Chapter 19 - Media and communication technologies

Summary

In the long afterlife of Henry James’s cultural presence, his appearance in Nonverbal Communication: Notes on the Visual Perception of Human Relations (1956), an illustrated psychology textbook by Jurgen Ruesch and Weldon Kees, must count among the more unexpected. Ruesch and Kees first mention James as part of a brief discussion of how ‘metacommunicative statements’ can give social advantage to those who recognize minute shifts in emotional context and emphasis, while those less observant – upon whom everything is lost, as James might have put it – are often subject to staggering misunderstandings. Ruesch and Kees cite The Sacred Fount as an especially telling proof that ‘the most worldly and discerning of novelists . . . are continuously and even obsessively preoccupied’ with the difficulties and ‘ironies’ of communication. Given that James’s stock was never higher than in the decades following World War II, it is easy enough to guess that such a reference was meant in part to capitalize on the growing reputation of his novels as investigations into the technicalities of human relations – manners, gestures, conversation – at the upper limit of nuance and complexity. Literature, for Ruesch and Kees, is imagined as a laboratory where techniques and practices of communication are tested, scrutinized and dissected. And no author pursues these investigations with more systematic rigour than James.