Title

Discourses of power have a way of constructing meaningless secrets in our hearts for us to search for in our lives and give meaning to the rest of the world. Literature has a way of expressing those powers and tying the reader into that reality of power structures. Those in power shape the knowledge that determine the values a character or reader would project from their lives on the text. In Henry James’, The Figure in the Carpet, an unknown narrator stumbles on the hint of a secret sewn into the novels of the respected author Hugh Vereker. As the narrator, his friend George Corvick and lady friend Gwendolen Erme agonize over the meaning of this little trick so does the reader.

The creator of the secret, Vereker, pulls the strings of the story. His status in the literary circle was above that of Corvick and the narrator, so that gave him authority and people believed and cared about he had to say. The narrator is assigned to write a review of Vereker’s most recent book, and later had the opportunity to meet the author himself. In the presence of this man, the narrator was in awe and thought: “The impression he made on me personally was such that I wished him to read it” (James, 574). He constructs the power around Vereker that causes the narrator to respect his opinion. However, when the esteemed writer read the review and revealed the narrator had missed the point completely, Vereker implies how much more knowledge he carries because no one else can grasp what he attempts to say in his novels. The narrator acknowledges the status of Vereker over his, reflecting on the evening they met: “I have always done justice to the generous impulse that made him speak; it was simply compunction for a snub unconsciously administered to a ma...

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...: “If my great affair’s a secret, that’s only because it’s a secret in spite of itself- the amazing event has made it one” (James, 580). The secret is now a fixed idea, and having already been established as a sign this means that the meaning is arbitrary.

In the end, any great secret about life that is described, but not revealed, and presented by a figure of power and respect is meaningless. Vereker would know that, and that is why he refers to the whole idea as a game that spoils the fun when someone finds out. He crafted the idea and gave it a language. The language deemed this mysterious information as important knowledge, and those in power construct what is considered knowledge. Vereker knowingly set that standard in this construction of reality of the secret in an awfully clever arrangement. The secret is that there is really no secret that means anything.