Handling the Master: Visual Homage and the Jamesian Gap

Handling the Master:Visual Homage and the Jamesian Gap Daniel Hannah (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Nova scotian comics artist kate beaton's recent reworking of Edward Gorey's 1954 cover illustration for What Maisie Knew, from her Web series Hark! A Vagrant, offers a useful entry point into thinking about absence in Henry James's writing and in writings about Henry James. Shawna Ross notes how Beaton's strip captures something of the novel's "complex epistemology" through its deployment of the "thickly scribbled bars" ambiguously censoring the adult dialogue: as the bars render unclear Maisie's knowledge of the censored material and, as such, the source of the censoring, the comic fruitfully places its readers "into Maisie's position" (295–6). Indeed, the speech bubbles' comic erasure—that we can't [End Page 3] unsee—nods at the novel's critically ambivalent exploitation of its adult characters' tendency to treat Maisie, the child as a tabula rasa capable of unknowing adult speech that might otherwise corrupt her; James's novel both critiques this construction of the child as absence even as it builds its narrative apparatus on an unsettlingly similar sense of the focalized child's capacity for vacuous innocence. Beaton's comic's thickly present erasure—its highly visible materialization of writing and its removal by the writer's hand—captures, in miniature, the manner in which Jamesian absence frequently surfaces in homages to his work as a kind of visual static, a material, almost tactile, actualization of textual space that disrupts and complicates, specifically, the representation of sex and desire. I want to suggest that Beaton's literal handling of What Maisie Knew, revealing and concealing its illicit adult sex and its scandalous imagining of the child's sexual knowledge, captures a participatory impulse at work in a range of Jamesian absences—moments of ellipsis, erasure, and foreclosure in James's works invite the reader's embodied engagement with a space that both opens out and ambiguously suppresses a sexual imaginary. Visual homages to James's works can illuminate the always already visual, material, and corporeally experiential quality of such absence in James's writings; these absences and their translations evoke, I argue, a complicated negotiation, for the reader, of the entanglement of queer and normative desire in Jamesian aesthetics. Scholars have long noted the tendency of Henry James's best works to turn on the galvanizing force of an unclear fissure in the text's plot—the unelaborated "innocence" of Daisy Miller; the unidentified "figure" in Hugh Vereker's "carpet"; Jeffrey Aspern's obliterated archive; the ghosts of "The Turn of the Screw"; the "supreme impression" produced by Milly Theale after her death. Such gaps and the rhetorical centrality of preterition and ellipsis to Jamesian style have been critical to queer readings of his work, offering a kind of resonant index for his imagining of desire's (and fiction's) resistance to straight narrative representation. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's influential reading of "The Beast in the Jungle" paved this interpretive path when she traced "an embodied male-homosexual thematics" in the story's "thematics of absence," in its "particular, historicized" deployment of the "absence of speech" (201). More recently, Kevin Ohi has found in James's aesthetic "resistance to reification and formalization of the novel" (31), in the elliptically discontinuous rhetoric of his late style and its dedication to "nonrepresentation," a "marker of queerness" (32). Queer desire, in such readings of James, emerges as an epistemological and ontological question situated in somatically resonant language; James's style figures forth [End Page 4] desire's queer fluidity in its refusals to know, in its unknowing, undoing of subjects, objects, bodies, and the spaces between them (Eric Savoy terms his deconstructive approach to James's stylistic turns "queer formalism" [103]). While I too am drawn to an anti-representational, erotic flush in James's style, I want to keep in the air a sense of the restraint, constraints, and loss traced by absences in his work. And where earlier queer readings have turned on the elusive presence of desiring bodies in James's prose, I wish to connect that corporeal imaginary to the...