A Momentary Watcher, or the Imperiled Reader of “A Round of Visits”

Henry James’s last short story, “A Round of Visits,” presents grounds for examining the role of the reader in not only interpreting but also in “causing” the story. This story, published in 1910 in James’s last collection of short stories, The Finer Grain, exemplifies late-late Jamesian methods of universalizing consciousness, of staging the implicit homoerotic scene, of triangulating desire, and of enacting the writer’s peril. Using aesthetic theory and neo-Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, this paper suggests that James unites his own peril with that of his reader, seeming to invite his reader to merge with him in the author/reader transaction.