630
EDWARD W. SAID
Poulet's work put
him
down sarcastically for these "fancy" unrealities,
but I do not find it hard to imagine that the mind can
be
interested,
even obsessively, in space and time.) Thus in eighteen chapters, four of
which examine whole periods and fourteen that explore individual
writers, he enters into contact with specific consciousness, a contact that
is direct and which is mediated only by the mind's effort to see its own
center and circumference. For the circle - as Poulet shows in each
chapter - is an image for understanding the mind's dialectical sense of
its own existence: the center is mind's identity, the circumference its
aequential progress through time, the area its way of inhabiting space
and the whole figure its final coherence.
Between the Middle Ages and the Baroque period consciousness
passes from an image of itself as the spherical analogy of God's perfect
circular wholeness to an indulgent delight in the mind's free concentra–
tion and expansion from circle to circumference and back again. The
eighteenth century, "a relativist century," feels thought as "pure sinuosity,"
creating its own occasional centers like a series of spider webs. Chapters
on Rousseau, Lamartine and the Romantics reveal the mind's gradual
defensive withdrawal into a center whose strength is its alienation from
others, because in reaching beyond itself it discovers the hostility of
others - Rousseau - or insubstantiality - Lamartine. Brilliant chapters
on Balzac, Flaubert, Mallarme and James alternate with unsatisfyingly
vague essays on Nerval and Vigny. The triumph happens also to be the
book's longest essay, on Arniel, the Swiss diarist. Here we discover the
validation of Poulet's method, for nowhere more than in a writer whose
concern is "pure consciousness" can we see how clearly thought's processes
aspire to the mathematical exactness of zero, point, circumference and
area. Despite the awesome length of his diary (fifty thousand plus
pages) Arnie! becomes quite literally the "brief abstract" of mind, an
attenuated chronicle of interior history, a man-made circle that compels,
implicates,
all other minds into its curves. Amiel, I think, is Poulet's
archetype; every other chapter translates Arnie!'s ascetic exercises
- Poulet reminds us that Arniel was singularly inept at "the dreary
intercourse" of everyday life - into a fuller, though less perfect, idiom
of self-consciousness.
Poulet asks us to believe that consciousness can be grasped as a pure
texture, as an irreducible medium. He deals only with a writer's total
oeuvre,
rarely with individual works. History is read as consciousness
slowly filling itself out, like some vast geometric pattern realizing itself
in reality. It ought to be remarked also how much Poulet's general
scheme of literary history adheres to our conventional understanding of
