Geneva or Paris?: The Recent Work of Georges Poulet

GENEVA OR PARIS? THE RECENT WORK OF GEORGES POULET* J. HILLIS MILLER Since the death of Albert Beguin and the retirement of Marcel Raymond , Georges Poulet has emerged as the leader of an important group of literary critics who are bound somewhat loosely together by commOn methodological presuppositions. The group is sometimes called "the Geneva School," since most of its members have been associated in one way or another with the University of Geneva. The group includes Jean Rousset, Jean Starobinski, and Jean-Pierre Richard as well as the three older critics already mentioned. This essay is an attempt to assess the Significance of the many books and essays Poulet has published since 1963.' I shall also set Poulet's criticism tentatively against the challenging new developments in literary criticism appearing now in Paris under the impact of structuralism and current reinterpretations of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. The contrast between the underlying assumptions of the two groups is one version of a fundamental tension within methodolOgical thinking in the "human sciences" On the Continent . The importance of the issues at stake can scarcely be exaggerated. They involve basic conceptions of literature, of consciousness, of language , of human temporality and human history, and of Occidental metaphysics from Plato to Husser! and Heidegger. Poulet's recent publications have filled out the contours of his lifework in several ways. New programmatic statements have confirmed his commitment to a ucriticism of consciousness." "I wish to save at any price the subjectivity of literature," he says; and he defines his kind of criticism firmly as "above all, a criticism of participation, better still, of identification. There is no true criticism without the coincidence of two consciousnesses."· The literary text is a means by which the critic can achieve an identification with "a consciousness which is in the work,'" and his criticism is an expression of the results of this identification. The pubHcation of Le point de depart and Mesure de l'instant, the third and fourth volumes of the Etudes sur Ie temps humain, has made "'This paper was the rust public lecture in comparative literature given at the University of TOlanta. Volume XXXIX, Nnmber 3, April 1970 THE RECENT WORK OF GEORGES POULET 213 clearer than before the monumental and inclusive nature of Poulet's work, its unity as an attempt to relive from within and to express in criticism more or less the whole range of French literature from the Renaissance to the present, placing it in the context of a less complete treatment of ancient and medieval literature, and of major modem writers in other European languages: Goethe, the English romantics, Poe, Whitman, Henry James, Guillen, and others. In fact Les metamorphoses du cercle is only somewhat arbitrarily excluded from the Etudes sur Ie temps humain (on the grounds, presumably, that its leitmotif is a spatial rather than a temporal form). The five volumes together, Etudes sur le temps humain, I, La distance interieure, Les metamorphoses du cercle, Le point de depart, and Mesure de l'instant, form a Single comprehensive work consisting of seventy essays on various writers, groups of writers, or literary periods. Most of the essays are on single authors, and each follows a ilialectical itinerary through the interior space of the author in question, drawing quotations from the whole range of his writing to trace out a spiritual adventure leading the author from some beginning in an awakening to consciousness toward an end of triumph or defeat. The seventy essays may be thought of as juxtaposed side by side in a spatial panorama, somewhat as, in Poulds interpretation of Proust in L'espace proustien, the various times of Marcel's life are set side by side in A la recherche du temps perdu like the paintings of different events from a saint's life in a triptych. To borrow another Proustian metaphor, the five major volumes of Poulds criticism are like five bays within the voluminous interior of a cathedral, the smaller books on Proust, Constant, etc., forming adjacent chapels. The introduction to each major volume identifies the special commitment of that collection within the all-inclusive themes of literary time and space: the range of literary experiences...