hans - gaston bachelard and the phenomenology of the reading consciousness

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Gaston Bachelard and the Phenomenology of the Reading Consciousness

Author(s): James S. HansReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Spring, 1977), pp. 315-327Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/430291 .Accessed: 09/01/2012 00:14

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JAMES S. HANS

G a s t o n Bachelard a n d th e

Phenomenology f th e

Reading C c

MUCH contemporary literary theory buildson the idea that literary criticism shouldbecome a scientific discipline, that criticism'sgoal is to describe the structure or the sys-tem of literary works of art. For GastonBachelard, though, such systems are beside

the point; for him the essence of poetry lieswell beyond any structural considerations,and indeed, he would maintain that onedestroys the effect of a poem in the processof objectivizing its structure. Bachelard'spoetics is a poetics of epiphany, of themoments in a poem or novel that stand bythemselves, that have no function as a partof a poetic or narrative structure, and hissensitive reading of various texts evinces agreat understanding of the poetic image

and its place in human life. As a reader oftexts/ though, and as a philosopher, he be-lieves that the beauty of poetry has nothingto do with its objective condition, thatpoetry only is poetry if it remains a sub-jective process, one that is not intent uponpursuing the rational relationships of thework. Thus, while one can readily concedethat Bachelard is a good reader, one mustalso question his approach to poetry andconsider its relationship to other poetictheories as well. Here one is left in the

JAMES S. HANS is a teaching fellow in English atWashington University, St. Louis.

)nsciousness

awkward position of having to approach atheory specifically subjective in viewpointwith an objective intent: in order to evalu-ate the poetics, one must go against thenotions put forth in the works in order toobjectify them for rational consideration.

Such an evaluation is necessary if we are toview the coherence of the theory, so I willnot hesitate using the more traditionalmeans for analyzing Bachelard's work.

Initially, Bachelard's theory rests on atheory of consciousness. He may well ex-coriate psychologists and psychoanalysts fortheir improper methods of dealing withliterature, but he too is concerned withpsychology, primarily with the psychologyof the reader and secondarily with the psy-

chology ofthe author. The

originsof this

psychology are found in the following pas-sage: "To specify exactly what a phenome-nology of the image can be, to specify thatthe image comes before thought, we shouldhave to say that poetry, rather than beinga phenomenology of the mind, is a phe-nomenology of the soul." 1 Here there aremany terms that need qualifying, but weshall deal for the moment with the divisionbetween mind and soul. Each psyche iscomposed of both a mind and a soul, andthe mind is not related to the "phenome-nology of the image" because the mind isthe objective aspect of the psyche and the



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image is subjective. This division is im-portant because the image "comes beforethought" in the realm of the soul. Thoughtand reason are the aspects of the mind that

objectify reality: they use concepts andmetaphors, neither of which are importantfor Bachelard. Metaphors are of no valueto poetry because they merely intellectual-ize images: "A metaphor is a false image,since it does not possess the direct virtue ofan image formed in spoken revery" (PS, 77).Metaphors are not direct or immediate;they are distanced, mental conceptions. Assuch, they have various negative qualities;they are real, intellectual, constitutive,causal, factual, and static. That is to say,the first five qualities are negative becausethey make the word static. The metaphorrefers to something real, so it is restrictedto that point of reference. This referenceto reality makes the metaphor factual andconstitutes it in a causal chain which fur-ther restricts the movement of the meta-phor; the metaphor constitutes or signifiessome object or idea and is totally restrictedto the orientation of that object or idea.All of these qualities are necessary for con-ceptualization and are essential to thought,for it is precisely their static aspect thatallows reavon to function.

The soul, however, makes no claims toobjectivity; it is subjective and, as such, itis an imaginative rather than a rationalfaculty. Hence, it uses images rather thanmetaphors or concepts. The images them-selves are of primary importance, of course,but first one must understand the facultythey emanate from, for it is not of our nor-

mal conscious world. As we pointed outabove, the image comes before thought, sothe realm of the soul is also before thought.The rational, objective world is the worldof normal consciousness, the world of a dis-tinct split between subject and object, andcontains all the necessary consequences ofsuch a split: temporality, historicity, etc.But the world of the soul is different, forwhen dealing with images "it is not a ques-tion of observing, but of experiencing beingin its immediacy. Full contemplation woulddivide into observing being and being ob-served" (PS, 234). Or again: "At the level

of the poetic image, the duality of subjectand object is iridescent, shimmering, un-ceasingly active in its inversions" (PS, xv).There is no subject/object dichotomy in the

soul; rather, to use Husserlian terminology,subject and object are co-constituted: theyare apprehended in their relationship to-gether rather than in their otherness. Andwithout this split, there is no temporality:"the imaging attention prepares our atten-tion for instantaneousness" (PS, 87). Bache-lard rejects reason and its metaphors pre-cisely because they already have driven awedge between subject and object and, in sodoing, have removed the object, the image,from immediacy. The image must be takenas it is, before thought has adulterated itwith its conceptual and abstract frameworks.

Bachelard develops this antinomy ofmind and soul further in The Poetics ofReverie, where he discusses it under therubric of animus and anima. The mindhas become animus, the soul anima. Here,aside from drawing out the masculine as-pects of mind (force, power, etc.) and thefeminine aspects of soul (grace, well-being,etc.), he makes the division clear: "Theimage cannot provide matter for a concept.By giving stability to the image, the con-cept would stifle its life." 2 By conceptualiz-ing the image, one suffocates it, takes allof the life out of it. Hence, images andconcepts must remain antithetical: "Thus,images and concepts take form at those twoopposite poles of psychic activity which areimagination and reason. . . . Here, the op-posing poles do not attract; they repel"(PR, 53). Images and concepts repulse each

other rather than being attracted to eachother; they can never be synthesized, so thedistinction becomes all-important in main-taining a precise formulation of the image.

Bachelard emphasizes this point becausehis methodology depends on it; if the readerdoes not treat images as images, he will de-stroy the poem: "It is a non-sense to claimto study imagination objectively since onereally receives the image only if he admiresit. Already in comparing one image toanother, one runs the risk of losing par-ticipation in its individuality" (PR, 53).Each image is individual and must be taken

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Phenomenology of Reading Consciousness

on its own ground. To compare it to an-other image is to undermine its value. Sucha severe nominalism, of course, eliminatesany systematic consideration of poetry, so

Bachelard has actually restricted the critic'sjob: now he must confine his activity toreading: "a sincere impulse, a little impulsetoward admiration, is always necessary ifwe are to receive the phenomenologicalbenefit of a poetic image. The slightestcritical consideration arrests this impulseby putting the mind in second position,destroying the primitivity of the imagina-tion" (PS, xxii). Thus, we must leave ourcritical pretensions, our pretensions of ob-jectivity, behind if we are going to dealwith the essence of a poem.

Before we return to the poetic image it-self, we must state the obvious: this dichot-omy between mind and soul places thoughtin one area and imagining in another, butlanguage itself is present in both. Onecannot have a poetic image without lan-guage, so language is clearly present in theworld of the soul. This is important forseveral reasons, the most important ofwhich is that the realm of the soul is thusa realm of consciousness - the kind of con-sciousness may differ from that of the mind,but if language, a social medium, is present,consciousness must also be present. Weshall return to this discussion later.

Relative to the poetic image itself, wecan now see how it differs from the meta-phor. While the metaphor was real, theimage is unreal (or irreal): it makes noclaims upon conceptual reality and is in noway bound to it. While metaphors are in-

tellectual, images are primal, both in thatthey come before thought and in that theyrelate to the realm of archetypes. Becausethey are not tied to reality, because theyare primal, they are not static; instead,they are variational, reverberational, valua-tional, and dynamic. Rather than beingconstituted once and for all like a meta-phor, the image is new each time it is ap-prehended: "the poetic act has no past"(PS, xi) because each image must be takenon its own terms, as the nominalistic state-ments above make clear. Rather than beinga fixed category, images reverberate, trans-

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forming the words and images aroundthem. Most importantly, they are valua-tional rather than factual: they are adjec-tives, not nouns, as Bachelard points out:

"And when a philosopher looks to poets.. he soon becomes convinced that theworld is not so much a noun as an adjec-tive" (PS, 143). This dynamic, qualitative,adjectival quality of images differentiatesthem from metaphors and has great signifi-cance for Bachelard.

In addition to placing poetic imaginingin the realm of the soul, Bachelard alsodivides the imagination into two categories:the formal and the material imagination.The images of the formal imagination arenew; they "take pleasure in the picturesque,in variety, in the unexpected event." 3 Phi-losophers have already dealt with theseimages, says Bachelard, so he devotes him-self to material images. They "plumb thedepths of being; there they seek at once theprimitive and eternal" (PI, 10). The word"material" here is the key, for these imagesdo have a material quality about them;they uncover qualities, primal qualities,and as such, they have the "feeling" of the

matter itself. In other words, if we pictureimages that relate more to the conceptualaspect of a word/image, we are dealingwith formal imagination; if we pictureimages that relate more to the physicalqualities of a word/image, bringing to mindthe feel, texture, look of an image, we aredealing with the material imagination.

With all of these distinctions in mind, wecan now broaden our inquiry with the aidof the following remark: "Only phenome-

nology - that is to say, consideration of theonset of the image in an individual con-sciousness - can help us to restore the sub-jectivity of images and to measure theirfullness, their strength, and their trans-subjectivity" (PS, xv). Bachelard's methodis phenomenological, but it is not Husser-lian phenomenology. Husserl tried to es-cape psychologizing through phenomenol-ogy, but Bachelard makes no pretense ofavoiding psychology. This is most evidentin comparing his method to Ingarden's inThe Literary Work of Art: the painstakingdescription of the various strata of the work



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of art show Ingarden's emphasis on thework of art itself; Bachelard's work, on theother hand, is almost always focussed onthe reader's perception of the work of art.

He takes the phenomenological impulse inconsidering "the onset of the image," liketraditional phenomenology, and his con-cept of trans-subjectivity also has some fam-ily resemblances to Husserl's transcendentalego, though Husserl certainly would havenothing to do with Bachelard's archetypes.But the psychological attitude here is com-pletely of Bachelard's own making.

Bachelard, as we have seen, wants to dealwith the onset of the image in an individualconsciousness; he wants to

graspthe image

as it emerges, as it is co-constituted withthe subject, before it is split into a distinctobject by thought. One could not deal witha primal image in any other way. But hav-ing insisted on restoring the "subjectivity ofimages," and having insisted on the dy-namic, ever-changing qualities of images,Bachelard faces the same problem Husserlencountered: solipsism. If the image isalways changing, and if we can always onlygrasp it as we ourselves constitute it, how

can we ever have any pretense of seeing theimage that the author intended, and howcan we avoid the conclusion that the imageis something different for every reader andfor every reading? By denying any objec-tive status to images, how can we ever testthe validity of a work of art? All observa-tion and interpretation would be purelysubjective and a given reader's taste wouldbe the deciding factor in any aestheticjudgment. While Bachelard never really

comes to grips with the evaluative part ofthe problem, except to ignore evaluation,he does overcome the solipsistic positionby way of archetypes and the concept oftrans-subjectivity.

Archetypes are the key to trans-subjectiv-ity, so we must be clear about Bachelard'snotion of them. An archetype is a primalimage, a material image, an image all man-kind has in common. The Poetics of Space,for example, is devoted to a discussion ofsome

archetypalimages of space: houses,

shells, nests, and the like. We all respondto these images in the same manner, for

"All great images reveal a psychic state"(PS, 72), and we all respond to this psychicstate in the same way. To continue withBachelard's examples, when we experience

a positive image of a house, we all experi-ence images of our first primal houses andthe resultant qualities of well-being, secur-ity, peace, etc. When we experience animage of a nest, "we place ourselves at theorigin of confidence in the world, we re-ceive a beginning of confidence, an urgetoward cosmic confidence" (PS, 103). Thisfeeling of confidence is the quality of theprimal nest, and thus, even though we allexperience these images subjectively, we allreact to their

qualitiesin the same way:

they are trans-subjective.If the poet presents us with an image of

a house, "it will be the voice we all hearwhen we listen as far back as memoryreaches, on the very limits of memory, be-yond memory perhaps, in the field of theimmemorial. All we communicate to othersis an orientation towards what is secretwithout ever being able to tell the secretobjectively" (PS, 13). The poet providesus with such an "orientation" and the

orientation leads us to certain qualities(again, well-being, security, etc.) - thesequalities rather than any actual picture ofa house are what the poetic image bringsto the forefront, and it is these qualities ofthe house and not the individual house thatmake the image archetypal. For Bachelard,"Well-determined centers of reverie aremeans of communication between men whodream as surely as well-defined concepts aremeans of communication between men who

think" (PS, 39). If we succeed in graspingthe image at its onset, we will respond to itin the same manner as everyone else whoproperly responds to it. Solipsism is thusavoided.

The archetypes themselves, though, de-mand further clarification, largely becauseof the plethora of archetypal criticism to-day. While Bachelard and Frye, for exam-ple, both derive the concept from Jung,there are significant differences in theirviews. For both, and by definition, arche-types are common to all men. For both,certain archetypes have primary value:

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earth, air, fire, and water, for example, areimportant for both men, Bachelard devot-ing one entire book and sections of othersto a discussion of how these images shape

our lives, Frye reinforcing these notions in,among other places, the preface to theEnglish translation of Bachelard's study onThe Psychoanalysis of Fire.

But a quick glance at Bachelard's workor at Frye's Anatomy of Criticism revealscertain differences. For Bachelard, thearchetype is much more immediate: it ismaterial, it is a quality, and the reader per-ceives the "materiality" of the archetypalimage and its quality: he actually feels theearth, or he has a feeling of well-being andsecurity when imagining a house. Bachelardsays that "This warm intimacy is the rootof all images" (PS, 154), that without thisintimacy, there is no image. But for Frye,though the material quality and the feel ofthe image are doubtless present, the arche-types are much more conceptually oriented:he is more concerned with archetypal pat-terns than with the specific quality of agiven archetype in a specific poem. Andwhile one might respond that the differ-

ence in emphasis here is based more on therespective methodologies of the two thanon their conceptions of archetypes, it ismore likely that their conceptions of arche-types determined their methodologies.Clearly, Bachelard employs the phenome-nological method because he believes thatthe image is only .pure at its onset, that itis no longer an image once it has beenconceptualized or fit into a pattern. Giventhis, archetypal patterns are not possible,

for that would be to reject nominalism forrealism, to sacrifice the particularity of theimage for a general concept. If Frye wereto adhere to this principle, the structuresof the Anatomy would be of no value, forthe dynamic nature of the individual imagewould defy any such categorization. Wecould say, then, that Frye employs arche-types of the mind, and Bachelard usesarchetypes of the soul, with the proviso thatBachelard would say that an archetype ofthe mind is a conceptual impossibility.Generalizability is what separates the twoconceptions.

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Bachelard's archetypes and their trans-subjectivity are connected to our early life,our childhood, and it is to our childhoodthat these images lead. They return us to

the feelings, qualities, and perceptions oflife before maturity and the developmentof the mind take away our immediate viewof the world and prompt us to conceptualizeaway our early contact with the world. Assuch, a child does not think - he imagines.Like Freud, Bachelard emphasizes that wealways carry our childhood with us, evenif it lies hidden by the mind; unlike Freud,he emphasizes the positive aspects of child-hood: "Being is already a value. Life be-gins well, it begins enclosed, protected ..."(PS, 7). Thus, in opposition to Heidegger's"thrownness," being begins with well-beingfor Bachelard, and we return to this well-being in the poetic image. Bachelard com-ments: "The reverie toward childhood re-turns us to the beauty of the first images"(PR, 103). Poetic images take us back tothe beauty of our first images, allow usto relive them. Thus, again in opposition toFreud, this is not a regression into child-hood whose purpose is to resolve dilemmas

originating from early traumas; we returnto these images to bring back well-being, toexpand our happiness in maturity througha reliving of primal images.

Childhood images are permanent, arche-typal, and always alive in us: "The perma-nence of a nucleus of childhood, an im-mobile but ever living childhood, outsidehistory, hidden from the others, disguisedin history when it is recounted, but whichhas real being only in its instants of illumi-

nation which is the same as saying in themoments of its poetic existence" (PR, 100).Even more important, it is precisely ourchildhood experiences that we share withother people; presumably, once the mindbegins to develop, our individuality beginsto develop, but before that, our experiencesare communal. Thus, for Bachelard, "Anexcess of childhood is the germ of a poem"(PR, 100), and "for that reason there iscommunication between a poet of child-hood and his reader through the inter-mediary of the childhood which endureswithin us" (PR, 101). The experiences of



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childhood become the intermediary be-tween poet and reader; without these per-manent remembrances of childhood therewould be no trans-subjectivity. Without

being able to reawaken these remembrancesthrough poetry, there could be no trans-subjectivity, and without this ever-presentchildhood, the poet could not write hispoems.

Finally, before moving on to the connec-tions between imagination and memory,we should look specifically at the quality ofthe images of childhood. Through poeticimages "we reach an anonymous childhood,a pure threshold of life, original life, origi-nal human life" (PR, 125). This childhoodis "anonymous" because the subject isblended into the object, co-constituted withit, and because of this, we are not relivingour history or a memory of that history -we are living "a memory of the cosmos"(PR, 119). In the jargon of Romanticism,we become one with the universe. Hencethe scope and the grandeur and beauty~ ofsuch primal images: "From poetic reverie,inspired by some great spectacle of theworld to childhood reverie, there is a com-

merce of grandeur. And that is why child-hood is at the origin of the greatest land-scapes. Our childhood solitudes have givenus the primitive immensities" (PR, 102).Hence, too, the atemporality of the experi-ence: "He [the dreamer] opens himself tothe world, and the world opens itself tohim.... Time is suspended.... Time is en-gulfed in the double depth of the dreamerand the world" (PR, 173). Here Bachelardis at his best, describing the epiphanic

moment in all of its grandeur with all ofits philosophical implications.Through all of this, though, it is impor-

tant to remember two points. First, themateriality of the image is never lost,though time may stop, though subject isone with object: "The cosmic image givesus a concrete, specified repose . . ." (PR,178). The image itself always remains con-crete and it always remains specific. Bache-lard is careful to avoid any metaphysicalimplications here, for in stressing the ma-teriality of the image to the end, he avoidsthe mystical trappings of more metaphysi-

cal explanations. Second, poet, image, andchildhood are always contingent upon oneanother: "Without childhood, there is noreal cosmicity. Without cosmic song, there

is no poetry" (PR, 126). Bachelard, then,has woven these together into an insepar-able fabric where to lose the world-view ofchildhood is to lose the cosmic effect of animage and hence to lose poetry itself.

With all the emphasis on childhood, ofcourse, Bachelard will have to includememory in his poetics, for without memory,one cannot recall one's childhood. Anddespite the atemporality of a poetic image,we find this statement: "After the originalreverberation, we are able to experienceresonances, sentimental repercussions, re-minders of out past. But the image hastouched the depths before it stirs the sur-face" (PS, xix). The reminders of our past,though, must come after the real memories,the cosmic memories that are intertwinedin the image, for otherwise the event doesnot take place in a moment, and Bachelardhas elsewhere pointed out that it is preciselythrough the image that imagination andmemory blend: "In their psychic primitive-ness, Imagination and Memory appear inan indissoluble complex" (PR, 105). Bache-lard clarifies this apparent contradiction oftemporality and atemporality in the follow-ing comment: "The further one goes towardthe past, the more indissoluble the psycho-logical memory-imagination mixture ap-pears" (PR, 119). Thus, there must be twokinds of memory: the cosmic memory men-tioned earlier, the memory that is notspecifically human, and the particular

memories of childhood: a specific house, acertain street, etc. Only the cosmic memoryis blended with the imagination - the par-ticular memories come afterwards and arenot a part of the trans-subjective complex.We can see this movement most explicitlywith Bachelard's own texts. At variouspoints in The Poetics of Space, for example,he will interrupt his commentary with re-marks like the following: "But my com-mentary is becoming too precise. Concern-ing the different characteristics of the house,it is inclined to be hospitable to fragmen-tary dialectics, and if I were to pursue it,

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I should destroy the unity of the arche-type" (PS, 53). When dealing with poeticimages, then, one must take care not toleave the unity of the archetype for the

resonances of particular memories.To sum up this discussion of cosmicmemory, cosmic images, and cosmic imagi-nation, it is necessary to point to the endprocess of such cosmic images. Bachelardgives us this point in two passages relatingto a discussion of Baudelaire's use of theword "vast." First Bachelard tells us that"All important words, all the words markedfor grandeur by a poet, are keys to the uni-verse, to the dual universe of the Cosmosand the depths of the human spirit" (PS,198). Immensity expands in both direc-tions, unfolding the infinity of the universeand the "depths of the human spirit." Andin the end, such immensity leads back tothe imagination: "since immensity is notan object, a phenomenology of immensewould refer us directly to our imaginingconsciousness. In analyzing images of im-mensity, we should realize within ourselvesthe pure being of pure imagination" (PS,184). The imagination ultimately imaginesitself; the soul contemplates itself, absorbsitself into its own pattern, contemplates theform of its own activity. Bachelard's remarkhere is strikingly close to Levi-Strauss'sstatement that myth and music are reflec-tions of human mental patterns.4 Bachelardhas indeed taken us to the end-point of theprocess of imagination.

If the imagination is capable of suchpowerful transformations, though, it stillneeds the poetic image, and the poetic

image, of course, requires language. Thepoet must put his images into words andwe must apprehend the images through thewords. Language itself, then, is importantfor Bachelard's poetics, so we must look athis remarks about it. "Language dreams"(PS, 146), says Bachelard, and this applieswell to his dream-memory-image compound.More specifically, though, "the poetic imageplaces us at the origin of the speaking be-ing" (PS, xix). In the context of the mind/soul distinction, this statement is important,for in the realm of the soul, at the onset ofthe image, we observe subject and object as

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they are co-constituted, before they splitinto subject and object. Thus, it is fromthis co-constituted complex that "speakingbeing" emerges, that language emerges; and

insofar as the poetic image places us at thispoint of origin, we can only assume thatlanguage emerges because of the poeticimage. "Expression creates being" (PS, xix),the poetic image is this expression, and thebeing is "speaking being," not written being- the word is initially a vocal enunciation,with Bachelard's emphasis, as we have al-ready seen, on the material quality of theimage/enunciation.

This point of origin, however, is not the

provinceof all

language.Bachelard says

that "poetry puts language in a state ofemergence, in which life becomes manifestthrough its vivacity" (my emphasis) (PS,xxiii). Conceptual language does not per-mit this manifestation of life because itoccurs after language emerges through thepoetic image. In other words, conceptuallanguage is dependent on the poetic imagebecause without the poetic image, languagecould not emerge at all. These remarkssound much like Heidegger's comment that"Language is the house of Being," butBachelard's point relates specifically to hisdiscussion of images. When he speaks ofthe poetic image as allowing language andbeing to emerge, we must remember hisconstant emphasis on the material andqualitative aspects of the image. It is pre-cisely the materiality of the image thatallows being to emerge, for it is the ma-teriality that connects the subject to theobject. Conceptual aspects of language can

only be developed at a later stage, in themind, after the material connections havebeen made.

Both Heidegger and Bachelard wouldagree that the origins of language and be-ing are the same, that being cannot emergewithout language, but while Heidegger isconcerned with how language allows beingin general to emerge, Bachelard is con-cerned with how language allows the qual-ity and materiality of being to emerge, withthe emphasis on materiality and qualityrather than on language itself. To put itanother way: Heidegger sees language as



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that medium which creates being in itstemporality; Bachelard sees language (poeticlanguage) as that medium which evokesbeing in its physicality, without any neces-

sary relationship to temporality. Language,then, plays a more subsidiary role in Bache-lard's poetics.

Finally, Bachelard's mind/soul dichot-omy, his emphasis on considering the imageat its onset, and his archetypes and trans-subjectivity all place poetry and poetics inthe realm of reverie. Thought will not dohere, for all thought is rational and con-ceptual, which the poetic image is not. Wehave already seen how thought distortsimages by making them static, by makingthem refer to specific objects, and by com-paring one image with another. If we wantto discuss images, then, we can only do thisin the same manner with which we observethem: through reverie. Here again, Bache-lard takes great care in defining what hemeans by reverie: it is a function of thesoul; it allows the image to be perceived inits "shimmering" immediacy; it allows theimage to reverberate over all consciousness,and rather than constricting the image, al-

lows it to expand into infinity. In poeticreverie, "The mind is able to relax, but inpoetic reverie the soul keeps watch, withno tension, calmed and active" (PS, xviii).It is a less-intentionalized state, but it is nota somnolent state (PS, xvii).

Reverie also differs from dream in sev-eral important respects. In reverie, a sub-ject can imagine itself and the image as theyare co-constituted and can report this com-plex as it occurs (theoretically); a dream

can only be reported after-the-fact, the nextmorning, when it is no longer immediate,as it would be in reverie. A related diffi-culty is that there is no subject in a dream,while there is one in reverie: "the subjectloses his being; they are dreams without asubject" (PR, 147). There is nothing to beco-constituted with the image in a dream,for the subject cannot be located. In addi-tion, a dream has no coherence to it, whilereverie has coherence (PR, 15). As such,Bachelard feels he has sufficiently delineatedthe realm of reverie, and by incorporatingthis state into the field of poetry, he has

given us a method for dealing with poeticimages and at the same time he has givengreat value to reverie itself, an activity thatis normally considered frivolous.

But while Bachelard has taken great carein describing all of the processes involvedin a reader's interaction with a given text,there are some inherent difficulties in hispoetics. From a subjective and atemporalpoint of view, these difficulties might notarise, but from an objective point of view,there are certain inconsistencies. So stated,there is a problem in Bachelard's concep-tion of language. He states, quite correctly,that "everything specifically human in manis logos. One would not be able to meditatein a zone that preceded language" (PS,xix). For Bachelard, then, the subjectivearea of the psyche (the soul) is an area thatmust contain language, for the soul em-ploys reverie to apprehend the poetic image- the poetic image is language, and reverie,as a state of meditation, must also be inthe realm of language in order for it to bemeditation. The soul, too, we will remem-ber, is the place where subject and objectare co-constituted. The problem is this:

isn't the very presence of language anacknowledgment that the split between sub-ject and object has already occurred, insofaras, in the manner of Cassirer, it is preciselythe word that is meant to mediate betweensubject and object, insofar as, without thechasm between the subject and the objectthat we call consciousness, there is no needfor words? If so, then Bachelard is reallydescribing the re-constituting of subjectand object rather than their intial co-

constitution, and this concession would nec-essarily remove the image from any pre-tense of immediacy. And immediacy, ofcourse, is one of the primary criteria forBachelard's poetics.

This difficulty is also apparent from an-other viewpoint: as Husserl discovered, toview the subject and object as co-constitutednecessitates a small time-lag, for the subjectcannot both observe and be co-constitutedat the same time. The subject must viewitself as it was a moment ago, as it wasco-constituted with the object; it can onlyview this process as an immediate retention,

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and regardless of how immediate the re-tention is, the subject-object is already inthe past tense as it is observed. As such,there is again an inevitable split between

subject and object, a split that simply can-not be avoided: without a split, there is noconsciousness-of; with a split, there is noimmediacy.5 This problem led Merleau-Ponty to reject Husserl's notion of the tran-scendental reduction because, as Merleau-Ponty saw it, the subject and object canonly be co-constituted in a pre-consciousstate - to be conscious of them is to admitthat they are no longer co-constituted inanything but memory.6 From this point ofview, consciousness, language, temporality,and the subject/object split are all contin-gent upon one another; to have conscious-ness is to have the whole complex, and inso-far as Bachelard's "soul" appears to benothing more than Merleau-Ponty's "pre-conscious" state, Bachelard's method willnot do: he can only consign himself to aworld of endless approximations, approxi-mations that can only assume that theyare in fact observation of the subject asco-constituted with the poetic image. The

only possible way out of this dilemma is tosay that one's concept of atemporality in-cludes that small time-lag that is necessaryto view subject and object together and thatour language, precisely because it is lockedinto a conceptual framework at this point,does not have a term that would sufficientlydistinguish this temporality-in-atemporalityconcept. But even here there are difficulties,for Bachelard was quite explicit in statingthat the only memory involved in the initial

observation was a cosmic memory, one thathad no connection with any particularhuman past, and the time-lag describedabove clearly relates to a particular humanmemory.

The same points can be made fromJacque Derrida's radical critique of Westernmetaphysics and his notions of differenceand the trace. In these terms, Bachelard'stheory fails to recognize that an image isnot an image unless it is both deferred intime and differentiated from all the otherimages (or signs) in the linguistic system.By making each image totally autonomous

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and discontinuous from the others, Bache-lard thinks he has eliminated this prob-lem; for him, the temporal and linguisticinconsistencies in his theory would only

be inconsistencies if he was speaking ofimages as concepts. In reality, however,even images are grounded in the linguisticsystem and must thus also come under thesway of difference. Bachelard is really onlychasing the endless series of traces in thelinguistic system, traces not at all based onpresence or immediacy but on absence andperpetual deferral. For Derrida, then,Bachelard's work is but one more meta-physical mystification of presence in a longseries of mystifications dating back to Plato.7

There are other, more mundane, diffi-culties in Bachelard's approach as well, andthey can be spotted in the following quota-tion: "One must be receptive, receptive tothe image at the moment it appears: ifthere be a philosophy of poetry, it mustappear and reappear through a significantverse, in total adherence to an isolatedimage; to be exact, in the very ecstasy ofthe newness of the image" (PS, xi). Hereagain the problem of atemporality comes

up, only now in a different guise. "Thecultural past doesn't count" (PS, xi) forBachelard, and so historical criticism hasno value. The image must always be takenin its newness, without reference to thepast, regardless of how many times thereader may have encountered the imagebefore. Once the image has been grasped,once its salience has struck the soul, thereader is free to move to the memories theimage leads to, but this is a peripheral and

not a primary activity, and it has no valuefor other readers. As such, the image neverhas a context, must never have a context,either in the poem itself or in poetic historyin general. If one places the image in sucha context, one is comparing it, and sincecomparisons are activities of the mind andnot the soul, the image has lost its effect.Only the image by itself, without referenceto anything else, is valid, and this excludesmost of the critic's usual activity.

Bachelard also states that "The imagin-ing attention prepares our attention forinstantaneousness" (PS, 87), as mentioned



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earlier, and this is certainly what Bachelarddescribes in his works. Indeed, his greatnessas a critic lies in his ability to wrest somesense out of the epiphanic quality of a strik-

ing poetic image; he is clearly a very subtlereader of images, and his discussions ofthese images attempt to describe them intheir immediacy, attempt to take the readeralong on Bachelard's epiphanic journeys.Then, too, few critics would disagree thatthese epiphanies are an important aspectof literature, whether one chooses to callthem Arnoldian touchstones or Blackmuriangestures, and Bachelard's descriptions inThe Poetics of Space, for example, of animage unfolding the depths of being whileexpanding the limits of space are excellentmovements of this theme. But if one mustmaintain this expansion in "total adher-ence to an isolated image," one wonderswhat he is supposed to do with the rest ofa poem or novel, or what he can use to dis-tinguish a poem from a novel. How doesthe poem as a whole lead up to the epiph-any? In what way does it contribute to thisexperience? How does the epiphany in anovel differ from an epiphany in a poem,

or indeed, how is the novel a distinct genrefrom poetry? Bachelard never answers thesequestions, and given the resolute emphasison the isolation of the image, one cannotsee how he could possibly include the frame-work of a poem or a description of genredifferences in his poetics. It is one thing,then, to say that a poem or novel works upto an epiphany, and it is another to say thatthis epiphanic character occurs without thehelp of the rest of the work of art. We are

left in a world of poetic fragments, andBachelard never shows us the way out.Furthermore, although Bachelard con-

tinually emphasizes the primacy of theimage and attributes great importance toliterature in general, the poetic image ulti-mately becomes only the initiator of anexperience that has nothing to do with theimage itself: "Paradoxically, in order tosuggest the values of intimacy, we have toinduce in the reader a state of suspendedreading. For it is not until his eyes haveleft the page that recollections of my roomcan become a threshold of oneirism for

him" (PS, 14). Poetry itself has no intrinsicvalue: it is valuable only to the extent thatit prompts us away from itself and into ourown world of reverie. Its "great function

... is to give us back the situation of ourdreams" (PS, 15). It turns out, then, thatpoetry itself is secondary to the dreams itleads us to - if our eyes never leave thepage, the poem is no good.

Finally, with regard to the evaluation ofpoetry, we find Bachelard of little or nohelp. We could derive the criterion that, ifthe poem leads us from the page into ourdreams it is a good poem, or that if theimage expands and reverberates in its sig-nification, it is a good poem, but even herewe would have some difficulty, for wewould have to resort to some sort of com-parison, and comparisons have been ex-cluded from poetics. Bachelard's own writ-ings show us that, from his perspective,there is no way to evaluate poetry and thatthere is no need to evaluate poetry. Whenreading over any of his texts, one is struckby the fact that while he discusses theimages of "great" writers like Baudelaire,there are at least as many quotations from

relatively obscure figures like Joe Bousquet.Some of the quotations, too, seem less thanextraordinary: one wonders, for example,where the greatness lies in this quote:"L'espace m'a toujours rendu silencieux"(PS, 183). Thus, we are suspicious early onas to how Bachelard chooses his images,and he doesn't hesitate to inform us: "Anyimage is a good one, provided we know howto use it" (my emphasis) (PS, 29). If anyimage is good, all poems have the same

value, or no value; it is only a question ofwhether or not a given reader can workwith the image in such a way as to make iteffective, and at this point, one is likely toconclude that Bachelard has emphasizedthe reader of the poems to such an extentthat the poems themselves are beside thepoint: all poems are equally valuable, giventhe facility of the reader.

Up to this point, I have been evaluatingBachelard's poetics largely from an objec-tive standpoint, but most of the difficultiesare also present from a phenomenologicalperspective. Bachelard adopts the phe-

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nomenological method for good reasons:he seeks to capture images at their point oforigin, and he wants to describe their emer-gence as faithfully as he can. And insofar

as this point of origin is located in a pre-objective state, where subject and objectare co-constituted, where language leads tothe emergence of being, the phenomenologi-cal method is an ideal tool that was de-veloped precisely to deal with these prob-lems. Phenomenologically, then, one canreadily grant the positing of the soul andits connections with language and the emer-gence of being; one can grant that theseemergent images correspond to the consti-tutive activity of childhood, to the non-conceptual framing of being; one can alsogrant the necessary immediacy of the ex-perience of such images. But even if all ofthis is accepted, the temporal nature of allexperiences necessarily distances us fromthe image, and, as I have shown above, thepresence of language evinces this problem.Indeed, there are few present-day phenome-nologists who would grant the immediacyof any experience that involved language.Rather, as with hermeneutic phenomenolo-gists like Ricoeur and Gadamer, their start-ing point would be that it is always impos-sible to grasp any linguistic element in itsimmediacy, first because all understandingof language implies interpretation, whichimplies a necessary distance from any text,and second because any written artifact hascome out of a specific, finite historicalframework which will have a world-view orhorizontal structure that will inevitablydiffer from our own horizons in some way,

leading to a further distancing of the text.Such a perspective, however, would notconfirm Derrida's view of the infinite regressinvolved in the linguistic system; instead, ahermeneutic viewpoint would argue thatthe significance or meaning of an image ora text could be recovered by a reader,though never totally so. Thus, my remarksabout the temporal gap and the media-tional nature of language do not dependon Derrida's critique; the same pointswould be made from the hermeneutic per-spective, which would deny the possibilityof the immediate experience of the image

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that Bachelard wants while still arguingthat the image can be recovered. The ex-perience of the image always depends onthe fusion of our own horizons with the

horizons of the image.The other major problem area in Bache-lard is his total commitment to the iso-lated image, and here one is reminded ofGadamer's lucid discussion of the increas-ing differentiation of the aesthetic realmfrom the realm of truth or knowledge thatbegan with Kant's Critique of Judgmentand reaches an extreme point in Bache-lard:8 we are meant to enjoy the well-beingof images, and we should enjoy the reveriethat is part of the experience of images, butboth are discontinuous from our normallives and seem to have no real effect onthem. We can observe being emerge throughimages, but the poem has no truth value,nor is there any way of integrating our ex-perience of it into our general horizons.But, as we have seen, this discontinuity isnot only a problem of experience; the textswe read ultimately become discontinuouspieces themselves, and they are totally cutoff from their history and their place in the

tradition of literature. Images have hori-zons, but texts apparently do not.

These discontinuities show that Bache-lard has adopted the phenomenologicalmethod without adopting any of the onto-logical assumptions that have been partand parcel of the various phenomenologies.His continual insistence that being emergesthrough language seems to place him withHeidegger, but Heidegger's phenomenol-ogy was grounded in Being and, at least

initially, had its locus in the historicity ofDasein. When he discusses a text, whetherit be Kant's or Holderlin's, he is alwaysaware of the historical horizons of the textand of his own historical horizons, and hisremarks are part of the continuity that thefusion of these horizons represents. Bache-lard ignores all historical horizons andseems in the end not to be speaking aboutHeidegger's ontological Being but aboutontic beings.

But one can reject Heidegger's distinc-tions and still find ways of achieving con-tinuity, though Bachelard rejects these pos-



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sibilities as well. Husserl himself can besaid to have developed three ways ofgrounding his phenomenology, although itcould be argued that each is merely an

aspect of the same foundation. His conceptof the transcendental ego was originally theultimate substrate of all the various in-tentionalities of the subject, and it pro-vided continuity for the experiences of thatsubject. Husserl's description of internaltime consciousness, with its running off ofprotentions and retentions, also provided acontinuous substratum for the acts of thesubject, as did his notion of the life-worldin his later work. Each provided a way ofintegrating the immediate experiences ofconsciousness, and each could have beenapplicable to a description of the image.But transcendental idealism was not suitedto Bachelard's enterprise.

Other alternatives were available thatwould have avoided the idealistic tendenciesof Husserl's position, but Bachelard doesnot adopt them. If we again briefly referto Roman Ingarden or to Mikel Dufrenne,we can see that Bachelard's basic positioncould achieve some sort of continuity. Both

Ingarden and Dufrenne provide a dual aes-thetic description, a noetic analysis whichdescribes the activity and the horizons ofthe subject, and a nomatic analysis whichdescribes the mode of being and horizonsof the work of art. By thus granting thetext as a whole some objective status, anexternal continuity is possible. But Bache-lard, despite all of his remarks about theimage, is really only concerned with noeticanalyses: he provides us with a thorough

description of the reading consciousness,but he pays little or no attention to thenomatic aspect of the co-constitution. Hegrants the image great power in claimingthat being emerges through it, yet he neverprovides an eidetic analysis of specificimages in the way that Husserl suggested.Rather than describing the essence of animage, he remains a phenomenologist ofnoetic analyses.

One final possibility for giving continuityto the poetics appears in the archetype.Both Jung and Frye find that archetypesprovide a basic means for integrating hu-

man experience, and these primeval imagescould also supply a continuous substratumfor the material imagination. In Bache-lard's terms, the archetype could provide a

bridge from the soul to the mind. Indeed,the archetypal substratum seems to beBachelard's ontological ground and shouldthus lead to a connection between soul andmind. Once again, though, Bachelard re-jects such a point of view because it wouldnecessarily involve conceptualization, whichwould in turn destroy the image. We havethus returned to our previous remark thatBachelard represents the extreme point ofaesthetic differentiation: he will allownothing into his poetics which has any con-nection with conceptualization; he reso-lutely denies any connection between con-ceptualization and imagination because theimage can only live in a subjective realm,a realm devoid of all comparison or rationalthought. Given his determination to up-hold this point, he must almost of necessityadopt the discrete nominalism that he does;he must deny the image any ontologicalstatus and place it in the realm of theirreal, and he must argue that just as all

images and texts are discontinuous, so alsoare the soul and the mind totally discon-tinuous faculties that cannot admit of anyinterconnections. These conclusions all fol-low from a commitment to the privilegedstatus of the image as Bachelard describesit, and this means that discontinuity is anecessary part of the system.

Overall, then, Bachelard has provided uswith a poetics which places the image inthe forefront, which distinguishes the image

from both metaphor and concept. He hasreturned to a subjective valuation of poemswhile avoiding solipsism through his con-ceptions of the archetype and trans-subjectivity. He has further offered ussome sophisticated readings of various linesand given both reverie and poetry an im-portant place in human life. In so doing,though, he has not avoided certain in-consistencies in his atemporal viewpoint,and he has left the critic without a func-tion: he must be content to read literatureand to enjoy it. If he goes further, he willdestroy poetry by objectivizing it. Bache-

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lard has also placed any structural or ge-neric considerations on the side, claiming,both in theory and practice, that works aswholes are irrelevant. We should be con-

tent to deal with fragments, with isolatedimages in their immediacy. Thus, he hasconsigned us to a nominalistic universewhere evaluation in the traditional senseof the word is meaningless or even destruc-tive, and where, despite the subtle readings,we end up knowing less about poetry as awhole than we did before we began. Andunless we are willing to concede that theentire corpus of the world's poetry existssolely for the sake of numerous isolatedepiphanies, or unless we are

willingto

modify Bachelard's nominalism so we canfind some way of intelligently discussingthe poem as a whole, we must concludethat Bachelard has done more deconstruct-ing than reconstructing, that he has left usonly a scattered pile of epiphanic fragments.

' Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans.Maria Jolas (Boston, 1969), p. xvi. Subsequentquotations are from this translation and will be

followed by "PS" and line numbers parentheticallyin the text.2 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie,

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trans. Daniel Russell (New York, 1969), p. 52.Subsequent quotations are from this translationand will be followed by "PR" and line numbersparenthetically in the text.

3Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and

Reverie: Selections from the Works of GastonBachelard, trans. and ed. Colette Gaudin (NewYork, 1971), p. 10. Subsequent quotations fromthis book are from this edition and will be fol-lowed by "P1" and line number parenthetically inthe text.

4See Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and theCooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (NewYork, 1969), pp. 15-17.

5 For an excellent discussion of this problem inHusserl's work, see Ludwig Landgrebe, "Husserl'sDeparture from Cartesianism" in The Phenomen-ology of Husseri: Selected Critical Readings, ed.and trans. R. O. Elveton (Chicago, 1970), pp.

259-302.6 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "What is Phenom-enology?" in Phenomenology: The Philosophy ofEdmund Husserl and its Interpretation, ed. JosephJ. Kockelmans (Garden City, N. Y., 1967), pp.357-374.

7The most lucid discussions of these pointsoccur in the essay "Difference" in Derrida's Speechand Phenomena, trans. David Allison (Evanston,1973), pp. 129-160, and in the essay "Structure,Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sci-ences" in The Structuralist Controversy: The Lan-guages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, eds.Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore,

1970), pp. 247-264.8Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

(New York, 1975), pp. 39-90.

hans - gaston bachelard and the phenomenology of the reading consciousness

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