EPILOGUE
“There Is Not a Pin to Choose Between Us”
Ten pages into Gift of Death there is an intriguing note to Derrida’s 1991 seminar on the secret: “Literature concerning the secret is almost always organized around scenes and intrigues that deal with death,” it begins. This is a theme, he adds, that he had attempted to demonstrate in the seminar, “referring most often to ‘American’ examples.”1 His list includes Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and Henry James’s The Aspern Papers and “The Figure in the Carpet.” There are numerous traces of Derrida’s readings of the first two stories in his published works, but, as far as I have been able to discover, there are no other significant references to Henry James in Derrida’s corpus.2 And yet there are few writers for whom the secret plays a greater role and whose treatment of it has been as thoroughly thematized. The reference was thus too enticing to ignore.
On the face of it, James’s 1896 story, “The Figure in the Carpet,” which follows a series of critics on their quest to discover the submerged secret at the heart of a famous writer’s successful literary oeuvre, would seem particularly relevant to Derrida’s own project. The story is told by an unnamed critic offered the chance by his friend Corvick to review the prominent writer Vereker’s latest work for The Middle. Corvick was originally commissioned to do the review for the journal, but has passed it along to the narrator after receiving a telegram calling him to Paris to come to the aid of a Miss Gwendolen Erme, whom Corvick would clearly like to marry, her ailing mother being the only remaining obstacle. The narrator produces his review with pride, knowing that he will meet “the great man” himself at an upcoming weekend party.3 At the party, when he discovers that the narrator has overheard him refer to the review as “the usual twaddle,” Vereker makes a point of coming by the critic’s room to apologize (127). In trying to explain himself, Vereker reveals that his work contains a secret, “the passion of his passion” that every critic had thus far failed to see (129). Between the two of them, they trade a series of metaphors to describe the nature of this secret, calling it “an exquisite scheme,” “a bird in a cage,” “a piece of cheese in a mousetrap,” “the organ of life,” “a sort of buried treasure,” “the very string that my pearls are strung on,” and “a complex figure in a Persian carpet” (131, 132, 136). When asked if it is a “kind of esoteric message,” Vereker replies that “it can’t be described in cheap journalese” (131). He eggs on the narrator with potential clues, only then to tell him to “give it up, give it up” (132). He worries and hopes that the secret will be revealed, but then follows this up by adding, “But I needn’t worry—it won’t.” This oscillation only motivates the narrator further, and he shares his story of the encounter with Corvick upon his return in hopes that the more senior critic might have better luck unlocking the secret. Corvick tells Gwendolen, and between the two lovers it becomes a shared project—an obsession even.
From there the story proceeds through a series of enticements and deferrals, and a string of deaths. Corvick removes himself to India on a journalistic assignment and supposedly solves the riddle while he’s there, but refuses to reveal what it is until he’s confirmed it with Vereker himself. He ultimately returns and supposedly has it verified, but the narrator is himself called away from England by an ailing brother and thus fails to hear the news from Corvick. In the meantime, Corvick marries Miss Gwendolen Erme, but on their honeymoon they have a carriage accident and he dies. Mrs. Corvick then becomes the supposed possessor of the secret, but refuses to share it. “I’ve heard everything,” she tells the narrator, “and I mean to keep it to myself” (148). Gwendolen seems ennobled by her knowledge, practically glowing from its impact, and produces a novel herself in its wake. The narrator considers pursuing her hand in hopes that the secret would come out with such intimacy. Meanwhile, Vereker dies six months later, and his wife follows. The narrator fails in his quest for Gwendolen, and she marries another critic, Drayton Deane from TheMiddle, but dies in childbirth. The story ends with the narrator soliciting Deane for the secret, only to find that he knew nothing of it. The story thus closes, of course, without the secret revealed, and the narrator’s only satisfaction comes from Deane’s shared ignorance. “I may say that to-day as victims of unappeased desire there isn’t a pin to choose between us. The poor man’s state is almost my consolation; there are really moments when I feel it to be quite my revenge” (156). Deane here is himself also the stand-in for the reader, for as a consequence of the narrator’s telling, a telling that fails to reveal the secret even as it shares it, the narrator extends both the awareness of the state of ignorance and the concomitant desire to penetrate the secret.
Not surprisingly the story has itself elicited tremendous speculation and served as a testing ground for the critical enterprise, especially as criticism came in the second half of the twentieth century to engage the very mechanics of literature’s meaning-making process. In the first edition of Poétique, a journal inaugurated in France by Hélène Cixous, Gérard Genette, and Tzvetan Todorov to develop a notion of “la littérarité,” which “exceeds the boundaries of literature,” Cixous wrote on “The Figure in the Carpet” among other stories and novels written by James.4 In the essay she develops a reading of James, but clearly of narrative art more generally, as a kind of magic lantern projection in which “the theatricality of the shadow of the real is underlined,” where knowledge is always dangerous either as too much or too little, “too violent and insufficient.”5 As the only literary author besides Balzac treated in this French journal’s first issue, James is a striking choice for the journal’s task, but the role of the enigma in his work was clearly attractive to those working out a structuralist method of literary criticism in France. Cixous’s own reading followed analyses by Phillipe Sollers and by Todorov.6
In 1978, in The Act of Reading, Wolfgang Iser used the story to work out his model for reader-response theory, arguing that the meaning of literature can never be a formula, or an object to be grasped, but only emerges through the reader’s engagement with a text, thus taking the critic Corvick’s discovery of the meaning of Vereker’s work as a paradigm for how literature generates meaning.7 Corvick is staged as the insider, and the narrator as the outsider. Corvick models the “right” way to read, and the narrator is misguided. But what Iser fails to point out is that, as readers, we are not with Corvick, but with Vereker. Iser seems to propose that by judging Vereker a failure we move closer to Corvick’s position. No doubt the story’s ironic dimension functions to solicit this move, but the alignment fails, for James gives us no access to Corvick or his “knowledge,” and such a reading risks making the real critic himself play the alazon. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, in her 1977 book The Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James, used the story to work out the nature of literary ambiguity, revealing the elements that resist clarification, showing that the story is constructed to thwart the reader’s desire to answer the question not only of what the secret is but also of whether or not there even is a secret. She counts the ambiguous pronouns and James’s “doubly directed clues” and shows the story to function like a maze made up only of dead ends.8 At the same time, she too reads itas “metaliterary,” duplicating in the reader the same search for a solution that Vereker, with his clues, elicits from his readers. Most readings of “The Figure in the Carpet”, she points out, tend to choose a side, either affirming the existence of the secret or denying it. J. Hillis Miller, in 1980, formulated his reading method in explicitly deconstructive terms. Like a number of others, he too reads the story as an allegory on the very process of narration, on its promise of representation as order, and order as representation, as a narrative about the fact that realistic representation is already a kind of catachresis, which James reveals through mechanisms of obscuration and deferral. According to this reading, “The Figure in the Carpet” is a story about the fact that succumbing to the lure of saying what a narrative is about is already to have taken the bait, which implies, of course, as Miller already knows, that he himself has swallowed the hook.9
In all these readings there is a kind of unacknowledged theological echo, resonant in the role of the unknown and unknowable that animates the story.10 But even as every critic who reads it is fascinated by the dynamic of the unrevealed and unrevealable, the lure of knowledge and its danger, only Miller notes the way in which the “figure” in the carpet as an image plays on the notion of logos, as that which is evident in every surface, in every manifestation of the creator, and yet necessarily remains veiled insofar as it can only appear as something else and thus cannot be grasped in itself. The story flirts with the trope of the mystery cult; Vereker balks at the possibility of an esotericism, but speaks of the ideal of a group of potential “initated.”11 And the story unfolds as a group of the initiated is formed, but to whose insight the narrative provides no access. The fact of their subsequent demise mimics the link in various mystical literatures between esoteric knowledge and death. Of course, in the Christian tradition, with mystics such as Catherine of Siena, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, union and annihilation of the soul is followed by a resurrection back into the world, but here, in our literary counterpart, their deaths serve merely as another obstacle to knowledge.12 James himself describes the story as about “the quality and play of an ironic consciousness in the designer left wholly alone, amid a chattering unperceiving world.”13 Yet this God’s-eye view is not that of the story itself. James can only tell this story through the consciousness of one who doesn’t see and who blocks the reader’s access to sight. Whether or not the “designer” is himself all-knowing, whether the secret is something that he could reveal or even articulate, is itself impossible to discern. Vereker’s clues are only more metaphors, “figures” for the secret and often at odds with one another in their description. Even James, in his preface to the story, describes the secret as “undiscovered, not to say undiscoverable.”14 This is itself an ambiguous phrase. The double negative seems only to further suspend our comprehension. Why should he not say “undiscoverable,” because it is discoverable or because one shouldn’t avow its undiscoverability? The very preface itself thus extends the game, taking it to a metalevel, inciting the urge to find graspable insight, but only furthering speculation.
Derrida’s own interest in the James story may have come from Miller, but it could easily also have arisen from the extensive French interest in the story ten years earlier.15 Given its themes and its role in criticism, at least in conversation with Derrida, if not inspired by him, it is notable that Derrida never published on it.16
Like Corvick and the story’s narrator, upon realizing this, I too began to play the role of tormented critic. Like James and Vereker, this is a role that Derrida solicits. How many hours had I spent combing his texts, looking for references to Levinas, tracing out shared metaphors, trying to discern a meaning running through layers of obfuscating prose? If Corvick and the narrator were duped, so was I. Was this really any way to be spending my time? Yet there I was, wondering if a story itself about this dynamic had some special significance for Derrida’s own project. Had it served as an unacknowledged inspiration? Providing him perhaps with the rubric of the secret as the means to think about the link between literature and religion. It certainly fit his model as a story about the relation between secrecy and death, but also about the relationship between revelation and betrayal.
With all these questions in mind, and an awareness of the fact that I was behaving like an overzealous “initiate,” I made my own pilgrimage to the Derrida archive at UC Irvine where the manuscripts for Derrida’s seminars are housed under impressive security: an attendant monitors the researchers at all times; no photographs are allowed. Only ten pages of photocopies can be made in any reader’s lifetime and from only one session of one seminar. The files themselves come with a large laminated legal-size marker printed with the archive’s rules and decorated with a photograph of Derrida’s face in its characteristically wry smile. This was certainly not what Levinas had in mind when he spoke of the face to face.
While I was there a couple of scholars, a husband and wife in black leather and designer eyeglasses, asked to see the papers. They had traveled a long way, they told the librarian, just to be there. When the librarian asked what in particular they wanted to see, they said it didn’t matter. They taught Derrida, they told her, and just wanted to see the handwriting, finger the pages. That was fine, she said, but they had to wear gloves. They sat in silence over Derrida’s indecipherable handwriting for fifteen minutes, returned the files, and then left.
How could it be, given Derrida’s own concern in Archive Fever that the archive is patriarchal in its restrictions as the site of the intersection of law and singularity in privilege, that we were in this anonymous room, in a state school library, behaving as though we had entered the inner sanctum? The irony was indisputable, but it was also exemplary.17 Nonetheless, with all these dynamics in mind, I confess, it was with a kind of zealous curiosity and a wild heartbeat that I opened the first session of the seminar entitled “Repondre au secret” and began searching for the reference to James.
The course begins with an extensive reading of “Bartleby,” the reading I had supposed was behind the essay “Passions,” but moves quickly to a more general theorizing of the role of secrecy in literature.18 About midway through the first session, Derrida looks up from the reading of “Bartleby,” Bartleby as character and “Bartleby” as story, to suggest the character himself as an emblem for literature. “It is also this statute of the literary récit of which the secret is not divulged and never will be…revealing the ultimate essence without essence of the secret…. It says ‘I am a secret,’ without unveiling anything, without saying anything, and without showing.”19 Such a line could, of course, serve as a reading of “The Figure in the Carpet,” but James does not appear until the fourth session of the seminar, when Derrida turns his attention to Heidegger and to a disruption of the proper and the improper in Heidegger’s own construction of care and being toward death.
“The Figure in the Carpet” and The Aspern Papers first appear only as references in the opening of the session, as examples of texts in which death “comes to bring a secret that has never existed.”20 Then Derrida raises the possibility that James’s accounts might disrupt the very distinction between authenticity and “falling” (Verfallen), between the anticipation of something futural and what Heidegger refers to as “the running away from waiting” manifest in curiosity.21 What interests Derrida in the stories is the relation between curiosity, as the approach to something “provisionally” hidden, and death, the fact that the stories themselves disrupt the distinction between a secret with content and death as that secret which cannot be uncovered. Citing Heidegger’s own degraded modalities of Dasein, Derrida writes, “Literature is above all curiosity, for the curious, it cultivates curiosity, these secrets are not real secrets, these are the secrets to excite Gerede, bavardage (talk or idle chatter) and one could say advertising, for fleeing anxiety, for…distracting one from death.”22 Unlike poetry, novels and stories are the object of Heidegger’s disdain. But it is literature, perhaps most acutely in its narrative form, that disrupts the very distinction between the proper and the improper, Derrida suggests. Yet, in offering this analysis, he does not exactly provide a reading of the James stories, although he anticipates his reading at least three times. Instead he provides a provisional postscript, a postscript to his lecture in the conditional tense: “My second anticipated postscript would concern that which Heidegger would think or would have thought finally of this literature of the secret in secret, of this American literature that occupies us here. One could imagine that before it, but particularly before James he would have, if he had, read him (did he read him? I don’t know, I don’t believe so) severely or disdainfully like police novels or detective novels as opposed to poetry [Dichtung].”23 He then goes on to compare Heidegger to Miss Tina Bordereau, the dowdy niece in James’s The Aspern Papers, at the moment when she discovers with her aunt that the narrator is, as the aunt declares, “a publishing scoundrel.”24 In the story Miss Bordereau plays something of the author figure herself when she says that indeed the papers of the great poet Aspern do exist, but she cannot show them. Instead she holds them out as a kind of lure or promise for the narrator. If he were to become “a relation,” however, things would be different.25
Derrida’s suggestion with the comparison to Miss Bordereau is that Heidegger himself can’t keep up the distinction between the secret as ruse and the profundity of the true secret or mystery, even as he condemns the former in favor of the latter. There is thus a parallel between the argument that Derrida makes here between Henry James and Heidegger and that which he makes in Gift of Death between the biblical secret and the literary secret. Derrida’s larger political point here brings us back to the relationship between literature and democracy. What Heidegger condemns as curiosity and idle talk, he condemns as well a kind of “vulgar” democracy that venerates surface over depth, distraction over authenticity, the movement of the crowd over the contemplation of the individual. What Derrida suggests is that literature disenables the possibility of holding fast to such distinctions. Literature exposes its mysteries as a mere lure and advertises its own seductive devices. It calls the reader to impute depth to the story, to speculate on the characters’ motivations, their backstory, their secrets, but when the reader tries to look behind the story to locate that depth, there are no people there, no depth of consciousness, only another sheaf of paper.
Literature does indeed belong to the throngs, to democracy, Derrida suggests, but among the crowds one’s exposure can be a form of privacy. If, in a monarchy, power depends upon the secret of the monarch, secured by the secrecy of God, literature recalls for us that in democracy secrecy remains, despite the endless efforts to evacuate it from the public sphere; it remains, but it hides right out in the open.
Another important point worth mentioning about the seminar is that the note points us toward its most explicit content. The majority of the sessions concern the comparison between literature’s relation to secrecy and Heidegger’s Sein zum Tode. The central content of Gift of Death, the reading of Patočka, Kierkegaard, and Levinas, is itself something of a digression in the course, and it interrupts Derrida’s very promise to offer a reading of the relation between Heidegger and James. Session 4 of the seminar closes with the suggestion that Derrida will return to the topic of James and Heidegger in the next session, but session 5 opens with the announcement of a digression. The digression, it turns out, is the reading of Patočka that becomes the central focus of Gift of Death. James does not again make an appearance.
My first reaction to this fact was of course grave disappointment. I had come in search of a reading of “The Figure in the Carpet” and found none. It was as though I had finally laid my hands on the Aspern papers themselves, only to discover that they were insignificant sheaves of paper. Why, I asked myself, had he even mentioned this story as a “subject” of a recent seminar when it appeared in title alone? And then I noticed a passage before the postscript in the seminar notes in which “The Figure in the Carpet” appeared again.
We could naturally, I do not dare say get bogged down [enliser] or get stuck, but rather remain to infinity, or rather up to death in the text of Being and Time as we could or ought to do in “Bartleby” or Baudelaire, much later in The Aspern Papers or “The Figure in the Carpet.” I could show if I had the time that it is a question of two ways, indiscernible, despite every effort, of discerning, of determining being for death [l’etre pour la la mort] (l’etre with l’ and not lettre in a word like dead letters) as relation to the secret of the secret. My only consolation consequently, given that I may not or ought not do it here, is to content myself in marking the pages, I can hope that you can do the work and you will see for yourselves.26
This was a strange moment for me in the archive. My heart again began to race. Was this a setup, or what I had been looking for all along? I was tempted to look behind me or even up. Instead I looked over at the goofy bookmark, at the laminated page with Derrida’s face on it. There was no transcendent presence in the room, no real face of the other to call to me, no encounter to be had, just words on a page and no one behind them. What I felt distinctly was absence—the sense in which death separates. I saw that Derrida’s own death was already foreshadowed in these letters, in the type on the page. I saw that, like the writers he discussed, he too linked curiosity and death, used it to lure his readers. It was both cheese in a mousetrap and the strand to string his pearls on. It had already been predicted: of course, I would arrive and initiate my own repetition of the story. I would arrive with the passion to see for myself. There would be no reading of “The Figure in the Carpet,” but he would set in motion its very dynamics. Like Vereker, he would “leave” the interpretation “to somebody else.”27
And so there in the archive I sat. I came convinced that I would find in the course Derrida’s definitive reading, that it would serve as the perfect capstone for my book, that I would be the one to unearth this new insight, to make the discovery. Was I just the victim of curiosity, one more voracious critic, one more publishing scoundrel? Or, even worse, was I another devotee, setting in motion the very dynamics of initiation and esotericism?
Or could I see things otherwise?
I thought about the last scene in the James story when the narrator finally manages to corner Drayton Deane and demand of him the secret, only to discover that Deane does not possess it. It is a scene that is consistently read as an indication of the superficiality of the story’s narrator. Despite all his searching, he has come to understand nothing. For those critics who see themselves as having fathomed the story’s secret, it is a moment when the irony of the story seems to be that they are on the inside while the narrator is on the outside. They understand. James has cleverly managed to write the story so that they can indeed be among the initiated while our poor narrator remains on the threshold with his new victim.
But who indeed is the alazon in this scenario?
“I may say that to-day as victims of unappeased desire there isn’t a pin to choose between us. The poor man’s state is almost my consolation; there are really moments when I feel it to be quite my revenge,” the story concludes.28 The phrase the narrator uses to describe his relation to Deane is striking: “there isn’t a pin to choose between us.” It recalls the old Norse folktale “There is Not a Pin to Choose Between Them.” The story is about an old man whose silly wife is taken by a con man when she tries to sell their cow. In trying to better the situation, the man marches off in anger, goes out, and behaves a little like a con man himself, taking money from other silly women. When he finally returns home, he tells his wife how silly she is, but concedes, “that is all one now, for the rest are not a bit wiser than you. There is not a pin to choose between you.”
We could take the reference to the folktale here as a sign that the narrator knows he’s been conned and thus, perhaps, so have we along with him. But it is significant that the phrase is now inclusive, indeed that literature allows such a stance, not so much the con itself but the awareness of it. One can know that it is all a trick and nonetheless read on, indeed desire on without the possibility of eternal life or even the promise of truth on the distant horizon. We can know that the very possibility of penetrating the secret is a ruse, that Vereker’s secret is indeed undiscoverable, and yet we read on and we read again. For Heidegger this was a sign that we seek distraction, that we’re always running from the possibility of our impossibility. Perhaps it is less a distraction and more like the virtual space of a collective wake.
In the end, the narrator and Deane are there as readers—critics even—together in their ignorance and their desire, as are we, the readers. They are also there as mourners and survivors. The scene takes place in the smoking room of a small club of which both are members. Alone in the room, in high-backed chairs, the story that the narrator has been telling unfolds before his new audience. “I told him in a word just what I’ve written out here, and I became aware” the narrator continues, “to my surprise, by his ejaculations, by his questions, that he would have been after all not unworthy to be trusted by his wife.”29 It is, in fact, the first real insight the narrator has had in the story and perhaps the first real insight James has allowed us, his readers. But, for all that, it remains in the past conditional, a hypothesis untested and untestable. In their mutual ignorance, the narrator and Deane form their own club, a club of the uninitiated.
The final line of the story, one might assume, suggests otherwise. The “poor man’s state” is almost the narrator’s consolation, and there are moments, he concludes, when he feels it to be his revenge. But revenge against what? It is certainly not revenge against Deane, for they are now together in their shared ignorance. Perhaps it is against death? Against the secret? Can the two be differentiated, one from the other?
In reading for myself these last lines of the story and knowing that I don’t know, I thought of Derrida after the death of his own friend. I thought of him standing at Levinas’s graveside and then two years later at the colloquium, a stranger, indeed, at a club to which he did not belong. And I thought of a sentiment I had encountered often in reading Derrida, which I had come across again in the archive, reading the seminar’s previous session, “the only secret that remains,” Derrida wrote in his notes, “is that of the encounter, the chance of the encounter that crosses two signatures, what Celan in the Meridian calls Geheimnis der Begegnung—the secret of the encounter in which the poem consists.”30
I have throughout this book referred to Derrida as misreading, perverting, betraying Levinas, but I have also described this as an act of fidelity and a gesture of friendship, one as the other. It was, in the end, also the drawing of a meridian and a means of survival. It was the beginning of a constellation that would continue to be forged after both were gone and only the words on the page remained, soliciting us, resisting our desire to produce the last word.