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Reserve Text:
from: Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary
Criticism
As a new generation enters the scene, a certain unease manifests itself in French literary criticism. This uncertainty prevails at once in the concern over fundamental methodological issues, and in the experimental, or polemical, character of several recent works. Roland Barthes's book-length essay, Writing Degree Zero,(1) for example, asserts its own terrorism; and Jean-Pierre Richard's two books, Litterature et Sensation and Poesie et Profondeur,(2) have recourse to a method whose systematic and exclusive use takes on the dimensions of a manifesto, an impression further reinforced by the author's own preface and that provided by Georges Poulet, both of which stress their opposition_ to other critical idioms. Explicitly, Poulet and Richard are opposed to Blanchot in the name of a criticism whose initiators would have been Marcel Raymond anti Albert Beguin, and whose philosophical |
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-------------------------------- Translator's note: This article was written for the express purpose of introducing the New Critic ism to French readers at the moment that there were some stirrings in French Criticism, but before the advent of Structuralism on the literary scene. 1. Roland Barthes, Le Degré Zero de lÉcriture (Paris, Seuil, 1953); trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, Writing Degree Zero (Nerw York: Hill aned Wang, 1967). 2. Paris: Editions de Seiuil, 1954 and 1955, respectively. [230] underpinnings would be found in Bachelard, Jean Wahl, and Sartre--a grouping that, in like case of every one of these, requires reservations and qualifications. Implicitly, they are also opposed to the historical and philological scholarship of the universities, from traditional explication de texte to the writings of Etiemble, as well as inother current trends: Jean Paulhan's work, Marxist criticism, history of ideas, etc. All of these trends-and there are others---are mutually incompatible. In the United States, the state of criticism appears more stable. It is well known that since roughly 1935, alongside traditional approaches to criticism such as the historical and the sociological or the biographical and psychological, there has arisen a trend that without constituting a school or even a homogeneous group, nevertheless shares certain premises. These are the authors generally known under the term "New Critics" (even though, once again, this term does not designate a well-defined group) and they can generally be subsumed under the denomination of "formalist" criticism--a term we will seek to make more explicit later on. This movement has come to wield considerable influence, in journals and in books, and especially in university teaching; to such an extent that one could legitimately speak of a certain formalist orthodoxy. In some cases, an entire generation has been trained in this approach to literature without awareness of any other. It is true, though, that at the very moment when it comes into its own, this generation is apt to turn against the training of which it is the product. Recently there have been attacks upon the methods of the prevalent criticism and calls for a clean sweeping away, a new start. It is hard to tell it these are portents of a more general reaction or merely individual and isolated occurrences. But even if it were on the point of being overtaken, formalist criticism would still have made a considerable contribution: on the positive side, by fostering the refinement of analytical and didactic techniques that have often led to remarkable exegeses; on the negative side, by highlighting the inadequacies of the historical approach as it was practiced in the United States. But it is also interesting from the perspective of theory: its internal evolution leads it to put into question the conception of the literary work upon which it was implicitly founded. Its development may well have a premonitory value for the new French criticism just as the latter, especially in the case of Roland Barthes, appears to be moving [231] in the direction of a formalism that, appearances notwithstanding, is not that different from New Criticism. In addition, it also has a certain demonstrative value for ontological criticism, for it proceeds in particularly clear fashion from a theory based upon more or less hidden or unconscious philosophical presuppositions. In its own inadequacy, it brings them out to the surface, and thus leads to authentic ontological questions. It has been said that all of American formalist criticism originates in the works of the English linguist and psychologist I. A. Richards.(3) As a historical statement such an assertion is questionable, for the mutual relations of American and English criticism are rendered more complex by the existence of purely native strands on both sides; but it is certainly true that Richards's theories have found fertile terrain in the United States, and that all American works of formalist criticism accord him a special status. For Richards, the task of criticism consists in correctly apprehending the signifying value, or meaning, of the work; an exact correspondence between the author's originary experience and its communicated expression. For the author, the labor of formal elaboration consists in constructing a linguistic structure that will correspond as closely as possible to the initial experience. Once it is granted that such a correspondence is established by the author, it will exist for the reader as well, and what is called communication can then occur. The initial experience may be anything at all and need not have anything specifically "aesthetic" about it. Art is justified as the preservation of moments in "the lives of exceptional people, when their control and command of experience is at its highest degree . . ."(4 ) The critic's task consists in retracing the author's journey backward: It will proceed from a careful and precise study of the signifying form toward the experience that produced this form. Correct critical understanding is achieved when it reaches the cluster of experience, elicited through reading, insofar as they remain sufficiently close to ------------------------------- [232] the experience or experiences the author started out with. It becomes possible then to define a poem, for example, as the series of experiences comprised within such a cluster. Since there are numerous possibilities of error in the carrying out of these analytical tasks, it is Richards's intention to elaborate techniques for avoiding them; but there never is the slightest doubt that in every case a correct procedure can be arrived at. This theory, which appears to be governed by common sense, implies, in fact, some highly questionable ontological presuppositions, the most basic of which is, no doubt, the notion that language, poetic or otherwise, can say any experience, of whatever kind, even a simple perception. Neither the statement "I see a cat" nor, for that matter, Baudelaire's poem "Le Chat" contains wholly the experience of this perception. It can be said that there is a perceptual consciousness of the object and an experience of this consciousness, but the working out of a logos of this experience or, in the case of art, of a form of this experience, encounters considerable difficulties. Almost immediately the existential status of the experience seems to be in question, and we conclude by considering as constructed that which at first appeared to be given: instead of containing or reflecting experience, language constitutes it. And a theory of constituting form is altogether different from a theory of signifying form. Language is no longer a mediation between two subjectivities but between a being and a non-being. And the problem of criticism is no longer to discover to what experience the form refers, but how it can constitute a world, a totality of beings without which there would be no experience. It is no longer a question of imitation but one of creation; no longer communication but participation. And when this form becomes the object of consideration of a third person who seeks to state the experience of his perception, the least that can be said is that this latest venture into language will be quite distant from the original experience. Between the originary cat and a critic's commentary on Baudelaire's poem, quite a few things have occurred. Nonetheless, Richards postulates a perfect continuity between the sign and the thing signified.' Through repeated association, the sign comes to take the place of the thing signified; and consciousness is consciousness of "the missing part of the sign, or, more strictly, 'of'
Richards insists continually on the fact that criticism does not deal with any given material object but with a consciousness (or an experience) of this object, and he quotes Hume to this efect: "Beauty is no quality in things themselves; it exists merely in the mind that contemplates them."(8) Form, as the object of the critic's reflection, is not a thing then but stands as the equivalent of the experience. An object desribed or painted or sculpted is the object initially given; it is the sign of the experience of a consciousness of that object. However, since form is the imitation of a mental experience in a substance (language, pigment or marble), it is legitimate for an observer to treat it as a signifying object that refers to a prior mental experience. In this sense, one can speak of a form-object in Richards. And one can also understand his insistent claim that poetic language is purely affective and, therefore, can never lead to cognition, since it has no verifiable referential value in reference to an external object. But for the critic who seeks to apprehend correctly the experience that is con-
6. Ibid, p. 127. [234]
The route may be different, but the starting point is the same for Roland Barthes. He, too, defines writing, or form, as the faithful reflection of the writer's free and signifying experience. It is true, though, that for him this form is not necessarily an object; when human actions are historically free, form is transparent. It is all object but not an object of reflection. But the moment this freedom is curtailed, the artist's endeavor and his choice of form become problematic; any restriction in the free choice of experience requires a justification of the form selected, an operation whose net effect is the genuine objectification of form. Richards's form-object resulted front the postulate of a perfect continuity of consciousness with its linguistic correlates; Barthes, on the other hand, proceeds from a historical situation. But, from the point of view of criticism, the result is the same, since, in both instances, criticism begins and ends with the study of form. There is, to be sure, a parting of the ways ultimately: for Richards, the next stage would be the working out of a utilitarian morality, while for Barthes it would more likely be revolutionary action. But, for the time being, we are concerned with issues of critical methodology; and it turns out that in the examples that he provides (the uses of the past tense in the novel, of the third person pronoun in Balzac, or of the "realistic" style of Garaudy--I am leaving aside his Michelet) Barthes's analyses are quite close to Richards's and those of his disciples. He could well profit, in fact, from the storehouse of techniques contained in their works in the preparation of his announced History of Writing. As befits its origins in the pedagogical research Richards conducted at Cambridge University,(9) his method derives much of its influence from its undeniable didactic power. His conception of form permits, at once, the development of a critical vocabulary of an almost scientific power and the elaboration of easily taught analytic techniques possessing the virtues of explication de texte, yet not thwarting the freedom of formal imagination. In its suggestion of a balanced and stable moral climate, it is also reassuring criticism. By bringing down poetic language to the level of the language of communication, and in its steadfast refusal to grant aesthetic experience any difference from ------------------ [235] other human experiences, it is opposed to any attempt to confer upon poetry an excessively exalted function, while still preserving for it the freshness and originality of invention. But what happens when one studies poetry a little closer following these instructions? A surprising answer is to be found in the work of William Empson, a brilliant student of Richards.(10) Empson, a poet in his own right, and, moreover, a reader of great acuity, applied Richards's principles faithfully to a set of texts drawn mainly, though not exclusively, from Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. From the very first example studied in Seven Types of Ambiguity, the results are troubling. It is a line from one of Shakespeare's sonnets. To evoke old age, the poet thinks of winter, more precisely a forest in winter, which, he says, is like:
'The thought is
stated in a metaphor whose perfection is immediately felt. But if it
is asked what is the common experience awakened by the forest and the
ruined choir, one does not discover just one but an indefinite number.
Empson lists a dozen of them and there are many others; it would be
impossible to tell which was dominant in the poet's mind or at which
we should stop. What the metaphor does is actually the opposite: instead
of setting up an adecquation between two experiences, and thereby fixing
the mind on the repose of an established equation, it deploys the initial
experience into an infinity of associated experiences that spring from
it. In the manner of a vibration spreading in infinitude from its center,
metaphor is endowed with the capacity to situate the experience at the
heart of a universe that it generates, It provides the ground rather
than the frame, a limitless anteriority that permits the limiting of
a specific entity. Experience sheds its uniqueness and leads instead
to a dizziness of the mind. Far from referring back to an object that
would be its cause, the poetic sign sets in motion an imaging activity
that refers to no object in particular. The "meaning" of the
metaphor is that it does not "mean" in any definite ------------------------------------- 11. William Shakespeare, Sonnets, #73. [236] This is obviously problematic. For if a simple metaphor suffices to suggest an infinity of initial experiences and, therefore, an infinity of valid readings, how can we live up to Richards's injunction to bring the reader's experience in line with the typical experience ascribed to the author? Can we still speak of communication here, when the text's effect is to transform a perfectly well-defined unity into a multiplicity whose actual number must remain undetermined? Empson's argument, as it proceeds from simple to increasingly complex examples, becomes apparent: a fundamental ambiguity is constitutive of all poetry. The correspondence between the initial experience and the reader's own remains forever problematic because poetry sets particular beings in a world yet to be constituted, as a task to fulfill. Not all ambiguities are of this basic type. Some are pure signifying forms, condensed means of evoking real adequation, of stating rapidly a perfectly determined mental structure. In such cases, and whatever the degree of complexity of the text, exegesis is primarily a matter of concentration and intelligence, and it is in search of a precise signification. It ends up either with a single reading concealed in the apparent multiplicity, or in a controlled, even when antithetical, super-position of significations to be uncovered. The latter type of ambiguity would be like the proffered "explication" of Mallarme's hermetic sonnets as purely erotic or scatological poems--a perfectly legitimate and possible reading in many instances, provided one adds immediately that they are something else and that Mallarme was striving to achieve precisely this layered presence of different significations. This type of form occurs most frequently in Elizabethan and metaphysical poetry, as indeed in any precious or baroque poetry, and lends itself particularly well to a deciphering along I. A. Richards's line. Some of the more notable achievements of formalist criticism are to be found in this area. Although Empson
does not draw this basic distinction himself, it is clear that five
of his seven types of ambiguity fall within this category of controlled
pseudo-ambiguity, and that only the first and the last relate to a more
fundamental property of poetic language. Any poetic sentence, even one
devoid of artifice or baroque subtlety, must, by virtue of being poetic,
constitute an infinite plurality of significations all melded into a
single linguistic unit: that is the first type. But as Empson's inquiry
proceeds, there occurs a visible increase in what he calls the logical
disorder of his examples until, in the seventh and last type of ambiguity, |
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[237] the form blows up under our very eyes. This occurs when the text implies not merely distinct significations but significations that, against the will of their author, are mutually exclusive. And here Empson's advance beyond the teachings of his master becomes apparent. For under the outward appearance of a simple list classifying random examples, chapter seven develops a thought Richards never wanted to consider: true poetic ambiguity proceeds from the deep division of Being itself, and poetry does no more than state and repeat this division. Richards did recognize the existence of conflicts, but he invoked Coleridge, not without some simplification, to appeal to the reassuring notion of art as the reconciliation of opposites." Empson's less serene mind is not content with this formula. In a note added to the text, he writes: "it may be said that the contradiction must somehow form a larger unity if the final effect is to be satisfying. But the onus of recon-ciliation can be laid very heavily pn the receiving end,"" that is, on the reader, for the reconciliation does not occur in the text. The text does not resolve the conflict, it names it. And there is no doubt as to the nature of the conflict. Empson has already prepared us by saying that it is "at once an indecision and a structure, like the symbol of the Cross,"" and he ends his book on George Herbert's extraordinary poem entitled "The Sacrifice," a monologue uttered by Christ upon the cross, whose refrain is drawn from the "Laments of Jeremiah" (1, 12). "is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, wherewith the Lord hath afflicted me in the clay of his fierce anger." This conflict can be resolved only by the supreme sacrifice: there is no stronger way of stating the impossibility of an incarnate and happy truth. The ambiguity poetry speaks of is the fundamental one that prevails between the world of the spirit and the world of sentient substance: to ground itself, the spirit must turn itself into sentient substance, but the latter is knowable only in its dissolution into nonbeing. The spirit cannot coincide with its object and this separation is infinitely sorrowful. Empson sheds light upon this dialectic, which is that of the unhappy consciousness, through some very well-chosen examples. He begins --------------------------------- 12. Principles
of Literary Criticism, pp. 251-ff. [238] with Keats's "Ode to Melancholy;" a very good selection, for Keats lived this tension especially acutely and lived it in its very substance. The growth of his consciousness results most often in a reversal that takes him from a happy and immediate sense impression to a painful knowledge. His sorrow is that of the man who can know substance only as he loses it; for whom any love immediately brings about tire death of what is being loved. Empson illustrates this problematic by adducing mystical texts of the seventeenth century which show that spiritual happiness is conceivable only in terms of sensations, of the very substantial joys whose tragic fragility Keats knew so well. Man stands in utter distress before a God whom he risks destroying by wanting to know Him; he feels envy for the natural creature that is the direct emanation of Being. A sonnet by the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins states the torture of this indecision. To he sure, George Herbert's serene tone does seem to convey a kind of peaceableness, for he managed in his poem to bring these contradictions and paradoxes side-by-side without occulting their outrageousness; but we must bear in mind that the protagonist here is not man but the Son of God, and that the display of error and human misery has been relegated to the background. We have traveled far from Richards's universe where there never is any error, only misunderstanding. Empson's inquiry, drawn by the very weight of his cogitations to problems that can no longer be ignored, has led him to broader questions. Instead of concentrating on details of poetic form, he will have to reflect henceforth upon the poetic phenomenon as such; a phenomenon that does seem to deserve this kind of attention since it leads, willy-nilly, to unsuspected perspectives upon human complexity. These broader questions are not addressed in the rather pedestrian last chapter of Seven Types of Ambiguity, but they are raised in the book Empson published a few years later. The tone of the exposition, as well as the selection of works commented upon in Some Versions of Pastoral, could lead to the supposition that he had undertaken the study of one literary form among others, and that this study could be followed by others in a similar vein, upon the epic tradition, let us say, or the tragic. Nothing could be further from the truth; as a consideration of the central theme of the book, to be found in the commentary of Andrew Marvell's famous "The Garden" (Chapter IV), makes abundantly clear. The central strophe of the poem happens to name the
The dialectical armature of this strophe defines what Empson calls the pastoral convention. It is the movement of consciousness as it contemplates the natural entity and finds itself integrally reflected down to the most peculiar aspects of phusis. But a reflection is not an identification, and the simple correspondence of the Mind with the natural, far from being appeasing, turns troublesome. The mind recovers its balance only in domination over that which is its complete other. Thus the essentially negative activity of all thought takes place, and poetic thought in particular: "Annihilating all that's made." One would be hard pressed to state it any more strongly. However, the recourse to the modifier "green" to qualify what is then created by thought, re-introduces the pastoral world of innocence, of "humble, permanent, undeveloped nature which sustains everything, and to which everything must return."" And it is reintroduced at the very moment that this world has been annihilated. It is the freshness, the greenness of budding thought that can evoke itself only through the memory of what it destroys on its way. What is the pastoral convention, then, if not the eternal separation between the mind that distinguishes, negates, legislates, and the originary simplicity of the natural? A separation that may be lived, as in Homer's epic poetry (evoked by Empson as an example of the universality of its definition), or it may be thought in full consciousness of itself as in Marvell's poem. There is no doubt that the pastoral theme is, in fact, the only poetic theme, that it is poetry itself. Under the deceitful title of a genre study, Empson has actually written an ontology of the poetic, but wrapped it, as was his wont, in some extraneous matter that may well conceal the essential. In light of this, what is the link between these considerations and -------------------------- 15. Some Versions of Pastoral, p. 128.
the first chapter of the book, entitled "Proletarian Literature," which concludes, paradoxically enough, that Marxist thought is pastoral thought disguised. Marxism draws its attractiveness from the reconciliation it promises, in all sincerity to be sure, but with a naive prematurity. "I do not mean to say," writes Empson, "that the [Marxist] philosophy is wrong; for that matter pastoral is worked from the same philosophical ideas as proletarian literature--the difference is that it brings in the absolute less prematurely.""(16) The pastoral problematic, which turns out to be the problematic of Being itself, is lived in our day by Marxist thought, as by any genuine thought. In motivation, if not in its claims, Marxism is, ultimately, a poetic thought that lacks the patience to pursue its own conclusions to their end; this explains why Empson's book, which is all about separation and alienation, places itself at the outset under the aegis of Marxism; a convergence confirmed by the apparent contradiction of the attraction exerted upon our generation by the problematic of poetry and the solution of Marxism.(17) Having started
from the premises of the strictest aesthetical formalism, Empson winds
up facing the ontological question. And it is by virtue of this question
that he stands as a warning against certain --------------------------------------- 16. Ibid, p. 23. 17. A remark by Heidegger confirms and sheds light on this encounter: The fate of the world announces itself in poetry, without already appearing nonetheless as a history of Being.... Alienation has become fated on a world-scale. Which is why this destiny must be thought at the outset of the history of Being. What Marx recognized, basing himself upon Hegel, as essentially and significantly the alienation of man, takes root in the fundamentally exiled character of modern man . . . . It is because he had a real experinece of this alienation that Marx has attained a profound dimension of history. That is why the Marxist conception of history by far surpasses all of the forms of contemporary historicism." Platons Lehre von de Warheit; mit eiem Brief uber den Humanismus (Bern: A. Francke, 1947), p. 87. 18. Pastoral, p. 15. [241]
The promise held
out in Richards's work, of a convergence between logical positivism
and literary criticism, has failed to materialize. After the writings
of an Empson, little is left of the scientific claims of formalist criticism.
All of its basic assumptions have been put into question: the notions
of communication, form, signifying experience, and objective precision.
And Empson is but an example among others." Their routes may at
times have differed, but numerous critics have come to recognize within
poetic language the same pluralism and the disorders signaling ontological
complexities. Terms such as paradox, tension, and ambiguity abound in
American criticism to the point of A conception of poetic consciousness as an essentially divided, sorrowful, and tragic consciousness (or as representing, in stoical or ironical guises, attempts to transcend this pain without eliminating it) forces some choices upon critical reflection. The impression of crisis and uncertainty that one gathers from reading contemporary criticism derives from these hesitations. Without simplifying excessively, we may distinguish three possible avenues for reflection: historical poetics, salvational poetics, and naive poetics. Historical poetics can be spoken of only in the conditional, for it ------------------ 19. Degre Zero
de l'Ecriture, p. 119; in English, p. 83. 21. The French
reader unfamiliar with Empson's work should be warned that this has
been an interpretation and not an exposition, and that it is, therefore,
subject to discussion. I suppose that the author especially, who has
always proclaimed his agreement with Richards, would have some difficulty
endorsing it.
exists but in scattered form. Strictly speaking, Marxist criticism is not historical for it is bound to the necessity of a reconciliation scheduled to occur al the end of a linear temporal development, and its dialectical movement does not include time itself as one of its terms. A truly historical poetics would attempt to think the divide in truly temporal dimensions instead of imposing upon it cyclical or eternalist schemata of a spatial nature. Poetic consciousness, which emerges from the separation, constitutes a certain time as the noematic correlate of its action. Such a poetics promises nothing except the fact that poetic thought will keep on becoming, will continue to ground itself in a space beyond its failure. Although it is true that a poetics of this kind has not found expression in an established critical language, it has, nevertheless, presided over certain great poetic works, at times even consciously. Salvational criticism,
on the other hand, has taken on considerable proportions in the United
States. "The ground-base of poetic truth is the truth, contextual
not real, of man's possible redemption through the fullest imaginative
response"; (22) this sentence from a recent and representative
work is typical of a trend in which formalist techniques are overlaid
with intentions (if a mythical and religious order. Since the sorrow
of separation i; most acutely felt at the level of historical reality
in the emptiness anti impoverishment of the times, salvational thought
turns eagerly to primordial origins, hence its mythico-poetic concerns:
"The true nature of mythic perspective reveals itself in its concern
for origins; the holy, in mythic perspective, finds its ulterior reference
in an original act of creation.' (23) Originary beginnings take on the
appearance of privilvged moments beyond lime, and their remembrance
serves as the promise of a new fruitfulness. This is a way of conquering
history: redemption is conceived of as an event residing in potentia
in arid reality, and whose prior occurrences are guarantees of permanent
presence. Although itremains caught in little when it -------------------------- 22. Philip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954). 23. Ernst Cassirer, Die Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, cited by Wheelrwrigiht, p. 164. These approaches have found a rich source of information in the works of the antrolpologists and British classicists known as the Cambridge school: Gilbert Murrray, James Frazer, and their students, I. E. Harrison, F. M. Cornford, Jessie Weston, etc.
ullinlalr reconciliation
on a cosmic scale, or, in any case, to a new beginning, cut off from
the memories of the past, and fresh with the innocence of new dawn,.
But the intellectual atmosphere specific to this criticism unites a
barely veiled nostalgia for immediale revelation with a very
and for whom divine incarnation is described in purely cerbral terms muffled by the reservations of a consciousness incapable of sustaining itself, but constituting, nonetheless, the sole means of acces to the eternal:
The same hesitancy at the prospect of surrendering to the faith ofsalvation is to be found in Wheelwright, together wills a presentation of poetry as a presage of redemption. Under the guise of a critique of the scientific claims of I. A. Richards's positivism, where he has little to add to what had been established by Empson, Wheelright's book introduces an eternalist and religious conception of poetry: "the language . . . of poetry . . . , speaks in a way that truly 'mounts to the dwelling-place of the gods,' and testifies to theo reality of that dweIling."(24) But these declarations of faith alternate with more prudent and less embracing statements, such as: "The dual role, the in-and-out movement of the mind seeking to penetrate its object, frames every experience with the irony of its own finitude,"(25) or even a definition of expressive thought as: "Some such vitalizing tension between the beholder's intuition of oneness with an object and his intuition of the object's otherness."(26) For Empson such paradoxes constituted the very essence of the poetic, insofar as the had to remain unresolved. How are they to be reconciled with a belief in the poetic as a salvational act capable of deciding these dilemmas? ------------------------------ 2t. Wheelright,
p. 7. 26 lbid, p. 187.
It remains for us to define the attitude we called naive, which rests on the belief that poetry is capable of effecting reconciliation because it provides an immediate contact with substance through its own sensible form. In a famous letter, Keats had already cried out: "O for a life of sensation not of thought," but he had sense enough to speak of sensation as something one desires but cannot have. A contemporary American poet is far less prudent when he writes: "[the poet] searches for meanings in terms of the senses. The intelligence of art is a sensory intelligence, the meaning of art is a sensory meaning.... There is no such thing as a good work of art which is not immediately apprehensible in the senses.(27) There is no doubt that there is a sensory dimension, as intention, in all poetry, but to assert its exclusive and immediate presence is to ignore the origin of all creative and imaging consciousness. The distinction, so often formulated, that the experience of the object is not the experience of the consciousness of the object, remains basic and valid. In a way, if it were not for the fact that substance is problematic and absent, there would not be art. It is apparent, then, that the criticism of sensation reappropriates and extends the illusion that had already occurred in a different form in I. A. Richards and according to which there is a continuity between experience and language. To go further, the practitioners of this criticism seem to believe in an adeyuation of the object itself with the language that names it. They assert that some texts establish such an ------------------------- 27. KrrI Shatnru, Be 1ua,l Cnru.ano (l.inculu: tlrove [245] adequation and
they are willing to erect it into a critical norm: "Great literature
[constitutes] ... the preferred domain of the happy relation,"
writes Jean-Pierre Richard; and, in his introduction Io Richards's two
books, Georges Poulet opposes the criticism of sensation to the criticism
of consciousness by writing: "[Criticism] must reach the act through
which the mind, coming to terms with its own body and that of others,
joined with tike object in order to invent itself as subject."(28)
It is a little fast going to assign to criticism the task of installing
itself at a point where no work in the world, however inspired, has
ever been able to install itself. To justify such a claim, Husserl is
eagerly invoked: all consciousness is consciousness of something. Must
it be recalled that for Husserl this statement is the point of departure
for a transcendental idealism most decidedly at a far remove from any
naive sensualism? And without wanting to enter into the intricacies
of the Whether it be in
France or in the United States, the foremost characteristic of contemporary
criticism is the tendency to expect a reecoclliation from poetry; to
see it in a possibility of filling the gap --------------------------------------------- 28. Jean Pierre Richard, Jroesir et Nrufmdew (Paris: Sruil, 1455), P 111 29. I omit.m.nliun
rd Mauri r Blencl 1. whose work,h~r ~ nut tall lu dw trend. awulunn
d hr-, 31. New rt Nrofondeur, p. 161. |
