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

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).