Looking back at the analyses of difficult texts performed by people such as Georges Poulet, Jean Richard, Jean Starobinski, and Roland Barthes, I can easily recognize the significance of the image of the author as a self-reflexive subject and the image of the text itself as a form of consciousness.

Phenomenological criticism assumed that the language of a text forges an idiosyncratic mediation of objective reality, that the text as logos is both this mediation and the constituting field of that reification of reality.   In Poulet’s defense of phenomenological criticism in The Structuralist Controversy, he introduces a material image of reading, based upon the physical sensation of holding the actual book.  He describes a situation that is essentially private in which the consciousness of the reader opens itself to the dynamics in which the texts produces or reproduces images in the reader’s consciousness.

The text functions as a complex body of stimuli that, in the process of “transsubjectivity”1 creates an interior space in the consciousness of the reader that approximates the field of consciousness in the writing itself took place.  The spatial organization of this interior field determines the consciousness of the reader at the moment of reading.

Every thought…is a thought of something.  It is turned invincibly toward the somewhere else, toward the outside.  Issuing from itself, it appears to leap over a void, meet certain obstacles, explore certain surfaces, and envelop or invade certain objects.  It describes and recounts to itself all these objects, and these accounts or these descriptions constitute the inexhaustible objective aspect of literature.  But every thought is also simply a thought.  It is that which exists in itself, isolatedly, mentally.  Whatever it objects may be, thought can never place them, think them, except in the interior of itself.  If it is necessary for it go searching through the exterior spaces for one or another of the thousands of objects which offer themselves there, it is no less necessary for it to constitute itself as a sort of interior depth which the images from outside come to populate.  My thought is a space in which my thoughts take place, in which they take their place.  I watch them arrive, pass on, wander aside or sink out sight, and I distinguish them at spatial and temporal distances which never cease to vary.  My thought it not made of solely of my thoughts; it is made up also, even more perhaps of all the interior distance which separates me from, or draws me closer to, that which I am able to think.  For all that I think is in myself who think it.  The distance is not merely an interval; it is an ambient milieu, a field of union.  Thus there is revealed another aspect of literature, a hidden aspect, the invisible face of the moon.  Objectively, literature is made  up of formal works the contours of which stand out with a greater or lesser clarity.  They are poem, maxims, and novels, plays.  Subjectively literature is not at all formal.  It is the reality of a thought that is always particular, always anterior and posterior to any object; one which, across and beyond all objects, ceaselessly reveals the strange and natural impossibilityit finds itself, of every having an objective existence.  The studies which follow…seek to bring to light that interior vacancy in which the world is redisposed.2

The first three sentences of Poulet’s introduction to The Interior Distance describes what one would call the literal function of a text, the references to an “objective reality,” what, in performance, operates as mimes.  This function constitutes thinking, the turning of a mind toward objects that are external to it.  Notice the verbs Poulet employs to characterize this process:  meet, explore, envelop or invade.

Thought, in this sense, is a confrontation with the external world, an issuing forth from the center point of a perceiving subject toward the objects it apprehends.  At the same time, however, the process of thinking constitutes a movement into an interior space or, in Poulet’s words, an interior depth.  In the experience of meeting, exploring, enveloping or invading the objective world, a writer’s thought constitutes itself as interiority into which the mediated images of these objectivities are assimilated. Notice that Poulet’s idea of consciousness depends upon the presence of a spatial figure–an interior distance that separates the I from the individual thought or draws him/her toward it.

My interpretation of Poulet identifies this individual thought as a mediated image of an object perceived initially as external to consciousness.  The thought is reified in the writer’s consciousness in the process of writing and the dynamics of its relationship to the subjectivity of the writer determines any distance between it and the I of the writer, and the constellation formed by it and other reified images constructs the interior space.  The reader reincorporates this space in his/her own interiority.  This space, in which the consciousness of the reader plays (and, thereby, constitutes itself) is produced by the reader’s incorporation of the dynamics of the text. In Poulet’s words, he “seek[s] to bring to light that interior vacancy in which the world is redisposed.”

The critical task is the revelation of the unique structure of consciousness (state of mind is too static a figure) produced by the writer’s mediation of his/her perception of the world.

1 Gaston Bachelard, “Introduction,” The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston:  Beacon Press, 1964 [originally published in France as La poˇeatique de l’espace in 1959), p. xv.

2.  Georges Poulet, The Interior Distance, trans. Elliott Coleman (Baltimore:  The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959 [originally published as La distance intˇearieure in France in 1952, as the second volume of Etudes sur le temps humain]) p. vii-viii.