Further Notes on Bachelard (introduction, chs. 1 and 9).
So much depends on Bachelard’s definition of what a poetic image is—and on the relationship of the poetic image with the past. It’s important to him that the image is not an echo; rather, the past is an echo of the image. How does this agree with what we said about the role of nostalgia in Bachelard’s work? Bachelard is a historian of science—but here he writes about poetry, and defiantly so. The image exists in the present, is dynamic, inverses the duality of subject and object, and so forth. It is both subjective and trans-subjective—how so? And what is the work of phenomenology, then? Bachelard declares here that he is departing from his former view (p. xviii)--a reference to his books on fire, water, earth, and air.
Note also the comparison between the phenomenologist’s work and that of the psychoanalyst, who translates the image “into a language that is different from the poetic logos” (p. xxiv). But is the phenomenologist a literary critic (p. xxv)? I like the phrase “felicitous reading” (p. xxv)—somehow I wish that’s what we could all engage in… “Felicitous reading” corresponds to what Bachelard defines as the object of his inquiry, “felicitous space” (p. xxxv). See also his thoughts on “harmony in reading.” Some of these concerns will reappear when we turn to Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours and her plea for an ecology of reading. Consider the brilliant distinction (derived from Bergson) between “language-as-instrument” and “language-as-reading”—what, in other words, does a phenomenologist not engage in when she is reading texts? (See p. xxvii: “ to determine its place and role in the poem’s composition”). Section VIII of the introduction is entirely directed against the equation of image with memory, or “reproductive imagination” (p. xxxv). Instead, Bachelard privileges chance, the unpredictability of the image (perhaps an indication that Bachelard was influenced by surrealism).
As always, Bachelard invokes experience as authenticating what the phenomenologist does: “Very clearly, the poetic image furnishes one of the simplest experiences of language that has been lived.” The poet herself is always already a phenomenologist. See the distinction (once again) between the psychoanalytic critic (“He explains the flower by the fertilizer,” p. xxx) and the phenomenologist-reader. The Latin on p. xxxii comes from Pliny and can be translated as follows: “Don’t be a cobbler beyond the sole [of the shoe.” Bachelard’s imaginative modification might be taken to read: “Don’t be a psychoanalyst beyond the lower part of the body” [the Latin “uterus” is a bit more comprehensive than the English equivalent]. Bachelard doesn’t want to examine “hostile space”—why? (p. xxxvi). And why end with a note of skepticism regarding the writing of books (p. xxxix)?
It is no coincidence that Bachelard begins his book with houses (later, there are chapters on the “houses of things,” wardrobes, chests, drawers). Houses stand for “protected intimacy” (p. 3); the house “protects the dreamer” (p. 6). All space, for Bachelard, is “inhabited space” (p. 5), the non-I that surrounds the I. Looking at houses will tell us how to “abide within ourselves” (p. xxxvii)—to live in the houses of our dreams (an “oneiric house” is, literally, a dream house). But how do these observations on memories, his definition of the image as a “blend of memory and legend” (p. 33), square with Bachelard’s insistence, in the introduction, that the phenomenologist’s work takes place in the present of experience? Psychoanalysis gives “an exterior destiny to the interior being” (p. 11); Bachelard, however, engages in “topoanalysis”—what is that? (For one thing, it bears the mark of “topophilia,” p. 12).
Poetry lets us live in the house that is gone, our childhood home. Think here of the etymology of ecology—nature as the house in which we live. Bachelard stresses the verticality of the dream-house, which is a combination of cellar (the earthly, watery depths) and tower, which “sounds a note of immense dreams” (p. 25). Poe’s indoor tales, as he sees them, “are the realization of childhood fears” (p. 20). But how would his reading differ from a psychoanalytic one, e.g. the interpretations provided by Marie Bonaparte? Bachelard’s discussion of city houses is especially interesting in the context of our seminar, given Buell’s efforts to integrate urbanism into environmental criticism. His attempt to transform his city dwelling into a boat rocked by the ocean reminds us, of course, of the transformation of his annoying neighbor into a woodpecker later in the book. Is this simply an attempt to ward off the noxious effects of modernity, a Heideggerian retreat to the farm, an escapist fantasy?
The chapter on the dialectics of inside and outside offers another variation on the idea of houses as both containing and expressing our being—see p. 222: “man is half-open being.” Bachelard extends here the walls of the house, making the outside the emanation of a former inside –see his brilliant reading of the Rilke passage, which illustrates “an osmosis between intimate and undetermined space” (p. 229-230). This section seems to be conceived as a counterpoint to the frightening reversal of interior and exterior space in the Michaux poem cited on pp. 216-17. See also p. 217-18: “Outside and inside are both intimate—they are always ready to be reversed.”
My hope for the Bachelard reading would be that it offers the starkest possible contrast to Buell’s vision for environmental criticism. Well, perhaps not as stark as it seems at first. Because Bachelard illustrates, in radical fashion, the kind of world-making Buell outlines when he tries to defend ecocriticism against the charge of naïve realism. The imagination inhabits the world as hermit crabs inhabit their shells and birds form their nests; human imagination and the imagination that manifests itself in nature—a gigantic tapestry of quotations, allusions, echoes—are coeval (so the question of mimesis doesn’t arise). BUT: Bachelard is completely uninterested in ethics—his images have ontological value only, as he emphasizes (compare this with Buell’s thrust in the direction of environmental justice). Finally, Bachelard obviously defines the role of reading very differently—as a sympathetic act (the reader is the writer’s “ghost”), very unlike Buell’s prescriptive model (we at least touched on the role of “power” in Buell’s book).
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Something that strikes me about Bachelard: in his eccentric levity he is perfectly willing to let contradictions coexist. If you try to track his argument to discover anything resembling a "system" you are bound to be frustrated. For instance, on the first page of the introduction he lays out some of the central terms and themes of his “phenomenology of imagination”: with the image “the cultural past doesn’t count…One must be receptive…to the image at the moment it appears…in total adherence to an isolated image…in the very ecstasy of the newness of the image” (xv). As will be the refrain throughout his chapters, the human relation to “the function of inhabiting” space reveals itself in images that are “new”, unique in their moment of upsurge. We get the sense that the phenomenologist’s goal is to transport us into the subjective moment in which the image is, profoundly, something new under the sun. At the same time we are led to believe that the moment of image making is due to a “primitive encounter”. Or, perhaps “due” is the wrong word. To push the bounds of common and scientific sense a bit further Bachelard makes the “rather serious statement” that “the poetic image is independent of causality” (xvii). Where does this leave us? On one hand, the image is supposedly divorced from the past. On the other, this daydream’s primordiality is, prior to, scientific knowledge. How is an experience both primitive and absolutely novel? To add to the confusion, there are lines like this one, which seem antithetical to his assertions about the image: “Great images have both a history and a prehistory; they are always a blend of memory and legend, with the result that we never experience an image directly” (33).
ReplyDeleteMy goal here is not to pull at loose threads in Bachelard’s oneiric skein. As we have all undoubtedly noticed, The Poetics of Space does not look at its subject from afar; “meta-poetry” might not be a bad way of describing Bachalard’s writing. Yet, I wonder to what extent Bachelard’s poetics can serve as a model for how we are supposed to think and write as ecocritics. As other’s have pointed out, the brunt of Buell’s examples of ecocriticism in practice are not academic, but creative. While Bachelard’s technique is a local, embodied counterpoint to Buell’s proposed powers of transnational omniscience, both author’s, in different ways, are comfortable within contradiction. In his ecstatic contradictions and insistence on collapsing boundaries between subject and object, proximity and distance, self and other, Bachelard seems to be part of a line of thought we can see in Emerson, Whitman and others. Embodying contradictions may be one powerful way to counter the Enlightenment rationality that presents such a threat to the natural world, but, since, unlike Whitman we must continue to “sweat with linguists and contenders”, is there a way that scholarly rigor can/does coincide with ecocritical poetics? While it seems like critical, playful inconsistency could be, in Bachelard at least, a way of poetically writing against the grain of the academy as well as a source of encouragement for his readers to comport themselves towards the non-human—even the “uncaused” reverie—with ever-renewed awe, I’m still not sure where this leaves us w/r/t being eco-critics.
I must confess that, while I enjoy reading Bachelard and am quite taken at times by what Chris calls his "eccentric levity," I'm not sure I can go along with him in his "ontological heroics" of space. The main problem I have, I think, is that his spaces are so empty, so removed from the past and from other people. Bachelard seems to want a "primitive" (maybe "primordial" is a better word) tabula rasa on which to inscribe his images. But do such blank spaces exist? I'm highly skeptical. In part VII of his Introduction, he quotes Jean Lescure on the importance of an "autonomous" art, which breaks free from "knowledge" to the realm of "non-knowing," which is "not a form of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge." "In poetry," Bachelard comments, "non-knowing is a primal condition; if there exists a skill in the writing of poetry, it is in the minor task of associating images. But the entire life of the image is in its dazzling splendor, in the fact that an image is a transcending of all the premises of sensibility." Clearly, Bachelard thinks highly of the imagination. But is any imagination so "autonomous" to be untouched by history or by other people? Should any imagination be so aloof? In this, it seems to me, Bachelard does not so much counter Enlightenment rationality as perpetuate one of its potential pitfalls - the over-valorization of the individual. I'm troubled by the notion that poetry should concern itself only with ontology and eschew ethics, largely because I think such a goal is unattainable (ontology, I would argue with many others, implies ethics), but also because I don't know why such a goal is desirable. And Bachelard at least hints to the notion that such is the case - that the autonomous individual only exists because of others, that the present is always colored by the past (even if he's only interested in some "primitive" past). "The real beginnings of images," he says at the start of Ch. 1, "will give concrete evidence of the values of inhabited space, of the non-I that protects the I." The "I" does not exist here without the protection and support of the "non-I." There is no isolated space for the imagination to roam, detached and free, from the natural world but also from history and other people. Why, then, does Bachelard pretend the imagination has some supernatural power to fulfill his stated desire to "detach from our own history the always too contingent history of the persons who have encumbered it"? And can we, as scholars committed to some form or other of "academic rigor," fully ignore (or even "transcend") the traces of these so-called "encumberances" on the literary works we study?
ReplyDeleteBachelard is most interested in original or primitive houses, “the house we were born in” which is “physically inscribed in us . . . a group of organic habits” (14); our memories of dreams are tied up with our memories of daydreams in that house, making that house “an embodiment of dreams” (15). And that house is assumed to be gone so that we can live in it oneirically and appreciate its dream values (16-17) rather than its real concrete details. All of this, however, may make the construction of childhood, childhood daydreams, childhood well-being, and cetera, a little too self-contained. It seems to me that our ideas about the intimate spaces of original houses don’t just come from the house we were born in itself, and our own individual past experience of that, but our cumulative experience of every idea about intimate space or houses or huts or candles in the window that we have encountered in the meantime. Phenomenology may deal with the primacy of present experience, even the present experience of the past via memory, but it should also deal with the problem that interpretation of the present will be negotiated relative to interpretation in the past, that is, how we have interpreted similar things in the past – similar to the background “sense of the past” or “sense of history” that we all carry around with us, according to David Carr.
ReplyDeleteThis complicates, in fact, Bachelard’s discussion of the imaginative failings of apartment buildings, because what if “the house we’re born in” were an apartment (to say nothing of a trailer park, igloo, Bedouin camp . . . )? Writing from his own culture – and ostensibly reading primarily from others who are writing from that same culture – Bachelard privileges a certain type of three-story house while dismissing as “incomplete” houses that lack that “verticality” and thus “cosmicity” (26-7). He assumes that by virtue of their setting within culture, such houses are “mechanical”; “intimate living flees” (27). It seems that culture and cosmicity are in some way mutually exclusive; too much human interaction and the cosmic dissolves (this is reinforced by his adoration of the hut, isolated, primitive, and allowing the hermit to dwell “alone before God” without any interference from, say, other huts in the vicinity, which evidently do not exist in the “land of legend.”); yet it seems there might be something apartment buildings have to offer a “house we’re born in” – in terms of culture and interaction rather than solitude, perhaps – which the house Bachelard speaks of lacks. The way Bachelard experiences houses (or apartments or igloos, whether real or imagined) seems clearly shaped by his own memory and his experience, and his sense of his own past, not just by his memories of dreams of primal images in an oneiric house. A different dreamer who dreamed first in an apartment would surely experience apartment buildings in a different, and perhaps less oneirically-stunted, way than Bachelard can.
As demonstrated by his writing methods, Bachelard is very concerned with movement, and he guards against the danger of using language to stop images, which alone, “can set verbs in motion again” (110). In many ways it is the writer’s responsibility to enact this motion and to write in a way that the motion can be sustained by the reader. Thus, he is very carefully not to “delineate the poet’s mediations before the more imposing spectacles of nature” by instead “participating more intimately in the movement of the image” (xxxix). It seems like this is his goal of phenomenology—to participate the action of the image—the present moment and the way that the poets language moves through the image, rather than imposing on, objectifying, or explaining it, or placing it in any sort of causal relationship. This, he realizes, requires one to obtain a great amount of distance from the image in order to apply the amount of pressure and scrutiny for the image to be rendered apart from value judgments and aesthetic leanings. He often uses the word “simplicity” which seems to suggest compression.
ReplyDeleteBachelard counters Bergson’s philosophy about the nature of images as a direct product of the imagination—the very thing he says image is not. For Bergson, the image derives from play or fantasy, otherwise “taking nature.” In this, language is thought supplemented, manipulated, changed by poetry in order to appropriate nature. But for Bachelard, language comes after the image to enact the resonance the poet hears. He resists the idea that the imagination could aptly designate language to itself: “The liberties that the mind takes with nature do not really designate the nature of the mind” (xxxiv). To him, the nature of the mind is not linear, does not proceed mechanically from subject to object, nor does it accurately take from nature anything it can correlate to itself.
The difficulty of writing a book such as this one, according to Bachelard, is it requires the work of poetry to be sustained over the duration of the book—hence the “circumscription” (xxxv). The writer must write in such a way that he asks the reader to be a good reader—not passive or complacent, but participating actively: “to consider an image not as an object and even less as the substitute for an object, but to seize its specific reality” (xix). By contrast, in lecturing, he says, one becomes animated with joy and so allows the words to speak for him rather than speaking through the words. This is the problem with ethics and values of any sort—they “alter facts.” He speaks later of the danger of the charms of external beauty (107), and warns poets against the love of beauty and symbolism, and being taken by fantasies which stop the image and prevent language from moving through it. The poetic image is clouded by values and ethics. Yet, underlying the desire to concentrate the image, to compress it to its most simple and original form, is what seems to be a value placed on communication—that all this work is done to have this authentic experience between writer and image, reader and writer. To what extent, if any, is the quality of an image determined by it’s capacity to be trans-subjective—not only insofar as language moves through the image, but that it also channels through or “concerns” the reader?
I’ve been reading Bachelard all the while thinking specifically about ecopoetics and what precisely defines ecopoetics, as well as with what it seems to be centrally concerned and how that fits in with what Bachelard is suggesting. As Kelly points out, for Bachelard, “language comes after the image to enact the resonance the poet hears”, resisting all the while the idea that the imagination could aptly designate language to itself. For me, this brings to mind the resistance of many ecopoets to poststructural theories of language which tend to deny any extralinguistic grounding for language, that is, that there is nothing before language itself, which seems to refute outrightly what Bachelard is suggesting here. “Image,” Bachelard writes “exists in the present, is dynamic, inverses the duality of subject and object.” Bachelard clearly opposes the Derridean notion here that “there is nothing outside the text.” Indeed, like Bachlelard, the ecopoet persistently stresses human cooperation with nature or the world of reference – the space from which images first seem to arise. The undercurrent here, of course, is that language and image-consciousness is a series of “cyclic feedback systems” (there’s a clear ecological emphasis here) which is both subjective and trans-subjective—something that we as writers and thinkers tap into. Ezra Pound said of this phenomenon that imagists were “trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself or darts into a thing inward and subjective”; but I would argue that the ‘cycle’ or imagination doesn’t stop there, but continues, and as Kelly said, the poet’s language moves through the image without any kind of manipulation, imposition or definition of causality. Moving one step close to the eco part of this (particularly in the case of ecopoetry), ecopoets in many cases are interested in the French idea of rėfėrence or the precise moment when one recognizes that “phonetic language is a reified, limited conceptual system of abstract rules and concepts, a product of human logic and reason, (brings to mind Bachelard’s comments on the scientist and psychoanalyst), whose major function is to point us outward, toward that infinitely less limited referential reality of nature”—all of this while searching for an originary language to allow for the image to come to its own. This, of course, might not entirely coincide with Bachelard’s aim and the goal of phenomology to “participate the action of the image”, but I can’t help but see many, many exciting parallels. Note: quoted material comes from “Sustainable Poetry” by Leonard Scigaj, which we’ll have a chance to talk more about later in the semester.
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