L’Inquiétante modernité de The Sacred Fount

Abstract

Just before writing The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, James wrote The Sacred Fount, and attempted to write a novel entitled The Sense of the Past, works in which an ambitious attempt to unearth the “source” of his writing and the mimetic origin of thought came to a head. The author’s apparent repudiation of the first, the failure to complete the latter, and the immense critical success which crowned his return to the “realist” novel, have all contributed to nearly obliterate, a century of (mis-)reading later, the wit and the analytical insight contained in what in many regards is James’s most “modern” novel, as well as the most (eccentrically) central novel of his œuvre as a whole. This paper attempts to throw light on the mimetic logic underwriting this paradoxically eccentric center, on the apocryphal nature of it – its “im-posture” as a work of representation –, and on the inherently impious, or traitorous, manner of being of this work in the eyes of the Master.