A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (review)

Abstract

Michael Moon's refreshing and original attempt to situate Henry James as "one queer culture-maker among others" (3) is, in several important ways, a corrective departure from the imperatives that have turned current gay literary studies into a period of consolidation rather than a phase of innovation of the sort we saw around 1990. Moon understands the critical limitations of what Ross Posnock has called "the cramped aura of sanctity [that] has grown up around . . . James's cultural presence," the fetishized icon that has "repress[ed] some of the deepest impulses of his art and life" (81). In articulating these impulses, Moon offers the most intelligent definition of Jamesian "queerness" that I have yet encountered--a term, like "performativity," that has been so evacuated of specificity in its academic circulation and that is so frequently and narrowly assumed to be self-evident that many writers have abandoned it. The "force and range" of queer James, he insists, are functions of "the daring and risky weirdness, dramatic uncanniness, erotic offcenteredness, and unapologetic perversity" (4) of his best writing. And it is this power to startle, to scandalize, to disorient identity and desire that Moon traces so assiduously.