ABSTRACT
Georges Poulet continues the belief in the fundamental importance of sympathetic identification that marks out Beguin's work, but he adopts a much more analytical approach to the text than would ever have been found congenial by the author of Balzac visionnaire. Poulet sees literary 'thought' as 'a motivating impulse, an original birth which must be resurrected by the reader as he rethinks and recreates the author's own expression'. The fact remains that Poulet has provided us with an illustration of the way the Balzac text possesses essential significance beyond its overt thematic concerns, at the level of its organizing principles. A first remark is that the Balzacian world is not a world that reduces itself to the pure diffusion of its movements. Balzac has always been haunted by the idea of a gigantic secret society that would possess the world by surrounding it with a network of their wills.
