[In the following essay, Christofides attempts to define Bachelard's esthetic, calling it “a fruitful theoretical statement that has affinities with Symbolist, Surrealist and Existentialist work evoking insights which are partly contingent on the theories of contemporary psychology.”]

Gaston Bachelard's lifelong fecund and original investigations into the realm of the imaginary and the stuff of dreams reached a triumphal apogee in 1957 with the publication of a volume on the “poetics of space.”¹ In a year that watched with exhilarating awe the penetration of space by a humanly-made satellite this was no science-fiction gimmick. It was the natural culmination of a work which for the last two decades had been leading the Sorbonne's philosopher of science not so much away from science as into the mystery of the creative act, the imagination which brings life to the material cause and the nature of oneiric experience.

None but the French academic and journalistic critics and a few literary linguists² have paid any attention to this philosopher's main body of work, some of them dismissing it as revival of alchemy and magic. In the United States, references to his work can be found in four major articles, two of them by Professor Robert Champigny, himself a Sorbonne product.³ And in general, recognition is vaguely given to Bachelard for being the “philosopher of Surrealism,” and for having fathered the phenomenological critics Georges Poulet and Jean-Pierre Richard.⁴ It is the purpose of this article to seek an esthetic in the scientific and non-scientific writings of Gaston Bachelard. This esthetic is a fruitful theoretical statement that has affinities with Symbolist, Surrealist and Existentialist work, evoking insights which are partly contingent on the theories of contemporary psychology.

For Bachelard, science produces the Cartesian distinction between reason and imagination; he sees here the cleavage that his predecessor at the University of Paris, Léon Brunschvicg, saw between science and perception. Scientific experimentation, which shattered the world of air, earth, fire and water by no longer considering them basic elements of nature, demonstrated the erroneous methods of pre-science. Bachelard's speculations are born of the consideration that what science has destroyed is not error but poetic expansion. It is of little importance that a pre-scientific treatise on fire may tell nothing about fire's natural structure. What is important is revelation about the unconscious of its author, since the elements have never ceased to be fundamental symbols of the imagination. In primitive times, says Bachelard, art, song, caress must have been associated with utilitarian activity in an unbreakable fashion: man is a hand, a language.⁵ Poetry can rewed what science has put asunder. To avoid dehumanization, the philosopher must seek understanding in the realms of both science and poetry by seeing clearly the relationships between the two activities. After all, argues Bachelard, science does not yield absolute reality, since scientific reality is always open to revision. In its quest of the reasonable, science must constantly admit that which is not amenable to reason. If science were an absolute, it would become contended at a given point of achievement, instead of perpetually negating, in order to be able to affirm. Reality, then, can be seized only in the oscillation between the intuitive and the geometric spirit. Verification is never total; its fragments and generalizations continuously pose new problems, and scientific method must of necessity follow a dual path.⁶ At the stage of evolution where contemporary science finds itself, the scientist is faced with the renascent need of living and reliving the instant of objectivity, of being ceaselessly at the emerging state of desubjectivation which gives the supreme joy of moving from extroversion to introversion, within a spirit liberated psychoanalytically from the twin slaveries of subject and object.⁷

But, there is one source in man that is a constant, an absolute, one source that is literally creative (poetic): the source of dreams, images, illusions. “Nous avons la puissance de réveiller des sources,”⁸ says Bachelard in an admirable sentence. “L'humanité imageante est au delà de la nature naturante.”⁹ With Otto Rank, Bachelard would agree that it is not sufficient to see the importance of the irrational element in human life and point it out in rational terms, but that on the contrary it is necessary not only to live with it but to live it actually.¹⁰

The dream is no longer the Bergsonian “détente et chute d'un élan,” for oneiric imagination is a “faculté de surhumanité,” without which man is not really man.¹¹ If in Bergson's philosophy to dream is to lose the sense of reality, in Bachelard's philosophy to lack the power of the unreal is to be neurotic.¹² “L'imagination invente plus que des choses et des drames, elle invente de la vie nouvelle; elle invente de l'esprit nouveau; elle ouvre des yeux qui ont des types nouveaux de vision.”¹³ The spirit must be vision and poetry for reason to be revision and analysis. Dream is not smoke but fire.¹⁴ The cogito is an oneiric one. I dream, therefore I am. Dream (not reason or faith) will break the eternal silence of these infinite spaces. The method is that of the alchemist, for whom “tout intérieur est un ventre, un ventre qu'il faut ouvrir. … Avant l'expérience, pour l'inconscient qui rêve, il n'y a pas d'intérieur placide, tranquille, froid. Tout ce qui est caché germine.”¹⁵ In La Psychanalyse du feu, Bachelard wrote that he was setting out to show how dreaming ceaselessly treats primitive themes, works as a demiurgic soul—against logic and science.¹⁶ At a staggering, frightening pace, twentieth-century scientism took less than twenty years to trap Bachelard's vision experimentally. In the University of Chicago's Sleep Laboratory, Professor Nathaniel Kleitman and his associates, by means of an electro-encephalograph and small disk electrodes attached near the eyes and scalp of their subject, have succeeded in registering on moving graph paper the live, pulsating dream, before it has been transformed into memory.¹⁷ Science, which, in Sir James Jeans' words, can give very few indications as to the way in which consciousness apprehends the work of art,¹⁸ is gradually moving toward the substantiation of this aspect of Bachelard's conceptions. In Physics and Philosophy (1958), Nobel Prize-winning atomic scientist Werner Heisenberg succinctly and eloquently describes the new horizons revealed by Einsteinian science: “The philosophic thesis that all knowledge is ultimately founded in experience has in the end led to a postulate concerning the logical clarification of any statement about nature. Such a postulate may have seemed justified in the period of classical physics, but since quantum theory we have learned that it cannot be fulfilled” (p. 85).

Contemporary literary criticism, never to be outdone by contemporary scientism, accepts, in principle, the validity of Bachelard's probings. For René Wellek and Austin Warren, among the important literary motifs are the supernatural and the non-naturalist or irrational.¹⁹ Dorothy Sayers reprimands critics who, to the claim that archetypes bring forth unknown things, base their objection on the ground that these things are not to be found in their personal experience.²⁰ The correctness of speaking of art as dream is admitted by De Witt Parker, because there is “creativeness” in dream.²¹ T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound conceived the image as an analogy offered to the senses, expressing vision—the precise moment when a thing outward and objective transforms itself into a thing inward and subjective. T. S. Eliot's “heap of broken images,” in the Waste Land, is the objectification of a spiritual situation. Yeats' “unpurged images” in “Byzantium” must be purged to summon the work of art into being. “Most images today,” writes William York Tindall, “whether in poem or novel, are allowed to stand alone, teasing our understanding by nondiscursive relationship with what surrounds them.”²² This is the temperate, tolerant view, not distant from Professor Helmut Hatzfeld's: “The mark of genius is evident when the oneiric and the realistic style fuse by an interior necessity without any surrealist experimentation involved.”²³

Margaret Gilman, in her imposing testament, The Idea of Poetry in France,²⁴ has shown that before the middle of the nineteenth century Hugo is almost alone in insisting that the artist's act is to create and to resuscitate, and in defining imagination as the faculty that simultaneously makes images and explores the infinite.²⁵ She might have added Baudelaire's “visionary” Balzac, who wrote in Séraphîta: “… comprends-tu que l'âme seule, élevée à sa toute puissance, résiste à peine, dans le rêve, aux dévorantes communications de l'Esprit?”²⁶ Miss Gilman shows that the dichotomy between matter and form, feeling and reason, was the prevalent artistic attitude in France before Baudelaire. This attitude distrusted imagination, considered it an embellishing rather than an inspirational faculty. Finally, Baudelaire came to ally suggestion with imagination and to enthrone the claims of dream and contemplation, with the creation of correspondences between the horizontal and the transcendental, the inner and the outer worlds. (Imagination, wrote Baudelaire, is the most scientific of all faculties because it alone understands universal analogy.) Imagination and vision were fused with form to create the modernist esthetic.²⁷ Miss Gilman quotes “a modern critic” (Bachelard): “Imagination is not the faculty of forming images of reality: it is the faculty of forming images which go beyond reality, which turn reality into song. It is a superhuman quality.”²⁸ This is a formulation reminiscent of Malraux's moving, lyrical sentence on the last page of Les Voix du silence: “… mais il est beau que l'animal qui sait qu'il doit mourir, arrache à l'ironie des nébuleuses le chant des constellations, et qu'il le lance au hasard des siècles, auxquels il imposera des paroles inconnues.”

Two strange bedfellows,²⁹ Thierry Maulnier and Henri Peyre, present the positivist rebuttal to activities of the order of Bachelard's investigations. Maulnier, not insensitively, points out that the content of poetry is verbal, not mental, and that its role is not in the vain undertaking of reproducing images formed in the consciousness of the poet, but rather in assembling and ordering words so as to endow them with an inexhaustible power of incantation.³⁰ Needless to state this is neither revelatory nor original, if one remembers that when these lines were published, the Abbé Bremond had been dead for six years. Henri Peyre's abolition of the dominant esthetic of his times, if no more clarifying, is as damning as it is puzzling: “The sacrosanct phrases of modern pedants, ‘levels of meaning,’ ‘formal patterns,’ ‘symbols’ and, worst of all, ‘myth,’ which have marred much German and American fiction seem to have left not only critics but, more fortunately, novelists in France untainted.”³¹ Exit Bachelard. More important, out go Camus and scenes from the novels of Malraux, Mauriac and Bernanos. Indeed, Bachelard's most lasting achievement may well be his sincere effort to understand and explain what modern artistic sensibility has wrought: Nerval's organic, life-infusing function of dream, the dream which in Aurélia he called a second life; Baudelaire's “many other” images in “Le Cygne”; Verlaine's “beaux yeux derrière des voiles”; Rimbaud's chaotic reconstruction of a primitive world; Mallarmé's cigar smoke rings that abolish each other, leaving behind them but ashes; Valéry's “être” and “nonêtre”; René Clair's “unreal” cinematographic attempts; Cézanne's, Picasso's and Braque's decomposition and recomposition of their universe, not to reproduce what is visible but to render visible; Apollinaire, Cocteau, Giraudoux, Fargue, Eluard, Supervielle.³²

In six books devoted to “material imagination,” two to earth,³³ one to fire, air, water and space, Bachelard gradually abandons pre-scientific literature for imaginative literature, especially poetry. He traces poetic imagery to some of its unconscious archetypes, to show the tangibility of both dream and matter, and to advance the theory that the gap between mind and environment is bridged whether the image-making faculties take on an active or a passive direction—reveries of will or reveries of repose—but that the image perceived and the image created are two different psychic moments. Bachelard asks that to understand his work, traditional considerations of imagery as the effect of perception be forgotten. Imagination, then, becomes itself creator, no longer linking fragments of perceived reality, but preceding thought, not exhausted at the moment of the birth of the image (whose creation is the release of psychic tensions). Surrealism, or imagination in action, seeks the new image by virtue of a thrust of renewal. The awakened dream takes its flight in the face of the elements: the resistance of matter increases the reactive capacity of the subject's imaginary forces and excites the will to penetrate it. In this process, air transports man's oneiric power to dreams of flight or fall. The earth suggests images of security, protection, asylum, hence the importance of the grotto in children's imaginations, and in novelists from Defoe to Verne. The labyrinth is the image of salutary refuge that may give way to an image of anxiety or perdition. The rock of Sisyphus illustrates the crowning of man's effort with the sentiment of the heroic. When the imagination masters dynamic correspondences, then images truly speak. It is as if water could feel the beauty born of its murmuring sound. Without onomatopoeic voices in nature, man could not hear natural voices poetically. Reflections instruct visual art, echoes instruct music: “Tout est écho dans l'Univers.” The deeper meaning of pathetic fallacy (Lamartine's in “Le Lac,” Hugo's in “Oceano nox”), is elucidated in the following passage: “Ces correspondances des images à la parole sont des correspondances vraiment salutaires. La consolation d'un psychisme douloureux, d'un psychisme affolé, d'un psychisme évidé sera aidée par la fraîcheur du ruisseau ou de la rivière. Mais il faudra que cette fraîcheur soit parlée. Il faudra que l'être malheureux parle à la rivière” (L'Eau et les rêves, p. 262). Each task has its oneirism, each penetrated matter its intimate reveries, its creative, revelatory imagination, by which man is rendered worthy to command all the good servants which nature entrusts to his love and government.

Bachelard's archetypal analysis parallels C. G. Jung's. Archetypes are not myths but psychic fores that cannot be raised to a conscious level, that have potential existence only, which cannot be affected by the forms they take. Jung, in his article “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetic Art,” which inspired Maud Bodkin's Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, further described archetypes as psychic residua of numberless experiences of the same type, that have happened to the individual's ancestors, the results of which determine individual experience, inherited as they are in the structure of the brain. (At the 1959 meetings of the American Psychological Association, Dr. James V. McConnell of the University of Michigan reported that his experiments with flatworms indicate that some memory, even in humans, may be chemical in nature and passed on by heredity.) The creative process, writes Jung, in so far as it can be followed at all, consists in an unconscious animation of the archetype. Some of the archetypes mentioned by Jung are the tree, the fish, the eagle, water and earth. Yet, there is no external evidence to link Bachelard with Jung. In Bachelard's own admission, he came to know Jung too late, after most of his theories had been formulated in his mind: their analogous work was conceived independently. This point is made by Bachelard in a remarkable interview recorded on tape in Bachelard's apartment at the Place Maubert, by the Franco-Estonian scholar and critic Alexandre Aspel, in the summer of 1957. Excerpts from the tape are published here for the first time, throwing useful light on Bachelard's intellectual evolution:

J'avais déjà près de quarante-cinq ans quand je me suis mis à faire des cours littéraires, d'abord sur Balzac, sur Stendhal, sur George Sand, et puis peu à peu j'ai touché aux poètes. … Eh, alors, quand je suis venu à Paris … j'ai été pris par mon enseignement purement scientifique, puisque ma chaire à la Sorbonne s'appelait “Chaire d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences.” Seulement, j'avais pris goût aux lectures. La guerre étant venue, je ne sortais plus, comme vous le savez, et par conséquent j'ai lu beaucoup de livres. En réalité, le premier livre littéraire que j'ai fait a été détaché des préoccupations épistémologiques. C'était … voyons, quel était le premier livre de littérature que j'ai fait? C'était La Psychanalyse du feu. Si on regarde bien La Psychanalyse du feu, on voit qu'elle se détache d'un livre plus général, au titre d'ailleurs mal choisi, qui s'appelle La Formation de l'esprit scientifique, et qui a pour sous-titre, “Contribution à une psychanalyse de la connaissance objective.” Dans ce livre j'indiquais, si vous voulez, tous les obstacles qu'une culture scientifique touchant la réalité, touchant la physique, touchant la chimie, rencontrait. J'avais pris de nombreux exemples dans les œuvres du dix-huitième siècle, et en particulier, j'avais vu que la chimie était en ce temps-là très handicapée, parce qu'elle était encore dans l'orientation des quatre éléments. N'est-ce pas? Des quatre éléments. Et alors je me suis aperçu que cette espèce de hantise des quatre éléments correspondait à une sorte de nécessité humaine, et que si la science ne devait plus s'en occuper, peut-être qu'il y avait du côté de l'imagination une suite de documents à mettre en ordre. Alors, qu'ai-je fait? J'ai détaché plusieurs résultats scientifiques de ce livre et j'y ai joint des documents que j'ai pris dans la littérature. C'est pourquoi ce livre est à la fois mêlé et incomplet. C'est un livre que je voudrais reprendre. J'ai toujours pensé que je le mettrais, si vous voulez, au même niveau d'étendue que les trois autres étéments ont reçu dans mes réflexions, car si on prenait effectivement toute la poésie et tout l'imagination du feu, il faudrait faire un livre qui serait au moins équivalent aux deux livres que j'ai faits sur la terre. Et c'est simplement quand j'ai commencé à approfondir, je crois, le point de vue philosophique, avec l'eau, que j'ai vu qu'on pouvait vraiment systématiser l'imagination. …

Ah, pour Jung … je l'ai reçu trop tard. Dans l'inspiration de Jung, j'ai compris que l'alchimie n'était pas la chimie, mais que c'était de la psychologie. …

J'ai surtout, je crois, dans L'Air et les songes, parlé d'images qui nous mettent en mouvement. Comprenez-vous? … C'est une certaine dynamique d'images qui entre dans le psychisme, c'est un psychisme alerté, un psychisme plus vivant, un psychisme réveillé. Il n'y a pas d'images qui vous endorment, je ne les crois pas berceuses. … On veut qu'il y ait des images qui s'apparentent les unes aux autres. On ne veut pas que les images se brisent. On ne veut pas que … ben, l'imagination ne peut pas supporter cela, n'est-ce pas? Quand l'imagination se trompe, ça n'a aucune importance. Elle s'arrête, elle a une cassure, et elle commence autre chose. Pourquoi voulez-vous que dans un poème on développe toute une théorie sentimentale? … Je comprends très bien qu'il faudrait que je l'étudie davantage, mais alors, vous m'en demandez trop. Je connais des images qui suscitent au moins une admiration. L'admiration c'est, si vous voulez, le devoir d'un lecteur. S'il n'admire pas le poète, eh, ben, il n'a qu'à fermer le livre. Alors, par conséquent, vous voyez, les problèmes de la composition d'un poème. Je comprends très bien que dans une poétique générale, ça devrait être fait, mais je ne sais pas, je ne sais pas, je ne suis pas au niveau pour faire cette recherche. Je voudrais consacrer au contraire tout ce qui m'est resté de forces à continuer ce que j'ai fait. … Le poème qui n'aurait pas tout à fait d'unité, mais qui aurait dix belles images, ben, ça me va. Vous voyez que mon rôle est très modeste, très modeste, et je ne me donne pas comme professeur de littérature. Je n'ai pas assez de culture pour cela, n'est-ce pas? Je n'ai pas essayé d'étudier une époque ou de fouiller une époque. Tous ces livres que j'ai faits sont des livres, sont des livres de divertissement pour moi, de mon point de vue. … Je n'ai jamais voulu faire une philosophie pseudo-scientifique. … Je crois fermement que j'ai des arguments pour développer mon point de vue. … [Mes recherches purement scientifiques] n'ont rien à voir avec le problème de l'imagination. Je ne me laisse même pas défier quand on me dit, “Mais, est-ce que ça vient de l'imagination mathématique?” Mais s'il y a une imagination mathématique, il faut appeler ça autrement qu'imagination. Vous comprenez?³⁴

The greatest and most systematic corollary to Bachelard's theories is Ernst Cassirer's summa, the three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (I, “Language”; II, “Mythical Thought”; III, “The Phenomenology of Knowledge”). As is the case with Jung, Bachelard and Cassirer meet on the same plane independently. For Cassirer, too, what the scientist seeks in phenomena is a statement of their necessary connection which he arrives at by turning away from the immediate world of sensory impressions. The concepts with which the scientist operates, space, time, mass, force, energy, atom, ether, are free “fictions,” says Cassirer, devised by cognition in order to dominate the world of sensory perception and experience and survey it as a world ordered by law, even though nothing in the sensory data corresponds to them immediately. Beside this world of scientific signs stands the world of myth and art, a world beyond sensation. Judged by ordinary empirical standards, its creations seem “unreal” [Bachelard's recurring “irréel”], but in this unreality lies the spontaneity and inner freedom of the mythical function: man can arrive at a system of the manifold manifestations of the mind only by pursuing the different directions taken by its original imaginative power. In them is reflected the essential nature of the human spirit—for it can disclose itself solely by shaping sensible matter (I, 85-88). In Cassirer's view, as in Bachelard's, the division between the two fundamental factors of representation—the representing and the represented—bears in itself the germ from which the world of space unfolds as a world of pure intuition (III, ch. 3).

In La Poétique de l'espace, Bachelard inverts his approach to describe the élan inward which solitude and reverie bestow. His analysis is presented in this latest work as the systematic study of man's intimate life, all space being considered as a sort of compressed time. Man, it has been seen, possesses an unreal function that allows him to seize thought through dream, but now the phenomenologist's task becomes to live as the great dreamers of images have, not by imitating them, but by becoming the subject itself that dreams the reverie—what Malraux called “the thrill of creation”: “Le sentiment de création que nous impose l'œuvre capitale est voisin de celui qu'éprouve l'artiste qui la crée: elle est une parcelle du monde qui n'appartient qu'à lui.”³⁵ The immensity opened up by the creator is man's interiority, “l'espace du dedans.” Every reader who reads and rereads a work that he loves knows that its pages “concern him” (La Poétique de l'espace, p. 9). Metaphor, by the way, is not to be confused with image. Bergson is taken to task for ascribing metaphorical rather than creative or causal powers to the imagination.³⁶ Bachelard's argument is that in Bergson metaphors are overabundant and images too rare: “Il semble que l'imagination soit pour lui toute métaphorique. La métaphore vient donner un corps concret à une impression difficile à exprimer. La métaphore est relative à un être psychique différent d'elle” (La Poétique, p. 79). The metaphor is a two-dimensional art, does not have phenomenological value, since, at best, it is an ephemeral expression, a manufactured image, without real roots; whereas the image, product of absolute imagination, exists in and by creative imagination: “La métaphore est une fausse image puisqu'elle n'a pas la vertu directe d'une image productrice d'expression, formée dans la rêverie parlée” (p. 81). This “psychoanalysis,” this phenomenology of matter, does give man mastery over his language. Phenomenological inquests into poetic imagination, even into an isolated image, a line, a verse, form spaces of language (“espaces de langage”). Things “speak” and if we accord value to this fact, greater contact with matter is established. “Très nettement, l'image poétique apporte une des expériences les plus simples de langage vécu” (p. 11). In this phenomenology of the imagination, consciousness originates. Contemporary poetry, says Bachelard, has brought freedom to language, thereby becoming a phenomenon of freedom. The question he does not answer is whether it is sufficient for an image to emerge from a psychoanalysis of matter in order to be called beautiful.

Bachelard's view is not the Sartrian outlook (philosophical, existential, psychoanalytic criticism), that seeks to find in the work of art its implicit metaphysics, the totality of its meanings. A “psychoanalysis” of the elements, such as Bachelard's, which Sartre utilizes,³⁷ permits the latter to understand how man announces what he is, his way of being in the world. But essentially, Bachelard's metaphysics and esthetics are of another order. They are more akin to the Diderot of the Salon de 1767 who admitted that imagination's work “n'est emprunté directement d'aucune image individuelle de Nature.” They are more akin to Novalis and the concept of imagination of the German romantics for whom nature preceded perception and was true creator. Bachelard is closer to the English romantics, Wordsworth (whom he is fond of quoting), and the Coleridge who said that imagination is a synthetic and magical power. And Dryden, writing as if to answer the Hobbesian dictum that whatever man perceives has been first perceived by sense, is, in the following statement, near Bachelard's thought: “The poet is not tied to a bare representation of what is true. … He may let himself loose to visionary objects, and to the representation of such things as depending not on sense, and therefore not to be apprehended by knowledge, may give him freer scope of imagination.”³⁸ Near, too, is the gigantic figure of Flaubert, who, in a letter to Taine, wrote:

Oui, toujours, … l'image est pour moi aussi vraie que la réalité objective des choses. …

L'intuition artistique ressemble en effet aux hallucinations hypnagogiques—par son caractère de fugacité—ça vous passe devant les yeux—c'est alors qu'il faut se jeter dessus, avidement.

Du reste n'assimilez pas la vision intérieure de l'artiste à celle de l'homme vraiment halluciné. Je connais parfaitment les deux états; il y a un abîme entre eux.—Dans l'hallucination proprement dite, il y a toujours terreur, on sent que votre personnalité vous échappe, on croit qu'on va mourir. Dans la vision poétique, au contraire, il y a joie. C'est quelque chose qui entre en vous.—Il n'en est pas moins vrai qu'on ne sait plus où l'on est.³⁹

Bachelard probes all that is not in Horatio's philosophy, anachronistically restores the pre-Socratic God who was fire or spirit, concretizes the soul that ws truly breath of air, stirs the sleeping thought of Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, invades what Robert Oppenheimer called in the 1959 ACLS Annual Lecture, “things quite outside the cognitive order.”

Literary criticism in the hands of Bachelard's disciples tries to seize in its living origins the experience of which the work of art is the expression (the birth-scene of art, as Malraux puts it), to illuminate, analogically, Leonardo da Vinci's: “Then it befell me to make a truly divine painting.” This criticism tends to become a “psychoanalysis” of the creative moment, but a non-Freudian (Freud minus sex or the view that literature is day-dreaming fantasy, minus what Jung calls Freud's “medical prejudices”), or existential “psychoanalysis” which, as it has been pointed out, would seek signs of a global attitude. In this direction, the critical work of Maurice Blanchot, Georges Poulet and Jean-Pierre Richard makes striking contributions. For Blanchot, the writer is Orpheus descending into an abyss where merge word and silence, life and death that is the beginning and end of meditation. For Poulet, thought is “the interior distance” which separates or links subject and object. Literature, objectively considered, writes Poulet, is form. But subjectively, there is nothing formal about literature: it is the reality of a thought, anterior and posterior to any object, and through object it reveals its objective non-existence.⁴⁰ Richard's merit is to restore the writer to his world, the world of sensation. Literature becomes more than interior distance, more than adventure in the unknowable: the poet succeeds in living life's depth on the horizontal plane of sensations and words. “Intériorité et extériorité,” writes Richard, “s'entrepénètrent dans leur milieu communiquant. Comme le dit Sartre à propos de Francis Ponge, ‘ici matérialisme et idéalisme ne sont plus de saison. Nous sommes loin des théories, au cœur des choses même.’ Cœur des choses, cœur de l'esprit.”⁴¹ The lessons of Gaston Bachelard have been understood cogently and well because they have been understood ambiguously and ambivalently. “J'ai tenu l'idée pour moins importante que l'obsession, j'ai cru la théorie seconde par rapport au rêve.”⁴²

Notes

1. La Poétique de l'espace (Paris, 1957). Parisian critics received the work with unanimous praise and it received a popular “book of the year” award. Bachelard's twenty-two books and their publishers are listed in this volume. His latest work, La Poétique de la rêverie (1960), is a phenomenologist's magnificent confessional, his vision of a tenderly concerned universe.

2. See, for instance, Bachelard's relegation to three footnotes, in Stephen Ullmann, Style in the French Novel (Cambridge, England, 1957) and the one reference in The Image in the Modern French Novel (Cambridge, England, 1960). And Marc Eigeldinger, in Le Dynamisme de l'image dans la poésie française (Neuchâtel, 1943), gives Bachelard a minor reference.

3. Philip B. Rice, “Children of Narcissus,” Kenyon Review, XII (1950), 130-32; Harry Levin, “The Ivory Gate,” Yale French Studies, No. 13 (1954), 21-23; Robert Champigny, “L'Expression élémentaire dans L'Etre et le néant,” PMLA, LXVIII (1953), 56-64; and “Translations from the Writings of Contemporary French Philosophers, with Comments by the Translator,” The Journal of Philosophy, LIV (1957), 335-42.

4. See Georges Poulet's preface to Jean-Pierre Richard's Littérature et sensation (Paris, 1954), pp. 10-11. Richard's own debt to Bachelard is acknowledged in his Poésie et profondeur (Paris, 1953), p. 10.

5. La Psychanalyse du feu (Paris, 1939), p. 67.

6. Essai sur la connaissance approchée (Paris, 1927), p. 10.

7. La Formation de l'esprit scientifique (Paris, 1938), pp. 248-49.

8. Essai sur la connaissance approchée, p. 290.

9. L'Eau et les rêves (Paris, 1942), p. 14.

10. Otto Rank, Beyond Psychology (New York, 1958), p. 14.

11. L'Eau et les rêves, p. 23.

12. L'Air et les songes (Paris, 1943), p. 14.

13. L'Eau et les rêves, p. 24.

14. Ibid., p. 9.

15. La Formation de l'esprit scientifique, p. 192.

16. La Psychanalyse du feu, p. 14.

17. Newsweek, April 6, 1959, pp. 69-72.

18. The Mysteries of the Universe (New York, 1958), p. 142.

19. Theory of Literature (New York, 1942), p. 196.

20. The Mind of the Maker (New York, 1956), p. 125.

21. “The Nature of Art,” Revue internationale de philosophie, No. 4 (Brussels, 1939), 684-702.

22. The Literary Symbol (Bloomington, Indiana, 1955), p. 117; see also pp. 102-15 for the theoretical position of Symbolists and Imagists.

23. Trends and Styles in Twentieth Century French Literature (Washington, D.C., 1957), p. 219. Bachelard's name is absent from Professor Hatzfeld's encyclopedic work. Possibly, “oneiric” has a pejorative connotation for the author, for on p. 218 he writes that “peculiarly enough Mauriac shares the dream language.”

24. Published by the Harvard University Press in 1958.

25. The Idea of Poetry, ch. VII.

26. Etudes philosophiques, V, La Comédie humaine, 31 (Paris, 1927), 210.

27. The Idea of Poetry, ch. VIII.

28. L'Eau et les rêves, p. 23. Bachelard's name is omitted from the posthumously compiled index.

29. In Yale French Studies, No. 13 (1954), p. 31, Professor Peyre talks of the “pompous and stilted pages” of Thierry Maulnier's Introduction à la poésie française.

30. Introduction à la poésie française (Paris, 1939), p. 21.

31. The Contemporary French Novel (New York, 1955), p. 290.

32. Richard writes in Poésie et profondeur: “Pour tous ces poètes [Char, Ponge, Emmanuel, Gayrol, Bonnefoy], il s'agit, il me semble, de traverser la profondeur et d'en ressortir délivré, fraternel. D'une manière ou d'une autre, tous s'enfoncent dans l'innommable, dans l'impossible, dans la mort, pour ensuite, ou pour en même temps en ressurgir vivant. Expérience paradoxale, et pourtant chaque jour recommencée et réussie, qui lie la littérature à l'impossibilité de toute littérature, et qui fonde l'être sur une familiarité active du néant” (p. 12).

33. La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté and La Terre et les rêveries du repos, 2 vols. (Paris, 1948).

34. The tape of the interview is owned by Professor Alexandre Aspel of the State University of Iowa, to whose discussions of Bachelard this study owes much. For the laborious work of transcription I am deeply indebted to Mrs. Edith Farrell.

35. Les Voix du silence (Paris, 1951), p. 459.

36. In Evolution créatrice, La Pensée et le mouvant and Matière et mémoire.

37. In L'Imagination (Paris, 1948), a work that is more historical and synthetic than theoretic or analytical, Sartre writes: “L'image est une réalité psychique certaine; l'image ne saurait, d'aucune façon, se ramener à un contenu sensible ni se constituer sur la base d'un contenu sensible” (p. 138). Thanks to Husserl, Sartre states, “nous savons à présent qu'il faut repartir de zéro … et tenter avant tout d'acquérir une vue intuitive de la structure intentionelle de l'image” (p. 158). For Sartre's psychoanalysis of the elements see Champigny, “L'Expression élémentaire dans L'Etre et le néant” (PMLA, LXVIII [1953], 56-64). Compare with Hatzfeld: “But as in his [Sartre's] philosophical writings there is nothing uplifting, so in his fiction the triumphant symbols of fire and air are lacking. Earth and water, slime and viscosity symbolize Sartre's world of moral depravity. And his cleverly used imagistic exemplification is disappointing because it misuses poetic means in order to debase human dignity” (Trends and Styles, p. 147).

38. See John M. Aden, “Dryden and the Imagination: The First Phase,” PMLA, LXXIV (1959), 28-40.

39. Correspondance: Supplément, II (1864-71) [Paris, 1954], 91-93.

40. La Distance intérieure (Paris, 1952), pp. i-ii.

41. Littérature et sensation, p. 11.

42. Richard, Poésie et profondeur, p. 10.