The Poetics of Space

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Any hope or fear that the experimental novel was an aberration of the twentieth century is dashed by the appearance of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, the first major experimental novel of the new millennium. And it’s a monster. Dazzling.” The ideas drawn from The Poetics of Space also live and breathe in the paper-thin porcelain boxes created by Irish ceramic artist, Isobel Egan. Often a simple detail suffices for Mme. Minkowska, a distinguished psychologist, to recognize the way the house functions. In one house, drawn by an eight-year-old child, she notes that there is " a knob on the door; people go in the house, they live there." It is not merely a constructed house, it is also a house that is "lived-in." Quite obviously the door-knob has a functional significance. This is the kinesthetic sign, so frequently forgotten in the drawings of "tense" children.

Yet if Bachelard’s phenomenological orientation was already evident before the Second World War, the philosophy of science—the subject of his initial formation—remained a central preoccupation throughout his career. To read only The Poetics of Space is therefore to miss his originality with respect to the philosophical tradition from which he emerged, as well as the historical specificity of his development. One must consider his work on the creative imagination together with his writings on science and rationality to appreciate the dialectic that informs his thought. Indeed, in a rereading of Bachelard today, it is the interrelationship between science and poetry, experiment and experience, that seems to have the most radical potential, while his well-known vision of the oneiric house, with its rather nostalgic and essentialist world view, comes across as historically dated. I am often intimidated by philosophy, but here Bachelard fashions it into a welcoming arena. Nothing is too minor or mundane for him. As he says, “I am moreover convinced that the human psyche contains nothing that is insignificant.” Images, after all, are simple; we experience them every second and no weighty scholarship can improve their reception. Bachelard is concerned with this topic, how the imagination processes space and transfers it to memory, to art, to awareness. He compares a home to a nest or a shell. By this, he means that a house is, symbolically, the place where life is created and also where it takes shelter. Bachelard also discusses psychoanalysis and the work of the psychiatrist Carl Jung. Comparing the psychoanalytic and phenomenological approaches to his subject matter, he sees merit in both, but finds the phenomenological approach preferable. [2] Publication history [ edit ] Richard Kearneyholds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and has served as a Visiting Professor at University College Dublin and the University of Paris (Sorbonne). He is the author of 25 books on European philosophy and literature.Inspired by The Poetics of Space, artist Isobel Egan's Cityscape explores 'issues of fragility, personal space and memory. These rooms recall the cardboard box houses and other fantastical environments of childhood; flimsy structures made robust by force of imagination.'(Submitted by Isobel Egan ) For Bachelard, the role played by the epistemological obstacle in experimental science is exactly paralleled by that of the poetic image in literary language. In Bachelard’s view, the authentically poetic image emerges from a form of forgetting or not-knowing that “is not ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge.” As such, it “constantly surpasses its origins.” Hence, neither history nor psychology can ever fully determine or explain it. As he puts it in The Poetics of Space—underscoring the irony in the title of his earlier book on fire—the problem with psychoanalysis (just as with Marxist interpretations of history) is that it seeks to explain the flower by the fertilizer. 10 For Bachelard, the poetic image “has no past; it is not under the sway of some inner drive, nor is it a measure of the pressures the poet sustains in the course of his early life. . . . The trait proper to the image is suddenness and brevity: it springs up in language like the sudden springing forth of language itself.” 11 Bachelard’s notion of the role played by chance and mutability in the emergence of the poetic image is virtually identical to the creative principle of the surrealists. For Bachelard, surrealism is related to realism as surrationalism is to rationalism.

Bachelard points out that there’s a real house and a dream house. We always build a dream house in our minds. Moreover, we also inhabit the spaces of that dream house. We design it, know its location, and inhabit it particularly in moments of nonconformity. The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace." Our soul is an abode. And by remembering houses and rooms, we learn to abide within ourselves." – Gaston Bachelard 'Home has a soul' Since its initial publication in 1958, The Poetics of Spacehas been a muse to philosophers, architects, writers, psychologists, critics, and readers alike. The rare work of irresistibly inviting philosophy, Bachelard’s seminal work brims with quiet revelations and stirring, mysterious imagery. This lyrical journey takes as its premise the emergence of the poetic image and finds an ideal metaphor in the intimate spaces of our homes. Guiding us through a stream of meditations on poetry, art, and the blooming of consciousness itself, Bachelard examines the domestic places that shape and hold our dreams and memories. Houses and rooms; cellars and attics; drawers, chests, and wardrobes; nests and shells; nooks and corners: No space is too vast or too small to be filled by our thoughts and our reveries. In Bachelard’s enchanting spaces,“We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”In the words of William Wordsworth, “We are less forlorn in a world which we meet with our imagination”. I can understand why so many people consider The Poetics of Space to be such an important book, but I found it rather uneven. The most interesting section, far and away, is the introduction. Bachelard begins the book by laying out his theory of the poetic image. Unlike metaphor, which is merely an intellectual comparison, the true poetic image causes a deep resonance in the reader. Upon glancing a poetic image for the home, for example, all of the homes of the reader's past well up in his imagination. The poetic image makes reading active - experiencing poetry is the mapping of your own memories onto the poet's text. As such, Bachelard's favorite word in the book is "daydreaming" - the course that your mind is set on after reading a particularly resonant image. Gilson, Étienne (1994). "Foreword to the 1964 edition". The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0-8070-6473-3. And it is through those New Eyes of the Spirit that I see clearly the veracity of my teenaged vision. The house on Quai Gaillot where Gaston Bachelard lived in Dijon. He was a professor at the university between 1930 to 1940.(gastonbachelard.org )