Embarrassments: Figure in the Carpet

Allegory goes away empty-handed.

—Walter Benjamin

“Perhaps it’s a preference for the letter P!”

—Henry James

“‘No one has the faintest conception of what I’m trying for’”—the perennial whine, the basso continuo, of Henry James at the fin de siècle is in this instance the lament of Neil Paraday in “The Death of the Lion.” In compensation, James locates both his homosocial and ficto-critical “subjects” in the worshipful young narrator’s riposte that “no bewilderment [was ever] more teachable” (NT 15: 122). Whatever James’s tales of writers and their acolytes “try for,” the short fiction of the mid-1890s is trying in several ways: his salon of bruised authorial egos—Dencombe, the “fingerer of style” in “The Middle Years” (16: 90); Ralph Limbert, who cannot make “‘a sow’s ear out of a silk purse’” and so achieve popular success in “The Next Time” (15: 204); the languid, limpid Neil Paraday; and the egregious Hugh Vereker in “The Figure in the Carpet”—struggle to preserve the illusion of authorial mastery and the ideology of the transparent signified of the Work, while their minions are enmeshed, perplexedly, in the Text. Consequently, it isn’t at all surprising that James’s tales, as “theory” avant-la-lettre, have endured as crucial points of reference for the mapping of playful textuality against monumental “work” in structuralism’s transition to deconstruction. Roland Barthes, for example, points out that while “the author is reputed the father and the owner of his work” (169), the authorial figment is in actuality “inscribed in the [text] like one of his characters, figured in the carpet; no longer privileged, paternal . . . his inscription is ludic” (170, emphasis mine).

The tensions between James’s discredited, shamefully exposed authors whose very failure is the ground of success and his submissive, impercipient, bewildered readers whose only hope of success inheres in conscious failure demonstrates conclusively the power of the text to “decant the work . . . from its consumption and gather it up as play, activity, production, practice” (Barthes 170). If “bewilderment” is “teachable”—as the avid novice avers in “The Death of the [authorial] Lion”—and if the recent history of theory bears witness to the professional utility of that maxim, then it seems useful and fitting to trace the congruences between particularly salient bewilderments characteristic of poststructuralist, “theoretical James” at the end of our century and of “Jamesian theory” at the end of the nineteenth. How might one account for the odd resonances between James’s thematics of humiliation and exposure—the very ground, it seems, of paternalistic literary culture—and the demystifying objectives of poststructuralism? I confess at the outset that my project is to take theory further: I want to revisit, and perhaps revive, the dead-end of deconstructive practice (which sees the text inevitably and inescapably as the allegory of its own unreadability) by bringing it into dialogue with recent queer theory, which is in dire need of recuperation from the dead-end of identity politics, and return it to specifically literary analysis. Both theoretical projects, it seems to me, have lost some of their glamour and transformative potential, are indeed embarrassed at the present academic moment: “embarrassed” in the dual and paradoxical senses of too much—prolific and prescriptive—and too little—predictable and pedestrian. My own embarrassed preference for the alliterative letter p takes me fairly directly—directly, that is, for a Jamesian—to James’s strikingly titled volume of short fiction of 1896, Embarrassments, and the trying work of “The Figure in the Carpet.”

This tale’s patient, ironic erosion of hermeneutic certainty has tended less to invite “theory” than to haul it on the carpet—to challenge “theory” to give some adequate account of itself. Critical discourse begins its supplementary work at the very point where the bewildered narrator leaves off, as a victim “of unappeased desire” (NT 15: 277). Samuel Weber points out that because such desire “has something to do with the compulsive need to name” all modes and manners of reading are necessarily self-apprehensive, “forever caught in an act [which they] can never quite get...