It’s Elementary: Gaston Bachelard, An Intellectual Biography

(Reaktion Books, University of Chicago Press.)

“An element, we take it, is a body into which other bodies may be analyzed, present in them potentially or in actuality, and is not itself divisible into bodies different in form. That, or something like it, is what all men in every case mean by element.”

--Aristotle, “On the Heavens,” 350 BCE.

Perhaps the most famous of the horde of books by the prolific French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) was his marvelous tome from 1957, The Poetics of Space. It was so popular that it almost accidentally became a bestseller, at least by the standards of rarefied French philosophers, so that Bachelard nearly achieved the same stature as the pop media philosopher Marshall McLuhan. It’s certainly the one that had the most lifelong impact on me personally, since I first encountered it many years ago on the nightstand bookcase of a youthful chum who was an architecture student at the time. He kept it in pride of place in a charming little shelf-like display that contained only about three or four books. I borrowed The Poetics of Space from his shelf (possibly without his permission) during one visit, and I didn’t return it for thirty years.

Eventually I not only acquired my own copy (and mailed his worn- out one back to him) but also became obsessively familiar with a host of other books by this thinker, who has had at least as much impact on the world of interdisciplinary cultural speculative literature as the great German critic Walter Benjamin. And now we have a most welcome addition to our shared Bachelard fetish, the first English biography exploring his life, work, thought and rightful place as a sui generis philosopher of the science of imagination. Steven Connor, a Professor of English and director of research at the Digital Future Insititute, King’s College London, is the author of some twenty books, including The Madness of Knowledge and Dreamwork. His Gaston Bachelard: An Intellectual Biography has been well worth the wait. (All three volumes are published by Reaktion Books.) Perhaps no other writer, with the exception of Benjamin and McLuhan, has managed to carve out as idiosyncratic a territory as Bachelard, who has few peers and practically no competitors.

Bachelard explored a unique domain of study, especially since he did not originally plan to become a professional writer at all, and his is a speculative realm. Raised in rural France, he served in the First World War, worked for many years as a postal clerk, and then, after polymathic study as an autodidact, he pursued degrees in both science and philosophy while teaching in his humble local school. His surprising path toward intellectual acclaim eventually led him to a professorship at the Sorbonne, where he had an enormous influence on many important French thinkers (among them Michel Foucault, Louis Althussur, Jacques Derrida and Bruno Latour). He is primarily known today for building bridges between disciplines and merging his deep insights in the most interstitial and liminal of ways, especially in his exploration of the psychology of the imagination (as in the literal component of our mental and emotional attachment to poetic images) and his many works which are inspired by the elements—earth, air, fire and water. His achievement has been to negotiate a constant tension between science and poetry, calculation and dream, especially the waking dreams we call reverie.

Connor expertly explores Bachelard in all facets of his life and work, in an intimate portrait that also illuminates his eloquent struggles with the nature of knowledge itself (officially designated as the zone of epistemology) and his fascination with the elements, which Bachelard called the “hormones of the imagination.” Following his inspiration by the historic work of Hegel, who believed that through the four elements we have the elevation of sensuous ideas into thought-forms, Bachelard has examined, in each progressively more impressive and highly accessible book, how the elements have parallel manifestations in our feelings, hopes, dreams, and even our nightmares. Connor demonstrates, in a deft collision of personal biographical data and professional dedication, how Bachelard’s graceful phenomenology of the imagination proposed to explore all the human values contained in poetic images and how, in his book on the element of air, for instance, he wanted to “reestablish imagination in its living role as a guide of human life, a role defined by human transcendence.” Some of his books are so gracefully composed that not only do they examine the poetics of the elements, but they also achieve a lofty place as poetry in themselves.

Connor commences his appreciative biography of Bachelard by astutely acknowledging an intriguing paradox at the heart of biography as a literary genre: a public figure who has lived out their life so much through their work that we feel we already know them via their own rich words. 

This book inhabits and is energized by a paradox. The biographer comes up against a strange and frustrating blank when it comes to the evidence of that life. To set about writing the life of one who, like Gaston Bachelard, spent much of their life writing and seems to have had little time for anything else. For it may appear that one who has spent their time writing has already turned their life into the Life, ghost-writing in advance any attempt by another coming after to write it. We write and read the lives of writers in part to make doubly sure the assurance of this doubling of life by writing. Bachelard’s life as a thinker and writer is devoted to the work of understanding what it means to delegate one’s life to thinking and writing.

The charming circularity with which Connor approaches his task of examining how a quaint rural upbringing and a job as a postal clerk somehow led him to become a certain kind of academic star and widely read author (in certain circles), who didn’t publish his first work until he was 48, is itself a kind of Bachelardian map of digressive detours and abrupt arrivals after slow-motion travel. From his earliest works, The Dialectic of Duration in 1936, in which he approaches time as an element as tangible as earth but as transient as air, and The Psychoanalysis of Fire in 1936, in which he undertakes a study of the imaginative poetics of heat and flames and their cultural parallels, Bachelard mapped out a territory that belonged to him alone. Likewise with the works that rapidly flowed afterwards like a veritable river of words: Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (1942); Air and Dreams (1943); Earth and Reveries of Will (1948); and Lautreamont (1956). This last, his quirky study of an even quirkier proto-surrealist whose real name was Isidore Ducasse, is a stunning book which James Hillman once called psychoanalysis without a patient. All of these works established his place in the history of images, poetry and the science of our shared imaginings.

It’s no wonder that architects like my youthful friend were given the task of studying The Poetics of Space, since few explorations have managed to approach the depth, height or width of Bachelard’s grasp of the poetry of dwelling and his consideration of several kinds of “praiseworthy spaces conducive to the flow of poetic imagery.” For him, dwelling consists of occupying spaces that are privileged, and a house is not a home unless it is transformed into a kind of nest. Another feature of Bachelard’s thinking and writing, a virtue which is extolled at length in Connors’ deep bio-dive, is the relentless forward motion of Bachelard’s mission to mine every nook and cranny of how our psyche is an echo of various elements. In the closing paragraphs of The Poetics of Space, its author opines that the book the reader is finishing ties into another one he has yet to write, calling it a “condensation of public lectures and metaphysical speculations.”

That book would follow soon enough, as Connor explains: 

The Poetics of Reverie, which appeared in 1960, seems intended to fulfill this ambition. It carries forward the introversive impetus of Poetics of Space, which, directed first of all at space, moves inward to the intimate space of the house, and then, leaving behind particular spaces and places, ends with tightly-coiled reflections on the spatiality of reverie itself. In Poetics of Reverie, Bachelard proclaims a phenomenology of the imaginary where the imagination is restored to its proper, all important place as the principle of direct stimulation of psychic becoming. 

A singularity is at the heart of this insightful philosopher and poet, as it is perhaps at the heart of every truly gifted specialist who emerges from a commonplace background and even has to maintain themselves early on by working at somewhat nondescript jobs while developing whatever superior skill is embodied in their eventual livelihood. For instance, one marvels that a simple country boy in the French countryside village of Bar-sur-Aube toils away as a postal clerk, then a humble schoolteacher, before launching himself into the stratosphere of his true calling. But then, one also recalls that many fabulously innovative thinkers worked in relative obscurity at near menial, or at least quotidian tasks, until their moment somehow arrived. Diverse examples are far afield, from T.S. Eliot in a bank job to Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives working as insurance executives, Franz Kafka squirreled away in his legal secretary position in the Prague Accident Institute, and one more genius with a wild hairdo who also leaps to mind.

As Connor reminds us, “There are striking parallels between the young man working in a provincial post office and another young man who had commenced work around the same time as an Expert III Class in the Swiss Patent Office in Zurich: Albert Einstein. Having completed a doctoral thesis, Einstein nevertheless sustained himself in this occupation for seven years, working six eight-hour days a week, while secretly pursuing his scientific work.” The remarkable thing about Bachelard was the manner in which he absorbed certain tragedies such as the sudden death of his young wife Jeanne in a mode of coping that becomes synonymous with his systematic thought patterns, most notably a creative celebration of interruption and discontinuity that permitted him to explore both science and the arts simultaneously, and even to merge them into a single alchemical whole.

Connor offers a cogent analysis of how Bachelard managed to stay the course of his creative evolution by means of a simple but dramatic survival mechanism:

 

On the point of entering the period of his celebrity (1938-1940) Bachelard began to give signs of the intellectual fission that would characterize the final two decades of his life. Thereafter, the one thing that Bachelard would be known for was the fact of there being two Bachelards. The Formation of the Scientific Mind would be the last book in which Bachelard would trust himself to put the two sides of his intellectual nature into such close proximity. Thereafter, the two Bachelards, one devoted to the wide awake world of scientific rationalism and the other to the spellbound gloaming of magical thinking, would not be permitted to coexist in the same work.

Connor brilliantly designates this ability as “engineering the encounter between knowledge and the imagination” and it is this canny biographical means that most clarifies some of what makes Bachelard a one-of-a-kind anomaly: a nocturnal being for whom thinking systematically and dreaming poetically not only are not at war with each other but actually nourish one another to an astonishing degree.

One of the most memorable achievements of this sensitively delivered book is that it is as much a biography of the ideas and writings of Bachelard as it is about the man who thought and composed them, hence An Intellectual Biography. He keeps a loose but confident hold on the reins of events and occurrences in the author’s life and always manages to focus our attention on not only the parallels between events and ideas, but also the impossibility of ever separating them. An example would be the exemplary chapter on the Occupation, 1940-42, Bachelard’s skillful navigation of teaching in his new academic appointment at the Sorbonne while Paris was under the paranoid constraints of the Vichy government, and his interactions with a variety of personages who became acclaimed members of the resistance. By far his most significant achievement during this period however was not just resistance but also his persistence, indeed, his insistence on being Gaston Bachelard, a creative force who always seemed to be a couple of decades ahead of everyone around him.

For me, and to a certain extent for Connor as well, it is with The Poetics of Reverie, probably his last significant work, that Bachelard reaches a sort of apotheosis, of himself. In it, he shares extraordinary meditations between the awareness of the daydreamer and the rest of the world around him, for which he claims reverie as the most dynamic point of reference. After all, considering its subtitle Childhood, Language and the Cosmos, he goes even further than merely the world and claims for reverie a dominion over the psychology of poetic wonderment itself. His hugely entertaining ruminations on the connecting tissues of consciousness to matter, in which he almost posits humanity as a phenomenal example of matter dreaming of itself, don’t just border on the emphatically spiritual. What they do so admirably in fact is to erase the borderline between inside us and outside us altogether: “What Bachelard discovers in his sequence of books on the imagination, and what proved to be most ‘Bachelardian’, is a particular style of heightening, apprehensible as a kind of willful of style itself. Air and Dreams (1943) brings to the fore the most characteristic feature of Bachelard’s new style, in the insistent pressure of hyperbole, enlarged from an occasional habit to a veritable principle of thought.”

Indeed, I would summarize by comfortably claiming that hyperbolic ekphrasis had become an emblematic signature of all his many charming roamings back and forth between science and poetry. And Connor’s new biography effectively charts the personal course for that shimmering erasure of all borders and limits with an abundance of impressive evidence drawn from the elementary daily existence of his admirable subject. Both of them.

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.