RETURNING TO GEORGES POULET: LITERATURE, SPIRITUAL INTIMACY, AND FAITH

This essay examines the work of arguably the most important member of the Geneva School, Georges Poulet, especially in relation to questions concerning spirituality and faith. In the introduction Poulet’s focus on the way an author thinks and feels is seen to reflect the grandfather of phenomenology Husserl’s emphasis on interiority, and Poulet is depicted as indebted to philosopher and theologian Schleiermacher who claimed that the personality of the author lying behind a literary work always has a spiritual component. The essay casts doubt, however, on whether Poulet’s approach can truly be labeled “spiritual,” in particular by juxtaposing his understanding of the author/reader relationship with the understanding of that relationship articulated by Charles Du Bos who always looked at it through the prism of Christian faith. By isolating Poulet’s formulations of what he called “cogitos” for, for example, Descartes, Pascal, and Rousseau, the essay also detects a tension between Poulet’s formulations of these writers’ manners of thinking and feeling in relation to time (and space) and indications that the authors themselves were preoccupied by ideas concerning, for example, uniting with God’s spirit or a possible afterlife. Toward the end of the essay, similar problems with Poulet’s approach become evident in an attempt to formulate a cogito for John Donne. The essay concludes by arguing that if the author/reader relationship really has a spiritual dimension, this claim makes far more sense—especially in relation to the authors discussed here—in a Christian context in which spiritual encounters must have spiritual consequences.