Featured White Papers
- Oct. 14th: Simplified IT with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) (ZDNet)
- PCI DSS therapy for the smaller retailer (McAfee)
- The rise of Web commuting (Citrix Online)
Content provided in partnership with
"In the Mystic Circle": The Space of the Unspeakable in Henry James's The Sacred Fount
Style, Fall, 2000 by Ann-Marie Priest
This double movement can be seen at a number of levels in The Sacred Fount. The central proposition of the novel--the narrator's unspeakable theory--is the focal point of an extraordinary sequence of affirmations and denials, sayings and unsayings. Further, even the narrator's own certainty about his theory is repeatedly "unsaid," making uncertainty--as the work of many critics testifies--the very condition of the text.
At the broadest level, the text puts its proposition forward in the first half of the novel, as the narrator develops and elaborates his theory, and then unsays that proposition in the second half. But these two large gestures are made up of a complex cross-hatching of smaller propositions and counter-propositions. The narrator's main collaborator in the construction and deconstruction of his theory is Grace Brissenden: the two work together by contradicting or, in milder moments, modifying one another's statements, as the narrator admits when he tells her that their "fighting was working, fo r we struck, you'll remember, sparks, and sparks were what we wanted" (257). "Piece by piece," they build together a "perfect palace of thought" (311-12)--an invisible palace, always rearing itself just beyond their words, just off the page. Thus the narrator begins his tale with his own skepticism about the notion, put to him by Grace Brissenden, that a man he knew as dull, Gilbert Long, has grown smart as a result of a liaison with an intelligent woman. He asks her sarcastically if the unknown woman administers "intellect" "as a daily dose, by the spoonful? or only as a drop at a time? Does he take it in his food? [...] The difficulty for me is simply that if I've seen the handsome grow ugly and the ugly handsome [...] so have I not seen--no, not once in all my days--the stupid grow clever" (10-11). Grace Brissenden herself, however, as a woman who has (in the narrator's eyes) grown young by sipping at the sacred fount of her husband's youth, all unconsciously exemplifies the theory she propounds--and the n arrator soon begins seriously to entertain the notion. He then finds himself disagreeing once again with Grace Brissenden over the identity of the woman who has apparently decanted her own intelligence into Gilbert Long and is herself correspondingly depleted. At this point, he tries to deny the theory, asking "gloomily" whether "we really want anyone at all?" (71-72). But Grace Brissenden, who does not believe his denial is sincere, will not allow him to "take [his theory] back" (72). And the two reflect that their interaction, at the metalevel, is in itself a kind of confirmation of their theory: Grace Brissenden notes that the narrator has affected her "quite as Mrs Server has affected Mr Long," making her "sublime" where she had been "dense"; and the narrator responds that he feels "drained [...]dry" (81). Again the narrator comes around to Grace Brissenden's point of view, though he determines to lie to her about it in order to shield the woman in question, May Server.
