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The Swedenborgian Figure in the Carpet: Henry James's Critical Point of View
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Extract
There is a critical opinion that Henry James's “Figure in the Carpet” is an ironic story in which the book-reviewer Corvick only pretends to discover a recurrent pattern in the works of a celebrated novelist in order to entice his fiancée, a literary compulsive, to marry him without waiting for her mother to die, the moral being that the search for such patterns does not represent a mature interest in literature. In his preface to the volume containing the story in the New York Edition, however, James replies to critics who demand to know “where on earth, where roundabout us at this hour,” he had found a living model for his pattern-weaving novelist: “As for the all-ingenious ‘Figure in the Carpet,’…nothing would induce me to come into close quarters with you on the correspondence of this anecdote.…All I can at this point say is that if ever I was aware of ground and matter for a significant fable, I was aware of them in that connection.” He adds that the impulse which led him to write the story, far from opposing a search for abstruse themes, was his opposition to the general “mistrust of anything like close or analytic appreciation—appreciation, to be appreciation, implying, of course, some such rudimentary zeal.…What I most remember of my proper process is the lively impulse, at the root of it, to reinstate analytic appreciation.” And in the story itself there is evidence that James intended Corvick to discover an actual pattern in Vereker's novels.
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- Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1975
References
1 See Vaid, Krishna B., Technique in the Tales of Henry James (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), pp. 84–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar, citing the partly similar views of Blackmur, R.P. (“In the Country of the Blue” Dupee, Frederick W., ed., The Question of Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays [London, 1947], pp. 214–15)Google Scholar, and Westbrook, Perry D. (“The Supersubtle Fry,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, VIII, [ 1953]: 137–39Google Scholar). “The point of the story,” Vaid says, “seems to be that the whole quest of ‘the figure in the carpet’ proceeds along lines that are almost fatuous—the inquirers approach it as they would a puzzle, and it is not a puzzle.…And the moral of it is that the methods pursued by his three admirers do not signify a genuine adult interest in Vereker's works: their methods are not the right ones” (pp. 84, 89).
2 New York Edition (Scribners, 1909), XV, xii.
3 Ibid., xv.
4 Ibid., 244.
5 This is Vaid's view. Blackmur thinks that “James may have meant more for it “The Figure in the Carpet”—his preface suggests that he did—but it would seem actually, as written, to mean no more than that there is a figure in the carpet if you can imagine it for yourself. It is rather like Kafka, manqúe, the exasperation of the mystery without the presence of mystery, or a troubled conscience without any evidence of guile” (quoted in Vaid, pp. 87-88). Westbrook says, “Both on the surface and in its implications the fable is a warning to critics not to take a self-important author too seriously.…The critics in the story are mere dupes; the novelist is a poseur, a fraud.…Corvick has only pretended to find the figure in the carpet in order to win the girl” (quoted in Vaid, p. 88). Vaid agrees that “there is a hint in the tale that Corvick did not discover any secret and that his claim is just a clever trick to patch up his relations with Gwendolen and hasten her into marriage” (p. 85) but believes that Blackmur's view “seems to contradict the intention embodied in the text as well as the preface” (p. 87) and concludes that the “excellence of Vereker's works has to be taken on trust. The main emphasis of the tale.…is on how we should go about the task of interpreting the works of such a writer” (p. 89). Anderson, Quentin (The American Henry James [New Brunswick, N.J., 1957], pp. 148–49)Google Scholar also believes there is an actual pattern that Corvick fails to discover: “The critics in The Figure in the Carpet.…have before them an authentically great novelist, whose intention they cannot discover because they have no power to love.”
6 N.Y. Ed. XV, 242-43, 245.
7 Ibid., 264
8 Ibid., 245-46.
9 Ibid., 240-41, 269.
10 Baumgaertel, Gerhard, “The Concept of the Pattern in the Carpet: Conclusions from T.S. Eliot,” Revue des Langues Vivantes, XXV (1959): 300–6.Google Scholar
11 Wilson, Edmund, “The Pilgrimage of Henry James” (from The Shores of Light, 1952)Google Scholar reprinted in Edel, Leon ed. Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, (New York, 1963), p. 68.Google Scholar
12 Anderson, pp. 208-9, 229-30.
13 Ibid., 149; “Corvick, whose name suggests a bird acquisitive of bright and shining objects, is said to have found the ‘figure.’ What he has found is an image, or inversion, which reflects his greedy self. His death and the death of his wife promptly ensue, and these are emblematic death. It is therefore true, as most critics have concluded, that The Figure in the Carpet gives no clue as to what the ‘figure’ was. The point it enforces is simply that the artist is a celebrant; he loves the image as it reflects life, not as it reflects his narrow, personal, ineffectual self.’“
14 Notes of a Son and Brother (New York, 1914), pp. 156, 178.Google Scholar
15 N.Y. Ed. XV, 220-22, 226, 229-32.
16 Ibid., 235.
17 Ibid., 239-40.
18 Wunsch, William F. ed., Marriage: Ideals and Realization: Compiled from the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (New York, 1929), p. 21.Google Scholar
19 Ibid., 14, 60, 77.
20 Ibid., 150.
21 N.Y. Ed. XV, 252.
22 Ibid., 251, 253, 255, 257-58, 262.
23 Ibid., 263, 265.
24 Ibid., 236.
25 Ibid., 266.
26 Wunsch, p. 30.
27 Ibid., 45.
28 Ibid., 18, 29, 141, 144-45.
30 Ibid., 250, 267.
31 Ibid., 272.
32 Ibid., 274, 276-77.
33 Wunsch, pp. 104-5.
34 Ibid., 145.
35 Ibid., 2-3, 77.
36 See Blackmur's remark quoted in footnote 5.
37 Lebowitz, Naomi, The Imagination of Loving: Henry James's Legacy to the Novel (Detroit, Mich., 1965), p. 17.Google Scholar
38 Anderson, p. 146.
39 N.Y. Ed. XV. xv-xvi.