The Figure in the Carpet

Images of filaments, ficelles, lines, figures drawn with lines, woven or embroidered cloth, thread themselves through dense metaphorical texture of Henry James's prefaces.' These prefaces taken together no doubt form most important treatise on novel in English. A passage in preface to Roderick Hudson is an appropriate place to begin, since it bears not only on difficulty of beginning but on even greater difficulty of stopping once one has begun. In passage I cite, issue is a double one: first, how, in writing a novel, to draw a line around material to be treated, to give it an edge or border which appears as a natural stopping place in all directions beyond which there is nothing relevant to subject, and, second, how, within those limits, to treat what is left inside charmed circle totally and with total continuity, omitting nothing and establishing or articulating all connections, all of what Tolstoj, in a splendid phrase, called the labyrinth of linkages.2 Continuity and completeness, on one hand, and finite form, on other, this is double necessity: