ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that Henry James's authorial subjectivity has a very different consistency—that it is determined less by the refinements of his consciousness than by the imperatives of his unconscious fantasy. Although this James, like the one who occupies the house of fiction, occupies an emphatically spectatorial position, his look exercises no control over the field it surveys; it is instead the point of entry for an alien and traumatic sexuality. The James who is conjured forth by his authorial fantasmatic defies specification according both to a strictly heterosexual, and to a classically homosexual paradigm. He is consequently an almost hyperbolically marginal male subject. A fantasmatic is an unconscious fantasy or group of related fantasies which underlies a subject's dreams, symptoms, repetitive behavior, and daydreams. Sodomitical identification with the fantasmatic father is the only means whereby the Jamesian "hero" can approximate a masculine position, and as seen that position is only very briefly sustained in "The Beast in the Jungle.".
