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A Marriage of Opposites: Henry James's "The Figure in the Carpet" and the Problem of Ambiguity

1980; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2872860

1080-6547

Rachel Salmon,

Short Stories in Global Literature

Although Jamesian ambiguity has been widely and repeatedly discussed, a clear-cut definition the phenomena-as equally tenable, but logically incompatible, readings a single text-has only recently been insisted upon. The New Critical school praised ambiguous texts for their complexity, and viewed multiple interpretations as, in some sense, complementary.' On the level practical criticism, however, the New Critics produced a plethora antithetical readings-mostly based on convincing textual evidence-which led to vehement and unresolvable controversies rather than an increased appreciation textual richness. Eventually critics with a more theoretical bent began to analyze the way that ambiguity actually functions in literary texts. Because the fiction Henry James is so decidedly ambiguous, it proved a fruitful field for such studies. Discoveries made in the examination Jamesian ambiguity are likely to have important implications for the phenomenon literary ambiguity as a whole. Christine Brooke-Rose and Shlomith Rimmon have made the most thorough-going theoretical attempts to describe ambiguity in James's work. Reexploring that most famous example controversial ambiguity-The Turn the Screw2-Brooke-Rose shows that is no word or incident in the story which cannot be interpreted in both ways.3 Each piece textual evidence perfectly supports each the mutually contradictory readings: there are ghosts and there are not (the hallucination theory). Since, according to Brooke-Rose, no synthesis or resolution these readings is possible, she seeks unity at a deeper level-what she calls a single sentence capable generating consistently binary readings on the story level. She unearths that which the formalists have already described as the deep structure of all folktales and most myths: an injunction is given, accepted, and transgressed.4 Although Brooke-Rose admits that there are as yet no transformational rules which can predict how a specific narrative deep