Sibyls, Seekers, and Sacred Founts in the Tales of Henry James

Sibyls, Seekers, and Sacred Founts in the Tales of Henry James by Larry A. Gray, University of Virgina I. The Sibyl and the Seeker May Bartram, just before her death in "The Beast in the Jungle," characterizes for John Marcher his role as a seeker of the knowledge that already defines his life: "Ah, your not being aware of it," and she seemed to hesitate an instant to deal with this—"your not being aware of it is the strangeness in the strangeness. It's the wonder of the wonder." She spoke as with the softness almost of a sick child, yet now at last, at the end of all, with the perfect straightness of a sibyl. She visibly knew that she knew, and the effect on him was of something co-ordinate, in its high character, with the law that had ruled him. It was the true voice of the law; so on her lips would the law itself have sounded. (CT XI, 389) Marcher, though baffled by the "straightness" of this riddle, understands that the sibyl's knowledge of him is beyond question; the structure of the tale also supports Marcher's certainty by placing May's words In the position of her deathbed confession. Whatever the law might be, it is as important as life or death offers. Further, when Marcher himself later recognizes the extent of his egotism, James as narrator steps forward to assert that this self-revelation will similarly represent the seeker's own final confession: "if light hadn't come to him in this particular fashion it would still have come in another. He was to live to believe this, I say, though he was not to live, I may not less definitely mention, to do much else" (CT XI, 398). James thus informs us that Marcher's failure to love May, his failure to understand himself through loving her, has led to nothing less than a bitter death sentence, in tum, for both of them. Such omniscient statements are sometimes considered to be uncharacteristic: James's development of the central consciousness as a fictional technique would seem to make them on the whole artistically unnecessary. Still, critics have often noted this mingling of James's view with that of the central consciousness, especially in the later works. With reference to 'The Beast in the Jungle," Wayne Booth points out that "the result ... is a kind of double vision: we have the effect of seeing things through Marcher's eyes, but the moral vision is James's all the while" (280). Ora Segal accounts for this "double vision" effect by the "constant interfusion of May's point of view with Marcher's own" (217). Both The Henry James Review 11 (1990): 189-201 ©1990 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 190 The Henry James Review descriptions are correct, I would suggest, just because James's omniscience and the sibyl's implicit moral view coincide. What the author has done to avoid imposing himself excessively as narrator is to emphasize the limited observer's view to the extent that the more spare depiction of the sibyl's moral certainty becomes a riddle in varying degrees of difficulty to seeker, reader, and perhaps even author.1 William R. Goetz, in the context of discussing James's management of the author's presence in both fictional and nonfictional works, has taken up this question of protagonist and "other," what I would call seeker and sibyl, in the later tales of "poor sensitive gentlemen." Like Booth and Segal, Goetz notes the use of "two centers of consciousness": the first is the narrative point-of-view figure while the second is a character which, "through its very opacity and its distance from the protagonist or narrator, exercises a fascination over him and becomes central to the story. . . . [The protagonist thus] feels that he lives in ignorance while true authority, mastery of knowledge resides elsewhere, in what Stransom of 'The Altar of the Dead' calls 'the Others'" (160). The religious imagery of a story like Stransom's leads Goetz to suggest that the "other" is a deified figure and that René Girard's model of metaphysical desire may therefore...