The poetics of space

240 Pages·2014·1.83 MB·English

by  Bachelard

PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE POETICS OF SPACE
GASTON BACHELARD was born in Bar-sur-Aube, in the Champagne region of France, in 1884. The
son of shoemakers, he first worked as postmaster general, but soon left to earn his bachelor’s and
doctoral degrees. During his illustrious academic career, he became inaugural Chair in History and
Philosophy of the Sciences at the Sorbonne, a position he held from 1940 to 1954. For his work in
phenomenology, epistemology, and psychoanalysis, he earned the French Legion of Honor prize in
1951 and the Grand Prix National des Lettres in 1960. Bachelard’s early work pioneered the concept
of an “epistemological break,” a notion that explains how obstacles to thinking interrupt the flow of
knowledge, forcing the creation of new ideas. Yet, later in his career, he unexpectedly turned to
studies of the imagination and consciousness in works like The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Lautréamont,
and The Poetics of Reverie. While he is best known today for his development of “topoanalysis” in
The Poetics of Space, his larger body of work influenced intellectual titans like Foucault, Merleau-
Ponty, Deleuze, and Althusser. Perpetually questioning establishment ideas, Bachelard built his work
upon conflict and complements: art and science; rationalism and idealism; experiment and
experience; empiricism and rationalism. Among his myriad achievements, perhaps his lasting
heritage is a renewal of emphasis on symbol and poetic meaning in fields like architecture that
became overwhelmingly concerned with form and structure. Bachelard died in Paris in 1962, his
legacy upheld by his daughter Suzanne, also a Sorbonne professor.
MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI is the author of House of Leaves. His other novels include Only Revolutions, a
finalist for the 2006 National Book Award, and The Fifty Year Sword. He lives in Los Angeles.
RICHARD KEARNEY is Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College. He is the author of
two novels, a volume of poetry, and more than twenty books on European philosophy and literature,
including The Wake of Imagination and Poetics of Imagining. He is international director of the
Guestbook Project.
MARIA JOLAS was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1893. She spent much of her lifetime in Europe,
where she devoted herself to antiwar activism and translated many works. A member of James
Joyce’s Parisian literary circle, she cofounded the literary journal transition with her husband,
Eugène Jolas. She died in Paris in 1987.

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China penguin.com
A Penguin Random House Company
First published in the United States of America by The Orion Press, Inc. 1964
This edition with a foreword by Mark Z. Danielewski and an introduction by Richard Kearney published in Penguin Books 2014
Copyright © 1958 by Presses Universitaires de France Translation copyright © 1964 by Penguin Group (USA) LLC
Foreword copyright © 2014 by Mark Z. Danielewski Introduction copyright © 2014 by Richard Kearney Penguin supports copyright.
Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an
authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in
any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Originally published in French under the title La poetique de l’espace by Presses Universitaires de France, Paris.
ISBN 978-0-698-17043-8
Version_1
Contents
About the Authors
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword by MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI
Introduction by RICHARD KEARNEY
Notes
Suggestions for Further Reading
THE POETICS OF SPACE
Introduction by GASTON BACHELARD
1. The House. From Cellar to Garret. The Significance of the Hut
2. House and Universe
3. Drawers, Chests and Wardrobes
4. Nests
5. Shells
6. Corners
7. Miniature
8. Intimate Immensity
9. The Dialectics of Outside and Inside
10. The Phenomenology of Roundness
Notes
Foreword
M Z D
ARK . ANIELEWSKI
For you without imagination, who can matter-of-factly claim that you’re not the
creative type—mind you, not proudly claim; for an imagination of ruin must
burn beneath defiances against personal invention—then best put this book down
and seek out instead some almanac of entertainment free from all such catalytic
risks to a mind just mad enough to make out of one world another world.
Gaston Bachelard’s book—published originally in 1957 by Presses
Universitaires de France as La poétique de l’espace—has as little to do with the
House, Cellar and Garret, the Hut, Drawers, Chests and Wardrobes, not to
mention Nests, Shells and even Roundness (these from chapter titles), as it has
everything to do with how our comprehension of space, however confined or
expansive, still affords an opportunity to encounter the boundaries of the self just
as they are about to give way.
“The lock doesn’t exist that could resist absolute violence, and all locks are an
invitation to thieves. A lock is a psychological threshold.” Yet despite saying so,
Bachelard does not turn to violence nor does he keep the company of thieves.
There aren’t even many locks. In fact it’s hard, over the course of even one
reading, not to detect the warmth of that rare personality who unmakes a thief
simply by making every article of interest available. Sit down. Stay awhile.
Something to nibble on? Generosity of spirit abounds. Doors swing open.
Thresholds offer little impediment. All are welcome. And in return, Bachelard
asks of us only to dream. Or rather he gives us the chance to dream. For a
chamber is no more a cage than reverie is an escape. Improbable discoveries
wait at every border. As when Bachelard extends René Char’s invitation
regarding
Discovery—not “hostile space”—concerns Bachelard. In the same way that
Steve Erickson’s Days Between Stations and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day
revive the sands of time as a medium intent on voyage, Bachelard gently
addresses those settings we live in, and finally die in, with the lightness of why
we live in the first place. Suddenly a chapter on miniatures offers a reflection on
a hermit who while “watching his hour-glass without praying . . . heard the
catastrophe of time.” The matter of prayer seems incidental to the anecdote, and
yet throughout these pages there arises something meditative. Call it a calculus
of emotional continuity or a music that only the grieving can know because they
chose to carry on: what warms the hearth long after catastrophe has razed both
hearth and home.
The Poetics of Space is one of those books in the tradition of Edmond Jabès’s
The Book of Questions, Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, Anne
Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, and Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. Whether portraiture
of Sarah and Yukel; the designs poets inscribe upon each other; Sappho; the
Kula exchange of necklaces and armshells, each of these aforementioned books
becomes so much more: an indispensable guide for anyone set on becoming an
artist.
Over the years I have discovered that it is not uncommon to mention
Bachelard and hear in return a sigh of happy recognition. I have sat at tables
crowded with journalists, graphic artists, urban planners, therapists, sculptors,
and architects, all of whom carry some fond memory of their first encounter with
The Poetics of Space.
The approval of architects seems the most obvious and at the same time the
most odd. Despite the mention here of everything from floorboards to molding,
names such as Isidore & Anthemius, Ictinus & Callicrates, da Vinci, Mansart,
Gabriel, Soufflot, Garnier, Bartholdi, let alone Eiffel, Van Alen, Wright, Gaudí,
Gabriel, Soufflot, Garnier, Bartholdi, let alone Eiffel, Van Alen, Wright, Gaudí,
Le Corbusier, or Pei, never appear. Instead the authorities vitalizing this work
are Desbordes-Valmore, Caubère, Wahl, Caroutch, Poe, Barucoa, Morange,
Clancier, Éluard, Milosz, Sand, Lafon, Duthil, Bosco, Monteiro, Proust,
Spyridaki, Cazelles, Hartmann, Thoreau, Laroche, Guillaume, Bourdeillette,
Richaud, Seghers, Supervielle, Wartz, Péguy, Rouffange, Vigée, Mallarmé,
Bousquet, Goll, Ganzo, Shedrow, Valéry, Alexandre, Puel, Rouquier, Blanchard,
Albert-Birot, de Boissy, Breton, Hugo, Bureau, Cadou, Patocchi, Rimbaud,
Masson, Daumal, Vallès, Jouve, Guéguen, Baudelaire, Tardieu, Michaux,
Pellerin, Barrault, Tzara, Rilke. Poets one and all. And why not? Just as stanza
means “verse,” it also means “room.”
Though architecture prompted the recommendation, my own introduction to
Bachelard came by way of poetry. A young woman I’d met one night in a roomy
loft on Varick Street responded to my sonnets with news that in Italian her name
meant “death”—A Non-Name Admittedly. Not that my interest was put off by
this a.m. warning. Eventually I came to give her more than poems, including an
early draft of my first novel. The seduction still failed and her stern advice to
read Bachelard hardly seemed to make up for bruised desire. But what did I
know? Thanks to love’s failure—and here, really, is a belated thanks to her
decades due—a necessary revision was set in motion thanks to a young woman
whose name meant nothing more.
Of course, sometimes nothing more can mean so much more. And these pages
offer just that. After all, here is a thinker who urges the reader to discover an
excess of association: “And how should one receive an exaggerated image, if not
by exaggerating it a little more, by personalizing the exaggeration? . . . in
prolonging exaggeration, we may have the good fortune to avoid the habits of
reduction.” At every turn Bachelard encourages personal engagement: “A house
that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends
geometrical space.” Or here: “Sometimes the house grows and spreads so that, in
order to live in it, greater elasticity of daydreaming, a daydream that is less
clearly outlined, are needed.” What would that have been like? To have had such
a teacher who applauded you for letting your thoughts run wild? Encouraged you
to live beyond gutters and margins, frames and apps, the limits of map and page?
Well, this is that education.