BACHELARD TO BARTHES
223
a state of suspended reading." "Nous lisions," Bachelard writes ad–
miringly in
La Poetique de La reverie,
"et voici que nous revons."
Reverie is a kind of half-conscious state in which human projects
spontaneously express themselves in images of matter; either water,
fire, earth or air is the "privileged substance" for each of the four
"fundamental oneiric temperaments" which Bachelard sets out to
classify in several of his works. "For certain souls, water is the matter
of despair." Or: "... All tranquillity is a dormant water. ... In
front of dormant water, the
reveur
adheres to the world's repose."
The absorption of a reverie into a material substance is a participa–
tion in the life of that substance. It
is
the act by which imagination
becomes
the world, breaks down the duality between the self and
the universe. Literature gives to these reveries "the exuberance of
forms"; it is the "emergence" of imagination, the completion of
human desires. But Bachelard is interested only in the "detached
images" of poetry; the formal arrangements of a whole poem or
novel are an obstacle to the reader's identification with "the poetic
will,"
with the "elan" of reverie which is the source of poetry. The
poetic image should, then, be the origin of the reader's reverie about
origins.
By all ordinary standards of judgments, Bachelard's taste in
poetry is often execrable. It is not always "to vibrate phenomenolo–
gically" that you make your eyes hurriedly leave the lines he quotes.
But of course that's not the point. Our notions of literary quality are
perhaps no more invulnerable to attack than Bachelard's "judgment"
of an image on the basis of its reverie-provoking potency. The crucial
element in his thought is what might be called a structuralist version
of the old idea of poetry's inspirational power. The power of poetry
is its ability to disappear, to make us participate so completely in the
structures of the creating imagination that- like the poet himself who
lives the lives of the elements-we no longer
see
the poem in our
identification with the act that produced it.
Bachelard is the Freud of the French new critics, in the sense
that he has provided them with a vocabulary in which to describe
mental reality. Much of what is bizarre in the works of Poulet, Staro–
binski, the early Barthes (his essay on Michelet), and especially
Richard derives from Bachelardian assumptions about the imagina–
tion's fundamental themes. Richard defines thematic criticism as a
"critique abyssale," a "study of hidden physical or humoral sources."
