Deleuze and the Jamesian Connect!

Deleuze has gotten me knocking on Henry James’s stories by the number! And how!

Now I suddenly find a renewed interest in Henry James and his fiction in quite a new light of sorts!

Especially his novella, In the Cage, after Deleuze has done a wonderful ‘social theory’ analysis (if I may call it this way) of it.

I wish Dr. Kunhammad, could throw further light on this thread, to make us hook onto the aura of Deleuze better!

Henry James in his seminal essay, ‘The Art of Fiction’, gives a lovelyyy liner that’s quite fascinated me bigtime! He quips: “When the mind is imaginative, “it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations”.

Correlates well with the theory of the Counterfactual imagination, which our philosophical forefathers including Plato and Aristotle would have called, subjunctive suppositions, that we’d been discussing not quite long back on these vibrant walls in a series of posts & threads!

On an aside, coincidentally, it was his brother William James who’d coined the term ‘stream of consciousness’!

Well, quite many of James’s protagonists are shown to have been possessed with such singularly powerful imaginations, capable of constructing the most wonderful of subjective adventures from the scantest of material.

Two of the most creative minds belong to the heroines of James’s 1898 works, In the Cage and The Turn of the Screw.

And yessss… I was so particularly interested in the tale, In the Cage because Deleuze and Guattari in their seminal work, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, have analysed this wonderful tale in such astute, erudite, and yet simple ways.

And that apart, the storyline in In the Cage also has huge semblance to what James himself tells us in his critical essay, The Art of Fiction, on the freeplay of the imagination to artistic freedom!

In In the Cage, James ain’t tell us what really happens! Looking back at the tale, in fact, very little seems to happen at all. The focus thus, is not on the events themselves, as they are, but on the principal character’s interpretation of the events.

The protagonist remains unnamed. She is an emotionally repressed young lady, from a middle class background, but, being impoverished, has to work for a living at a post-office counter.

It is obviously a drudgery of a job: the ‘grill’ at the counter at which she works is the metaphoric “cage” of the title!

Every aspect of her life is severely circumscribed by social and economic realities.

She is engaged also, to one Mr Mudge, a grocer who, through diligence and through thrift, is already on his way to becoming successful in life. Mr Mudge, for all his absurdity, is at least a decent man. But, still, “her imaginative life, was the life in which she spent most of her time”.

Inside this cage, the protagonist, as part of her job, has to send off telegrams from various customers, many of whom are aristocratic.

And, while she doesn’t admit this to herself, she clearly falls in love with a young aristocrat; and, from the messages of the telegrams he sends, she deduces that he is having an illicit affair. So she starts constructing in her mind – a wonderful counterfactual imagination - stories which may or may not be true!

Although the world she lives in is mundane and dull, still, in the midst of all this, her imagination creates something that is more splendid and more noble by far than anything reality can offer her in her cage, or even, perhaps, out of it.

She is presented as an artist, taking from reality its various scraps and pieces, and re-forming them, and re-arranging them into something that is more beautiful. And when, eventually, reality has to be faced, she faces it: she has, after all, already had her triumph.

Now, how does Deleuze present his side of the story, In the Cage for us?

Here goes… just excerpts for y’all…

The heroine, a young telegrapher, leads a very clear-cut, calculated life proceeding by delimited segments: the telegrams she takes one after the other, day after day; the people to whom she sends the telegrams; their social class and the different ways they use telegraphy; the words to be counted.

Moreover, her telegraphist's cage is like a contiguous segment to the grocery store next door, where her fiance works. Contiguity of territories. And the fiance is constantly plotting out their future, work, vacations, house.

Here, as for all of us, there is a line of rigid segmentarity on which everything seems calculable and foreseen, the beginning and end of a segment, the passage from one segment to another.

Our lives are made like that: Not only are the great molar aggregates segmented (States, institutions, classes), but so are people as elements of an aggregate, as are feelings as relations between people; they are segmented, not in such a way as to disturb or disperse, but on the contrary to ensure and control the identity of each agency, including personal identity.

The fiance can say to the young woman, Even though there are differences between our segments, we have the same tastes and we are alike. I am a man, you are a woman; you are a telegraphist, I am a grocer; you count words, I weigh things; our segments fit together, conjugate.

Conjugality. A whole interplay of well-determined, well-planned territories. They have a future but no becoming.

This is the first life line, the molar or rigid line of segmentarity; in no sense is it dead, for it occupies and pervades our life, and always seems to prevail in the end. It even includes much tenderness and love.

It would be too easy to say, "This is a bad line," for you find it everywhere, and in all the other lines.

To be contd…