39 pages • 1 hour read
Gaston BachelardThe Poetics of Space
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1957A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary and Analysis: “Corners”
Another case that creates and contains solitude—this time within the human world—is the corner. Bachelard writes that the corner is a space for solitude and silence. Corners are particularly useful for the imagination because they emulate immobility. When individuals are in a corner, they sense that they are protected, sheltered, and able to be still.
Bachelard refers to the corners of the house as well as the corners of being, postulating that children discover their own sense of existence within the corners of their beings. He also states that topoanalysis explores both the introvert and the extrovert—concepts refined by Carl Jung. The terms "introvert” and “extrovert” could also be replaced in The Poetics of Space with “interior” and “exterior.” By leaving home and experiencing the exterior, individuals are forced to confront their own existence in relation to the exterior world. They then retreat home, back to the safety of their own consciousness.
Bachelard uses the phrase “life in corners,” referencing those physical and figurative spaces that invite engagement with conscious and unconscious awareness. Corners offer respite for those seeking a place to sulk and feel gloomy, as experienced by a character in the novel L’amoureuse initiation by O. V. de Milosz. The dreamer in Milosz’s novel also sought corners to alleviate boredom and engage in reverie. Corners offer respite for those seeking a place to read and daydream; in this instance, Bachelard points to those spaces in the memories of childhood where individuals spent hours exploring their own imaginations. He suggests that corners contain universes.
Throughout The Poetics of Space, Bachelard asks readers to connect with their childhood: the houses of their childhood, the corners where they found refuge, the boxes that hid their trinkets. His work centers the phenomenology of the imagination, and childhood offers the first introduction to the imagination as well as, arguably, the most vivid use of it. It is this childlike connection to space that reinforces its emotional architecture. In the corner, a child can find a place to hide, to feel solitude, to brood, to chase a daydream, and to explore universes. Thus, once again, the themes of the Relationship Between Design and Emotion and Humanity’s Relationship with Interior Space are crucial to The Poetics of Space.
Chapter 7 Summary and Analysis: “Miniature”
Bachelard again turns to childhood to provide an example of a concept. Here, the miniature is more than just something made smaller. It has “profound values” (169). Something draws a child to the miniature: a dollhouse, a toy car, a minuscule soldier. Bachelard suggests that the absurdity of things in miniature can liberate, as in the example of the prisoner who imagines himself riding the tiny train inside a painting. Miniatures take many forms, including the examples from childhood mentioned above, as well as things viewed from a distance or magnified by a microscope. They can also mean the small sensory details in a text that transfer a reader into a different world.
Miniatures appeal to the imagination because they lend value to everything, which, in turn, leads to daydreaming. Bachelard offers multiple literary examples of the miniature or of things examined in their miniature form. In each, the imaginative descriptions center on feelings of warmth and intimacy. When an observer considers things in miniature or examines them through a magnifying glass, new worlds open. These new worlds have immense value, a term that Bachelard uses to indicate meaning, beauty, and vastness.
An example of this is that of the poet concentrating attention on a spot viewed through a curved glass. The longer the poet ruminates on this spot, the larger and more imposing the spot becomes. In this moment, Bachelard suggests that the imagination can run freely. The miniature spot reveals universes. Often, when Bachelard speaks of the imagination, he speaks of universes. His philosophical thought aligns the two: Accessing one’s imagination means dipping into a collective consciousness—a cosmos—and accessing things beyond oneself. Miniatures allow individuals to ignore or blur those things that lie outside the imagination so that they can center their focus on the imagination.
Bachelard speaks again of his preference for phenomenology over psychoanalysis. When interpreting a text, psychologists or psychoanalysts become bogged down by their own experiences, so that they inflict the weight of their own minds upon a passage. The phenomenologist inhabits the text, experiencing everything as the entities in the story. Miniatures in a text place the reader in a space; they force the reader to inhabit the story and take note of its nuances.
This chapter speaks little of the subject of the house, leaving the reader to make inferences about the connection between the house and the miniature. The argument could be made that the role of the miniature within a house—that of focusing attention on fine details and sensory experience—offers the inhabitant the opportunity to engage with multiple universes. It increases warmth and intimacy.
Chapter 8 Summary and Analysis: “Intimate Immensity”
In contrast to Chapter 7, Chapter 8 zooms out and examines immensity. Immensity evokes feelings of existentialism and grandeur. Bachelard explains that the imagination and its ability to engage vastness are one of the purest forms of consciousness. This imaginative space of immensity is what Bachelard calls “elsewhere,” the place one immediately travels to when engaging the imagination (202).
Bachelard utilizes the example of the forest to illustrate a sense of immensity. The farther the individual travels into the forest, the larger the forest feels and the greater the sense of infinite space. However, Bachelard states that there can be intimacy within the immensity. In the case of the forest, individual trees can take on personas. The individual walking through the forest gets the sense of somehow being a part of it, of both inhabiting the space and being inhabited by the space. This appeals to Bachelard’s pursuit of the phenomenology of the imagination. If an immense space can increase a sense of consciousness outside the self, then it increases the understanding of what it means to be. Rilke references the intimacy of immensity when he speaks about “communion with the universe,” the moments of solitude within a vast space that forces perspective about life and existence within a larger reference point.
Bachelard returns to Milosz to illustrate this idea. Milosz takes in the full view of a garden and has the impression that he was also taking in the full view of his own existence. This sense occurs often when people consider vast spaces. Those visiting the Grand Canyon or looking at a landscape through the window of an airplane cannot help but draw personal connections between those spaces and their own experiences. The word “vast” invites the reader to consider both the physical space and the value of something, particularly in its relationship with being.
Throughout The Poetics of Space, Bachelard considers the duality of the exterior and the interior, which he will explore further in Chapter 9. This chapter’s focus on intimate immensity is juxtaposed with the preceding chapter’s emphasis on miniatures. Bachelard maintains that exterior and interior space support one another, each lending the other value. Immensity is made more vast by the presence of the miniature, and the miniature is made more wondrous by its contrast with the larger exterior world.
