224
LEO BERSANI
In
Litterature et
sensation,
Richard treats Flaubert's ascetic attitude
toward style as an escape from the fear of being drowned in un·
differentiated liquid matter. Poulet constantly invites us to think of a
writer's mind crossing intervals, concentrating itself on a point,
dif·
fusing itself along the periphery of a circle. And Barthes speaks of
Michelet's Anglophobia as "supported by a feeling of nausea in front
of an excess and stagnancy of blood," of his Germanophilia as deriv·
ing ''from his delight in a ceaselessly flowing substance, in blood·
milk...."
These weird categories bring us to a dilemma in the new French
criticism, and to a parting of the ways among some of the men
involved. Bachelard's work
is
both abstract and psychologically con–
crete: he's more interested in a typology of the imagination than in
particular imaginative products, but
his
classifications are entirely
affective in content. His work thus opens out into the two directions
which Barthes distinguishes in
Critique et
veriM.
On the one hand,
we can undertake the science of literature, which would attempt to
describe the "signifying logic" of symbolic language itself, "the empty
fonns which allow us to speak and to operate." On the other hand,
criticism, which deals with specific meanings, is bound to describe an
individual signifying logic when it treats individual writers. The new
critics, as I have said, are not interested in deriving a biographical
personality from a literary work; there is no pregnant subject "be–
hind" the writer's language. But even if the critic sees his job, as
Barthes puts it, as one of producing a "new flowering of the sym–
bols" of the work itself, as one of continuing the work's metaphors,
he obviously does not merely reproduce the work, and he gives a
greater intelligibility to literature by the language he
adds
to it. It is
in this sense that all criticism is subjective: while the critic refuses to
explain the work by causes external to it, he nevertheless creates a
new relationship--between the work and the interpretive system in
which he himself "speaks" the work.
What language will you choose to speak? I think that the themes
chosen by the French critics in order to imitate what might be called
the writer's path of coherence can best be understood as an attempt to
formulate an acausal psychology. Their categories are most interest·
ing-Bachelard makes the point explicitly-as an alternative to what
the French seem to dread as the deterministic implications of Freud–
ianism. The French managed to act for a long time as if Freud and
