Title Page:

Within the city dwelling, there is no room for daydreams:

Bachelards phenomenology of imagination and the poetics of space

Steven Michael DeBurger

University of Hawai`i at Manoa
Department of Political Science
2424 Maile Way
Saunders Hall, Room 640
Honolulu, HI 96822-2223
[email protected]

Within the city dwelling, there is no room for daydreams: Bachelards

phenomenology of imagination and the poetics of space

Abstract:
Gaston Bachelards work represents a philosophical investigation into the poetics of the house,
its interior places, and its outdoor context. It explores the edges of the imagination, recesses of
the psyche, the hallways of the mind ([1958],1994: vii). It appeals to sensation. Educationally it
can be used to better understand the interconnections between literature, imagination, and space;
and how these in turn shape our thoughts, memories, and daydreams. Narrative makes space
possible for the psychoanalytical production of dreams. It is poetry however, that brings into
being the space possible for a phenomenology of daydreams. For Bachelard, the horizontality of
the urban dwelling does not possess the verticality of consciousness needed in order to produce
images of the imaginary daydream. Poetry processes its own verticality. Poetic phenomenology
describes imagination as a perpetual interaction between the human subject and the image itself.
It creates the space of daydreams. The house is only a metaphor for this creation. The house,
the space between the rationality of the attic and the irrationality of the cellar, is the synthesis
between the rationality and irrationality of man. There we can dwell in recollection on the scenes
of our childhood, which give rise to what Aristotle called the pleasures of the imagination.

Cultural theorist Ben Highmore begins the second chapter of Cityscapes (2005) by
quoting Edgar Allen Poes The Man of the Crowd in order to foreground the theme of
illegibility of street scenes which create the spirit of modern urban existence. As the narrator
sits at the window of a London coffeehouse watching and reading the urban crowd, he sees a
metaphorical ocean of humanity. In Poes words, the man views the continuous tides of
population and the tumultuous sea of human heads (Poe [1840] 1960: 215-6). Upon reading
Highmores interpretation of Poe, it evoked in my memory instances where I have come across
other representations on the theme of the city-ocean. One such mental image in which I
reverted back is to be found in the French philosopher Gaston Bachelards ([1958] 1994) work
on the phenomenological determination of images, The Poetics of Space (xviii). In it Bachelard
writes: When insomnia, which is the philosophers ailment, is increased through irritation

caused by city noises causes me to curse my city-dwellers fate, I can recover my calm by
living the metaphors of the ocean (28).
I dream an abstract-concrete daydream. My bed is a small boat lost at sea; that sudden whistling is the
wind in the sails. On every side the air is filled with the sound of furious klaxoning. I talk to myself to
give myself cheer: now there, your skiff is holding its own, you are safe in your stone boat. Sleep in spite
of the storm. Sleep in the storm. Sleep in your own courage, happy to be a man who is assailed by the
wind and the wave.
And I fall asleep, lulled by the noise of Paris. (28)

The Poetics of Space looks not solely on the city-ocean, but the lived experience of
architecture. It represents a philosophical investigation into the poetics of the house, its interior
places, and its outdoor context. It explores the edges of the imagination, recesses of the psyche,
the hallways of the mind ([1958] 1994: vii). It appeals to our sensations. And can be used to
better understand the interconnections between literature, imagination, and space; and how these
in turn shape our thoughts, memories, and daydreams. In one explicit moment Bachelard writes
that the house constitutes a body of images and to bring order to these images one must consider
two principle connecting themes: 1) A house is imagined as a vertical being. It rises upward. It
differentiates itself in terms of its verticality. It is one of the appeals to our consciousness of
verticality. 2) A house is imagined as a concentrated being. It appeals to our consciousness of
centrality ([1958] 1994: 17). This verticality of the house is ensured by the polarity of the cellar
and attic. For Bachelard this polarity opens up different perspectives for a phenomenology of the
imagination. One can easily oppose the rationality of the roof to the irrationality of the cellar.
Edgar Allen Poes short story The Cast of Amontillado illustrates the natural fears of
the cellar, which produce cellar dreams. In the short story Montresor, the narrator, immures his
enemy, Fortunato, within the catacombs beyond the wine cellar under his palazzo. The

frightening mental image of the cellar as the location of buried madness or walled-in tragedy
leaves an indelible mark on the human memory. It exploits our natural fears, which are inherent
to the dual nature of both man and house (Bachelard [1958] 1994: 20).
We passed through a range of low arches, descended, passed on, and descending again, arrived at a deep
crypt, in which the foulness of the air caused our flambeaux to glow than flame.
At the most remote end of the crypt there appeared another less spacious. Its walls had been lined with
human remains, piled to the vault overhead, in the fashion of the great catacombs of Paris.

(Poe [1846] 1966: 194)

According to Bachelard, the cellar dream irrefutably increases reality ([1958] 1994:
20). The human wants the underground of legendary castles where mysterious passages and
unknown spaces lurk. But what if one lives in a city and has no cellar? Bachelard, citing the
novels of Henri Bosco, articulates that the novelist takes the reader to the ultra-cellar, in other
words the dreams of the dominating depths of the surrounding cellars. The ultra cellars consist of
the undergrounds of the city, the mysterious passages, the underworld, the land of the projects of
diabolical men, the unseen. The buildings of the city itself dig its cosmic roots into the stone as
a plant growing out into the blue sky of a tower. Below is a world subjected to the crushing mass
and the enormous upheavals of an oppressive world. But these enormous stone plants would
not flourish if it did not have subterranean water at its base. The house described here stretches
from earth to sky. It possesses the verticality of the tower rising from the most earthly, watery
depths, to the abode of a soul that believes in heaven (25). This illustrates the verticality of man.
It oneirically dramatizes the two poles of the house dream. The stairways go up in ascending
scales. What joy for the legs to go up four steps at a time! (26). [W]e always go up the attic
stairs, which are steeper and more primitive. For they bear the mark of ascension to a more

tranquil solitude (26). Stairways go down in descending scales. We always go down the cellar
stairs, and this going down is all we remember. Down into the unknown.
Thus we cannot remain men of only one story. He was a man with only one story: he
had his cellar in his attic (Joe Bousquet, from Bachelard [1958] 1994: 26). But in the modern
urban environment there are no houses, and the inhabitants of the city live in superimposed
boxes (Bachelard [1958] 1994: 26). For French poet Paul Claudel, the urban room is a sort of
geometric site, a conventional hole (27). This abode has neither space around it nor vertically
inside of it. The buildings are fastened to the ground with concrete, in order not to sink within the
earth. They have no roots. They have no cellars. From street to roof, the rooms pile on top of one
another, while the tent of the horizonless sky encloses the entire city. But the height of city
buildings is a purely exterior one. Elevators have taken away the heroism of stairclimbing so that
there is no longer any virtue of living near the sky. Home has become mere horizontality (27).
Thus the different rooms that compose living quarters jammed onto one floor lack the
fundamental principles for distinguishing and classifying the values of intimacy (27). The city
dweller lacks, not only the intimate value of verticality, he lacks cosmicity. The houses are not
longer set in natural surroundings. Its relationship between the house and space is an artificial
one. Everything is artificial and, on every side, intimate living flees (27). Within the city
dwelling, there is no room for daydreams.
Dreams have often been encountered in psychoanalysis. It requires an all-inclusive
symbolism to determine its interpretations (Bachelard [1958] 1994: 26). Thus psychoanalysis is
better equipped to study dreams for it does not take in account the complexity of mixed revery
and memory (26). Daydreams however require philosophy. They require a phenomenology to
untangle the complex of memory and imagination (26). The daydream produces symbols,

which bestow upon our most intimate of moments. From these moments our recollections
become sharper. The verticality of the symbolic steps, which ascend to the attic, or descend to
the cellar, engrave in the memory. Through this slight difference in level we recall memories of
the old house in its longitudinal detail, everything that ascends or descends comes to life again
dramatically (26). Thus the urban habitation lacks the personal verticality of the oneiric house.
It lacks the centers of condensation of intimacy, in which daydream accumulate (29).
Daydreams are visionary fantasies experienced while awake. They can consist of pleasant
thoughts of hopes and ambitions. They may also include fantasies of future scenarios or plans,
remembrances of past experiences, or vivid images, often connected with some type of emotion.
The house is a demonstration of the imaginary primitive elements that remain fixed in our
memories. An image sparks the imaginary.
Bachelards poetic phenomenology describes imagination as a perpetual interaction
between the human subject which imagines and the image itself. Imagination is thus recognized
to be conscious of something other than itself which motivates, induces and transforms it
(Kearney 1998: 97). The image is an act of intentional consciousness. Sartes solipsistic
conclusions sees it as a circle of self-involement; Bachelard as the spiral of mans dialogue of
the world (98). Thus creativity is not negation of being. It is a flare up of being in the
imagination. It is precisely in the creative act that the world comes to know itself in the images
of man (98). The poetic image reacts on other minds and in other hearts. It acts to transcend
reality and free man from the constriction of both past and present. The poetic image sparks the
imaginary, the site of daydreams. The image is to be understood as a genesis not an effect; and
this is possible only in a poetics where the suspension of causal preconceptions allows for an
assessment of the unprecedented nature of its being (99).

The theory of literary discourse thus explores what Hume called [a]ll those opinions
and notions of things, to which we have been accustomd from our infancy, take such deep root,
that tis impossible for us, by all the powers of reason and experience, to eradicate them (Hume
[1739] 1978: 116). Thus the poets fascination with images. These images produce opinions and
notions of things that are buried within the depths of the mind. Images create the imaginary.
Imagination is the great synthesizer of our universe. The house, for Bachelard, is giver of the
space in order to imagine. Through poetics we can analyze the experiences of the house, the attic
to the cellar, that construct imagination. The memory, senses, and understanding, says Hume,
are, therefore, all of them founded on the imagination, or the vivacity of our ideas ([1739]
1978: 265). Kathleen Raines Encounter evokes the imagination that exemplifies the
verticality, not only within the house, but also of the consciousness.
Fallen to what strange places
Love travels pilgrim,
And into what deep dream
Descend these bottomless synthetic stairs?

Out of the void, impassable locked doors,

Clocks, telephones and sound-proof rooms
Proliferate like cancer in the mind
Interior prisons vaster than the dark.

There I the dreamer stood

Watching the handsome soldiers pass
In uniform of time, conscripts of place
Coming and going in the mind of God.

And there I met my love

Whom I had known before the stars were made;
We paused in recognition, and I said
Carry this memory, an amulet against death.

But he replied
This is deaths house, where love must learn to die
And time moved on again, and we parted.
(Raine 1956: 84)

Moreover, the urban inhabitant is no longer aware of the world outside. The house does
not tremble, however, when thunder rolls (Banchelard [1958] 1994: 27). Within the skyscraper
we are less afraid. The lack of the urban dwellings cosmicity makes the study of the centers
of condensation of intimacy, in which the daydream accumulates problematic (29). A house
that lacks the interior verticality required for the production of the daydream, thus produces the
genesis of the hut dream, which is well-know to anyone who cherishes the legendary images of
primitive houses. The hut dream hopes to live elsewhere, far from the overcrowded room, far
from the city cares. It is for the dreamers of distant escape, searchers of real refuge. The root of
the hut dream is in the house itself. To Bachelard, How many dwelling places there would be
if we were to realize in detail all the images by means of which we live our daydreams of
intimacy (31). In Prelude Cambodian poet U Sam Oeur talks of urbanism as war. Imagery
necessary to facilitate a hut dream, for example.
My house was crowded, then, with noble ladies
Who couldnt eat (we had no beef or pork)
And couldnt drink (no iced teajust well water).
They filled our bedrooms and pilfered all books;

It was at that moment I sensed Id lost the war.

(U Sam Oeur 1998: 45)

Imagery is used in psychology and everyday discourse to refer to mental images, i.e., the
making (or re-creation) of any experience in the mind auditory, visual, tactical, olfactory,
gustatory, kinesthetic, organic this is a cognitive process employed by most, if not all, humans.
For Henri Lefebvre (2002), the image is the opposite of the signal and the sign. The image
rescues the past from the darkness (from unconsciousness, to use another terminology) and
dispersion, bringing it into the light of the present day (288). It arouses emotions, feelings and
desires and the deepest communication of all is achieved through images (288-289).
Poetry and literature can evoke through language, imagery.
He has only to give a few touches to the spectacle of the family sitting-room, only to listen to the stove
roaring in the evening stillness, while an icy wind blows against the house, to know that at the houses
center, in the circle of light shed by the lamp, he is living in the round house, the primitive hut, of
prehistoric man. (Bachelard [1958] 1994: 31)

The nativity of the hut dream is only an instance of the power of the image generated through
language. Language, or for Elaine Scarry (1999) the verbal art, especially narrative, is almost
bereft of any sensuous content. Its visual features, as has often been observed, consist of
monotonous small black marks on a white page (5). But [p]oetryagain unlike narrative
even has immediate sensory content, since the visual disposition of the lines and stanzas provides
an at once apprehensible visual rhythm that is a prelude to, or rehearsal for, or promise of, the
beautiful regulation of sound to come (7). William Wordsworth describes two fish living within
their glass bowl house as a glittering motion of sound.

How beautiful!Yet none knows why

This ever graceful change,
Renewedrenewed incessantly
Within your quiet range.
(Wadsworth 1936: 412)

Narrative, not poetry, makes space possible for the psychoanalytical production of
dreams. It is poetry however, that brings into being the space possible for a phenomenology of
daydreams. The horizontality of the urban dwelling does not possess the verticality of
consciousness needed in order to produce images of the imaginary daydream. Dreams of
verticality are personified through narrative. Poetry processes its own verticality. Poetic
phenomenology describes imagination as a perpetual interaction between the human subject and
the image itself. It creates the space of daydreams. The house is only a metaphor for this
creation. The house, the space between the rationality of the attic and the irrationality of the
cellar, is the synthesis between the rationality and irrationality of man. There we can dwell in
memory or recollection on the scenes of our childhood, which give rise to what Aristotle,
followed by Hobbes, called the pleasures of the imagination.

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References

Bachelard, Gaston. ([1958] 1994). The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.
Hume, David. ([1739] 1978). A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kearney, Richard. (1998). Poetics of Imagining. New York: Fordham University Press.
Lefebvre, Henri. (2002). Critique of Everyday Life Volume 2. London: Verso.
Poe, Edgar Allen. ([1846] 1996). The Cast of Amontillado, Complete Stories and Poems of
Edgar Allen Poe. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
_____. ([1840] 1996). The Man of the Crowd, Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allen
Poe. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Raine, Kathleen. (1956). The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Scarry, Elaine. (1999). Dreaming by the Book. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
White, Alan R. (1990). The Language of Imagination. London: Basil Blackwell.
Wordsworth, William. (1936). Gold and Silver Fishes in A Vase, Wordsworth Poetical Works.
London.
U Sam Oeur. (1998). Prelude, Sacred Vows: Poetry by U Sam Oeur. Minneapolis: Coffee
House Press.

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