonly associated with the medium, such as speed. As Alfred Vail, Morse’s assistant, writes, The great advantage which [the electric] telegraph possesses in transmitting messages with the rapidity of lightning, annihilating time and space, would perhaps be much lessened in its usefulness, could it not avail itself of the application of a secret alphabet.24

In this rehearsal of the “annihilation” trope—so favored by early commentators on the telegraph, as we saw in chapter 1—speed comes second in utility to secrecy, the latter being predicated on a particular code, the “secret alphabet.” At this point, it is worth pausing to distinguish essential aspects of telegraphy from contingent aspects of its use. On one hand, the fact that the telegraph necessarily “depends on Morse’s code for its utility,” as Shawn James Rosenheim writes, creates a “natural affinity” between the telegraph and the use of secret codes.25 On the other, it would be wrong to say that this affinity creates an equally “necessary” relationship between the use of codes as such and secretive intent. To see this, we may refer back to the episode in A Laodicean where Somerset finds a telegram “unintelligible.” Here, in fact, Somerset’s incomprehension is almost immediately negated, when Charlotte explains the message on the specific grounds that it contains “no secret” (35). Clearly, Morse encoded messages do not have to be exclusive to the persons they are sent to. However, not only does this episode suggest the possibility of secrets, but it also, in so doing, foreshadows Somerset’s vulnerability to those technologically facilitated conspiracies considered by us earlier in chapter 2. And in doing so, it also evokes other episodes where third party ignorance of codes is systematically exploited. In Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, for example, a near-identical scenario sees Hank communicating via telegraph with his assistant Clarence, while another telegrapher attempts to listen in. Although the latter “cock[s] his ear to listen,” Hank tells us, “it didn’t win. I used a cipher.”26 Here, eavesdropping is defeated because Hank’s “cipher” differs from the codes of “normal” telegraphic use. Another process of encryption is superimposed, over and above the use of “dots” and “dashes” to represent letters that electrical telegraphy presupposes. It is precisely “ciphers” such as these that Vail has in mind when referring to “secret alphabets.”27 By means of prearranged substitution of letters, he

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explains (the letter “a,” for instance, being represented by the letter “y,” “c,” or “x”), “a message may pass between two correspondents . . . and yet the contents of that message remain a profound secret to all others, not excepting the operators of the telegraphic stations, through whose hands it must pass.”28 This, of course, is almost exactly the situation (bar the operator’s role) that Twain describes. Not coincidentally, it also recalls the narrator’s deployment as a “telephone” in The Virginian. All one need add is that Hank’s “cipher” is structurally equivalent to the “Masonic signs” of the navy in Melville’s White-Jacket, and that, as such, it leaves the eavesdropping telegrapher—like Melville’s narrator in Typee—seeing (or here, rather, hearing) everything, but “comprehend[ing] nothing.” Among the first to exploit this “affinity” between telegraphy and secrecy were traders in stocks and shares, who used cipher telegrams in order to share financially sensitive information with colleagues. According to Richard Du Boff, such practice was common among nineteenth-century American businessmen; certainly it appears as such in several early twentieth-century business novels.29 In Frank Norris’s The Pit (1903), for example, Curtis Jadwin’s decision to re-enter the wheat market is precipitated by a cipher telegram forewarning him of changing market conditions.30 In Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier (1912), similarly, Frank Cowperwood entrusts one of his business partners with a “secret operating code,” to assure him that his communications “will be strictly confidential.”31 Significantly, in the latter instance, such practices are strongly linked to criminality: though eventually pardoned, Cowperwood is tried, convicted, and temporarily jailed for larceny. But the prime example of cipher telegraphy being used for criminal as well as secretive purposes is surely the attempt by Democrat Party officials—hotly disputed at the time—to subvert the outcome of the presidential election of 1876.32 This arose because the outcome of the election was itself contested: of the 369 electoral college votes available, a crucial 22 were in dispute. To resolve this dispute, a special committee was formed, which eventually ruled that all the relevant votes, and thus the presidency, should be awarded to the Democrat candidate, Samuel Tilden. However, in October 1878, the New York Tribune published sensational evidence that Tilden’s victory had been secured by bribery, and that these bribes had themselves been arranged by a conspiratorial cabal of Democrat officials, communicating via cipher telegrams. It was, as David Kahn writes, “one of the great scoops of American journalism.”33 Not coincidentally, it was also one of the great feats of cryptology.

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In its news-breaking story, the Tribune explained that “no fewer than six distinct systems of cryptography” had been used by the conspirators, but that one deserved particular attention, both because of its predominance, and for its exceptional difficulty of interpretation.34 “This system,” it continued: consisted of a cipher within a cipher. First, arbitrary ciphers—generally geographical proper names—were substituted for all tell-tale words and expressions. . . . Secondly, these substitutions having been made, their messages were broken up and dislocated, the words being taken out of the proper order, and arranged as if they had been shaken in a bag, drawn out at random, and set down as chance dictated. (1)

Unsurprisingly, this “double cipher” proved harder to crack than any other the investigators found (ibid.). However, the Tribune declared that not only had it cracked the code, but that its consequent interpretations of the Democrats’ messages had “all the certainty of an absolute mathematical proof ” (ibid.). “Little by little,” it continued, “the fragments fall easily into their appropriate places, and as they fit themselves together the hidden meaning shines forth, not simply in one dispatch,” but throughout the correspondence as a whole (7). The moral of the story was that any code, in principle, could be decoded, and therefore that “the best laid plans of rogues and plotters are always in danger of detection” (1). Here, then, we are led to a novel subject in this chapter: the “breaking” or interpretation of codes, which we may now consider alongside, and in addition to their making. As depicted by the Tribune, the successful outcome of this process may be compared to what Carlyle calls “revelation”: in Carlyle’s words, the “shin[ing] forth” of meaning hidden in the symbol. (As a corollary of this, Carlyle and the Tribune are both concerned with “doubleness”; although the doubleness of “double ciphers” is, in a sense, the opposite of symbolic “doubling,” being an attempt to obscure meaning, rather than multiply it.) However, as any student of literature knows, interpretation is, at best, a controversial activity, and at worst, an “undecidable” one—these valuations may, of course, be switched if one prefers—in which competing parties often disagree over which (if any) of several possible interpretations can be adopted in any given instance. These disagreements are likely to be all the more fierce where conspiracies are concerned, precisely because successful interpretations of conspiratorial communications destroy the very secrecy on which conspiracies depend. As a result, conspirators are likely to

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deny not only particular interpretations of their messages, but also that they have even been conspiring in the first place. And so it proved in the case of the Democrat conspiracy of 1876. To test the Tribune’s claims, a select committee of the House of Representatives was formed with a view to establishing whether the alleged electoral fraud had happened. Much of the questioning of, and testimony given by, witnesses to this committee turns precisely on the question of how the relevant telegrams should be interpreted. As such, it represents a case study in the agonistics of interpretation itself. Much of this testimony reminds one of Simmel’s claim that secrets exert a “peculiar attraction” over their beholders. Certainly, Thomas J. Brady, one of those responsible for discovering the cipher telegrams, embodies this contention: recalling one telegram, he states, “It looked as if there was an immense amount of latent rascality there, and I proposed to find out what was in it.”35 A questioner then asks: “I suppose you assumed that all that you did not understand concealed something?” and is answered in the affirmative (ibid.). As this exchange makes clear, those who believed in (or at least suspected) a conspiracy presumed the incomprehensibility of messages to be a function of their own “outsidership,” and, correlatively, that “insiders” must have mischievous intent. Like Helen Keller at the telephone pole, then, they did not assume that what they found was “meaningless,” but rather that it was a sign of meanings imperceptible to them. Once started, this line of thought could easily extend beyond enciphered to apparently uncoded, would-be “steganographic” telegrams. One committee member wonders, “if a dispatch having an apparent sense on its face should really have another meaning” underneath the first (49). However, witnesses who doubted the existence of a conspiracy (or, as seems more likely, witnesses who were conspirators, but denied it) consistently critiqued this line of thought, by pointing out, on one hand, that latency is not invariably bound up with “rascality,” and on the other, that the telegrams presented by the Tribune did not necessarily mean the things it said they did. Notwithstanding the paper’s claims to “mathematical proof,” one witness complains: “The trouble with the Tribune’s translations of these dispatches is that they pick out any word they see fit and call that not a cipher word, and put in any word that they see fit and call that a cipher word” (155). Thus, he tells the committee, in relation to one especially contentious telegram: “I will not swear that I did not send the cipher dispatch, but I will swear that [the Tribune’s translation] is not a correct rendition of any dispatch that I did send” (150). On this account, the paper may quote telegrams correctly but misrepresent their meanings.

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For other witnesses, the Tribune’s alleged mistranslations were less the result of flawed investigative techniques, or political bias, than of a failure to appreciate certain realities about telegraphy itself. The fact that telegraph operators are, like anybody else, capable of human error was said to explain the mysterious omission of words from some transmissions, lending otherwise inoffensive messages their secretive appearance (86). The relatively high cost of telegrams, and in particular, the fact that they were charged for on a word-by-word basis was likewise said to explain their sometimes enigmatic character: where others saw “rascality,” their authors saw succinctness, born of thrift (89). One witness explained his use of arcane terminology on the grounds that he “did not want to telegraph about money”; apparently, because conscious that his telegram would pass through the hands of at least one third party telegraph operator, thus breaching confidentiality (103). (Ironically, his inquisitor remarks: “Yet by that dispatch you seem not only not to have avoided showing that money was passing between you, but to have made it patent that it was passing between you for an improper purpose” [106].) In all these instances, witnesses attempted to deny wrongdoing by, in effect, blaming suspicious features of their correspondence on the medium it was sent by. And in so doing, at least two them draw attention to a subject intensively explored in chapter 2, and last addressed in chapter 3: the quintessential, yet rarely (if ever) unqualified status of telegraphers as mediums. In Bryan and Harter’s studies, let us recall, telegraphers are said to become expert precisely by becoming “mediumistic”: that is, by sending messages as swiftly, accurately, and “automatically” as possible; without affecting their semantic value; and sometimes, indeed, without becoming conscious of this value in the first place. However, as we also saw in chapter 2, these studies show that such mediumship is never “pure,” as telegraphers almost always inflect the messages they reproduce with signs of gender, competence, or mood. In the case of cipher correspondence, we may now add, telegraphers can be expected to become either “more” or “less” mediumistic, depending on circumstance: “more,” if their incomprehension of messages makes them indifferent to their contents; “less,” if, on the contrary, this very incomprehension makes them eager to discover the cipher’s secret. These two possibilities were those conspirators would (or perhaps, if they did not, should) have had to weigh up before deciding whether the telegraph was “safe” for their particular purposes. The latter possibility, especially, was one that fascinated Henry James.

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Publicity, “Detection,” and Adultery: Telegraphy in Henry James Telegrams are everywhere in James’s fiction. As Richard Menke writes, “as plot points and as a technology for intercontinental communication, they feature in his transatlantic novels from The American (1876–77) to The Ambassadors (1903).”36 We may add that they also form a backdrop to his thinking about “nontechnical,” interpsychic intercontinental communication, as featured in The Sense of the Past (1915), and as discussed in chapter 1. This may, in part, reflect his own reliance on the medium: of one’s local telegraph office, he writes, it is the “scene of the transaction of so much of one’s daily business, haunt of one’s needs and one’s duties, . . . almost of one’s rewards and one’s disappointments, one’s joys and one’s sorrows . . .”37 It also, incontrovertibly, indicates a well-proportioned sense of the telegraph’s popularity with his contemporaries: in 1874–75, a year or so before he moved to London, a total of 19, 253, 120 telegrams were sent in the United Kingdom alone.38 Moreover, as Menke’s words remind us, James spent most of his adult life both mindful of and able to exploit the fact that people could, if and when they needed, communicate via telegraph between Europe and North America: a consequence of the “Atlantic Cable,” identified as such by Marie Corelli in A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), and first made available for use in 1866.39 Not only does this distinguish his experience of the telegraph from that of, say, Hawthorne, but it also implicates it in his thinking on the “international theme” that famously controls much of his fiction. But perhaps the best way to start explaining the significance of James’s telegrams in our present context of inclusion and exclusion is by examining a key word in his lexicon: “publicity.”40 A crucial text, in this respect, is The Bostonians (1886). Significantly, the term is herein linked with journalism, via the newspaperman Matthias Pardon, to whom newspapers are said to offer “the richest expression . . . of human life.”41 As a corollary, Pardon regards “Human existence” as itself “a huge publicity, in which the only fault was that it was sometimes not sufficiently effective” (121). To help remedy this insufficiency, Pardon takes to publicizing the activities of women’s rights campaigner Verena Tarrant; a task James glosses at one point by having another character report: “there has been enough arranging and interviewing, and discussing and telegraphing and advertising, enough wire-pulling and rushing around, to put an army in the field” (407). As this description indicates, publicity is furthered

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by, if not dependent, on the telegraph, and thus the electricity controlling it. (Indeed, James makes the latter link himself, attributing the fluency of telecommunications in New York City to “the number of electric feelers that stretched away everywhere” [288].) It is fitting, then, that Pardon proves a particular champion of this technology, “regarding the mission of mankind upon earth as a perpetual evolution of telegrams” (140). Through this character, then, the novel establishes a three-way association between publicity, the telegraph, and newspaper journalism; each of which are eulogized in similarly hyperbolic fashion; and each of which, accordingly, metonymically evoke each other. Contrary to the majority of evidence considered in this chapter, The Bostonians identifies the telegraph not with secrets, but disclosure. The consequences of this perhaps surprising state of affairs emerge more clearly when we consider secrets and disclosure not just as conceptual, but, as it were, “historical” antitheses: two rival “fates” that may potentially befall a single artifact or piece of information. (Here, we may recall Simmel’s characterization of history as a process whereby “what at an earlier time was manifest, enters the protection of secrecy,” and vice versa.) In James’s The Aspern Papers (1888), the narrator attempts to win control over a series of historically important letters their recipient has hitherto concealed. It is extraordinary, the narrator writes, that such concealment should be possible “in the latter half of the nineteenth century—the age of newspapers and telegrams and photographs and interviewers.”42 Again, the telegraph, along with other “publicizing” media, is linked to a historic diminution of the capacity to keep things secret. But the most explicit statement of this principle in James’s oeuvre comes in The Reverberator (1888). Here, attention focuses on the fictitious newspaper of James’s title, and its unscrupulous correspondent, George Flack. “I’m going for the secrets,” Flack says of his principle activity: ingratiating himself among society figures in Europe, so that details of their private lives can be sent for publication in America.43 And though the telegraph is not explicitly referred to in this regard—in fact, the only telegrams reported in the novel are sent by Flack’s victims—it is implicitly the medium on which he (like, in fact, every other international correspondent of his era) must depend.44 It is in light of this that we must consider James’s most sustained and oft-discussed consideration of the telegraph, “In the Cage” (1898).45 Here, the telegraph is used for secretive purposes, being the medium of choice for two illicit lovers—one of whom is committing adultery, while the other helps to conceal this fact by composing his

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side of their correspondence in a Democrat-conspiracy-like cipher.46 However, not only are these secrets discovered (and thus, the cipher “cracked”), but they are done so by a female telegrapher operator, James’s protagonist, who behaves in decidedly unmediumistic fashion, not only by decoding those portions of the lovers’ correspondence that pass through her hands, but also, on one occasion, intervening in it decisively. At length becoming personally acquainted with the male lover, Captain Everard, this “lady-telegraphist” (120) promises to help his cause. (In fact, she has, by this point, already done so, correcting an incriminating flaw in one of the telegrams sent as an alibi by his female counterpart, Lady Bradeen.) For this, she is rewarded by an otherwise unattainable level of emotional and intellectual involvement in the couple’s lives, scarcely distinguishable, in her own mind, from intimacy; itself defined, as we recall from chapter 1, as an affective likeness or affinity between two or more people, irrespective of any other bond between them. And it is this that constitutes the story’s crucial twist on James’s erstwhile identification of the telegraph with publicity. On one hand, James makes clear that the telegrapher’s knowledge of the couples’ secrets is precisely a function of what he calls “the intense publicity of her profession” (94). Since her services are available, in principle, to everyone, her attentions may attach themselves, in principle, to anyone. On the other, her confidentiality toward, and later assistance of the lovers, indicates the reemergence of a link between telegraphy and secrecy, which here survives not just in spite of, but also, in a sense, because of the telegrapher’s discoveries. James’s reaffirmation of this principle also clarifies the story’s bearing on our wider themes, inclusion and exclusion, and their “agential” counterparts, insiders and outsiders. For we may now say that by virtue of her code breaking, the telegrapher is as an outsider turned insider: someone whose inclusion in the lovers’ lives both compensates for, and, momentarily, eclipses her exclusion. To better understand this complex knot of affects and alliances, we must consider both James’s commentary on the protagonist, and her own account of what she’s doing. To James, the telegrapher enjoys a special gift for “observation and detection,” which, when harnessed to “odd caprices of curiosity,” makes her well equipped to see into the messages she sends (104, 94). To the telegrapher, these messages betray, above all, the “secret” lives of those who send them: “Their affairs, their appointments and arrangements, their little games and secrets and vices—those things all pass before me” (112). This would, in itself, confirm the story’s interest in the interplay between Simmel’s “first” and “second” worlds—along with that between Arnold’s

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“masquerade” and world of “sympathy”—or, in more Jamesian terms, “publicity” and “privacy.” But James’s greater interest, at this juncture, is less in publicity and privacy themselves than in the effort needed to traverse the gap between them—an effort that turns out to owe a lot to the protagonist’s imagination. Since she sees only one side of the couple’s correspondence, the telegrapher must reconstruct the other by conjecture: a process, as James shows, that paradoxically intensifies her sense of omniscience. Lacking Lady Bradeen’s answers to a tranche of correspondence, “she press[es] the romance closer by reason of the very quantity of imagination that it demanded” (101). Later, “she read[s] into the immensity of their intercourse stories and meanings without end” (105). And later still, face to face with Lady Bradeen, a glance suffices to fill in “the gaps” in Everard’s dispatches, and so effectively supply the “missing answers” (125). The highpoint of this imaginative engagement follows an interview between the telegrapher and Everard, their one and only “private” meeting. Having said she will do “ ‘anything’ ” to help him, the pair’s next encounter in the telegraph office sees the word “anything” traveling “to and fro between them” silently, “under the poked-out chins that interposed” (149). In the telegraph office, James suggests, the unspoken, paradoxically, may be as potent as the spoken or dispatched. But the substance of the telegrapher’s assistance, here and hereafter, turns out to consist more pointedly in her ability to stay “unspeaking,” and thus be as mediumistic in practice as she is unmediumistic by character and capability. Already, James has contrasted her “framed and wired confinement” (in the “cage,” or telegraphic booth that gives the story its title) with the lovers’ mobility, and their presumed meetings, in and out of London (92). Now, following her interview with Everard, the telegrapher finds herself increasingly cut out of the couples’ affairs, only re-entering them to recall a telegram sent months earlier, and remind Everard what it contains (159–63).47 More significantly still, her previously cherished knowledge now appears distinctly partial, as feelings of exclusion from the couple’s affairs replace her earlier sense of inclusion. As a result, the very “gaps and blanks and absent answers” she had earlier considered “filled” come to appear, not so much as spurs to imaginative reconstruction, but as humiliating testaments to “how much” she had “missed” (158). In sum, the story thus affirms and suspends James’s earlier identification of the telegraph with disclosure and publicity. The lovers may be discovered, but crucially, go unexposed. And in relation to secrets and cryptography, too, the story has a clear if “double” message.

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As in the Democrat conspiracy of 1876, and its exposure by the New York Tribune, the telegraph appears as both a vehicle of secrets and the means of their unmasking: without it, the lovers would presumably forsake its ease of encipherment; with it, they show that (to recall the Tribune’s words) “the best laid plans of rogues and plotters are always in danger of detection.” In relation to inclusion and exclusion, meanwhile, the story has, again, a “double” message, though here the two alternative outcomes are, if anything, yet more intimately linked. Though not a pure outsider, James’s telegrapher finds that she is not a pure insider either, despite her seeming intimacy with Everard, and understanding of the lovers’ lives. We must revise, then, our earlier estimate of her as an “outsider turned insider,” whose exclusion, through “curiosity,” is transformed into its opposite, inclusion. For what she now appears as, more precisely, is an outsider who sees “in”: someone who, like Helen Keller feeling the telephone pole, finds her inclusion shadowed, if not negated, by a more profound position, and thus sensation, of exclusion. This newly coined, revisionary figure, the “outsider who sees ‘in,’” is one with which James displayed a wider fascination. In addition to the telegrapher, the protagonists of What Maisie Knew (1897), “The Turn of the Screw” (1897), and the narrator of The Sacred Fount (1901) might all be plausibly located in this category. But the ultimate exemplar of this figure is surely Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors. Significantly, this novel too features a raft of telegraphic correspondence, and turns on the revelation of an unorthodox (though not, on this occasion, adulterous) love affair. As the “ambassador” to Mrs. Newsome, tasked with persuading her son Chad to return from Paris to the United States, Strether finds himself “communicating with a quickness with which telegraphy alone would rhyme”; using the Atlantic cable, that is, much like George Flack, to send bulletins back home via the quickest means available.48 However, Strether fails to spot perhaps the one thing Mrs. Newsome most desires to know: the fact that Chad is having an affair with Mme De Vionnet; a person whom, like Chad, Strether feels himself to know intimately but turns out to be the dupe of. When he does, eventually, learn of the affair, Strether receives a telegram from Mme de Vionnet requesting an interview. Dispatching his reply, Strether visits a telegraph office that James depicts, superbly, as a kind of institutional embodiment of Strether’s friends’ duplicity, and the morality they represent. “There was,” James writes: something in the air of these establishments; the vibration of the vast strange life of the town, the influence of the types, the performers

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concocting their messages; the little prompt Paris women, arranging, pretexting goodness knew what, driving the dreadful needle-pointed public pen at the dreadful sand-strewn public table: implements that symbolized for Strether’s too interpretative innocence something more acute in manner, more sinister in morals, more fierce in the national life. (358)

This “fierce[ness]” is, of course, the supposedly “French” penchant for romantic intrigue that Strether has hitherto ignored but now perceives. All the “women” in this office, James suggests, are “arranging” amorous affairs. (And again, James is at pains to stress the irony inherent in the “public[ness]” of the medium they use.) At length communicating with Mme de Vionnet, Strether thus finds his own correspondence “quite in the key of the Postes et Télégraphes in general,” and of a sort that leagues him with his “neighbours” (ibid.). As in “In the Cage,” the telegraph emerges as both a symbol and material support of secretive, illicit love. The apotheosis of this line of thought appears, though, not in this, but in James’s final published novel, The Golden Bowl (1904). Here, adultery moves, as it were, from the margins to center-stage, being no longer a remote spectacle, as in “In the Cage,” but the very medium in which the novel’s characters conduct their lives. Not coincidentally, it is here, too, that James conducts his most intense enquiry into inclusion, exclusion, and the sometime-porousness of barriers between them; showing that, in fact, the radical confusion of these categories is none other than the signature of adultery itself.49 Within adultery, the novel shows, “outsiders” become “insiders” while “insiders” become “outsiders”: whether as practitioners or victims, and whether consciously or otherwise, those involved are thus essentially engaged in exchanging one another’s “proper” roles. Famously, James’ two adulterers, Prince Amerigo and Charlotte Stant, are drawn into proximity by two marriages: the first, between the Prince and Maggie Verver, the second, between Charlotte and Maggie’s father, Adam. Though Charlotte’s and the Prince’s affair predates the former marriage, the latter triggers its renewal, by gifting the two lovers an opportunity for constant—and, to all appearances, quite “innocent”— contact. And it is just this opportunity that forms the substance of a crucial telegram, sent by the Prince to Charlotte in response to news of her engagement. This is how the telegram appears in retrospect, via Charlotte’s receipt of it: That telegram, that acceptance of the prospect proposed to them . . . she had never destroyed; though reserved for no eyes but her own it was still carefully reserved. She kept it in a safe place—from which,

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very privately, she sometimes took it out to read it over. “A la guerre comme à la guerre then”—it had been couched in the French tongue. “We must lead our lives as we see them; but I am charmed with your courage and almost surprised at my own.”50

The message is, to say the least, as James concedes, “ambiguous” (ibid.). But its central meaning is surely that its author considers himself and his correspondent bound by covert bonds of understanding; that this understanding is both a precondition and, in another sense, the very product of this message; and that by sending the message in the first place, the Prince both presupposes and, as it were, proleptically receives Charlotte’s agreement to the plan it intimates (ibid.). Indeed, this agreement is rather affirmed than contradicted by Charlotte’s offer to show the message to Adam, which, if accepted, “would in all probability at once have dished her marriage,” leaving her fiancé in little doubt of how matters stand between her and the Prince (245). Here, James suggests, Adam’s “delicacy” (for he declines) and Charlotte’s simulated candor combine fatefully to preserve the very secret she effectively proposes to reveal (ibid.). So it is that by deploying this most “public” medium, the telegraph, the Prince ensures the most “private” of effects; not only by eliciting Charlotte’s readings and re-readings, but also, only slightly less directly, and, in the final analysis, more importantly, by precipitating an affair that at least one of its victims, Adam, remains unaware of to the last.

“Underground” or “Mute” Telegraphy, and “Race” But the lovers’ other victim, Maggie, does not remain “unaware” of the affair. Having learned of it, she hints as much to Fanny Assingham, during an interview on which the Prince belatedly intrudes. Following this intrusion, the trio exchange glances, amounting to what James calls a “rapid play of suppressed appeal and disguised response” (448). Moments later, Maggie and the Prince are left alone, whereupon there again occurs “a kind of unprecedented moral exchange,” involving more—or maybe less—than words (455). As in “In the Cage,” where the word “anything” travels silently between the telegrapher and Everard, communication here takes place on levels that transcend or obviate the written, read, or spoken. James’s interest in such forms of communication was sustained. As Roger Luckhurst has shown, it suggests his closeness to the discourse

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of “telepathy,” and other paranormal phenomena addressed by us in chapter 1.51 Moreover, as Sharon Cameron has shown, it forms part of James’s still-wider interest in supra-individual “consciousness”—a topic I have also taken up elsewhere.52 But all we really need to note about this here is that Jamesian nonverbal communication is often, though not always, articulated via reference to the telegraph. And where the latter is concerned, we can perhaps infer a key distinction. Take an incident from The American, where Newman “telegraph[s]” to his companion by means of “physiognomical play.”53 Here, telegraphy is clearly visual, being based on facial and other bodily signs explicitly identified with “physiognomy,” the would-be “science” (and medium) of self-representation discussed above, in chapter 2.54 But in The Golden Bowl, Charlotte and the Prince at one point reach an understanding “without any sort of straight telegraphy”—not only “practically without words,” but also, it seems, without those meaningful exchanges of glances the novel specifies elsewhere (282; my emphasis). This suggests that in the latter case, at least, James is thinking less of a device than of its apparatus-free equivalent, much as Mark Twain conceives “mental telegraphy”—an agency, as we have seen, explicitly modeled on its electric namesake but “far outstripping” it in clarity and speed. A passage from The Wings of the Dove (1902) makes this point more clearly still: “It wasn’t . . . simply that their eyes had met,” James says of yet another pair of lovers (Kate Croy and Merton Densher); “other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well.”55 When James refers to “mute telegraphy”—to quote one last example, from “The Real Thing” (1892)—he therefore has in mind a social act involving ocular and supra-ocular capacities for “thinking things” to one’s associates.56 Like Twain, then, James makes a definitive displacement from machinery to mind, identifying technical effects with “faculties,” distinct from the devices they resemble. And like many other writers we have considered, James seems to have conceived communications grounded in such faculties as a sign of other, more “foundational” affinities—especially romantic love. But there is another species of affinity—or so, at least, it was alleged by James’s contemporaries— that mattered deeply in this context (if not, perhaps, to James himself ), not least because it seemed responsible for otherwise inexplicable incidences of inclusion and exclusion, and the distinct forms of “insidership” and “outsidership” with which these corresponded. This supposed affinity was “race.”57 To see this, we may turn to a little-known story by Bret Harte, “See Yup” (1898).58 In this story of a gold prospecting settlement in

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California, a “Chinaman,” See Yup, is asked by the narrator if he does not “think the electric telegraph wonderful?”59 Surprisingly, See Yup does not reply in the affirmative; a fact the narrator—like Harte, implicitly American and “white”—accounts for by reflecting: we knew that the Chinese themselves possessed some means of secretly and quickly communicating with one another. Any news of good or ill import to their race was quickly disseminated through the settlement before we knew anything about it. An innocent basket of clothes from the wash, sent up from the river-bank, became in some way a library of information; a single slip of rice paper, aimlessly fluttering in the dust of the road, had the mysterious effect of diverging a whole gang of coolie tramps away from our settlement. (Ibid.; emphasis in original)

This, then, is why both See Yup and the Chinese as a whole may deprecate the telegraph: they have some intangible, and, it would seem, superior, equivalent. Like James, Harte suggests that this is grounded in material, visual signs (the clothes basket, the slip of paper), while also hinting that these are insufficient for explaining the phenomenon at hand: surely, his text implies, some other, more innate, and here distinctly “racial” faculty must be involved as well. As such, this would-be faculty is directly linked to secrecy, and the ability of one group to construct themselves as “insiders,” while excluding others as “outsiders.” The point, then, is not just the swiftness or efficacy of this Chinese would-be “telegraph,” but that others do not understand it. Moreover, these others are ignorant both of what this “telegraph” says and how it works. Such fascination with, if not alarm about, “the other’s” intragroup communications was an established part of racial discourse by this time.60 It is implicit in Melville’s comments on the Typee’s “vocal telegraph”—whose “inconceivable rapidity,” noted in my “Introduction,” implies some attribute outside the norms of white observers. But the phenomenon that most gave credence to such ideas, while associating them with yet another “race,” African Americans, was the construction of the “Underground Railroad” by slaves, ex-slaves, and abolitionists.61 As one of its chief historians, Wilbur Siebert, writes, this was “a great and intricate network,” involving many people (black and white), that reached its highest levels of activity in the decades prior to the Civil War.62 As Siebert’s map suggests (see figure 5.2), the railroad trafficked people across the United States on a multitude of intersecting lines, much like its “overland” equivalent, though with the more specific purpose of transporting its peculiar class of passenger from South to North

186 Figure 5.2 Map of the Underground Railroad (Detail). From Wilbur H. Siebert, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Macmillan, 1898). Author’s collection

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(or Canada), and so to freedom. Unlike its counterpart, however (and as the name “underground” implies), it was essentially secretive and conspiratorial, a fact necessitated both by its illegality, and by the active efforts of slaveholders to prevent their slaves escaping.63 Though more “a mode of operation” than a “corporation or material object,” as H. V. Johnson writes, its given name was not entirely frivolous: like the “real” railroad, it had “conductors,” “tracks,” and “stations” (agents, routes, and safe-houses respectively), and furthermore made use of “real” trains wherever possible—a fact suggestive of Simmel’s claim that, having distinguished “first” and “second” worlds, secrecy allows the former to be manipulated via the latter.64 And like the “real” railroad, too, the Underground Railroad had a telegraph, both comparable to and yet distinct from its mechanical equivalent. This “underground telegraph” forms the subject of an article by that name, written by abolitionist James Redpath, in 1859. The article begins: THE thriving condition of the Underground Railroad establishes conclusively the existence of secret and rapid modes of communication among the slave population of the South. Many extraordinary stories are told by the Southrons themselves of the facility with which the Negroes learn of all events that transpire in the surrounding country.65

So far, so like Bret Harte. But more explicitly than Harte, Redpath (or perhaps his “Southron” source) identifies this “extraordinary” capability with “race”: here, more specifically, “traits and peculiarities of the Negro character” (240; emphasis added). It is because of “Negroness,” in other words, that this telegraph exists at all—and further, does so in a way that proves immune to “white” surveillance or analysis. Redpath goes on to state that this “power” may soon be capable of launching “a formidable insurrection” (241), a point he reiterated one year later, in a partisan biography of John Brown, lately executed for leading the failed slave insurrection at Harpers Ferry.66 As Twain (whom Redpath later knew) might say, all underground telegraphy yet lacks, compared to its electrical equivalent, is “certainty and system.”67 Redpath was not the only white slave-sympathizer to identify such “telegraphic” powers with slaves: in a biography of Harriet Tubman, one of the Underground Railroad’s most formidable agents, Sarah H. Bradford notes “the mysterious telegraphic communication existing among these simple people” (i.e., “negroes”).68 But whenever such

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communicative methods are specified more clearly, they seem to have less to do with any “innate,” much less “racial,” attribute than with cryptography, as practiced by the Democrats in 1876, or James’s cheating lovers. Here is Siebert’s summary: Much of the communication relating to fugitive slaves was had in guarded language. Special signs, whispered conversations, passwords, messages couched in figurative phrases, were the common modes of conveying information about underground passengers, or about parties in pursuit of fugitives. These modes of communication constituted what abolitionists knew as the “grape-vine telegraph.”69

We could be reading “In the Cage,” of the Democrats’ steganographic telegrams, or even of freemasonry: a fact confirmed elsewhere, by one agent’s use of a Masonic sign when trying to locate an ally.70 Like Carlyle’s symbols, then, the “grape-vine” telegraph may be perceptible to all, and yet discriminate insiders from outsiders. Other testimony underscores this principle: one ex-conductor recalls whistling and singing popular song in ways that signaled “railroad telegraphy” to insiders, but not outsiders; others are described using a code (in the Tribune’s terms, an “arbitrary cipher”) whereby routes were “called by the names of timber.”71 In all of these and similar instances, communications were less secret in themselves than they were secretive, in their effects. As two contemporary writers put it (of quilts, yet another medium in which Railroad insignia were embedded), such communications remained “hidden in plain view.”72 Again, then, we must distinguish essentially secretive modes of communication, such as the “underground telegraph” itself, from contingently secret institutions, such as the electric telegraph, and other “overland” facilities. Where the latter were used, in fact, it was often with a view to exploiting their apparent “innocence.” Levi Coffin, an important Underground Railroad agent, recalls a group of telegrams in which information was “conveyed in a manner that could convey no suspicions of the truth to others.”73 But by the same token, the telegraph could just as well be used by opponents of the Railroad, especially when they sought to thwart the Railroad’s operations. Of one such incident, in which four slaves were captured, and an agent drowned, Johnson recalls: “I could have torn down all the telegraph wires in the land.”74 (Ironically, the same agent had earlier sent a letter detailing his telegraphic correspondence, sent with a view to ascertaining the safest route.75) Similarly, Frederick Douglass writes of slaves traveling by train, “almost in advance” of the “lightning,” or telegraphy, carrying news of their escape.76 All of this

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suggests that whether by letter, railroad, or telegraph—or more particularly, via combinations of all three, plus (in the slaves and abolitionists’ case) their “underground” equivalents—both the Railroad and its adversaries were seeking some version of the “logistical sublime”: that acme of coordinated action, involving many technologies and many agents, disparate in time and space, addressed in chapter 1, via Stoker’s Dracula. All one need add is that, unlike Dracula himself, escaping slaves were not just the objects of conspiracies against them, but also “subjects” of their own conspiracies; and that, as such, they were not only victims, but also beneficiaries of some, if not all, of the new technologies electricity made available.

The End, and the Coming of a “Crisis in God’s Realms” Douglass was, of course, aware of this. As we have seen in this book’s “Introduction,” he elsewhere celebrated “lightning”—his favored term for electricity—among the “agents” of a beneficent modernity, whose penetration to “the darkest corners of the globe” would (he predicted) soon help bring an end to slavery itself. As this reminds us, abolitionism always had an “international” dimension: a fact further borne out by Douglass’s prototelephonic claim that “Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are distinctly heard on the other.”77 So, too, did the “logic” of conspiracy, at least in some articulations: one thinks again of Arnold’s dream of global masonry. But it remains to be seen that such “international,” if not global, aspirations also characterized less benign conspiracies; or so it was alleged by hostile commentators, for whom the international transit of people and ideas was just as much about peril as progress, and telecommunications just as likely to subvert as sponsor freedom. Such commentators would today be called “conspiracy theorists,” and have a long tradition in America.78 One such nineteenth-century theorist, remarkably, was Samuel Morse. Morse’s interest in conspiracies was, perhaps, ancestral. His father, Jedidiah Morse, had been the first American to publicly denounce the Illuminati, in 1798.79 But the younger Morse’s target was far larger, being nothing less than the international Roman Catholic Church, which he claimed was plotting to overthrow the government of the United States. In the second of his two pseudonymous pamphlets on this subject, the putative Confessions of a French Catholic Priest (1838), Morse lays bear his central claim: “Romanism has two doctrines—the public or apparent, and the secret or concealed,” the second of which

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is “real,” while the first is mere pretence.80 Like Carlyle discussing symbols, then, Morse found “doubleness” to be intrinsic to the church. Where he differed from Carlyle was in finding this doubleness deceitful and malicious. The substance of Morse’s complaint against Catholicism was that its followers were agents of Clemens Metternich, the then-chancellor of the Habsburg Empire, a power Morse believed to harbor covetous designs against America. That Catholicism should be a vehicle of these designs was, Morse argued, a function of its hierarchical structure: by contrast with Protestantism, believers are said to stand “in regular steps of slave and master,” from the humblest parishioner up to Metternich, and ultimately, the emperor himself.81 To stop them spreading “un-American” ideals, Morse argues, America should stem the flow of Catholic immigrants from Europe, while simultaneously providing “religious and intellectual cultivation” for those already resident.82 The antidote to “Popery,” Morse concluded, was thus a campaign of nationwide acculturation. Given this claim, it is tempting to wonder whether Morse’s fear of conspiracy and his interest in the telegraph were not somehow linked. For on the face of things, at least, it is easy to imagine how any nationwide educational campaign might have benefited from a device whose manifest purpose (or so, as we have seen, it seemed to many) was to quicken intellectual exchange. But is this really what Morse had in mind, either consciously or otherwise? As we have seen, one of the great boons of his device, according to his letter to the U.S. Treasury Secretary on the subject, was that communications remain “secret to all but the persons for whom they are intended.” This is hardly the view of, say, James’s telegraph-enthusiast, the publicist Matthias Pardon. Moreover, in his first anti-Catholic tract, Morse warns that the enemy’s “Principles are not bounded by geographical limits. Oceans present to them no barriers,” as if to warn against the very ecumenicalism of ideas Douglass finds so praiseworthy.83 Neither claim suggests any great enthusiasm for unregulated intellectual exchange. The latter, indeed, seems to positively dread it, while the former suggests a more specific fear of foreign spies. And it is spies that play a key role in the work of one of Morse’s great conspiracy-imagining successors, the English novelist, William Le Queux. Though now generally forgotten, Le Queux is, as much as anyone, responsible for our contemporary idea of spies.84 This is largely due to his genre-founding espionage novel, Secrets of the Foreign Office (1903), in which a British secret agent, Duckworth Drew, foils a succession of foreign plots. The coding, sending, interception and

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decoding of telegrams are crucial to the novel’s action, both when engaged in by conspirators and when Drew resorts to such techniques himself. In an early episode, for instance, intercepted “cipher correspondence” alerts the British government to a plot, which Drew subsequently subverts by intercepting a particularly important telegram, allowing it to be decoded.85 Echoing this, the novel’s closing episode sees foreign spies intercepting British messages, until Drew discovers how this is done and stops it. The novel thus sets in play a Jamesian dialectic whereby the telegraph is used by some to traffic secrets, by others to discover them, and by both parties to get one over on the other. This theme is developed further in Le Queux’s later novels, where attention switches from the “wired” telegraph to its “wireless” successor, radio. In Tracked by Wireless (1922), for example, another band of conspirators, this time thieves, use radio to liaise among themselves, while the protagonist (like Le Queux himself, a radio enthusiast) uses the same technology to “track” the villains and, ultimately, thwart them.86 Here, then, as in espionage, insiders and outsiders repeatedly switch places, one simply doing to the other what the other does to them. Like Morse, Le Queux was more or less alarmed by “foreigners.” Like the James of “In the Cage,” he was also intrigued by the prospect of surveillance, of the sort telegraphy and radio enabled. These two interests coincide in Le Queux’s portrayal of another archetypal figure, the master criminal, whose best exemplar is Sassari, in The Broadcast Mystery (1924).87 Known as “The World’s Master,” this character (born of a “Polish Jew” and an “Italian gipsy,” therefore effectively “without birth or country”) sits at the center of an enormous web of financial interests—which Le Queux likens, à la Frank Norris, to an “octopus.”88 From his London headquarters, Sassari controls these assets via electrical technologies, including a “mass of [radio] receiving equipment” and a “telephone transmitting-set of latest design” (83). Moreover, he uses nontechnological means of control, such as “animal magnetism” and “telepathy,” whose electrical associations we have tracked throughout this study (188). His most formidable asset, however, is yet another piece of electrical apparatus, the “Eye of Death,” that can “dissolve any material, no matter what it is, into dust by means of an invisible ray” (238). With this terrifying weapon, Sassari plans to hold the world to ransom. In the event, Sassari’s plan (literally) backfires, as his death ray destroys him, and not the world. But no such happy ending is envisaged by the German jurist and mental patient Daniel Paul Schreber, whose Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) constitutes perhaps the ultimate

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conspiracy theory (or fantasy).89 Schreber is a suitable figure with whom to conclude, not only this chapter, but also this book, because his thought unites themes that have governed our discussion from the outset: sociality, the “idea of ideas,” and bodily vitality and matter. Like Le Queux, he imagines a planetary—and, in fact, for him, cosmic—conspiracy involving “rays,” though his are not products of technology, but direct emanations from God, the arch-conspirator. Like every major figure we have discussed, he uses electrical vocabulary to “think” and “write” such theories through, adducing “The power of attraction,” for example, to explain how “rays” behave.90 And like so many others, he identifies such “powers” with the body, and more specifically the nervous system, our major topic in chapter 4. It is with Schreber’s idiosyncratic view of “nerves,” in fact, that we must begin considering his theory—for God’s conspiracy, in Schreber’s view, is waged not just against him, but also, via nerves, within him. Schreber is one of the great thinkers of the nervous system. This is not because his thought has any neurological value, but because it is the category through which he understands everything. Thus God, who is “to start with only nerve,” is “reflected on my [own] inner nervous system” (20, 131). Moreover, Schreber exhorts his readers to “think of my body on our earth as connected to other stars by stretched out nerves” (123). This is because Schreber’s body has been targeted by God as the arena of a terrible and remorseless campaign: “since my nervous illness took [its] . . . critical turn,” Schreber writes, “my nerves have been set in motion from without incessantly and without any respite” (55; emphasis in original). This motion is instigated by means of “rays,” which are like “long drawn-out filaments approaching my head from some vast distant spot on the horizon” (273). Their activity has a twofold objective: first, that of destroying Schreber’s reason; and second, that of giving him the body of a woman (59–62). It is the latter aspect of God’s plot that famously attracted the attention of Freud, who saw it as evidence of incipient homosexuality—a subject, as we have seen, on which Freud expressed more general views elsewhere.91 It is the assault on Schreber’s reason, however, which is of most concern to us here, for this constant activity in Schreber’s nerves takes the specific form of words. Indeed, as Schreber writes, “it seems to lie in the nature of rays that they must speak as soon as they are in motion” (126; emphasis in original). This propensity to speak within the nervous system brings together two lines of thought familiar from elsewhere in this study: that which sees the nervous system as a form of communications technology, and

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that which sees electricity (as the substrate of both nerves and such technology) as the medium and substance of ideas. The convergence of these lines of thought is, perhaps, implicit in the work of anyone who uses either the nervous system-telegraph, or brain-telephone exchange analogies dicussed in chapter 4. But in Schreber’s view, nervous activity is not just like a language; it is voiced in “a somewhat antiquated but nevertheless powerful German, characterized particularly by a wealth of euphemisms” (26). In other respects, the language of nerves resembles a sort of telegraphese, in which “certain words” are “omitted” where they are “not essential for the sense” (56n26). Meanwhile, God’s co-conspirator in chief, Professor Flechsig (the psychiatrist responsible for Schreber), speaks of a “ ‘principle of light-telegraphy,’ to indicate the mutual attraction of rays and nerves” (116n58). This language of the nerves has a complex relation to that of Schreber, being simultaneously alien to, a recapitulation of, and a misrepresentation of his own. In the first instance, it is alien because it belongs to God and other “souls” leagued against him. In the second, however, souls have the strangely secretarial habit of writing down everything that Schreber does, says, or thinks (123)—an activity Friedrich Kittler has likened to that of the conspirators in Dracula.92 But third, and most significantly, souls make deliberately fraudulent claims about what Schreber’s thoughts and sayings are, through their habit of “ ‘representing,’ that is to say of giving to a thing or a person a semblance different from its real nature” (124n62). This, of course, may be related to what we have elsewhere called misrepresentation, as practiced by Dare in A Laodicean, or Burley in Twain’s “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton.” But here, by contrast, misrepresentation does not go on behind the victim’s back, but in his presence, and is indeed intended to transform its very object: “one has the boundless impudence,” Schreber complains of the souls, “to demand that I should express this falsified nonsense in spoken words as if it were my own thoughts” (126; my emphasis). Above all, then, the souls seek to make Schreber correspond to the image they project upon him. This last reflection, moreover, helps to clarify a further difference that exists between, say, A Laodicean, and Schreber’s Memoirs. In the latter instance, the discourse of the conspirators is not kept secret from its victim: on the contrary, it is kept immediately and oppressively available. Everything that the souls say is directly “spoken into [his] head,” and there is no way that Schreber can either ignore them or remove himself from their presence (168). It is this vicious

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circularity, in which everything that Schreber thinks or says is repeated back to him, albeit in mutilated or travestied form, that distinguishes this conspiracy not only from that of A Laodicean, but also from every other we have discussed. For whereas most conspiracies have a clear interest in keeping themselves secret, this one has the opposite intention of leaving Schreber in no doubt as to its existence, and indeed, of destroying him precisely through exposure to its workings. This is why the essence of Schreber’s predicament might be regarded as a kind of unbearable intimacy: a terrible and obscene parody of the forms of social contact new electrical technologies enable. Like Twain, in “Mental Telegraphy,” although to quite different effect, Schreber thus knows exactly how it feels to have others “shoot [their] thoughts” across thousands of miles, and “fill [his] head with them, to the exclusion of every other interest, in a single moment.” These are not the only comparisons that one might draw between the experiences of Schreber and those of others who have featured in this study. One can note that by “participat[ing] in my thinking and my sensations,” the souls make a similarly prosthetic use of Schreber’s faculties as Keller does when participating in the sensations of other people (118). It is also notable that in drawing attention to the “[g]rowing nervousness among mankind,” Schreber strikes a similar tone to that of George Miller Beard in his speculations on the spread of neurasthenia (40).93 But we must conclude, not by noting this, or any other comparison, but by considering the social dimension of Schreber’s experience, and its relation to this chapter’s master themes, inclusion and exclusion. God’s campaign, says Schreber, is founded on a misapprehension, for throughout His behavior toward his victim there is manifested a “total inability to understand living man” (124–25n62). Furthermore, this misunderstanding has led God to embark upon a conspiracy that has potentially disastrous implications for its initiator; for the nerves of human beings, “particularly when in a state of high-grade excitation, have such power of attraction for the nerves of God that He [might] not be able to free Himself from them again, and [might] thus endanger His own existence” (24; emphasis in original). The resulting “crisis in God’s realms” (33–42) has the twofold effect of imperiling God’s existence and revealing Him to Schreber: brought down to earth, He is thus “reflected” on the latter’s “nervous system” (131). And it is through this, and a particular technological simile, that Schreber becomes the auditor of God Himself: It is presumably a phenomenon like telephoning; the filaments of rays spun out towards my head act like telephone wires; the weak

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sound of the cries of help coming from an apparently vast distance is received only by me in the same way as telephonic communication can only be heard by a person who is on the telephone, but not by a third person who is somewhere between the giving and the receiving end. (277; emphasis in original)

As in The Virginian, the telephone suggests how some may be included in a relation others are excluded from. But here, crucially, the narrator identifies himself as the “only” one “included,” rather than as a “third person,” listening in. The exclusion of such persons is, moreover, an intrinsic feature of the technology, as Schreber understands it. He is not alone in feeling this way. In “A Telephonic Conversation” (1880), Twain also notices the way in which the third party listener to a telephone call hears “a conversation with only one end to it,” calling it the “queerest of all queer things in this world.”94 It is thus apt that Schreber should designate the same experience as a kind of inverse analogy to his own experience of isolation, because as Elias Canetti has suggested, there is nothing of which Schreber is surer than the fact that he is alone.95 It does not matter that in this case he is on the receiving end of the line, rather than a third party, because here this is something that does not bind him within a community, but, on the contrary, forecloses the very possibility of this ever happening: God’s cries for help are heard, but “only by me.” For Schreber, then, there is no “magnetic chain of humanity,” as Hawthorne might put it. Hence the beauty and justice of his telephonic simile, for in the situation he describes, he is simultaneously connected with God and placed beyond the realm of fellow men. Once again, the telephone unites inclusion and exclusion, as it does for Helen Keller, when, at Bell’s suggestion, she places her hands upon the telephone pole to feel the speech she cannot hear. This, then, might be deemed a suitable point on which to close a study in which electricity and its technologies have often been shown as ways of thinking about the social, but where the social has itself appeared, at times, as a source of disease, regret, and isolation.

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Note s

Introduction 1. Congressional Globe, 27th Congress, 3rd session (1843), 323. Commentaries on this episode include Carleton Mabee, The American Leonardo: A Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944), 251–61; Shawn James Rosenheim, The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 92; Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 128–29; Linda Simon, Dark Light: Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-Ray (Orlando: Harcourt, 2004), 33–34. 2. See, for example, Gerrit L. Verschuur, Hidden Attraction: The History and Mystery of Magnetism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), ch. 7. 3. Congressional Globe, 27th Congress, 3rd session (1843), 323. 4. Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Iwan Rhys Morus, Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Otis, Networking; Simon, Dark Light. 5. Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Sara Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 6. On the history of the term “idea,” see Robert McRae, “ ‘Idea’ as a Philosophical Term in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 26 (1965), 175–90; John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 80–89. 7. William Hazlitt, “On the Knowledge of Character” [1826], Selected Writings, ed. Ronald Blythe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 105;

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8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851; New York: Norton, 1967), 264. William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. II (1890; New York: Dover, 1950), 568; emphasis in original. George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–72; Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1994), 13. Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses” [1850], The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A, MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1987), 249. On this affinity, see, for example, James C. Wilson, ed., The Hawthorne and Melville Friendship: An Annotated Bibliography, Biographical and Critical Essays, and Correspondence between the Two (Jefferson: McFarland, 1991). Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (1860; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 40. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Ethan Brand” [1850], Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales, ed. James McIntosh (New York: Norton, 1987), 241. Hawthorne, Seven Gables, 166. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850; New York: Norton, 1988), 105. Ibid. Harold Aspiz, Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980). Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century[1845], rep. The Portable Margaret Fuller, ed. Mary Kelley (New York: Penguin, 1994). George Miller Beard and Alphonso David Rockwell, On the Medical and Surgical Uses of Electricity, 5th ed. (1871; London: H. K. Lewis, 1891), 175. On the possible influence of Shelley’s novel on Hawthorne, see Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and NineteenthCentury Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 68–72. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (rev. ed. 1831; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 8. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 34; Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 94. Emily Dickinson, poem no. 1431 [c.1877], The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 610. Cf. Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire [1938], trans. Alan C. M. Ross (London: Quartet Books, 1987), 55 (on “sexualized fire”); Iwan Rhys Morus, “A Grand and Universal Panacea: Death, Resurrection and the Electric Chair,” Bodies/Machines, ed. Iwan Rhys Morus (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 102.

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25. Edgar Allan Poe, “Some Words with a Mummy” [1845], Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), 810. 26. J. L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 318. 27. Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851; New York: Norton, 2002), 141. 28. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Premature Burial” [1844], Poetry and Tales, 670–72; Herman Melville, Mardi (1849; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 580; Twain, Connecticut Yankee, 124. 29. Richard Henry Dana Jr., Two Years before the Mast (1840; New York: Signet, 1964), 323. 30. See, for example, William Berkson, Fields of Force: The Development of a World View from Faraday to Einstein (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974). 31. George Miller Beard, Sexual Neurasthenia, ed. A. D. Rockwell, 5th ed. (1884; New York: E. B. Treat and Co., 1900), 101–07. See also Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body, 19–20. 32. Heilbron, Electricity, 320. 33. Samuel F. B. Morse, Letter to the Hon. Levi Woodbury, Secretary of the U.S. Treasury (September 27, 1837), rep. Alfred Vail, The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph, with the Reports of Congress, and a Description of All Telegraphs Known, Employing Electricity or Galvanism (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845), 70; emphasis in original. 34. Ibid. 35. On Franklin and lightning, see Heilbron, Electricity, ch. 14; I. Bernard Cohen, Benjamin Franklin’s Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Michael Brian Schiffer, Draw the Lightning Down: Benjamin Franklin and Electrical Technology in the Age of Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). For lightning’s cultural significations, see Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 21–26. 36. Cave Johnson, “Report of the Postmaster General,” Congressional Globe [Appendix], 29th Congress, 1st session (1845–46), 22. 37. James W. Carey, “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph,” Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 204. 38. For a full account, see C. L. Grant, “Cave Johnson: Postmaster General,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly, 20 (1961), 323–49. 39. See, for example, Wayne E. Fuller, The American Mail: Enlarger of the Common Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 172–75. 40. Cave Johnson, “Report of the Postmaster General,” Congressional Globe [Appendix], 30th Congress, 1st session (1847–48), 27–28. 41. Cf. Rosenheim, The Cryptographic Imagination, 93. 42. Herman Melville, Typee (1846; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 157.

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43. Henry James, “The Real Thing” [1892], Selected Tales, ed. Tom Paulin and Peter Messent (London: J. M. Dent, 1982), 54. 44. For a critique of “impact analysis,” see Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 45. Vail, The Electro Magnetic Telegraph, 72. 46. Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 11. 47. Ibid., 10. 48. Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography” [1931], OneWay Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1997), 247. 49. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davies (Oxford: Berg, 1988), 49. 50. Richard B. Kielbowicz, News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 1700–1860s (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 82, 142, 151–55. For further thoughts along these lines, see Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, Nancy J. Vickers, eds., Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production (New York: Routledge, 1997). 51. See, for example, Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz, “Introduction,” Reading Matters: Narrative in the New Media Ecology, ed. Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 8–10; Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Sphere, 1967), 61. 52. Gillian Beer, “Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary Modernism,” Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 305. 53. See, for example, Beard and Rockwell, On the Medical and Surgical Uses of Electricity, 2. 54. R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 29–30; Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 30. 55. On “science” and “pseudo-science,” see Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). On “dominant” and “emergent,” see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), ch. 8. 56. Cf. Herbert Leventhal, In the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism and Renaissance Science in Eighteenth-century America (New York: New York University Press, 1976). 57. Eric Wilson, Emerson’s Sublime Science (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999) (on Emerson and Faraday); Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body, ch. 1 (on Dreiser); Mary Ann Doane,

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“Technophilia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine,” Body/Politics, ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelynn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (New York: Routledge, 1990), and Felicia Miller Frank, The Mechanical Song: Women, Voice, and the Artificial in NineteenthCentury French Narrative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), ch. 6 (on Villiers L’Isle Adam); Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, and Nye, Electrifying America (on electric lighting); Th. Metzger, Blood and Volts: Edison, Tesla, and the Electric Chair (New York: Autonomedia, 1996) (on execution). 58. Paul Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Paul Giles, Virtual Americas: Transatlantic Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 59. Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” [1852], The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader, ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 129. 60. On Melville’s reading, see Richard Dean Smith, Melville’s Science: “Devilish Tantalization of the Gods!” (New York: Garland, 1993).

1

Time and Space

1. The most comprehensive account of the twins’ life is Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace’s The Two: A Biography (London: Cassell, 1978). For a suggestive, theoretically informed account, see Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone, 1996), 52–59. 2. Advertising bill, quoted in Anon., An Account of Chang and Eng, the World Renowned Siamese Twins (New York: T. W. Strong, 1853), 62. 3. George Buckley Bolton, On the United Siamese Twins (London: Raymond Taylor, 1830), 181. Subsequent references in the text. 4. Anon., An Account of Chang and Eng, 89. 5. Mark Twain, “The Siamese Twins” [1869], The Complete Humorous Sketches and Tales of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 282. 6. Herman Melville, letter to Richard H. Dana, Jr. [New York, May 1, 1850], Correspondence, Vol. 14 of the Northwestern-Newberry Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 160. 7. Richard Henry Dana Jr., Two Years before the Mast (1840; New York: Signet, 1964), 239. 8. Douglass edited the North Star, an abolitionist newspaper he founded in 1847. For more on Douglass and trans-spatial intellectual exchange, see Paul Giles, Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), ch. 2.

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9. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 10. Karl Marx, Grundrisse [1857–58], trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 524; H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895; London: J. M. Dent, 1995), 5; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Works and Days,” Society and Solitude (Boston: Fields, Osgood and Co., 1870), 388. All emphases added. 11. H. D. Estabrook, “The First Train Order by Telegraph,” Baltimore and Ohio Employees Magazine, 1 (July 1913), 27–29; quoted in Robert Luther Thompson, Wiring a Continent: The History of the Telegraph Industry in the United States, 1832–1866 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 204. 12. Norris’s conception of the trilogy is set out in a letter to William Dean Howells and in the preface to The Pit (1903; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 4–5; see The Letters of Frank Norris, ed. Franklin Walker (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1956), 34. For commentary, see Donald Pizer, The Novels of Frank Norris (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), ch. 4. 13. Marx, Grundrisse, “Introduction.” 14. Frank Norris, The Octopus (1901; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 53–54. Subsequent references in the text. 15. Norris, The Pit, 88. 16. As Robert Luther Thompson writes, “The introduction of the railroad into the United States parallels so closely the advent of the telegraph that the story of the one cannot be told properly without touching upon that of the other.” Wiring a Continent, 203. 17. See Robert Shaw, Down Brakes: A History of Railroad Accidents, Safety Precautions, and Operating Practices in the United States of America (London: Macmillan, 1961). Ironically though, fatal accidents became far more common after the adoption of telegraphy in railroad management, largely because of the increased volume of railroad traffic, and the increased size and speed of trains. 18. Harold Sharlin, The Making of the Electrical Age: From the Telegraph to Automation (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1963), 22. 19. Brian Winston, Media Technology and Society, A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet (London: Routledge, 1998), ch. 1; esp. 23. 20. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Anselm Hollo (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), ch. 2; esp. 37–40. 21. For examples, see Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 21, 247n75. 22. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 38. 23. Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1901; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 11, 31. 24. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes: Short Stories (London: John Murray, 1928), 306.

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25. On timetables, see Eviatar Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 26. James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 213. 27. On Thoreau’s antipathy toward technology see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); on his countervailing fascination, see Richard D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 227–30. 28. Henry David Thoreau, Walden [1854], and “Resistance to Civil Government,” 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1992), 79. Subsequent references in the text. 29. The railroads with which Thoreau was most familiar were, in fact, precociously reliable: see Carlene Stephens, “ ‘The Most Reliable Time’: William Bond, the New England Railroads, and the Awareness of Time in 19th-Century America,” Technology and Culture, 30 (1989), 1–24. 30. See John Auchard, “Introduction” to Henry James, Italian Hours (1909; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), x. 31. Michael O’Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), ch. 2 and 3; Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 48–50. 32. See, for example, Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 12–14; O’Malley, Keeping Watch, 109. 33. O’Malley, Keeping Watch, 100. 34. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 178–79, 181. 35. Ibid., 181. 36. For a comparable analysis to that which follows, see Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 194–219. For further discussion of technology in Stoker’s novel, see Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 353–56; Friedrich A. Kittler, “Dracula’s Legacy,” trans. William Stephen Davis, Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: G⫹B Arts International, 1997), 50–84; Jennifer Wicke, “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media,” ELH, 59 (1992), 467–93; Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Undead Networks: Information Processing and Media Boundary Conflicts in Dracula,” Literature and Science, ed. Donald Bruce and Anthony Purdy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 107–29; Jennifer Fleissner, “Dictation Anxiety: The Stenographer’s Stake in Dracula,” Nineteenth Century Contexts, 22 (2000), 417–55. 37. Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 7. Subsequent references in the text.

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38. Here I differ from Franco Moretti’s classic analysis of the novel, “Dialectic of Fear,” Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1983). Moretti sees the Count as an emblem of Capital, despite his feudalism, and thus aligns him with modernity. 39. Wells, The Time Machine, 18. 40. On time and parsimony, see Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture 1880–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 41. On punctuality in other novels of this period, see Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 2. 42. Kittler, “Dracula’s Legacy,” 79. 43. S. G. Sturmey, The Economic Development of Radio (London: Duckworth, 1958), 49. 44. The story first appeared in Atlantic Monthly (1878). I use the text collected in Mark Twain’s Short Stories, ed. Justin Kaplan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 162–84. Subsequent references in the text. 45. See Peter Messent, The Short Works of Mark Twain: A Critical Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 92–94. 46. Claude S. Fischer, “ ‘Touch Someone’: The Telephone Industry Discovers Sociability,” Technology and Culture, 29 (1988), 32–61. 47. Cf. Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Peter Coviello, Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 6. 48. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, esp. 67–81. 49. See, for example, Stephen Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers: America’s Pre–Civil War Reformers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 50. See, for example, Harold Aspiz, “Sexuality and the Pseudo-Sciences,” Pseudo-Science and Society in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Arthur Wrobel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 144–65. 51. Among many studies of phrenology, perhaps the most suggestive and comprehensive is Charles Colbert’s A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 52. Orson Squire Fowler, Creative and Sexual Science (1870; New York: Fowler and Wells Co., 1904), 191; emphasis in original. Subsequent references in the text. 53. Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 5. 54. Cf. Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 295.

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55. See, for example, Dana, Two Years before the Mast, 337. For further background and discussion, see Geoffrey Wilson, The Old Telegraphs (London: Phillimore and Co., 1976). 56. Other discussions of Twain’s essay include Susan Gillman, Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), 147–50; Randall Knoper, Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), ch. 5; Otis, Networking, 188–94. 57. Mark Twain, “Mental Telegraphy” [1891], The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (Garden City: Doubleday, 1963), 72. Subsequent references in the text. 58. For Leo Charney, the “moment” emerges as fully explicated category only in the 1870s, in response to sociotechnical developments beginning in that decade. (“In a Moment: Film and the Philosophy of Modernity,” Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995], 279–94.) However, the evidence presented in this chapter suggests that the “instant” had taken on a cognate function earlier in the nineteenth century. 59. The term was coined by Frederick W. H. Myers, in 1882. For a fulllength study, see Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 60. For Freud’s reading of Twain, see Nicholas Royle, “Hotel Psychoanalysis,” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 9 (2004), 3–14; Sam Halliday, “History, ‘Civilization,’ and A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court,” A Companion to Mark Twain, ed. Louis J. Budd and Peter Messent (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 416–30. 61. Sigmund Freud, “Dreams and Occultism,” New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis [1933], Vol. 2 of the Penguin Freud Library, trans. James Strachey, ed. James Strachey, assisted by Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 65–66. 62. For example, in Phantasms of the Living (1886), one of the compendia produced under SPR auspices, almost all the telepathic phenomena reported involve close friends or relatives of the people concerned: Edmund Gurney, Frederick W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore, Phantasms of the Living, 2 vols. (Gainseville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970). 63. Freud, “Dreams and Occultism,” 66, 85. 64. Sigmund Freud, “Dreams and Telepathy” [1922], The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XVIII, trans. and ed. James Strachey, with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 195–220. 65. Ibid., 205–06. 66. Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-Analysis and Telepathy,” ibid., 184. Subsequent references in the text.

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NOTES

67. For more on this, see, for example, Ronald E. Martin, American Literature and the Universe of Force (Durham: Duke University Press, 1981), ch. 5. 68. Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, “Introduction: A Future for Haunting,” Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, ed. Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 1. See also Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). 69. See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994). 70. Ibid., 111. 71. Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 108. 72. Virginia Woolf, “Kew Gardens” [1919], A Haunted House and Other Stories (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), 35. 73. Ambrose Bierce, “The Ways of Ghosts” [1905], Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce, ed. E. F. Bleiler (New York: Dover, 1964), 62. Subsequent references in the text. 74. Henry James, The Sense of the Past, Vol. 26 of the New York Edition of Henry James’s work (1917; New York: Scribner’s, 1945), 33; emphasis in original. Subsequent references in the text. 75. On “self-haunting” in James, see Martha Banta, Henry James and the Occult: The Great Extension (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972). See also T. J. Lustig, Henry James and the Ghostly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 76. For further discussion, see, for example, Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971); Paul Hamilton, Historicism (London: Routledge, 1996). 77. For more on this, see, for example, Halliday, “History, ‘Civilization,’ and A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court.” 78. See, for example, Henry Nashe Smith, “Mark Twain’s Images of Hannibal: From St. Petersburg to Eseldorf,” Texas Studies in English, 37 (1958), 3–23. 79. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 404. 80. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907; Boston: Riverside Press, 1961), 382. Subsequent references in the text. 81. James Carey, “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph,” Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 204. 82. For more on this affinity, see Roger B. Salomon, Twain and the Image of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 7, 34n. 83. Mark Twain, Following the Equator [1897], and Anti-Imperialist Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 699.

NOTES

207

84. Mark Twain, “The World in the Year 920 after Creation” [c.1906], Part V of “Papers of the Adam Family,” Letters from the Earth, ed. Bernard DeVoto (New York: Crest, 1963), 89. 85. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). See also Stephen G. Brush, The Temperature of History: Phases of Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Burt Franklin, 1978); Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian England (London: Athlone Press, 1998). 86. See, for example, Bruce Clarke, Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 121–27. 87. Ibid., 111. 88. Here, I follow the revisionary account of Howard Horwitz, who looks beneath Adams’s apparent pessimism to the (guarded) optimism this conceals: “The Education and the Salvation of History,” New Essays on “The Education of Henry Adams,” ed. John Carlos Rowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 115–56. 89. Henry Adams, The Tendency of History (New York: Macmillan, 1928). Subsequent references in the text. This volume collects material from 1894, 1908, and 1910: for commentary on its constituents, see Charles Hirschfeld’s “Introduction” to Henry Adams, The Degradation of Democratic Dogma (1919; New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1947), vii–xxvii. 90. For Adams’s use (and abuse) of Gibbs’s ideas, see William H. Jordy, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 166–71. 91. See Martin, American Literature and the Universe of Force, 139. 92. In its early pages, The Education nominates “the telegraphic messages which carried from Baltimore to Washington the news that Henry Clay and James K. Polk were nominated for the Presidency” (in 1844) amongst the means whereby “the old universe was thrown into the ash-heap, and a new one created” (5). 93. Cf. N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 80. 94. The standard account is still William Berkson’s Fields of Force: The Development of a World View from Faraday to Einstein (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974). Faraday’s discoveries were also an important factor in the emergence of thermodynamics: see, for example, P. M. Harman, Energy, Force, and Matter: The Conceptual Development of Nineteenth-Century Physics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 95. Max Nänny, Ezra Pound: Poetics for an Electric Age (Berne: Francke, 1973), 24. See also Gillian Beer, “Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary Modernism,” Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter

208

NOTES

96.

97. 98.

99.

100.

101. 102. 103.

104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); N. Katherine Hayles, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). My discussion of Kipling’s tale is indebted to Gillian Beer, “ ‘Wireless’: Popular Physics, Radio and Modernism,” Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention, ed. Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), 149–66. See also Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 178–79; Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 29–31. Beer, “ ‘Wireless,’ ” 152–53. Rudyard Kipling, “Wireless” [1903], Collected Stories, introduced by Robert Gottlieb (London: Everyman Library, 1994), 570. Subsequent references in the text. The invention of the coherer is conventionally ascribed to Edouard Branly (1844–1940), in 1890, though it was given this name in 1894 by Oliver J. Lodge (1851–1940). For Walter Benjamin, the “difference between technology and magic” is a “thoroughly historical variable”: “A Small History of Photography” [1931], One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1997), 244. Beer, “ ‘Wireless,’ ” 156. Ezra Pound, “Preface” [1910], The Spirit of Romance, rev. ed. (London: Peter Owen, 1952), 8. For more on Pound and electricity, see Ian F. A. Bell, Critic as Scientist: The Modernist Poetics of Ezra Pound (London: Methuen, 1981); Nänny, Ezra Pound: Poetics for an Electric Age. On Pound and the past, see James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Ezra Pound, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris, I; A Rather Dull Introduction,” The New Age (December 7, 1911), 130–31; 130 cited. Ezra Pound, “How to Read” [1931], The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1960), 23. Ibid., 29. Ezra Pound, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris, IX: On Technique,” The New Age (January 25, 1912), 297–99; 298 cited. Ibid. Ezra Pound, “Psychology and Troubadours” [1916], The Spirit of Romance, 92. Ibid., 96. Ezra Pound, “Remy De Gourmont” [1920], Literary Essays, 341. Ezra Pound, “The Serious Artist” [1913], Literary Essays, 52. See, for example, Mark Twain, “Unconscious Plagiarism,” Mark Twain’s Speeches (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910), 56–59. “Chromo” is short for “chromolithograph”—the product of a color printing technique popular in the nineteenth century for the reproduction of paintings. As Kipling’s words suggest, they became a byword for vulgarity and garishness. See Miles Orvell, The Real

NOTES

209

Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 36–38.

2

Individual Difference and Self-Representation

1. Mary Moss, “Machine-Made Human Beings,” Atlantic Monthly, 94 (1904), 264–68; 264 cited. 2. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” [1936], Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), 211–44. 3. Gerald Stanley Lee, Crowds (London: Curtis Brown, 1913), 251. 4. Gregory W. Bush, Lord of Attention: Gerald Stanley Lee and the Crowd Metaphor in Industrializing America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991). 5. Gerald Stanley Lee, Inspired Millionaires: A Study of the Man of Genius in Business (1908; London: Grant Richards, 1911), 32. 6. Lee, Crowds, 257, 65. 7. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, L’Homme Machine [Man a Machine] [1748], trans. Richard A. Watson and Maya Rybalka (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1994). 8. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 9. Bernhard Siegert, “Switchboards and Sex: The Nut(t) Case,” Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication, ed. Timothy Lenoir (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 18–90; 89 cited. 10. Ibid. See also Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1990); Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ch.7. 11. See, for example, John O’Donnell, The Origins of American Behaviorism: American Psychology, 1870–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1985); Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology, from Erasmus Darwin to William James (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 12. Helmet E. Adler, “Vicissitudes of Fechnerian Psychophysics in America,” Psychology: Theoretical-Historical Perspectives, 2nd ed., ed. Robert W. Rieber and Kurt D. Salzinger (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1998), 3–14; R. W. Rieber, “Wundt and the Americans: From Flirtation to Abandonment,”

210

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

NOTES

Wilhelm Wundt in History: The Making of a Scientific Psychology, ed. R. W. Rieber and David K. Robinson (New York: Kluwer Academic, 2001), 145–60. See, for example, Martha Banta, Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993); James Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (London: Little Brown, 1997). Lee, Crowds, 168–71. David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 233. See also Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974; New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), ch. 9. Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), esp. 103–13. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 161. Subsequent references in the text. Twain’s thoughts on “training” are further elaborated in “What is Man?” (1906), The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (Garden City: Doubleday, 1963), 335–99, which evolves the La Mettrie-like thesis that man is “a machine.” For further discussion along these lines, see Cindy Weinstein, The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-century American Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 4; Peter Messent, Mark Twain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 119–24. Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, Part I. O’Donnell, The Origins of Behaviorism, 34; Danziger, Constructing the Subject, 64. See, for example, Ronald R. Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 241. Galton’s own position in this respect is paradoxical, as he regarded individual differences significant mainly in relation to the supraindividual norms to which they supposedly pointed: Danziger, Constructing the Subject, 56. Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), xiv. Ibid., xiii. William Lowe Bryan and Noble Harter, “Studies in the Physiology and Psychology of the Telegraphic Language” [1897] and “Studies in the Telegraphic Language: The Acquisition of a Hierarchy of Habits” [1899], rep. The Psychology of Skill: Three Studies (New York: Arno Press, 1973), 27–53 and 345–75. Subsequent references in the text. The telegraph office in question is that of the Union and Wabash Railway: see O’Donnell, The Origins of Behaviorism, 157.

NOTES

211

28. See, for example, William James’s discussion in The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I (New York: Dover, 1950), 89–90. 29. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks [1929–35], ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 302. 30. Cf. Edwin Gabler, The American Telegrapher: A Social History, 1860–1900 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 51. 31. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course on General Linguistics [1916], trans. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth and Co., 1983), 110–20. 32. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition [1968], trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 117. 33. Saussure, Course on General Linguistics, 120. 34. James, Principles, Vol. I, 121. The complex relation between James’s thought and the new psychology is nicely captured in J. C. Flugel’s A Hundred Years of Psychology, 1833–1933, 3rd ed. (London: Duckworth and Co., 1964), 128–29. 35. Ibid., 109. 36. Roger Shattuck, The Innocent Eye: On Modern Literature and the Arts (New York: Washington Square Press, 1986), 120. Tim Armstrong, commenting on this passage, notes the distinction between this “speed” model and the alternative, “depth” model with which we have become familiar: Modernism, Technology and the Body, 203. 37. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 309. 38. Lee, Crowds, 267. 39. Ibid., 25. 40. Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, 75. Subsequent references in the text. 41. See, for example, Graeme Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Mary Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist: The Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Christopher Rivers, Face Value: Physiognomical Thought and the Legible Body in Marivaux, Lavater, Balzac, Gautier, and Zola (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). 42. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View [1798], trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 209. 43. Kant continues: “nothing is left of [physiognomy] but the art of cultivating taste, not taste in things, but rather in morals, manner and customs, in order to add to the knowledge of man through a critique which would enhance human relations and the knowledge of man in general.” (Ibid.) 44. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 257. 45. On the importance of this assumption in an American context, see Randall Knoper, Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). For

212

46.

47.

48. 49.

50.

51.

52.

53. 54. 55.

NOTES

discussion of this principle in nineteenth-century epistemology more generally, see Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” History Workshop Journal, 9 (1980), 5–36. See Lavater’s two lectures “On Hypocrisy, Deceit, and Candour”: The Whole Works of Lavater on Physiognomy (4 vols.), trans. George Grenville (London: W. Simmonds, 1800), Vol. II, 13–23. For general discussion of this topic, see Susan S. Williams, Confounding Images: Photography and Portraiture in Antebellum American Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). Herman Melville, Pierre, or, the Ambiguities (1852; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), 253. Subsequent references in the text. For further discussion of the portraits in this novel, see Leon Chai, The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 419–23; Williams, Confounding Images, ch. 5. Herman Melville, The Confidence Man, His Masquerade (1857; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1990), 227. On the peculiarly American figure of the confidence man, see Karen Haltunnen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). Such use of the telegraph by criminals became a problem for the British police shortly after its introduction: see Jeffrey Kieve, The Electric Telegraph: A Social and Economic History (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973), 245. As the century wore on, faked telegrams were increasingly used by dishonest speculators in stock markets: see George Robb, White-Collar Crime in Modern England: Financial Fraud and Business Morality, 1845–1929 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 90–91. For the use of telegraphy by nineteenth-century American fraudsters, see Anthony Comstock, Frauds Exposed; Or, How the People Are Deceived and Robbed, and Youth Corrupted (New York: J. Howard Brown, 1880), 111–12. For general discussion of how the ongoing struggle between criminals and law enforcement agencies was inflected by technological change throughout the period, see J. J. Tobias, Crime and Industrial Society in the 19th Century (London: B. T. Batsford, 1967), 191–98. Siegfried Kracauer, “Travel and Dance” [1925], The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 71; my emphasis. Ibid.; my emphasis. Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean (1881; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), 16. Subsequent references in the text. The role of telegraphy in the novel is discussed by John Schad, in his “Introduction” to the Penguin edition (see n54), and Jay Clayton, “The Voice in the Machine: Hazlitt, Hardy, James,” Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production, ed. Jeffrey Masten,

NOTES

56.

57. 58.

59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68.

213

Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy J. Vickers (New York: Routledge, 1997), 209–32. Georg Simmel, “Sociology of the Senses” [1907], Simmel on Culture, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), 113–14 cited. Subsequent references in the text. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 193. Mark Twain, “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton” [1878], Mark Twain’s Short Stories, ed. Justin Kaplan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 168. Subsequent references in the text. There is a strongly gendered dimension to this. As Carolyn Marvin writes, women in the nineteenth century were “considered especially susceptible to male manipulation of electrical technology because of their less-worldly experience in gauging trustworthiness. Their experiences were assumed to be limited to intimate, orally based communities where close and constant association discouraged the kind of deception that was possible in electrically constructed communities where unknown parties could pretend a dangerous familiarity.” When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 93. It should also be said that Twain’s scenario is not without basis in fact. In the early years of the telephone, there were several well-publicized cases of couples meeting and even marrying (as Alonzo and Rosannah eventually do) via the technology: see Martin, When Old Technologies Were New, 70–76. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (London: Verso, 1988), 95. Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 20. Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 285. Allucquère Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 94–95. Ibid. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality [1887], ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 12–13. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 183. Cf. Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth-Century’s Online Pioneers (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998), 119.

3

Sympathy and Reciprocity

1. Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean (1881; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), 18. Subsequent references in the text.

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NOTES

2. Daniel J. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 10. See also James W. Carey, “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph,” Communications as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 201–30. 3. H. L. Wayland, “Results of the Increased Facility and Celerity of Inter-Communication,” New Englander, 16 (1858), 800; quoted in Czitrom, Media and the American Mind, 10. 4. For a reading of this episode similar to the one that follows, see Charles Swann, Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tradition and Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 101–03. 5. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851; New York: Norton, 1967), 264. Subsequent references in the text. 6. On the genealogy of this term, see Marco Bresadola, “Early Galvanism as Technique and Medical Practice,” Electric Bodies: Episodes in the History of Medical Electricity, ed. Paola Bertucci and Giuliano Pancaldi (Bologna: Dipartmento di Filosofia, Università di Bologna, 2001), 157–79. For a recent selection of essays on Galvani’s historical significance, see Marco Bradola and Giuliano Pancaldi, eds., Luigi Galvani International Workshop Proceedings (Bologna: Dipartmento do Filosofia, Centro Internazionale per la Storia della Università e della Scienza, 1999). 7. Exemplary in this regard was Andrew Crosse (1784–1855), the English amateur scientist who, in 1836, caused widespread consternation by claiming to have precipitated insects by electrifying minerals: see James A. Secord, “Extraordinary Experiment: Electricity and the Creation of Life in Victorian England,” The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, ed. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Iwan Rhys Morus, Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-century London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), ch. 4–5. 8. See, for example, Gerrit L. Verschuur, Hidden Attraction: The History and Mystery of Magnetism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), ch. 7. 9. H. A. N. Snelders, “Oersted’s Discovery of Electromagnetism,” Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 228–39. 10. See, for example, Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1993), ch. 2. 11. Roy R. Male Jr., “Hawthorne and the Concept of Sympathy,” PMLA, 68 (1953), 138–49; 140 cited. See also Trevor H. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early NineteenthCentury Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Leon Chai, The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); Cunningham

NOTES

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

215

and Jardine, eds., Romanticism and the Sciences; Eric Wilson, “Emerson and Electromagnetism,” ESQ, 42 (1996), 93–124. On Romantic conceptions of electricity, see Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 153–60. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Ethan Brand” [1850], Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales, ed. James McIntosh (New York: Norton, 1987), 241. Herman Melville, Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), 151. Subsequent references in the text. For background on this, and an analysis similar to the one that follows, see Aaron McClendon, “For Not in Words Can It Be Spoken: John Sullivan Dwight’s Transcendental Music Theory and Herman Melville’s Pierre; Or, the Ambiguities,” American Transcendental Quarterly, 19 (2005), 23–36. On the provenance of such ideas, see Jamie C. Kassler, “Man—A Musical Instrument: Models of the Brain and Mental Functioning before the Computer,” History of Science, 22 (1984), 59–92. Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), 57. Ibid. On the relationship of these two terms, see Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (London: Virago, 1990). Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Out of the Spirit of Music [1876], trans. Shaun Whiteside (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 35. Schopenhauer’s discussion of music famously features in The World and Will and Representation (1818). On the emergence of this theme in German philosophy, and especially its relation to music, see Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). Ernst Benz, The Theology of Electricity: On the Encounter and Explanation of Theology and Science in the 17th and 18th Centuries, trans. Wolfgang Taraba (Allison Park: Pickwick Publications, 1989); James Delbourgo, “Electrical humanitarianism in North America: Dr. T. Gale’s Electricity, or Ethereal Fire, Considered (1802) in Historical Context,” Electric Bodies, ed. Bertucci and Pancaldi, 117–56. See the author’s “Introduction” to the second edition of the novel: Marie Corelli, A Romance of Two Worlds, A New Edition with Introduction and Appendix (1886; London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1887), ix–xxv. Subsequent references in the text. Brian Masters, Now Barabbas Was a Rotter: The Extraordinary Life of Marie Corelli (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), 6. See also Annette R. Federico, Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian Literary Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). Pierre, famously, was a publishing disaster: see, for example, Leon Howard and Hershel Parker, “Historical Note” to Pierre (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 365–410.

216

NOTES

25. Cf. Marx’s description of Christ is a “mediator between God and humanity—a mere instrument of circulation between the two”: Grundrisse [1857–58], trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 332. 26. Studies include: R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989); Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 27. Braude, Radical Spirits, 83. 28. For more on the gendering of professional telegraphy, see Edwin Gabler, The American Telegrapher: A Social History, 1860–1900 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988). 29. See Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), ch. 1. 30. Moore, In Search of White Crows, 22; Braude, Radical Spirits, 5. 31. R. Laurence Moore, “Spiritualism and Science: Reflections on the First Decade of the Spirit Rappings,” American Quarterly, 29 (1972), 475–500; 486 cited; Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America, 69. 32. John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 94–96. 33. Moore, In Search of White Crows, 29–30. 34. Alan Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), Part III. 35. The best source on early French mesmerism is Robert Darnton’s Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). American developments are the focus for Robert C. Fuller’s Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). 36. Here, and in what follows, I draw on Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (1970; London: Fontana, 1994); Alan Gauld, A History of Hypnotism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud; and Mesmer’s own writings, as collected in Mesmerism: A Translation of the Original Scientific and Medical Writings of F. A. Mesmer, trans and comp. George Bloch (Los Altos: William Kaufmann, 1980). 37. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, 152. 38. Mesmer modified his theory in the course of his career, and his early disciple, the Marquis de Puységur (1751–1825), eventually abandoned the belief that a superfine fluid was responsible for mesmeric phenomena. Nonetheless, the idea that some kind of fluid, akin to electricity and magnetism, pervaded the atmosphere and was responsible for otherwise inexplicable phenomena remained enormously influential.

NOTES

217

39. See, for example, Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Julia A. Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Caleb Crain, American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-century American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Kristin Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson to the Jameses (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002); Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-century American Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 40. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 3–9. 41. In addition to the texts cited in n39 above, see Gordon Hutner, Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne’s Novels (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988); Joseph Alkana, The Social Self: Hawthorne, Howells, William James, and NineteenthCentury Psychology (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), ch. 2–3; Robert S. Levine, “Sympathy and Reform in The Blithedale Romance,” The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Richard H. Millington (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 207–29. 42. Maria M. Tatar, Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), ch. 6; Taylor Stoehr, Hawthorne’s Mad Scientists: Pseudoscience and Social Science in Nineteenth-Century Life and Letters (Hamden: Archon Books, 1978), ch. 2; Samuel Chase Coale, Mesmerism and Hawthorne: Mediums of American Romance (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998). 43. Honorable exceptions to this rule include Male Jr.’s “Hawthorne and the Concept of Sympathy” and, more obliquely, Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature, 9–12; Levine, “Sympathy and Reform in The Blithedale Romance.” 44. Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851; New York: Norton, 2002), 255. Subsequent references in the text. 45. Aside from those described above, these phenomena include the electrical storms described in chapter 119 (“The Candles”) and chapter 124 (“The Line”). 46. Herbert Rothschild Jr., “The Language of Mesmerism in ‘The Quarter Deck’ Scene in Moby Dick,” English Studies, 53 (1972), 235–38. 47. Herman Melville, Typee (1846; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 70. 48. Ibid., 196; Herman Melville, White-Jacket (1850; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 112. 49. Herman Melville, The Confidence Man, His Masquerade (1857; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1990), 190.

218

NOTES

50. Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor [1891; pub. 1924], The Complete Shorter Fiction (New York: Everyman, 1997), 449. 51. This segue between reciprocity and hierarchy all but irrepressibly recalls Hegel’s famed account of the “master-slave relationship.” And indeed, according to Malcolm Bull, this account is informed by mesmeric theory: Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision and Totality (London: Verso, 1999), ch. 6. 52. For background on Grimes, see Gauld, A History of Hypnotism, 183–89. 53. Rev. J. B. Dods and Prof. J. S. Grimes, Electrical Psychology: Or the Electrical Philosophy of Mental Impressions, Including a New Philosophy of Sleep and Consciousness, rev. ed. H. G. Darling (London: John J. Griffin and Co., 1851), 149. Subsequent references in the text. The final three chapters of this text are by Grimes, and it is from these that I quote in the remainder of this section. 54. Anon. [J. F. Ferrier], “What Is Mesmerism?” [1851], Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890, ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 58–59. Emphasis in original. 55. Horace Bushnell, A Discourse on the Slavery Question (1839); William Ellery Channing, Slavery (1835): both rep. Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader, ed. Mason Lowance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 230, 186. 56. Ibid., 183. 57. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 116. Subsequent references in the text. 58. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Letter to Sophia Peabody, October 18, 1841, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Vol. XV, the Letters, 1813–1843, ed. Thomas Woodson, L. Neal Smith, and Norman Holmes Pearson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984), 588. A good contextualizing account of this letter can be found in Stoehr, Hawthorne’s Mad Scientists, ch. 2. 59. Hawthorne, Letter to Sophia Peabody, 589–90. 60. Coale, Mesmerism and Hawthorne, 3. 61. Richard H. Millington makes similar points, in relation to Alice Pyncheon’s enslavement by Maule, and Phoebe’s relationship with Holgrave, in Practicing Romance: Narrative Forms and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne’s Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 139–40. 62. “Since the beginning of the nineteenth century,” write Carroll Smith Rosenberg and Charles Rosenberg, “American physicians and social commentators generally had feared that American women were physically inferior to their English and Continental sisters.” “The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Woman and Her Role in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History, 60 (1973), 332–56; 339 cited.

NOTES

219

63. For a full-length study of this and many other aspects of Fuller’s influence on Hawthorne, see Thomas R. Mitchell, Hawthorne’s Fuller Mystery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 64. Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century [1845], rep. The Portable Margaret Fuller, ed. Mary Kelley (New York: Penguin, 1994), 293. Subsequent references in the text. 65. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological [1966], trans. Carolyn Porter (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 101. 66. For an alternative perspective on this, and other aspects of Hawthorne’s novel considered in this section, see Russ Castronovo, Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-century United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), ch. 3. 67. To live in “Enjoyment,” as Alexandre Kojève writes, is “to preserve oneself in Nature without fighting against it”: Introduction to the Reading of Hegel [1933–39], trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 46. This seems a concise definition of both the pigs’ “satisfaction,” and of Coverdale’s complaint against it. 68. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama [1928], trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 217. 69. Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 131. 70. Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, 139. 71. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (1860; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 40. Subsequent references in the text. On ideas of art in this novel, see Chai, The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance, 55–61, 414–17; John Limon, The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A Disciplinary History of American Writing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 153–59. 72. For a related reading of Zenobia’s body, see Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 242–44. 73. Here, and throughout the remainder of this section, I draw on Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). On the history of ideas about the ether, see G. N. Cantor and M. J. S. Hodge, Conceptions of Ether: Studies in the History of Ether Theories, 1740–1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 74. Georges Bataille, “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur in the words Surhomme [Superman] and Surrealist” [c.1929], Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Alan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). The surrealists, says Bataille, claim to affirm what is traditionally despised: sexuality, filth, and so on. However, he argues, what they really end up doing is precisely the opposite, for by elevating these terms, they in fact are investing them with “immaterial values” (39). Idealism, then, returns with a vengeance, as is indicated

220

NOTES

75.

76. 77. 78.

79.

80.

81.

by the prefix sur, suggesting elevation and transcendence. This, I think, is also Hawthorne’s strategy—the signal difference being that, unlike the surrealists, he knows what he is doing. I am thinking here of Tom Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theatre, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny,” Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Pedro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 42–71. José B. Monleón, A Specter Is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 60. For background on Dods, see Fuller, Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls, 58–88. Rev. J. B. Dods and Prof. J. S. Grimes, Electrical Psychology, 23, 22. All quotations in this section, subsequently referred to in the text, are from Dods’ contribution to the book. For full reference see n53. Edgar Allan Poe, “Mesmeric Revelation” [1844], Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), 723. Subsequent references in the text. For further discussion of this and other “mesmerist” texts by Poe, see Sidney E. Lind, “Poe and Mesmerism,” PMLA, 62 (1947), 1077–94; Doris V. Falk, “Poe and the Power of Animal Magnetism,” PMLA, 84 (1969), 536–46. For an even-handed appraisal of the “science” in “Eureka,” see Peter Swirski, Between Literature and Science: Poe, Lem, and Explorations in Aesthetics, Cognitive Science, and Literary Knowledge (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), ch. 2–3. Edgar Allan Poe, “Eureka” [1848], Poetry and Tales, 1286. Subsequent references in the text.

4

Connection and Division

1. Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851; New York: Norton, 2002), 45. 2. Herman Melville, Mardi (1849; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 505. Subsequent references in the text. 3. The most comprehensive discussion of this, and Melville’s other scientific interests is Richard Dean Smith’s Melville’s Science: “Devilish Tantalization of the Gods!” (New York: Garland, 1993). 4. Marshall Hall, Memoirs on the Nervous System (London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, 1837), 4; emphasis in original. The extent to which Hall can be credited with this discovery is controversial; for discussion, see Franklin Fearing, Reflex Action: A Study in the History of Physiological Psychology (1930; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970); Roger Smith, “The Background of Physiological Psychology in Natural Philosophy,” History of Science, 11 (1973), 75–123; John D. Spillane, The Doctrine of the Nerves: Chapters in the History of Neurology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), ch. 5; Edwin Clarke and L. S. Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (Berkeley: University of California Press,

NOTES

5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

221

1987), 114–24; Ruth Leys, From Sympathy to Reflex: Marshall Hall and His Opponents (New York: Garland, 1990); George Canguilhem, “The Concept of Reflex,” A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from George Canguilhem, ed. François Delaporte, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 179–202. For an extended account of this analogy, see Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). Cf. Peter Melville Logan, Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Jane Wood, Passion and Pathology in Victoria Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Here, and throughout this section, I draw on Clarke and Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts. Emblematic of this shift is Diderot’s remark in Rameau’s Nephew (c.1761): “Formerly Mademoiselle Used to Have the Vapours, Nowadays It Is Nerves”: Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew/D’Alembert’s Dream, trans. Leonard Tancock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 88. Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 15. Spillane, The Doctrine of the Nerves, 251; Margaret Rowbottom and Charles Susskind, Electricity and Medicine: A History of Their Interaction (San Francisco: San Francisco Press, 1984), 87, 109–10; Iwan Rhys Morus, Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Nineteenth-Century London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 239. Timothy Lenoir, “Models and Instruments in the Development of Electrophysiology, 1845–1912,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Life Sciences, 17 (1986), 1–54; 3 cited. Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Reden, II (Leipzig: Veit, 1887), 50–51; quoted and trans., Otis, Networking, 49. Rev. J. B. Dods and Prof. J. S. Grimes, Electrical Psychology: Or the Electrical Philosophy of Mental Impressions, Including a New Philosophy of Sleep and Consciousness, rev. and ed. H. G. Darling (London: John J. Griffin and Co., 1851), 32. Only Dods’s portions of this volume are considered in this chapter. Frederick Hollick, Neuropathy: Or, the Principles of the Art of Healing the Sick. Being an Explanation of the Action of Galvanism, Electricity, and Magnetism in the Case of Disease (Philadelphia: [No publisher credited], 1847), 54, 52. Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1973), ch. 3. For an interesting sidelight on this issue, see Elizabeth Green Musselman, “The Governor and the Telegraph: Mental Management in British Natural Philosophy,” Bodies/Machines, ed. Iwan Rhys Morus (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 67–92.

222

NOTES

17. William F. Channing, “On the Municipal Telegraph,” American Journal of Science and Art, 63 (May 1852), 58–59; quoted in Daniel Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 12. 18. The phrase “therapeutic perspective” derives from John Harley Warner’s The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge and Identity in America, 1820–1885 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). See also Joan Burbick, Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 19. Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1980), 4. Another useful full-length study of Graham and his milieu is Jayne E. Sokolow’s Eros and Modernization: Sylvester Graham, Health Reform, and the Origin of Victorian Sexuality in America (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983). 20. In addition to Nissenbaum’s account, see, for example, Clarke and Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts, 318–27. 21. Famously, Bichat defined life as “the totality of those functions which resist death.” Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility, 60. 22. Nissenbaum states that in conceding this point, Graham broke with Bichat’s teaching, the latter insisting that the two systems were radically distinct; Sex, Diet, and Debility, 61. However, Clarke and Jacyna show that Bichat himself referred to interaction between the organic and animal systems, albeit occasionally and inconsistently; Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts, 324. 23. Sylvester Graham, A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity, Intended Also for Serious Consideration of Parents and Guardians, 2nd. ed. (Boston: Light and Stearns, Crocker and Blewster, 1837), 48. Subsequent references in the text. 24. For Graham’s influence on Fowler, see Sokolow, Eros and Modernization, 156–58. 25. Orson Squire Fowler, Love and Parentage: Applied to the Improvement of Offspring (1846; Manchester: John Heywood, 1898), 10. 26. Orson Squire Fowler, Amativeness; Or, Evils and Remedies of Excessive and Perverted Sexuality (1849; Manchester: John Heywood, 1897), 18; emphasis removed. 27. Fowler, Love and Parentage, 44. 28. These dimension of Graham’s thinking are emphasized by the studies cited in n19. 29. Previous accounts of Beard include Charles Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), ch. 5; F. G. Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community, 1870–1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity

NOTES

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

223

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), ch. 6; Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Janet Oppenheim Shattered Nerves: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body, ch. 1; Linda Simon, Dark Light: Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-Ray (Orlando: Harcourt, 2004), ch. 4–7. Beard and Edison collaborated on a series of experiments: see Simon, Dark Light, 124–27. Edison’s light bulb dates from 1879. George Miller Beard, American Nervousness; Its Cause and Consequences. A Supplement to Nervous Exhaustion (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881), 98. Subsequent references in the text. George Miller Beard, A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia): Its Symptoms, Future, Sequences, Treatment [1869], ed. A. D. Rockwell (London: H. K. Lewis, 1890), 61; emphasis in original. Subsequent references in the text. The importance of the reflex principle in Beard’s thinking is pointed out by Rosenberg, No Other Gods, 103. For further discussion of this point, see Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 159–63; Barbara Will, “Nervous Systems, 1880–1915,” American Bodies: Cultural Histories of the Physique, ed. Tim Armstrong (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 86–100. For background, see Rowbottom and Susskind, Electricity and Medicine. Beard and Rockwell are discussed in ch. 7. George Miller Beard and Alphonso David Rockwell, On the Medical and Surgical Uses of Electricity, 8th ed. (1871; London: H. K. Lewis, 1891), 190. Subsequent references in the text. David F. Channell, The Vital Machine: A Study of Technology and Organic Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 70. George Miller Beard, Sexual Neurasthenia (Nervous Exhaustion): Its Hygiene, Causes, Symptoms and Treatment, 5th ed. A. D. Rockwell (1884; New York: E. B. Treat and Co., 1900), 76. Subsequent references in the text. Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903. Sigmund Freud, “On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description ‘Anxiety Neuroses’ ” [1895], On Psychopathology, Vol. 10 of the Penguin Freud Library, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 35–63. Subsequent references in the text. Here, and throughout the remainder of this paragraph, I draw on Philip P. Wiener’s “Beard and Freud on ‘American Nervousness,’ ” Journal of the History of Ideas, 17 (1956), 269–74. See also Nathan G. Hale Jr., Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876–1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). Sigmund Freud, “ ‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” [1908], Civilization, Society and Religion, Vol. 12 of the

224

42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

NOTES

Penguin Freud Library, trans. James Strachey, ed. Albert Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 37. Subsequent references in the text. The following account draws principally on J. L. Heilbron’s Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), and Benjamin Franklin’s own Experiments and Observations on Electricity (London: E. Cave, 1751). Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries, 329n19. The relevant passages appear in Franklin’s Experiments and Observations, 14–15, and A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (London: [No Publisher credited], 1725), 22. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries, 326. Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century [1845], rep. The Portable Margaret Fuller, ed. Mary Kelley (New York: Penguin, 1994), 293. Subsequent references in the text. However, Fuller immediately adds that the two sides of this “dualism” are “perpetually passing into one another.” Thus, “There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman” (293). Thomas Lacquer, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries, 67–70. Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body, 19. Cf. my comments on “The Dialectic of Old and New,” above. Dods, Electrical Psychology, 34; emphasis in original. Subsequent references in the text. Orson Squire Fowler, Creative and Sexual Science (1870; New York: Fowler and Wells Co., 1904), 85. Cf. Ben Barker-Benfield, “The Spermatic Economy: A Nineteenth Century View of Sexuality,” Feminist Studies, 1 (1972), 45–74; esp. 48. I owe this reference to Harold Aspiz, Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 145. Lorenz Oken, Elements of Physiophilosophy [1810], trans. Alfred Tulk (London: The Ray Society, 1847), 381. Subsequent references in the text. The following account is principally indebted to Aspiz, Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful. See also Betsy Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Whitman’s Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Burbick, Healing the Republic, ch. 6; Vivian Pollock, The Erotic Whitman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Mark Maslan, Whitman Possessed: Poetry, Sexuality, and Popular Authority (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

NOTES

225

57. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” [1855–81], Leaves of Grass: Authoritative Texts, Prefaces, Whitman on His Art, Criticism, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (New York: Norton, 1973), 29, 52. Except where otherwise indicated, all subsequent references to Whitman’s work are to this edition. 58. For more on this, see Barker-Benfield, “The Spermatic Economy”; Harold Aspiz, “Walt Whitman: The Spermatic Imagination,” American Literature, 56 (1984), 379–95. 59. See, for example, Gary Schmidgall, Walt Whitman: A Gay Life (New York: Dutton, 1997). 60. For a range of opinion on this issue, see, for example, Joseph Cady, “Not Happy in the Capitol: Homosexuality and the Calamus Poems,” American Studies, 19 (1978), 5–22; Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet; Moon, Disseminating Whitman; Schmidgall, Walt Whitman. Whereas Cady and Erkkila see Whitman as “internalizing” elements of contemporary homophobia, critics such as Moon and Schmidgall see any evidence to this effect as part of a tactical ploy, on Whitman’s part, to advance his “homophile” agenda, as it were, by stealth. 61. The term is one of several Whitman derived from phrenology, where it designates the capacity for friendship. See Edward Hungerford, “Walt Whitman and His Chart of Bumps,” American Literature, 2 (1931), 350–84; Aspiz, Whitman and the Body Beautiful, 161–62; Michael Lynch, “ ‘Here is Adhesiveness’: From Friendship to Homosexuality,” Victorian Studies, 29 (1985), 67–96. Hungerford denies that Whitman’s usage is eroticized; more recent readers, including Aspiz, Lynch, and myself, feel that it is. 62. Walt Whitman, Notes and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, Vol. II, ed. Edward F. Grier (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 889–90. 63. Ibid., 888; emphasis in original. 64. Ibid., 889. 65. The following account is indebted to Pollock, The Erotic Whitman, ch. 2. 66. Walt Whitman, The Early Poems and the Fiction, ed. Thomas L. Brasher (New York: New York University Press, 1963), 95. 67. Ibid., 239. 68. It may be objected that Whitman did fully integrate homosexuality into his political worldview, and, indeed, that it was central to his democratic vision. For versions of this claim, see, for example, all sources listed in n60. While this is true, I would argue that Whitman’s thinking about biological sexuality remained circumscribed in the way I have described. 69. Roger Austen, Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977), 9–11. I owe this reference, and that to Taylor’s novel, to Hugh Stevens’s Sexuality in Henry James (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 70–73.

226

NOTES

70. Taylor wrote Whitman several admiring letters, before repudiating him. See Schmidgall, Walt Whitman, xvi, 301. 71. Bayard Taylor, Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Philadelphia (1870; London: Sampson Low, 1871), 49. Subsequent references in the text. 72. Anon., Teleny, or, the Reverse of the Medal: A Physiological Romance of Today (1893; London: Icon, 1966), 102. 73. For commentary on this, see Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 34–35. 74. For Whitman’s influence, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 201–17. 75. Bert Hansen, “American Physicians’ ‘Discovery’ of Homosexuals, 1880–1900: A New Diagnosis in a Changing Society,” Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History, ed. Charles Rosenberg and Janet Golden (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 104–33; Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. ch. 2. 76. Xavier Mayne [pseud. Edward Prime-Stevenson], Imre: A Memorandum (Naples: English Book Press, 1906), 114, 133; emphasis in original. Subsequent references in the text. For further discussion of this novel, see Austen, Playing the Game, 20–27. 77. Imre and Oswald’s self-descriptions echo Karl Heinrich Ulrich’s distinction between “uranians” and “dionians”; for more details, see, for example, Gert Hekma, “ ‘A Female Soul in a Male Body’: Sexual Inversion as Gender Inversion in Nineteenth-century Sexology,” Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History (New York: Zone, 1994), 213–39. 78. This case is made, most notably, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905): Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, Vol. 7 of the Penguin Freud Library, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 37–169; esp. 155–56. 79. It should be added, though, that in this essay, Freud does not count homosexuality as a “perversion,” but as an “inversion.” He does, however, treat “inversion” and “perversion” as cognate and comparable phenomena. 80. Steven Connor, “Volts from the Blue,” a talk given at the conference, “Electra: Electricity in Culture,” at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, May 22, 2004; available online at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/ eh/skc/volts/; page 8 of 11. 81. See, for example, Clarke and Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts, 130. 82. The term “unconscious cerebration” first appears in the fourth edition of Carpenter’s Principles of Human Physiology (London: John

NOTES

83.

84.

85.

86.

87. 88.

89. 90. 91.

92.

93.

94.

227

Churchill, 1853), 819. See, for example, Wood, Passion and Pathology, 111n3. James Braid, Neurypnology; Or, the Rationale of Nervous Sleep, Considered in Relation with Animal Magnetism (1843), excerpted as “Hypnotism,” Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890, ed. Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 59–61. For further discussion, see, for example, Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), ch. 8. Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 79; Carpenter’s commentary on Braid’s findings is excerpted as “Mesmerism, Scientifically Considered,” Embodied Selves, 62–63. See Charles Boewe, “Reflex Action in the Novels of Oliver Wendell Holmes,” American Literature, 26 (1954), 303–19; Randall Knoper, “American Literary Realism and Nervous ‘Reflexion,’ ”American Literature, 74 (2002), 715–45. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elsie Venner (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861), Vol. I, 282; quoted by Knoper, “American Literary Realism and Nervous ‘Reflexion,’ ” 723. Oliver Wendell Holmes, A Mortal Antipathy (1885; Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1886), 221. Subsequent references in the text. J. E. Kingsbury, The Telephone and Telephone Exchanges: Their Invention and Development (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1915), 77–79. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907; Boston: Riverside Press, 1961), 433. Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science (1892; London: J. M. Dent, 1937), 42–43. William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I (1890; New York: Dover, 1950), 26; Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory [1896], trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 30. Morton Prince, The Nature of Mind, and Human Automatism (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1885), 8. Subsequent references in the text. Morton Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality: A Biographical Study of Abnormal Psychology (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906), 411n1. Subsequent references in the text. Prince does not specify which “conventional methods” he had used. However, in an earlier article on the therapeutic use of hypnotism, he states that these include “massage, galvanism, ice-bags, [and] staticelectricity”: Morton Prince, “Some of the Revelations of Hypnotism: Post-Hypnotic Suggestion, Automatic Writing and Double Personality” [1890], rep. Psychotherapy and Multiple Personality: Selected Essays, ed. Nathan G. Hale, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 39.

228

NOTES

95. I reflect on Keller’s career at greater length in my “Helen Keller, Henry James, and the Social Relations of Perception,” Criticism, 48 (2006). For further background, see Joseph P. Lash, Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan Macy (London: Allen Lane, 1980). Theoretical and/or interpretative accounts include Jim Swan, “Touching Words: Helen Keller, Plagiarism, Authorship,” The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriations in Law and Literature, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 57–100; Mary Klages, Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), ch. 8; Jodi Cressman, “Helen Keller and the Mind’s Eyewitness,” Western Humanities Review, 54 (2000), 108–23. 96. Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, with Her Letters (1887–1901) and a Supplementary Account of Her Education, Including Passages from the Reports of Her Teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, ed. John Albert Macy (1903; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1958), 36. 97. Mark Twain, Letter to Helen Keller, “St. Patrick’s Day, 1903,” Mark Twain’s Letters, Vol. II, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper and Bros., 1917), 731. 98. Keller, The Story of My Life, 17. 99. Helen Keller, The World I Live In (1908; London: Methuen and Co., 1933), 63–64. 100. Sullivan was, in fact, partially sighted herself, though not nearly as visually disabled as Keller. Sullivan could (and did), then, act as a “borrowed team” of eyes, though Keller may have been thinking of other friends in this respect as well. 101. Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Autobiography (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924), Vol. II, 298; quoted in Lash, Helen and Teacher, 193. 102. Quoted in Keller, The Story of My Life, 188. 103. Ibid., 256. 104. Ibid., 256–57. 105. Helen Keller, Out of the Dark (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1913), 15. 106. Ibid.

5

Inclusion and Exclusion

1. For an alternative reading to the one that follows, see Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 404–08. Despite my variance from her on this issue, Ronell’s study as a whole informs my argument throughout this section. 2. Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, with Her Letters (1887–1901) and a Supplementary Account of Her Education, Including Passages

NOTES

3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

229

from the Reports of Her Teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, ed. John Albert Macy (1903; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1958), v. The second line of work, in fact, emerged directly out of the first, when Bell discovered that a device he had built to study voice production converted sound into electric current, thereby allowing it to be transmitted. See, for example, Robert V. Bruce, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (London: Victor Gallanz, 1973); James Mackay, Sounds out of Silence: A Life of Alexander Graham Bell (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1997). Keller, The Story of My Life, 69. See Bruce, Bell, 255–56. Despite Bell’s interest, a viable telephone for the deaf did not appear until the 1960s: see Harry G. Lang, A Phone of Our Own: The Deaf Insurrection against Ma Bell (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2000). See esp. Bruce, Bell. Helen Keller, Midstream: My Later Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1929) 123. Subsequent references in the text. The precise wording of this phrase is contentious; nonetheless, this is how Keller renders it. For further discussion of this phrase itself, see Ronell, The Telephone Book, 227–32. Owen Wister, The Virginian (1902; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 19. Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean (1881; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), 35. Subsequent references in the text. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans and ed. Kurt H. Wolf (New York: The Free Press, 1950), 330. The portions of this volume I quote from here are translated from Simmel’s Soziologie, first published in 1908, and revised in 1923. Subsequent references in the text. For background, see Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheism, Freemasons, and Republicans (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981); Reinhart Kosselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford: Berg, 1988); Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Alexander Piatigorsky, Who’s Afraid of Freemasons? The Phenomena of Freemasonry (London: Harvill, 1997). Augustus C. L. Arnold, History and Philosophy of Freemasonry, and Other Secret Societies (Glasgow: J. Pryde, 1868), 2. Subsequent references in the text. For discussion of these “spheres” in an American context, see, for example, Joel Pfister, The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne’s Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-century American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

230

NOTES

15. Cf. Simmel, Sociology, 345–76. 16. Gerald Stanley Lee, Crowds (London: Curtis Brown, 1913), 65. 17. For Carlyle’s influence, see William Silas Vance, “Carlyle and the American Transcendentalists” (Ph.D. Dissertation: University of Chicago, 1941). 18. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1833–34; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 166; Arnold, History and Philosophy of Freemasonry, 109. 19. See, for example, David E. Newton’s definition, Encyclopedia of Cryptology (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1998), 77–78. 20. David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing, rev. ed. (New York: Scribner, 1996), xv. This book provides the best available historical overview of cryptology as such. 21. Herman Melville, Typee (1846; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 244. Subsequent references in the text. 22. Herman Melville, White-Jacket (1850; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 241–42. Subsequent references in the text. 23. Samuel F. B. Morse, Letter to the Hon. Levi Woodbury, Secretary of the U.S. Treasury (September 27, 1837), in Alfred Vail, The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph, with the Reports of Congress, and a Description of All Telegraphs Known, Employing Electricity or Galvanism (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845), 70; emphasis in original. The other advantages Morse lists are speed; the fact that the electric telegraph can operate in any weather, and at any time of day of night; the relatively small size of the telegraphic apparatus; and the fact that permanent records of messages may be kept, via telegraphic tape (Ibid.). 24. Vail, The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph, 46. 25. Shawn James Rosenheim, The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing From Edgar Poe to the Internet (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 88. 26. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 343. 27. Technically speaking, ciphers are distinguished by codes by their dependence on the letter, rather than the word, as “the basic unit of concealment”: Newton, Encyclopedia of Cryptology, 50. Throughout this chapter, however, I follow common usage in considering ciphers as a subclass within the wider category of codes. 28. Vail, The American Electro Magnetic Telegraph, 47. 29. Richard Du Boff, “Business Demand and the Development of the Telegraph in the United States, 1844–1860,” Business History Review, 54 (1980), 459–79; esp. 471. See also Richard Du Boff, “The Telegraph and the Structure of Markets in the United States, 1845–1890,” Research in Economic History, 8 (1983), 253–77. 30. Frank Norris, The Pit (1903; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 77. 31. Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (1912; New York: Dell, 1961), 93. Here, it should be added that the telegraph is not specifically mentioned

NOTES

32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

231

in relation to this “secret code.” However, it is clearly integral to Cowperwood’s business dealings as a whole, as evidenced both by the fact that Cowperwood mentions it himself (189) and by Dreiser’s scene setting, part of which involves carefully setting out the technological infrastructure available to Cowperwood at each stage of his career. Thus, as the novel opens, Dreiser describes how “things were slowly improving, for the telegraph had facilitated stock-market quotations, not only between New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, but between a local broker’s office in Philadelphia [where Cowperwood lives] and his stock exchange. In other words, the short private wire had been introduced. Communication was quicker and freer, and daily grew better” (53). For background and discussion, see Paul Leland Haworth, The HayesTilden Disputed Presidential Election of 1876 (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1906); Kahn, The Codebreakers, 221–29; Roy Morris Jr., Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003); William H. Renquist, Centennial Crisis: The Disputed Election of 1876 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2004). Kahn, The Codebreakers, 221. New York Tribune, October 7, 1878, 1. Subsequent references in the text. “Testimony taken by the Select Committee on Alleged Frauds in the Presidential Election of 1876,” Vol. IV, Miscellaneous Documents of the House of Representatives, V, 45th Congress, 3rd Session (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1879), 51. Subsequent references in the text. Richard Menke, “Telegraphic Realism: Henry James’s in the Cage,” PMLA, 115 (2000), 975–90; 979 cited. Henry James, Preface to volume 11 of the New York Edition of Henry James’s works [1908] (What Maisie Knew; “In the Cage”; “The Pupil”) (New York: Scribner’s, 1963), xviii. Jeffrey Kieve, The Electric Telegraph: A Social and Economic History (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973), 183. James moved to London in December 1876. For more on the Atlantic Cable, see, for example, Kieve, The Electric Telegraph, ch. 5. For a full-length discussion of this topic, see Richard Salmon, Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Henry James, The Bostonians (1886; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 120. Subsequent references in the text. For further discussion of Pardon, and other journalists in James’s fiction, see Allan Burns, “Henry James’s Journalists as Synecdoche for the American Scene,” Henry James Review, 16 (1995), 1–17. Henry James, The Aspern Papers (1888; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 6.

232

NOTES

43. Henry James, The Reverberator (1888; London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949), 61. 44. On the importance of the telegraph to nineteenth-century newspapers, especially as a source of long-distance and international news, see Richard B. Kielbowicz, News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 1700–1860s (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), ch. 8; Menaheim Blondheim, News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844–1897 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 45. Previous discussions include Andrew J. Moody, “ ‘The Harmless Pleasure of Knowing’ : Privacy in the Telegraph Office and Henry James’s ‘In the Cage,’ ” Henry James Review, 16 (1995), 53–65; Menke, “Telegraphic Realism”; Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 162–79; Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ch. 4. I draw on all of these discussions in what follows. 46. Like the Democrats, this lover uses what cryptologists call a “substitution cipher,” in which pseudonyms replace his real name. He also uses a system whereby numbers substitute for words: Henry James, “In the Cage” [1892], Selected Tales, ed. Tom Paulin and Peter Messent (London: J. M. Dent, 1982), 99, 102–03. Subsequent references in the text. 47. Admittedly, this is a crucial intervention, as it assures Everard that his and Lady Bradeen’s affair cannot be proved. However, just as crucially, this intervention underlines the telegrapher’s mediumistic status, being, so to speak, an act of data retrieval, rather than of data production. 48. Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), 92. Subsequent references in the text. 49. Related points are made in Tony Tanner’s Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). 50. Henry James, The Golden Bowl (1904; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 244–45; emphasis in original. Subsequent references in the text. 51. Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 6. 52. Sharon Cameron, Thinking in Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Sam Halliday, “Helen Keller, Henry James, and the Social Relations of Perception,” Criticism, 48 (2006). 53. Henry James, The American (1876–77; New York: Norton, 1978), 132. 54. Newman’s self-representations are the key exhibit in Mark Seltzer’s discussion of this topic: Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), 74–80.

NOTES

233

55. Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 89. 56. Henry James, “The Real Thing” [1892], Selected Tales, 54. 57. For a view of the centrality of “race” to other aspects of James’s work, see Sara Blair, Henry James and the Writing or Race and Nation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 58. I owe this reference to Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 226–28. 59. Bret Harte, “See Yup” [1898], The Ancestors of Peter Atherly, and Other Tales (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1900), 148. Subsequent references in the text. 60. See, for example, Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 157. Relatedly, Susan Gillman discusses late nineteenth-century theorizations of the “racial occult” in Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 61. Though well known by reputation, the Underground Railroad has rarely been the focus of contemporary scholarship. In what follows, I draw principally on first-hand reminiscence and commentary from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sources, including W. M. Mitchell, The Underground Railroad (London: William Tweedie, 1860); William Still, The Underground Railroad: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, Etc. (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1872); Levi Coffin, Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, The Reputed President of the Underground Railroad (Cincinnati: Western Tract Society, 1876); Eber M. Pettit, Sketches in the History of the Underground Railroad (1879; Westfield, NY: Chautauqua Region Press, 1999); Ascott R. Hope, Heroes in Homespun: Scenes and Stories from the American Emancipation Movement (London: Wilson and Maine, 1894); H. V. Johnson, From Dixie to Canada: Romances and Realities of the Underground Railroad, Vol. I (Buffalo: Charles Wells Moulton, 1894); Wilbur H. Siebert, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Macmillan, 1898); William M. Cockrum, History of the Underground Railroad, as It Was Conducted by the Anti-Slavery League (1915; New York: Negro University Press, 1969). 62. Siebert, The Underground Railroad, 62. 63. Johnson, From Dixie to Canada, v. 64. Ibid. For general commentary on the use of trains, see Siebert, The Underground Railroad, 59, 78, 142–44. 65. James Redpath, “The Underground Telegraph,” The Roving Editor. Or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States, ed. John R. McKivigan (1859; University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1996), 239. Subsequent references in the text. 66. James Redpath, The Public Life of Captain John Brown (London: Thickbroom and Stapelton, 1860), 162.

234

NOTES

67. For Twain’s relationship with Redpath, see Charles F. Horner, The Life of James Redpath, and the Development of the Modern Lyceum (New York: Barse and Hopkins, 1926), 164–71. 68. Sarah H. Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (Auburn: W. J. Moses, 1869), 40. 69. Siebert, The Underground Railroad, 56. 70. Alexander Milton Ross, Memoirs of a Reformer (1832–1892) (Toronto: Hunter, Rose and Co., 1893), 67. 71. Johnson, From Dixie to Canada, 181; emphasis in original; Cockrum, History of the Underground Railroad, 17. 72. Jacqueline L. Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard, Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad (New York: Anchor, 1999). 73. Coffin, Reminiscences, 399. 74. N. R. Johnson, quoted in Still, The Underground Railroad, 33. 75. Ibid., 29. 76. Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself, rev. ed. (1881; Boston: De Wolfe, Fiske and Co., 1893), 349. 77. Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” [1852], The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader, ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 129. On this “international” dimension, see, for example, C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 163–65. 78. For general commentary, see, for example, Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). For details of pre–twentiethcentury conspiracies, see David Brion Davis, “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 47 (1960), 205–24; Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 79. See, for example, Levine, Conspiracy and Romance, 19–21. 80. Anon., Confessions of a French Catholic Priest, to Which Are Added, Warnings to the Americans by the Same Author, Whose Character Is Fully Attested by the Editor, Samuel F. B. Morse, 3rd ed. (Dublin: William Carson, 1838), 18. 81. Brutus [pseud. Samuel Morse], Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States (New York: Leavitt, Lord and Co., 1835), 54. 82. Ibid., 57, 101; emphasis removed. 83. Ibid., 15. 84. See David Stafford, The Silent Game: The Real World of Imaginary Spies (London: Viking, 1989). 85. William Le Queux, Secrets of the Foreign Office (London: Hurts and Blackett, 1903), 12. 86. William Le Queux, Tracked by Wireless (London: Stanley Paul, 1922).

NOTES

235

87. On such archetypes, see Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 347, 362. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young has more specifically located the emergence of the “criminal mastermind” within the rise of technologically dependent bureaucracies: “Undead Networks: Information Processing and Media Boundary Conflicts in Dracula,” Literature and Science, ed. Donald Bruce and Anthony Purdy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 117. 88. William Le Queux, The Broadcast Mystery (London: Robert Holden and Co., 1924), 89, 88. Subsequent references in the text. 89. For background and commentary, see Eric L. Santner, My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Other recent commentaries include Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone Press, 1984), ch. 1; Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), Part II. 90. Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness [1903], trans. Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter (New York: New York Review Books, 2000), 40. Subsequent references in the text. 91. Sigmund Freud, “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)” [1911], Case Histories II, Vol. 9 of the Penguin Freud Library, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 138–223. 92. Kittler, Discourse Networks, 354–55. 93. Cf. Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 286–87. 94. Mark Twain, “A Telephonic Conversation” [1880], Collected Tales, Speeches and Essays, 1852–1890, selected and annotated by Louis J. Budd (New York: Library of America, 1992), 738. 95. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power [1960], trans. Carol Stewart (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 513.

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Index

abolitionism, 112, 131, 185–9 Adams, Henry, 44, 56, 140, 156 The Education of Henry Adams, 45–9, 50, 51, 152–4, 207n92 The Tendency of History, 47–9, 50 “adhesiveness,” 146–7 adultery, 166, 178, 181, 182–3, anachronism, 26–7, 39–40, 43 “animal magnetism,” see mesmerism Armstrong, Tim, 2, 142–3 Arnold, Augustus, 179, 189 History and Philosophy of Freemasonry, 168–70 automaticity, 75–6, 106, 154–5 Bataille, George, 121, 219–20n74 Beard, George Miller, 5, 8, 134–41, 145, 155, 193 American Nervousness, 140 Sexual Neurasthenia, 140–1 Beauchamp, Christine, see Prince, Morton Bell, Alexander Graham, 161–6, 165, 169, 195 Benjamin, Walter, 11, 118, 120 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 60 Bergson, Henri Matter and Memory, 154 Bichat, Xavier, 132, 222n22 Bierce, Ambrose “The Ways of Ghosts,” 40–1 blindness, 86 see also Keller, Helen body, 34, 79, 81, 87, 89–90, 97, 115, 118, 120–1, 124,

128–41, 142–6, 148–50, 151–2, 158–9, 161 circulatory system, 143–4 female, 116, 117, 137, 139, 192 as an image, 120–1 pigs’, 118 respiratory system, 143–4 and technology, 55–6, 58, 61–3, 68, 77, 81–2, 83, 90, 135–6, 138–9, 160–1 and voice, 91 see also health; illness; “nervous” illness; nervous system; materiality; mind/body relationship; sexual difference body/soul relationship, see mind/body relationship Bolton, George Buckley, 17 Bose, Georg Matthias, 142 Bradford, Sarah H., 187 Brady, Thomas J., 175 Braid, James, 152 Brown, John, 187 Bryan, William Lowe, and Harter, Noble, 64–78, 81–2, 106, 130, 136, 155, 176 Bunker, Chang and Eng, 12, 17–19, 18, 20, 33–4, 35, 109, 159 Buse, Peter, 39 Bushnell, Horace, 112 Byron, Lord (George Gordon), 5 Canetti, Elias, 195 Canguilhem, George, 117 Carey, James, 8–9, 45 Carlyle, Thomas, 174, 188, 190 Sartor Resartus, 170

238

INDEX

Carpenter, William Benjamin, 151, 152 carrier pigeons, 23 Cattell, James McKeen, 62, 64 Channell, David, 139 Channing, William Ellery, 112 Channing, William F., 131 chromolithographs, 57, 208n114 ciphers, see codes Coale, Samuel Chase, 113 codes, 166, 167, 170–6, 188, 190–1, 230n27, 230–1n31 see also cryptology; Morse code; secrecy Coffin, Levi, 188 Conan Doyle, Arthur “Silver Blaze,” 24 Connor, Steven, 151 consciousness, 67, 72–6, 155 conspiracies, 167, 172, 173–6, 187–9, 189–95 corpses, 118, 119–20 and art, 119 and electricity, 7, 17, 128 Corelli, Marie, 98, 124, 125 A Romance of Two Worlds, 101–6, 110, 177 “credenciveness,” 111–12 cryptology, 173, 232n46 cryptography, 170, 171, 174, 180, 188 steganography, 170, 175 Dalton, John, 49 Dana Jr., Richard Henry, 19, 109–10 Two Years Before the Mast, 7, 19 Danius, Sara, 2 deafness, 161–2, see also Keller, Helen de Certeau, Michel, 40 Democrat conspiracy of 1876, 173–6, 179, 181, 188 Derrida, Jacques, 39–40, 55 Dickinson, Emily, 5–6, 145

diet, 131–2 vegetarianism, 120–1, 132 dissociation and reassociation, 75, 155, 158 dissociative personality disorder (multiple personality), 129, 154–8 see also telephony, analogy with brain distance, 21, 31, 32, 35, 39, 52, 90–3, 100, 161 divinity, 96, 101, 102, 104–6 see also electricity, and the divine; electricity, as God’s body; God Dods, John Bovee, 123–4, 125, 131, 145 Electrical Psychology, 143–4 Douglass, Frederick, 14–15, 19, 188, 189, 190 Doyle, Peter, 147 dreams, 38, 41, 121 Dreiser, Theodore, 140 The Financier, 173, 230–1n31 Sister Carrie, 79 Du Boff, Richard, 173 Du Bois-Reymond, Emil, 61, 63, 130–1 Dufay, Charles François de Cisternay, 142 Dumont, Francois, 152 dynamo, 45, 49, 51 Edison, Thomas, 135 electricity and abstract concepts, 5–6 and affect, 5–6, 100 and air, 129, 143–4, 145 and bipolarity (“positive” and “negative”), 8, 141–4, 147–51, 150–1 and blood, 129, 143–4, 145, 150 and the body, 1–2, 4–5, 6, 128, 138–9, 144, 145 and class, 139 and communication, 5, 9 and corpses, 7, 17, 128

INDEX

and death, 45 and the divine, 102–3, 124–6 as fluid, 7, 11, 39, 73, 99, 108, 142–3 as God’s body, 124, 131 and haunting, 40–1 and ideas, 3–4, 8–9, 35–7, 47–8, 97, 102, 192, 193 as imponderable, 11 and instantaneity, 8 and language, 51, 55–6, 193 and “life,” 4–5, 17, 32, 98–9, 116, 144, 192 and lightning, 7, 8, 14, 172, 188, 189 and literature, 4, 19, 54 and magnetism, 1, 7, 32, 97, 98, 99–100, 101, 114 and matter, 7, 192 and medicine, 102, 135, 138–9, 227n94 and the mind, 1–2 and nation, 139 and the nervous system, 102, 111, 128, 130, 148, 151 and the non-electrical, 11, 34–5 and the postal service, 10 and publicity, 178 and “race,” 5, 139 and science, 6–8, 11–12, 142–3 and secrecy, 170 and semen, 129, 144, 145 and sexual difference, 5, 116, 142–3, 144 and sexuality, 5, 8, 32, 132–3, 144, 145–6, 148–51 and the social, 4, 6, 93, 170 and speed, 8, 36 and spiritualism, 107 and technology, 6–7, 8–10, 14 and time, 24, 50, 55 electromagnetism, see electricity, and magnetism Eliot, George, 3–4 Ellenberger, Henri F., 107

239

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 20, 43, 145, 147 ether, 47, 120–3, 125 Faraday, Michael, 7, 49, 50 Fechner, Gustav, 62 field theory, 50–2, 53, 56 Fischer, Claude S., 30, 34 Fourierist socialism, 115, 131 Fowler, Lorenzo Niles, 32 Fowler, Orson Squire, 5, 31–4, 35, 69, 84, 100, 133–4, 137, 144, 145, 146, 149, 150 Franklin, Benjamin, 8, 142–3 freemasonry, 168–70, 171, 188, 189 Freud, Sigmund, 37, 102, 151, 192 “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,” 140–1, 150–1 “Dreams and Telepathy,” 38 New Introductory Lectures, 37 “On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description ‘Anxiety Neuroses,’” 140, 151 “Psychoanalysis and Telepathy,” 38 Fuller, Margaret, 5 Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 116–18, 142 Galton, Francis, 64, 210n23 Galvani, Luigi, 5, 7, 98, 116, 130 see also galvanism galvanism, 5, 17, 77, 98, 128, 129, 131, 132, 144 ghosts, 39–41, 44, 51, 53, 121–3, 124 and representation, 122 see also haunting Gibbs, Willard, 47 Giles, Paul, 14 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 140 God, 101, 125–6, 128, 131, 192–5 see also divinity; electricity, and the divine; electricity, as God’s body

240

INDEX

Graham, Sylvester, 132–5, 136, 137, 141, 146, 154, 222n22 Gramsci, Antonio, 69, 75 Grimes, James Stanley, 111–12 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 25 habit, 72–6, 152, 155 Hall, Marshall, 128, 130, 137, 151, 152 handwriting, 64, 72 Hardy, Thomas A Laodicean, 83–5, 86–7, 91, 95–6, 166, 167, 169, 171, 172, 193 Harris, Neil, 131 Harte, Bret, 187 “See Yup,” 184–5 Harter, Noble, see Bryan, William Lowe haunting, 39–44 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 5, 107–9, 111, 123, 170, 177, 195 The Blithedale Romance, 97, 112–14, 115–23, 139 “Ethan Brand,” 4, 99 The House of the Seven Gables, 3–4, 96–8, 99, 107, 112–13, 160, 169 The Marble Faun, 4, 14, 119 The Scarlet Letter, 4, 7 Hazlitt, William, 3 health, 117–18, 128, 129, 131, 132, 134, 138, 146 Heilbron, J. L., 142 Helmholtz, Hermann, 61, 62, 130 Hertz, Heinrich, 51–4 historicism, 44–9, 50 Hollick, Frederick, 131 Holmes, Oliver Wendell Elsie Venner, 152 A Mortal Antipathy, 152, 161 homosexuality, 8, 141, 145, 146–51, 192, 225n68 see also sexual difference; sexuality humor theory, 130 hypnotism, 29, 152, 154, 155–6, 158

illness, 115–17, 120, 123, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 146, 159 see also body; health; “nervous” illness Illuminati, 168, 189 images, see body, as an image; representation imitation, 78, 87 individuality, 18, 21, 42, 59–60, 63–5, 68, 72, 77–8, 82, 87–90, 113, 155 industry, 59, 61, 62 telecommunications, 58, 61 interpersonality, 4, 5, 18, 68, 100, 104, 111, 129, 144, 149, 184 see also reciprocity; sociality; “sympathy” intimacy, 30–1, 69, 90–1, 93, 104, 163, 179 James, Henry, 14–15, 176, 191 The Ambassadors, 177, 181–2 The American, 177, 184 The Aspern Papers, 178 The Bostonians, 177–8 English Hours, 25 The Golden Bowl, 182–3, 184 “In the Cage,” 178–81, 188 Italian Hours, 25 “The Real Thing,” 10, 184 The Reverberator, 178 The Sacred Fount, 181 The Sense of the Past, 42–4, 177 “The Turn of the Screw,” 181 What Maisie Knew, 181 The Wings of the Dove, 184 James, William, 152, 154, 155 The Principles of Psychology, 3–4, 73, 154 John, Richard R., 10 Johnson, Cave, 1, 8, 9, 10–11, 14, 107 Johnson, H. V., 187

INDEX

Kahn, David, 173 Kant, Immanuel, 78–9, 90, 211n43 Keller, Helen, 129, 159–61, 163–6, 165, 167, 169, 175, 181, 193, 195 Mainstream, 165 The Story of My Life, 159, 161–2 Kern, Stephen, 31 The Culture of Time and Space, 20 Kleist, Ewald Jürgen von, 7 Kipling, Rudyard, 44 Kim, 23–4 “Wireless,” 51–4 Kittler, Friedrich, 29, 93, 193 Kracauer, Siegfried, 82, 92 Lacquer, Thomas, 142 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de L’Homme Machine, 61 Lavater, Johan Caspar, 78 Lee, Gerald Stanley, 65, 78, 160 Crowds, 60–1, 62, 170 Inspired Millionaires, 61 Le Monnier, Pierre-Charles, 7, 160 Lenoir, Timothy, 130 Le Queux, William The Broadcast Mystery, 191 Secrets of the Foreign Office, 190–1 Tracked by Wireless, 191 Leyden jar, 7, 110 Lloyds of London, insurers, 28–30 “logistical sublime,” 29–30, 167, 189 love, 31–4, 38, 39, 53, 69, 84, 88, 93, 100, 133, 134, 144, 145, 146, 184 love affairs, 166, 178, 181, 188 Luckhurst, Roger, 2, 183 McLuhan, Marshall, 11 Marconi, Guglielmo, 29, 40, 52 Marvin, Carolyn, 2, 213n59 Marx, Karl, 20 The Communist Manifesto, 123 materiality, 4, 7, 27, 47, 51, 52, 97, 118–26

241

“surmateriality,” 121–2, 219–20n74 Maxwell, James Clerk, 50–1 mediums, 53, 57–8, 76–7, 105, 106, 176, 179, 180 Melville, Herman, 14, 19, 84, 97, 104 Billy Budd, 111 The Confidence Man, 80, 88, 111, 169 “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 4, 5, 7, 19, 160, 169 Mardi, 7, 127–9, 131, 151 Moby Dick, 7, 109–11, 127 Pierre, 79–81, 82, 99–100, 101, 105, 111, 169 Typee, 10, 34, 171, 173, 185 White-Jacket, 171, 173 Menke, Richard, 177 Mesmer, Anton, 107–8, 128, 152, 216n38 mesmerism, 1, 96–7, 107–9, 108, 110–4, 115, 117, 119, 120, 124, 151, 169, 191 and slavery, 112–14 see also hypnotism Metternich, Clemens, 190 mind/body relationship, 5–6, 18, 33, 58, 62, 63, 64, 68, 82, 127–9, 133, 145, 151–2 misrepresentation, see representation modernity, 95–6, 123, 129, 134–7, 140–1 the “moment,” 35, 205n58 see also electricity, and instantaneity Monleón, José B., 123 Montgomery, David, 62 Morse code, 65–7, 68–72, 160, 166, 171–2 see also codes; Morse, Samuel Morse, Jedidiah, 189 Morse, Samuel as conspiracy theorist, 189–90

242

INDEX

Morse, Samuel––continued and the telegraph, 1, 8, 10, 34, 37, 107, 136, 171–2, 230n23 Morus, Iwan Rhys, 2 Moss, Mary, 59–60, 61, 63, 77, 79, 88 Müller, Johannes, 61, 62, 130 multiple personality, see dissociative personality disorder music, 88, 99–101, 103, 105–6 Musschenbroek, Pieter van, 7 Nänny, Max, 51 Naturphilosophie, 98 nervous system, 98, 115, 127–41, 143–4, 148, 151–4, 161, 192–5 “neurological imaginary,” 129 reflex action, 127–9, 137–8, 151–2, 154 see also body; electricity, and the nervous system; “nervous” illness; telegraphy, analogy with nervous system “nervous” illness, 69, 102, 130, 133–41, 152 neurasthenia, 135–41, 155, 193 new psychology, 62–3, 64, 73, 152, 154, 158 newspapers, 19, 177–8, 232n44, see also New York Tribune Newton, Isaac, 49, 50–1, 52, 56, 142 New York Tribune, 173–6, 181 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 46, 91–2, 101 Nissenbaum, Stephen, 132, 222n22 Nollet, Jean Antoine, 7, 160 Norris, Frank, 140, 191 The Octopus, 20–1, 23, 24, 38–9, 52, 102, 136 The Pit, 21, 173 Nye, David E., 2 Oersted, Hans Christian, 1, 7, 98 Oken, Lorenz, 145 Elements of Physiophilosophy, 144 Otis, Laura, 2

painting portrait, 42, 79–80, 81 still life, 119, 124 paranormal phenomena, see electricity, and the imponderable; ghosts; haunting; spiritualism, and telegraphy; telepathy Peabody, Sophia, 113, 114 Pearson, Karl The Grammar of Science, 154 phonograph, 90, 158 photography, 84–5, 86, 90, 178 phrenology, 32, 225n61 physics, see field theory; individual names; thermodynamics; science physiognomy, 78–9, 80, 81–2, 83, 90 physiology, 61–3, 64, 127–8, 131, 132, 134, 135, 150, 151, 152, 154 see also body; health; illness; “nervous illness”; nervous system plagiarism, 56–7 postal service, 9–11, 23, 35, 57 Poe, Edgar Allan, 98, 123 “Eureka,” 125 “Mesmeric Revelation,” 12–5 “The Premature Burial,” 7 “Some Words with a Mummy,” 6, 7 Pound, Ezra, 44 The Spirit of Romance, 54–5 presidential election of 1876, see Democrat conspiracy of 1876 Prime-Stevenson, Edward Imre, 150–1 Prince, Morton, 227n94 The Dissociation of a Personality, 154–8 The Nature of Mind, and Human Automatism, 154, 155 prosthesis, 67, 135, 160, 194 psychic phenomena, see telepathy

INDEX

publicity, 177–8, 179, 182 and privacy, 167, 169, 180, 183 punctuality, 24 Rabinbach, Anson, 61 “race,” 5, 139, 184–9 radio, 10, 29–30, 34, 38, 40, 41, 51–4, 191 railroads, 21–9, 33, 148, 185–7, 188–9 accidents, 23, 202n17 and standard time, 24–5 and telegraphy, 20, 22–4, 28–9 and timetables, 24–6, 29 see also Underground Railroad reciprocity, 99–101, 103–4, 111, 125, 170 “fantasy of pure reciprocity” (Seltzer), 100 see also interpersonality, sociality, “sympathy” Redpath, James, 187 representation, 59–60, 78–81, 82, 83–5, 86–8, 90, 93, 119–23, 169, 193 see also body, as an image; ether; ghosts; painting; sculpture resemblance, see representation Rockwell, Alphonso David, 5, 138 Roget, Peter Mark, 17 Roman Catholic Church, 189–90 Ronell, Avital, 89, 228n1 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 70–1 Scarry, Elaine, 86 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 11, 23 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 101 Schreber, Daniel Paul Memoirs of my Nervous Illness, 191–5 science, 11–12, 97, 98, 125, 129, 143 and Christianity, 103 and “pseudo-science,” 12 see also electricity, and science; individual names and

243

disciplines; technology, and science scientific management, 62 secrecy, 167–73, 174–6, 178–83, 185, 187–9, 194 and symbols, 170–1, 188 see also codes; cryptology Seltzer, Mark, 63, 80, 87, 100, 119 Bodies and Machines, 78 senses, 18, 29, 56, 48, 61–2, 85, 124, 129, 133, 159 sexual difference, 5, 142–3, 147 sexual education and reform, see sexuality sexuality, 5, 8, 31–2, 129, 132–4, 140–1, 144–51 see also electricity, and sexuality; homosexuality; telephony, phone sex Shelley, Mary Frankenstein, 5, 7, 17, 59, 77, 128 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 5 Siamese twins, see Bunker, Chang and Eng Siebert, Wilbur, 185, 188 Siegert, Bernhard, 61 Simmel, Georg, 85–6, 167–8, 169, 175, 178, 179 Simon, Linda, 2 simultaneity, 30–1, 33, 35, 38, 41, 43, 55, 86, 205n58 slavery, 45, 112, 185–9 see also mesmerism, and slavery Sloterdijk, Peter, 87 Smith, Adam, 111 The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 109 sociality, 97, 99, 108–9, 114, 131, 145, 160, 166, 167, 168, 169–70, 192, 194, 195 see also electricity, and the social; “sympathy” Society for Psychical Research, 37, 102 speed, 8, 22, 36, 47, 65, 70, 73–4, 76, 172

244

INDEX

spies, 190–1 spiritualism, 11, 96–7, 106–7, 119, 125, 131, 169 and telegraphy, 97, 106–7 Stone, Allucquère Rosanne, 91 Stoker, Bram Dracula, 26–30, 34, 45, 83, 90, 158, 189, 193 Stott, Andrew, 39 Sullivan, Annie, 159–60, 163, 164 “surmateriality,” see materiality “sympathy,” 18–19, 33–4, 99, 102, 109, 111–12, 114, 114–16, 125–6, 129–31, 168–9, 170 see also electricity, and the social; sociality Taylor, Bayard Joseph and His Friend, 147–9 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 74, 75 Principles of Scientific Management, 62 technology, 60, 135, 166, 167, 189, 212 “impact” of, 10, 34 and the non-technological, 9–10, 29, 34–7, 38, 41, 42–4, 51–4, 100, 160, 184, 188–9 and science, 49, 51–2 see also individual technologies by name telegraphy, 8–11, 14, 21–4, 28–9, 34, 38, 41, 49, 52, 57, 60, 64–78, 79, 81, 82, 83–4, 86, 92, 93, 95–7, 103–5, 129, 131, 136–7, 141, 160, 166, 167, 169, 171, 172–6, 177–83, 184–5, 187–9, 190–1, 193, 212n51 analogy with nervous system, 128, 130–1, 135, 152, 154, 160, 193 apparatus, 66–8, 67 Atlantic telegraph, 14–15, 103, 104, 105, 177, 181

and financial markets, 21–2, 166, 173, 230–1n31 non-mechanical telegraphy, 10, 32, 34, 35–6, 184 operators, 65–77, 106, 136, 155, 176 optical telegraph, 23, 34–5 and the postal service, 10–11 and railroads, 20, 22–4, 28–9 as social activity, 68–9 see also Morse code; Morse, Samuel; telepathy telepathy, 29, 37–9, 41, 43–4, 53–4, 56–7, 102, 160, 177, 183–7, 191 and love, 38, 184 and “race,” 184–8 telephony, 10, 30–1, 34, 36, 38, 40, 60, 61, 86–93, 105, 129, 161, 163–6, 167, 171, 189, 191, 194–5 analogy with brain, 152–4, 161, 193 phone sex, 91 telephone exchange, 152–4, 153, 156–8, 157 television, 41 thermodynamics, 44, 46–8 Thoreau, Henry David Walden, 24 Thornton, Tamara Plakins, 64, 72 Thurschwell, Pam, 2 Tilden, Samuel, 173 time, 24, 50, 55, 65 and meaning in telegraphy, 70–1 and space, 19–20, 22 time travel, 42–5, 54, 55 “training,” 63, 68, 72, 74, 76–7, 155, 210n18 Tubman, Harriet, 187 Twain, Mark, 5, 18, 76, 87, 158, 187 A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, 7, 14, 44–5, 63, 69, 88, 92–3, 172–3, 198n22

INDEX

Following the Equator, 46 “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton,” 30–1, 69, 86–93, 96, 100, 161, 169, 193 “Mental Telegraphy,” 35–7, 41, 56, 100, 102, 160, 184, 184 Pudd’nhead Wilson, 198n22 “A Telephonic Conversation,” 195 Underground Railroad, 185–9, 186 Vail, Alfred, 172 voice, 69, 77, 85, 87–9, 88, 90, 91–2, 105 Watson, Thomas, 165 Wells, H. G. The Time Machine, 20, 27, 44, 47

245

Whitman, Walt, 5, 150, 225n68 Calamus, 146 Franklin Evans, 147 “The Last of the Sacred Army,” 147 “I Sing the Body Electric,” 145 “Song of Myself,” 144–5, 146, 147 “Song of the Open Road,” 145, 146 “Starting from Paumanok,” 146 “A Woman Waits for Me,” 145 Wilde, Oscar Teleny, 149–50 Winston, Brian, 23 Wister, Owen The Virginian, 166, 167, 171, 173, 195 Woolf, Virginia “Kew Gardens,” 40 Wundt, Wilhelm, 62, 67