Fire in Heterotopia: Henry James and Barbara Kruger

Most studies of Henry James and the visual arts center on James's interest in the history of art up to and including that of his own epoch. While this mode of analysis does a lot to explain how James applies visual aesthetics to narrative form, it leaves aside the tremendous effect James brings to bear on the visual art that comes after him. Using Barbara Kruger's "Turned Trick" and James's "The Beast in the Jungle," I argue that there are close intertextual ties between James and the visual artists associated with feminist postmodernism. These ties become especially evident insofar as James and Kruger reconstitute the phallocentric gaze through the dramatization of Nachtraglichkeit, the psychoanalytic memory function in which Freud and Lacan locate the primal cause of resubjectification.