Since Gwendolen refuses to share her knowledge, the narrator speculates, "the figure in the carpet [was] traceable or describable only for husbands and wives—for lovers supremely united." She explained that our friend, abroad, had just settled down to it when interrupted by her mother’s death, and that then, on his return, he had been kept from work by the engrossments into which that calamity was to plunge them. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ continues to frustrate readers, but when analysing James’s story we should avoid coming face-to-face with the narrator’s selfish features when seeking to find ‘the’ meaning to the story. The story ostensibly concerns a young literary critics who greatly admires the writer Hugh Vereker. Once we realise that James’s narrator is unreliable and not especially perceptive, we begin to doubt other aspects of the story. Fair enough, we might say: he wishes to remain focused on the story at hand. (For more on this, we recommend Nicholas Freeman’s excellent 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture).) Among the summaries and analysis available for The Figure in the Carpet, there are 1 Full Study Guide, 1 Short Summary and 2 Book Reviews. Neither we nor Henry James’s narrator learn the secret, the ‘figure in the carpet’. For a critic to lay claim to naïveté is unusual. A meeting with Vereker, however, shows him that he – and all other critics – have in fact missed the great point of Vereker's work, and the critic (and his editor) thereupon devote themselves to trying to unravel the mystery. Chapter Summary for Henry James's The Figure in the Carpet, chapter 8 summary. "The Figure in the Carpet" is a short story (sometimes considered a novella) by American writer Henry James first published in 1896. The Figure in the Carpet - Claremont Review of Books. James thought the crowds who were laughing uproariously at Wilde’s one-liners and farcical plot were vulgar, and he gave up his plans to write for the theatre. First, his choice to tell the story using the first-person narrator of the (unnamed) critic means that we can never learn the secret of the story: the narrator is in the dark, so we are in the dark, since he is our only access to the ‘truth’ of Vereker’s work. patronising; but when I take the little measure of my course (a . Enter your email address to subscribe to this site and receive notifications of new posts by email. ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ invites numerous interpretations, many of them equally plausible. Henry James's The Figure in the Carpet Plot Summary. The two men are left scratching their heads over the solution to this mystery of ‘the figure in the carpet’. The figure in the carpet might take on another twist or two, but the sentence had virtually been written. A Summary and Analysis of Henry James’s ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ by 1 comment. What we can analyse in James’s story is the narration, and this is important for two reasons. Intriguing post. We’re used to Sherlock Holmes solving the mystery and illuminating us, and the rest of the story, so all loose ends are tied up. The Mysterious Figure Symbol Analysis Next. This tells us a great deal about the narrator, and it isn’t particularly endearing. And we should remember that we are readers and human beings before we are critics – something that James’s narrator all too quickly forgets, if he knew it in the first place. In the preface to his A Choice of Kipling's Verse (1941), T. S. Eliot wrote, "Nowadays, we all look for the Figure in the Carpet." "I had done a few things and earned a few pence" (p. 357), declares the narrator in the opening line. In hardcover, it was first published in June 1896 in a volume titled Embarrassments, simultaneously issued by London publisher William Heinemann (1250 copies) and the Macmillan Company in New York (1600 copies). We might also draw a link between ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ and a story published seven years before by James’s bête noire, Oscar Wilde, titled ‘The Portrait of Mr W. H.’ Wilde’s story is about a man’s attempt to find evidence for his own literary interpretation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which views the sonnets addressed to a ‘Fair Youth’ as homoerotic poems about a specific person, a boy-actor named Willie Hughes – the ‘Mr W. H.’ of the Sonnets’ dedication-page, according to Wilde’s protagonist. "The Figure in the Carpet" has evaded definitive interpretation. Spurred on by this, the narrator sets out to discover what ‘the figure in the carpet’ really is that will unlock the secrets of Vereker’s work. Gwendolen dies in childbirth, and the narrator approaches Drayton Deane, but is surprised to learn that Gwendolen’s widower is clueless about either the nature of the secret, or even that there is a secret at all. Is Vereker being truthful when he confides that there is a central ‘idea’ that provides the key to his work? Post was not sent - check your email addresses! The tribe of scholiasts prides itself on its super-subtlety, its powers of penetration, its ability to get at an author or into him. But the widowed husband is surprised and humiliated by the news of his late wife's great "secret," and he and the narrator conclude by sharing the same curiosity. It contains ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ as well as most of James’s other classic tales and has an invaluable introduction and notes. When Corvick returns to Britain, he and Gwendolen marry (they had had an understanding for a while, but Gwendolen’s mother had objected to the match), and Corvick announces that he will write up his discovery in an article on Vereker’s work. "The Figure in the Carpet" is also significant because it prefigures a prominent twentieth-century literary theory, that of the death of the author, expounded in the late 1960s by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. But when he meets the author in person at a social event, Vereker tells him that whilst the review is intelligent, he has missed the hidden underlying issue which informs all of his writing. "The Figure in the Carpet" is also significant because it prefigures a prominent twentieth-century literary theory, that of the death of the author, expounded in the late 1960s by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. As the story progresses, the narrator begins to imagine that, in a certain light, a mysterious figure appears within the wallpaper. The narrator, a writer for a literary newspaper, prides himself on his astute review of Hugh Vereker's latest novel. Meanwhile, Corvick leaves Britain for India on a special journalistic commission, and writes from there that he has discovered the secret, but refuses to say what it is. He confides this news to two people: his best friend and rival, a fellow critic named George Corvick, and Gwendolen, an aspiring novelist. It may be that ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, then, was partly motivated by James’s desire to offer his altogether more studied and subtle take on a similar theme to the one we encounter in Wilde’s story. Vereker dismisses his efforts, explaining that all critics have "missed my little point," "the particular thing I've written my books most for," "the thing for the critic to find," "my secret," "like a complex figure in a Persian carpet." But it would be gullible for us to accept everything the narrator tells us, simply because he has accepted it. The Figure in the Carpet. But whereas Wilde’s story contains action, drama, and sensation, James’s is typically more nuanced and understated. Is it a satire on the vogue for popular fiction in the 1890s, such as the hugely successful detective stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and James – in withholding the solution to the riddle, and suggesting that there may not even be a solution – is deliberately playing with readers’ expectations concerning the detective story? On his way home, he stops in Italy where he writes that he has met Vereker and the novelist has confirmed that Corvick has discovered his idea. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. He is also quickly badgering the bereaved widow for information about her dead husband’s work: did he finish his article? This short story–related article is a stub. In his book Henry James (1913), Ford Madox Ford wrote that after it was published, James's contemporaries set themselves on a quest for the Figure as an identifiable physical entity. The story ostensibly concerns a young literary critic who greatly admires the writer Hugh Vereker. The Figure in the Carpet is an important part of the plot of Eureka, a novel by Anthony Quinn. Corvick and his novelist fiancée, Gwendolen, pursue "the trick" without success until Corvick, traveling alone in India, wires Gwendolen and the narrator "Eureka! Immense." But in the same sentence he quickly brings the focus back to himself: to ‘my patience and my pain’. It is told in the first person; the narrator, whose name is never revealed, meets his favorite author and becomes obsessed with discovering the secret meaning or intention of all the author's works. Was Henry James’s great tale one big joke? It is possible that James's Figure is a palpable object that, like a talisman, facilitates interpretation of his own work. Henry James (1843 - 1916). In Iser’s paradigmatic interpretation James’s story juxtaposes two radically different conceptions of meaning: according to The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. Although he pronounces the death of his ‘best friend’ to have been an ‘unmitigated tragedy’, he is happy to ‘pass rapidly over’ it and what it ‘meant for me’. However, she’s having none of it, and instead weds Drayton Deane, another critic and rival of the narrator’s. The Figure in the Carpet HENRY JAMES IS one of the few writers who dared to treat in literary form, in "The Figure in the Carpet" (1896), the thorny and inexhaust- ible question of the relationship between the writer (and therefore the text) and h1S critics. Three other stories appear in the book: "Glasses", "The Next Time", and "The Way It Came". Except in the case of The Figure in the Carpet, that guy is the author himself, in gleeful frustration over the density of literary critics. LibriVox recording of The Figure in the Carpet, by Henry James. Her answer was as prompt as my question: the article, which had been barely begun, was a mere heartbreaking scrap. A meeting with Vereker, however, shows him that he – and all other critics – have in fact missed the great point of Vereker's work, and the critic (and his editor) thereupon devote themselves to trying to unravel the mystery. Learn more about The Figure in the Carpet with a detailed plot summary and plot diagram. And yet the story in which the idiom was born, Henry James’s 1896 tale ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, refuses to open itself up to easy interpretations or analysis. Abstract Henry Jamess novella The Figure in the Carpet (1896) offers an ironic commentary on the failure of the literary critic or reader to fully establish the writers intentions. Find a summary of this and each chapter of The Figure in the Carpet! The great literary critic Frank Kermode wrote of “The Figure in the Carpet” that “Vereker’s secret—‘the thing for the critic to find’—is not, we infer, the sort of thing the celibate and impotent may look for when they speculate about sex. I find HJ’s use of ‘figure’ notable- as a fluent French speaker he’d have been aware of the connotations of ‘face’, so this would support your persuasive interpretation that the ‘key’ To the puzzle is locatable, but elusive – and may be imaginary. He refuses to tell Gwendolen the secret until they are married, and then dies in an accident. But this remains somewhat speculative. This would still be possible with a limited third-person ‘omniscient’ narrator, but there is a second reason why James’s first-person narration is a triumph. Summary The narrator, a writer, prides himself on his astute review of Hugh Vereker's latest novel. Both Wilde’s and James’s stories turn on literary interpretation and on finding the ‘key’ to unlocking a writer’s work. Or is he pulling the narrator’s leg? So what is this ambiguous story saying? James, unable to remain while the play was being staged, went across the road and watched Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, which was going down a storm with its packed audience. Is it a satire on the relationship between authors and critics, whereby James is mocking those critics and reviewers who aren’t really interested in understanding an author’s work, but merely want to advance their own careers? But while on his honeymoon with Gwendolen, Corvick is killed in an accident, having completed just a few pages (which reveal nothing of ‘the figure in the carpet’) of his great article on Vereker. But far from asserting the critic's powerlessness in But at a party, he overhears Vereker telling the other guests that the narrator’s review was ‘the usual twaddle’. Of all the things that are ‘heartbreaking’ about the death of his ‘best friend’, Corvick’s failure to reveal the secret of Vereker’s work before he popped his clogs is the most painful for him. THE FIGURE IN THE CARPET . Tale by Henry James, collected in Embarrassments (1896).Considered to be a self-revelation of the author, this is the narrative of an earnest young critic's study of the works of the brilliant novelist Hugh Vereker—his search for “the figure in the carpet,” which Vereker tells him cryptically is the key to an appreciation of his books, although no one has yet understood it. This ideal rings true in The Figure in the Carpet because the symbolism and imagery relates to all time periods because they deal with basic characteristics of human nature. When Vereker discovers the narrator heard him badmouthing his review, he seeks to mollify him by telling him that nobody has managed to divine the true meaning of his work, but that there is an idea present in all of his novels, which he likens to the complex woven figure in a Persian carpet, which provides the ‘secret’ or ‘key’ to understanding all of his work. had time to begin to think I was finer than was perceived by the . "The Figure in the Carpet" is also significant because it prefigures a prominent twentieth-century literary theory, that of the death of the author, expounded in the late 1960s by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. Eventually this figure takes on the form of a woman, and she seems to be trapped within the wallpaper. ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ has become a short-hand or idiom for the ‘key’ to understanding a writer’s work. The narrator becomes quickly convinced that Vereker is in earnest, so he, in turn, convinces us. Looking for the Figure in the Carpet of the Symbolic of Motives Robert Wess, Oregon State University Abstract : As William H. Rueckert notes, Essays toward a Symbolic of Motives is one of the three texts that one must work through to know what Burke’s A Symbolic of Motives is about. An unnamed narrator reviews the latest novel by the author Hugh Vereker, and congratulates himself on having divined the true meaning of Vereker’s book. The Puzzling Message of Figure in the Carpet At the beginning of "The Figure in the Carpet", the main character considers the criticism of literature to be a career, something he does for money. The main character is a The central premise of this story - a desperate search for the cryptic essence of one authors works - reminds me in particular of Gene Wolfe. Perhaps, as may be the case with Hugh Vereker’s work, there is no one central ‘idea’ or secret after all. 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