Gaston Bachelard 'The Poetics of Space' - WordPress.com

I' I I I POE TIC S()I11ACEI II I ( I \ S S I (: L 0 0 K AT HOW W EI' I II 1 I'. N (, E I N TIM ATE P LAC E SGASTONBACHELARDWITH A NEW FOREWORDBY JOHN R . STILGOEJ

Gaston Bachelard

Beacon Press25 Beacon StreetBoston, Massachusetts 02108-2892Beacon Press booksare published under the auspices ofthe Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.First published in French under the title La poetique de l'espace,© 1958 by Presses Universitaires de FranceTranslation © 1964 by The Orion Press, Inc.First published as a Beacon paperback in 1969by arrangement with Grossman Publishers, Inc.Foreword to the 1994 Edition © 1994 by John R. StilgoeAll rights reservedPrinted in the United States of America99 98 97 96 95 8 7 6 5 4 3Text design by Wladislaw FinneLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataBachelard, Gaston, 1884-1962.[Poetique de l'espace. English]The poetics of space / Gaston Bachelard ; translated from theFrench by Maria Jolas, with a new foreword by John R. Stilgoe ..p. cm.Originally published: New York: Orion Press, 1964. Translationof: La poetique de l'espace.Includes bibliographical references.ISBN 0-8070-6473-41. Space and time. 2. Imagination. 3. Poetry. I. Jolas, M.II. Title.B2430.B253P6313 1994114-dc20 93-27874

contentsForeword to the 1994 EditionForeword to the 1964 EditionIntroductionVllXlxv1 . The House. From Cellar to Garret.The Significance of the Hut 32 House and Universe 383 Drawers, Chests and Wardrobes 7 44 Nests 905 Shells 1056 Corners 1367 Miniature 1488 Intimate Immensity 183·9The Dialectics of Outside and Inside 21110 The Phenomenology of Roundness 232

foreword to the 1994 editionShells and doorknobs, closets and attics, old towers andpeasant huts, all shimmer here, shimmer as points linked inthe transcendental geometry of Gaston Bachelard. Ostensiblymodest in compass, an inquiry focused on the house,its interior places, and its outdoor context, The Poetics ofSpace resonates deeply, vibrating at the edges of imagination,exploring the recesses of the psyche, the hallways ofthe mind. In the house Bachelard discovers a metaphor ofhumanness.No other writer closes so accurately, so deftly with themeanings of domestic space. Bachelard admits that everyhouse is first a geometical object of planes and right angles,but asks his reader to ponder how such rectilinearity so welcomeshuman complexity, idiosyncrasy, how the houseadapts to its inhabitants. Eschewing all simplicities of merearchitectural history, mere building detail, he skews hisscrutiny, moving through the house not as mere visitor, butas the master penetrator of anthro-cosmology. "A housethat has been experienced is not an inert box," he determinesearly on. "Inhabited space transcends geometricalspace." As he listens to the geometry of echoes dignifyinganddistinguishing-every old house, every experiencedhouse, he probes the impact of human habitation on geometricalform, and the impact of the form upon humaninhabitants.Here is indeed a magical book. Bachelard guides thereader into wondering why adults recall childhood cellarstairs from the top looking down but recall attic stairs fromthe bottom looking up, into musing on the significance ofdoorknobs encountered by children at eye level, into ponderingthe mysteries of fingertip memory. How does the

viiiforeword to the 1994 editionbody, not merely the mind, remember the feel of a latch in along-forsaken childhood home? If the house is the first universefor its young children, the first cosmos, how does itsspace shape all subsequent knowledge of other space, ofany larger cosmos? Is that house "a group of organic habits"or even something deeper, the shelter of the imaginationitself?In poetry and in folktale, in modern psychology andmodern ornithology, Bachelard finds the bits and pieces ofevidence he weaves into his argument that the house is anest for dreaming, a shelter for imagining. Beyond his startling,unsettling illuminations of criminal cellars and raisinsmellingcabinets, his insistence that people need houses inorder to dream, in order to imagine, remains one of themost unnerving, most convincing arguments in Westernphilosophy. Bachelard emphasizes not only the deeper significancesof tales of peasant huts and hermit shelters, significancesenduring as contemporary fascinations with lovers'cottages and readers' nooks, but also the abuse suffered bysuch simple structures in storm. Gales, hurricanes, anddownpours haunt The Poetics of Space, all vicissitudes thatmake the simplest of simple huts shine in strength of sheltering.Storm makes sense of shelter, and if the shelter issound, the shelter makes the surrounding storm good, enjoyable,re-creational, something that Bachelard uses toopen his understanding of house and universe, of intimacyand immensity.Always container, sometimes contained, the house servesBachelard as the portal to metaphors of imagination. Witha rare grace, Bachelard handles the most fragile shell, themost delicate "cottage chrysalis," the most simple containers."Chests, especially small caskets, over which we have morecomplete mastery, are objects that may be opened." Whatimmensities flow from objects that may be opened. FromJungian psychology to sexual intimacy, Bachelard exploresthe significances of nooks and crannies, the shells of turtles,the garden "chambers" still favored by landscape architects.To imagine living in a seashell, to live withdrawn into one'sshell, is to accept solitude-and to embrace, even if momentarily,the whole concept and tradition of miniature, of

ixforeword to the 1994 editionshrinking enough to be contained in something as tiny as aseashell, a dollhouse, an enchanted cottage. To imagineminiature is to glimpse others of Bachelard's wonders, theimmensity of the forest, the voluptuousness of high places.Out of the house spin worlds within worlds, the personalcosmoses Bachelard describes perhaps more acutely thanany other writer concerned with space.Language serves and delights Bachelard even as it servesand delights the reader. A master of poetic reading, perhapsa master of poetic hypervision, Bachelard writes toanyone transfixed by clear-eyed words. "Being myself a philosopherof adjectives," he admits in his chapter on miniature,"I am caught up in the perplexing dialetics of deepand large; of the infinitely diminished that deepens, -or thelarge that extends beyond all limits." Can one hear oneselfclose one's eyes? How accurately must one hear in order tohear the geometry of echoes in an old, peculiarly experiencedhouse? Bachelard writes of hearing by imagination,of filtering, of distorting sound, of lying awake in his cityapartment and hearing in the roar of Paris the rote of thesea, of hearing what is, and what is not. In struggling tolook "through the thousand windows of fancy," Bachelardelevates language, pushes adjectives and nouns to far-offlimits, perhaps to voluptuous heights, certainly to intimacyelsewhere unknown.And Bachelard addresses the moment, our liminal era ofchanging centuries in which so many verities seem shaky.He offers ways of interpreting not only the most ancient ofhouses but the most contemporary of office towers, shoppingmalls, and condominium complexes. His analysis istruly cross-cultural, for it focuses on physical items knownand cherished the world over, structures and objects thatcomprise a universal vocabulary of space, a vocabulary socrucially important that few inquirers notice it, let alonehold it up and turn it before the eye. In an age of so muchhomogenized space, so much shoddy, cramped, dimly lit,foul-smelling, low-ceilinged, ill-ordered structure, Bachelardoffers not only methods of assaying existing form butways of imagining finer textures and concatenations. ThePoetics of Space resonates in an era suffused by television

xforeword to the 1994 editionand video games, fluorescent lighting and plastic floors, airconditioningsystems and too-small closets. It is a book thatmakes its readers dissatisfied with much contemporarystructure and landscape, for it demonstrates to its readersthat space can be poetry.This book opens its readers to the titanic importance ofsetting in so much art from painting to poetry to fiction toautobiography. In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard revealstime after time that setting is more than scene in works of art,that it is often the armature around which the work revolves.He elevates setting to its rightful place alongside characterand plot, and offers readers a new angle of vision that reshapesany understanding of great paintings and novels, andfolktales too. His is a work of genuine topophilia.The Poetics of Space is a prism through which all worldsfrom literary creation to housework to aesthetics to carpentrytake on enhanced-and enchanted-significances.Every reader of it will never again see ordinary spaces inordinary ways. Instead the reader will see with the soul ofthe eye, the glint of Gaston Bachelard.JOHN R. STILGOEHarvard University

foreword to the 1884 editionAn unusual man, with an unusual career and a still moreunusual mind, Gaston Bachelard was so modest that probablyfew of his contemporaries will remember him as ayoung man, when he was slowly working his way fromsmall jobs in public administration up to a chair of philosophyin the Sorbonne. The Bachelard they will rememberis the last one, a debonair patriarch, with a marked provincialaccent, dearly loved by his students to whom he wasso generously devoted, but chiefly known to his neighborsas an old man fond of choosing his own cut of meat at themarket or of buying his own fish.I wish I could make clear how his provincial origins andhis familiarity with the things of the earth affected hisintellectual life and influenced the course of his philosophicalreflections. Owing to his courageous efforts, Bachelardfinally succeeded in giving himself a universityeducation, got all the university degrees one can get andended as a university professor; yet, unlike most of us, aleast in France, he never allowed himself to become moldedby the traditional ways of thinking to which universitiesunavoidably begin by submitting their students. His intellectualsuperiority was such that he could not fail tosucceed in all his academic ventures. We all loved him,admired him and envied him a little, because we felt he wasa free mind, unfettered by any conventions either in hischoice of the problems he wanted to handle or in his wayof handling them.What the reader will find in this volume marks the . laststage of his philosophical career. The first pages of theintroduction suggest that he himself then felt a need to ex-

xiiforeword to the 1964 editionplain to his public the reasons behind his recent estheticinterests.As a young philosopher, Bachelard had devoted his attentionto the problems raised by the nature of scientificknowledge, especially in physics. It was as a specialist inthe philosophy of science that he first made himself knownand established his reputation. Thirteen volumes, if I amnot mistaken, in which scientific competence went hand inhand with philosophical acumen, amply justified his reputation.Among them, one title at least should be mentionedat this place, namely The Experience of Space in ContemporaryPhysics. What I want to make dear, however,is that, as a university professor his whole career was foundedupon his philosophical critique of scientific knowledge andhis conception of a free type of rationalism, quite differentfrom the abstract mode of thinking which the word usuaIIydesignates, and wholly bent upon the art of using reasonas an instrument to achieve an always closer approach toconcrete reality.At that time, the future of Bachelard's career was easy toforetell. Having specialized, as they say, in the philosophyof science, he was likely to write a dozen more books on thesame subject. But things. were not to be that way. Bachelardfired his first warning shot when he unexpectedly publisheda book curiously entitled The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Idistinctly remember my first reaction to it. It was: Whatare they going to say? Who, they? Well, we, all of us, thecolleagues. After appointing a man to teach the philosophyof science and seeing him successfully do so for a numberof years, we don't like to learn that he has suddenly turnedhis interest to a psychoanalysis of the most unorthodox sort,since what then was being psychoanalyzed was not evenpeople, but an element.More volumes in the same vein were to follow duringthe course of years: Water and' Dreams, Air and Revery,The Earth and the Reveries of the Will, The Earth and theReveries of Rest, in which Bachelard was resolutely turningfrom the universe of reason and science to that of imaginationand poetry. Everything in them was new and I feel

xiiiforeword to the 1964 editionquite certain that their ultimate import has not yet beenfully realized. Perhaps it never wiII be, for what Bachelardcalls imagination is a most secret power that is as much of acosmic force as of a psychological faculty. In his introductionto Water and Dreams, shamelessly relapsing into someof the oldest philosophical categories-and I think I couldsay why he had to do so-Bachelard distinguished betweentwo forms of imagination, the formal imagination and thematerial imagination, and the main point was that he foundthem both at work in nature as well as in the mind. Innature, the formal imagination creates all the unnecessarybeauty it contains, such as the flowers; the material imagination,on the contrary, aims at producing that which, inbeing, is both primitive and eternal. In the mind, theformal imagination is fond of novelty, picturesqueness,variety and unexpectedness in events, while the materialimagination is attracted by the elements of permanencypresent in things. In us as well as in nature the materialimagination is productive of germs, but of germs wherethe form is deeply sunk in a substance. The images of theformal imagination, that is, of the free forms, have alwaysreceived the attention they deserve from the philosophers,but Bachelard was conscious of doing pioneering work inturning to the "images of matter." Of course, even suchimages imply a formal element, but those direct images ofmatter, as Bachelard calls them, are precisely those of formsgiven in matter and inseparable from it. By calling theattention of the philosophers to the significance of thematerial imagination, Bachelard was conscious of defininga new concept "necessarily required for a complete philosophical study of the poetic creation." In other words, hewas then turning from the philosophy of science to thephilosophy of art and to esthetics.This could not be done without extreme care, especiallyon the part of a mind for so many years intent on the intricate,but always precise, moves of the scientific mind. Fromthe very beginning, as will be seen in the first lines of thiswork, Bachelard realized that he would have to forget allhis acquired knowledge, all the philosophical habits con-

xivforeword to the 1964 editiontracted during years of scientific reflection, if he wantedfruitfully to approach the problems raised by the poeticimagination. To me at least, the first paragraph of theintroduction to this volume is one of the major modemcontributions to the philosophy of art, especially to itsmethodology. It opens in it a new era. By carefully dissociatingthe principles of a correct interpretation of artfrom those that have always rightly presided over thatknowledge, Gaston Bachelard has done about all that itis possible to do in order to establish the specificity of thephilosophy of art in the general family of the philosophicaldisciplines.How he did it is something every attentive reader willhave to discover by himself. Commentaries usually are longerthan the books and, in the last analysis, much less clear.I only wanted to mark the striking originality of a man sodeeply rooted in the soil of everyday life, and in such intimaterelation with the concrete realities of nature, thatafter carefully scrutinizing the methods whereby manachieves scientific cognition, he yielded to an irresistibleurge personally to communicate with the forces that createit. The only field where he could hope to observe them atplay was poetry. Hence the series of writings in' whichGaston Bachelard has applied the principles of his newmethod, and quite particularly this one, in which he finallybrought it to perfection.1ETIENNE GILSONAugust 19631 French titles of books mentioned: L'experience de l'espace dans laphysique contemporaine, La psych analyse du feu, L'eau et les rlves,L'air et les songes, La terre et les rlver;es de la volonte, La terre etles rlveries du repos.

IntroductionIA philosopher who has evolved his entire thinking from thefundamental themes of the philosophy of science, and fol·lowed the main line of the active, growing rationalism ofcontemporary science as closely as he could, must forget hislearning and break with all his habits of philosophical re·search, if he wants to study the problems posed by the poeticimagination. For here the cultural past doesn't count. Thelong day-in, day-out effort of putting together and con·structing his thoughts is ineffectual. One must be receptive,receptive to the image at the moment it appears: if therebe a philosophy of poetry, it must appear and re-appearthrough a significant verse, in total adherence to an isolatedimage; to be exact, in the very ecstasy of the newness ofthe image. The poetic image is a sudden salience on thesurface of the psyche, the lesser psychological causes ofwhich have not been sufficiently investigated. Nor can anythinggeneral and co-ordinated serve as a basis for a philosophyof poetry. The idea of principle or "basis" in thiscase would be disastrous, for it would interfere with theessential psychic actuality, the essential novelty of thepoem. And whereas philosophical reflection applied toscientific thinking elaborated over a long period of timerequires any new idea to become integrated in a body oftested ideas, even though this body of ideas be subjected toprofound change by the new idea (as is the case in all therevolutions of contemporary science), the philosophy ofpoetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past,at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearancecould be followed.

xvi introductionLater, when I shall have occasion to mention the relationof a new poetic image to an archetype lying dormant in thedepths of the unconscious, I shall have to make it understoodthat this relation is not, properly speaking, a causalone. The poetic image is not subject to an inner thrust. Itis not an echo of the past. On the contrary: through thebrilliance of an image, the distant past resounds withechoes, and it is hard to know at what depth these echoes. will reverberate and die away. Because of its novelty andits action, the poetic image has an entity and a dynamismof its own; it is referable to a direct ontology. This ontologyis what I plan to study.Very often, then, it is in the opposite of causality, thatis, in reverberation, which has been so subtly analyzed byMinkowski,l that I think we find the real measure of thebeing of a poetic image. In this reverberation, the poeticimage will have a sonority of being. The poet speaks on thethreshold of being. Therefore, in order to determine thebeing of an image, we shall have to experience its reverberationin the manner of Minkowski's phenomenology.1 Cf. Eugene Minkowski, Vers une Cosmo logie, chapter IX.(Editor's note: Eugene Minkowski, a prominent phenomenologistwhose studies extend both in the fields of psychology and phlosophy.followed Bergson in accepting the notion of "elan vital" as thedynamic origin of human life. Without the vital impulse, as conceivedby Bergson. the human being is static and therefore moribund.Referring to Anna Teresa Tymieniecka's book Phenomenologyand Science, we can say that for Minkowski, the essence of life isnot "a feeling of being, of existence:' but a feeling of participationin a flowing onward, necessarily expressed in terms of time. andsecondarily expressed in terms of space.In view of this, Minkowski's choice of what he calls an auditivemetaphor, retentir, is very apt, for in sound both time and space areepitomized. To understand Bachelard', reference, the following excerptfrom Minkowski's Vers "ne Cosmologie might be helpful:"If. having fixed the original form in our mind', eye, we ask ourselveshow that form comes alive and fills with life, we discover a newdynamic and vital category. a new property of the universe: reverberation(retentir). It is as though a well-spring existed in a sealed vaseand its waves. repeatedly echoing against the sides of this vase, filledit with their sonority. Or again. it is as though the sound of a huntinghom. reverberating everywhere through its echo, made the tiniestleaf, the tiniest wisp of moss shudder in a common movement and

xvii introductionTo say that the poetic image is independent of causalityis to make a rather serious statement. But the causes citedby psychologists and psychoanalysts can never really explainthe wholly unexpected nature of the new image, any morethan they can explain the attraction it holds for a mindthat is foreign to the process of its creation. The poet doesnot confer the past of his image upon me, and yet his imageimmediately takes root in me. The communicability of anunusual image is a fact of great ontological significance. Weshall return to this question of communion through brief,isolated, rapid actions. Images excite us-afterwards-butthey are not the phenomena of an excitement. In all psychologicalresearch, we can, of course, bear in mind psychoanalyticalmethods for determining the personality of apoet, and thus find a measure of the pressures-but abovetransformed the whole forest, filling it to its limits, into a vibrating,sonorous world .. . What is secondary in these images, or, in otherterms, what makes these images only images for us, are the sonorouswell-spring, the hunting hom, the sealed vase, the echo, the reflectionof sonorous waves against the sides-in a word, all that belongs to thematerial and palpable world."Suppose these elements were missing: would really nothing livingsubsist? For my part, I believe that this is precisely where we shouldsee the world come alive and, independent of any instrument, of anyphysical properties, fill up with penetrating deep waves which, althoughnot sonorous in the sensory meaning of the word, are not, forthis reason, less harmonious, resonant, melodic and capable of determhiingthe whole tonality of life. And this life itself will reverberateto the most profound depths of its being, through contact withthese waves, which are at once sonorous and silent . .. Here to "fillup" and "plenitude" will have a completely different sense. It is nota material object which fills another by espousing the form that theother imposes. No, it is the dynamism of the sonorous life itself whichby engulfing and appropriating everything it finds in its path, fillsthe slice of space, or better, the slice of the world that it assigns itselfby its movement, making it reverberate, breathing into it its ownlife. The word "slice" must not be taken in its geometrical sense. Itis not a matter of decomposing the world virtually or actually intosonorous balls, nor of tracing the limits of the sphere determined bythe waves emanating from a sonorous source. In fact, our examples,the sealed vase, the forest, because of the very fact that they fill upwith sounds, form a sort of self-enclosed whole, a microcosm . . ott)

xviiiintroductionall of the oppressions-that a poet has been subjected to inthe course of his life. But the poetic act itself, the suddenimage, the flare-up of being in the imagination, are inaccessibleto such investigations. In order to clarify theproblem of the poetic image philosophically, we shall haveto have recourse to a phenomenology of the imagination.By this should be understood a study of the phenomenonof the poetic image when it emerges into the consciousnessas a direct product of the heart, soul and being of man,apprehended in his actuality.III shall perhaps be asked why, departing from my formerpoint of view, I now seek a phenomenological determinationof images. In my earlier works on the subject of the imagination,I did, in fact, consider it preferable to maintain asobjective a position as possible with regard to the imagesof the four material elements, the four principles of theintuitive cosmogonies, and, faithful to my habits as aphilosopher of science, I tried to consider images withoutattempting personal interpretation. Little by little, thismethod, which has in its favor scientific prudence, seemedto me to be an insufficient basis on which to found a metaphysicsof the imagination. The "prudent" attitude itselfis a refusal to obey the immediate dynamics of the image.I have come to realize how difficult it is to break away fromthis "prudence." To say that one has left certain intellectualhabits behind is easy enough, but how is it to be achieved?For a rationalist, this constitutes a minor daily crisis, a sortof split in one's thinking which, even though its object bepartial-a mere image-has none the less great psychicrepercussions. However, this minor cultural crisis, thiscrisis on the simple level of a new image, contains the entireparadox of a phenomenology of the imagination, which is:how can an image, at times very unusual, appear to be aconcentration of the entire psyche? How-with no preparation-canthis singular, short-lived event constituted bythe appearance of an unusual poetic image, react on other

xix introductionminds and in other hearts, despite all the barriers of commonsense, all the disciplined schools of thought, content intheir immobility?It seemed to me, then, that this transsubjectivity of theimage could not be understood, in its essence, through thehabits of subjective reference alone. Only phenomenology-that is to say, consideration of the onset of the image inan individual consciousness--can help us to restore thesubjectivity of images and to measure their fullness, theirstrength and their transsubjectivity. These subjectivitiesand transsubjectivities cannot be determined once and forall, for the poetic image is essentially variational, and not,as in the case of the concept, constitutive. No doubt, it is anarduous task-as well as a monotonous one-to isolate thetransforming action of the poetic imagination in the detailof the variations of the images. For a reader of poems, therefore,an appeal to a doctrine that bears the frequently misunderstoodname of pheomenology risks falling on deafears. And yet, independent of all doctrine, this appeal isclear: the reader of poems is asked to consider an imagenot as an object and even less as the substitute for anobject, but to seize its specific reality. For this, the act ofthe creative consciousness must be systematically associatedwith the most fleeting product of that consciousness, thepoetic image. At the level of the poetic image, the dualityof subject and object is iridescent, shimmerIng, unceasinglyactive in its inversions. In this domain of the creation ofthe poetic image by the poet, phenomenology, if one dareto say so, is a microscopic phenomenology. As a result, thisphenomenology will probably be strictly elementary. Inthis union, through the image, of a pure but short-livedsubjectivity and a reality which will not necessarily reachits final constitution, the phenomenologist finds a field forcountless experiments; he profits by observations that canbe exact because they are simple, because they "have noconsequences," as is the case with scientific thought, whichis always related thought. The image, in its simplicity, hasno need of scholarship. It is the property of a naive consciousness;in its expression, it is youthful language. The

xxintroductionpoet, in the novelty of his images, is always the origin oflanguage. To specify exactly what a phenomenology of theimage can be, to specify that the ix;nage comes before thought,we should have to say that poetry, rather than being aphenomenology of the mind, is a phenomenology of thesoul. We should then have to collect documentation on thesubject of the dreaming consciousness.The language of contemporary French philosophy-andeven more so, psychology-hardly uses the dual meaning ofthe words soul and mind. As a result, they are both somewhatdeaf to certain themes that are very numerous inGerman philosophy, in which the distinction between mindand soul (der Geist und die Seele) is so clear. But since aphilosophy of poetry must be given the entire force of thevocabulary, it should not simplify, not harden anything.For such a philosophy, mind and soul are not synonymous,and by taking them as such, we bar translation of certaininvaluable texts, we distort documents brought to lightthanks to the archeologists of the image. The word ··soul"is an immortal word. In certain poems it cannot be effaced,for it is a word ,born of our breath.1 The vocal importancealone of a word should arrest the attention of a phenomenologistof poetry. The word "soul" can, in fact, be poeticallyspoken with such conviction that it constitutes a commitmentfor the entire poem. The poetic register that correspondsto the soul must therefore remain open to ourphenomenological investigations.In the domain of painting, in which realization seemsto imply decisions that derive from the mind, and rejoinobligations of the world of perception, the phenomenologyof the soul can reveal the first commitment of an oeuvre.Rene Huyghe, in his very fine preface for the exhibition ofGeorges Rouault's works in Albi, wrote: "1£ we wanted tofind out wherein Rouault explodes definitions . . . weshould perhaps have to call upon a word that has become1 Charles Nodier, Dictionnaire raisonne des onomatopees franfaises,Paris 1828, p. 46. "The different names for the soul. among nearlyall peoples. are just so many breath variations. and onomatopaoeicexpressions of breathing."

xxiintroductionrather outmoded, which is the word, souL" He goes on toshow that in order to understand, to sense and to loveRouault's work, we must "start from the center, at the veryheart of the circle from where the whole thing derives itssource and meaning: and here we come back again to thatforgotten, outcast word, the souL" Indeed, the soul-asRouault's painting proves-possesses an inner light, thelight that an inner vision knows and expresses in the worldof brilliant colors, in the world of sunlight, so that a veritablereversal of psychological perspectives is demanded ofthose who seek to understand, at the same time that theylove Rouault's painting. They must participate in an innerlight which is not a reflection of a light from the outsideworld. No doubt there are many facile claims to the expressions"inner vision" and "inner light." But here it isa painter speaking, a producer of lights. He knows fromwhat heat. source the light comes. He experiences the intimatemeaning of the passion for red. At the core of suchpainting, there is a soul in combat-the fauvism, the wildness,is interior. Painting like this is therefore a phenomenonof the soul. The oeuvre must redeem an impassioned soul.These pages by Rene Huyghe corroborate my idea thatit is reasonable to speak of a phenomenology of the soul. Inmany circumstances we are obliged to acknowledge thatpoetry is a commitment of the soul. A consciousness associated with the soul is more relaxed, less intentionalizedthan a consciousness associated with the phenomena of themind. Forces are manifested in poems that do not passthrough the circuits of knowledge. The dialectics of inspirationand talent become clear if we consider their two poles:the soul and the mind. In my opinion, soul and mind areindispensable for studying the phenomena of the poeticimage in their various nuances, above all, for following theevolution of poetic images from the original state of reveryto that of execution. In fact, in a future work, I plan toconcentrate particularly on poetic revery as a phenomenologyof the soul. In itself, revery constitutes a psychic conditionthat is too frequently confused with dream. But whenit is a question of poetic revery, of revery that derives

xxiiintroductionpleasure not only from itself, but also prepares poetic pleasurefor other souls, one realizes that one is no longer driftinginto somnolence. The mind is able to relax, but inpoetic revery the soul keeps watch, with no tension, calmedand active. To compose a finished, well-constructed poem,the mind is obliged to make projects that prefigure it. Butfor a simple poetic image, there is no project; a flicker ofthe soul is all that is needed.And this is how a poet poses the phenomenological problemof the soul in all clarity. Pierre-Jean Jouve writes:l"Poetry is a soul inaugurating a form." The soul inaugurates.Here it is the supreme power. It is human dignity.Even if the "form" was already well-known, previously discovered,carved from "commonplaces," before the interiorpoetic light was turned upon it, it was a mere object for themind. But the soul comes and inaugurates the form, dwellsin it, takes pleasure in it. Pierre-Jean Jouve's statement cantherefore be taken as a clear maxim of a phenomenologyof the soul.IIISince a phenomenological inquiry on poetry aspires to goso far and so deep, because of methodological obligations,it must go beyond the sentimental resonances with whichwe receive (more or less richly-whether this richness bewithin ourselves or within the poem) a work of art. Thisis where the phenomenological doublet of resonances andrepercussions must be sensitized. The resonances are dispersedon the different planes of our life in the world, whilethe repercussions invite us to give greater depth to our ownexistence. In the resonance we hear the poem, in the reverberationswe speak it, it is our own. The reverberationsbring about a change of being. It is as though the poet'sbeing were our being. The multiplicity of resonances thenissues from the reverberations' unity of being. Or, to put itmore simply, this is an impression that all impassionedpoetry-lovers know well: the poem possesses us entirely.1 Pierre-Jean Jouve. En miroir, Mercure de France. p. 11.

xxiii introductionThis grip that poetry acquires on our very being bears aphenomenological mark that is unmistakable. The exuberanceand depth of a poem are always phenomena of theresonance-reverberation doublet. It is as though the poem,through its exuberance, awakened new depths in us. Inorder to ascertain the psychological action of a poem, weshould therefore have to follow the two perspectives ofphenomenological analysis, towards the outpourings of themind and towards the profundities of the soul.Needless to say, the reverberation, in spite of its derivativename, has a simple phenomenological nature in thedomain of poetic imagination. For it involves bringingabout a veritable awakening of poetic creation, even in thesoul of the reader, through the reverberations of a singlepoetic image. By its novelty, a poetic image sets in motionthe entire linguistic mechanism. The poetic image places usat the origin of the speaking being.Through this reverberation, by going immediately beyondall psychology or psychoanalysis, we feel a poetic powerrising naively within us. After the original reverberation,we are able to experience resonances, sentimental repercussions,reminders of our past. But the image has touched thedepths before it stirs the surface. And this is also true of asimple experience of reading. The image offered us by readingthe poem now becomes really our own. It takes root inus. It has been given us by another, but we begin to havethe impression that we could have created it, that we shouldhave created it. It becomes a new being in our language,expressing us by making us what it expresses; in otherwords, it is at once a becoming of expression, and a becomingof our being. Here expression creates being.This last remark defines the level of the ontology towardswhich I am working. As a general thesis I believe that everythingspecifically human in man is logos. One would not beable to meditate in a zone that preceded language. But evenif this thesis appears to reject an ontological depth, it shouldbe granted, at least as a working hypothesis appropriate tothe subject of the poetic imagination.Thus the poetic image, which stems from the logos, is

xxiv introductionpersonally innovating. We cease to consider it as an "object"but feel that the "objective" critical attitude stiflesthe "reverberation" and rejects on principle the depth atwhich the original poetic phenomenon starts. As for thepsychologist, being deafened by the resonances, he keepstrying to describe his feelings. And the psychoanalyst, victimof his method, inevitably intellectualizes the image,losing the reverberations in his effort to untangle the skeinof his interpretations. He understands the image moredeeply than the psychologist. But that's just the point, he"understands" it. For the psychoanalyst, the poetic imagealways has a context. When he interprets it, however, hetranslates it into a language that is different from the poeticlogos. Never, in fact, was "traduttore, traditore" more justifiablyapplicable.When I receive a new poetic image, I experience itsquality of inter-subjectivity. I know that I am going to repeatit in order to communicate my enthusiasm. When consideredin transmission from one soul to another, it becomesevident that a poetic image eludes causality. Doctrinesthat are timidly causal, such as psychology, or stronglycausal, such as psychoanalysis, can hardly determine theontology of what is poetic. For nothing prepares a poeticimage, especially not culture, in the literary sense, and especiallynot perception, in the psychological sense.I always come then to the same conclusion: the essentialnewness of the poetic image poses the problem of thespeaking being's creativeness. Through this creativeness theimagining ' consciousness proves to be, very simply but verypurely, an origin. In a study of the imagination, a phenomenologyof the poetic imagination must concentrate onbringing out this quality of origin in various poetic images.IVBy thus limiting my inquiry to the poetic image at itsorigin, proceeding from pure imagination, I leave aside theproblem of the composition of the poem as a grouping togetherof numerous images. Into this composition enter

xxv introductioncertain psychologically complex elements that associateearlier cultures with actual literary ideals-componentswhich a complete phenomenology would no doubt beobliged to consider. But so extensive a project might beprejudicial to the purity of the phenomenological observations,however elementary, that I should like to present.The real phenomenologist must make it a point to be systematicallymodest. This being the case, it seems to me thatmerely to refer to phenomenological reading powers, whichmake of the reader a poet on a level with the image he hasread, shows already a taint of pride. Indeed, it would be alack of modesty on my part to assume personally a readingpower that could match and re-live the power of organized,complete creation implied by a poem in its entirety. Butthere is even less hope of attaining to a synthetic phenomenologywhich would dominate an entire oeuvre, as certainpsychoanalysts believe they can do. It is therefore on thelevel of detached images that I shall succeed in "reverberating"phenomenologically.Precisely this touch of pride, this lesser pride, this merereader's pride that thrives in the solitude of reading, bearsthe unmistakable mark of phenomenology, if its simplicityis maintained. Here the phenomenologist has nothing incommon with the literary critic who, as has frequently beennoted, judges a work that he could not create and, if weare to believe certain facile condemnations, would notwant to create. A literary critic is a reader who is necessarilysevere. By turning inside out like a glove an overworkedcomplex that has become debased to the point of beingpart of the vocabulary of statesmen, we might say that theliterary critic and the professor of rhetoric, who know-alland judge-all, readily go in for a simplex of superiority. A'Sfor me, being an addict of felicitous reading, I only readand re-read what I like, with a bit of reader's pride mixedin with much enthusiasm. But whereas pride usually developsinto a massive sentiment that weighs upon the entirepsyche, the touch of pride that is born of adherence to thefeiicity of an image, remains secret and unobtrusive. It iswithin us, mere readers that we are, it is for us, and for us

xxvi introductionalone. It is a homely sort of pride. Nobody knows thatin reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet.All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurtureand repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.When the page we have just read is too near perfection, ourmodesty suppresses this desire. But it reappears, nevertheless.In any case, every reader who re-reads a work that helikes, knows that its pages concern him. In Jean-PierreRichard's excellent collection of essays entitled Poesie etProfondeur (Poetry and Depth), there is one devoted toBaudelaire and one to Verlaine. Emphasis is laid on Bau"elaire,however, since, as the author says, his work "concernsus." There is great difference of tone between the two essays.Unlike Baudelaire, Verlaine does not attract completephenomenological attention. And this is always the case.In certain types of reading with which we are in deep sympathy,in the very expression itself, we are the "beneficiaries."Jean-Paul Richter, in Titan, gives the following descriptionof his hero: "He read eulogies of great men with as muchpleasure as though he himself had been the object of thesepanegyrics."! In any case, harmony in reading is inseparablefrom admiration. We can admire more or less, but asincere impulse, a little impulse toward admiration, is alwaysnecesssary if we are to receive the phenomenologicalbenefit of a poetic image. The slightest critical considerationarrests this impulse by putting the mind in secondposition, destroying the primitivity of the imagination. Inthis admiration, which goes beyond the passivity of contemplativeattitudes, the joy of reading appears to be thereflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader werethe writer's ghost. At least the reader participates in thejoy of creation that, for Bergson, is the sign of creation.2Here, creation takes place on the tenuous thread of thesentence, in the fleeting life of an expression. But this poeticexpression, although it has no vital necessity, has a bracingeffect on our lives, for all that. To speak well is part of liv-1 Jean-Paul Richter, Le Titan, French translation by Philarete-Chaslea,1878, Vol. I, p. 22.2 Henri Bergson, L'Energie Spirituelle, p. IS.

xxvii introductioning well. The poetic image is an emergence from language,it is always a little above the language of signification. Byliving the poems we read, we have then the salutary experienceof emerging. This, no doubt, is emerging at shortrange. But these acts of emergence are repeated; poetry putslanguage in a state of emergence, in which life becomesmanifest through its vivacity. These linguistic impulses,which stand out from the ordinary rank of pragmatic language,are miniatures of the vital impulse. A micro-Bergsonismthat abandoned the thesis of language-as-instrument infavor of the thesis of language-as-reality would find inpoetry numerous documents on the intense life of language.Thus, along with considerations on the life of words, asit appears in the evolution of language across the centuries,the poetic image, as a mathematician would say, presentsus with a sort of differential of this evolution. A great versecan have a great influence on the soul of a language. Itawakens images that had been effaced, at the same time thatit confirms the unforeseeable nature of speech. And if werender speech unforeseeable, is this not an apprenticeshipto freedom? What delight the poetic imagination takes inmaking game of censors I Time was when the poetic artscodified the licenses to be permitted. Contemporary poetry,however, has introduced freedom in the very body of thelanguage. As a result, poetry appears as a phenomenon offreedom.vEven at the level of an isolated poetic image, if only in theprogression of expression constituted by the verse, the phenomenologicalreverberation can appear; and in its extremesimplicity, it gives us mastery of our tongue. Here we are inthe presence of a minuscule phenomenon of the shimmeringconsciousness. The poetic image is certainly the psychicevent that has the least importance. To seek justification ofit in terms of perceptible reality, to determine its placeand role in the poem's composition, are two tasks that donot need to be undertaken until later. In the first phenom-

xxviiiintroductionenological inquiry of the poetic imagination, the isolatedimage, the phrase that carries it forward, the verse, or occasionallythe stanza in which the poetic image radiates,form language areas that should be studied by means oftopo-analysis. J. B. Pontalis, for instance, presents MichelLeiris as a "lonely prospector in the galleries of words,"!which describes extremely well this fibered space traversedby the simple impetus of words that have been experienced.The atomism of conceptual language demands reasons forfixation, forces of centralization. But the verse always hasa movement, the image flows into the line of the verse,carrying the imagination along with it, as though the imaginationcreated a nerve fiber. Pontalis adds the following(p. 932), which deserves to be remembered as a sure indexfor a phenomenology of expression: "The speaking subject.is the entire subject." And it no longer seems paradoxicalto say that the speaking subject exists in his entirety in apoetic image, because unlesss he abandons himself to itwithout reservations, he does not enter into the poetic spaceof the image. Very clearly, the poetic image furnishes oneof the simplest experiences of language that has been lived.And if, as I propose to do, it is considered as an origin ofconsciousness, it points to a phenomenology.Also, if we had to name a "school" of phenomenology, itwould no doubt be in connection with the poetic phenomenonthat we should find the clearest, the really elementary,lessons. In a recent book, J. H. Van den Berg2writes: "Poets and painters are born phenomenonologists."And noting that things "speak" to us and that, as a resultof this fact, if we give this language its full value, we havea contact with things, Van den Berg adds: "We are continuallyliving a solution of problems that reflection cannothope to solve." The philosopher whose investigations1 J. B. Pontalis, "Michel Leiris ou la psychanalyse intenninable" inLes Temps Modernes, December 1955, p. 931.2 J. H. Van den Berg, The Phenomenological Approach in Psychology.An introduction to recent phenomenological psycho-pathology (CharlesC. Thomas, Publisher. Springfield, Illinois, 1955, p. 61).

xxix introductionare centered on the speaking being will find encouragement"in these lines by this learned Dutch phenomenologist.VIThe phenomenological situation with regard to psychoanalyticalinvestigation will perhaps be more precisely statedif, in connection with poetic images, we are able to isolatea sphere of pure sublimation; of a sublimation which sublimatesnothing, which is relieved of the burden of passion,and freed from the pressure of desire. By thus giving to thepoetic image at its peak an absolute of sublimation, I placeheavy stakes on a simple nuance. It seems to me, however,that poetry gives abundant proof of this absolute sublimation,as will be seen frequently in the course of this work.When psychologists and psychoanalysts are furnished thisproof, they cease to see anything in the poetic image but asimple game, a short-lived, totally vain game. Images, inparticular, have no significance for them-neither from thestandpoint of the passions, nor from that of psychology orpsychoanalysis. It does not occur to them that the significanceof such images is precisely a poetic significance. Butpoetry is there with its countless surging images, imagesthrough which the creative imagination comes to live in itsown domain.For a phenomenologist, the attempt to attribute antecedentsto an image, when we are in the very existence of theimage, is a sign of inveterate psychologism. On the contrary,let us take the poetic image in its being. For the poetic consciousnessis so wholly absorbed by the image that appearson the language, above customary language; the language itspeaks with the poetic image is so new that correlations betweenpast and present can no longer be usefully considered.The examples I shall give of breaks in significance, sensationand sentiment will oblige the reader to grant me thatthe poetic image is under the sign of a new being.This new being is happy man.Happy in speech, therefore unhappy in reality, will be thepsychoanalyst's immediate objection. Sublimation, for him,

xxxintroductionis nothing but a vertical compensation, a flight upwards,exactly in the same way that compensation is a lateral flight.And right away, the psychoanalyst will abandon ontologicalinvestigation of the image, to dig into the past of man. Hesees and points out the poet's secret sufferings. He explainsthe flower by the fertilizer.The phenomenologist does not go that far. For him, theimage is there, the word speaks, the word of the poet speaksto him. There is no need to have lived through the poet'ssufferings in order to seize the felicity of speech offered bythe poet-a felicity that dominates tragedy itself. Sublimationin poetry towers above the psychology of the mundanelyunhappy soul. For it is a fact that poetry possesses a felicityof its own, however great the tragedy it may be called uponto illustrate.Pure sublimation, as I see it, poses a serious problem ofmethod for, needless to say, the phenomenologist cannot disregardthe deep psychological reality of the processes ofsublimation that have been so lengthily examined by psychoanalysis.His task is that of proceeding phenomenologicallyto images which have not been experienced, andwhich life does not prepare, but which the poet creates; ofliving what has not been lived, and being receptive to anoverture of language. There exist a few poems, such ascertain poems by Pierre-Jean Jouve, in which experiencesof this kind may be found. Indeed, I know of no oeuvre thathas been nourished on psychoanalytical meditation morethan Jouve's. However, here and there, his poetry passesthrough flames of such intensity that we no longer need liveat its original source. He himself has said:1 "Poetry constantlysurpasses its origins, and because it suffers moredeeply in ecstasy or in sorrow, it retains greater freedom."Again, on page 112: "The further I advanced in time, themore the plunge was controlled, removed from the contributorycause, directed toward the pure form of language." I1 Pierre-Jean Jouve, En Miroir, Mercure de France, p. 109. AndreeChedid has also written: "A poem remains free. We shall never encloseits fate in our own." The poet knows well that "his breath willcarry him farther than his desire." (Terre et poesie, G.L.M. § § 14 and2S)·

xxxiintroductioncannot say whether or not Pierre-Jean Jouve would agreeto consider the causes divulged by psychoanalysis as "contributory."But in the region of "the pure form of language"the psychoanalyst's causes do not allow us to predict thepoetic image in its newness. They are, at the very most,opportunities for liberation. And in the poetic age in whichwe live, it is in this that poetry is specifically "surprising."Its images are therefore unpredictable. Most literary criticsare insufficiently aware of this unpredictability, which isprecisely what upsets the plans of the usual psychologicalexplanations. But the poet states clearly: "Poetry, especiallyin its present endeavors, (can) only correspond to attentivethought that is enamored of something unknown, and essentiallyreceptive to becoming." Later, on page 170: "Consequently,a new definition of a poet is in view, which is:he who knows, that is to say, who transcends, and nameswhat he knows." Lastly, (p. 10) : "There is no poetry withoutabsolute creation."Such poetry is rare.1 The great mass of poetry is moremixed with passion, more psychologized. Here, however,rarity and exception do not confirm the rule, but contradictit and set up a new regime. Without the region of absolutesublimation-however restrained and elevated it may be,and even though it may seem to lie beyond the reach ofpsychologists or psychoanalysts, who, after all, have noreason to examine pure poetry-poetry's exact polarity cannotbe revealed.We may hesitate in determining the exact level of disruption,we may also remain for a long time in the domain ofthe confusing passions that perturb poetry. Moreover, theheight at which we encounter pure sublimation is doubtlessnot the same for all souls. But at least the necessity ofseparating a sublimation examined by a psychoanalyst fromone examined by a phenomenologist of poetry is a necessityof method. A psychoanalyst can of course study the humancharacter of poets but, as a result of his own sojourn in theregion of the passions, he is not prepared to study poeticimages in their exalting reality. C.J. Jung said this, in fact,1 Pierre-Jean Jouve, IDe. cit., p. 9: "La poesie est rare."

xxxiiintroductionvery clearly: by persIstIng in the habits of judgment inherentin psychoanalysis, "interest is diverted from the workof art and loses . itself in the inextricable chaos of psychologicalantecedents; the poet becomes a 'clinical case,' anexample, to which is given a certain number in the psychopathiasexualis. Thus the psychoanalysis of a work ofart moves away from its object and carries the discussioninto a domain of general human interest, which is not inthe least peculiar to the artist and, particularly, has noimportance for his art."1Merely with a view to summarizing this discussion, Ishould like to make a polemical remark, although indulgingin polemics is not one of my habits.A Roman said to a shoemaker who had directed his gazetoo high:Ne sutor ultra crepidam.Every time there is a question of pure sublimation, whenthe very being of poetry must be determined, shouldn't thephenomenologist say to the psychoanalyst:Ne psuchor ultra uterum.VIIIn other words, as soon as an art has become autonomous,it makes a fresh start. It is therefore salient to consider thisstart as a sort of phenomenology. On principle, phenomenologyliquidates the past and confronts what is new. Evenin an art like painting. which bears witness to a skill, theimportant successes take place independently of skill. In astudy of the painting of Charles Lapicque, by Jean Lescure,we read: "Although his work gives evidence of wide cultureand knowledge of all the dynamic expressions of space,they are not applied, they are not made into recipes.. . . Knowing must therefore be accompanied by an equalcapacity to forget knowing. Non-knowing is not a form of1 C. G. Jung "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to the PoeticArt" in Contributions to Analytical PsychololfY, trans. by H. G. BeCary F. Baynes. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928.

xxxiiiintroductionignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge. Thisis the price that must be paid for an oeuvre to be, at alltimes, a sort of pure beginning, which makes its creationan exercise in freedom."1 These lines are of essential importancefor us, in that they may be transposed immediatelyinto a phenomenology of the poetic. In poetry, non-knowingis a primal condition; if there exists a skill in the writingof poetry, it is in the minor task of associating images. Butthe entire life of the image is in its dazzling splendor, inthe fact that an image is a transcending of all the premisesof sensibility.It becomes evident, then, that a man's work stands outfrom life to such an extent that life cannot explain it. JeanLescure says of the painter (loc. cit., p. 132): "Lapicque demandsof the creative act that it should offer him as muchsurprise as life itself." Art, then, is an increase of life, asort of competition of surprises that stimulates our consciousnessand keeps it from becoming somnolent. In aquotation of Lapicque himself (given by Lescure, p. 1 32)we read: "If, for instance, I want to paint horses taking thewater hurdle at the Auteuil race-course, I expect my paintingto give me as much that is unexpected, although of anotherkind, as the actual race I witnessed gave me. Not for asecond can there be any question of reproducing exactlya spectacle that is already in the past. But I have to re-liveit entirely, in a manner that is new and, this time, from thestandpoint of painting. By doing this, I ,create for myselfthe possibility of a fresh impact." And Lescure concludes:"An artist does not create the way he lives, he lives theway he creates."Thus, contemporary painters no longer consider theimage as a simple substitute for a perceptible reality. Proustsaid already of roses painted by Eistir that they were "a newvariety with which this painter, like some clever horticulturist,had enriched the Rose famiIy."21 Jean Lescure, Lapicque, Galanis, Paris, p. 78.2 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. V: Sodom andGomoTTah.

xxxiv introductionVIIIAcademic psychology hardly deals with the subject of thepoetic image, which is often mistaken for simple metaphor.Generally, in fact, the word image, in the works of psychologists,is surrounded with confusion: we see images, wereproduce images, we retain images in our memory. Theimage is everything except a direct product of the imagination.In Bergson's Matiere et Memoire (Matter and Memory),in which the image concept is very widely treated,there is only one reference (on p. 198) to the productiveimagination. This production remains, therefore, an act oflesser freedom, that has no relation to the great free actsstressed by Bergsonian philosophy. In this short passage, thephilosopher refers to the "play of fantasy" and the variousimages that derive from it as "so many liberties that themind takes with nature." But these liberties, in the plural,do not commit our being; they do not add to the languagenor do they take it out of its utilitarian role. They reallyare so much "play." Indeed, the imagination hardly lendsiridescence to our recollections. In this domain of poeticizedmemory, Bergson is well this side of Proust. The libertiesthat the mind takes with nature do not really designate thenature of the mind.I propose, on the contrary, to consider the imaginationas a major power of human nature. To be sure, there isnothing to be gained by saying that the imagination is thefaculty of producing images. But this tautology has at leastthe virtue of putting an end to comparisons of images withmemories.By the swiftness of its actions, the imagination separatesus from the past as well as from reality; it faces the future.To the junction of reality, wise in experience of the past,as it is defined by traditional psychology, should be addeda junction of unreality, which is equally positive, as I triedto show in certain of my earlier works. Any weakness in thefunction of unreality, will hamper the productive psyche.If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee.But to touch more simply upon the problems of the

xxxvintroductionpoetic imagination, it is impossible to receive the psychicbenefit of poetry unless these two functions of the humanpsyche-the function of the real and the function of theunreal-are made to co-operate. We are offered a veritablecure of rhythmo-analysis through the poem, which interweavesreal and unreal, and gives dynamism to language bymeans of the dual activity of signification and poetry. Andin poetry, the commitment of the imagining being is suchthat it is no longer merely the subject of the verb uto adaptoneself." Actual conditions are no longer determinant. Withpoetry, the imagination takes its place on the margin,exactly where the function of unreality comes to charm orto disturb-always to awaken-the sleeping being lost in itsautomatisms. The most insidious of these automatisms, theautomatism of language, ceases to function when we enterinto the domain of pure sublimation. Seen from this heightof pure sublimation, reproductive imagination ceases to beof much importance. To quote Jean-Paul Richter:1 "Re_productive imagination is the prose of productive imagination."IXIn this philosophical introduction-doubtless too long-Ihave summarized certain general themes that I should liketo put to the test in the work that follows, as also in a fewothers which I hope to write. In the present volume, myfield of examination has the advantage of being well circumscribed.Indeed, the images I want to examine are thequite simple images of felicitous space. In this orientation,these investigations would deserve to be called topophilia.They seek to determine the human value of the sorts ofspace that may be grasped, that may be defended againstadverse forces, the space we love. For diverse reasons, andwith the differences entailed by poetic shadings, this iseulogized space. Attached to its protective value, which1 Jean-Paul Richter, Poetique 01£ introduction tl l'esthetique translated,1862, Vol. 1, p. 145.

xxxviintroductioncan be a positive one, are also imagined values, which soonbecome dominant. Space that has been seized upon by theimagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to themeasures and estimates of the surveyor. It has been livedin, not in its positivity, but with all the partiality of theimagination. Particularly, it nearly always exercises an attraction.For it concentrates being within limits that protect.In the realm of images, the play between the exteriorand intimacy is not a balanced one. On the other hand,hostile space is hardly mentioned in these pages. The spaceof hatred and combat can only be studied in the context ofimpassioned subject matter and apocalyptic images. Forthe present, we shall consider the images that attract. Andwith regard to images, it soon becomes clear that to attractand to repulse do not give contrary experiences. The termsare contrary. When we study electricity or magnetism, wecan speak symmetrically of repulsion and attraction. Allthat is needed is a change of algebraic signs. But images donot adapt themselves very well to quiet ideas, or above all,to definitive ideas. The imagination is ceaselessly imaginingand enriching itself with new images. It is this wealth ofimagined being that I should like to explore.Here, then, is a rapid account of the chapters that composethis book.First of all, as is proper in a study of images of intimacy,we shall pose the problem of the poetics of the house. Thequestions abound: how can secret rooms, rooms that havedisappeared, become abodes for an unforgettable past?Where and how does repose find especially conducive situations?How is it that, at times, a provisional refuge or anoccasional shelter is endowed in our intimate day-dreamingwith virtues that have no objective foundation? With thehouse image we are in possession of a veritable principleof psychological integration. Descriptive psychology, depthpsychology, psychoanalysis and phenomenology could constitute,with the house, the corpus of doctrines that I havedesignated by the name of topo-analysis. On whatever theoretical horizon we examine it, the house image would appearto have become the topography of our intimate being.

xxxvii introductionIn order to give an idea of how complex is the task of thepsychologist who studies the depths . of the human soul,C. G. Jung asks his readers to consider the following comparison:"We have to describe and to explain a building theupper story of which was erected in the nineteenth century;the ground-floor dates from the sixteenth century, and a carefulexamination of the masonry discloses the fact that it wasreconstructed from a dwelling-tower of the eleventh century.In the cellar we discover Roman foundation walls, and underthe cellar a filled-in cave, in the floor of which stonetools are found and remnants of glacial fauna in the layersbelow. That would be a sort of picture of our mental structure."1Naturally, Jung was well aware of the limitations ofthis comparison (d. p. 120). But from the very fact that itmay be so easily developed, there is ground for taking thehouse as a tool for analysis of the human soul. With the helpof this tool, can we not find within ourselves, while dreamingin our own modest homes, the consolations of the cave? Arethe towers of our souls razed for all time? Are we to remain,to quote Gerard de Nerval's famous line, beings whose"towers have been destroyed"? Not only our memories, butthe things we have forgotten are "housed." Our soul is anabode. And by remembering "houses" and "rooms," welearn to "abide" within ourselves. Now everything becomesclear, the house images move in both directions: they arein us as much as we are in them, and the play is so variedthat two long chapters are needed to outline the implicationsof house images.After these two chapters on the houses of man, I studieda series of images which may be considered the houses ofthings: drawers, chests and wardrobes. What psychologylies behind their locks and keys! They bear within themselvesa kind of esthetics of hidden things. To pave the waynow for a phenomenology of what is hidden, one preliminaryremark will suffice: an empty drawer is unimaginable.It can only be thought of. And for us, who must describe1 C. G. Jung, Contributions to Analytical Psychology, translated byH. G. and Cary F. Baynes. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928, pp. 118-119. (Bollingen Series, Vol. XV). This passage is taken from the essayentitled: "Mind and the Earth."

xxxviii introductionwhat we imagine before what we know, what we dream beforewhat we verify, all wardrobes are full.At times when we believe we are studying something, weare only being receptive to a kind of day-dreaming. Thetwo chapters that I devoted to nests and shells--the tworefuges of vertebrates and invertebrates-bear witness to anactivity of the imagination which is hardly curbed by thereality of objects. During my lengthy meditation upon theimagination of the four elements, I re-lived countless aerialor aquatic day-dreams, according to whether I followed thepoets into the nest in the tree, or into the sort of animalcave that is constituted by a shell. Sometimes, even when Itouch things, I still dream of an element.After having followed the day-dreams of inhabiting theseuninhabitable places, I returned to images that, in orderfor us to live them, require us to become very small, as innests and shells. Indeed, in our houses we have nooks andcomers in which we like to curl up comfortably. To curlup belongs to the phenomenology of the verb to inhabit,and only those who have learned to do so can inhabit withintensity. In this respect, we have within ourselves an entireassortment of images and recollections that we wouldnot readily disclose. No doubt, a psychoanalyst, who desiredto systematize these images of comforting retreat, couldfurnish numerous documents. All I had at my disposal wereliterary ones. I thus wrote a short chapter on "nooks andcorners," and was surprised myself to see that importantwriters gave literary dignity to these psychological documents.After all these chapters devoted to intimate space, Iwanted to see what the dialectics of large and small offeredfor a poetics of space, how, in exterior space, the imaginationbenefited from the relativity of size, without the helpof ideas and, as it were, quite naturally. I have put thedialectics of small and large under the signs of miniatureand immensity, but these two chapters are. not as antitheticalas might be supposed. In both cases, small and largeare not to be seized in their objectivity, since, in this presentwork, I only deal with them as the two poles of a projection

xxxix introductionof images. In other of my books, particularly with regardto immensity, I have tried to delineate the poet's meditationsbefore the more imposing spectacles of nature.1 Here,it is a matter of participating more intimately in the movementof the image. For instance, I shall have to prove infollowing certain poems that the impression of immensityis in us, and not necessarily related to an object.At this point in my book, I had already collected a sufficientnumber of images to pose, in my own way, by givingthe images their ontological value, the dialectics of withinand without, which leads to a dialectics of open and closed.Directly following this chapter on the dialectics of withinand without is a chapter titled "The Phenomenology ofRoundness." The difficulty that had to be overcome in writingthis chapter was to avoid all geometrical evidence. Inother words, I had to start with a sort of intimacy of roundness.I discovered images of this direct roundness amongthinkers and poets, images-and this, for me, was essential-that were not mere metaphors. This furnished me with afurther opportunity to expose the intellectualism of metaphorand, consequently, to show once more the activity thatis characteristic of pure imagination.It was my idea that these two last chapters, which arefull of metaphysical implications, would tie into anotherbook that I should still like to write. This book would bea condensation of the many public lectures that I gave atthe Sorbonne during the three last years of my teachingcareer. But shall I have the strength to write this book? Forthere is a great distance between the words we speak uninhibitedlyto a friendly audience and the discipline neededto write a book. When we are lecturing, we become animatedby the joy of teaching and, at times, our words thinkfor us. But to write a book requires really serious reflection.G. B.1 Ct. La terre et leI rtoeries de la volonte, Corti, Paris, p. 878 and thefollowing pages.

1the house.from cellar 10 Barral.the SlgnlllCance ol lhe hulA. la porte de la maison qui viendra frapper7Une porte ouverte on entreUne porte fermee un antreLe monde bat de l'autre ctJte de ma porte.PIERRE ALBERT BIROTLes A.musements Naturels, p. 217(At the door of the house who will come knocking?An open door, we enterA closed door, a denThe world pulse beats beyond my door.)The house, quite obviously, is a privileged entity for aphenomenological study of the intimate values of insidespace, provided, of course, that we take it in both its unityand its complexity, and endeavor to integrate all the specialvalues in one fundamental value. For the house furnishesus dispersed images and a body of images at the same time.In both cases, I shall prove that imagination augments thevalues of reality. A sort of attraction for images concentratesthem about the house. Transcending our memories of allthe houses in which we have found shelter, above and beyondall the houses we have dreamed we lived in, can weisolate an intimate, concrete essence that would be a justificationof the uncommon value of all of our images ofprotected intimacy? This, then, is the main problem.In order to solve it, it is not enough to consider the. houseas an "object" on which we can make our judgments anddaydreams react. For a phenomenologist, a psychoanalyst,or a psychologist (these three points of view being named

4 the poetics of spacein the order of decreasing efficacy), it is not a question ofdescribing houses, or enumerating their picturesque featuresand analyzing for which reasons they are comfortable. Onthe contrary, we must go beyond the problems of description-whether this description be ,objective or subjective, that is,whether it give facts or impressions-in order to attain tothe primary virtues, those that reveal an attachment that isnative in some way to the primary function of inhabiting.A geographer or an ethnographer can give us descriptionsof very varied types of dwellings. In each variety, the phenomenologist makes the effort needed to seize upon thegerm of the essential, sure, immediate well-being it encloses.In every dwelling, even the richest, the first task of thephenomenologist is to find the original shell.But the related problems are many if we want to determinethe profound reality of all the subtle shadings of ourattachment for a chosen spot. For a phenomenologist, theseshadings must be taken as the first rough outlines of a psychologicalphenomenon. The shading is not an additional,superficial coloring. We should therefore have to say howwe inhabit our vital space, in accord with all the dialecticsof life, how we take root, day after day, in a "comer of theworld."For our house is our corner of the world. As has oftenbeen said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in everysense of the word. If we look at it intimately, the humblestdwelling has beauty. Authors of books on "the humblehome" often mention this feature of the poetics of space.But this mention is much too succinct. Finding little todescribe in the humble home, they spend little time there;so they describe it as it actually is, without really experiencingits primitiveness, a primitiveness which belongs toall, rich and poor alike, if they are willing to dream.But our adult life is so dispossessed of the essential benefits,its anthropocosmic ties have become so slack, that wedo not feel their first attachment in the universe of thehouse. There is no dearth of abstract, "world-consdousuphilosophers who discover a universe by means of the dia-

5 the house. from cella.,. to garret. the significance of the hutIectical game of the I and the non-I. In fact, they know theuniverse before they know the house; the far horizon before the resting-place; whereas the real beginnings ofimages, if we study them phenomenologically, will give concreteevidence of the values of inhabited space, of the non-Ithat protects the I.Indeed, here we touch upon a converse whose images weshall have to explore: all really inhabited space bears theessence of the notion of home. In the course of this work,we shall see that the imagination functions in this directionwhenever the human being has found the slightestshelter: we shall see the imagination build "walls" of impalpableshadows, comfort itself with the illusion of protection-or,just the contrary, tremble behind thick walls,mistrust the staunchest ramparts. In short, in the mostinterminable of dialectics, the sheltered being gives perceptiblelimits to his shelter. He experiences the house inits reality and in its virtuality, by means of thought anddreams. It is no longer in its positive aspects that the houseis really "lived," nor is it only in the passing hour that werecognize its benefits. An entire past comes to dwell in anew house. The old saying: "We bring our lares with us"has many variations. And the daydream deepens to thepoint where an immemorial domain opens up for thedreamer of a home beyond man's earliest memory. Thehouse, like fire and water, will permit me, later in this work,to recall flashes of daydreams that illuminate the synthesisof immemorial and recollected. In this remote region, memoryand imagination remain associated, each one workingfor their mutual deepening. In the order of values, theyboth constitute a community of memory and image. Thusthe house is not experienced from day to day only, on thethread of a narrative, or in the telling of our own story.Through dreams, the various dwelling-places in our livesco-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days. Andafter we are in the new house, when memories of otherplaces we have lived in come back to us, we travel to theland of Motionless Childhood, motionless the way all Im-

6 the poetics of spacememorial things are. We live fixations, fixations of happiness.1We comfort ourselves by reliving memories ofprotection. Something closed must retain our memories,while leaving them their original value as images. Memoriesof the outside world will never have the same tonality asthose of home and, by recalling these memories, we add toour store of dreams; we are never real historians, but alwaysnear poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but anexpression of a poetry that was lost.Thus, by approaching the house images with care not tobreak up the solidarity of memory and imagination, wemay hope to make others feel all the psychological elasticityof an image that moves us at an unimaginable depth.Through poems, perhaps more than through recollections,we touch the ultimate poetic depth of the space of thehouse.This bei.ng the case, if I were asked to name the chiefbenefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming,the house protects the dreamer, the house allowsone to dream in peace. Thought and experience are notthe only things that sanction human values. The valuesthat belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths.Daydreaming even has a privilege of autovalorization. Itderives direct pleasure from its own being. Therefore, theplaces in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitutethemselves in a new daydream, and it is becauseour memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreamsthat these dwelling-places of the past remain in usfor all time.Now my aim is clear: I must show that the house is oneof the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts,memories and dreams of mankind. The binding principle inthis integration is the daydream. Past, present and futuregive the house different dynamisms, which often interfere,at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another. In1 We should grant "fixation" its virtues, independently of psychoanalyticalliterature which, because of its therapeutic function, is obligedto record. principally. processes of defixation.

7 the house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hutthe life of a man, the house thrusts aside contingencies, itscouncils of continuity are unceasing. Without it, manwould be a dispersed being. It maintains him through thestorms of the heavens and through those of life. It is bodyand soul. It is the human being's first world. Before he is"cast into the world," as claimed by certain hasty metaphysics,man is laid in the cradle of the house. And always,in our daydreams, the house is a large cradle. A concretemetaphysics cannot neglect this fact, this simple fact, allthe more, since this fact is a value, an important value, towhich we return in our daydreaming. Being is already avalue. Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, allwarm in the bosom of the "house.From my viewpoint, from the phenomenologist's viewpoint,the conscious metaphysics that starts from the momentwhen the being is Hcast into the world" is a secondarymetaphysics. It passes over the preliminaries, whenbeing is being-well, when the human being is deposited ina being-well, in the well-being originally associated withbing. To illustrate the metaphysics of consciousness weshould have to wait for the experiences during which beingis cast out, that is to say, thrown out, outside the beingof the house, a circumstance in which the hostility of menand of the universe accumulates. But a complete metaphysics,englobing both the conscious and the unconscious,would leave the privilege of its values within. Within thebeing, in the being of within, an enveloping warmth welcomesbeing. Being reigns in a sort of earthly paradise ofmatter, dissolved in the comforts of an adequate matter.It is as though in this material paradise, the human beingwere bathed in nourishment, as though he were gratifiedwith all the essential benefits.When we dream of the house we were born in, in theutmost depths of revery, we participate in this originalwarmth, in this well-tempered matter of the material paradise.This is the environment in which the protectivebeings live. We shall come back to the maternal featuresof the house. For the moment, I should like to point out

8 the poetics of spacethe original fullness of the house's being. Our daydreamscarry us back to it. And the poet well knows that the households childhood motionless "in its arms"l:Maison, pan de prairie, d lumiere du soirSoudain vow acquerez presque une face humaineVow tes pres de now, embrassants, em brasses.(House, patch of meadow. oh evening lightSuddenly you acquire an almost human faceYou are very near us, embracing and embraced. )IIOf course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memoriesare housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if ithas a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memorieshave refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. Allour lives we come back to them in our daydreams. A psychoanalystshould, therefore, turn his attention to this simplelocalization of our memories. I should like to give thename of topoanalysis to this auxiliary of psychoanalysis.Topoanalysis, then, would be the systematic psychologicalstudy of the sites of our intimate lives. In the theater ofthe past that is constituted by memory, the stage settingmaintains the characters in their dominant r6les. At timeswe think we know ourselves in time, when all we know isa sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being's stability-a being who does not want to melt away, and who, evenin the past, when he sets out in search of things past, wantstime to "suspend" its flight. In its countless alveoli spacecontains compressed time. That is what space is for.And if we want to go beyond history, or even, while remainingin history, detach from our own history the alwaystoo contingent history of the persons who have encumberedit, we realize that the calendars of our lives can only be1. Rainer Maria Rilke, translated into French by Claude Vie, in LaLettres, 4th year, Nos. 14-15-16. p. 11. Editors note: In this work, allof the Rilke references will be to the French translations that inspiredBachelard's comments.

9 the house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hutestablished in its imagery. In order to analyze our beingin the hierarchy of an ontology, or to psychoanalyze ourunconscious entrenched in primitive abodes, it would benecessary, on the margin of normal psychoanalysis, to desocializeour important memories, and attain to the planeof the daydreams that we used to have in the places identifiedwith our solitude. For investigations of this kind, daydreamsare more useful than dreams. They show moreoverthat daydreams can be very different from dreams.1And so, faced with these periods of solitude, the topoanalyststarts to ask questions: Was the room a large one?Was the garret cluttered up? Was the nook warm? Howwas it lighted? How, too, in these fragments of space, didthe human being achieve silence? How did he relish thevery special silence of the various retreats of solitary daydreaming?Here space is everything, for time ceases to quickenmemory. Memory-what a strange thing it isl-does notrecord concrete duration, in the Bergsonian sense of theword. We are unable to relive duration that has been destroyed.We can only think of it, in the line of an abstracttime that is deprived of all thickness. The finest specimensof fossilized duration concretized as a result of long sojourn,are to be found in and through space. The unconsciousabides. Memories are motionless, and the moresecurely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are. Tolocalize a memory in time is merely a matter for the biographerand only corresponds to a sort of external history,for external use, to be communicated to others. But hermeneutics,which is more profound than biography, mustdetermine the centers of fate by ridding history of its conjunctivetemporal tissue, which has no action on our fates.For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces ofour intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.Psychoanalysis too often situates the passions "in thecentury." In reality, however, the passions simmer and resimmerin solitude:the passionate being prepares hisexplosions and his exploits in this solitude.1 I plan to study these differences in a future work.

10 the poetics of spaceAnd all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, thespaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed,desired and compromised solitude, remain indelible withinus, and precisely because the human being wants them toremain so. He knows instinctively that this space identifiedwith his solitude is creative; that even when it is foreverexpunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is aliento all the promises of the future, even when we no longerhave a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, thereremains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived inan attic. We return to them in our night dreams. Theseretreats have the value of a shell. And when we reach thevery end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to theregions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a typeof repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial. But in the daydream itself,the recollection of moments of confined, simple, shut-inspace are experiences of heartwarming space, of a spacethat does not seek to become extended, but would like aboveall still to be possessed. In the past, the attic may haveseemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter andhot in summer. Now, however, in memory recapturedthrough daydreams, it is hard to say through what syncretismthe attic is at once small and large, warm. and cool,always comforting.IIIThis being the case, we shall have to introduce a slightnuance at the very base of topoanalysis. I pointed out earlierthat the unconscious is housed. It should be added thatit is well and happily housed, in the space of its happiness.The normal unconscious knows how to make itself at homeeverywhere, and psychoanalysis comes to the assistance ofthe ousted unconscious, of the unconscious that has beenroughly or insidiously dislodged. But psychoanalysis setsthe human being in motion, rather than at rest. It calls onhim to live outside the abodes of his unconscious, to enterinto life's adventures, to come out of himself. And natu-

11 the house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hutrally, its action is a salutary one. Because we must also givean exterior destiny to the interior being. To accompanypsychoanalysis in this salutary action, we should have toundertake a topoanalysis of all the space that has invitedus to come out of ourselves.Emmenez.-moi, chemins! . • •(Carry me along, oh roads ... )wrote Marceline Desbordes.Valmore, recalling her nativeFlanders (Un ruisseau de la Sca1'pe).And what a dynamic, handsome object is a path! Howprecise the familiar hill paths remain for our muscularconsciousnessl A poet has expressed all this dynamism inone single line:0, mes chemins et leur cadenceJean Caubere, Deserts(Oh, my roads and their cadence.)When I relive dynamically the road that "climbed" thehill, I am quite sure that the road itself had muscles, orrather, counter-muscles. In my room in Paris, it is a goodexercise for me to think of the road in this way. As I writethis page, I feel freed of my duty to take a walk: I am sureof having gone out of my house.And indeed we should find countless intermediaries betweenreality and symbols if we gave things all the movementsthey suggest. George Sand, dreaming beside a pathof yellow sand, saw life flowing by. "What is more beautifulthan a road?" she wrote. "It is the symbol and theimage of an active, varied life." (Consuelo, vol. II, p. 116).Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossds, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a/surveyor's map of his lost fields and meadows. Thoreausaid that he had the map of his fields engraved in his soul.And Jean Wahl once wrote:Le moutonnement des haiesC'est en mo; que je l'ai.

12 the poetics of space(Poemel p. 46)(The frothing of the hedgesI keep deep inside me.)Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived.These drawings need not be exact. They need only to betonalized on the mode of our inner space. But what a bookwould have to be written to decide all these problems I Spacecalls for action, and before action, the imagination is atwork. It mows and ploughs. We should have to speak ofthe benefits of all these imaginary actions. Psychoanalysishas made numerous observations on the subject of projectivebehavior, on the willingness of extroverted persons toexteriorize their intimate impressions. An exteriorist topoanalysis would perhaps give added precision to this projective behavior by defining our daydreams of objects.However, in this present work, I shall not be able to undertake,as should be done, the two-fold imaginary geometricaland physical problem of extroversion and introversion.Moreover, I do not believe that these two branches ofphysics have the same psychic weight. My research is devotedto the domain of intimacy, to the domain in whichpsychic weight is dominant.I shall therefore put my trust in the power of attractionof all the domains of intimacy. There does not exist a realintimacy that is repellent. All the spaces of intimacy aredesignated by an attraction. Their being is well-being. Inthese conditions, topoanalysis bears the stamp of a topophilia,and shelters and rooms will be studied in the senseof this valorization.IVThese virtues of shelter are so simple, so deeply rooted inour unconscious that they may be recaptured through meremention, rather than through minute description. Here thenuance bespeaks the color. A poet's word, because it strikestrue, moves the very depths of our being.Over-picturesqueness in a house can conceal its intimacy.

Uthe house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hutThis is also true in life. But it is truer still in daydreams.For the real houses of memory, the houses to which wereturn in dreams, the houses that are rich in unalterableoneirism, do not readily lend themselves to description.To describe them would be like showing them to visitors.We can perhaps tell everything about the present, butabout the past! The first, the oneirically definitive house,must retain its shadows. For it belongs to the literature ofdepth, that is, to poetry, and not to the fluent type of literaturethat, in order to analyze intimacy, needs other people's stories. All I ought to say about my childhood homeis just barely enough to place me, myself, in an oneiricsituation, to set me on the threshold of a day-dream inwhich I shall find repose in the past. Then I may hopethat my page will possess a sonority that will ring true-avoice so remote within me, that it will be the voice we allhear when we listen as far back as memory reaches, on thevery limits of memory, beyond memory perhaps, in the fieldof the immemorial. All we communicate to others is anorientation towards what is secret without ever being ableto tell the secret objectively. What is secret never has totalobjectivity. In this respect, we orient oneirism but we donot accomplish it.1What would be the use, for instance, in giving the planof the room that was really my room, in describing thelittle room at the end of the garret, in saying that from thewindow, across the indentations of the roofs, one could seethe hill. I alone, in my memories of another century, canopen the deep cupboard that still retains for me alonethat unique odor, the odor of raisins drying on a wickertray. The odor of raisins! It is an odor that is beyond description,one that it takes a lot of imagination to smell.But I've already said too much. If I said more, the reader,1 After giving a description of the Canaen estate (Yolupte, p. 30) ,Sainte-Beuve adds: "It is not so much for you, my friend, who neversaw this place, and had you visited it, could not now feel the impressionsand colors I feel, that I have gone over it in such detail,for which I must excuse myself. Nor should you try to see it as aresult of what I have said; let the image float inside you: pass lightly;the slightest idea of it will suffice for you."

14 the poetics of spaceback in his own room, would not open that unique wardrobe,with its unique smell, which is the signature of intimacy.Paradoxically, in order to suggest the values ofintimacy, we have to induce in the reader a state of suspendedreading. For it is not until his eyes have left thepage that recollections of my room can become a thresholdof oneirism for him. And when it is a poet speaking, thereader's soul reverberates; it experiences the kind of reverberationthat, as Minkowski has shown, gives the energyof an origin to being.It therefore makes sense from our standpoint of a philosophyof literature and poetry to say that we "write a room,""read a room," or "read a house." Thus, very quickly, atthe very first word, at the first poetic overture, the readerwho is "reading a room" leaves off reading and starts tothink of some place in his own past. You would like totell everything about your room. You would like to interestthe reader in yourself, whereas you have unlocked adoor to daydreaming. The values of intimacy are so absorbingthat the reader has ceased to read your room: he seeshis own again. He is already far off, listening to the recollectionsof a father or a grandmother, of a mother or aservant, of "the old faithful servant," in short, of the humanbeing who dominates the corner of his most cherishedmemories.And the house of memories becomes psychologicallycomplex. Associated with the nooks and corners of solitudeare the bedroom and the living room in which the leadingcharacters held sway. The house we were born in is an inhabitedhouse. In it the values of intimacy are scattered,they are not easily stabilized, they are subjected to dialectics.In how many tales of childhood-if tales of childhoodwere sincere-we should be told of a child that, lacking aroom, went and sulked in his cornerlBut over and beyond our memories, the house we wereborn in is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organichabits. After twenty years, in spite of all the otheranonymous stairways; we would recapture the reflexes ofthe "first stairway," we would not stumble on that rather

15 the house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the huthigh step. The house's entire being would open up, faithfulto our own being. We would push the door that creakswith the same gesture, we would find our way in the darkto the distant attic. The feel of the tiniest latch has remainedin our hands.The successive houses in which we have lived have nodoubt made our gestures commonplace. But we are verysurprised, when we return to the old house, after an odysseyof many years, to find that the most delicate gestures, theearliest gestures suddenly come alive, are still faultless. Inshort, the house we were born in has engraved within usthe hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting. We arethe diagram of the functions of inhabiting that particularhouse, and all the other houses are but variations on afundamental theme. The word habit is too worn a wordto express this passionate liaison of our bodies, which donot forget, with an unforgettable house.But this area of detailed recollections that are easily retainedbecause of the names of things and people we knewin the first house, can be studied by means of general psychology.Memories of dreams, however, which only poeticmeditation can help us to recapture, are more confused,less clearly drawn. The great function of poetry is to giveus back the situations of our dreams. The house we wereborn in is more than an embodiment of home, it is also anembodiment of dreams. Each one of its nooks and cornerswas a resting-place for daydreaming. And often the restingplaceparticularized the daydream. Our habits of a particulardaydream were acquired there. The house, the bedroom,the garret in which we were alone, furnished the frameworkfor an interminable dream, one that poetry alone,through the creation of a poetic work, could succeed inachieving completely. If we give their function of shelterfor dreams to all of these places of retreat, we may say, asI pointed out in an earlier work,1 that there exists for eachone of us an oneiric house, a house of dream-memory, thatis lost in the shadow of a beyond of the real past. I calledthis oneiric house the crypt of the house that we were born1 La terre et les rveries du "epos, p. 98. Corti. Paris.

16 the poetics of spacein. Here we find ourselves at a pivotal point around whichreciprocal interpretations of dreams through thought andthought through dreams, keep turning. But the word interpretationhardens this about-face unduly. In point of fact,we are in the unity of image and memory, in the functionalcomposite of imagination and memory. The positivity ofpsychological history and geography cannot serve as atouchstone for determining the real being of our childhood,for childhood is certainly greater than reality. In order tosense, across the years, our attachment for the house wewere born in, dream is more powerful than thought. It isour unconscious force that crystalizes our remotest memories.If a compact center of daydreams of repose had notexisted in this first house, the very different circumstancesthat surround actual life would have clouded our memories.Except for a few medallions stamped with the likeness ofour ancestors, our child-memory contains only worn coins.It is on the plane of the daydream and not on that of factsthat childhood remains alive and poetically useful withinus. Through this permanent childhood, we maintain thepoetry of the past. To inhabit oneirically the house we wereborn iIi means more than to inhabit it in memory; it meansliving in this house that is gone, the way we used to dreamin it.What special depth there is in a child's daydream I Andhow happy the child who really possesses his moments ofsolitude I It is a good thing, it is even salutary, for a childto have periods of boredom, for him to learn to know thedialectics of exaggerated play and causeless, pure boredom.Alexander Dumas tells in his Memoires that, as a child,he was bored, bored to tears. When his mother found himlike that, weeping from sheer boredom, she said:"Andwhat is Dumas crying about?" "Dumas is crying becauseDumas has tears," replied the six-year-old child. This is thekind of anecdote people tell in their memoirs. But howwell it exemplifies absolute boredom, the boredom that isnot the equivalent of the absence of playmates. There arechildren who will leave a game to go and be bored in acorner of the garret. How often have I wished for the attic

17 the house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hutof my boredom when the complications of life made melose the very germ of all freedom IAnd so, beyond all the positive values of protection,the house we were born in becomes imbued with dreamvalues which remain after the house is gone. Centers ofboredom, centers of solitude, centers of daydream grouptogether to constitute the oneiric house which is more lastingthan the scattered memories of our birthplace. Longphenomenological research would be needed to determineall these dream values, to plumb the depth of this dreamground in which our memories are rooted.And we should not forget that these dream values communicatepoetically from soul to soul. . To read poetry isessentially to daydream.vA house constitutes a body of images that give mankindproofs or illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imaginingits reality: to distinguish all these images would be todescribe the soul of the house; it would mean developing averitable psychology of the house.To bring order into these images, I believe that we shouldconsider two principal connecting themes: 1) A house isimagined as a vertical being. It rises upward. It differentiatesitself in terms of its verticality. It is one of the appealsto our consciousness of verticality. 2) A house is imaginedas a concntrated being. It appeals to our consciousness ofcentrality.1These themes are no doubt very abstractly stated. Butwith examples, it is not hard to recognize their psychologicallyconcrete nature.Verticality is ensured by the polarity of cellar and attic,the marks of which are so deep that, in a way, they open uptwo very different perspectives for a phenomenology of theimagination. Indeed, it is possible, almost without com-1 For this second part. see page 2g.

18 the poetics of spacementary, to oppose the rationality of the roof to the irrationalityof the cellar. A roof tells its raison d' tre rightaway: it gives mankind shelter from the rain and sun hefears. Geographers are constantly reminding us that, inevery country, the slope of the roofs is one of the surestindications of the climate. We "understand" the slant of aroof. Even a dreamer dreams rationally; for him, a pointedroof averts rain clouds. Up near the roof all our thoughtsare clear. In the attic it is a pleasure to see the bare raftersof the strong framework. Here we participate in the carpenter'ssolid geometry.As for the cellar, we shall no doubt find uses for it .. Itwill be rationalized and its conveniences enumerated. Butit is first and foremost the dark entity of the house, theone that partakes of subterranean forces. When we dreamthere, we are in harmony with the irrationality of thedepths.We become aware of this dual vertical polarity of ahouse if we are sufficiently aware of the function of inhabitingto consider it as an imaginary response to the functionof constructing. The dreamer constructs and reconstructsthe upper stories and the attic until they are well constructed.And, as I said before, when we dream of theheights we are in the rational zone of intellectualized projects. But for the cellar, the impassioned inhabitant digsand re-digs, making its very depth active. The fact is notenough, the dream is at work. When it comes to excavatedground, dreams have no limit. I shall give later some deepcellarreveries. But first let us remain in the space that ispolarized by the cellar and the attic, to see how this polarizedspace can serve to illustrate very fine psychologicalnuances.Here is how the psychoanalyst, C. G. Jung, has used thedual image of cellar and attic to analyze the fears that inhabita house. In Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soullwe find a comparison which is used to make us understandthe conscious being's hope of "destroying the autonomyof complexes by debaptising them." The image is the foIlHarcourt, Brace and World, New York.

19 the house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hutlowing: "Here the conscious acts like a man who, hearinga suspicious noise in the cellar, hurries to the attic and,finding no burglars there decides, consequently, that thenoise was pure imagination. In reality, this prudent mandid not dare venture into the cellar."To the extent that the explanatory image used by J ungconvinces us, we readers relive phenomenologically bothfears: fear in the attic and fear in the cellar. Instead offacing the cellar (the unconscious), Jung's "prudent man"seeks alibis for his courage in the attic. In the attic rats andmice can make considerable noise. But let the master ofthe house arrive unexpectedly and they return to the silenceof their holes. The creatures moving about in the cellarare slower, less scampering, more mysterious.In the attic, fears are easily "rationalized." Whereas inthe cellar, even for a more courageous man than the oneJung mentions, "rationalization" is less rapid and lessclear; also it is never definitive. In the attic, the day's experiencescan always efface the fears of night. In the cellar,darkness prevails both day and night, and even when weare carrying a lighted candle, we see shadows dancing onthe dark walls.If we follow the inspiration of Jung's explanatory exampleto a complete grasp of psychological reality, weencounter a co-operation between psychoanalysis and phenomenologywhich must be stressed if we are to dominatethe human phenomenon. As a matter of fact, the image hasto be understood phenomenologically in order to give itpsychoanalytical efficacy. The phenomenologist, in thiscase, will accept the psychoanalyst's image in a spirit ofshared trepidation. He will revive the primitivity and thespecificity of the fears. In our civilization, which has thesame light everywhere, and puts electricity in its cellars,we no longer go to the cellar carrying a candle. But theunconscious cannot be civilized. It takes a candle when itgoes to the cellar. The psychoanalyst cannot cling to thesuperficiality of metaphors or comparisons, and the phenomenologisthas to pursue every image to the very end.Here, so far from reducing and explaining, so far from

20 the poetics of spacecomparing, the phenomenologist will exaggerate his exaggeration.Then, when they read Poe's Tales together, boththe phenomenologist and the psychoanalyst will understandthe value of this achievement. For these tales are therealization of childhood fears. The reader who is a "de_votee" of reading will hear the accursed cat, which is asymbol of unredeemed guilt, mewing behind the wall.1The cellar dreamer knows that the walls of the cellar areburied walls, that they are walls with a single casing, wallsthat have the entire earth behind them. And so the situationgrows more dramatic, and fear becomes exaggerated.But where is the fear that does not become exaggerated?In this spirit of shared trepidation, the phenomenologistlistens intently, as the poet Thoby Marcelin puts it, "Hushwith madness." The cellar then becomes buried madness,walled-in tragedy. Stories of criminal cellars leave indeliblemarks on our memory, marks that we prefer not to deepen;who would like to re-read Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado"?In this instance, the dramatic element is too facile,but it exploits natural fears, which are inherent to the dualnature of both man and house.Although I have no intention of starting a file on thesubject of human drama, I shall study a few ultra-cellarswhich prove that the cellar dream irrefutably increasesreality.If the dreamer's house is in a city it is not unusual thatthe dream is one of dominating in depth the surroundingcellars. His abode wants the undergrounds of legendaryfortified castles, where mysterious passages that run underthe enclosing walls, the ramparts and the moat put theheart of the castle into communication with the distantforest. The chAteau planted on the hilltop had a cluster ofcellars for roots. And what power it gave a simple house tobe built on this underground clump!In the novels of Henri Bosco, who is a great dreamer ofhouses, we come across ultra-cellars of this kind. Under thehouse in L'Antiquaire (The Antique Dealer, p. 60), thereis a "vaulted rotunda into which open four doors." Four1 Edgar Allan Poe: "The Black Cat."

21 the house. from celiaT to garret. the significance of the hutcorridors lead from the four doors, dominating, as it were,the four cardinal points of an underground horizon. Thedoor to the East opens and "we advance subterraneouslyfar under the houses in this neighborhood . . ." There aretraces of labyrinthine dreams in these pages. But associatedwith the labyrinths of the corridor, in which the air is"heavy," are rotundas and chapels that are the sanctuariesof the secret. Thus, the cellar in L'AntiquaiTe is oneiricallycomplex. The reader must explore it through dreams, certainof which refer to the suffering in the corridors, andothers to the marvelous nature of underground palaces. Hemay become quite lost (actually as well as figuratively).At first he does not see very clearly the necessity for sucha complicated geometry. Just here, a phenomenologicalanalysis will prove to be effective. But what does the phenomenologicalattitude advise? It asks us to produce withinourselves a reading pride that will give us the illusion ofparticipating in the work of the author of the book. Suchan attitude could hardly be achieved on first reading, whichremains too passive. For here the reader is still somethingof a child, a child who is entertained by reading. But everygood book should be re-read as soon as it is finished. Afterthe sketchiness of the first reading comes the creative workof reading. We must then know the pToblem that confrontedthe author. The second, then the third reading . . •give us, little by little, the solution of this problem. Imperceptibly,we give ourselves the illusion that both theproblem and the solution are ours. The psychologicalnuance: "I should have written that," establishes us asphenomenologists of reading. But so long as we have notacknowledged this nuance, we remain psychologists, or psychoanalysts.What, then, was Henri Bosco's literary problem in hisdescription of the ultra-cellar? It was to present in onecentral concrete image a novel which, in its broad lines, isthe novel of underground maneuveTS. This worn-out metaphoris illustrated, in this instance, by countless cellars, anetwork of passages, and a group of individual cells withfrequently padlocked doors. There, secrets are pondered,

22 the poetics of spaceprojects are prepared. And, underneath the earth, actiongets under way. We are really in the intimate space ofunderground maneuvers. It is in a basement such as thisthat the antique dealers, who carry the novel forward,claim to link people's fates. Henri Bosco's cellar, with itsfour subdivisions, is a loom on which fates are woven. Thehero relating his adventures has himself a ring of fate, aring carved with signs that date from some remote time.However, the strictly underground, strictly diabolical, activitiesof the Antiquaires fail. For at the very momentwhen two great destinies of love are about to be joined,one of the loveliest sylphs dies in the vault of the accursedhouse-a creature of the garden and the tower, the one whowas supposed to confer happiness. The reader who is aliveto the accompaniment of cosmic poetry that is always activebeneath the psychological story in Bosco's novels, will findevidence, in many pages of this book, of the dramatic tensionbetween the aerial and the terrestrial. But to live suchdrama as this, we must re-read the book, we must be ableto displace the interest or carry out our reading in thedual interest of man and things, at the same time that weneglect nothing of the anthropo-cosmic tissue of a humanlife.In another dwelling into which this novelist takes us,the ultra-cellar is no longer under the sign of the sinisterprojects of diabolical men, but is perfectly natural, inherentto the nature of an underground world. By followingHenri Bosco, we shall experience a house with cosmic roots.This house with cosmic roots will appear to us as a stoneplant growing out of the rock up to the blue sky of a tower.The hero of L' A ntiquaire having been caught on a compromisingvisit, has been obliged to take to the cellar.Right away, however, interest in the actual story is transferredto the cosmic story. Realities serve here to revealdreams. At first we are in the labyrinth of corridors carvedin the rock. Then, suddenly, we come upon a body ofmurky water. At this point, description of events in the

2! the house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hutnovel is left in abeyance and we only find compensation forour perseverance if we participate by means of our ownnight dreams. Indeed, a long dream that has an elementalsincerity is inserted in the story. Here is this poem of thecosmic cellar: 1"Just in front of me, water appeared from out of thedarkness."Water! . . . An immense body of water! . . . And whatwater I . . . Black, stagnant, so perfectly smooth that nota ripple, not a bubble, marred its surface. No spring, nosource. It had been there for thousands of years and remainedthere, caught unawares by the rock, spread outin a single, impassive sheet. In its stone matrix, it had itselfbecome this black, still rock, a captive of the mineral world.It had been subjected to the crushing mass, the enormousupheavals, of this oppressive world. Under this heavyweight, its very nature appeared to have been changed asit seeped through the thicknesses of the lime slabs that heldits secret fast. Thus it had. become the densest fluid elementof the underground mountain. Its opacity and unwonted2consistency made an unknown substance of it, a substancecharged with phosphorescences that only appeared on thesurface in occasional flashes. These electric tints, whichwere signs of the dark powers lying on the bottom, manifestedthe latent life and formidable power of this stilldormant element. They made me shiver."But this shiver, we sense, is no longer human fear; thisis cosmic fear, an anthropo-cosmic fear that echoes thegreat legend of man cast back into primitive situations.From the cavern carved in the rock to the underground,from the underground to stagnant water, we have movedfrom a constructed to a dreamed world; we have left fictionfor poetry. But reality and dream now form a whole. Thehouse, the cellar, the deep earth, achieve totality throughdepth. The house has become a natural being whose fate1 Henri Bosco, L'Antiquaire, p. 154.2 In my study of the material imagination: L'eau et les rves, therewas mention of thick, consistent water, heavy water. This was imaginedby a great poet, by Edgar Allan Poe, d. chapter II.

24 the poetics of spaceis bound to that of mountains and of the waters that ploughthe land. The enormous stone plant it has become wouldnot flourish if it did not have subterranean water at itsbase. And so our dreams attain boundless proportions.The cosmic daydream in this passage of Bosco's bookgives the reader a sense of restfulness, in that it invites him.to participate in the repose to be derived from all deeponeiric experience. Here the story remains in a suspendedtime that is favorable to more profound psychological treatment.Now the account of real events may be resumed; ithas received its provision of "cosmicity" and daydream.And so, beyond the underground water, Bosco's cellar recoversits stairways. After this poetic pause, description canbegin again to unreel its itinerary. "A very narrow. steepstairway, which spiraled as it went higher, had been carvedin the rock. I started up it" (p. 155). By means of thisgimlet, the dreamer succeeds in getting out of the depthsof the earth and begins his adventures in the heights. Infact, at the very end of countless tortuous, narrow passages.the reader emerges into a tower. This is the ideal towerthat haunts all dreamers of old houses: it is "perfectlyround" and there is "brief light" from "a narrow window."It also has a vaulted ceiling, which is a great principle ofthe dream of intimacy. For it constantly reflects intimacyat its center. No one will be surprised to learn that thetower room is the abode of a gentle yop.ng girl and that sheis haunted by memories of an ardent ancestress. The round.vaulted room stands high and alone, keeping watch overthe past in the same way that it dominates space.On this young girl's missal, handed down from her disstantancestress, may be read the following motto:The flower is always in the almond.With this excellent motto, both the house and the bedchamberbear the mark of an unforgettable intimacy. Forthere exists no more compact image of intimacy, none thatis more sure of its center, than a flower's dream of the futurewhile it is still enclosed, tightly folded, inside its seed. How

25 the house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hutwe should love to see not happiness, but pre-happinessremain enclosed in the round chamber!Finally, the house Bosco describes stretches from earth tosky. It possesses the verticality of the tower rising from themost earthly, watery depths, to the abode of a soul thatbelieves in heaven. Such a house, constructed by a writer,illustrates the verticality of the human being. It is alsooneirically complete, in that it dramatizes the two poles ofhouse dreams. It makes a gift of a tower to those who haveperhaps never even seen a dove-cote. A tower is the creationof another century. Without a past it is nothing. Indeed,a new tower would be ridiculous. But we still have books,and they give our day-dreams countless dwelling-places. Isthere one among us who has not spent romantic momentsin the tower of a book he has read? These moments comeback. to us. Daydreaming needs them. For on the keyboardof the vast literature devoted to the function of inhabiting,the tower sounds a note of immense dreams. How manytimes, since reading L'Antiquaire, have I gone to live inHenri Bosco's towerlThis tower and its underground cellars extend the housewe have just been studying in both directions. For us, thishouse represents an increase in the verticality of the moremodest houses that, in order to satisfy our daydreams, haveto be differentiated in height. If I were the architect of anoneiric house, I should hesitate between a three-storyhouse and one with four. A three-story house, which is thesimplest as regards essential height, has a cellar, a groundfloor and an attic; while a four-story house puts a floorbetween the ground floor and the attic. One floor more, andour dreams become blurred. In the oneiric house, topoanalysisonly knows how to count to three or four.Then there are the stairways: one to three or four ofthem, all different. We always go down the one that leadsto the cellar, and it is this going down that we remember,that characterizes its oneirism. But we go both up and

26 the poetics of spacedown the stairway that leads to the bed-chamber. It is morecommonly used; we are familiar with it. Twelve-year oldseven go up it in ascending scales, in thirds and fourths,trying to do fifths, and liking, above all, to take it in stridesof four steps at a time. What joy for the legs to go up foursteps at a timelLastly. we always go up the attic stairs, which are steeperand more primitive. For they bear the mark of ascension toa more tranquil solitude. When I return to dream in theattics of yester-year, I never go down again.Dreams of stairs have often been encountered in psychoanalysis.But since it requires an all-inclusive symbolismto determine its interpretations, psychoanalysis haspaid little attention to the complexity of mixed revery andmemory. That is why, on this point, as well as on others,psychoanalysis is better suited to the study of dreams thanof daydreams. The phenomenology of the daydream canuntangle the complex of memory and imagination; it becomesnecessarily sensitive to the differentiations of thesymbol. And the poetic daydream, which creates symbols,confers upon our intimate moments an activity that is polysymbolic.Our recollections grow sharper, the oneiric housebecomes highly sensitized. At times, a few steps have engravedin our memories a slight difference of level thatexisted in our childhood home.l A certain room was notonly a door, but a door plus three steps. When we recallthe old house in its longitudinal detail, everything thatascends and descends comes to life again dynamically. Wecan no longer remain, to quote Joe Bousquet, men wionly one story. "He was a man with only one story: hehad his cellar in his attic." 2By way of antithesis, I shall make a few remarks ondwellings that are oneirically incomplete.In Paris there are no houses, and the inhabitants of thebig city live in superimposed boxes. "One's Paris room,1 La terre et les rtveries du repos, pp. 105-106.2 Joe Bousquet, La neige d'un autre dge, p. 100.

27 the house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hutinside its four walls," wrote Paul Claudel, "is a sort ofgeometrical site, a conventional hole, which we furnishwith pictures, objects and wardrobes within a wardrobe."!The number of the street and the floor give the location ofour "conventional hole," but our abode has neither spacearound it nor verticality inside it. "The houses are fastenedto the ground with asphalt, in order not to sink into theearth."2 They have no roots and, what is quite unthinkablefor a dreamer of houses, sky-scrapers have no cellars. Fromthe street to the roof, the rooms pile up one on top of theother, while the tent of a horizonless sky encloses the entirecity. But the height of city buildings is a purely exteriorone. Elevators do away with the heroism of stairclimbing so that there is no longer any virtue in living upnear the sky. Horne has become mere horizontality. Thedifferent rooms that compose living quarters jammed intoone floor all lack one of the fundamental principles fordistinguishing and classifying the values of intimacy.But in addition to the intimate value of verticality, ahouse in a big city lacks cosmicity. For here, where housesare no longer set in natural surroundings, the relationshipbetween house and space becomes an artificial one. Everythingabout it is mechanical and, on every side, intimateliving flees. "The streets are like pipes into which men aresucked up." (Max Picard, loco cit. p. 119).Moreover, our houses are no longer aware of the stormsof the outside universe. Occasionally the wind blows a tilefrom a roof and kills a passer-by in the street. But this roofcrime is only aimed at the belated passer-by. Or lightningmay for an instant set fire to the window-panes. The housedoes not tremble, however, when thunder rolls. It tremblesneither with nor through us. In our houses set close oneup against the other, we are less afraid. A hurricane in Parishas not the same personal offensiveness towards the dreamerthat it has towards the hermit's house. We shall understandthis better, in fact, when we have studied, further on,the house's situation in the world which gives us, quite1 Paul Claudel, Oiseau noir dans le solil levant, p. 144.2 Max Picard, La juite devant Dieu, trans. p. 121.

28 the poetics of spaceconcretely, a variation of the metaphysically summarizedsituation of man in the world.Just here the philosopher who believes in the salutarynature of vast daydreams is faced with a problem: how canone help confer greater cosmicity upon the city space thatis exterior to one's room? As an example, here is onedreamer's solution to the problem of noise in Paris:When insomnia, which is the philosopher's ailment, isincreased through irritation caused by city noises; or when,late at night, the hum of automobiles and trucks rumblingthrough the Place Maubert causes me to curse my citydweller'sfate, I can recover my calm by living the metaphorsof the ocean. We all know that the big city is aclamorous sea, and it has been said countless times that, inthe heart of night in Paris, one hears the ceaseless murmurof flood and tide. So I make a sincere image out of thesehackneyed ones, an image that is as much my own as thoughI myself had invented it, in line with my gentle mania foralways believing that I am the subject of what I am thinking.If the hum of cars becomes more painful, I do mybest to discover in it the roll of thunder, of a thunder thatspeaks to me and scolds me. And I feel sorry for myself. Sothere you are, unhappy philosopher, caught up again bythe storm, by the storms of life! I dream an abstract-concretedaydream. My bed is a small boat lost at sea; that suddenwhistling is the wind in the sails. On every side the air isfilled with the sound of furious klaxoning. I talk to myselfto give myself cheer: there now, your skiff is holding itsown, you are safe in your stone boat. Sleep, in spite of thestorm. Sleep in the storm. Sleep in your own courage,happy to be a man who is assailed by wind and wave.And I fall asleep, lulled by the noise of Paris.1In fact, everything corroborates my view that the imageof the city's ocean roar is in the very "nature of things,"and that it is a true image. It is also a salutary thing to1 I had written this page when I read in Balzac's Petites miseres de lavie conjugale (edited by "Formes et Reftets" 1952, vol. 12, p. 1802) :"When your house trembles in its beams and turns on its keel, youthink you are a sailor, rocked by the breeze."

29 the house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hutnaturalize sound in order to make it less hostile. Just inpassing, I have noted the following delicate nuance of thebeneficent image in the work of a young contemporarypoet, Yvonne Caroutch,l for whom dawn in the city is the"murmur of an empty sea shell." Being myself an earlyriser, this image helps me to wake up gently and naturally.However, any image is a good one, provided we know howto use it.We could find many other images on the theme of thecity-ocean. Here is one that occurred to a painter. The artcriticand historian, Pierre Courthion,2 tells that whenGustave Courbet was confined in the Sainte Pelagie prison,he wanted to paint a view of Paris, as seen from the topHoor of the prison. In a letter to a friend, Courbet wrotethat he was planning to paint it "the way I do my marines:with an immensely deep sky, and all its movement, all itshouses and domes, imitating the tumultuous waves of theocean."Pursuant to my method, I have retained the coalescence ofimages that refuse an absolute anatomy. I had to mentionincidentally the house's "cosmicity." But we shall returnlater to this characteristic. Now, after having examinedthe verticality of the oneiric house, we are going to studythe centers of condensation of intimacy, in which daydreamaccumulates.VIWe must first look for centers of simplicity in houses withmany rooms. For as Baudelaire said, in a palace, "there isno place for intimacy."But simplicity, which at times is too rationally vaunted,is not a source of high-powered oneirism. We must thereforeexperience the primitiveness of refuge and, beyond1 Yvonne Caroutch, Veilleurs endormis, d. Debresse, p. 30.2 Pierre Courthion, Courbet racconte par lu;-meme et par ses am is.Published by Cailler, 1948, vol. I, p. 278. General Valentine did notallow Courbet to paint his city-ocean on the grounds that he "was notin prison for the purpose of amusing himself."

50 the poetics of spacesituations that have been experienced, discover situationsthat have been dreamed; beyond positive recollections thatare the material for a positive psychology, return to thefield of the primitive images that had perhaps been centersof fixation for recollections left in our memories.A demonstration of imaginary primitive elements maybe based upon the entity that is most firmly fixed in ourmemories: the childhood home.For instance, in the house itself, in the family sittingroom,a dreamer of refuges dreams of a hut, of a nest, orof nooks and corners in which he would like to hide away,like an animal in its hole. In this way, he lives in a regionthat is beyond human images. If a phenomenologist couldsucceed in living the primitiveness of such images, he wouldlocate elsewhere, perhaps, the problems that touch uponthe poetry of the house. We find a very clear. example of thisconcentration of the joy of inhabiting in a fragment ofHenri Bachelin's life of his father.1Henri Bachelin's childhood home could not have beensimpler. Although no different from the other houses inthe oversized Morvan village where he was born, it wasnevertheless a roomy home with ample outbuildings inwhich the family lived in security and comfort. The lamplitroom where, in the evening, the father read the lives ofthe saints-he was Church sexton as well as day-Iaborerwasthe scene of the little boy's daydreaming of primitiveness,daydreaming that accentuated solitude to the pointof imagining that he lived in a hut in the depth of theforest. For a phenomenologist who is looking for the rootsof the function of inhabiting, this passage in Henri Bachelin'sbook represents a document of great purity. The essentiallines are the following (p. 97): "At these moments, Ifelt very strongly-and I swear to this-that we were cutoff from the little town, from the rest of France, and fromthe entire world. I delighted in imagining (although I keptmy feelings to myself) that we were living in the heart of1 Henri Bachelin, Le seroiteur, 6th edition, Mercure de France, with anexcellent preface by Rene Dumesnil, who relates the life and work ofthis forgotten writer.

81 the house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hutthe woods, in the well-heated hut of charcoal burners; Ieven hoped to hear wolves sharpening their claws on theheavy granite slab that formed our doorstep. But our housereplaced the hut for me, it sheltered me from hunger andcold; and if I shivered, it was merely from well-being."Addressing his father-his novel is constantly written in thesecond person-Bachelin adds: "Comfortably seated in mychair, I basked in the sensation of your strength."Thus, the author attracts us to the center of the house asthough to a center of magnetic force, into a major zone ofprotection. He goes to the very bottom of the "hut dream,"which is well-known to everyone who cherishes the legendaryimages of primitive houses. But in most hut dreams wehope to live elsewhere, far from the over-crowded house,far from city cares. We Bee in thought in search of a realrefuge. Bachelin is more fortunate than dreamers of distantescape, in that he finds the root of the hut dream in thehouse itself. He has only to give a few touches to the spectacleof the family sitting-room, only to listen to the stoveroaring in the evening stillness, while an icy wind blowsagainst the house, to know that at the house's center, in thecircle of light shed by the lamp, he is living in the roundhouse, the primitive hut, of prehistoric man. How manydwelling places there would be, fitted one into the other,if we were to realize in detail, and in their hierarchicalorder, all the images by means of which we live our daydreamsof intimacy. How many scattered values we shouldsucceed in concentrating, if we lived the images of ourdaydreams in all sincerity.In this passage from Bachelin's book, the hut appears tobe the tap-root of the function of inhabiting. It is the simplestof human plants, the one that needs no ramificationsin order to exist. Indeed, it is so simple that it no longerbelongs to our memories-which at times are too full ofimagery-but to legend; it is a center of legend. When weare lost in darkness and see a distant glimmer of light, whodoes not dream of a thatched cottage or, to go more deeplystill into legend, of a hermit's hut?A hermit's hut. What a subject for an engravingr Indeed

82 the poetics of spacereal images are engravings, for it is the imagination thatengraves them on our memories. They deepen the recollectionswe have experienced, which they replace, thusbecoming imagined recollections. The hermit's hut is atheme which needs no variations, for at the simplest mentionof it, "phenomenological reverberation" obliterates all ,mediocre resonances. The hermit's hut is an engraving thatwould suffer from any exaggeration of picturesqueness. Itstruth must derive from the intensity of its essence, which isthe essence of the verb "to inhabit." The hut immediatelybecomes centralized solitude, for in the land of legend,there exists no adjoining hut. And although geographersmay bring back photographs of hut villages from theirtravels in distant lands, our legendary past transcends everythingthat has been seen, even everything that we haveexperienced personally. The image leads us on towardsextreme solitude. The hermit is alone before God. His hut,therefore, is just the opposite of the monastery. And thereradiates about this centralized solitude a universe of meditationand prayer, a universe outside the universe. The hutcan receive none of the riches "of this world." It possessesthe felicity of intense poverty; indeed, it is one of the gloriesof poverty; as destitution increases it gives us access to absoluterefuge.This valorization of a center of concentrated solitude isso strong, so primitive, and so unquestioned, that the imageof the distant light serves as a reference for less clearlylocalized images. When Thoreau heard the sound of ahorn in the depths of the woods, this image with its hardlydetermined center, this sound image that filled the entirenocturnal landscape, suggested repose and confidence tohim. That sound, he said, is as friendly as the hermit'sdistant candle. And for those of us who remember, fromwhat intimate valley do the horns of other days still reachus? Why do we immediately accept the common friendshipof this sound world awakened by the horn, or the hermit'sworld lighted by its distant gleam? How is it that imagesas rare as these should possess such power over the imagination?

33 the house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hutGreat images have both a history and a prehistory; theyare always a blend of memory and legend, with the resultthat we never experience an image directly. Indeed, everygreat image has an unfathomable oneiric depth to whichthe personal past adds special color. Consequently it is notuntil late in life that we really revere an image, when wediscover that its roots plunge well beyond the history thatis fixed in our memories. In the realm of absolute imagination,we remain young late in life. But we must lose ourearthly Paradise in order actually to live in it, to experienceit in the reality of its images, in the absolute sublimationthat transcends all passion. A poet meditating uponthe life of a great poet, that is, Victor-Emile Micheletmeditating upon the life of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, wrote:"Alas I we have to grow old to conquer youth, to free itfrom its fetters and live according to its original impulse."Poetry gives not so much a nostalgia for youth, whichwould be vulgar, as a nostalgia for the expressions of youth.It offers us images as we should have imagined them duringthe "original impulse" of youth. Primal images, simpleengravings are but so many invitations to start imaginingagain. They give us back areas of being, houses in whichthe human being's certainty of being is concentrated, andwe have the impression that, by living in such images asthese, in images that are as stabilizing as these are, we couldstart a new life, a life that would be our own, that wouldbelong to us in our very depths. When we look at imagesof this kind, when we read the images in Bachelin's book,we start musing on primitiveness. And because of this veryprimitiveness, restored, desired and experienced throughsimple images, an album of pictures of huts would constitutea textbook of simple exercises for the phenomenologyof the imagination.In line with the distant light in the hermit's hut, symbolicof the man who keeps vigil, a rather large dossier ofliterary documentation on the poetry of houses could bestudied from the single angle of the lamp that glows in thewindow. This image would have to be placed under one ofthe greatest of all theorems of the imagination of the world

34 the poetics of spaceof light: Tout ce qui brille voit (All that glows sees). Rimbaudexpressed in three syllables the following cosmic theorem:"Nacre voit" (Mother-of-pearl sees).l The lampkeeps vigil, therefore it is vigilant. And the narrower theray of light, the more penetrating its vigilance.The lamp in the window is the houses eye and, in thekingdom of the imagination, it is never lighted out-of-doors,but is enclosed light, which can only filter to the outside. Apoem entitled Emmure (Walled-in), begins as follows:Une lampe allumee derriere la jenetreVeille au coeur secret de la nuit.(A lighted lamp in the windowWatches in the secret heart of night.)while a few lines above the same poet speaks:Du regard emprisonneEntre ses quatre murs de pierre2(Of a gaze imprisonedBetween its four stone walls.)In Henri Boscos novel, Hyacinthe which, together withanother story, Le Jardin d'Hyacinthe (Hyacinths Garden),constitutes one of the most astounding psychological novelsof our time, a lamp is waiting in the window, and throughit, the house, too, is waiting. The lamp is the symbol ofprolonged waiting.By means of the light in that far-off house, the housesees, keeps vigil, vigilantly waits.When I let myself drift into the intoxication of invertingdaydreams and reality, that faraway house with its lightbecomes for me, before me, a house that is looking outitsturn now!-through the keyhole. Yes, there is someonein that house who is keeping watch, a man is working therewhile I dream away. He leads a dogged existence, whereas1 Rimbaud, Oeuvres Completes, published by Le Grand-Chne. Lausanne,p. 321.2 Christiane Barucoa, Antee, Cahiers de Rochefort, p. 5.

85 the house. from cellar to garret. the significance 0/ the hutI am pursuing futile dreams. Through its light alone, thehouse becomes human. It sees like a man. It is an eye opento night.But countless other images come to embellish the poetryof the house in the night. Sometimes it glows like a fireByin the grass, a creature with a solitary light:Ie verrai vos maisons comme des vers luisants au creu"des collines1(I shall see your houses like fire-flies in the hollow of the hilla.)Another poet calls houses that shine on earth "stars ofgrass"; and Christiane Barucoa speaks elsewhere of thelamp in the human house as anEtoile prisonniere prise au gel de I'instant(Imprisoned star caught in the instant's freezing.)In such images we have the impression that the stars inheaven come to live on earth, that the houses of men formearthly constellations.With ten villages and their lights, G. E. Clander nails aLeviathan constellation to the earth:Une nuit, di" villages, une montagne,Un leviathan noir cloute d'or.2(A night, ten villages, a mountain,A black, gold-studded Leviathan.)Erich Neumann has analyzed the dream of a patientwho, while looking at the stars from the top of a tower,saw them rise and shine under the 4earth; they emergedfrom the bowels of the earth. In this obsession, the earthwas not, however, a mere likeness of the starry sky, but thegreat life-giving mother of the world, the creator of night1 Helene Morange. Asphodeles et PeroefJches, seghers. p. 2g.2 G.-E. Clancier" Une Voi, Gallimard, p. 172.

S6the poetics of spaceand the stars.1 In his patient's dream, Neumann shows theforce of the Mother-Earth (Mutter-Erde) archetype. Poetry comes naturally from a daydream, which is less insistentthan a night-dream; it is only a matter of an"instant's freezing." But the poetic document is none theless indicative. A terrestrial sign is set upon a celestial being.The archeology of images is thus illumined by the poet'sswift, instantaneous image.I have dwelt somewhat at length on this apparentlycommonplace image, in order to show that images are incapableof repose. Poetic revery, unlike somnolent revery,never falls asleep. Starting with the simplest of images, itmust always set the waves of the imagination radiating.But however cosmic the isolated house lighted by the starof its lamp may become, it will always symbolize solitude.I should like to quote one last text which stresses thissolitude.In the Fragments from an intimate diary that precede aFrench collection of RiIke's letters,2 we find the followingscene: one very dark night, Rilke and two friends perceive"the lighted casement of a distant hut, the hut that standsquite alone on the horizon before one comes to fields andmarshlands." This image of solitude symbolized by a singlelight moves the poet's heart in so personal a way that itisolates him from his companions. Speaking of this groupof three friends, Rilke adds: "Despite the fact that we werevery close to one another, we remained three isolated. individuals,seeing night for the first time." This expressioncan never be meditated upon enough, for here the mostcommonplace image, one that the poet had certainly seenhundreds of time, is suddenly marked with the sign of"the first time," and it transmits this sign to the familiarnight. One might even say that light emanating from a lonewatcher, who is also a determined watcher, attains to thepower of hypnosis. We are hypnotized by solitude, hypnotized by the gaze of the solitary house; and the tie that binds1 Erich Neumann, Eranos-Jahrbuch, 1955, pp. 40-41.2 Rainer Maria Rilke, Cho;x de lettres, Stock, 1984, p. 15.

57 the house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hutus to it is so strong that we begin to dream of nothing buta solitary house in the night.o Licht im schlafenden Haus!l(0 light in the sleeping housel)With the example of the hut and the light that keepsvigil on the far horizon, we have shown the concentrationof intimacy in the refuge, in its most simplified form. Atthe beginning of this chapter, on the contrary, I tried todifferentiate the house according to its verticality. Now,still with the aid of pertinent literary documents, I shallattempt to give a better account of the house's powers ofprotection against the forces that besiege it. Then, afterhaving examined this dynamic dialectics of the house andthe universe, we shall study a number of poems in whichthe house is a world in itself.1 Richard von Schaubl. Anthologie de la poesie allemande, Stock, II.p. u5·

2housa and universeQuand les times -de notre del se TejoindTontMa maison aura un toit.l.(When the peaks of our sky come togetherMy house will have a roof.)In the preceding chapter, I pointed out that it was reasonableto say we "read a house," or "read a room," since bothroom and house are psychological diagrams that guidewriters and poets in their analysis of intimacy. We shallnow read slowly several houses and rooms "written" bygreat writers.Although at heart a city man, Baudelaire sensed the increasedintimacy of a house when it is besieged by winter.In Les paradis artificiels (p. 280) he speaks of Thomas deQuincey's joy when, a prisoner of winter, he read Kant,with the help of the idealism furnished by opium. Thescene takes place in a cottage in Wales. IIUne jolie habitationne ,.end-eUe pas l'hiver plus poetique, et l'hiver n'augmente-t-Upas la poesie de l'habitation'! Le blanc cottageetait ASSIS au fond d'une PETITE valle FERMEE de montagnesSUFFISAMENT HAUTES; il etait comme emmaillote d' arbustes/'("Isn't it true that a pleasant house makes winter morepoetic, and doesn't winter add to the poetry of a house?The white cottage sat at the end of a little valley, shut inby ,.ather high mountains; and it seemed to be swathed inshrubs.")1 Paul Eluard. Dignes de vivre. Julliard. Paris, p. 115.

59 house and 'UniverseI have underlined the words in this short sentence thatbelong to the imagination of repose. And what a quiet settingfor an opium-eater, reading Kant in the combinedsolitudes of dream and thought! As for the passage Baudelairedevoted to it, no doubt we can read it the way wecan read any easy, too easy, passage. A literary critic mighteven be surprised by the naturalness with which this greatpoet has used commonplace images. But if, while readingthis over-simplified passage, we accept the daydreams ofrepose it suggests; if we pause over the underlined words,it soon brings tranquility to body and soul. We feel thatwe are living in the protective center of the house in thevalley. We too are "swathed" in the blanket of winter.And we feel wann because it is cold out-of-doors. Furtheron in this deep-winter "artificial Paradise" Baudelairedeclares that dreamers like a severe winter. "Every yearthey ask the sky to send down as much snow, hail and frostas it can contain. What they really need are Canadian orRussian winters. Their own nests will be all the wanner,all the downier, all the better beloved . . ."1 Like EdgarAllan Poe, a great dreamer of curtains, Baudelaire, in orderto protect the winter-girt house from cold added "heavydraperies that hung down to the floor." Behind dark curtains,snow seems to be whiter. Indeed, everything comesalive when contradictions accumulate.Here Baudelaire has furnished us with a centered picturethat leads to the heart of a dream which we can then takeover for ourselves. No doubt we shall give it certain personalfeatures, such as peopling Thomas de Quincey's cot ..tage with persons from our own past. In this way we receivethe benefits of this evocation without its exaggerations; ourmost personal recollections can come and live here. Andthrough some indefinable current of sympathy, Baudelaire'sdescription has ceased to be commonplace. But it is alwayslike that: well-determined centers of revery are means ofcommunication between men who dream as surely as well-1 Henri Bosco has given an excellent description of this type of reveryin the following short phrase: "When the shelter is sure, the storm isgood."

40 the poetics of spacedefined concepts are means of communication between menwho think.In Curiosites esthetiques (p. 331) Baudelaire also speaksof a canvas by Lavieille which shows "a thatched cottageon the edge of a wood" in winter, "the sad season." "Certainof the effects that Lavieille often got," wrote Baudelaire,"seem to me to constitute the very essence of winterhappiness." A reminder of winter strengthens the happinessof inhabiting. In the reign of the imagination alone,a reminder of winter increases the house's value as a placeto live in.If I were asked to make an expert evaluation of the oneirismin De Quincey's cottage, as relived by Baudelaire, Ishould say that there lingers about it the insipid odor ofopium, an atmosphere of drowsiness. But we are told nothingabout the strength of the walls, or the fortitude of theroof. The house pts up no struggle. It is as thoughBaudelaire knew of nothing to shut himself in with butcurtains.This absence of str.uggle is often the case of the winterhouses in literature. The dialectics of the house and theuniverse are too simple, and snow, especially, reduces theexterior world to nothing rather too easily. It gives a singlecolor to the entire universe which, with the one word,snow, is both expressed and nullified for those who havefound shelter. In Les deserts de l'amour (p. 104), Rimbaudhimself said: UC'etait comme une nuit d'hiver, avec uneneige pour etoufJer Ie monde decidement." (It was like awinter's night, with snow to stifle the world for certain.)In any case, outside the occupied house, the winter cosmosis a simplified cosmos. It is a non-house in the sameway that metaphysicians speak of a non-I, and between thehouse and the non-house it is easy to establish all sorts ofcontradictions. Inside the house, everything may be differentiatedand multiplied. The house derives reserves andrefinemen ts of intimacy from winter; while in the outsideworld, snow covers all tracks, blurs the road, mumes everysound, conceals all colors. As a result of this universal white-

41 house and universeness, we feel a fonn of cosmic negation in action. Thedreamer of houses knows and senses this, and because ofthe diminished entity of the outside world, experiences allthe qualities of intimacy with increased intensity.IIWinter is by far the oldest of the seasons. Not only does itconfer age upon our memories, taking us back to a remotepast but, on snowy days, the house too is old. It is as thoughit were living in the past of centuries gone by. This feelingis described by Bachelin in a passage that presents winterin all its hostility.1 "Those were evenings when, in oldhouses exposed to snow and icy winds, the great stories, thebeautiful legends that men hand down to one another, takeon concrete meaning and, for those who delve into them,become immediately applicable. And thus it was, perhaps,that one of our ancestors, who lay dying in the year onethousand, should have come to believe in the end of theworld." For here the stories that were told were not thefireside fairy tales recounted by old women; they werestories about men, stories that reflect upon forces andsigns. During these winters, Bachelin writes elsewhere(p. 58), "it seems to me that, under the hood of the greatfireplace, the old legends must have been much older thenthan they are today." What they really had was the immemorialquality of the tragic cataclysms that can presagethe end of the world.Recalling these evenings during the dramatic winters inhis father's house, Bachelin writes (p. 104): "When ourcompanions left us, their feet deep in snow and their facesin the teeth of the blizzard, it seemed to me that they weregoing very far away, to unknown owl-and-wolf-infestedlands. I was tempted to call after them, as people did inmy early history books: "May God help y()Ur"And what a striking thing it is that a mere image of theold homestead in the snow-drifts should be able to inte-1 Henri Bachelin, Le ServiteuT, p. 102.

42 the poetics of spacegrate images of the year one thousand in the mind of achild.IIIWe come now to a case which is more complex, and mayeven appear to be paradoxical. It is taken from a passage inRilke's correspondence.1Con trary to the general thesis I set forth in the precedingchapter, for Rilke, storms are particularly aggressive incities, where heaven's ire, too, is most clearly manifested.In the country, apparently, hurricanes are less hostile tous. From my point of view, this is a paradox of cosmicorigin. But, needless to say, the Rilke fragment is very fine,and it lends itself to interesting comment.Here is what Rilke wrote to his fair "musician." "Doyou know that when I am in a city I am frightened byhurricanes at night. It is as though, in their elemental pride,they did not see us. But they do see a lonely house in thecountry; they take it in their powerful arms and, in thatway, they inure it, and when you are there, you would liketo be out-of-doors, in the roaring garden, or at least, standat the window and applaud the infuriated old trees thattwist and turn as though possessed by the spirits of theprophets."Photographically speaking, these lines of Rilke seem tome to be a "negative" of the house, the reverse of the {une·tion of inhabiting. When the storm rages and lashes thetrees, in the shelter of the house, Rilke would like to beout-of-doors, not through any desire to enjoy the wind andthe rain, but in order to pursue his own revery. So heshares, we feel, the anger reflex of the tree attacked by theanger of the wind. But he does not share the house's resistance.He puts his trust in the wisdom of the storm, inthe clear vision of the lightning, and in all the elementswhich, even in their rage, see the abodes of men and agreeto spare them.But this "negative" of an image is none the less reveal-1 Rilke, Lettres a une musicienne, in French translation, p. 112.

4Shouse and universeing, for it gives evidence of a dynamism in combat that iscosmic in its proportions. Rilke has furnished many proofs-to which we shall often refer-of his cognizance of thedrama that attaches to the dwellings of men. At whateverdialectical pole the dreamer stands, whether in the houseor in the universe, the dialectics become dynamic. Houseand space are not merely two juxtaposed elements of space.In the reign of the imagination, they awaken daydreams ineach other, that are opposed. Rilke is ready to concedethat the old house is "inured" by its trials. The house capitalizesits victories over the hurricanes. And since, in allresearch concerning the imagination, we must leave therealm of facts behind, we know perfectly that we feel calmerand more confident when in the old home, in the housewe were born in, than we do in the houses on streets wherewe have only lived as transients.IVContrary to the "negative" we have just been considering,let us now take the example of a "positive" that constitutestotal adherence to the drama of the house besieged bystorms.In Henri Bosco's Malicroix the house is called La Redousse.1It is built on an island in the Camargue region,not far from the great Rh6ne river. It is a humble houseand appears to lack resistance. We shall see what fortitudeit possessed.The author takes many pages to prepare us for the stormthat is brewing. A poetic weather forecast goes to the verysource from whence the sound and the movement are tocome. With what art, to begin with, he achieves absolutesilence, the immensity of these silent stretches of space!"There is nothing like silence to suggest a sense of unlimitedspace. Sounds lend color to space, and confer a sort of soundbody upon it. But absence of sound leaves it quite pure and,in the silence, we are seized with the sensation of somethingvast and deep and boundless. It took complete hold of me1 Corruption of redo ute: retreat.

44the poetics of spaceand, for several moments, I was overwhelmed by thegrandeur of this shadowy peace."It asserted itself like a person."This peace had a body. It was caught up in the night,made of night. A real, a motionless body."In this vast prose-poem, we come upon passages thatcontain the same progression of sounds and fears as is tobe found in certain stanzas of Victor Hugo's Les Djinns.Only here, the author takes the time to show the narrowingof the space at the center of which the house is to live likean anguished heart. A kind of cosmic anguish precedes thestorm. Then the wind starts to howl at the top of its lungs.Soon the entire menagerie of the hurricane lifts its voice.If one had the leisure to analyze the dynamics of storms,what a bestiary of the wind could be found not only in thesepages but throughout Bosco's work. For this author knowsinstinctively that all aggression, whether it come from manor from the world, is of animal origin. However subtle,however indirect, hidden or contrived a human act of aggressionmay be, it reveals an origin that is unredeemed.In the tiniest of hatreds, there is a little, live, animal filament.And the poet-psychologist-or the psychologist-poet,if such a one exists-cannot go wrong in marking the differenttypes of aggression with an animal cry. It is also aterrible trait of men that they should be incapable of understandingthe forces of the universe intuitively, otherwisethan in terms of a psychology of wrath.And faced with this pack, which gradually breaks loose,the house becomes the real being of a pure humanity whichdefends itself without ever being responsible for an attack.La Redousse is man's Resistance; it is human virtue man'sgrandeur.Here is the passage that describes the house's humanresistance at the height of the storm: (p. 115)."The house was fighting gallantly. At first it gave voiceto its complaints; the most awful gusts were attacking itfrom every side at once, with evident hatred and suchhowls of rage that, at times, I trembled with fear. But itstood firm. From the very beginning of the storm, snarling

45house and universewinds had been taking the roof to task, trying to pull it off,to break its back, tear it into shreds, suck it off. But it onlyhunched over further and clung to the old rafters. Thenother winds, rushing along close to the ground, chargedagainst the wall. Everything swayed under the shock of thisblow, but the flexible house stood up to the beast. No doubtit was holding firmly to the soil of the island by means ofthe unbreakable roots from which its thin walls of mudcoatedreeds and planks drew their supernatural strength.Though the shutters and doors were insulted, though hugethreats were proferred, and there was loud bugling in thechimney, it was of no avail. The already human being inwhom I had sought shelter for my body yielded nothingto the storm. The house clung close to me, like a she-wolf,and at times, I could smell her odor penetrating maternallyto my very heart. That night she was really my mother."She was all I had to keep and sustain me. We werealone."Discussing maternity in my book, La terre et les reveriesdu reposl I' quoted the following magnificent lines byMilosz,2 in which the Mother image and the House imageare united:Je dis ma Mere. Et c'est a vous que je pense, 0 Maison!Maison des beaux cUs obscurs de mon en/ance.(Mclancolie)(I say Mother. And my thoughts are of you, oh, House.House of the lovely dark summers of my childhood.)(Melancholy)It was imperative to find a similar image to express thedeep graditude of the inhabitant of La Redousse. Here,however, the image does not come from a nostalgia forchildhood, but is given in its actuality of protection. Here,too, in addition to community of affection, there is communityof forces, the concentrated courage and resistanceof both house and man. And what an image of concentrated1 Jose Corti, Paris.2 O. V. de Milosz, 1877-199.

46 the poetics 0/ spacebeing we are given with this house that "clings" to its inhabitantand becomes the cell of a body with its wallsclose together. The refuge shrinks in size. And with its protective qualities increased, it grows outwardly stronger.From having been a refuge, it has become a redoubt. Thethatched cottage becomes a fortified castle for the recluse,who must learn to conquer fear within its walls. Such adwelling has an educative value, for in this passage ofBosco's book there is a sort of dovetailing of the reserves ofstrength with the inner fortresses of courage. In a housethat has become for the imagination the very heart of acyclone, we have to go beyond the mere impressions of con:solation that we should feel in any shelter. We have to participatein the dramatic cosmic events sustained by thecombatant house. But the real drama of Malicroix is anordeal by solitude. The inhabitant of La Redousse mustdominate solitude in a house on an island where there isno village. He must attain to the dignity of solitude thathad been achieved by one of his ancestors, who had becomea man of solitude as a result of a deep tragedy in his life.He must live alone in a cosmos which is not that of hischildhood. This man, who comes of gentle, happy people,must cultivate courage in order to confront a world that isharsh, indigent and cold. The isolated house furnishes himwith strong images, that is, with counsels of resistance.And so, faced with the bestial hostility of the storm andthe hurricane, the house's virtues of protection and resistanceare transposed into human virtues. The house acquiresthe physical and moral energy of a human body. It bracesitself to receive the downpour, it girds its loins. Whenforced to do so, it bends with the blast, confident that itwill right itself again in time, while continuing to denyany temporary defeats. Such a house as this invites mankindto heroism of cosmic proportions. It is an instrumentwith which to confront the cosmos. And the metaphysicalsystems according to which man is "cast into the world"might meditate concretely upon the house that is cast intothe hurricane, defying the anger of heaven itself. Comewhat may the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant

47 house and universeof the world, in spite of the world. The problem is not onlyone of being, it is also a problem of energy and, consequently,of counter-energy.In this dynamic rivalry between house and universe, weare far removed from any reference to simple geometricalforms. A house that has been experienced is not an inertbox. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.But can this transposition of the being of a house intohuman values be considered as an activity of metaphor?Isn't this merely a matter of linguistic imagery? As metaphors,a literary critic would certainly find them exaggerated.On the other hand, a positivist psychologist wouldimmediately reduce this language to the psychological realityof the fear felt by a man immured in his solitude, farfrom all human assistance. But phenomenology of theimagination cannot be content with a reduction whichwould make the image a subordinate means of expression:it demands, on the contrary, that images be lived directly,that they be taken as sudden events in life. When the imageis new, the world is new.And in reading applied to life, all passivity disappearsif we try to become aware of the creative acts of the poetexpressing the world, a world that becomes accessible toour daydreaming. In Bosco's Malicroix the world influencessolitary man more than the characters are able to do.Indeed, if the many prose-poems the book contains were tobe deleted, all that remained would be the story of alegacy, and a duel between the notary and the heir. Butmuch is to be gained for a psychologist of the imaginationif to "social" he adds "cosmic" reading. He comes to realizethat the cosmos molds mankind, that it can transform aman of the hills into a man of islands and rivers, and thatthe house remodels man.With the house that has been experienced by a poet, wecome to a delicate point in anthropo-cosmology. The house,then, really is an instrument of topo-analysis; it is even anefficacious instrument, for the very reason that it is hard touse. In short, discussion of our theses takes place on groundthat is unfavorable to us. For, in point of fact, a house is

48the poetics of spacefirst and foremost a geometrical object, one which we aretempted to analyze rationally. Its prime reality is visibleand tangible, made of well hewn solids and well fittedframework. It is dominated by straight lines, the plumblinehaving marked it with its discipline and balance.1 Ageometrical object of this kind ought to resist metaphorsthat welcome the human body and the human soul. Buttransposition to the human plane takes place immediatelywhenever a house is considered as space for cheer and intimacy,space that is supposed to condense and defendintimacy. Independent of all rationality, the dream worldbeckons. And as I read and re-read Malicroix, to quotePierre-Jean Jouve, "I hear the iron hooves of dream" onthe roof of La Redousse.But the complex of reality and dream is never definitivelyresolved. The house itself, when it starts to live humanly,does not lose all its "objectivity." We shall therefore haveto examine more closely how houses of the past appear indream geometry. For these are the houses in which we aregoing to recapture the intimacy of the past in our daydreams.We shall have to apply ourselves increasingly tostudying how, by means of the house, the warm substanceof intimacy resumes its form, the same form that it hadwhen it enclosed original warmth.Et l' ancienne maison,Je sens sa rousse tiedeurVient des sens a l'esprit.2(And the old houseI feel its russet warmthComes from the senses to the mind.)vFirst of all, these old houses can be drawn-we can makea representation that has all the characteristics of a copy.1 In fact, it is interesting to note that the wOI'd house does not appearin the very well-compiled index to the new edition of C. G. JungsMetamorphosis of the Soul and its Symbols.2 Jean Wahl, Poemes, p. 23.

49 house and universeAn objective drawing of this kind, independent of all daydreaming,is a forceful, reliable document that leaves itsmark on a biography.But let this exteriorist representation manifest an art ofdrawing, or a talent for representation, and it becomesinsistent, inviting.Merely to judge it as a good, wellexecuted likeness leads to contemplation and daydreaming.Daydreams return to inhabit an exact drawing and nodreamer ever remains indifferent for long to a picture ofa house.Long before the time when I began to read poetry everyday, I had often said to myself that I should like to live ina house such as one sees in old prints. I was most attractedby the bold outlines of the houses in woodcuts which, itseemed to me, demanded simplicity. Through them, mydaydreams inhabited the essential house.These naive daydreams, which I thought were my own,were a source of astonishment to me when I found tracesof them in my reading.In 1913, Andre Lafon had written:Ie reve d'un logis, maison basse a fentresHautes, au" trois degres uses, plats et verdisLogis pauvre et secret a l'air d'antique estampeQui ne vit qu'en moi-meme, ou je rentre par/oisM'asseo;r pour oubUer Ie jour gris et la pluie1(I dream of a house, a low house with highWindows, three worn steps, smooth and greenA poor secret house, as in an old print,That only lives in me, where sometimes I returnTo sit down and forget the gray day and the rain.)Andre Lafon wrote many other poems under the sign of"the poor house." In his literary "prints" the house welcomesthe reader like a host. A bit more and he would beready to seize the chisel and engrave his own reading.1 Andre Lafon, Potsies "Le rve d'un logis." p. 91.

50 the poetics of spaceCertain types of prints end by specifying types of houses.Annie Duthil wrote:Ie suis dans une maison d'estampes japonaisesLe soleil est partout car tout est transparent.1(I am in a house in a Japanese printThe sun is everywhere, for everything is transparent.)There exist sunny houses in which, at all seasons, it issummer, houses that are all windows.And isn't the poet who wrote the following also an inhabitantof prints?Qui n'a pas au fond de son coeurUn sombre chateau d'ElseneurA l'instar des gens du passeOn construit en soi-mme pierrePar pierre un grand chateau hante2('Yh0 has not deep in his heartA dark castle of ElsinoreIn the manner of men of the pastWe build within ourselves stoneOn stone a vast haunted castle.)And so I am cheered by the pictures I find in my reading.I go to live in the "literary prints" poets offer me. Themore simple the engraved house the more it fires my imaginationas an inhabitant. It does not remain a mere "representation."Its lines have force and, as a shelter, it isfortifying. It asks to be lived in simply with all the securitythat simplicity gives. The print house awakens a feelingfor the hut in me and, through it, I re-experience thepenetrating gaze of the little window. But see now what hashappened I When I speak the image sincerely, I suddenly1 Annie Duthil, La Pcheuse d'absolu, p. 20, Seghers. Paris.2 Vincent Monteiro, Yers sur verre, p. 15.

51 howe and universefeel a need to underline. And what is underlining but engravingwhile we write?VISometimes the house grows and spreads so that, in orderto live in it, greater elasticity of daydreaming, a daydreamthat is less clearly outlined, are needed. "My house," writesGeorges Spyridaki,l "is diaphanous, but it is not of glass.It is more of the nature of vapor. Its walls contract andexpand as I desire. At times, I draw them close about melike protective armor . . . But at others, I let the walls ofmy house blossom out in their own space, which is infinitelyextensible."Spyridaki's house breathes. First it is a coat of armor,then it extends ad infinitum, which amounts to saying thatwe live in it in alternate security and adventure. It is bothcell and world. Here, geometry is transcended.To give unreality to an image attached to a strong realityis in the spirit of poetry. These lines by Rene Cazelles2speak to us of this expansion, if we can inhabit his images.The following was written in the heart of Provence, a countryof sharp contours:"The undiscoverable house, where this lava flower blows,where storms and exhausting bliss are born, when will mysearch for it cease?"Symmetry abolished, to serve as fodder for the winds"I should like my house to be similar to that of the oceanwind, all quivering with gulls."Thus, an immense cosmic house is a potential of everydream of houses. Winds radiate from its center and gullsfly from its windows. A house that is as dynamic as thisallows the poet to inhabit the universe. Or, to put it differently.the universe comes to inhabit his house.I Georges Spyridaki, Mort lucide, p. 85, ghers, Paris.2 Rene Cazelles, De terre et d'envo!ee. pp. 23, 36. "G.L.M." Paris.

52 the poetics of spaceOccasionally, in a moment of repose, the poet returns tothe center of his abode (p. 29) ... . Tout respire a nouveauLa nappe est blanche( . .. Everything breathes againThe tablecloth is white)This bit of whiteness, this tablecloth suffices to anchorthe house to its center. The literary houses described byGeorges Spyridaki and Rene Cazelles are immense dwellingsthe walls of which are on vacation. There are momentswhen it is a salutary thing to go and live in them, as atreatment for claustrophobia.The image of these houses that integrate the wind, aspireto the lightness of air, and bear on the tree of their impossiblegrowth a nest all ready to fly away, may perhapsbe rejected by a positive, realistic mind. But it is of valuefor a general thesis on the imagination because, withoutthe poet's knowing it apparently, it is touched by the attractionof opposites, which lends dynamism to the greatarchetypes. In an articlel in the Eranos yearbook, ErichNeumann shows that all strongly terrestrial beings-and ahouse is strongly terrestrial-are nevertheless subject to theattractions of an aereal, celestial world. The well-rootedhouse likes to have a branch that is sensitive to the wind,or an attic that can hear the rustle of leaves. The poet whowroteL' escalier des arb resOn y monte2(On the stairs of the treesWe mount)was certainly thinking of an attic.1 Erich Neumann, Die Bedeutung des Erdarchetyps fUr die Neuzeit.Eranos-Jahrbuch, 1955. p. 12.2 Claude Hartmann. Nocturnes, La Galere, Paris.

55 house and universeIf we compose a poem about a house, it frequentlyhappens that the most flagrant contradictions cometo wake us from our doldrums of concepts, as philosopherswould say, and free us from our utilitarian geometricalnotions. In this fragment by Rene Cazelles, solidityis achieved by an imaginary dialectics. We inhale in it theimpossible odor of lava, here granite has wings. Conversely,the sudden wind is as rigid as a girder. The house conquersits share of sky. It has the entire sky for its terrace.But my commentary is becoming too precise. Concerningthe different characteristics of the house, it is inclinedto be hospitable to fragmentary dialectics, and if I wereto pursue it, I should destroy the unity of the archetype.However, this is always the case. It is better to leave theambivalences of the archetypes wrapped in their dominantquality. This is why a poet will always be more suggestivethan a philosopher. It is precisely his right to be suggestive.Pursuing the dynamism that belongs to suggestion, then,the reader can go farther, even too far. In reading andre-reading Rene Cazelles' poem, once we have accepted theburst of the image, we know that we can reside not only inthe topmost heights of the house, but in a super-height.There are many images with which I like to make superheightexperiments. The image of the house in the solidrepresentation is folded lengthwise. When the poet unfoldsit and spreads it out, it presents a very pure phenomenologicalaspect. Consciousness becomes "uplifted" in contactwith an image that, ordinarily, is "in repose." The imageis no longer descriptive, but resolutely inspirational.It is a strange situation. The space we love is unwillingto remain permanently enclosed. It deploys and appears tomove elsewhere without difficulty; into other times, andon different planes of dream and memory.Is there a reader who would fail to take advantage of theubiquity of a poem like this one:U ne maison dressee au coeurMa cathedrale de silenceChaque matin reprise en reve

54 the poetics of spaceEt chaque soir abandonneeU ne maison couverte d' aubeOuverte au vent de ma jeunesset(A house that stands in my heartMy cathedral of silenceEvery morning recaptured in dreamEvery evening abandonedA house covered with dawnOpen to the winds of my youth.)This house, as I see it, is a sort of airy structure thatmoves about on the breath of time. It really is open to thewind of another time. It seems as though it could greet usevery day of our lives in order to give us confidence in life.In my daydreaming, I associate these lines by Jean Larochewith the passage in which Rene Char2 dreams in "a roomthat grew buoyant and, little by little, expanded into thevast stretches of travel." If the Creator listened to poets, Hewould create a flying turtle that would carry off into theblue the great safeguards of earth.If further proof of these weightless houses were needed,there is a poem by Louis Guillaume, entitled uMaison deVent"S (Wind House), in which the poet dreams as follows:Longtemps je t'ai construite, d maison!A chaque souvenir je transportais des pierresDu rivage au sommet de tes mursEt je voyais, chaume couve par les saisonsTon toit changeant comme la merDanser sur Ie fO,ld des nuagesAuxquels il melait ses fumeesMaison de vent demeure qu'un souffle effafait.(Long did I build you, oh houselWith each memory I carried stones1 Jean Laroche, Memoires d'eU, Cahiers de Rochefort, p. g.2 Rene Char, Fureur et Mystcre, p. 41.3 Louis Guillaume, N oir com me la mer, Les Lettres, p. 60.

55 howe and univet'seFrom the bank to your topmost wallAnd I saw your roof mellowed by timeChanging as the seaDancing against a background of cloudsWith which it mingled its smoke.Wind house, abode that a breath effaced.)Some may wonder at this accumulation of examples. Forthe realist, the matter is settled: "none of that holds waterlIt is nothing but vain, inconsistent poetry; poetry that haslost all touch with reality." For the positive man, everythingthat is unreal is alike, the forms being submergedand drowned in unreality; and the only houses that arecapable of possessing individuality are real ones.But a dreamer of houses sees them everywhere, and anythingcan act as a germ to set him dreaming about them.Jean Laroche has written elsewhere:Cette pivoine est une maison vagueOU chacun retrouve La nuit(This peony is an empty houseIn which each of us recaptures night.)The peony encloses a sleeping insect in its red night:Tout calice est demeure(Every chalice is a dwelling-place.)Pivoines et pavots paradis tacit urnes!(Peonies and poppies silent gardens of Paradise I )writes Jean Bourdeillette1 in a line that encloses infinity.When we have dreamed as intensely as this in the hollowof a flower, the way we recall our lives in the house that islost and gone, dissolved in the waters of the past, is noordinary way. It is impossible to read the four lines thatfollow without entering into a dream that is endless:1 Jean Bourdeillette, Les etoiles dans la main, seghers, p. 48.

56 the poetics of spaceLa chambre meurt miel et tilleulOil. les tiro irs s' ouvrirent en deuilLa maison se mle a la mortDans un miroir qui se ternit.1(The room is dying honey and lindenWhere drawers opened in mourningThe house blends with deathIn a mirror whose lustre is dimming.)VIIIf we go from these images, which are all light and shimmer,to images that insist and force us to remember fartherback. into our past, we shall have to take lessons from poets.For how forcefully they prove to us that the houses thatwere lost forever continue to live on in us; that they insistin us in order to live again, as though they expected us togive them a supplement of living. How much better weshould live in the old house todayl How suddenly ourmemories assume a living possibility of being! We considerthe past, and a sort of remorse at not having lived profoundlyenough in the old house fills our hearts, comes upfrom the past, overwhelms us. Rilke2 expresses this poignantregret in unforgettable lines which we painfully makeour own, not so much for their expression as for theirdramatic depth of feeling:o nostalgie des lieux qui n'etaient pointAssez. aimcs a l'heure passagereQue je voudrais leur rendre de loinLe geste oubUc, i'action supplementaire.(Dh longing for places that were notCherished enough in that fleeting hourHow I long to make good from farThe forgotten gesture, the additional act.)1 Jean Bourdeillette, op. cit. p. 8. See, too, (p. 64) his recollection ofa house that is lost and gone.2 Rilke, Yergers, XLI.

57 house and universeWhy were we so quickly sated with the happiness of livingin the old house? Why did we not prolong those fleetinghours? In that reality something more than reality waslacking. We did not dream enough in that house. Andsince it must be recaptured by means of daydreams, liaisonis hard to establish. Our memories are encumbered withfacts. Beyond the recollections we continually hark back to,we should like to relive our suppressed impressions and thedreams that made us believe in happiness:Ou vous ai-je perdue, mon imagerie pietinee11(Where did I lose you, my trampled fantasies?)If we have retained an element of dream in our memories,if we have gone beyond merely assembling exact recollections,bit by bit the house that was lost in the mists oftime will appear from out the shadow. We do nothing toreorganize it; with intimacy it recovers its entity, in themellowness and imprecision of the inner life. It is as thoughsomething fluid had collected our memories and we ourselveswere dissolved in this fluid of the past. Rilke, whoexperienced this intimacy of fusion, speaks of the fusionof being with the lost house: "I never saw this strangedwelling again. Indeed, as I see it now, the way it appearedto my child's eye, it is not a building, but is quite dissolvedand distributed inside me: here one room, there another,and here a bit of corridor which, however, does not connectthe two rooms, but is conserved in me in fragmentaryform. Thus the whole thing is scattered about inside me,the rooms, the stairs that descended with such ceremoniousslowness, others, narrow cages that mounted in a spiralmovement, in the darkness of which we advanced like theblood in our veins."2Indeed, at times dreams go back so far into an undefined,dateless past that clear memories of our childhood homeappear to be detached from us. Such dreams unsettle ourdaydreaming and we reach a point where we begin to doubt1 Andre de Richaud, Le droit d'asile, ghers, p. 26.2 Rilke, Notebook of Malte Laurids Br;gge, (Fr. tr. p. SS).

58 the poetics of spacethat we ever lived where we lived. Our past is situatedelsewhere, and both time and place are impregnated witha sense of unreality. It is as though we sojourned in a limboof being. And poets and dreamers find themselves writingthings upon which metaphysicians would do well to meditate.Here, for instance, is a page of concrete metaphysicswhich by overlaying our memory of the childhood housewith daydreams leads us to the ill-defined, vaguely locatedareas of being where we are seized with astonishment atbeing. In his novel House of Breath! (p. 40), WilliamGoyen writes: "That people could come into the world ina place they could not at first even name and had neverknown before; and that out of a nameless and unknownplace they could grow and move around in it until its namethey knew and called ' with love, and call it HOME, andput roots there and love others there; so that wheneverthey left this place they would sing homesick songs aboutit and write poems of yearning for it, like a lover; .... . .The soil in which chance had sown the human plant wasof no importance. And against this background of nothingnesshuman values growl Inversely, if beyond memories, wepursue our dreams to their very end, in this pre-memoryit is as though nothingness caressed and penetrated being,as though it gently unbound the ties of being. We ask ourselvesif what has been, was. Have facts really the value thatmemory gives them? Distant memory only recalls them bygiving them a value, a halo, of happiness. But let this valuebe effaced, and the facts cease to exist. Did they ever exist?Something unreal seeps into the reality of the recollectionsthat are on the borderline between our own personal history and an indefinite pre-history, in the exact place where,after us, the childhood home comes to life in us. For beforeus-Goyen makes us understand this-it was quite anonymous.It was a place that was lost in the world. Thus, onthe threshold of our space, before the era of our own time,we hover between awareness of being and loss of being.And the entire reality of memory becomes spectral.1 Random House, New York."

59 house and universeBut it would seem that this element of unreality in thedreams of memory affects the dreamer when he is faced withthe most concrete things, as with the stone house to whichhe returns at night, his thoughts on mundane things. WilliamGoyen understands this unreality of reality (loc. cit.p. 56): "So this is why when often as you came home to it,down the road in a mist of rain, it seemed as if the housewere founded on the most fragile web of breath and youhad blown it. Then you thought it might not exist at allas built by carpenter's hands, nor had ever; and that it wasonly an idea of breath breathed out by you who, with thatsame breath that had blown it, could blow it all away."In a passage like this, imagination, memory and perceptionexchange functions. The image is created through co-operationbetween real and unreal, with the help of the functionsof the real and the unreal. To use the implements ofdialectical logic for studying, not this alternative, but thisfusion, of opposites, would be quite useless, for they wouldproduce the anatomy of a living thing. But if a house is aliving value, it must integrate an element of unreality. Allvalues must remain vulnerable, and those that do not aredead.When two strange images meet, two images that are thework of two poets pursuing separate dreams, they apparentlystrengthen each other. In fact, this convergence oftwo exceptional images furnishes as it were a countercheckfor phenomenological analysis. The image loses itsgratuitousness; the free play of the imagination ceases to bea form of anarchy. I should like, therefore, to compareGoyen's image in the House of Breath with one that Iquoted in my book La terre et les reveries du repos (p. 96)and which, at the time, I was unable to relate to any other.In Le domaine public (p. 70) Pierre Seghers writes:11 My imagination having been stimulated as a result of the day-dreamsset in motion by reading William Goyen, I have extended the originalquotation, used in 1948.

60the poetics of spaceUne maison ou je vais seul en appelantUn nom que Ie silence et les murs me renvoientUne etrange maison qui se tient dans ma voixEt qu'habite Ie vent.Ie l'inventel mes mains dessinent un nuageUn bateau de grand ciel au-dessus des foretsUne brume qui se dissipe et disparateComme au jeu des images.(A house where I go alone callingA name that silence and the walls give back to meA strange house contained in my voiceInhabited by the windI invent it, my hands draw a cloudA heaven-bound ship above the forestsMist that scatters and disappearsAs in the play of images.)In order to build better this house in the mist and wind,we should need, according to the poet,• . • . • Une voix plus forte et l'encensBleu du coeur et des mots( . • . . . A more sonorous voice and the blueIncense of heart and word.)Like the house of breath, the house of wind and voice isa value that hovers on the frontier between reality andunreality. No doubt a realistic mind will remain well thisside of this region. But for the poetry lover who ceads withjoy and imagination, it is a red-letter day when he canhear echoes of the lost house in two registers. The old house,for those who know how to listen, is a sort of geometry ofechoes. The voices of the past do not sound the same inthe big room as in the little bed chamber, and calls on thestairs have yet another sound. Among the most difficultmemories, well beyond any geometry that can be drawn,we must recapture the quality of the light; then come thesweet smells that linger in the empty rooms, setting anaerial seal on each room in the house of memory. Still far-

61 house and universether it is possible to recover not merely the timbre of thevoices, "the inflections of beloved voices now silent," butalso the resonance of each room in the sound house. In thisextreme tenuousness of memory, only poets may be expectedto furnish us with documents of a subtly psychologicalnature.VIIISometimes the house of the future is better built, lighterand larger than all the houses of the past, so that the imageof the dream house is opposed to that of the childhoodhome. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continueto say that we are going to do what we have not yet done:we are going to build a house. This dream house may bemerely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everythingthat is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy,sound, desirable, by other people. It mUst therefore satisfyboth pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms. If thesedreams are realized, they no longer belong in the domainof this study, but in that of the psychology of projects.However, as I have said many times, for me, a project isshort-range oneirism, and while it gives free play to themind, the soul does not find in it its vital expression. Maybeit is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a housethat we shall live in later, always later, so much later, infact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a housethat was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to thehouse we were born in, would lead to thoughts-serious, sadthoughts-and not to dreams. It is better to live in a stateof impermanence than in one of finality.The following anecdote contains a certain wisdom.It is told by Campenon, who has been discussing poetrywith the poet, Ducis: "When we came to the little poems,indited to his home his flower-beds, his kitchen garden, hislittle wood or his wine-cellar . .. I could not help remarkingjokingly that, a hundred years hence, he risked obliginghis commentators to rack their brains. He began tolaugh, and told me that having desired vainly ever since

62 the poetics of spacehe was young, to have a house in the country, with a smallgarden, he had made up his mind, at the age of seventy,to give them to himself on his own authority as a poet, aridwithout putting his hand in his pocket. He had begun byacquiring a house, then, as the charm of ownership increased,had added the garden, the little wood, etc. Noneof this existed outside his imagination; but it sufficed forthese little fancied possessions to take on reality in his eyes.He spoke of them and derived pleasure from them asthough they were real; and so powerful was his imaginationthat I should not be surprised if, on frosty April nights, hedidn't show signs of anxiety about his Marly vineyards."In this connection, he told me that a decent, honestcountry fellow, having read in the papers some of his lyricalpieces on the subject of his estate, had written to offer hisservices as overseer, adding that all he asked was a place tolive and whatever wages might be considered fair."Housed everywhere but nowhere shut in, this is the mottoof the dreamer of dwellings. In the last house as well as inthe actual house, the day-dream of inhabiting is thwarted.A daydream of elsewhere should be left open therefore, atall times.An excellent exercise for the function of inhabiting thedream house consists in taking a train trip. Such a voyageunreels a film of houses that are dreamed, accepted and refused,without our ever having been tempted to stop, as weare when motoring. We are sunk deep in day-dreaming withall verification healthily forbidden. But lest this mannerof travel be merely a gentle mania of mine, I should liketo quote the following passage from Thoreau's Journals,of October 31, 1850:"I am wont to think that I could spend my days contentedlyin any retired country house that I see; for I see itto advantage now and without incumbrance; I have notyet imported my humdrum thoughts, my prosaic habits,into it to mar the landscape." On August 28, 1861, Thoreauaddresses in thought the fortunate owners of the houses hehas seen: "Give me but the eyes to see the things which youpossess."

63 house and universeGeorge Sand said that people could be classified accordingto whether they aspired to live in a cottage or iIi apalace. But the question is more complex than that. Whenwe live in a manor house we dream of a cottage, and whenwe live in a cottage we dream of a palace. Better still, weall have our cottage moments and our palace moments. Wedescend to living close to the ground, on the floor of acottage, then would like to dominate the en tire horizonfrom a castle in Spain. And when reading has given uscountless inhabited places, we know how to let the dialecticsof cottage and manor sound inside us. This was experiencedby a great poet, Saint-Pol Roux, whose book, FeeriesInterieurs (Inner Enchantments), contains two stories thatneed only be compared to obtain two quite different picturesof Brittany, and indeed two different worlds. Frompne world to the other, from one dwelling to the other,dreams come and go. The first story is entitled: Adieux a lachaumiere (Farewell to the Cottage, p. 205) and the second:Le chdtelain et Ie paysan (Squire and Peasant, p. 359).The minute they entered the cottage, it opened its heartand soul: "At dawn, your freshly white-washed beingopened its arms to us: the children felt that they had enteredinto the heart of a dove, and we loved the ladderyourstairway-right away." Elsewhere the poet tells howgenerously a cottage radiates peasant humanity and fraternity.This dove-house was a hospitable ark.One day, however, Saint-Pol Roux left the cottage forthe manor-house. "Before leaving for a life of 'luxury andpride,' '' according to Theophile Briant,l "his Franciscansoul lamented, and he lingered a while longer under thelintel of Roscanvel." Briant quotes him as follows: "Onelast time, oh cottage, let me kiss your humble walls, evenin their shadow, which is the color of my woe ...."The Camaret manor, which became Saint-Pol Roux'shome, is undoubtedly a poetic creation, in every sense ofthe word; it is the realization of a poet's dream castle. Forhe first bought a fisherman's cottage situated right by thesea, on the crest of the dune that the inhabitants of this1 Theophile Briant, Saint-Pol Roux, p. 42, 5eghers, Paris.

64the poetics of spaceBreton peninsula call the Lion of Toulinguet. With thehelp of a friend, an artillery officer, he then drew up plansfor a manor house with eight towers, the center of whichwas to be the house he had just bought. An architect modifiedsomewhat this poetic project and the manor with thecottage heart was built."One day," Theophile Briant recalls (loc. cit. p. 37),"to synthesize the little Camaret peninsula for me, SaintPol Roux took a sheet of paper and drew a stone pyramidshowing the hatchings of the wind and the roll of the sea.Underneath it he wrote: 'Camaret is a stone in the wind ona lyre.' "A few pages back we discussed poems that sing of breathand wind houses, poems with which we seemed to haveattained the ultimate degree of metaphor. And here we seea poet who follows the working draft of these metaphors tobuild his house IWe should find ourselves indulging in similar daydreamsif we started musing under the cone-shaped roof of a windmill.We should sense its terrestrial nature, and imagineit to be a primitive hut stuck together with mud, firmlyset on the ground in order to resist the wind. Then, in animmense synthesis, we should dream at the same time of awinged house that whines at the slightest breeze and refinesthe energies of the wind. Millers, who are wind thieves,make good flour from storms.In the second tale in Feeries Interieures, Saint-Pol Rouxtells how he lived a peasant's life at the same time that hewas lord of the Camaret manor. Never, perhaps, have thedialectics of cottage and manor been so simply or so powerfullyinverted as here. "As I stand riveted to the first stepsof the perron by my hob-nailed boots, I hesitate to emergesuddenly from my rustic's chrysalis in the r6le of lord." lAnd further on (p. 362) he writes: "My flexible natureadapts itself easily to this eagle's well-being, high abovetown and sea, a well-being in which my imagination losesno time conferring supremacy upon me, over elements andpersons. And soon, bound up in my egoism, I forget, up-1 p. 361•

65house and universestart peasant that I am, that the original reason for themanor house was, through antithesis, to enable me to reallysee the cottage."The word chrysalis alone is an unmistakable indicationthat here two dreams are joined together, dreams that bespeakboth the repose and flight of being, evening's crystallizationand wings that open to the light. In the body ofthe winged manor, which dominates both town and sea,man and the universe, he retained a cottage chrysalis inorder to be able to hide alone, in complete repose.Referring to the work of the Brazilian philosopher, LucioAlberto Pinheiro dos Santos,l I once said that by examiningthe rhythms of life in detail, by descending from the greatrhythms forced upon us by the universe to the finer rhythmsthat play upon man's most exquisite sensibilities, it wouldbe possible to work out a rhythmanalysis that would tendto reconcile and lighten the ambivalences that psychoanalystsfind in the disturbed psyche. But if what poets sayis true, alternating daydreams cease to be rivals. The twoextreme realities of cottage and manor, to be found in thecase of Saint-Pl Roux, take into account our need forretreat and expansion, for simplicity and magnificence. Forhere we experience a rhythmanalysis of the function ofinhabiting. To sleep well we do not need to sleep in alarge room, and to work well we do not have to work in aden. But to dream of a poem, then write it, we need both.It is the creative psyche that benefits from rhythmanalysis.Thus the dream house must possess every virtue. Howeverspacious, it must also be a cottage, a dove-cote, a nest,a chrysalis. Intimacy needs the heart of a nest. Erasmus, hisbiographer tells us, was long "in finding a nook in his finehous in which he could put his little body with safety.He ended by confining himself to one room until he couldbreathe the parched air that was necessary to him. "2And how many dreamers look everywhere in their house,or in their room, for the garment that suits them!1 Cf. La dialecte de la duree, Presses Universitaire de France, p. 129.2 Andre Saglio, Maisons d'hommes celebres, Paris 189, p. 82.

66the poetics of spaceBut I repeat: nest, chrysalis and garment only constituteone moment of a dwelling place. The more concentratedthe repose, the more hermetic the chrysalis, the more thebeing that emerges from it is a being from elsewhere, thegreater is his expansion. And, in my opinion, as the readergoes from one poet to the other, he is made more dynamicby his reader's imagination if he listens to Supervielle invitingthe entire universe to come back into the housethrough all the wide-open doors and windows.1Tout ce qui fait les bois, les rivieres ou l'airA place entre ces murs qui croient fermer une chambreAccourez, cavaliers qui traversez les mersJe n'ai qu'un to it du del, vow aurez de la place.(All that makes the woods, the rivers or the airHas its place between these walls which believe they close a roomMake haste, ye gentlemen, who ride across the seasI've bu"t one roof from heaven, there'll be room for you.)The house's welcome is so genuine that even what maybe seen from the windows belongs to it.Le corps de la montagne hesite a ma fentre:"Comment peut-on entrer si l'on est la montagne ..Si l'on est en hauteur, avec roches, cail/oux,Un morceau de la Terre altere par Ie Ciel1"(The body of the mountain hesitates before my window:"How can one enter if one is the mountain,If one is tall, with boulders and stones,A piece of Earth, altered by Sky?")When we have been made aware of a rhythmanalysis bymoving from a concentrated to an expanded house, theoscillations reverberate and grow louder. Like SupervielIe,great dreamers profess intimacy with the world. Theylearned this intimacy, however, meditating on the house.1 Jules Supervielle, Les amis inconnus, p. 93, p. g6.

67 house and universeIXSupervieUe's house is a house that is eager to see, one forwhich seeing is having. It both sees the world and has it.But like a greedy child, its eyes are bigger than its stomach.It has furnished us with one of those exaggerated imagesthat a philosopher of the imagination is obliged to noteright away with a reasonably critical smile.But after this holiday of the imagination we shall haveto return to reality, in order to speak of daydreams thataccompany household activities. For they keep vigilantwatch over the house, they link its immediate past to itsimmediate future, they are what maintains it in the securityof being.But how can housework be made into a creative activity?The minute we apply a glimmer of consciousness to amechanical gesture, or practice phenomenology while polishinga piece of old furniture, we sense new impressionscome into being beneath this familiar domestic duty. Forconsciousness rejuvenates everything, giving a quality ofbeginning to the most everyday actions. It even dominatesmemory. How wonderful it is to really become once morethe inventor of a mechanical action! And so, when a poetrubs a piece of furniture-even vicariously-when he putsa little fragrant wax on his table with the woolen cloth thatlends warmth to everything it touches, he creates a newobject; he increases the object's human dignity; he registersthis object officially as a member of the human household.Henri Bosco once wrote:1 "The soft wax entered into thepolished substance under the pressure of hands and theeffective warmth of a woolen cloth. Slowly the tray took ona dull luster. It was as though the radiance induced bymagnetic rubbing emanated from the hundred-year-oldsapwood, from the very heart of the dead tree, and spreadgradually, in the form of light, over the tray. The old fingerspossessed of every virtue, the broad palm, drew fromthe solid block with its inanimate fibers, the latent powers1 Henri Bosco, Le jardin d'Hyacinthe, p. 192.

68the poetics of spaceof life itself. This was creation of an object, a real act offaith, taking place before my enchanted eyes."Objects that are cherished in this way really are born ofan intimate light, and they attain to a higher degree ofreality than indifferent objects, or those that are defined bygeometric reality. For they produce a new reality of being,and they take their place not only in an order but in acommunity of order. From one object in a room to another,housewifely care weaves the ties that unite a very ancientpast to the new epoch. The housewife awakens furniturethat was asleep.If we attain to the limit at which dream becomes exaggerated,we experience a sort of consciousness of constructingthe house, in the very pains we take to keep it alive, togive it all its essential clarity. A house that shines from thecare it receives appears to have been rebuilt from the inside;it is as though it were new inside. In the intimate harmonyof walls and furniture, it may be said that we become consciousof a house that is built by women, since men onlyknow how to build a house from the outside, and theyknow little or nothing of the "wax" civilization.No one has written better of this integration of reveryinto work, of our vastest dreams into the humblest of occupations,than Henri Bosco, in his description of the oldfaithful servant, Sidoine (op. cit. p. 173): "This vocationfor happiness, so far from prejudicing her practical life,nurtured its action. When she washed a sheet or a tablecloth,when she polished a brass candlestick, little movementsof joy mounted from the depths of her heart,enlivening her household tasks. She did not wait to finishthese tasks before withdrawing into herself, where she couldcontemplate to her heart's content the supernatural imagesthat dwelt there. Indeed, figures from this land appearedto her familiarly, however commonplace the work she wasdoing, and without in the least seeming to dream, shewashed, dusted and swept in the company of angels."I once read an Italian novel in which there was a streetsweeper who swung his broom with the majestic gesture

69 house and univeTseof a reaper. In his daydream he was reaping an imaginaryfield on the asphalt, a wide field in real nature in which herecaptured his youth and the noble calling of reaper underthe rising sun.We should need, then, purer "reagents" than those ofpsychoanalysis to determine the "composition" of a poeticimage. The fine determinations required by poetry bringus into the field of micro-chemistry, and a reagent that hadbeen ' adulterated by the ready-made interpretations of apsychoanalyst could cloud the solution. No phenomenologist re-living Supervielle's invitation to the mountains tocome in through the window would see in it a sexual monstrosity.This is rather the poetic phenomenon of pureliberation, of absolute sublimation. The image is no longerunder the domination of things, nor is it subject to thepressures of the unconscious. It floats and soars, immense,in the free atmosphere of a great poem. Through the poet'swindow the house converses about immensity with theworld. And as metaphysicians would say, it too, the houseof men, opens its doors to the world.In the same way, the phenomenologist who followswomen's construction of the house through daily polishingmust go beyond the psychoanalyst's interpretations. I, myselfheld to these interpretations in some of my earlierbooks.1 But I now believe that we can go deeper, that wecan sense how a human being can devote himself to thingsand make them his own by perfecting their beauty. A littlemore beautiful and we have something quite different.Here we have the paradox of an incipience of a verycustomary action. Through housewifely care a house recoversnot so much its originality as its origin. And whata great life it would be if, every morning, every object inthe house could be made anew by our hands, could "issue"from our hands. In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincentvan Gogh tells him that we should "retain something ofthe original character of a Robinson Crusoe" (p. 25). Makeand remake everything oneself, make a "supplementary1 Cf. La psychanalyse du leu.

70 the poetics of spacegesture" toward each object, give another facet to thepolished reflections, all of which are so many boons theimagination confers upon us by making us aware of thehouse's inner growth. To have an active day I keep sayingto myself, "Every morning I must give a thought toSaint Robinson."When a dreamer can reconstruct the world from an objectthat he transforms magically through his care of it,we become convinced that everything in the life of a poetis germinal. The following long fragment by Rilke, in spiteof a certain overloading (gloves and costumes) gives us afeeling of naive simplicity.In Lettres a une musicienne, Rilke writes to Benvenutathat in the absence of his cleaning woman, he had beenpolishing his furniture. "I was, as I said, magnificentlyalone ... when suddenly I was seized by my oId passion.I should say that this was undoubtedly my greatest childhoodpassion, as well as my first contact with music, sinceour little piano fell under my jurisdiction as duster. Itwas, in fact, one of the few objects that lent itself willinglyto this operation and gave no sign of boredom. On the contrary,under my zealous dustcloth, it suddenly started topurr mechanically . . . and its fine, deep black surface becamemore and more beautiful. When you've been throughthis there's little you don't know! I was quite proud, ifonly of my indispensable costume, which consisted of a bigapron and little washable suede gloves to protect one'sdainty hands. Politeness tinged with mischief was my reactionto the friendliness of these objects, 'Which seemedhappy to be so well treated, so meticulously renovated. Andeven today, I must confess that, while everything about megrew brighter and the immense black surface of my worktable, which dominated its surroundings ... became newlyaware, somehow, of the size of the room, reflecting it moreand more clearly: pale gray and almost square . . ., well,yes, I felt moved, as though something were happening,something, to tell the truth, which was not purely superficialbut immense, and which touched my very soul: I was

71 house and universean emperor washing the feet of the poor, or Saint Bonaventure,washing dishes in his convent."Benvenuta's comment! on these episodes detracts fromtheir charm somewhat when she tells us that Rilke's mother,"while he was still a mere child, forced him to dust thefurniture and perform other household tasks." But onecannot help sensing the nostalgia for work that emanatesfrom this fragment by Rilke, or realizing that this is anaccumulation of psychological documents from differentmental ages, since to the joy of helping his mother is addedthe glory of be"ing one of the great of the earth, washingthe feet of the poor. The whole thing is a complex of sentiments,with its association of politeness and mischief, ofhumility and action. Then, too, there is the striking linewith which it opens: "I was magnificently alone!" Alone,as we are at the origin of all real action that we are not"obliged" to perform. And the marvelous thing about easyactions is that they do, in fact, place us at the origin ofaction.Removed from its context, this long passage seems to meto be a good test of the reader's interest. Some may disdainit or wonder that it should interest anyone; whereas toothers it may seem alive, effective and stimulating, since itoffers each one of us a means of becoming aware of ourroom by strongly synthesizing everything that lives in it,every piece of furniture that wants to be friends.There is also the courage of the writer who braves thekind of censorship that forbids "insignificant" confidences.But what a joy reading is, when we recognize the importanceof these insignificant things, when we can add ourown personal daydreams to the "insignificant" recollectionsof the authorl Then insignificance becomes the sign of ex ..treme sensitivity to the intimate meanings that establishspiritual understanding between writer and reader.And what charm it confers upon our memories to be ableto say to ourselves that, except for the suede gloves, wehave lived moments similar to those lived by Rilkel1 Benvenuta. Rille et Benvenuta, French translation, p. 80.

72 the poetics of spacexAll great, simple images reveal a psychic state. The house,even more than the landscape, is a "psychic state," andeven when reproduced as it appears from the outside, itbespeaks intimacy. Psychologists generally, and FranoiseMinkowska in particular, together with those whom shehas succeeded interesting in the subject, have studied thedrawings of houses made by children, and even used themfor testing. Indeed, the house-test has th e advantage ofwelcoming spontaneity, for many children draw a housespontaneously while dreaming over their paper and pencil.To quote Anne Balif:1 "Asking a child to draw his houseis asking him to reveal the deepest dream shelter he hasfound for his happiness. If he is happy, he will succeed indrawing a snug, protected house which is well built ondeeply-rooted foundcltions." It will have the right shape,and nearly always there will be some indication of its innerstrength. In certain drawings, quite obviously, to quoteMme. Balif, "it is warm indoors, and there is a fire bum·ing, such a big fire, in fact, that it can be seen coming outof the chimney." When the house is happy, soft smokerises in gay rings above the roof.If the child is unhappy, however, the house bears tracesof his distress. In this connection, I recall that FranoiseMinkowska organized an unusually moving exhibition ofdrawings by Polish and Jewish children who had sufferedthe cruelties of the German occupation during the last war.One child, who had been hidden in a closet every time therewas an alert, continued to draw narrow, cold, closed houseslong after those evil times were over. These are what Mme.Minkowska calls "motionless" houses, houses that havebecome motionless in their rigidity. "This rigidity and mo·tionlessness are present in the smoke as well as in the win·dow curtains. The surrounding trees are quite straight and1 De Van Gogh et Seurat aux dessins d'en/ants, illustrated catalogue ofan exhibition held at the Musee Pedagogique (Paris) in 1949. Dr. F.Minkowska's comments on the drawings appear on page 137 of Mme.Balif's article.

78 house and universegive the impression of standing guard over the house"(loc. cit. p. 55). Mme. Minkowska knows that a live houseis not really "motionless," that, particularly, it integratesthe movements by means of which one accedes to the door.Thus the path that leads to the house is often a climbingone. At times, even, it is inviting. In any case, it alwayspossesses certain kinesthetic features. If we were making aRorschach test, we should say that the house has "K."Often a simple detail suffices for Mme. Minkowska, adistinguished psychologist, to recognize the way the housefunctions. In one house, drawn by an eight-year-old child,she notes that there is "a knob on the door; people go inthe house, they live there." It is not merely a constructedhouse, it is also a house that is "lived-in." Quite obviouslythe door-knob has a functional significance. This is thekinesthetic sign, so frequently forgotten in the drawings of"tense" children.Naturally, too, the door-knob could hardly be drawn inscale with the house, its function taking precedence overany question of size. For it expresses the function of opening,and only a logical mind could object that it is used toclose as well as to open the door. In the domain of values,on the other hand, a key closes more often than it opens,whereas the door-knob opens more often than it closes.And the gesture of closing is always sharper, firmer andbriefer than that of opening. It is by weighing such finepoints as these that, like Franoise Minkowska, one becomesa psychologist of houses.

3drawers, Chestsand wardrobesI always feel a slight shock, a certain mild, philologicalpain, whenever a great writer uses a word in a derogatorysense. To begin with, all words do an honest job in oureveryday language, and not even the most ordinary amongthem, those that are attached to the most commonplacerealities, lose their poetic possibilities as a result of thisfact. But somehow, when Bergson uses the word "drawer,"he does it disdainfully. Indeed, the word always appears inthe r6le of a controversial metaphor, giving orders andpassing judgment, always in the same way. Our philosopherdislikes compartmented arguments.This seems to me to be a good example for demonstratingthe radical difference between image and metaphor. I shalltherefore insist upon this difference before returning tomy examination of the images of intimacy that are inharmony with drawers and chests, as also with all the otherhiding-places in which human beings, great dreamers oflocks, keep or hide their secrets.Although there is a superabundance of metaphor inBergson's writings, in the last analysis, his images are rare.It is as though, for him, imagination were entirely metaphorical.Now a metaphor gives concrete substance to animpression that is difficult to express. Metaphor is relatedto a psychic being from which it differs. An image, on thecontrary, product of absolute imagination, owes its entirebeing to the imagination. Later, when I plan to go moredeeply into the comparison between metaphor and image,we shall see that metaphor could not be studied phenomenologically,and that in fact, it is not worth the trouble,since it has no phenomenological value. At the most, it is a

75 drawers chests and wardrobesfabricated image) without deep, true, genuine roots. It isan ephemeral expression. It is, or should be, one that is usedonly once, in passing. We must be careful, therefore, notto give it too much thought; nor should the reader thinktoo much about it. And yet, what a success the drawermetaphor has had with Bergson's followerslContrary to metaphor, we can devote our reading beingto an image, since it confers being upon us. In fact, theimage, which is the pure product of absolute imagination,is a phenomenon of being; it is also one of the specificphenomena of the speaking creature.IIAs is well known, the drawer metaphor, in addition tocertain others, such as "ready-made garments," is used byBergson to convey the inadequacy of a philosophy of concept.Concepts are drawers in which knowledge may beclassified; they are also ready-made garments which doaway with the individuality of knowledge that has beenexperienced. The concept soon becomes lifeless thinkingsince, by definition, it is classified thinking.I should like to point out a few passages which show thepolemical nature of the drawer metaphor in Bergsonianphilosophy.In L'Evolution creatrice (1907, p. 5) we read: UMemory,as 1 have tried to prove,1 is not the faculty for classifyingrecollections in a drawer, or writing them down in a register.Neither register nor drawer exists ..."Faced with any new object, reason asks (see L' Evolutioncreatrice) p. 52) "in which of its earlier categories the newobject belongs? In which ready-to-open drawer shall weput it? With which ready-made garments shall we investit?" Because, of course, a ready-made garment suffices toclothe a poor rationalist. In the second Oxford conferenceof May 27, 1911 (later included in La Pensee et Ie mou ..vant) p. 172), Bergson shows the indigence of the imageaccording to which there exist "here and there in the1 This refers to Bergson's Matiere et Memoire, chapters II and III.

76 the poetics of spacebrain, keep-sake boxes that preserve fragments of the past."In the Introduction to Metaphysics (La Pensee et Iemouvant, p. 221) Bergson states that all Kant saw in sciencewas "frames within frames:'He was still haunted by this metaphor when he wrote hisessay entitled La Pen see et Ie mouvant, 1922, which, inmany respects, summarizes his philosophy. On page 80 ofthe 26th edition, he says again that in memory words arenot deposited "in a cerebral or any other kind of drawer."If this were the occasion to do so, it could be demonstrated that in contemporary science, the active inventionof concepts, necessitated by the evolution of scientificthinking, is greater than those determined by simple classifications that "fit into one another," as Bergson expressesit (La Pensee et le mouvant). In opposition to a philosophy that seeks to discover the conceptualistic features incontemporary science, the "drawer" metaphor remains acrude instrument for polemical discussion. But for ourpresent problem, which is that of distinguishing betweenmetaphor and image, this is an example of a metaphorthat hardens and loses even the spontaneousness of theimage. This is particularly noticeable in the simplifiedBergsonism taught in the classrooms, where the polemicalmetaphor of the drawer in the filing cabinet comes backtime and again in elementary analyses that set out to attackstereotyped ideas. It is even possible, when listening tocertain lectures, to foresee that the drawer metaphor isabout to appear. And when we sense a metaphor in ad.vance there can be no question of imagination. This metaphor-which,I repeat, is a crude polemical instrumenttogetherwith a few others that hardly vary at all, hasmechanized the debates that Bergsonians carry on with thephilosophies of knowledge, particularly with what Bergsonhimself, using an epithet that passed quick judgment,called "dry" rationalism.IIIThese rapid remarks are intended to show that a metaphor

77 drawers, chests and wardrobesshould be no more than an accident of expression, and thatit is dangerous to make a thought of it. A metaphor is afalse image, since it does not possess the direct virtue ofan image formed in spoken revery.A great novelist has used this Bergsonian metaphor butit was for the purpose of characterizing the psychology ofan arrant fool, rather than that of a Kantian rationalist.I refer to Henri Bosco's Monsieur Carre-Benoit a la campagne,in which the drawer metaphor is presented in reverse:it is not the intelligence that is a filing cabinet; thefiling cabinet is an intelligence.The only piece of furniture, among all that he possessed,for which Carre-Benoit felt real affection was hissolid oak filing cabinet, which he contemplated with satisfactionwhenever he passed in front of it. Here, at least,was something that was reliable, that could be countedon. You saw what you were looking at and you touchedwhat you were touching. Its proportions were what theyshould be, everything about it had been designed andcalculated by a meticulous mind for purposes of utility.And what a marvelous to01l It replaced everything, memoryas well as intelligence. In this well-fitted cube therewas not an iota of haziness or shiftiness. Once you had putsomething in it, even if you put it a hundred or ten thousandmore times, you could find it again in the twinklingof an eye, as it were. Forty-eight drawers! Enough to holdan entire well-classified world of positive knowledge. M.Carre-Benoit attributed a sort of magic power to thesedrawers concerning which he said that they were "thefoundations of the human mind."lIt should not be forgotten that in the novel, this is saidby a very commonplace man. But the novelist who makeshim say it is an unusually gifted one. For with this filingcabinet he has succeeded in embodying the dull administrativespirit. And since stupidity must be turned to ridicule,Henri Bosco's hero has hardly spoken when, as heopens the drawers of the "august cabinet," he finds that themaid has used it as a place to put mustard, salt, rice, coffee,1 Cf. loco cit. p. 126.

78 the poetics of spacepeas and lentils. His reasoning cabinet had become alarder.Perhaps, after all, this image could be used to illustratea "philosophy of having," since it may be taken both literallyand figuratively. There are many erudite minds thatlay in provisions. We shall see later, they say to themselves.whether or not we'll use them.IVBy way of preamble to our posItive study of images ofsecrecy, we began by examining a hastily formulated meta ..phor that does not really unite exterior realities with intimatereality. Then, in this passage from Bosco's book, wesucceeded in getting a direct, characterological hold, basedon a clearly outlined reality. Now we must return . to ourstudies of the imagination, all of them positive. With thetheme of drawers, chests, locks and wardrobes, we shallresume contact with the unfathomable store of daydreamsof intimacy.Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers,and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs ofthe secret psychological life. Indeed, without these "ob ..jects" and a few others in equally high favor, our intimatelife would lack a model of intimacy. They are hybridobjects, subject objects. Like us, through us and for us,they have a quality of intimacy.Does there exist a single dreamer of words who does notrespond to the word wardrobe? .....And to fine words correspond fine things, to grave-soundingwords, an entity of depth. Every poet of furnitureevenif he be a poet in a garret, and therefore has no furni·ture-knows that the inner space of an old wardrobe isdeep. A wardrobe's inner space is also intimate space) spacethat is not open to just anybody.But words carry with them obligations. Only an indigentsoul would put just anything in a wardrobe. To put justanything, just any way, in just any piece of furniture, isthe mark of unusual weakness in the function of inhabit-

79 drawers chests and wardrobesing. In the wardrobe there exists a center of order thatprotects the entire house against uncurbed disorder. Hereorder reigns, or rather, this is the reign of order. Order isnot merely geometrical; it can also remember the familyhistory. A poet knew this:1Ordonnance. Harmonie.Piles de draps de I' armoireLavande dans Ie linge.(Orderliness. Harmony.Piles of sheets in the wardrobeLavender in the linen.)With the presence of lavender the history of the seasonsenters into the wardrobe. Indeed, lavender alone introducesa Bergsonia.n duree into the hierarchy of the sheets.Should we not wait, before using them, for them to be, asthey say in France, sufficiently "lavendered"? What dreamsare reserved for us if we can recall, if we can return to, theland of tranquility! Memories come crowding when welook back upon the shelf on which the lace-trimmed,batiste and muslin pieces lay on top of the heavier materials:"A wardrobe," writes Milosz,2 "is filled with themute tumult of memories."Bergson did not want the faculty of memory to be takenfor a wardrobe of recollections. But images are more demandingthan ideas. And the most Bergsonian of his disciples,being a poet, recognized that memory is a wardrobe.The following great line was written by Charles Peguy:Aux rayons de memoire et aux temples de l'armoires(On the shelves of memory and in the temples of the wardrobe)But the real war

80 the poetics of space-L'armoire etait sans clefs! . .. Sans clefs la grande armoireOn regardait souvent sa porte brune et noireSans clefs! . .. C'etait etrange!-On rvait bien des foisA ux mysteres dormant entre ses {lanes de boisEt l'on eroyait ouir au fond de la serrureBeante, un bruit lointain, vague et joyeux murmure.1(The wardrobe had no keysr . . • No keys had the big wardrobeOften we used to look at its brown and black doorNo keys! ... It was stranger Many a time we dreamedOf the mysteries lying dormant between its wooden BanksAnd we thought we heard, deep in the gaping lockA distant sound, a vague and joyful murmur.)Here Rimbaud designates a perspective of hope: whatgood things are being kept in reserve in the locked wardrobe?This time it is filled with promise, it is somethingmore than a family chronicle.Andre Breton, with a single word, shows us the marvelsof unreality by adding a blessed impossibility to the riddleof the wardrobe. In Revolver aux cheveux blancs (p. 110)he writes with typical surrealist imperturbability:2L'armoire est pleine de linge ,Il Y a meme des rayons de lune que je peux deplier.(The wardrobe is filled with linenThere are even moonbeams which I can unfold.)This carries the image to a point of exaggeration thatno reasonable mind would care to attain. But exaggerationis always at the summit of any living image. And to addfantasy linen is to draw a picture, by means of a volute ofwords, of all the superabundant blessings that lie folded1 Arthur Rimbaud. Les etrennes des orphelins.2 Another poet, Joseph Rouffange, writes:Dans Ie linge mort des placardsIe cherche Ie surnaturel(In the dead linen in cupboardsI seek the supernatural.)Deuil et luxe du coeur, d. Rougerie.

81 drawers, chests and wardrobesin piles between the flanks of an abandoned wardrobe.How big, how enveloping, is an old sheet when we unfoldit. And how white the old tablecloth was, white as the moonon the wintry meadowl If we dream a bit, Breton's imageseems perfectly natural.Nor should we be surprised by the fact that an entitywhich possesses such great wealth of intimacy should beso affectionately cared for by housewives. Anne de Tourvillesays of a poor woodcutter's wife: "She had startedrubbing, and the high-lights that played on the wardrobechctered the heart."l An armoire radiates a very soft lightin the room, a communicative light. It is understandable,therefore, that a poet watching the October light play overthe wardrobe should writeLe reflet de l'armoire ancienne sowLa braise du crepuscule d'octobre2(The reflection on the old wardrobeCast by the live coals of an October twilight.)If we give objects the friendship they should have, wedo not open a wardrobe without a slight start. Beneath itsrusset wood, a wardrobe is a very white almond. To openit, is to experience an event of whiteness.vAn anthology devoted to small boxes, such as chests andcaskets, would constitute an important chapter in psychology.These complex pieces that a craftsman creates arevery evident witnesses of the need for secrecy, of an intuitivesense of hiding places. It is not merely a matter ofkeeping a possession well guarded. The lock doesn't existthat could resist absolute violence, and all locks are aninvitation to thieves. A lock is a psychological threshold.And how it defies indiscretion when it is covered withornaments! What "complexes" are attached to an orna-1 Anne de Tourville, Jabadao, p. 51.2 Claude Vigee, loco cit. p. 161.

82 the poetics of spacemented lock! Denise Paulme1 writes that among the Bambaras,the center of the lock is sculptured "in the form ofa crocodile, or a lizard, or a turtle . . ." The power thatopens and shuts must possess the power of life, humanpower, or the power of a sacred animal. "And among theDogons, in the Sudan, locks are decorated with two humanfigures representing the first man and first woman." (Loc.cit. p. 35).But rather than challenge the trespasser, rather thanfrighten him by signs of power, it is preferable to misleadhim. This is where boxes that fit into one another comein. The least important secrets are put in the first box, theidea being that they will suffice to satisfy his curiosity,which can also be fed on false secrets. In other words, thereexists a type of cabinet work that is "complexualistic."For many people, the fact that there should exist ahomology between the geometry of the small box and thepsychology of secrecy does not call for protracted comment.However, novelists occasionally make note of this homologyin a few lines. One of Franz Hellens' characters, wishing tomake his daughter a present, hesitates between a silk scarfand a small, Japanese lacquer box. He chooses the box"because it seems to be better suited to her reserved na.ture."2 A rapid, simple notation of this kind may wellescape the attention of the hurried reader. And yet it isat the very core of a strange tale, in which father and daughterhide the same mystery. This same mystery is headingtowards the same fate, and the author applies all his talentsto making us feel this identity of intimate spirits. Indeed,this is a book that should be added to a dossier on thepent-up soul, with the box for emblem. For it shows usthat the psychology of reserved persons is not depicted bylisting their negative attitudes, cataloguing their detachmentsor recounting their moments of silence! Watch them,1 Denise PaulIne, Les Sculptures de I#Afrique noire, Presses Univerait·aires de France, 1956, p. 12.2 Franz Hellens, Fantdmes vivants, p. 126. Cf. the line in Baudelaire'sLes petits poemes en prose, p. 32, in which he speaks of "the egoist,shut up like a box."

83 drawers .. chests and wardrobesrather, in the moment of positive joy that accompanies theopening of a new box" like this young girl who receivesimplicit permission from her father to hide her secrets;that is to say, to conceal her mystery. In this story by FranzHellens, two human beings "understand" each other withouta word, without knowing it, in fact. Two pent-up humanbeings communicate by means of the same symbol.VIIn an earlier chapter, I stated that to say one "reads" ahouse or a room, makes sense. We might also say thatwriters let us read their treasure-boxes, it being understoodthat a well-calculated geometrical description is not theonly way to write "a box." And yet Rilke has spoken of thepleasure he felt when he saw a box that closed well. "Abox-top that is in good condition," he wrote, "with itsedges unbattered, should have no other desire than to beon its bOX."l A literary critic will probably ask how it waspossible, in as well-written a work as the Cahiers .. for Rilketo have overlooked such a "commonplace" as this. Theobjection will be overridden, however, if one accepts thegerm of daydream contained in the gently closed box. Andhow far the word desire goes! I am reminded of an optimisticproverb according to which: "Every pot has itscover." The world would get along better if pots and coverscould always stay together.Gentle closing calls for gentle opening, and we shouldwant life always to be well oiled.If we "read" a Rilke box, we shall see how inevitably asecret thought encounters the box image. In a letter toLiliane,2 Rilke wrote: "Everything that touches upon thisieffable experience must remain quite remote, or onlygive r to the most cautious handling at some future time.Yes, I must admit that I imagine it taking place one daythe way those heavy, imposing seventeenth-century lockswork; the kind that filled the entire top of a chest with1 Rilke, Cahiers, p. 166. French translation.a Claire Goll. Rillce et les femmes .. p. 70.

84 the poetics of spaceall sorts of bolts, clamps, bars and levers, while a single,easily turned key pulled this entire apparatus of defenseand deterrence from its most central point. But the key isnot alone. You know too that the keyholes of such chestsare concealed under a button or under a leather tonguewhich also only responds to some secret pressure." Whatconcrete images to express the "Open, Sesame" formulalAnd what secret pressure, what soft words, are needed togain access to a spirit, to calm a Rilkean heartlThere is no doubt that Rilke liked locks. But who doesn'tlike both locks and keys? There is an abundant psychoanalyticalliterature on this theme, so that it would be easyto find documentation on the subject. For our purpose,however, if we emphasized sexual symbols, we should concealthe depth of the dreams of intimacy. Indeed, one isprobably never more aware of the monotony of the symbolsused in psychoanalysis than in such an example. When aconflict between lock and key appears in a night dream,for psychoanalysis this is a clear sign, so clear, in fact, thatit cuts the story short. When we dream of locks and keysthere's nothing more to confess. But poetry extends wellbeyond psychoanalysis on every side. From a dream it alwaysmakes a daydream. And the poetic daydream cannot contentitself with the rudiments of a story; it cannot be tiedto a knotty complex. The poet lives a daydream that isawake, but above all, his daydream remains in the world,facing worldly things. It gathers the universe togetheraround and in an object. We see it open chests, or condensecosmic wealth in a slender casket. If there are jewels andprecious stones in the casket, it is the past, a long past, apast that goes back through generations, that will set thepoet romancing. The stones will speak of love, of course.But of power too, and fate. All of that is so much greaterthan a key and its locklThe casket contains the things that are unforgettable,unforgettable for us, but also unforgettable for those towhom we are going to give our treasures. Here the past,the present and a future are condensed. Thus the casket ismemory of what is immemorial.

85drawers, chests and wardrobesIf we take advantage of images to indulge in psychology,we find that every important recollection-Bergson's purerecollection-is set in its little casket. The pure recollection,the image that belongs to us alone, we do not want to com·municate; we only give its picturesque details. Its very core,however, is our own, and we should never want to tell allthere is to tell about it. This in no way resembles unconsciousrepression, which is an awkward form of dynamism,with symbols that are conspicuous. But every secret has itslittle casket, and this absolute, well-guarded secret is independentof all dynamism. Here the intimate life achievesa synthesis of Memory and Will. This is Iron Will, notagainst the outside, or against other persons, but beyondall the psychology of being "against." Surrounding certainrecollections of our inner self, we have the security of anabsolute casket.1But with this absolute casket, I too am now talking inmetaphors. Let's get back to our images.VIIChests, especially mall caskets, over which we have morecomplete mastery, are objects that may be opened. Whena casket is closed, it is returned to the general communityof objects; it takes its place in exterior space. But it openslFor this reason, a philosopher-mathematician would saythat it is the first differential of discovery. In a later chapterI plan to study the dialectics of inside and outside. Butfrom the moment the casket is opened, dialectics no longerexist. The outside is effaced with one stroke, an atmosphereof novelty and surprise reigns. The outside has no moremeaning. And quite paradoxically, even cubic dimensionshave no more meaning, for the reason that a new dimen ..sion-the dimension of intimacy-has just opened up.1 In a letter to llubanel, Mallarme wrote: "Every man has a secret inhim, many die without finding it, and will never find it because theyare dead, it no longer exists, nor do they. I am dead and risen againwith the jeweled key of my last spiritual casket. It is up to me nowto open it in the absence of any borrowed impression, and its mysterywill emanate in a sky of great beauty." (Letter dated July 16, 1866.)

86 the poetics of spaceFor someone who is a good judge of values, and who seesthings from the angle of the values of intimacy, this dimensioncan be an infinite one.As proof, I should like to quote a marvelously perceptivefragment from an article by Jean-Pierre Richard,l whichoffers a veritable theorem of the topo-analysis of intimatespace. Jean-Pierre Richard is a writer who analyzes literaryworks in terms of their dominant images. Here he allowsus to relive the moment in Poe's story, The Gold Bug, whenthe casket is opened. To begin with, the jewels found init are of inestimable value. They could not, of course, be"ordinary" jewels. However, the treasure was not inventoriedby a lawyer, but by a poet. It is fraught with "unknownand possible elements, it becomes again an imaginaryobject, generating hypotheses and dreams, it deepens andescapes from itself toward an infinite number of othertreasures:' Thus it seems that at the moment when thestory reaches its conclusion, a conclusion that is as coldas a police record, it has lost nothing of its oneiric richness.The imagination can never say: was that all, for thereis always more than meets the eye. And as I have said severaltimes, an image that issues from the imagination isnot subject to verification by reality.Having achieved valorization of the contents by valorizationof the container, Jean-Pierre Richard makes the followingpenetrating comment: "We shall never reach thebottom of the casket." The infinite quality of the intimatedimension could not be better expressed.Sometimes, a lovingly fashioned casket has interior perspectivesthat change constantly as a result of daydream.We open it and discover that it is a dwelling-place, that ahouse is hidden in it. To illustrate, there exists a marvelof this kind in a prose poem by Charles Cros, in which thepoet carries on where the cabinet-maker left off. Beautifulobjects created by skillful hands' are quite naturally "carriedon" by a poet's daydream. And for Charles Cros, imaginarybeings are born of the "secret" of a marquetry casket.1 Jean-Pierre Richard, "Le vertige de Baudelaire," in the reviewCritique, nos. 100-101, p. 777.

87 drawers, chests and wardrobes"In order to detect its mystery, in order to go beyond theperspectives of marquetry, to reach the imaginary worldthrough the little mirrors," one had to possess a "rapidglance, fine hearing, and be keenly attentive." Indeed, theimagination sharpens all of our senses. The imagining at ..tention prepares our attention for instantaneousness.And the poet continues: "Finally I caught a glimpse ofthe clandestine festivity. I heard the tiny minuets, I guessedthe complicated web of entanglements that was being woveninside the casket."The doors open, and we see what appears to be a parlorfor insects, the white, brown and black floors are seen inexaggerated perspective."1But when the poet closes the casket, inside it, he sets anocturnal world into motion. (p. 88)."When the casket is closed, when the ears of the importunateare stopped with sleep, or filled with outside noises,when the thoughts of men dwell upon some positive object,"Then strange scenes take place in the casket's parlor,several persons of unwonted size and appearance step forthfrom the little mirrors."This time, in the darkness of the casket, it is the endosedreflections that reproduce objects. The inversion ofinterior and exterior is experienced so intensely by thepoet that it brings about an inversion of objects and reflections.And once more, after dreaming of this tiny parlor enlivenedby the dancing of figurines of another day, the poetopens the casket (p. go): "The lights go out, the guests,composed of belles and their beaux, and a few aging relatives,disappear pell-mell, into the mirrors and along thecorridors and colonnades, without giving a thought to their, dignity, while chairs and tables and hangings evaporate intothin air."And the parlor remains empty, silent and clean." Seri ..ous minded persons may then say with the poet, "It's amarquetry casket, and that's all." Echoing this reasonableopinion, the reader who is averse to playing with inver ..1 Charles Cros, Poemes et Prose, Gallimard, p. 87.

88 the poetics of spacesions of large and small, exterior and intimacy, may alsosay: "It's a poem and that's all." "And nothing more."lIn reality, however, the poet has given concrete form toa very general psychological theme, namely, that there willalways be more things in a dosed, than in an open, box.To verify images kills them, and it is always more enrichingto imagine than to experience.The action of the secret passes continually from the hiderof things to the hider of self. A casket is a dungeon forobjects. And here is a dreamer who feels that he shares thedungeon of its secret. We should like to open it, and weshould also like to open our hearts. The following lines byJules Supervielle can be read in a dual sense:2Je cherche dans des cofJres qui m'entourent brutalementMettant des tenebres sens dessus dessousDans des caisses pr% ndes pr% ndesCom me si elles n'etaient plus de ce monde.(Roughly I search in coffers that surround mePutting disarray in the darknessOf cases that are deep, deepAs though they had departed this life.)He who buries a treasure buries himself with it. A secretis a grave, and it is not for nothing that a man who canbe trusted with a secret boasts that he is "like the grave."All intimacy hides from view, and I recall that the lateJoe Bousquet wrote:3 "No one sees me changing. But whosees me? I am my own hiding-place."It is not my intention, in this volume, to recall the problempresented by the intimacy of substances, which I haveoutlined elsewhere.' I shall, however, point out the natureof the two dreamers who seek the intimacy of man and the1 In English in the text.2 Jules Supervielle, Gravitations, p. 17.3 Joe Bousquet, La neige d'un autre dge, p. go." Cf. La terre et [es reveries du repos, Chapter I, and La formation de['esprit scientifique, contribution to a psychoanalysis of objectiveknowledge, Chapter VI.

89 drawers chests and wardrobesintimacy of matter. Jung has shown very clearly this correspondencebetween dreamers of alchemy (d. Psychologieund Alchemie). In other words, there is only one place forthe superlative element of what is hidden. The hidden inmen and the hidden in things belong in the same topaanalysis,as soon as we enter into this strange region of thesuperlative, which is a region that has hardly been touchedby psychology. And to tell the truth, all positivity makes thesuperlative fall back upon the comparative. To enter intothe domain of the superlative, we must leave the positivefor the imaginary. We must listen to poets.

4DestsJe cueillis un nid dans Ie squelette du lierreUn nid doux de mousse champtre et herbe de songe.YVAN GOLL, Tombeau du pere, in Poetes d'aujourd'hu;, '50.Ed. Seghers, p. 156.(1 found a nest in the skeleton of the ivyA soft nest of country moss and dream herb.)Nids blancs vos oiseaux vont fleurirVous volerez, sentiers de plume.ROBERT GANZO, L' oeuvre poetiqueEd. Grasset, p. 63.(White nests your birds will flowerYou will fiy, feather paths.)In one short sentence, Victor Hugo associates the imagesand beings of the function of inhabiting. For Quasimodo,he says,1 the cathedral had been successively "egg, nest,house, country and universe." "One might almost say thathe had espoused its form the way a snail does the form ofits shell. It was his home, his hole, his envelope . • . Headhered to it, as it were, like a turtle to its carapace. Thisrugged cathedral was his armor." All of these images wereneeded to tell how an unfortunate creature assumed the1 Victor Hugo. Notre-Dame de Paris, book IV, § 3.

91 nestscontorted forms of his numerous hiding-places in the corners of this complex structure. In this way, by multiplyinghis images, the poet makes us aware of the powers of thevarious refuges. But he immediately adds a sign of moderation to the abundance of images. "It is useless," he continues,"to warn the reader not to take literally the figuresof speech that I am obliged to use here to express thestrange, symmetrical, immediate, almost consubstantialflexibility of a man and an edifice."It is striking that even in our homes, where there is light,our consciousness of well-being should call for comparisonwith animals in their shelters. An example may be foundin the following lines by the painter, Vlaminck, who, whenhe wrote them, was living quietly in the country:l "Thewell-being I feel, seated in front of my fire, while badweather rages out-of-doors, is entirely animal. A rat in itshole, a rabbit in its burrow, cows in the stable, must all feelthe same contentment that I feel." Thus, well-being takes usback to the primitiveness of the refuge. Physically, the crea.ture endowed with a sense of refuge, huddles up to itself,takes to cover, hides away, lies snug, concealed. If we wereto look among the wealth of our vocabulary for verbs thatexpress the dynamics of retreat, we should find images basedon animal movements of withdrawal, movements that areengraved in our muscles. How psychology would deepenif we could know the psychology of each muscle I And whata quantity of animal beings there are in the being of amanl But our research does not go that far. It would alreadybe a good deal if we were able to enhance the value ofthese images of refuge by showing that by understandingthem, in a way, we live them.With nests and, above all, shells, we shall find a wholeseries of images that I am going to try to characterize asprimal images; images that bring out the primitiveness inus. I shall then show that a human being likes to "with_draw into his corner," and that it gives him physical pleasure to do so.1 Vlaminck, Poliment, 1931, p. 52.

92the poetics of spaceIIAlready, in the world of inanimate objects, extraordinarysignificance is attached to nests. We want them to be perfect,to bear the mark of a very sure instinct. We ourselvesmarvel at this instinct, and a nest is generally consideredto be one of the marvels of animal life. An example of thismuch vaunted perfection may be found in one of AmbroisePare's works: 1 "The enterprise and skill with which animalsmake their nests is so efficient that it is not possible todo better, so entirely do they surpass all masons, carpentersand builders; for there is not a man who would be able tomake a house better suited to himself and to his childrenthan these little animals build for themselves. This is sotrue, in fact, that we have a proverb according to whichmen can do everything except build a bird's nest."A book that is limited to facts soon dampens this enthusiasm,as, for instance, Arthur Landsborough Thomson'sbook, in which we are told that nests are often barelystarted, and at times, botched. "When the golden eaglenests in a tree, it sometimes makes an enormous pile ofbranches to which every year it adds others, until one daythe entire thing falls to pieces under its own weight."2Between enthusiasm and scientific criticism one could findcountless shades of opinion if one followed the history ofornithology. But this is not our subject. Let us note inpassing, however, that we have here a controversy overvalues that often deforms the facts on both sides. And whoknows if this fall, not of the eagle, but of the eagle's nest,does not furnish the author with the minor delight of beingdisrespectful.IIIPositively speaking, there is nothing more absurd thanimages that attribute human qualities to a nest. For a bird,1 Ambroise Pare. Le livre des animaux et de l'intelligence de l'homme.Oeuvres completes. edition J. F. Malgaigne. vol. III. p. 740.2 A. Landsborough Thomson. Birds. Reference is to French translation(ed. Cluny. 194). p. 104.

93 nestsa nest is no doubt a good warm home, it is even a lifegivinghome, since it continues to shelter the bird that hascome out of the egg. It also serves as a sort of downy coverletfor the baby bird until its quite naked skin grows itsown down. But why hasten to make a human image, animage for man's use, out of such a paltry thing? The ridiculousnature of this image. would become evident if the cosy"little nest," the warm "little nest" that lovers promise eachother, were actually compared with the real nest, lost in thefoliage. Among birds, need I recall, love is a strictly extracurricularaffair, and the nest is not built until later, whenthe mad love-chase across the fields is over. If we wereobliged to reflect upon all this and deduce from it a lessonfor human beings, we should have to evolve a dialectics offorest love and love in a city room. But this is not our subject,either. Only someone like Andre Theuriet wouldcompare a garret to a nest, and accompany the comparisonwith the following single remark: "Haven't dreams alwaysliked to perch on high?"l In short, in literature, the nestimage is generally childish.The "nest" that is "lived" was therefore a poor image tostart with. And yet it has certain initial virtues which aphenomenologist who likes simple problems, can discover.It offers a fresh opportunity to do away with misunderstandingsas to the principal function of philosophicalphenomenology. For it is not the task of this phenomenologyto describe the nests met with in nature, which is aquite positive t ask reserved for ornithologists. A beginningof a philosophical phenomenology of nests would consistin our being able to elucidate the interest with which welook through an album containing reproductions of nests,or, even more positively, in our capacity to recapture thenaive wonder we used to feel when we found a nest. Thiswonder is lasting, and today when we discover a nest ittakes us back to our childhood or, rather, to a childhood;to the childhoods we should have had. For not many ofus have been endowed by life with the full measure of itscosmic implications.1 Andre Theuriet, Colette, p. 20g.

94the poetics of spaceHow many times, in my garden, I have experienced thedisappointment of discovering a nest too late. Autumn wasthere, the leaves had already begun to fall and in the forkof two branches there was an abandoned nest. To thinkthat they had all been there: the father bird, the motherbird and the nestlings. And I had not seen themlAn empty nest found belatedly in the woods in winter,mocks the finder. A nest is a hiding-place for winged creatures.How could it have remained invisible? Invisible fromabove, and yet far from the more dependable hiding-placeson the ground? But since, in order to determine the shadesof being in an image, we must add a super-impression toit, here is a legend that carries the imagination of an invisiblenest to its utmost point. It is taken from Charbonneaux-Lassay'svery fine book: Le bestiaire du Christ.l"People used to think that the hoopoe bird could hideentirely from the sight of all living creatures, which explainsthe fact that, at the end of the Middle Ages, it wasstill believed that there was a multicolored herb in thehoopoe's nest which made a man invisible when he wore it."This may be Yvan Goll's "dream herb."But the dreams of today do not go this far, and an abandonednest no longer contains the herb of invisibility.Indeed, the nest we pluck from the hedge like a deadflower, is nothing but a "thing." I have the right to takeit in my hands and pull it apart. In melancholy mood, Ibecome once more a man of the fields and thickets, and abit vain at being able to hand on my knowledge to a child,I say: "This is the nest of a titmouse."And so the old nest enters into the category of objects.The more varied the objects, the simpler the concept. Butas our collection of nests grows, our imagination remainsidle, and we lose contact with living nests.And yet it is living nests that could introduce a phenomenologyof the actual nest, of the nest found in naturalsurroundings, and which becomes for a moment the center-the term is no exaggeration-of an entire universe, theevidence of a cosmic situation. Gently I lift a branch. In1 L. Charbonneaux-Lassay, Le bestiaire du Christ, Paris, 1940, p. 489-

95 neststhe nest is a setting bird. But it doesn't fly away, it onlyquivers a little. I tremble at having caused it to tremble.I am afraid that this setting bird will realize that I am aman, a being that has lost the confidence of birds. I remainmotionless. Slowly the bird's fear and my own fear of causingfear are allayed-or so I imagine. I breathe easily again,and let go of the branch. I'll come back tomorrow. Today,I am happy, because some birds have built a nest in mygarden.And the next day when I come back, walking more softlythan the day before, I see eight pink-white eggs in the bottomof the nest. But how small they arel How small thesethicket eggs are IThis is a living, inhabited nest. A nest is a bird's house.I've known this for a long time, people have told it to mefor a long time. In fact, it is such an old story that I hesitateto repeat it, even to myself. And yet, I have just reexperiencedit. And I recall very clearly days in my lifewhen I found a live nest. Such genuine recollections asthese are rare in life. And how well I understand theselines from Toussenel's Le monde des oiseaux:1 "My recollectionof the first bird's nest that I found all by myselfhas remained more deeply engraved in my memory thanthat of the a first prize I won in grammar school for a Latinversion. It was a lovely linnet's nest with four pinkish-grayeggs striated with red lines, like an emblematical map. I wasseized with an emotion of such indescribable delight thatI stoo«i--there for over an hour, glued to one spot, looking.That day, by chance, I found my vocation." What a finepassage for those who are always looking for primal interestslAnd the fact that from the start, Toussenel reactedwith such "emotion," helps us to understand that he shouldhave succeeded in integrating the entire harmonic philosophyof a Fourier in both his life and work, and even addedan emblematical life of universal dimensions to the life ofa bird.1 A. Toussenel, Le monde des oiseaux, Omithologie passionnelle, Paris1853, p. 32.

96the poetics of spaceBut in everyday life too, for a man who lives in the woodsand fields, the discovery of a nest is always a source of freshemotion. Fernand Lequenne, the botanist, writes that oneday while walking with his wife, Matilda, he saw a warbler'snest in a black hawthorne bush: "Matilda knelt down and,holding out one finger, barely touched the soft moss, thenwithdrew her finger, only leaving it outstretched ..."Suddenly I began to tremble."I had just discovered the feminine significance of a nestset in the fork of two branches. The thicket took on sucha human quality that I called out: 'Don't touch it, aboveall, don't touch it'!" lIVToussenel's "emotion" and Lequenne's "trembling" bothbear the mark of sincerity. I have recalled them in myreading, since it is in books that we enjoy the surprise of"discovering a nest." Let us pursue our search for nests inliterature. The following is an example in which the authorsets the domiciliary value of the nest one tone higher. Itis taken from the ] ournals of Henry David Thoreau, March17, 1858. Here the entire tree, for the bird, is the vestibuleof the nest. Already, a tree that has the honor of shelteringa nest participates in its mystery. For a bird, a tree is al·ready a refuge. Thoreau tells of a green woodpecker thattook an entire tree for its home. He compares this takingpossession with the joy of a family that returns to live in ahouse it had long since abandoned."It is as when a family, your neighbors, return to anempty house after a long absence, and you hear the cheer·ful hum of voices and the laughter of children, and seethe smoke from the kitchen fire. The doors are thrownopen, and children go screaming through the hall. So theflicker dashes through the aisles of the grove, throws up awindow here and cackles out it, and then there, airing thehouse. It makes its voice ring up-stairs and down-stairs, and1 Fernand Lequenne, Plantes sauvages, p. 269.

97nestsso, as it were, fits it for its habitation and ours, and takespossession. "In this passage Thoreau gives an expanded version ofboth nest and house. We are struck too by the fact thatthe text comes alive in both directions of the metaphor:the happy household is a flourishing nest. The woodpecker'sconfidence in the shelter of the tree in which it has hiddenits nest, represents taking possession of a home. Here weleave we'll behind us the implications of comparisons andallegories. A reasonable critic will no doubt consider thatthis woodpecker "proprietor," who appears at the windowof the tree and sings on its balcony, is an "exaggeration."But a poetic spirit will be grateful to Thoreau for givingit, with this nest that has the dimensions of a tree, a fullnessof image. A tree becomes a nest the moment a greatdreamer hides in it. In his Memoires d'Outretombe, Ghateaubriandmade the following confidential note: "I had setup my headquarters, like a nest, in one of these willows,and there, isolated between heaven and earth, I spent hoursamong the warblers."And the fact is that, in a garden, we grow more attachedto a tree inhabited by birds. However mysterious and invisibleamong the leaves the green-garbed woodpecker maybe at times, he nevertheless becomes familiar to us. For awoodpecker is not a silent dweller. It is not when he sings,however, that we think of him, but when he works. Upand down the tree-trunk, his beak pecks the wood withresounding taps, and although he frequently disappears,we sti hear him. He is a garden worker.And so the woodpecker enters into my sound world andI make a salutary image of him for my own use. In myParis apartment, when a neighbor drives nails into thewall at an undue hour, I "naturalize" the noise by imaginingthat I am in my house in Dijon, where I have a garden.And finding everything I hear quite natural, I say to myself:"That's my woodpecker at work in the acacia tree."This is my method for obtaining calm when things disturbme.

98 the poetics of spacevA nest, like any other image of rest and quiet, is immediatelyassociated with the image of a simple house. When wepass from the image of a nest to the image of a house, andvice versa, it can only be in an atmosphere of simplicity.Van Gogh, who painted numerous nests, as well as numerouspeasant cottages, wrote to his brother: "The cottage,with its thatched roof, made me think of a wren's nest."lFor a painter, it is probably twice as interesting if, whilepainting a nest, he dreams of a cottage and, while paintinga cottage, he dreams of a nest. It is as though one dreamedtwice, in two registers, when one dreams of an image clustersuch as this. For the simplest image is doubled; it is itselfand something else than itself. Van Gogh's thatched cottagesare overladen with thatch. Thick, coarsely plaitedstraw emphasizes the will to provide shelter by extendingwell beyond the walls. Indeed, in this instance, among allthe shelter virtues, the roof is the dominant evidence. Underthe roof's covering the walls are of earth and stone. Theopenings are low. A thatched cottage is set on the groundlike a nest in a field.And a wren's nest is a thatched cottage, because it is acovered, round nest. The Abbe Vincelot has described itas follows: "The wren builds its nest in the form of a veryround ball, in the bottom of which it makes a small holeto let the water out. Usually this hole is hidden beneath abranch, and I have often examined a nest from every anglebefore noticing this opening, which also serves as entrancefor the female bird."2 By living Van Gogh's nest-cottage inits obvious liaison, the words suddenly seem to jest. I liketo tell myself that a little king lives in that cottage. Hereis certainly a fairy-tale image, an image that suggests anynumber of tales.1 Van Gogh, Lettres a Theo, p. 12 (French translation) .2 Vincelot, Les noms des oiseaux expliques par leurs moeursl ou essaisetymologiques sur l'ornithologie, Angers, 1867, p. 233.

99 nestsVIA nest-house is never young. Indeed, speaking as a pedant,we might say that it is the natural habitat of the functionof inhabiting. For not only do we come back to it, but wedream of coming back to it, the way a bird comes back to itsnest, or a lamb to the fold. This sign of return marks aninfinite number of daydreams, for the reason that humanreturning takes place in the great rhythm of human life,a rhythm that reaches back across the years and, throughthe dream, combats all absence. An intimate component offaithful loyalty reacts upon the related images of nest andhouse.In this domain, everything takes place simply and delicately.The soul is so sensitive to these simple images thatit hears all the resonances in a harmonic reading. Readingon the conceptual level, on the other hand, would be insipidand cold; it would be purely linear. For here we areasked to understand the images one after the other. Andin this domain of the nest image the lines are so simplethat one is surprised at the poet's delight in them. Butsimplicity brings forgetfulness, and suddenly we feel gratefultoward the poet who has the talent to renew it with suchrare felicity. No phenomenologist could help reacting tothis renewal of such a simple image. We are deeply movedwhen we read Jean Caubere's simple poem entitled: Le nidtiede (The warm nest). This poem becomes all the morerrleaningful when one considers that it appeared in arather austere volume on the theme of the desert:1Le nid tiede et calmeOil, chante I' oiseauRappelle les chansons, les charmesLe seuil purDe la vieille maison.1 Jean Caubere, Deserts, p. 25. Debresse, Paris.

100the poetics 0/ space(The warm, calm nestIn which a bird singsRecalls the songs, the charms,The pure thresholdOf my oId home.)And here the threshold is a hospitable threshold, onethat does not intimidate us by its majesty. The two images:the calm nest and the old home, weave the sturdy web ofintimacy on the dream loom. And the images are all simpleones, with no attempt at picturesqueness. The poetrightly thought that, at the mention of a nest, a bird's song,and the charms that take us back to the old home, to thefirst home, a sort of musical chord would sound in thesoul of the reader. But in order to make so gentle a comparisonbetween house and nest, one must have lost thehouse that stood for happiness. So there is also an alas inthis song of tenderness. If we return to the old home as toa nest, it is because memories are dreams, because the homeof other days has become a great image of lost intimacy.VIIThus values alter facts. The moment we love an image, itcannot remain the copy of a fact. One of the greatest ofdreamers of winged life, Jules Michelet, has given us freshevidence of this. And yet he only devotes a few pages to"bird architecture." But these are pages that think anddream at the same time.According to Michelet, a bird is a worker without tools.It has "neither the hand of the squirrel, nor the teeth ofthe beaver." "In reality," he writes, "a bird's tool is itsown body, that is, its breast, with which it presses andtightens its materials until they have become absolutelypliant, well-blended and adapted to the general plan:'!1 Jules Michelet, L'oiseau, 4th edition, 1858, p. 208 etc. Joseph Joubert(Pensees, Vol. 11. p. 167) has also written: "It would be interesting tofind out if the forms that birds give their nests, without ever havingseen a nest, have not some analogy with their own inner constitutions."

101 nestsAnd Michelet suggests a house built by and for the body,taking form from the inside, like a shell, in an intimacythat works physically. The form of the nest is commandedby the inside. "On the inside," he continues, "the instrumentthat prescribes a circular form for the nest is nothingelse but the body of the bird. It is by constantly turninground and round and pressing back the walls on every side,that it succeeds in forming this circle." The female, likea living tower, hollows out the house, while the male bringsback from the outside all kinds of materials, sturdy twigsand other bits. By exercising an active pressure, the femalemakes this into a felt-like padding.Michelet goes on: "The house is a bird's very person; itis its form and its most immediate effort, I shall even say,its suffering. The result is only obtained by constantlyrepeated pressure of the breast. There is not one of theseblades of grass that, in order to make it curve and hold thecurve, has not been pressed on countless times by the bird'sbreast, its heart, surely with difficulty in breathing, perhapseven, with palpitations."What an incredible inversion of images! Here we havethe breast created by the embryo. Everything is a matter ofinner pressure, physically dominant intimacy. The nest isa swelling fruit, pressing against its limits.From the depths of what daydreams do such images arise?They might come, of course, from the dream of the protectionthat is closest to us, a protection adapted to ourbodies. Dreams of a garment-house are not unfamiliar tothose who indulge in the imaginary exercise of the functionof inhabiting. And if we were to work at our dwellingplacesthe way Michelet dreams of his nest, we should notbe wearing the ready-made clothe, so often viewed withdisfavor by Bergson. On the contrary, each one of us wouldhave a personal house of his own, a nest for his body,padded to his measure. In Romain Rolland's novel, ColasBreugnon, when, after a life of trials, the leading characteris offered a larger, more convenient house, he refuses it asbeing a garment that would not fit him. "Either it would

102 the poetics of spacehang on me too loosely," he says, "or I should make it burstat the seams."lBy following the nest images collected by Michelet to thehuman level, we realize that, from the start, these werehuman images. It is even doubtful if an ornithologist woulddescribe the building of a nest the way Michelet does, anda nest built in this way would have to be called a Micheletnest. Phenomenologists will use it to test the dynamismsof a strange sort of withdrawal, which is active and in astate of constant renewal. This is not a dynamics of insomnia,during which we turn and toss in our beds. Micheletpoints out how the home is modeled by fine touches, whichmake a surface originally bristling and composite into onethat is smooth and soft.Incidentally, this passage by Michelet constitutes a rareand, for this reason, all the more valuable, document onthe subject of the material imagination. Indeed, no onewho likes images of matter can forget it, because it describesdry modeling. This is the modeling, or shall we say, themarriage, in the dry air and summer sunlight, of moss anddown. Michelet's nest is a paean of praise to its felt-likefabric.It should be noted in closing that few dreamers of nestslike a swallow's nest which, they say, is made of saliva andmud. People have even wondered where all the swallowslived before the existence of houses and cities. Swallows,in other words, are not "regular" birds, and CharbonneauxLassay wrote of them: "I have heard peasants in the Vendeesay that a swallow's nest could frighten the night devilsaway, even in winter."2VIIIIf we go deeper into daydreams of nests, we soon encountera sort of paradox of sensibility. A nest-and this we understandright away-is a precarious thing, and yet it sets usto daydreaming of security. Why does this obvious pre-1 Romain Rolland. Colas Breugnon. p. 107.2 Lac. cit. p. 572.

103 nestscariousness not arrest daydreams of this kind? The answerto this paradox is simple: when we dream, we are phenomenologistswithout realizing it. In a sort of naIve way,we relive the instinct of the bird, taking pleasure in accentuatingthe mimetic features of the green nest in green leaves.We definitely saw it, but we say that it was well hidden.This center of animal life is concealed by the immensevolume of vegetable life. The nest is a lyrical bouquet ofleaves. It participates in the peace of the vegetable world.It is a point in the atmosphere of happiness that alwayssurrounds large trees.A poet once wrote: 1}'a; re d'un n;d ou les arb res repoussaient la mort.(I dreamed of a nest in which the trees repulsed death.)And so when we examine a nest, we place ourselves atthe origin of confidence in the world, we receive a beginningof confidence, an urge toward cosmic confidence.Would a bird build its nest if it did not have its instinct forconfidence in the world? If we heed this call and make anabsolute refuge of such a precarious shelter as a nest-paradoxicallyno doubt, but in the very impetus of the imagination-wereturn to the sources of the oneiric house. Ourhouse, apprehended in its dream potentiality, becomes anest in the world, and we shall live there in complete confidenceif, in our dreams, we really participate in the senseof security of our first home. In order to experience thisconfidence, which is deeply graven in our sleep, there is noneed to enumerate material reasons for confidence. Thenest, quite as much as the oneiric house, and the oneirichouse quite as much as the nest-if we ourselves are at theorigin of our dreams-knows nothing of the hostility of theworld. Human life starts with refreshing sleep, and all theeggs in a nest are kept nicely warm. The experience of thehostility of the world-and consequently, our dreams ofdefense and aggressiveness-come much later. In its germi-1 Adolphe Shedrow, Berceau sans prom esses, p. !J!J. seghers, Paris.Shedrow also wrote: 1 dreamed of a nest in which the ages no longerslept.

104 the poetics of spacenal form, therefore, all of life is well-being. Being startswith well-being. When a philosopher considers a nest, hecalms himself by meditating on the subject of his ownbeing in the calm world being. And if we were to translatethe absolute naivete of his daydream into the metaphysicallanguage of today, a dreamer might say that the world isthe nest of mankind.For the world is a nest, and an immense power holds theinhabitants of the world in this nest. In Herder's history ofHebrew poetry there is an image of the immense sky restingon the immense earth: "The air," he wrote, "is a dovewhich, as it rests on its nest, keeps its young warm."lI was thinking these thoughts and dreaming these dreamswhen I read a passage in the autumn 1954 issue of Cahie1'sG.L.M. that encouraged me to maintain the axiom thatidentifies the nest with the world and makes it the centerof the world. Here Boris Pasternak speaks of "the instinctwith the help of which, like the swallow, we construct theworld-an enormous nest, an agglomerate of earth and sky,of death and life, and of two sorts of time, one we candispose of and one that is lacking."2 Yes, two sorts of time,for what a long time we should need before waves of tranquilityspreading out from the center of our intimacy,reached the ends of the world.What a concentration of images in Pasternak's swallow'snestl And, in reality, why should we stop building andmolding the world's clay about our own shelters? Mankind'snest, like his world, is never finished. And imaginationhelps us to continue it. A poet cannot leave such agreat image as this, nor, to be more exact, can such animage leave its poet. Boris Pasternak also wrote (loc. cit.p. 5): "Man himself is mute, and it is the image that speaks.For it is obvious that the image alone can keep pace withnature."1 French translation: L'histoire de la poesie des Hebrew(, p. a6g.2 Cahiers G.L.M., p. 7. Autumn 1954. translated by Andr du Bouchet.

5sheilSThe concept that corresponds to a shell is so clear, sohard, and so sure that a poet, unable simply to draw itand, reduced rather to speaking of it, is at first at a lossfor images. He is arrested in his flight towards dreamvalues by the geometrical reality of the fonns. And theseforms are so numerous, often so original, that after a positiveexamination of the shell world, the imagination is defeatedby reality. Here it is nature that imagines, andnature is very clever. One has only to look at pictures ofammonites to realize that, as early as the Mesozoic Age,mollusks constructed their shells according to the teachingsof a transcendental geometry. Ammonites built theirhomes around the axis of a logarithmic spiral. (A veryclear account of this construction of geometrical forms bylife may be read in Monod-Herzen's excellent book.)lA poet naturally understands this esthetic category oflife, and Paul Valery's essay Les coquillages (Shells) fairlyglows with the spirit of geometry. For Valery: "A crystal,a flower or a shell stands out from the usual disorder thatcharacterizes most perceptible things. They are privilegedforms that are more intelligible for the eye, even thoughmore mysterious for the mind, than all the others we see1 Edouard Monod-Herzen, Principes de morphologie generale, Vol. 1,p. 119, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, Ig27. "Shells offer countless examplesof spiral surfaces, on which the joining lines of the successive whorlsare spiral helices." The geometry of a peacock's tail is more aerial:"The eyes in a peacock's spread tail are situated at the intersectingpoint of a double cluster of spirals. that are apparently Archimedeanspirals." (Vol. I, p. 58) .

106the poetics of spaceindistinctly."l For this poet, whose thinking was essentiallyCartesian, a shell seems to have been a truth of well solidifiedanimal geometry, and therefore "clear and distinct."The created object itself is highly intelligible; and it is theformation, not the form, that remains mysterious. As tothe form it would eventually assume, a vital decision governedthe initial choice that involved knowing whetherthe shell would coil to the left or to the right. This originalvortex has provoked endless commentary. Actually, however,life begins less by reaching upward, than by turningupon itself. But what a marvelously insidious, subtle imageof life a coiling vital principle would be! And how manydreams the leftward oriented shell, or one that did notconform to the rotation of its species, would inspire!Paul Valery lingered long over the ideal of a modeled,or carved object that would justify its absolute value bythe beauty and solidity of its geometrical form, whileremaining unconcerned with the simple matter of protectingits substance. In this case, the mollusk's motto wouldbe: one must live to build one's house, and not build one'shouse to live in.However, in a second stage of his meditation, Valerybecomes aware of the fact that a shell carved by a manwould be obtained from the outside, through a series ofenumerable acts that would bear the mark of touched-upbeauty; whereas "the mollusk exudes its shell" (loc. cit.p. 10), it lets the building material "seep through," "distill .its marvelous covering as needed." And when the seepingstarts, the house is already completed. In this way Valeryreturns to the mystery of form-giving life, the mystery ofslow, continuous formation.But this reference to slow formation is only one stageof his meditation, and his book is an introduction to amuseum of forms. The collection is illustrated with watercolorsby Paul-A. Robert who, before he started to paint,had prepared the object by polishing all the valves. Thisdelicate polishing laid bare the roots of the colors, which1 Paul Valery, Les merveilles de la mer. Les coquillages, p. 5. Collection"Isis," PIon, Paris.

107 shellsmade it possible to participate in a will to color, in thevery history of coloration. And at this point the house turnsout to be so beautiful, so deeply beautiful, that it wouldbe a sacrilege even to dream of living in it.IIA phenomenologist who wants to experience the images ofthe function of inhabiting must not be subject to the charmsof external beauty. For generally, beauty exteriorizes anddisturbs intimate meditation. Nor can a phenomenologistfollow for long the conchologist, whose duty it is to classifythe immense variety of shells, and who is looking for diversity.However, a phenomenologist could learn a lotfrom a conchologist, if the latter were to share with him hisown original amazement.For here too, as with nests, enduring interest shouldbegin with the original amazement of a naIve observer.Is it possible for a creature to remain alive inside stone,inside this piece of stone? Amazement of this kind is rarelyfelt twice. Life quickly wears it down. And besides, for one"living" shell, how many dead ones there are I For one inhabitedshell, how many are emptylBut an empty shell, like an empty nest, invites day-dreamsof refuge. No doubt we over-refine our daydreams when wefollow such simple images as these. But it is my belief thata phenomenologist should go in the direction of maximumsimplicity. And therefore I believe that it is worthwhileproposing a phenomenology of the inhabited shell.IIIThe surest sign of wonder is exaggeration. And since theinhabitant of a shell can amaze us, the imagination willsoon make amazing creatures, more amazing than reality,issue from the shell. In Jurgis Baltrusaitis's fine volumeentitled: Le moyen dge fantastique, we find reproductionsof antique jewels in which "the most unexpected animals:a hare, a bird, a stag, or a dog, come out of a shell, as from

108 the poetics of spaceout of a magician's hat."l This comparison with a magician'shat will be quite useless to anyone who takes up hisposition in the very center where images develop. Whenwe accept slight amazement, we prepare ourselves toimagine great amazement and, in the world of the imagination,it becomes normal for an elephant, which is an enormousanimal, to come out of a snail shell. It would beexceptional, however, if we were to ask him to go back intoit. In a later chapter, I shall have an opportunity to showthat, in the imagination, to go in and come out are neversymmetrical images. "Large, free animals escape mysteriouslyfrom some small object," writes Baltrusaitis, and headds: "Aphrodite was born in these conditions."2 Beautyand magnitude cause spores to swell. As I shall show later,one of the powers of attraction of smallness lies in the factthat large things can issue from small ones.Everything about a creature that comes out of a shell isdialectical. And since it does not come out entirely, thepart that comes out contradicts the part that remains inside.The creature's rear parts remain imprisoned in thesolid geometrical forms. But life is in such haste when itcomes out that it does not always take on a designatedform, such as that of a young hare or a camel. Certainengravings show strangely mixed creatures, as in the caseof the snail shown in this work by Baltrusaitis (p. 58), "witha bearded human head and hare's ears, wearing a bishop'smitre, and with four animal feet." The shell is a witch'scauldron in which bestiality is brewing. According to Baltrusaitis,"Les Heures de Marguerite de Beaujeu" are fullof grotesque figures of this kind. Several of them have discardedtheir shells and remained coiled in the form of theshell. Heads of dogs, wolves and birds, as well as humanheads, are attached directly to mollusks." And so, unbridled,bestial daydream produces a diagram for a shortenedversion of animal evolution. In other words, in order1 Jurgis Baltrusaitis, fe moyen-dge fantastique. p. 57. Colin, Paris.2 Jurgis Baltrusaitis, loco cit. p. 56. "On the coins of Hatria, a woman'shead, with her hair blown by the wind, perhaps Aphrodite herself, isseen coming out of a round shell."

109shellsto achieve grotesqueness, it suffices to abridge an evolution.And the fact is that a creature that comes out of its shellsuggests daydreams of a mixed creature that is not only"half fish, half flesh," but also half dead, half alive, and, inextreme cases, half stone, half man. This is just the oppositeof the daydream that petrifies us with fear. Man is born ofstone. If in C. G. Jung's book Psychologie und AlchemieJwe examine closely the figures shown on page 86, we seeMelusines, not the romantic Melusines that spring fromthe waters of lakes, but Melusines that are symbols ofalchemy, who help us to formulate dreams of the stonefrom which the principles of life are said to come. Melusineactually comes forth from her scaly, gravelly tail, whichreaches back into the distant past, and is slightly spiraled.We have not the impression that this inferior being hasretained its energy. The tail-shell does not eject its inhabitant.It is rather a matter of an inferior form of life havingbeen reduced to nothing by a superior one. Here, as elsewhere,life is energetic at its summit. And this summit acquiresdynamism in the finished symbol of the humanbeing, for all dreamers of animal evolution have man inmind. In these drawings of alchemical Melusines, the humanform issues from a poor, frayed form, to which theartist has devoted little care. But inertness does not inciteto daydreaming, and the shell is a covering that will beabandoned. The forces of egress are such, the forces of productionand birth are so alive, that two human beings, bothwearing diadems, may be seen half emerged from the formlessshell, in figure 11 of Jung's book. This is the "doppelkopfige,"or two-headed Melusine.All of these examples furnish us with phenomenologicaldocuments for a phenomenology of the verb "to emerge,"and they are all the more purely phenomenological in thatthey correspond to invented types of "emergence." In thiscase the animal is merely a pretext for multiplying theimages of "emerging." Man lives by images. Like all importantverbs, to emerge from would demand considerableresearch in the course of which, besides concrete examples,one would collect the hardly perceptible movements of cer-

110 the poetics of spacetain abstractions. We sense little or no more action ingrammatical derivations, deductions or inductions. Evenverbs become congealed as if they were nouns. Only imagescan set verbs in motion again.IVOn the shell theme, in addition to the dialectics of smalland large, the imagination is stimulated by the dialecticsof creatures that are free and others that are in fetters: andwhat can we not expect from those that are unfetteredlTo be sure, in real life, a mollusk emerges from its shellindolently, so if we were studying the actual phenomenaof snail "behavior," this behavior would yield to observationswith no difficulty. If, however, we were able to recaptureabsolute naivete in our observation itself, that is, reallyto re-experience our initial observation, we should givefresh impetus to the complex of fear and curiosity thataccompanies all initial action on the world. We want tosee and yet we are afraid to see. This is the perceptiblethreshold of all knowledge, the threshold upon which interestwavers, falters, then returns. The example at handfor the purpose of indicating the fear and curiosity complexis not a sizable one. Fear of a snail is calmed immediately,it is an old story, it is "insignificant." But then thisstudy is devoted to insignificant things. Occasionally theyreveal strange subtleties. In order to bring them out I shallplace them under the magnifying glass of the imagination.These- undulations of fear and curiosity increase whenreality is not there to moderate them, that is, when we areimagining. However let's not invent, but rather give documentsconcerning images which have actually been imaginedor drawn, and which have remained engraved inprecious and other stones. There is a passage in the bookby Jurgis Baltrusaitis in which he recalls the action of anartist who shows a dog that "leaps from its shell" andpounces upon a rabbit. One degree more of aggressiveness and the shell-dog would attack a man. This is a clearexample of the progressing type of action by means of

111 shellswhich imagination surpasses reality. For here the imaginationacts upon not only geometrical dimensions, but uponelements of power and speed as well-not in an enlargedspace, either, but in a more rapid tempo. When the motionpicture camera accelerates the unfolding of a flower, wereceive a sublime image of offering; it is as though theflower we see opening so quickly and without reservation,sensed the meaning of a gift; as though it were a gift fromthe world. But if the cinema showed us a snail emergingfrom its shell in fast motion, or pushing its horns towardthe sky very rapidly, what an aggression that would belWhat aggressive hornsl All our curiosity would be blockedby fear, and the fear-curiosity complex would be torn apart.There is a sign of violence in all these figures in whichan over-excited creature emerges from a lifeless shell. Herethe artist precipitates his animal daydreams. Since theybelong to the same type of daydreams, we must associateabbreviations of animals that have their heads and tailsfastened together-the artist having neglected to show theintermediary parts of their bodies-with these snail-shellsfrom which emerge quadrupeds, birds and human beings.To do away with what lies between is, of course, an ideal ofspeed, and thanks to a sort of acceleration of the imaginedvital impulse, the creature that emerges from the groundimmediately assumes its physiognomy.But the obvious dynamism of these extravagant figureslies in the fact that they come alive in the dialectics of whatis hidden and what is manifest. A creature that hides and"withdraws into its shell," is preparing a "way out." Thisis true of the entire scale of metaphors, from the resurrectionof a man in his grave, to the sudden outburst of onewho has long been silent. If we remain at the heart of theimage under consideration, we have the impression that,by staying in the motionlessness of its shell, the creature ispreparing temporal explosions, not to say whirlwinds, ofbeing. The most dynamic escapes take place in cases ofrepressed being, and not in the flabby laziness of the lazycreature whose only desire is to go and be lazy elsewhere.If we experience the imaginary paradox of a vigorous mol-

112 the poetics of spacelusk-the engravings in question give us excellent depictionsof them-we attain to the most decisive type ofaggressiveness, which is postponed aggressiveness, aggressivenessthat bides its time. Wolves in shells are crueler thanstray ones.vBy adhering to a method which seems to me decisive in aphenomenology of images, and which consists of designatingthe image as an excess of the imagination, I haveaccentuated the dialectics of large and small, hi d den andmanifest, placid and aggressive, flabby and vigorous. I havealso followed the imagination to a point well beyond reality,in its task of enlargement, for in order to surpass, onemust first enlarge. We have seen how freely the imaginationacts upon space, time and elements of power. But the actionof the imagination is not limited to the level of images. Onthe level of ideas too, it tends towards extremes, and thereare ideas that dream. For instance, certain theories whichwere once thought to be scientific are, in reality, vast,boundless daydreams. I should like to give an example ofa dream-idea of this type, which takes the shell as the clearestproof of life's ability to constitute forms. According tothis theory, which was propounded in the eighteenth centuryby J. B. Robinet, everything that has form has a shellontogenesis, and life's principal effort is to make shells. Itis my opinion that at the center of Robinefs immenseevolutionary table there was a vast dream of shells. Indeedthe title alone of one of his books: Vues philosophiques dela gradation naturelle des formes de l'tre, ou les essais dela nature qui apprend a faire l'homme (Philosophicalviews on the natural gradation of forms of existence, or theattempts made by nature while learning to create humanity,Amsterdam, 1768), describes the orientation of his thinking.Those who have the patience to read the entire workwill discover a veritable commentary, in dogmatic form,on the type of drawings I mentioned earlier. Here too partialanimal forms appear on every side. Fossils for Robinet

115 shellsare bits of life, roughcasts of separate organs, which will findtheir coherent life at the summit of an evolution that ispreparing the way for man. We might say that the insideof a man's body is an assemblage of shells. Each organ hasits own causality, that has already been tried out duringthe long centuries when nature was teaching herself tomake man, with one shell or another. The function constructsits form from old models, and life, although onlypartial, constructs its abode the way the shell-fish constructsits shell.If one can succeed in reliving this partial life, in theprecision of a life that endows itself with a form, the beingthat possesses form dominates thousands of years. For everyform retains life, and a fossil is not merely a being thatonce lived, but one that is still alive, asleep in its form.The shell is the most obvious example of a universal shellorientedlife.All of this is firmly stated by Robinet.1 "I am- persuadedthat fossils are alive," he writes, "if not from the standpointof an exterior form of life, for the reason that they lackperhaps certain limbs and senses, (I should hesitate toassert this, however), at least from that of an interior, hiddenform of life, which is very real of its kind, even thoughquite inferior to that of a sleeping animal or a plant. Butfar be it from me to deny them the organs necessary to thefunctioning of their vital economy. And whatever theirform, I consider it as a progress toward the form of theiranalogues in the vegetable world, among insects, large animalsand, lastly, among men."Robinet's book goes on to give descriptions, accompaniedby very fine engravings, of Lithocardites (heart stones),Encephalites (which are a prelude to the brain), stones thatimitate a jaw-bone, the foot, the kidney, the ear, the eye,the hand, muscles-then Orchis, Diorchis, Triorchis, thePriapolites, Colites and Phallolds, which imitate the maleorgans, and Histerapetia, which imitate the female organs.It would be a mistake to see nothing in this but a refer-1 Loc. cit. p. 17.

114 the poetics of spaceence to language habits that name new objects by comparingthem with other commonplace ones. Here names thinkand dream, the imagination is active. Lithocardites areheart shells, rough draughts of a heart that one day willbeat. Robinet's mineralogical collections are anatomicalparts of what man will be when nature learns to make him.A critical mind will object that our eighteenth century naturalistwas a "victim of his imagination." A phenomenologist,however, who avoids all criticism on principle, cannotfail to recognize that in the very extravagance of thebeing given to words, in the extravagance of his images, ismanifested a profound daydream. On all occasions Robinetthinks of form, from the inside out. For him, life originatesforms, and it is perfectly natural that life, which is the causeof forms, should create living forms. Once again, for suchdaydreams as these, form is the habitat of life.Shells, like fossils, are so many attempts on the part ofnature to prepare forms of the different parts of the humanbody; they are bits of man and bits of woman. In fact Robinetgives a description of the Conch of Venus that representsa woman's vulva. A psychoanalyst would not fail tosee a sexual obsession in these designations and descriptionsthat enter into such detail. Nor would he have any difficultyfinding, in the shell museum, such representations offantasms as that of the toothed vagina, which is one of theprincipal themes of Marie Bonaparte's study of EdgarAllan Poe. Indeed, if we listened to Robinet, we should beinclined to believe that nature went mad before man did.And one can imagine the diverting reply that Robinetwould make in defense of his system to the observations ofpsychoanalysts or psychologists. With simple gravity hewrote: "We should not be surprised at the assiduity withwhich Nature has multiplied models of the generativeorgans, in view of the importance of these organs." (loc. cit.P· 73)·With a dreamer of scholarly thoughts such as Robinet,who organized his visionary ideas into a system, a psycho-

IUSshellsanalyst accustomed to untangling family complexes wouldbe quite powerless. We should need a cosmic psychoanalysis,one that would abandon for a second human considerationsand concern itself with the contradictions of the Cosmos.We should also need a psychoanalysis of matter which, atthe same time that it accepted the human accompanimentof the imagination of matter, would pay closer attentionto the profound play of the images of matter. Here, in thevery limited domain in which we are studying images, weshould have to resolve the contradictions of the shell, whichat times is so rough outside and so soft, so pearly, in itsintimacy. How is it possible to obtain this polish by meansof friction with a creature that is so soft and flabby? Anddoesn't the finger that drealns as it strokes the intimatemother-of-pearl surface surpass our human, all too human,dreams? The simplest things are sometimes psychologicallycomplex.But if we were to allow ourselves to indulge in all thedaydreams of inhabited stone there would be no end to it.Curiously enough, these daydreams are at once long andbrief. It is possible to go on with them forever, and yetreflection can end them with a single word. At the slightestsign, the shell becomes human, and yet we know immediatelythat it is not human. With a shell, the vital inhabit ..ing impulse comes to a close too quickly, nature obtainstoo quickly the security of a shut-in life. But a drean'ler isunable to believe that the work is finished when the wallsare built, and thus it is that shell-constructing dreams givelife and action to highly geometrically associated molecules.For these dreams, the shell. in the very tissue of its matter,is alive. Proof of this may be found in a great naturallegend.VIA Jesuit priest, Father Kircher, once asserted that on thecoast of Sicily "the shells of shell-fish, after being ground topowder, come to life again and start reproducing, if thispowder is sprinkled with salt water." The Abbe de Valle-

116 the poetics of spacemont! cites this fable as a parallel to that of the phoenixthat rises from its ashes. Here, then, is a water phoenix.However, the Abbe de Vallemont gives little credence tothe fable of either one of these phoenixes. But for me, whoseoutlook is governed by the imagination, there can be butone conclusion: both phoenixes were products of theimagination. These are facts of the imagination, the verypositive facts of the imaginary world.Moreover, these facts of the imagination are related toallegories of very ancient origin. J urgis BaItrusaitis recalls(loc. cit. p. 57) that "as late as the Carolingian epoch, burialgrounds often contained snail shells-an allegory of a gravein which man will awaken." -And in Le bestiaire du Christ,p. 922, Charbonneaux-Lassay writes: "Taken as a whole,with both its hard covering and its sentient organism, theshell, for the Ancients, was the symbol of the human beingin its entirety, body and soul. In fact, ancient symbolicsused the shell as a symbol for the human body, which enclosesthe soul in an outside envelope, while the soul quickensthe entire being, represented by the organism of themollusk. Thus, they said, the body becomes lifeless whenthe soul has left it, in the same way that the shell becomesincapable of moving when it is separated from the partthat gives it life." A wealth of documentation could beassembled on the subject of "resurrection sheIls."2 There isno need, however, given the simplicity of the problemstreated in this work, for us to insist on very remote traditions.All we have to do is to ask ourselves how, in the caseof certain naive daydreams, the simplest images can nurturea tradition. Charbonneaux-Lassay says these things withall the simplicity and naivete one could wish. After quotingthe Book of Job with its invincible hope of resurrection,he adds, (loc. cit., p. 927): "How did it happen that the1 Abbe de Vallemont, Curiosites de la nature et de ['art sur la vegetationou l'agriculture et Ie ;ardinage dans leur perfection. Paris, 1709,First Part, p. 18g.2 Charbonneaux-Lassay quotes Plato and Iamblichus. He also refers thereader to Les Mysteres d'Eleusis, VI, by Victor Magnien, Payot,Publisher.

117 shellsquiet, earthbound snail should have been chosen to symbolizethis ardent, invincible hope? The explanation isthat at the gloomy time of year, when 'Vinter's death holdsearth in its grip, the snail plunges deep into the ground,shuts itself up inside its shell, as though in a coffin, bymeans of a strong, limestone epiphragm, until Spring comesand sings Easter Hallelujahs over its grave . . . Then ittears down its wall and reappears in broad daylight, full oflife."I shall ask readers who may be inclined to smile at suchenthusiasm, to try to imagine the amazement of the archeologistwho discovered in a grave in the Indre et Loiredepartment "a coffin that contained nearly three hundredsnail shells placed about the skeleton from feet to waistline."Such a contact with a belief places us at the origin ofall beliefs. A lost symbolism begins to collect dreams again.All the proofs that we are obliged to present one afterthe other, of capacity for renewal, of resurrection .or reawakeningof being, must be taken as coalescence of reveries.If we add to these allegories and symbols of resurrectionthe synthesizing nature of dreams of the powers of matter,we understand the fact that profound dreamers are unableto rule out the dream of a water-phoenix. The shell itself,in which a resurrection is being prepared in the synthesizingdream, is subject to resurrection. For if the dust in theshell can experience resurrection, there is no reason whythe pulverized shell should not recapture its spiralingforce.Of course, a critical mind will scoff at unconditionedimages; and a realist would soon demand control experiments.Here, as elsewhere, he would want to verify theimages by confronting them with reality. If he were showna mortar filled with crushed shells, he would say, now makea snail! But a phenomenologist's projects are more ambitious:he wants to live as the great dreamers of imageslived before him. And since I have underlined certainwords, I shall ask the reader to note that the word as isstronger than the word like, which as it happens, would

USthe poetics of spaceomit a phenomenological nuance. The word like imitates,whereas the word as implies that one becomes the personwho dreams the daydream.And so, we shall never collect enough daydreams, if wewant to understand phenomenologically how a snail makesits house; how this flabbiest of creatures constitutes such ahard shell; how, in this creature that is entirely shut in,the great cosmic rhythm of winter and spring vibrates nonetheless.And from the psychological standpoint, this is not avain problem. It arises automatically, in fact, as soon as wereturn to the thing itself, as phenomenologists put it, assoon as we start to dream of a house that grows in proportionto the growth of the body that inhabits it. How canthe little snail grow in its stone prison? This is a naturalquestion, which can be asked quite naturally. (1 should prefernot to ask it, however, because it takes me back to thequestions of my childhood.) But for the Abbe de Vallemont,it is a question that remains unanswered, and he adds:"When it is a matter of nature, we rarely find ourselves onfamiliar ground. At every step, there is something thathumiliates and mortifies proud minds." In other words, asnail's shell, this house that grows with its inmate, is one ofthe marvels of the universe. And the Abbe de Vallemontconcludes that, in general, (loc. cit., p. 255) shells are "sublimesubjects of contemplation for the mind."VIIIt is always diverting to see a destroyer of fables become thevictim of a fable. At the beginning of the eighteenth century,the Abbe de Vallemont believed no more in the firephoenix than he did in the water phoenix; but he didbelieve in palingenesis, that is, in a sort of mixture of both.If we reduce a fern to ashes, which we dissolve in pure water,then allow the water to evaporate, we obtain lovely crystalsthat have the form of a fern frond. And many other examplescould be furnished of dreamers meditating in order to

U9shellsdiscover what I should call saturated growth salts of formalcausality.1But closer to the problems with which we are concernedjust now, one feels in the Abbe de Vallemont's book theeffect of a contamination of the nest images and those ofthe shell. At one point, this author speaks of the anatifereplant, or the anatifere shell-fish, that grows on the wood ofships (loc. cit. p. 43). "It is an assemblage of eight shells,"he writes, "that looks rather like a bunch of tulips • • . allof the same substance as mussel shells . ... The entrance isat the top, and it is closed by means of little doors that arejoined together in a most admirable way. All that remainsis to find out how this sea-plant, and the little inmates thatoccupy these artistically created apartments, are formed."A few pages on, the contamination of the shell and thenest is presented quite clearly. These shells are nests fromwhich birds have flown (p. 46). "I say that the differentshells of my anatifere plant . .. are nests in which the birdsof obscure origin that, in France, we call macreuses (scoterducks),form and hatch."Here we have a confusion of genres that is quite commonto the daydreams of pre-scientific epochs. Scoter-ducks weresupposed to be cold-blooded birds. If it was asked how thesebirds hatched their young, a frequent reply was: whyshould their hens set since, by nature, they can warmneither the eggs nor the nestlings? The Abbe de Vallemontadds (p. 50) that CI a group of theologians, assembled atthe Sorbonne, decided that they would withdraw scoterducksfrom the bird category and put them into the fishcategory." This being the case, they can be eaten in Lent.Before it leaves its nest-shell the seater-duck, which ishalf-bird, half-fish, is attached to it by a pedunculated beak.Thus a learned dream collects legendary hyphens. Herethe great daydreams of nest and shell are presented in twoperspectives that could be said to be in reciprocal anamorphosis.Nest and shell are two great images that reflect back1 Cf. Bachelard's La formation de [,esprit scientifique, Vrin, publisher,p. 206.

120 the poetics of spacetheir daydreams. Here forms do not suffice to determinesuch affinities. Indeed, the principle of the daydreams thatwelcome such legends goes beyond experience. For here thedreamer has entered into the domain in which convictionsthat originate beyond what we see and touch, are formed.If nests and shells were without significance, their imagewould not be so easily or so imprudently synthesized. Witheyes closed, and without respect to fonn and color, thedreamer is seized by convictions of a refuge in which lifeis concentrated, prepared and transformed. Nests and shellscannot unite as strongly as this otherwise than by virtue oftheir oneirism. Here an entire branch of "dream houses"finds two remote roots that intermingle in the same waythat, in human daydreams, everything remote intermingles.One hesitates to be too explicit about these daydreams,which no memory can either clarify or explain. And if onetakes them in the resurgence manifested in the abovementionedtexts, one inclines to think that imaginationantedates memory.VIIIAfter this long excursion into the more distant regions ofdaydream, let us return to images that seem closer to reality.Yet I wonder if an image of the imagination is ever closeto reality. For often when we think we are describing wemerely imagine. We believe. that we have achieved a descriptionthat is at once instructive and amusing. This falsegenre overlies an entire literature, as, for instance, in a certaineighteenth century volume that purports to be a textbookfor the instruction of a young knight,l and in whichwe find the following "description" of an open musselattached to a pebble: "With its cords and stakes it couldbe mistaken for a tent." Naturally, the author doesn't failto mention the fact that these tiny cords can be woven intofabric, and it is true that at one time thread actually wasmade from the mooring-cords of mussels. The author'sphilosophical conclusion is presented in a very common-1 Le spectacle de la nature, p. 281.

121 shellsplace image: "Snails build a little house which they carryabout with them," so "they are always at home in whatevercountry they travel." I should not repeat such triviality asthis if I had not found it hundreds of times in variouswritings. And here it was offered for meditation to a knightof sixteenlThere is also frequent reference to the perfection of natu·ral dwellings. "They are all built on the same plan," hewrites (p. 256), "the object of which is to provide shelterfor the animal. But what variety in this very simple planlEach one has its own perfections, its own charms and conveniences."Such images as these correspond to a childish, superficial,diffuse type of wonderment. However, a psychology of theimagination must make note of everything, since the mostminor interests can prepare the way for major ones.There also comes a time when one rejects images thatare too naive, and disdains those that have become toohackneyed. Certainly none is more hackneyed than that ofthe shell-house. It is too simple to be elaborated felicitouslyand too old to be rejuvenated. It says what it has to sayin a single word. But the fact remains that it is a primalimage as well as an indestructible one. It belongs in theindestructible emporium that deals in cast-offs of the humanimagination.Folklore is filled with ditties inviting the snail to showits horns. Children love to tease it with a blade of grass tomake it go back into its shell, and the most unexpectedcomparisons have been made to explain this retreat. Accordingto one biologist, "a snail withdraws into its kioskthe way a girl who has been teased goes and cries in herroom."!Images that are too clear-here we have an examplebecomegeneralities, and for that reason block the imagination.We've seen, we've understood, we've spoken. Everythingis settled. So we must find a particular image in orderto restore life to the general image. Here is one for reviving1 Leon Binet, Secrets de la vie des anima'""e, Essai de phyaiologieanimale, p. 19, Presses Universitaires de France.

122 the poetics of spacethis paragraph, in which we seem to be victims of thecommonplace.Robinet believed that it was by rolling over and overthat the snail built its "staircase." Thus, the snail's entirehouse would be a stair-well. With each contortion, thislimp animal adds a step to its spiral staircase. It contortsitself in order to advance and grow. The bird building itsnest was content to turn round and round. Robinet's dynamicshell image may be compared with Michelet's dynamicimage of the nest.IXNature has a very simple way of amazing us-through exaggeratedsize. In the case of the shell commonly known asthe Grand Benitier (Great Baptismal Font), we see naturedreaming an immense dream, a veritable delirium of protection,that ends in a monstrosity of protection. This mollusk"only weighs 14 pounds, but the weight of each of itsvalves is between 500 and 600 pounds, and it measures froma yard to a yard and a half in length."l The author of thisbook, which belongs in the famous Bibliotheque des met'veilles(Collection of Marvels), adds: "In China . . . certainrich mandarins own bathtubs made of one of theseshells." A bath taken in the abode of such a mollusk mustbe very mollifying indeed. And what capacity for relaxationmust be felt by a 14-pound animal that occupies thismuch space! Being myself a mere dreamer of books, I knownothing about biological realities. But when I read thisaccount by Armand Landrin, I sink into a vast dream ofcosmicity. And who would not feel cosmically cheered atthe thought of taking a bath in the Grand Benitier's shell?The Grand Benitier's strength is on a par with the heightand bulk of its walls. Indeed, according to one observer, itwould take two horses hitched to each valve to force theGrand Benitier "to yawn, in spite of itself."I should love to see an engraving that represented this1 Armand Landrin, Les monstres marins, p. 16, Hachette, Paris (IDdedition) .

123 shellsexploit. I can imagine it, however, by recalling an oldpicture, which I have looked at long and often, of horseshitched to the two hemispheres, between which nothingexisted but space. Here this image depicting the "Magdeburgexperiment," which is legendary in elementary scientificculture, would have a biological illustration. Fourhorses to overcome fourteen pounds of limp fleshlBut however exaggerated in size nature's creations maybe, man can easily imagine things that are bigger still. Inan engraving by Cork, based on a composition by HieronymousBosch, known as: Shell navigating on the water,we see an enormous mussel shell in which some ten personsare seated, with four children and a dog. There is anexcellent reproduction of this mussel shell inhabited bymen, in the fine book on Hieronymous Bosch, by AndreLafon (p. 106).This hypertrophy of the dream of inhabiting all thehollow objects in the world is accompanied by ludicrousscenes peculiar to Bosch's imagination. In the mussel-shell,the travelers are feasting and carousing, with the result thatthe dream of tranquility we should like to pursue whenwe "withdraw into our shells," is lost because of the insistenceupon frenzied joy that marks the genius of thispainter.But after hypertrophic daydreaming we always have toreturn to the type of daydreaming that is designated by itsoriginal simplicity. We know perfectly well that to inhabita shell we must be alone. By living this image, one knowsthat one has accepted solitude.To live alone; there's a great dreaml The most lifeless,the most physically absurd image, such as that of living ina shell, can serve as origin of such a dream. For it is a dreamthat, in life's moments of great sadness, is shared by everybody,both weak and strong, in revolt against the injusticesof men and of fate. As, for instance, Salavin,l a weak, sadcreature, who takes comfort in his narrow room preciselybecause it is narrow and permits him to say: "What would1 Georges Duhamel, Confession de minuit. Chap. VII.

124 the poetics of spaceI do if I hadn't this little room, this room that is as deepand secret as a shell? Ah! snails don't realize their goodfortune."At times, the image is very unobtrusive, hardly perceptible,but it is effective nonetheless. It expresses the isolationof the human being withdrawn into himself. A poet, at thesame time that he dreams of some childhood house, magnifiedin his memory to becomeLa vieille maison ou vont et viennentL' etoile et la rose(The old house where star and roseCome and go)writes:Mon ombre forme un coquillage sonoreEt Ie poete ecoute son passeDans la coquille de l'ombre de son corpsl(My shadow forms a resonant shellAnd the poet listens to his pastIn the shell of his body's shadow.)At other times, the image acquires its force through theeffect of an isomorphism of all restful space. Then everyhospitable hollow is a quiet shell. The poet, Gaston Puel,writes: 2Ce matin je dimi Ie simple bonheur d'un hommeallonge au creux d'une barque.L'oblongue coquille d'un canot s'est fermee sur lui.II dort. C'est une amande. La barquecomme un lit epouse Ie sommeil.(This morning I shall tell the simple happinessof a man stretched out in the hollow of a boat.The oblong shell of a skiff has closed over him.He is sleeping. An almond. The boat, like a bed,espouses sleep.)1 Maxime Alexandre, La peau et les os, p. 18, Gallimard, Paris, 1956.2 Gaston Puel, Le chant entre deux astres, p. 10.

125shellsA man, an animal, an almond, all find maximum reposein a shell. The virtues of repose dominate all of theseimages.xSince it is my endeavor to multiply all the dialectical shadingsby which the imagination confers life upon the simplestimages, I should like to note a few references to theoffensive capacity of shells. In the same way that there areambush-houses, there exist trap-shells which the imaginationmakes into fish-nets, perfected with bait and snap.Pliny gives the following account of how the pea-crab'smussel finds its sustenance: "The blind shell-fish opens up,thus exposing its body to all the small fish playing about.When they sense that they can enter with impunity, theybecome emboldened and fill the shell. At this moment, thecrab, which is on the alert, warns the mussel by means of alittle bite, upon which the latter closes the shell, crushingeverything that is caught between the valves, then dividesthe prey with its partner."1In the way of animal stories it would be hard to do better.To avoid multiplying examples, therefore, I shall repeatthis same fable, since it is borne out by another greatname. In Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks, we read: "Anoyster opens wide at full moon. When the crabs sees this, itthrows a pebble or a twig at the oyster to keep it fromclosing and thus have it to feed upon." Da Vinci adds thefollowing suitable moral to this fable: "Like the mouththat, in telling its secret, places itself at the mercy of anindiscreet listener."Extensive psychological research would be needed todetermine the value of the moral examples that have alwaysbeen drawn from animal life. I only point this out1 Armand Landrin, loco cit., p. 15. The same fable is quoted byAmbroise Pare (Oeuvres completes, vol. III, p. 776) . The little crabaid is "seated like a porter at the entrance of the shell." When a fishswims into the shell, the bitten shellfish shuts the shell, "then,together, they nibble and eat their prey."

126 the poetics of spacein passing, however, since our encounter with the problemis quite accidental. But there are names that tell their ownstory, such as the name of the Bernard l'Ermite, or hermitcrab. This mollusk does not build its own shell but, aseveryone knows, goes to live in an empty shell. It changeswhen it feels too cramped for space.The image of the hermit crab that goes to live in abandonedshells is sometimes associated with the habits ofthe cuckoo, which lays its eggs in other nests. In both cases,Nature seems to enjoy contradicting natural morality. Theimagination, whetted by exceptions of all kinds, takespleasure in adding resources of cunning and ingenuity tothe characteristics of this bird squatter. The cuckoo, we aretold, after making sure that the setting mother-bird hasgone, breaks an egg in the nest in which it plans to lay.If it lays two eggs it breaks two. In spite of its identifyingcall, the cuckoo is also past master in the art of concealment,it loves to play hide and seek. And yet no one hasever seen it. As often happens in real life, the name isbetter known than the bearer. Who, for instance, can distinguishbetween the russet and the blond cuckoo? Accordingto Abbe Vincelot (loc. cit. p. 101) certain observers havemaintained that the russet cuckoo is simply the gray cuckoowhen it is young, and that if some "migrate northward andothers southward, with the result that the two species arenot to be found in the same locality, it is because amongmigrant birds, old and young rarely visit the same country."Is it any wonder, then, that this bird, with its instinct forsecrecy, should have been credited with such powers ofmetamorphosis that, for centuries, according to Abbe Vincelot(p. 102), "the ancients believed that the cuckoo becametransformed into a hawk." Musing upon a legendof this kind, and recalling that the cuckoo is an egg thief,I suggest that the story of its turning into a hawk might besummarized in a scarcely altered version of the Frenchproverb: Qui vole un oeuf, enieve un boeuf.l (He who stealsan egg will carry off an ox.)1 The correct version, of course, is: Qui vole un oeuf volera un boeul(He who steals an egg will steal an ox).

127shellsXIThere are minds for which certain images retain absolutepriority. Bernard Palissy'sl was one of these and, for him,shell images were of enduring interest. If one had to designatePalissy by the dominating element of his materialimagination, he would fall quite naturally into an "earthly"group. But since the material imagination is a matter ofnuances, Palissy's imagination would have to be specifiedas that of an earthly being in quest of a hard earth thatmust be further hardened by fire, but which also has thepossibility of attaining natural hardness through the actionof a solidifying, self-containing salt. Shells manifest thissame possibility and, in this respect, the limp, sticky,"slimy" creatures that inhabit them, play a role in theirhard consistency. Indeed, the principle of solidification isso powerful, the conquest of hardness is carried so far, thatthe shell achieves its enamel-like beauty as though it hadbeen helped by fire. Beauty of substance is added to beautyof geometrical form. For a potter or an enamelist, a shellmust indeed be a subject for infinite meditation. But thereare many animals beneath die enameled glaze of thisgifted potter's plates, that have made the hardest possibleshells of their skins. If we relive Bernard Palissy's passion,in the cosmic drama of different sorts of matter, or in thestruggle between clay and fire, we can understand why thehumblest snail that secreted its own shell should have provided him with food for infinite dreaming.Among all these daydreams, I shall note here only thosethat furnish the most curious images of the house. Thefollowing, entitled: "About a fortress city" (De la ville deforteresse) is included in Palissy's Recepte veritable.2 Insummarizing it I shall try to retain the amplitude of theoriginal.Faced with "the horrible dangers of war," Bernard PaIissy1 Sixteenth century scholar, potter and enamelist. One of the creatorsof the ceramic arts in France.2 Bernard Palissy. Recepte veritable, p. 151, published by Bibliothecaromana.

128 the poetics of spacecontemplated a design for a "fortress city." He had lost allhope of finding an existing plan "in the cities built today."Vitruvius himself could be of no help in the century of thecanon. So he journeyed through "forests, mountains andvalleys to see if he could find some industrious animal thathad built some industrious houses." After inquiring everywhere,Palissy began to muse about "a young slug that wasbuilding its house and fortress with its own saliva." Indeed,he passed several months dreaming of a construction fromwithin, and most of his leisure time was spent walking besidethe sea, where he saw "such a variety of houses andfortresses which certain little fishes had made from theirown liquor and saliva that, from now on, I began to thinkthat here was something that might be applied to my ownproject." "The battles and acts of brigandry" that takeplace in the sea being on a larger scale than those that takeplace on land, God "had conferred upon each one thediligence and skill needed to build a house that had beensurveyed and constructed by means of such geometry andarchitecture, that Solomon in all his wisdom could neverhave made anything like it."With regard to spiralled shells, he wrote that this shapewas not at all "for mere beauty, there's much more to itthan that. You must understand that there are several fishwith such sharply pointed beaks that they would devourmost of the above-mentioned fish if the latter's abodes werein a straight line: but when they are attacked by theirenemies on the threshold, just as they are about to withdrawinside, they twist and turn in a spiral line and, in thisway, the foe can do them no harm."Meanwhile, someone brought Palissy two large shellsfrom Guinea: "A murex and a whelk." The murex beingthe weaker must be the best defended, according to Palissy'sphilosophy. As a matter of fact, the shell having "a numberof rather large points around the edges, I decided thatthese horns had been· put there for a purpose, which wasfor defense of the fortress."It has seemed necessary to give all these preliminary

129shellsdetails, because they show that Palissy was looking fornatural inspiration. He sought nothing better for constructinghis fortress city than to "take the fortress of theabove mentioned murex as an example." With this idea inmind, he started work on his plan. In the very center of thefortress city, there was to be an open square on which thegovernor's house would be located. Starting from thissquare, a single street would run four times around thesquare; first, in two circuits that espoused the shape of thesquare; then, in two octagon-shaped circuits. All doors andwindows in this quadruple winding street were to giveonto the inside of the fortress, so that the backs of thehouses would constitute one continuous wall. The last ofthe house-walls was to back up against the city wall which,thus, would form a gigantic snail.Bernard Palissy enlarged at length on the advantages ofthis natural fortress. Even if part of it fell to the enemythere would always remain a possibility of retreat. In fact,it was this spiral movement of retreat that determined thegeneral line of the image. Nor would enemy cannon beable to follow the retreat and "rake" the streets of the coiledcity. Enemy artillerymen would be as disappointed as the"pointed-beaked" marauders had been when they tried toattack a coiled shell.In this summary, which may seem too long to the reader,it has nevertheless been impossible to enter into the detailof mixed images and proof. A psychologist who followedPalissy's text line by line would find images used as proof,images that are witnesses of a reasoning imagination. Thissimple account is psychologically complex. But for us, inthis century, the "reasoning" of such images is no longerconvincing. We no longer have to believe in naturalfortresses. And when military men build "hedgehog" defenses,they know that they are not in the domain of theimage, but in that of simple metaphor. It would be a greatmistake, however, if we were to confuse the genres andtake Palissy's snail-fortress for a simple metaphor. This isan image that has inhabited a great mind.

130 the poetics of spaceAs for myself, in a leisurely book of this kind, in whichI enjoy all the images, I was obliged to linger over thismonstrous snail.And in order to show that, through the simple play ofthe imagination, any image may be increased in size, Ishould like to quote the following poem, in which a snailassumes the dimensions of a village:1C' est un escargot enormeQui descend de la montagneEt le ruisseau l' accompagneDe sa bave blancheTres vieu", il n'a plus qU'une corneC' est son court clocher carre.(It's a giant snailDescending the mountainWith at its sideThe brook's white foamVery old, only one horn leftWhich is its short, square belfry.)And the poet adds:Le chateau est sa coquille . . . •(The manor is its shell ....)But there are other passages in Bernard Palissy's workswhich accentuate this predestined image that we are obligedto recognize in his shell-house experience. As it happens,this potential constructor of a shell-fortress was also anarchitect and landscape gardener, and to complement hisplans for gardens, he added plans for what he called"chambers." These "chambers" were places of retreat thatwere as rough and rocky on the outside as an oyster shell:"The exterior of the aforementioned chamber," wrotePalissy,2 "will be of masonry made with large uncut stones,in order that the outside should not seem to have beenman-built." Inside, on the contrary, he would like it to be1 Rene Rouquier, La boule de verre, p. 12. ghers, Paris.2 Loc. cit. p. 78.

151 shellsas highly polished as the inside of a shell: "When themasonry is finished, I want to cover it with several layersof enameling, from the top of the vaulted ceiling down tothe floor. This done, I should like to build a big fire in it. . . until the aforesaid enameling has melted and coatedthe aforesaid masonry ..." In this way, the "inside of thechamber would seem to be made of one piece ... and wouldbe so highly polished that the lizards and earthworms thatcome in there would see themselves as in a mirror."This indoor fire lighted for the purpose of enamelingbricks is a far cry from the "blaze" we light in our time to"dry the plaster." Here, perhaps, Palissy recaptured visionsof his potter's kiln, in which the fire left brick tears on thewalls. In any case, an extraordinary image demands extraordinarymeans. Here a man wants to live in a shell.He wants the walls that protect him to be as smoothlypolished and as firm as if his sensitive flesh had to come indirect contact with them. The shell confers a daydream ofpurely physical intimacy. Bernard Palissy's daydream expressesthe function of inhabiting in terms of touch.Because dominant images tend to combine, his fourthchamber is a synthesis of house, shell and cave: "The insidemasonry will be so skilfully executed," he wrote (loc. cit.,p. 82) "that it will appear to be simply a rock that has beenhollowed out in order to cut stone from the interior; andthe aforesaid chamber will be twisted and humped withseveral skewed humps and concavities having neither appearancenor fonn of either the chiseler's art or of workdone by human hands; and the ceiling vaults will be sotortuous that they will look as though they are about tofall, for the reason that there will be several pendanthumps." Needless to say, the inside of this spiraled housewill also be covered with enamel. It will be a cave in theform of a coiled shell. Thus, by means of a great sum ofhuman labor, this cunning architect succeeded in makinga natural dwelling of it. To accentuate the natural characterof the chamber he had it covered with earth "so that,having planted several trees in the aforesaid earth, it wouldnot seem to have been built." In other words, the real home

132 the poetics 01 spaceof this man of the earth was subterranean. He wanted tolive in the heart of a rock, or, shall we say, in the shell ofa rock. The pendant humps fill this dwelling with a nightmaredread of being crushed, while the spiral that penetratesdeep into the rock gives an impression of anguisheddepth. But a being who desires to live underground is ableto dominate commonplace fears. In his daydreams, BernardPalissy was a hero of subterranean life. In his imaginationhe derived pleasure-so he said-from the fear manifestedby a dog barking at the entrance of a cave; and the samething was true of the hesitation, on the part of a visitor, toenter further into the tortuous labyrinth. Here the shellcaveis also a "fortress city" for a man alone, a man wholoves complete solitude, and who knows how to defend andprotect himself with simple images. There's no need of agate, no need of an iron-trimmed door; people are afraid tocome in.In any case, an important phenomenological investigationremains to be made on the subject of dark entrancehalls.XIIWith nests, with shells-at the risk of wearying the readerI have multiplied the images that seem to me to illustratethe function of inhabiting in elementary forms which maybe too remotely imagined. Here one senses clearly that thisis a mixed problem of imagination and observation. I havesimply wanted to show that whenever life seeks to shelter,protect, cover or hide itself, the imagination sympathizeswith the being that inhabits the protected space. Theimagination experiences protection in all its nuances ofsecurity, from life in the most material of shells, to moresubtle concealment through imitation of surfaces. As thepoet Noel Arnaud expresses it, being seeks dissimulation insimilarity.1 To be in safety under cover of a color is carryingthe tranquility of inhabiting to the point of culmination,not to say, imprudence. Shade, too, can be inhabited.1 Noel Arnaud, L'etat d'ebauche, Paris. 1950.

155 shellsXIIIMter this study of shells, we could, of course, tell a numberof stories about the turtle which, as the animal with thehouse that walks, would lend itself to much facile commentary.However, this commentary would only illustratewith new examples themes that have already been treated.I shall therefore forego writing a chapter on the turtle'shouse.But since slight contradictions to primal images can occasionallystimulate the imagination, I should like to commentupon a passage from the Flemish travel notes of theItalian poet, Giuseppe Ungaretti.1 At the home of the poetFranz Hellens-only poets possess such treasures-Ungarettisaw a woodcut "depicting the fury of a wolf which, havingatta Ck ed a turtle that had withdrawn into its bony carapace,went mad, without having appeased its hunger."These three lines keep coming back to my mind, and Itell myself endless stories around them. I see the wolf arrivingfrom a distant, famine..stricken land. It is lean andhungry looking, its tongue hanging out, red and feverish.At that moment, what should come out from under a bushbut a turtle, considered by epicures the world over to bea particularly delicate morsel. With one leap, the wolfseizes its prey, but the turtle, which is endowed by naturewith unusual alacrity when it wants to withdraw head,limbs and tail into its house, is quicker than the wolf. Forthe famished wolf, it is now nothing but a stone on theroad.One hardly knows which side to take in this dramaticincident of hunger. I have tried to be impartial. I don'tlike wolves. But, for once, the turtle might have refrainedfrom action. And U ngaretti, who had thought lengthilyabout the engraving, said explicitly that the artist had succeededin making "the wolf likeable and the turtle odious."A phenomenologist would have many comments to makeon this commentary! Of course, the psychological interpretationexceeds the facts, since no drawn line can inter-1 In La revue de culture europeenne, 4th trimester 1953, p. 259·

134 the poetics of spacepret an "odious" turtle. The animal in its box is sure ofits secrets, it has become a monster of impenetrable physiognomy.The phenomenologist, therefore, will have to tellhimself the fable of the wolf and the turtle. He will haveto elevate the drama to the cosmic level and, from there,meditate upon world-hunger. To put it more simply, thephenomenologist would need to have, for one moment,the entrails of the wolf, faced with a prey that has turneditself into stone.If I had reproductions of an engraving of this kind, Ishould use them to differentiate and measure people's viewsand the depth of their participation in hunger dramasthroughout the world. Almost surely, this participationwould manifest a certain ambiguity. Some would give into the drowsiness of the story-telling function and leave theplay of the old childish images undisturbed. They wouldtake pleasure in the wicked animal's resentment and laughup their sleeves at the turtle that withdrew into its shell.Others, however, having been alerted by Ungaretti's interpretation,might reverse the situation. Such a reversal ofa fable that has long lain dormant in its traditions, couldhave a rejuvenating effect on the function of story-telling.For here the imagination makes a fresh start, which couldbe of advantage to phenomenologists. Reversals of this kindmay seem to have only slight documentary interest for theall-of-a-piece school of phenomenologists who take theWorld as their next-door neighbor. They are immediatelyconscious of being of and in the world. But the problembecomes more complicated for a phenomenologist of theimagination constantly confronted with the strangenessof the world. And what is more, the imagination, by virtueof its freshness and its own peculiar activity, can make whatis familiar into what is strange. With a single poetic detail,the imagination confronts us with a new world. From thenon, the detail takes precedence over the panorama, and asimple image, if it is new, will open up an entire world.If looked at through the thousand windows of fancy, theworld is in a state of constant change. It therefore givesfresh stimulus to the problem of phenomenology. By solv-

155 shellsing small problems, we teach ourselves to solve large ones.I have limited myself to proposing exercises conceived foran elementary phenomenology. I am moreover convincedthat the human psyche contains nothing that is insignificant.

BcornerstlFermez. l'espace! Fermez. la poche du Kangourou! Il 'Y fait chaud:'MAURICE BLANCHARDl(Close spacel Close the kangaroo's pouchl It's warm in there.)IWith nests and shells, I was quite obviously in the presenceof transpositions of the function of inhabiting. Myaim was to study chimerical or crude types of intimacy,whether light and airy, like the nest in the tree" or symbolicof a life rigidly encrusted in stone, like the mollusk.Now should I like to tum my attention to impressions ofintimacy which, however short-lived or imaginary, havenevertheless a more human root, and do not need transposition.They lend themselves to a direct psychology, evenif positive minds take them for so much idle musing.The point of departure of my reflections is the following:every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inchof secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdrawinto ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination;that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house.The documents available in literary works are few, for thereason that this purely physical contraction into oneselfalready bears the mark of a certain negativism. Also, inmany respects, a corner that is "lived in" tends to reject andrestrain, even to hide, life. The corner becomes a negationof the Universe. In one's corner one does not talk. to oneself.When we recall the hours we have spent in our corners, we1 Le Temps de la poesie, G.L.M. July 1948, p. 8"

157 comersremember above all silence, the silence of our thoughts.This being the case, why describe the geometry of suchindigent solitude? Psychologists and, above all, metaphysicians,will find these circuits of topa-analysis quite useless.They know how to observe "uncommunicative" naturesdirectly. They do not need to have a sullen person in acorner described to them as "cornered." But it is noteasy to efface the factors of place. And every retreat on thepart of the soul possesses, in my opinion, figures of havens.That most sordid of all havens, the corner, deserves to beexamined. To withdraw into one's corner is undoubtedlya meager expression. But despite its meagerness, it hasnumerous images, some, perhaps, of great antiquity, imagesthat are psychologically primitive. At times, the simplerthe image, the vaster the dream.To begin with, the corner is a haven that ensures usone of the things we prize most highly-immobility. It isthe sure place, the place next to my immobility. The corneris a sort of half-box, part walls, part door. It will serveas an illustration for the dialectics of inside and outside,which I shall discuss in a later chapter.Consciousness of being at peace in one's corner producesa sense of immobility, and this, in turn, radiates immobility.An imaginary room rises up around our bodies, whichthink that they are well hidden when we take refuge in acorner. Already, the shadows are walls, a piece of furnitureconstitutes a barrier, hangings are a roof. But all of theseimages are over-imagined. So we have to designate the spaceof our immobility by making it the space of our being. InL'etat d'ebauche,l Noel Arnaud writes:Je suis l'espace OU je suis(1 am the space where 1 am.)This is a great line. But nowhere can it be better appreciatedthan in a comer.In Mein Leben ohne mich (My Life Without Me), Rilkewrites: "Suddenly, a room with its lamp appeared to me,1 Quoted earlier, p. 127.

188 the poetics 0/ spacewas almost palpable in me. I was already a comer in it, butthe shutters sensed me and closed." It would be hard to finda more felicitous way of saying that the corner is the chamberof being.IILet us take now an ambiguous text in which being becomesmanifest at the very moment when it comes forth from itscorner.Jean-Paul Sartre, writing on Baudelaire, quotes a sentencefrom Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica1 thatdeserves lengthy commentary: "Emily had been playinghouses in a nook right in the bows ..." It is not this line,however, that Sartre discusses, but the following: ". .. andtiring of it (she) was walking rather aimlessly aft ... whenit suddenly flashed into her mind that she was she . . ."Before examining these thoughts from various angles, Ishall point out that in all probability, in the novel, theycorrespond to what we are obliged to call invented childhood,with which novels abound. For novelists often returnto an invented childhood which has not been experiencedto recount events whose naivete is also invented. Thisunreal past projected through literary means into a timethat precedes the story, often conceals the actuality of a daydreamwhich would assume all its phenomenological valueif it were presented in really actual naivete. But the verbsto be and to write are hard to reconcile.And yet, as it is, the text quoted by Sartre is a valuableone, because it designates topo-analytically, that is, in termsof space and experience of outside and inside, the twodirections that psychoanalysts refer to as introvert andextrovert: before life, before the passions, in the very patternof existence, the novelist encounters this duality. Thelightning-like thought that the little girl in the story hasfound in herself, comes to her as she leaves her "house."Here we have a cogito of emergence without our havingbeen given the cogito of a being withdrawn into itself;11929-

IS9cornersthe more or less sombre cogito of a being who first playsat making itself a "Dutch stove," like Descartes, a sort ofchimerical home, in a comer of a boat. The child hasjust discovered that she is herself in an explosion towardthe outside, which is a reaction, perhaps, to certain concentrationsin a comer of her being. For the recess in the boatis also a comer of being. But when she has explored thevast universe of the boat in the middle of the ocean, doesshe return to her little house? Now that she knows that sheis herself, will she resume her game of "playing houses," willshe return home, in other words, withdraw again into herself?One can undoubtedly become aware of existing byescaping from space. Here, however, the figure of beingis related to a special concept. Therefore, the novelistshould have given us the details of the inversion of a dreamthat lead from home to the universe, in quest of being. Andsince this is invented childhood, fictionalized metaphysics,the author holds the key to both domains, 'he senses theircorrelation. No doubt he could have illustrated otherwisethis sudden awareness of "being." But since the housepreceded the universe, we should be told her daydreamsin it. As it is, the author has sacrificed-or perhaps suppressed-these"corner" daydreams and placed them inthe category of "children's games," by which he more orless admits that the real things of life are the exterior ones.But life in comers, and the universe itself withdrawninto a comer with the daydreamer, is a subject about whichpoets will have more to tell us. They will not hesitate togive this daydream all its reality.IIIIn the novel Lamoureuse initiation by the Lithuanianpoet, O. V. de Milosz, there is a passage in which the leadingcharacter, a cynically sincere figure, who has forgotten nothing,is reminiscing (p. 201). But these are not childhoodmemories. On the contrary, the entire work is set in theexperienced present. And we are shown him in his palace,where he leads a fervent existence, setting aside certain

140 the poetics of spacecorners to which he often repairs. As, for instance, "Thatlittle dark corner between the fireplace and the oak chest,where you used to hide," when she went away. It shouldbe noted that he did not wait for her in the vast palace,but in a corner reserved for gloomy waiting, where he coulddigest his anger at her faithlessness. "With your bottom restingon the hard, cold, marble floor, your blank gaze turnedtoward the make-believe sky of the ceiling, and in yourhands, a book with uncut pages, you spent many a delightfullysad hour there waiting, like the poor blockhead thatyou were." What a refuge for ambivalencel Here is adreamer who is happy to be sad, content to be alone,waiting. In his corner he can meditate upon life anddeath, as befits the heights of passion: "To live and diein this sentimental corner, you told yourself; Yes, indeed,to live and die there; why not, then, Monsieur de Pinamonte,you who so love dark, dusty little corners?"And all who live in corners will come to confer life uponthis image, multiplying the shades of being that characterizethe corner dweller. For to great dreamers of corners andholes nothing is ever empty, the dialectics of full and emptyonly correspond to two geometrical non-realities. The functionof inhabiting constitutes the link between full andempty. A living creature fills an empty refuge, images inhabit,and all corners are haunted, if not inhabited. Milosz'scorner dreamer, M. de Pinamonte, in his, on the whole,spacious "den," between the chest and the fireplace, resumeshis reminiscing: "Here the meditative spider lives powerfuland happy; the past shrivels up and all but disappears, likea frightened old lady-bug . . . Ironic, cunning lady-bug,here the past can be recaptured and yet remain hiddenfrom the learned spectacles of collectors of pretty-pretties."Under the poet's magic wand, one cannot help becoming alady-bug, or gathering memories and dreams under theelytra of this round, this roundest of animals. But how wellour little earth-ball of red life hid its ability to flyl Itescapes from its sphere as from a hole. Perhaps up in theblue sky it, too, experiences sudden awareness that it is

141 cornersitself, like the little girl in Richard Hughes's novel. Andwe find it hard to stop dreaming before the spectacle ofthis little shell that suddenly starts to fly.Exchanges of animal and human life become frequentin Milosz's novel. His cynical dreamer goes on (p. 242):here, in this corner, between the chest and the fireplace,"you find countless remedies for boredom, and an infinitenumber of things that deserve to occupy your mind forall time: the musty odor of the minutes of three centuriesago; the secret meaning of the hieroglyphics in fly-dung;the triumphal arch of that mouse-hole; the frayed tapestryagainst which your round, bony back is lolling; the gnawingnoise of your heels on the marble; the powdery soundof your sneeze ... and finally, the soul of all this old dustfrom corners forgotten by brooms."But, except for such "corner readers" as ourselves, whowill continue to read about all this dustiness? Someonelike Michel Leiris, perhaps, who tells of having pickedthe dust from the cracks in the floor with a pin.l But, Irepeat, not everybody will admit to these things.Yet in such daydreams as these the past is very old indeed.For they reach into the great domain of the undated past.By allowing the imagination to wander through the cryptsof memory, without realizing it, we recapture the bemusedlife of the tiniest burrows in the house, in the almostanimal shelter of dreams.But against this distant background, childhood returns.In his meditation corner Milosz's dream questions his conscience.The past rises to the level of the present. Andthe dreamer finds himself in tears: "Because, already as achild, you liked the eaves of chateaux and corners of dustyold libraries, and you read avidly, without understandinga word, falsely learned volumes on the privileges of theDutch ... Ah! you rascal, what delightful hours you usedto pass in your rascality in those nostalgia-dredged nooksand corners of the palazzo Merona! The time you squanderedthere trying to get at the heart of things that had1 Michel Leiris, BiDures, p. 9.

142 the poetics of spacehad their day! With what joy you changed yourself into anold shoe, picked out of the gutter, saved from being sweptout with the rubbish."Just here, we can come to an abrupt halt, break upthe daydream, and lay aside our reading. For who is preparedto go beyond the spider, the lady-bug and the mouse,to a point of identification with things forgotten in a corner?But what kind of daydream is this that can be brokenup? And why break. it up for reasons of conscience or goodtaste, or through disdain for old things? Milosz does notbreak it up. And when, guided by his book, we ourselvesdream beyond it, we share his dream of a corner that isthe grave of a "wooden doll forgotten last century, in thiscorner of the room, by some little girl ..." No doubt, onewould have to sink into profound daydreaming to be movedby the vast museum of insignificant things. It is impossibleto dream of an old house that is not the refuge of old things-its own-or that has been filled with old things as a resultof the simple craze of a collector of knick-knacks. To restoretheir soul to corners, it is better to have an old slipper or adoll's head, like those that attract the meditations of Milosz'sdreamer. "The mystery of things," the poet continues(p. 243), "little sensations of time, great void of eternity!All infinity can be contained in this stone corner, betweenthe fireplace and the oak chest . . . Where are they now,I ask you! all those marvelous, spidery delights of yours,those profound meditations on poor, dead little things."Then, from the depths of his corner, the dreamer remembersall the objects identified with solitude, objects thatare memories of solitude and which are betrayed by themere fact of having been forgotten, abandoned in a corner."Remember the old, old lamp that greeted you from faraway, through the window of your thoughts, its panes burnedby suns of other years ..." From the depths of his corner,the dreamer sees an older house, a house in another land,thus making a synthesis of the childhood home and thedream home. The old objects question him: "What willthe friendly old lamp think of you, during the lonely winternights? What will the other objects think of you, the-

148 cornersones that were so kind, so fraternally kind to you? Was nottheir obscure fate closely united with your own? . .. Motionless,mute things never forget: melancholy and despised asthey are, we confide in them that which is humblest andleast suspected in the depths of ourselves (p. 244). " Whata call to humility this dreamer heard in his corner I Forthe corner denies the palace, dust denies marble, and wornobjects deny splendor and luxury. The dreamer in hiscorner wrote off the world in a detailed daydream thatdestroyed, one by one, all the objects in the world. Havingcrossed the countless little thresholds of the disorder ofthings that are reduced to dust, these souvenir-objects setthe past in order, associating condensed motionlessness withfar distant voyages into a world that is no more. WithMilosz, the dream penetrates so deeply into the past that itseems to attain to a region beyond memory: "All thesethings are far, far away, they no longer exist, they never didexist, the Past has lost all recollection of them . . . Look,seek and wonder, tremble . .. Already you yourself no longerhave a past" (p. 245). Meditating upon certain passages ofthis work, one feels onself carried away into a sort of antecedenceof being, as though into a beyond of dreams.IVIn quoting this fragment by Milosz, I have sought to presentan unusually complete experience of a gloomy daydream,the daydream of a human being who sits motionlessin his corner, where he finds a world grown old andworn. Incidentally, I should like to point out the powerthat an adjective acquires, as soon as it is applied to life.A gloomy life, or a gloomy person, marks an entire universewith more than just a pervading coloration. Even thingsbecome crystallizations of sadness, regret or nostalgia. Andwhen a philosopher looks to poets, to a great poet likeMilosz, for lessons in how to individualize the world,he soon becomes convinced that the world is not so mucha noun as an adjective.If we were to give the imagination its due in the philo-

144the poetics of spacesophical systems of the universe, we should find, at theirvery source, an adjective. Indeed, to those who want tofind the essence of a world philosophy, one could give thefollowing advice-look for its adjective.vBut let us resume contact with shorter daydreams, thekind that are attracted by detail or by features of realitywhich, at first, seem insignificant. People never tire of recallingthat Leonardo da Vinci advised painters who lackedinspiration when faced with nature, to contemplate witha reflective eye the crack in an old wall I For there is amap of the universe in the lines that time draws on theseold walls. And each of us has seen a few lines on the ceilingthat appeared to chart a new continent. A poet knows allthis. But in order to describe in his own way a universe ofthis kind, created by chance on the confines of sketch anddream, he goes to live in it. He finds a corner where hecan abide in this cracked-ceiling world.Thus we see a poet take the hollow road of a piece ofmolding in order to reach his hut in the corner of a cornice.In his Poemes a l'autre moi (Poems to my other sel!) PierreAlbert-Birot "espouses," as they say, "the curve that warms."Soon its mild warmth calls upon us to curl up under thecovers.To begin with, Albert-Birot slips into the molding:... ] e suis tout droit les mouluresqui suivent tout droit Ie pla/ond(I follow the line of the moldingswhich follow that of the ceiling.)But if we "listen" to the design of things, we encounteran angle, a trap detains the dreamer:Mais il y a des angles d'ou l'on ne peut plus sortir.(But there are angles from which one cannot escape.)

145 comersYet even in this prison, there is peace. In these anglesand comers, the dreamer would appear to enjoy the reposethat divides being and non-being. He is the being of anunreality. Only an event can cast him out. And just herethe poet adds: "But a klaxon made me come out of theangle where I was beginning to die of an angel's dream."It is easy for a rhetorician to criticize a text like this.Indeed, the critical mind has every reason to reject suchimages, such idle musings.First of all, because they are not "reasonable," becausewe do not live in "corners of the ceiling" while lolling ina comfortable bed, because a spider's web is not, as the poetsays, drapery-and, to be more personal, because an exaggeratedimage is bound to seem ridiculous to a philosopherwho seeks to concentrate being in its center, and finds ina center of being a sort of unity of time, place and action.Yes, but even when the criticisms of reason, the scorn ofphilosophy and poetic traditions unite to tum us from thepoet's labyrinthine dreams, it remains nonetheless true thatthe poet has made a trap for dreamers out of his poem.As for me, I let myself be caught. I followed the molding.In an earlier chapter devoted to houses, I said that ahouse in an engraving may well incite a desire to live in it.We feel that we should like to live there, between thevery lines of the engraved drawing. At times, too, the phantasmthat impels us to live in corners, comes into being bythe grace of a mere drawing. But, then, the grace of acurved line is not a simple Bergsonian movement with wellplaced inflexions. Nor is it merely a time that unreels. Itis also habitable space harmoniously constituted. We areagain indebted to Pierre Albert-Birot for an engraved"comer," a lovely engraving, in terms of literature:1Et voici qut ie suis devenu un dessin d' OTnementVolutes sentimentalesEnroulement des spirales1 Poemes a Z'autre moi, p. 48.

146 the poetics of spaceSurface organisee en noir et blancEt pourtant je viens de m ' entendre respirerEst-ce bien un dessinEst-ce bien moi.(So now I have become a decorative drawingSentimental scrollsCoiling spiralsAn organized surface in black and whiteAnd yet I just heard myself breatheIs it really a drawingIs it really I.)Here it is as though the spiral greeted us with claspedhands. However, the drawing is more effective for whatit encloses than for what it exfoliates. The poet feels thiswhen he goes to live in the loop of a scroll to seek warmthand the quiet life in the arms of a curve.The intellectualist philosopher who wants to hold wordsto their precise meaning, and uses them as the countlesslittle tools of clear thinking, is bound to be surprised by thepoet's daring. And yet a syncretism of sensitivity keepswords from crystallizing into perfect solids. Unexpectedadjectives collect about the focal meaning of the noun. Anew environment allows the word to enter not only intoone's thoughts, but also into one's daydreams. Languagedreams.The critical mind can do nothing about this. For it isa poetic fact that a dreamer can write of a curve that it iswarm. But does anyone think that Bergson did not exceedmeaning when he attributed grace to curves and, no doubt,inflexibility to straight lines? Why is it worse for us to saythat an angle is cold and a curve warm? That the curvewelcomes us and the oversharp angle rejects us? That theangle is masculine and the curve feminine? A modicumof quality changes everything. The grace of a curve is aninvitation to remain. We cannot break away from it withouthoping to return. For the beloved curve has nest-like powers;it incites us to possession, it is a curved "corner," inhabitedgeometry. Here we have attained a minimum of refuge,

147 cornersin the highly simplified pattern of a daydream of repose.But only the dreamer who curls up in contemplation ofloops, understands these simple joys of delineated repose.No doubt it is very rash on the part of a writer to accumulate,in the final pages of a chapter, disconnected ideas,images that only live in a single detail, and convictions,however sincere, which only last for an instant. But whatelse can be done by a phenomenologist who wants to braveteeming imagination, and for whom, frequently, a singleword is the germ of a dream? When we read the works ofa great word dreamer like Michel Leiris (particularly in hisBifJures), we find ourselves experiencing in words, on theinside of words, secret movements of our own. Like friendship,words sometimes swell, at the dreamer's will, in theloop of a syllable. While in other words, everything iscalm, tight. Even as sober a man as Joseph Joubertl recognizesthe intimate repose of words when he speaks of certainideas rather curiously as "huts." Words-I oftenimagine this-are Ii ttle houses, each wi th its cellar and garret.Common-sense lives on the ground floor, always readyto engage in "foreign commerce," on the same level as theothers, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To goupstairs in the word house, is to withdraw, step by step;while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losingoneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology,looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. Tomount and descend in the words themselves-this is apoet's life. To mount too high or descend too low, isallowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and skytogether. Must the philosopher alone be condemned by hispeers always to live on the ground floor?1 Eighteenth-century French moralist, friend of Chateaubriand.

7minialureIPsychologists-and more especially philosophers-pay littleattention to the play of miniature frequently introducedinto fairy tales. In the eyes of the psychologist, the writer ismerely amusing himself when he creates houses that canbe set on a pea. But this is a basic absurdity that placesthe tale on a level with the merest fantasy. And fantasyprecludes the writer from entering, really, into the domainof the fantastic. Indeed he himself, when he develops hisfacile inventions,- often quite ponderously, would appearnot to believe in a psychological reality that corresponds tothese miniature features. He lacks that little particle ofdream which could be handed on from writer to reader.To make others believe, we must believe ourselves. Is itworthwhile, then, for a philosopher to raise a phenomenologicalproblem with regard to these literary "miniatures,"these objects that are so easily made smaller throughliterary means? Is it possible for the conscious-of bothwriter and reader-to play a sincere role in the very originof images of this kind?Yet we are obliged to grant these images a certain objectivity,from the mere fact that they both attract andinterest many dreamers. One might say that these housesin miniature are false objects that possess a true psychologicalobjectivity. Here the process of imagination is typical,and it poses a problem that must be distinguished fromthe general problem of geometrical similarities. A geometriciansees exactly the same thing in two similar figures,drawn to different scales. The plan of a house drawn on a

149 miniaturereduced scale implies none of the problems that are inherentto a philosophy of the imagination. There is even noneed to consider it from the general standpoint of representation,although it would be important, from this standpoint,to study the phenomenology of similarity. Our studyshould be specified as belonging definitely under theimagination.Everything will be clear, for instance, if, in order to enterinto the domain where we imagine, we are forced to crossthe threshold of absurdity, as in the case of Tresor des /eves(Bean Treasure), Charles Nodier'sl hero, who gets into afairy's coach the size of a bean. In fact, he gets into it withsix "litrons"2 of beans on his shoulder. There is thus a contradictionin numbers as well as in the size of the spaceinvolved. Six thousand beans fit into one. And the samething is true when Michael-who is oversize-finds himself,to his great surprise, in the house of the Fee aux Miettes(Beggar Fairy), which is hidden under a tuft of grass. Buthe feels at home there, and settles down. Happy at beingin a small space, he realizes an experience of topophilia;that is, once inside the miniature house, he sees its vastnumber of rooms; from the interior he discovers interiorbeauty. Here we have an inversion of perspective, which iseither fleeting or captivating, according to the talent of thenarrator, or the reader's capacity for dream. Nodier, whowas often too eager to be "agreeable," and too much amusedto give full rein to his imagination, allows certain badlycamouflaged rationalizations to subsist. In order to explainpsychologically this entry into the tiny house, he recallsthe little cardboard houses that children play with. In otherwords, the tiny things we imagine simply take us back tochildhood, to familiarity with toys and the reality of toys.But the imagination deserves better than that. In pointof fact, imagination in miniature is natural imaginationwhich appears at all ages in the daydreams of born dreamers.Indeed, the element of amusement must be removed,if we are to find its true psychological roots. For instance,1 Charles Nodier, 1780-1844. French writer of tales of fantasy.2 Old measure, about 1/16 of a bushel.

150 the poetics of spaceone might devote a serious reading to this fragment byHermann Hesse, which appeared in Fontainel (N °57' p.725). A prisoner paints a landscape on the wall of his cellshowing a miniature train entering a tunnel. When hisjailers come to get him, he asks them "politely to wait amoment, to allow me to verify something in the little trainin my picture. As usual, they started to laugh, because theyconsidered me to be weak-minded . .I made myself verytiny, entered into my picture and climbed into the littletrain, which started moving, then disappeared into thedarkness of the tunnel. For a few seconds longer, a bit offlaky smoke could be seen coming out of the round hole.Then this smoke blew away, and with it the picture, andwith the picture, my person . . ." How many times poetpainters,in their prisons, have broken through walls, byway of a tunnelf How many times, as they painted theirdreams, they have escaped through a crack in the walll Andto get out of prison all means are good ones. If need be,mere absurdity can be a source of freedom.And so, if we follow the poets of miniature sympathetically,if we take the imprisoned painter'S little train,geometrical contradiction is redeemed, and Representationis dominated by Imagination. Representation becomesnothing but a body of expressions with which to communicateour own images to others. In line with a philosophythat accepts the imagination as a basic faculty, one couldsay, in the manner of Schopenhauer: "The world is myimagination." The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world,the better I possess it. But in doing this, it must be understoodthat values become condensed and enriched in miniature.Platonic dialectics of large and small do not suffice forus to become cognizant of the dynamic virtues of miniaturethinking. One must go beyond logic in order to experiencewhat is large in what is small.By analyzing several examples, I shall show that miniatureliterature-that is to say, the aggregate of literary1 Fontaine, French literary review published in Algiers, then in France,during the Second World War.

151 miniatureimages that are commentaries on inversions in the per.pective of size-stimulates profound values.III shall first take a fragment from Cyrano de Bergerac, whichis quoted in a very fine article by Pierre-Maxime Schuhl,entitled Le theme de Gulliver et Ie postulat de Laplace.Here the author is led to accentuate the intellectualistnature of Cyrano de Bergerac's amused images in order tocompare them with this astronomer-mathematician's ideas.1The Cyrano text is the following: "This apple is a littleuniverse in itself, the seed of which, being hotter than theother parts, gives out the conserving heat of its globe; andthis germ, in my opinion, is the little sun of this little world,that warms and feeds the vegetative salt of this little mass."In this text, nothing stands out, but everything is imagined,and the imaginary miniature is profX>sed to enclosean imaginary value. At the center is the seed, which ishotter than the entire apple. This condensed heat, thiswarm well-being that men love, takes the image out of theclass of images one can see into that of images that arelived. The imagination feels cheered by this germ which isfed by a vegetable saIt.2 The apple itself, the fruit, is nolonger the principal thing, but the seed, which becomesthe real dynamic value. Paradoxically, it is the seed thatcreates the apple, to which it transmits its aromatic sapsand conserving strength. The seed is not only born in atender cradle, protected by the fruit's mass. It is the generatorof vital heat.In such imagination as this, there exists total inversion aregards the spirit of observation. Here the mind thatimagines follows the opposite path of the mind that ob-1 Journal de psychologie, April-June 1947, p. 169.2 How many of us, once we have eaten an apple, attack the seed I Incompany, we restrain our innocent mania for decorticating the seedsin order to chew them. And what thoughts we have, what daydreams,when we eat the germs of plants!

152 the poetics of spaceserves, the imagination does not want to end in a diagramthat summarizes acquired learning. It seeks a pretext tomultiply images, and as soon as the imagination is interestedby an image, this increases its value. From the momentwhen Cyrano imagined the Seed-Sun, he had the convictionthat the seed was a source of life and heat, in short, thatit was a value.Naturally, this is an exaggerated image. The jesting elementin Cyrano, as in many writers, as for instance Nodier,whom we mentioned a few pages back, is prejudicial toimaginary meditation. The images go too fast, and too far.But a psychologist who reads slowly and examines imagesin slow motion, lingering as long as is needed over eachimage, will experience a sort of coalescence of unlimitedvalues. Values become engulfed in miniature, and miniaturecauses men to dream.Pierre-Maxi me Schuhl concludes his analysis by underliningin the case of this particularly felicitous example, thedangers of the imagination, which is master of error andfalsehood. I think as he does, but I dream differently or, tobe more exact, I am willing to react to my reading the waya dreamer does. Here we have the entire problem of theoneiric attitude toward oneiric values. Already, when wedescribe a daydream objectively this diminishes and interruptsit. How many dreams told objectively, have becomenothing but oneirism reduced to dust! In the presence ofan image that dreams, it must be taken as an invitation tocontinue the daydream that created it.The psychologist of the imagination who defines thepositivity of the image by the dynamism of daydream, mustjustify the invention of the image. In the present example,the problem posed: is the seed of an apple its sun? is anabsurd one. If we dream enough-and undoubtedly a lotis needed-we end by giving this question oneiric value.Cyrano de Bergerac did not wait for Surrealism to delightin tackling absurd questions. From the standpoint of theimagination, he was not "wrong"; the imagination is neverwrong, since it does not have to confront an image withan objective reality. But we must go further: Cyrano did

155 miniaturenot mean to deceive his readers. He knew quite well thatreaders would not mistake it. He had always hoped to findreaders worthy of his imagination. Indeed, there is a sortof innate optimism in all works of the imagination. Gerardde Nerval wrote, in Aurelia (p. 41): "I believe that thehuman imagination never invented anything that was nottrue, in this world or any other."When we have experienced an image like the planetaryimage of Cyrano's apple, we understand that it was notprepared by thought. It has nothing in common with imagesthat illustrate or sustain scientific ideas. On the other hand,the planetary image of Bohr's atom-in scientific thinking,if not in a few indigent, harmful evaluations of popularphilosophy-is a pure synthetic construct of mathematicalthoughts. In Bohr's planetary atom, the little central sunis not hot.This brief remark is to underline the essential differencebetween an absolute image that is self-accomplishing, anda post-ideated image that is content to summarize existingthoughts.IIIOur second example of valorized literary miniature will bea botanist's daydream. Botanists delight in the miniatureof being exemplified by a flower, and they even ingenuouslyuse words that correspond to things of ordinary sizeto describe the intimacy of flowers. The following descri ption of the flower of the German stachys may be read underHerbs in the Dictionnaire de botanique chretienne, whichis a large volume of the Nouvelle Encyclopedie theologique,published in 1851:"These flowers, which are grown in cotton cradles, arepink and white in color, and small and delicate. I take offthe little chalice by means of the web of long silk threadsthat covers it . . . The lower lip of the flower is straightand a bit folded under; it is a deep pink on the inside, and

154 the poetics of spaceon the outside is covered with thick fur. The entire plantcauses smarting when touched. It wears a typically northerncostume with four little · stamens that are like littleyellow brushes." Thus far, this account may pass for objective.But it soon becomes psychological, and, gradually,the description is accompanied by a daydream: "The fourstamens stand erect and on excellent terms with one anotherin the sort of little niche formed by the lower lip,where they remain snug and warm in little padded casemates.The little pistil remains respectfully at their feet,but since it is very small, in order to speak to it, they, inturn, must bend their knees. These little women are veryimportant, and those that appear to be the humblest, oftenassume great authority in their homes. The four seedsremain at the bottom of the chalice, where they are grown,the way, in India, children swing in a hammock. Eachstamen recognizes its own handiwork, and there can beno jealousy."Here our learned botanist has found wedded life inminiature, in a flower; he has felt the gentle warmth preservedby fur, he has seen the hammock that rocks the seed.From the harmony of the forms, he has deduced the wellbeingof the home. Need one point out that, as in theCyrano text, the gentle warmth of enclosed regions is thefirst indication of intimacy? This warm intimacy is the rootof all images. Here-quite obviously-the images no longercorrespond to any sort of reality. Under a magnifying glasswe could probably recognize the little yellow brushes ofthe stamens. But no obseroer could see the slightest realfeature that would justify the psychological images accumulatedby the narrator in this Dictionary of ChristianBotany. We are inclined to think that the narrator wouldhave been more cautious had he had to describe an objectwith ordinary dimensions. But he entered into a miniatureworld and right away images began to abound, then grow,then escape. Large issues from small, not through the logicallaw of a dialectics of contraries, but thanks to liberationfrom all obligations of dimensions, a liberation that is a

155 miniaturespecial characteristic of the activity of the imagination.Under Periwinkle, in this same dictionary of ChristianBotany, we find: "Reader, study the periwinkle in detail,and you will see how detail increases an object'S stature."In two lines, this man with a magnifying glass expressesan important psychological law. He situates us at a sensitivepoint of objectivity, at the moment when we have toaccept unnoticed detail, and dominate it. The magnifyingglass in this experience conditions an entry into the world.Here the man with the magnifying glass is not an old manstill trying to read his newspaper, in spite of eyes that areweary of looking. The man with the magnifying glass takesthe world as though it were quite new to him. If he wereto tell us of the discoveries he has made, he would furnishus with documents of pure phenomenology, in which discoveryof the world, or entry into the world, would be morethan just a worn-out word, more than a word that hasbecome tarnished through over-frequent philosophical use.A philosopher often describes his "entry into the world,"his "being in the world," using a familiar object as symbol.He will describe his ink-bottle phenomenologically, and apaltry thing becomes the janitor of the wide world.The man with the magnifying glass-quite simply-barsthe every-day world. He is a fresh eye before a new object.The botanist's magnifying glass is youth recaptured. Itgives him back the enlarging gaze of a child. With this glassin his hand, he returns to the garden,ou les en/ants regardent grandl(where children see enlarged)Thus the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entireworld. The details of a thing can be the sign of a newworld which, like all worlds, contains the attributes ofgreatness.Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness.1 P. de Boissy, Main premiere, p. 21.

156 the poetics of spaceIVOf course, in describing a phenomenology of the man withthe magnifying glass, I was not thinking of the laboratoryworker. A scientific worker has a discipline of objectivitythat precludes all daydreams of the imagination. He hasalready seen what he observes in the microscope and, paradoxically,one might say that he never sees anything for thefirst time. In any case, in the domain of scientific observationthat is absolutely objective, the "first time" doesn'tcount. Observation, then, belongs in the domain of "severaltimes: In scientific work, we have first to digest oursurprise psychologically. What scholars observe is well definedin a body of thoughts and experiments. It is not,then, on the level of problems of scientific experiment thatI shall make my comments when we study the imagination.When we have forgotten all our habits of scientific objectivity,we look for the images of the first time. If we were toconsult psychological documents in the history of sciencesincethe objection may well be raised that, in this history,there is quite a store of "first times" -we should find thatthe first microscopic observations were legends about smallobjects, and when the object was endowed with life, legendsof life. Indeed, one observer, still in the domain of naivete,saw human forms in "'spermatazoic animals!"1Here I am again, then, obliged to pose the problems ofthe Imagination in terms of "first time," which justifies myhaving chosen examples in realms of the most exaggeratedfantasy. And by way of a surprising variation on the themeof the man with the magnifying glass, I shall study a prosepoemby Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues, entitled The eggin the landscape.2Like countless others, our poet is sitting dreaming at thewindow. But he discovers in the glass itself a slight deformation,which spreads deformation throughout the universe."Come nearer the window," Mandiargues tells hisreader, "while you force yourself not to allow your atten-1 Cf. Bache1ard's La formation de I'esprit scientifique.2 Edition Metamorphoses, Gallimard, Paris, p. 105.

157 miniaturetion to be too much attracted by the out-of-doors. Untilyou have seen one of these kernels that are like cysts in theglass, at times transparent little knucklebones, but moreoften, befogged or very vaguely translucent, and so long inshape that they make you think of the pupils of a eat's eyes."But what happens to the outside world, when it is seenthrough this little glazed lune, this pupil of a eat's eye?"Does the nature of the world change (p. 106), or is it realnature that triumphs over appearances? In any event, theexperimental fact is that the introduction of the nucleusinto the landscape sufficed to make it look limp . .. Walls,rocks, tree-trunks, metal constructions, lost all rigidity inthe area surrounding the mobile nucleus." Here the poetmakes images surge up on all sides, he presents us with anatom universe in the process of multiplication. Under hisguidance, the dreamer can renew his own world, merely bymoving his face. From the miniature of the glass cyst, hecan call forth an entire world and oblige it to make "themost unwonted contortions" (p. 107). The dreamer sendswaves of unreality over what was formerly the real world."The outside world in its entirety, is transformed into amilieu as malleable as could be desired, by the presence ofthis single, hard, piercing object, this veritable philosophical ovum which the slightest twitch of my face sets movingall through space."Here the poet did not look far for his dream instrument.And yet with what art he nucleized the landscapel Withwhat fantasy he conferred multiple curvature on space!This is really a fantasy on Riemann's curved space. Becauseevery universe is enclosed in curves, every universe is concentra ted in a nucleus, a spore, a dynamized center. Andthis center is powerful, because it is an imagined center.One step further into the world of images offered us byPieyre de Mandiargues, and we see the center that imagines;then we can read the landscape in the glass nucleus. We nolonger look at it while looking through it. This nucleizingnucleus is a world in itself. The miniature deploys to thedimensions of a universe. Once more, large is contained insmall.

158 the poetics of spaceTo use a magnifying glass is to pay attention, but isn'tpaying attention already having a magnifying glass? Attentionby itself is an enlarging glass. Elsewhere,l Pieyre deMandiargues meditates upon the flower of the euphorbia:"Like the cross-cut of a flea under the lens of a microscope,the euphorbia had grown mysteriously under his overattentivescrutiny: it was now a pentagonal fortress, loomingstupendously high above him, in a desert of white rocks,and the pink spires of the five towers that studded the castleset in the front line of the flora o the arid country-side,appeared inaccessible."A reasonable philosopher-and the species is not uncommon-willobject, perhaps, that these documents are exaggerated,and that, with words, they make the large, eventhe immense, issue too gratuitously from the small. For himthey are nothing but verbal prestidigitation, which is apoor thing compared to the feat of the real prestidigitatorwho makes an alarm-clock come out of a thimble. I shallnevertheless defend "literary" prestidigitation. The prestidigitator'saction amazes and amuses us, while that of thepoet sets us to dreaming. I cannot live and relive what isdone by the former. But the poet's creation is mine if onlyI like to daydream.This reasonable philosopher would excuse our imagesif they could be presented as the effect of a drug, such asmescaline. Then they would have physiological reality forhim; and he could use them to elucidate his problems ofthe union of soul and body. I myself consider literary documentsas realities of the imagination, pure products of theimagination. And why should the actions of the imaginationnot be as real as those of perception?Is there any reason, either, why these "extreme" images,which we should be unable to form ourselves, but whichreaders can receive sincerely from poets, should not bevirtual "drugs"-if we must keep to this notion-that procurethe seeds of daydreams for us? This virtual drug, moreover,possesses very pure efficacy. For with an "exaggerated"1 Marbre, p. 63. Laffont, Paris.

159 miniatureimage we are sure to be in the direct line of an autonomousimagination.vI felt a certain scruple when, a few pages back, I introducedthat long description by the botanist in the Nouvelle EncyclopedieTheologique. This fragment abandons the seedof daydream too quickly. But because of its gossipy nature,we accept it when we have time for pleasantry. We mustdismiss it, however, when we are trying to find the livingseed of products of the imagination. If one may say this,it is a miniature made with big pieces and I shall have tolook for a better contact with the miniaturizing imagination.Unfortunately, being, as I am, a philosopher who plieshis trade at home, I haven't the advantage of actuallyseeing the works of the miniaturists of the Middle Ages,which was the great age of solitary patience. But I can wellimagine this patience, which brings peace to one's fingers.Indeed, we have only to imagine it for our souls to bebathed in peace. All small things must evolve slowly, andcertainly a long period of leisure, in a quiet room, wasneeded to miniaturize the world. Also one must love spaceto describe it as minutely as though there were worldmolecules, to enclose an entire spectacle in a molecule ofdrawing. In this feat there is an important dialectics of theintuition-which always sees big-and work, which is hostileto flights of fancy. Intuitionists, in fact, take in everythingat one glance, while details reveal themselves andpatiently take their places, one after the other, with thediscursive impishness of the clever miniaturist. It is asthough the miniaturist challenged the intuitionist philosopher'slazy contemplation, as though he said to him: "Youwould not have seen thatl Take the time needed to see allthese little things that cannot be seen all together." Inlooking at a miniature, unflagging attention is required tointegrate all the detail.Naturally, miniature is easier to tell than to do, and it

160the poetics of spaceis not hard to find literary descriptions that put the worldin the diminutive. But because these descriptions tell thingsin tiny detail, they are automatically verbose. This is trueof the following passage by Victor Hugo (I have cut itsomewhat), in whose name I shall request the reader'sattention for examination of a type of daydream that mayseem insignificant.Although Hugo is generally thought to have had a magnifyingvision of things, he also knew how to describe themin miniature, as in this passage from Le Rhin1: "In FreibergI forgot for a long time the vast landscape spread outbefore me, in my preoccupation with the plot of grass onwhich I was seated, atop a wild little knoll on the hill.Here, too, was an entire world. Beetles were advancingslowly under deep fibres of vegetation; parasol-shaped hemlockflowers imitated the pines of Italy . . ., a poor, wetbumble-bee, in black and yellow velvet, was laboriouslyclimbing up a thorny branch, while thick clouds of gnatskept the daylight from him; a blue-bell trembled in thewind, and an entire nation of aphids had taken to shelterunder its enormous tent ... I watched an earthworm thatresembled an antediluvian python, come out of the mudand writhe heavenward, breathing in the air. Who knows,perhaps it, too, in this microscopic universe, has its Herculesto kill it and its Cuvier2 to describe it. In short, thisuniverse is as large as the other one." The account continues,to the poet's evident amusement. Having mentionedMicromegas, he goes on to pursue a facile theory. But theunhurried reader-I personally hope for no others-undoubtedlyenters into this miniaturizing daydream. Indeed,this leisurely reader has often indulged in daydreams ofthis kind himself, but he would never have dared to writethem down. Now the poet has given them literary dignity.It is my ambition to give them philosophical dignity. Forin fact, the poet is right, he has just discovered an entireworld. "Here, too, was an entire world." Why should a1. Victor Hugo, Le Rhin, Hetzel edition, Vol. III, p. g8.2 Baron Georges Cuvier, eighteenth-century ZOOlogist and founder of thescience of paleontology.

161 miniaturemetaphysician not confront this world? It would permithim to renew, at little cost, his experiences of "an openingonto the world," of "entrance into the world." Too oftenthe world designated by philosophy is merely a non-I, itsvastness an accumulation of negativities. But the philos.opher proceeds too quickly to what is positive, and apprpriates for himself the World, a World that is unique ofits kind. Such formulas as: being-in-the-world and worldbeingare too majestic for me and I do not succeed inexperiencing them. In fact, I feel more at home in miniatureworlds, which, for me, are dominated worlds. Andwhen I live them I feel waves that generate world-consciousnessemanating from my dreaming self. For me, the vastnesof the world has become merely the jamming of these waves.To have experienced miniature sincerely detaches me fromthe surrounding world, and helps me to resist dissolutionof the surrounding atmosphere.Miniature is an exercise that has metaphysical freshness;it allows us to be world conscious at slight risk. And howrestful this exercise on a dominated world can be! Forminiature rests us without ever putting us to sleep. Herethe imagination is both vigilant and content.But in order to devote myself to this miniaturized metaphysicswith a clear conscience, I should need the increasedsupport of additional texts. Otherwise, by confessing mylove of miniature, I should be afraid of confirming thediagnosis suggested, some twenty-five years ago, by my oIdfriend Mme. Favez-Boutonier, who told me that my Lilliputianhallucinations were characteristic of alcoholism.There exist numerous texts in which a meadow is a forest,and a tuft of grass a thicket. In one of Thomas Hardy'snovels, a handful of moss is a pine wood; and in NielsLyne,l J. P. Jacobsen's novel of subtle passions, the author,describing the Forest of Happiness, with its autumn leavesand the shadbush "weighted down with red berries," completeshis picture with "vigorous, thick moss that lookedlike pine trees, or like palms." Also, ".there was in addition,a thin moss that covered the tree-trunks and reminded one1 Niels Dyne was a work that Rilke read and reread.

162 the poetics of spaceof the wheat-fields of elves" (p. 255 of the French translation).For a writer whose task it is to follow a highly intensehuman drama-as was the case with Jacobsen-tointerrupt his passionate story, in order to "write this miniature,"presents a paradox that would need elucidating ifwe wanted to take an exact measure of literary interests. Byfollowing the text closely, it is as though something humangained in delicacy in this effort to see this delicate forestset in the forest of big trees. From one forest to the other,from the forest in diastole to the forest in systole, there isthe breathing of a cosmicity. And paradoxically, it seemsthat by living in the world of miniature, one relaxes in asmall space.This is one of the many daydreams that take us out of thisworld into another, and the novelist needed it to transportus into the region beyond the world that is the world ofnew love. People who are hurried by the affairs of men willnot enter there. Indeed the reader of a book that followsthe undulations of a great love may be surprised at thisinterruption through cosmicity. But he only gives the booka linear reading that follows the thread of the humanevents. For this reader, events do not need a pIcture. Andlinear reading deprives us of countless daydreams.Daydreams of this sort are invitations to verticality,pauses in the narrative during which the reader is invitedto dream. They are very pure, since they have no use. Theymust also be distinguished from the fairy-tale conventionin which a dwarf hides behind a head of lettuce to lay trapsfor the hero, as in Le nain jaune (The Yellow Dwarf) byCountess d'Aulnoy.l Cosmic poetry is independent of theplots that characterize stories for children. In the' examplesgiven, it demands participation in a really intimate vegetismthat has none of the torpor to which Bergsonian philosophycondemned it. Indeed, through its attachment to miniaturizedforces, the vegetal world is great in smallness, sharpin gentleness, vividly alive in its greenness.1 Seventeenth-century French author of many fairy tales that havebecome classics.

165 miniatureAt times, a poet seizes upon some tiny dramatic incident,as for instance, Jacques Audiberti who, in his amazingA braxas, makes us sense the dramatic moment at which"the climbing nettle raises the gray scale" in its strugglewith a stone wall. What a vegetal Atlas! In Abraxas Audibertiweaves a closely-knit fabric of dream and reality. Heknows the daydreams that put intuition at the punctummaximum. One would like to help the nettle root makeone more blister on the old wall.But we haven't time, in this world of ours, to love thingsand see them at close range, in the plentitude of their smallness.Only once in my life I saw a young lichen come intobeing and spread out on a wall. What youth and vigor tohonor the surface IOf course, we should lose all sense of real values if weinterpreted miniatures from the standpoint of the simplerelativism of large and small. A bit of moss may well be apine, but a pine will never be a bit of moss. The imaginationdoes not function with the same conviction in bothdirections.Poets learn to know the primal germ of flowers in thegardens of tininess. And I should like to be able to say withAndre Breton:rai des mains pour te cueillir,lhym minuscule de mes rbJes,romarin de mon extreme paleur.1(I have hands to pluck you,wee thyme of my dreams.rosemary of my excessive palor.)VIA fairy tale is a reasoning image. It tends to associate exI raordinary images as though they could be coherent images,imparting the conviction of a primal image to an entiret Andre Breton, Le revolver aux cheveux blancs, p. 122. Cahiera Libres,Paris.

164the poetics of space#-ensemble of derivative images. But the tie is so facile, andthe reasoning so fluid that soon we no longer know wherethe germ of the tale lies.In the case of a story told in miniature such as PetitPoucet (Tom Thumb), we seem to have no difficulty infinding the principle of the primal image: mere tininesspaves the way for everything that happens. But when weexamine it more closely, the phenomenological situation ofthis narrated miniature is precarious. And the fact is thatit is subject to the dialectics of wonder and jest. A singleoverdrawn feature suffices sometimes to interrupt participationin wonderment. In a drawing, we might continue toadmire it, but the commentary exceeds the limits: in oneversion, quoted by Gaston Paris,! Poucet is so small "thathe splits a grain of dust with his head, and passes throughit with his entire body." In another, he is killed by a kickfrom an ant. But in this last, there is no oneiric value. Ouranimalized oneirism, which is so powerful as regards largeanimals, has not recorded the doings and gestures of tinyanimals. In fact, in the domain of tininess, animalizedoneirism is less developed than vegetal oneirism.2Gaston Paris notes that this direction, in which Poucetis killed by a kick from an ant, leads inevitably to the epigram,and a sort of insult through the image that expressescontempt for lowly creatures. Here we are faced withcounter participation. "These witty games may be foundamong the Romans," he writes, "who, at the period of thedecadence, addressed a dwarf with the following epigram:'A flea's skin would be too big for you'." "Today still," addsGaston Paris, "the same jokes are to be found in the songabout Le Petit Mari"3 (The Little Husband). Gaston Parisdescribes this song, moreover, as a "children's song," whichwill no doubt astonish our psychoanalysts. Fortunately, in1 Gaston Paris, Le Petit Poucet et la Grande Ourse, p. 22. Paris, 1875.2 It should be noted, however. that certain neurotics insist that theycan see the microbes that are consuming their organs.3 Mon pere m'a donne un mari, mon Dieu, quel petit hommt'! PopularFrench folk song.

165miniaturethe last seventy-five years, we have acquired new means ofpsychological explanation.In any case, Gaston Paris clearly designated the weakpoint of the legend (loc. cit. p. 23): the passages that jeerat tininess deform the original story, the pure miniature.In the original tale, which the phenomenologist must alwaysreinstate, "smallness is not ridiculous, but wonderful. Infact, the most interesting features of the story are theextraordinary things that Poucet accomplishes, thanks tohis smallness; he is wi tty and clever on all occasions, andalways extricates himself triumphantly from the awkwardsituations in which he happens to be."But then, in order to participate in the story really,this subtlety of wit should be accompanied by materialsubtlety. The tale invites us to "slip" between the difficulties.In other words, in addition to the design, we must seizethe dynamism of the miniature, this being a supplementaryphenomenological instance. And what a thrill we get fromthe story if we trace the source of this smallness, the nascentmovement of this tiny creature, exerting influence uponthe large one. As an example, the dynamism of miniatureis often evidenced by the stories in which, seated in thehorse's ear, Poucet is master of the forces that pull theplough. "This, in my opinion," writes Paris (p. 23), "isthe original basis of his story; for this is a feature that isfound among the legends of all peoples, whereas the otherstories that are attributed to him, and which are creationsof the imagination, once it has been stirred by this amusinglittle creature, usually differ among different peoples."Naturally, when he is in the horse's ear, Poucet ordersit to turn right or left. He is the center of decision, thatthe daydreams of our will advise us to set up in any smallspace. I said earlier that tininess is the habitat of greatness.But if we sympathize dynamically with this livelylittle Poucet, tininess soon appears to be the habitat ofprimitive strength. A Cartesian philosopher-if a Cartesiancould indulge in pleasantry-would say that, in this story,Petit Poucet is the pineal gland of the plough. In any

166the poetics of spacecase, the infinitesimal is master of energies, small commandslarge. When Poucet has spoken, horse, ploughshareand man have only to follow. The better these threesubordinates obey, the greater the certainty that the furrowwill be straight.Petit Poucet is at home in the space of an ear, at theentrance of the natural sound cavity. He is an ear withinan ear. Thus the tale figured by visual representations isduplicated by what, in the next paragraph, I shall call aminiature of sound. As a matter of fact, as we follow thetale, we are invited to go beyond the auditory threshold,to hear with our imagination. Poucet climbed into thehorse's ear in order to speak softly, that is to say, to commandloudly, with a voice that none could hear excepthe who should "listen." Here the word "listen" takes onthe double meaning of to hear and to obey. It is moreoverin the minimum of sound, in a sound miniature likethe one that illustrates this legend, that the play of this doublemeaning is most delicate.This Poucet who guides the farmer's team with his intelligenceand will, seems rather remote from the Poucet ofmy youth. And yet it is in line with the fables that willlead us to primitive legend, in the footsteps of GastonParis, who was the great dispenser of primitivity.For Paris, the key to the legend of Petit Poucet-as inso many legends!-is in the sky; in other words, it is Poucetwho drives the constellation of the Grand Chariot.1 And asa matter of fact, in many lands, according to this author,a little star just above the chariot is designated by the nameof Poucet.We need not follow all the convergent proofs that thereader can find in this work by Gaston Paris. However, Ishould like to insist upon a Swiss legend which will give usour full of an ear that knows how to dream. In this legend,also recounted by Paris (p. 11), the chariot turns over atmidnight with a frightful noise. Such a legend teaches us tolisten to the night. The time of night? The time of the starry1 Alas, in English, the "Grand Chariot" is the "Great Bear," so this"key" will not fit the legend of our Tom Thumb. (Translator'S note) .

167 miniaturesky? I once read somewhere that a hermit who was watchinghis hour-glass without praying, heard noises that splithis eardrums. He suddenly heard the catastrophe of time,in the hour-glass. The tick tock of our watches is so mechanicallyjerky that we no longer have ears subtle enoughto hear the passage of time.VIIThe tale of Petit Poucet, transposed into ' the sky, showsthat images move easily from small to large and fromlarge to small. The Gulliver type of daydream is natural,and a great dreamer sees his images doubly, on earthand in the sky. But in this poetic life of images there ismore than a mere game of dimensions. Daydream is notgeometrical. The dreamer commits himself absolutely. Inan Appendix to C. A. Hackett's thesis on Le Lyrisme deRimbaud, under the title, Rimbaud et Gulliver, there is anexcellent passage in which Rimbaud is represented as smallbeside his mother, and great in the dominated world.Whereas in the presence of his mother he is nothing but"a little man in Brobdingnag's country," at school, little"Arthur imagines that he is Gulliver among the Lilliputians."And C. A. Hackett quotes Victor Hugo who, inLes contemplations (Souvenirs paternels), shows childrenwho laughDe voir d'aBreux geants tres betesVa incus par des nains d'esprit.(When they see frightful, very stupid giantsOverpowered by witty dwarfs.)Here Hackett has given an indication of all the elementsof a psychoanalysis of Rimbaud. But although psychoanalysis,as I have often observed. can furnish us valuableinformation with regard to the deeper nature of a writer,occasionally it can divert us from the study of the directvirtue of an image. There are images that are so immense,their power of communication lures us so far from life,

168 the poetics of spacefrom our own life, that psychoanalytical commentary canonly develop on the margin of values. There is immensedaydreaming in these two lines by Rimbaud:Petit Poucet reveurJ j' egrenais dans ma courseDes rimes. Mon auberge etait a la Grande Ourse.(Dreamy Petit Poucet, on my way, as though in prayer,I said rhymes, my inn was under the sign of the Great Bear.)It is of course possible to admit that, for Rimbaud, theGreat Bear was an "image of Mme. Rimbaud" (Hackett,p. 69) . But additional psychological insight does not giveus the dynamism of this outburst of image that led thepoet to recapture the legend of the Walloon Poucet. In factI shall have to leave aside my psychoanalytical knowledge ifI want to be touched by the phenomenological grace ofthe dreamer's image, of the image of this fifteen-year-oldprophet. If the Great Bear Inn is merely the harsh homeof an ill-handled adolescent, it awakens no positive memoryin me, no active daydream. Here I can only dream in Rimbaud'ssky. The particular origin that psychoanalysis findsin the writer's life, even though it may be psychologicallycorrect, has little chance of recapturing an influence overany one. And yet I receive the message of this extraordinaryimage, and for a brief instant, by detaching me from mylife, it transfonns me into an imagining being. It is in suchmoments of reading as this that, little by little, I havecome to doubt not only the psychoanalytical origin of theimage, but all psychological causality of the poetic imageas well. Poetry, in its paradoxes, may be counter-causal,which is yet another way of being of the world, of beingengaged in the dialectics of the passions. But when poetryattains its autonomy, we can say that it is a-causal. Inorder to receive directly the virtue of an isolated imageandan image in isolation has all its virtue-phenomenologynow seems to me to be more favorable than psychoanalysis,for the precise reason that phenomenology requires us toassume this image ourselves, uncritically and with enthusiasm.

169 miniatureConsequently, in its direct revery aspect, "The Great BearInn" is not a maternal prison any more than it is a villagesign. It is a "house in the sky." If we dream intensely at thesight of a square, we sense its stability, we know that it isa very safe refuge. Between the four stars of the GreatBear, a great dreamer can go and live. Perhaps he is fleeingthe earth, and a psychoanalyst can enumerate the reasonsfor his flight. But the dreamer is sure to find a resting placeproportionate to his dreams. And this house in the skykeeps turning round and roundl The other stars, lost inthe heavenly tides, tum ineptly. But the Grand Chariotdoes not lose its way. To watch it turning so smoothlyis already to be master of the voyage. And, while dreaming,the poet undoubtedly experiences a coalescence of legends,all of which are given new life through the image. Theyare not an ancient wisdom. The poet does not repeatold-wives' tales. He has no past, but lives in a world that isnew. As regards the past and the affairs of this world, hehas realized absolute sublimation. The phenomenologistmust follow the poet. The psychoanalyst is only interestedin the negativity of sublimation.VIIIOn the theme of Petit Poucet, in folklore as well as amongpoets, we have just seen transpositions of size that give adouble life to poetic space. Two lines suffice sometimes forthis transposition, as, for instance these lines by NoelBureau: 1Il se couchait derriere Ie brin d'herbePour agrandir Ie ciel.(He lay down behind the blade of grassTo enlarge the sky.)But sometimes the transactions between small and largemultiply, have repercussions. Then, when a familiar imagegrows to the dimensions of the sky, one is suddenly struck1 Noel Bureau, Les mains tendues, p. 25.

170 the poetics of spaceby the impression that, correlatively, familiar objects become the miniatures of a world. Macrocosm and microcosmare correlated.This correlation, which can become operative in bothdirections, has served as basis for certain poems by JulesSupervielle, especially those collected under the revealingtide, Gravitations. Here every poetic center of interest,whether in the sky or on the earth, is a center of activegravity. For the poet, this center of gravity is soon, if onecan say this, both in heaven and on earth. For instance,with what freedom of movement in the images, the familytable becomes an aerial table, with the sun for its lamp.1L'homme) la femme) les enfantsA la table aerienneAppuyee sur un miracleQui cherche a se definir.(The man, the woman, the childrenAt the aerial tableResting on a miracleThat seeks its definition.)Then, after this "explosion of unreality," the poet comesdown to earth again:Ie me retrouve a ma table habituelleSur la terre cultiveeCelle qui donne Ie mai's et les troupeauxIe retrouvais les visages autour de moiAvec les pleins et les creux de la verite.(I am back again at my usual tableOn the cultivated earthThe one that yields corn and flocksI recognized the faces about meWith their lights and shades of truth.)1 Jules Supervielle, Gravitations, pp. 183-185.

I7lminiatureThe image that serves as pivot for this transformingdaydream, which is by turns earthly and aerial, familiarand cosmic, is the image of the lamp-sun or the sun-lamp.One could find innumerable literary documents on thesubject of this very ancient image. But Jules Superviellecontributes an important variation by making it activein both directions. Thus he restores its entire supplenessto the imagination, a suppleness so miraculous that theimage can be said to represent the sum of the directionthat enlarges and the direction that concentrates. The poetkeeps the image from becoming motionless.If we are alive to Supervielle's cosmic allusions, underthis title Gravitations, which is filled with scientific significancefor the modern mind, may be found ideas that have adistinguished past. When the history of science is not overmodernized,and Copernicus, for instance, is taken as hewas, with all his dreams and ideas, it becomes evidentthat the stars gravitate about light, and that the sun is,primarily, the great Light of the World. Later, mathematiciansdecided that it was a magnetic mass. Upper light,being the principle of centrality, is a very important valuein the hierarchy of images. For the imagination, therefore,the world gravitates about a value.The evening lamp on the family table is also the centerof a world. In fact, the lamp-lighted table is a little worldin itself, and a dreamer-philosopher may well fear lest ourindirect lighting cause us to lose the center of the eveningroom. If this happens, will memory retain the faces ofother days,With their lights and shades of truth7When we have followed Supervielle's entire poem, bothin its astral ascensions and its return to the world of humanbeings, we perceive that the familiar world assumes thenew relief of a dazzling cosmic miniature. We did not knowthat the familiar world was so large. The poet has shownus that large is not incompatible with small. And we arereminded of Baudelaire's comments on certain Goya litho-

172 the poetics of spacegraphs, which he called "vast pictures in miniature." l Healso said of Marc Baud,2 an enamelist, "he knows how tocreate large in small."In reality, as we shall see later, especially when weexamine images of immenseness, tiny and immense arecompatible. A poet is always ready to see large and small.For instance, thanks to the image, a man like Paul Claudel,in his cosmogony was quick to assimilate the vocabulary-if not the thinking-of contemporary science. The followinglines are from his Cinq grandes odes (p. 18o): "Justas we see little spiders or certain insect larvae hidden likeprecious stones in their cotton and satin pouches,HIn the same way, I was shown an entire nestful of stillembarrassed suns in the cold folds of the nebula."If a poet looks through a microscope or a telescope, healways sees the same thing.IXDistance, too, creates miniatures at all points on the horizon,and the dreamer, faced with these spectacles of distantnature, picks out these miniatures as so many nests ofsolitude in which he dreams of living.In this connection, Joe Bousquet3 writes: HI plungeinto the tiny dimensions that distance confers, for I amanxious to measure the immobility in which I am confinedwith this reduction." A permanent invalid, this greatdreamer bestrode the intervening space in order to Hplunge"into tininess. The isolated villages on the horizon becomehomelands for the eyes. Distance disperses nothing but,on the contrary, composes a miniature of a country in whichwe should like to live. In distant miniatures, disparatethings become reconciled. They then offer themselves forour Hpossession," while denying the distance that createdthem. We possess from afar, and how peacefully!These miniature pictures on the horizon may be comparedwith the sights that characterize belfry daydreams,1 Baudelaire, Curiosites esthetiques, p. 429.2 Baudelaire, loco cit. p. 316.S Joe Bousquet, Le meneur de lune, p. 162.

173 miniatureand which are so numerous that they are considered commonplace.Writers note them in passing but vary themhardly at all. And yet what a lesson in soli tude I Fromthe solitude of a belfry-tower, a man watches other men"running about" on the distant square bleached white bythe summer sun. The men look "the size of flies," andmove about irrationally "like ants." These comparisons,which are so hackneyed that one no longer dares to usethem, appear as though inadvertently in numerous passagesthat recount a belfry daydream. It remains true,nevertheless, that a phenomenologist of images must takenote of the extreme simplicity of these reflections whichso successfully separate the daydreamer from the restlessworld, and give him an impression of domination at littlecost. But once its commonplace nature has been pointed out,we realize that this is specifically the dream of high solitude.Enclosed solitude would think other thoughts. Itwould deny the world otherwise, and would not havea concrete image with which to dominate it. From the topof his tower, a philosopher of domination sees the universein miniature. Everything is small because he is so high.,And since he is high, he is great, the height of his stationis proof of his own greatness.Many a theorem of topo-analysis would have to be elucidatedto determine the action of space upon us. For imagesc.annot be measured. And even when they speak of space,they change in size. The slightest value extends, heightens,or multiplies them. Either the dreamer becomes the beingof his image, absorbing all its space or he confines himselfin a miniature version of his images. What metaphysicianscall our being-in-the-world (etre-lO,) should be determinedas regards each image, lest, occasionally, wefind nothing but a miniature of being. I shall return tothese aspects of this problem in a later chapter.xSince I have centered all my considerations on the probkms of experienced space, miniature, for me, is solely a

174 the poetics of spacevisual image. But the causality of smallness stirs all oursenses, and an interesting study could be undertaken ofthe "miniatures" that appeal to each sense. For the senseof taste or smell, the problem might be even more interestingthan for the sense of vision, since sight curtails thedramas it witnesses. But a whiff of perfume, or even theslightest odor can create an entire environment in theworld of the imagination.Naturally, the problems of causality of smallness havebeen analyzed by sensory psychology. In a perfectly positiveway, the psychologist carefully determines the differentthresholds at which the various sense organs go into action.These thresholds may differ with different persons, butthere is no contesting their reality. In fact, the idea ofthreshold is one of the most clearly objective ideas in modempsychology.In this paragraph I should like to see if the imaginationdoes not attract us to an area beyond these thresholds; if apoet who is hyper-alert to the inner word, by making formand color speak, doesn't hear in a region beyond perception.There exist too many paradoxical metaphors in thisconnection, for us not to examine them systematically, sincethey must conceal a certain reality, a certain truth of theimagination. I shall give some examples of what, for thesake of brevity, I shall call sound miniatures.First of all, we must dismiss the usual references toproblems of hallucination. For they refer to objectivephenomena detectable in actual behavior that can berecorded thanks to photographs of faces in anguish athearing imaginary voices. They would therefore not allowus to really enter into the domains of pure imagination.Nor do I believe that we can apprehend the autonomousactivity of the creative imagination through a mixture oftrue sensations and hallucinations that may be either trueor false. The problem for me, I repeat, is not to examinemen, but images. And the only images that can be examinedphenomenologically are transmissible ones; they are thosewe receive in a successful transmission. And even if thecreator of an image were the victim of an hallucination, the

175 miniatureimage can very well fulfill our desire to imagine as readers,who are not hallucinated.It must be recognized that a veritable ontological changetook place when what psychiatrists designate as auditoryhallucinations were given literary dignity by a great writerlike Edgar Allan Poe. In such a case, psychological or psychoanalyticalexplanations concerning the author of thework of art can lead to a situation where problems of thecreative imagination would be posed wrongly, or not at all.In general, too, facts do not explain values. And in worksof the poetic imagination, values bear the mark of suchnovelty that everything related to the past, is lifeless besidethem. AU memory has to be reimagined. For we have inour memories micro-films that can only be read if they arelighted by the bright light of the imagination.Naturally, it can still be affirmed that Poe wrote "TheFall of the House of Usher" because he suffered fromauditory hallucinations. But "suffer" runs counter to"create," and we may be sure that it was not while he was"suffering" that he wrote this tale, in which the images arebrilliantly associated and the shades and silences have verydelicately corresponding features. "Terrestrial objects wereglowing" in the darkness, words were "murmurs." A sensitiveear knows that this is a poet writing in prose, andthat, at a certain point, poetry dominates meaning. Inshort, in the auditory category, we have here an immensesound miniature, the miniature of an entire cosmos 'thatspeaks softly.Faced with such a miniature of world sounds as this, aphenomenologist must systematically point out all thatgoes beyond perception, organically as well as objectively .. rhis is not a rna tter of ears burning or of wall lizardsgrowing bigger. There's a dead woman in a vault, whodoesn't want to die. On a shelf in the library are very oldhooks that tell of another past than the one the dreamer hasknown. Dreams, thoughts and memories weave a singlefabric. The soul dreams and thinks, then it imagines. Thepoet has brought us to an extreme situation beyond whichwe are afraid to venture, a situation that lies between

176 the poetics of spacemental disorder and reason, between the living and a womanwho is dead. The slightest sound prepares a catastrophe,while mad winds prepare general chaos. Murmur andclangor go hand in hand. We are taught the ontology of presentiment.In this tense state of fore-hearing, we are askedto become aware of the slightest indications, and in thiscosmos of extremes, things are indications before theyare phenomena; the weaker the indication, the greater thesignificance, since it indicates an origin. Taken as origins,it seems as though all these indications occur and reoccurwithout the tale coming to an end. Here genius teachesus some quite simple things. The tale ends by taking rootin our consciousness and, for this reason, becomes thepossession of the phenomenologist.Meanwhile, consciousness increases; not, however, in relationsbetween human beings, upon which psychoanalysisgenerally bases its observations. For it is not possible toconcentrate on human problems in the face of a cosmosin danger. Everything lives in a sort of pre-quake, in ahouse about to collapse beneath the weight of walls which,when they too collapse, will have achieved definitive burialfor a dead woman.But this cosmos is not real. As Poe himself said, it is asulphurous ideality, created by the dreamer with each newwave of his images. Man and the World, man and hisworld, are at their closest, it being in the power of the poetto designate them to us in their moments of greatest proximity.Man and the world are in a community of dangers.They are dangerous for each other. All this can be heardand pre-heard in the sub-rumbling murmur of the poem.But my demonstration of the reality of poetic soundminiatures will be simpler, no doubt, if I take miniaturesthat are less composed. I shall therefore choose examplesthat may be contained in a few lines.Poets often introduce us into a world of impossiblesounds, so impossible, in fact, that their authors may becharged with creating fantasy that has no interest. Onesmiles and goes one's way. And yet, most often, the poet

177 miniaturedid not take his poem lightly, and a certain tendernesspresided over these images.Rene-Guy Cadou, who lived in the Village of HappyHomes, was moved to write:1On entend gazouiller les fleurs du paravent(You can hear the 'prattle of the flowers on the screen.)Because all flowers speak and sing, even those we draw,and it is impossible to remain unsociable when we drawa Hower or a bird.Another poet writes:Son secret c' etaitD' ecouter la fleurUser sa couleur.2(Her secret wasListening to flowersWear out their color.)Like so many poets, Claude Vigee hears the grass grow:sj'ecouteUn jeune noisetierVerdir.(I hearA young nut-treegrow green.)Such images as these must be taken, at the least, in theirexistence as a reality of expression. For they owe their entirebeing to poetic expression, and this being would be diminishedif we tried to refer them to a reality, even to a psycho-1 Rene-Guy Cadou, Helene ou Ie regne vegetal, p. IS. ghers, Paris.2 Noel Bureau. Les mains tendues, p. 29.8 Claude Vigee, loco cit. p. 68.

178 the poetics of spacelogical reality. Indeed, they dominate psychology and correspondto no psychological impulse, save the simple needfor self-expression, in one of those leisurely moments whenwe listen to everything in nature that is unable to speak.It would be quite superfluous for such images to be true.They exist. They possess the absoluteness of the image,and they have passed beyond the limit that separates conditionedfrom absolute sublimation.But even when they start from psychology, the turningaway from psychological impressions to poetic expression issometimes so subtle that one is tempted to attribute a basisof psychological reality to what is pure expression. TheTouraine writer, J. Moreau, could "not resist the pleasureof quoting Theophile Gautier, when he gives poetic formto the impressions he had while smoking hashish."! "Myhearing," Gautier wrote, "became enormously keen; I heardthe noises of colors; green, red, blue, yellow sounds cameto me ih perfectly distinct waves." But Moreau was nottaken in, and he notes that he quoted the poet's words"in spite of the poetic exaggeration that marks them, andwhich it is useless to point out." But then, for whom is thisdocument intended? For the psychologist, or for the philosopher,who is interested in the poetic human being? Inother words, is it the hashish or the poet that exaggerates?Alone, the hashish would not have succeeded in exaggeratingso well. And we quiet readers, whose knowledge ofhashish impressions has been acquired through literaryproxy, would not hear colors shudder if a poet had notknown how to make us 'listen, not to say, super-listen.Then how shall we see without hearing? There existcomplicated forms which, even when they are at rest,make a noise. Twisted things continue to make creakingcontortions. And Rimbaud knew this whenIl ecoutait grouiller les galeux espaliers(Les poetes de sept ans)(He listened to mangy trellises crawling)1 J. Moreau, Du haschisch et de l'alienation mentale, Etudes Psychologiques,1845, p. 'I.

179 miniatureThe form of the mandrake maintains its legend. Indeed,this root in human form must cry out when it is pulledup from the ground. And for ears that dream, what a noiseof syllables there is in its namell Words are clamor-filledshells. There's many a story in the miniature of a singleword IThere are also great waves of silence that vibrate inpoems, as in the little selection of poems by Pericle Patocchi,prefaced by Marcel Raymond. Here we have thesilence of the distant world concentrated in one line:Au loin j'entendais prier les sources de la terre(Vingt Poemes)(Far off I heard the springs of earth praying.)Some poems move toward silence the way we descend inmemory. As, for instance, in this great poem by Milosz:Tandis que Ie grand vent glapit des noms de mortesOu bruit de vieille pluie aigre sur quelque routeEcoute-plus rien-seul le grand silence-ecoute.(0. w. DE L. MILosz )2(While the high wind yelps the names of women long deadOr the sound of bitter old rain on a roadListen-now there's nothing-but complete silence-listen.)Here there is nothing that would require the kind ofpoetic imitation to be found in Victor Hugo's great play,Les Djinns. It is the silence, rather, that obliges the poetto listen, and gives the dream greater intimacy. Wehardly know where to situate this silence, whether in thevast world or in the immense past. But we do know thatit comes from beyond a wind that dies down or a rain thatgrows gentle. In another poem, (IDe. cit., p. 372) we findthis unforgettable line by Milosz:1 In French, mand1"agore.2 Published in Les Lettres, No. 8, 2nd year.

180 the poetics of spaceL'odeur du silence est si vieille(The odor of silence is so old ...)As life grows older, we are besieged by many a silencelXIHow hard it is to situate the values of being and non-being IAnd where is the root of silence? Is it a distinction of nonbeing,or a domination of being? It is "deep." But where isthe root of its depth? In the universe where sources aboutto be born are praying, or in the heart of a man who hassuffered? And at what height of being should listeningears become aware?Being myself a philosopher of adjectives, I am caughtup in the perplexing dialectics of deep and large; of theinfinitely diminished that deepens, or the large that extendsbeyond all limits. In Claudel's L'annonce faite a Marie, thedialogue between Violaine and Mara reaches down to un·plumbed depths, establishing in a few words the ontologicallink between invisible and inaudible.VIOLAINE (who is blind)-I hear . ..MARA-What do you hear?VIOLAlNE-Things existing with me.Here the touch goes so deep that one would have tomeditate at length upon a world that exists in depth by virtueof its sonority, a world the entire existence of whichwould be the existence of voices. This frail, ephemeralthing, a voice, can bear witness to the most forceful realities.In Claudel's dialogues-abundant proof of this wouldbe easy to find-the voice assumes the certainties of a realitY'that unites man and the world. But before speaking, onemust listen. Claudel was a great listener.XIIWe have just seen united in grandeur of being, the transcendencyof what is seen and what is heard. The follow-

lSIminiatureing bit of daring, however, will serve as a simpler indicationof this dual transcendency:1Je m'entendais fermer les 'Yeux les rouvrir.(I heard myself close my eyes, then open them.)All solitary dreamers know that they hear differentlywhen they close their eyes. And when we want to thinkhard, to listen to the inner voice, or compose the tightlyconstructed key sentence that will express the very core ofour thinking, is there one of us who hasn't his thumb andforefinger pressed firmly against his lids? The ear knowsthen that the eyes are closed, it knows that it is responsiblefor the being who is thinking and writing. Relaxation willcome when the eyes are reopened.But who will tell us the daydreams of closed, half-closed,or even wide-open eyes? How much of the world must oneretain in order to be accessible to transcendency? On page247 of the above-mentioned book written over a centuryago, by J. J. Moreau, we read: "With certain patients,merely to lower their eye-lids, while still awake, sufficesto produce visual hallucinations." Moreau quotes Baillarger,adding: "Lowering the eyelids does not produce visualhallucinations only, but auditory hallucinations as well."By associating the observations of these doctors of theold school, with a gentle poet like Loys Masson, I providemyself with countless daydreams. What a fine ear this poethasl And what mastery in directing the play of the dreamdevices known to us as seeing and hearing, ultra-seeingand ultra-hearing, hearing oneself seeing.Another poet teaches us, if one may say this, to hear ourselveslisten:Ecoute bien pourtant. Non pasmes paroles mais Ie tumulte quis'eleve en ton corps lorsque tu t'ecoutes.21 Loys Masson, [care ou Ie voyageur, p. 15. seghers, Paris.2 Rene Daumal, Poesie noire, poesie blanche, p. 42. Gallimard, Paris.

182 the poetics of space(Yet listen well. Not to my words.but to the tumult that rages inyour body when you listen to yourself.)Here Rene Daumal has seized upon a point of departurefor a phenomenology of the verb to listen.The fact that I have made use of all the documents offantasy and daydreams that like to play with words andthe most ephemeral sort of impressions, is another admissionon my part of my intention of remaining in thedomain of the superficial. I have only explored the thinlayer of nascent images. No doubt, the frailest, most inconsistentimage can reveal profound vibrations. But to determinethe metaphysics of all that trnscends our perceptivelife would require a different type of research. Particularly,if we were to describe how silence affects not only man'stime and speech, but also his very being, it would fill alarge volume. Fortunately, this volume exists. I recommendMax Picard's The World of Silence.11 Max Picard, Die Welt des Schweigens, R.entsch Verlag, 1948, Englishtranslation, Harvill Press, London, 1951.

8Inllmale ImmenSityLe monde est grand, mais en nousil est pr% nd comme la mer.R.. M. lULKE(The world is large, but in usit is deep as the sea.)L'espace m'a toujours rendu silencieux(JULES VALLES, L'en/ant, p. 238)(Space has always reduced me to silence.)One might say that immensity is a philosophical categoryof daydream. Daydream undoubtedly feeds on all kinds ofsights, but through a sort of natural inclination, it contemplatesgrandeur. And this contemplation produces anattitude that is so special, an inner state that is so unlikeany other, that the daydream transports the dreamer out ..side the immediate world to a world that bears the markof infinity.Far from the immensities of sea and land, merely throughmemory, we can recapture, by means of meditation, theresonances of this contemplation of grandeur. But is this1 eally memory? Isn't imagination alone able to enlargeindefinitely the images of immensity? In . point of fact, daydreaming,from the very first second, is an entirely constitutedstate. We do not see it start, and yet it always starts

184 the poetics of spacethe same way, that is, it flees the object nearby and rightaway it is far off, elsewhere, in the space of elsewhere.1When this elsewhere is in natural surroundings, that is,when it is not lodged in the houses of the past, it is immense.And one might say that daydream is original contemplation.1£ we could analyze impressions and images of immensity,or what immensity contributes to an image, we should soonenter into a region of the purest sort of phenomenologyaphenomenology without phenomena; or, stated less paradoxically,one that, in order to know the productive flowof images, need not wait for the phenomena of the imaginationto take form and become stabilized in completedimages. In other words, since immense is not an object, aphenomenology of immense would refer us directly to ourimagining consciousness. In analyzing images of immensity,we should realize within ourselves the pure being of pureimagination. It then becomes clear that works of art arethe by-products of this existentialism of the imaginingbeing. In this direction of daydreams of immensity, thereal product is consciousness of enlargement. We feel thatwe have been promoted to the dignity of the admiringbeing.This being the case, in this meditation, we are not "castinto the world," since we open the world, as it were, bytranscending the world seen as it is, or as it was, before westarted dreaming. And even if we are aware of our ownpaltry selves-through the effects of harsh dialectics-webecome aware of grandeur. We then return to the naturalactivity of our magnifying being.Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort ofexpansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, butwhich starts again when we are alone. As soon as we becomemotionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a worldthat is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement ofmotionless man. It is one of the dynamic characteristics ofquiet daydreaming.1 Cf. Supervielle, L1escalier. p. 124. "Distance bears me along in itsmobile exile."

185 intimate immensityAnd since we are learning philosophy from poets, hereis a lesson in three lines, by Pierre Albert-Bireau:1Et je me cree d'un trait de plumeMaitre du MondeHomme illimite.(And with a stroke of the pen I name myselfMaster of the WorldUnlimited man.)IIHowever paradoxical this may seem, it is often this innerimmensity that gives their real meaning to certain expressionsconcerning the visible world. To take a preciseexample, we might make a detailed examination of whatis meant by the immensity of the forest. For this "immensity"originates in a body of impressions which, inreality, have little connection with geographical information.We do not have to be long in the woods to experiencethe always rather anxious impression of "going deeper anddeeper" into a limitless world. Soon, if we do not knowwhere we are going, we no longer know where we are. Itwould be easy to furnish literary documents that would beso many variations on the theme of this limitless world,which is a primary attribute of the forest. But the followingpassage, marked with rare psychological depth, from Marcaultand Therese Brosse's excellent work,2 will help us todetermine the main theme: "Forests, especially, with themystery of their space prolonged indefinitely beyond theveil of tree-trunks and leaves, space that is veiled for oureyes, but transparent to action, are veritable psychologicaltranscendents."s I myself should have hesitated to use theterm psychological transcendents. But at least it is a goodindicator for directing phenomenological research towards1 Pierre Albert-Bireau, Les amusements naturels, p. 192.II Marcault and There Brosse, L'education de d'emain, p. 255.a "A characteristic of forests is to be closed and, at the same time, openon every side." A. Pieyre de Mandiargues, Le lis de mer, 1956, p. 57.

186 the poetics of spacethe transcendencies of present-day psychology. It would bedifficult to express better that here the functions of description-psychologicalas well as objective-are ineffective.One feels that there is something else to be expressed besideswhat is offered for objective expression. What shouldbe expressed is hidden grandeur, depth. And so far fromindulging in prolixity of expression, or losing oneself inthe detail of light and shade, one feels that one is in thepresence of an "essential" impression seeking expression;in short, in line with what our authors call a "psychologicaltranscendent." If one wants to "experience the forest,"this is an excellent way of saying that one is in thepresence of immediate immensity, of the immediate immensityof its depth. Poets feel this immediate immensity ofold forests: 1Foret pie use} foret brisee OU l'on n'enleve pas les mortsInfiniment fermee} serree de vieilles tiges droites rosesInfiniment resserree en plus vieux et gris fardesSur la couche de mousse enorme et profonde en cri de velours(Pious forest, shattered forest, where the dead are left lyingInfinitely closed, dense with pinkish straight old stemsInfinitely serried, older and grayedOn the vast, deep, mossy bed, a velvet cry.)Here the poet does not describe. He knows that his is agreater task. The pious forest is shattered, closed, serried.It accumulates its infinity within its own boundaries. Fartheron in the poem he will speak of the symphony of an"eternal" wind that lives in the movement of the tree-tops.Thus, Pierre-Jean Jouve's "forest" is immediately sacred,sacred by virtue of the tradition of its nature, far from allhistory of men. Before the gods existed, the woods weresacred, and the gods came to dwell in these sacred woods.All they did was to add human, all too human, characteristicsto the great law of forest revery.But even when a poet gives a geographical dimension,he knows instinctively that this dimension can be deter-1 Pierre-Jean Jouve, Lyrique, p. 13. Mercure de France, Paris.

187 intimate immensitymined on the spot, for the reason that it is rooted in a particularoneiric value. Thus, when Pierre Gueguen speaks of"the deep forest" (the forest of Broceliande),l he adds adimension; but it is not the dimension that gives the imageits intensity. And when he says that the deep forest is alsocalled "the quiet earth, because of its immense silencecurdled in thirty leagues of green," Gueguen bids us participatein transcendent quiet and silence. Because theforest rustles, the "curdled" quiet trembles and shudders,it comes to life with countless lives. But these sounds andthese movements do not disturb the silence and quietude ofthe forest. When we read this passage of Gueguen's bookwe sense that this poet has calmed all anxiety. Forest peacefor him is inner peace. It is an inner state.Poets know this, and some reveal it in one line as, forinstance, Jules SupervielIe, who knows that in our peacefulmoments we areHabitants deiicats des forets de nous-memes.(Sensitive inhabitants of the forests of ourselves.)Others, who are more logical, such as Rene Menard,present us with a beautiful album devoted to trees, inwhich each tree is associated with a poet. Here is Menard'sown intimate forest: "Now I am traversed by bridle paths,under the seal of sun and shade ... I live in great density... Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage... In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possiblein my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines.Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codesand cities."2 But one should read this whole prose-poemwhich, as the poet says, is actuated by "reverent apprehensionof the Imagination of Creation."In the domains of poetic phenomenology under consideration,there is one adjective of which a metaphysician ofI he imagination must beware, and that is, the adjectiveI Pierre Gueguen, La Bretagne, p. 71.1 Rene Menard, Le livre des arb res, pp. 6 and 7. Arts et MetiersCraphiques, Paris, 1956.

188the poetics of spaceancestral. For there is a corresponding valorization to thisadjective which is too rapid, often entirely verbal, andnever well supervised, with the result that the direct natureof depth imagination and of depth psychology, generally,is lacking. Here the "ancestral" forest becomes a "psychologicaltranscendent" at small cost, it is an image suited tochildren's books. And if there exists a phenomenologicalproblem with regard to this image, it is to find out for whatactual reason, by virtue of what active value of the imagination,such an image charms and speaks to us. The hypothesis,according to which it is due to remote permeationfrom infinite ages, is a psychologically gratuitous one. Indeed,if it were to be taken into consideration by a phenomenologist,such an hypothesis would be an invitationto lazy thinking. And, for myself, I feel obliged to establishthe actuality of archetypes. In any event, the wordancestral, as a value of the imagination, is one that needsexplaining; it is not a word that explains.But who knows the temporal dimensions of the forest?History is not enough. We should have to know how theforest experiences its great age; why, in the reign of theimagination, there are no young forests. I myself can onlymeditate upon things in my own country, having learnedthe dialectics of fields and woods from my unforgettablefriend, Gaston Roupne1.1 In the vast world of the non-I,the non-I of fields is not the same as the non-I of forests.The forest is a before-me, before-us, whereas for fields andmeadows, my dreams and recollections accompany all thedifferent phases of tilling and harvesting. When the dialecticsof the I and the non-I grow more flexible, I feel thatfields and meadows are with me, in the with-me, with-us.But forests reign in the past. I know, for instance, that mygrandfather got lost in a certain wood. I was told this, andI have not forgotten it. It happened in a past before I wasborn. My oldest memories, therefore, are a hundred yearsold, or perhaps a bit more.1 Gaston Roupnel, La campagne franaise, see the chapter entitled LaForet, p. 75 and after. Club des Libraires de France, Paris.

189 intimate immensItyThis, then, is my ancestral forest. And all the rest isfiction.IIIWhen such daydreams as these take hold of meditating man,details grow dim and all picturesqueness fades. The veryhours pass unnoticed and space stretches out interminably.Indeed, daydreams of this kind may well be called daydreamsof infinity. With these images of the "deep" forest,I have just outlined the power of immensity that is revealedin a value. But one can follow the opposite course. In thepresence of such obvious immensity as the immensity ofnight, a poet can point the way to intimate depth. A passagein Milosz's L'amoureuse initiation (p. 64) will serveas a center where we can sense the concordance of worldimmensity with intimate depth of being."As I stood in contemplation of the garden of the wondersof space," Milosz writes, "I had the feeling that I waslooking into the ultimate depths, the most secret regions ofmy own being; and I smiled, because it had never occurredto me that I could be so pure, so great, so fair! My heartburst into singing with the song of grace of the universe.All these constellations are yours, they exist in you; outsideyour love they have no reality! How terrible the worldseems to those who do not know themselves! When you feltso alone and abandoned in the presence of the sea, imaginewhat solitude the waters must have felt in the night, or thenight's own solitude in a universe without end!" And thepoet continues this love duet between dreamer and world,making man and the world into two wedded creatures thatare paradoxically united in the dialogue of their solitude.Elsewhere in this same work (p. 151), in a sort of meditation-exaltationwhich unites the two movements that concentrateand dilate, Milosz writes: "Oh, space, you whoseparate the waters; my joyful friend, with what love I senseyou! Here I am like the flowering nettle in the gentle sunlightof ruins, like the pebble on the spring's edge, or the

190the poetics of spaceserpent in the warm grass! Is this instant really eternity?Is eternity really this instant?" And the passage goes on,linking infinitesimal with immense, the white nettle withthe blue sky. All these sharp contradictions, the thin edgeof the pebble and the clear spring, are now assimilated anddestroyed, the dreaming being having transcended the contradictionof small and large. This exaltation of spacegoes beyond all frontiers (p. 155). "Away with boundaries,those enemies of horizons! Let genuine distance appear!"And further (p. 168): "Everything was bathed in light, gentlenessand wisdom; in the unreal air, distance beckoned todistance. My love enveloped the universe."Of course, if it were my aim to study images of immensityobjectively, I should have to start a voluminous file, forimmensity is an inexhaustible poetic theme. I touched onthis in an earlier work,l in which I insisted upon the desirefor confrontation that exists in man meditating upon aninfinite universe. I also spoke of a spectacle complex inwhich pride of seeing is the core of the consciousness of abeing in contemplation. But the problem under considerationin this present work is that of a more relaxed participationin images of immensity, a more intimate relationshipbetween small and large. I should like to liquidate, as itwere, the spectacle complex, which could harden certainvalues of poetic contemplation.IVWhen a relaxed spirit meditates and dreams, immensityseems to expect images of immensity. The mind sees andcontinues to see objects, while the spirit finds the nest ofimmensity in an object. We shall have various proofs ofthis if we follow the daydreams that the single word vastinspired in Baudelaire. Indeed, vast is one of the most Baudelairianof words, the word that marks most naturally,for this poet, infinity of intimate space.No doubt, pages could be found in his work in which the1 Cf. La terre et les reveries de la volonte, chapter XII, § VII, "La terreimmense."

191 intimate immensityword vast has merely its ordinary geometrically objectivemeaning: "Around a vast oval table ..." is from a descriptionin Curiosites esthetiques (p. 390). But when one hasbecome hypersensitive to this word, one sees that it denotesattraction for felicitous amplitude. Moreover, if we wereto count the different usages of the word vast in Baudelaire'swritings, we should be struck by the fact that examplesof its positive, objective use are rare compared withthe instances when the word has more intimate resonances.1Despite the fact that Baudelaire consciously avoidedwords used by force of habit, and took particular pains notto let his adjectives be dictated by his nouns, he did notkeep a close eye on his use of the word vast. Whenever athing, a thought or a daydream was touched by grandeur,this word became indispensable to him. I should like to givea few examples of the astonishing variety of uses to whichhe put it.The opium-eater must have "a vast amount of leisure"2to derive benefit from his soothing daydreams. Daydreamingis encouraged by "the vast silence of the country."8The "moral world opens up vast perspectives filled withnew clarities."4 Certain dreams are laid "on the vast canvasof memory." And elsewhere, Baudelaire speaks of a manwho was "the prey of great projects, oppressed by vastthoughts."Describing a nation, he wrote, "Nations . . . (are) vastanimals whose organization is adequate to their environment";and returning later to the same subject,1S "Nations(are) vast collective creatures." Here there is no doubt thatthe word vast increases the tonality of the metaphor; infact, without this word, to which he attached importance,he would have perhaps hesitated because of the indigenceof the image. But the word vast saves everything and BauI The word vast is not included, however, in the excellent index toFusees et journaux in times, edited by Jacques Crepet (Mercure deFrance) Paris.2 Baudelaire, Le mangeur d'opium, p. 181.3 Baudelaire, Les paradis artificieis, p. 325.4 Loc. cit., p.p. 169, 172, 183.IS Baudelaire, Curiosites esthetiques, p. 221.

192 the poetics of spacedelaire adds that readers will understand this comparisonif they are at all familiar with "these vast subjects of contemplation."It is no exaggeration to say that, for Baudelaire, theword vast is a metaphysical argument by means of which thevast world and vast thoughts are united. But actually thisgrandeur is most active in the realm of intimate space. Forthis grandeur does not come from the spectacle witnessed,but from the unfathomable depths of vast thoughts. In hisJournaux intimes (loc. cit,J p. 29) Baudelaire writes: "Incertain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life isentirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that wehave before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it."Here we have a passage that designates the phenomenologicaldirection I myself pursue. The exterior spectacle helpsintimate grandeur unfold.The word vast, or Baudelaire, is ellso the word that expressesthe highest degree of synthesis. In order to learn thedifference between the discursive ventures of the mind andthe powers of the spirit, we must meditate upon the followingthought,1 "the lyrical spirit takes strides that are asvast as synthesis while the novelist's mind delights inanalysis."Thus, under the banner of the word vast, the spirit findsits synthetic being. The word vast reconciles contraries."As vast as night and light." In a poem about hashish,2we find some elements of this famous line that haunts thememory of all Baudelaire's admirers: "The moral worldopens up vast perspectives, filled with new clarities." Andso it is the "moral" nature, the "moral" temple that conveysgrandeur in its pristine state. Throughout this poet'swork, one can follow the action of a "vast unity" that isalways ready to unite dislocated riches. The philosophicalmind goes in for endless discussion on the relation of theone to the many, while Baudelaire's meditations, which arevery typically poetic, find a deep, somber unity in the verypower of the synthesis through which the different impres-1 Baudelaire, L'art romantique, p. 369.2 Baudelaire, Les paradis artificiels, p. 169.

193 intimate immensitysions of the senses enter into correspondence. Often these"correspondences" have been examined too empirically asbeing the effects of sensibility. However, the range of sensibilityfrom one dreamer to the other rarely coincides.Except for the delight that it affords every reader's ear,myrrh is not given to all of us. But from the very firstchords of the sonnet COTTespondances the synthesizingaction of the lyrical spirit is at work. Even though poeticsensibility enjoys countless variations on the theme of"correspondences," we must acknowledge that the themeitself is also eminently enjoyable. And Baudelaire says, infact, that at such moments "the sense of existence is immenselyincreased."l Here we discover that immensity inthe intimate domain is intensity, an intensity of being, theintensity of a being evolving in a vast perspective of intimateimmensity. It is the principle of "correspondences"to receive the immensity of the world, which they transforminto intensity of our intimate being. They institutetransactions between two kinds of grandeur. We cannotforget that Baudelaire experienced these transactions.Movement itself has, so to speak, a favorable volume,and because of its harmony, Baudelaire included it in theesthetic category of vastness. Writing about the movementof a ship, he said, "The poetic idea that emanates from thisoperation of movement inside the lines is the hypothesisof a vast, immense creature, complicated but eurhythmic,an animal endowed with genius, suffering and sighing everysigh and every human ambition." Thus, the ship, beautifulvolume resting on the waters, contains the infinite of theword vast, which is a word that does not describe, but givesprimal being to everything that must be described. ForBaudelaire, the word vast contains a complex of images thatdeepen one another because they grow on a vast being.At the risk of my demonstration becoming diffuse, I havetried to indicate the places in Baudelaire's work where thisstrange adjective appears; strange because it confers grandeurupon impressions that have nothing in common.But in order to give my demonstration greater unity, I1 Baudelaire. Journaux intimes. p. 28.

194 the poetics of spaceshall follow a line of images, or values, which will showthat, for Baudelaire, immensity is an intimate dimension.A rarely felicitous expression of the intimate nature ofthe notion of immensity may be found in the pages Baudelairedevoted to Richard Wagner,l and in which he lists,so to speak, three states of this impression of immensity.He begins by quoting the program of the concert at whichthe Prelude to Lohengrin was played (loc. cit. p. 212)."From the very first measures, the spirit of the pious reclusewho awaits the sacred cup, is plunged into infinite space.Little by little, he sees a strange apparition assuming form.As this apparition becomes clearer, the marvellous bandof angels, bearing in their midst the sacred goblet, passes.The holy procession approaches, little by little the heartof God's elect is uplifted; it swells and expands, stirred byineffable aspirations; it yields to increasing bliss, and as itcomes nearer the luminous apparition, when at last theHoly Grail itself appears in the midst of the procession,it sinks into ecstatic adoration as though the whole worldhad suddenly disappeared/' All the underlinings in thispassage were made by Baudelaire himself. They make ussense clearly the progressive expansion of the daydream upto the ultimate point when immensity that is born intimately,in a feeling of ecstasy, dissolves and absorbs, as itwere, the perceptible world.The second state of what we might call an increase ofbeing is furnished by a few lines by Liszt. These lines permitus to participate in mystic space (p. 213) born of musicalmeditation. "Vaporous ether . . . overspreads a broaddormant sheet of melody." In the rest of this text by Liszt,metaphors of light help us to grasp this extension of a transparentmusical world.But these texts only prepare Baudelaire's own note onthe subject, in which the "correspondences" appear to beintensifications of the senses, each enlargement of an imageenlarging the grandeur of another image, as immensitydevelops. Here Baudelaire, who is now entirely immersedin the oneirism of the music, has, as he says, "one of those1 Baudelaire, L'art romantique § X.

195 intimate immensityimpressions of happiness that nearly all imaginative menhave experienced in their sleeping dreams. I felt freed fromthe powers of gravity and, through memory, succeeded inrecapturing the extraordinary voluptuousness that pervadeshigh places. Involuntarily I pictured to myself the delightfulstate of a man in the grip of a long daydream, in absolutesolitude, but a solitude with an immense horizon andwidely diffused light; in other words, immensity with noother setting than itself."In the text that follows, any number of factors may befound that could be used for a phenomenology of extension,expansion and ecstasy. But after having been lengthilyprepared by Baudelaire, we have now come upon the formulathat must be put in the center of our phenomenologicalobservations: "immensity with no other setting thanitself." Concerning this immensity, Baudelaire has just toldus in detail, that it is a conquest of intimacy. Grandeurprogresses in the world in proportion to the deepening ofintimacy. Baudelaire's daydream does not take shape in contemplationof a universe. He pursues it-as he tells uswithdosed eyes. He does not live on memories, and hispoetic ecstasy has become, little by little, an eventIess life.The angels whose wings had once shown blue in the skyhave blended into a universal blue. Slowly, immensity becomesa primal value, a primal, intimate value. When thedreamer really experiences the word immense, he sees himselfliberated from his cares and thoughts, even from hisdreams. He is no longer shut up in his weight the prisonerof his own being.If we were to study these fragments by Baudelaire accordingto the normal methods of psychology, we might concludethat when the poet left behind him the settings ofthe world, to experience the single "setting" of immensity,he could only have knowledge of an "abstraction cometrue." Intimate space elaborated in this way by a poet,would be merely the pendant of the outside space ofgeometricians, who seek infinite space with no other si6llthan infinity itself. But such a conclusion would fail torecognize the concrete ventures of long daydreaming. Here

196the poetics of spaceevery time daydream abandons a too picturesque feature,it gains further extension of intimate being. Without evenhaving the privilege of hearing Tannhauser, the reader whoreflects on these pages by Baudelaire, while recalling thesuccessive states of the poet's daydream, cannot fail to realizethat in rejecting metaphors that are too facile, he ismarked for an ontology of human depth.For Baudelaire, man's poetic fate is to be the mirror ofimmensity; or even more exactly, immensity becomes consciousof itself, through man. Man for Baudelaire is a vastbeing.Thus, I believe that I have proved in many ways that inBaudelaire's poetics, the word vast does not really belongto the objective world. I should like to add one more phenomenologicalnuance, however, which belongs to thephenomenology of the word.In my opinion, for Baudelaire, the word vast is a vocalvalue. It is a word that is pronounced, never only read,never only seen in the objects to which it is attached. It isone of those words that a writer always speaks softly whilehe is writing it. Whether in verse or in prose, it has a poeticeffect, which is also an effect of vocal poetry. This wordimmediately stands out from the words that surround it,from the images, and perhaps, even, from the thought. Itis a "power of the word."! Indeed, whenever we read thisword in the measure of one of Baudelaire's verses, or in theperio" s of his prose poems, we have the impression that heforces us to pronounce it. The word vast, then, is a vocableof breath. It is placed on our breathing, which must beslow and calm.2 And the fact is that always, in Baudelaire'spoetics, the word vast evokes calm, peace and serenity. Itexpresses a vital, intimate conviction. It transmits to our1 Cf. Edgar Allan Poe, La puissance de la parole, apud. Nouvelleshistoires extraordinaires, translated into French by Ch. Baudelaire,P· 238.2 For Victor Hugo the wind is vast. The wind says: 1 am the greatpasser-by, vast, invincible and vain. (Dieu, p. 5) . In the three lastwords we hardly move our lips to pronounce the v sounds.

197 intimate immensityears the echo of the secret recesses of our being. For thisword bears the mark of gravity, it is the enemy of turmoil,opposed to the vocal exaggerations of declamation. In diction enslaved to strict measure, it would be shattered. Theword vast must reign over the peaceful silence of being.If I were a psychiatrist, I should advise my patients whosuffer from "anguish" to read this poem of Baudelaire'swhenever an attack seems imminent. Very gently, theyshould pronounce Baudelaire's key word, vast. For it is aword that brings calm and unity; it opens up unlimitedspace. It also teaches us to breathe with the air that restson the horizon, far from the walls of the chimerical prisonsthat are the cause of our anguish. It has a vocal excellencethat is effective on the very threshold of our vocal powers.The French baritone, Charles Panzera, who is sensitive topoetry, once told me that, according to certain experimentalpsychologists, it is impossible to think the vowel sound ahwithout a tautening of the vocal chords. In other words,we read ah and the voice is ready to sing. The letter a,which is the main body of the word vast, stands aloof inits delicacy, an anacoluthon of spoken sensibility.The numerous commentaries that have been made onBaudelaire's "correspondences" seem to have forgotten thissixth sense that seeks to model and modulate the voice. Thisdelicate little Aeolian harp that nature has set at the entrance to our breathing is really a sixth sense, which followedand surpassed the others. It quivers at the merestmovement of metaphor; it permits human thought to sing.And when I let my nonconformist philosopher's daydreamsgo unchecked, I begin to think that the vowel a is thevowel of immensity. It is a sound area that starts with asigh and extends beyond all limits.In the word vast, the vowel a retains all the virtues of anenlarging vocal agent. Considered vocally, therefore, thisword is no longer merely dimensional. Like some soft substance,it receives the balsamic powers of infinite calm. Withit, we take infinity into our lungs, and through it, webreathe cosmically, far from human anguish. Some mayfind these minor considerations. But no factor, however

198 the poetics of spaceslight, should be neglected in the estimation of poeticvalues. And indeed, everything that contributes to givingpoetry its decisive psychic action should be included in aphilosophy of the dynamic imagination. Sometimes, themost varied, most delicate perceptive values relay one another,in order to dynamize and expand a poem. Longresearch devoted to Baudelaire's correspondences shouldelucidate the correspondence of each sense with the spokenword.At times the sound of a vocable, or the force of a letter,reveals and defines the real thought attached to a word.In this connection, it is interesting to recall what MaxPcard wrote on the subject, in his excellent work, DerMensch und das Wort: UDas W in Welle bewegt die Welleim Wort mit das H in Hauch liisst den, Hauch aufsteigendas t in fest und hart macht fest und hart."1 With theseremarks, the philosopher of the Welt des Schweigens bringsus to the points of extreme sensibility at which, languagehaving achieved complete nobility, phonetic phenomenaand phenomena of the logos harmonize. But we should haveto learn how to meditate very slowly, to experience the innerpoetry of the word, the inner immensity of a word. All importantwords, all the words marked for grandeur by apoet, are keys to the universe, to the dual universe of theCosmos and the depths of the human spirit.vThus, it seems to me to have been proven that in the workof a great poet like Baudelaire an intimate call of immensitymay be heard, even more than an echo from theoutside world. In the language of philosophy, we couldsay, then, that immensity is a "category" of the poeticimagination, and not merely a generality formulated dur-1 Max Picard, Der Mensch und das Wort, Eugen Rentsch Verlag,Zurich, 1955, p. 15. It goes without saying that such a sentence asthis should not be translated, since it obliges us to listen to thevocality of the German language. Every language has its words ofgreat vocal value.

199 intimate immensitying contemplation of grandiose spectacles. By way of contrast,and in order to give an example of "empirical"immensity, I should like to consider a passage from Taine'sVoyage aux Pyrenees (p. 96).1 Here we shall see bad literatureand not poetry in action, the kind of bad literaturethat aims at pictorial expression at all cost, even at theexpense of the fundamental images."The first time I saw the sea," writes Taine, "I was mostdisagreeably disillusioned . .. I seemed to see one of thoselong stretches of beet-fields that one sees in the countrynear Paris, intersected by patches of green cabbage, andstrips of russet barley. The distant sails looked like homingpigeons and even the outlook seemed narrow to me; paintershad represented the sea as being much larger. It wasthree days before I recaptured the feeling of immensity."Beets, barley, cabbages and pigeons in a perfectly artificialassociation! To bring them together in one "image"could only be a slip in the conversation of someone who istrying to be "original." For it is hard to believe that in thepresence of the sea, anyone could be so obsessed by beetfields.A phenomenologist would be interested to know how,after three days of privation, this philosopher recaptured his"feeling of immensity," and how, on his return to the seathat had been looked at so naively, he finally saw itsgrandeur.After this interlude, let us come back to our poets.VIPoets will help us to discover within ourselves such joy inlooking that sometimes, in the presence of a perfectlyfamiliar object, we experience an extension of our intimatepace. Let us listen to Rilke for instance, give its existenceof immensity to a tree he is looking at.2I Hippolyte Taine, French philosopher, historian and critic (1828-189)· I'oeme dated June 1924, translated into French by Claude Vige,published in the review Les Lettres, 4th year, Nos. 14, 15, 16, p. 15.

200the poetics of spaceL'espace, hors de nous, gagne et traduit les choses:Si tu veux Tcussir l'existence d'un arbre,Investis-Ie d'espace interne, cet espaceQui a son etre en toi. Cerne-Ie de contraintes.II est sans borne, et ne devient vraiment un arbreQue s'il s'ordonne au sein de ton renoncement.(Space, outside ourselves, invades and ravishes things:If you want to achieve the existence of a tree,Invest it with inner space, this spaceThat has its being in you. Surround it with compulsions,It knows no bounds, and only really becomes a tree1£ it takes its place in the heart of your renunciation.)In the two last lines, a Mallarme-like obscurity forces thereader to stop and reflect. The poet has set him a niceproblem for the imagination. The advice to "surround thetree with compulsions" would first be an obligation to drawit, to invest it with limitations in outside space. In thiscase, we should obey the simple rules of perception, weshould be "objective," cease imagining. But the tree, likeevery genuine living thing, is taken in its being that "knowsno bounds." Its limits are mere accidents. Against the accidentof limits, the tree needs you to give it your superabundantimages, nurtured in your intimate space, in "thisspace that has its being in you." Then, together, the tree andits dreamer, take their places, grow tall. Never, in the dreamworld, does a tree appear as a completed being. Accordingto a poem by Jules Supervielle, it seeks its soul:1Azur vivace d'un espaceOu chaque arbre se hausse au denouement des palmesA la recherche de son ame.(Vivid blue of a spaceIn which each tree rises to foliation of palmsIn search of its soul.)1 Jules Supervielle, L'escalier, p. 106.

201 intimate immensityBut when a poet knows that a living thing in the worldis in search of its soul, this means that he is in search ofhis own. "A tall shuddering tree always moves the soul."!Restored to the powers of the imagination, and investedwith our inner space, trees accompany us in an emulationof grandeur. In another poem dated August 1914 (loc. cit.,p. 11) Rilke wrote:.... A travers nous s' envoZentLes oiseaux en silence. 0, moi qui veux grandirIe regarde au dehors, et Z'arbre en moi grandit.\( . ... Silently the birdsFly through us. 0, I, who long to grow,I look outside myself, and the tree inside me grows.)Thus a tree is always destined for grandeur, and, in fact,it propagates this destiny by magnifying everything thatsurrounds it. In a letter reproduced in Claire Goll's veryhuman litile book, Rilke et les femmes (p. 63), Rilke wrote:"These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent isthe sublime and moving space between them, as thoughwith their growth it too increased."The two kinds of space, intimate space and exteriorspace, keep encouraging each other, as it were, in theirgrowth. To designate space that has been experienced asaffective space, which psychologists do very rightly, doesnot, however, go to the root of space dreams. The poetgoes deeper when he uncovers a poetic space that does notenclose us in affectivity. Indeed, whatever the affectivitythat colors a given space, whether sad or ponderous, once itis poetically expressed, the sadness is diminished, the ponderousnesslightened. Poetic space, because it is expressed,assumes values of expansion. It belongs to the phenomenologyof those words that begin with "ex." At least, this is thethesis that I shall insist upon, and to which I plan to returnin a future volume. Just in passing, here is a proof: When1 Henri Bosco, Antonin, p. 13.

202 the poetics of spacea poet tells me that he "knows a type of sadness that smellsof pineapple,"! I myself feel less sad, I feel gently sad.In this activity of poetic spatiality that goes from deepintimacy to infinite extent, united in an identical expansion,one feels grandeur welling up. As Rilke said: "Throughevery human being, unique space, intimate space, opens upto the world ..."Here space seems to the poet to be the subject of theverbs 4'to open up," or "to grow." And whenever space isa value-there is no greater value than intimacy-it has magnifyingproperties. Valorized space is a verb, and never,either inside or outside us, is grandeur an "object."To give an object poetic space is to give it more spacethan it has objectivity; or, better still, it is following theexpansion of its intimate space. For the sake of homogeneity,I shall recall how Joe Bousquet expressed the intimatespace of a tree:2 "Space is nowhere. Space is inside it likehoney in a hive." In the realm of images, honey in a hivedoes not conform to the elementary dialectics of containedand container. Metaphorical honey will not be shut up, andhere, in the intimate space of a tree, honey is anythingbut a form of marrow. It is the "honey of the tree" thatwill give perfume to the flower. It is also the inner sunof the tree. And the dreamer who dreams of honey knowsthat it is a force that concentrates and radiates, by turns.If the interior space of a tree is a form of honey, it givesthe tree "expansion of infinite things."Of course, we can read this line of Joe Bousquet's withouttarrying over the image. But if one likes to go to theultimate depths of an image, what dreams it can set astirlEven a philosopher of space starts to dream. And if we likewords of composed metaphysics, one might say that hereJoe Bousquet has shown us a space-substance, honey-spaceor space-honey. May all matter be given its individualplace, all sub-stances their ex-stance. And may all matterachieve .conquest of its space, its power of expansion over1 Jules Supervielle, L'escalier, p. 123.2 Joe Bousquet, La neige d'un autre age, p. 92.

203 intimate immensityand beyond the surfaces by means of which a geometricianwould like to define it.It would seem, then, that it is through their "immensity"that these two kinds of space-the space of intimacy andworld space-blend. When human solitude deepens, thenthe two immensities touch and become identical. In oneof Rilke's letters, we see him straining toward "the unlimitedsolitude that makes a lifetime of each day, towardcommunion with the universe, in a word, space, the invisiblespace that man can live in nevertheless, and which surroundshim with countless presences."This coexistence of things in a space to which we addconsciousness of our own existence, is a very concretething. Leibnitz's theme of space as a place inhabited bycoexistants has found its poet in Rilke. In this coexistentialismevery object invested with intimate space becomes thecenter of all space. For each object, distance is the present,the horizon exists as much as the center.VIIIn the realm of images, there can be no contradiction,and two spirits that are identically sensitive can sensitizethe dialectics of center and horizon in different ways. In thisconnection a sort of plains test could be used that wouldbring out different types of reactions to infinity.At one end of the test, we should set what Rilke saidbriefly and superbly: "The plain is the sentiment thatexalts us." This theorem of esthetic anthropology is soclearly stated that it suggests a correlative theorem whichcould be expressed in the following terms: any sentimentthat exalts us makes our situation in the world smoother.Then, at the other end of the "plains" test, we couldset this passage from Henri Bosco's Hyacinthe, (p. 18). "Onthe plains I am always elsewhere, in an elsewhere that isfloating, fluid. Being for a long time absent from ·myself,and nowhere present, I am too inclined to attribute theinconsistency of my daydreams to the wide open spacestha t induce them."

204 the poetics of spaceMany a nuance could be found between these two polesof domination and dispersion if the dreamer's mood, theseasons and the wind were taken into consideration. Therewould always be nuances, too, between dreamers who arecalmed by plain country and those who are made uneasyby it, nuances that are all the more interesting to studysince the plains are often thought of as representing a simplifiedworld. One of the charms of the phenomenology ofthe poetic imagination is to be able to experience a freshnuance in the presence of a spectacle that calls for uniformity,and can be summarized in a single idea. If thenuance is sincerely experienced by the poet, the phenomenologistis sure to obtain an image at its inception.In a more elaborate inquiry than ours, one would haveto show how all these nuances are integrated .in the grandeurof the plain or the plateau, and tell, for instance, why aplateau daydream is never a daydream of the plains. Thisanalysis is difficult because sometimes, a writer wants todescribe, sometimes he knows already, in square miles,the extent of his solitude. In this case, we dream over amap, like a geographer. There is the example of Loti writingin the shade of a tree in Dakar, which was his homeport: "Our eyes turned toward the interior of the country,we questioned the immense horizon of sand."! But thisimmense horizon of sand is a schoolboy's desert, the Saharato be found in every school atlas.The images of the desert in Philippe Di'Ole's excellentbook, Le plus beau desert du mondel2 are much morevaluable to a phenomenologist. For here the immensityof a desert that has been experienced is expressed throughinner intensity. As Philippe Diole says-and he is a dreamhauntedtraveler-the desert must be lived "the way it isreflected in the wanderer." And Diole invites us to a typeof meditation in which, through a synthesis of opposites,we can experience concentration of wandering. For thiswriter, "these mountains in shreds, these dunes and deadrivers, these stones and this merciless sun," all the universe1 Pierre Loti. Un jeune officier pauvre. p. 85.2 Philippe DioIe, Le plus beau deJert du monde, Albin Michel, p. 178.

205 intimate immensitythat bears the mark of the desert, is "annexed to innerspace." And through this annexation, the diversity of theimages is unified in the depths of "inner space."l This isa conclusive formula for the demonstration I want tomake on the correspondence between the immensity ofworld space and the depth of "inner space."In Diole's work, however, this interiorization of thedesert does not correspond to a sense of inner emptiness. Onthe contrary, Diole makes us experience a drama of images,the fundamental drama of the material images of waterand drought. In fact, his "inner space" is an adherenceto an inner substance. As it happens, he has had long,delightful experience of deep-sea diving and, for him, theocean has become a form of "space." At a little over 125feet under the surface of the water, he discovered "absolutedepth," depth that is beyond measuring, and wouldgive no greater powers of dream and thought if it weredoubled or even tripled. By means, then, of his divingexperiences Diole really entered into the volume of thewater. And when we have read his earlier books and sharedwith him this conquest of the intimacy of water, we cometo a point where we recognize in this space-substance, aone-dimensional space. One substance, one dimension. Andwe are so remote from the earth and life on earth, that thisdimension of water bears the mark of limitlessness. To tryand find high, low, right or left in a world that is so wellunified by its substance, is thinking, not living-thinkingas formerly we did in life on earth; but it is not livingin the new world conquered by diving. As for myself, beforeI Henri Bosco has also written on this subject, (Vantiquaire, p. 228):"In the hidden desert that each one of us bears within himself, and10 which the desert of sand and stone has penetrated, the expanse ofthe spirit is lost in the infinite, uninhabited expanse that is the desolationof earth's place of solitude." See also p. 227.Elsewhere on a bare plateau, on the plain that touches the sky, thisgreat dreamer gives profound expression to the analogies betweenthe desert on earth and the desert of the spirit. "Once more emptincssstretched out inside me and I was a desert within a desert." Themcditation ends on this note: "My spirit had left me." (Henri Bosco,Hyacinthe, pp. 33, 34) .

206 the poetics of spaceI read Diole's books, I did not imagine that limitlessnesscould be attained so easily. It suffices to dream of puredepth which needs no measuring, to exist.But then, we ask, why did Diole, who is a psychologistas well as an ontologist of under-seas human life, go intothe desert? As a result of what cruel dialectics did he decideto leave limitless water for infinite sand? Diole answers thesequestions as a poet would. He knows that each new contactwith the cosmos renews our inner being, and thatevery new cosmos is open to us when we have freed ourselvesfrom the ties of a former sensitivity. At the beginningof his book (loc. cit., p. 12), Diole tells us that he hadwanted to "terminate in the desert the magical operationthat, in deep water, allows the diver to loosen the ordinaryties of time and space and make life resemble anobscure, inner poem."At the end of his book, Diole concludes (p. 178) that"to go down into the water, or to wander in the desert,is to change space," and by changing space, by leaving thespace of one's usual sensibilities, one enters into communicationwith a space that is psychically innovating."Neither in the desert nor on the bottom of the sea doesone's spirit remain sealed and indivisible." This change ofconcrete space can no longer be a mere mental operationthat could be compared with consciousness of geometricalrelativity. For we do not change place, we change our nature.But since these problems of the fusion of being in hightyqualitative, concrete space are interesting for a phenomenologyof the imagination-for one has to imagine veryactively to experience new space-let us examine the holdthat fundamental images have on this author. While in thedesert, Diole does not detach himself from the ocean and, infact, desert space, far from contradicting deep-sea space, isexpressed in Diole's dreams in terms of water. Here wehave a veritable drama of the material imagination bornof the conflict of two such hostile elements as arid desertsand and water assured of its mass, without any compromisewith pastiness or mud. Indeed, this passage of Diole's

207 intimate immensityshows such sincerity of imagination that I have left ituncut (loc. cit. p. 118)."I once wrote that a man who was familiar with the deepsea could never be like other men again. Such moments asthis (in the midst of the desert) prove my statement.Because I realize that, as I walked along, my mind filledthe desert landscape with waterl In my imagination Iflooded the space around me while walking through it.I lived in a sort of invented immersion in which I movedabout in the heart of a fluid, luminous, beneficent, densematter, which was sea water, or rather the memory of seawater. This artifice sufficed to humanize for me a worldthat was dishearteningly dry, reconciling me with its rocks,its silence, its solitude, its sheet of sun gold hanging fromthe sky. Even my weariness was lessened by it. I dreamedthat my bodily weight reposed on this imaginary water."I realize that this is not the first time that unconsciously,I have had recourse to this psychological defense. Thesilence and the slow progress I made in the Sahara a wakenedmy memories of diving. My inner images were bathed thenin a sort of gentleness, and in the passage thus reflectedby dream, water appeared quite naturally. As I walkedalong, I bore within me gleaming reflections, and a translucentdensity, which were none other than memories ofthe deep sea:'Here Philippe Diole gives us a psychological techniquewhich permits us to be elsewhere, in an absolute elsewherethat bars the way to the forces that hold us imprisoned inthe "here." This is not merely an escape into a space thatis open to adventure on every side. With none of the machineryof screens and mirrors installed in the box thatearried Cyrano to the Sun Empires, Diole transports us tothe elsewhere of another world. He does this, one might say,merely by means of a psychological machinery that bringsinto play the surest, the most powerful psychological laws.In fact, his only resources are the great, lasting realities thatcorrespond to fundamental, material images; those that areat the basis of all imagination. Nothing, in other words,Ihat is either chimerical or illusory.

208 the poetics of spaceHere both time and space are under the domination ofthe image. Elsewhere and formerly are stronger than thehic et nunc. The being-here is maintained by a being fromelsewhere. Space, vast space, is the friend of being.How much philosophers would learn, if they wouldconsent to read the poetslVIIISince I have just taken two heroic images for discussion,the diving image and the image of the desert, both of whichI can only experience in imagination, without ever beingable to enrich them with any concrete experience, I shallclose this chapter with an image that is nearer to me, onethat I shall provide with all my memories of the plain.We shall see how a very special image can command andimpose its law on space.Faced with a quiet world, on a soothing plain, mankindcan enjoy peace and repose. But in an imagined world, thesights of the plain often produce only the most commonplaceeffects. To restore their action to these sights, it istherefore necessary to supply a new image. An unexpectedliterary image can so move the spirit that it will followthe induction of tranquility. In fact, the literary image canmake the spirit sufficiently sensitive to receive unbelievablyfine impressions. Thus, in a remarkable passage, d' AnnunZiOl makes us see the look in the eyes of a trembling harewhich, in one torment-free instant, projects peace overthe entire autumnal world. He writes: "Did you ever seea hare in the morning, leave the freshly ploughed furrows,run a few seconds over the silvery frost, then stop in thesilence, sit down on its hind legs, prick up its ears andlook at the horizon? Its gaze seems to confer peace uponthe entire universe. And it would be hard to think of asurer sign of deep peace than this motionless hare which,having declared a truce with its eternal disquiet, sits observingthe steaming countryside. At this moment, it is a sacredanimal, one that should be worshipped." The source of1 Gabriele d'Annunzio, Le feu, French translation, p. 26 1.

209 intimate immensitythe calm that is going to cover the plain is clearly indicated:"Its gaze seems to confer peace upon the entireuniverse." The dreamer who lets his musings follow thisline of vision will experience immensity of outspread fieldsin a higher key.Such a passage in itself, is a good test of rhetorical sensitivity.It faces the critical slaughter of apoetic minds withlamb-like calm.. It is also very typical of d' Annunzio, andcan be used as an example of this writer's cumbersomemetaphors. It would be so simple, positivist minds object,to describe pastoral peace directly! Why choose a contemplativehare as go-between? But a poet disregards this reasoning.He wants to give all the degrees of growing contemplation,all the instants of the image, and to beginwith, the instant when animal peace becomes identifiedwith world peace. Here we are made aware of the functionof a seeing eye that, having nothing to do, has ceased tolook at anything in particular, and is looking at the world.We should not have been so radically thrown back intoprimitiveness if the poet had told us something of hisown contemplation. This, however, would be merely repetitionof a philosophical theme. But d'Annunzio's animalis freed from its reflexes for an instant: its eye is no longeron the look-out, no longer a rivet of the animal machine;its eye does not command flight. Yes, this look, in an animalthat is all fear, is the sacred instant of contemplation.A few lines earlier, pursuing an inversion that expressesthe dualism of observer-observed, this poet had seen inthe hare's fine, large, tranquil eyes the aquatic nature of thegaze of a vegetarian animal: "These large, moist eyes . . 'Jare as beautiful as ponds on summer evenings, with theirrushes bathing in water that mirrors and transfigures theentire sky." In my book entitled L'eau et les reves I collectedmany other literary images in which the pond isthe very eye of the landscape, the reflection in water thefirst view that the universe has of itself, and the heightenedbeauty of a reflected landscape presented as the very rootof cosmic narcissism. In Walden Thoreau followed this

210 the poetics oj spaceenlargement of images quite naturally. "A lake is the landscape'smost beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth'seye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth ofhis own nature."!And, once more, the dialectics of immensity and depthis revived. It is hard to say where the two hyperbolesbegin; the one of the too sharp eye, and the other of thelandscape that sees itself confusedly under the heavy lidsof its stagnant water. But any doctrine of the imaginary isnecessarily a philosophy of excess, and all images are destinedto be enlarged.A contemporary poet uses more restraint, but he saysquite as much as in this line by Jean Lescure:}'habite la tranquillite des feuilles, l'ete grandit(I live in the tranquility of leaves, summer is growing)Tranquil foliage that really is lived in, a tranquil gazediscovered in the humblest of eyes, are the artisans ofimmensity. These images make the world grow, and thesummer too. At certain hours poetry gives out waves ofcalm. From being imagined, calm becomes an emergence ofbeing. It is like a value that dominates, in spite of minorstates of being, in spite of a disturbed world. Immensityhas been magnified through contemplation. And the contemplativeattitude is such a great human value that itconfers immensity upon an impression that a psychologistwould have every reason to declare ephemeral and special.But poems are human realities; it is not enough to resortto "impressions" in order to explain them. They must belived in their poetic immensity.1 Thoreau, Walden.

8the dialecllcs 01outside and inSideLes geographies solennelles des limites humaines . ..(PAUL ELUARD,Les Yeux Fertiles, p. 4z)(The solemn geographies of human limits)Car nous sommes ou nom ne sommes pas.( PIERRE-JEAN JOUVE,Lyrique, p. 59)(For we are where we are not.)Une des maximes d'education pratique quiont regi mon enfance: ttNe mange pas labouche ouverte."(COLETrE,Prisons et Paradis, p. 79)(One of the maxims of practical educationthat governed my childhood: "Don't eatwith your mouth open.")Outside and inside form a dialectic of division, the obviousgeometry of which blinds us as soon as we bring it intoplay in metaphorical domains. It has the sharpness of thedialectics of yes and no, which decides everything. Unlessone is careful, it is made into a basis of images that governall thoughts of positive and negative. Logicians drawcircles that overlap or exclude each other, and all their

212 the poetics of spacerules immediately become clear. Philosophers, when confrontedwith outside and inside, think in terms of beingand non-being. Thus profound metaphysics is rooted in animplicit geometry which-whether we will or no-confersspatiality upon thought; if a metaphysician could not draw,what would he think? Open and closed, for him, arethoughts. They are metaphors that he attaches to everything,even to his systems. In a lecture given by Jean Hyppoliteon the subtle structure of denegation (which is quitedifferent from the simple structure of negation) Hyppolitespokel of "a first myth of outside and inside." And headded: "you feel the full significance of this myth of outsideand inside in alienation, which is founded on these twoterms. Beyond what is expressed in their formal oppositionlie alienation and hostility between the two." And so, simplegeometrical opposition becomes tinged with agressivity.Formal opposition is incapable of remaining calm. It is obsessedby the myth. But this action of the myth throughoutthe immense domain of imagination and expression shouldnot be studied by attributing to it the false light of geometricalintuitions.2"This side" and "beyond" are faint repetitions of thedialectics of inside and outside: everything takes form,even infinity. We seek to determine being and, in so doing,transcend all situations, to give a situation of all situations.Man's being is confronted with the world's being, as thoughprimitivity could be easily arrived at. The dialectics ofhere and there has been promoted to the rank of an absolutismaccording to which these unfortunate adverbs ofplace are endowed with unsupervised powers of ontologicaldetermination. Many metaphysical systems would needmapping. But in philosophy, all short-cuts are costly, andphilosophical knowledge cannot advance from schematizedexperiments.1 Jean Hyppolite, Spoken commentary on the Verneinung (negation)of Freud. See La Psychanalyse, NO. 1, 1956, p. 35.2 Hyppolite brings out the deep psychological inversion of negation indenegation. Later, I plan to give examples of this inversion, 011 thesimple level of images.

213 the dialectics of outside and insideIII should like to examine a little more closely, this geometricalcancerization of the linguistic tissue of contemporaryphilosophy.For it does indeed seem as though an artificial syntaxwelded adverbs and verbs together in such a way as to formexcrescences. By multiplying hyphens, this syntax obtainswords that are sentences in themselves, in which the outsidefeatures blend wi th the inside. Philosophical languageis becoming a language of aglutination.Sometimes, on the contrary, instead of becoming weldedtogether, words loosen their intimate ties. Prefixes andsuffixes-especially prefixes-become unwelded: they wantto think for themselves. Because of this, words are occasionallythrown out of balance. Where is the main stress, forinstance, in being-there (etre-Ht): on being7 or on there7In there-which it would be better to call here-shall Ifirst look for my being? Or am I going to find, in my being,above all, certainty of my fixation in a there7 In any case,one of these terms always weakens the other. Often thethere is spoken so forcefully that the ontological aspectsof the problems under consideration are sharply summarizedin a geometrical fixation. The result is dogmatizationof philosophemes as soon as they are expressed. Inthe tonal quality of the French language, the la (there)is so forceful, that to designate being (l'etre) by etre-la is topoint an energetic forefinger that might easily relegateintimate being to an exteriorized place.But why be in such a hurry to make these first designations?One has the impression that metaphysicians havestopped taking time to think. To make a study of being,in my opinion, it is preferable to follow all the ontologicaldeviations of the various experiences of being. For, inreality, the experiences of being that might justify "geometrical"expression are among the most indigent . . . InFrench, one should think twice before speaking of I' etre-la.Entrapped in being, we shall always have to come out ofit. And when we are hardly outside of being, we always

214 the poetics of spacehave to go back into it. Thus, in being, everything is circuitous,roundabout, recurrent, so much talk; a chaplet ofsojoumings, a refrain wi th endless verses.But what a spiral man's being representsl1 And whata number of invertible dynamisms there are in this spiraUOne no longer knows right away whether one is runningtoward the center or escaping. Poets are well acquaintedwith the existence of this hesitation of being, as exemplifiedin this poem by Jean Tardieu:Pour avancer je tourne sur moi-memeCyclone par l'immobile habite.(JEAN TAlU)lEU.Les Temoins invisibles, p. 36)(In order to advance. I walk the treadmill of myselfCyclone inhabited by immobility.)Mais au-dedans, plus de /rontieres!(But within, no more boundaries I)Thus, the spiraled being who, from outside, appears tobe a well-invested center, will never reach his center. Thebeing of man is an unsettled being which all expressionunsettles. In the reign of the imagination, an expression ishardly proposed before being needs another expression,before it must be the being of another expression.In my opinion, verbal conglomerates should be avoided.There is no advantage to metaphysics for its thinking tobe cast in the Inolds of linguistic fossils. On the contrary,it should benefit by the extreme mobility of modern languagesand, at the same time, remain in the homogeneityof a mother tongue; which is what real poets have alwaysdone.To benefit by all the lessons of modern psychology andall that has been learned about man's being through psychoanalysis,metaphysics should therefore be resolutely discursive.It should beware of the privileges of evidence1 Spiral? If we banish geometry from philosophical intuitions, it reappearsalmost immediately.

215 the dialectics of out ide and insidethat are the property of geometrical intuluon. Sight saystoo many things at one time. Being does not see itself. Perhapsit listens to itself. It does not stand out, it is notbordered by nothingness: one is never sure of finding it,or of finding it solid, when one approaches a center of being.And if we want to determine man's being, we are never sureof being closer to ourselves if we "withdraw" into ourselves,if we move toward the center of the spiral; for often it isin the heart of being that being is errancy. Sometimes, itis in being outside itself that being tests consistencies. Sometimes,too, it is closed in, as it were, on the outside. Later,I shall give a poetic text in which the prison is on the outside.If we multiplied images, taking them in the domains oflights and sounds, of heat and cold, we should prepare aslower ontology, but doubtless one that is more certainthan the ontology that reposes upon geometrical images.I have wanted to make these general remarks because,from the point of view of geometrical expressions, the dialecticsof outside and inside is supported by a reinforcedgeometrism, in which limits are barriers. We must be freeas regards all definitive intuitions-and geometrism recordsdefinitive intuitions-if we are to follow the daring of poets(as we shall do later) who invite us to the finesses of experienceof intimacy, to "escapades" of imagination.First of all, it must be noted that the two terms "outside"and "inside" pose problems of metaphysical anthropologythat are not symmetrical. To make inside concrete andoutside vast is the first task, the first problem, it would seem,of an anthropology of the imagination. But between concreteand vast, the opposition is not a true one. At theslightest touch, asymmetry appears. And it is always likethat: inside and outside do not receive in the same way thequalifying epithets that are the measure of our adherence.Nor can one live the qualifying epithets attached to insideand outside in the same way. Everything, even size, is ahuman value, and we have already shown, in a precedingchapter, that miniature can accumulate size. It is vast inits way.

216 the poetics of spaceIn any case, inside and outside, as experienced by theimagination, can no longer be taken in their simple reciprocity;consequently, by omitting geometrical referenceswhen we speak of the first expressions of being, by choosingmore concrete, more phenomenologically exact inceptions,we shall come to realize that the dialectics of insideand outside multiply with countless diversified nuances.Pursuing my usual method, I should like to discuss mythesis on the basis of an example of concrete poetics, forwhich I shall ask a poet to provide an image that is sufficientlynew in its nuance of being to furnish a lesson inontological amplification. Through the newness of theimage and through its amplification, we shall be sure toreverberate above, or on the margin of reasonable certainties.IIIIn a prose-poem entitled: L' espace aux ombres HenriMichaux writes:1L'espace mais vous ne pouvez concevoir, cet horrible en dedans-en dehors qu'est Ie vrai espace.Certaines (ombres) surtout se bandant une derniere fois, fontun eOort desespere pour "etre dans leur seule unite." Mal leur enprend. pen rencontrai une.Detruite par chatiment, eUe n'etait plus qu'un bruit, ma;$enorme.Un monde immense l'entendait encore, mais eUe n'etait plus,devenue seulement et uniquement un bruit, qui aUait roulerencore des siecles mais destine a s' eteindre compzetement, commesi eUe n'avait jamais ete.SHADE-HAUNTED SPACE(Space, but you cannot even conceive the horrible inside-outsidethat real space is.Certain (shades) especially, girding their loins one last time,1 Henri Michaux, Nouvelles de Z'etranger, Mercure de France, Paris,1952•

217 the dialectics of outside and insidemake a desperate effort to "exist as a single unity." But they ruethe day. I met one of them.Destroyed by punishment, it was reduced to a noise, a thunderousnoise.An immense world still heard it, but it no longer existed, havingbecome simply and solely a noise, which was to rumble onfor centuries longer, but was fated to die out completelYI asthough it had never existed.)If we examine closely the lesson in philosophy the poetgives us, we shall find in this passage a spirit that has lostits "being-there" (tre-Ia), one that has so declined as tofall from the being of its shade and mingle with the rumorsof being, in the form of meaningless noise, of a confusedhum that cannot be located. It once was. But wasn't itmerely the noise that it has become? Isn't its punishmentthe fact of having become the mere echo of the meaningless,useless noise it once was? Wasn't it formerly what itis now: a sonorous echo from the vaults of hell? It is CODdemnedto repeat the word of its evil intention, a wordwhich, being imprinted in being, has overthrown being.1And we are in hell, and a part of us is always in hell,walled-up, as we are, in the world of evil intentions.Through what naive intuition do we locate evil, which isboundless, in a hell? This spirit, this shade, this noise of ashade which, the poet tells us, desires its unity, may beheard on the outside without it being possible to be surethat it is inside. In this "horrible inside-outside" of unutteredwords and unfulfilled intentions, within itself, being isslowly digesting its nothingness. The process of its reductionto nothing will last "for centuries." The hum of thebeing of rumors continues both in time and in space. Invain the spirit gathers its remaining strength. It has becomethe backwash of expiring being. Being is alternately condensationthat disperses with a burst, and dispersion thatflows back to a center. Outside and inside are both intimate1 Another poet writes: "To think that a mere word, a name, suffices tomake the dividing walls of your strength come tumbling down."Pierre Reverdy, Risques et Perils, p. 23.

218 the poetics of space-they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange theirhostility. If there exists a border-line surface between suchan inside and outside, this surface is painful on both sides.When we experience this passage by Henri Michaux, weabsorb a mixture of being and nothingness. The centerof "being-there" wavers and trembles. Intimate space losesits clarity, while exterior space loses its void, void beingthe raw material of possibility of being . We are banishedfrom the realm of possibility.In this drama of intimate geometry, where should onelive? The philosopher's advice to withdraw into oneselfin order to take one's place in existence, loses its value, andeven its significance, when the supplest image of "beingthere"has just been experienced through the ontologicalnightmare of this poet. Let us observe, however, that thisnightmare is not visually frightening. The fear does notcome from the outside. Nor is it composed of old memories.It has no past, no physiology. Nothing in common, either,with having one's breath taken away. Here fear is beingitself. Where can one flee, where find refuge? In what sheltercan one take refuge? Space is nothing but a "horrible outside-inside."And the nightmare is simple, because it is radical. Itwould be intellectualizing the experience if we were tosay that the nightmare is the result of a sudden doubt asto the certainty of inside and the distinctness of outside.What Michaux gives us as an a priori of being is the entirespace-time of ambiguous being. In this ambiguous space,the mind has lost its geometrical homeland and the spiritis drifting.Undoubtedly, we do not have to pass through the narrowgate of such a poem. The philosophies of anguish wantprinciples that are less simplified. They do not turn theirattention to the activity of an ephemeral imagination, forthe reason that they inscribed anguish in the heart of beinglong before images had given it reality. Philosophers treatthemselves to anguish, and all they see in the images aremanifestations of its causality. They are not at all concernedwith living the being of the image. Phenomenology

219 the dialectics of outside and insideof the imagination must assume the task of seIzIng thisephemeral being. In fact, phenomenology can learn fromthe very brevity of the image. What strikes us here is thatthe metaphysical aspect originates on the very level of theimage, on the level of an image which disturbs the notionsof a spatiality commonly considered to be able toreduce these disturbances and restore the mind to a statuteof indifference to space that does not have to localize dramaticevents.Personally, I welcome this poet's image as a little pieceof experimental folly, like a virtual grain of hashish withoutwhich it is impossible to enter into the reign of the imagination.And how should one receive an exaggerated image,if not by exaggerating it a little more, by personalizing theexaggeration? The phenomenological gain appears rightaway: in prolonging exaggeration, we may have the goodfortune to avoid the habits of reduction. With space images,we are in a region where reduction is easy, commonplace.There will always be someone who will do away with allcomplications and oblige us to leave as soon as there ismention of space-whether figurative or not-or of the oppositionof outside and inside. But if reduction is easy, exaggerationis all the more interesting, from the standpointof phenomenology. This problem is very favorable, it seemsto me, for marking the opposition between reflexive reductionand pure imagination. However, the direction of psychoanalyticalinterpretation-which is more liberal thanclassical literary criticism-follows the diagram of reduction.Only phenomenology makes it a principle to examine andtest the psychological being of an image, before any reductionis undertaken. The dialectics of the dynamisms ofreduction and exaggeration can throw light on the dialecticsof psychoanalysis and phenomenology. It is, of course,phenomenology which gives us the psychic positivity ofthe image. Let us therefore transform our amazement intoadmiration. We can even begin by admiring. Then, later,we shall see whether or not it will be necessary to organizeour disappointment through criticism and reduction. Tobenefit from this active, immediate admiration, one has only

220 the poetics of spaceto follow the positive impulse of exaggeration. Here Iread Michaux's poem over and over, and I accept it asa phobia of inner space, as though hostile remoteness hadalready become oppressive in the tiny cell represented byinner space. With this poem, Henri Michaux has juxtaposedin us claustrophobia and agoraphobia; he has aggravatedthe line of demarcation between outside and inside.But in doing so, from the psychological standpoint, he hasdemolished the lazy certainties of the geometrical intuitionsby means of which psyc:;hologists sought to govern the spaceof intimacy. Even figuratively, nothing that concerns intimacycan be shut in, nor is it possible to fit into one another,for purposes of designating depth, impressions that continueto surge up. A fine example of phenomenological notationmay be seen in the following simple line by a symbolistpoet: "The pansy took on new life when it became acorolla . .. ."1A philosopher of the imagination, therefore, should followthe poet to the ultimate extremity of his images, withoutever reducing this extremism, which is the specificphenomenon of the poetic impulse. In a letter to ClaraRilke, Rilke wrote: "Works of art always spring from thosewho have faced the danger, gone to the very end of anexperience, to the point beyond which no human beingcan go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, themore personal, the more unique a life becomes."2 But isit necessary to go and look for "danger" other than thedanger of writing, of expressing oneself? Doesn't the poetput language in danger? Doesn't he utter words that aredangerous? Hasn't the fact that, for so long, poetry hasbeen the echo of heartache, given it a pure dramatictonality? When we really live a poetic image, we learn toknow, in one of its tiny fibres, a becoming of being that isan awareness of the being's inner disturbance. Here beingis so sensitive that it is upset by a word. In the same letter,1 Andre Fontainas, L'ornement de la solitude, Mercure de France, 1899,p. 22.2 Lettres, Stock, Paris; p. 167.

221 the dialectics of outside' and insideRilke adds: "This sort of derangement, which is peculiarto us, must go into our work."Exaggeration of images is in fact so natural that howeveroriginal a poet may be, one often finds the same impulsein another poet. Certain images used by Jules Supervielle,for instance, may be compared with the Michaux imagewe have just been studying. Supervielle also juxtaposesclaustrophobia and agoraphobia when he writes: ttTropd'espace nous etoufJe beaucoup plus que s'il n'y en avaitpas assez."l (Too much space smothers us much more thanif there were not enough).Supervielle is also familiar with "exterior dizziness"(loc. cit., p. 21). And elsewhere he speaks of "interior immensity."Thus the two spaces of inside and outside exchangetheir dizziness.In another text by Supervielle, which Christian Senechalpoints out in his book on Supervielle, the prison is outside.After endless rides on the South American pampas, Superviellewrote: "Precisely because of too much riding andtoo much freedom, and of the unchanging horizon, in spiteof our desperate gallopings, the pampa assumed the aspectof a prison for me, a prison that was bigger than the others."IVIf, through poetry, we restore to the activity of languageits free field of expression, we are obliged to supervise theuse of fossilized metaphors. For instance, when open andclosed are to play a metaphorical role, shall we harden orsoften the metaphor? Shall we repeat with the logiciansthat a door must be open or closed? And shall we find inthis maxim an instrument that is really effective for analyzinghuman passions? In any case, such tools for analysisshould be sharpened each time they are used. Each metaphormust be restored to its surface nature; it must bebrought up out of habit of expression to actuality of ex-1 Jules Supervielle. Gravitations, p. 19.

222 the poetics of spacepression. For it is dangerous, in expressing oneself, to be''all roots."The phenomenology of the poetic imagination allows usto explore the being of man considered as the being of asurface, of the surface that separates the region of the samefrom the region of the other. It should not be forgottenthat in this zone of sensitized surface, before being, onemust speak, if not to others, at least to oneself. And advancealways. In this orientation, the universe of speech governsall the phenomena of being, that is, the new phenomena.By means of poetic language, waves of newness flow overthe surface of being. And language bears within itself thedialectics of open and closed. Through meaning it encloses,while through poetic expression, it opens up.It would be contrary to the nature of my inquiries tosummarize them by means of radical formulas, by definingthe being of man, for instance, as the being of an ambiguity. .1 only know how to work with a philosophy ofdetail. Then, on the surface of being, in that region wherebeing wants to be both visible and hidden, the movementsof opening and closing are so numerous, so frequently inverted,and so charged with hesitation, that we could concludeon the following formula: man is half-open being.vBut how many daydreams we should have to analyze underthe simple heading of Doors! For the door is an entirecosmos of the Half-open. In fact, it is one of its primalimages, the very origin of a daydream that accumulatesdesires and temptations: the temptation to open up theultimate depths of being, and the desire to conquer allreticent beings. The door schematizes two strong possibilities,which sharply classify two types of daydream. Attimes, it is closed, bolted, padlocked. At others, it is open,that is to say, wide open.But then come the hours of greater imagining sensibility.On May nights, when so many doors are closed, there isone that is just barely ajar. We have only to give it a very

22Sthe dialectics of outside and insideslight push! The hinges have been well oiled. And our fatebecomes visible.And how many doors were doors of hesitation! In LaRomance du Retour, by Jean Pellerin, this tender, delicatepoet wrote: 1La porte me flaire, elle hbite.(The door scents me, it hesitates.)In this verse, so much psychism is transferred to the object that a reader who attaches importance to objectivitywill see in it mere brain-play. If such a document had itssource in some remote mythology, we should find it morereadily acceptable. But why not take the poet's verse as asmall element of spontaneous mythology? Why not sensethat, incarnated in the door, there is a little threshold god?And there is no need to return to a distant past, a past thatis no longer our own, to find sacred properties attributedto the threshold. In the third century, Porphyrus wrote: "Athreshold is a sacred thing."2 But even if erudition did notpermit us to refer to such a sacralization, why should wenot react to sacralization through poetry, through a poemof our own time, tinged with fantasy, perhaps, but whichis in harmony with primal values.Another poet, with no thought of Zeus, discovered themajesty of the threshold within himself and wrote the following:Je me surprends a definir Ie seuilComme etant Ie lieu geometriqueDes arrivees et des departsDans la Maison du pere.3(I find myself defining thresholdAs being the geometrical placeOf the comings and goingsIn my Father's House.)1 Jean Pellerin, La Romance du Retour, N.R.F. 1921. p. 18.2 Porphyrus: The Nymph's Cave § 27.8 Michel Barrault. Dominicale, I, p. 11.

224 the poetics of spaceAnd what of all the doors of mere curiosity, that havetempted being for nothing, for emptiness, for an unknownthat is not even imagined?Is there one of us who hasn't in his memories a Bluebeardchamber that should not have been opened, evenhalf-way? Or-which is the same thing for a philosophy thatbelieves in the primacy of the imagination-that should noteven have been imagined open, or capable of openinghalf-way?How concrete everything becomes in: the world of thespirit when an object, a mere door, can give images ofhesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect. If one were to give an account of all the doors onehas closed and opened, of all the doors one would like tore-open, one would have to tell the story of one's entirelife.But is he who opens a door and he who closes it the samebeing? The gestures that make us conscious of security orfreedom are rooted in a profound depth of being. Indeed,it is because of this "depth" that they become so normallysymbolical. Thus Rene Char takes as the theme of oneof his poems this sentence by Albert the Great: . "In Germanythere once lived twins, one of whom opened doorsby touching them with his right arm, and the other whoclosed them by touching them with his left arm." A legendlike this, treated by a poet, is naturally not a mere reference.It helps the poet sensitize the world at hand, andrefine the symbols of everyday life. The old legend becomesquite new when the poet makes it his own. He knows thatthere are two "beings" in a door, that a door awakens inus a two-way dream, that it is doubly symbolical.And then, onto what, toward what, do doors open? Dothey open for the world of men, or for the world of solitude?Ramon Gomez de la Serna wrote: "Doors that open onthe countryside seem to confer freedom behind the world'sback."l1 Ramon Gomez de la Serna, Echantillons, p. 167, Grasset, Paris.

225the dialectics of outside and insideVIAs soon as the word in appears in an expression, peopleare inclined not to take literally the reality of the expressionand they translate what they believe to be figurativelanguage into reasonable language. It is not easy for me,indeed it seems futile, to follow, for instance, the poetI shall furnish documentation on the subject-who saysthat the house of the past is alive in his own head. I immediatelyinterpret: the poet simply wants to say that anold memory has been preserved in his mind. The exaggeratednature of the image that seeks to upset the relationshipof contained to container makes us shrink in the presenceof what can appear to be mental derangement of images.We should be more indulgent if we were reading a feverchart. By following the labyrinth of fever that runs throughthe body, by exploring the "seats of fever," or the painsthat inhabit a hollow tooth, we should learn that theimagination localizes suffering and creates and recreatesimaginary anatomies. But I shall not use in this work thenumerous documents that psychiatry provides. I prefer tounderline my break with causalism by rejecting all organiccausality. For my problem is to discuss the images of a pure,free imagination, a liberating imagination that has noconnection with organic incitements.These documents of absolute poetics exist. The poet doesnot shrink before reversals of dovetailings. Without eventhinking that he is scandalizing reasonable men, contraryto the most ordinary common sense, he actually experiencesreversal of dimensions or inversion of the perspective ofinside and outside.The abnormal nature of the image does not mean that itis artificially produced, for the imagination is the mostnatural of faculties. No doubt the images I plan to examinecould not figure in a psychology of projects, even ofimaginary projects. For every project is a contexture ofimages and thoughts that supposes a grasp of reality. Weneed not consider it, consequently, in a doctrine of pure

226the poetics of spaceimagination. It is even useless to continue an image, or tomaintain it. All we want is for it to exist.Let us ·study then, in all phenomenological simplicity,the documents furnished by poets.In his book: Oil boivent les loups, Tristan Tzara writes(p. 24):Une lente humilite penetre dans la chambreQui habite en mo; dans la paume du repos(A slow humility penetrates the roomThat dwells in me in the palm of repose.)In order to derive benefit from the oneirism of such animage, one must no doubt first place oneself "in the palmof repose," that is, withdraw into oneself, and condense oneself in the being of a repose, which is the asset one has mosteasily "at hand." Then the great stream of simple humilitythat is in the silent room flows into ourselves. The intimacyof the room becomes our intimacy. And correlatively, intimatespace has become so quiet, so simple, that all thequietude of the room is localized and centralized in it. Theroom is very deeply our room, it is in us. We no longersee it. It no longer limits us, because we are in the veryultimate depth of its repose, in the repose that it has conferredupon us. And all our former rooms come and fitinto this one. How simple everything islIn another passage, which is even more enigmatic for thereasonable mind, but quite as clear for anyone who sensesthe topoanalytical inversions of images, Tzara writes:Le marche du soleH est entre dans la chambreEt la chambre dans la tete bourdonnante.(The market of the sun has come into my roomAnd the room into my buzzing head.)In order to accept and hear this image, one must experiencethe strange whir of the sun as it comes into a room inwhich one is alone, for it is a fact that the first ray strikes

227 the dialectics of outside and insidethe wall. These sounds will be heard also-over and beyondthe fact-by those who know that every one of the sun'srays carries with it bees. Then everything starts buzzingand one's head is a hive, the hive of the sounds of the sun.To begin with, Tzara's image was overcharged with surrealism.But if we overcharge it still more, if we increasethe charge of image, if we go beyond the barriers set upby criticism, then we really enter into the surrealistic actionof a pure image. And the exaggerated nature of the imageis thus proved to be active and communicable, this meansthat it started well: the sunny room is buzzing in the headof the dreamer.A psychologist will say that all my analysis does is torelate daring, too daring, "associations." And a psychoanalyst will agree perhaps to "analyze" this daring; he isaccustomed to doing this. Both of them, if they take theimage as symptomatic, will try to find reasons and causesfor it. A phenomenologist has a different approach. Hetakes the image just as it is, just as the poet created it, andtries to make it his own, to feed on this rare fruit. Hebrings the image to the very limit of what he is able toimagine. However far from being a poet he himself may be,he tries to repeat its creation for himself and, if possible,continue its exaggeration. Here association ceases to befortuitous, but is sought after, willed. It is a poetic, specificallypoetic, constitution. It is sublimation that is entirelyrid of the organic or psychic weights from which one wantedto be free. In other words, it corresponds to pure sublimation.Of course, such an image is not received in the same wayevery day. Psychically speaking, it is never objective. Othercommentaries could renew it. Also, to receive it properly,one should be in the felicitous mood of super-imagination.Once we have been touched by the grace of superimagination,we feel it in the presence of the simpler imagesthrough which the exterior world deposits virtual elements

228 the poetics of spaceof highly-colored space in the heart of our being. The imagewith which Pierre-Jean Jouve constitutes his secret beingis one of these. He places it in his most intimate cell:La cellule de moi-mme emplit d'etonnementLa muraille peinte a la chaux de mon secret.(Les Noces) p. 50)(The cell of myself fills with wonderThe white-washed wall of my secret.)The room in which the poet pursues such a dream as thisis probably not "white-washed." But this room in whichhe is writing is so quiet, that it really deserves its name,which is, the "solitary" rooml It is inhabited thanks to theimage, just as one inhabits an image which is "in theimagination." Here the poet inhabits the cellular image.This image does not transpose a reality. It would be ridiculous,in fact, to ask the dreamer its dimensions. It does notlend itself to geometrical intuition, but is a solid frameworkfor secret being. And secret being feels that it isguarded more by the whiteness of the lime-wash than bythe strong walls. The cell of the secret is white. A singlevalue suffices to coordinate any number of dreams. And itis always like that, the poetic image is under the dominationof a heightened quality. The whiteness of the walls,alone, protects the dreamer's cell. It is stronger than allgeometry. It is a part of the cell of intimacy.Such images lack stability. As soon as we depart fromexpression as it is, as the author gives it, in all spontaneity,we risk relapsing into literal meaning. We also risk beingbored by writing that is incapable of condensing the intimacyof the image. And we have to withdraw deep intoourselves, for instance, to read this fragment by MauriceBlanchot in the tonality of being in which it was written:"About this room, which was plunged in utter darkness,I knew everything, I had entered into it, I bore it withinme, I made it live, with a life that is not life, but which isstronger than life, and which no force in the world can

229 the dialectics of outside and insidevanquish."! One feels in these repetitions, or to be moreexact, in this constant strengthening of an image into whichone has entered (and not of a room into which one hasentered, a room which the author bears within himself,and which he has made live with a life that does not existin life) one feels, as I said, that it is not the writer's intentionmerely to describe his familiar abode. Memory wouldencumber this image by stocking it with composite memoriesfrom several periods of time. Here everything is simpler,more radically simple. Blanchot's room is an abodeof intimate space, it is his inner room. We share the writer'simage, thanks to what we are obliged to call a generalimage that is, an image which participation keeps us fromconfusing with a generality. We individualize this generalimage right away. We live in it, we enter into it the wayBlanchot enters into his. Neither word nor idea suffices, thewriter must help us to reverse space, and shun description,in order to have a more valid experience of the hierarchyof repose.Often it is from the very fact of concentration in themost restricted intimate space that the dialectics of insideand outside draws its strength. One feels this elasticity inthe following passage by RiIke:2 "And there is almost nospace here; and you feel almost calm at the thought thatit is impossible for anything very large to hold in this narrowness."There is consolation in knowing that one is inan atmosphere of calm, in a narrow space. Rilke achievedthis narrowness intimately, in inner space where everythingis commensurate with inner being. Then, in the nextsentence, the text continues dialectically: "But outside,everything is immeasurable. And when the level rises outside,it also rises in you, not in the vessels that are partiallycontrolled by you, or in the phlegm of your mostunimpressionable organs: but it grows in the capillaryveins, drawn upward into the furthermost branches of yourinfinitely ramified existence. This is where it rises, whereit overflows from you, higher than your respiration, and,1 Maurice Blanchot, L'arrt de mort, p. 124.2 Rilke, French translation, p. 106. of Les Cahiers.

250 the poetics 0/ spaceas a final resort, you take refuge, as though on the tip ofyour breath. Ah! where, where next? Your heart banishesyou from yourself, your heart pursues you, and you arealready almost beside yourself, and you can't stand it anylonger. Like a beetle that has been stepped on, you flowfrom yourself, and your lack of hardness or elasticity meansnothing any more."Oh night without objects. Oh window muffled on theoutside, oh, doors carefully closed; customs that have comedown from times long past, transmitted, verified, neverentirely understood. Oh silence in the stair-well, silence inthe adjoining rooms, silence up there, on the ceiling. Ohmother, oh one and only you, who faced all this silence,when I was a child."I have given this long passage without cuts for the reasonthat it has dynamic continuity. Inside and outside are notabandoned to their geometrical opposition. From whatoverflow of a ramified interior does the substance of beingrun, does the outside call? Isn't the exterior an old intimacylost in the shadow of memory? In what silence does the stairwellresound? In this silence there are soft foot-steps: themother comes back to watch over her child, as she oncedid. She restores to all these confused, unreal sounds theirconcrete, familiar meaning. Limitless night ceases to beempty space. This passage by Rilke, which is assailed bysuch frights, finds its peace. But by what a long, circuitousroute! In order to experience it in the reality of the images,one would have to remain the contemporary of an osmosisbetween intimate and undetermined space.I have presented texts that were as varied as possible,in order to show that there exists a play of values, whichmakes everything in the category of simple determinationsfall into second place. The opposition of outside and insideceases to have as coefficient its geometrical evidence.To conclude this chapter, I shall consider a fragment inwhich Balzac defines determined opposition in the face of

231the dialectics of outside and insideaffronted space. This text is all the more interesting in thatBalzac felt obliged to correct it.In an early version of Louis Lambert we read: "Whenhe used his entire strength, he grew unaware, as it were,of his physical life, and only existed through the all-powerfulplay of his interior organs, the range of which he constantlymaintained and, according to his own admirableexpression, he made space withdraw before his advance/'1In the final version, we read simply: "He left space, ashe said, behind him."What a difference between these two movements of expression!What decline of power of being faced with space,between the first and second forms! In fact, one is puzzledthat Balzac should have made such a correction. He returned,in other words, to "indifferent space." In a meditationon the subject of being, one usually puts spacebetween parentheses, in other words, one leaves space "be_hind one." As a sign of the lost "tonalization" of being, itshould be noted that "admiration" subsided. The secondmode of expression is no longer, according to the author'sown admission, admirable. Because it really was admirable,this power to make space withdraw to put space, all space,outside, in order that meditating being might be free tothink.1 Ed. Jean Pommier, Corti, p. 19.

10Ihe PhenomenOlogy01 roundnessIWhen metaphysicians speak briefly, they can reach immediatetruth, a truth that, in due course, would yield toproof. Metaphysicians, then, may be compared and associated with poets who, in a single verse, can lay bare a truthconcerning inner man. The following concise statement istaken from Karl Jaspers' thick volume entitled Von de,Wahrheit (p. 50): "Jedes Dasein scheint in sich rund."(Every being seems in itself round.) In support of this unsubstantiatedmetaphysician's truth, I should like to presentseveral texts formulated in schools of thought that areall oriented differently from metaphysical thought.Thus, without commentary, Van Gogh wrote: "Life isprobably round."And Joe Bousquet, with no knowledge of Van Gogh'ssentence, wrote: "He had been told that life was beautiful.Nol Life is round."!Lastly, I should like to know where La Fontaine said:"A walnut makes me quite round."With these four texts of such different origin, it seemsto me that here we have the phenomenological problemvery clearly posed. It should be solved by enriching it withfurther examples to which we should add other data, takingcare to conserve their nature of intimate data, independentof all knowledge of the outside world. Such data as thesecan receive nothing from the outside world but illustrations.We must even be careful lest the too vivid colors ofthe illustration make the being of the image lose its original1 Joe Bousquet, Le meneur de lune, p. 174.

255 the phenomenology of roundnesslight. Here the average psychologist can do nothing butabstain from action, since the perspective of psychologicalresearch must be reversed. Such images cannot be justifiedby perception. Nor can they be taken for metaphors as, forinstance, when we say of a man who is simple and frank,that he is :"tout rond."l This roundness of a being, or ofbeing, that Jaspers speaks of, cannot appear in its directtruth otherwise than in the purest sort of phenomenologicalmedi ta tion.Nor can such images as these be transported into just anyconsciousness. No doubt there are those who will want to"understand," whereas the image must first be taken atits inception. Others will declare ostentatiously that theydo not understand, and will object that life itself is certainlynot spherical. They will express surprise that thisbeing we seek to characterize in its intimate truth, shouldbe so ingenuously handad over to geometricians, whosethinking is exterior thinking. From every side, objectionsaccumulate to put a quick end to the discussion. And yetthe expressions I have just noted are there. They are there,in relief, in everyday language, implying meanings of theirown. They do not come from immoderateness of language,any more than they do from linguistic clumsiness. They arenot born of a desire to astonish others. In fact, despite theirextraordinary nature, they bear the mark of primitivity.They suddenly appear and, in a twinkling, they are completed.This is why, from my standpoint, these expressionsare marvels of phenomenology. In order to judge them, andto like and make them our own, they oblige us to take aphenomenological attitude.These images blot out the world, and they have no past.They do not stem from any earlier experience. We can bequite sure that they are metapsychological. They give us alesson in solitude. For a brief instant we must take themfor ourselves alone. If we take them in their suddenness,we realize that we think of nothing else, that we are entirelyin the being of this expression. If we submit to the1 Alas, in English, such a man is never "round" but "square." (Tranilator'snote.)

254 the poetics of spacehypnotic power of such expressions, suddenly we find ourselvesentirely in the roundness of this being, we live inthe roundness of life, like a walnut that becomes round inits shell. A philosopher, a painter, a poet and an inventorof fables have given us documents of pure phenomenology.It is up to us now to use them in order to learn how togather being together in its center. It is our task, too, tosensitize the document by multiplying its variations.IIBefore giving additional examples, I believe that it wouldbe advisable to reduce Jaspers' formula by one word, inorder to make it phenomenologically purer. I should say,therefore: das Dasein ist mnd, being is round. Because toadd that it seems round is to keep a doublet of being andappearance, when we mean the entire being in its roundness.In fact, it is not a question of observing, but of experiencingbeing in its immediacy. Full contemplationwould divide into the observing being and being observed.In the limited domain in which we are working, phenomenology must do away with all intermediaries, all additionalfunctions.Consequently, in order to obtain maximumphenomenological purity, we must divest Jaspers' formulaof everything that could conceal its ontological value. Thiscondition is necessary if the formula "being is round" isto become an instrument that will allow us to recognizethe primitivity of certain images of being. I repeat, imagesof full roundness help us to collect ourselves, permit us toconfer an initial constitution on ourselves, and to confirmour being intimately, inside. For when it is experiencedfrom the inside, devoid of all exterior features, being cannotbe otherwise than round.Is this the moment to recall pre-Socratic philosophy, torefer to Parmenidian being and the "sphere" of Parmenides?Or, to speak more generally, can philosophical culture bethe propaedeutics to phenomenology? It does not seemso. Philosophy introduces us to ideas that are too well co-

285 the phenomenology of roundnessordinated for us to examine and re-examine them, detailafter detail, as the phenomenologist must from the beginning.If a phenomenology of the logical sequence of ideasis possible, it must be acknowledged that this could notbe an elementary phenomenology. In a phenomenology ofthe imagination, however, we receive a benefit of · elementariness.An image that is worked over loses its initialvirtues. Parmenides' "sphere" has played too important arole for his image to have retained its primitivity. Consequently, it could not be the tool required for our researchon the subject of the primitivity of images of being. Itwould be hard to resist the temptation to enrich the imageof Parmenidian being by means of the perfections of thegeometrical being of the sphere.But why speak of enriching an image, when we crystallizeit in geometrical perfection? Examples could be furnishedin which the value of perfection attributed to thesphere is entirely verbal. Here is one that we can use as acounter-example, in which, quite evidently, the author hasfailed to recognize all the values of images. One of Alfredde Vigny's characters, a young lawyer, is educating himselfby reading Descartes's Meditations:l "Sometimes," writesVigny, "he would take up a sphere set near him, and afterturning it between his fingers for a long time, would sinkinto the most profound daydreams of science." One wouldlove to know which ones. The author doesn't say. Does heimagine that the reading of Descartes's Meditations ishelped if the reader begins to roll a marble between his fingers?Scientific thought develops on another horizon andDescartes's philosophy cannot be learned from an object,even a sphere. Used by Alfred de Vigny, the word profound,as is often the case, is a negation of profundity.Moreover, it is evident that when a geometrician speaksof volumes, he is only dealing with the surfaces that limitthem. The geometrician'S sphere is an empty one, essentiallyempty. Therefore it cannot be a good symbol for ourphenomenological study of roundness.1 Alfred de Vigny, Cinq-Mars, Chapter XVI.

236 the poetics of spaceIIIThere is no doubt that these preliminary remarks areheavy with implicit philosophy. I have nevertheless feltobliged to give them brief mention because they have servedme personally, and because, too, a phenomenologist musttell everything. They have helped me to "dephilosophize,"to shun the allures of culture and to place myself on themargin of convictions acquired through long philosophicalinquiry on the subject of scientific thinking. Philosophymakes us ripen quickly, and crystallizes us in a state ofmaturity. How, then, without "dephilosophizing" ourselves,may we hope to experience the shocks that being receivesfrom new images, shocks which are always the phenomenaof youthful being? When we are at an age to imagine,we cannot say how or why we imagine. Then, when wecould say how we imagine, we cease to imagine. We shouldtherefore dematurize ourselves.But since I seem to have been seized-quite accidentallywitha neological fit, let me say again, by way of introductionto the phenomenological examination of images ofsolid roundness, that I have sensed the necessity here, as onmany other occasions, of "de-psychoanalyzing" ourselves.In fact, some five or ten years ago,l in any psychologicalexamination of images of roundness, but especially of solidroundness, we should have laid stress on psychoanalyticalexplanations, for which we could have collected an enormousamount of documentation, since everything roundinvites a caress. Such psychoanalytical explanations are,no doubt, largely sound. But they do not tell everything,and above all, they cannot be put in the direct line of ontologicaldeterminations. When a metaphysician tells usthat being is round, he displaces all psychological determinationsat one time. He rids us of a past of dreams andthoughts, at the same time that he invites us to actualityof being. It is not likely that a psychoanalyst would becomeattached to this actuality enclosed in the very being of an1 This volume first appeared in 1958 (Translator'S note) .

2S7the phenomenology 0/ roundn"essexpression. From his standpoint such an expression is humanlyinsignificant because of the very fact of its rarity.But it is this rarity that attracts the attention of the phenomenologistand encourages him to look with fresh eyes,with the perspective of being that is suggested by metaphysiciansand poets.IVI should like to give an example of an image that is outsideall realistic meaning, either psychological or psychoanalytical.Without preparing us, precisely as regards the absolutenature of the image, Michelet says that "a bird is almostcompletely sphericaL" If we drop the "almost," which moderatesthe formula uselessly, and is a concession to a viewpointthat would judge from the form, we have an obviousparticipation in Jaspers' principle of "round being." Abird, for Michelet, is solid roundness, it is round life, and ina few lines, his commentary gives it its meaning of modelof being.1 "The bird, which is almost completely spherical,is certainly the sublime and divine summit of living concentration.One can neither see, nor even imagine, a higherdegree of unity. Excess of concentration, which constitutesthe great personal force of the bird, but which implies itsextreme individuality, its isolation, its social weakness."In the book, these lines also appear totally isolated fromthe rest. One feels that the author, too, followed an imageof "concentration" and acceded to a plane of meditationon which he has taken cognizance of the "sources" of life.Of course, he is above being concerned with description.Once again, a geometrician may wonder, all the more sosince here the bird is considered on the wing, in its outof-doorsaspect, consequently, the arrow figures could accordhere with an imagined dynamics. But Michelet seized thebird's being in its cosmic situation, as a centralization oflife guarded on every side, enclosed in a live ball, and1 Jules Michelet, L'oiseau, p. 291.

238 the poetics of spaceconsequently, at the maximum of its unity. All the otherimages, whether of form, color or movement, are strickenwith relativism in the face of what we shall have to callthe absolute bird, the being of round life.The image of being-because it is an image of beingthatappears in this fragment by Michelet is extraordinaryfor the very reason that it was considered of no significance.Literary criticism has attached no more importance to itthan has psychoanalysis. And yet, it was written, and itexists in an important book. It would take on both interestand meaning if a philosophy of the cosmic imaginationcould be instituted, that would look for centers of cosmicity.Seized in its center and brevity, the mere designation ofthis roundness is astonishingly complete. The poets whomention it, unaware that others have done the same, replyto one another. Thus Rilke, who undoubtedly did not recallwhat Michelet had written on the subject, wrote:1: . . Ce rond cri d'oiseauRepose dans I'instant qui I'engendreGrand comme un ciel sur la fO'ret fant!eTout vient docilement se ranger dans ce criTout Ie paysage y semble reposer.( . .. This round bird-callRests in the instant that engenders itHuge as the sky above the withered forestDocilely things take their place in this callIn it the entire landscape seems to rest.)To anyone who is receptive to the cosmicity of images,the essentially central image of the bird is the same inRilke's poem as in the fragment by Michelet, only expressedin another register. The round cry of round being makesthe sky round like a cupola. And in this rounded landscape,1 Rilke, Poesie, translated (into French) by Maurice Betz, under thetitle: Inquietude, p. 95.

289 the phenomenology of roundnesseverything seems to be in repose. The round being propagatesits roundness, together with the calm of all roundness.And for a dreamer of words, what calm there is in theword round. How peacefully it makes one's mouth, lipsand the being of breath become round. Because this tooshould be spoken by a philosopher who believes in thepoetic substance of speech. And for the professor who hasbroken with every kind of "being-there" (etre-la), it is ajoy to the ear to begin his course in metaphysics with thedeclaration: Das Dasein ist rund. Being is round. Thenwait for the rumblings of this dogmatic thunder to diedown, while his disciples beam with ecstasy.But let us come back to a simpler, more tangible kindof roundness.vSometimes we find ourselves in the presence of a form.that guides and encloses our earliest dreams. For a painter,a tree is composed in its roundness. But a poet continuesthe dream from higher up. He knows that when a thingbecomes isolated, it becomes round, assumes a figure ofbeing that is concentrated upon itself. In Rilke's Poemesfrancais this is how the walnut tree lives and commandsattention. Here, again around a lone tree, which is thecenter of a world, the dome of the sky becomes round, inaccordance with the rule of cosmic poetry. On p. 169 ofthis collection we read:Arbre toujours au milieuDe tout ce qui I' entoureArbre qui savoureLa vo'llte des deux(Tree always in the centerOf all that surrounds itTree feasting uponHeaven's great dome)

240the poetics of spaceNeedless to say, all the poet really sees is a tree in ameadow; he is not thinking of a legendary Yggdrasill thatwould concentrate the entire cosmos, uniting heaven andearth, within itself. But the imagination of round beingfollows its own law: since, as the poet says, the walnuttree is "proudly rounded," it can feast upon "heaven'sgreat dome." The world is round around the round being.And from verse to verse, the poem grows, increases itsbeing. The tree is alive, reflective, straining toward God.Dieu lui va apparaitreOr pour qu'il soit surIl developpe en yond son treEt lui tend des bras murs.Arbre qui peuttrePense au-dedans.Arbre qui se domineSe donnant lentementLa forme qui elimineLes hasards du vent!(One day it will see GodAnd so, to be sure,. It develops its being in roundnessAnd holds out ripe arms to Him.Tree that perhapsThinks innerlyTree that dominates selfSlowly giving itselfThe form that eliminatesHazards of windl)I shall never find a better document for a phenomenologyof a being which is at once established in its roundnessand developing in it. Rilke's tree propagates in greenspheres a roundness that is a victory over accidents of formand the capricious events of mobility. Here becoming hascountless forms, countless leaves, but being is subject to

241 the phenomenology of roundnessno dispersion: if I could ever succeed in grouping togetherall the images of being, all the multiple, changing imagesthat, in spite of everything, illustrate pennanence of being,Rilke's tree would open an important chapter in my albumof concrete metaphysics.

GASTON BACHELARDBachelard was born in 1884 in the small Champagne townof Bar-sur-Aube. A postman in his youth, he studied chemistryand physics and, at the age of thirty-five, became acollege professor of natural sciences. He then turned tophilosophy, teaching at the University of Dijon and, untilhis retirement, at the College de France. He died in 1962,an honorary professor at the Sorbonne and one of Europe'sleading philosophers.

\I\CII II'ECTliHE/PHILOSOI'II\/1 111 1 \1111'I'IIE POETI(;S ()I'CASTON BA(;IILI \1MORE THAN 8o .,()()() , I' I, I J)Thirty years since its first puhl icalioll III I II II Ii II IIIhow our perceptions of houses alld 01111'1thoughts, memories, and dreams."A magical book . . . . The Poeti(,s ({.'ifllli t' Ithetics to carpentry take on enharl('c,d 1111(1 III " 1111significances. Every reader of it wil l lll'VI 'I 1'111spaces in ordinary ways. Instead IIIC' l\'atl"1tilsoul of the eye, the glint of Gaston Bal'l lI I "d '- From the new Foreword by John B. SI i I 'Ot'Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) was Ollt' 01 1':11101philosophers. He is also the author of TIlt' ,\ ,I"',II/',{I III/Fire and The Poetics of Reverie.John R. Stilgoe is professor of visual alld I'm II OIlIlH III d 111.1ies at Harvard University and author or /l()II/'" /1/ lit! ( , / ' /11 tI/the American Suburbs.COVER DESIGN BYI BN [) 1\11 III I" 1- 4SAHA EISENMAN(;0\ Ell PHOTOGRAPH BYPHILIPBEACONTRAGERPRESSBOSTON

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