D`où venons nous? D`où sortons nous
?
Where do we come from? Where do we leave from?
Quand saurait-je où je vais?
When will I know where I`m going?
Pourquoi sommes-nous sur terre?
Why are we here ?
LOUISE BOURGEOIS le jour la nuit le jour
2. Space- The Mapping
(Map as a sign of structures of power)- how
to subvert this power?
These (to find) are places
and spaces of political and personal resistance, of memory and action. In and
of itself this will not bring the State to its knees—indeed the Nazis brought
about Benjamin’s own untimely death—but it does suggest, quite brilliantly, the
dialectic between lived experience/embodied space and the larger political and
cultural world, and the potential for subversion.
Benjamin’s
insistence that memory collapses time into space goes against the western
notion of the linear narrative, of biography as sequence, of maps that chart
events and actions as though they were over and done with. It emphasizes flux,
change, potential: Time…thrusts us forward from behind, blows us out through
the narrow funnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming
with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns,
dead ends, one-way streets.
Part of
Benjamin’s fantasy of alternative ways of mapping have been put into action in
contemporary Britain by organisations such as Common Ground, which try to get
people to draw their own maps: ‘authorising’ their version of the world, the
places and paths they know as against the grey anonymity of the official map.
In such undertakings the map is as much performance and process as object. It
may become a site for struggle as well as celebration, bringing out social
difference by providing one public imaginative space on which to work.
Even the most outwardly conciliatory and harmonious of Parish Maps might act as
a blanket thrown over difference which, in covering it, keeps it warm and
stewing. (Crouch and Matless 1996:253) In part, Benjamin’s fantasy is given
academic expression through Giddens’s mapping of people’s movement between
places, of entrances and exits, back-stages and fore-ground, in which
repetitive time and cyclical time are played off against time’s arrow
(Giddens 1985; see also Harvey 1989; Soja 1989; Pred1990).
—differentiated
worlds of experience. It could, I suppose, be suggested that Giddens or
Rose is simply mapping Bourdieu’s habitus: mapping the everyday places and encounters through
which people are socialised and disciplined; logging the behaviour that creates
and maintains Foucault’s structures of surveillance. But, equally, they may be
mapping potential non conformism, ways of questioning—even undermining —the
accepted way of doing things.
A POETICS OF
INTELLECTUAL LIBRARY SPACE: A HIDDEN STORY OF NATURAL GROWTH
Ewen Jarvis, Deakin
University
Synopsis.
Libraries are structures built
for the storage, preservation and provision of stories, and as a story is an
intellectual structure, one can conceive of libraries as spaces in which
intellectual structures are brought together to form a kind of superstructure.
When readers and writers use libraries they do more than inhabit them
physically. To make use of a library is also to inhabit the intellectual
structure it represents. This paper aims to describe the experience of
inhabiting and extending intellectual library space. By focusing on how Haruki
Murakami’s protagonist in Kafka on the
Shore experiences language, this paper will attempt to come to an
understanding of what the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard called the ‘psychic
reality of reading and writing’: a reality within which the library’s primary
function is to open spaces within readers and writers in which acts of creation
can occur. After considering the nature of the reading and writing experience,
this paper will propose various built forms appropriate to an intellectual
library which deals in such acts of creation. This task will involve describing
how built forms taken from the literary works of Italo Calvino, Coleman Barks,
Jeanette Winterson and Franz Kafka, among others, can be profitably employed as
metaphors for intellectual library space.
A
POETICS OF INTELLECTUAL LIBRARY SPACE: A HIDDEN STORY OF NATURAL GROWTH
In the final instalment of
Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
the French novelist writes: ‘In reality, every reader, as he reads, is the
reader of himself. The work of the writer is only a sort of optic instrument
which he offers to the reader so that he may discern in the book what he would
probably not have seen in himself’ (2009). In Champion of a cause: essays and addresses on librarianship
Archibald MacLeish, the poet and former librarian of congress, writes that ‘the
physical book: is never more than an ingenious cipher by which the intellectual
book is communicated from one mind to another, and the intellectual book is always
a structure in the imagination’ (MacLeish in Basbanes 2003: 6). In these
passages Proust and MacLeish both comment on the nature of books. Proust likens
books to optic instruments that enable readers to make the invisible within
them visible, while MacLeish likens books to ingenious ciphers through which
meaning can be conveyed. Both writers suggest that books direct our gaze
inward, allowing us to internally apprehend the intellectual structures they
contain.
This article aims to interrogate
the experience of reading, which the physical library serves. It will then
suggest a series of habitable structures that can be profitably employed as
metaphors for the intellectual apparatus we use and develop when we bring story
structures into existence. In literary terms, the space of the reading
experience has been described variously as ‘the domain of the prophet’ (Sebald
2002: 62) and as ‘the realms of gold’ (Keats 1970: 61). Jalal ad-Din Rumi
refers to such spaces as ‘inspired solitudes’ (trans. Barks: 2002:105). Italo
Calvino, contemplating the nature of nameless things, imagines that they reside
in the place where ‘thoughts take on form and substance’ (2009: 110). Haruki
Murakami refers to a ‘space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap’
(2005: 449). In philosophical terms, however, this space has been described as
a space that ‘links us to an eternal present’, and as the sphere of language
and writing, which, more than the body, “corresponds to the soul” (Derrida
2006: 18). It has been called a ‘poetisphere’ and a ‘dimension of the modern
psychism’ (Bachelard 1994: 24) that represents ‘the threshold of being’
(Bachelard 1994: xii).
In Earth and Reveries of the Will, Bachelard reminds us that the task
of philosophy, according to the German philosopher Friedrich Jacobi, is simply
to discover the origins of language (2002: 4), and he maintains that each
literary image offers the experience of the creation of language’ (2002: 5).
What remains to be explored is the space within which this creation of language
is experienced. Bachelard describes this space as the site of the poetic act
and as a place where the poetic image emerges into the consciousness as a
direct product of the heart, soul and being of man (1994: xviii). Elsewhere, he
writes that ‘the poet in the novelty of his images is always the origin of
language’ (1994: xx). But it is not only the poet who experiences this poetic
act which is an origin of language. Readers also share in the joy of creation,
and this act of creation ‘makes of the reader a poet on a level with the image
he has read’ (1994: xxv).
In this light, it would not be
too presumptuous to suppose that the primary function of the library, the
function it performs that is higher than its functions of storage,
preservation, access, and so forth, is to open up within readers a space where
acts of creation can take place. This is, indeed, how Murakami uses the
invented library in his novel Kafka on
the Shore, in which a fifteen-year-old boy runs away from home to live in
the corner of a small public library. The library that is central to Kafka on the Shore acts as a kind of
halfway house between the conscious and the subconscious, the living and the
dead. From the first chapter, in fact, we are informed that this halfway house
is the destination of the protagonist: ‘On my fifteenth birthday’, the narrator
explains, ‘I’ll run away from home, journey to a far-off town, and live in the
corner of a small library’ (Murakami 2005: 4). It is, furthermore, not
insignificant that Murakami specifically states that his protagonist will come
to live in ‘the corner’ of a small library, and it would even be useful, at
this point, to reflect on what Bachelard has written about the corners of
inhabited spaces: ‘every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch
of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a
symbol of solitude for the imagination’ (Bachelard 1994: 136). When we recall
the hours we have spent in our corners,’ he continues, ‘we remember above all
silence, the silence of our thoughts’ (Bachelard 1994: 137). At one point,
Bachelard even designates the corner as ‘the chamber of being’ (1994: 138).
These descriptions of corners reveal something about our experience of reading,
as it is a corner that we see when we open the pages of a book: a corner of
paper that takes us to realms beyond memory. One of the most concise
descriptions of disappearing into a corner of paper appears in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in
which Blake writes: ‘I took him to the altar and open’d the Bible, and lo! it
was a deep pit, into which I descended’ (2004: 191). An observation of
Bachelard’s also takes us deep into the reading experience: ‘it is as though
the poem in its exuberance’, he writes, ‘opened new depths in us’ (1994:
xxiii). This is not to suggest that the religious and philosophical system that
Blake envisioned agrees with the phenomenological insights of Bachelard. Their
conceptions of depth in these works differ, but both writers, nonetheless,
associate the reading experience with the notion of descent. It is a simple and
meaningful association.
This depth-opening experience of
language is also described by Jacques Derrida: ‘To grasp the operation of the
creative imagination at the greatest possible proximity to it, one must turn
oneself toward the invisible interior of poetic freedom. One must be separated
from oneself in order to be reunited with the blind origin of the work in its
darkness’ (2006: 7). Murakami explores this concept through his protagonist’s
imagined friend, whose name, quite appropriately, is Crow. It is Crow who, on
Kafka Tamura’s behalf, swoops down into blind depths to find words for Kafka’s
half-formed thoughts: ‘I try putting into words my impressions of the novel,
but I need Crow’s help – need him to appear from wherever he is, spread his
wings wide and search out the right words for me’ (Murakami 2005: 113). Crow
plays a part in the creative acts that are inherent to the protagonist’s
experience of language. Crow is at once part of and separate from the
protagonist, and his presence illustrates the concept of separation from self
that Derrida proposes. There are, however, less benign sides to our experience
of lonely corners and dark depths; ‘there are angles from which one cannot
escape’ (Bachelard 1994: 144), and there are corners which are also graves. It
is Kafka Tamura’s desire to avoid such malevolent corners that drives him to
seek out the Komura Memorial Library: a place that is situated somewhere
between, or rather within, both reality and imagination. The protagonist even
states, at one point, that:
As I relax on the sofa and gaze around the
room a thought hits me: this is exactly the place I’ve been looking for all my
life. A little hideaway in some sinkhole somewhere. I always thought of it as a
secret, imaginary place, and can barely believe that it actually exists
(Murakami 2005: 39).
Inevitably, Kafka Tamura is
drawn into the space between the real and the imagined within the library. His
journey is indeed a journey into the depths—into the aspect of library space
that interests us most—the in between space, that is, which exists between the
written word and the emerging image: an in between space which swells and
expands a sentence’s tenuous thread (Bachelard 1994: xxii). This in between
space is where we go when we begin to intimately inhabit the space of the word:
an experience that has been described in the following way:
Words–I often imagine this–are little houses,
each with its cellar and garret. Common-sense lives on the ground floor, always
ready to engage in “foreign commerce,” on the same level as the others, as the
passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house, is to
withdraw, step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is
losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for
treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words
themselves–this is a poet’s life. To mount too high or descend too low is
allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together. (Bachelard
1994: 147)
So if a single word can be the
germ of a house or a world, then what of a sentence or a story, and what of an
entire library? When we begin to imagine intellectual systems made up of
multiple word, sentence, and story structures, vast edifices begin to swell in
the imagination: vast edifices that exist on the other side of the corporal and
temporal world. Indeed, what pleasurable feelings of expansion we experience
when, seduced by what we read, these structures begin to expand as we push them
out from within? Murakami, through his protagonist, describes this experience
in the following way: ‘I’m alone inside the world of the story. My favourite
feeling in the world’ (2005:61), and Bachelard would say that during such
moments of expansion the dreamer and his reverie have entered totally ‘into the
substance of his happiness’ (1994: 12).
This alone space within which we
build habitable story structures is the liminal space that the title of
Murakami’s book alludes to. The protagonist is, after all, positioned, right
from the beginning ‘on the Shore’. Perhaps Murakami is referring to the
shore-like space that Bachelard describes in Earth and Reveries of the Will, a space that exists between an
images psychological reality and its physical reality (2002: 3). Similarly, the
philosopher and phenomenologist Maurice Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception goes some
way towards describing how we experience this space between the physical and
the psychological:
the [physical] brush which presents itself to
the senses is merely an envelope or a phantom. The true brush, the stiff,
prickly entity which is incarnated in these appearances, is concentrated in the
gaze; it has moved from the window, leaving there only its lifeless shell.
(Merleau-Ponty 2007: 339)
What is said here of the
physical brush could also be said of the word ‘brush’, which itself is merely
an envelope that allows for the incarnation of the true brush. Between the
brush itself and the word brush is a border space. It is this border space, no
doubt, in which Bachelard imagines a chord sounding in the soul of the reader
(Bachelard 1994: 100), the type of word-chord that generates images as it
descends: images that will become more stable as they surface. Bachelard
maintains that the human psyche forms itself first and foremost in images
(2002: 3), and ascertaining what happens in the silent poetic moment in which
images emerge takes him directly to the object of his enquiries, which is the
insides of poems (2002: 6), as it is within poems that literary images are
born. ‘I believe’, he continues, ‘that the pre-eminence of imagination may be
discovered through the close examination of literary images’ (2002: 4–5). This
observation, which puts its faith in the pre-eminence of the imagination, seems
to be pointing to a renewal of Romanticism, which is in essence a renewed
interest in genesis, in becoming. We are given more proof of this in his
description of the two types of images: perceived images and created images,
which seem to correspond to Merleau-Ponty’s ‘psychological’ and ‘physical’
realities. For Bachelard ‘perceived images and created images constitute two
very different psychological phenomena:
Creative imagination functions very
differently than imagination which relies on the reproduction of past
perceptions, because it is governed by an unreality
principle every bit as powerful, psychologically speaking, as that reality
principle so frequently invoked by psychologists to characterize an
individual’s adjustment to whatever “reality” enjoys social sanction. It is
precisely this unreality principle that reinstates the value of solitude, ordinary
reverie being one of the most elementary aspects of solitude. (Bachelard 2002:
2)
Here Bachelard elevates the
creative imagination, which is governed by an unreality principle, above the
formal imagination, which relies solely on the reproduction of past
perceptions. This movement, which, as we have noted, is a movement toward
Romanticism, and which is guided by the phenomenological method, involves a
study of poetic images as they are originally experienced. What, however, is an
appropriate shape for an intellectual library which deals in such originally
experienced creations?
There are many habitable
structures in the natural world that can help us to envision what such a
library would look like. In The Poetics of Space Bachelard describes ‘the world
as the nest of mankind’ (1994: 104), and in the same work he describes nests as
refuges, as shelters, and, quite significantly, as curved corners. There are
dead nests and living nests (994: 94) and oneirically fertile nests full of
eggs which sit snugly in the forks of branches (1994: 96). But if we can think
of the world as the nest of mankind, can we not also think of the library as
the nest of the human mind? What is a library, after all, if not a nest of
poetic images waiting to be re-experienced/imagined? Two lines by the poet Ivan
Goll take our imagination in this direction:
I found a nest in the skeleton of the ivy
A soft nest of country moss and dream herb.
(Ivan Goll in Bachelard 1994: 90)
Thinking oneirically, it makes
perfect sense to use dream herb to build soft nests of the mind.
Another natural structure that
can help us to envision an intellectual library that deals in originally
experienced creations is the shell. One writer who has dreamed the life of a
shell-secreting mollusc is Italo Calvino, and deep within his shell building
reverie we are informed that the mollusc made the shell simply to express
itself: ‘while I [the mollusc] was making it [the shell] I had no idea of
making it because I needed it; on the contrary, it was like when somebody lets
out an exclamation he could perfectly well not make, and yet he makes it, like
a ‘Ha’ or ‘hmph!’, that’s how I made the shell: simply to express myself … From
the margin of that fleshy cloak on my body, using certain glands, I began to
give off secretions which took on a curving shape all around, until I was
covered with a hard and variegated shield, rough on the outside and smooth and
shiny inside. … Once it existed, this shell was also a necessary and
indispensable place to stay inside of, a defence for my survival’ (2009: 143).
Similar observations have been made about nests.
According to Jules Michelet, the
nineteenth century French historian and natural scientist, a bird is a worker
without tools. It has ‘neither the hand of the squirrel, nor the teeth of the
beaver.’ ‘In reality,’ Michelet writes, ‘a bird’s tool is its own body, that
is, its breast, with which it presses and tightens its materials until they
have become absolutely pliant, well-blended and adapted to the general plan’
(Michelet in Bachelard 1994: 100). But even though nests are precarious
shelters, they do encourage day dreams of security. They remind us of home, and
as nests are the hiding places of winged creatures, they can easily set us to
dreaming of homecomings and movements towards safe shelter (Bachelard 1994:
94-103). As we noted in chapter two, Murakami’s library in Kafka on the Shore
is a transitory space, and all of the characters have a nomadic quality about
them; not for a moment are we given the impression that any of them are there
in the library to stay. Murakami’s library does remain, nonetheless, a place in
which it is possible to feel at home, and this inhabiting of word-homes within
the library corresponds to an inhabiting of homes in the natural world. In
Kafka on the Shore, movements toward the library are certainly imbued with a
sense of homecoming. When Kafka Tamura needs somewhere that is safe and warm,
for instance, the only place that comes to mind is the library (Murakami 2005:
76). The library is a physical home for Kafka, but it is also an intellectual
one, and this intellectual library is like a nest or a shell composed of
intimate dreams within which it is possible to live. Meditating on these
habitable libraries of the mind, we are reminded of what Bachelard tells us
books give us: They ‘give our day-dreams’, he writes, ‘countless dwelling
places. Is there one among us’, he continues, ‘who has not spent romantic
moments in the tower of a book he has read?’ (1994: 25)
One manmade dwelling place that
embodies aspects of intellectual library space is the seventeenth century
Khajou Bridge in the city of Isfahan in Iran. In utilising Bachelard’s
phenomenological method of analysis, however, we will concern ourselves not
with the bridge’s physicality, but with how it has been experienced by the
active imagination of the poet, who in this case is Coleman Barks, the American
poet and translator of the Persian poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi. But before Barks
shares his impressions of the Khajou Bridge, he prefaces his comments with the
following words:
I sometimes fall in love with bridges. One
lazy spring when I was staying in a house in Kanlica, across from Istanbul, it
was the Sultan Mehmet Bridge, with its Bosphoric procession of boats. The
Clifton Suspension Bridge near Bristol, England. The lowly San Mateo Bridge
across San Francisco Bay, and all those others across that body of water. The
rickety old Walnut Street Bridge we drove over every morning going to
elementary school in Chattanooga. I used to imagine places to live in lodged
among the girders, or especially, not on that bridge but others, in the
drawbridge lift operator’s room. (Barks 2007: 1)
This passage bridges its way
toward childhood dreams of inhabiting, and inhabiting has been central to this
discussion of library space thus far. One invented library in particular that
seems to mirror the sentiment of Barks’ bridge-dwelling reverie appears in
Jeanette Winterson’s Art and Lies. In Winterson’s re-imagining of the ancient
library of Alexandria, the library is a vertiginous space in which climbing
boys, whose job it is to ascend into the dizzy miles of shelves, are eventually
racked at various levels around the library, so that they can form a human
chain, and pass down any volume. Accordingly, Winterson writes, the boys built
themselves eyries in among the books, and were to be seen squatting and
scowling at greater and greater heights around the library. Soon, we are told,
the boys had tunnelled behind the huge shelves and thrown up a rookery of strange
apartments where beds were books and chairs were books and dinner was eaten off
books and all the stuffings, linings, sealings, floorings, openings and
closings, were books (Winterson 1995: 4-5).
In Winterson’s soaring reverie,
the physical library becomes a many-chambered nest inhabited by vaporous
Alexandrian slave-boys. Winterson’s library, however, is made somewhat
grotesque by the fact that the library’s residents are slaves who are unable to
benefit from the knowledge which surrounds them. Barks’ bridge inhabiting
reverie provide a less pessimistic impression of the structures he imagines
himself lodged in, but his reveries only reach their full potential when his
dreams of inhabiting are applied, through metaphor, to poetry. He does this by
using the Khajou Bridge as a metaphor for Rumi’s poems: ‘the stanzas of a Rumi
ghazal (ode)’, he writes, ‘have the brio and living dynamic of the sluices and
alcoves of the Khajou Bridge … they provide spaces where conversation can
flourish, and [they provide] silence, the deep silence we remember near water.’
Barks then writes that he ‘was impressed by the depth of solitude in those who
were sitting on the steps looking downstream’ (2007: 5), and further on he
states that ‘the ghazals of Rumi and the Khajou Bridge are similar expressions
of awareness’ (2007: 6). Barks is clearly pointing to the possibility of
inhabiting the lines of poems. This oneiric correspondence is, however, not the
only way that the Khajou Bridge could be said to resemble an inhabited intellectual
structure.
Blake observed that it is in the
brain of man that we live (2004: 288), and this sentiment is echoed in Arnold
Zable’s description of the domed reading room of the State Library of Victoria:
‘The Dome and its ascending galleries’, Zable writes, ‘seemed like a giant
brain vaulting towards the heavens’ (ed. Barnes 2003: 76). Barks uses a similar
comparison to describe the Khajou Bridge, which is a bridge with both an upper
and a lower level. The bridge’s upper level is lined with small arcades, in
which, we are told, groups congregate for dinners, poetry recitations,
philosophical discussions, etc., and its lower level, which sits a few feet
above the water, is much more intimate and conducive to solitary reflection.
‘It is as intricate and as woven as a brain,’ Barks writes, before going on to
describe the bridge as ‘a halved and opened labyrinth’. ‘The right brain’, he
maintains, ‘is dominant here, with its artistic sensitivity and wisdom flow,
but Khajou is also an image of balance, with its upper roadway, very practical
and left-brain, and its lower level conductive to music and meditation,
friendship and poetry’ (Barks 2007: 2–3). At any rate, it is certainly right
brain, artistically sensitive thinking that is responsible for a legend about
the construction of the bridge, which holds that the bricks used to build it
were made of ‘limestone mixed with egg white, like a cake’, ‘Alchemically
cooked’ (Barks 2007: 4), as it were. Barks admits to being unaware of why
limestone and egg whites were used, but as limestone is a sedimentary rock born
of the earth, and as egg white is close to the origin of dreams of flight, then
perhaps it is not too much to say that the bridge, made as it is of dreams of
earth and air, is not only a bridge from one bank to another, but also a bridge
from the earth to the sky. We are thus reminded of Bachelard’s words in The
Poetics of Space: ‘To mount and descend in the words themselves–this is a
poet’s life. To mount too high or descend too low is allowed in the case of
poets, who bring earth and sky together’ (1994: 147). By reading the bridge in
this way it can be seen to represent the creative activity of poets and of
those who read their work.
As well as having been invested
with the oneiric power of the earth and the air in its materiality, the Khajou
Bridge also offers us, as libraries do, an invitation to be silent, all the
better to allow us to join the poets in their mad ascents and descents. In
fact, there is something of an ode to silence in Barks’ description of the
Khajou quarter and the Khajou Bridge. He describes the Khajou quarter, on the
north bank of the river, as ‘a honeycomb of secret places, many of them out in
the open, but perfectly suited for any transaction with beauty. … It is an
encouragement for those sojourning through to rest a while and deepen’ (Barks
2007: 2). And on the edge of this quarter of secret places, the Khaju Bridge
stands like ‘a human-made shoal that people are drawn to, to enjoy the seasonal
motion, to sit quietly in time’ (Barks 2007: 6). The words Barks uses to
describe a man-made structure speak eloquently of the experience of intimately
inhabiting. A human-made shoal full of places to sit quietly in time and within
which it is possible to rest a while and deepen certainly comes close to
intellectual library space as we have conceived it thus far. In fact, the verbs
‘to deepen’ and ‘to descend’ are at the core of our intimate experience of this
type of space. We have noted that Kafka Tamura’s journey is ‘a journey into the
depths’, and it is the ‘depths of solitude’ into which people have allowed
themselves to fall that impress Barks as he crosses the bridge. In fact, to
Barks, the Khajou Bridge seems to stand as a symbol of a sound mind: a mind
that, from time to time, needs ‘to rest a while and deepen’ (2007: 2). All of
this deepening begs a consideration of what Merleau-Ponty has written about our
experience of depth.
Merleau-Ponty argues that depth
is the most existential of all dimensions because it announces an indissoluble
link between things and self by which the self is placed in front of them,
whereas breadth can, at first sight, pass for a relationship between things
themselves, in which the perceiving subject is not implied’ (2007: 298). In
this sense, depth is the only dimension in which the perceiving subject is
indispensable and central, as there can be no depth without an embodied subject
with the ability to project a gaze, and there can never be an embodied gaze
without some sort of intention. ‘Depth is born beneath my gaze’, Merleau-Ponty
writes, ‘because the latter tries to see something’ (2007: 306), and he
describes this intention-loaded gaze as ‘a sort of knowledge machine’ which
organises what we perceive and which is guided by a ‘perceptual genius underlying
the thinking subject’ (2007: 307). This perceptual genius at work in our visual
field, tending always towards the most determinant form (2007: 306) operates in
the dimension of depth: ‘the dimension in which things or elements of things
envelope each other’, as opposed to breadth and height in which they are
juxtaposed (Merleau-Ponty 2007: 308). The dimension of depth brings the body’s
genius back into our understanding of space by making the body the subject and
origin of space, while forcing us to rediscover the primordial experience from
which it springs (Merleau-Ponty 2007: 292-8).
But, in as much as there can be
a double reality of the image, can there not also be a double reality of depth?
We certainly sense, at any rate, that Bachelard and Barks would both attempt to
steer us away from a purely external perception of depth and toward a
perception of depth which reaches from the external through to the internal: to
an inner depth in which ‘things or elements of things envelope each other’
(Merleau-Ponty 2007: 308); to an inner depth which, like its external
counterpart, longs for synthesis, and which speaks of the genius within us that
seeks meaningful shapes and forms, not only in space, but in the whole unruly
mosaic of experienced sensations, descriptions, narratives and ideas; to a
depth which remains a core of disorder seeking order. Reaching such a depth
involves, we must assume, some kind of descent. Barks posits that the Khajou
Bridge might be a kind of ‘descent’ (2007: 4). Alternately, a library might act
as a site from which we descend. Indeed, at the end of Barks’ reflective
contemplation of the Khajou Bridge, he unites the bridge and the library with a
single image. After reminding us that Rumi ‘has long been felt to be a bridge,
a place for cultures and religions especially to merge and enjoy each other’,
Barks recalls that ‘During his [Rumi’s] ride with his family down the Silk Road
ahead of the Mongol armies, from Balkh in central Asia to Iconium (Konya,
Turkey), he accumulated a rich baggage of Taoist, Buddhist, and Zoastrian
images, along with stories from India, to add to those from his Islamic texts.
It is said’, Barks continues, ‘that ninety camels were needed just to carry
Bahauddin’s (Rumi’s father’s) books. There is a caravan bridge to contemplate’
(2007: 7-8), he concludes. This caravan/bridge/library, with its rich baggage
of literary images, comes close to being an ideal metaphor for a library of the
mind. What it lacks, however, and what the reading experience can invest it with,
is depth. To understand the space of the reading experience, a space which the
physical library serves, we would certainly do well to try to see it through
the lens of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological observations about the nature of
depth.
Perhaps, not surprisingly, it is
Franz Kafka who provides us with a reverie of depth and descent which, in its
labyrinthine, round-cornered intimacy, succeeds in creating a sense of
homecoming for us in our search for forms that can be employed as metaphors for
intellectual library space. In his work entitled ‘The Burrow’ we find an
incredibly detailed and sensitively rendered description of what it means to
call a complex structure home. The narrator of ‘The Burrow’ is a small animal
who, over the course of the narrative, describes the home that it has been
building for much of its life. It is a home composed, we are told, of
passageways along which, every hundred yards or so, little round cells have
been hollowed out, and in the very centre of which lies a chief cell, which is
referred to as the Castle Keep (Kafka 1993: 470). When the burrow was just
beginning, the narrator of the story informs us, he was ‘nothing more than a
humble apprentice’ and ‘the labyrinth was only sketched out in rough outline’,
and ‘everything was so tentative that it could only be regarded as an
experiment’, but by slow degrees the burrow expands, and when, towards the end
of the animal’s life, the burrow is completed, it is described as a ‘great
vulnerable edifice’ (Kafka 1993: 499). As is often the case with Kafka,
however, early on we begin to assume that in writing about a burrow, he is
referring to much more than a burrow, and, indeed, as his description proceeds,
we begin to apprehend a structure that resembles a branching intellectual growth:
an intellectual growth, furthermore, that is intimately experienced precisely
because it is inhabited. In fact, Kafka’s burrow is, if nothing else, a
masterfully rendered dream of inhabiting, and in its lines we find repeated
many of the themes that we have encountered on our way towards a more complete
understanding of intellectual library space.
Kafka’s narrator informs us, for
instance, that although the small cells that line the passageways of his burrow
are very nearly identical, he is, nonetheless, able to clearly distinguish one
from the other with his eyes shut by the mere feel of the wall: ‘they enclose
me’, he says, ‘more peacefully and warmly than a bird is enclosed in a nest’
(1993: 483). And in this warm, peaceful, nest-like burrow, a process of
ordering and reordering is constantly underway. The stores kept in the burrow’s
central chamber are endlessly divided, and only after precise calculations have
been made and careful plans have been laid are these stores carried to other
cells, and in this activity it is easy to make out a system of mass
intellectual organisation: a system not without moments of intellectual crisis.
Occasionally it dawns on the narrator that ‘the present distribution of his
stores is completely and totally wrong, might lead to great dangers, and must
be set right at once, and at these times everything is thrown into disarray …
at other times, it seems best to keep all the stores in the Castle Keep (Kafka
1993: 472). This perpetual reorganisation certainly corresponds to the
following passage from Murakami’s Kafka
on the Shore:
Every one of us is losing something precious
to us … Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back
again. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads – at
least that’s where I imagine it – there’s a little room where we store those
memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the
workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We
have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the
water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live forever in your own
private library. (Murakami 2005: 501)
What better way is there of
saying that we inhabit our thoughts, and that to understand and protect
ourselves requires many and constant adjustments? Another aspect of the burrow
that we have found in both the bridge and the library, and which Kafka draws
our attention to, is its stillness and its silence. ‘But the most beautiful
thing about my burrow’, Kafka’s narrator informs us ‘is the stillness (1993:
469), and he describes the entrance to the passageways, which lead off the
Castle Keep, as ‘still and empty, [and] ready by their various routes to
conduct me to all the other rooms, which are also still and empty’ (1993: 483).
At the best of times the passageways are filled with a ‘silence which flows’,
and we are informed that sometimes ‘it is as if the fountains from which flows
the silence of the burrow were unsealed.’ This is a silence in which ‘all life
is transfigured’ (Kafka 1993: 494). It is a silence which ‘can flood one with
peace if one only remains quite open and receptive to it’ (Kafka 1993: 482). At
one point, Kafka’s narrator states quite forcefully that he must have silence
in his passage (1993: 486). Then, inevitably and importantly, we are confronted
with the fact that the narrator of the story, the one-time apprentice who is
now the master architect of the burrow, judges himself to be inextricably
united with his abode, and Kafka provides several reasons as to why the subject
of the story would feel this way, not least of which is the fact that so much
physical and intellectual effort has gone into its construction. There are the
passageways and smaller cells of the burrow which, we are told, ‘are the
outcome of intense intellectual labor’, and then there is the central chamber
which was ‘fashioned by the most arduous labor of the body, which involved
hammering and pounding the loose and sandy soil into a firm state to serve as a
wall for the beautifully vaulted chamber’ (Kafka 1993: 470). At one point,
Kafka’s narrator states that ‘I and the burrow belong ‘indissolubly together’
(1993: 483), and a little later he states that ‘any wound to his burrow hurts
him as if he himself were hit’ (1993: 499).
Kafka’s story is about an animal
burrowing, but at a deeper level it is about a human burrowing an intellectual
home of the mind. ‘To experience a structure’, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘is not to
receive it into oneself passively: it is to live it, to take it up, assume it
and discover its immanent significance’ (2007: 301), and, in this sense,
Kafka’s animal could certainly be said to have experienced its burrow. So we
can say that the burrow’s branching growth, in conjunction with the animal’s
constant rearranging, and its constant and regular descents into the Castle
Keep, which, it should be noted, lies at ‘unusual depth’ (Kafka 2007: 488), its
need for stillness and silence, and the intellectual and physical labour that
has gone into the burrow’s construction, and, furthermore, the presence of an
intimacy within which the entity inhabiting and the space being inhabited are
one: all of these things can be seen to represent the necessary aspects of an
intellectual library in which descents into pure depth, where the origin of
language lies, are made possible. And what are these descents if not, to use
Derrida’s words, a ‘returning to the things themselves’ (2006: 194), what are
they if not ways to open a ‘space of description’? (Derrida 2006: 196)
Our exploration of poetic images
of intimately inhabited spaces that correspond to the experience of intimately
inhabiting intellectual library space has taken us from an exploration of the
shell, to an exploration of the nest and the bridge and finally the burrow – all
structures that can help us conceive of a psychically authentic and intimately
experienced intellectual library which can potentially serve as a
shell/nest/bridge/burrow/library-home within which the embodied ‘I’ can reside.
Such an intellectual home has ‘the curious property of being in relation with
all other sites’ (Foucault 1998), and is, furthermore, able to bring earth and
sky together. Without the descent of the reading and writing experience,
however, such library homes lack ‘depth’: the kind of depth that Bachelard
seemed to understand only too well: ‘in human daydreams everything remote
intermingles’ (1994: 120) he writes. It is this ‘deep’ and ‘remote’
intermingling, this deep and remote becoming, this deep and remote genesis, if
you like, that makes the expansion of the intellectual library possible. This
deep and remote activity at the root of the reading and writing experience,
within which words are found to describe, ‘the uniqueness of inner disturbance’
(Bachelard 1994: 220), is, most certainly, a true origin of language.
Agrippa once wrote that
‘imagination is a better interpreter of the world than reason’ (Bachelard 2004:
151), and perhaps Heidegger had such a sentiment in mind when he chose to fall
back on the words of a poet in his attempts to articulate for his readers the
nature of language’s remote source. The poem that performs this task for
Heidegger describes a transcendental landscape, in which a goddess of words
inhabits a twilight world. From a dark place without names the poet approaches
with what he has found, and the goddess draws names from her well to bring
these nameless things to life, because it is only with a name that the poet can
truly own what he has found (Stefan George in Heidegger 1982: 60). Language,
Heidegger writes, belongs within the domain of this mysterious landscape in
which poetic saying borders on the fateful source of speech. This origin of
language, this place of genesis, where, as Bachelard puts it, ‘the poet’s soul
discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry’ (2004: 5), is
a living space, a living depth, that finds corresponding spaces in the depths
of the physical world: in the depths of oceans, in the depths of the earth, and
in the less fathomable depths of space. There are also, however, manmade depths
which attempt to mirror the living depths where language has its root. The
interiors of Aztec temples as described by Bernal Diaz in 1519, for instance,
seem to be, in a perverse way, reaching toward a kind of manmade depth: ‘all the
walls of that shrine were so splashed and caked with blood [the blood of
sacrificial victims, that is] that they [the walls] and the floor too were
black’ (Diaz in Tannahill 1975: 87) Diaz writes. And this layered organic depth
reminds us of the massive canvasses that Rothko produced in his final years,
which have been described as rectangles that ‘pull us into a dark, choking,
grave like space’ (Elkins 2001: 14). Perhaps we could even see, in the Hebrew
myth of the Passover, in which the blood of a spring lamb was daubed on the
doorposts of houses for protection, an unconscious attempt to invest physical
abodes with a kind of interior living depth.
Such manmade constructions seem
to invite us to share in an inner depth of mankind, either through real or associated
violence or death. The means used to extend this invitation, however, must
certainly strike us as misplaced, and, in the case of the Aztecs, perverse. But
it is precisely this sense of living depth that we seek in our experience of
library space. Only a poverty of authentic depth, however, would cause us to
attempt to create this through physical means, that is, with physical violence
and bloodletting with a view to making what is transcendentally internal
physically external. What is called for, however, is the type of experience
with language that Heidegger urges us to undergo by entering into language and
submitting to it (1982: 57), and this type of experience flows from a genesis
in ‘lived’ depth (Merleau-Ponty 2007: 300). ‘If it is true’, Heidegger writes,
‘that man finds the proper abode of his existence in language … then an
experience we undergo with language will touch the innermost nexus of our
existence’ (1982: 57). Close reading of the work of William Blake would lead us
to believe that Blake arrived at similar conclusions almost two centuries
before Heidegger. According to the Blake scholar S. Foster Damon, ‘LOS is
Poetry, the expression in this world of the Creative Imagination. He is the
manifestation in time and space of Urthona, the deepest Zoa, who is the centre
of each Individual’ (1965: 246).
It is difficult to speak with
complete certainty when it comes to terms like ‘the innermost core of our
being’, ‘the centre of each Individual’ and what has been described elsewhere
as man’s ‘controlless core’ (Kernan in Bloom 1970: 345). What we can be certain
of, however, is that for Blake the core of man is where man is most creative,
and man is, as Bachelard has observed, an imagining being in whose reveries he
alone is sovereign (2004: 80–81). The physical library presumes the existence
of an intellectual library where this creative function in man is given free
reign. This intellectual library, as has been shown, resembles habitable
structures in the physical world. The physical library is therefore an in
between space that allows for the storage and consumption of dead words: dead
words that the human imagination must resurrect, because only when words have
been revived by man’s deeply rooted imagination do they begin to breathe, and only
when they breathe do they start to tell the truth.
References
Gaston Bachelard (1988). Air and dreams: an essay on the imagination
of movement (Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications)
Gaston Bachelard (2002). Earth and reveries of will: an essay on the
imagination of matter (Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and
Culture)
Gaston Bachelard (2004). The poetics of reverie: childhood, language,
and the cosmos (Boston: Beacon Press)
Gaston Bachelard (1994). The poetics of space, (Boston: Beacon
Press)
Gaston Bachelard (1968). The psychoanalysis of fire (Boston:
Beacon Press)
Gaston Bachelard (1983). Water and dreams: an essay on the
imagination of matter (Dallas: The Pegasus Foundation)
Coleman Barks trans.(2007). Rumi: bridge to the soul (New York:
HarperOne)
Coleman Barks trans. (2002). The Soul of Rumi (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco)
John Barnes (ed) (2003). The La Trobe journal, No. 72 spring
(Melbourne: State Library of Victoria Foundation)
Nicholas Basbanes (2003). Patience & fortitude (New York:
Perennial)
William Blake (1991). Poems and prophecies (New York:
Everyman’s Library)
William Blake (2004). The complete poems (London: Penguin
Books)
Harold Bloom (ed) (1970). Romanticism and consciousness: essays in
criticism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company)
Italo Calvino (2009). Cosmicomics (London: Penguin Classics)
Samuel Damon (1965). A Blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of
William Blake (Providence, Rhode Island: Brown University Press)
Jacques Derrida (2006). Writing and Difference (London and New
York: Routledge Classics)
Umberto Eco (1983). The name of the rose (London: Secker
& Warburg)
James Elkins (2001). Pictures and tears: a history of people who
have cried in front of paintings (New York: Routledge)
Michael Foucault (1998). ‘Of other spaces’
http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html
(accessed: 5 October 2009).
Martin Heidegger (1982). On the way to language (New York:
HarperSanFrancisco).
Franz Kafka (1993). Franz Kafka: collected stories (New
York: Everyman’s Library).
John Keats (1970). The poems of John Keats (London:
Longman).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2007). Phenomenology of perception (London and
New York: Routledge Classics).
Haruki Murakami (2005). Kafka on the shore (London: Harvill).
Marcel Proust (2009). Time regained
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/p96t/chapter3.html
(accessed: 20 February 2010).
Winfried Sebald (2002). Vertigo (London: Vintage).
Reay Tannahill (1975). Flesh & blood: a history of the cannibal
complex (London: Hamish Hamilton).
Jeanette Winterson (1995). Art & lies (London: Vintage).
GASton bachelard
et l'intuition de l'instant
Iuliana Pastin
Abstract: If the purely
epistemological work of Gaston Bachelard was the
subject of several high
quality studies, we may note, however, the absence of
studies related to
Bachelard's philosophy of time. This article tries to give a
contribution to fill this
gap.
Keywords: movement, space,
intuition, time, instant, imaginary.
Abstract: If the purely
epistemological work of Gaston Bachelard was the
subject of several high
quality studies, we may note, however, the absence of
studies related to
Bachelard's philosophy of time. This article tries to give a
contribution to fill this
gap.
Keywords: movement, space,
intuition, time, instant, imaginary.
Dans un livre récent,
publié par Vincent Bontems1 Gaston Bachelard
(1884-1962), est présenté
comme un philosophe originaire, non conformiste:
figure exemplaire de
l’école laïque - boursier d’origine modeste, il finira par
occuper la chaire
d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences de la Sorbonne - est un
penseur non conventionnel: s’appuyant
sur des recherches de chimie et de
mathématiques en pleine
révolution, mais aussi sur Freud et Jung (réinterprétés),
il a construit une
épistémologie d’un rationalisme subtil qui a largement fait école,
comprenant le progrès de
la science comme une suite de discontinuités; Il le
caractérise aussi comme
étant un métaphysicien, qui s’est opposé à Bergson sur le
problème du temps, défendant une
philosophie de l’instant contre sa
philosophie de la durée. II a aussi
introduit une nouvelle approche de la
poésie, en donnant une
importance inédite à l’Imaginaire et à
la rêverie.
On pourrait examiner
l’œuvre complexe de Bachelard son épistémologie,
depuis l’Essai sur la
connaissance approchée jusqu’au Matérialisme rationnel en
passant par La Philosophie
du non et Le nouvel esprit scientifique jusqu'à sa
”métaphysique”,
concentrée dans L’Intuition de l’instant et La Dialectique de la
durée;
On arrivera ainsi à sa
poétique, depuis La Psychanalyse du feu jusqu’à La
Poétique de la rêverie en passant
par L’Eau
et les rêves et La Poétique de l’espace.
Cependant l’espace
restreint de cet article ne nous permet que quelques
considérations plus
générales sur son œuvre L’intuition de l’Instant qui l’opposera
à la célèbre théorie de
la durée de Bergson.
Influences de la
philosophie de l’époque sur Bachelard
Gaston Bachelard, est un
philosophe français qui a eu un grand renom
non seulement dans le
domaine des sciences mais aussi dans celui de la poésie
et de l’imaginaire. Il
est l'auteur de nombreuses réflexions concernant la
connaissance et la
recherche scientifique. Sous l’influence de Jung il invente ce
qu'il appelle la «psychanalyse de
la connaissance objective, étudie les obstacles
∗
∗
Senior Lecturer Ph.D, - „Dimitrie Cantemir”
Christian University, Bucharest.
1
Vincent Bontems, Bachelard, Editions Les
Belles lettres, Figures du savoir, Paris, 2010.
affectifs dans l'univers
mental du scientifique et de l'étudiant, obstacles qui les
empêchent de progresser
dans la connaissance des phénomènes. Dans la
Philosophie du non, il analyse
des exemples tirés de la logique, de la physique
ou encore de la chimie. Dans cette
œuvre, Gaston Bachelard livre une critique
sévère de l'inductivisme et de l'empirisme. Le
fait scientifique est construit à la
lumière d'une
problématique théorique. A partir de laquelle la science se construit
contre l'évidence, contre
les illusions de la connaissance immédiate, des théories
de l’empirisme. C'est en
ce sens que Bachelard parle d'une «philosophie du non».
L'accès à la connaissance
comme l'histoire des sciences est donc marquée par une
«coupure
épistémologique», qui opère une séparation avec la pensée
pré-scientifique.
Produire des connaissances nouvelles, c'est donc franchir des
«obstacles épistémologiques» selon
l'expression de Bachelard qui parle aussi de
rupture épistémologique.2
Pour Bachelard, toute
connaissance est une connaissance approchée:
«Scientifiquement, on pense
le vrai comme rectification historique d'une longue
erreur, on pense
l'expérience comme rectification de l'illusion commune et
première».
En tant qu’épistémologue Bachelard
renouvelle l'approche philosophique
et littéraire de l'imagination,
s'intéressant à des poètes et écrivains tels que
Lautréamont, Edgar Poe, Novalis, au symbolisme ou encore à
la
psychanalyse.
Le grand mérite de G.
Bachelard est celui d’avoir eu le courage d’approcher
des domaines en apparence
irréconciliables tels que la littérature et la
science, c'est-à-dire
d’étudier les rapports entre l'imaginaire et la rationalité.
Ils peuvent être
conflictuels ou complémentaires selon certains auteurs.
Concernant la
psychanalyse du feu nous pouvons constater que chez Bachelard
une image ayant un
intense pouvoir affectif provoquera des illusions pour le
scientifique car l'image
du feu pourra empêcher la connaissance de l'électricité.
Mais cette même image
produira en littérature des effets inattendus et surchargés
poétiquement: son pouvoir
de fascination sera très important chez des poètes
romantiques tels que Novalis ou Hölderlin surtout pour
l’image du feu.
Dans son ouvrage
essentiel: Le nouvel esprit scientifique (1934), Gaston
Bachelard opère un
dépassement du débat empirisme/rationalisme. Pour
Bachelard, le matérialisme rationnel se
trouve au centre d'un spectre
épistémologique dont les deux
extrémités sont constituées par l'idéalisme et
le matérialisme.
Cependant Bachelard considère qu'il
faut dépasser l'opposition entre
empirisme et rationalisme: «Pas de
rationalité à vide, pas d'empirisme
décousu». L'activité
scientifique suppose la mise en œuvre d'un «rationalisme
appliqué» ou d'un
«matérialisme rationnel.»
2
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_Bachelard. La rupture
épistémologique
désigne, dans l’approche de la
connaissance, le passage qui permet de connaître réellement en
rejetant certaines connaissances antérieures
qu’il serait nécessaire de détruire pour que se révèle
la connaissance nouvelle.
Dans cette perspective, l’obstacle épistémologique que peut constituer le
savoir du passé, bien que
naturel, ainsi que le "sens commun", devraient être
franchis afin qu'une
«vraie science»
apparaisse.
La notion de temps chez
Gaston Bachelard
Pour comprendre Bachelard
nous devons commencer par nous poser
quelques questions: sur le temps
de même que sur la «durée», sur «l’instant», ou
sur «le moment». Y a-t-il
un fondement à la réalité? Pour Gaston Bachelard, la
vérité est avant tout une
histoire, une perception du vrai, admise aujourd'hui, niée
demain; le monde est
imaginé avant d'être vu et remémoré. Cet essai constitue
aussi une excellente
introduction à une philosophie originale où le poème et
l’analyse scientifique ne
s'excluent pas. L’intuition de l’instant est un
ouvrage suivi de l'Introduction à
la poétique de Bachelard par Jean Lescure3
qui fait le commentaire
suivant:
Qu'est-ce que le temps? Que
faut-il entendre par «durée», «instant»,
«moment»? Y a-t-il un
fondement à la réalité? Pour Gaston Bachelard, la
vérité est avant tout une
histoire, une perception du vrai, admise
aujourd'hui, niée demain;
le monde est imaginé avant d'être vu et
remémoré. Un essai limpide,
qui est aussi une excellente introduction à une
philosophie originale où le
poème et le théorème ne s'excluent pas. Un
hommage de la pensée à la
pensée.
Dialectique de la durée
métaphysique
Le titre du premier
ouvrage de Bachelard ― l’Intuition de
l’instant4― rend
compte d’une polémique
affichée contre les thèses bergsoniennes telles qu’elles
sont exposées dans L’Essai sur les
données immédiates de la conscience5 ainsi que
dans Durée et simultanéité. Bergson
estimait en effet que l’homme pouvait faire
«l’intuition de la
durée», c’est-à dire l’expérience métaphysique d’un temps
subjectif, radicalement
indivisible et impossible à mesurer, distinct par sa nature
du temps homogène et
spatialisé des montres et des horloges. Cette analyse de la
durée s’accompagne d’une
dépréciation du «temps homogène», quantitatif et
objectif dans lequel
Bergson ne voit qu’une projection de la durée qualitative dans
l’espace, qu’une sorte de
durée dégradée. Dans L'Intuition de l'instant
Gaston Bachelard considère
que:
«La durée intime, c'est
toujours la sagesse. Ce qui coordonne le monde, ce
ne sont pas les forces du
passé, c'est l'harmonie tout en tension que le
monde va réaliser. On peut
parler d'une harmonie préétablie dans les
choses, il n'y a d'action
que par une harmonie préétablie dans la raison.
Toute la force du temps se
condense dans l'instant novateur où la vue se
dessille, près de la
fontaine de Siloë, sous le toucher d'un divin rédempteur
qui nous donne d'un même
geste la joie et la raison, et le moyen d'être
éternel par la vérité et la
bonté».
3
Gaston Bachelard, L’Intuition de l’Instant,
Introduction a la poétique de Bachelard, Editions
Stock, coll. Livre de
poche, La quatrième de couverture, Paris, 1931, 1965, 1992.
4
Gaston Bachelard, L’Intuition de l’instant, éd. Stock,
Paris, 1932, 1992.
5
cf. Bergson, L’Essai sur les données
immédiates de la conscience, thèse de doctorat p.82
Ouvrage originalement
publié en 1888. 144e édition. Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France,
1970, 182 pages.
C’est cette
argumentation, fondée toute entière sur «l’intuition de la durée»,
que Bachelard entreprend
non seulement de critiquer, mais de renverser cette
thèse.
D’après M. Bergson, nous
avons une expérience intime et directe de la
durée. Cette durée est même
une donnée immédiate de la conscience. Sans
doute elle peut être par la
suite élaborée, objectivée, déformée. Les
physiciens, par exemple,
tout à leurs abstractions, en font même un temps
uniforme et sans vie, sans
terme ni discontinuité. Ils livrent alors le temps
entièrement déshumanisé aux
mathématiciens. (G. Bachelard, l’Intuition
de l’Instant, p.17)
À partir d’une lecture du
livre Siloë6 de son ami Gaston Roupnel, Bachelard
va mener une véritable
critique de la durée pure. Il reproche d’abord à Bergson
d’avoir séparé le temps
des hommes du temps des choses, faisant de la durée une
nouvelle différence
anthropologique. Ce «temps des horloges», Bergson en parle
comme d’un temps inhumain
littéralement impossible à habiter. L’instant, nous
dit Bachelard, n’a pas
qu’une réalité objective: il a aussi une réalité subjective.
Renouant avec la théorie
humienne de l’associationnisme7
7
si injustement
critiquée par Bergson,
Bachelard entend montrer que notre esprit, à
proprement parler, ne
«dure» pas mais qu’il est tout entier investi
dans l’instant présent, dans
l’instant objectif. Chose dont nous faisons tous
l’expérience élémentaire:
«Qu’on se rende donc compte
que l’expérience immédiate du temps, ce n’est
pas l’expérience si fugace,
si difficile, si savante, de la durée, mais bien
l’expérience nonchalante de
l’instant, saisi toujours comme immobile. Tout
ce qui est simple, tout ce
qui est fort en nous, tout ce qui est durable même,
est le don de l’instant».
A l’intuition si incertaine
de la durée, Bachelard oppose l’intuition naturelle
de l’instant présent. Il
n’y a guère que l’esprit du Métaphysicien, tout éloigné qu’il
est du réel, qui puisse
vraiment se dire coupé du «temps des choses». Bachelard
reproche donc à Bergson
d’avoir joué l’hypothèse invraisemblable de la durée
contre la réalité
véritablement intuitive, la réalité présente et incontestable de
l’instant:
«Nous refusons, ajoute-t-il
sur un ton décidément fort humien, cette
extrapolation métaphysique
qui affirme un continu en soi, alors que nous
ne sommes toujours qu’en
face du discontinu de notre expérience». (p.42)
6
Gaston Roupnel, Siloë, éd. Stock,
Paris, 1927.
7
7
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associationnisme:
L'associationnisme
(qui
s'écrit parfois
aussi associationisme) est une thèse
philosophique concernant l'esprit et la connaissance.
Fortement liée à l'empirisme, elle prétend
expliquer par l'association des idées toutes les
opérations
intellectuelles, tous les principes de la raison et même tout
l'ensemble de la vie mentale.
David Hume comparait
l'association des idées à la loi de l'attraction universelle découverte par
Newton.
En somme, et pour
détourner une formule platonicienne célèbre, Bachelard
ne croit pas à cette
«image immobile du temps mobile» qu’est la durée
bergsonienne. Le
renversement s’opère dans ce cas sous la forme d’une
opposition: ce n’est pas
le temps qui a été inventé à partir de la durée, mais la
durée à partir du temps,
c’est-à-dire à partir de l’instant. Ainsi G. Bachelard se
demande sur la démarche
incompréhensible pour lui du raisonnement
bergsonien: Pourquoi alors
serions-nous arrêtés dans la division du temps? (p.
43). Et il continue
en ajoutant d’autres arguments:
«Mais le problème changerait
de sens si nous considérions la construction
réelle du temps à partir
des instants, au lieu de sa division toujours factice
à partir de la durée. Nous
verrions alors que le temps se multiplie sur le
schème des correspondances
numériques, loin de se diviser sur le schème
du morcelage d’un continu».8
Car Bergson pense le
temps objectif sur le mode du morcelage: une continuité
essentielle (la durée)
est parasitée par une division objective (le temps). Pour
Bachelard, au contraire,
c’est dans la discontinuité radicale que réside l’essence du
temps. Le temps ne se
remarque que par ses instants car il n’est qu’instant. Et
voici le vieux problème
augustinien résolu. Ainsi, dès le troisième chapitre de
l’Intuition de
l’instant, la sentence est définitive: «La durée n’est qu’un
nombre
dont l’unité est l’instant.» Elle est «poussière
d’instants, mieux, un groupe de
points qu’un phénomène de
perspective solidarise plus ou moins étroitement.»
La physique radicale du
temps
Le moment critique de
l’argumentation étant achevé, il s’agit maintenant
pour Bachelard d’établir
une physique du temps, qui puisse se passer de la
représentation abstraite
d’une durée non-physique. Pour ce faire, il s’appuie
sur la critique
einsteinienne de la durée objective. La longueur de temps
que Bergson voulait
homogène et mesurable se révèle essentiellement relative à la
méthode de mesure. C’est
sur cette base que Bachelard récuse l’idée d’une
perception distincte du
temps que l’on pourrait abstraire du mouvement et du
repos des choses. Le temps n’est
pas une donnée métaphysique. Il n’est
jamais que «la quatrième
dimension de l’espace». Un philosophe
contemporain ne saurait
ignorer purement et simplement cet acquis incontestable
de la physique moderne.
«La relativité du laps de temps [ou: durée] pour les
systèmes en mouvement est
désormais une donnée scientifique [...] Par exemple
tout le monde s’accorde
que l’expérience de dissolution d’un morceau de sucre
met en jeu la
température? Eh bien, pour la science moderne elle met également
en jeu la relativité du
temps». On peut lire dans la même perspective ces lignes
extraites de La dialectique
de la durée:
«La science contemporaine
dispose de la variable temps comme de la
variable espace; elle sait
rendre le temps efficace ou inefficace à propos de
qualités distinguées. Peu à
peu, quand la technique des fréquences sera
8
L’Intuition de l’instant, p.43
mieux connue, on arrivera à
peupler le temps d’une manière discontinue
comme l’atomisme a peuplé
l’espace».9
L’intuition de l’instant
Bachelard propose de saisir la
réalité première et fondamentale de
l’instant objectif dans
l’expérience intuitive. Il développe pour cela deux
exemples bien distincts:
l’instant douloureux et l’instant d’attention.
«Quand survient l’instant
déchirant où un être cher ferme les yeux,
immédiatement on sent avec
quelle nouveauté hostile l’instant suivant
assaille notre cœur».10
Le fardeau du Temps se
fait insoutenable, «déchirant», proprement
discontinu. Mais si
l’instant demeure une réalité indépassable en termes
quantitatifs ― car il ne
saurait y avoir de «durée» mais seulement des
instants qui se succèdent et s’anéantissent cela ne veut
dire qu’il n’y ait
aucune différence
qualitative entre les différents instants qui composent une
journée car c’est
seulement l’idée de durée qui égalise et efface l’instant vécu pour
en faire une réalité
dégradée. L’intuition de l’instant vécu nous montre, tout au
contraire, combien des
instants peuvent être différents, combien ils peuvent être
plus ou moins riches,
plus ou moins denses, lourds ou légers, joyeux ou tristes11.
Le phénomène de
condensation instantanée
«Cueille l’instant», conception
épicurienne antique aurait pu être le titre
de ce paragraphe tant la
conception bachelardienne du temps rejoint celle des
épicuriens12. «Le temps
infini contient un plaisir égal à celui du temps limité, si de
ce plaisir on mesure les
limites par la raison», affirmait le philosophe. Alors la
question qui se pose
serait: comment un temps fini pourrait-il contenir autant de
plaisir qu’un temps
infini? Bachelard essaie de répondre à cette question dans les
dernières lignes de L’Intuition de
l’instant:
«Toute la force du temps se condense dans
l’instant novateur où la vue se
dessille, près de la
fontaine de Siloë, sous le toucher d’un divin rédempteur
9
Gaston Bachelard, La dialectique de la durée, éd. P.U.F.,
coll. «Quadrige», Paris, 1963, p.60
10
L’Intuition de l’instant, p.15
11
L’Intuition de l’instant, p.16
12
Littéralement, cette phrase signifie «Cueille le
jour présent et sois le moins confiant possible
en l'avenir». Elle est
tirée de vers latins du poète Horace, intéressé par l'épicurisme et le
stoïcisme (dans ses Odes, I, 11, 8 «À
Leuconoé»). Elle résume le poème qui le précède et dans
lequel Horace cherche à
persuader Leuconoé de profiter du moment présent et d'en tirer toutes les
joies, sans s'inquiéter ni
du jour ni de l'heure de sa mort. Rendu célèbre auprès du grand public
depuis l'Antiquité, l'extrait Carpe diem fait l'objet
d'une mauvaise interprétation: traduit par
«Profite du jour présent»
(alors que les deux mots signifient «cueille le jour»), est compris comme
une incitation à l'hédonisme le plus fort,
peut-être le plus aveugle, il perd tout rapport avec le texte
original, qui au
contraire, incite à bien savourer le présent (sans toutefois récuser toute
discipline de vie) dans
l'idée que le futur est incertain et que tout est appelé à
disparaître. C'est donc un
hédonisme d'ascèse, une recherche de plaisir ordonnée, raisonnée, qui
doit éviter tout déplaisir
et toute suprématie du plaisir. C'est un hédonisme a m inima: c'est un
épicurisme (Horace
faisait partie de ces épicuriens de l'ère romaine).
qui nous donne d’un même
geste la joie et la raison, et le moyen d’être
éternel par la vérité et la
bonté».(p.95)
Il s’agit selon Bachelard
de connaître «la joie et la raison» ainsi que de
devenir éternel. Le moyen d’être
éternel n’est autre que la capacité à
faire que «la force du
temps se condense». Vivre «plus» ce n’est pas
vivre plus longtemps mais
c’est vivre mieux, connaître un supplément
d’être.
De là l’inversion
proposée par Bachelard dans son article «Instant poétique et
instant métaphysique»13: le temps
doit parfois se faire «vertical» et non plus
simplement «horizontal».
Voila pourquoi toute l’importance de l’instant vécu
consistera alors à donner
à l’instantané les couleurs et le goût de l’éternité.
«Condenser» le temps
c’est d’abord prêter au présent les résonances du passé, de
notre plus lointain
passé. La condensation du temps est, tout simplement, une
«recherche de la base et
du sommet». Au-delà du sens psychanalytique du terme
qui n’est pas sans
intérêt, il faut comprendre le mot «condensation» dans le sens
qu’il prend en chimie;
c’est-a dire de rendre solide, d’amener à l’être-solide un
élément aussi volatil que
le temps. Il faut tout un art du progrès qualitatif de vivre.
Il y faut cette alchimie
que l’on appelle sagesse. C’est donc bien la densité
singulière d’un instant,
tout en nuances, tout en «différences», qu’à redécouvert
Bachelard. Ce qui fait, en
somme, la valeur d’un instant n’est pas son
inscription éphémère dans
une Durée majuscule mais c’est sa densité
qui lui permet de prendre
corps et d’être vraiment cueilli à l’arbre de
la vie, et de cultiver ce
carpe diem. De cette façon on pourrait considérer
qu’un instant vécu est
toujours plus qu’un instant. En ce sens nous pouvons
rappeler l’affirmation de
Proust qui s’éloignait à ce propos de la pensée
bergsonienne et qui
s’exprimait d’une façon très originale et poétique a à la fois
dans Le temps retrouvé:
«Une heure n’est pas qu’une
heure. C’est un vase rempli de parfums, de
sons, de projets et de
climats.»
Ce que Bachelard semble
dire c’est
qu’il n’appartient qu’à nous de
faire d’un instant une
telle condensation de réel. Ainsi, l’éthique
bachelardienne de l’instant vécu nous
donne les moyens d’habiter le temps
poétiquement. Solidifié,
condensé, l’instant restera non pas inscrit dans
l’être-mémoire bergsonien
mais «exinscrit» à l’être-vivant, ou plutôt «co-inscrit à
l’être», comme une nuance
musicale dans la marge de notre existence. Qu’est-ce
donc alors que se souvenir? C’est
«partir à la recherche des instants perdus»14
nous dit Bachelard; car
une durée ne peut en aucun cas faire l’objet d’une
réminiscence. Nous ne
nous souvenons pas, à proprement parler, d’une semaine
ou d’un mois, mais
toujours d’un instant précis dans sa densité plurielle et
inépuisable, éternelle.
13
G. Bachelard, «Instant poétique et instant
métaphysique» in Le droit de rêver, PUF,
collection
"Quadrige", 2010. (Œuvre posthume).
14
L’Intuition de l’instant, p.47.
Il faut la mémoire de
beaucoup d’instants pour faire un souvenir complet.
[…] Le temps n’a qu’une
réalité, celle de l’instant. Autrement dit, le temps
est une réalité resserrée
sur l’instant et suspendue entre deux néants. Le
temps pourra sans doute
renaître, mais il lui faudra d’abord mourir. Il ne
pourra pas transporter son
être d’un instant sur un autre pour en faire une
durée. L’instant c’est déjà
la solitude… C’est la solitude dans sa valeur
métaphysique la plus
dépouillée. Mais une solitude d’un ordre plus
sentimental confirme
isolement de l’instant: par une sorte de violence
créatrice, le temps limité
à l’instant nous isole non seulement des autres
mais de nous-mêmes,
puisqu’il rompt avec notre passé le plus cher. (p 13)
La dialectique de l’éveil
et du repos
Quatre années après la
parution de l’Intuition de l’instant, Bachelard publie
un autre livre consacré à
la notion de temps: La dialectique de la durée15. Il
entreprend d’y démontrer
que l’essence de ce que nous appelons «durée» n’est pas
seulement discontinue
mais, bien plus, dialectique. C’est-à-dire que,
contrairement à ce
qu’avançait Bergson, la durée est nécessairement hétérogène:
elle comporte des moments
négatifs que l’on pourrait appeler «intervalles». La
durée homogène n’est
jamais, pour l’être vivant, qu’une abstraction. C’est
pourquoi Bachelard
soutient qu’une «description temporelle du psychisme
comporte la nécessité de
poser des lacunes». On pourrait, par analogie, décrire la
physique bachelardienne
du temps comme une théorie atomiste. Lui même
n’hésite pas à s’en réclamer.
En ce sens, une fois de plus, Bachelard est épicurien.
Contre Aristote, Épicure
affirme que le temps est une succession de mouvements
et de repos: il confère
au repos une réalité temporelle positive. L’aristotélisme de
Bergson n’étant plus à
prouver, c’est sur le lien entre les deux «physiques du
temps» qu’il nous faut
concentrer notre analyse.
«Sans doute n’est-il pas
indifférent, qu’Épicure mette le repos sur le même
plan que le mouvement et
qu’il rapporte la perception du temps à des
couples contraires. Il
n’est pas impossible qu’il veuille ainsi suggérer que le
temps se caractérise, non
pas par une illusoire continuité du mouvement,
mais par l’alternance des
phases événementielles, éventuellement
contraires, et par les
ruptures qui marquent leur succession»16
Nous sommes ici en
présence d’une théorie dialectique de la durée telle
qu’elle est défendue par
Bachelard dans les ouvrages qui nous intéressent. Comme
chez Épicure, la physique
du temps a une fin pratique. La discontinuité temporelle
fonde une certaine
tranquillité: elle possède une vertu prophylactique qui nous
libère tout simplement de
la crainte de l’avenir et du poids du passé. Elle permet
l’«oubli», la vie
intempestive, qui est, selon Nietzsche, la faculté première du
surhomme, ce danseur
d’avenir.
La contribution de
Bachelard aux principes de la physique épicurienne
concernent Les notions
d’éveil et de repos. Il est remarquable en effet que,
15
La dialectique de la durée, p.128.
16
Morel P.-M., Les ambiguïtés de la conception
épicurienne du temps, Revue philosophique de
la France et de l’étranger 2002/2, Tome
127 - n° 2, p. 195-211.
dans La dialectique
de la durée Bachelard fasse jouer ensemble le couple
mouvement/repos et le couple éveil/repos. Ce jeu peut
nous éclairer sur la
nature de ces «lacunes»
constitutives de ce qu’est le temps. Les lacunes (ou
discontinuités) sont bien
des
«repos», surtout au sens grammatical du terme qui
nous enseigne qu’un
point, qu’une virgule, servent à reposer la voix. De même la
ponctuation réalise la
dialectique d’une écriture, de même le repos (la sieste, la
détente, le farniente...
etc.) réalise la dialectique de la durée. Le repos est tout
simplement nécessaire, au
même titre que le mouvement, et ce bien qu’il soit la
force qui le nie, bien
qu’il soit une «vaporisation d’être» plutôt qu’une
concentration. Et nous
pensons que Bachelard ne veut pas dire autre chose
lorsqu’il annonce dans
l’avant-propos de La dialectique de la durée sa conviction
que «le repos est
inscrit au cœur de l’être, que nous devons le sentir au fond
même de notre être,
intimement mêlé au devenir imparti à notre être intimement
mêlé au devenir imparti à
notre être au niveau même de la réalité temporelle sur
laquelle s’appuient notre
conscience et notre personne.»
La dialectique propre à
la durée n’est donc pas une dialectique au sens strict
qui verrait s’opposer
deux déterminations logiques absolues. Il s’agit d’une
dialectique de forces
subtiles, d’une dialectique héraclitéenne. Cette dialectique
de la différence, Bachelard
veut la penser comme un rythme: «Le rythme est
vraiment la seule manière
de discipliner et de conserver les énergies les plus
diverses. Il est la base
de la dynamique vitale et de la dynamique psychique. Le
rythme ― et non pas la
mélodie trop complexe ― peut fournir les
véritables
métaphores d’une
philosophie de la durée». Les dernières pages de la Dialectique
de la durée pourraient
assurer le lecteur qu’il y trouverait matière à penser et
à repenser le monde, la
vie et l’esprit. Il nous suffirait alors de retenir l’aspect
polémique de cette
nouvelle science du rythme, comme l’affirme David Macey17,
dans l’article Le «moment»
Bergson-Bachelard18 en contredisant toutes
les affirmations qui
veulent faire du temps une donnée métaphysique:
«La matière n’est pas étalée dans
l’espace, indifférente au temps; elle ne
subsiste pas toute
constante, tout inerte, dans une durée uniforme. [...] Elle
est, non seulement sensible
aux rythmes; elle existe, dans toute la force du
terme, sur le plan du
rythme, et le temps où elle développe certaines
manifestations délicates
est un temps ondulant, temps qui n’a qu’une
manière d’être uniforme: la
régularité de sa fréquence».
Toute l’éthique de
l’instant vécu, dont nous n’avons essayé qu’une analyse
dans l’espace restreint
d’un article, devra donc être une pratique personnelle du
rythme de l’éveil et du
repos, une libre éthique nos rythmes intérieurs, un travail
exigeant de condensation
et de dilatation, de tension, de détente, de concentration,
et de sublimation de
l’être. Voila pourquoi, L’Intuition de l’instant reste encore un
livre à déchiffrer et à
approfondir.
17
David Macey, "Le «moment»
Bergson-Bachelard", Acta Fabula, Essais critiques, URL:
http://www.fabula.org/revue/document5315.php
18
La dialectique de la durée, p.130.
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(1938).
3. Bachelard G.,
(1970), Le Rationalisme appliqué, Paris, PUF, (1949).
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(1973), L’intuition de l’instant. Etude sur la Siloë de Gaston
Roupnel, Paris, Gonthier,
(1932), Recherches en Education - n° 4 octobre 2007 -
Michel Fabre 84.
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(1970), Lautréamont, Paris, José Corti, (1939).
6. Barthes R.,
(1973), Le plaisir du texte, Paris, Seuil.
7. Berger G.,
(1964), Phénoménologie du temps et prospective, Paris, PUF.
8. Bergson H.,
(1965), Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience,
Paris, PUF, (1889).
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10. Fabre M.,
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11. Fabre M.,
(2001), Gaston Bachelard. La formation de l’homme moderne,
Paris, Hachette.
12. Houde O.,
(1995), Rationalité, développement et inhibition, Paris, PUF.
13. Husserl E.,
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