Abstract
Part IV addresses the concept of the sublime and the feelings of madness and solitude that ensue from it. Whether described as an extremely powerful feeling, a privation, or an abyss, the sublime is a relevant trope to examine the different aporias that lie at the heart of each metacognitive quest. Accordingly, this chapter analyzes “The Figure in the Carpet” in a way that highlights the perverse and destructive curiosity of a literary critic who desperately tries to grasp a writer’s secret and is always comically and horrifyingly prevented from reaching his goal, consoling himself with the ignorance of others. James’s tale introduces the theme of madness and questions the very possibility of indisputable truths.
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Notes
- 1.
For a reading of Eurêka as a metacognitive mystery tale, see Bertrand and Delville’s article (2016).
- 2.
This discovery is not unlike what Peter Stillman Sr. is trying to recreate in Auster’s City of Glass, namely, the “natural,” pure, prelapsarian language of man, the language of God (1990, 39).
- 3.
It is tempting to link this timely illness with that of Pierre Pain whose lungs were scorched at the battle of Verdun. Similarly, it is also interesting to note that the young painter studies in Munich instead of Paris because his aunt and sponsor sees the French capital as “the school of evil, the abyss” (James 1964, 301). Paris is equally described as a gray, rainy, and forsaken place in Bolaño’s novel. What the poor woman probably fears is that her nephew turns into another “painter of modern life,” a flâneur or a poète maudit. As for the narrator, he would have preferred his brother to work in Paris.
- 4.
Reading the silence “full of holes” is also what Pain tries to do when he enters Vallejo’s room (Bolaño 2010, 40).
- 5.
This title, like the name The Middle, implies an idea of process. Both titles symbolize the center of the labyrinth: they “reinforce the image of a journey of penetration, crossing barriers, reaching depths, but remaining always, precisely, in the middle, on the way” (Miller 1980, 116).
- 6.
The narrator similarly refers to Miss Erme’s first novel entitled “Deep Down” as a “desert in which she had lost herself,” digging a “wonderful hole in the sand – a cavity out of which Corvick had still more remarkably pulled her” (James 1964, 296).
- 7.
One can of course doubt the narrator’s good faith here and question his ability to detect Vereker’s influence since he himself is unable to determine what the author’s “general intention” is.
- 8.
The representation of the city as an urban jungle is a common trope in literature, relating the image of the metropolis to the wilderness usually found in adventure novels, which, in the second half of the nineteenth century, have gradually been replaced by crime narratives.
- 9.
When asked to review Vereker’s latest book, she cynically laughs and replies that she does not write about others but that others write about her.
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Dechêne, A. (2018). Henry James’s “The Figure in the Carpet”. In: Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94469-2_10
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