ELH

I.

Need our bodily appetites perpetually signify, as they do for Tanner, no more than the lowest common denominator of human existence? What if James, of all writers, could show us ways in which the two forms of taste interact rather than opposing one another? This is what I wish to argue here. The dismissal of the gustatory realm has recently begun to receive a sustained and, in many respects, salutary challenge from a burgeoning interest across the humanities and social sciences in taking food and eating seriously as subjects for scholarly consideration. New volumes—from Sociology on the Menu to Kitchen Culture in America—strive to make clear alimentation's significance to the structuring concerns of their respective fields; others, such as the anthology Food and Culture: A Reader, demonstrate that this work is not wholly without historical precedent.⁷ Of the disciplines in question, anthropology appears to possess the longest history of attending to eating practices; philosophy, perhaps the shortest.⁸ As Carolyn Korsmeyer points out in Making Sense of Taste: Philosophy and Food, philosophers since Plato (who in the Timaeus presents appetite as "a wild animal . . . chained up with man") have posited a "hierarchy of the senses," with the purportedly more objective, detached sense of sight at the apex, and taste, weighed down by its associations with gross sensuality and "selfish interest," at the bottom.⁹ The Kantian distinction between aesthetic and gustatory taste, then, clearly grows out of this framework. Aesthetic theory becomes a way to develop a model of clearheaded judgment and preference not tied to the body's indelicate, urgent demands.

The recent turn toward "food studies," then, aims at just these sorts of long-presumed distinctions between mind and body; indeed, books in the field often begin by explaining the topic's long neglect as a function of not only its "taken-for-grantedness" but its persistent association with the sort of "baser senses, instincts, and bodily functions" deemed "not suited for scholarly or 'mental' pursuit."¹⁰ I would argue, however, that the attempt to address this split between body and mind most often turns out to involve an implicit capitulation to the split's own terms. To be sure, unlike nearly all their scholarly predecessors, the food studies writers do consider scenes of literal tasting. Yet the point of these, over [End Page 28] and over, is to elevate eating by showing that its occasions reach for something far more transcendent—and specifically human—than the satisfaction of a bestial hunger. In particular, the shared experience of the meal is shown to strengthen social bonds (seen in the etymology of "companion": the one with whom one shares bread), and can even become the foundation of the holiest ceremonies, from ritual sacrifices to the collectively consumed Eucharist.

In emphasizing these transmutations of eating, contemporary scholars echo the earliest social scientists to give the topic extended attention in late-nineteenth-century England, France, Germany, and the United States. For such writers as Robertson Smith and Marcel Mauss, too, the key lay in emphasizing not appetite but the socially unifying aspects of the meal. On the one hand, such rituals showed what all human cultures, across time and space, held in common. Yet on the other hand, in their relative elaboration, they could also map an evolutionary trajectory toward the writers' own late nineteenth-century West. As Georg Simmel put it in a 1910 essay, "[T]o the extent that a meal becomes a sociological matter, it becomes more stylized, more aesthetic, and more supraindividually regulated." From "the first conquest of the naturalism of eating" in the notion of regular meals, human societies moved on, through a long acquisition of increasingly codified manners and customs, to that exemplum of alimentary ritual, the Victorian middle-class dinner party.¹¹ As an 1888 American Anthropologist article reminded its readers, "Brutes feed. The best barbarian only eats. Only the cultured man can dine."¹²

The modern subject emerges here, as in important historical studies of manners such as Norbert Elias's The Civilizing Process, as defined by his capacity to sublimate those urges that might otherwise make evident his link to lower forms of life.¹³ Like the dinner party, the late nineteenth-century development of the now-familiar culture of dieting and nutrition offered new opportunities for class distinctions, as middle-class reformers began to lament the preferences of working-class diners for heavy meats that signified "plenty" for its own sake, rather than cost-effectiveness or nutritional value.¹⁴ The values employed here, Pierre Bourdieu has argued, resemble those at work in the notion of the dinner party as emblem of distinction: in either case, the lower-class eater is said to seek out simply instant gratification, while the bourgeois diner, intent on consuming "with all due form," "so as to deny the crudely material reality of the act of eating," its link to "animal nature," begins ironically to approach "asceticism."¹⁵ [End Page 29]

In this sense, literal tasting indeed becomes, for the civilized diner, little different from the employment of aesthetic taste.¹⁶ In their aesthetic preferences, too, the masses are said to seek a "primitive" form of pleasure modeled directly on bodily sensation, while the privileged few recognize that the appreciation of true art requires sublimation—to the extent, indeed, that Bourdieu terms their actual experience "pleasure purified of pleasure," so insistent is it on denying any relish or gusto to the aesthetic encounter.¹⁷ Instead, he argues, the true aim of the discourse of taste is evident: simply to affirm class hierarchy. Hence, in his monumental study Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, he hopes to overcome this invidious tendency by bringing the abjected body back to bear on discussions of aesthetics—reconnecting "the elaborated taste for the most refined objects . . . with the elementary taste for the flavours of food" (and, similarly, rooting culture in the high Arnoldian sense back in its anthropological equivalent).¹⁸

In the realm of fiction, it can certainly be argued, the realist novel of manners affirms the link between the two forms of taste. Like the anthropological writings of the same era, as Nancy Bentley has argued, the realist text chronicles the complex knowledges involved in such social rituals as dining, as well as the devastation of exposure for those who failed to meet the standards.¹⁹ William Dean Howells's Rise of Silas Lapham paints a classic portrait of the horrors visited upon the unlucky soul who oversteps the bounds of dinner-party etiquette in particular. Even while critiquing the culture in question, however, the novelist often makes clear his own possession of taste in the broader sense of both aesthetic and social refinement; thus, Howells's narrator not only mocks the Laphams' interior-decorating preferences, but notes that they drink Oolong tea, as "none of them had a sufficiently cultivated palate for Souchong."²⁰

While a number of readers have noted the way displays of proper dining and overall good taste converge in both Howells and Edith Wharton, however, the virtual absence of interest in actual scenes of eating in James criticism would suggest that, in the Master's oeuvre, aesthetic taste has fully triumphed over its eaterly counterpart. Certainly, such a view would comport with the long tradition of materialist readings of James, from Fredric Jameson to Jonathan Freedman and beyond, which have stressed his management of the problem of a mass readership through an "austere" insistence on notions of aesthetic distinction.²¹ In a Bourdieuian gesture, Arnold Bennett thus attempted to bring back the gustatory to the standard public view of James as [End Page 30] ascetic, reading the novelist's imagined comportment at table through the alimentary qualities, or shortcomings, of his fiction. Thus, James's "fastidiousness" as a writer, the "thinness" of his work and the sense it gave of being "packed close with vitamines," suggested a man who, Bennett complained, in his private life probably never enjoyed the simple pleasures of a pint of beer.²²

James's most famous essays on the writing of fiction imply that he would reject such an analogy between the literary and the culinary, finding inappropriate its conflation of aesthetic and physical taste. In that very act of rejection, however, he confirms the elevation of the aesthetic sort at which the Bourdieuian critique is aimed. In both "The Art of Fiction" and "The Future of the Novel," after all, it is the mass reader who, mistakenly in James's view, conceives of literary works as forms of food. That reader, "for whom taste is but an obscure, confused, immediate instinct"—for whom, in other words, all "taste" functions with the thoughtless, animal instantaneousness of physical taste—believes simply (along with many writers of novels) that "a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that our only business with it could be to swallow it."²³ Such readers thus prefer happy endings for the same reason that they believe "a course of desserts and ices" should follow a meal; no surprise, then, that the writer who denies them such treats would appear akin to a pusher of "vitamines," bent on "forbid[ding] agreeable aftertastes."²⁴ Yet the novelist is not a purveyor of food, is not to be confused with the grocer, as James put it in an 1895 letter to Edmund Gosse (in a characterization tellingly opposed to that of James Joyce, who once compared the novelist precisely to a grocer).²⁵ The novelist, that is, is not a Mr. Mudge.

Or is he? In this essay, I argue that In the Cage in fact ends up possessing a far less straightforward posture in relation to these matters than the simple case of Mudge might imply. In his characterization of Mudge's fiancée, the story's telegraphist heroine, James actually ends up calling into question his own essays' divide between the physical and the metaphysical, and he does so precisely by re-conceiving the imagination's work as a form of eating. The novella, when considered alongside James's other writings from the same era, thus contests the long tradition I've just sketched, from Simmel and other turn-of-the-century writers to contemporary food studies, in which eating can only be purged of its animalistic associations by being transformed into something perceived as higher. James, we'll see, does the opposite, transforming more valorized human activities—most notably, art itself—into instances of gustation. As a result, he comes closer [End Page 31] than we still often seem able to do to imagining a truly embodied subjectivity.

Queer theory, of course, has led the way in transforming the familiar view of James as ascetic renouncer, stressing instead the possibility that he often, rather, reconstrues the erotic in forms for which criticism may need to develop new languages.²⁶ Yet while parallels can be drawn between the remarkable rise of sexuality studies and the more recent turn to food studies, based on their common interest in taking bodily matters seriously, important differences also characterize the two lines of inquiry. For one thing, the curiously ambivalent discourse of aesthetic taste means that an examination of eating can, in a writer like James, become a way into the consideration of aesthetics. Yet at the same time, eating also differs in being much harder to sever from animal necessity. Regardless of how tastefully we eat, we still eat because we must—a fact that arguably lends an important complexity to the study of food, whereas to stress the tie to reproduction of the species seems to limit rather than to widen our consideration of the sexual.

These two opposing features—the tie to aesthetics, and the tie to necessity—help to explain why eating comes especially front and center in a work like In the Cage. As mentioned earlier, the story shares with other James texts the possibility of treating the heroine as an artist manqué. Yet, as Nicola Nixon has argued, this work also stands out amid James's corpus for its "Zola-esque naturalism": specifically, its depiction of a working heroine, rare among the author's protagonists, whose entrapment in the "cage" of economic necessity is portrayed in the explicitly physical terms of cramped space and unpleasant odors.²⁷ Indeed, we might say the story appears strikingly bifurcated—quite literally, we will see in a moment—between a more familiarly Jamesian realist novel of manners involving romantic dalliances among the upper crust and a naturalist world where marriage to a grocer can keep a "caged" girl from joining her "starved sister" (C, 387).

Presented as a bifurcation, this depiction of dual realms need not, of course, trouble the split between the world of taste as refinement and that of gustatory taste; it might well seem to cement that divide, mapping the two sorts of taste onto the two competing modes of fiction. This is, as I will show, how most readers, from very different critical perspectives, have viewed In the Cage. Yet the story also, we will further see, clearly chips away at this split, most evidently by allowing the naturalist perspective gradually to blanket the entire story, such that what Bourdieu terms the "taste of necessity" indeed becomes generalized, and all inhabitants stand revealed with their animalistic, "caged" qualities on display.²⁸ [End Page 32]

James might appear, then, to move from his perch as high priest of aesthetic taste to, against all odds, progenitor of the Bourdieuian alternative. Finally, however, what I wish to demonstrate here are the limits of that alternative itself, and, hence, the way In the Cage at its most innovative pushes equally past both of these options, which in fact turn out to share much despite their apparent opposition. We've seen that the well-mannered, dieting, nutrition-conscious modern subject is most typically characterized in the terms of the initial opposition between the two sorts of taste—as learning ever more assiduously to transmute the "sheer naturalism of eating" into something more refined.²⁹ Yet we must remember that that same subject is also often conceived, again from the late nineteenth century forward, in just the opposite terms: as a combatant in a Darwinian universe that collapses distinctions between man and beast, precisely by stressing the governing laws of "eat or be eaten" and "dog eat dog." If the discourse of manners affirms class hierarchies, social Darwinism at least holds the potential to level them; for worker and capitalist alike, as the American Darwinist William Graham Sumner put it, "This is a world in which the rule is, 'Root, hog, or die.'"³⁰

As I will show, James, writing in 1898, would best be situated at the intersection between these two opposing discourses of the modern individual. Moreover, we continue in many ways to find ourselves at the same intellectual crossroads. The image of an evolutionarily driven homo economicus is, for example, the most common alternative within contemporary food studies to the stress on the human freedom to transmute food into culture. Where the cultural option tends to leave the embodied urgency of eating behind, for the evolutionary one, that urgency is all there is: human food choices become, first and foremost, the result of such materially determinative factors as evolution, nutrition, economics, and climate.³¹ Thus, we find repeated in this field one of the most familiar and stubborn divides in contemporary scholarship, that between a more humanistic discourse wary of biology for its deterministic resonances, and a scientific one for which the latter becomes the only acceptable tool of explanation.

The only thing the two sides might be said to agree on, tellingly, is that eating itself is an animalistic behavior; this is either blandly affirmed, from the sociobiological perspective, or, to preserve the dignity of culture, seems to require a move toward leaving the body behind, as for the humanists. Through my reading of James here, then, I aim to find some ways of beginning to move beyond this problematic impasse. In the Cage, for the reasons I've just mentioned, offers an ideal space [End Page 33] for doing so. Written amid the conflict between these discourses, the novella moves through each one, making clear both what appeals to James about it and what seems limited. Finally, however, he introduces a third possibility, the only one among them to recast eating itself in new terms—terms whereby the very individuality of persons, and even their power of aesthetic expression, could be expressed not in opposition to but, rather, through their cagedness in physical form.

II.

The bifurcation that initially structures In the Cage, between the realm of refined taste and that of literal tasting, is rendered at the start of the story in spatial terms: "our young woman" (the story's nameless heroine) sits "sandwiched" between what appear as the two opposed worlds of those who deal in food and those who deal in words. Only a "frail structure of wood and wire" separates the telegraph-office from the grocery adjoining it (C, 368). In the girl's view, "the social, the professional separation was a gulf," yet the grocery makes itself persistently felt, not only in the form of the only temporarily banished Mudge (who, having secured a job elsewhere, waits to whisk his fiancée away to married life in Chalk Farm), but in the "presence of hams, cheese, dried fish, soap, varnish, paraffin and other solids and fluids that she came to know perfectly by their smells without consenting to know them by their names" (C, 368, 367). As the quote suggests, the heroine would like to dwell on the separation rather than the proximity of the two realms, and the way to do so, as the story unfolds, seems to lie in increasingly inhabiting her own mind, as it embroiders the adventures of the upper-class individuals who send the telegrams. For whereas the "animals in the cage" are always in danger of being reduced to the purely physical world of the grocery, clients like the apparent illicit lovers Lady Bradeen and Lord Everard appear divorced from the material realm altogether (C, 428). Described as an "apparition," Bradeen possesses eyes that "seemed to reflect such utterly other things than the mean things actually before them" (that is, the truer "high reality"); for such an individual, no doubt, "a lady-telegraphist, and especially one who passed a life among hams and cheeses, was as the sand on the floor" (C, 378, 377, 414).

What is perhaps most striking about the accumulated criticism on In the Cage is its fundamental assent to the split that the heroine creates between these two worlds, even when it questions the meanings she gives them. The longest tradition of readers, beginning in the 1940s [End Page 34] with L. C. Knights, has read the telegraphist as a stand-in for the artist, and thus in essence has agreed with her that the most significant "reality" in the story is that of her own mind, that part of her that the "purely physical" Mudge cannot possibly grasp.³² Although this perspective might seem readily susceptible to a materialist critique, such critiques in fact tend to continue to oppose the two worlds, the point being only to stress that the heroine cannot finally escape the realm of "primary survival needs (the need for food)"; to end up with the grocer marks the triumph of a "thing-oriented world" over an "interpretation-oriented one."³³ Yet the valuation of the latter world tends, surprisingly enough, to remain.³⁴

The other main strand of criticism on the novella, then, also keeps the split, but reverses the valuation. For these readers, the heroine's mental world is a place of delusion.³⁵ Hence, the material reality that continues to lie elsewhere now receives a positive valence, even to the extent of a wholesale reassessment of Mr. Mudge. Noting James's emphasis in his preface on "the girl's 'subjective' adventure," Ralf Norman asserts that the story validates "the supremacy of objective reality" over her fantasies, by showing at the end that, in her attempts to intervene in her clients' lives based on her reading of their telegrams, she has been "wrong about everything."³⁶ And once the mental realm has been recast as one of fantasy—often characterized as sexual evasion—Mudge's very physicality becomes a source of manly appeal, particularly in its contrast with the impotent figure that the ironically named Everard, by story's end, has been revealed to offer.³⁷ Nonetheless, it is telling that this rehabilitation of Mudge requires reading his physicality through not eating but sex—"flirtations" rather than the "cheese and pickles" and chocolate-creams with which he seems bent on aligning them. As Korsmeyer points out, sexual love may furnish the subject matter of the most serious art, but an equally lusty gustatory appetite tends to call forth only "the gross or the comic."³⁸

Indeed, that a sexually refurbished Mudge need not trouble the essential divide between disembodied aesthetic taste and ignoble eating becomes clear when we note what happens to the notion of the telegraphist as artist figure in these less laudatory treatments of her imaginative pursuits. Rather than a creator of texts, she becomes akin to a consumer of them. The girl's entire "insatiable curiosity" concerning the romantic world of Bradeen and Everard can be traced, it is argued, to her lunchtime devouring of ha'penny-a-day library novels "all about fine folks" (C, 371).³⁹ With remarkable consistency throughout the criticism, these books are described as if they themselves constituted [End Page 35] the actual midday meal. They stimulate her "emotional and sexual hungers": she is an "avid reader," with a "compulsive appetite" for "feed[ing] herself on cheap novels."⁴⁰ In this conception, then, the telegraphist shares far less with James himself than she does with those mass readers he saw as viewing books as so many puddings, or at least their endings as forms of dessert.

This preference for texts not simply as edibles but, specifically, as sweets marks a familiar figure of the mass reader that is decidedly feminine, as is certainly the case of the "abysmally absorbent" public in James's "Future of the Novel."⁴¹ As Rita Felski argues, images of "nonintellectual and particularly female readers" as literally eating up popular fiction "reduc[es]" their reading "to a quasi-mechanical satisfaction of instinctual appetite"—that is, a form of mere animal gratification. Perhaps, then, the telegraphist is "in the cage" for a reason after all?⁴² A figure akin to those theatergoers who booed James's infamous flop Guy Domville, whom the author, in perhaps his most vituperative swipe at the mass audience, termed "a cage of beasts at some infernal 'zoo'"?⁴³ We see "our young woman," after all, metaphorically pounce on Lady Bradeen in the word-changing scene: "It was as if she had bodily leaped—cleared the top of the cage and alighted upon her interlocutress" (C, 426). Lunching on novels, she appears quite akin to the "purely physical" Mudge; her library books and his little pocket planner are, we might note, identically described by James as "very greasy" (C, 371, 450).

Attempting to account for what might so disturb male writers about the model of the mass reader as eater, Felski suggests that it threatens the "professionalized status of the literary artifact" by refusing the text's "autonomy."⁴⁴ Ultimately, however, she seeks to overcome the metaphor altogether, as does Janice Radway in her article "Reading Is Not Eating," a corollary to her work asserting the complex critical strategies of female romance readers. The implication for both is that to conceive reading as eating is necessarily to "reduce" it; it becomes, as in James's image of the novel as pudding, a form of thoughtless gobbling or "swallow[ing] whole" that lays bare the reader's enslavement to "sensual rather than cognitive interests."⁴⁵

Clearly, then, eating's metaphorical capacities are viewed here as irredeemably constrained by the sense of the degrading animalism of actual eating that we've seen so persistently characterizes even contemporary writing on the subject.⁴⁶ For Felski and Radway, the way to deny the (here gendered) taste hierarchy entails the banishment of eating even as metaphor. As we saw in Bourdieu, however, that [End Page 36] hierarchy may be made equally vulnerable to an opposing strategy, whereby eating is not banished but generalized. By, in effect, linking all reading to eating—bringing back the material base denied by high aesthetics—his approach breaks down class distinctions by expanding, rather than doing away with, the category of the eater governed by basic animal necessity.

Moreover, as I suggested earlier, this opposing view is not absent from James's novella, given its naturalistic dimension. After all, as many readers have acknowledged, one aspect of the story fails to dovetail with the view either of the heroine's transcendent imaginative inhabitation of the higher world, or of her pathetic yearning to do so by eating up that world's every word. That is the fact of her obvious resentment toward the upper classes, which is depicted sharply and which gives her portrait a fullness it would lack were her only stance toward them one of abject longing for recognition.

It is, first, in his portrayal of that resentment that James's language begins to break down the split between the world of the grocery and that of the rich who send the telegraphs. At first, it is one of the other employees who comments on the relative calm of the office during the lunch hour—or, as he "vulgarly" puts it, "while the animals were feeding" (C, 371). Yet this conception of the rich, too, as a pack of ravening beasts emerges within the girl's own lexicon as well. "'They're selfish brutes!'" she snaps at her friend Mrs. Jordan (C, 400); and, to Mudge, "'What I 'like' is just to loathe them. . . .They're simply packed together in those smart streets. Talk of the numbers of the poor! What I can vouch for is the numbers of the rich!'" (C, 408).⁴⁷ This numerousness, which matches that of the words in the telegrams ("as numberless as the sands of the sea" [C, 367]), is clarified twice as creating a "human herd," a "shuffling herd" that passes before her daily (C, 373, 390). And while at times those who most fascinate her seem the only ones who stand apart from this "herd," even the "apparition" Lady Bradeen is eventually depicted through her relation to eating: only, given that she does come in to the office during lunchtime, her "meals were apparently irregular" (C, 371).

The second element in the story that seems to trouble the familiar split, in fact, is the truth finally uncovered about the lives of Everard and Bradeen themselves. Far from being truly those "in whom all the conditions for happiness actually met," they—and particularly he, her favorite—are revealed as living "caged," debt-ridden lives of their own (C, 377–78). In line with a more naturalistic view of the story, James begins to appear less and less to affirm a rhetorical split between those [End Page 37] leading an animalistic existence and those who waft above it, and more to recast the entire social world in bestial terms. The heroine, after all, fears being "pounced" upon for her indiscretions as much as she imagines pouncing herself on her upper-class prey (C, 483).

The animalization of the wealthy through depictions of their grotesque eating was a strategy frequently employed by more obviously progressive writers and artists during the same era. Hence, the familiar cartoon image of the self-satisfied, gorged plutocrat, or a herd of them at "a banquet party with bulging stomachs, aghast at the presence of a ragged intruder, with whom they would not think of dining."⁴⁸ In naturalist fiction, Frank Norris's The Octopus buries the greedy merchant alive under a shower of grain, while Upton Sinclair's 1906 The Jungle, most famously, reveals the poor's role as literal food for the rich, by showing the workers falling, unnoticed, into the lard-vats. Capitalism itself is cast in that novel as pure "Greed," "a monster devouring with a thousand mouths."⁴⁹ Thus do the purportedly bodiless appear not merely as eaters but as eaters of the most degraded sort: cannibals in Sinclair, parasites who feed without producing in Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, vampires sucking workers' blood in Karl Marx's Capital.

Notably, all of these forms of grotesque upper-class eating have been detected in James as well: a 1902 review of Wings of the Dove, for example, combines all three. The "society" James depicts is said to engage in "a sort of organised cannibalism, in which every one is . . . preying on his or her neighbour, much as the micro-organisms in the drop of ditch-water"; the "arch-vampire" Kate Croy is finally foiled only by the "parasitic English peer" Lord Mark.⁵⁰ Similarly, Susan Mizruchi remarks on James's interest in "human parasitism," and she and Bentley both note the "images of blood sacrifice" that mark the portrayal of characters like The Awkward Age's Nanda Brookenham.⁵¹ As Bentley has importantly shown, these visions of barbaric consumption and other atavistic rites among the elite were as crucial to the novel of manners in James's era as their familiar civilized opposites. She links this "ethnographic 'savaging' of the leisure class" to the challenge that the new and potentially relativist anthropological concept of "culture" (as evident in the work of E. B. Tylor) posed to the aesthetic sense of high "culture" as staving off anarchy (familiar from Matthew Arnold).⁵²

Here, then, we see the Bourdieuian aim at collapsing these two conceptions—along with the split between aesthetic and everyday taste—actually realized, startlingly, in the work of one of the literary [End Page 38] canon's most refined specimens. Yet at the same time, we also begin to see what might be problematic about simply adhering to this strategy. The case of The Jungle, the political sympathies of which would seem even more in line with Bourdieu's, makes the potential difficulties especially evident. Sinclair, of course, famously stated that "'I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach'"—referring to the legislative impact of scenes such as the drama of the lard-vats not on workers' rights but on higher standards of food safety.⁵³ As several readers have commented, however, these remarks may be a bit disingenuous; in June Howard's words, while "Sinclair appeals to his readers to pity the miserable, thwarted lives of the other half . . . he also pays a great deal of attention to unclean meat and does not distinguish the two concerns so clearly as his lament would seem to suggest."⁵⁴

More broadly, The Jungle has been described as manifesting "an aversion to the body and all of its fluids, smells, and processes," a "reject[ion of] man's animal nature" more than a revelation of its commonality; the one working-class woman shown simply enjoying her food, Madame Haupt, is, in Sinclair's words, an "enormously fat," greedy, "greasy" grotesque.⁵⁵ The assertion that all of society in fact constitutes a Darwinian "jungle" thus may bring the rich rhetorically down, but does not fulfill the book's clear aim of elevating the poor, for it merely generalizes without altering the existing association between the shared bodily fact of eating and an animalistic rapacity.⁵⁶ (Is it a surprise to learn that Sinclair went on to become a proselytizer in popular magazines for fasting?)⁵⁷ Despite the collapse of the hierarchy separating aesthetic from gustatory taste, the problematic inability to move past this association thus remains.

III.

What if James, then, could be read as collapsing the hierarchy from the other direction—asserting not that what looks like refinement should be unmasked as animality but, rather, that the body should be granted an aesthetic life of its own? As we will see in a moment, such a possibility could elevate ordinary acts of eating, but, crucially, it would not have to do so by denying their root in desire, or even in necessity. Instead, it could remind us that human beings respond to necessity in idiosyncratic, and sometimes even creative, ways.

Put otherwise, might we not extend queer theory's excavations of the supposedly suppressed bodily element in James to encompass his [End Page 39] equally unexpected reimaginings of eating?⁵⁸ After all, if Sinclair's aesthetic of disgust seems literalized in his move toward rejecting food entirely, James—as the briefest glance at his letters and Leon Edel's biography will remind us—was legendarily a bon vivant. A good meal could leave him with a "voluptuous glow."⁵⁹ And his tastes were nothing if not down-to-earth: roast beef, potatoes, big breakfasts, ice cream. Indeed, Bennett's characterization aside, James is probably seen quaffing beer—generally English ale—more often than doing any other form of eating or drinking in the entire biography.⁶⁰ While he routinely abominates British food and hymns the "glorious grub" of France (L, 4:444), he is equally passionate about the familiar fare back home, writing to his mother from Florence about his return: "Be sure about Sept. 4th to have on hand a goodly store of tomatoes, ice cream, corn, melon, cranberries and other indigenous victuals."⁶¹ The foods of childhood—or, more accurately, youth itself as a careless rapture of gorging—receive one of the lustiest depictions in literature in A Small Boy and Others' overflowing paean to America's fruits:

It was, surely, save perhaps for oranges, a more informally and familiarly fruit-eating time, and bushels of peaches in particular, peaches big and peaches small, peaches white and peaches yellow, played a part in life from which they have somehow been deposed; every garden, almost every bush and the very boys' pockets grew them; they were 'cut up' and eaten with cream at every meal; domestically 'brandied' they figured, the rest of the year, scarce less freely—if they were a 'party dish' it was because they made the party whenever they appeared, and when ice-cream was added, or they were added to it, they formed the highest revel we knew. Above all the public heaps of them, the high-piled receptacles at every turn, touched the street as with a sort of southern plenty; the note of the rejected and scattered fragments, the memory of the slippery skins and rinds and kernels. . . .We ate everything in those days by the bushel and the barrel, as from stores that were infinite; we handled watermelons as freely as cocoanuts, and the amount of stomach-ache involved was negligible in the general Eden-like consciousness.⁶²

In contrast—and again, Bennett aside—a "nutritive" approach to life gets quite rejected, as in an 1874 letter that Edel notes retains "a touch of the nursery" in its frustration at the substitution of "vitamines" for plenty (it also explains James's willingness to leave Florence): "I have been jerked away from Rome . . . just as I was warming to the feast, and Florence . . . doesn't go so far as it might as a substitute. . . . It's like having a great plum-pudding set down on the table before you, [End Page 40] and then seeing it whisked away and finding yourself served with wholesome tapioca" (L, 1:426).⁶³

Here, of course, we see a shift from describing actual food to the use of food as metaphor for something else. The two occur with equal frequency in James's letters, giving the lie to the assumption that conceiving of varied human activities as modes of eating necessarily vulgarizes them. In earlier missives, social experiences—places and people—appear as forms of food. James's "appetite [is] whetted" for a return to Italy; a trip into the Tyrol and Bavaria constitutes "a wonderful unexpected hors d'oeuvre" (L, 1:267; 3:298). Dining with Lowell in France, the food is "very savoureux," but the "company . . . more succulent still" (L, 1:308), while a less appealing milieu (again in Florence) is described as "a not very savoury human broth" (L, 3:165). By contrast, he writes to Arthur Benson, "With my voracity for personal introspections, I find in your existence a great deal to feed upon" (L, 4:58). This later quote, indeed, suggests that letters themselves might be conceived as tasty tidbits, an idea James begins to employ in the 1880s. One unanswered letter has, he assures, still been thoroughly "digested" (L, 3:198); another of his own, he fears, is being served up "cold, coagulated, and unappetizing," when it should (as he puts it in yet a third case) offer "a smoking porridge of news" (L, 3:234; 3:360). From here, then, but a small leap is needed to envision other textual forms equally as edibles. Thus appear, also beginning in the 1880s, the books of his friends and correspondents. His brother's Psychology "will be a tough morsel for me to chew, but I don't despair of nibbling it up slowly" (L, 3:204). For the latest from Robert Louis Stevenson, on the other hand, "I lick my chops in advance," and to H. G. Wells, writing in 1904, he offers what seems the sweetest of compliments: Wells's tales, read in bed, make the perfect dessert, each one "a substantial coloured sweet or bonbon . . . which I just allowed to melt lollipop-wise, upon my imaginative tongue. Some of the colours seemed to me perhaps prettier than the others, as some oranges are the larger and some the smaller, in any dozen. But I (excuse me!) sucked all the oranges" (L, 3:204; 4:304).⁶⁴

Clearly, James revels not simply in food but in food language and metaphor. Yet it may still register at first as surprising, given all we've seen thus far, that he will go so far as to treat books as things to eat, and particularly as sweetmeats, for this had seemed precisely the error of the tasteless mass reader in his earlier essays. By the first decade of the twentieth century, however, this conception has shifted, keeping some of its prior features while shedding others.⁶⁵ Hence, in [End Page 41] the preface to The Awkward Age, written for the New York Edition in 1908, the "'public for fiction'" is critiqued less for treating books as food than for wishing to bolt them as quickly as possible, "on the scale and with the smack of lips that mark the consumption of bread-and-jam by a children's school feast." Thus are "good solid slices of fiction . . . deplored by editor and publisher as positively not, for the general gullet as known to them, made adequately 'slick'" or "boneless" enough to be wolfed down.⁶⁶ The image of the mass reader as thoughtless gobbler remains here, but this is no longer the natural result of envisioning books as food. What get rejected, after all, are "good solid slices of fiction," presumably including James's own. How then ought these books to be consumed, if it is now agreed that, in some fashion, "consumed," indeed eaten, is what they will be?

James's remarks above about Wells can offer some help here. We should note that James admits giving himself over to an indiscriminate, rather orgiastic "sucking" which he feels the need to excuse. At the same time, however, he describes a more discrete, gradual process in which each story is not a juicy piece of fruit, but a contained individual candy, "just allowed to melt, lollipop-wise, upon my imaginative tongue." This image of a deeply pleasurable but also slowed-down process of reading as eating, I want to argue, likely became increasingly available to James in the early 1900s because of its fit with what had begun to take place in his actual consumption of food.

Always attuned to his avoirdupois as a result of his capacious appetites, James became more deeply concerned about it around the turn of the century, at a time when more and more public attention was being paid to the possible ill effects of overeating on general health.⁶⁷ In 1904, then—a mere month after writing to Wells—he discovered a curious new dietary regimen, via a book sent to him by his brother William: The New Glutton or Epicure, by the American reformer Horace Fletcher. William, it turned out, was already a convert to Fletcher's program, a fast-growing turn-of-the-century trend aimed at weight loss and improved digestion through prolonged mastication of one's food, an activity dubbed "Fletcherizing." The theory was that sufficiently worked-over edibles would stimulate an automatic swallowing mechanism, designed only to allow healthy, easily digested substances—the pure "essences of things"—into the stomach.⁶⁸ Against all odds, this notion had spawned a massive fad; as Fletcher himself reported in New Glutton, "munching parties," where the host held a stopwatch while guests diligently chewed, were the latest fancy in London, and by the 1910s Fletcher's publishers believed his precepts to have been embraced by millions.⁶⁹ [End Page 42]

James would be among them. "I don't know who H.F. is," he wrote to William, "but his treatise somehow speaks to me on the spot, and I have been breakfasting this morning wholly in the light of it."⁷⁰ After requesting and receiving further Fletcher tomes by March 1904, he became not only a "convert" to the system but, in his own words, a "fanatic"—as well as a proselytizer. "Fletcherise hard," he commanded Mrs. Humphry Ward. "it's the greatest thing that ever was. Grapple it to your soul with hoops of steel" (L, 4:415-16). To Edith Wharton, he commented that a friend's health problems would surely be resolved were she only to "really and sacrificially commit herself to the divine Fletcher," who "has renewed the sources of my life" (L, 4:374).

Why did Fletcherizing "speak[. . .] to [James] on the spot"? Surely, if we recur to the letter to Wells, a parallel may be discerned with the deliberate, careful form of reading as eating that he describes—the words melting gradually on the tongue—as opposed to the mindless devouring of the mass reader, or eater, approaching food and text alike as something only to swallow. Since a major purpose of Fletcherizing—certainly for James—lay, however, in eating less as a result of chewing more, the even better comparison might be to the unfolding of artistic inspiration. The New York Edition prefaces are famous, after all, for their repeated invocation of the tiny "germ" out of which an entire novel grows. And to return us now to In the Cage, not only is this the form that the telegraphist's role as Jamesian artist clearly takes; moreover, it is a process described throughout the text in a way that finally begins to break down the body/mind split once and for all, for here the work of the imagination stands revealed, without degradation, as a form of tasting.

As we've seen, it has seemed easy enough for most criticism to assent to the apparent split implied in the first paragraph of James's story, between the telegraphist's mental world and Mr. Mudge's domain of hams and cheeses, tastes and smells, pungently assaulting her nose even as she strives to ignore them. As Bourdieu would have it, aesthetic taste, aiming to leave the body behind, appears to war here with sheer physicality. Yet the story turns out not to confirm this divide, and not merely by reducing all of its inhabitants, rich and poor, to ruthless feeders upon each other, combatants in the animal struggle of all against all. Rather, with striking consistency, the story depicts the heroine's own imaginative flights in complex and even aesthetic, yet unmistakably bodily terms.

This is true from the first telegrams we see commanding her interest, the initial set sent off by Lady Bradeen: "After the long stupors . . . [End Page 43] there almost always suddenly would come a sharp taste of something; it was in her mouth before she knew it; it was in her mouth now" (C, 377). Alternatively, this sort of moment appears as a smell: "a dropped fragrance, a mere quick breath, but which in fact pervaded and lingered. . . . The nose of this observer was brushed by the bouquet. . . . As the weeks went on she lived more and more in the world of whiffs and glimpses" (C, 378, 386). The holiday down times, then, when there is less to engage her, are described as offering "little to feed . . . her interest"; instead, "the only thing to give a taste to [such] dead weeks was the spice of a chronic resentment" (C, 428–29). Yet the alternative of asking for details from her friend, Mrs. Jordan, is rejected, for "that showed too starved a state" (C, 396).

As those readers sympathetic to the telegraphist's imaginings have commented, she seems most to resemble the "man of imagination" as James defines him in the sense that, for her, too, "the minimum of valid suggestion serve[s] . . . better than the maximum."⁷¹ As Tanner writes, "If James heard the start of an anecdote that stimulated his imagination he would ask his raconteur to discontinue, in case more facts inhibited his growing vision."⁷² The telegraphist, of course, deals only with the smallest word-fragments, tantalizing scraps of information appealing as much for what they withhold as for what they offer up, for this is what allows her imaginative faculties room to function. The imagery of sudden tastes and smells, then, comports with this sense of the elusive brevity of her material—as it did for James himself, particularly in prefaces to books he wrote around the same time. The "scant but quite ponderable germ" that grows into The Awkward Age is, he admits, no "fine purple peach" (his image, as we saw above, for the vast cornucopia of childhood), "but it might pass for" something smaller yet still worth tasting—perhaps "a round ripe plum."⁷³ As for smells, in the prefatory remarks to What Maisie Knew (part of the In the Cage preface), we are treated to the remarkable notion of the "intellectual nostril," patient enough to sniff out the germ as "buried scent; the more the attention hovered the more it became aware of the fragrance" (C, vi).⁷⁴

I'd like to suggest, then, that this shared activity of James and his heroine constitutes an alternative to reading-as-gobbling not dependent on simply leaving the body behind. Rather, the speculative facility that enables writing here resembles, specifically, Fletcherist eating. Although none of James's food language is mentioned, the Fletcherist element can be read directly out of an account of the heroine's activity such as that given by Jennifer Gribble, where we are treated to, as it [End Page 44] were, an entire tour of what happens inside the imagination-as-mouth. She "seizes on details" ("with something of her creator's . . . seizing on germs for his stories"), "saturates details with significance"; "[f]rom within the cage of the isolated imagination, she . . . catch[es], from its fragments . . . the essence of the whole social network."⁷⁵

We saw that, for most of the story's interpreters, the telegraphist could be understood as an artist or a consumer, a practitioner of disembodied aesthetic taste or a literal taster, but not both at once. Within the history of aesthetics, the reasoning has been that while a sense like sight takes us outside of ourselves to an objective truth, taste returns us to our own subjective desires. As one of the premier aesthetic theorists of James's own era, George Santayana, wrote in 1896, the "lower" senses receive their designation from the fact that they "call our attention to some part of our own body" rather than something beyond it.⁷⁶ Hence, they seem to "provid[e] information only about the perceiver"—her particular taste—not the thing perceived.⁷⁷ In this sense, to link the telegraphist's imaginative flights to forms of eating would seem to confirm the claims of those readers for whom her faculties of perception are irredeemably clouded, unable to access "objective reality," precisely due to their assumed "interestedness": specifically, her "coarse and materialistic" belief that "Everard loves and needs her."⁷⁸

Santayana, however, may aid us in pressuring this conception, for he in fact goes on to take issue with those writers, such as Arthur Schopenhauer, for whom a firm line may be drawn separating "disinterested" aesthetic pleasure from the desire "to possess."⁷⁹ One may enjoy something aesthetically without seeking to possess it, he agrees—"the appreciation of a painting is not identical with the desire to buy it"; and yet, as he goes on to argue, "it is, or ought to be, closely related and preliminary to that desire."⁸⁰ This seems to offer a much better way of understanding the telegraphist's practice of tasting, as a model for her relation to a figure like Everard. For despite the above readings, her demeanor toward Everard is marked much less by a clear will to possession than by a certain skittishness at crucial moments—in particular, one that takes the form of a possible proposal to dine together for real. "'I was going to my supper,'" she explains, upon intercepting him outside his quarters. "'Then you haven't eaten—?'" he promptly exclaims. The point of this exchange, and what flows from it, however, seems much more encapsulated in her mental response: as James puts it, "She had known he wouldn't say, 'Then sup with me!' but the proof of it made her feel as if she had feasted" (C, 436). [End Page 45]

At the moment she might most realize her purported fantasies about Everard, then, the heroine makes clear that she would much rather "feast" on the impossibility of doing so. Such an attitude is hardly surprising given her acute desire not to be taken by him for the wrong sort of girl. It makes clear, however, her reliance much less on the reader-as-eater's excited devouring than on a careful (and distinctly Fletcherist) concern not to bite off more than she can chew. Tasting rather than gulping, she remains more in Santayana's "preliminary" stage, that of intrigued contemplation, which may, but need not, lead to the attempt at possession (what is tasted, after all, can always be spit out in the end). In this regard, she might instructively be compared to her friend, also a "victim of reverses," the florist Mrs. Jordan (C, 372).⁸¹

One of the story's odder repeated details, after all, if one has not caught onto its sustained vocabulary of eating, concerns Mrs. Jordan's "extraordinarily protrusive teeth," which are said to make her smile look like a "large benevolent bite," as in their final scene together: "she took one of her big bites of the brown gloom" (C, 394, 491, 506). Yet these great chomps turn out to map directly onto Mrs. Jordan's crucial difference, as laid out in this last moment, from her young companion. Throughout the story, Mrs. Jordan has been certain that her job of "[doing] the dinner-tables" of the rich leaves her one step away from an entrée into high society, and at end she appears surer still, announcing her engagement to a Mr. Drake, "[g]reat and trusted friend" of "Lord Rye" (C, 491). As the heroine gradually realizes in amusement, "Mr. Drake . . . verily was a person who opened the door": that is, he is Lord Rye's butler (C, 496). And with this recognition, her understanding of the gap separating her from her grasping friend—whose very un-Fletcherist giant bites speak to her hopeless swipes at social power—is laid bare. Determining at last to leave her job and join her own soon-to-be-husband, Mr. Mudge, the girl idly thinks, in the story's final words, that "it was strange such a matter should be at last settled for her by Mr. Drake" (C, 507).

IV.

One could imagine, of course, a potential danger for us in simply leaving matters there. The heroine assents to what appears a life of limitation. Particularly given the contrast with Mrs. Jordan's somehow vulgar hungers, is this not only another case of Jamesian renunciation, but a particularly unsettling one, given that the telegraphist is one of [End Page 46] his only non-aristocratic British protagonists? What does it mean to extend a Fletcherist sensibility—less is more—to such a figure? The actual Fletcherizer, after all, chooses to eat less; the telegraphist, it would seem, has no choice but to do so. Those who jeered at Fletcher in the popular press noted the irony that the fad reversed the usual current of social striving, making rich people suddenly want to eat like poor ones: one could now "dine sumptuously on a menu card and a wafer biscuit."⁸² Fletcher was termed "the apostle of polite starvation."⁸³ Supporters of the diet often merely gave these same notions a positive spin: Dr. Russell Chittenden of Yale, for example, saw as Fletcherism's best feature that it "tends to diminish the craving for food and thus results in the appetite being satisfied by a small amount."⁸⁴

Here the Fletcherist threatens to become simply another version of Bourdieu's bourgeois ascetic, the modern eater as sublimator. The bodily urgency of appetite is once more conquered in favor of a tasteful restraint, and literal tasting thus approaches the disinterestedness of the aesthetic sort. The working girl who emulates such a model might indeed become acceptable as a version of the artist, yet only, it would seem, by either learning to forfeit her own enjoyment, or deluding herself into believing she can be satisfied with less. Yet while such disturbing possibilities need to be taken seriously, I want finally to argue that neither of them can quite account for our heroine's conclusion. Rather, at its most far-reaching, her portrayal changes the very terms whereby we figure artistic production as the transcendence of bodily need.

Let me begin, then, by addressing the first characterization, of a forfeiture of enjoyment, for this charge can indeed be fairly applied to much of the diet discourse proliferating around 1900, an era in which an unprecedented number of writers saw foodways as the key to a broader project of Progressive reform. As the Wesleyan University chemist Wilbur O. Atwater, "nutrition guru" of the 1890s, put it, "In our actual practice of eating we are apt to be influenced too much by taste, that is, by the dictates of the palate."⁸⁵ Fletcherism, then, might seem the most extreme version of depriving people of all pleasure in eating (what Bourdieu called a "pleasure purified of pleasure"); note James's ascetic language in discussing his diet, with its allusions to conversion and sacrifice.⁸⁶ Certainly, this loss of enjoyment forms the emphasis in most historians' treatments of Fletcher's project. In one typical historical account, the fad's demise thus showed American sensibly refusing to go on "subordinating taste . . . to concerns over health."⁸⁷ As the image of the party run by stopwatch suggests, the [End Page 47] hygienic body Fletcher envisioned resembled in many ways a Taylorized factory, eschewing waste (a concept about which Fletcher entertained some truly peculiar notions).⁸⁸

At the same time, however, protracted chewing hardly seems conducive to efficiency in the literal sense; imagine, if you will, a Fletcherist lunch break!⁸⁹ Or simply consider the reaction of the In the Cage heroine's fellow telegraphist to the revelation of her mental "chewings-over" in the climactic scene with Everard: a peremptory "'And what game is that, miss?'" (C, 375). In James's New York Edition preface to the story, it is even clearer that he sees the telegraphist's imaginings in precisely these terms, as play rather than work (an exercise of "that idle faculty" [C, xix]). Specifically, the imagination wastes: it is driven to "reckless expenditure," "insatiable, extravagant, and immoral" in its endless "speculati[ons]" (C, xx). If we are to understand the imagination as Fletcherist, I would therefore submit, it seems necessary to recognize that Fletcher's extension of the act of eating involved a kind of pleasurable, even perverse dilating as much as any paring down or resisting of desire.

To suggest, as is usually done, that Fletcher "subordinated taste" to a healthy monotony or a streamlined digestion has it exactly wrong: taste was one of his most abiding concerns, and never elaborated with greater care than in the book James fell for, The New Glutton or Epicure. There, Fletcher attacked head-on the idea of taste as the lowest sense, arguing that his program of slowed-down eating allowed one to appreciate its true complexity. Far from rendering food as tasteless as possible, Fletcherizing allowed for a perception and enjoyment of subtle nuances of taste simply unavailable if food was tossed down too quickly.⁹⁰ In particular, Fletcher was insistent that chewing not be taken to such an extreme of "painful tediousness" that it would become a form of "work," removing the "pleasure," the "psychic enjoyment of eating."⁹¹

This pleasure, moreover, was not standardizable. While Fletcher did dictate eating's style, he did not, importantly, dictate its content—another important difference between his program and those of those of the period's other reformers, who often lamented the pleasure-seeking (rather than cost-effective) diets of the working class. To be an epicure (a concept quite foreign to those writers) had nothing to do with having a carefully educated, refined palate, of the sort that might prefer Souchong tea. Rather, Fletcher's epicure was the man or woman who ate with lingering enjoyment exactly what he or she felt like eating. "In the perfect feeding of the human body," he told [End Page 48] an interviewer in 1905, "there are no don't's."⁹² Rather, he wrote, "Nature has a separate message for each intelligence"; one need only "accept her guidance" when, in the form of appetite, it comes. "If she calls for pie," he insisted, "eat pie. If she calls for it at midnight eat it then, but eat it right."⁹³

Amid the reform discourse of the period, these claims stand out, and not simply because of their refusal to assume the usual role of the nutritionist who knows what is good for you better than you do yourself. That role requires a split between the objective facts of the body and the waywardness of individual preferences that Fletcher directly refuses. Instead, quite remarkably, by claiming that "[n]ature has a separate message for each intelligence," he makes the body itself the very site of idiosyncrasy, not of a leveling animal sameness. The result is an eating subject we might characterize as both more and less embodied than the food studies compromise of the diner whose true appetite is for sociability. Where that figure transcends the body to attain a collective identity, the Fletcherist attains an individuality by listening to her body's particular desires.

As Peter Melville points out, this same paradox has long been embodied in the figure of the solitary eater, who seems almost a masturbator of sorts, given over wholly to his own enjoyment.⁹⁴ Without the presence of companionship, Simmel wrote in 1910, it becomes impossible to "disguise any longer the repulsiveness, yes, the nastiness of the physical process of eating."⁹⁵ Yet Fletcherism did notoriously encourage solitary dining, in part because for those dining with the chewers, in one observer's view, "'The best that can be expected from them is the tense and awful silence that always accompanies their excruciating tortures of mastication.'"⁹⁶ James delighted in the opportunity, however, as he wrote to Mrs. Humphry Ward about his diet in 1906: "I munch unsociably and in passionate silence . . . it is making me both unsociable and inhospitable (without at the same time making me in the least ashamed of so being. I brazenly glory in it)" (L, 4:416). In fact, despite his feats of dining out and love of good conversation, James seems to have taken great solace in the occasional dinner alone from early in his career—at one point adopting William Makepeace Thackeray's rather suggestive phrase, "mumbl[ing] one's bone," to do so. "I confess it most sweet," he exclaimed, after a series of dinners out, "to mumble one's bone . . . in solitude, without the need of swallowing inscrutable entrées and tugging at the relaxed bell-rope of one's brain for a feeble tinkle of conversation" (L, 3:233). [End Page 49]

To return to In the Cage, could there be a better image for what Gribble calls the telegraphist's propensity for "self-delighting"?⁹⁷ Stuart Hutchinson refers to her imaginings as an "onanistic" tendency, such that the question then becomes what that tendency's fate will be once she has settled down with Mr. Mudge.⁹⁸ He seems to offer her precious little of what she most enjoys feeding upon: for the New York Edition, James changed the phrase "she often asked herself what it was marriage would be able to add to a familiarity so final" to "a familiarity that seemed already to have scraped the platter so clean" (C, 369). At the same time, hints are dropped to the effect that, on the one hand, the heroine will not simply leave her solitary space behind when she moves to Chalk Farm. Pondering her imminent marriage early in the story, for example, she thinks that so long as she keeps some of her "silly" reasons for postponing it to herself, it will "g[i]ve her the margin which at the best she would always require" (C, 406).

Also importantly, on the other hand, as several readers have noted, Mudge himself is not simply devoid of an appeal for her, which, James shows, stems directly from the very physicality that for some renders him so clearly below her.⁹⁹ The point, then, seems less that he has nothing to offer her, and more that, in many ways, the marriage will not differ very drastically from her situation in the telegraph-office, in which she survives on the scraps that come her way, but also insists, to the extent she can, on appropriating those she finds most appealing.

In this sense, one can conceive no better image of their marriage than the scene with which I began, in which they consume the chocolate-creams together. "'Have another?—that one,'" says Mr. Mudge to his fiancée. "She had another," James writes, "but not the one he indicated, and then he continued: 'What took place afterwards?'" (C, 457). Here Mudge feeds her, but she does retain her "margin," and the important thing to note is that he does not blink in the face of it, but allows her, without comment, to take what she understands herself to need.

In sum, then, while the telegraphist's small bites cannot be said to result from her own choice alone, but in many ways indicate a painful necessity, they do not merely suggest a case of learning to forgo enjoyment. Quite otherwise: this very necessity of surviving on scraps is what gives significance to her implicit assertion that doing so need not rule out the possibility of a pleasurable excess. Does this mean, however, that she has learned to satisfy herself with less? I would say not. Satisfaction, as a feeling of repletion, a cessation of desire, seems deeply at odds with her particular combination of pleasure and deprivation. [End Page 50]

V.

This combination is, finally, what the Fletcherist model can most usefully bring forward: an attitude that might be encapsulated by the word "savoring." Savoring suggests a dual relation to food, one in which necessity and extravagance, animal need and human desire, are literally rendered inseparable from one another. The savorer excessively, even perversely insists on wringing all possible pleasure from the meagerest morsel, precisely as a result of the evident recognition that more may not follow.¹⁰⁰ One thus occupies not the satisfied person's state of having but a perennial position of uncertainty with respect to the future.¹⁰¹ In this situation, a certain form of outsized enjoyment peculiarly seems to draw on necessity for its activation. The result, however, is that pleasure itself may not always be separable from what appears as its opposite.

Isn't this, then, the usual response to the late style that James's late-1890s, pre-Major Phase works began to inaugurate? So much is made of so little—a tendency culminating in the last of these writings, The Sacred Fount, the obsessively narrowed focus of which Rebecca West famously compared to "a rat nibbling at a wainscot."¹⁰² Others expressed this aspect of James's writing in even more directly Fletcherist terms: as Clover Adams once opined, the Master "chewed more than he bit off."¹⁰³

As nibbling rat, however, James may come closest to emulating his telegraphist's mode. Consider the possibility of imagining her as a version of the "parasite" theorized by Michel Serres: the rat who chews over the leftover scraps of the non-producing rich. To parasite, Serres explains, in fact means literally "to eat next to"; in French, intriguingly, the same word also refers to static, "a corruption, a rupture of information": what keeps "a message . . . from being heard, and sometimes, from being sent."¹⁰⁴ Both definitions clearly suit the experience of "our young woman," but it is important that, in Serres's generalization of the idea, there is nothing necessarily ignoble in parasitism, which in many ways may be said to define the social itself: a "system [that] includes the telephone, the telegraph, television . . . the circulation of messages and of raw materials, of language and foodstuffs"—precisely the material life of texts that we've seen define the telegraph-office in James.¹⁰⁵

And who is James himself, then? In Serres's account, it is the philosopher, but we might say here also the novelist, who slips in last, behind the rats, and "parasites the parasites."¹⁰⁶ He chews on the very situation of the telegraph-office, which seems so full of untasted [End Page 51] human incident, and even "admonishe[s]" his heroine's real-life counterparts, in his preface, for their indifference to the groaning-board of possibilities before them (C, xxi). And yet in the story itself, it is hard not to notice that the emphasis lies, rather, on the actual paucity of potential intrigue for the heroine to seize upon: "in the shuffling herd that passed before her the greater part only passed" (C, 390), and it is this barrenness, surely, that most accounts for her outsized savoring of what does catch her fancy.

Jean-Christophe Agnew has taught us to read the late James as a voracious devourer of a dazzling array of human "consumables," yet, as Edel points out, In the Cage actually coincides with his move away from the hub of social excitement in London to the relative backwater of Rye. Like his heroine, Edel suggests, "James in Rye now felt shut out from the great world."¹⁰⁷ Edel does not mention that the story itself features as the very emblem of that "great world" itself a "Lord Rye," whose crumbs the unfortunate Mrs. Jordan hopes will feed her in her own quest for social privilege. With such a naming, James seems to distance himself from the view Edel offers, suggesting, in effect, that it is he, Lord of Rye, around whom the real social scene gathers.

Yet the opposed possibility, that he is but another parasite seeking crumbs from the table—and indeed, that the novelist must always be a sort of parasite—haunts In the Cage. From James's own preface forward, the question has always been whether the telegraphist can make sense to us as a version of the artist. In the terms put forward here, we can see instead her refiguration of that very positioning; she does not fit a preexisting model so much as she changes our view of the artist as a transcendent figure. She helps us to see in the late James not only the modernist as Master but the proto-avant-gardist who, in Jean-François Lyotard's terms, "seeks sublimity in the here-and-now" precisely because of "the possibility of nothing happening, of words, colours, forms or sounds not coming; of this sentence being the last, of bread not coming daily."¹⁰⁸ Seen in these terms, James by century's end would no longer, in style most of all, conceive pleasure as the alternative to privation, but mark the attempt to transform the latter into the former—an achievement whose determinations, that refusal to let go of a single morsel, will always risk the awful exposure of necessity in the very hyperbolization of the hope to overcome its hold. [End Page 52]