Technologies of vision in Henry James's what Maisie knew

Inscribed within What Maisie Knew, then, is a disciplinary scenario which recurs, in various displaced forms, across James's fiction.13 Beneath the attempt to articulate a modern(ist) aesthetic pedagogy hovers the image of a fictional torture-machine, which produces the heightened vision and peculiarly negative knowledge of his protagonists. It is above all a machine for seeing, a device for the projection of images. Maisie's viewing of the "strange shadows dancing on a sheet" is compulsory; she is, we recall, "a mite of a half-scared infant in a dark theatre" (Maisie 29). Indeed the narrator goes on, in that key passage, quoted earlier (10), to gloss Maisie's overwhelmingly ocular predicament as a "sacrifice." Similarly, the telegraphist of "In the Cage" (1898) enjoys "a prodigious view as the pressure heightened, a panorama fed with facts and figures, flushed with a torrent of colour and accompanied with wondrous world-music" (21). The figure of mechanical or physical "pressure," of the "turn of the screw," reinserts material relations of power within the apparently abstract realm of the urban gaze. Like Maisie, the telegraphist is made adequate to a narrative technique whose will to modernity is reinscribed, at the figurative level, upon the body. The cerebral adventures of James's privileged centers of consciousness are constantly shadowed at the figurative level by fables of brute power: the turning of the screw.

It is precisely at the point in the novel when Maisie is poised on the verge of the acquisition of adult subjectivity and social agency that the novel's dominating tropes of optical performance, display, and illusion are displaced by the sacrificial interrogation scene. The phantasmagoria is thereby revealed not merely as an external show but as an apparatus for the production of the viewer herself. Maisie's trajectory constitutes a comment on the perceptual regime of modernity itself, as, in Jonathan Crary's words, a "massive reorganization of knowledge and social practices that modified in myriad ways the productive, cognitive and desiring capacities of the human subject"(3). As a subject-in-process, Maisie provides the "experimental" space in which this reorganization is played out: "As she was condemned to know more and more, how could it logically stop before she should know Most?" (Maisie 213). If, however, modernity offers a dizzying expansion of the possibilities of perception, this expansion is seen as taking place at the cost of certain kinds of willed blindness: a negation or sublimation of the embodied self, which becomes associated with a spectacularly racialized otherness. "Poor little monkey" is a phrase applied to Maisie at the outset of the novel (36), linking her with the "brown lady" whom, later in the novel, she encounters but fails to countenance. The paradoxes of Maisie's knowledge clearly gesture toward an autocritique of the Western philosophical tradition which progressively defines the modern individual as disembodied observer. Yet James's urban phantasmagoria also offers a salvage operation of sorts; it provides a means of recoding the perceiving subject in technological terms, as a point of view, a fictional optic, whose abstraction or lack of grounding is ideally designed to accommodate the relativizing flux of identities and values in the modern metropolis. The phantasmagoric mechanism becomes the place of production of the novelist-observer, who responds to the forces of rationalization by inventing an alternative novelistic economy based on irony and the "scenic." He becomes the showman of an urban spectacle, which domesticates itself above all through the techniques of the exhibition, with its attendant "exoticist" imaginary. What the Jamesian project demonstrates, however, is the extent to which the technological recoding of the subject, a strategy inherited by modernism, relies upon, indeed requires, a defensive sublimation of violence into the cognitive realm. This figurative violence marks the limit of James's fictional urbanity, gesturing towards an abject border that both contains and menaces it.