Rereading The Sacred Fount and Rethinking the Major Phase by “the lurid light of Dreyfus”

Abstract: Tropes of wish-fulfillment and “real life writes the plot” inform The Sacred Fount , James’s first new novel after the Dreyfus Affair. Later novels’ confidently social, international interactions contrast with this novel’s cerebral, introverted theorizing as James’s escapism from France’s fraught political talk. Let us come to understand the novel James writes to suppress and depoliticize Dreyfus hysteria, assess how its interpersonal strife and provincial settings still haunt the author, and see James asking himself: Might it have been better, one “new March” later, for this self-abnegating narrator to pretend the trip that inspired the novel had never happened, after all?