Casanova, P.: "Literature as a World" en New Left Review, 31 (Jan Feb 2005), pp. 71-90 (73).
"In his story, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’—turning as it does on the aims of interpretation in literature—Henry James deploys the beautiful metaphor of the Persian rug. Viewed casually or too close up, this appears an indecipherable tangle of arbitrary shapes and colours; but from the right angle, the carpet will suddenly present the attentive observer with ‘the one right combination’ of ‘superb intricacy’—an ordered set of motifs which can only be understood in relation to each other, and which only become visible when perceived in their totality, in their reciprocal dependence and mutual interaction.
Only when the carpet is seen as a configuration—to use Foucault’s term in Les Mots et les choses—ordering the shapes and colours can its regularities, variations, repetitions be understood; both its coherence and its internal relationships. Each figure can be grasped only in terms of the position it occupies within the whole, and its interconnections with all the others.
The Persian carpet metaphor perfectly encapsulates the approach offered here: to take a different perspective, shifting the ordinary vantage-point on literature. Not to focus just on the global coherence of the carpet, but rather to show that, starting from a grasp of the overall pattern of the designs, it will be possible to understand each motif, each colour in its most minute detail; that is, each text, each individual author, on the basis of their relative position within this immense structure. My project, then, is to restore the coherence of the global structure within which texts appear, and which can only be seen by taking the route seemingly farthest from them: through the vast, invisible territory which I have called the ‘World Republic of Letters’. But only in order to return to the texts themselves, and to provide a new tool for reading them".
