The Poetics of Space

by Gaston Bachelard

Bachelard gently addresses those settings we live in, and finally die in, with the lightness of why we live in the first place.

Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence,

He values the imagination because he recognizes that understanding without imagination is doctrine

without growth. And without growth, what chance is there to engage the complexity that bounds us?

Amidst our culture of broadcast and bigness, Bachelard recommends that we rediscover the immense in the most intimate of things.

We are inhabited by deep imaginings—visual and verbal, auditory and tactile—that we reinhabit in our own unique way.

And this oscillating tension flies in the face of traditional dichotomies between subject and object, mind and matter, active and passive, which inform the history of Western thought. Or

to put it another way: Bachelard’s sense of poetic creation transcends the traditionally opposed roles of the image as either “imitation” or “invention.”

Bachelard resisted both extremes. For him imagination was at once receptive and creative—an acoustic of listening and an art of participation. The two functions, passive and active, were inseparable.

Instead, he made a sustained effort to think always from the beginning—focusing on the micro-phenomenon of the poetic image “at the moment of its emergence” in the reader’s waking consciousness.

But perhaps the most original contribution that The Poetics of Space makes to contemporary poetics is its exploration of the rapport between imagination and language. It is here that Bachelard clarifies his bold claim that images “speak” the emergence of being, setting verbs in motion and turning sensations into metaphors by inviting us to live figuratively. For this reason, he insists, images are more demanding and rewarding than ideas. They give logos to perception. So that, as he says, we can devote our reading being to an image that confers being on us. In fact, the image that is the pure product of “absolute imagination” is a specific phenomenon of the speaking creature.

In this the phenomenologist and the poet are one, for they both know that imaginative contact with the outer world renews our inner being.

One must be receptive, receptive to the image at the moment it appears:

At the level of the poetic image, the duality of subject and object is iridescent, shimmering, unceasingly active in its inversions.

They must participate in an inner light which is not a reflection of a light from the outside world. No doubt there are many facile claims to the expressions “inner vision” and “inner light.” But here it is a painter speaking, a producer of lights. He knows from what heat source the light comes. He experiences the intimate meaning of the passion for red. At the core of such painting, there is a soul in combat—the fauvism, the wildness, is interior. Painting like this is therefore a phenomenon of the soul. The oeuvre must redeem an impassioned soul.

Knowing must therefore be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget knowing. Non-knowing is not a form of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge.

want to examine are the quite simple images of felicitous space. In this orientation, these investigations would deserve to be called

topophilia.

They seek to determine the human value of the sorts of space that may be grasped, that may be defended against ad...

Space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor.

For the present, we shall consider the images that attract.

At times when we believe we are studying something, we are only being receptive to a kind of daydreaming.

Directly following this chapter on the dialectics of within and without is a chapter titled “The Phenomenology of Roundness.” The difficulty that had to be overcome in writing this chapter was to avoid all geometrical evidence. In other words, I had to start with a sort of intimacy of roundness. I discovered images of this direct roundness among thinkers and poets, images—and this, for me, was essential—that were not mere metaphors. This furnished me with a further opportunity to expose the intellectualism of metaphor and, consequently, to show once more the activity that is characteristic of pure imagination.

Thus the house is not experienced from day to day only, on the thread of a narrative, or in the telling of our own story. Through dreams, the various dwelling-places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days.

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

Topoanalysis, then, would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives. In the theater of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant rôles. At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being’s stability—a being who does not want to melt away, and who, even in the past, when he sets out in search of things past, wants time to “suspend” its flight. In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for.

For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.

These virtues of shelter are so simple, so deeply rooted in our unconscious that they may be recaptured through mere mention, rather than through minute description.

And we should not forget that these dream values communicate poetically from soul to soul. To read poetry is essentially to daydream.

A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability.

Great images have both a history and a prehistory; they are always a blend of memory and legend, with the result that we never experience an image directly. Indeed, every great image has an unfathomable oneiric depth to which the personal past adds special color. Consequently it is not until late in life that we really revere an image, when we discover that its roots plunge well beyond the history that is fixed in our memories. In the realm of absolute imagination, we remain young late in life. But we must lose our earthly Paradise in order actually to live in it, to experience it in the reality of its images,

in the absolute sublimation that transcends all passion. A

Rilke’s letters,24 we find the following scene: one very dark night, Rilke and two friends perceive “the lighted casement of a distant hut, the hut that stands quite alone on the horizon before one comes to fields and marshlands.” This image of solitude symbolized by a single light moves the poet’s heart in so personal a way that it isolates him from his companions.

We are hypnotized by solitude, hypnotized by the gaze of the solitary house; and the tie that binds us to it is so strong that we begin to dream of nothing but a solitary house in the night.

Isn’t it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn’t winter add to the poetry of a house? The white cottage sat at the end of a little valley, shut in by rather high mountains; and it seemed to be swathed in shrubs.”)

With what art, to begin with, he achieves absolute silence, the immensity of these silent stretches of space!

“There is nothing like silence to suggest a sense of unlimited space. Sounds lend color to space, and confer a sort of sound body upon it. But absence of sound leaves it quite pure and, in the silence, we are seized with the sensation of something vast and deep and boundless. It took complete hold of me and, for several moments, I was overwhelmed by the grandeur of this shadowy peace.

In this dynamic rivalry between house and universe, we are far removed from any reference to simple geometrical forms. A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

But phenomenology of the imagination cannot be content with a reduction which would make the image a subordinate means of expression: it demands, on the contrary, that images be lived

directly, that they be taken as sudden events in life. When the image is new, the world is new.

Daydreams return to

inhabit an exact drawing and no dreamer ever remains indifferent for long to a picture of a house.

. Everything breathes again The tablecloth is white.) This bit of whiteness, this tablecloth suffices to anchor the house to its center. The literary houses described by Georges Spyridaki and René Cazelles are immense dwellings, the walls of which are on vacation. There are moments when it is a salutary thing to go and live in them, as a treatment for claustrophobia.

The image of these houses that integrate the wind, aspire to the lightness of air, and bear on the tree of their impossible growth a nest all ready to fly away, may perhaps be rejected by a positive, realistic mind.

(A house that stands in my heart My cathedral of silence Every morning recaptured in dream Every evening abandoned A house covered with dawn Open to the winds of my youth.)

William Goyen writes: “That people could come into the world in a place they could not at first even name and had never known before; and that out of a nameless and unknown place they could grow and move around in it until its name they knew and called with love, and call it HOME, and put roots there and love others there; so that whenever they left this place they would sing homesick songs about it and write poems of yearning for it, like a lover; . . .” The soil in which chance had sown the human plant was of no importance. And against this background of nothingness human values grow!

Inversely, if beyond memories, we pursue our dreams to their very end, in this pre-memory it is as though nothingness caressed and penetrated being, as though it gently unbound the ties of being. We ask ourselves if what has been, was.

Did they ever exist? Something unreal seeps into the reality of the recollections that are on the borderline between our own personal history and an indefinite pre-history, in the exact place where, after us, the childhood home comes to life in us. For before us—Goyen makes us understand this—it was quite anonymous. It was a place that was lost in the world.

Thus, on the threshold of our space, before the era of our own time, we hover between awareness of being and loss of being. And the entire reality of memory becomes spectral.

When two strange images meet, two images that are the work of two poets pursuing separate dreams, they apparently strengthen each other. In fact, this convergence of two exceptional images furnishes as it were a counter-check for phenomenological analysis. The image loses its gratuitousness;