1964
Preface to Gaston Bachelard’s Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C.M. Ross (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), v–viii. This was the first English translation of Bachelard’s La Psychanalyse du Feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1938).
Literary critics have been aware of the great importance of Bachelard’s work for many years, but this is the first time The Psychoanalysis of Fire has been available in English. Professor Ross’s lucid and eloquent translation gives an excellent sense of the original, which has a subversive wit reminding the English reader of the prose style of the nineteenth-century Samuel Butler. I speak of literary critics, because, as its conclusion makes clear, this is the area in which The Psychoanalysis of Fire lies, despite its title and the numerous references to its author’s earlier scientific works. Nearly a century ago Thomas Huxley, discussing the limitations of the scientific method, remarked, “I cannot conceive […] how the phenomena of consciousness, as such […], are to be brought within the bounds of physical science.”1 He did not mean that no science of psychology would ever be possible, but that the process of perception could not nullify itself, so to speak, by becoming objective to itself. Sciences are placed at various angles to the perceiving process, as physics is at an angle to the primitive categories of hot, cold, moist, and dry, or to the primitive perception of red and blue. Psychology occupies another angle of perception, and Bachelard has begun to isolate still another, a basis for a systematic development of the critical study of the arts.
The scientific procedure normally begins empirically, with reality thought of first of all as “out there,” after which it gradually becomes incorporated into an intellectual construct. The arts, on the other hand, begin with a constructing power, generally called imagination, and embody it in forms with a clarity of communication that makes them objects of perception to others. The units of this constructing power are analogy and identity, which appear in literature as the figures of simile and metaphor. To the imagination, fire is not a separable datum of experience: it is already linked by analogy and identity with a dozen other aspects of experience. Its heat is analogous to the internal heat we feel as warmblooded animals; its sparks are analogous to seeds, the units of life; its flickering movement is analogous to vitality; its flames are phallic symbols, providing a further analogy to the sexual act, as the ambiguity of the word “consummation” indicates; its transforming power is analogous to purgation. These links of analogy are so adhesive that they spread all over the universe: we see in this book, as often elsewhere, how the pursuit of one mythical complex tends to absorb all other myths into it. The reader should consult Bachelard’s books on the other three elements for a corrective.2
It is possible to take up a construct based on such analogies and correspondences, and then apply it to the external world as a key to the explanation of its phenomena. The typical examples of such constructs are in occultism, though they exist also in the Ptolemaic cosmology of the Middle Ages, with its correspondences of the seven metals, seven planets, seven days of the week, and the like. From one point of view, a somewhat narrow one, such constructs are both bastard art and bastard science, combining the limitations of the two with the genuine achievements of neither. A more liberal view might see them rather as helping to expand the horizons of both. We notice that poetry shows a strong affinity for constructs based on analogy and symmetry, Ptolemaic in Dante, occult in the Romantics and their successors down to Yeats. For the poet, the elements will always be earth, air, fire, and water; for the poet, the sun will always rise and set as it moves around the earth. It is only in science that such myths are a nuisance; yet even in science the tendency to make them is extraordinarily persistent. Almost every major group of discoveries in science brings with it a great wave of speculative cosmologies based on analogies to them. Bachelard gives many quaint examples from eighteenth-century science, along with such analogy-myths as “spontaneous combustion.” He could have gone on with the nineteenth-century speculations about “odic force” and the vitalist philosophies that followed early Darwinism, both of them pure fire-myths.
The proper place for all such analogy-making is literature, or, in earlier times, the mythology which eventually develops into literature. Bach-elard does not explicitly say that mythology, considered as a body of stories, is potential literature, but the whole trend of his book is towards that principle. He quotes some of the myths about the origin of fire which include the theme of a woman’s hiding fire in her belly. This feat is known to be anatomically impossible by those who are telling and listening to the story, so why should it be told? We recall that many similar stories are told about water, that there are more highly developed stories of the Jonah type, where a human being disappears into a monstrous belly, that the conception of a hidden interior world of fire is the basis of Dante’s Inferno—in short, the story illustrates a structural principle of storytelling, and its study eventually falls into the area of literary criticism.
Centuries ago it was believed that the four possible combinations of the four “principles,” hot, cold, moist, and dry, produced, in the organic world, the four humours, and, in the inorganic world, the four elements. The hot and dry combination produced choler and fire, the hot and moist blood and air, the cold and moist phlegm and water, the cold and dry melancholy and earth. The four elements are not a conception of much use to modern chemistry—that is, they are not the elements of nature. But, as Bachelard’s book and its companion works show, and as an abundance of literature down to Eliot’s Quartets also shows, earth, air, water, and fire are still the four elements of imaginative experience, and always will be. Similarly, the four humours are not a conception of any use to modern medicine; they are not the constituents of human temperament. But they may be the elements of imaginative perception, and Bachelard’s analysis of Hoffmann’s fire-images is linked to a suggestion that poets may be “humours” not in their bodies or characters but in their poetry, a poetic temperament being reflected in a preference for the corresponding element.3
What Bachelard calls a “complex” might better be called something else, to avoid confusion with the purely psychological complexes of actual life. I should call it a myth, because to me a myth is a structural principle in literature. For example, there is, in Bachelard’s sense, a literary Oedipus complex: it appears in every comedy in which the hero is a son outwitting his father to get possession of a courtesan or other tabooed female. It is undoubtedly related to the Oedipus complex discussed by Freud, but can hardly be treated as identical with it. The “complexes” dealt with in this book are actually the points at which literary myth becomes focused on its cardinal points of creation, redemption, and apocalypse.
In the earlier part of our cultural tradition the fire-world was most significantly the world of heavenly bodies between heaven proper and the earth. The Spirit descends from above in tongues of fire; the seraphim are angels of fire; the gods who preceded the angels are in charge of the planets; for Christianity the world of superior spirits is all that is left of the unfallen world that God originally planned. The fire-world as the unfallen world of pre-creation appears in Bachelard as the “Novalis complex.” The return of man to his original home, the complementary myth of ascending fire, is symbolized by the funeral pyre of Hercules (in the fourth section of Eliot’s Little Gidding, for example, this image is brought into direct contrast with the image of fire descending from the Holy Spirit), and comes into all the imagery of purgatorial fire in Dante and elsewhere. With the Romantics this more specifically human fire, which symbolizes the raising of the human state to a quasi-divine destiny, becomes more purely a “Prometheus complex,” especially to the more revolutionary Romantics, Shelley, Byron, Victor Hugo, who feel, like Ahab in Moby Dick, that the right form of fire-worship is defiance. The Last Judgment, the destruction of the world by fire and the absorption of the human soul into the soul of fire, is the “Empedocles complex.”
Thus the myth of “spontaneous combustion” is used by Dickens in Bleak House to describe the death of Krook. In his preface Dickens stubbornly defends the actuality of the conception, and refers to some of the authorities quoted by Bachelard, including Le Cat. When Dickens finally says, “I shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable Spontaneous Combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received”4—in other words the Last Judgment—we begin to get a clue to the real reason why Dickens felt that such a device was essential to his story. This is merely one example of the kind of expanding insight into literature which can take off from Bachelard’s witty and pungent study.