The Dialectics of Outside and Inside

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Gaston Bachelard

This selection from The Poetics of Space demonstrates Gaston Bachelard's ability to bridge scientific logic with poetic analysis. As a phenomenological reading of the poetic image, it probes the geometrical divide between inside and outside through an analysis of the imagination of matter. It resists simplification, engaging with both physical and psychological body-space relations, and describes an exchange between interior and exterior in which the latter might be 'an old intimacy'. The dialectical condition of 'interior immensity' and the 'immeasurable outside', attests to the spatiality of being as a reflexive inquiry on interiority, what Bachelard calls intimate geometry grounded in imagination.

Once we have been touched by the grace of super-imagination, we feel it in the presence of the simpler images through which the exterior world deposits virtual elements of highly-colored space in the heart of our being. The image with which Pierre Jean Jouve constitutes his secret being is one of these. He places it in his most intimate cell:

La cellule de moi-même emplit d'étonnement

La muraille peinte à la chaux de mon secret.

(Les Noces, p 50)¹

(The cell of myself fills with wonder

The white-washed wall of my secret.)

The room in which the poet pursues such a dream as this is probably not 'white-washed.' But this room in which he is writing is so quiet, that it really deserves its name, which is, the 'solitary' room! It is inhabited thanks to the image, just as one inhabits an image which is 'in the imagination.' Here the poet inhabits the cellular image. This image does not transpose a reality. It would be ridiculous, in fact, to ask the dreamer its dimensions. It does not lend itself to geometrical intuition, but is a solid framework for secret being. And secret being feels that it is guarded more by the whiteness of the lime-wash than by

the strong walls. The cell of the secret is white. A single value suffices to coordinate any number of dreams. And it is always like that, the poetic image is under the domination of a heightened quality. The whiteness of the walls, alone, protects the dreamer's cell. It is stronger than all geometry. It is a part of the cell of intimacy.

Such images lack stability. As soon as we depart from expression as it is, as the author gives it, in all spontaneity, we risk relapsing into literal meaning. We also risk being bored by writing that is incapable of condensing the intimacy of the image. And we have to withdraw deep into ourselves, for instance, to read this fragment by Maurice Blanchot in the tonality of being in which it was written: 'About this room, which was plunged in utter darkness, I knew everything, I had entered into it, I bore it within me, I made it live, with a life that is not life, but which is stronger than life, and which no force in the world can vanquish.'² One feels in these repetitions, or to be more exact, in this constant strengthening of an image into which one has entered (and not of a room into which one has entered, a room which the author bears within himself, and which he has made live with a life that does not exist in life) one feels, as I said, that it is not the writer's intention merely to describe his familiar abode. Memory would encumber this image by stocking it with composite memories from several periods of time. Here everything is simpler, more radically simple. Blanchot's room is an abode of intimate space, it is his inner room. We share the writer's image, thanks to what we are obliged to call a general image, that is, an image which participation keeps us from confusing with a generality. We individualize this general image right away. We live in it, we enter into it the way Blanchot enters into his. Neither word nor idea suffices, the writer must help us to reverse space, and shun description, in order to have a more valid experience of the hierarchy of repose.

Often it is from the very fact of concentration in the most restricted intimate space that the dialectics of inside and outside draws its strength. One feels this elasticity in the following passage by Rilke:³ 'And there is almost no space here; and you feel almost calm at the thought that it is impossible for anything very large to hold in this narrowness.' There is consolation in knowing that one is in an atmosphere of calm, in a narrow space. Rilke achieved this narrowness intimately, in inner space where everything is commensurate with inner being. Then, in the next sentence, the text continues dialectically:

But outside, everything is immeasurable. And when the level rises outside, it also rises in you, not in the vessels that are partially controlled by you, or in the phlegm of your most unimpressionable organs: but it grows in the capillary veins, drawn upward into the furthermost branches of your infinitely ramified existence. This is where it rises, where it overflows from you, higher than your respiration, and, as a final resort, you take refuge, as though on the tip of your breath. Ah! where, where next? Your heart banishes you from yourself, your heart pursues you, and you are already almost beside

yourself, and you can't stand it any longer. Like a beetle that has been stepped on, you flow from yourself, and your lack of hardness or elasticity means nothing any more.

Oh night without objects. Oh window muffled on the outside, oh, doors carefully closed; customs that have come down from times long past, transmitted, verified, never entirely understood. Oh silence in the stair-well, silence in the adjoining rooms, silence up there, on the ceiling. Oh mother, oh one and only you, who faced all this silence, when I was a child.

I have given this long passage without cuts for the reason that it has dynamic continuity. Inside and outside are not abandoned to their geometrical opposition. From what overflow of a ramified interior does the substance of being run, does the outside call? Isn't the exterior an old intimacy lost in the shadow of memory? In what silence does the stair-well resound? In this silence there are soft foot-steps: the mother comes back to watch over her child, as she once did. She restores to all these confused, unreal sounds their concrete, familiar meaning. Limitless night ceases to be empty space. This passage by Rilke, which is assailed by such frights, finds its peace. But by what a long, circuitous route! In order to experience it in the reality of the images, one would have to remain the contemporary of an osmosis between intimate and undetermined space.

I have presented texts that were as varied as possible, in order to show that there exists a play of values, which makes everything in the category of simple determinations fall into second place. The opposition of outside and inside ceases to have as coefficient its geometrical evidence.

To conclude this chapter, I shall consider a fragment in which Balzac defines determined opposition in the face of affronted space. This text is all the more interesting in that Balzac felt obliged to correct it.

In an early version of Louis Lambert, we read: 'When he used his entire strength, he grew unaware, as it were, of his physical life, and only existed through the all-powerful play of his interior organs, the range of which he constantly maintained and, according to his own admirable expression, he made space withdraw before his advance.' $^{4}$

In the final version, we read simply: 'He left space, as he said, behind him.'

What a difference between these two movements of expression! What decline of power of being faced with space, between the first and second forms! In fact, one is puzzled that Balzac should have made such a correction. He returned, in other words, to 'indifferent space.' In a meditation on the subject of being, one usually puts space between parentheses, in other words, one leaves space 'behind one.' As a sign of the lost

'tonalization' of being, it should be noted that 'admiration' subsided. The second mode of expression is no longer, according to the author's own admission, admirable. Because it really was admirable, this power to make space withdraw, to put space, all space, outside, in order that meditating being might be free to think. (… p 231)

Notes

1 [Editors' note: See Pierre Jean Jouve, Poésie: Les Noces, Sueur de Sang, Matière Céleste, Kyrie, Mercure de France (Paris), 1964, p 43.]

2 Maurice Blanchot, L'arrêt de mort, p 124. [Editors' note: See Maurice Blanchot, L'arrêt de mort, Gallimard (Paris), 1948, p 124.]

3 Rilke, French translation, p 106, of Les Cahiers. [Editors' note: For another English translation see: Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge [1910], Oxford University Press (Oxford, New York), 1984, pp 70-1.]

4 Ed Jean Pommier, Corti, p 19. [Editors' note: See Honoré de Balzac, Louis Lambert: édition critique établie par Marcel Bouteron et Jean Pommier avec la collaboration de Madame Robert Siohan, J Corti (Paris), 1954, p 19. For an English translation see Honoré de Balzac, Louis Lambert (electronic resource), trans Clara Bell and James Waring, Champaign, Ill, Project Gutenberg, Boulder, Colo, NetLibrary, p 4, http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1943.]

'The Dialectics of Outside and Inside', from The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, translated by Maria Jolas, The Orion Press (London), 1964. © 1964 by The Orion Press, Inc. Original copyright © 1958 by Presses Universitaires de France. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. (Excerpt pp 227-31)