The title of Bachelard’s 1938 essay, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, is both preposterous and intriguing. How can a material phenomenon like fire be “psychoanalyzed”? Is this a book of science or of fantasy? The answer, of course, is that it is a little of both, although not necessarily for reasons suggested by the title. Bachelard’s initial intention is quite clearly to respond to the concerns of science, to write a book of epistemology by examining the facile assumption that objectivity results from studying objects. In The Formation of the Scientific Mind, published earlier that year, he shows how such an attitude, an outgrowth of traditional philosophical realism, actually constitutes an obstacle to the rationally constructed knowledge of contemporary science. Immediate, everyday reality can elicit wonder and can cloud rational detachment. Objective knowledge must be freed from such subjective responses—it must be “psychoanalyzed.” Bachelard’s research for The Formation of the Scientific Mind had shown him that among the most widespread and tenacious of such subjective images in imaginative literature were those associated with fire.1 These vestiges of unexamined attitudes about fire represent a specific challenge for the “psychoanalysis of objective knowledge.”
Objectivity requires not only that sensations and commonsense associations with matter be critically assessed, but that words themselves be subject to the scrutiny of objective thought, “for words, which are made for singing and enchanting, rarely make contact with thought.”2 The poetry inspired by matter is dangerously seductive. Requiring caution, but awakening sensibilities, it draws forth an ambivalent response from Bachelard the epistemologist. Like fire, poetry can be both destructive and fascinating.
Beginning with the warning that “the axes of poetry and science are opposed to one another from the outset” (PF, 2; Fr., 10), and setting out to catalog the dangers of the imagination of fire for objective thought, Bachelard is gradually drawn nonetheless toward a most sympathetic treatment of the poetic power of the imagination of fire. It is a luxury he allows himself with the understanding that philosophy can only hope “to make poetry and science complementary, to unite them as two well-defined opposites” (PF, 2; Fr., 10). Bachelard’s self-imposed challenge is to explore the axes of poetry and of science while respecting the demands of each. Like the polarity of description and retrieval so central to his epistemology, this challenge is fundamental to all of his subsequent work. And, as was the case earlier, this twofold challenge will be met in varying ways.
Initially, Bachelard’s objective in The Psychoanalysis of Fire does not differ appreciably from that of The Formation of the Scientific Mind. He continues to seek a maximum degree of rationality and, in this case, he does so by identifying conditions under which images of fire are created. As with its Freudian model, the implied hope of Bachelard’s “psychoanalysis” is that, once the unconscious, image-producing processes are exposed and understood, the rational mind will be freed from their influences. His purpose is therapeutic, as he seeks to separate scientific abstraction from the “illness” of subjectivity by resolving whether a text is meant to be understood subjectively or objectively:
This determination of the axis of explanation, whether it should be subjective or objective, appears to us to be the first diagnosis required for a psychoanalysis of knowledge. If, in a particular field of knowledge, the sum of personal convictions exceeds the sum of the items of knowledge that can be stated explicitly, taught, and proven, then a psychoanalysis is indispensable. The psychology of the scientist must tend towards a psychology that is clearly normative; the scientist must resist personalizing his knowledge; correlatively he must endeavor to socialize his convictions. (PF, 76–77; Fr., 127)
Bachelard, of course, is hardly interested in developing an orthodox generalized therapy. His “psychoanalysis” is exclusively concerned with norms for a rationally based objectivity. He is Freudian only as far as it suits his purpose.
As Bachelard sees it, the threat to objective knowledge does not come so much from the depths of a repressed unconscious as from a less profound layer of commonly held semiconscious attitudes or images. Such a notion has at least as much to do with Jung’s archetypes as it does with Freudian interpretation of dreams.3 For, despite his Freudian terminology, Bachelard is less concerned with reducing images to a hidden, individual meaning than with exploring the way in which shared imaginative responses cluster around a common phenomenon like fire. For this reason, Bachelard finds semiconscious reverie to be more significant than dream and the unconscious. He explains that, “since we are limiting ourselves to psychoanalyzing a psychic layer that is less deep, more intellectualized, we must replace the study of dreams by the study of reverie, and, more particularly, in this little book we must study the reverie before the fire. In our opinion, this reverie is entirely different from the dream by the very fact that it is always more or less centered upon one object” (PF, 14; Fr., 32). It is precisely because fire is so commonplace that the reveries associated with it may go unnoticed and thus present a surreptitious risk to the quest for objective knowledge.
While the danger for the prescientific mind was that reveries of fire usually blocked the development of objective knowledge, in the contemporary scientific era, the peril, while different, is no less real since the very attractiveness of such images can distort an existing rationalism by distracting from the rigors of rational thought. Bachelard must therefore concentrate on those very features that make images of fire attractive, those features that give reverie the power of reality. In one sense, there is nothing new in this, since he had frequently warned about the danger of relating surface qualities to an assumed, underlying substance, of treating the descriptive word as a manifestation of the substantial reality of a phenomenon. It will be recalled that such attitudes were the source of epistemological obstacles, which, in The Formation of the Scientific Mind, had been associated with a prescientific philosophical realism. But we have also seen that it is not until he develops the notion of epistemological profile in The Philosophy of No that Bachelard makes clear his opinion that prescientific attitudes survive even in the new scientific mind. Published two years earlier, The Psychoanalysis of Fire already provides an indication that, with respect to the phenomenon of fire at least, “personal intuitions and scientific experiments are intermingled” (PF, 3; Fr., 11).
Bachelard’s readings on fire lead him to the conclusion that “the initial charm of the object is so strong that it still has the power to warp the minds of the clearest thinkers and to keep bringing them back to the poetic fold in which reveries replace thought and poems conceal theorems” (PF, 2; Fr., 10). Pointing out that he had previously examined objective approaches to heat phenomena in L’Étude sur l’évolution d’un problème de physique, Bachelard now sets out to explore “the other axis—no longer the axis of objectification but that of subjectivity” (PF, 3; Fr., 11–12). In terms of this goal, the only significant difference from The Formation of the Scientific Mind is that he now concentrates on subjective postures clustered around images of a single element. In this sense, the purpose of The Psychoanalysis of Fire is to illustrate further The Formation of the Scientific Mind by focusing on a single epistemological obstacle.
In keeping with his Freudian frame of reference, Bachelard revives his liberal use of the term “complex,”4 which now is used to categorize the various subjective attitudes associated with fire. The tone is often anecdotal, as when Bachelard recounts his memories of having stolen matches as a boy in order to build a secret fire. “What we first learn about fire is that we must not touch it” (PF, 11; Fr., 25), he recalls. The rebellion against this interdiction he names, appropriately enough, the “Prometheus complex.” But, emphasizing that he is “examining a zone that is less deep than that in which primitive instincts function” (PF, 12; Fr., 26), he insists on the intellectual character of the Prometheus complex. It translates the impetus “to know as much as our fathers, more than our fathers” so that it might suitably be called “the Oedipus complex of the life of the intellect” (PF, 12; Fr., 27).
Like the Oedipus complex, the Prometheus complex represents an attitude that is fundamentally ambivalent. In a more extreme form, the reverie associated with a small, local fire is broadened to include a similarly ambivalent attitude in the face of cataclysmic fire. Expressing both fascination and terror as it moves from “the hearth to the volcano,” such a reverie joins “the instinct for living and the instinct for dying” (PF, 16; Fr., 35). Bachelard names this attitude the “Empedocles complex,” after the fifth-century-B.C. Greek philosopher who, according to legend, died by throwing himself into the crater of Mount Etna.
But subjectivity is not only expressed as ambivalence. Bachelard invents several other complexes to identify mainly positive reveries of fire. Among them is the “Novalis complex,” Bachelard’s speculation on the origin of fire. Convinced that an examination of primitive psychology would be more revealing than what he considers to be the much weaker utilitarian reasons usually advanced for the discovery of fire, Bachelard does not rely on anthropological studies of contemporary primitive people to explain the origins of fire. Instead, he explores the psychological attitudes of eighteenth-century nonscientists faced with a new phenomenon of fire—that of electricity. He also suggests the need for a “psychoanalytical interpretation” (PF, 35; Fr., 63) of J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Myths of the Origin of Fire. Bachelard attributes the early association of fire with rubbing, not to an imitation of some natural phenomenon, but to the subjective lessons of sexual experience. Similarly, he explains various customs described by Frazer by referring to their association with sexual activity rather than to their utility, so that “the explanation by the useful must give way to the explanation by the agreeable, the rational explanation must give way to the psychoanalytical explanation” (PF, 33; Fr., 60).
Bachelard sees in the poetry and short stories of Novalis a similar intuition of the sexually inspired origin of fire, manifested in a “Novalis complex … characterized by a consciousness of inner heat which always takes precedence over a purely visual knowledge of light” (PF, 40; Fr., 70). In opposing inner consciousness and visual knowledge, Bachelard attempts to account for the power of the imagination of fire by treating it on its own terms, as a subjective phenomenon. He dismisses positivistic explanations as missing the mark, for the “objective interpretation, while it discovers a chemical cause of the phenomenon that fills us with wonder, will never take us to the center of the image, to the kernel of the Novalis complex” (PF, 41; Fr., 72). Thus Bachelard, an avowed rationalist, finds himself arguing against the role of reason!
Yet, despite this shift, he remains consistent in several respects. He had previously rejected the utilitarian prejudice of pragmatism in The Formation of the Scientific Mind and, to the extent that rational explanations stem from what, in this case, is a predisposition toward realism, they are not justified in Bachelard’s eyes. Notwithstanding the opposed axes of poetry and science, poetry shares an openness and freedom with science.5 Moreover, by relying, however loosely, on the framework of psychoanalysis to justify his impressionistic approach to fire imagery, Bachelard is essentially substituting one form of scientifically inspired rationalism for another. Continuing a process begun in The Dialectic of Duration and expanded in The Formation of the Scientific Mind, psychoanalysis replaces physics and mathematics as a guarantor of rationality in The Psychoanalysis of Fire.
Bachelard’s longstanding opposition to naive realism and his more recent identification of animistic epistemological obstacles in The Formation of the Scientific Mind are expressed somewhat playfully as the “Pantagruel complex.” Surely no figure more aptly represents the association of fire with nourishment than Rabelais’s ravenous giant. In a chapter entitled “The Chemistry of Fire: History of a False Problem,” Bachelard turns away from the literary imagination of fire and examines the related reveries of alchemy and the embryonic chemistry and biology of the eighteenth century. Subject to substantialist prejudices with respect to fire, these fledgling sciences were even more vulnerable to taking literally “the idea that fire feeds itself like a living creature” (PF, 64; Fr.,109). Bachelard gives several examples of such attempts to explain combustion by recourse to the image of alimentation and by the attribution of beneficial qualities to substances reputed to contain heat. For the Pantagruel complex, fire may either consume or be consumed, but in both cases it is equated with life.
While we may view such notions as naive and give them a metaphorical interpretation, Bachelard warns us not to forget “that they corresponded to psychological realities” (PF, 70; Fr., 117). In fact, he is convinced that these realities still persist in contemporary notions of fire. “There is still a trace of concreteness in certain soundly abstract definitions. A psychoanalysis of objective knowledge must retrace and complete this process of de-realization” (PF, 70; Fr., 117).
If we were to identify a particular moment as the one when Bachelard finally “crosses over” from science to poetry, it would have to be the sixth chapter of The Psychoanalysis of Fire, wherein he discusses the “Hoffmann complex.” The name is a reference to the German romantic Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, whose tales of fantasy are largely inspired by intuitions of alcohol or “fire-water.” Here there is no longer any question of psychoanalyzing objective knowledge. Rather, Bachelard examines, both in literature and in prescientific writings, the proposition that “alcohol is a creator of language” (PF, 87; Fr., 144). The bonhomie and gentle irony of our “peasant” from Champagne is not lost when he finds that reveries of alcohol and fire inspire poets and novelists as well as writers of moralistic tracts on the “spontaneous combustion” of alcoholics.
Bachelard seems to have discovered, in his childhood recollections of his parents preparing a burnt-brandy or brulôt, a sense of the material base of the imagination. He finds in his own reveries of fire, echoed in those of Hoffmann and others, a close association of subject and object,6 which leads him to propose his now famous four-part classification of the imagination:
The precise and concrete bases must not be forgotten, if we wish to understand the psychological meaning of literary constructions. … If our present work serves any useful purpose, it should suggest a classification of objective themes which would prepare the way for a classification of poetic temperaments. We have not yet been able to perfect an over-all doctrine, but it seems quite clear to us that there is some relation between the doctrine of the four physical elements and the doctrine of the four temperaments. In any case, the four categories of souls in whose dreams fire, water, air, or earth predominate, show themselves to be markedly different. Fire and water, particularly, remain enemies even in reverie, and the person who listens to the sound of the stream can scarcely comprehend the person who hears the song of the flames: they do not speak the same language. (PF, 89; Fr., 147)
Such a proposal is ripe for misinterpretation, especially if applied too rigidly. Indeed, Bachelard warns that he is “not dealing here with matter, but with orientation. It is not a question of being rooted in a particular substance, but of tendencies, of poetic exaltation” (PF, 90; Fr., 148–49). What he is suggesting is that the reveries of certain writers gravitate toward images of one of the four elements and that such tendencies can be detected in their language. It is thus a question of imagination and language rather than of specific concrete reality. As Jacques Gagey points out, “the four elements, taken as names, are more the symbol of the substance than the substance itself. Earth, water, fire, and air qualify as inductors of the poetic logos and of reverie, not as a function of their objective determination, but as images.”7
The traditional realism associated with the notion of four elements, or with any fundamental substance,8 has long been rejected by science. And Bachelard is not reversing himself here by suggesting that such realism should now be accepted by epistemology. Rather, he continues to recognize the fundamentally subjective nature of naive realism, but he also comes to the conclusion that, while it may be a threat to scientific objectivity, it is also a source of poetry. This is tantamount to recognizing that he, and by implication any of us, can respond to the ontological temptation of beauty without abandoning the search for knowledge.
It is as if, after years of the rigorous isolation required by rationalism and the respect for objective knowledge, Bachelard has found a way to enjoy the intersubjective pleasures of poetry “legitimately”—that is to say, while still maintaining the goal of objectivity. He proposes this difficult balancing act toward the end of The Psychoanalysis of Fire, not by liberating unconsciously repressed subjectivity, in the manner of classical psychoanalysis, but by consciously supressing it, so that “the error is recognized as such, but it remains as an object of good-natured polemic” (PF, 100; Fr.,165). He clearly hopes that this process, which, in an echo of the dialectical transcendence of science, he calls “dialectical sublimation” (PF, 100; Fr., 164), will both allow the image to exist and allow him to study it objectively. For, as he says, “how much more intense is this enjoyment when our objective knowledge is the objective knowledge of the subjective, when we discover in our own heart the human universal, when, after having honestly psychoanalyzed our study of self, we integrate the rules of morality with the laws of psychology!” (PF, 101; Fr., 165).
Central to this almost puritanical approach to reverie is Bachelard’s fundamental ambivalence toward the poetic imagination. Like burnt-brandy or like fire itself, imagination is something to be enjoyed, but also something to be controlled. Chastened by his epistemological background, he approaches this new psychological reality primarily as something to be known within the constraints of rationally organized knowledge. This is evinced by his recourse to the taxonomy of the elemental imagination, which he revealingly calls “this Physics or this Chemistry of reverie” (PF, 90; Fr., 148). Even when, toward the end of the book, the ground shifts from reveries, which can be known psychoanalytically, to the poetic images themselves, Bachelard continues to insist that “it would be interesting to match the psychological study of reverie with the objective study of the images that enchant us” (PF, 107; Fr., 175). In short, having set out to examine reveries specifically associated with fire in order further to psychoanalyze objective knowledge, to free it from the influence of reverie, Bachelard is led to the discovery of the poetic expression of that reverie, to the particular verbal images produced by the imagination of fire.
This discovery prompts a call for “an objective literary criticism” (PF, 109; Fr., 179), which would continue the objective study of reverie he has begun. But, although he may sound particularly modern when he suggests that “a poetic mind is purely and simply a syntax of metaphors” (PF, 109; Fr., 179), he warns that any attempt at criticism “must find the way to integrate the hesitations, the ambiguities” (PF, 110; Fr., 180) that precede the poem itself and are part of the creative process. For Bachelard, the imagination is “an autochthonous, autogenous realm … the true source of psychic production” (PF, 110; Fr., 181), and, ultimately, it cannot be determined by objective means. It is a measure of Bachelard’s ambivalence vis-à-vis the imagination that what began as an attempt to understand imaginative processes objectively should end with a cautionary reminder of the irredeemable subjectivity of the imagination. It is also a measure of that ambivalence that, despite his recognition of this indeterminable subjectivity, he should continue to imitate the taxonomic approach of early science in the works that follow.
Before Bachelard turns his attention again to the elemental imagination, he undertakes, with Lautréamont (1939), his only extended examination of a single author’s work, that of “The Count of Lautréamont,” pen name for the nineteenth-century poet Isidore Ducasse. This study of Lautréamont’s Maldoror allows Bachelard to explore more fully some of the implications of the Psychoanalysis of Fire for the literary imagination and to concentrate on a literary work, as such, rather than to use literary images as illustrations for an essay on objective knowledge.
He continues to place value on the goal of unfettered thought in Lautréamont, where a “psychoanalysis of life”9 follows his earlier Psychoanalysis of Fire, but, in choosing a particularly unconventional work as the subject of his study, Bachelard also associates this freedom with the imagination. Throughout Lautréamont, Bachelard’s critical stance is informed by two main perspectives: the practice of contemporary science and his more recent tendency to reduce an imaginative text to one or two categories of images. Thus Lautréamont summarizes Bachelard’s dilemma with respect to imaginative literature: for much of his subsequent writing on the literary imagination, he will be torn between preserving the essentially epistemological perspective of science, with its emphasis on method, and acquiescing in the ontological outlook of imaginative literature, with its emphasis on symbolic reality.
As Bachelard sees it, Lautréamont’s work inaugurates a “primitive poetry which must create its own language” (L, 29; Fr., 53), a language of energetic, animalistic imagery, which can be reduced to two basic images of animal aggression: clawing and suction. With its brutal imagery, this new language replaces the space-conscious form of descriptive poetry with the time-conscious function of a new, dynamic poetry. In Maldoror, action replaces fixed rational classifications as “the function creates the organ” (L, 11; Fr., 24). By contrast, notes Bachelard, the animal imagery of a poet like Leconte de Lisle is static and overly visual. It betrays the influence of a formal and rational tradition, while Lautréamont’s aggressive imagery is a willful attack on the dogmatic past. Here Bachelard sees in Lautréamont’s exaggerated dynamism an adolescent rebellion against books and teachers, an energetic espousal of life against the irrationalism of imposed authority. Grounded in the specific sociocultural situation of the adolescent in nineteenth-century France, such a rebellion promotes “culture complexes” (L, 34; Fr., 62) of fear and cruelty that must find their resolution within the culture itself, which is to say, in literature. Thus, for the first time, Bachelard is brought to a sustained study of the literary imagination as such.
Lautréamont’s literary resolution to his culture complexes is to forge what Bachelard calls, in imitation of projective geometry, a “projective poetry” (L, 29; Fr., 54) in which certain images are projected beyond the usual limits of poetic form, while still displaying an underlying poetic coherence within a particular group of images. Here, then, Bachelard combines the lessons of a transcendent, or projective, science with the ontological reduction to fundamental images inspired by psychoanalysis; Lautréamont’s clusters of images are not only projective, they also appear to be obsessive. Nevertheless Bachelard defends Lautréamont against the charge that these clusters of images reveal the obsessions of a madman by referring to Gide’s definition of a human being as “‘the animal capable of a gratuitous action’” (L, 80; Fr., 138). He points to the variety of imagery, to the many metamorphoses of Maldoror as evidence that Lautréamont escaped from the determinism of animal instinct, from the monomania of madness.
Despite its aggressive animal imagery, Bachelard maintains that Lautréamont’s poetry is a human poetry, a pioneering work that creates by violating reality. Yet it is limited by its heavy reliance on what Bachelard calls “the efficient causality of natural gestures” (L, 89; Fr., 153), by a certain lack of control inherent in the use of such forceful animal imagery. Now that Lautréamont has freed poetry from the yoke of description, what is needed, concludes Bachelard, is “a sort of non-Lautréamontism that will spill out of Maldoror in all directions” (L, 90; Fr., 154). Using the term in the same way as non-Euclidism, Bachelard seeks a conversion of Lautréamont’s work that, like transcendent science and mathematics, will not oppose Lautréamont’s metamorphoses but will realize their potential by integrating them into a more fully human poetry. Poetry, like thought, must resist immediate reality: “For us the choice has been made: new thought and new poetry require a break and a conversion. … No value is specifically human if it is not the result of a renunciation and a conversion. A specifically human value is always a converted natural value. Lautréamontism, the result of a primal dynamization, thus seems a value to be converted, a power of expansion to be transformed” (L, 91; Fr., 155–56).
The lesson has consequences for Bachelard’s own approach to literature. In treating the work of this most original poet, he perceives the possibility of converting the values of science, especially nondeterminism and dialectical transcendence, to human cultural values, including literature in particular. Bachelard’s thorough familiarity with the revolutionary nature of contemporary science clearly enables him to understand the power, the significance, and even the limits of Lautréamont’s poetry. For, once Bachelard’s disclosures on the “Copernican revolution” in modern science are understood, once it is clear that the fundamental lesson of contemporary science is the need to reject the rigid determinism of a priori outlooks, there is no enigma in the fact that an epistemologist can come to such a sympathetic understanding of a work that initially seems so profoundly irrational. Lautréamont’s poetry allows Bachelard to confirm that, if the axes of poetry and science are initially opposed, they nevertheless can share a common spirit. As Vincent Therrien suggests in his monumental Révolution de Gaston Bachelard en critique littéraire, there is in Bachelard a “new literary mind” that corresponds to his “new scientific mind”10 and its first full expression is to be found in Bachelard’s Lautréamont.
In a frequently quoted passage from Water and Dreams (1942), Bachelard proclaims his continuing goal of becoming a rationalist while acknowledging his failure to do so when it comes to images of water:
Rationalist? That is what we are trying to become, not only in our learning generally but also in the details of our thinking and the specific organization of our familiar images. That is how, through a psychoanalysis of objective knowledge and image-centered knowledge, we became a rationalist toward fire. To be honest, we must confess that we have not achieved the same result with water. We still live water images; we live them synthetically, in their original complexity, often according them our unreasoning adherence.11
This does not mean that his analysis of such images is unreasoned, however.12 But it does indicate that the role of psychoanalysis will be greatly reduced. “To speak of psychoanalysis, it is necessary to have classified the original images without allowing a trace of their initial privileges to remain” (WD, 6; Fr., 9).
Here the vestiges of the image’s privileges do remain. Rather than attempting to exorcise them as part of a “psychoanalysis of objective knowledge,” Bachelard develops the conditions for a rational approach to their manifestation in language. Instead of concentrating on the sources of images as would psychoanalysis, Bachelard focuses on the transformation of such sources when an image is put into words. He examines the circumstances surrounding the literary expression of images in an attempt to “make a contribution to the psychology of literary creation” (WD, 161; Fr., 216). The distinction here between psychology and psychoanalysis is significant. The psychology of literary creation tries to establish the connection between deep complexes born of repression and certain “prereflective attitudes that govern the very process of reflection” (WD, 17; Fr., 25). Bachelard calls these attitudes “culture complexes [which] are grafted on more profound complexes which psychoanalysis has brought to light” (WD, 17; Fr., 26). As was the case in Lautréamont, it is not nature but culture that he wishes to explore, although he insists that the two are linked, that like the natural complex of psychoanalysis, the culture complex of his psychology of literary creation is a means of transforming psychic energy.
What he proposes, then, is a psychological literary criticism: “Under these conditions, a literary criticism that is not to be limited to a static balance statement of images must be complemented by a psychological criticism that relives the dynamic character of the imagination by following the connection between original complexes and culture complexes” (WD, 18; Fr., 26). The study of culture complexes is meant to provide a method of understanding how the imagination produces certain kinds of images. This, in turn, fits well with Bachelard’s conviction that images are reducible, that they betray one of the four types of imagination.
Less of a practitioner than an illustrator of psychological criticism, Bachelard first examines images of pure water and clear, reflecting surfaces that he associates with a “cosmic narcissism” (WD, 24; Fr., 36–37). Such images are essentially visual; they create a serene world of surface contemplation. But it is in the tactile “heavy water” (WD, 46; Fr., 64) of Edgar Allan Poe that the real power of the imagination of water is revealed. Here a viscous water, sometimes dark, sometimes milky, transmits a preoccupation with death and a cultural transformation of certain Oedipal impulses later studied by Marie Bonaparte.13 This opaque water of depths rather than surfaces is, in effect, the imagined water discussed in most of Water and Dreams; culture complexes are invoked to express attitudes associated with what can only be described as hydrophobia.
Bachelard concludes that visual water images merely reproduce perception, that they are too conceptual, while language has the power to produce the very sound of water and thus to evoke the subjective depths of this element. When the imagination of water is truly creative, when it is not merely imitative, he insists that it is expressed verbally rather than visually, that “the true domain for studying the imagination is not painting; it is the literary work, the word, the sentence” (WD, 188; Fr., 252). Yet, despite appearances, Bachelard’s quarrel is not with painting itself but with excessively conceptual representation as opposed to truly creative, subjective anticipation. For Bachelard, the poetic imagination should be inventive and such inventiveness is necessarily verbal.
As is the case in science, creativity and discovery are not found in the merely visual, in the surface reality. For the arts, too, the visual is the realm of the inauthentic, whether the medium is painting or literature. Not only are there several examples of unduly visual and aridly imitative literary images in Water and Dreams, but, in several separately published essays on the “visual” arts, ranging from etching to painting, Bachelard associates the creative power of reverie with words.14 While he never develops even the outlines of a linguistic theory, his predilection for language over form rests on his association of words with archetypes of the imagination and of the visual with naively rational concepts.
In Water and Dreams the preference for words over form is translated into a fundamental opposition between the formal and the material imagination. Recognizing that these two types of imagination are never completely separable, Bachelard nevertheless gives particular emphasis to the material imagination when he maintains that, “besides the images of form, so often evoked by psychologists of the imagination, there are—as we will show—images of matter, images that stem directly from matter. The eye assigns them names, but only the hand truly knows them. A dynamic joy touches, moulds, and refines them. When forms, mere perishable forms and vain images—perpetual change of surfaces—are put aside, these images of matter are dreamt substantially and intimately” (WD, 1; Fr., 2). In the realm of the imagination, the element and not merely the object is the source of original images. Matter, which Bachelard calls “the unconscious of form” (WD, 50; Fr., 70), is the hidden impulse that gives a particular image its poetic power. The object of perception is quite literally superficial; that is, it exists only as a surface and is secondary to the imagination of matter. Thus the classification of the imagination according to the four elements now becomes a four-part classification of the material imagination.
The fact is, of course, that despite an aversion to immediate surface reality that they share with science, many of the reveries of the material imagination, as had been the case earlier with reveries of fire, are the very epistemological obstacles that Bachelard had tried to eliminate on the way to a rationally constructed knowledge. For both prescientific philosophy and for the contemporary imagination, the fundamental importance of matter over form betrays a naive realism in which the qualities of objects are merely reflections of an underlying substance. How like Bachelard’s description of philosophical realism is his observation that, with water, “color matters little: it only provides an adjective, only designates a variety. Material imagination moves immediately to the substantial quality” (WD, 117; Fr., 158). An object’s color, like its shape, is a function of its appearance. These external qualities serve to describe the object, while the material imagination relates the object to prior reverie in which images of the underlying substance prevail. “For everything of a literary nature is dreamed before being seen, even the simplest of descriptions” (WD, 135; Fr., 185). Description belongs to science and reverie to poetry.
Where the alchemists and scholars of prescientific eras produced a pseudoscience because this description stemmed more from prior subjective reverie than from rational construction, their contemporary heirs, the poets, create an authentic literature precisely because they are in touch with these very reveries. The apparently “‘natural learning’ [of prescientific thinkers] is closely connected with ‘natural’ reveries. Those are the reveries that a psychologist of the imagination must recover” (WD, 135; Fr., 184–85). Unlike rationalism, which is perfectible, and which the scientist must struggle to maintain, reverie, for Bachelard, is a human constant that takes place naturally. We do not labor to become daydreamers, we give in to daydreams. And while today’s reveries may be about new objects and new forms, the elemental substratum remains unchanged.
This link between prescientific realism and present-day reverie explains why Bachelard is increasingly at pains to differentiate between the metaphor and the image. “The prescientific mind thinks concretely about images that we take for mere metaphors. It really thinks that the earth drinks water” (WD, 124; Fr., 168). The metaphor, in Bachelard’s view, merely reproduces the object of perception. It is a visual, intellectualized figure that may even be used to illustrate scientific concepts. The image, on the other hand, precedes concepts; it is not limited by rational knowledge.
As an example of the image, Bachelard recalls Poe’s description of Antarctic waters in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym: “The heat of the water was now truly remarkable, and its color was undergoing a rapid change, being no longer transparent, but of a milky consistency and hue.”15 Despite the fact that it is polar water and that, in empirical and rational terms, it ought to be cold, Bachelard notes that we are dealing “with water taken as matter, as a substance that is both warm and white. It is white because it is warm. Its warmth is noticed before its whiteness” (WD, 122; Fr., 166). For, with the image, the material takes precedence over the visual, the substantial over the rationally empirical. The result of a direct apprehension of immediate reality through the prism of prior reverie, the image expresses an ontological rather than an epistemological view of the world. It is this view that the poet continues and to which Bachelard returns when he examines the psychology of the literary imagination.
The peculiar attribute of the literary imagination is that, unlike objective knowledge, which must be rationally constructed, it approaches the world naively, in its concrete immediacy. In those instances in which the imagination attempts to rely on reason rather than reverie—as when culture complexes lose contact with deeper psychological complexes—images are artificial, they grow out of “a tradition which has been naively rationalized” (WD, 40; Fr., 58). Such a tradition is neither good reverie, which must be “natural” and spontaneous, nor good rationality, which, in the service of contemporary science, has learned to transcend the immediate. As Bachelard points out, “we see no solid basis for a natural, immediate, elementary rationality” (WD, 7; Fr., 9–10). Immediate, concrete, naive realism, on the other hand, is the stuff of reverie. While Bachelard had discarded both naive realism and monolithic rationalism in favor of a constructed, less naive rationalism in his epistemology, he now embraces naive realism, but still rejects naive rationalism. In this way, without doing violence to the rationalistic principles of his epistemology, which he continues to uphold, he is able to recognize a new ontological perspective in “the real phantom of our imaginary nature, which, if it ruled our lives, would give us back the truth of our being” (WD, 185; Fr., 249).
After the escape from subjectivity necessary for rational knowledge, the imagination has the therapeutic value of leading us back to what is particularly human within ourselves. “Real life is healthier if one gives it the holiday of unreality that is its due” (WD, 23; Fr., 35). The paradox that the well-being of reality should depend on unreality is basic to Bachelard’s developing ontology. It reflects his coming to terms with the notion that the reality of life, which is both objective and subjective, simply does not always follow determinable logical patterns. The literary imagination verbally expresses reverie, that inventive, unpredictable aspect of “real life.” It makes of life a particularly human reality which is as nondeterministic as the reality of contemporary science.
Reverie, therefore, serves an ontological function by translating concrete, immediate reality into human terms. It is to real life what scientific reason is to the physical world. Both scientific reason and reverie transcend immediate reality. Reason does so in the direction of a constructed, objective reality, inseparable from the method of knowing, while reverie operates in the direction of a subjective reality, inseparable from its means of expression. Thus, where ontology is a function of epistemology in science—where what is known depends on how it is known—in poetry—where what is known depends on how it is written— it is a function of language, a “symbolic ontology.”16
In Water and Dreams, Bachelard’s focus has shifted from a primary concern with how reality is known to a direct emphasis on a new, particularly human reality in which the literary imagination rather than the means of knowing plays the most fundamental role. The “superhuman faculty” (WD, 16; Fr., 23), as Bachelard calls the imagination, is the means by which we can create an open superreality. As Mary Ann Caws has indicated, there is, in Bachelard, a parallel between his transcendent rationalism, or “surrationalism,” and this new “surrealism.”17 As Bachelard’s epistemological concerns give way to ontological considerations in the works on the four elements, or the Elements, as we shall call them here, nondeterministic, transcendent openness remains a constant human trait.
It is precisely because the imagination is a manifestation of human openness and inventiveness that it is never content merely to copy reality. Imagination must act upon material reality in order to translate it into a particularly human surreality. There is what Bachelard calls a “coefficient of adversity” (WD, 159; Fr., 213) between the imagination and reality. Reverie, the means by which imagination transforms reality into human terms, is therefore not neutral. In confronting reality it must conquer an adversary that resists. Its transformations of reality are victories similar to those of objective knowledge when it tries to understand reality.
Such victories of the imagination over reality may take various forms, but, in the case of water, Bachelard identifies two major types of triumph that have found verbal expression. The first, which he calls the “Swinburne complex” (WD, 167; Fr., 224), after the nineteenth-century English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, expresses the ambivalence of the swimmer who initially is sadistically victorious over water but who ultimately is defeated by that element. “Fatigue is the destiny of the swimmer: sadism, sooner or later, must yield to masochism” (WD, 169; Fr., 227). But Bachelard also detects “a complex that is more clearly sadistic,” which he names the “Xerxes complex” (WD, 179; Fr., 241) after the Persian king who, according to Herodotus, ordered the Hellespont whipped when a storm destroyed the bridges he had built. Both complexes recognize that the imagination assigns a value (either negative or positive, and occasionally both) to an element such as water.
This valorization also takes place when a quality, such as purity or impurity, is recognized imaginatively in water. As happens in traditional philosophical realism, all such qualities are attributed to the element itself, to the substance which, in terms of the imagination, acts either purely or impurely. For the imagination, even a small amount of pure water can purify a far greater amount, while the reverse is also true of a small quantity of impure water. Bachelard calls this action of valorized substance “a fundamental law of material imagination” (WD, 142; Fr., 194).18 When the imagination assigns value to a substance, it also assigns it the will to act. This animism marks a “transformation from material imagination to dynamic imagination” (WD, 143; Fr., 195), of which the Swinburne complex and the Xerxes complex are two examples. Just as animism was related to substantialism in prescientific times, the dynamic imagination grows out of and is linked to the material imagination and both are opposed to the more superficial formal imagination. But a more complete consideration of the dynamic imagination shall await Bachelard’s exploration of the imagination of air and earth.
In any discussion of Bachelard’s first two books on the elemental imagination, it is easy to overlook his many methodological hesitations. As he moves from The Psychoanalysis of Fire to Water and Dreams, he clearly has discovered in the literary imagination a worthy object of study. This is new ground, a new axis, with echoes of prescientific, naive realism, although its very source—reverie—parallels the nondeterministic constructive reason of science. While Bachelard appears to recognize the intricacy of his discovery, he still seems uncertain as to the best approach to take in exploring it. The reader is left with a sense that Bachelard is stumbling toward a method, that some of his proposals, including his categorization according to the four elements and his differentiation among the formal, the material, and the dynamic imaginations may well be the results of sudden inspiration and that they have yet to be incorporated into a carefully worked-out theory. At the same time, the literary imagination legitimizes naive realism thereby making previously limited ontological considerations a central concern for the first time in Bachelard’s work.
Neither the primary focus on ontology nor the serendipitous approach to concepts is typical of most of Bachelard’s prior work, so that it seems likely that both the overall reference to psychoanalysis and psychology and the preservation of his categories of the imagination are means by which to continue his investigation of the literary image without having actually to confront the question of method, and without having to relinquish his fundamental confidence in science and reason. Yet all such borrowings are applied loosely; they are adapted to the particularities of the literary imagination with a flexibility that is both worthy of and undoubtedly inspired by his philosophy of science. Nevertheless, as he completes his first two books on the elemental imagination, the means of knowing has ebbed as his single major concern. Finding himself somewhere between the psychology of symbolization and literary criticism, Bachelard turns his attention increasingly to how images are produced and expressed, with only a passing glance at the appropriateness of his approach.