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GASTON BACHELARD
French philosopher of science andpheno!Denologist Gaston Bachelard (1884 Gaston
- trained originally as a scientist and as a philosopher, before developing a Bachelard strong interest in phenomenology and the theory of the imagination. The seeds of his subsequent theorization of the imagination can be found in his early work on the philosophy of science. Bachelard stressed the dialectical relationship between rationalism (the world of thinking) and realism ,(the empirical world). Critical of the Cartesian drive, towards simplicity; he emphasized instead complexity. In this
Bachelard was heavily influenced by psychoanalysis and surrealism. He developed the concept of 'surrationalism',by which he sought to reinvigorate ,our under standing of the rational, ' by emph~sizihg the complexity of its material situation, rather as surrealism sought to invigorate realismby'playing upon the dream world. In his later work the influence of psychoanalysis and the role of the imagination became increasingly dominant. ' The introduction to Bachelard's influential work, The Poetics of Spa~, be~ins on a seemingly autobiographical note: A philosopher who has evolved his entire thinking from the fundamental themes of the philosophy of science, and followed the main line of the active, ,growing rationalism of contemporary science as closely as he could, must forget his learning and break with all his habits of philosophical research,' if he wants to study the problems posed by the poetic imagination. In the extract included here Bachelard pursues this question in the context of the house. In order to understand the house we must go beyond mere description and beyond the limited constraintS of a realist (Cartesian) conception. We need to re~ort to the world of the daydream where 'memory and ,imagination remain , associated'. Here in the realm of personal memories, 'in the realm of 'the odour of raisins drying on a , wicker basket', the ,'oneiric house', the -hotise of dream-memory, can be retrieved. For daydreaming is more PQwefful than thought, and through its poetic ' dimension can recover the essence of the house that has been lost 'in a ,shadow of the beyond of the real 'past''- In emphasizing the daydream rather than the dream it is clear that Bachelard owes his psychoanalytic insights to Jung rather than to Freud. Clear parallels may be drawn between Bachelard's French suburban house and Marrin Heidegger's German~asant hut. Likewise Bachelard's sub~equent account of the cellar begins to evoke Freud's distinction between the 'heimlich' (homely) and 'unheimlich' (uncaimy), and comparisons can be made with references to the cellar in Lyotard's essay, 'Domus and the Megalopolis~. ~--.
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f~---'"-----------'--~~~~~
Bachelard POETICS OF SPACE' (EXTRACT)
PART ONE
A la porte de La maison qui viendra frapper? Une porte ouverteon entre · Une porte fermee un 'antre Le monde bat de i'autre cote de rna porte.
At the door of the house who will come knocking? An open , doo~we enter A closed door, a den
. The world pulse beats beyond my door. Pierre Albert Birot, Les Amusements Naturels; p. 217
The ~~~b~~Jly.js a Qrivileged entitt..!£5.a Phenomen~cal study c1fme lfltlmate valUes of insid,e space, provided, of course.. that we Clkeltin both"its~\i1'ii'tYin(rTts complexit:y;-"'arul--ernte'lrVoUrtOTntegrate all the special
vaJJes in one .funaam~:l'or'theh~~nishes us with dispersed.
images and a body of lma~s at the sa~e t~e. In both ~ I shall prov~at im3:gin~ values of reali~:.....A-sortorattractiQn for images con centrates ilie~rdi:e house. Transeendirig;;urmemories of all the houses lrt
w~ ~fu.~sh~lter, above a.naij~:the-h~ we have drea~d
~:...~~inrc!-n ~_i_s.~l~.: alilntiirfate,concret~ eSsence that would ~e a: justi~
flC~~~(~h.!U~.n.co~o.n-::v..~~1l of o~ ~cted m~
This, the~.!uhe_ !.D~ln P_~9.ble~~. o · , ' ' morder to solve it, it is not enough to consider the house as an 'object' on which we can make our judgments and daydreams react. For a phenom enologist, a psychoanalyst or, a psycholog'ist (theSe three points of view being named in the order of decreasing efficacy), it is not a question of describing houses, or enumerating their picturesque features and analysing for which reasons they are comfortable. On' the contrary, .we must go 'beyond the problems of description -whether this description be objective or subjective, that is, wheth~r it give facts o~ impressions;'" in order. to a.ttain to the primary virtues, those that reveal an , attacl)ment that is native in some way to the primary function of inhabiting. A ge9grapher or an ethnographer can give us. descriptions ' of very vaded typeS of dwellings. In each variety; the phenom enologistmakes the effort needed to seize upon the germ of the essential, sure, immediate well-being it encloses., In e~elling, even the ri~hest, the ftrst
task of the ~nomenologist is to"Und t e on " ~SIleI[ ,
~relate pro. ems are many if we want to determine the profound reality of all the subtle shadings of our attachment for a chosen spot. For a phenoQ1enologist, these shadings ,must be taken as the first rough outlines of a psychological phenomenon. The 'shading is not an additional, superficial colourIng. We should therefore have to say how we inhabit our vital space" in accord With all the dialectics of iife, how :we take root, day after day, in a 'conier of the world'. '. ~pr our use is our corner of ' orld. As has often been said, it is ourfirst · universe, a real cosmos in every sense of t e word. If we look at it intimately,
88 PHENOMENOLOGY
Bachelard This being the case, ifIwereasked 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. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths. Daydreaming even has a privilege of auto-valoriza tion. It derives direct pleasure from its own being. Therefore, the places in ....... which we have^ experienced daydreaming^ reconstitute themselves in a new day dream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain iri us for all time.: Now my aim is clear: I.must show that the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thQughts;-memorles and dreams of ma:nkind. The binding pririciple in this-integration is the daydream. Past, present and future give the house dIfferent dynamisms, which often interfere,.. at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another. In the life of a man, the house thrusts aside contingencies; its councils of continuity are unceasing. Without it, in~ would be a dispersed being, It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human being's first world.. I.-. Before ,he is 'cast into the world', as c1ahnedby certain hasty metaphysics, man is laid in the cradleI I. ' of the house.. And always, in our daydreams, the house is a large cradle. A COncrete metaphysics cannot neglect this fact, this simple fact, ~.;
all the more, since this fact is a value, an important value, to which we return in our daydreaming. Being is already a value. Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all.warm in the bosom of thehouse: From my. viewpoint, from the phenomenologist'S viewpoint, the conscious metaphysics that starts from the moment when the- bdng is 'cast into the world' is a .secondary. metaphys'ics. It passes over the' preliminaries, when being is being-:weli, when the human. being is deposited in a being-well, in the well-being originally associated with being. To illustrate the metaphysics of consciousness we should have to wait for the experiences during which being is cast out, that is to say, thrown out, o.utside the being of the house, a circum stance iri which the hostility of men and ofthe universe accumulates. But a complete metaphysics, englobing hoth theconscii?us and the unconscious,.. would leave the privilege of its values wicllin. Within the being, in the being of within, an enveloping warmth welcomes .being. Being reigns in a sort of earthly paradise of matter, dissolved in dxe comforts of an adequate matter. It is as though in this material paradi~e,the human being were bathed ' in nourishment, as though he were gratified with ~ll the essential benefits.. When .we dream of the houSe we were born iri', in .the utmost depths of revery, we participate in this original warmth, iri this well-tempered matter of the material paradise. This is the environment in which the protectiv:ebeirigs live. We shall come back tQthe maternal features of the house. For the moment, I should like to point out the original fullness of the house's being .. Our day dreams carry us Qack to it. And the po~t well knows that the house holds childc hood moticmlesS 'in its arms':2. .."
Maison, pan de prairie; 6lumieredu soir
Soudain voils acquerez presque une face hutn4ine
Vo~ etes pres de nou~, embrassants, embr~sses.
House,: patch of meadow, oh evening light
POETICS OF SPACE 89
Suddenly you acquire an almost human face Bachelard You are very near us, embracing and embraced.
PART'JWO
Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives , we come back to them in our daydreams. A psychoanalyst should, therefore, tun;t his attention to this simple localiZation of our memories. I should like to give the name of topoanalysis to this auxiliary of psychoanalysis. Topoanalysis, then, would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives. In the theatr!;! of the past that is ~onstituted by memory,the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant roles. At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a,sequence of flXations in the spaces of the ~eing's stability- a becing 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. Jri its countless alveoli, space contains compressed time. That is what space is for. And if we ,want to go beyond history, or even, while remaining in history, detach from our own history the always too contingent history of the persons who have encumbered it, we realize that the .calendars of our lives can only be established in its imagery. In order t<? analy;se our being in the hierarchy of an ontology, or to psychoanalyse.our unconscious entrenched in primitive abodes, it would be necessary,on the margin of normal psychoanalysis, to desocialize our important memories, and attain to the plane ofthe daydreams that we used to have in the places identified with our solitude. For investigations of this kind, daydreams are more useful than dreams. They show moreover that daydreams can"be very different from dreams.^3 And so, faced with these periods of solitude; the topoanalyst star:s 'to. ask questions:· Was the room a large one? Was the garret cluttered up? Was the nook warm? How was it lighted? How, too, in these fragments of space, did the human being acrueve silence? How did he relish the very special silence of the various retreats of solitary daydreaming? Here space. is everything, for time ceases to quicken memory. Memory
. what a strange thing it is! - does not record concrete duratioI1,in the Bergsonian sense of the. word. We are un~ble tq, .relive·duration that has been destroyed. We can only think of it; intlie line of an ' abstract time that is deprived of all thickness: The finest specimens of fossilized duration con- ' cretized as a result of long sojourn, are to be found in and through space. The unconscious ·abides ..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 '. ernal history, for external use, to be communicated to others. Bu. hermeneutics which is more profound than biography, must determine the c~ es' of ate y 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. Psychoa'nalysis too often situates the passions 'in the century'. In reality,
I
POETICS OF SPACE
Paris, it is a good exercise for me to think of the road in this wa. s I write this page, I fee reed of my duty to take a walk: 1 am sure of having gone out of my
hOUSe:===--.
And mdeed we should find countless intermediaries between reality and symbols if we gave things all the movements they suggest. George Sand, dreaming beside a path of yellow sand, sa~ life flowing by. 'What is more beautiful than a road?' she wrote. 'It is the symbol and the image of an active, · varied life' (Consuelo, vol. ll, p. 116). Each one ' of u~, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside .benches; each one of us should make a surveyor's map of his lost fields and meadows. Thoreau said that he had the map of his fields engraved in'his soul", And Jean w'Jlt once wrote:. - .- Le moutonnement des haies C'est en moi que;e l'ai. The frothing of the hedges I keep deep inside me. Poeme, p. 46 Thus we cover the universe vyith drawings, we have lived. These drawings need not be exact. They need only to be tonalized on the mode of our inner space. But what a book would have to ~e written to decide all these problems! Space calls for action, and before action, the imagination is at work. lt mows and ploughs. We should have to speak of the benefits of all these imaginary actions. Psychoanalysis has made, numerous observations on thesubjeqr of projective behaviour, on the willingness of extroverted persons to exteric\rize their intimate impressions. An exteriorist topoanalysis would perhaps give added precision to this projective 'behaviour by defining our daydreams of objects. .However, in this present work, I shall not be able to undertake, as · should be done, the two-fold ·imaginary geometrical,and physical problem\ of extroversion and introversion. Moreover, I do not believe that these two branches of physics have the same psychic weight. My research is devoted to the domain of intimacy, to the domain iIi whic~ psychic weight is dominant. I shall therefore put my trust in the power of attraction of all the domains,of intimacy. There does not exist a real intimacy that i~ repellent. All the,spaces 'of intimacy are designated by an attraction. Their being is well-being. In these conditions, topoanalysis bears the stamp of a' topophilia, and shelters and rooms will be studied in the sense of this valorization.
PART FOUR
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. Here the nuance bespeaks the colour. A poet's word, because, it strikes true, moves the very depths of our being.
Bachefard
Over-picturesqueness in a house can conceal its intimacy. This is also true in life. But it is truer still in daydreams. For the ,real houses of memory, the houj to which we return in dreams the houses.^ '- that^ are^ - rich ,in unalterable-----~----:--:: 0 ., £1, do not rea y end themselves to escnption. To describe them would be like
r-
..
92 PHENOMENOLOGY
Bachelard showing them to visitors. We can perhaps tell everything about the present, but about the past! The first, the oneirically definitive house, inust retain its shadows. For it belongs to the literature of deptli, that is, to poetry, and not to the fluent type of literature that, in order to ,analyse intimacy, needs other people~s -stories. 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 cOIDmuQicate-t<Yothers is an orientation towards what is secret without ever-,beiIigable to tell the secret objectively, What is secret never has total-C;bjectivity. In this ' respect, we orient oneirism but we do not accomplish it.^4 ' WlYat 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 odour, the odour of raisins drying on
a wi~k~r tray. The odour ' of raisins! It is an odour that is beyond description,
one that iuakes a lot of imagination to smell. But rve already said too much ~ Ifl' 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. Para doxically, in order to suggest the values of intimacy, we have to induce in the reader a state of suspended reading. Forit is not 'until his eyes have left the page that recollections of my room can become a threshold of oneirism for him. And wheri it is a poet speaking, the r~der's soul reverberates; it experiences the kind of reverberation that, as Minkowski has shown, gives the energy of all origin to , being. It therefore makes sense from our standpoint of a philosophy of literature and poetry to say that we 'write a room', 'read a rPom' or 'read a house'. Thus, very quickly, at the very fust word; at the first poetic;: overture, the reader who is 'reading a room' leaves off reading and sta'rts to think of some place in',his own past. You would like to tell everything about your room. You would like to interest the reader in yourself, whereas ' you have unlocked a door to day dreaming. The values of intimacy are s~ absorbing that the reader has ceased to read your room: he sees his own again. He is already far off, listening to the recollections of a father or a grandmother, of a mother or a servant, of'the old faithful servant', in short, of the human being who dominates the corner of his most cherished memories. , ' And the house 'of memories becomes psychologically complex. Associated with the nooks and comers of solitude are the b edroom and the living room in which the leading characters held sway. The hollse we were born in is an inhabited house. In it the values of intimacy are scattered, they are not easily stabilized, they are subjected to dialectics. In how many tales of childhood - if
tales of childhood were sincere- we should be told of a chUd that, lacking a
room, went and sulked in his comer!
But over and beyond our memories, the house we were born in IS physically ,
inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits. After twenty years, in spite of all
94 PHENOMENOLOGY
Bachelard who really possesses his moments of solitudeI It is a good thing, it is even salutary, for a child to have periods of boredom, for him to learn to know the ....... dialectics^ of^ exaggerated play and causeless, pure boredom. Alexander Dumas tells in his Memoires that, as a child, he was bored, bored to tears. When his mother found him like thai, weeping from sheer boredom, she said: 'And what is Dumas crying about?' 'Dumas is crying because Dumas has tears,' replied the six-year-old child. This is the kind of anecdote people tell in their memoirs. But how well it exemplifies absolute boredom, the boredom · that is not the equivalent of the absence of playmates. There are children who will leave· a game to go and be bored in a corner of the garret. How often have I wished for the attic of my boredom wh..en- - ~hecomplications of life made me lose the very genIi of all freedoml--. And be ond all the ues of protection, the house we were b()rn. In becomes -imbue with dream values w c remain a er t .e ouse is gone. ~s of h()[~ centr~ centres of daydre-;m group together to. constitute the oneiric house which is more lasting than the scattered memories of our birthplace. Long phenomenological research would be needed to· deter mine;all these dream values, to plumb the depth of this dream ground in which om: ~emories are rooted... And we should not forget that these dream values communicate poeti~aUy from soul to soul. To read poetry is essentially to daydream.
PART FIVE
A house constitutes a body of iJ;Uages that give mankind proofs or illusions of
stability. We are constantly re-imagining its reality: to distiriguish ali these
images would be to describe the soul of the house·; it would mean developing a veritable psychology of the house. 0 To bring order into these images, I believe'that we should consider two principal connecting themes: 1 A house is imagined as a vertical being. It rises upward. It differentiates itself in terms of its verticality. It is one of the appeals to our con sciousness of verticality. 0 2 A house is imagined as a concentrated being. It appeals to our con- o sciousness of centrality.6 I These themes are no doubt very abstractly stated. But with examples, it is not hard to recognize their psychologically concrete nature. Verticality is. red by-the polarity of cellar a fwhich are so deep that; in a way, open up two very different perspectives a phenomenology of the imagination. Indeed, it is possible, almost without com mentary, to oppose the rationality of the roof to the irrationality of the cellar. A
roof tells its raison d'etre right away: it gives mankind shelter from the rain and
sun he fears. Geographers are consrani:ly reminding us that, in every country, the slope of the roofs is oneo(the surest indications of the climate. We 'under
. stand' the slant of a roof. Even a dreamer dreams rationally; for him, .a p~inted
roof a'verts rain douds. Up near the roof all our th.o~e clear. In the attic it is a pleasure to see the-bare rafters of the strong fr<:lmework. Here we parti':'
-Clpa'te1n che carpenter's solid geometry. .. ~~
<
POETICS OF SPACE 95
As for the cellar, we shall no doubt find uses for it. It will be rationalized and Bachelard its conveniences enumerated. But it is fir~t and foremost the dark entity ofthe house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces. When we dream there, we are in harmQny with the irrationality of ,the depths. (^) ..:." We bee war I olarity of a house if we are ~ ", suf, y aware of the function of inhabiting 'it as a. agina.
J:.~se , to the function of constructing. The dreamer constructs an econ~
tructs the upper stories and the attic until they are well constructed. And, said ,before, when we dream of the heights we are in the rational zone 0 intellectualized projects. Budor the cellar, the impassioned inhabitant digs and redigs, making its very depth active. The fact is not enough, the dream is at work. When it comes.toexcavated ground, dreams have no limit. I. --- <T _ . ter some deep cellar re '. , ~.. 10 the spac~~ b th ' r an'd the attic, to se~lhis_polari2e(hpaCecan serv; illustrate very tme psychological ftQaiia;sr~ Here is how the p~ychoanalyst C. G. Jung has used the dual image of cellar and attic:to analyse the fears that inhabit a house. In Jung's Modern Man in Search of a SouP we find a comparison which is used to make us understand t~~ con~iOUs~ing'~st.rgying the autonomy of complexes ~bap t1s~liem'. ' e lffiage [s the foUowUig~-------:' .~. Here the conscious acts like a man who~hearing a suspicious noise in \
the c.ellar, hurrie~ to the attic ~nd, finding p.o bUrglars there decides,
consequently, that the noise was pure' imagination. In reality, this / prudent ~art did not dare venture into the cellar. 1 --- - (^) I To"tlie extent that the explanatory image used by Jung convinces us, we readers relive phenomenologically both fears: fear in the attic and fear in the cellar. Instead of facing the cellar (the unconscious), Jung's 'prudent man' seeks alibis' for his courage in the attic. In the attic rats and mice can make copsider able noise. But let the master of the house arrive tinexpectedly and they!return to the silence of their 'holes. The creatures moving aboutin the cellar are slower, less,scampering, mOl,"e mysterious.. In the attic, fears are easily 'rationalized'. Whereas in the cellar, even for a more courageous man than the one lung mentions, 'rationaliiation' \s less rapid and less clear; also it is never definitive. In the attic, the day's experiences can always efface th!! fears of night. In the·cellar, dari<r!!!ss }:>revails both day and night, and even when we are carrying aJighted-candle, we see shadows dancing on the dark walls. If we follow ~he inspiration of Jung's explanatory example to a complete grasp of psychological reality, we encounter a cooperation between psycho analysis and .phenomenologywhich must be stressed ifwe are to dominate the human phenomenon. As a matter of fact, the image. has to be understood phenomenologically in order to give it psychoanalytical efficacy. The phenom enologist, in this case, will accept the psychoanalyst'S image in a spirit of shared trepidation. He will revive the primitivity and the specificity of the fears. In our civilization, which has the same light everywhere, and puts electricity in its cellars, we no' ~ longer go to the cellar carrying a candle. But the unconscious cannot be civilized. Ittakes a candle. when it goes to the cellar. The psycho analyst cannot cling to the superficiality of metaphors or comparisons,and the
POETICS OF SPACE 97
solution of this problem. Imperceptibly, we give ourselves the illusion that both Ba.chelard the problem and the solution ' are ours. The psycholOgical nuance: '1 should have written that', establishes us as phenomenolo ists of reading. But so IOng '. we remain psychologists, or psycho-
NOTES
All footnotes 'for thls article have been reproduced verbatim. 1 We should grant 'fixation' its virtues, independendy of psychoanalytical literature which, because of its therapeutic function, is obliged to record, principally, .processes of defixation.
2 Rainer Maria Rilke, translated into French by Claude Vigee, in us Lettres, 4th year, Nos. 14
15-16, p. 11. Editor's note,ln thls work, all of the Rilke references will be to the French translations that inspired Bachelard's comments. 3 I plan to study these' differences in a futur!; w~rk. 4 After giving a description of the Canaen estate <,;"olupte, p. 30), Sainte-Beuve adds: it is not so much for you, my friend, who nev~ saw this place, and had you visited it, could not now feel the impressions and colours, I feel; that I have gone over it in such detail, for which I must excuse myself. Nor should you try to.see it as a result of what I have said; let the image float inside you; pass lightly; the 'slightest idea of it will suffice for you. 5 La terre et les reveries du repos, Paris: Corti, p. 98. 6 For this second part, see Bachelard, I!oetics of Space, Maria Jolas (trans.), Boston: Beacon ' Press, 1969, p~ 29. 7 C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a S~l, Harcourt, Brace & World, New York. 8 Edgar Allan Poe: 'The Black Cat':
