Henry James and the Art of the Striptease

Keeping Us Unsatisfied, Holding Our Hands:
A Barthesian Analysis of the “Figure in the Carpet”

Adam Joachim Goldmann

Many of Henry James’ shorter works initiate the reader into a perverse game of suspense and frustration. Among these attempts, we can locate novellas like “The Aspern Papers,” and “The Author of Beltraffio” and short stories like “The Beast in the Jungle” and “The Lesson of the Master.” These works, which represent an important cross-section of James’ shorter writing, all hinge on keeping the reader maddened yet sufficiently intrigued to continue reading past the point where he realizes that the author has no intention of providing a definite resolution. This strategy of seducing the reader through a game of suspense compounded by frustration reaches its apogee in “The Figure in the Carpet.” As in the aforementioned stories, here James provides a beguiling state of affairs and some vital quest for which a character is willing to struggle to the death. James hooks us - the readers - with the eccentricity of this challenge and goads us on until we teeter on frustration’s brink. Devilishly, James teases us with a donné that may or may not exist. Henceforth he further limits our capacity for knowledge and discovery at every turn by thwarting our ever attempt to get at it.

This paper looks at “The Figure in the Carpet” and offers a Barthesian analysis of the story’s main elements. I will look at the nature of the game as constructed by James and analyze his technique in terms of what the reader and writer gain from playing it. The contention I hope the paper bears out is that James is aiming for something he dramatizes early on in the bedroom scene (more on that later) between Vereker and the narrator; a certain admission of the narrator’s after learning for the first time of the vague “figure.”

Allow me to begin with a brief summary. An unnamed critic who fancies himself a shrewd reader is dismayed by the dismissive attitude with which a respected author brushes aside his review of the writer’s latest book. The author, Hugh Vereker, piques the critic’s interest in a grand scheme that runs through his entire body of work, yet one which no critic has ever managed to discern. The unnamed narrator sets about the task of discovering this underlying secret, this “figure in the carpet” but soon gives up in frustration. His best friend, Corvick, however, refuses to surrender. Along with his fiancée, Gwendolyn, the couple devotes their lives to deciphering the figure that runs through all of Vereker’s novels. Corvick is sent to India and, after several months cables London that he’s discovered the secret in a blinding flash. Unfortunately, Corvick dies before he makes know his secret to the narrator. Shortly afterwards, Vereker – having confirmed Corvick’s theory – dies as well. Gwendolyn claims to be in possession of the secret, yet refuses to impart it to the narrator. The narrator lives on in mystery. Gwendolyn remarries (to a literary rival of the narrator’s) and dies in childbirth. When the narrator approaches the widower and pleads with him to divulge the great secret, the widower displays genuine shock and surprise: Gwendolyn never uttered a word to him. The narrator is left feeling that Gwendolyn’s sin of omission is some small solace for his torment and frustration.

In a story so full of bizarre coincidences and startling double entendres, I see James harboring two interlocked objectives. He wants to keep the reader unsatisfied yet intrigued, while at the same time desiring communion with the reader. I see this double notion dramatized in the story at the end of Chapter III, when the narrator clings to Vereker begging him to stay and explain himself: “I was unsatisfied – I kept hold of his hand.” Roland Barthes’ musings about the pleasure of the text provide us with a vocabulary to discuss the elements of suspense and frustration, pleasure and teasing that are so prevalent in this story.

In “The Pleasure of the Text,” Barthes’ employs an erotic vocabulary in discussing literary pleasure. Barthes’ conception of such pleasure is similar to what Corvick describes early on as the unnamable experience he gets from reading Vereker. Here, we get an intimation that Corvick knows somehow of the figure since reading Vereker gives him a pleasure he can’t quite explain. As he tells the narrator: “’He gives me a pleasure so rare; the sense of’ – he mused a little – ‘something or other’” (James, p. 359). I don’t think its reading too much into this passage if we find some coy erotic suggestion.

We see James in this text engaged in cruising the reader and creating what Barthes calls a “site of bliss,” which is the author’s first objective. Regardless of whether the act of writing brings pleasure to the author, the author must further solicit from his reader:

Does writing in pleasure guarantee – guarantee me, the writer – my reader’s pleasure? Not at all. I must seek out the reader (must “cruise” him) without knowing where he is. A site of bliss is then created. In is not the reader’s “person” that is necessary to me, it is this site: the possibility to a dialectics of desire, of an unpredictability of bliss: the bets are not placed, there can still be a game. (Barthes, p. 4)

By initiating a game with the reader, James hopes to create such a site. He would like to be able to provoke in us a response as strong as that which the narrator feels for Vereker, that is, to create a site of bliss equal to the sites Vereker dangles before the eyes of our frustrated narrator: “[Little] by little my curiosity not only had begun to ache again, but had become the familiar torment of my days and nights…[L]iterature was a game of skill, and skill meant courage, and courage meant honour, and honour meant passion, meant life” (James, p. 380). Failing to inhabit a site of bliss in Vereker’s work, he tries to eke one out in the intellectual life of the Corvicks.

After Corvick’s death, Gwendolyn preserves this site of bliss by refusing to share her knowledge with the narrator. In a sense, it’s as if she’s exchanged her virginity for this knowledge: this is suggested by the reference to her marriage as “the last barrier to their intimacy” (James, p. 391). In refusing to divulge Vereker’s general intention, Gwendolyn is compensating for Corvick’s loss. Thus it is up for James to provide for us an alternative one; one where the lack of clear resolution does not dampen, but rather heightens the pleasure we find in the text.

We must inquire into the nature of this site of bliss and of the game itself. We turn to Barthes again and his discussion of the “gapes,” an analogy he applies to literature. It is the “intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing” that seduces; the pleasure of literature is by its nature tantalizing.

The pleasure of the text is not the pleasure of the corporeal striptease or of narrative suspense. In these cases, there is no tear, no edges; a gradual unveiling: the entire excitation takes refuge in the hope of seeing the sexual organ (schoolboy’s dream) or in knowing the end of the story (novelistic satisfaction). (Barthes, pp. 8-9)

Exposure and concealment come up in the story relatively early. In the first chapter, the narrator is certain he’s pinned Vereker down, exposed him: he fancies himself responsible for bringing Vereker’s brilliance to the light of day: “We had found out at last how clever he was, and he had had to make the best of the loss of his mystery. I was strongly tempted, as I walked beside him, to let him know how much of that unveiling was my act.” (James, p. 360) In the subsequent tête-à-tête with Vereker, however, it is the author who after complaining that, “no one sees anything” will of his own accord “unveil” a bit of himself. The story will hitherto bear out the extent to which this cleavage obsesses the narrator.

We find that the game James invites us to play is indeed erotic, akin to an elaborate and protracted seduction. By refusing us any resolution or answer, James is able to make the game go on forever. What James succeeds so masterfully at doing here is keeping the whole fifty-page-long story in a liminal state where we allow ourselves to be seduced despite the increasing sense that we will be denied a conventional satisfaction. James drives home this strategy in all the double-entendres he uses and the coy, coaxing manner in which the story progresses. The analogy with sexual pleasure here seems apt, as James is for certain engaging in a wily seduction of his reader.

Despite first appearances, we soon realize that the ideal reader of Vereker is not our narrator but rather Corvick. Despite his untimely death, Corvick wins the secret, the girl and – perhaps most importantly – the author’s admiration. Even the way in which Gwendolyn explains Corvick’s break smacks of a sexual suggestion. “[I]t’s the thing itself, let severely alone for six months, that has sprung out of him like a tigress out of a jungle” (James, p. 381). This language makes it sound like literary orgasms are erupting around us. The pleasure to be gained from Corvick’s insight seems boundless. Corvick becomes a man intoxicated, drunk on his own discovery: “his ecstasy only obscured [his triumph],” which leads him to surrender all else (James, p. 382). Additionally, Corvick’s message to the narrator certainly has orgasmic implications: “Have patience; I want to see, as it breaks on you, the face you’ll make!” (James, p. 383)

The heavily sexualized language serves both to communicate the pleasure of the text created in this site of desire and to underscore the narrator’s failure to inhabit it. The narrator relates Corvick’s pleasure of knowing the secret it is put in deliriously intoxicating terms:

He had found Mr. Vereker deliriously interesting and his own possession of the secret a real intoxication. The buried treasure was all gold and gems. Now that it was there it seemed to grow and grow before him; it would have been, through all time and taking all tongues, one of the most wonderful flowers of literary art. Nothing, in especial, once you were face to face with it, could show for more consummately done. When once it came out it came out, was there with a splendour that made you ashamed; and there hadn’t been, save in the bottomless vulgarity of the age, with every one tasteless and tainted, every sense stopped, the smallest reason why it should have been overlooked. It was great, yet so simple, was simple, yet so great, and the final knowledge of it was an experience quite apart. He intimated that the charm of such an experience, the desire to drain it, in its freshness, to the last drop, was what kept him there close to the source. (James, p. 384-5).

James understands how great is the pleasure to be gained from a text. This point is strengthened by him presenting us with characters that are obsessive in their text-based quest. Of Gwendolyn, the narrator tells us, “It was extravagant, I admit, the way she lived for the art of the pen. Her passion visibly preyed on her, and in her presence I felt almost tepid.” Thus, our frustrated narrator is unable to enjoy this sort of pleasure. In that, James seems to label him something of a failure. And this failure renders him impotent.

This game is addictive and upon giving it up, the narrator seems to go into a sort of withdrawal: at the thought of Vereker’s death, the narrator feels grief: “there rolled over me a wave of anguish – a poignant sense of how inconsistently I still depended on him.” (James, p. 394) In the final pages James reinforces how painful and maddening this must be for him: “I was shut up in my obsession forever - my gaolers had gone off with the key” (James, p. 395). Interestingly enough, however, this admission we get somewhat earlier: Gwen’s refusal to share her knowledge constitutes the “final nail in the coffin” on his luckless idea, which would be converted “into the obsession of which I’m for ever conscious” (James, p. 391). Such foreshadowing is effective precisely because it reveals at the same time it conceals, adding to the volume of cleavage James includes to draw the reader further in.

Why does James choose to play this particular game? The answer, perhaps, we can see in Barthes’ musing on erotic texts:

“So-called “erotic” books (one must add: of recent vintage, in order to except Sade and a few others) represent not so much the erotic sense as the expectation of it, the preparation for it, its ascent; that is what makes them “exciting”; and when the scene occurs, naturally there is disappointment, deflation.” (Barthes, p. 58)

That this is central is evident by the fact that all the value in the story for Corvick and Gwendolyn is in discovering it for yourself and keeping the game going. The game must not stop. For the couple, there is a private pleasure to be gained from this inquiry: “a too precious to be stared with the crowd” (James, p. 374). The narrator almost envies them and wishes he were on their team, since “[Corvick] could say things to her that I could never say to him” (James, p. 375). For them, the nobility and worth of playing the game comes across as almost even its own award. In a sense, then, they are playing the game for it own sake: “I felt humiliated at seeing other persons deeply beguiled by an experiment that had brought me only chagrin.” (James, p. 375) At this point, the narrator has ceased to get pleasure from the story he’s recounting. He can only envy.

James peeks through the narrator’s description of how Gwendolyn and Corvick go about their quest: “They would take him page by page, as they would take one of the classics, inhale him in slow draughts and let him sink all the way in” (James, p. 375). At the same time, the narrator tempers it by sounding a note of doom for Corvick, (“had he lived”), eager to use his powers of prophecy where he can.

As a writer, James wants to ensure that he has our complete and undivided attention. As such, he tries to curtail the extent to which we might be tempted to skim. There is a connection to be made with Barthes, who goes on to explain how we don’t read everything at the same pace, with the same amount of attention (Dickens, Balzac and Proust figure as especially prominent targets):

[W]e boldly skip (no one is watching) descriptions, explanations, analyses, conversations; doing so, we resemble a spectator in a nightclub who climbs onto the stage and speeds up the dancer’s striptease, tearing off her clothing, but in the same order, that is…the author… cannot choose to write what will not be read. And yet, it is the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasures of the great narratives. (Barthes, pp. 9 -10)

No, James cannot choose to write what will not be read. He would, in fact, like if we were to read his every word with extreme care, recognizing in them a grain of what’s precious and essential to the story. To prevent us from giving into the temptation of skimming, James sustains the tension throughout the story, leaving open the (absurd) possibility of a resolution, despite the hints we get increasingly from out narrator. That the elusive figure might still be revealed forever lurks in the far corner of the realm of possibility. The story becomes not about the gradual unveiling of the secret, but about subsisting that state of tantalizing, frustrating yet pleasurable ignorance: this is one of those rare cases where ignorance is true bliss! However, James is, I feel, conscious that his efforts to divert in order to build suspense are among the least interesting – most expendable – sections of the story. The pages that detail the narrator’s travels with his brother or discuss Corvick’s trip to India are filler. These are the parts James gives us permission to skip.

James sets up these “skimmable moments” for us in earlier scenes where characters appear uninterested. At one point, Vereker himself starts getting bored (p. 368). The winking implication seems to be that this is a place for him to skip. A similar moment occurs when early on the narrator decides to renounce his quest: “At last they even bored me, and I accounted for my confusion – perversely I allow – by the idea that Vereker had made a fool of me. The buried treasure was a bad joke, the general intention a monstrous pose” (James, p. 370).

The perversity of the game in “Figure” is rivaled only by the perversity of tragic texts. James’ objective here is to keep us tantalized and intrigued by setting up a site of bliss unfamiliarly situated between knowing and not knowing.

Many readings are perverse, implying a split, a cleavage. Just as the child knows its mother has no penis and simultaneously believes she has one…so the reader can keep saying: I know these are only words, but all the same…Of all readings, that of tragedy is the most perverse: I take pleasure in hearing myself tell a story whose end I know: I know and I don’t know, I act toward myself as though I did not know... (Barthes, p. 47)

As in tragedy, the end of “Figure” is practically given us in advance; or rather we know that we won’t know the end and this we know in advance. Barthes is also reiterating the idea of cleavage: the knowing and not knowing. This is the state of heightened desire and suspense in which James hopes to successfully keep us. This notion comes across in the sexualized words that characters use to describe the mysterious figure and what they know of it. The obtuseness and perversity of this language spills out over the entire story. Especially since the narrator – especially in the later pages – can’t help but reveal the end of the story early, through various clues and asides.

Much of the story’s perversity consists in how James takes pains to inflate a mystery he has no intention of resolving. Just look at the way in which Vereker describes his “little scheme” which was become the great amusement of his life. “I live almost to see if it will ever be detected,” he tells the narrator (James, p. 367). All the clues Vereker gives us are dead-ends, they tell us nothing. Yet the sense we get from them is that perhaps Vereker himself is imprisoned by his “little scheme.” He compares it to a bird in a cage, or bait on a hook, cheese in a mousetrap, a foot in a shoe and calls it the “organ of life” (James, p. 368). Later on, he expresses extreme pride and jubilation for it: “It is the joy of my soul!” “The loveliest thing in the world” (James, p.369). With such admissions, James is forever tantalizing us, ever flashing the reader.

Knowing and not knowing is seen earliest in the character of Corvick, who hints at something in Vereker that forever eludes his grasp. This liminal knowledge is put in highly sexualized language by the narrator: “He had hold of the tail of something: he would pull hard, pull it right out. He pumped me dry on Vereker’s strange confidence” (James, p. 371). Engaged in this literary game, they are quite literally playing with themselves; the intimation of onanism seems appropriate here, seeing that both the readers are out for pleasure.

After showing why and how James goes about keeping the reader sufficiently unsatisfied yet tantalized, it remains for us to explain the second half of James’ grand intention. We might inquire into the possible motives James might have for keeping the game going. I refer here to James’ desire to “hold hands” with his reader: the sense in which the author needs the reader. It is helpful to discuss this in relation to Barthes and his idea of how the text itself becomes a fetish object that desires the reader. Here the discourse of seduction is especially pertinent:

“As institution, the author is dead; his civil status, his biographical person have disappeared; dispossessed, they no longer exercise over his work the formidable paternity whose account of literary history, teaching, and public opinion had the responsibility of establishing and renewing; but in the text, in a way, I desire the author; I need his figure…as he needs mine.” (Barthes, p. 27)

The interdependency of reader to writer emerges as one of the story’s major themes. In such a symbiosis, both parties contribute an equal share of interest; something they are willing to stake. We find this thought reflected in something the narrator tells us early on, while hoping that Vereker will be more charitable that Corvick was: “I reflected indeed that the heat of the admirer was sometimes grosser even than the appetite of the scribe” (James, p. 359).

This is primarily what I mean by drawing attention to the fact that the narrator wants to hold Vereker’s hand. The writer wants desperately to guide the reader from beyond the grave. The author is also in the text, lost in it – not behind it! We can thus see certain aspects of the relationship between reader and writer as wish fulfillment on James’ behalf.

Instances of the author desperately trying to pop out of the text abound. We see this aspect of the story most clearly in Vereker’s interactions with the narrator. A double-seduction seems to be operating here on both ends. At the start of Chapter III, for instance, we find Vereker “cruising” the narrator in a similar way that James is cruising the reader. The language he uses is full of sexual suggestion: “It’s quite with you rising young men…that I feel most what a failure I am!” (James, p. 365). It’s not hard to hear this as a confession of impotence. Here the sexual language is covering up the narrative impotence, for the pleasure that the text gives goes unnoticed by his readership.

As we’ve seen already, Vereker’s explanation of his “little point” is riddled with erotic suggestion. He calls it, “the very passion of his passion, the part of the business in which, for him, the flame of art burns most intensely.” After a potentially offensive statement, Vereker “laid his hand on my shoulder to show the allusion wasn’t to my personal appearance” (James, p. 366). In such interactions, what come across are both the care and the desire of the artist to find a reader.

Likewise, the desire of the author to find a reader to fetishize is also represented. The extent to which James sees the relationship as reciprocal can be seen in the language – much of which can be read as a sexual come-hither – as when the narrator tells Vereker, “But you talk about the initiated. There must therefore, you see, be initiation” (James, p. 366).

The language of seduction is everywhere in the scene between the narrator and Vereker. He tells us that “the only effect I cared about was the one it would have on Vereker up there by his bedroom fire,” during the scene of physical intimacy where Vereker has somehow transgressed by crossing the threshold of the narrator’s room (James, pp. 363-4).

James ends the chapter with a deliriously sensual and precise description that raises more questions than it answers. We are left with a view of a supple, obliging author offering himself coyly to a young admirer. The admirer takes the bait, without knowing what he’s getting into:
I can see him there still, on my rug, in the firelight and his spotted jacket, his fine clear face all bright with the desire to be tender to my youth…I think the sight of my relief touched him, excited him, brought up words to his lips from far within…The hour, the place, the unexpectedness deepened the impression: he couldn’t have done anything more intensely effective” (James, p. 364).

While we can read this as a cliffhanger to sustain the reader’s interest until the next installment (it was published originally in Cosmopolis during January and February of 1896), as the next chapter seems to take up exactly where this one ends, we might also be tempted to wonder after what transpires in the blank space between the two chapters? Certainly, one wouldn’t be that far gone to read an erotic suggestion into this. The desired state of affairs is achieved when the narrator is unsatisfied and holds Vereker’s hand. In this act – or state of affairs – James’ whole technique of thwarted seduction crystallizes. Again, James wants us to hold him hand and be unsatisfied; but by no means does he want us to give up the game.

Soon after making his confession, Vereker seems to realize that he’s mistook the narrator for the ideal reader, and relents. When they meet again, Vereker – still cordial – repents of his admission in a manner that starkly contrasts against the tenderness of their previous meeting: “I was accidentally so much more explicit with you than it had ever entered into my game to be, that I find this game – I mean the pleasure of playing it – suffers considerably” (James, p. 372). We see a further deterioration of their relationship. Here, the language makes it sound almost like a break-up. “He had been free with me in a mood, he had repented in a mood, and now in a mood he had turned indifferent” (James, p. 373). After that, the narrator is not only unable to enjoy Vereker’s company but also develops a dislike for his books: “Not only had I lost the books, but I had lost the man himself; they and their author had been alike spoiled for me. I knew too much which was the loss I most regretted. I had taken to the man still more than I had ever taken to the books.” (James, p. 378) The reader is left to wonder: are we too going to start losing interest?

James has yet another motive for keeping us unsatisfied. Late in the story, the narrator speculates that now that Gwendolyn knows the secret, “The writer might go down to his grave: she was the person in the world to whom – as if she had been his favoured heir – his continued existence was least of a need” (James, p.394). This can be read as an argument against being understood in one’s lifetime, and forms a part of why James wants to keep us unsatisfied: so to live on in mystery in our imagination. Once the author can be pinned down and is understood, he’s as good as dead. But it is equally true that after Vereker’s death, Gwendolyn will never have the satisfaction of his blessing: “I had above all to remind myself that with Vereker’s death the major incentive dropped. He was still there to be honoured by what might be done – he was no longer there to give it his sanction. Who alas but he had the authority?” (James, p. 397)

In James’ desire for a reciprocal relationship, we also glimpse something that approaches a moral dimension. If we understand the narrator’s quest and his obsessiveness in Barthesian terms, then he is an extreme pleasure seeker. His quest, however, makes him oblivious to a whole code of values. Nowhere in the story do we really see him as much as communicating sincerely with another human being or making a moral choice. He’s living for pleasure alone and in this is callous to all values:

Pleasure’s force of suspension can never be overstated; it is a veritable époché, a stoppage which congeals all recognized values (recognized by oneself). Pleasure is a neuter (the most perverse for of the demonic). (Barthes, p. 65)

In his choice of narrator, James warns us against this very danger. James wants a reciprocal relationship with the reader, the very kind that our narrator is unable to provide. The narrator starts out wanting to hold the author’s hand, but ends up alienating himself and even relishing in the despair of a rival. This is opposition to the moral obligation that the narrator has as a critic (and which is previously laid out by Vereker), that the “figure” is just the critic’s “responsibility;” “the thing for the critic to find.” But the obsession makes him cruel and heartless. All he thinks about is how he can possibly uncover the secret until at last all he is able to do is relish in is the pain he causes Gwendolyn’s widower. At story’s end, the unnamed pleasure-seeker finds satisfaction in his dissatisfaction; he gives up the game and lets go of the author’s hand.

Works Cited:

Barthes, Roland, The Pleasure of the Text., tr. Richard Miller. New York; Hill and Wang, 1975.

James, Henry, The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories. London; Penguin Classics, 1986.