The idea of writing as a project informs Poulet’s criticism, the concept that each text operates as one in a series of mediations of reality that, as they accrue, produce an essential strategy of accommodating the world.  Poulet conceives that strategy as an essential dynamism.

Consider, for example:

…for Hugo the self is found amongst an engulfing reality.  The Hugolian being comes suddenly to consciousness when the formidable mass of things breaks over him and feels everywhere its moving and multiple contact….suddenly the object is no longer an object, and the spectacle is no longer a spectacle.  How can one describe this situation in which a human being appears all at once to himself, not in the sanctuary of his consciousness, not in a solitary thought that assures him of his sole existence, but in so total an envelopment and penetration by things that he cannot detach himself from the, cannot distinguish himself from them, cannot abstract himself from them?  He is, but he is in things.  He is athwart things, and things are athwart him.  He is, but like a wrestler so tightly entwined with his adversary that the same heat and the same lock seem to animate both of them. [Interior Distance, p. 163.]

Or consider:

To love without ceasing is to be reborn without creasing; it is also `to die more than once.’  At each instant it seems that the whole of life is found again, but that it is also lost again.  Time `pulls away the ladder behind us as soon as we reach a halting-place; nay it breaks under our feet, rung by rung…’  Musset’s existence would therefore appear to be doomed to being a series of systoles and diastoles, of dilations and contractions, if the absolute character of each one of these deaths and rebirths did not furnish an unseen hope.  For at this point we touch on something than which there is nothing more essential for Musset, something to which he returned with the greatest insistence in his writings, and yet without ever being able to explain himself fully, since, to tell the truth, at this point one perhaps leaves the domain of the explicable.

Or, for example:

What the Mallarmean poem proposes to us…is at the same time a sacrifice and an identification.  By `his death as so and so’, one arrives at being nothing other than this general being in whom the human desire is realized and typified.  One becomes apt at recognizing, no longer outside of oneself but within oneself, him whose figure first outlined itself, unreal and remote, at a distance, beyond the void, in some mythical place.  That doubt is abolished, that void is filled.  One becomes the place in which the spiritual universe is attested and incarnated. Man, then, his authentic terrestrial sojourn, exchange a reciprocity of proofs….And so the Mallarmean poem can exist only in this `reciprocity.’ It furnishes the reader with a text which has meaning and even existence only if the reader projects his own thought into it.  There is no Mallarmean poem except from the moment when there is no longer on one side the poem, and on the other a thought, with, between the two `the vacant space facing the stage.’ It is necessary that there should no longer be anything other that the one self same place, that in which one sesame being sees himself and thinks himself, in which he recognizes himself in a spectacle which is none other than the `spectacle of Self.'[Ibid., 283.]

While Poulet’s conceptualizations of the essential dynamic that drives a writer’s work are reductive, they base themselves upon a careful, detailed reading of an oeuvre that discovers this dynamic in recurrent manifestations and variations of certain images in a relational structure.

What do I find attractive in this method of reading?

First of all, it demands a slow, careful processing of a series of texts, an insightful, penetrating reading that sees the text as a rich resource to be mined.  To balance the notion of penetrating the text, the process provides the illusion of one’s imagination being assimilated into the text, of opening one’s consciousness to an other, and becoming available to that other.  That paradoxical appropriation of the text and assimilation by the text constitutes what Bachelard calls transsubjectivity.  The process requires a slow, progressive building of an image of consciousness as reading and re-reading familiarizes you with the key images and relational dynamics of the oeuvre.  The demand to see a writer’s total work as a whole requires a painstaking study of many texts and the kind of satisfaction that only a comprehensive project can bring.  In other words, the interpretative project brings the pleasures of reading, the pleasures of playing with words and the virtual worlds of consciousness they establish.

The method seems to be both responsive to the text and responsible to the text.

The phenomenological reading focuses upon the text as the material of one’s immediate experience; and while one internalizes the dynamics of the text, the text as external object directs that process of incorporation.  One submits to the energy of the text.  As one deals with the text as a phenomenon, this method provides the satisfaction of having encountered and, in some sense, encompassed that phenomenon.  While the experience of reading and study remains a private event or series of events, this critical strategy gives one the sense that you have actually engaged yourself with another consciousness, that the body of texts has allowed a transaction between the subjectivity of the writer and the subjectivity of the reader.  The process of spatializing an author’s oeuvre, of perceiving the individual text as a manifestation and variation of an essential dynamic gives one the illusion of comprehending the work.  As well, because the interior space that reading creates is not finite, continued re-reading expands and deepens the space in which the text plays.

The phenomenlogical readings of Georges Poulet and others depend upon a modernist notion of the subject, the sense of the unique, self-reflexive individual whose self-conscious mediations of the world constitute the primary reality, the reality of consciousness.  While Poulet does not negate the presence of culture as the basis of certain forms of thinking and conventions of expression, his notion of the writer as self-reflexive subject provides an image of a transcendent subject that eludes the specific space and time of its historical origin.  The virtual reality of the writer’s interiority, in which the reified objective reality plays in an ambient field, may be informed by culturally specific objective presences, but this temporal specificity loses its authority in the process of reification.

In Poulet’s sense of language the individual writer infuses language with an idiosyncratic variation and a syntax (or relational structure of images) that becomes a cultural artifact.  The text is not merely the manipulation of a given vocabulary within a grammar provided by culture.