(orewopd to the 1994 edition
Shells and doorknobs, closets and attics, old towers and peasant huts, all shimmer here, shimmer as points linked in the transcendental geometry of Gaston Bachelard. Ostensibly modest in compass, an inquiry focused on the house, its interior places, and its outdoor context. The Poetics of Space resonates deeply, vibrating at the edges of imagination, exploring the recesses of the psyche, the hallways of the mind. In the house Bachelard discovers a metaphor of humanness.
No other writer closes so accurately, so deftly with the meanings of domestic space. Bachelard admits that every house is first a geometical object of planes and right angles, but asks his reader to ponder how such rectilinearity so welcomes human complexity, idiosyncrasy, how the house adapts to its inhabitants. Eschewing all simplicities of mere architectural history, mere building detail, he skews his scrutiny, moving through the house not as mere visitor, but as the master penetrator of anthro-cosmology. “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box,” he determines early on. “Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.” As he listens to the geometry of echoes dignifying— and distinguishing—every old house, every experienced house, he probes the impact of human habitation on geometrical form, and the impact of the form upon human inhabitants.
Here is indeed a magical book. Bachelard guides the reader into wondering why adults recall childhood cellar stairs from the top looking down but recall attic stairs from the bottom looking up, into musing on the significance of doorknobs encountered by children at eye level, into pondering the mysteries of fingertip memory. How does the
foreword to the 1994 edition
body, not merely the mind, remember the feel of a latch in a long-forsaken childhood home? If the house is the first universe for its young children, the first cosmos, how does its space shape all subsequent knowledge of other space, of any larger cosmos? Is that house “a group of organic habits” or even something deeper, the shelter of the imagination itself?
In poetry and in folktale, in modern psychology and modern ornithology, Bachelard finds the bits and pieces of evidence he weaves into his argument that the house is a nest for dreaming, a shelter for imagining. Beyond his startling, unsettling illuminations of criminal cellars and raisinsmelling cabinets, his insistence that people need houses in order to dream, in order to imagine, remains one of the most unnerving, most convincing arguments in Western philosophy. Bachelard emphasizes not only the deeper significances of tales of peasant huts and hermit shelters, significances enduring as contemporary fascinations with lovers’ cottages and readers’ nooks, but also the abuse suffered by such simple structures in storm. Gales, hurricanes, and downpours haunt The Poetics of Space, all vicissitudes that make the simplest of simple huts shine in strength of sheltering. Storm makes sense of shelter, and if the shelter is sound, the shelter makes the surrounding storm good, enjoyable, re-creational, something that Bachelard uses to open his understanding of house and universe, of intimacy and immensity.
Always container, sometimes contained, the house serves Bachelard as the portal to metaphors of imagination. With a rare grace, Bachelard handles the most fragile shell, the most delicate “cottage chrysalis,” the most simple containers. “Chests, especially small caskets, over which we have more complete mastery, are objects that may be opened.” What immensities flow from objects that may be opened. From Jungian psychology to sexual intimacy, Bachelard explores the 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’s shell, is to accept solitude—and to embrace, even if momentarily, the whole concept and tradition of miniature, of
foreword to the 1994 edition
shrinking enough to be contained in something as tiny as a seashell, a dollhouse, an enchanted cottage. To imagine miniature is to glimpse others of Bachelard’s wonders, the immensity of the forest, the voluptuousness of high places.
Out of the house spin worlds within worlds, the personal cosmoses Bachelard describes perhaps more acutely than any other writer concerned with space.
Language serves and delights Bachelard even as it serves and delights the reader. A master of poetic reading, perhaps a master of poetic hypervision, Bachelard writes to anyone transfixed by clear-eyed words. “Being myself a philosopher of adjectives,” he admits in his chapter on miniature, “I am caught up in the perplexing dialectics of deep and large; of the infinitely diminished that deepens, or the large that extends beyond all limits.” Can one hear oneself close one’s eyes? How accurately must one hear in order to hear the geometry of echoes in an old, peculiarly experienced house? Bach