Outstanding Henry James collection here. I'll focus on two of the master's tales, including the title story. Enjoy.
THE FIGURE IN THE CARPET
This Henry James short story published in 1896 is a lustrous, clear Tahitian pearl for avid readers since the first-person narrator is a young book reviewer who becomes obsessed with both Hugh Vereker, a much celebrated novelist, and also Vereker’s novels. It all started when our narrator penned a glowing review of the latest Verkeker and then had occasion to meet the great novelist himself at an evening social.
Enjoying his magazine review and also recognizing a fellow lover of literature, author Vereker takes an instant liking to the young narrator and shares his lifelong secret: all the critics, reviewers and readers of his novels have missed his "little point," that is, his central authorial purpose, a purpose profound yet so simple that “It governs every line, it chooses every word, it dots ever I, it places every comma.” Such disclosure has a powerful effect- the master’s words fuel our young narrator’s lively curiosity to dig deep and discover the hidden, mysterious Vereker secret.
Predictably, filled with youthful ardor, not to mention obsessive infatuation, the narrator’s excitement brims over – he relates the details of his conversation to his fellow reviewer, George Crovick, and Crovick, in turn, unveils it all to Gwendolen Erme, an accomplished author herself, having published her first three-volume novel at age nineteen, a young lady he desires to marry once Gwendolen’s dying mother finally shuffles off her mortal coil.
Now Hugh Vereker has not only one but three young lovers of literature aflame to embark on a quest to discover his "little point." And as part of their literary detective work, which both men likened to a game of chess, the narrator shares with Crovick one key reflection on what the author conveyed during that memorable evening of revelation, “For himself, beyond doubt, the thing we were also blank about was vividly there. It was something. I guessed, in the primal plan; something like a complex figure in a Persian carpet. He highly approved of this image when I used it, and he used another himself.”
So, the answer to Hugh Vereker’s literary puzzle is likened to a clear-cut but weighty mystery we might uncover whilst looking carefully at a Persian carpet. Let’s pause here – please take a close look at this exquisite Persian:
Now let me add a bit of tantalizing information about Persian rugs I learned from a scholar of Middle Eastern art: these rugs can be viewed as a visual symbol of the universe. For example, in the above pic, rather than seeing the pattern as a flat surface, look at this rug as if you are looking up at the sky, as if you are viewing it in 3D, the outer rectangular border representing our material world and each successive rectangle contained therein indicating a further distant, more ethereal plane of reality leading to the far distant field of paradise in the middle. And all the symbols contained in this paradise are supercharged with meaning, especially the most central symbol, the eight petal flower. I don’t know about you, but once alerted to this methodology, casting my eyes on Persian rugs has never been the same. Anyway, my sense is our three literary investigators in James’ tale are attempting to uncover a comparable formula in the Hugh Vereker oeuvre.
There are a number of other themes in this superb tale, such as how the mysteries of literature may be more readily uncovered in collaboration with friends or one’s spouse and how a story can serve as a vehicle to theorize about the very nature of fiction itself, the dynamics of storytelling or the interpretation of narrative.
However, I’d like to focus on one other major theme: author intention. When Henry James published this work there was much postulating and conjecture on authorial intention, more specifically on the author’s underlying message and meaning of why pen was set to paper in the first place. Of course, it is this authorial intention driving our three literary explorers in their probing the Vereker riddle.
A most formidable challenge to this emphasis on author intention was formulated in the 1950s by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley. Stated concisely, these two philosophers reasoned the author’s intention is only a secondary and much less consequential consideration; rather, any meaning contained within a piece of literature must be derived from the work itself. I have always wondered how Henry James would have responded to what Wimsatt and Beardsley termed “The Intentional Fallacy.”
I myself am inclined to agree with Wimsatt and Beardsley since, being a romantic at heart, I see literature taking on a life of its own well beyond the reach of an author’s ideas, philosophy, and yes, intention. But this doesn’t detract one bit from my enjoying this classic Henry James set in the atmosphere of genteel conversations, top hats and horse-drawn carriages, featuring a famous author who takes this Edgar Degas quote very, very seriously: “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”
THE JOLLY CORNER
A ghost story. Actually, after The Turn of the Screw, many consider this the very best Henry James ghost story. I concur – the tale gathers serious momentum and an eerie psychic power with every turn of the page (no pun intended).
We have a beginning innocent enough: after an absence of thirty-three years, Spencer Brydon returns to New York, the city of his youth, adolescence and early manhood.
The city surprises him, including how when visiting an apartment property he owns under construction, he learns he might just be a building foreman at heart and quite possibly could have become a New York real estate tycoon if he chose to remain rather than flee the city. A close lady friend of his tells him much of the same; matter of fact, she confesses that she twice had a dream where Spencer is a New York billionaire.
All this “What if I remained in New York?” prompts Spencer to project a second self, one who, in fact, has always lived in the home of his childhood, the house he calls with a measure of affection “the Jolly Corner.” Spencer is staying at a nearby hotel but has been in the habit of spending hours every evening, midnight to 2 a.m., investigating the many empty rooms, hallways and stairways of his boyhood mansion.
After awhile, feeling especially bold, Spencer places the candle down and explores the rooms of his house in the dark – and the more accustomed his eyes become to the lack of light, the more courage fills his breast. We read: “It made him feel, this acquired faculty, like some monstrous stealthy cat; he wondered if he would have glared at these moments with large shining yellow eyes, and what it mightn’t verily be, for the poor hard-pressed alter ego, to be confronted with such a type.”
Now all those many hours of the night in isolation, pursuing mystical, otherworldly dimensions, calling up past memories as if they are a swarm of ghosts, dealing with a father’s curse in not making this house your home, opening doors and peering into blackish rooms as if they are subconscious and unconscious spaces in your own mind or part of some mysterious Egyptian tomb, well, such practices can have unexpected and even undesired consequences. Read all about it in this Henry James dusky jewel.
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