2.1 Imagining the Ambivalences
2.1.3 The Childhood House
This section probes into another dimension of the seemingly static yet transformative poetic image of the deserted childhood house. The house image is essentially significant: not only does it foreshadow a probable answer to Bonnefoy’s personal poetic quest, but also, with its importantly poetic implications given in Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, has the
ontological effect on the imagining subject. “Our soul is an abode,” Bachelard says, “[a]nd by remembering the ‘houses’ and ‘rooms,’ we learn to ‘abide’ within ourselves … the house images move in both directions: they are in us as much as we are in them” (PS 21). Since Bachelard already acknowledged that in The Poetics of Space only the “eulogized space” was depicted, Bonnefoy’s manifestation of the childhood house’s menace can be seen as fortifying the undiscussed phases of Bachelard’s house image. The analysis of this sophisticated,
lengthy poem “The House where I was Born” follows the presented formal sequence to show the winding yet progressive process of the subjective recognition of the childhood house and the dweller lived within; in such an interpretation, similar to the spatial positiveness put in the placeless context as previously examined, the pessimistic as well as the optimistic imaginings of the house are simultaneously juxtaposed. In a total of twelve sections, 271 lines, Bonnefoy demonstrates numerous returns to the house in which the I-narrator was born, each time with subtle variations: the first three sections begin with a similar refrain “I woke: the house where I was born” to give a detailed illustration of the interior (CP 115, 117); the following in-between sections are fragmentary memories from other times, then, in sections VIII and X the refrain reappears yet deviates from its former structure, distinctively “I open my eyes: / This is the house where I was born, / Surely the one that was and nothing more” and “Life, then:
and once again / A house where I was born” (CP 129, 131). These refrains function as
watersheds throughout, indicating the psychological development of the subject and the focus of succeeding sections. For instance, from sections IV to VII are seen interlaced memories and dreams; section IX demonstrates the narrator’s rediscovering and the recognition of the house after a long, passive denial; sections XI and XII reestablish the value of the house with the narrator’s active exploration, which too presents the metamorphosis of the house from limited and definite (“the house where I was born,” emphasis added) to indefinite and universal (“A house where I was born,” emphasis added). Observed from this initial, rough segment of the house’s transformation, the image of the house is indeed multifold and
complex in both its forming and deforming.
To begin, the topological details are given in sections I and II with the careful illustration of interior objects; both the outside and inside view of the house are outlined through the narrator’s observation and actual walking from room to room. Contrasting to this concrete, detail-given, plcial structure is the apparent anxiety which, embodied by various forms of water such as wave, soft rain, and rapid stream, floods and swallows throughout the sections:
I
I woke: the house where I was born.
Spume battered the rock. Not a bird;
Only wind, closing and opening the wave.
The horizon all around smelled of ash, As though somewhere beyond the hills A fire was devouring a universe. I went Into the side room: the table had been set.
…
Water was already flooding the room.
I turned the mob; the door wouldn’t give.
I almost heard them on that far-off shore — Children laughing in high grass. Others Laughing, always others, in their joy.
II
I woke: the house where I was born.
Rain was falling softly in all the rooms.
I went from room to room, looking At the water as it sparkled on the mirrors Piled up everywhere—some shattered, others Even tucked between the furniture and walls.
…
Here the only thing we ever own is dream:
Though we reach out, our hand can never cross
The rapid stream where memories recede. (CP 115, 117)
The exterior landscape of the house is devastated by the deprivation of visual vivacity (“Not a bird;” “The horizon all around smelled of ash”), leaving only the desolate impression
“[a]s though … / A fire was devouring a universe” (CP 115). The narrator walks inside the house for the shelter only to discover the similarly devasting flooding and, when he attempts to escape, the defense of the house (“the door wouldn’t give”). Being rejected by the house in the first place, the narrator is unable to explore this childhood place further; such spatial denial is even emphasized by the final depiction of the narrator’s hearing “[c]hildren laughing in high grass,” by how he/she stands as a bystander and realizes the immense spaces in
between his isolation and communal delight (“I almost hear them on that far-off shore,”
“Others / Laughing, always others, in their joy”). The narrator returns to the house again in section II, only to discover rain “falling softly in all the rooms” (CP 115). According to Bachelard, “water helps the imagination in its task of de-objectifying and assimilating”
through “grouping images and dissolving substance;” what water achieves is to emancipate the poetic quality from objects with its embedded fluidity, to “contribute a type of syntax, a continual linking up movement of images that frees a reverie bound to objects” (WD 12).
Indeed, the similar grouping of objects is achieved through water’s working under
Bonnefoy’s poetic descriptions: water ensures not only the consistency of spatial structuring
of images but also the imaginative dynamism throughout. Since rain does not fall in the interior house, the water flooded the lines is highly metaphorical, a hidden narrative—
memories of the past—that conceals from sight (“Though we reach out, our hand can never cross / The rapid stream where memories recede”). Importantly, the water illustrated here does not cease its occupation even with its disappearance: whether in an oneiric scene of the curved planks stumbling in the surging waves in section V, or the surreal shipwreck outlined in section XI, the water continues its threatening and pervasive working.
In section III, the narrator finds himself standing “on the threshold,” a noticeable and highly symbolic word in Bonnefoy’s poetics, between “two large figures:” one “an old woman, evil and stooped,” “the other ... radiant as a lamp” (CP 117). The figures are identified as the goddess Ceres in different phases, presumably before and after she founds her lost child. The two phases of the goddess represent also the narrator’s leaping between different time-space, along with his future alteration of attitude when rediscovering the value of the house. Standing on the threshold that differentiates past and present, mirage and reality, concrete, geographical place and immense, mental space, the narrator sets out to collect the long-lost memories in the succeeding section by “gather[ing] up / An armful of branches and leaves” which are “bristled with snags, / Throbbing hopes, points, and cries” (CP 119). The subjective, voluntarily entering the past is directly shown in section V:
V
… I get up,
I walk through the house from room to room, And now the rooms are numberless.
I hear voices shouting behind the doors.
I’m distressed by these torments that pound At the decrepit doorjambs. I hurry by.
The night drags on. Fear weighs me down.
I enter a room crowded with desks.
Look, I am told. This classroom was yours.
Look at the wall. Those were your first images.
Look, there’s the tree, and there’s the yelping dog.
And this map that yellows on the wall, This slow discoloring of names and shapes, These rivers, these mountains that disappear In the whiteness invading language:
This was your only book. Isis—
The plaster wall pealing in this room—
Has never had, will never have Anything else to open up to you Or close to you again. (CP 121, 123)
The numberless rooms are the projection of the narrator’s mental spaces separated by partitions of time. “Space compressed time,” Bachelard states, within which each particular fragment of memory is stored and placed (PS 30). From the narrator’s perception of the sound blocked behind the doors (“I’m distressed by these torments that pound”) and his unwillingness to enter (“I hurry by”), these securely placed memories are the ones that haunt, rendering the overall space of the childhood house hostile. Reluctantly, the narrator still enters one of the rooms that reveals one of the central conflicts the following sections desperate to solve, namely the father-son relationship. This room is well organized owing to the thorough employment of spatial deixis (“This classroom,” “Those were your first
images,” “there’s the tree,” “there’s the yelping dog,” “this map,” “this slow discoloring of names and shapes,” “these rivers,” “these mountains,” “this was your only book,” “this
room,” emphasis added); with the contents along with the distances these demonstrative pronouns imply, the room is simultaneously finite yet infinite, familiar yet also strange. Near the end of the section, the goddess Isis who is recognized by her ability to protect and love the child appears, forecasting the father-son relationship in sections VII and VIII.
The father figure appears in three fragments in section VII, the first two are memories indicated by the past tense, while the third one is a postponed confession the narrator wished to dedicate to his father with the verb tense simple present. In the memory, the father was first spotted in the garden, “stood motionless. Where he was looking, / Or at what, I could not tell—outside everything. / Stooped as he already was, he lifted his gaze / Toward the unachieved, or the impossible” (CP 125). The amorphous gaze of the father is never
understood by the child even till now, as the narrator confesses: “[w]ho he was, who he had been in the light: / I did not know, I still do not know” (CP 125). The alienation is further depicted when the son saw his father “slowly walking forward” to work, with “so much tiredness / Weighing down his gestures of former days;” whereas the child “was strolling with some classmates / In the afternoon, timeless as yet” (CP 125, 127). The difference between the father and the son, in which the former seemed withered in his fatigue whereas the later stayed complete ignorant of such weariness and only squandered his abundance (“timeless as yet”), has further dramatize the failure of their relationship. Desiring to reconcile with his father when returning to this childhood house, the narrator then depicts an image of the father playing cards with the son, a scene perceived “[a]s something of a sign, something that might nourish— / What, being a child, he cannot know—some kind of hope” (CP 127). Yet, since the whole reflection is put in the parenthesis as the unknown confession, this hope is never found or realized. The intimate feelings derived from this father-son relationship has proliferated to the extent that the narrator finds it difficult to bear and reach: “always they well up again, / And tell their truth” (CP 127).
Such a relationship continues to occupy the narrative in section VIII, in which the
suspension of the house comes to the fore and further announces its stop:
VIII
I open my eyes:
This is the house where I was born, Surely the one that was and nothing more.
The same small dining room looks out On a peach tree that never grows. (CP 129)
This is the house bereaves of extensional possibilities and spatial flexibility (“the one that was and nothing more”); the interior layout looks the same, even the peach tree planted in the garden ceases its growth. This static moment, however, is simultaneously magical, as the whole scene is presented with the narrator’s seeing the child (could be his other self) observing the parents who sit “in front of the window, face to face” from the garden;
watching from afar, the child “[k]now[s] that life can be born from these words” (CP 129).
The spatial shift is implicitly formed as the narrator bravely confront the past with this gaze, along with his acceptance of all its promises and turndown.
The value of the house meets its watershed and is further transformed in section VIII.
By reexamining the father-son relationship through multiple angles, the narrator slowly yet steadily accepts the relationship as it is with the lucid claim: “I only need to recognize and love / What had returned from the depths of my life,” which is “[a] long lost place of here and now” (CP 131). The realization to some extent relieves the narrator’s pressure resulted from the kinship, which further reshapes the narrator’s realization of the childhood house; since the house is already identified as “the house we have lost,” the narrator determines to embrace its state of becoming which resembles “words / That only seem to speak of something else” (CP 133). The house that previously described has become indefinite and truly numberless from
section X; the proliferation of the house, in return, also helps rebuilt the father-son
relationship by the narrator’s frank confession: “How I loved those days of ours” (CP 133).
Though the intimate reflection is still put in the parenthesis, it still proves to be a tremendous shift considering the narrator’s first encounter with the house’s hostility in beginning
sections:
(I was almost awake,
How I loved those days of ours, preserved The way a river slows, already caught In the resounding arches of the sea.
They moved with the majesty of simple things.
They moved with the majesty of simple things.
Vast sails, the sails of all that is, agreed to lift Our fragile human life aboard the ship
That the mountains wrapped around us.
O memory,
Their luffing silence decked the sound Our voices made, like water on stones.
No doubt on the horizon would be death:
But milky as that shade where beaches end, At evening, when the children still touch bottom
Into the sea, laughing in tranquil waters, and still play.) (CP 133)
The influence memory on life is similar to how the river gradually erodes the cliff and creates out the sea arches; such impact, however subtle and slow, will always find their presences in their endless (de)formation (“In the resounding arches of the sea”). The whole seaside view is
imbued with realization and serenity; although the narrator sees clearly the omnipresence of death, he still unravels in such a threatening termination the fertility of life (“No doubt on the horizon would be death: But milky as that shade where beaches end”). The symbolic water that fiercely demonstrates its presences in the opening also becomes “tranquil” where children laugh and play. This tranquility resulted from the reconciliation with the past memories has significantly stabilized the inner mental state of the narrator; it too urges the narrator to “start out again” (“Et je repars”) to refound the childhood house.
The final two sections, XI and XII, can be regarded as the manifestation of Bonnefoy’s entering into another space, one that is simultaneously immense and intimate, divergent and cohesive, human but also divine. The geographical shift is clearly given: the narrator now walks on the landscape “where time goes hollow here, becomes / Eternal water surging in the foam” (CP 133). Following the winding road to the seaside, the narrator witnesses
A black candelabra, all its boughs Engulfed in flames and smoke.
What can we do? people cry out on every side.
Shouldn’t we help the voyagers out there
Who’re asking us for berth? Yes, darkness shouts.
And then I see how swimmers in the night Race toward the ship with one hand raised Above the stormy swells, holding the lamps That stream with colored pennants. (CP 135)
This timeless space where the wreck took place might be one of the polymorphs of a house:
through the event of life and death, saving and being saved, Bonnefoy demonstrates a house that is open to all human beings on earth through the exchange of human benevolence and
shared love (“then I see how swimmers in the night / Race toward the ship … holding the lamps”). Here the childhood house clearly breaks away from its geographical concreteness with the poet’s purposeful uplifting of the content to that of universal; the house is becoming abstract, a vision as well as the idealized vessel that desires to place not only the poet’s own expectation of home but that of humankind (“Shouldn’t we help the voyagers out there / Who’re asking us for berth?”).
The metamorphosis of the house is clearly given in the final section, which, continuing the wreck theme, prompts the narrator to rethink the desire and need to return to this house which is now, similar to the boy in “The Curved Planks,” “immense already” (CP 145):
XII
Beauty and truth. But tall waves crash
On cries that still persist. The voice of hope, Above the din—how can we make it heard?
How can growing old become rebirth?
How can the house be opened from within, So death will not turn out the child Who asked for a native place?
Now I understand: it was Ceres Who sought shelter on the night Someone was knocking at the door.
Outside her beauty suddenly flared—
Her light and her desire too, her need To slake her thirst with the cup of hope:
She might still find that child again,
Even if lost …
We must pity Ceres, not mock her—and so Must meet at crossroads in deepest night, Call out athwart our words, even with no reply:
And make our voice, no matter how obscure,
Love Ceres at last, who suffers and seeks. (CP 135, 137)
In this final section, Ceres makes her appearance again in a much vivid description; similar to the house that has gone through series of deformations to ultimately become the house that
“opened from within” (CP 135), Ceres too is immersed in the apparent determination and confidence (“her beauty suddenly flared— / Her light and her desire too, her need / To slake her thirst with the cup of hope”) which is entirely different from her impression made in section I (“Yet she had to come in, the faceless one,” emphasis added). As I previously
mentioned, Ceres can be taken as the narrator’s double owing to the reason that her search for the lost child bears high similarity to the narrator’s reestablishment of the value of the house.
Since the narrator already understands the transformative quality the house possesses, Ceres too transforms her image to a positive whose search manifests the will of humankind. By saying that the house must “be opened from within,” the true value of the house is ultimately clear: it is Bonnefoy’s poetic space made visualized. The search for the house, on the other hand, proves the poet’s own struggle for making his poetic space approachable and
imaginable. With both passive and active imaginings of its malice as well as promises, Bonnefoy demonstrates the fanning out of the house from a single definitive object to a collective unit; he too delineates the multiplicity of poetic space with the proliferation of the house.