The Figure in the Carpet

Author(s): J. Hillis Miller

Source: Poetics Today , Spring, 1980, Vol. 1, No. 3, Special Issue: Narratology I: Poetics
of Fiction (Spring, 1980), pp. 107-118
Published by: Duke University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1772414

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 THE FIGURE IN THE CARPET

J. HILLIS MILLER
English, Yale University

Images of filaments, ficelles, lines, figures drawn with lines, w

embroidered cloth, thread themselves through the dense metaphor
of Henry James's prefaces.' These prefaces taken together no doub
most important treatise on the novel in English. A passage in the
Roderick Hudson is an appropriate place to begin, since it bears not on
difficulty of beginning but on the even greater difficulty of stopping
begun. In the passage I cite, the issue is a double one: first, how, in writ
to draw a line around the material to be treated, to give it an edge
which appears as a natural stopping place in all directions beyond whic
nothing relevant to the subject, and, second, how, within those limits
what is left inside the charmed circle totally and with total continuity
nothing and establishing or articulating all the connections, all of wha
a splendid phrase, called "the labyrinth of linkages."2 Contin
completeness, on the one hand, and finite form, on the other, this is
necessity:

Yet it must even then have begun for me too, the ache of fear, that wa
so familiar, of being unduly tempted and led on by "developments"; whic

I This essay is drawn from a book in progress to be called Ariadne's Thread. The
image of the line in narrative and in language about narrative. James's insight into th
continuity in story-telling finds an appropriate place in a study which is an extended eff
the unorganizable, to trace a sequential line making a figure through a tangled web o
linear imagery in narrative. This web extends in all directions from any given sta
Daedalian complexity. On its surface innumerable figures might be traced, in the impo
to achieve Apollonian reduction of Dionysiac materials. Such an attempt would be like
the too rational Theseus, which marked out ever-changing, winding figures on
compulsively retracing the labyrinth in an always frustrated desire to master it (see
The present essay is one more execution of the dance of Theseus.
2 Cited by Erlich (1969: 241). Tolstoj was attacking critics who attempted to reduce A
to a brief formula. Critics rather, he said, should inquire into "the laws governing tha
linkages (labirint sceplenij) which is literary art."

? Poetics Today, Vol. 1:3 (1980), 107-118

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108 J. HILLIS MILLER

desperate discipline of the question inv

the novelist's process, and it is by the
and lives; but they impose on him, thro
a proportionate anxiety. They are the
and drops without them; the painte
related state, to each other, of certain
once they have all been recognized, is
none of those that directly ministe
remaining meanwhile a matter of high
felicity of form and composition, as a p
what point is such and such a developm
point beyond which it ceases to be rig
of one's subject, does a particular r
concerned in that expression?'

Completeness; continuity; finite for

to this triple necessity in the product
given subject or relation within that
nuance. What is the difference betw
interest and only indirectly or loosel
The edge is no sharp boundary but an
quite so rigorously relevant, but not
accrued interest become so small tha
nearest zero, so to speak? What does
in the carpet? Figures of speech, em
persons of the drama? Whatever the
for James the necessity of complete
form, can never by any means other
triple necessity is a triple bind.
The reasons for this are multiple. O
limit to a given subject. To represent
web of relevant relations extend
direction: "Really, universally, rela
however, that this problem could
boundary line establishing an edg
himself to go. The fundamental ac
periphery. This periphery must b
wall beyond which there is nothi
invisible enclosure or reduction, like
appear, or like the limits, no limits,
such a universe, one can go anyw
enclosed, without ever encounter
nowhere," "the exquisite problem

3 Henry James (1950: 4-5). Further referenc

page numbers in this text.

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 THE FIGURE IN THE CARPET 109

geometry of his own, the circle within which

(P, 5).
Even when this reduction of the infinite to the finite has been accomplished,
however, the problem of the limitless reforms itself within the magic circle.
Continuity is everything for the novelist. This means that every possible relation
must be retraced within the circle, every figure drawn on its surface. Since each
entity, "figure," or "thing," for James, exists as its relations, to represent the
figure or thing completely is to represent all its relations. The figure. by a cunning
equivocation, is the figure made by the lines which may be drawn between it and
other things, other figures. The multiplicity of these lines would be paralyzing if
the writer consulted it directly. He has to know it and not to know it in order to
focus on one relation without being distracted by all the others. Here is another
way in which the narrative line may be described as spun out of its own
impossibility. Even the tiniest temporal or spatial gap in the universal continuity
would be a disaster. The writer has to be both aware of this necessity and force
himself fiercely to ignore it. This is as impossible a task as being told no to think
of something without being given a positive substitute: "Don't think of your own
name." The artist, says James, "is in the perpetual predicament that the
continuity of things is the whole matter, for him, of comedy and tragedy; that this
continuity is never, by the space of an instant or an inch, broken, and that, to do
anything at all, he has at once intensely to consult and intensely to ignore it" (P,
5).
The infinity and hence impossibility of the narrator's task reforms itself, then,
within the arbitrarily closed line which was drawn to make the infinite finite. One
way to see this infinity of the finite is to recognize an equivocation in the concept
of representation, an equivocation also to be encountered in the term diegesis. A
diegesis is the following through of a line already there. A representation is a
presenting again of something once present. Any telling is a retelling, a new line
different from the first line. Therefore it contains within itself the potentiality of
further repetition. One doubling invites endless redoublings.
In the passage which follows the one just quoted, James speaks of life as a
featureless canvas. The novelist's work is the embroidery of figures on this
surface. Life itself is a woven texture, but an undifferentiated or unfigured one. It
contains the possibility of many figures rather than being a single unequivocal
figure already present. Representation is the choice of one line to follow with the
new thread interlaced from hole to hole on the already woven canvas of life. This
new thread makes a figure, a flower on that ground. The same canvas contains
the possibility, however, of an infinite number of slightly different variations on
the "original" flower, set side by side on the canvas like the figures on a quilt, but
intrinsically present as possibilities of the original finite square or circle. They are
in fact not only possibilities but necessities. The initial requirement was for total
completeness in the retracing of all possible relations.
Here the figure of the embroidered canvas breaks down, like all such figures,
and, in its breaking down, as in all such cases, reveals an impasse which was
imolicit as much as a conceptual as a figurative possibility in the "original" idea

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110 J. HILLIS MILLER

to be expressed. The narrative li

episode, in a linear sequence, mak
of relation in the elements of th
number of repetitive variations
come first. These in fact must be
with no intrinsic priorities of orig
must make a line. In the spatial fig
imaged as separate flowers side by
a canvas which, at first a figure fo
circle the artist has drawn by th
"boundless" once more, since it
implicit in the finite. All the flow
be imaged in that circle but only t
each figure somewhat different fr
claim that the demand for absolute
and intensely ignored,
will perhaps pass but for a supersub
embroiderer of the canvas of life so
expanse of that surface, of the boun
needle, and of the tendency inherent
and consume as many as possible of
of the figure, involved thus an im
among them. That would have been,
it not the very nature of the holes
positively a thousand lures and d
The finite has here become mag
paradoxical law, which governs all
narrow, restricted, and exclusive t
four persons in The Golden Bowl, t
greater and greater length and eve
disproportionate. Each work has
lopsided shape seeking to be hidd
incomplete treatment of certain
These "flowers and figures," w
all-inclusive design encompassing t
repeating figure specified and then
the flower is an ancient one for fig
the anthology or bouquet of trop
expressing by displacement wha
language. Of what are James's fl
literal for these figures? The answ
is a matter of both/and and at the
both/and, of having something.wh
once single and multiple. It is the f
figure of the repeated configuratio

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 THE FIGURE IN THE CARPET 111

actual "figures" or characters of the story, and at

relation, for a design which emerges only from th
to each other, of certain figures and things."
"Flower" or "figure" - the figure as flower -
configuration made by the "realistically" trea
relationships, with all their abundance of psyc
realistic human story is the literal of which Jam
metaphor. On the other hand, the characters in
end of the story. They are themselves, in all th
material with which James creates the flowers or
story, like a repeated figure in a carpet. The hum
figure, which, paradoxically, is the literal object o
which could never be described or named liter
figure or flower, that is, as catachresis. Catachres
flower no flower which poisons the antholog
Catachresis is the name for that procedure where
detail of his procedure as a novelist to name in fi
abusive transfer, something else for which there i
within the convention of referentiality which
accepts, no existence. This something else is fi
flower itself.

"The Figure in the Carpet" is James's most explicit allegorical narrative of this
procedure, but it is of course the procedure of all his fiction, and in fact of fiction
in general. It is not self-referentiality which subverts the assumptions and
procedures of realistic fiction, since self-reference is still reference and therefore
is assimilable into the assumptions of mimetic representation. This means that all
those Anglo-American studies of the novel which trace the supposed gradual
development within it or constant presence within it since Cervantes of
self-reflection on its own procedures remain, in spite of their considerable
sophistication, caught in the false assumptions of mimetic representationalism.
Examples of such books are Robert Alter, 1975, Peter Garrett, 1969, Alan
Friedman, 1967, and Frank Kermode, 1968. Self-referentiality is the mirror
image of extra-referentiality. The former imperturbably reaffirms the
assumption of the latter, since the notion of self-reference depends for its
definition on the assumption that there could be such a thing as a
straightforwardly realistic novel, from which the self-referential novel is a
deviation, modification, or development. The more or less hidden presence of
catachresis in one way or another in any "realistic" narrative, for example in the
fact that there is no "literal" language for the representation of states of
consciousness and interior experience, does, however, constantly subvert the
claims of literal reference of any realistic narrative, even the claims of
straightforward mirroring made by the most apparently simple stories. This
subversion makes all realistic narrative "unreadable," undecidable, irreducible
to any single unequivocal interpretation.

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112 J. HILLIS MILLER

"The Figure in the Carpet" is a sto

thematic level, on the figurative le
as text. As Shlomith Rimmon has
fundamentally uncertain in mea
supporting two incompatible rea
presented "monological" readings o
the story itself, in its presentat
clarification, as by their false pres
single, logically unified meaning. R
too rational, too "canny," too much
any literary work, for example
scheme. The multiple ambiguous
alternative possibilities. They are
unreadability, each possibility ge
Rimmon's concept of ambiguity,
misleadingly logical schematizatio
blind alley of unreadability encoun
work.

The notion of unreadability must be distinguished, in one direction, from a

definition of ambiguity in literature as plurisignificance or richness of meaning.
In the other direction, the notion of unreadability must be distinguished from
that perspectivism which holds that each reader bring something different to a
text and so the text has a different meaning for each reader. Though the insight
into ambiguity and irony in the New Critics, for example in Empson (from which,
by the way, Rimmon distinguishes her concept of ambiguity), goes beyond the
notion of plurisignificance, nevertheless, such insights tend to be covered over or
controlled, within the New Criticism, by the notion of organic unity, the notion
that a work has total and totalizable significance, even if that totalizing is an
insight which the critic can never satisfactorily express in words. Though a
literary text is seen as having a richness of meaning which is beyond paraphrase,
nevertheless, for the New Criticism, that meaning makes a whole.

I See also Rimmon, 1973. Two other recent valuable discussions of James's story may be mentioned.
One is Tsvetan Todorov, 1973. Though this essay does not discuss "The Figure in the Carpet" in
detail, but rather attempts to find a common theme in all James's tales, the figure in his carpet, so to
speak, Todorov's formulation is close to my own: "James's tales are based on the quest for an
absolute and absent cause. ...The secret of James's tales is, therefore, precisely this existence of an
essential secret, of something which is not named, of an absent, overwhelming force which puts the
whole machinery of the narrative into motion." 1 differ from Todorov in arguing that James allows
also for the possibility that the "cause" may be not only absent but non-existent, a phantom
projection. The other recent discussion of "The Figure in the Carpet" is by Wolfgang Iser (1978:
3-10), who uses James's story as an opening illustration of the way readers have expected narratives
to have kernel meanings which, once reached, will allow the reader to throw away the husk, so to
speak, dismiss the surface details as superficial, mere means of access to the deeper significance.
Once that is found, the story can be dispensed with as the vehicle of a separable meaning. Iser. of
course, wants to argue that the meaning is in the details, but this too. as 1 have claimed, is part of the
metaphysical paradigm.

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 THE FIGURE IN THE CARPET 113

"Unreadability," on the other hand, is som

work, an effect of the rhetoric or of the play
the work, an effect the words of the work im
"reader response." Moreover, instead of ric
"unreadability" names the presence in a te
contradictory meanings which imply one a
another, but which may by no means be f
"Unreadability" names the discomfort of t
Mobius strip which has two sides, but o
interminably.
There is nothing new about the experienc
literature to which the name "unreadabilit
great writers themselves through all the centu
know this experience, as their works show.
writers in their readings of their own work,
lure of single and totalizable meaning, which
They have tended to believe in the presence o
for each work. This lure is always presen
unreadability. Unreadability is the generation
possession of the logos, while at the same time
in a torsion of undecidability which is intrin
the reader to believe that he ought to be able
same time making that saying impossible
Figure in the Carpet" is about, though to clai
say what it is "about" is of course to succumb
be better to say that the story dramatizes
rather, since this experience can only be named
not least in the recurrent pattern of inter
human base for the story's allegorizing of
The "figure in the carpet" is on the "lite
narrator to formulate his undertanding of V
novelist is unified by the presence of a sin
which none of his critics has noticed, though
reveal. The reader of this admirably comic sto
meant by this figure in the carpet, and fig
adjacent terms and figures for this figure wh
time or another, use:

"Isn't there," [asks Vereker in his midnight co

writer a particular thing of that sort, the thing t
thing without the effort to achieve which he wo
his passion, the part of the business in which,
intensely? Well, it's that!...
...there's an idea in my work without which I
whole job. It's the finest fullest intention of the
I think, a triumph of patience, of ingenuity. I ou

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114 J. HILLIS MILLER

say; but that nobody does say it is prec

little trick of mine, from book to book
the surface of it. The order, the form
constitute for the initiated a complet
for the critic to look for. It strikes

The unifying design is here spoken

and yet "in" it too. It existed firs
author, father and mother at once,
was then "applied." What, however,
novelist? "I wondered as I walked aw
second meeting by Vereker's refu
carpet of his works, "where he ha
"applied," the intention fulfilled, it
pattern within and behind the wo
whole, and at the same time above a
genius. The work as a totality, its
what is superficially visible in it,
figure. The structure in question, on
logos, of God, for example, as the c
as their ground, as the signature wr
always present in veiled form, since
in disguised, delegated, or represe
visible, the overall pattern of Verek
the face. At the same time it is nece
but the sign, signature, or trace of
figure is precisely a figure, a substi
The various figures for this fig
everywhere in "The Figure in The
the design of interpersonal relation
or restate the traditional metaphysi
always present subversive anaglyp
that the figure behind the surfa
superficial and visible figurative
without the other. Each generates t
figure and ground reversing constan
The development of the story in "T
wonderfully comic series of cl
possibilities latent in the "logocen
within container, that it is beneath
thread, that it is all surface and no
all, that it is the abyss, that it is
satisfaction which destroys the on

5 Henry James (1909: 230-231). Further ref

by page numbers in this text.

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 THE FIGURE IN THE CARPET 115

always figures, since the "it" can only be express

terms for the "it," which means that these figur
the figure that explodes the distinction be
catachresis. Rhythm, ratio, or proportion, measu
a design, a general and organizing intention;
possibility, and yet existing only as objective the
below; hidden, and yet revealed; ground, gro
pattern, all three; secret, perhaps phantasmal, th
the visible beads strung on that thread - in sh
"Is it a kind of esoteric message?" asks the de
which Vereker replies, "Ha my dear fellow, i
journalese!" (233). Vereker refuses to give any
labyrinth because, as he says, "my whole lucid ef
page and line and letter. The thing's as concrete t
a hook, a piece of cheese in a mousetrap. It's stuck
is stuck into your shoe. It governs every line, it c
i, it places every comma" (233). Immanent law wh
therefore present in that detail, as contained wit
"thing" has the power of punctuating the line of
rhythm of pauses in the chain of signs which is
gives heads to what might otherwise be decapitat
capitalization. It dots every i. It gives a ruling
establishing a pervasive law or figure of the who
leads the one who sees it by the false promis
saturating of emptiness and blandness. This p
diabolical satire of fulfillment. It leads in fact to t
caged bird changes in mid-chain of figures into t
safely theoretical spectator, watching at a distanc
which becomes a means of execution. Vereker's im
a promise. "Give it up - give it up!" he mocki
"anxiously" says to the narrator at the end of
The "general intention" of Vereker's work is, as
of buried treasure" (235), visible, audible, or
"whiffs and hints,...faint wandering notes of a h
idol or goddess (251), and yet visible as a mode of
in her mortal incarnation. This mode is the rhythm
vera incessu patuit dea! (251). "It's the very str
pearls are strung on!" (241). In short, as the na
like a complex figure in a Persian carpet" (240).
"It" is also absent, hollow, a hoax, a vacancy:
joke, the general intention a monstrous pose"
exasperation, and later: "I know what to think
The best, and most comic, expression for this la
displaced one. It is shifted from the work of the
chauvinist, Vereker ("A woman will never find ou

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116 J. HILLIS MILLER

[239]), to the parody of that work i

in the story who is fascinated by V
man among the critics who are fas
Down' again," says the narrator, of
had lost herself, but in which too
cavity..." (250). The title and the fi
Gwendolen Erme's second, slightl
tolerably intricate it was a carpet w
the figure I was looking for" [267]
Way, and the name of the journal f
write reviews, The Middle - all t
and unattainable texts. These
penetration, crossing barriers, reac
in the middle, on the way. With
finally in the arcanum. One rem
sign, obstacle as well as promise,
This structure is repeated in th
organizes James's story. It is a cha
be one of the major sources of c
series of phenomena so strangely
Vereker's sick wife. Her illness, "w
the reason the great novelist goes
His friend, Corvick, however, id
work in a flash of intuition. Corvic
confirmed. Presumably he passes
he?). She in turn may or may not
the egregious Drayton Deane, tho
of knowledge. One by one, after V
wife (who probably, the narrator
anyway), the possessors of the secr
as to suggest that possession of thi
naked. The newly-married Corvick
on the spot, leaving his critical ess
a mere useless fragment. Gwendo
received the secret as a wedding
in childbirth without telling the n
revealed it to her new husband either.
The passing on of the secret obviously has something to do with sexual
intimacy and sexual knowledge. The narrator's "impotence" (273) seems
connected with his celibacy, though both he and Drayton Deane at the end of the
story are left equally "victims of unappeased desire" (277), in spite of the fact
that Deane was not celibate. "Corvick," says the narrator, "had kept his
information from his young friend till after the removal of the last barrier to their
intimacy - then only had he let the cat out of the bag. Was it Gwendolen's idea,
taking a hint from him, to liberate this animal only on the basis of the renewal of

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 THE FIGURE IN THE CARPET 117

such a relation? Was the figure in the carp

husbands and wives - for lovers supremely
sexual knowledge? Is it nothing at all? Is sexu
absence, the absence of any heading power, an
is it rather some ultimate presence, capital so
beam, loom (istos)6, on which is woven the fig
figure of nothing, or is it the figure of the lo
story remains alogical, caught in the oscillatio
It remains a mise en abyme of analogies, n
analogy between the frustrated activity o
Vereker's work by the narrator and that perf
carpet by any reader.

To return, then, after this digression (or

smack in the middle of the right of way?
Hudson. There the figure of the figure in the
both figurative and literal, both a name for
human figures in the story and the "it" which
young author works away month after mo
The images of cloth and the figures woven on
before and after the passage I began with fro
law of that compulsion to repeat which see
though signs must have a genetic life of th
replication appropriating foreign conceptua
It is by way of the metaphor describing Rode
out of the shallow waters of the short story
the novel that the metaphor of canvas is
'Roderick' figures [!] to me vividly this em
forgotten, even after long years, how the
immediately before me and the breath of the
breeze" (P, 4). After this figure, introduced s
sense that its figurative nature is made o
theoretical paragraph I discussed above, it reappears once more in the
subsequent return to reminiscences about the writing of Roderick Hudson. It
returns as an image of the fact that the novel had not been finished when it began
to appear in monthly parts. This fact "is one of the silver threads of the
recoverable texture of that embarrassed phase" (P, 6). The sequence of
paragraphs is like a quilt with squares in repeating patterns.
How can this series of compulsive duplications be stopped from proliferating
endlessly? This is the question James addresses at the end of the theoretical
development of the image of the embroidered flower. The image is of a
seduction. The embroidering novelist, "masculine" perhaps in his activity of

6 The Greek word laor6 means ship's mast; weaver's yar'n-beam; loom; warp; web; tissue; spider's
web; honeycomb; wand, rod, shaft, shank; penis.

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118 J. HILLIS MILLER

piercing all those little holes w

"covering" them and in the passi
perforated surface. He follows it
remember, "the very nature of th
practise positively a thousand lures
led astray, seduced, is how ever t
some loving fatherly power, patern
the whole and give it visible boun
would act as the law or logos of
Alas, no such power exists. The wr
self-generating which is at the sam
and sacrifice. The writer can come
the abyss of the interminable, only
the moment of "cruel crisis." This crisis is an encounter at the crossroads which
reverses the Oedipal murder. The artist as father, as patron, cuts off the
potentially infinite power of the artist as son, as weaver, as artificer. Only this act
of giving up can draw the line which makes narrative possible, defining narration
as a feminine and at the same time masculine activity of embroidery. It pierces
the little holes on the prepared canvas with a threaded needle and makes the
figure in the carpet:
The prime effect of so sustained a system, so prepared a surface, is to lead on and on;
while the fascination of following resides, by the same token, in the presumability
somewhere of a convenient, of a visibly-appointed stopping-place. Art would be easy
indeed if, by a fond power disposed to "patronise" it, such conveniences, such
simplifications, had been provided. We have, as the case stands, to invent and
establish them, to arrive at them by a difficult, dire process of selection and
comparison, of surrender and sacrifice. The very meaning of expertness is acquired
courage to brace one's self for the cruel crisis from the moment one sees it grimly
loom (P, 6).

REFERENCES

ALTER. ROBERT, 1975. Partial Magic (Berkeley: California UP).

DAMISCH, HUBERT, 1966. "Le Danse de Th6s6e," Tel Quel 26, 60-68.
ERLICH, VicrOR, 1969. Russian Formalism: History - Doctrine (Hague, Paris: M
GARRETT, P., 1969. Scene and Symbol from George Eliot to James Joyce: Stud
Fictional Mode (New Haven: Yale UP).
FRIEDMAN, A., 1967. Turn of the Novel (New York: Oxford UP).
ISER, WOLFGANG, 1978. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London and Henley:
Routledge and Kegan Paul).
JAMES, HENRY, 1909. The Novels and Tales XV (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons).
1950 The Art of the Novel, Critical Prefaces, R.P. Blackmur, ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons).
KERMODE, FRANK, 1968. The Sense of an Ending (Oxford UP).
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