Bippart, Graham

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Bucknell University

Comparative Humanities ReviewVolume 1Issue 1 Conversation/Conversion 1.1 Article 42007The Spirit of Prospero: Fiction and Identity inGeorges Poulet’s Phenomenology of ReadingGraham BippartBucknell UniversityFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/chrThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by Bucknell Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Comparative HumanitiesReview by an authorized administrator of Bucknell Digital Commons. For more information, please contact dcadmin@bucknell.edu.Recommended CitationBippart, Graham (2007) "The Spirit of Prospero: Fiction and Identity in Georges Poulet’s Phenomenology of Reading," ComparativeHumanities Review: Vol. 1: Iss. 1, Article 4.Available at: http://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/chr/vol1/iss1/4The Spirit of Prospero:Fiction and Identityin Georges Poulet’sPhenomenology of ReadingGraham BippartBucknell UniversityGeorges Poulet understands the act of reading to be a confluenceof minds, or better, an identification of a passive consciousness with thatof an active storyteller. This strange unification begins with the transmu-tation of words on a page into mental objects, of which the reader’s mindis the vessel. The act of reading, for Poulet, catalyzes a disappearance ofobjectivity, a fading of the world of which the reader is objectively a part,and a consequent submersion into complete subjectivity; a subjectivityguided by fiction: “For the book is no longer a material reality. It hasbecome a series of words, of images, of ideas which in their turn begin toexist”, and this new existence takes shape within the reader’s mind. The“number of significations” which take their place in the mind are stillobjects, but objects of thought for which existence is dependent on themind which entertains them.This is the quality of the book which lends itself to greater interestfor Poulet than other works of art, such as sculpture, which do not proffer,in their objective rigidity, any means to alleviate the distance between thesubjectivity of the observer, and the objectivity of the observed. The liter-ary object warmly gives itself up in order so that the reader may attend toit in the most intimate arena: the mind. But, “in order to exist as mentalobjects, they [the words of a page, presumably] must relinquish their exis-The Comparative Humanities Review, Vol. 1, Issue 1.33tence as real objects” (Poulet 1969, 1321). What objective existence mightPoulet be speaking of? It appears as though he is referring to the “contor-tions of…printer’s ink” (Beckett, 119), as Beckett would have it, which rankamongst the objects of the world in their place on bleached parchment. Ina sense, this is indeed what Poulet refers to. He has, of course, explainedto us the apparent disappearance of the book during a reading of it: “It isstill there”, he assures us, “and at the same time it is there no longer, it isnowhere” (Poulet 1321). But this is unsatisfying: the words of the page can-not have completely given their existence up; no one would claim that kindof power for the human gaze.Poulet seems then to be speaking of the existence of words as theysomehow ‘objectively’ refer; as they exist in some standardized “languageof reality”, whose use is that of social utility, not of creation in the sense offiction. In this sense, Poulet speaks of the “transmutation through lan-guage of reality into a fictional equivalent” (Poulet 1322). It would be to gowell beyond what Poulet has given us here to say that he is indicating somewholesale change in the references of every word in the language as theyare applied to fiction. But he does seem to be indicating that languageitself loses its objectivity, its ability to be clearly summarized, explained,re-formed. Perhaps there is a more than facile connection to work of theDionysian, who “smashes [the framework of Apollonian knowledge], jum-bles it up and ironically reassembles it” (Nietzsche 883), in an illustrationof the artist’s freedom from the ‘neediness’ of reason and his reliance onthe sheer powers of intuition.In fact, this seems to be a wholly proper reference. Nietzsche writesof artistic creation that it is the expression of an intuition which is beyondthe capacity of human understanding to explain. Intuition is, according toNietzsche, the furthest extent of human reconciliation with the ‘objective’world, which is forever outside our comprehension; irreparably separateand distant from the subjectivity in which we are helplessly entrenched.Poulet, as if supporting Nietzsche’s claim by addressing the reception ofart, speaks of reading as a kind of intuition of the author’s consciousness,and more, he speaks of the metamorphoses of the words of a book into theobjects of a mind as that quality of reading by virtue of which “the opposi-tion between the subject and its objects has been considerably attenuated”(Poulet 1322). In reading, Poulet feels that the world presented to him infiction is thus “not radically opposed to theme who thinks it”, because theobjects presented have made their home in the reader, so to speak, and arenot rigidly outside the reader’s subjective grasp. Nietzsche might takeaversion to Poulet’s desire for shelter, but the likeness between theDionysian intuition and Poulet’s language of fiction seem helpful: the lan-34 GRAHAM BIPPARTguage of fiction takes the ‘pretense’ of the language of reality, we mightsay.Essentially, Poulet’s assertion that mental objects must give uptheir objectivity is unclear. What objectivity? Which aspect of the book ishe addressing, the words on the page? If we are to take it seriously, how-ever, the best sense in which to take it is in the sense of language as awhole, it seems. Language must lose its objective apparel (the Nietzschean‘pretense’ if we may); that sense that it normally describes the world as itactually is; the sense of clarity with which we use it to describe, proposi-tionally, for example, the occurrences and phenomena around us. In thereading of fiction, language recognizes itself to be wholly subjective. Theobscurity of poetry and much prose is a testament to this. Blanchotexplains “Only the nonliterary book is presented as a stoutly woven web ofdetermined significations, as an entity made up of real affirmations:before it is read by anyone, the nonliterary book has been read by every-one” (Blanchot 95). The work of fiction has no such “preliminary reading”(Ibid) as the nonliterary work. Poulet’s language seems to suggest thisapproach to the difference between fiction and the (objective) language ofreality.For in the act of reading fiction, according to Poulet, we apprehendthe consciousness of the author. This is afforded the reader through thecomplete subjectification of the objects of his thought; the attenuation ofthat “opposition” discussed earlier. The reader is thus enabled an identifi-cation with the author, whose thoughts are for the moment the reader’sthoughts: “When I am absorbed in reading, a second self takes over, a selfwhich thinks and feels for me” (Poulet 1324). Whereas in everyday life weare irreparably separated, as subject and object of thought normally are,from our human peers, in reading, the very consciousness, the very sub-jectivity of another, is made into the object of thought. It is because thethoughts of the author are, for Poulet, actually being thought by the read-er, that a unification between two subjectivities is granted: “They are thethoughts of another, and yet it is I who am their subject” (Poulet 1322).Of course this unification is one-sided. The author himself, thehuman consciousness who may or may not still inhabit the world in whichwe read, is absent. Poulet’s understanding of reading as a comforting coin-cidence of the subject and the objects of his thought, unrealizable exceptin the act of reading, may imply a darker, more solitary existence for theauthor himself. Indeed Blanchot seems to have anticipated such anapproach to reading, so inherently neglectful of the author’s burden, whenhe says that reading is a “dance with an invisible partner in a separatespace, a joyful, wild dance with the ‘tomb’” (Blanchot 98). The author, as35THE SPIRIT OF PROSPEROa subject himself, must feel at all times in the act of writing that threaten-ing severance of the subject from its surroundings that Poulet feels daily.One implication is that the author himself does not perceive his very ownconsciousness, in its essence, as Poulet seems to perceive it in the act ofreading. Indeed, Sartre notes that author is always, in writing, attemptingto propose a silence with which the author himself “has never been famil-iar with” (Sartre 1339). Sartre explains this ‘silence’ to be “subjective andanterior to language” (Sartre 1339). Perhaps it is this intent which Pouletapprehends, as for him the final result of reading is truly something inef-fable: “When reading a literary work, there is a moment when it seems tome that the subject present in this work disengages itself from all that sur-rounds it, and stands alone” (Poulet 1332). He continues to say that “nostructure can any longer define it; it is exposed in its ineffability and itsfundamental indeterminacy” (Poulet 1333). The subject which presentsitself in the reading of a book transcends the very work itself in the sameway, it seems, that Sartre articulates.This takeover of the reader’s mind by the author’s thoughts con-trasts considerably with Sartre’s notion of reading. Poulet says that “I [thereader] play a much more humble role [than that of the author], contentto record passively all that is going in me” (Poulet 1325). Whateverremains of the reader’s consciousness during the takeover of his mind bythe author’s thoughts, Poulet calls the “consciousness of the critic” (Poulet1325). Sartre is not content to relegate the act of reading to pure passivity.He does agree that a ‘literary object…exists only when in movement”(Sartre 1337), and this movement is granted by the contribution of thereader, but for Sartre reading itself is a creative process: “The reading iscomposed of a host of hypotheses, of dreams followed by awakenings, ofhopes and deceptions” (Sartre 1337). This “directed creation” is “as newand original an act as the first invention [writing]” (Sartre 1339).Poulet is sure, however, that it is the author who plays the activerole in reading. Poulet’s insistence on an “I” who reads and an “I” who ispresent in the work of an author is succinctly refuted in Barthes assertionthat a “text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination” (Barthes1968,1469). This destination is the reader alone. For Barthes reduces theauthor to a linguistic instance of self-reference, and nothing more: “theauthor is never more than the instance of writing, just as I is nothing otherthan the instance of saying I: language knows a ‘subject’, not a ‘person’”(Barthes 1467). Poulet’s psychologistic tendency is revealed in Barthestreatment of the ‘Text’, as well. No longer may we see the work of anauthor as inviting us into an experience of an essential subjectivity, ineffa-ble, and woven into it. A text for Barthes, being a linguistic object, must be36 GRAHAM BIPPARTseen as infinitely abundant in its possible readings and interpretations.Language acts not as a transparent surface which the author standsbehind, but as an opaque barrier. Just as the spoken word may be misun-derstood or misconstrued, so the text can not be seen as anything but asentence that has outlived its speaker: “if the Text extends itself, it is aresult of combinatory systematic…Hence, no vital ‘respect’ is due to theText: it can be broken” (Barthes 1971, 1473). And if there is somethingineffable which we perceive in a text it is not “the unnamable signified”(Barthes, 1472), but perhaps indicates instead that we have been search-ing for what is not there: an authoritative signified.Finally, criticism, for Poulet, is a necessary, and necessarily fallibletask. Not unlike a willful return from Enlightenment, or the vocation of aBiblical prophet, only of human consciousness, the critic must relate whatcannot be articulated: “the [author’s] thought is grasped not at its highest,but at its most obscure, at its cloudiest point, at the point at which it isreduced to being a mere self-awareness scarcely perceived by the beingwhich entertains it” (Poulet 1330). Here, again, we see the likeness ofPoulet’s thought in this respect to Sartre. The author can only be ‘scarcelyaware’ of the transcendent self which he wishes to offer up to examination.To be sure, the reader himself can only apprehend it, not comprehend it,like the Kantian sublime. Thus literary criticism will always fall short of itsgoal: to relate the Sartrean ‘silence’ of a work. All criticism becomes tooanalytical, too concerned with structure and technique, at the expense ofthe pre-lingual essence that reading the work itself achieves, or too mimet-ic, too obscure in its own emotion and passion to be understood theoreti-cally and accurately. We are reminded that language must be wholly ‘real’or wholly ‘fictional’ in its apparel for Poulet, though some critics seem tostrike closer balances between the two.The language of fiction in Poulet’s Phenomenology of Reading isthus to be understood as a shedding of pretenses. His is a peculiar blendof Romanticism and Humanism, in which the goal of contemplation is nolonger a communion between the subject and the divine, but a commun-ion between subjects. In it, we are allowed to shake off the incongruity ofour existence in a cold and indifferent world, infinitely distanced from us,and meet with our others in the world of the subject, where, as Blanchotsays “nothing has any meaning yet, properly speaking, but to which, evenso, everything that has a meaning returns to its origins” (Blanchot 96).Poulet’s treatment of language may seem confused, though passionately,but it is surely moving. The language of reality, divested of the clothes ofutility, allows us to say “farewell to what is” (Poulet 1322) so that we mayshare in the otherwise impenetrable world of the tempestuous artist.37THE SPIRIT OF PROSPEROWorks CitedBarthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” The Norton Anthology ofTheory and Criticism. Trans. Stephen Heath. Gen. ed. Vincent B.Leitch. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 2001.Barthes, Roland. “Work to Text.” The Norton Anthology of Theory andCriticism. Trans. Stephen Heath. Gen. ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 1st ed.New York: Norton, 2001.Beckett, Samuel. “Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce.” I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On.Ed. Richard W. Seaver. New York: Grove Press, 1976.Blanchot, Maurice. “Reading.” In The Sirens’ Song: Selected Essays byMaurice Blanchot. Ed. Gabriel Jocipovici. Trans. SashaRabinovitch. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1982.Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” TheNorton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Trans. Ronald Speirs.Gen. ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 2001.Poulet, Georges. “Phenomenology of Reading.” The Norton Anthology ofTheory and Criticism. Gen. ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 1st ed. NewYork: Norton, 2001.Sartre, Jean-Paul. “What is Literature?” The Norton Anthology of Theoryand Criticism. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. Gen. ed. Vincent B.Leitch. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 2001.38 GRAHAM BIPPART

The Spirit of Prospero: Fiction and Identity
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The Spirit of Prospero: Fiction and Identity in Georges Poulet’s Phenomenology of Reading

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