The Ironic Figure in ‘The Figure in the Carpet’

Abstract

Published in 1896, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ has created more controversy than any other of James’s short fictions about writers and critics. No less a Jamesian than F. O. Matthiessen found the story ‘overly ingenious’ and ‘fresher in intention than in effect’ (Stories of Writers and Artists 1953, p. 16). Despite James’s often-quoted claim in the Preface to Volume XV that his aim in the story was to ‘reinstate analytical appreciation’, his idea did not develop from the anger and disillusionment which had informed such close predecessors of the story as ‘The Death of the Lion’ (1894) and ‘The Next Time’ (1895). In tone, the story is closest to the radical comic irony of ‘The Coxon Fund’. In substance, it goes far to advance, in comic terms, James’s developing argument about the art of criticism, of reading, in relation to the art of fiction and to dramatise the difficulties of that essential relation for both critics and novelists. Moreover, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ prefigures James’s issues in The Sacred Fount, where, as we shall see, he dramatises a collaborative relation between the writer-artist and his audience and the responsibility of each party in the creation of art. Seen in the context of James’s developing portrayal of an ideal relation between the writer-artist and the critic-as-idealreader, the celebrated ambiguities of the story fall into perspective (see Rimmon, 1977, pp. 95–115; 228–32). Issues such as whether there is an undiscovered ‘figure’ in the fiction of Hugh Vereker and whether anyone discovers it merely frame the comic focus upon the young critics’ misguided quest to discover the illusive point novelist Hugh Vereker claims lies hidden like buried treasure in the rich mine of his fiction.