Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The World of Perception - Timothy R. Quigley

the poem, as in the perceived object, form cannot be separatedfrom content; what is being presented cannot be separatedfrom the way in which it presents itself to the gaze. And someof today’s authors, such as Maurice Blanchot, 7 have been askingthemselves whether what Mallarmé said of poetry should notbe extended to the novel and literature in general: a successfulnovel would thus consist not in a succession of ideas or thesesbut would have the same kind of existence as an object of thesenses or a thing in motion, which must be perceived in its temporalprogression by embracing its particular rhythm and whichleaves in the memory not a set of ideas but rather the emblemand the monogram of those ideas.If these observations are correct and if we have succeeded inshowing that a work of art is something we perceive, the philosophyof perception is thereby freed at a stroke from certainmisunderstandings that might be held against it as objections.The world of perception consists not just of all natural objectsbut also of paintings, pieces of music, books and all that theGermans call the ‘world of culture’. Far from having narrowedour horizons by immersing ourselves in the world of perception,far from being limited to water and stone, we haverediscovered a way of looking at works of art, language and culture,which respects their autonomy and their original richness.101