BOOKS
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terestingly, Blackmur's unique classroom mode, as described by Arthur
Gold, one of Blackmur's Princeton students, was to demonstrate how one
becomes intimate with literature.) For all their differences then, Poulet
and Blackmur are virtuous in their devotion to a writer's experience,
and virtuosos in their gift for handling and representing that experience.
The costs of such criticism are necessarily high. Blackmur irritates
with his hedging, his hidden ball play, as one critic called it, that neither
wholly delivers a point nor lets it go. His wit is gnarled and capricious,
his continuity often a mystery. Poulet's tone suggests the voice of litera–
ture itself, as if each writer he discusses is simply an idea momentarily
illuminated by a cosmic consciousness. Unkindly, a twentieth-century
Circumlocution Office (Blackmur) and Monsieur Teste (Poulet). Yet
a price more than worth it. Blackmur's aphorisms that epitomize a
writer's energy, the special genius that combines "unconscious skills of ap–
prehension and gradual intimacy" with a deep immersion in the ways of
"bourgeois humanism," the talent for theorizing that never loses its
grip on the "rich irregularity of things"; Poulet's enormous tact in the
choice of quotations, his ability to describe a consciousness revealing it–
self to itself as "pure instantaneousness," the extraordinary working
together in his essays of a heedless abstraction with an almost shocking
particularity. Neither plays what Blackmur calls "the game of research."
And each reads literature like his autobiography written at the time of
happening.
It never will cease to amaze, I think, how it is that the closeness and
intimacy that Poulet and Blackmur convey can be so greatly different
in tone. Poulet's books, of which
The Metamorphoses of the Circle
is only
the third to be translated, are always concerned with a theme - time,
space, the circle - treated in the work of a series of writers. The given
writer's initial moment of self-consciousness, his Cartesian
cogito,
will
imply the kind of interior life that he will continue to lead thereafter:
man is given only the instant, says Poulet in
Le Point de Depart
(1964),
and then the mind creates duration whose "true direction is that which
goes from the isolated instant to temporal continuity." Poulet's method
is to attribute measurable dimension to a writer's style, which is the
writer's consciousness translated into the duration of language. Hence
Poulet can study changes in interior space and time, changes in the
cosmology of style and consciousness, as evidence of the history of
sensibility. In
The Metamorphoses of the Circle
Poulet chooses the
circle as a Kantian
ding-an-sich,
its perfection and inviolability provid–
ing an aloof model for minds whose chief purpose, Poulet claims, is to
achieve plenitude, horizon and centrality. (A recent
TLS
review of
