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BACHELARDS SUBVERSIVE HERMENEUTICS:

A READING OF LIGHTNING IN SHELLEYS
PROMETHEUS UNBOUND

EILEEN RIZO-PATRON
Binghamton University

Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours,

And momentsaye divided by keen pangs . . .
Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

Thunderbolt steers all things.

Heraclitus, Fragments

O nly in one tantalizing instance did Gaston Bachelard (18841962)

explicitly refer to his readings on the poetic imagination as a
hermeneuticsand that was in The Poetics of Space (La Potique de lespace,
1957) when he wrote that a hermeneutics, more profound than biogra-
phy, must determine the destinal centers (in literary works) by disentan-
gling historys conjunctive tissue which has no eect on our destinies.1
In this essay I will attempt to tease out what Bachelard might have
meant by this elliptical and rather enigmatic statementrst, by fore-
grounding its underlying hypothesis of discontinuous temporality along
with the suggestion that destiny can summon readers through sudden
intuitions or images that may emerge unexpectedly from unknown
depths in human works,2 and, secondly, by setting an instance of Bache-
lards subversive hermeneutics in motion through a rereading of Percy
Bysshe Shelleys Prometheus Unbound (1819) that focuses on the critical role
of lightning in this lyrical drama.
Although in his writings on the imagination Bachelard did not the-
matically develop a hermeneutic method as did other phenomenolog-
ical thinkers after Heidegger, such as Gadamer or Ricur,3 he insistently
pointed in the direction of a poetic hermeneutics throughout his career
with his suggestive remarks on the role of the literary image in semantic
and ontological innovationhighlighting those startling poetic intuitions
which, by the intensity and novelty of their action, can break into
the order of events with a dynamism of their own, unsettling language,

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provoking ruptures in the fabric of texts and unexpected turns in the

readers psyche (Poetics of Space xviii). One might even say that Bache-
lards writingsfrom his early LIntuition de linstant (1932) to his posthu-
mously published Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (Fragments dune potique du feu,
1988)challenge and in some ways subvert hermeneutic tradition by
redening literature itself as a transformative venture at the furthest
limits of creative evolution, that is, as literature litteraturans (modeled after
Spinozas natura naturans), rather than treating it as a created product,
archive of tradition, or literature litteratura (after Spinozas natura naturata).4
The interpreter, in this view, is called not so much to perpetuate the
legacy of a literary work through a faithfully descriptive exegesis but, more
importantly, to welcome and unfold its inductive force while actively tak-
ing up its invitation to dream.5
Yet, insofar as Bachelards hermeneutics focuses on the sudden emer-
gence of poetic images in consciousness, on mere fragments of texts,
while bracketing concerns for works as a whole or their insertion in his-
tory,6 it places itself under the direct line of re of the Gadamerian
critique of modern aesthetic consciousnessnamely, the type of con-
sciousness that according to Gadamer fullls itself in absolute disconti-
nuity or in the disintegration of the unitary aesthetic object into a
multiplicity of subjective, impressionistic experiences.7 Bachelard indeed
admits in Fragments of a Poetics of Fire, for instance, that he makes use of
elements borrowed from tradition only to prepare the way for the liter-
ary question that concerns him the mostnamely, whether an image or
gure must be rooted in tradition for its poetic force to be felt, whether its
history must be known for a poetics of the instant to emerge.8 His hope,
in this text, is to show that a gure such as the phoenix is a natural
or, he concedes, more or less naturalimage of re that bears unex-
pected quickening powers each time it is experienced in a new poetic
context (4142). And he hails the phenomenological approach for allow-
ing readers the simplicity of rst impressions in ones encounters with tra-
ditional imagery (38). In fact he never ceases to stress the importance of
returning again and again to what Mallarm called les eaux vives de la
navet, to allow ourselves rst to respond to natural phenomena and
images through natural reverie (38).9
The fragments Bachelard seeks to highlight and discuss in his read-
ings, I would further argue, are never arbitrary images but those very
destinal sites or magnetic intuitionstypically packed with opposite
chargesfrom which texts draw their heat and momentum, or toward
which they gravitate. It is precisely one such provocative intuition that
Bachelard sets out to explore through his reading of Gaston Roupnels
philosophical drama Silo (1927) in LIntuition de linstant 10namely, the

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insight on the disruptive yet potentially redemptive nature of the instant

on which Bachelard poignantly reects by turning to his own experience:

The cruelest mourning is the consciousness of a future

betrayed. When that shattering instant arrives as the eyes
of a cherished being close forever, we immediately feel the
hostile novelty with which the next instant pierces the
heart. This dramatic character of the instant may be what
enables us to sense its reality. For it is in the experience of
a certain rupture of being that the idea of discontinuity
imposes itself without dispute. Some might object that such
dramatic instants only separate two more monotonous
durations. But we call monotonous and regular every
evolution that we have not examined with passionate
attention. If our heart were large enough to love life in all
its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and
a plunderer, and that a young or tragic noveltyalways sud-
dennever ceases to illustrate the essential discontinuity of
time. (Intuition 15; my translation and emphasis).

I even propose that it is by embracing Roupnels leading intuition on the

nature of time and the instant in Silo that our unusual philosopher of
science might have been struck by the philosophically subversive insight
that would spark not only his epistemology but his future poetics as well.
In essence, the polemical intuition at stake here is that temporal conti-
nuity or historical duration is not something given a priori as the uncon-
scious ow of lifea widely accepted notion developed by Bergson in
Lvolution cratrice (1907)but that what is given a priori is, instead, the
promise of possibility at every instant in time. As Bachelard had written in
an even earlier text on science, The possible is the a priori framework
of the real (Valeur inductive de la relativit 81). This means that historical
duration, for him, is ultimately something we create out of possibility
(Intuition 7995): we weave continuity out of those dramatic instants to
which we attach ourselves and consecrate as our destinal sites, however
prereectively, allowing them to organize and orient our lives and works.
Duration, for Bachelard, is thus a fabric woven on the basis of our
responses to an intuited promise or imagined fate, and on our repeated
evocation of this destiny in a movement of reverie whichunlike hap-
hazard dreamsworks in a star-like pattern, rhythmically returning to
its center to shoot out new beams (Psychoanalysis of Fire 14).
This thesis further suggests that, for Bachelard, what is delivered
to our experience at any given instant in timewhether it be a living

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phenomenon, or an image in a literary textis never an enduring real-

ity, constituted and propelled into its future by its past, a reality merely
to be acknowledged and faithfully represented by the perceiver. Rather,
in his view, what is given to experience presents itself at every pulsing
moment as a site of indeterminacy, fraught with ambivalenceas an
event that needs and calls for an interpreters existential engagement and
ethical struggle at a level of material and dynamic reverie, beyond sense
experience. It is only from such a responsive engagement by interpreting
subjects that a phenomenon (natural or existential), or even a human
work, can yield a particular meaning and contour at a particular moment
in time. Specically, as readers, we are thus summoned time and again
to play out our destinies before the texts to which we are drawn
(Lautramont 59), so that our respective readings end up disclosing our
tacit attitudes, value struggles, and nal aims vis vis the ambivalences
and claims of the text itself. This is how a literary work can become, for
Bachelard, a living site of disclosure and potential transformation of self
and world: an event of literature litteraturans.
Years later, in Earth and Reveries of Repose (La Terre et les rveries du repos,
1948) Bachelard would go so far as to claim that in those tiny images
which can surprisingly harbor a texts deepest tensions and aspirations,
the universe of expressionhowever indeterminate and open-ended
presents itself as an autonomous world that oers itself as an opportu-
nity for liberation with regard not only to the Eigenwelt, the personal
world envisaged by existential hermeneutics (Daseinanalyse), but also to the
Mitwelt and Umwelt, the social and environing worlds (7677). While it
remains to be seen whether or to what degree such bold claims actually
bear themselves out (as in the case of the lyrical drama we are about
to examine), it is important to highlight Bachelards basic wager that a
textual hermeneutics attentive to the subtle explosions of a sudden poetic
insight, far from being a solipsistic or self-indulgent exercise, may deliver
us to a primordial site of beingthe time of a potentially fertile instant
where the destinal forces, hidden wills, and habits of thought that have
tacitly shaped our sedimented worlds may be critically exposed, perhaps
even shattered, clearing the way for the advent of unprecedented ways
of seeing, thinking, and being.
Already in LIntuition de linstant Bachelard had begun to formulate and
put to the test what would eventually become one of the accompa-
nying features of his subversive hermeneutics: imaginative deformation
(the play of possibility).11 Endorsing Samuel Butlers claim that if a truth
is not strong enough to endure distortion and rough handling, it does
not come from a very robust species,12 he had argued that the best
way to measure the true force of a poets images is to subject them to

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elemental deformation or, conversely, to allow them to ferment in us

while we follow, in written reverie, the surprising transmutations they
begin to trigger in our own thoughts and states of mind. Nonetheless,
Bachelard did concede even there that we can and should always return
to the textto its mysterious and inexhaustible source13if we suspect
that our deformations are beginning to impinge on its integrity or living
claim (8).

By way of furthering Bachelards eorts at literature litteraturans, I would

now like to turn to a text for which he harbored a special fondness:
Shelleys Prometheus Unbound. Bachelard dedicated an entire section in Air
and Dreams to a sustained meditation on this lyrical drama (3842),14
dwelling on those dynamic images of air and ight that evoke a
Promethean aspiration for moral heights. But Bachelards claim here is
that Shelleys social imagination, with its passionate demands for social
justice, is essentially subsumed within a cosmic imaginationthe driving
force of the poem being not only the desire to release humanity from its
psycho-social chains, that it may become airborne, but a desire for cos-
mic renewal.15 Shelleys Prometheus Unbound is thus an epitome of what
Bachelard would later describe as a psychodrama of the personal world that
is entwined with both a sociodrama of the interhuman world and a cos-
modrama of the material world (Terre et rveries du repos 77). Acknowledging
Shelleys own prefatory explanation that the images he employsgods,
demigods, and natural elementsare drawn largely from operations of
the human mind, Bachelard proceeds to read them even more broadly
and concretely as psychic forces that play a role in a Cosmos animated
by a true psychic destiny (39), thus restoring the profound dynamic
interdependence of the human and the cosmic.
In this regard, however, the image from Prometheus Unbound that strikes
me as most provocative and revealing is lightning. I shall hence pro-
ceed in the spirit of Bachelards hermeneutics to focus on the strange and
unexpected ways in which lightning appears, or makes itself felt, in this
lyrical dramatracing its startling variations and contradictions as a way
of exploring the dynamics of the poetic instant in Shelleys writing. But
Bachelard himself never explicitly isolated irruptions of lightning in
Shelleys poetry nor in his own poetic meditations. As a way of explor-
ing the poetics of the instant, he focused instead on ashing appearances
of the phoenix in literature (Fragments 35). One is indeed left to won-
der where the phoenix might have led him had he nished writing
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire before he died. Nonetheless, lightning was

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bound to make its way here, too, as evidenced by one brief yet signicant
moment when Bachelard notes that the essential image of the phoenix is
a bird moving at lightning speed (33). He might well have conjured up
a bird crackling in the oven or reduced to ashes, but he did notinstead
highlighting the phoenix as a dynamic image more than a substantial one
(32). Thus, he added:

When these ashes of re, lightning or ight, surprise us in

our contemplation, they appear to our eyes as heightened,
universal momentsnot so much ours as given to us moments
which mark the memory and return in dreams. (32)

But the appearance of lightning imagery as such in Shelleys poem, with

its trailing allegorical tradition, is richly problematic. I would further
contend that Shelleys rewriting of Aeschyluss Prometheus Unbound (the
lost sequel to the classic Prometheus Bound) itself becomes an act of
subversive hermeneutics: a pre-Bachelardian attempt at disentangling
traditions conjunctive tissue of meanings,16 at loosening the hardened fabric of
historyor what Bachelard once called ill-made durations17by play-
ing on a single one of its strands. It is this unraveling of the myth of
victimization that I would now like to trace through a rereading of
Shelleys poetic drama by taking lightning as its destinal site, or center
of fate.18

Lightning had long stood in classical Western tradition as a sign of Zeuss

heavenly rule which strikes fear and instills an attitude of submission on
human subjects through violent force and intimidation. This image of
universal cosmic power goes back at least to ancient Heraclituss enig-
matic fragment, Thunderbolt steers all things, and gures prominently
in Shelleys poem under the guise of Jupiter, described as the oppressor
of mankind. But in Shelleys Prometheus Unbound, as we shall see, light-
ning gradually becomes internalized and transmuted, as the Titan
Prometheuschained for three thousand years to the icy rocks of the
Indian Caucasus for having stolen the gods re and handing it to
humanitybegins to turn inward and to confront his long repressed
anger against the heavenly monarch.
In the preface, where Shelley sets the stage for his rewriting of the
Prometheus myth, however, we nd him also alluding to lightning as the
spirit that quickens a work of art:

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A number of writers possess the form, whilst they want the

spirit of those whom they imitate; . . . the former is the
endowment of the age in which they live, and the latter . . .
the uncommunicated lightning of their own mind. (Selected
Poetry and Prose 122)

Although conventional form may indeed be handed down through his-

tory, the spirit of a work of art remains elusive. It overtakes and stirs the
soul in ways none other has done before or ever will. Notice, however,
that Shelley sees lightning here as arising from within the writers own
mind. But when he again refers to lightning later in the preface, this
time the image appears more in the collective sense of a poetic spirit stir-
ring and awakening the public mind during the age of the Romantic ren-
aissance: The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and
the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring, or
about to be restored (122123).
So we encounter a sharp discrepancy already in Shelleys preface
between the romantic image of lightning as inspiration and the inherited
classical image of lightning as a force of coercion.19 But Shelleys poetic
subversions and variations of the image can only be traced within his
lyrical drama itself, which was most likely written before the preface.
In the opening act, we encounter Prometheus chained to the
Caucasus, trying to converse with the mountains and the elements (air,
whirlwinds, springs, earth), straining to listen to their elusive voices in the
hope of eliciting from them the hidden evidence and cause of his alien-
ation for three thousand uninterrupted years. As he puts it: No change,
no pause, no hopeyet I endure (1.20). So numb has he become, that
he can no longer feel or even remember his ancient hate against Jupiter,
the tyrant who condemned him for championing the cause of humanity.
Desperately, the Titan dares the elements to spew forth his forgotten
curse against the ruling god, that he may release his repressed poison and
set himself free:

Who dares? for I would hear that curse again.

Ha, what an awful whisper rises up!
Tis scarce a sound: it tingles through the frame
As lightning tingles, hovering ere it strike. (1.131134)

Now thats a Bachelardian deformation of lightningan image one

would normally expect to evoke heavens wrath! For a moment, it makes
itself felt as a subtle vibration that hovers in slow motion before it strikes

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and tingles as it rises like energy up the spine. Rather than a pierc-
ing crack of thunder, acoustically, lightning is here but a whisper. Of
course, lightning appears in this instance as a mere simile, signaling the
imminent emergence of some painful ash of revelation. But its oddness
in this context makes one suspect that there is a deft poetic subversion
here in progress: Shelleys Prometheus is stealing Olympian light-
ningas he had previously stolen reand bringing it into the deep
recesses of his own mind and consciousness!
Surely enough, just as Prometheus is conjuring up the forgotten curse,
the phantom of Jupiter bursts forth from utter darkness onto the stage of
awareness, crying out:

A spirit seizes me and speaks within:

It tears me as re tears a thunder-cloud. (1.25455)

As the phantom proceeds to spew forth the curse Prometheus had

uttered, the Titan is shocked to discover his own festering rage as he had
invoked Jupiters lightning, defying him to bring it on:

And let alternate frost and re

Eat into me, and be thine ire
Lightning, and cutting hail, and legioned forms
Of furies, driving by upon the wounding storms . . .
Be thy swift mischiefs sent
To blast mankind, from yon ethereal tower.
(1.267271, 274275)20

Yet, curiously, after Prometheus is mocked and tortured by the elemen-

tal Furies for recanting his ancient deance while yet refusing to reveal
the timing of Jupiters fated downfall to Mercury, his envoy, a Chorus
of Spirits emerges from the dim caves of human thought (at Mother
Earths behest) evoking lightnings most extreme opposite charges in a
whirl of songsi.e., not only as a violent force that ruthlessly destroys
ships and their crews (1.714719), but also as the movement of desire
(1.734), and even, quite unexpectedly, as a vision streaking the world
with light and liquid joy as it zips by on lightning-braided pinions
(1.764767)a glimpse of the Bachelardian phoenix?
Signicantly, meanwhile, Prometheuss consort and symbol of his
anima, Asia, is shown in the second act descending through the mouth
of a volcano to encounter Demogorgon (Gk. demos + gorgon: people
monster): Shelleys personication of the darkly intimate yet universally

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stirring and unsettling voice of poetry: the oracular vapor which is

contagion to the world (2.3.110). As Asia descends into the bowels of
the earth, the spirits lure her on, singing,

In the depth of the deep

Down, down!
Like veiled lightning asleep,
Like the spark nursed in embers . . .
A spell is treasured but for thee alone.
Down, down! (2.3.8189)

By this time, we notice, Shelley has buried Prometheuss stolen lightning

deep within the earth.
Act three, however, will reveal Demogorgon abruptly driven up to
Jupiters heavenly abode by the Car of the Hourthe surge of the
kairos moment whereupon he makes it known that he is Jupiters son,
and forcefully orders his father to step down from the throne:

Descend, and follow me down the abyss.

I am thy child, as thou wert Saturns child;
Mightier than thee: and we must dwell together
Henceforth in darkness. Lift thy lightnings not,
The tyranny of heaven none may retain,
Or reassume, or hold, succeeding thee. (3.1.5357)

As Jupiter is being brought down, Apollo wrily remarks on his descent

using imagery of a falling eagle with baed wings, entangled in a whirl-
wind of thunder and lightning no longer under his control. Jupiter has
lost his lightning . . . and is now even blinded by it! (3.2.1117). But to
our surprise, as the whole world awakens to a new order the next morn-
ing, a joyful Chorus of Hours greets the newly released spirits of the
human mind, singing as they approach:

Whence come ye, so wild and so eet,

For sandals of lightning are on your feet . . . (4.8990)

With a delightful stroke of the pen, Shelley has deftly placed Jovian
lightning at the feet of the mind, where it now serves to give them winged
speed!21
The disturbing problem begins to emerge only later, however, in the
triumphant act four, as the release of Prometheus and the birth of a new

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1. Paul Manship, Prometheus. 1934. Rockefeller Center, New York City.

Earth are being most fervently celebrated. The young spirits of Earth
and Moon, resembling the elder couple Prometheus and Asia, here
appear singing to each other, although brother Earth seems frankly more
interested in reveling over the downing of Jupiter and the victory of the
Promethean mind than in listening to the words of his enamoured sister.
So he sings:

Man, oh, not men! A chain of linked thought,

Of love and might to be divided not,
Compelling the elements with adamantine stress;
As the sun rules, even with a tyrants gaze,
The unquiet republic of the maze
Of planets, struggling erce towards heavens free wilder-
ness. (4.394399)

Violent force has somehow found its way, through these verses, into the
Promethean mind that now controls nature, compelling the elements
with a tyrannical gaze that Shelley compares to the suns gravitational

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force. Matters have been reversed: the heavens are now regarded as a
wilderness that must be coerced to conform to the human intellect. And
so the new spirit of Earth exults:

The lightning is his slave; heavens utmost deep

Gives up her stars, and like a ock of sheep
They pass before his eye, are numbered, and roll on!
The tempest is his steed, he strides the air;
And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare,
Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none.
(4.418423)

The calculating faculty now rules over lightningit steers the thunder-
bolt! No longer is nature revered as an intelligent spirit capable of speak-
ing mysteriously to the human soul, moving it with ever-nascent melodies,
or wisely guarding her silence. Instead, it is human language that here
becomes the exclusive object of celebratiton:

Language is a perpetual Orphic song,

Which rules with Daedal harmony a throng
Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless
were. (4.415417)

Anything in nature that does not conform to the technologies of lan-

guage (which must surely owe more to Daedalus than to Orpheus)22 is
now dismissed as chaotic or barbaric. Nonetheless, it is curious to note
that these Shelleyan verses on Orphic song have been consistently cel-
ebrated among literary critics as epitomizing the powers of poetic lan-
guage to liberate a suering humanity from the tyrannies of nature or
phenomenal reality. The idea of a marriage of language and music
through Daedal harmony is so enchanting indeed that criticsinclud-
ing D. J. Hughes (605), Elizabeth Sewell (281), Angela Leighton (87), and
Lawrence Kramer (2)have scarcely paused to remark on its potentially
dangerous totalitarian presumptions.23
To Shelleys credit, however, as young Earths victory song begins to
unwind, he suddenly reveals a bit of uneasiness. For once acknowledging
the Moons gentle presence, he admits that his excessive pride has made
wounds that need her balm (4.499502). And it is likely that such uneasi-
ness echoes Shelleys own discomfort as he becomes aware of the rather
unsettled atmosphere, charged with contradictions, into which his poetic
vessel has been inadvertently steered.24 This may indeed be the one
instance where lightning strikes invisiblyyet most eectivelyin

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Shelleys poem. For the dialogue between Earth and Moon is here inter-
rupted as the voices of sea-nymphs emerge from the dark rocks, herald-
ing a shift in the tonal axis of the poem. Although accompanied by no
brilliant ash or positive image, the indeterminate yet strangely intelli-
gible voice of Demogorgon25a tacit appeal to moral feelingis now felt
as if pouring through the atmosphere like night, simultaneously rising out
of the earth, descending from the sky, or darkly exploding from within
the pores of light like a gathered eclipse (4.509514). Everyone, every-
thing now stops . . . to listen (4.519553).

Although we do not know the exact moment when the poets uneasi-
ness turns into the burning question that yields a tragic insight
into passions destiny in Shelleys Prometheus Unbound, I submit that here
we nevertheless nd evidence of what Bachelard probably meant in
LIntuition de linstant when he wrote: In granting us consciousness of
the irrational, the truly synthetic instant of decisive failure becomes, at
once, the success of thought (6).26 For by the time Shelley wrote his
Defence of Poetry (1821), shortly after Prometheus Unbound (1819), he had
already arrived at the conscious realization that the unmitigated exercise
of the calculating faculty was bound to lead to despotism if not subordi-
nated to a higher poetic faculty whichhe was now ready to admit
was not under the control of the intellect (440, 446). And he adds,

The cultivation of the sciences that have enlarged the lim-

its of mans empire over the external world has, for want
of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed the
limits of the internal world, and man, having enslaved the
elements, remains himself a slave. (442)

These last words, in particular, echo the lines of Earths euphoric song
about mans compelling the elements with adamantine stress (4.394
396) and making lightning his slave (4.418). The coercive notion of the
enslavement of lightning, of course, is a direct allusion to Prometheuss
triumph over Jupiter, hence to the triumph of the modern scientic mind
over the powers of transcendent nature.27 However, the paradox is that
Shelley himself had used lightning as a metaphor of poetic inspiration
in his preface to Prometheus Unbound (122123)a matter which, however
unintentionally on Shelleys part, links Jupiter (understood as the force of
the unexpected breaking into human life) with poetry, and the enslave-
ment of Jupiter with the suppression of the poetic instant!

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A poetic or tragic insight, Bachelard insists, alights as a gift or a rup-

turealways as a psychological shock in a moment of pre-conscious
lived experience. But unless the mind heeds its ethical call, welcomes it,
and brings it to attention through what he calls the will to contemplate
(Water and Dreams 27); unless the mind strains to listen, even beyond the
apparent dissonance, to the hidden harmony of the possible, the
momentary ash of insight of beauty may be lost, without making a
dierence in our lives.28 Although such moments never fail to come, it
appears that some natures may never permit them to emerge into atten-
tion, as philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once suggested in his
Adventures of Ideas (288). Even Shelleys youthful spirit of Earth in the
apotheosic conclusion to Prometheus Unbound almost missed one such
redemptive moment during his exultation over the victory of the human
mind. It is at such points when those hidden attitudes which Bachelard
coins as culture complexes29 steal in and start laying their snares: in
this case, the darker side of the will to intellectuality that Bachelard extols
as the Prometheus complex in both The Psychoanalysis of Fire and
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire: an intelligence complex of constructive dis-
obedience whereby the son/disciple strives to outdo the father/master,
and on which, he notes, the history of human progressparticularly
scientic progressdepends (Psychoanalysis 12; Fragments 82).
The problem is that in Shelleys Prometheus Unbound the Prometheus
complex almost becomes rebounda possibility which had been
brought to horric fruition just a year earlier by his wife Mary Shelley
in the now classic Frankenstein, which happens to be subtitled The
Modern Prometheus (1818).30 But the awareness of that ever-present
danger31 is precisely, I submit, what gives Shelleys lyrical drama its
undying force, by enjoining the reader to remain ever vigilant . . .
exposed to the pang of the instant. Heeding the voice of this often unex-
pected ethical appeal becomesin Bachelard as well as in Shelleythe
poetic-hermeneutic act par excellence, which prepares a path for the
advent of fertile awakenings (Intuition 3536, 86).

NOTES

1 My translation. Plus profonde que la biographie, lhermneutique doit dter-

miner les centres de destin, en dbarrassant lhistoire de son tissu temporel con-
jonctif sans action sur notre destin (Potique de lespace 28). Maria Jolas translates
Bachelards centres de destin as centers of fate in The Poetics of Space (9).
Hereafter in this essay I will be citing from Jolass translation.
2 Bachelard rst explored the existential implications of these two themes from
the perspective of an epistemologist and philosopher of science in LIntuition de

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linstant: essai sur la Silo de Gaston Roupnel (1932), although his strong poetic
inclinations can already be detected in that early work. Bachelard later held the
Chair of the History and Philosophy of Science at the Sorbonne, Paris, from
1940 to 1954 .
3 At least in name as well as in deed, Richard Kearney notes, the rst phe-
nomenologists after Heidegger actually to espouse a hermeneutic method were
Hans-Georg Gadamer in Germany and Paul Ricur in France (Poetics of
Imagining 144). Yet in this text Kearney also underlines the signicant inuence
of Bachelards works on the literary imagination in the development of Ricurs
hermeneutics (143160 passim).
4 Right to Dream 140. Natura naturans (Lat., nature maturing, nature naturing,
nature nurturing) refers to the active, creative processes of nature that are
being manifested at any given moment; for the Dutch philosopher Baruch de
Spinoza (16321677) it referred to nature as a causal agent of modes and
attributes. Natura naturata (Lat., nature matured, nature natured, nature
having been nurtured) refers to the things created by (or in) nature; in Spinoza,
it alluded to the reality created by natura naturans. (Dictionary of Philosophy 184).
5 In an essay entitled A Psychology of Literary Language Bachelard writes:
There ought to pass between writer and reader a kind of verbal induction
sharing many of the characteristics of electromagnetic induction between two
circuits. A book would then be a sort of psychic induction apparatus producing
in the reader temptations to originality of expression (Right to Dream 141).
6 Bachelard discusses this distinctive feature of his approach in LIntuition de lin-
stant (89), The Poetics of Space (xxxxi), and Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (65).
7 Truth and Method 85. Tracing this type of consciousness back to Heraclitus,
Gadamer concludes that an aesthetics of experience leads to an absolute
series of points which annihilates (not only) the unity of the work of art, (but
also) the identity of the artist with himself, and the identity of the man under-
standing or enjoying the work of art (Truth and Method 85). Such words indeed
echo Heraclituss fragment that one cannot step twice into the same river for
not only is the river always changing, but so is the person stepping into it (see
Kahn 166169.) The undeniable anities between Heraclitean and Bache-
lardian thought would be worth pursuing in detail.
8 Bachelards line reads: Must a gure be rooted in tradition for a Poetics of the
Phoenix to develop? (42). But in this text, The Phoenix is an Instant, a Poetic
Instant (54, cf. 35).
9 Earlier, in Water and Dreams, Bachelard had insisted on the importance of reviv-
ing natural reveries when we interpret texts from lost civilizations, rather than
engaging in overly clever readings (135). For him natural reverie is the way
in which an elemental cosmos dreams in and through us: Reverie is an ever-
emanating universe, a fragrant breath that issues from things through the
dreamer (7). Eventually, however, he will draw a distinction between natural
reverie and disciplined poetic reverie (Poetics of Reverie 6). While natural
reverie is our way of reconnecting with the germinative pulse of the world, writ-
ten poetic reverie becomes a way of awakening and intensifying the possibilities
of such elemental energies in ourselves through language (Water and Dreams 18).

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10 Bachelard lays out his hermeneutic approach to Silo in LIntuition de linstant as

one which does not aim at summarizing Roupnels argument but at unfolding
what lies implicit in the text by focusing on its leading intuition of the instantan
intuition that cannot be proven but only experiencedand letting its own power
move him to philosophical meditation (69). I would thus disagree with critics
such as Jacques Gagey who claim that Bachelards reading is untouched in its
essentials by Roupnels thinking (qtd. in McAllester, Gaston Bachelard: Subversive
Humanist 28). Although Bachelard, inspired by Roupnels text, engages in a
polemic of his own against Bergson and his theory of continuous temporality,
he repeatedly cites and closely comments on Roupnels textpointing out their
dierences in perspective when applicable, and acknowledging his occasional
wanderings beyond the text. Most importantly, Bachelards meditations are
patently moved by the lyrical force of Silo and Roupnels dramatic evocation of
the redemptive instant (see Intuition 69, 97100 passim).
11 Years later, in Air and Dreams, he would write: The imagination [is] a faculty
that . . . deforms what we perceive; it is above all the faculty that frees us from
immediate images and changes them (1).
12 La Vie et lhabitude 17 (qtd. in Intuition 8; my re-translation).
13 The title of Roupnels book, Silo, is an allusion to the waters of Siloam that
restored the blind mans sight in Johns Gospel (9:7), although its meaning,
Roupnel claims, is intelligible only in an intimate and unique way to each per-
son (8, 13). Bachelard, an avid historian of science, readily associated it with the
fountain of intellectual youth where Reason is summoned to return for its
incessant renewal (Intuition 56).
14 Mary McAllester Jones oers a clear expos of Bachelards reading of Prometheus
Unbound in her essay On Science, Poetry, and the Honey of Being: Bache-
lards Shelley (Philosophers Poets 168174). The signicant dierence between
Bachelards own reading of this lyrical drama and the one I propose below will
attest to the potential fecundity of his poetic/subversive hermeneutics.
15 In a Bachelardian reading, the moral life is a cosmic life: The whole world
wants to be renewed. Material imagination dramatizes the world in its depths
(Water and Dreams 148).
16 Cf. Shelleys own account of his subversion of the classic model in his preface
to Prometheus Unbound (120121).
17 A sick soul, especially one that suers the pain of time and of despair, writes
Bachelard in The Dialectic of Duration, must rst be cleared of all false perma-
nence, of ill-made durations, and be disorganised temporally (21). Such ill-
made durations are apparent antecedents to the sclerosed culture complexes
Bachelard is to explore later in his books on the material imagination, and
which we shall revisit toward the end of this essay.
18 Bachelards subversive hermeneutics might here be said to anticipate certain
strategies of deconstruction as it avidly sets in motion a pedagogy of dis-
continuity (Intuition 56) through the study of unsettling intuitions that emerge
unexpectedly in poetic language. Such a pedagogy prods us relentlessly to
question habits of thought which can so readily desensitize us to the pang of the
instant.

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19 Storm and lightning, we should note, also appear in the Germanien hymns
of romantic poet Friedrich Hlderlin (17701843) as the language of the gods
who speak not in assertions but in the manner of hints. But in Heideggers
reading, Hlderlins poet stands with bare head under the storm of the god,
defenselessly abandoned, yet steadfastly bearing and absorbing this language
so as to transmit it to the people. See Martin Heidegger, Hlderlins Hymnen
Germanien und der Rhein (3031); also On the Way to Language (2427).
20 Cf. Prometheuss imprecation against Zeus in Aeschyluss Prometheus Bound: So
let the curling tendril of the re / from the lightning bolt be sent against me:
let / the air be stirred with thunderclaps, the winds in savage blasts convulsing
all the world (10431046).
21 Bachelard cites these pivotal lines in Air and Dreams as well, but with the pur-
pose of underscoring the image of the oneiric wing and its swiftness (38).
22 Orpheus, we might recall, was the mythical Greek bard whose heartfelt singing
tamed the beasts and even persuaded the shades in Hades, if momentarily, to
allow him to bring his beloved Eurydice back to life. Daedalus, on the other
hand, was the legendary Greek inventor who built the Cretan labyrinth where
king Minos trapped the Minotaur who was used to kill the Athenian youths sent
as tribute when Athens fell under Crete. That monster had itself been an
ospring of Daedal technology, for it was Daedalus who built the hollow
wooden cow that had allowed Pasiphae, Minoss wife, to mate with a bull that
initially had been sent by Poseidon for sacrice. Daedaluss skill also produced
the wings that helped him and his son Icarus to escape from Crete, yet Icarus
fell from the skies for ying too close to the sun, which melted the wax on his
wings (see Classical Mythology 417, 425).
23 Celebrating these lines on Orphic song from Shelley, Lawrence Kramer does
make a fascinating point: Through the song . . . of a gure touched by divin-
ity, language is represented as broaching the ineable. Carried by the singing
voice, poetry approaches the source of creation by uniting with the harmony
that its words cannot express (2). But the nature of such musical language,
I suspect, transcends that Daedal techn whichas Icaruss story indirectly sug-
gestsis doomed to fail when it attempts to reach, much less seize, the ineable
sources of creation. Shelleys deeper understanding of the nature of Orphic song
is better illustrated, in my view, by the scenes of Prometheuss and Asias rec-
onciliation in act two than in the triumphant apotheosis of act four.
24 Percy Bysshe Shelley met his tragic death only three years after writing this lyri-
cal drama, on July 8, 1822, when his boat capsized during a tempest at sea as
he and his friend Edward Williams were sailing back to their home near Lerici,
Italy.
25 On Shelleys Demogorgon, Harold Bloom notes insightfully: His only clear
attributes are dialectical; he is the god of all those at the turning, at the reversing
of the cycles (Selected Poetry and Prose xxiv; my emphasis).
26 Bachelards full passage reads: We cannot determine the exact moment when
the mystery suddenly becomes clear enough to announce itself as a burning
question. But . . . whether it comes from suering or whether it comes from joy,
every human being has, at some point in his life, this moment of illumination

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the moment when he suddenly understands his own message, the moment when
knowledge, by shedding light on passion, detects at once the rules and relent-
lessness of destinythe truly synthetic moment when decisive failure, by ren-
dering us conscious of the irrational, becomes itself the success of thought
(Intuition 6; my translation and emphasis). In her essay The Redemptive Instant:
Bachelard on the Epistemological and Existential Value of Surprise, Mary
McAllester interprets this passage in terms of the objective irrational in mathemat-
ical thought and scientic epistemology rather than as the subjective irrational of a
hubristic passion, as I do here in my reading of Shelley (Redemptive Instant
125). It is interesting to witness how both objective and subjective readings of
the irrational can work vis vis Bachelards theory of the redemptive instant.
27 Among natures transcendent powers, Bachelard would have included the poetic
faculty itself, as implied by his claim that mankind imagining is the transcen-
dent aspect of natura naturans (Water and Dreams 10), which arguably suggests it
is a faculty that lies beyond intellectual jurisdictiona creative power that issues
from the worlds own soul (cf. Poetics of Reverie 187188).
28 Intimate duration and progress in life occur, in Bachelards view, not as a result
of forces from the past or some preestablished harmony in things but always
in response to the harmony of the possiblea redemptive promise that the
world is ever poised to realize. Hence, he argues, the force of time is wholly
condensed within the novel instant where vision awakens, near the fountain of
Siloam (Intuition 9495, 98; Silo 198).
29 Bachelardian culture complexes may be traced back to his earlier notion of
ill-made durations (see note 17). In Water and Dreams, he denes them as
prereective attitudes that tend to govern our ordinary perceptions and processes
of reection (17). He further qualies them elsewhere as pre-conscious attrac-
tions or as manifestations of a hidden will that fuels and orients our expres-
sions and actions, providing dynamism to our works (Psychoanalysis 83; Earth and
Reveries of Will 165167). In Psychoanalysis of Fire he goes so far as to claim that
a poetic work can hardly be unied except by a complex. If the complex is
lacking, the work is cut o from its roots, and no longer communicates with the
unconscious (19). But Bachelard also portrays such complexes as hinges of
ambivalence or psychic knots (Water and Dreams 167) thatif unrecognized or
ignoredmay easily become sclerosed as ill-made durations (Dialectic of Duration
21; Psychoanalysis 112; Lautramont 70).
30 Maurice Hindles 2003 critical edition of Mary Shelleys Frankenstein: The Modern
Prometheus includes the authors account of the heated discussions in her literary
circle (which included Percy Shelley and Lord Byron) on the scientic investi-
gations into the principle of life which scientists at the time linked to gal-
vanism and electricity.
31 Babette Babich, in her essay Gaston Bachelard: Scientism with a Human
Face, notes the ambivalences of Bachelards own modern Prometheus
gurethe scientist as philosopher-poet who calls a world into being, even while
re-evoking his tragic potential: The dierent senses evoked by the idea of a
modern Prometheus in an English literary context (Mary Shelleys Frankenstein)
and a continental context (romanticized Titanism) are signicant and testify to

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the diculties inherent in assimilating such an elusive and allusive author as

Bachelard (Continental Philosophy in the 20th Century 198).

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