Summary & Review

Excerpts from:
http://culturalstudiesnow.blogspot.com/2011/06/gaston-bachelard-poetics-of-space.html


Gaston Bachelard's "The Poetics of Space" ( La Potique de l'Espace, 1958) is a phenomenological
interrogation into the meaning of spaces which preoccupy poetry, intimate spaces such as a house, a
drawer, a night dresser and spaces of wide expansion such as vistas and woods. In the opening chapter
of The Poetics of Space Bachelard places special emphasis on the interior domestic space and its
component: the various rooms and the different types of furniture in it. Bachelard attempts to trace the
reception of the poetic image in the subjective consciousness, a reception which demands, so Bachelard
holds, great openness and a focus on the present experience while eliminate transient time.

The house is, for Bachelard, the quintessential phenomenological object, meaning that this is the place in
which the personal experience reaches its epitome. Bachelrad sees the house as a sort of initial universe,
asserting that "all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home" (The Poetics of Space,
p.5). Bachelard proceeds to examine the home as the manifestation of the soul through the poetic image
and literary images which are found in poetry. He examines locations in the house as places of intimacy
and memory which are manifested in poetry.

Bachelard explains his focus on the poetic image for it being the property of the innocent consciousness,
something which precedes conscious thought, does not require knowledge and is the direct product of the
heart and soul. This direct relation of poetry to reality, for Bachelard, intensifies the reality of perceived
objects ("imagination augments the values of reality", The Poetics of Space, p.3). Poetry, Bachelrad
holds, is directed at one and the same time both inwards and outwards, thus establishing his future
discussion of inside and outside which is so familiar to anyone dealing with the theory of space.

Bachelard determines that the house has both unity and complexity, it is made out of memories and
experiences, its different parts arouse different sensations at yet it brings up a unitary, intimate
experience of living. Such experiential qualities are what Bachelard finds it the poetry and prose he
analyzes. Home objects for Bachelard are charged with mental experience. A cabinet opened is a world
revealed , drawers are places of secrets, and with every habitual action we open endless dimensions of
our existence.

In "The Poetics of Space" Bachelard introduces his concept of topoanlysis, which he defines as the
systematic psychological studying of the sites of our intimate lives. The house, the most intimate of all
spaces, "protects the daydreamer" and therefore understanding the house is for Bachelard a way to
understand the soul.

Our soul, argues Gaston Bachelard in his "Poetics of Space", in a place of dwelling. Therefore the house
is an especially suitable site for phenomenological research of the intimacy of the inner mental space. For
this end, which Bachelard terms "topoanalysis", we need to perceive it in both its diversity and unity, in its
aspects as well as in its totality of essence. The house for Bachelrad is the source of poetic images,
which bring up both its complexity and unity. This is because poetry enables us to experience the house
instead of just verbalizing it.

The house for Bachelard is not an object to examine and describe. On the contrary, one of the key
notions of Bachelard's The Poetics of Space is that one should transcend mere description in order to
grasp the essential qualities of space, the intimacy of the house, the protection and bliss that it grants us.
A phenomenological examination of the poetic representations of the house, Bachelard holds, will enable
us to experience the meaning of the home space. In the introduction to The Poetics of Space Bachelard
notes that the phenomenology of the poetic expression is the phenomenology of the soul and not the
mind, and it is aimed at a core, initial and essential strata of our experience of being. By reconstructing a
subjective consciousness which gave birth to a poetic image of homw we discover an individuality we can
connect with by means of our analysis, what Bachelard terms inter-subjectivity.


Bachelard speaks of thought, daydreaming and dreaming invoked by the house, actions which resurrect
the past and connect it with the present. When we enter a new house we are flooded with experiences of
prior homes, which are not memories but something rather different. In this state all of the homes of our
life trace back to the early house of our childhood. As Bachelard puts it "we are never real historians, but
always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost (The
Poetics of Space, p.6).

In his "The Poetics of Space" Gaston Bachelard introduces his concept of "topoanalysis" which he defines
as "the systematic psychological study of the sites of out intimate lives" (The Poetics of Space, p.8). He
then proceeds to assert that "in the theatre of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting
maintains the characters in their dominant roles" (ibid). What Bachelard means is that memories of the
house and its various parts are not something remembered but rather something which is entwined with
the present, a part of our ongoing current experience. Bachelard writes about the desire to stop time. The
way to transcend history, to produce that space which suspends time, is through imaging and
hallucination. Unretrievable history is fossilized, memories stand, they do not move, and therefore for
Bachelard it is space, not time, which invokes memories. Bachelrad therefore searches, through is
topoanalysis, the experience and not the process, the essence and not the contingent and fleeting.

In order to give an account of mental life a biography is insufficient for Bachelard who asks for a
topoanalysis of places, houses, in subjective terms. The topoanalysis examines the intimacy of the house
room after room, space after space. These are not actual material rooms or spaces, but rather the
dreamed, imagined, remembered and read places, which allow us to come closer to the core of mental
experience.

The psychoanalytic subconscious, Bachelard holds, is "normal" whenever it conveniently and blissfully
dwells in place. Bachelard does not elaborate in this respect but what is implied in the introduction to The
Poetics of Space is that such blissful dwelling is the sense of feeling at ease, feeling at home.
Psychoanalysis calls the subconscious into the conscious in order to help the "homeless" find their sense
of being in place. Topoanalysis, as an aid for psychoanalysis, will examine the spaces through which we
can exit the shelter of the subconscious and enter the conscious of our imagination.

With these intimate spaces being spaces of bliss, topoanalysis is related to topophilia (the love of place) -
the love for those places exposed by topoanlysis. And through the concept of topophila Bachelard
examines those spaces of intimacy he most esteems the rooms of the house.

Poetry's capacity, Bachelard holds, to summon the subconscious is not dependant on its ability to
describe space, but rather to direct or set a bearing towards it. Only an implied description will enable us
to bring forth those sought after feelings which might vanish if intellectualized.

To his notions of topoanalysis and topophilia introduced in The Poetics of Space Bachelard adds the
physical dimension, arguing that our house is engraved into our flesh. The body it better in preserving
detailed memories than the mind is. Other memories are harder to trace and these can be revealed only
by means of the poetic image. For Bachelard, poetry's main function is to give us back a state of
daydreaming, which is something history, psychology and geography are incapable of.

The house, says Gaston Bachelard in "The Poetics of Space", is a body of images which gives the illusion
of stability. He offers a vertical image of the house which is created by the polarity of the attic and
basement which denote, for Bachelard, irrationality and rationality respectively. The reason for going up
to the attic is rather obvious for the attic not only shelters us from the weather but it also makes apparent
the whole structure of the house. The attic, in Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, is a metaphor for clarity
of mind. The basement, on the contrary, is the darker, subterranean and irrational entity of the house.
Both this sites appear in our dreams and produce varying kinds of them.

Bachelard relies on Jung to account for his psychoanalytic metaphor in which when a person hears
suspicious sounds coming from the basement he rushes to the attic to see what they are, fearing to go
down to the basement.

One of the problems with this metaphor introduced in The Poetics of Space is that urban homes do not
have an attic nor basement, contrary to the countryside homes which Bachelard obviously has in mind.
Therefore Bachelard concludes that urban homes lack the vertical quality of intimacy. The urban boxes,
as Bachelard puts it, have neither roots nor a space around them. Their relations with space have
become artificial. the only way urban residential apartments can offer the experience elaborated upon by
Bachelard in The Poetics of Space in by employing our imagination, and here Bachelard describes his
own personal experience in a Paris apartment in which he had to mentally imagine his room and the city
as nature, turning the sofa into a boat rocking on the waves, and the city into an ocean.