The Figure in the Carpet

In “The Figure in the Carpet”, Henry James discusses the writer's motivation in his creative work. Speaking through Hugh Vereke, a successful novelist who presumably represents himself, he inquires, “Isn't there for every writer a particular thing that most makes him apply himself?” Affirmatively, he answers, “There's an idea in my work without which I wouldn't have given a straw for the whole job”: an idea which, like “an organ of life”, stretches through his successive writings. “The order, the form, the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the initiated a complete representation of it”. Asked by the puzzled critic for a clue to this “figure in the carpet”, Vereke responds: “My whole lucid effort gives the clue - every page and line and letter. The thing's as concrete there as a bird in a cage, a bait on a hook, a piece of cheese in a mousetrap. It's stuck into every volume as your foot is stuck into your shoe. It governs every line, it chooses every word, it dots every i, it places every comma”.

This contention of James-Vereke would probably be supported by most psychoanalysts and many literary critics of the present time. The writer - perhaps even so versatile and universal a genius as Shakespeare - basically explores and works through variations of a single theme which attracts him and is rooted in an infantile fixation that he seeks to master repetitively in his phantasies. Not only is the content of his work testimony to the particular range and limits of his own phantasy, but his metaphors, his phraseology, in short his style, reflect in characteristic ways the same basic influences and preoccupations - as modern literary criticism shows with increasing authority (1, 2).

To be sure, the validation of surmises as to the special