Mise en Crypte: The Man and the Mask

The Henry James Review Spring, 1984 of internal mediation: in either case, the social benefits of either alliance or domestic harmony are lost to the BeUegardes because they cannot marry outside their clan. Similarly, the sacrifice of Claire cannot reconcile rivalry into unanimity. If Claire can only reply to the sterile rivalry between the American and the nobility with a sterile self-sacrifice, the recognition of its futility creates a positive reciprocity between Newman, Mrs. Tristram, and the reader, a reciprocity that regrets the loss of Claire. Tuttleton is surely correct to warn against exaggerating James's investment in the associative value of the religious figures in the novel, and of the hero's Christian name, to the Christian value of selfsacrifice (143-44). Lona Hessel (Samfundets St0tter) and Nora Helmer (Et Dukkehjem ), the American's immediate antecedents , and Stephen Dedalus, his descendant, represent modernity as postsacrificial. Violence , against others or oneself, can no longer be justified by the wiU of the gods, tribal or nationalistic prestige, or the autonomy of the instincts: all are sterile misunderstandings of the consequences of mimesis . But if the modern antipathy of these belated Europeans to the sacrificial values latent in all social forms insists that their use of religious figures cannot promote the sacrifice of Christ, perhaps these texts are part of a vast coUaborative, corroborative modernization of the sacrificial reading of the Scriptures, whose history is not yet written: l'écriture judéo-chrétienne. NOTES Mrs. Tristram's declared fear that Newman had looked like he needed watching makes Newman reply, in the 1907 version , "Surely I didn't look as if I wanted to take life." "I might have feared [said Mrs. Tristram], if I had let myself go a little, that you were thinking of taking your own" (TANYE 339). Key to Works by Henry James AA-"Americans Abroad." In The American . Ed. James W. Tuttleton. York: Norton, 1978. HJL-Henry James Letters. New Ed. Leon TAEdel . Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974. -The American. Ed. James W. Tuttleton . New York: Norton, 1978. TAMsR-"The American." Manuscript Revision , 1908. Facsimile. London: The Scolar Press and Oxford Univ. Press, 1975. TANYE—The American. Ed. Gerald Willen. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1972. Other Works Cited "A Surge of Patriotic In The American. Ed. Cargill, Oscar. Indignation." __ James W. Tuttleton. ton, 1978. Girard, René. Le Bouc émissaire. New York: NorParis : Grasset, 1982. ---------. Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde. Paris: Grasset, 1982. Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque. Paris: Grasset, 1961. ---------. La violence et le sacre. Paris: Grasset, 1972. Tuttleton, James W. "Rereading The American : A Century Since." The Henry James Review l(1979):139-53. Mise en Crypte: The Man and the Mask by Susan Winnett, Harvard University "Portraits of the dead are at best ironic things . . ." The notorious ambiguity or undecidability of The Sacred Fount is a product of Volume V 220 Number 3 The Henry James Review Spring, 1984 two mutually exclusive undertakings pursued by the narrator: he is both a participant in what he calls the "favouring frame" of Newmarch sociability and an observer, standing outside this frame, whose interpretive adventures defy the conventions that make social participation comprehensible. Unable to draw a line between his hypothesis and an outside reality independent of it, he is incapable of maintaining one narrative that answers to both the exigencies of his theoretical ramblings and those of the conventional sociable landscape of Newmarch. The question of the relation of the narrator—and by extension, his narrative —to these various frames of endeavor has presented a puzzle to commentators on the novel. And I would submit that no one has gotten further in solving the problem than James did—or did not—in writing the novel. In this paper, I shall not attempt to provide an interpretation that rectifies the problem of The Sacred Fount, but rather will propose a scheme for understanding why the problem remains unsolvable. I would like further to suggest how a reconception of the notion of framing enabled James to write the novels that foUow The Sacred Fount. I would like to approach the problem of framing in the Fount by examining—I...