Creativity in The Sacred Fount

Abstract

In The Sacred Fount written in late 1899 and early 1900, James created his last and fullest portrait of the writer-critic. An experimental work, it attempts a fusion of forms and themes unique in James’s fiction. It is a comic metaphor of the creative process in which James develops a modernist paradigm of the shared responsibility of the writer-critic and the reader for every stage of the creation and final expression of art. The narrator, a brilliantly conceived comic character, sees himself as an evocateur and an organising, dominating consciousness. To the extent that he engages all of the other characters in the fiction in his imaginative process, all are contributors to its ‘truth’. Moreover, his effort clearly allegorises the role of the reader.