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  • Stereo Rivalry in James’ “The Jolly Corner”
  • Mark Schiebe

“I imagine my ego as being viewed through a lens: all the forms which move around me are egos; and whatever they do, or leave undone, vexes me.”

—E. T. A. Hoffman

“Two modes of his life question each other, and the answer is his life itself.”

—Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

In 1859, two years prior to building the handheld stereoscopic viewer that would become a familiar item in tens of thousands of American homes, Oliver Wendell Holmes published a piece in the Atlantic Monthly in which he translated for the general public the physiological principles behind the new instrument:

Two eyes see two different pictures of the same thing, for the obvious reason that they look from points two or three inches apart. By means of these two different views of an object, the mind, as it were, feels round it and gets an idea of its solidity. We clasp an object with our eyes, as with our arms, or with our hands . . . and then we know it to be something more than surface. . . . Now, if we can get two artificial pictures of any given object, one as we should see it with the right eye, the other as we should see it with the left eye, and then . . . contrive some way of making these pictures run together as we have seen our two views of a natural object do, we shall get the sense of solidity that natural objects give us. . . . The scraggy branches of a tree in the foreground run out at us as if they would scratch our eyes out. The elbow of a figure stands forth so as to make us almost uncomfortable.1

The eminent Harvard physician and close friend of the James family marveled at the potentiality of an instrument which would allow the observer to experience remote objects and scenes as if he were physically present. “The stereograph,” Holmes writes, “as we have called the double picture designed for the stereoscope, is to be the card of introduction to make all of mankind acquaintances.”2

Public fascination with the stereoscopic image, on both sides of the Atlantic, more than bore out Holmes’ enthusiasm for the optical device, [End Page 49] even if the average consumer might not have shared the doctor’s august pronouncements about its social and technological import. After an endorsement from Queen Victoria during the Great Exhibition of 1851, stereoscopic viewers began being mass-produced by the London Stereoscopic Company in 1854, successfully marketed as “a piece of domestic apparatus without which no drawing-room is thought complete” to a Victorian middle-class with a ravenous thirst for curiosities.3 As the instrument’s initial wave of popularity crested in the final decades of the century, coin-operated stereoscopic viewing machines were also a regular draw in European arcades, and other public spaces. As David Saunders observes, stereographic cards were the most popular souvenir item at the 1900 International Exposition in Paris, depicting everything under (and beyond) the sun: “European capitals, the villages of Borneo, Presidents, celebrities, opera stars, ballerinas, heavenly bodies, birds bugs, floods, fires,” and, of course, ghosts.4

Despite his familiarity with Holmes’ work and the seeming ubiquity of the optical instrument during his lifetime, James scholarship has only begun to trace the stereoscope’s influence on the master, or to discover stereoscopic vision, if you will, in any of his fiction. In her valuable work on Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation (1996), Sara Blair has shown how James’ interest in optical illusions and “phantasmagoria” inform his pictorial vocabulary in The American Scene (1907) as well as how his depictions of urban space “stake out a contestatory interest in such alternative documentary modes as photography, the half-tone image, and the stereograph.”5 Noting how Holmes’ handheld stereoscope was the original medium of the slum images in Jacob Riis’ pioneering work of photojournalism How The Other Half Lives (1890), Blair observes that James would have arrived in New York in 1904 amidst a flood of phantasmagoric productions aiming to commercially capitalize on the success of Riis’ work.6 If...

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