Searching for the Figure in the Carpet in the Tales of Henry James: Reflections of an Ordinary Reader (review)

Benjamin Newman. Searching for the Figure in the Carpet in the Tales of Henry James: Reflections of an Ordinary Reader. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. 194 pp. $30.00. "I thought at first that this record of my search for your figure in the carpet should have a summary in which I would list, in words of the mind, the elements of the figure you spun out in those precious tales. How degrading that would have been! What elements? There are no elements to list. No. Life for you, as well as for us all, is the poetry of feelings, feelings within the heart, and not a grammar of thought" (186). These comments from the remarkable "Epilogue" to Searching for the Figure in the Carpet in the Tales of Henry James represent Benjamin Newman's apparent refusal to define what the reader expects him to define through some 191 pages of text. I call the "Epilogue" remarkable because its audience is not the reader but Henry James himself. The reader is an eavesdropper on this very private and personal prose lyric to the Master. And yet it is not quite correct to declare that Newman does not define the figure in James's carpet. And we should bear in mind the title of Newman's work, Searching for the Figure. In effect, our critic sets out not to provide us with the answer so much as a record of his peregrinations in search of the answer. Like Descartes trying to doubt everything he could doubt and concluding that the only thing he could not doubt was the process of doubting that was going on in him, Newman laments the "mounting piles of books about James" (3), the critics who seem to be "pecking away at him, a piece here and then there" (3), and decides, as he tells us, that "I would listen only to him" (4), would read no more biographies or literary criticism, "No more writings about him; only his own" (4). This is a determined effort to get at James in his works in order to draw reasonable inferences. "Conjectures and theories of personality," Newman insists, "would be left for others" (4). And when would Newman be satisfied that he had uncovered or revealed the figure? His answer to this reveals a goal that he does not quite reach: "when the several elements of James's outlook on life will have been perceived as recurring themes throughout the works being studied . . . when any seeming ambiguities and obscurities will have become satisfactorily explainable and resolved by reference to the figure; and finally, when nothing will have remained, not a symbol, or a line, or a phrase, whose meaning is not so explainable" (5). One pauses over the phrases "have been perceived as," "will have become explainable," and "is not so explainaö/e." And the inductive approach taken by Newman, with no footnotes or critical apparatus save the information that all references are to the "New York Edition," makes the reader pause again. But as we follow him in this Odyssey through some ten of James's tales, we do observe a critic with sensitivity, insight, and the capacity to respond to the subtle nuances of James's style. Newman's ability to notice such hints as the "shadow-like descriptions and fleeting scenes that strongly suggest that Mrs. St. George is having an affair with Lord Masham" (44-45) in 'The Lesson of the Master" and his similar observations that suggest that Hugh Vereker is engaged in an illicit relationship with Lady Jane in "The Figure in the Carpet" The Henry James Review 11 (1990): 223-25 01990 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 224 The Henry James Review reveal a critical mind eminently capable of piercing the veils of indirection that so characterize James'snarratives. Moreover, careful perusal of the volume does reveal a series of criteria for a figure that explains or illuminates these tales. The reader gradually pieces together paradigms like the wanderer-searcher characters whose obtuseness prevents them from responding or giving love to victims ranging from Daisy Miller, Morgan Moreen, and Miss Tina to more ambiguous cases such as Paul Overt, Lyon, and...