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· 1 ·· INTRODUCTION · On the Erotics of Literary Style A great writer is always like a foreigner in the language in which he expresses himself, even if this is his native tongue. At the limit, he draws his strength from a mute and unknown minority that belongs only to him. He is a foreigner in his own language: he does not mix another language with his own language, he carves out a nonpreexistent foreign language within his own language. He makes the language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur. —Gilles Deleuze, “He Stuttered” Henry James and the Queerness of Style seeks to trace such a “nonpreexistent foreign language” in the writings of Henry James and thereby to find in James’s style a queerness that, not circumscribed by whatever sexualities or identities might be represented by the texts, makes for what is most challenging about recent queer accounts of culture: a radical antisociality that seeks to unyoke sexuality from the communities and identities—gay or straight—that would tame it, a disruption that thwarts efforts to determine political goals according to a model of representation, the corrosive effect of queerness, in short, on received forms of meaning, representation, and identity. To perceive such a potential, it suffices to engage in that most old-fashioned and, by now, almost marginalized activity : close reading—in the very disgrace to which it has been consigned now that, no longer synonymous with literary study tout court, it seems almost an antique curiosity (at best irrelevant, and at worst a pernicious, or somehow complicitous, indulgence), in, as D. A. Miller writes, “its humbled , futile, ‘minoritized’ state.”1 Through such a marginal, wasteful form of attention to James’s texts, and to the foreign language murmuring audible there, this book seeks to delineate what it calls the queerness of style. Henry James’s writing continually throws the reader off balance with disorienting mixings of register and sudden shifts of tone, with unexpected syntactical inversions and equivocal reifications that hover at 2 ON THE EROTICS OF LITERARY STYLE indeterminate levels of abstraction, with pronouns that divide their allegiances between any number of more or less distant antecedents, with symbolic and figural language that spurns subservience, determining plots and becoming visible on depicted landscapes, and with coercively authoritative voices that unexpectedly cede their perspective or suddenly give way to ironical deflation. Such effects inevitably lead acute critics to confront the consequences for the novel form of a style that presents a surface of such redoubtable complexity, to examine, in consequence, ways that this eminently “psychological” writer imagines consciousness in curiously nonpsychological terms and formulates a “realism” that does something other than represent reality. Meanwhile, other acute critics, influenced by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and by queer theory more generally, have at last made the question of sexuality, and particularly homosexuality, unavoidable for any serious consideration of James’s works. The intensity of relations between men and between women, the thematization of homophobic panic in his writing, the erotic energies that escape containment in marriage or heterosexual romance, the authorial and narrative investments across or within genders that resist assimilation to heterosexual models—these are just a few of the elements that a criticism of James attuned to questions of sexuality has made it impossible to ignore.2 It suffices to attend to what is explicitly there in the work of this legendarily reticent writer to perceive that it hardly shies from sexual detail and that (among the many diverse incarnations of human sexuality that preoccupy it) so-called normative heterosexuality is perhaps the sole form in which it can hardly muster even a glancing interest. Implicit in Sedgwick’s work—and that of one or two other recent critics—is the intuition that these two strands are connected; otherwise, unfortunately, these parallel preoccupations with style and sexuality have remained separate—and have even seemed inimical—in critical readings of James.3 This book seeks to bring out the common ground of these two critical preoccupations, suggesting that each is incomplete to the extent that it does not consider the other. The daunting complexity of James’s writing is its queerness: the erotic in his work can be most fully understood when it is considered in linguistic rather than representational terms. The queerness of Henry James’s writing resides less in its representation of marginal sexualities—however startlingly explicit those may be—than in its elusive and multivalent effects of syntax, figure, voice, and [3.140.198.43] Project MUSE (2024...

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