The Poetics of Space

by Gaston Bachelard

in prolonging exaggeration, we may have the good fortune to avoid the habits of reduction.”

“A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.”

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?

“Our soul is an abode. And by remembering ‘houses’ and ‘rooms,’ we learn to ‘abide’ within ourselves.”2

This meant breaking with the strict habits of scientific research—which placed new discoveries always in the context of acquired bodies of evidence—so as to expose oneself to the novelty of the poetic instant.

Bachelard offers a poetics of both matter and form, whereas Aristotle had originally defined poetics in terms of formal properties of plot (muthos) and imitation (mimesis).

Hence Bachelard’s refusal of Jean-Paul Sartre’s argument in The Imaginary (1940) that perception and imagination are two radically opposed modes of intentionality.

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.

Bachelard’s poetics of space equally entails a poetics of time.

Where prosaic time is evolving and continuous (like Bergson’s), poetic time is disruptive and surprising.

It calls for a radical transmutation of values in a gesture Bachelard calls “rapture” or “ecstasy.”

A genuine poetics of space explodes the continuum of the world’s time, as happens in the reading or dreaming of a great fantasy.

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.

the “epistemological break” (the idea of radical rupture between different paradigms of knowledge),

the claim that the image is a four-way relationship between author, reader, text and world.

Once you have entered the poetics of space there is no going back. The home you revisit is never the same again.

The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche,

the philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past,

the reader of poems is asked to consider an image not as an object and even less as the substitute for an object, but to seize its specific reality.

The language of contemporary French philosophy—and even more so, psychology—hardly uses the dual meaning of the words “soul” and “mind.” As a result, they are both somewhat deaf to certain themes that are very numerous in German philosophy, in which the distinction between mind and soul (der Geist und die Seele) is so clear.

And this is also true of a simple experience of reading. The image offered us by reading the poem now becomes really our own. It takes root in us. It has been given us by another, but we begin to have the impression that we could have created it, that we should have created it. It becomes a new being in our language, expressing us by making us what it expresses; in other words, it is at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our being. Here expression creates being.

As a general thesis I believe that everything specifically human in man is logos.

When he interprets it, however, he translates it into a language that is different from the poetic logos. Never, in fact, was “traduttore, traditore” more justifiably applicable.

As for me, being an addict of felicitous reading, I only read and re-read what I like, with a bit of reader’s pride mixed in with much enthusiasm.

Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet.

All readers who have a certain passion for reading nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer. When the page we have just read is too near perfection, our modesty suppresses this desire. But it reappears, nevertheless.

the joy of reading appears to be the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer’s ghost.

Van den Berg adds: “We are continually living a solution of problems that reflection can not hope to solve.”

He sees and points out the poet’s secret sufferings. He explains the flower by the fertilizer.

He himself has said:8 “Poetry constantly surpasses its origins, and because it suffers more deeply in ecstasy or in sorrow, it retains greater freedom.”

— Pierre-Jean Jouve

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.

Art, then, is an increase of life, a sort of competition of surprises that stimulates our consciousness and keeps it from becoming somnolent.

the images I 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 adverse forces, the space we love.

it soon becomes clear that to attract and to repulse do not give contrary experiences. The terms are contrary. When we study electricity or magnetism, we can speak symmetrically of repulsion and attraction.

Not only our memories, but the things we have forgotten are “housed.” Our soul is an abode. And by remembering “houses” and “rooms,” we learn to “abide” within ourselves. Now everything becomes clear, the house images move in both directions: they are in us as much as we are in them,

For there is a great distance between the words we speak uninhibitedly to a friendly audience and the discipline needed to write a book. When we are lecturing, we become animated by the joy of teaching and, at times, our words think for us. But to write a book requires really serious reflection.

For our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.

all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home.

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.

if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths.

the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.

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.

Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are. To localize a memory in time is merely a matter for the biographer and only corresponds to a sort of external history, for external use, to be communicated to others. But hermeneutics, which is more profound than biography, must determine the centers of fate by ridding history of its conjunctive temporal tissue, which has no action on our fates. For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.

The normal unconscious knows how to make itself at home everywhere,

the willingness of extroverted persons to exteriorize their intimate impressions.

All I ought to say about my childhood home is just barely enough to place me, myself, in an oneiric situation, to set me on the threshold of a daydream in which I shall find repose in the past. Then I may hope that my page will possess a sonority that will ring true—a voice so remote within me, that it will be the voice we all hear when we listen as far back as memory reaches, on the very limits of memory, beyond memory perhaps, in the field of the immemorial. All we communicate to others is an orientation towards what is secret without ever being able to tell the secret objectively. What is secret never has total objectivity.

What would be the use, for instance, in giving the plan of the room that was really my room, in describing the little room at the end of the garret, in saying that from the window, across the indentations of the roofs, one could see the hill. I alone, in my memories of another century, can open the deep cupboard that still retains for me alone that unique odor, the odor of raisins drying on a wicker tray. The odor of raisins! It is an odor that is beyond description, one that it takes a lot of imagination to smell. But I’ve already said too much. If I said more, the reader, back in his own room, would not open that unique wardrobe, with its unique smell, which is the signature of intimacy. Paradoxically, in order to suggest the values of intimacy, we have to induce in the reader a state of suspended reading.

The great function of poetry is to give us back the situations of our dreams.