Volume 2, Number 6 · April 30, 1964
Day-Dreams
By John Weightman
The Psychoanalysis of Fire
by Gaston Bachelard, translated by Alan C.M. Ross
Beacon, 284 pp., $3.95
The Poetics of Space
by Gaston Bachelard, translated by Maria Jolas
Orion, 241 pp., $6.00
When he died last year at the age of seventy-nine, Gaston Bachelard had some thirty books to his credit but, so far as I know, these are the only two available as yet in translation. The explanation for his neglect by Anglo-American publishers is, no doubt, that half his output consists of quite difficult works on the history and philosophy of science, while the other half, although much easier to read, is the sort of writing which appeals less to the general public than to other writers, particularly critics and essayists. With them, on its home ground, it has been so effective that Bachelard started a fashion in modern French literature. Once you have become acquainted with his approach and style, you find echoes of them everywhere, and not only in such avowed admirers as the critics, Roland Barthes and Jean-Pierre Richard. His vocabulary colors literary conversations and the literary reviews. He has not, to date, achieved the international fame of Sartre or Teilhard de Chardin, perhaps because he never dealt specifically with the ultimate metaphysical problems. He is neither a self-confessed and tortured atheist like Sartre, nor, like Chardin, a heretic combining a belief in God with proficiency in modern science. But, within the French context, he is almost as important as they are, because he has a pseudo-religious force, without taking a stand on religion. To define him as briefly as possibly—he is a philosopher, with a professional training in the sciences, who devoted most of the second phase of his career to promoting that aspect of human nature which often seems most inimical to science: the poetic imagination.
Review, 2314 words
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