"In the Mystic Circle": The Space of the Unspeakable in Henry James's The Sacred Fount

"Well," said Mrs Briss, "I think you're crazy."

It naturally struck me. "Crazy?"

"Crazy." [...]

I risked the long laugh which might have seemed that of madness [...]. And whether or not it was the special sound, in my ear, of my hilarity, I remember just wondering if perhaps I mightn't be [...].

I gave her then the benefit of my stirred speculation. "It always happens, of course, that one is one's self the last to know [...]." (278-79)

At this point, with the narrator laughing insanely, everything is in question. His apparent willingness to consider the question--to wonder "if perhaps [he] mightn't be" mad--is yet another of the many moments in the novel when the narrator "unsays" his own certainty and disrupts the meaning of his own text. This moment marks the extent to which the narrator is dabbling in things that defy the rationality of which coherent language is the guarantee. It is almost an expression on behalf of the reader of the unease inspired by the narrator's free manipulations of his extra-linguistic "space," his mystic circle.

The most extreme instance of what the narrator reads into suggestive "gaps" in discourse is his conversation with May Server in the grounds at Newmarch. This scene is sometimes cited by critics as the moment at which the narrator, reading everything in terms of his own interpretative schema, loses touch completely with any kind of plausible reality. Donna Przybylowicz argues that in this scene, "everything is re-created in the terminology of a fairy tale, a transmutative process which resembles [the narrator's] distorted perception of the constant change and phantastic fluctuation in the other characters' ages" (74). His interpretations of May Server's silences are equally "transmutative." The narrator begins by "innocently" asking a question that echoes ironically across the concealed subject of his text: "'What is it that has happened to you?'" (135). In May's look and in her silence, he finds an apophatic doubleness: it opens up "the depths it would have closed" (135); it is "a supremely unsuccessful atte mpt to say nothing" (135). Trying to close depths, she opens them; trying to say nothing, she says everything. The narrator sees this "doubleness" in May's very appearance, for her eyes and her "aspect" show "strange intermissions of darkness or of light" (137) and the "strangest alternatives [...] of presence and absence" (151). For him, the "meaning of our silence seemed to stare straight out" (132), and he concludes that "[i]t was prodigious what, in the way of suppressed communication, passed in these wonderful minutes between us" (138). Despite a prolonged meditation on what her silence, which is the confession of "all her secret," reveals to him about "the possibilities of our common nature" (136-37), he assures the reader that he has gathered from his silent interlocutor "more things than I could have named" (136). By shading off into silence this way, he manages to create once more the sense that in spite of all he has said about his theory and its implications, there is still more that cannot be said --and thereby directs our attention once more off the page. In May Server's "absence," he even goes so far as to invent the words that would confirm his hypothesis about her and imagine her speaking them (141). But when she does speak, it is to contradict the words he has imputed to her--a contradiction that quickly becomes for him, precisely as a contradiction, "a supremely convincing bit of evidence" (145).