Tracing “The Figure in the Carpet”: A Truth about the “Truth” in Henry James’s Tales
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Many of James’s literary tales and short stories are densely peopled with writers, readers and critics who seek knowledge in one form or another. This essay is an attempt to investigate James’s dealings with the matters of knowledge and truth as represented in such tales. A persistent search for knowledge and an insistent belief in truth are so prevalent in James’s world that such an obsessive attachment to truth and knowledge seems an almost inevitable, curious human condition. I explore what this pursuit might imply in terms of the symbolic power invested in knowledge as a form of privileged resources. In so doing, instead of trying to identify or define the possible contents of the hidden truth in James’s work, I examine how this truth as a paradoxically absent presence affects those who desire to partake in the symbolic power invested in it. My discussion of James’s tales about knowledge and truth focus especially on “The Figure in the Carpet” as a paradigmatic instance of the pursuit of knowledge. For James the truth refers not so much the finality of meaning as an unquestioning belief in it, which he problematizes. It never is certain whether there is something special to know, something that may be categorized and privileged as “truth.” The force of the unknown truth does not emanate shiningly from any privileged point of referential actuality, but is felt in one’s incapacity to remain unknowing or to accept such an incapacity to know. In reaction to this impasse, one searches for, constructs, and believes in one’s own vision and version of knowledge. Whereas the existence of the secret remains uncertain, the inability to handle this uncertainty fosters at once an obsessive search for “something” on the one hand and a dismissive hermeneutics of “nothing” on the other. Inaccessibility, inscrutability, incommunicability, indeterminacy and irreducibility, should not be taken for absence or nothingness. James’s representation of such pursuits of truth is, I argue, a powerful commentary on the often misplaced value of knowledge and the limited human capacity for knowing anything at all. It is also a poignant critique of the gendered structure of epistemology that heavily privileges masculinity, in which the traditional masculine appropriation of truth ends up revealing its own untruth.
Abstract
Many of James’s literary tales and short stories are densely peopled with writers, readers and critics who seek knowledge in one form or another. This essay is an attempt to investigate James’s dealings with the matters of knowledge and truth as represented in such tales. A persistent search for knowledge and an insistent belief in truth are so prevalent in James’s world that such an obsessive attachment to truth and knowledge seems an almost inevitable, curious human condition. I explore what this pursuit might imply in terms of the symbolic power invested in knowledge as a form of privileged resources. In so doing, instead of trying to identify or define the possible contents of the hidden truth in James’s work, I examine how this truth as a paradoxically absent presence affects those who desire to partake in the symbolic power invested in it. My discussion of James’s tales about knowledge and truth focus especially on “The Figure in the Carpet” as a paradigmatic instance of the pursuit of knowledge. For James the truth refers not so much the finality of meaning as an unquestioning belief in it, which he problematizes. It never is certain whether there is something special to know, something that may be categorized and privileged as “truth.” The force of the unknown truth does not emanate shiningly from any privileged point of referential actuality, but is felt in one’s incapacity to remain unknowing or to accept such an incapacity to know. In reaction to this impasse, one searches for, constructs, and believes in one’s own vision and version of knowledge. Whereas the existence of the secret remains uncertain, the inability to handle this uncertainty fosters at once an obsessive search for “something” on the one hand and a dismissive hermeneutics of “nothing” on the other. Inaccessibility, inscrutability, incommunicability, indeterminacy and irreducibility, should not be taken for absence or nothingness. James’s representation of such pursuits of truth is, I argue, a powerful commentary on the often misplaced value of knowledge and the limited human capacity for knowing anything at all. It is also a poignant critique of the gendered structure of epistemology that heavily privileges masculinity, in which the traditional masculine appropriation of truth ends up revealing its own untruth.
참고문헌 (19)
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