Henry James's Second Wave

146 The Henry James Review Jennifer Wicke—Henry James's Second Wave One of James's most famous critical asides is of course "ReaUy, relations stop nowhere." This comes as part of James's mapping out of the Venn diagrams of concentric consciousness in the critical apparatus to his own fiction, the critical armature that accounts for James's first wave, as the exhumed, proleptic arbiter of New Criticism for the novel. James's second wave, which his corpus now experiences in some kind of infernal critical surfing ritual, is a bifurcated one, with the energy divided between formatist rhetorical readings that rediscover tiie swooning abysses of the textual Jamesian surface, and more pugnacious, if totalizing, historical readings that seek to situate James's texts in the welter of market "power." Through a reading of "In the Cage" I want both to look at a juncture where relations do indeed stop somewhere, aestheticaUy and historicaUy, at a point of convergence, and by doing so to propose a reason why James's work lends itself at this historical moment to such heightened critical charge. "In the Cage" is set literally in the cage, the iron cage of Weber's incipient social bureaucratization as weU as the cage or net of words necessitated by the telegraph office created by this wire cage, which the story calls "words as numberless as the sands of the sea." Not since Bartleby the Scrivener has a working environment of the office type been so thoroughly limned, down to the whiffs of dried fish and varnish that pervade the cage by its proximity to the rest of the items in the greengrocer's shop where it is, historicaUy accurately, located. The cage is a minutely referenced site, an artifact of the city, while it also circumscribes a relational dynamic that can in no way be reduced to the simply textual. The cage is a "fraU structure of wood and wire," but in addition is a savage if modest architectural divide within social relations. And, in a reversal of the panoptical strategy, there is another entombment at the heart of the cage, instead of an aU-seeing eye: the sounder, the machine at the innermost core of the telegraph office, is itself further encaged, "being the uttermost cell of captivity, a cage within the cage, fenced off from the rest by a frame of ground glass." The cage animalizes by encapsulating a perpetual class rage, the rage that leaves the heroine, the young telegraphist-in-spite-of-herself, aware of her Ufe Uke a "guinea pig or magpies," aware of her "sort of rage" for the affluent senders of telegrams she "hates." When the telegraphist is able to correct a coded message for one of her rich female customers, because she remembers the code better than its user does, her trump card of knowledge sets her triumphanüy free, for a fantasmatic moment, of the confines of the cage: "It was as if she had bodUy leaped—cleared the top of the cage and alighted on her interlocutress." The cage is connected with a transparent screen, in literal terms the wire mesh that serves to demarcate the counter, and through which the telegraphic order forms and the resulting money and change are pushed. That screen is, however, a liminal boundary that enmeshes the social relation of exchange, so that despite the ironclad fact of the cage with its bars it is permeable, a nexus as much as a site. Upon that transparency of metal, as if projected there, are ranged an eddy of words, words that each have a price affixed to them: "during the first weeks she had often gasped at the sums people were wiUing to pay for the stuff they transmitted—the 'much loves', the 'awful regrets', the compliments and wonderments and vain, vague gestures that cost the price of a new pair of boots." The cage houses the instruments of communication, and presides over Selected Papers on Henry James 147 the translation of communication into the grid of social relation. "There were times when aU the wires in the country seemed to start from the little holeand -corner where she plied for a livetihood...