Summary
Critic of consciousness whose work, with R. P. Blackmur’s, is set against E. D. Hirsch’s demand for validation in “Sense and Sensibility” (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.41-47).
Details
- Said’s Poulet wishes to prolong literature in his criticism; J. Hillis Miller spoke of his “quietistic” explorations into a writer’s consciousness (PDF p.42).
- His method attributes measurable dimension to a writer’s style, which is the writer’s consciousness translated into the duration of language; man is given only the instant, in Le Point de Départ (1964), and the mind then creates duration (PDF p.43).
- The Metamorphoses of the Circle, only the third of his books to be translated at the time Said wrote, studies the circle in eighteen chapters — four on whole periods, fourteen on individual writers — as an image of the mind’s dialectical sense of its own existence: center as identity, circumference as sequential progress through time, area as inhabiting space (PDF p.43-44).
- The book’s longest essay, on the Swiss diarist Amiel, is in Said’s account the triumph and validation of the method: Amiel’s diary of fifty thousand plus pages becomes the “brief abstract” of mind (PDF p.44).
- Said’s limit on Poulet: his criticism is an essentializing activity, an Olympian daydream whose voice turns out one author after another, resolving life into a book of world consciousness (PDF p.44-45, p.47).
Related pages
R. P. Blackmur, E. D. Hirsch, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays