Hi everyone,
This is the first time I've ever blogged, so I may not do it very well.
In any case, I've been trying to puzzle out some ideas I had about our Bachelard reading which I couldn't quite put my finger on in class. I think I mentioned that what struck me about the book was the "love" which Bachelard has towards poetry, matched by the "love" of the people he quotes towards their subjects. After that, we got onto the subject of being alone with the world, which I think ties into this "love" directly. Love, at least in my understanding of it, is something which can only exist as a relationship between two people or in this case a person and a thing, not as a group or societal phenomena... one might be able to experience multiple loves occuring simultaneously, but in the end real love is only possible in reference to a single other. And of course, I don't mean love in a Disney/Hollywood kind of way, perhaps not even in a romantic way... and I would shy away from a Platonic view as well, as I think Bachelard is critiquing alot of Plato in his book. Maybe what Bachelard is giving us here, as opposed to Buell who is attempting to totalize his view into a sort of Pauline message, is the opportunity to enter into a relationship with the natural world as the other... to see nature not as oneself, but as a fascinating other which deserves our devotion. So, for the conchologist or ornithologist, we see the moment of infatuation which changes their life, when they enter into a relationship with shells or birds. According to Bachelard, the honeymoon is over when it becomes an academic discipline, but who cares more than these people about the life and safety of birds or mollusks? I still haven't thought this out completely, and I think there are some obvious flaws: how can nature be a single other, for example? But I thought I would share and see what everyone else thinks.
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I was interested in this topic last class as well, so I'll add my post here below Ben's. I agree that Bachelard is interested in the moment of encounter with the objects he writes about. This is, after all, the focus of his field of study. What Ben calls the "moment of infatuation," (and what I think he is equating with love in the Bachelardian sense) is the unmediated experience of the encounter. For the phenomenologist, the experience never loses its wonder because it is the object of study, not the thing itself. Bachelard's comparison of the phenomenologist to the conchologist hinges on this. For the conchologist, the systematic study of shells mediates his experience of shells, and he seems to claim that they therefore lose their sense of wonder. I wonder if this is true. It seems to me that the biologists I've known remain deeply in love with their subject matter even after long study.
ReplyDeleteThere is a passage in the Nests chapter that illustrates Bachelard's privileging of the initial, almost childlike experience. He writes "...so the old nest enters into the category of objects...but as our collection of nests grows, our imagination remains idle, and we lose contact with living nests"(94). This losing contact with living nests seems a lot like the loss of contact he associates with the conchologist, and Bachelard goes on to describe a phenomenologist's encounter with a living nest in vivid detail. This passage (94-95) is the one of the most ecocritical sections I've seen in Bachelard, and he describes the encounter with a sense of poetic wonder. Still, he writes "it is such an old story that I hesitate to repeat it, even to myself" (95). So even for the phenomenologist, these natural encounters are only really appreciated (or appreciable) in the past.
Is all phenomenology nostalgia then? It seems hard to reconcile the poetic sense of wonder that is only associated with the past: "in order to make so gentle a comparison between house and nest, one must have lost the house that stood for happiness" (100) with the celebration of unmediated, childlike experience that Bachelard suggests elsewhere. I, like Andrew and Ben, find myself swept away by Bachelard's poetic writing and beautiful juxtaposition of thoughts and images, but can't reconcile his contradictions when I try to separate them out!
These are some compelling thoughts here. I am also interested in how Bachelard deals with love and nostalgia in his interactions with nature and the poetic image. As Ben mentions, it is difficult to talk about love without all of its Hallmark/Disney baggage, especially since we tend to avoid the clichés of a sentimentalized or a nostalgic natural world. But, as many of you pointed out, Bachelard's writing is so idiosyncratically pleasing, even in translation, that terms like "love" and "nostalgia" seem alien instead of trite. I think this particular tension in Bachelard needs to be worked out. By his own admission, Bachelard focuses solely on topophilia, disregarding any misotopia entirely: “… hostile space is hardly mentioned in these pages. The space of hatred and combat can only be studied in the context of impassioned subject matter and apocalyptic images. For the present, we shall consider the images that attract. And with regard to images, it soon becomes clear that to attract and to repulse do not give contrary experiences” (xxxvi). Bachelard seems to be waffling here. If, indeed, our experience is “symmetric[]” when encountering both attractive and repulsive images, then why not devote an entire chapter to “sewer” or “slum apartment?” Would we still find a nest or nook in these spaces? Would a Poetics of Wasted Space read the same way? What would it look like, especially considering Buell’s insistence that we incorporate such hostile spaces into our concept of environment (I’m thinking here of dystopian novels and films)? Does such a book need to be written? Bachelard’s championing of nostalgia and childlike, naïve wonder perhaps accounts for this symmetric experience: “We live fixations, fixations of happiness. We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost” (6). Here, nostalgia seems to be complicit in identity-making, in memory-making. But the imagination that fuels our sense of self is grounded in an idealized mimesis. To me this sounds a little Platonic, or at least Neoplatonic, yet I’m interested to see where Bachelard is critiquing Platonism, as Ben suggests. In any event, can such naivety ever be dangerous? Or are wonder and the imagination psychic defense mechanisms to shield the body from a hostile environment?
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