By Gaston Bachelard
Passages from Bachelard's significant works are brought right here in excerpts chosen by means of Colette Gaudin, a professor of French literature at Dartmouth university and an expert on Bachelard.
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Extra resources for On Poetic Imagination and Reverie
Sample text
66 H. James, The Golden Bowl 39. ” The economy that we see in the concentration of the The Golden Bowl’s plot compresses the narrative pattern that was dispersed throughout art galleries, collections, furniture, and the architecture of palaces in The Portrait of a Lady. The main theme centres on the trends of a society; a characteristic statement from Amerigo allows the narrator to consider the power of this general law. As he declares “Oh, if I’m a crystal I’m delighted that I’m a perfect one, for I believe that they sometimes have cracks and flaws – in which case they are to be had very cheap,” the following comment is made about him: Representative precious objects, great ancient pictures and other works of art, fine eminent “pieces” in gold, in silver, in enamel, majolica, ivory, bronze, had for a number of years so multiplied themselves round him and, as a general challenge to acquisition and appreciation, so engaged all the faculties of his mind, that the instinct, the particular sharpened appetite of the collector, 67 had fairly served as a basis for his acceptance of the Prince’s suit.
The long process of narration throughout the book’s six hundred pages thus constructs a perfect unity of the heroine’s emotional makeup. Unlike the countess of Gemini who “paid justice to Rome,” but not to the ruins or the catacombs, nor even to the monuments, Isabel – like Henry James who was captivated from his very first journey in 18691870 by the Roman columbaria and burial grounds – finds nothing more in the “Eternal City” than the confirmation of her gloomiest urges. It is not without irony that this process occurs under the ever-present eye of 30 H.
The scene described in chapter six, in which the narrator brings up Miss Tina’s “ecstasy,” when she is moved by the marvels of the Grand Canal (that she had forgotten all about after living confined in an old “dilapidated palace”), is a notable example. Venice turns out to be a “stifling” town, an obsessed town, whose magnificence is contrasted with the scourge that is rotting away its old palaces. But in the heart of this old city corrupted by money (tourists fiercely haggle for a discount on a gondola trip), there is a steadfast “centre,” a permanence embodied in the mystical cult of historic relics, which offers a final line of resistance to financial power.