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Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3303 Notes 07C
GEORGES POULET “THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF READING” (1969)
(PUBLISHED AS “CRITICISM AND THE EXPERIENCE OF INTERIORITY” IN 1970)
Georges Poulet is particularly influenced by the views of Edmund Husserl. For Poulet, the
literary work is thought to originate in the intentional acts of consciousness of its author
(what Poulet terms, pace Descartes, the cogito). Each work is a fictive work created out of
the lived experiences of the author whose unique consciousness it embodies. The cogito or
distinctive modes of thinking and feeling of the author (not to be confused with the
author’s real self) necessarily pervades his/her literary work. That is, the contents of a
work (imagery, plot, characters, verbal style, etc.) are the imaginative projection or
correlate of the author’s characteristic patterns of awareness of the world. These
intentional acts may then be re-experienced and assimilated by the reader in his/her own
consciousness via the medium of the literary work. The goal of criticism / interpretation is
to ‘bracket’ one’s own predispositions and inclinations in order to experience in pure and
undistorted form the consciousness of a work’s author. Indeed, the reading process
reaches its apogee when the reader is able to suppress his own conscious awareness
totally identify with the author’s consciousness. (The debt to the Romantics and their
expressive model of literature ought to be obvious, to wit, the view that literature
expresses the personality of the author, an awareness of this personality being the goal of
criticism.)
For Poulet, in the course of reading, the reader becomes the subject of thoughts not
his own: "My consciousness behaves as though it were the consciousness of another" (59).
A presence, alien yet located within, takes possession of the reader's mind. The upshot of
this is that whenever "I read, I mentally pronounce an I . . . which . . . is not myself" (60).
The reader becomes the subject of thoughts not his own: "My consciousness behaves as
though it were the consciousness of another" (59). A presence, alien yet located within,
takes possession of the reader's mind. The upshot of this is that whenever "I read, I
mentally pronounce an I . . . which . . . is not myself" (60). The book acquires a new form
of existence within the reader's inmost self, blurring the boundaries between self and
work, subject and object. The book becomes a subjectified object, as it were: "You are
inside it; it is inside you" (57).
For Poulet, the source of this second self is the author who "impregnates" (61) his
work with his mind and "awakens in us the analogue of what he thought or felt" (61). To
"understand a literary work . . . is to let the individual who wrote it reveal himself to us in
us" (61). For Poulet, the objective organisation of the work is given its distinctive shape
by the writer's "organ ising power" (70). Behind every web, as he puts it, there is a spider.
The work, qua formal objectification of the author's consciousness, becomes a "sort of
human being . . . a mind conscious of itself and constituting itself in me as the subject of
its own objects" (62), in the process suspending the reader's internal life and taking over
his/her mind. Poulet uses tropes of haunting, possession and enforced seizure and
occupation to underscore the process of identification which occurs between reader and
author: "Another's thought inhabits me or haunts me . . . I lose myself into that alien
world" (67). The result is the formation of a shared "common consciousness" or
"community of feeling" (63) that is tantamount to what he describes as an "identification
within difference" (63).