Henry James and the Queerness of Style

Kevin Ohi begins this energetic book with the proposition that to read Henry Jamesparticularly the late textsis to confront the queer potential of style and the traces it leaves on the literary life. In contrast to other recent critics, Ohi asserts that Jamess queerness is to be found neither in the homoerotic thematics of the texts, however startlingly explicit, nor in the suggestions of same-sex desire in the authors biography, however undeniable, but in his style. For Ohi, there are many elements in the style that make Jamess writing queer. But if there is a thematic marker, Ohi shows through his careful engagements with these texts, it is belatedness. The recurrent concern with belatedness, Ohi explains, should be understood not psychologically but stylistically, not as confessing the sad predicament of being out of sync with ones life but as revealing the consequences of styles refashioning of experience. Belatedness marks lifes encounter with style, and it describes an experience not of deprivation but of the rich potentiality of the literary work that James calls freedom. In Ohis reading, belatedness is the indicator not of sublimation or repression, nor of authorial self-sacrifice, but of the potentiality of the literaryand hence of the queerness of style. Presenting original readings of a series of late Jamesian texts, the book also represents an exciting possibility for queer theory and literary studies in the future: a renewed attention to literary form and a new soundingenergized by literary questions of style and formof the theoretical implications of queerness.