Reweaving the Carpet (Reading Stephan Mussil Reading James)

[L]anguage seemed itself only where sound and image, image and sound, interpenetrated with automatic precision and such felicity that no chink was left for the penny-in-the-slot called “meaning.”

—Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia”¹

I. A Little Drama

If there is an open secret in the work of Henry James (a secret in plain sight), it may well be his dramaturgy, what he called his “scenic philosophy.” No matter how you yourself experience the effect of this philosophy, James considered it a sublime yet simple trick. “Yes, I see thus, I think, my little act of my little drama here. Ah, this divine conception of one’s little masses and periods in the scenic light—as rounded ACTS.” In the Notebooks, he comes to fixate on this divine discursive maneuver, “the scenic philosophy and method”: “I feel as if it still (above all, YET) had a great deal to give me, and might carry me as far as I dream!”² Two months later (in 1896), with eight sections of What Masie Knew (1897) complete, the fixation remains fully in force: “the scenic method is my absolute, my imperative, my only salvation,” a salvation because it enables him to “stick to the march of an action,” the “only thing that really, for me, at least, will produire L’OEUVRE, and L’OEUVRE is, before God, what I’m going for.”³ There are few moments where the intensity of James’s relationship with his work (with himself) is so manifest, at once so gleeful and so grandiose.

Of course James continued to deploy this “method,” and he continued to think about it in print, above all when he sat down to reread his fiction and to write the prefaces for the New York edition. In his preface to The Ambassadors, describing his “insistence on the scenic side of [his] labour,” he portrays “the material” of the novel as “taken absolutely for the stuff of drama,” and thus declares, for instance, that the problem of Strether’s biographical past gets “treated scenically, and scenically alone.” But James also believed that this scenic philosophy does not reveal itself—that the novel looks “as little scenic as possible.”⁴ The metadrama staged here—between composition and reception, between the scenic method wonderfully deployed and that method everywhere disguised—casts critical work as the act of disclosure, as though the “absolute . . . salvation” at the heart of the WORK were something that only an especially astute reader, an initiate, could detect. James has enjoyed many such astute readers, of course, who have made much of the novelist’s dramatic mode, perfected even as he failed as a dramatist in the theater, humiliated by the public response to Guy Domville in 1895.

My point, then, is not to call attention to this method (as others have) but to call attention to James’s own account of the method—his spiritual conviction about its underlying and overarching power, coupled with his observation that it would be anything but obvious to his reading public. It is as though James understood his scenic philosophy as a “secret in spite of itself,” an “exquisite scheme” that had become his work’s “organ of life.” He might have written that it “stretches, this little trick of mine, from book to book, and everything else, comparatively, plays over the surface of it. The order, the form, the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the initiated a complete representation of it.”⁵ And though he never did speak or write of his scenic philosophy in precisely these words, these are the words that the novelist Vereker employs to describe the secret of his work to the narrator of “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896), the unnamed critic, ambitious yet uninitiated, who feels responsible for discovering the secret—at once “a little trick” and “an exquisite scheme”—and for sharing that secret with the reading public (FC 366).

This is one reason why it seems difficult to extract “The Figure in the Carpet” from the context of...