) :,

'tI, .~'.' :~ iJ~

-$William E, Cain The Norton Anthology MARY JEWETT GAISER PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES

WELLESLEY COLLEGE

of Theory and Criticism Laurie A. Finke PROFESSOR OF WOMEN'S AND GENDER STUDIES

KENYON COLLEGE

Barbara E. Johnson PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

FREDHIC WERTHAM PROFESSOR OF lAW AND PSYCHIATRY IN SOCIETY Vincent B. Leitch, General Editor II PROFESSOR AND PAUL AND CAROL DAUBE SUTTON CHAIR IN ENGLISHHARVARD UNIVERSITY I 1

t UNIVE~SITY OF OKLAHOMA John McGowan "

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE , UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA, CHAPEL HILL

!

~ Jeffrey J. Williams

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI

Copyright 2001 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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1316 I LANGSTON HUGHES

not praise it. The white people did not buy it. Most of the who did read "Cane" hate it. They are afraid of it. Although the. it good reviews the public remained indifferent. Yet (excepting DuBois)8 "Cane" contains the finest prose written by a Negro in: And like the singing of Robeson,9 it is truly racial.

But in Spite of the Nordicized Negro intelligentsia and the White editors we have an honest American Negro literature Now I await the rise of the Negro theater. Our folk mUSic, world-wide fame, offers itself to the genius of the great Negro composer who is to come. And within the next decade I the work of a grOwing schoo,! of colored artists who paint and beauty of dark faces and create with new technique the expreSSions own soul-world. And the Negro dancers who will dance like singers who will continue to carry our songs to all who listen~the with us in even greater numbers tomorrow.

Most of my own poems are racial in theme and treatment,

the life I know. In many of them I try to grasp and hold Some of the

and rhythms of jazz. I am sincere as I lrnow how to be in these

yet after every reading I answer questions like these from my

Do you think Negroes should always write about Negroes? I

wouldn't read SOme ofyour poems to White folks. How do You.find

interesting in a place like a cabaret? Why do you write about

You aren't black What makes you do so many jazz poems?

But jazz to me is one of thejnherent expressions of Negro life in

the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul-the tom-tom of

weariness in a white world, a world ofsUbway trains, and work,

the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.

Philadelphia clubwoman is ashamed to say that her race created

does not like me to write about it. The old subconscious "White is

through her mind. Years of study under White teachers, a.lifetime

books, pictures, and papers, and white manners, morals, and

dards made her dislike the spirituals. And now she turns up her

and all its manifestations-likewise almost everything else distinctly,

She doesn't care for the Win old Reissl portraits of Negroes because

"too Negro." She does not want a 'true picture of herself from

wants the artist to flatter her, to make the White world believe.

Negroes are as smug and as near white in. soul as she wants to be ..

my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any

at all from outSiders, to change through the force of his art that

pering "I want to be white," hidden in the aspirations of his people,

should I want to be white? I am a Negro-and beautiful!"

So I am ashamed for the black poet who says, "I want to be a poeti;

Negro po.et," as though his own racial world Were not as in teres

other world. I am ashamed, too, for the colored artist who runs

painting of Negro faces to the painting of sunsets after the manner

8. w. E. s: DU nOIS (1868-1963), African Ameri

can historian, socio!ogistt poJitical activist, and L German-born. painter (J 886-1 author; the foremost black intellectual and

, known for his portraits of Native academic of the lirst half of the twentieth century. African Amer.icans. He Contrihut 9. Paul Robeson (J898-1976),AfricanAmerican illUstration~ to Alain Locke's pathbreaking, ~ stage actor, singer r and political activist. ogy ne New Negra(J 925). ,,"

GEOHGES POULET I 1317

because he fears the strange un-Whiteness of his own features. be free to choose what he does, certainly; but he inust also to do what he might choose. of Negro jazz bands and the bellOWing voice of Bessie Smith2

penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until 'arid perhaps understand. Let Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, , Fisher3 writing about the streets of Harlem, and Jean Toomer

of Georgia in his hands, and Aaron Douglas4 drawing fantasies cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their

tspectable, ordinary books and papers to catch.a glimmer of their We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our

ElI,:dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are care glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are

ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-torn laughs. If col'are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't

We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we lrnow how, on top of the mountain, free wIthin ourselves.

; American singer (ca. 1894-1937), 4. African American artist and educator (1899Empress of the Blues." 1979), the most significant visual artist of the Har

I short story writer and physi lem Renaissance. Douglas studied with Win old associated with the Harlem Reiss, and his work was included in Locke's New

Negro.

GEORGES POULET 1902-1991

much of his long and distinguished career, the phenomenological literary Poulet devoted himself to patient and reverential study of the various ! consciousness ~anifested in the history of French literature. For

cdticism has been variously termed "criticism of identificati~!I1," "conconsciousness," and "genetic .criticism," any given work of literature is a verbal medium, as it is for formalist critics like CLEANTH BROOKS, but of a distinct form of human consciousness. Following in the f~otsteps

rationalism, Poulet labels this form the cogito, which he characterizes as ~llseendent living source of literature and the spiritual center of.an author's

of writings. As a result, reading for Poulet becomes an intimate, meditative I with the cogito. The reader selflessly and passively relives the mental the author, achieving a coincidence of minds that mingles traditionally

subject and object; Jheir interanimation is a main feature of modern pheenologieal philosophy.

in Chenee, Belgium, Poulet studied at the University.of Liege, where he his doctorate in 192.7. He first ,drew international attention after World War

a prominent member of the so-called Geneva School, a respected group of ImenoJogicalliterary critics that included such notable figures as Marcel Ray-Albert Beguin, Jean Rousset, Jean Starobinski, and Jean-Pierre Richard. Poulet his teaching. career at the University of Edinburgh; he later became a professor

1926

.1.:.)10 tiEORGES POULET

in 1952 at Johns Hopkins University, a base from which his books influenced U.s.' theory and criticism-especially the work of his ]. Hillis Miller, an ardent disciple of Poulet's during the 1950s groundbreaking texts The Disappearance of God (1963) and Poets of extended Poulet's approach. It was Hillis Millet who famously cha gram of Geneva School criticism as the "consciousness of the another, the transposition of the mental universe ofan author into of the critic's mind." In 1958 Poulet returned to Europe, teaching versity of Zurich and completing his career in France at the University earned numerous honorary degrees, awards, and prizes for his work.

Poulet's most higllly regarded achievement is the four-volume work icism Studies in Human Time (I 949-68), which explores the distinctive of consciousness and selfhood in the various writings of selected spanning the Renaissance to the modern period. Throughout this Poule~ attempts to examine all available examples of a particular whether published or not; he thus considers letters, marginalia, essays, and fragmentary or aborted texts, as well as literary works in Poulet believed that a critic may find a page of a discarded notebook to be as a finished poem in expressing or revealing an author's consciousness, text can reveal deep-seated psychic patterns, constants, or preoCcUpations. inclusive approach, which ambitiously embraces the totality of an author's sharply distinguished the mid-twentieth-century work of Poulet from his contemporaries,the New Critics, who concentrated on individual texts. formalists, such as JOHN CROWE RANSOM and Cleanth Brooks, Were pied with analyzing single, isolated poems and discovering the unique poetic language, Poulet's focuson the oeuvre struck some U.S. critics as a fresh air. It both broadened the scope and the field of opportunities literary studies and implicitJy questioned the formalist conception of text an tinction between literary and nonliterary texts.

Published in the first issue of the journal New Literary History in 1969, "Phenomenology of Reading," Our seiection, offers a Succinct programma! ment of his critical approach. In the key first section of the essay, Poulet the peculiar nature of books, distingUishing them from other objects, such machines, vases, and statues, by applying one main criterion: the degree to object in question allows the reader to access or enCOunter the consciousnesl object's maker. As he sees it, an object such as a sewing machine does induce subjective interest, for it presents merely an opaque, flat, lifeless contrast, objects such as a statue or a vase suggest an ihtriguing, mysterious with which one might have a relationship, prompting one to look closely and for a possible entrance to its secret chamber; but, in the end, no such be found. Thus they remain isolated and closed, preserving the distinction object and subject, inside and outside, and harring any kind of deep, oersoMI templative engagement with the consciousness of its artificer.

A book, however,. is not a dosed object like the others. During the

reading, the reader becomes aware of a rational being emerging out

Ideally, the barriers between the reader and the book fall aWay, eroding

between subject and object and permitting an astonishing communion

consciousness of the reader and that of the author. Poulet sees the reader as

Eying 'vith a pure form of the author's consciousness that can manifest itself

an author's works. (he diSCOurages standard biographical Criticism). Such tion can take different forms and pOSsess different intensities, as Poulet makes eli in the second section of his essay, where he offers case studies. In this regard, ,vas an unacknowledged pioneer of reader-rE:!sponse criticism. For him, the becomes a passive intuitive receptacle for the consciousness of the author and ies an interior universe of mental entities (i.e., images,. ideas, and words).

GEORGES POULET / 1319

are objects, Poulet agrees, but they are subjectified objects, for they mind of the reader for their continued existence. The process of read

Jlomentarily replaces the lifeless external objects and forms of books with objects of the author. Consequently the reader, dispossessed,

he thoughts of the author, enacting a wondrous merging with the pres'l~onieone wholly other and unique. At the same time, the style of the critic

fashion veers away from analytical impartiality toward literary lyricism, Hillis Miller labeled this criticism "literature about literature."

of reading and criticism, as might be expected, have drawn a criticisms. In the 19505 some formalists charged Poulet with blurring the ,between vario!ls written artifacts and undermining the generic conven

unique internal designs that are key elements in determining the value of More pointed attacks appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, prompted by

structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction, which defined themopposition to phenomenology: they explicitly forsook consciousness and intention for textuality and intertextuality. One charge common at this time poulet neglected the rhetorical and self-constitutive nature of "language," merely as an unproblematic transparent and disposable medium that allows some kind of prelinguistic, subjective sense of immediacy and plenitude (a branded as "psychologism"). Many faulted Poulet for tending to view read

a passive process, giving up on critical judgment and ideological critique as _anl.ecting the extent to which the reader actively constructs the message of

fills in significant textual gaps and blanks. United States, the signs of this changing attitude toward Poulet and phe

criticism became apparent in 1966 at the celebrated Johns Hopkins conference "Languages of Criticism and Sciences of Man." Poulet preearly version of "Phenomenology of Reading'" titled "Criticism and the of Interiority," but the rising stars of the conference were TZVETAN TODO

BARTHES, JACQUES LACAN, and JACQUES DERRIDA, all variously.associstructuralism and poststructuralism; indeed, the conference is credited with

these schools of thought to the American academy. Poulet appeared next to such theorists, an incongruity made more obvious when the con

proceedings were later published under the title The Struct~lralist Controversy But for nearly a quarter of a century, Poulet inspired French and American critics, creating unforgettable portraits of his authors' souls. Still today his of the experience of reading is one of the most moving ever penned.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

',polleC[ea edition of Poulet's works exists. English translations ofindividual books dates of publication given first) include Studies in Human Time (1949;

first volume of Poulel's magnum opus (which also provides the multi-work with its overall title); The Interior Distance (I952; 1959), the second of Studies in Human Time; Metamorphoses of the Circle (1961; 1966); Prous

(I977); Who Was Baudelaire? (I %9; 1969); Exploding Poetry: I Rimbaud (I980; 1984). Major French works unavailable in English (l.re depart (1964), the third volume of Studies in Human Time; Trois essais

mytholollie romantique (I 966); Les Chemins actuels de la critique (1967); Mes'lfre (1968), the fourth volume ofStudies in HU1na11 Time; La Conscience 69); Entre moi et mai: Essais critiques sur la conscience de soi (1977); and

indeterminee (3 vols., 1985-90). A revealing collection of letters between and Marcel Raymond exists in French, titled Correspondence: 1950-1977,

by Pierre Grotzer (198 I). Hillis Miller has published two influential assessments of Poulet's work, "The

School: The Criticism of Marcel Raymond, Albert B(!guin, Georges Poulet,

J

On the one hand, this is cause for regret. As SOon as I replace' perception of reality by the words of a book, I deliver myself, and foot to the omnipotence offiction. I say farewell to what is, feign belief in what is not. I surrqund myselfwith fictitious _ the prey of language. There is no escaping this tal

15"::"1 ! (JEORGES POULET

and even naivest form in the sort of spell brought about by kinds of reading, such as thrillers, of which I say "It gripped me,". important to .note that this possess~on of myself by another takes only on the level of objective.thought, that is with regard to tions, ideas which reading affords me, but also on the level of jectivity. When I am absorbed in reading, a second self takes which thinks and feels for me. Withdrawn in some recess' of then silently witness this dispossession? Do I derive from it or, on the contrary, a kind of anguish? However that may be, holds the center of the stage, and the question which imposes I am absolutely obliged to ask myself, is this: "Who is the usurper pies the forefront? What is this mind who all alone by himself ilk, sciousness and who, when I say I, is indeed that I?"

There is an immediate answer to this question, perhaps too easy This I who thinks in me when I read a book, is the I of the one the book. When I read Baudelaire or Racine, 4it is really Baudelaire who thinks,. feels, allows himself to be read within me. Thus a only a book, it is the means by which an author actually preserves his feelings, his modes of dreaming and living. It is his means of identity from death. Such an interpretation of reading is not false. to justify what is commonly called the biographical explication texts. Indeed every word of literature is impregnated with the one who wrote it. As he makes us read .it, he awakens in us the what he thought or felt. To understand a literary work, then, is to individual who wrote it reveal himself to us in us. It is not the which explicates the work, but rather the work which sometimes to understand the biography. . But biographical interpretation is in .part false and misleading. It that there is an analogy between the works of an author and the of his life. The works may be seen as an incomplete translation And further, there is an even more significant analogy among all of a single author.. Each of:the works, however, while I am reading iome its own,life. The subject who is revealed to me through my it is not the .author, either in the disordered totality of his outer or in the aggregate, better organized and concentrated totality, whichii-: one of his writings. Yet the subject which presides over the work can only in the work. To be sure, nothing is unimportant for understandi! work, and a mass of biographical, bibliographical, textual, and information is indispensable to me. And yet this knowledge does not with the internal knowledge of the work. Whatever may be the sum information, I acquire on Baudelaire or Racine, in whatever degree macy I may live with their genius, I am aware thaUhis contribution does not suffice to illuminate for me in its .own inner meaning, in its perfection, and in the subjective principle which animates it, the work of Baudelaire or Racine the reading of which now absorbs me. At moment what matters to me is to live, from the inside, in a certain with the work and the work alone. It could hardly be otherwise. external to the work could possibly sq,are. the extra~rdinary claim which work now exerts on me. It is there within me, not to send me back,

4, Jean Racine (1639-1699), French dramatist. CHARLES BAUDElAIRE (1821-1867), French poet.

PHENOMENOLOGY OF READING I 1325

nor to his other writings, but on the contrary to keep my ~rjVeneu on itself. It is the work which traces in me the very bound-which this consciousness will define itself. It is the work which a series of mental objects and creates in me a network of words,

for the time being, there will be no room for other mental for other words. And it is the work, finally, which, not satisfied defining the content of my consciousness, takes hold of it, approand makes of it that I which, from one end of my reading to the

over the unfolding of the work, of the single work which I

work forms the temporary mental substance which fills my

; and itis moreover that consciousness, the I-subject, the conrin~ciousness of what is, revealing itself within the interior ofthe

is the characteristic condition of every work which I summon

by placing my consciousness at its disposal. I give it not

_ but awareness of existence. And so I ought not to hesitate to

so long as it is animated by this vital inbreathing inspired by

dfreading, a work of literature becomes (at the expense of the reader

life it suspends) a sort of human being, that it is a mind conscious

and constituting itself in me as the subject of its own objects.

II lives its own life within me; in a certain sense, it thinks itself, and

itselfa meaning within me. Hr",noe displacement of myself by the work deserves to be examined

;',wo thinks itself in me, does this mean that, during a complete loss rK

on my part, a.nother thinking entity invades me, taking of my unconsciousness in order to think itself without my being

think it? Obviously not. The annexation of my consciousness by (the other which is the work) in no way implies that I am the victim

deprivation of.consciousness. Everything happens, on the contrary, .ugh, from the moment 1 become a prey to what I read, I begin to share

my consciousness with this being whom I have tried to define and the conscious subject ensconced at the heart of the work. He and I,

having a common consciousness. Doubtless, within this community the parts played by each of us are not of equal importance. The

!{l10.U5Iless inherent in the work is active and potent; it occupies the it is clearly related to its awn world, to objects which are its

In opposition, I myself, although conscious of whatever it may be of, I playa much more humble role, content to record passively

is going in me. A lag takes place, a sort of schizoid distinction between feel and what the other feels; a confused awarenesscif delay, so that

seems first to think by itself, and then to inform me what it has Thus I often have the impression, while reading, of simply witness

which at the same time concerns and yet does not concern me. nrr",,,kes a certain feeling of surprise within me. I am a consciousness

by an existence which is not mine, but which I experience as itwere mine. astonished consciousness is in fact the consciousness of the critic:

1326 / GEORGES POULET

the consciousness of a being who is allowed to apprehend as its happening in the conSciousness of another being. Aware of a disclosing a feeling of identity, but of identity within difference, sciousness does not necessarily imply the total disappearance of mind in the mind to be criticized. From the partial and hesitan mation ofJacques Riviere5 to the exalted, digressive and triumphan hnation of Charles Du Bos,6 criticism can pass through a wh nLlances which we would be well advised to study. That is what I to do. By discovering the various forms of identification identification to be found in recent critical writing in French shall be able perhaps to give a better account of the variations of relationship-between criticizing subject and criticiZed object-is

Let me take a first example. In the caSe of the first critic I shall this fUSion of two consciousnesses is barely suggested. It is an movement of the mind toward an object which remains hidden. the perfect identification of two conscipusnesses, each sees itself in the other, in this instance the critical consciousness can, at best; but to draw closer to a reality which must remain forever veiled. attempt it uses the only mediators available to it in this quest, senses. ArId since sight, the most intellectual of the five senses, particl):lllr case to come up against a basic opacity, the critical approach its goal blindly, through the tactile exploration ofsurfaces, a groping exploration of the material world which separates the from its object. Thus, despite the immense effort on the part of thetic intelligence to lower itself to a level where it can, however make some progress in its quest toward the consciousness of the enterprise is destined to failure. One senses that the unfortunat condemned never to fulfill adequately his role as reader. He puzzles, he questions awkwardly a language which he is condemned to read with ease; or rather, in trying to read the language, he which enables him to translate but a fraction of the text.

This critic is Jacques Riviere. And yet it is from this failure that a mllch later critic will derive'

successful method of approaching a text. With this later critic, as ere, the whole project begins with an attempt at identification on basic level. But this most primitive level is the one in which there mind to mind, a current which has only to be followed. To identifY work means here, for the critic, to undergo the same experiences, with the most elementary. On the level of indistinct thought, of emotions, images, and obsessions of preconscious life, it is possible critic to repeat, within himself, that life of which the work affords~ version, inexhaustibly revealing and suggestive. And yet such an

could not take place, in a domain so hard to define, without

powerful auxiliary. This auxiliary is language. There is no critical

tion which is not prepared,realized, and incarnated through the

language. The deepest sentient life, hidden in the recesses of thoughts, could never be truly transposed, save for the mediation

~ . 5. French critic (1886-1925), editoroftheinflu_ entia] journal Lll Nouvelle ReVile F","'~.ise. 6. French critic (J 882- I939), associated

journal La NOlwe11e Revue Fn"'~a;se.

PHENOMENOLOGY OF READING / 1327

fLwhole series of equivalences to arise. To c1escribe this phe.,s it takes place in the criticism I am speaking of now, I can no

Qo[!tent with the usual distinctions between the signifier (signifiant) fled {signifier for what would it mean here to say that the lancritic signifies the language of the literary work? There is not similitude, Words have attained a veritable power of recrea

are a sort of material entity, solid and three-dimensional, thanks . life of the senses is reborn, finding in a network of verbal

the very .conditions necessary for its replication. In other words, of .qiticism here dedicates itself to the business of mimicking

,tneapperceptual world of the author. Strangely enough, the lanthis sort of mimetic criticism becomes even more tangible, more

the author's own; the poetry of the critic becomes more "poetic" ... _ers. This verbal mimesis, consciously exaggerated, is in no way

~r does it tend at all toward the pastiche. And yet it can reach its insofar as that object is deeply enmeshed in, almost confounded

matter. This form of criticism is thus able to provide an admiof the vital substratum which underlies all thought, and yet

incapable of attaining and expressing thought itself. This criticism Mpedand hindered by the language which it employs; helped, inso

language allows it to express the sensuous life in its original state, is,stjII almost impossible to ,distinguish between subject and object; hindered, too, because this l;lnguage, too congealed and opaque, ;lend itself to analysis, and because the subjectivity which it evokes

is as though forevermired in its objects. And so the activity of "_ this case .is somehow incomplete, in spite oUts remarkable suclentification relative to objects is accomplished almost too well:

LO, subjectivity it is barely sketched.

then, is the criticism of Jean-Pierre Richard.s '

,extreme form,in the abolition of any subject whatsoever, this criti

. to extract from a literary work a certain condensed matter, a essence.

what, then, would be a criticism which would be the reverse which lu;;abolish the object and extract from the texts their most subjective Ints?

,.conceivesuch a criticism, I must leap to the opposite extreme. I imagcritical language which wo.uld attempt deliberately to strip the literary

of anything concrete. In sl):cha criticism it would be the artful aim of every sentence, of every. metaphor, of every word, to reduce

nothingness of abstraction the images of the real world reflected ~. If literature, by definition, is already a transportation of the real

untealityof verbal cpnception, then the critical act in this case will a transposition of this transposition; thus taising to the second "de-realization" of being through language. In this way, the mind

maximum distance between its thought and what is. Thanks to this and to the. consequent dematerialization of every object thus

owed to the Swiss linguist FER meaning). DE SAUSSURE (1857-1913), who divided 8. French critic (b. 1922), a member of the into Signified (the meaning conveyed) and Geneva Schoo\. (the sound or symbol that conveys that,

1328 J GEORGES POl/LET

pushed to the vanishing pOint, the universe represented in this, seems not so much the equivalent of the perceivable world, or of representation, as rather its image crystallized through a process intellectualization. Here criticism is no longer mimesis; it is the of all literary forms to the same level of insignificance. In short, this attempted annihilation of literature by the critical act? save a consciousness ceaselessly confronting the hollowness objects, which yield without resistance, and an absolutely tran""". guage, which, by coating all objects with the same clear glaze, ("like leaves seen far beneath the ice") appear to be infinitely far the language of this criticism plays a role exactly opposite to the has in Jean-Pierre Richard's criticism. It does indeed bring about cation of critical thought with the mental world revealed by the but it brings it about at the expense of the work Everything is .. by the dominion of a consciousness detached from any object, a consciousness, functioning all alone, somewhere in the void.

Is there any need to say that this hyper-criticism is the criticalMaurice BIanchot?9

I have found it useful to compare the criticism of Richard to the of Blanchot. I learn from this confrontation that the critic's linguisL!'" ratus can, just as he chooses, bring him closer to the work under ation, or can remove him from it indefinitely. If he so wishes, approximate very closely the work in question, thanks to a verbal which transposes into the critic's language the sensuous themes of Or else he can make language a pure crystallizing agent, an absolute lucence, which, suffering no opacity to exist between. subject and promotes the exercise of the cognitive power on the part of the subjecL: at the same time accentuating in the object those charae emphasize its infinite distance from the subject. In the first of the two criticism achieves a remarkable complicity, but at the riskof losing its imum lucidity; in the second case, it results in the most complete

tion; the maximum lUcidity thereby achieved only confirms a

instead of a union. .

Thus criticism seems to oscillate between two possibilities: a union out comprehension, and a comprehension without union. I may completely with what I am reading that I lose consciousness not myself, but also of that other consciousness which lives within the proximity blinds me by blocking my prospect. But I may, on the separate myself so completely from what I am contemplating thought thus removed to a distance assumes the aspect of a being with I may never establish any relationship whatsoever. In either case, the reading has delivered me from egocentricity: another's thought inhabus or haunts me, but in the first case I lose myself in that alien world, the other we keep our distance and,refuse to identify. Extreme closeness extreme detachment have then the same regrettable effect of making short of the total critical act: that is to say, the exploration of that interrelationship which, through the nlediation of reading and of is established to our mutual satisfaction between the work read and

9, French writer and critic (b. 1907), associated with postwar phenomeilOlogical criticism.

PHENOMENOLOGY OF READING J 1329

''extreme proximity and extreme separation each have grave disadvanyet they have their privileges as well. Sensuous thought is privi

move at once to the heart of the work and to share its own life; clear .Drivileged to confer on its objects the highest degree of intelligisorts of insight are here distinguishable and mutually exclusive:

penetration by the senses and penetration by the reflective conNow rather than contrasting these two forms of critical activity, not be some way, I wonder, not of practicing them simultanewould be impossible, but at least of combining them through a

reciprocation and alternation? this perhaps the method used today by Jean Starobinski?' For it would not be difficult to find in his work a number of texts which to Maurice Blanchot. Like Blanchot he displays exceptional lucid

an acute awareness of distance. And yet he does not quite abandon to'Blanchot's habitual pessimism. On the contrary, he seems inclined

even at times to a pleasant utopianism. Starobinski's intellect is analogous to that of Rousseau, 2 yearning for an immediate

of all beings to each other which would enable them to under-other in an ecstatic happiness. From this point of view, is not the

criticism precisely represented by the fete citadine (street celebrachampetre (rustic feast)? There is a milieu or a moment in the

,.__ which everyone communicates with everyone else, in which hearts en like books. On a more modest scale, doesn't the same phenomenon in reading? Does not one being open its innermost self? Is not the

enchanted by this opening? In the criticism of Starobinski we crystalline tempo of music, that pure delight in understand

perfect sympathy between an intelligence which enters and that which welcomes it.

moments of harmony, there is no longer any exclusion, no inside Contrary to Blanchot's belief, perfect translucence does not result

o;:paIGtUon. On the contrary, with Starobinski, all is perfect agreement, the pleasure of understanding and of being understood. More

such pleasure, however intellectual it may be, is not here exclusively a of the mind. For the relationship established on this level between

and critic is not a relationship between pure minds. It is rather incarnate beings, and the particularities of their physical existence

not obstacles to understanding, but rather a complex of supplesigns, a veritable language which must be deciphered and which mutual comprehension. Thus for Starobinski, as much physician

there is a reading ofbodies which is likened to the reading ofminds. 'ot of the same nature, nor does .itbring the intelligence to bear on the 'area of human knowledge. But for the' critic who practices it, this

provides the opportunity for a reciprocating exchange between diftypes of learning which have, perhaps, different degrees of transpar

iarobinski's criticism, then, displays great flexibility. Rising at times to heights of metaphysics, it does not disdain the farthest reaches of the

critic (b. 1920), psychiatrist, historian of 2. Jean.Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Swissand member of the Geneva School. born French philosopher and author.

&. '-'VL..l:."l;".

subconScious. It is.sometimes>intimate, sometimes detached; the degrees of identification and.nonjdentification. But its final seems .,to consist In a ,Sort of withdrawal, contradistinction Wit' aCcord. After an initial intimacy With the object under study,. has finally to detach itself, to move on, but this time in; solitude. see this, withdrawal as a failure of sympathy but rather as away the encumbrances .of too prolongeq a life in common. Above all an acute need to establish bearings",to adopt the judicious assess the fruits of proximity by examining them at a distance. binski's criticism always ends Witha view from afar, or rather for while mOving away it has also moved imperceptibly tOward (surplombante)' position. Does this mean that Starobinski's Blanchot's is doomed to end ina philosophy of separation? must be conceded, and it is no coincidence that Starobinski cialcare the themes of melancholy and nostalgia. His Criticism" dudes with a doublefareweU. But this farewell is exchanged.by who have begunbyJivingtogether; and the one left behind illuminated by that Critical intellect which moves on.

The sole fault with which I might reproach .such criticism isthe ease with which it penetrates what it illuminates.

By dint of seeing in literary wOI:ksonlYthe thoughts which Starobinski's criticism somehowpasses through theiriEorms, not them, it is true, but without pausing on the way. Under .its wo.rks lose their opacity,their solidity,theirobjective dimenSion; palace walls whfch become transparent in certain fairy tales. An that the ideal act of criticism must seize (and reproduce) that q tionship between an object and a mind which is the work itself" the act of criticism succeed when it suppresses one of the (polar) this relationship?,

My search must continue, then, fora,criticism in which this subsists.. Could it perhaps be the criticism of Marcel Raymond

Rousset?3 Raymond:s criticismaI:ways:recognizes the presence of a

reality, both mental and formal. It strives to comprehend almost

neouslyan inner. experien.ce and a perfected form. On the one hand, allows himself-to be absorhe.dWith such complete self-forgetful thought of another. But the other;s thou,ghtisgrasped notat its at'its most obscure, at its doudiest point"at the point at which it is to being a mere self-awareness scarcely perce,ived by the being which tains it; and.whichyet to the eyes of the critic seems the sole me.ans e by which g can penetrate within the precincts of the alien mind.

But Raymond's cI:-iticism"pr~sents another aspect;,which is precis"", reverse oEthis ,confused identification ofthe critic's thought with the criticized, It is then the reflective ,contemplation of a formal reality the work itself. The work stands before the critical in~elIigence as a object, which is in fact an enigma, an external thing existing in with. which there is no possibility ofidentification nor, of innetknowle(

Thus Raymond perceives sometimes a subject, sometimes an _ subject is pure mind: it is a sheer indefinable presence, an almost ". '. ....

3. Raymond (189.7-1981) and Rousset(b. 1910), both Swiss critics and members of Ihe, Geneva

PHENOMENOLOGY OF READING I 1331

j by veryyirtue, of its absenee of,form, it becomes possible tmind to penetrate. The .work, on .the contrary, exists only

form, but this definition limits it, encloses it within its own same-time constraining the mind which studies it to remain

, that, if on,the one hand the critical thought of Raymond selfwithin an undefined subjectivity, on the other it tends to .before an impenetrable objectivity.

to submit his own subjectivity to that of another, and in the obscurest depths of every mental entity, the

is less well equipped to penetrate the ,obstacle presented ",surface of the ,works. He then finds himself marking time,

Circles around the' work, as around the ,vase or the statue menI Does Raymond then establish an insurmountable partition

two realities-subjective, objective-::cunified though they may No, indeed, .at least not in his best essays, since in them, by

itiveapprehensionof the text and participation by the critic. in (e in the, poet's use of language, there appears some kind of ,~he objective aspects of the work and the :undefined subjectivity

it. A link not to be confused with a pure relation ofidentity. of the formal aspects of the work becomes somehow an anae by means of which it becomes possible for the critic to go,

beyond the formal aspects .it presents. Nevertheless this presented by Raymond asa dialectical process. The usual

his method of criticism is one.of plenitude, and even of a ilenitude. A certain fulness of experience detected in the 'poet and

mind of. the critic, is connected by the latter with a certain form;' but why this is so, and how it does become so, is never

Hained. .Jt then possibl~ to go one step further? This is what is attempted by

a former student. of Raymond and perhaps his .closest friend. 1:ledicates himself to the task of discemingthe structure of a work as

depth ofan experience. Only what essentially matters tohiinjs to a connection between the objective reality of the work and the

which gives it shape; A work is.,not explained for him, as for uralists, by-the exclusive.interdependence of the ebjective elements

(!:ompose it. He does not see in itafortuitous.combination, interpreted 'i as ifjt were ana priori organization. There is not in his eyes. any

f-the work without a principle of systematization which operatesiri with that work and which is even included in it; In short, there is

without a center which is the spider. On the other hand, it is [question of going from the workto the ,psychology of the author, but of

" within the .sphere of the work, from the objective elements sysarranged, to a certain power of-organization, inherent in .the work the latter showed itself to be .an intentional;consciousness deter

its. arrangements and solving its problems. So thaLitwould, scarcely of terms to say that it speaks, by means ofits structural elements, language, thanks to which it discloses itself and means nothing

. Such,then is the critical enterprise. of Jean Rousset. It sets itself to bjective elements of the work in order to aWiin, beyond them, a real

nor objective, Written down however in forms and expressing

1332 I GEORGES POULIn

itselfby means of them. Thus the understanding offorms must not merely to the recording of their objective aspects. As F cmon

o 4from the point of view of art history, there is a "life of forms" only in the historic development which they display from within each single work, in the movement by which forms tend times to stabilize and become, static, and sometimes to change another. Thus the two contradictory forces which are always at literary writing, the will to stability and the protean impulse, help ceive by their interplay how much forms are dependent on what called a shaping power which determines them, replaces them scends them. The teaching of Raymond finds then its most satisfying in the critical method ofJean Rousset, a method which leads the the continuously changing frontiers of form to what is beyond form.

It is fitting then to conclude this inquiry here, since it has goal, namely to desCribe, relying on a series of more or less adequate pIes, a critical method having as guiding principle the relation ject and object. Yet there remains One last difficulty~ In order to the interrelationship between subject and object, which is the all creative work and of the understanding of it, two ways, at least cally, are opened, one leading from the objects to the subject, the the Subject to the objects. Thus we have seen Raymond and Rousset, perception of the objective structures of a literary work, strive to subjective principle which upholds it. But, in so dOing, they seem to. nize the precedenceof the subject Over its objects. What Raymond and set are searching for in the objective and formal aspects of the something which is previous to the work and on which the work its very existence. So that the method which leads from the object subject does not differ radically at bottom from the one which leadssubject to object, since it does really consist in going from Subject to through the object. Yet there is the risk of overlooking an important The aim of criticism is not achieved merely by the understanding of played by the subject in its interrelation with objects. When reading a work, there is a moment when it seems to me that the Subject present work disengages itself from all that surrounds it, and stands alone. Had once. the intuition of this, when viSiting the Scuola de San Rocco in one of the highest summits of art, where there are assembled so many ings of the same painter, Tintoretto?6 When looking at all these masterple brought there together and revealing so manifestly their unity of inspirati I had suddenly the impreSSion of having reached the. common essence ent in all the works of a great master, an essence which I was not

. perceive, except.when emptying my mind of all the particular images

by the artist. I became aware of a SUbjective power at work in aU

pictures, and yet never so clearly understood by my mind as when I

forgotten all their particular figurations.

One may ask oneself: What is this subject left standing in isolation

all examination of a literary work? Is it the individual genius of the

4. Henri FodUon (1881-1943), French art and cultural historial);he theorized the evolution ofatt English Romantic poet and critic; the fo l1lls in Vie desformes (Life ofForms, 1934).

. here is to his theory of imaginati!)n.5. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834), 6. Jacopo Robusti (1518-1594), Italian

known as Tintoretto.

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE I J 333

in his work, yet having an invisible life independent of the it, as Valery7 thinks, an anonymous and abstract consciousness

in its aloofness, over the operations of all more concrete conWhatever it may be, I am constrained to acknowledge that all

activity present in a literary work is not entirely explained by its ~with forms and objects within the work. There is in the work a

_ profoundly engaged in objective forms; and there is, at ~vel, forsaking all forms, a subject which reveals itself to itself {and Jtstranscendence over all which is reflected in it. At this point, no

any longer express it, no structure can any longer define it; it is in its ineffability and in its fundamental indeterminacy. Such is 'he reason why the critic, in his elucidation of works, is haunted by tendence of mind. It seems then that criticism, in order to accom

in this effort of detachment from itself, needs to annihilate, momentarily to forget, the objective elements of the work, and to

to the apprehension of a subjectivity without objectivity.

(1871-1945), French poet, critic, and essayist.

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE 1905-1980

Sartre was an eminent French philosopher, novelist, and dramatist who literary criticism and biography, including books on the nineteenth- and

French writers CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, Gustave Flaubert, STEPHANE Jean Genet. During his lifetime, he became known worldwide for his

of existentialism, which focused on the human experience of freedom ,ponsibility in a godless universe. For Sartre, "existence is prior to essence":

world and human na.ture. possess. no nxed meaning, human beings are for their own choices and actions. The experience of literature, Sartre ecisely the experience of this freedom, an experience that draws together reader into the collaborative, future-oriented project of human existence,

always in a state of becoming. ,n. in Paris, Sartre was raised by his mother and his grandfather, bis father having i,year after his birth. As a young man, he was educated at the elite Louis-Ie

preparatory school and the Lycee Henri IV. Later he trained in philosophy at it)l(\ prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure, receiving his postgraduate degree in 1929.

time he met his famous intellectual associate and lifelong companion, the existential philosopher SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR. Until the outbreak of World

.in 1939, Sartre taught philosophy at various secondary schools. From 1940 I he was a prisoner of war in Germany, and after being released he joined the Resistance; until 1944 he worked as a joumalist for the liberation of France, subversive underground publications. Philosophically, Sartre's experience of led him to a deeper appreciation of human freedom and responsibility. Polit

, it led him to a Marxist position. Soon after the war Sartre and Beauvoir founded prestigious journal Les Temps MQdernes, which continues to be ari important

periodical in France.

1969