A Secret in Spite of Itself: Recursive Meaning in Henry James’s “The Figure in the Carpet”

I

To the extent that transcendent belief is waning, culture becomes the authoritative source of meaning. As Wallace Stevens puts it: “in the absence of a belief in God, the mind turns to its own creations and examines them, not alone from the aesthetic point of view but for what they reveal, for what they validate and invalidate, for the support that they give.”¹ Instead of explaining this world in terms of another, secular societies tend to explain what there is in their own terms: as social constructions. Consequently, meaning merges with self-knowledge. The very works, however, which promise a particularly profound insight into human nature are those which appear to withhold their ultimate meaning. Plato’s dialogues and Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, puzzle rather than reveal so that we cannot say what exactly they validate or invalidate. Separated from absolute transcendent faith, self-knowledge turns into relative and uncertain belief. Quoting the New Testament in a Christian society, a believer can assert, “This is the unconditional meaning of life”; quoting from Hamlet, a critic in a secular culture may only suggest a reading relative to culturally and historically conditioned perspectives. Just like interpretations of Shakespeare, our take on human nature, society, or history must not claim to be absolute, universal, and certain. The more secular and reflexive self-knowledge becomes, the more willingly it admits its own inherent negativity.

For John Keats negativity marks a merit: “at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”² Yet such an attitude is itself deeply uncertain. A theoretical justification of negative capability would compromise its subject and refute itself. But do we need a theory in the first place? Why not just enjoy the negativity of self-knowledge? It may be doubted, however, that a Nietzschean gay science or deconstruction as a kind of writing (in Richard Rorty’s phrase) can jettison theoretical claims. All its playfulness notwithstanding, modern scepticism asserts itself and criticizes other discourses for getting it wrong, which presupposes some claim on its part to getting it right.

Negative capability is thus a difficult substitute for religious belief. But is it all there is to secular meaning? Would a return to religious faith be the only way of poising our self-understanding? I should like to address this problem by turning to literature. My working assumption is that literary texts present models of self-knowledge and its problems. In literature, too, understanding moves among relativism, paradoxes, and attempts at discarding the value of stable meaning. A case in point is Henry James’s novella “The Figure in the Carpet.”³ Here the problem of literary meaning, which is usually discussed in the confines of critical theory, is worked through by literature itself. As I shall try to show, James’s story articulates the problem in such an exemplary fashion that the solution—not only to the problem of literary meaning but possibly to the problem of secular meaning in general—might emerge directly from close reading.

II

At first glance, James’s story seems to underscore perfectly the idea that secular meaning requires negative capability. It presents the account of a critic who fails to understand the work of a fictitious author, Hugh Vereker. What makes this failure particularly embarrassing for the reader is the fact that the unfortunate critic is also the narrator. The reader is caged, or so it seems, into the uncomfortable position of ignorance and frustration.

Here is a summary of the story:

The narrator, who remains anonymous, works for a literary journal. From his friend and colleague, Corvick, he takes over the assignment to review the latest novel of Hugh Vereker. Corvick is in a distressful personal situation: he is engaged to Gwendolin Erme, a writer, but they cannot marry since her ill mother does not consider Corvick eligible.

During a...