Henry James's "In The Cage" with Miss Oedipa Bartleby

[Campbel Morgan]

In the Cage is HJ’s short story or maybe novella that centers on an
unnamed telegraphist living and working in and around London. With the
positive paranoia essential, according to HJ, to the writer’s craft
and the art of fiction, she deciphers clues to her clients' personal
lives from the often cryptic telegrams they submit to her as she sits
in the "cage" at the post office. Sensitive and intelligent, the
telegraphist eventually finds out more than she may want to know.
Gender, class, disinheritance, information technology, a nameless
young woman ( call her Miss Oedipa Bartleby) projects a world she
weaves from cryptic messages: “Most of the elements swam straight
away, lost themselves in the bottomless common, and by so doing really
kept the page clear.  On the clearness therefore what she did retain
stood sharply out; she nipped and caught it, turned it over and
interwove it.”   And, “ … half of it was appointments and allusions,
all swimming in a sea of other allusions still, tangled in a
complexity of questions that gave a wondrous image of their life.”

A  circuit board Lives of London & Revelations.

fr Chapter V
This was neither more nor less than the queer extension of her
experience, the double life that, in the cage, she grew at last to
lead.  As the weeks went on there she lived more and more into the
world of whiffs and glimpses, she found her divinations work faster
and stretch further.  It was 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.  What it
mainly came to at this period was a picture of how London could amuse
itself; and that, with the running commentary of a witness so
exclusively a witness, turned for the most part to a hardening of the
heart.  The nose of this observer was brushed by the bouquet, yet she
could never really pluck even a daisy.  What could still remain fresh
in her daily grind was the immense disparity, the difference and
contrast, from class to class, of every instant and every motion.
There were times when all the wires in the country seemed to start
from the little hole-and-corner where she plied for a livelihood, and
where, in the shuffle of feet, the flutter of “forms,” the straying of
stamps and the ring of change over the counter, the people she had
fallen into the habit of remembering and fitting together with others,
and of having her theories and interpretations of, kept up before her
their long procession and rotation.  What twisted the knife in her
vitals was the way the profligate rich scattered about them, in
extravagant chatter over their extravagant pleasures and sins, an
amount of money that would have held the stricken household of her
frightened childhood, her poor pinched mother and tormented father and
lost brother and starved sister, together for a lifetime.  During her
first weeks she had often gasped at the sums people were willing to
pay for the stuff they transmitted—the “much love”s, the “awful”
regrets, the compliments and wonderments and vain vague gestures that
cost the price of a new pair of boots.  She had had a way then of
glancing at the people’s faces, but she had early learnt that if you
became a telegraphist you soon ceased to be astonished.  Her eye for
types amounted nevertheless to genius  . . .

Check out this page too ...

VIRTUAL HENRY JAMES
Andrew Cutting, London Metropolitan University
How might we reread James for a digital age? Should we use him to
resist the impacts of new media and technologies? Or can we exploit
these technologies to better popularise and understand James's
writing?

Hope I got this linking thing correct this time.

http://www2.newpaltz.edu/~hathawar/cutting/cage.htm