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PAUL DE MAN
experience. To this
is
opposed the cycle of myth and nature beyond time,
which can indeed be called spatial. According to Mr. Frank and Mr.
Miller, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century writer strives
to
be re–
united with this kind of space, driven at times by such strong nostalgia as
to call it God. Mr. Miller refers to this as the "heroic attempts to recover
immanence in a world of transcendence" and he can go very far in
showing how and why these heroic attempts fail. What he doesn't
see (though he comes tantalizingly close) is that Arnold certainly,
and most likely Hopkins, are ahead of him in having discovered that,
by presumably transcending time towards esthetic space, the realm one
reaches is no longer spatial at all. Instead, they re-discover time, although
on an altogether different, more fundamental and, one might say with
some caution, "purer" level-although this purity is not Proust's "pure
time, which is but space." Mr. Miller's flawless essay on Arnold shows
very well how the spatial dialectic of proximity and distance becomes
superseded, not just metaphorically but in actual fact, by a radically
different temporal dialectic-but from which Mr. Miller fails to draw
the conclusions that would impair his method.! The matter is even more
involved and more instructive in the case of Hopkins. With admirable
consistency, Hillis Miller shows us how Hopkins devised strategies of
infinite refinement and delicacy to detect or create an analogy between
the self (which is temporal) and a natural God which he still experiences,
probably under strong Hellenic influence, as spatial; we owe Miller's
outstanding reading of "Pied Beauty" to such an analysis-the only
example, by the way, of a poem read as a whole in the entire book.
When these attempts fail, Hopkins recognizes that the failure is due to
his too narrow conception of God as a natural, spatial entity and,
finding support in pre-Socratic thought as well as in non-Thomist
Christian theology, he expands his conception of the divine to include
a mode of being that is no longer natural or analogically related to
nature. Mr. Miller describes this very well, with a perfect awareness of
the philosophical and theological background of this "conversion," and
with an equally sensitive ear for the changes it brings about in Hopkins'
poetic language. But the critic's own language is less rigorous at this
point, for spatial metaphors such as "interlocking harmony of nature in
3. I don't think that, in spite of many appearances to the contrary, the same
spatial priority can be found in the thought of Georges Poulet, if one con–
siders
it
in its evolving totality. The determining esthetic event, for Pouiet,
is always the impulse of originating consciousness in what he calls the
cogito,
and the
cogito
is for him entirely temporal. It is significant in that respect
that, after the above-mentioned essay on Proust which seems to coincide so
entirely with Joseph Frank's views, he inserts an essay on Bergson which
moves in precisely the opposite direction and ip which PfOu.t
is
~fere4
10
1\1
a
"l'ensel4r inf,rmilfellf."