“‘I see–it’s some idea ABOUT life, some sort of philosophy. Unless it be,’ I added with the eagerness of a thought perhaps still happier, ‘some kind of game you’re up to with your style, something you’re after in the language. Perhaps it’s a preference for the letter P!’ I ventured profanely to break out. ‘Papa, potatoes, prunes–that sort of thing?’ He was suitably indulgent: he only said I hadn’t got the right letter.”
‘The Figure in the Carpet’ forces you to accept ambiguity, waking up your thoughts and giving them insomnia. This was one of the stories I couldn’t have omitted without ingratitude – I read it early and it’s become part of the furniture of my brain. It’s about a young critic who dedicates his life to learning the hidden meaning of an author’s work. Like Paul Auster’s City of Glass or any number of Borges’ stories, it captures something ineffable in concrete, only to sink it just out of view so that we really feel its absence.
I am often very sure that I know things – about myself, other people, the meaning of books and films and tv shows – right up until the moment that I try to articulate them to myself or others. Then I have that moment of terrifying undoing when I realise that nothing exists outside the how of my saying it, and if I don’t have that how, the knowledge recedes, and I’m left with nothing but a feeling of personal insufficiency. I think that’s what’s compelling about ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, more than it being a theorisation of ‘criticism’ or ‘authorship’ or whatever – it’s a story about the frustration of feeling like you ought to be able to know.
First published in Cosmopolis, 1896. Collected in The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, Penguin Books, 1986; also available as a Little Black Classic, Penguin, 2015. Read online at Project Gutenberg here
A Personal Anthology 