THE FIGURE IN THE TAPESTRY
THE FIGURE IN THE TAPESTRY

Summary/Abstract: The existence of a mystery, be it even a literary one, transforms any story into a thriller, while its absence makes fiction, as well as life, boring. Starting from the metaphor of the Persian carpet in Henry James’s short story as the development of a mise en abyme – in its strictest sense of placing a secret correspondence in the deep structure of a work of art –, this paper looks at the different ways in which a similarly intricate and mysterious mise en abyme is achieved in both Tracy Chevalier’s The Lady and the Unicorn (2003) and Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Flanders Panel (a book that appeared in 1990 and was translated into Romanian in 2003).

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