The Fixation of Belief in "The Figure in the Carpet": Henry James and Peircean Semiotics

Contemporary readers have tended to view Henry James’s “The Figure in the Carpet” as a fable of misreading—one that illustrates the pitfalls of erroneous and ill-conceived appropriations of texts. Wolfgang Iser, for example, has argued that the commodification of texts, the need to isolate a definite meaning, existed in the nineteenth century as a common approach to literature—an approach that James is clearly at odds with in this tale. Curiously, while James outlines the wrong way to read, he fails to suggest a correct approach. The characters in this tale either attempt to mine a specific, quantifiable meaning from a text or they naively avoid the need to investigate meaning at all. It would be absurd to suggest that James, who was so conspicuously concerned with the way his texts were perceived, would propose that there are only two kinds of readers—those like Corvick whose one-to-one misassociation of text and meaning results in an inevitable destruction, and those like the narrator whose obsessive search for dyadic meaning renders him unable to approach the text at all. The possibility of a third kind of reader, a functional reader, can be found in the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. Though better known as William James’s mentor, Peirce was also a perennial, if not intimate, associate of Henry’s. It is, of course, hardly necessary to prove that James had detailed knowledge of Peircean semiotics to demonstrate its functioning in his writing; nevertheless, the two men did spend the winter of 1875 together in Paris, and, considering Peirce’s well-known inability to discuss much of anything other than philosophy, it seems unlikely that he would not have availed himself of the opportunity to explain his concepts of linguistic signification to the young novelist. ¹ Further, a signification process that functioned with equal parts of perception and text would have been extremely inviting to a novelist who believed that the work of fiction was equally “divided between the writer and the reader” (GE 485). If we then accept that the phenomenological readings of critics like Iser are valid, and if “The Figure in the Carpet” outlines inappropriate explorations of meaning, then Peirce’s semiotics function as a likely set of road signs for James’s map of misreading.

Iser’s reading proposes a connection between the tale and James’s desire to break away from the nineteenth-century concept of text as product—that is, as some kind of specific, quantifiable message. Readers of popular fiction on both sides of the Atlantic tended to assume that any given text would have a general intention: “It seems only natural to the critic that meaning, as a buried secret, should be accessible to and reducible by the tools of referential analysis” (Iser 5). Iser argues, however, that if meaning is perceived as something that “can be subtracted from the work” then “the very heart of the work...can be lifted out of the text, [and] the work is then used up—through interpretation” (4). In “The Figure in the Carpet,” this process is apparent to the reader, who recognizes the inefficacy of this critical process and “gradually realiz[es] the inadequacy of the perspective offered him” (8). M. A. Williams’s reading comes to a similar conclusion, suggesting that the meaning of the text “is to be traced out through the very act of reading which engages a responsive consciousness with the text” (108).

These readings suggest not that the text is without meaning, but that the meaning is contained beyond the limitations of the text itself and produced by the reading subject. James himself, in the preface to the tale, coyly hints at an extant meaning, calling it Vereker’s “undiscovered, not to say undiscoverable secret” (AN 228), which in his notebooks he refers to as something “for the reader to find out” (CN 138). James seems to imply that the secret remains discoverable, a gesture that places the burden of discovery on James’s readers, not his characters. The reader, after all, is kept prohibitively...