Henry James’s Esthetics: “The Figure in the Carpet”를 중심으로

Abstract

Henry James’s Esthetics in “The Figure in the Carpet”Koh, Inn-SookThis article aims to win some glimpse of the elusive “figure”―“the string on which his pearls are strung.” In perfecting his art James sought to make every word and phrase articulate and extend the symbolic scheme whose development was inseparable from the figure in the carpet. This is also suggested by what Hugh Vereker says of his “secret.” He does not limit it by saying it is “something in the style or something in the thought, an element of form or an element of feeling.”The effort to view the whole of James's work closely and analytically as an expression of his “finest fullest intention” can significantly enlarge our sense of what James is doing in his art. We may come to see a figure constituting a single vision of which all the author’s works are the representation. The figure in the carpet is that which gives life to the whole work. It must be the inner meaning and the motive of all that is included in his method. Perhaps we should say there is not one. There are many figures in the carpet―as many figures as there are discerning readers. For me the figure in the carpet is not James’s philosophy of life but the sacred mastery of structure. It is not an esoteric message but the organ of life or the texture of life.