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LEO BERSANI
rigorously adhering to categories of only limited interest, is Poulet.
The image of a circle may be recurrent in literature, but no interest–
ing literary work can be adequately discussed in tenns of its meta–
phors of "centers" and "circumferences." And even the categories
of time and space in, for example, Proust can themselves
be
made
intelligible only if they are placed in relation to other things in the
work (jealousy and snobbery, which Poulet doesn't even mention),
that is, considered as metaphorical terms of a larger system in which
affectivity is infinitely more than geometric.
The principal interest of Poulet's and Richard's work is as models
of abstract structuralist analyses with which they probably wouldn't
like to be identified. While their
decoupage
into a writer's language
is unable to account for all that we respond to in a literary work, it
could be argued that the very nature of their critical procedures
makes explicit the real subject of literature. The direction of time in
art, Poulet writes, is not from past to future or from future to past,
but rather "from the isolated instant to temporal continuity," from
discontinuous sensations to a structural coherence among sensations.
Thus time for Poulet is not a chronological sequence but, instead, a
process of connecting and differentiating among different "points,"
that is, the process of making lines and shapes, of giving fonn to
space.
Poulet's and Richard's constant use of false temporal transi–
tions is both irritating and deceptive. We are always being told how
things "begin" in a writer, what his mind is doing "now," how it
moves from "now" to "then" to a "final moment." But these are, of
course, anything but "moments"; Poulet and Richard use metaphors
of temporal progress to point to the organizational potentialities of a
mass of either undifferentiated or disconnected sensations. The prog–
ress of the critical essay thus illustrates the structural logic of the
work; and the work's motivation is located in the very articulation
of its coherence. Implicit in Poulet and Richard is the assumption
that the work has been thoroughly described once the critic's metaphor
has been exhausted, for the work seeks to express nothing more than
the total intelligibility which is the object of criticism.
Time is nevertheless important in Poulet in that structures, as
he writes in
Le Point de depart,
are never "radically objective"; their
discovery is the writer's intention, and coherence can be only a
gradual process. This interest in the subjective movement
toward
structures distinguishes the earlier French critics from the more re-
