BOOKS
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it, but even though he speaks of the medieval sense of wholeness and of
romantic alienation he gives us an uncannily precise tracing of the
figures in history's carpet. God, presumably, is totality, the fulfillment
of which goes on apace. Behind, or underneath, all activity is the desire
for completion, and if Poulet's quiet essays seem unconcerned with the
brute facts of existence it is because his criticism is an essentializing ac–
tivity. One may wish to disagree with him, but in the absence of every–
thing but the virtuality of consciousness the conflicts of ordinary experi–
ence, as we encounter them in Edmund Wilson, say, or in Erich Auer–
bach, seem completely foreign. For all its tremendous complexity Poulet's
work is like an Olympian d.aydream (Coleridge's phrase for
Clarissa),
its voice unvaryingly deliberate as it turns out one author after another
like emptied receptacles. His text is Maurice Blanchot's description of
li.terature: "the experience whereby consciousness discovers its being in
its inability to lose consciousness." With Poulet, in fine, we see what
Shelley meant when he referred to the "intense inane"; it is one of the
mind's necessary poles, though its untempered fineness drives us in the
other direction.
Blackmur is our best guide on that vacillating journey between
Poulet's metaphysics and "what holds us, what keeps us, what moves
us." All of Blackmur's work can be viewed as an effort to grasp the rich
variety of experience as it bends and surges either toward form (thought)
or toward pure behavior (actuality). To discover the "deep, underlying
form" in behavior is the task of literature, specifically of fiction, and most
specifically in the master nineteenth-century novelists, of whom James
was Blackmur's spiritual mentor. Whereas Poulet sees consciousness
aspiring to the condition of mathematics, Blackmur prefers to do his
"sums" in criticism: his "digits," as he called them, are analysis, com–
parison, elucidation and judgment. He is a lively abacus of all our
critical and imaginative skills. What quickens the pulse of Blackmur's
work is a skepticism learnt from Montaigne, what Blackmur called
"having a marginal mind for the play and interest of it," which holds
to a sense of radical imperfection in both imagination and intellect. TIlls
is one reason, incidentally, why Blackmur's essays are fiendishly hard to
write about. So shot through is his work with provisionality that state–
ment about his work is virtually misrepresentation. The value of Black–
mur is in the reading of his Tory anarchy.
The irony is that Blackmur is almost always talking about, and at–
tempting, representation.
A Primer of Ignorance,
a selection of essays
culled by Frank out of Blackmur's writing between 1943 and 1959, is
the representation of Blackmur's intimacy, "the sense of which is the
