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PAUL DE MAN
described as
if
they were natural objects-i.e., objects whose spatial and
temporal nature are given and not posited, let alone invented. The
hopeless confusion that surrounds the notion of intentionality in Wimsatt
and which is carried over in Frye's discussions of the problem, indicate
the shortcomings of the underlying ontology. The practical consequence
is that New Criticism was never able
to
rise above the essential but
merely preparatory task of local exegesis, and never offered a convincing
interpretation of entire works or historical periods.
Seen as reactions to this, Mr. Frank and Mr. Miller's books
can indeed be heralded as a renewal. They break out of the impasse of
American formalism by rediscovering the constitutive and intentional
nature of poetic language, and they both do so, albeit in very different
ways, by growing conscious of the true nature of literary space. Instead
of the frozen, static space of the New Critical form (or, for that matter,
of Northrop Frye's system or archetypes), Joseph Frank sees esthetic
space as the fundamental project of the writer who transforms random
experience into the order of a spatial structure. It matters little that
Mr. Frank's historical exposition of this process is highly debatable; his
references to Lessing and Worringer are very sketchy intellectual history,
and his way of equating "spatial form" with twentieth-century literature
would demand so many qualifications as to become practically meaning–
less; the problem goes back at least as far as the early Renaissance.
But his basic insight is nonetheless valid. A novelist like Proust-far from
imitating or preserving empirical time, modulates, by a system of complex
reflective juxtapositions, from a temporal into a spatial realm.
2
Proust's
entire novel can be understood only in terms of this esthetic project.
"Proust's 'pure time,' '' says Mr. Frank, "obviously is not time at all–
it is perception in a moment of time, that is to say, space." One should
add that this space is essentially different from actual space in that it
has the richness as well as the frailty of an intentional act.
Mr. Frank develops this insight with great clarity in his first essay,
and illustrates it effectively in his study of Malraux's books on art history.
But the purely literary essays that conclude the work make little use of the
methodological possibilities inherent in the concept of spatial form. The
fact that they make some prominent New Critics look themselves like part
of history, by treating them with proper di!tance, is the only evidence of
Mr. Frank's further critical evolution. Hillis Miller on the other hand,
without going into theory, has made similar convictions an integral part
of his method.
2. Mr. Frank's description coincides with the most perceptive analyses by French
critics, especially Ramon Fernandez
(Messages,
p. 160; p. 210
in
American
translation) quoted by both Frank and Poulet, and G. Poulet,
op. cit.