Abstract
In a 24 October 1895 Notebook entry, Henry James reviewed his ideas for a story on the struggle of literary critics with ‘the Author’s Secret’. Interestingly, this note rehearses the plot of what would become ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ not in the author’s ‘proper identity’, but from the perspective of an unnamed narrator-critic, punctuating the rich comic-rhetorical resources of this shifted focus:
Our evaluation can be linked only to a practice, and this practice is that of writing. On the one hand, there is what it is possible to write, and on the other, what is no longer possible to write: what is within the practice of a writer and what has left it: which texts would I consent to write (to rewrite), to desire, to put forth as a force in this world of mine? What evaluation finds is precisely this value: what can be written (rewritten) today: the writerly. Why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text.
Roland Barthes, S/Z (p. 4)
Narratives portray the motors of desire that drive and consume their plots, and they also lay bare the nature of narration as a form of human desire: the need to tell as a primary human drive that seeks to seduce and to subjugate the listener, to implicate him in the thrust of a desire that never can quite speak its name — never can quite come to the point — but that insists on speaking over and over again its movement toward that name. For the analyst of narrative, these different yet convergent vectors of desire suggest the need to explore more fully the shaping function of desire, its modeling of the plot, and also the dynamics of exchange and transmission, the roles of tellers and listeners.
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (p. 61)
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Notes and References
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© 1992 Marcel Cornis-Pop
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Cornis-Pope, M. (1992). An ‘Intimate Commerce with Figures’: On Rereading/Rewriting Narratives. In: Hermeneutic Desire and Critical Rewriting. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371378_1
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