Book review
If you’ve ever looked out a window on a snowy day, a warm cup of coffee/hot chocolate/tea in your hand, your body wrapped in a blanket, the soft light of a fireplace nearby, you probably thought about how pleasant your situation was. You may even have thought something like ‘I love winter, it’s such a cozy time.’ It all seems natural enough, the stuff of hallmark cards and Folgers commercials.
The Poetics of Space is hard to describe, but I suppose its goal is to look a little deeper at the feelings and emotions experienced in vignettes like this. ‘A house in winter,’ and the deep feeling of satisfaction and security it can evoke, is a nearly universal image, found in multiple arts–literature, poetry, film, etc. In particular, it is a place-based image. Winter is not actually cozy at all; it is cold and dark, and has a corresponding imagery all its own in the arts related to those ideas. The winter house as refuge is born from a contrast to this imagery–you like the winter because the house protects you from it, shelters you. In a related example, Bachelard notes that we sometimes find violent storms exhilarating when hearing or observing them from within the security of our own home. If you’ve ever listened to the wind howling and whistling outside your walls, the occasional but subtle creak of beams and tree branches, you know this feeling without me having to describe it further. As with winter, your satisfaction is not with the storm itself, which is destructive, and without shelter could harm you. ‘When the shelter is secure, the storm is good,’ as Bachelard says.
This book is full of examples like this, delving into the nature of what Bachelard calls ‘topoanalysis’–as he defines it, ‘the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.’ He begins with houses, but ranges across different kinds of ‘intimate space’: corners, nests, chests and drawers, and even concepts like miniatures/immensity and roundness.
Clearly, he is making the point that the physical representations of these things, like an actual house, are more than just objects you can touch and interact with. They are the stuff of ‘images,’ which in Bachelard’s usage is not just a picture or metaphor. It is something deeper and almost inexpressible, a thing of the imagination. Psychology is a factor here, but not exactly the same. Yes, you might have a fear of the basement because once when you were three years old you accidentally wandered down into one and were scared of the dark there. But even without this, basements have an association with the chthonic. You don’t ‘learn’ this intellectually, you feel it in your bones.
Bachelard is not so much concerned with why this is than he is with meditating upon it. In a way this whole book is a kind of meditation, a way of seeing things that doesn’t try to get too attached to explaining or deconstructing the imagery of our intimate spaces. Look too closely and the image disappears or becomes absurd. In his chapter on chests and drawers, Bachelard highlights a passage from a book in which an author imagines a world inside a box. Naturally, when he opens the box, there is nothing of the sort inside, but instead of talking about how this world never really existed, since it was scientifically impossible, he talks about how it must have vanished when he opened the lid. Whether you find this amusing/enchanting or empirically ridiculous, the tendency is to just dismiss writing like this as fanciful. If encountered in a person you meet, you might think they are eccentric at best. ‘In reality however, the poet has given concrete form to a very general psychological theme, namely, that there will always be more things in a closed, than in an open, box. To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.’
Bachelard is not trying to pit literary imagination against science and reason, far from it. Indeed, there is almost a kind of strange consilience with the above quote and actual scientific ideas, like Schrodinger’s Cat. That’s beside the point however. The point is that imagination, along with art, can help us ‘see.’ The imagination is ‘never wrong,’ because it goes beyond reality.
These are not easy concepts to put into words, so it is significant that Bachelard continually notes the power of art, particularly poetry, to express them. This is a powerful book because it explains feelings you might have had for stories, poems, paintings, etc., you’ve encountered during your life that you cherish, but are sometimes at a loss to understand why. I found myself thinking a lot about the poetry and prose of Borges, who often wrote about inexpressible feelings in seemingly mundane places. A street in Buenos Aires in the late afternoon, a leftover matchbook in an old drawer, the feeling of loss when realizing that the last time you saw someone was the last time you would ever see them again, but didn’t know it then. Borges understood the power of imagery, and frequently invoked them in his writing–the endless ‘Library of Babel’ could be one of immensity under Bachelard’s reasoning, while the accursed coin in ‘The Zahir’ might be one of miniaturization, and so on.
There are lots of similar examples, many from art that might get labelled ‘indie,’ or introspective,’ by the more diplomatic, ‘boring’ by others. Bachelard remarks that stories or art like this can act as a kind of litmus test for the reader/viewer and how they ‘see.’ One of his favorite examples was an account by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, about a time that he cleaned his piano. Described like this, it sounds painfully mundane. Why would anyone care to read about this? What is the point? For Bachelard, it is the ability to find joy and creativity in places where these things are not obvious: ‘The whole thing is a complex of sentiments, with its association of politeness and mischief, of humility and action….Some may disdain it or wonder that it should interest anyone; whereas to others it may seem alive, effective and stimulating, since it offers each one of us a means of becoming aware of our room by strongly synthesizing everything that lives in it, every piece of furniture that wants to be friends.’
To me, this explains much about those novels or movies that ‘don’t seem to be about anything.’ Think of the films of Yasujiro Ozu, or Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse.’ Very little ‘happens’ in art like this, nothing of world-shattering import. The actions of the characters, if they can even be described as actions, are insignificant:
‘But what a joy reading is, when we recognize the importance of these insignificant things, when we can add our own personal daydreams to the ‘insignificant’ recollections of the author! Then insignificance becomes the sign of extreme sensitivity to the intimate meanings that establish spiritual understanding between writer and reader.
And what charm it confers upon our memories to be able to say to ourselves that, except for the suede gloves, we have lived moments similar to those lived by Rilke!’
Being able to imagine the lives of others, both real and fictional, and in the process see them and ourselves better, is the whole reason the humanities exist and why they are still important. This is what separates art from its shallow, navel-gazing imitation. A poem written authentically, from the imagination of a person who knows the power of imagery, will always resonate with those it is intended for.
This review began with houses and ended with a more general talk about art, but that is the format Bachelard follows. As you read you will find yourself moving from discussions about basements and attics, to the difference between psychology and phenomenology, to the importance of dreams and daydreams. A highly recommended journey!
- Goodreads rating – 4.19
- REVIEW – Edward