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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
The structural center, the pivot point, of the novel is the scene in the grounds at twilight between the narrator and May Server when the narrator declares himself to be "morally confident" and "intellectually triumphant" (142)--he having worked out (by the mystical expedient of reading the "meaning" of "silence" [132]) both the intricacies of his theory and the identities of the people implicated in it. This is the point at which "the wheel had completely turned"--the narrator has "come round to the opposite pole" from where he started (154). It is also the moment in which the text doubles up and begins to swing back on itself. From this point on, the resistances to and contradictions of his theory--the "unsayings" that counterbalance his confident "saying"--begin to pile up. The dynamic of proposition and denial is reversed: Grace Brissenden denies everything she had previously asserted (arraying her "negations," as the narrator sees it [318]), while the narrator seeks to affirm it. His affirmations, howev er, take the form of attempts to deny her denials--he will not make any positive statements, certain as he is that no affirmation can contain his "truth," and as determined as ever to keep his "secret." The situation is further complicated by the fact that he believes Grace Brissenden's denials and recantings to be insincere--according to his logic, her denials are in fact affirmations. His logic is that the only reason she would deny the changes is that she feels herself to be implicated in them. If his theory is true, then she will stand convicted of feeding off her diminishing husband. The narrator responds to her (false) denials, then, with his own false, negative affirmations: he affirms that he, too, has given up his theory even as he is all the while gathering more evidence for it. Thus each embodies the contradiction inherent in the double proposition as well as enacts
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it in relation to the other by putting forward propositions the other then modifies by contradicting or denying them. And there are fu rther doublings. Even as Grace Brissenden denies the narrator's theory with her words, she stands before him as a living symbol of its truth: convinced that her very success in their "game" is due to the youth and vigor she has vampirically drained from her husband, the narrator reflects that "she had at no moment since her marriage so triumphantly asserted her defeat of time" (240). It is on this irresolvable contradiction that the novel ends: Grace Brissenden has won the argument, apparently convincing the narrator that their theory of the passage of a vital flow from one to another is false, but she has won it precisely by vampirically drawing from the "sacred fount" of the narrator himself-she gathers "herself up into the strength of twenty-five" while he can barely move under the accumulated weight of his years, years he feels to be "a thousand" (318). In other words, she is able to win the argument only by doing the very thing she is arguing is impossible. In denying the narrator's proposition, she only affirms it. [4]
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