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"In the Mystic Circle": The Space of the Unspeakable in Henry James's The Sacred Fount
Style, Fall, 2000 by Ann-Marie Priest
it was the infinite that, for the hour, the distinguished foreigner poured out to us, causing it to roll in wonderful waves of sound, almost of colour, over our receptive attitudes and faces. Each of us, I think, now wore the expression--or confessed at least to the suggestion--of some indescribable thought; which might well, it was true, have been nothing more unmentionable than the simple sense of how the posture of deference to this noble art [of music] has always a certain personal grace to contribute. (166)
From the sublime to the affected is, it seems, only a matter of a sentence or two.
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Then, too, there is the question of just what the "indescribable" theory the narrator is pursuing concerns: "nothing more unmentionable," after all, than who is sleeping with whom. As Rebecca West famously put it, the narrator spends "more intellectual force than Kant can have used on The Critique of Pure Reason, in an unsuccessful attempt to discover whether there exists between certain of his fellow-guests a relationship not more interesting among these vacuous people than it is among sparrows" (qtd. in Edel vii). James himself, in a 1901 letter to Mrs Humphrey Ward, described the book as "the merest of jeux d'esprit," and as a "joke" (Letters 186). And yet, the central idea explored in this novel--the idea of an intimate interconnection between lovers, a "flow" from one to the other that may transform one or both in the image of the other--was a persistent preoccupation of James's writing, one cropping up in all three of his subsequent novels. Whatever James meant by his (perhaps defensive) dismissal of t he novel in that letter, it seems unlikely that he meant that the narrator's theory itself was a joke, for he takes some care in the same letter to give explanations of the plot that bear out the narrator's version of events. He explains, for instance, that at the end of the novel both May Server and Guy Brissenden are "back in the coffin" (an image that incidentally conjures up visions of the "undead," the victims of vampires), implying that the narrator's view of them as doomed ("poor Briss" to succumb to "inexorable time" and May Server to give way "under a cerebral lesion" [Fount 168]) is his own view. Further, he apparently takes the very same view of the final conversation between the narrator and Grace Brissenden that the narrator himself takes: the final interview is, he writes, "all an ironic exposure of [Grace Brissenden's] own false plausibility, of course" (186). According to the view James expresses here, then, it is not the narrator whose plausibility is exposed as "false" but Mrs Brissenden's--that is, her "plausible" explanations, on which the book ends, of why Gilbert Long and May Server are not in fact "vampire" and victim. The narrator's theory, according to which both Guy Brissenden and May Server are doomed, appears to be vindicated by this letter. [10]
While James did keep some critical distance from mysticism, then, it seems clear that some of the "unspeakables" in James's texts do in fact belong to the realm of the mystical--things that cannot be said because words would incalculably diminish them (the torch that illuminates the sun), or because they are so alien to accepted modes of thought and speech that there are no words with which to say them. [11] From this perspective, the unspeakable in James's novel becomes a kind of fantasy of otherness--of the realm of the unconscious, perhaps, whose workings seemed to fascinate James, or simply of his sense of those things in heaven and earth that are not dreamed of in philosophy, [12] things that could not be seriously spoken within dominant discourses: ghosts, mental telepathy, a fluid interconnection between self and other. According to Madan Sarap, Levinas argues that "when knowledge or theory tries to understand the Other, then the alterity of the Other vanishes as it becomes part of the same [...]. In his view, language's function in conceptualizing thought is to suppress the Other and bring it within the aegis of the same" (68). [13] Levinas's view may be one way of understanding the significance of the insistence, within James's texts, on maintaining a space outside of language--it is a way of preserving otherness from reduction and appropriation, of keeping open a space where alterity can be maintained, however invisibly, however impossibly.
