Henry James and the Queerness of Style by Kevin Ohi (review)

Much recent criticism works to defamiliarize the objects it studies. The impulse is particularly strong when the objects in question are realist novels, whose presumed transparency and normative plotting the critic seeks to counter by uncovering signs [End Page E-4] of trouble or resistance not immediately evident to most readers. But what to do when a novelist’s style is already so disorienting that there is little danger of readers’ consuming his fictions too easily? For those of us who love Henry James and who wish to pass that love on to others, the question of whether—and how—to translate his late style into more accessible terms is a constant challenge. Some choose to err on the side of clarity, at the risk of rendering the novels far more conventional and unexciting than they in fact are. Others insist on registering and even magnifying the difficulties, so as to remain faithful to what Kevin Ohi terms the “queerness” of James’s style. Drawing evocatively on Gilles Deleuze’s contention that “a great writer is always like a foreigner in the language in which he expresses himself,” Ohi places himself firmly in this camp, as he sets out to show how “the foreign language murmuring audible” in James’s texts produces a “corrosive effect . . . on received forms of meaning, representation, and identity” (1). The result is a book that proves dazzlingly brilliant and frustratingly opaque by turns: an often stunning demonstration of the semantics and syntax of James’s alien tongue that occasionally pushes its case—and the convolutions of its own prose—to the edge of incomprehensibility.

After an introduction that seeks to show how James’s theorizing about the novel in “The Art of Fiction” (1884) and “The Future of the Novel” (1899) works to undermine not just moralizing accounts of the form but—more surprisingly—mimetic ones as well, Ohi divides his study into four chapters. These take up in sequence The Golden Bowl (1904); The Wings of the Dove (1902); a miscellany of late biographical texts, including in rough order James’s last published essay (a preface to Rupert Brooke’s Letters from America that appeared in 1916), A Small Boy and Others (1913), “Is there a Life after Death?” (1910), and the Introduction to The Tempest (1907); and, finally, The Ambassadors (1903). Apart from a passing allusion in the opening pages of the Ambassadors chapter, Ohi says almost nothing about this unconventional arrangement, but the deliberate a-chronology clearly accords with his strong desire to counter the lure of biography. Henry James and the Queerness of Style resists not just the order in which texts are written and published but the idea that life precedes art—or that it takes a homosexual man to produce “queer” writing. Indeed, one of the great strengths of Ohi’s argument is his consistent refusal to identify the writer’s style with his sexual preferences, or even to read the fiction for representations of homoerotic desire. Though he understands the appeal of recent biographical and novelistic attempts to bring James out of the closet, he rightly mistrusts the impulse to conflate art and life. Even Colm Tóibín’s “sometimes very affecting novel” The Master understandably troubles him, by seeming to imply that James’s fiction had its origin in certain formative moments of experience missed—as if the “life” that James somehow failed to lead were finally of more concern to us than the one he created by means of his writing (18). In his discussion of The Ambassadors, Ohi aptly characterizes the Pococks as “one of the great representatives of stupidity in the history of the English and American novel” (162). And while he does not make the connection, there is a worrying continuity between their reductive vision of what is “really” at issue between Chad and Marie de Vionnet and our own concern to ferret out the truth about James’s sexuality.

At the same time, as Ohi...