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Gaston Bachelard: “If there be a philosophy of poetry, it must appear and reappear… in the very ecstasy of the newness of the image.” (1)”Because of its novelty and its action, the poetic image has an entity and a dynamism of its own: it is referable to direct ontology.” (2) “The communicability of an unusual image is a fact of great ontological significance… In order to clarify the problem of the poetic image philosophically, we shall have recourse to a phenomenology of the imagination.” (3)
Genesis: Language
Binary: Narrative/Poetic
First Analysis: “Author-Function” and “Free-Spectator”
Physical Definition: A narrative is a story. It is broken into scenes, and each scene develops the narrative sensibly (paragraphs and chapters in, what are ironically, called novels). A poem is a short work, broken into fragments. The audience has to complete the poem, and fill in blanks, rather than follow the story (which implies being “led”). The narrative tells a story over time, the poem reflects on a moment in time.
Metaphysical Definition: In all languages there is a difference between poetry and narrative. First there is the “object” of language (language existing at all) and then there are two modes, two ways of using (written) language: as “narrative” and “poetry.” A narrative tells a story from A, to B, to C. Poetry does not seek to carry us from point to point sensibly, but leaves the image open, and fragmented. A painting which seeks to represent the world as it was seen by the artist (or “anyone”) is “narrative.” A painting which I cannot recognise, such as an abstract, which suggests that “I” complete the image, is “poetic.”
Narrative works by subtracting the “author” from our experience of the work, creating a “suspension of disbelief.” In terms of French analysis, this is called “histoire,” an objective third-person-perspective (in which we suspend our knowledge of the second person, the author). The “poetic” does not suspend our disbelief (creating a pretend world to watch, a diegesis). It often presents images in “series,” like a “list.” In narrative I see “what” is said (the diegesis, an imaginary world). In poetry I see also “how” it is said. It makes me aware of what the French call “discours” (the opposite of histoire, a discourse which makes me aware that it is a discourse, discourse qua discourse). The “poetic” invites us to contemplate its “concrete” existence in the world as “experience,” as discourse with “me,” the spectator. The “poetic” suggests that we question our interpretations, perhaps even leaving the realm of interpretations behind. I do not really “interpret” a Mark Rothko painting, I simply experience it as a concrete, real experience of paint (4).
A poetic image suggests that we do philosophy, ontology and phenomenology with the image, to work out what it might mean to me. In this sense I am speaking of the poetic as something the author does, as a “function” of their authorship which leaves “traces” in the image. The narrative image has a clear trajectory, often using just one cliché structure in which characters encounter a problem, and then succeed in overcoming it. This structure is a “trace,” something which the author chose to do, in order to say something in particular to me, the spectator. As such, I am positioned by the text, and it has power over the meanings I produce. (5)
But, it is more complex than this. There is poetry all the time in narrative, and many poems use narrative images. Let us say then that there are works which are dominantly narrative, and works that are dominantly poetic (6). In the narrative there is always the potential for the images to open onto the poetic. In the poetic there is always the potential for the images to collapse into narrative meaning. Each text is neither one or the other, but is both narrative and poetry, in proportion (a logos of narrative, a “narratology”).
Further more, a Hollywood film (narrative to me, often devoid of poetry) would become a “poetic-image” to anyone who didn’t know the language of narrative films (considered to be a “language” by many). A Jackson Pollock painting which one person sees as concrete, another may see as figurative, like the way we see images in clouds. I have often noticed this when viewing abstract art with certain other people. I see just a “thing,” an experience of colour and paint. For them, they see things in the paintings: that looks like a face, or that looks like a car. Sometimes I do this too, but not as often. In this sense there are two kinds of “poetic images,” those that you feel were intended as poetry, and those which you have chosen to read as poetry regardless of their “author-function.”
The “poetic image” of Gaston Bachelard is very similar to Deleuze’s “time-image,” Bertolt Brecht’s “author as producer,” and to Annette Kuhn’s descriptions of the “open,” or “feminine” mode of discourse.
See also: Time-Image, Ontology
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Notes (Wayfarer Library)
(1) Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, pxi.
(2) Bachelard, pxii.
(3) Bachelard, pxiii.
(4) However, is it the “material” as Greenberg holds, or the “metaphysical,” as Merleau-Ponty holds, or “movement” itself, as Deleuze holds?
(5) This paragraph draws on Foucault’s notion of the “author function,” in “What is an Author?” in John Caughie’s Theories of Authorship (Routledge, 1981) p282-291.
(6) An idea I picked up from Roman Jakobson, through Alex Greenhough.
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