Summary
American critic whose work, with Georges Poulet’s, is set against E. D. Hirsch’s demand for validation in “Sense and Sensibility”, the second essay in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.41-47).
Details
- Said’s Blackmur wishes to reveal literature taking, in Henry James’s phrase, from “the enormous lap of the actual” (quoted PDF p.42); his enterprise, in his own phrase as Said gives it, is bringing literature to performance, and Joseph Frank called his sentences “ideated sensations” (PDF p.42).
- His costs, in Said’s account, are hedging and hidden ball play, a gnarled and capricious wit, and continuity that is often a mystery; his virtues are aphorisms, “unconscious skills of apprehension and gradual intimacy” and a talent for theorizing that keeps its grip on the “rich irregularity of things” (PDF p.43).
- In A Primer of Ignorance, a selection by Frank of his writing between 1943 and 1959, his “terms” set theorizing intellect against representative imagination: technique is imagination aspiring to reason, form is reason aspiring to imagination, and knowledge is “a fall from the paradise of undifferentiated sensation” (PDF p.45-46).
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s lateral, oblique style of exposition is strikingly reminiscent of Blackmur’s, whose interest in “gesture” Merleau-Ponty shares (PDF p.33).
Related pages
Georges Poulet, E. D. Hirsch, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays