SOURCE: Grimsley, Ronald. “Two Philosophical Views of the Literary Imagination: Sartre and Bachelard.” Comparative Literature Studies 8, no. 1 (March 1971): 42-57.

[In the following essay, Grimsley compares the role of the imagination in the philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre and Bachelard.]

Whereas any attempt to clarify the relationship between philosophy and literature has to reckon with the fundamental and obvious difference between literary creation and reflective analysis, the bearing of philosophy on literary criticism seems at first sight easier to understand and justify. On the one hand, the writer derives his initial inspiration from within his own consciousness and begins by identifying himself with the imaginative impulse to which he seeks to give formal objective embodiment through the use of language. The critic, on the other hand, like any other reader, has to start with what is for the author the end product of all his efforts—with the literary work itself. Approaching the work from the outside, the critic tries to consider it as a phenomenon, which has a certain form and meaning for him. Although his ultimate purpose is undoubtedly to enjoy and appreciate the work, he must first of all clarify its essential features by setting it at a certain distance from himself and treating it as an object of reflection and contemplation. In order to see the work as some kind of “object,” the critic is forced to use interpretative principles—which, in their turn, may be reasonably subjected to critical scrutiny. Moreover, it is possible to widen the issue still further by relating the whole function of literary criticism to more fundamental human activities.

Instead of trying to give a synoptic view of the various ways in which philosophy can, or might, be related to literary criticism, the present essay proposes to limit itself to a single theme, which nonetheless goes to the heart of the matter and about which some modern philosophers have made interesting and controversial comments—to the theme of the nature and function of the literary imagination. In view of the close link between imagination and other aspects of human consciousness, an examination of this particular issue may have the advantage of leading to reflection on more general aesthetic problems.

Modern philosophical discussions of the imagination have had two important consequences. In the first place, they have led to a radical reexamination of the place and function of the image in consciousness, so that there has been a marked tendency, especially on the part of certain modern French and Swiss critics, to consider the literary work as a phenomenon existing primarily for the human consciousness. Secondly, they have revived interest in the question of the objective status of a literary work and the way in which the work depends on the conscious intention that has brought it into being. Clearly, the two issues are interdependent, since both the creative consciousness in which the work originates and the physical medium through which it finds concrete expression are but different aspects of a single experience.

French critics of the second half of the nineteenth century, inspired by the positivist principles of Taine, had no doubt about the kind of answer that ought to be given to all questions on the nature of the literary work, for they were writing at a time when science seemed to be making such rapid progress that in the opinion of many thinkers, all valid forms of human knowledge would have ultimately to be based on scientific principles. Impressed by the discoveries of Darwin, a critic like Brunetière thought that the idea of biological evolution could be usefully applied to the study of literature and that the development of certain literary genres could be treated like biological descriptions of the evolution of animal species. In short, the positivists believed that the literary work was not unique, but a phenomenon explicable in terms of something other than itself—a scientific object that could be understood by the scientific use of causal principles and, more especially, by those drawn from psychology, sociology, and history. It is enough to recall here Taine's famous trinity of “la race, le moment et le milieu.” Suffice to say that in Taine's opinion, literature could be adequately interpreted as the result of the writer's psychological and physiological endowment, the influence of his social environment, and his historical situation. Heredity, society, and history combined to produce the object known as the work of art.

The spirit, if not the precise notions, of Taine's outlook has survived in a much changed and more subtle form in the modern Marxist and psychoanalytical schools of criticism. In a more general and modest way, the positivist outlook has survived in the so-called Lansonianism of French university criticism, which seeks to interpret the work against its biographical, historical, linguistic, and literary background; but this more limited “scientific” approach is confined for the most part to the methods of scholarly investigation and falls short of the ambitious philosophical claims of the more radical positivist attitude.

One of the factors destined to undermine the influence of the Tainian theory was not so much the loss of faith in science itself as the growing realization that Taine's principles rested upon a very inadequate, and often crude, psychological basis. Consciousness as a collection of atomistic elements held together by the principle of association gradually gave way to a view that treated it as a dynamic, unified phenomenon. The influence of a philosopher like Bergson and the notion of the “stream of consciousness” developed by writers like Joyce and Proust soon made Taine's views very outmoded. Henceforth the emphasis was to be placed on the active rather than the passive aspects of consciousness. In any case, an examination of Taine's outlook shows that it was as much a metaphysical as a scientific theory, for it made sweeping claims to explain art by means of a few simple fundamental principles. In this respect, it is worth recalling that Taine in his youth had been a great admirer of Spinoza and Hegel. It was, however, especially after the advent of the phenomenological movement that the older forms of psychologism were to become almost completely discredited. This new influence is very apparent in the work of the two philosophers whose work on the imagination we may now briefly consider.

In 1936 the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre published a small book entitled L'Imagination, the importance of which was to be somewhat overshadowed by his later, existentialist publications. The main purpose of this work was to make a critical appraisal of the treatment of the imagination by certain leading European philosophers and psychologists from the seventeenth century onward. As Sartre points out, the rationalist philosophers naturally relegated the imagination to a fairly subordinate position in the hierarchy of human powers. Since Descartes established a rigid distinction between mind and matter, and granted to the mind alone the capacity for finding truth through the medium of “clear and distinct ideas,” he distrusted any faculty that was primarily dependent on the sensations. The imagination, therefore, suffered from the disadvantage of occupying an ambiguous position somewhere between the mind and the senses, and its products were judged to be inferior to mental ideas.

The same distrust of the imagination is also apparent in the work of such other thinkers as Malebranche and Pascal. The latter described it as “cette partie décevante dans l'homme, cette maîtresse d'erreur et de fausseté.”¹ Indeed, the whole spirit of French classicism, by extolling the virtues of Reason and Nature (vague though these terms often were), was unsympathetic to the activity of an imagination that seemed too erratic and unpredictable in its effects to form the universal basis of great art. It is also well known that Boileau's famous Art poétique, which embodied so many ideas about aesthetic matters, makes no mention of the imagination. In fact, the great importance attached by classical theorists to the principle of imitation in art—a principle which owed much to the influence of Aristotle and a belief in the perfection of classical models—made it difficult to allow much influence to the activity of the creative imagination.

At first sight, the English school of philosophical empiricism, by setting the lessons of sense experience above those of pure reason, seemed likely to overcome the old prejudice against the imagination. For the most part, however, the results of this new approach were disappointing, even though some impetus was given to a study of the psychological aspects of imaginative activity. Sartre's analysis of the work of Hobbes and Hume is sketchy, but his main point seems to be valid: these philosophers looked upon the “image” as some kind of “object” that could be explained as a weaker form of perception.

For Hobbes the imagination was “nothing but decaying sense.” Moreover: “When we would express the decay and signify that the sense is fading, old, and past, it is called memory. So that imagination and memory are but one thing, which for divers considerations hath divers names.”² True, Hobbes distinguished between simple imagination (“when one imagineth a man or horse, which he hath seen before”) and compound imagination (“as when from the sight of a man at one time and of a horse at another, we conceive in our mind a centaur”), but he considered that this “compounding” activity could also be found in the realm of perception. Furthermore, he insisted that the ultimate unity of the different aspects of the image was due to the principle of association. Admittedly, Hobbes made an important contribution to the subsequent development of literary criticism by giving an impetus to the study of the psychological aspects of the imagination, but he always believed that the imagination had to be subordinated to judgment and perception.³

Later on, Hume also kept the link between perception and imagination. Dividing the contents of the mind into “impressions” and “ideas” (“sensations” and “images”), he made the distinction between the two rest solely on vividness and intensity, images being mere copies of the original impressions or sensations. Likewise, Hume used the principle of association—rather on the analogy of the Newtonian principle of attraction—as the factor uniting the “atomistic” elements of consciousness into a coherent pattern.

To some extent Sartre oversimplifies the attitude of the eighteenth century toward the imagination. He does not, for example, mention the work of Shaftesbury, whose stress upon the organic, creative aspect of nature (he considered the poet to be “indeed a second Maker, a just Prometheus under Jove”) was firmly opposed to Hobbes's mechanistic views. Addison too, a literary critic with an eclectic interest in philosophy, also anticipated the future with his essays on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” in The Spectator, for he examined the psychological effects of literary works upon the reader. Akenside's poem The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744), which was to some extent influenced by both Addison and Shaftesbury, treated the imagination as a “power” that “held a middle road between the organs of sense and the faculties of moral perception.” There were, thus, thinkers, critics, and poets who were already looking forward, albeit hesitantly, to later romantic developments. It still remains true, however, that the empirical outlook generally dominated philosophical discussion of the imagination.

Sartre considers the idea of the necessary connection between imagination and perception to have continued until the time of Bergson. (Perhaps it is a pity that he does not mention the important views of the romantics and their successors: for example, Coleridge's famous distinction between primary and secondary imagination, and Baudelaire's interesting remarks about the poetic imagination.) Bergson is praised for having rid philosophy of an outmoded associationist view of consciousness and, so, for having broken with the inadequate psychological basis of Taine's positivism. In Sartre's opinion, Bergson had the merit of separating the fundamental, dynamic activity of “duration” from the merely static, atomistic conception of intellectual attitudes. Even so, Sartre regrets that his views of the imagination did not measure up to his general interpretation of consciousness, for he considers that in Bergsonian philosophy the image still remains related to memory and assumes the form of a sensuous residue, a quasi object that cannot be assimilated into the mainstream of consciousness.

Sartre believes that a proper approach to the problem of the imagination was first made possible by the advent of phenomenology. It will be recalled that Husserl wanted to free philosophy from the nefarious influence of a psychologism that sought to reduce logic and mathematics to psychological concepts; the philosopher, he insisted, had to return to “things themselves,” describing and analyzing them in an attitude that was free from distracting questions about their existential status; his initial task was to describe things as they appeared to his immediate consciousness, and yet in such a way as to clarify their eidetic or essential aspects. Now, consciousness, according to the famous Husserlian dictum, is always of “something”; it always “intends” or “aims at” an object of some kind, even though the object is not necessarily a real one. The intentional nature of the conscious act thus remains of decisive importance for the meaning of its object. The main point, however, is that each kind of conscious act (perception, memory, imagination, etc.) has to be examined in the light of its own intrinsic characteristics.

Although Husserl laid down the basic principles of the phenomenological method, Sartre does not consider that he dealt adequately with the problem of the imagination, and it is in his own L'Imaginaire: Psychologie phénoménologique de l'imagination (1940) that he tries to give a constructive solution to the problem. Following the phenomenological principle that the imagination must be treated on its own merits and not confused with the problem of perception, Sartre distinguishes four principal aspects. First, the image is not a thing. (Sartre does not like the term “mental image,” which suggests the existence of some kind of object, and he retains the expression only because of its long philosophical history.) The image can best be described as a form of consciousness, for the image exists solely through the conscious act that brings it into being; it is a relationship or structure inherent in consciousness itself. Second, the image constitutes a kind of quasi observation—that is, it has only a superficial and misleading resemblance to real perception. Since the image is not a pseudo object copied from perception, but a special form of consciousness, it is unlike perception inasmuch as it springs suddenly into being; perception, on the other hand, involves a series of acts that ultimately constitute a synthesis of the object. Whereas in perception consciousness remains largely passive, gradually learning to know its object, the image cannot be gradually built up in this way, for it is an isolated act that has no direct connection with the real world. When we perceive a house, we see it from various viewpoints and so gradually form an increasingly adequate conception of its shape and form, but an imaginative act always has a certain poverty; it is in no way informative, merely containing what we put into it. In imagination I merely seem to observe, I do not really do so; hence the notion of quasi observation. The third characteristic of the image is thus its spontaneity; if it does not have the richness and density of a real object, it can be freely created by consciousness. Finally—and this is an equally crucial aspect of Sartre's view—the image always “involves a certain nothingness,” because it indicates the absence or nonexistence of the object to which it refers. Whatever its particular form, the image always contains this negative element; it is an image precisely because it is unreal. From Sartre's preliminary analysis emerges the essential point that consciousness is sui generis.

Yet the image clearly has some connection with the real world, because it seeks to “represent” that world, in a negative way, as absent or nonexistent. It is an analogon created by consciousness in accordance with its own specific needs. Once again we are led to see that the image cannot be described in perceptual terms. The space and time expressed through the image, for example, are not those of the real world, where they are dependent on various kinds of causal connections; in imagery they have an absolute quality that is derived from the “internalizing” activity of the consciousness. Similarly, since they have an affective tonality that gives them a certain generality, they do not possess the individuation of real objects; nor do they obey the “principle of identity,” for they often undergo a contamination that is, again, due to their role as a psychic function. (Thus dream images do not simply represent particular objects or persons of waking life, because they may be the condensed and symbolic expression of a number of emotional reactions to different people.)

The negative aspect of the imagination necessarily involves it in some relationship with real objects. By the very fact of negating the real world, the image presupposes its existence. The image appears always “against a background of world.” Through the imaginative consciousness the material opacity of the real world is denied and set at a distance. By means of the imagination, man is able to prevent himself from being “imprisoned” and bogged in physical things. In other words, the spontaneity and the “nihilating” power of the imagination are an expression of man's fundamental freedom.

In view of the analogous function of the image, Sartre concludes that the work of art is an “unreal object,” which comes into being only when it is apprehended by an imagining consciousness that treats the material elements as a mere analogon for the constitution of another (the unreal) object. The true picture is not what we see on the canvas, but “a material object visited from time to time (whenever the spectator assumes an imagining attitude) by an unreality which is the painted object.” Perhaps not very convincing as an explanation of visual art, this view is more applicable to literature. The language of a novel, for example, seems to form the basis of an unreal, imaginary world, which the reader brings into being through the perusal of the printed signs. Sartre concludes that this imaginative world is a kind of synthesis of conceptual and perceptual elements without being either in the strictest sense; although it makes some indirect use of both, it does not involve either actual perception or abstract thought.

Sartre does not attempt to examine in detail the purely formal and aesthetic implications of the relationship between the imaginative and material elements in the work of art; he is interested primarily in the work of art as the expression of a writer's “free choice”; the imaginative attitude portrayed in the work expresses the way in which the author seeks to choose himself as a certain kind of being. In L'Etre et le néant he develops a theory of existential psychoanalysis through which a writer's fundamental choice may be elucidated. As the use of the term psychoanalysis suggests, the meaning of this choice may not be immediately apparent because it is expressed through a series of “empirical, concrete projects,” which have to be interpreted in the light of a more fundamental principle. The position of the critic before the literary work is somewhat similar to that of the psychoanalyst in the presence of the patient's symptoms. In each case, the particular aspects of behavior (gestures, images, etc.) are seen as the indirect expression of a radical, dynamic choice that governs them all.

Unlike Freud, however, Sartre does not accept the idea of a “complex” determined by unconscious motives. In every case, it is a question of a choice, not a complex. To account for the phenomena that seem to be hidden from immediate apprehension, Sartre has recourse to a distinction between consciousness and knowledge. The writer is conscious of making a choice, but he does not necessarily know its meaning; it is the responsibility of the critic, who, unlike the author, can see the work from outside, to try to reveal the knowledge only implicitly present in the artist's consciousness.

Yet Sartre also insists that the ultimate nature of the choice is not restricted to the author's work, for a man's eating habits, style of dress, speech mannerisms, and reactions to material objects may all indicate the quality of his imaginative choice of being. From this point of view, as Sartre's own study of Baudelaire makes clear, an artist's work cannot be separated from his life, and the evidence of his correspondence and private conduct may be as significant as that of his books. Many different factors contribute to his ultimate choice of being.

In spite of the considerable importance attached to the imagination in Sartre's early works, he seems to have laid increasing stress on the link between imagination and freedom he indicated at the end of L'Imaginaire. In the important essay Qu'est-ce que la littérature? the notion of freedom becomes the main focus of interest. Freedom is of vital importance to both the author and his reader, the work itself being the means of bringing these two forms of freedom into active contact. Since the work of art is an unreal object, and a mere material analogon, the reader is left with the responsibility of re-creating it on the basis of the material embodied in its linguistic form and structure. Because he cannot passively perceive the work as he would a physical object, the reader is compelled to choose its meaning. At the same time, this meaning has to be based on the careful observation and interpretation of the structure of the work itself. Reading, says Sartre, is “directed creation,” and it is often a question of precise and complicated directions; the reader cannot make the work mean anything he likes but has to be guided by what the artist has created. From this point of view, Sartre sees the literary work as an “exercise in generosity”; the artist “appeals to the reader to collaborate in the production of his work.”

By invoking his reader's freedom, the author wants to make him commit himself completely, not merely imaginatively—that is, commit himself as a concrete, particular person, not as an abstract being. Moreover, we have already seen that for Sartre the exercise of the imagination brings man into a free (“nihilating”) relationship with the real world. The world is, in a sense, brought into existence as a meaningful whole (though not, of course, as a mere physical existent) by the consciousness that makes it an intentional object. In Sartre's opinion, the writer cannot treat the world as a mere imaginative possibility; by invoking the fundamental principle of freedom, he asks his reader to treat the world as a gift and a task: “To write is to reveal the world and propose it as a task to the reader's generosity.”

Furthermore, because freedom is always concrete and not merely abstract—because, in other words, it can express itself only in specific situations—it must always be “committed,” but committed in a way that makes it relevant both to the real world and to man's inescapable humanity. In Sartre's view, no true literature can violate this essential principle, and he refuses to believe that a good book can be written against human freedom. A book, for example, in favor of anti-Semitism could not address itself to all men, for it would assume the right of some human beings to treat others as slaves and, insists Sartre, “one does not write for slaves but free men.” From this point of view, any committed literary work would seem to have some moral value by the very fact of being “an act of confidence in human freedom.” Presumably, therefore, a writer's first and foremost intention is to write for his own time. By presenting an imaginative picture of the world, he implies that its present features need to be changed. At the same time, Sartre sees himself as a metaphysical writer, because literature cannot remain narrowly political or social in its emphasis but must ultimately refer to the human condition. Sartre treats his own novels as “fictitious and concrete experiments justifying certain ideas about man's condition in the world.”

In spite of this metaphysical aspect of his view of literature, Sartre tends to place increasing emphasis on the link between literature and society. The writer's fundamental choice is rooted in his social condition; even though it ultimately involves a personal decision, its social implications cannot be ignored. The essay entitled “Questions de méthode” and inserted in the volume on Critique de la raison dialectique (1960) shows Sartre's growing sympathy for Marxism, even though it makes equally clear his serious reservations about the value of Marxist principles as the sole basis of literary criticism. Accepting the well-known Marxist assumption that political, social, and cultural attitudes are ultimately determined by the mode of economic production, he nonetheless points out that this principle is too general and abstract to be of much use in the interpretation of individual literary works. In particular, it fails to reckon with the importance of a factor already stressed by psychoanalysis: that the individual becomes related to his social class through childhood participation in family life. No individual is directly conditioned by his social origins. Broadly speaking, it is true to say that the work of Paul Valéry is that of a member of the petty bourgeoisie, but such a statement tells us little about the characteristics of his literary production.

Yet psychoanalysis, in its turn, by placing exclusive emphasis on the child's early psychological experience, ignores not only the broad social framework stressed by the Marxists but the important way in which sociopsychological factors are modified through the individual's free choice. All social and psychological elements, however objective they may seem to be, have to be experienced by the individual in his own way, and it is to this individual choice that every literary work owes its particular form. It is, therefore, quite misleading to characterize Flaubert's work solely by his social background and origins, for he entered society through a network of family relationships that involved, for example, his reactions to his father and his brilliant elder brother. Even then, he was still faced with the responsibility of making his own choice of his particular domestic situation.

So once again, Sartre insists on the importance of the existentialist principle that every individual choice is inseparable from the desire to modify the immediate situation in the light of a future possibility. Each situation contains an existential core or nucleus that accounts for its ultimate significance, and it is to this element that the critic must pay particular heed. It is also necessary for him to work backward from the completed work through the particular influences acting upon it, and from this point of view, his method may be called regressive. But this backward-looking view has to be implemented by the interpretation of the work as the progressive expression of an imaginative choice that transcends and modifies its given elements through the projection of a new and hitherto unfulfilled possibility of existence. The true critical method will thus be “progressive-regressive.”

At the same time, this progressive-regressive method will not be merely conceptual in its approach to the literary work, but essentially dialectical: it sees the work in terms of a dynamic forward-looking project that confers meaning on the original psychological data by making them the starting point of a movement of “totalizing enrichment”—a movement by which the individual (for example, the writer) transforms himself in the world as an “objective totality.” Thus Flaubert overcomes his personal contradictions by expressing himself objectively as Madame Bovary. In other words, the movement from social origins to the finished literary work is not a simple linear development, but a dialectical process that passes through different stages of objectivation, each one of which enriches the ultimate end. The individual goes beyond the “merely given” aspect of his material situation by developing an attitude that looks toward the future possibility of himself as a different kind of being—a being objectified through work, action, or literary creation.

These summary and necessarily inadequate remarks about Sartre's later view of literature will perhaps be enough to show that he is now adopting a more flexible attitude than in earlier studies, for he seems to allow a greater place to the analysis of the work itself. Even so, there is still the same tendency to shift the center of attention from the form and structure of the literary work to its existential intention, which continues to express itself through the “nihilating” activity of the imaginative consciousness.

We may now compare Sartre's views on the imagination with those of another philosopher who made a detailed examination of the question: Gaston Bachelard. It is worth noting that Bachelard is both praised and criticized by Sartre in L'Etre et le néant. Bachelard's early works, concerned primarily with the philosophy of science, scarcely foreshadow his later interest in the imagination as a creative force. In Le Nouvel Esprit scientifique he showed how scientific progress had been constantly impeded by the imagination's distorting influence on theories about the physical world; only when the scientific outlook had been purged of its irrational elements could it hope to make steady progress. That is why Bachelard spoke of the need to “psychoanalyze” objective knowledge. When he began to study the imagination more directly and positively, he still gave the same kind of psychoanalytic emphasis to his work. His analysis of the various theories of fire (La Psychanalyse du feu) also shows how much early scientific theories owed to the influence of subjective feelings. In the latter part of the book, however, he begins to study some of the poetic interpretations of the fire theme; and there he shows that what was a weakness in scientific theory may well be a source of strength in poetic practice.

Unlike Sartre, Bachelard does not begin by attempting to analyze the general characteristics of the imagination, but prefers to concentrate on an analysis of different kinds of images. Yet his view of the imagination resembles Sartre's inasmuch as both philosophers treat it as a dynamic primordial force that precedes the reflective activity of the intellect. Bachelard, however, seems to admit the existence of the “unconscious,” for the mysterious power of the imagination often impels the poet to choose a certain type of image, almost in spite of his conscious will. Since it is primarily the images themselves that fascinate Bachelard, they give his reflection a considerable richness and variety of content.

As we have just seen, Bachelard's early works owe a great deal to the spirit, if not the letter, of psychoanalysis, although most Freudians would probably not be prepared to admit that he uses the psychoanalytic method in the orthodox sense. Even in his early works Bachelard is much less inclined to conceptualize the image, in the sense that he does not readily admit that it stands for anything but itself. Whereas psychoanalysts treat the patient's dream images as symbolic and disguised expressions of his unconscious wishes and anxieties, thus establishing a distinction between outward form and inner content, Bachelard, rather like Sartre, considers the meaning of the image to be inherent in its structure. Moreover, in his later works he becomes increasingly critical of psychoanalytic principles, so that his earlier use of psychoanalysis tends to be replaced by another method of investigation: phenomenology. Here again, however, it is doubtful whether Bachelard's description of himself as a phenomenologist means more than a sympathy for the general spirit of the Husserlian method. What Bachelard seeks to stress by this description is the importance he attributes to seeing the image in all its original spontaneity and freshness.

In fact, Bachelard blames the psychoanalysts for obscuring the uniqueness of the image by intellectualizing and conceptualizing it. The critic's first task, according to Bachelard, is to listen to the reverberation of the image in the depths of his own being. Because it has sprung forth from the writer's creative consciousness, it should evoke astonishment and wonder. Before he seeks to analyze, the critic should first learn to admire; it is only by adopting an attitude of sympathy and wonder that he can become sensitive to the original quality of the image. No doubt this is why Bachelard calls himself “a dreamer of images.” It is not until he has experienced this intimate participation in the source of literary inspiration that a critic can hope to reconstitute and analyze the emergence of the image in the work itself.

Bachelard's preference for the literary image leads him to stress the importance of its close connection with language. The image is given forceful expression through the poet's use of language, so that the work may be described as “a syntax of metaphors.” The critic thus becomes not merely a dreamer of images but also a dreamer of words. Yet language, in its turn, is energized by images that form “the original text of language.” The material imagination is “truly the plastic mediator that unites literary images and substances.”

Bachelard admits that a particular image has no intrinsic aesthetic value unless it attains a certain depth and intensity, and this becomes possible only when the imaginative consciousness establishes a primordial relationship with some aspect of the material world. The oneiric quality of the image is directly due to the intimate link between the inner self and material substance. It would seem as though the poet's temperament vibrates in response to some material element—to earth, fire, air, and water. A great poet finds a secret affinity between his own being and external reality, between his own intimate impulses and natural forces: “When we dream of the secret virtue of substances, we dream of our own being.” The image thus reaches down into our existence and at the same time moves outward and forward to material substance. This perhaps explains Bachelard's interest in alchemy, for the old alchemists sought to penetrate the inner substance of material objects by means of a “loving” participation in nature's essential being. The poet, like the alchemist, is haunted by “the intimate beauty of matter.”

The true poetic image, then, is not a merely subjective phantasm but a dynamic activity that is able, through its embodiment in language, to open up a vision of the world. The image has ontological status because it corresponds to the force of nature as well as to the force of man's own being. At its most expressive, it becomes endowed with cosmic significance. In this respect the later Bachelard shows much more sympathy for Jung than for Freud, since the former stresses the importance of the “archetype” grounded in the collective, rather than the individual, unconscious. If psychoanalysis is to have any validity it must be truly cosmic by “momentarily abandoning human preoccupations to concern itself with the contradictions of the cosmos.” Bachelard constantly insists on the cosmic, elemental value of the image. The essential cosmicality of the material imagination is also due to its powerful dynamism, which makes it “wish to impregnate everythng and be the substance of the whole world.” In one of his last books, La Poétique de la rêverie, he insists that because of its involvement with man's primordial relation in cosmic forces, the image is essentially androgynous. The cosmic aspects of reverie cause it to include within itself both the male and female aspects of the human psyche.

Unlike Sartre, Bachelard refuses to accept the idea that the image is necessarily related to nonbeing. The image, he says, “always fills the dreamer's space,” even though the real object is absent. True imagery, in Bachelard's view, is noteworthy for its fertility and abundance, its plenitude, and its joy. It is also significant that although Sartre in L'Etre et le néant praises Bachelard's discovery of the principle of the material imagination, he considers that its ontological implications have not been properly clarified; it is necessary, he points out, to distinguish between an imaginative and a scientific view of matter. Sartre considers that before drawing up a kind of poetic bestiaire in his study of animal imagery in the poet Lautréamont, Bachelard should have examined the whole notion of animality and its relationship with Lautréamont's view of being. On his side, Bachelard implies that Sartre's own view of the imagination is inadequate, for its fails to account for the richness and abundance of genuine imagery.

More important than the differences between the two philosophers is the way in which both have opened up new ways of looking at the problem of the literary imagination. It is no longer possible to treat the image as a mere adornment of the literary work, a means of beautifying a more fundamental and rational imitation of reality. As Bachelard says, the imagination can “form images that go beyond reality and change it.” In this respect both philosophers are following one of the most significant developments of romantic aesthetic theory.⁴ The activity of the imagination precedes mere reflection and is a dynamic creative activity that produces its own kind of world—a world of imaginative possibility with a unique form and structure. Because this world is not a mere copy of the real one, but receives its shape and substance through the imaginative use of language, the reader is given the responsibility of particularizing the literary work and of deciding its meaning; he cannot adopt a merely passive attitude toward it, for it is not a perceptual object but an object of a special kind—one that owes its essential features to the dynamic organizing power of the imagination.

The two philosophers' particular views of the imagination may, naturally, be criticized on various grounds. We have already seen the way in which Sartre's analysis of the imagination exaggerates its “nihilating” function, while his constant stress on freedom tends to minimize the unique aesthetic features of the literary work. Although Bachelard gives greater emphasis to the positive power of the imagination, he much too readily ignores other and equally important aspects of the literary act; he tends to wrench the image from its context and to consider it in itself instead of treating it as part of a greater whole. Important though the problem of the imagination is, it still has to be related to other aspects of literary creation. Even so, Sartre and Bachelard have had the great merit of calling attention to a problem that is still at the forefront of modern literary criticism.

Notes

1. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. L. Brunschwieg (Paris, 1904), p. 363.

2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I, Ch. II.

3. See C. D. Thorpe, The Aesthetic Theory of Hobbes (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1940).

4. See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1953).