A Guest in the House

I thank Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan for her courteous, intelligent, and penetrating comment on my Figure in the Carpet, published in the Spring (1980) issue of Poetics Today. I much admire her The Concept of Ambiguity, The Example of James (1977) and was, in what I said of her book in my essay, attempting to measure the differences between us, as well as the similarities. Her reply gives me a chance to think about this again. In reading that reply I have had the experience, probably common in such cases, of feeling She's doing it again, that is, repeating those features of her original work which seemed to me to differ from my way of reading James's story. Those features are primarily forms of a schematizing rationality devoted to intellectual mastery, whereas I was attempting to express the experience (both words must be put in suspension) of the failure of an attempt at mastery. No doubt I failed in this. No doubt my formulations, like all such formulations, are, as Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan says, too decisive, too canny, to avoid being recuperable within such concepts as ambiguity or binary opposition. Precisely. This was the point I was making. My own discourse is necessarily an example of the failure I was trying to identify. Had I succeeded I would have failed. Only by failing could I succeed, which is lucky, since, like everyone else playing this game, like the characters, including the narrator, in Figure in the Carpet, like Henry James himself, I am certain to lose it. (No doubt at this point Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, if she reads this, will say, He's doing it again.) Nevertheless, though losing is inevitable here, there are different forms of it, and I have one or two more remarks to make about the differences between Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's procedures with Figure in the Carpet and mine. I shall try to make them as economically canny as possible. In these regions the traveler needs as much of the protective shield of logic as he can get. First point: Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan is right to say that more is at stake between us than a question of slightly different ways of reading James's Figure in the Carpet. The two readings set against one another that form of criticism called structuralist and that form called deconstructive. To what she says of the differences I would add that the difference in or of critical discourse (I don't know quite what to call it) is decisive here. Structuralism, as practiced for example by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan in her book on James, is reasoned, more or less abstract, given to diagrams and tables. It is written from within an international community of researchers sharing the same goals, the same norms and procedures, and speaking the same language of analysis. The way of coding references to previous works in Poetics Today is a good example of this. Like the other features of tone and style in question it incorporates the essays in Poetics Today within the domain of linguistics and the other human those in turn within a larger domain including the social and physical sciences, as part of a world-wide collective enterprise of technicalization and scientific mastery. James's story is one more item

Aesthetics · Ambiguity · Art · Binary opposition · Epistemology · Feeling · Linguistics · Literature · Poetics · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Rationality · Reflexive pronoun · Sociology · History · Law · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Psychology

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  Stephan Mussil•New Literary History•2008

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• Poststructuralism

  Lubomir Dolezel•Poetics Today•2000

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• The Concept of Ambiguity - The Example of James

  Christine Brooke-Rose, Christine Brooke‐rose et al.•Poetics Today•1979

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• The Figure in the Carpet

  J Hillis Miller•Poetics Today•1980

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• The Critic as Host

  J Hillis Miller•Critical Inquiry•1977

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