BACHELARD TO BARTHES
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psychoanalysis had never happened. Their indifference or ignorance
was followed by protest (Sartre and Bachelard, for example), and
they seem at present to have an uneasily sympathetic and not wholly
knowledgeable relation to the methods of Freudian analysis. It's true
that psychoanalytic criticism, like Marxist criticism, tends ultimately
to formulate the relation between a writer's work and his life or his
society not as a relation of parallel structures, but rather as one of
cause and effect. Thus, Charles Mauron's often impressive "psycho–
critical" readings of Racine's plays are weakened by an appeal to
Racine's life as, finally, a sanction for those readings, while Lucien
Goldmann's generally unimpressive analyses of Pascal and Racine are
supported by what Barthes rightly detects as the hidden economic
determinism of the so-called structuralist approach in
The Hidden
God.
Both methods are imitatively defective, and it could be shown,
I think, that biographical and economic hypotheses actually make
unintelligible structures of the texts Mauron and Goldmann discuss.
That is, their various local interpretations fit together coherently only
if you agree that the principle of Racinian coherence is independent
of (but responsible for) Racine's creation of a coherent dramatic
world. And an immanent, noncausal coherence is the only criterion
on which structural criticism
asks
to
be
judged. The appeal to causes
makes for a missing link in the structuralist chain.
The appeal of Bachelard's categories is that they presumably
account for their own nature. He himself insisted on the absolute
newness of the poetic image, on poetry as "a sublimation which
doesn't sublimate anything." But thematic criticism has suffered bad–
ly from a Bachelardian and, in Poulet, a spatiotemporal vocabulary.
The invention of a drastically simplified psychology is hardly a satis–
factory escape from psychological causality. Those "humoral sources"
are, after all, metaphors which have to he treated metaphorically,
and not literally, if the critic's vocabulary is to "cover" the writer's
work in its entirety. Any interpretive system is legitimate, writes
Barthes, if it is capable of transforming
everything
in a work accord–
ing to the laws of its own logic. But everything in a work simply
does not yield to a system of sensory perceptions which are not, in
any writer I know of, the final term of his intelligibility. Richard,
who is a brilliant critic, gets further than anyone else with this
method; the man who is least well served by
his
language, whose ex–
traordinary sensitivity to literature is continually thwarted by his
