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Saturday, December 24, 2005
What Goes On
"It was exactly as if she had been there by the operation of my intelligence, or even by that — in a still happier way — of my feeling. My excitement, as I have called it, on seeing her, was assuredly emotion. Yet what was this feeling, really?"
The Sacred Fount made Henry James's friends fear for his sanity. (Henry Adams offered the cheery consolation that "most of the rest of us" would be institutionalized with him.) James himself seemed taken aback by the tumorous growth of the novel. It remained his most extreme experiment: a postmodernist parody of a country house mystery avant la lettre; a mad (social) scientist in a meet-cute(-and-go-nowhere) romantic thriller; a locked room containing the foully-played corpse of realism. (Possibly a suicidal frame-up.)
And it's my sentimental favorite. But I've never tried to work out a way to write about it. The Sacred Fount scares off analysis by example. Some critics express bafflement or disgust; others take short simple pleasure in their manifest superiority to James's first-person.
So I doff my Santa cap to Michael Wood for "The Museum of What Happens", a compact essay which takes the risk of taking the book's problems seriously, starting with the infamous unreliability of its narrator.
Comments
In his brief survey of The Perverse Novel, Paul Kerschen has reached The Sacred Fount.
(His first installment, on Pierre, or the Ambiguities, is fine stuff, too.)