The Poetics of Space

by Gaston Bachelard

George Sand said that people could be classified according to whether they aspired to live in a cottage or in a palace. But the question is more complex than that. When we live in a manor house we dream of a cottage, and when we live in a cottage we dream of a palace. Better still, we all have our cottage moments and our palace moments. We descend to living close to the ground, on the floor of a cottage, then would like to dominate the entire horizon from a castle in Spain. And when reading has given us countless inhabited places, we know how to let the dialectics of cottage and manor sound inside us.

But if what poets say is true, alternating daydreams cease to be rivals. The two extreme realities of cottage and manor, to be found in the case of Saint-Pol Roux, take into

account our need for retreat and expansion, for simplicity and magnificence. For

But to dream of a poem, then write it, we need both.

But I repeat: nest, chrysalis and garment only constitute one moment of a dwelling place. The more concentrated the repose, the more hermetic the chrysalis, the more the being that emerges from it is a being from elsewhere, the greater is his expansion. And,

There is also the courage of the writer who braves the kind of censorship that forbids “insignificant” confidences. But what a joy reading is, when we recognize the importance of these insignificant things, when we can add our own personal daydreams to the “insignificant” recollections of the author! Then insignificance becomes the sign of extreme sensitivity to the intimate meanings that establish spiritual understanding between writer and reader.

I shall therefore insist upon this difference before returning to my examination of the images of intimacy that are in harmony with drawers and chests, as also with all the other hiding-places in which human beings, great dreamers of locks, keep or hide their secrets.

Now a metaphor gives concrete substance to an impression that is difficult to express. Metaphor is related to a psychic being from which it differs. An image, on the contrary, product of absolute imagination, owes its entire being to the imagination.

Later, when I plan to go more deeply into the comparison between metaphor and image, we shall see that metaphor could not be studied phenomenologically, and that in fact, it is not worth the trouble, since it has no phenomenological value.

At the most, it is a fabricated image, without deep, true, genuine roots. It is ...

Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life. Indeed, without these “objects” and a few others in equally high favor, our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy. They are hybrid objects, subject objects. Like us, through us and for us, they have a quality of intimacy. Does there exist a single dreamer of words who does not respond to the word wardrobe? . . .

With the presence of lavender the history of the seasons enters into the wardrobe.

And quite paradoxically, even cubic dimensions have no more meaning, for the reason that a new dimension—the dimension of intimacy—has just opened up.

The imagination can never say: was that all, for there is always more than meets the eye.

reader who is averse to playing with inversions of large and small, exterior and intimacy, may also say: “It’s a poem and that’s all.” “And nothing more.”17 In reality, however, the poet has given concrete form to a very general psychological theme, namely, that there will always be more things in a closed, than in an open, box. To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.

For Quasimodo, he says,1 the cathedral had been successively “egg, nest, house, country and universe.” “One might almost say that he had espoused its form the way a snail does the form of its shell. It was his home, his hole, his envelope . . . He adhered to it, as it were, like a turtle to its carapace. This rugged cathedral was his armor.” All of these images were needed to tell how an unfortunate creature assumed the contorted forms of his numerous hiding-places in the corners of this complex structure.

It is striking that even in our homes, where there is light, our consciousness of well-being should call for comparison with animals in their shelters.

An example may be found in the following lines by the painter, Vlaminck, who, when he wrote them, was living quietly in the country:2 “The well-being I feel, seated in front of my fire, while bad weather rages out-of-doors, is entirely animal. A rat in its hole, a rabbit in its burrow, cows in the stable, must all feel the same contentment that I feel.” Thus, well-being takes us back to the primitiveness of the refuge. Physically, the creature endowed with a sense of refuge huddles up to itself, takes to cover, hides away, lies snug, concealed. If we were to look among the wealth of our vocabulary for verbs that express the dynamics of retreat, we should find images based on animal movements of withdrawal, movements that are engraved in

With nests and, above all, shells, we shall find a whole series of images that I am going to try to characterize as primal images; images that bring out the primitiveness in us. I shall then show that a human being likes to “withdraw into his corner,” and that it gives him physical pleasure to do so.

“The cottage, with its thatched roof, made me think of a wren’s nest.”9 For a painter, it is probably twice as interesting if, while painting a nest, he dreams of a cottage and, while painting a cottage, he dreams of a nest.

It is as though one dreamed twice, in two registers, when one dreams of an image cluster such as this. For the simplest image is doubled; it is itself and something else than itself.

paean

If we go deeper into daydreams of nests, we soon encounter a sort of paradox of sensibility. A nest—and this we understand right away—is a precarious thing, and yet it sets us to daydreaming of security. Why does this obvious precariousness not arrest daydreams of this kind? The answer to this paradox is simple: when we dream, we are phenomenologists without realizing it. In a sort of naïve way, we relive the instinct of the bird, taking pleasure in accentuating the mimetic features of the green nest in green leaves. We definitely saw it, but we say that it was well hidden. This center of animal life is concealed by the immense volume of vegetable life. The nest is a lyrical bouquet of leaves. It participates in the peace of the vegetable world. It is a point in the atmosphere of happiness that always surrounds large trees. A poet once wrote:15 J’ai rêvé d’un nid où les arbres repoussaient la mort. (I dreamed of a nest in which the trees repulsed death.)

oneiric

In its germinal form, therefore, all of life is well-being. Being starts with well-being. When a philosopher considers a nest, he calms himself by meditating on the subject of his own being in the calm world being. And if we were to translate the absolute naïveté of his daydream into the metaphysical language of today, a dreamer might say that the world is the nest of mankind.

axiom

agglomerate

Paul Valéry lingered long over the ideal of a modeled, or carved, object that would justify its absolute value by the beauty and solidity of its geometrical form, while remaining unconcerned with the simple matter of protecting its substance. In this case, the mollusk’s motto would be: one must live to build one’s house, and not build one’s house to live in.

it. In a later chapter, I shall have an opportunity to show that, in the imagination, to go in and come out are never symmetrical images.

diadems,

impetus

assiduity

palingenesis,

pedunculated

Yet I wonder if an image of the imagination is ever close to reality.

felicitously

cosmicity.

I have simply wanted to show that whenever life seeks to shelter, protect, cover or hide itself, the imagination sympathizes with the being that inhabits the protected space.

As the poet Noël Arnaud expresses it, being seeks dissimulation in similarity.

“odious”

With a single poetic detail, the imagination confronts us with a new world. From then on, the detail takes precedence over the panorama, and a simple image, if it is new, will open up an entire world. If looked at through the thousand windows of fancy, the world is in a state of constant change. It therefore gives fresh stimulus to the problem of phenomenology. By solving small problems, we teach ourselves to solve large ones.

The point of departure of my reflections is the following: every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house.

When we recall the hours we have spent in our corners, we remember above all silence, the silence of our thoughts.

This being the case, why describe the geometry of such indigent solitude?

And every retreat on the part of the soul possesses, in my opinion, figures of havens.

But despite its meagerness, it has numerous images, some, perhaps, of great antiquity, images that are psychologically primitive. At times, the simpler the image, the vaster the dream.

The corner is a sort of half-box, part walls, part door. It will serve as an illustration for the dialectics of inside and outside, which I shall discuss in a later chapter.

Consciousness of being at peace in one’s corner produces a sense of immobility, and this, in turn, radiates immobility.

So we have to designate the space of our immobility by making it the space of our being.

In L’état d’ébauche,2 Noël Arnaud writes: Je suis l’espace où je suis (I am the space where I am.)