South Atlantic Modern Language Association

Review: [untitled]
Author(s): Gray Kochhar-Lindgren
Source: South Atlantic Review, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan., 1989), pp. 95-96
Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3200070 .
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 SouthAtlanticReview 95

on "the making and breaking of significant form in English-speaking

fiction for the past three centuries"(3): either by inscribing a potential
resistance within even the traditional paradigms of novelistic plotting
themselves, or by pointing out the intricate embeddedness of novelistic
structures in historical or cultural changes. This study of the Anglo-
American novel therefore follows what turns out to be a very traditional
understanding of the relation between form and (social, sexual, psy-
chological) themes. Failing to theorize fully the problematics of the key
terms he cites as the ground of his study-gender, desire, ideology-
Boone instead thematizes these issues so that they remain relatively
unproblematic analogues of narrative forms.
Steven Cohan, SyracuseUniversity

O]OnPoeticImagination and Reverie.Selections

from GastonBachelard.Trans-
lated and introduced by Colette Gaudin. Dallas, TX: Spring Publica-
tions, 1987. lxvi + 108 pp.

Gaston Bachelard is a master of the written reverie, but he is,

nonetheless, a critic who seems to exist only at the periphery of literary
studies. We vaguely associate him with the esoterica of an alchemy of
the imagination, perhaps remember that he wrote an odd book called
ThePsychoanalysis of Fireand recall that he was mentioned by Derrida in
"White Mythology." Bachelard is not often discussed in seminars and
does not usually appear on the pages of academic journals. On Poetic
Imagination,a selection of excerpts from a wide range of his works on
poetics, provides us with a starting point for correcting this situation.
As Colette Gaudin demonstrates in her superb introduction, Bache-
lard is, in fact, a man difficult to position in our usual notions of the
literary critic. Born in Bar-sur-Aube in 1884, he worked as a postal
employee and then taught physics and chemistry in his home-town
high school before beginning graduate study at the age of thirty-five.
After receiving his degree in 1927, he taught in Dijon before eventually
moving to the chair in Philosophy of Science at the Sorbonne. His
writings follow an unusual trajectory,moving from the epistemology of
science to the nature of the imagination, reverie, and the poetic image.
It would be impossible to adequately summarize the selections that
Gaudin has chosen from Bachelard's works on the imagination. In-
stead, I will focus briefly on his relationship with the literary image,
which is central to Bachelard's way of reading. His understanding of
the image enables us to see how his thought moves with a different
rhythm and proceeds from different assumptions than much of the
96 BookReviews

literary theory currently in vogue.

Bachelard's authentically poetic image is a primordial and autono-
mous product of the imagination. It is neither derived from external
perception nor from internal psychoanalytic pressures such as
dreamwork or symptom-formation. The genuine image is ontological
in nature. This perspective immediately establishes a rather wide gulf
between Bachelard and those thinkers who stress the mediated nature
of every image and word, who believe that every image acts as a
substitute for a more fundamental something-or-another (such as a
complex, neurosis, desire, aggression, or simply the rest of the chain of
signifiers). Poetry consists of authentic images and thus it is "nota poor
substitute for any other activity. It accomplishes a human desire. It
represents an emergence of the imagination" (26).
More specifically, the poet crafts a literary image by reworking the
naively given, the old or worn bit of language, and through a poetic
vitalization of its "oneiric power"gives it a new life. "Here the sign is
not," Bachelard writes in LAir et lessonges,"a reminder, a memory, or an
indelible mark of a distant past" (26). The sign is not, to use another
idiom, a trace of that which is absent. It is itself a fullness whose
"double function" is to create a different meaning and to evoke a
different reverie.
The image is known most fully by an admiring objectivity- a stance
achieved by an ongoing surveillance de soi conjoined with an explication
of the text-and opens up into the material world. Granting us direct
access to the elemental forms of matter, it does not inform us only
about human consciousness, but also about consciousness as it is
cosmologically environed. Just as the images of reverie include this
dimension, so, too, Bachelard suggests, the cosmos has about it a kind
of "narcissism"that is pleased with poetic activity. "Once a primal
image has been identified, we can no longer ignore its profound and
cosmic life; it is in the fullness of nature that human imagination wants
to play its role" (90). This is a long way indeed from the tone of
contemporary criticism, much of which is ruled by a deep skepticism.
There is far more to be said about Bachelard's work-about the
oneiric power of the imagination and the imaginal connections between
cosmos and psyche--but that will have to wait. On PoeticImagination,
with its excellent bibliography, introduces us to a thinker who gives
intimate rather than close readings of poems, and whose books, as
Gaudin reminds us, "offerlessons for working, reading, breathing, and
dreaming well, all of which constitute an art of living poetically"
(xxviii).
Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, EmoryUniversity