The Gender and Genre of Reverie Author(s): Grard Genette and Thas E.

Morgan Reviewed work(s): Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Winter, 1994), pp. 357-370 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343915 . Accessed: 15/12/2011 05:38
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The Gender and Genre of Reverie

Gerard Genette

Translated by Thais E. Morgan

In Mimologiques: Voyage en Cratylie [Mimologics: A Voyage into Cratylusland], Gerard Genetteanalyzes the historyof an importantinterdisciplinary genre: "mimology." Beginning with Plato's Cratylus and continuingthroughthe structuralist poetics of RomanJakobson, mimologyis reverieor imaginativelydirecteddaydreaming thepossibleconnectionsbetweenwordsand things. Mimolon involves two majorkinds of speculationon language in relationto the ogy always world:sound symbolism the ear and graphicsymbolism the eye. Throughout for for and detoursby which mimology Mimologics, Genettepursues the contradictions becomes institutionalized the ground of the truths expoundedby philosophers, as philologists,and linguists. grammarians, As a genre of writing, mimology aims to compensate and also to hide the for irremediable between and thing in all natural languages, or whatin chapsign gap ter 12 Genettecalls the "defect natural languages"[d6faut des langues]. The of devoteshis timeto inventing linkagesbetween soundsand shapesof the mimologist on one hand, and theitemsor creatures whichhe believestheyrefer,on the to words, maybe a seriouslogician, such as Leibniz,or a playful poet, other.The mimologist such as FrancisPonge. In eithercase, mimologics entails a two-step process: first, links betweenwordsand things areforged throughthe processof reverie multiple or mimology; then, these word/thingassociationsare rationalizedand justified in mimologismthrough conceptssuch as motivation,naturalness, expressivenessAll citations refer to pages in current English translations, where available, which at times have been slightly altered.
CriticalInquiry20 (Winter 1994) copyright @1976 by tditions du Seuil. This translation copyright @ 1993 by the Fromn G6rard Genette's Mimologiques University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved. This publication published by arrangement with the University of Nebraska Press.

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sion the ofmimology through of genre itself gender

conceptsthat recuracrossthe discoursesof human sciencesas well as within aesthetics. discussionof the Chapter17, entitled"LeGenrede la riverie,"caps Genette's in systems and of poetics(chap1-11) ofphilosophy (chapters workingsof mimology showshow GastonBachelard's bookson the elements(air,fire, ters 12-16). Genette water,earth)all point towarda centralmodelsetforth in La Po6tique de la revcontribution a as erie [The Poetics of Reverie]. MoststrikingaboutBachelard's de mots] is his concern-not to say,his obsession-with "word-dreamer" [reveur thegenderof nouns [le genre des noms]. Briefly sexualizeseveryput, Bachelard he wheneverhe hears the letter 1 spoken,he seesfeminine beings;wherever thing: sees the letter a written,hefeels the "profundity" water [1'eau,fem.: water].In of this way, Genetteexplains, "sexualizingreveriegets bound up with the themeof it mimology: consistsinjustifyingthegenderof a noun througha relationof conforbetweenthatgender and the sexual identitymetaphorically mity given to the object named." Equally significant is Bachelard'sunstintingprivileging of femininityas the bothin phenomenology in poetry. and to all reverie,theground of all creativity key Whatare the implicationsof this gender marking the relationshipbetweenthe for discoursesof philosophyand literature?Whatrole do feminist theoryand psychoanalysis have to play in adjudicatingthis relationship?Genettecloseschapter17 with a provocativedouble gesture: while acknowledginga Freudian reading of reverieson words,he opensup thepossibility a deconstructive Bachelard's (re)viof

and what mystery? The emblem of the union Marriage is a mystery; of Jesus Christ with his church. And what would have happened to this mystery if the word Church had happened to be masculine in Latin? De l'amour -STENDHAL,

Gerard Genette is Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales where he teaches aesthetics and poetics. His principal works in French include Figures (1966), Figures II (1969), Figures III a (1979; in English, 1992), and Seuils (1987). (1972), Introduction l'architexte His most recent contribution to CriticalInquiry is "Structure and Functions of the Title in Literature" (Summer 1988). Thais E. Morgan teaches critical theory and nineteenth-century studies for the Englishdepartment and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at Arizona State University. She has published on gender theory, semiotics, Victorian poetry, and pedagogy. Her translation of G6rard Genette's Mimologiques(1976) is forthcoming.

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Like Charles Nodier or Michel Leiris, whom he cites and discusses several times, Bachelard is what he himself calls a "word-dreamer" [riveur de mots],and we have already seen the terms in which he acknowledges his special debt to the Dictionnaireraisonni des onomatopies franfaises.' Today, Bachelard is often reproached for his indifference to poetic craft and to the total structure of those works in which he seems to look only for a sort of fragmentary pretext for reverie-a line here, an "image" there, without much attention to their context and even less to their compositional function. This relative indifference could of course be of the same nature, and stem from the same motives, as that indifference which we were able to detect in Nodier himself, through an anticipatory opposition between his linguistic quietism and his Mallarmean will to "compensate for the failing in natural languages" by the perfection of poetry.2 When language is (envisioned as) [rivee] flawless, poetically satisfying in itself, the task of the poet is virtually reduced to the function of illuminator or foil of language and educator of our linguistic sensibility. In its more indirect way, but just as much as the mimological gloss, the "poetic image" (PS, p. xii), through an unprecedented but silently expected parallel, also has the role of "causing to resonate in the hollow of words" a "distant echo" that it has not invented but merely discovered, as if by chance, through marrying two words (bicher de saves [a sapling pyre]; feu humide [a wet fire]) that had never met before, and revealing their profound resonance: "Bucherde seves, an unspoken word, the sacred seed of a new language, which must think the world through poetry"; "an imagethought-phrase like Joubert's ('the flame is wet fire') is an exploit of expression. The spoken word surpasses thought."3 This is because "we are not able to meditate within a prelinguistic zone" (PS, p. xix); "language
1. On Nodier, see Gaston Bachelard, Waterand Dreams:An Essay on the Imaginationof Matter trans. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas, Tex., 1983), pp. 189-90, hereafter abbreviated WD; L'Air et les songes:Essai sur l'imaginationdu mouvement(Paris, 1943), p. 272 (where Nodier is referred to as "our good teacher"), hereafter abbreviated AS; The Poeticsof Reverie, trans. Daniel Russell (New York, 1969), p.31, hereafter abbreviated PR; and La Flammed'unechandelle (Paris, 1961), p. 42. On Leiris, see Bachelard, ThePoeticsof Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston, 1969), p. 147, hereafter abbreviated PS; and La Terre les reveriesde la volonti (Paris, 1948), p. 278. et In the first secton of chapter 12, in Mimologics,entitled "Failing Natural Languages" [Le Defaut des langues], Genette discusses Mallarme's view that natural languages fall short of the true, originary, and comprehensive language. Engaging in secondary mimologism, Mallarme seeks "to compensate for the failing in natural languages," Genette argues, by writing poetry. Words and sounds are specially arranged in Mallarmean "verse" [vers] in order to raise the natural language of French to this Cratylian ideal.-TRANs. 2. Genette analyzes the Dictionnaireraisonnedes onomatopiesfranfaises(1808) and other works by Charles Nodier in chapter 8, entitled "Onomatopoetics" [Onomatopodtique], Miin mologics.Nodier practices a systematic yet imaginative mimologism and this is what attracted Bachelard to his riveries on words.-TRANS. 3. Bachelard, La Flammed'une chandelle,pp. 42, 74, 23.

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is always a step ahead of our thinking, a bit more effervescent than our love" (AS, p. 288), always "at the command post of the imagination."4 Thus, the poetic event, always instantaneous and free of structural relations, because it is always closer to the single vocable, can be for Bachelard, in Barthes's phrase, an object of reading, of pleasure, of happy reverie, without first having been an object of writing in the strong sense, that is, of craft.5 The reading of poetry can even be reduced entirely to word reveries [reveries mots]-in an obviously double sense: first, there de are words that dream (see PS, p. 146); we only have to listen to these words dreaming in order to dream them in turn, 'just as the child listens to the sea in a seashell" (PR, p. 49). And despite certain protests against the "unjust privileging of sonorities," the natural inclination of this reverie really lies, as with Nodier, in mimophonic interpretation (AS, p. 283). For the person who knows how to "explore with his ear the hollow of the syllables that make up the sonorous edifice of a word," clignoter[to flicker] is "an onomatopoeia for the flame of the candle," in which the "malaise of the light" condenses into clashing and trembling syllables; piauler [to pule] is another, "in the minor mode, with tearful eyes";6 vaste [vast] is the "'power of the spoken word,' " a "respiratory vocable," which teaches us to "breathe with the air resting on the horizon," by virtue of that a which is "the vowel of boundlessness" (PS, pp. 196-97). In contrast, miasme [miasma] is "a sort of silent onomatopoeia of disgust"; 7 riviere[river], grenouille [frog], gargouille [gargoyle], glaieul [gladiolus] are "water words," the "waggish" speech of liquid consonants (WD, p. 189): riviere "never stops flowing" (WD, p. 188); grenouille, "phonetically-in the true phonetics of the imagination-is already a water animal" (WD, p. 191); gargouille "was a sound before becoming an image, or at least it was a sound that suddenly found its image in stone," fashioned, like itself, to "spew the gutteral insults of water" (WD, p. 192); the poets are rightmake glaieul an aquatic flower, for experience notwithstanding-to "where song is concerned, realism is always wrong.... The gladiolus, then, is a special sigh of the river ... the melancholy water in halfmourning ... a soft sob forgotten" (WD, p. 191). It is easy to discern in this latter gloss the unacknowledged role of indirect motivation (mourning, sob), but Bachelard's commentary puts it down to "liquid speech," to a ("the vowel of the water"); to "the liquid consonants" (r, 1, gr, gl); to the "correspondence between word and reality"; and to the semantic expansiveness of onomatopoeia, which, according to Nodier's precept, is capable of transposing and "delegating" all sensible qualities into verbal sonorities. Because
4. 5. p. 37. 6. 7. et Bachelard, La Terre les reveriesde la volonti, p. 8. See Roland Barthes, ThePleasureof the Text,trans. Richard Miller (New York, 1975), Bachelard, La Flammed'une chandelle,pp. 42, 45. et Bachelard, La Terre la reveriedu repos(Paris, 1948), p. 68.

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the ear is much more receptive than we suppose, it quite readily accepts a certain degree of transposition in imitation, and before long it imitates the first imitation. With his joy of hearing man combines the joy of active speaking, the joy of his whole physiognomy which expresses a talent for imitation. Sound is only onepart of mimologism. [WD, p. 189] As we can see, Bachelard merely follows and illustrates one of the familiar paths of Cratylian reverie here. His specific contribution-and also, it seems, the most deeply motivated one-involves a less traditional aspect of linguistic functioning, which is the gender of words. His is a motivating, and therefore sexualizing, interpretation of a phenomenon that two clever grammarians (one a psychiatrist) earlier termed, approof priately, the "sexusemblance" [sexuisemblance] substantives.8 knows that the distinction of grammatical gender is neiEveryone ther universal nor identical in all the natural languages that employ it. Some have a system with two levels, or with three terms in which the neuter (inanimate) intervenes, with the masculine/feminine opposition being reserved in principle for animate and sexed beings. In this case, the phenomenon of sexusemblance cannot occur since no inanimate signified is marked by a pseudosexual index; this is what happens in English, at least when no expressive or poetic intention occasions recourse to personification, a figure of speech that immediately imposes a choice of sex. (This essentially poetic figure also has a familiar, even popular usage: car or ship, for example, are often feminized in idiomatic usage.) On the other hand, the effect of sexusemblance can appear once the use of the neuter is no longer rigorously systematic and once certain inanimate things can be masculine or feminine. This is the most frequent case, for example, in Greek, in Latin, or in German; it happens a fortiori in modern romance languages that ignore the neuter.9 The distribution of inanimate things into masculine and feminine is thus highly capricious,
8. Jacques Damourette and Edouard Pichon, "Sexuisemblance du substantif nominal," Des motsa la pensee:Essai de grammaire la languefrangaise, 8 vols. (Paris, 1911-52), 1: 354de 423. However, for these authors, sexusemblance apparently was an a priori motivation of grammatical gender, a "perpetual metaphor through which things, both material and immaterial, all find themselves assigned a sex," and according to which the original creatorspeakers of language divided objects, including the inanimate, into masculine and feminine 3 (Pichon, "La Polarisation masculin-f6minin," L'Evolutionpsychiatrique [1934]: 67; hereafter to abbreviated "PMF"). In contrast, I take sexusemblance mean a metaphorical sexualization induced a posteriori from the grammatical gender of words, itself generally inherited from an entirely mechanical evolution. 9. "What a great service French does us-a passionate language which has not wanted to preserve a 'neuter' gender, that gender which does not choose when it is so pleasant to multiply the opportunities for choosing" (PR, p. 39). The former choice is what PierreJoseph Proudhon calls "giving sexes to one's words" (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, "Essai de grammaire generale," in Nicolas Bergier, Les Elimensprimitifsdes langues [1764; Besangon, 1837], p. 265; hereafter abbreviated "EG").

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resulting from purely mechanical reasons, a rather striking illustration of the "arbitrariness" of the sign. That, at any rate, is the common view of linguists,10a view of which Bachelard is clearly aware, but one that hardly suits his purposes: I would certainly have benefited from a close study of the grammarians. I cannot conceal my astonishment, however, at seeing so many linguists dispose of the problem by saying that the masculine or feminine of nouns comes about haphazardly. Obviously, no reason at all can be found for this if only logical reasons are sought. Perhaps an oneiric study ought to be undertaken. [PR, pp. 34-35] The implicit hypothesis of this project of study, or "genoanalysis,"" seems to be that the distribution of genders originally corresponds to a more or less conscious ("oneiric") motivation on the part of the creators of language. Bachelard recounts the delightful conjecture of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, according to whom women created masculine words to designate objects endowed "with strength and power," and conversely men created feminine words for objects endowed "with grace and charm" (PR, p. 37). Less imaginative, and usually very little inclined to speculation on motivation, James Harris himself ventured: In some Words these distinctions seem owing to nothing else, than to the meer casual structure of the Word itself: 'tis of such a Gender, from having such a Termination; or from belonging perhaps to such a Declension. In others we may imagine a more subtle kind of reasoning, a reasoning which discerns even in thingswithouta Sex a dis10. Grammatical gender is one of the least logical and most unpredictable grammatical categories.... This distinction, which cuts across the entire language, no longer corresponds to anything in the great majority of cases: for example, certain abstract nouns are masculine, others feminine, and still others neuter without our being able to see the reason for these differences. The name of certain objects is masculine, that of others feminine, and that of still others neuter, without visible reason. [Antoine Meillet, "Le Genre grammatical et l'l1imination de la flexion," Linguistiquehistoriqueet linguistique generale, 2 vols. (Paris, 1921-38), 1: 202-3] "The difference between the masculine and the feminine ... can hardly ever be traced back to a definite signification, except in that small number of cases where it serves to mark the opposition between 'male' and 'female'" (Meillet, "La Categorie du genre et les conceptions indo-europ~ens," Linguistique et historique linguistique gendrale, 1:228; hereafter abbreviated "CG"). "This system was never coherent because, at its origin and increasingly since, arbitrariness has reigned in the designation of things and abstract ideas, while the reasons for the designations based on mythology have ceased to be recognized" (Albert Dauzat, "Le Genre en frangais moderne," Le Frangaismoderne5 [June-July 1937]: 193). But this doctrine is not without its nuances, which we have seen in Damourette and Pichon, and to which we will return. 11. I am slightly extending the sense proposed for this term: "analysis of a literary passage through the gender of the words" (PR, p. 40).

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tant analogy to that great NATURAL DISTINCTION, which (according to 12 Milton) animatesthe World. It is clear how sexualizing reverie gets bound up with the theme of mimology. It consists injustifying the gender of a noun through a relation of conformity between that gender and the sexual identity metaphorically given to the object named. This motivation is a partial one, since it bears upon only one aspect and not the entirety of the vocable. With Bachelard, it could be said that the feminine gender of the French word eau [water] is well suited to the "femininity" of the aquatic element, but this does not imply that the sound, for example, or the graphismeof this word has something feminine about it. Present also is a purely and, as it were, abstractly grammatical motivation that concerns the gender itself and not its material morphological mark. This kind of motivation, therefore, should not be confused with that variety of classical mimologism which consists in motivating and justifying a morpheme of gender by a phonic characteristic claimed to be "adequate" to its function; just so, Bachelard speaks of the "softness" [douceur]or the "unhurriedness" [lenteur] of feminine endings.'" Likewise, Proudhon observed that "in all natural languages the feminine ending [originally, according to him, a mark of the diminutive] was softer, more delicate, one might say, than the masculine: Hebrew, Greek, Latin, etc., use the a, French the silent e, and it is generally agreed that these two endings give style lightness and grace" ("EG," p. 265). For Grimm, "the masculine gender was the one that received the strongest and most perfect impress; the feminine gender took on a less sharply defined and more ponderous form. In the masculine gender the consonants and short vowels dominate, in contrast to the long vowels in the feminine gender."'4 And according to Renan, "if a and i are characteristically feminine vowels in all natural languages, it is probably because these vowels are better suited to the female organ than the virile sounds o and ou."'5 In principle, this morphophonic motivation applies to properly feminine (animate) nouns such as lupa versus lupus or louve
12. James Harris, Hermes:or,A PhilosophicalInquiry ConcerningLanguage and Universal Grammar(London, 1751), p. 44; hereafter abbreviated H. This hypothesis does not seem to have been unanimously accepted in the eighteenth century. In his eighth lesson in rhetoric (1783), Blair refers to it through examples, but not without raising a few doubts about it; natural languages do not seem to him in any way "to have been more capricious, and to have proceeded less according to fixed rule" (Hugh Blair, "Structure of Language," Lectures on Rhetoricand Belles Lettres,2 vols. [London, 1783], 1:149). 13. "Feminine endings have a certain delicacy"; "the feminine in a word accents the pleasure of speaking, but one must have a certain love of lingering sonorities" (PR, pp.

30, 31).
14. Jakob Grimm, De l'originedu langage, trans. Fernand de Wegmann (Paris, 1859), pp. 43-44. 15. Ernest Renan, De l'originedu langage, in Oeuvrescompldtes, Henriette Psichari, 10 ed. vols. (Paris, 1947-61), 8:22. The influence attributed to the female organ (the speech organ, I assume) in the choice of morphemes is again a slippage toward subjective mimologism,

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versus loup.16 It may also coincide (as we often see in Bachelard) with the sexualizing motivation of genders for inanimate things, thereby reinforcing their effect, as in, say, riviere [fem.: river] versus ruisseau [masc.: stream], or cuillitre [fem.: spoon] versus couteau[masc.: knife]; but the first does not merge with the second. The same psychological projections are invested in both but through completely distinct linguistic processes. Properly speaking, sexusemblance is independent of motivation by the morphemes of gender; it focuses on the notion of gender itself, without involving its morphemes-which are most often, at least in French, external to the word anyway: eau [water] is feminine only through its determining marks on other words (its article, its adjective) that "agree" with it; rivitre [tributary river] is morphologically not more feminine than fleuve [main river], nor femme [woman] than homme[man], and soeur [sister] is rather less so than frdre [brother], just asfagus [beech tree] was less so than poeta [poet].17 What we have here, then, is a relatively abstract psycholinguistic phenomenon, in which the signifier is not necessarily a phonic or graphemic reality but a grammatical category, whatever its mark or absence of a mark. As for the signified, it is obviously metaphorical, and the role of the imagination lies essentially in the construction of this metaphor.18 The justificatory motivation will therefore consist of interpreting the object's
characteristic of Renan: certain phonemes are feminine through adequation not to the designated object but to the designating subject. Unless, in order to harmonize the two functions, one assumes, as Renan seems to here, that "feminine" objects have been named by women and masculine ones by men: the reverse of Bernardin's hypothesis, and certainly less elegant. 16. Genette here contrasts the feminine versus the masculine forms for wolf in Latin and French, respectively. His critique of the gendering of words in linguistics and philosophy depends on the series of similar contrasts that follows-contrasts motivated by masculinist reveries on language rather than by objective data.-TRANs. 17. Genette's point is that, in inflected languages, the gender of a noun is not necessarily intrinsic to its morphemes, but instead is marked by the article it takes (masculine, feminine, or neuter), and/or by its grammatical force over the adjectives it governs. Thus, if it is arguable that the femininity of the noun eau [water] stems from both its morphology (the vowels e-a-u being mimologically considered feminine) and its grammatical entailments (the feminine article, la-here elided to l'--and the feminization of all modifiers, as in l'eau fraiche et douce), the morphology of words such as soeur and poeta has little bearing on their assignment to the feminine gender. Rather, they are marked as feminine by the article (la soeur) or by inflexion (poeta) and the adjectives that they govern-a point in favor of the arbitrariness or conventionality of the sign and against mimological reveries such as Bachelard's.-TRANS. 18. "The attribution of gender to sexless beings was a true metaphor" ("EG,"p. 266). In French profondeurcarries several meanings, so that Bachelard's privileging of the feminine in reverie entails the feminine as "depth" [Lat., profundus, deep, with a possible reversal into its opposite, high], hence "intimacy" and closeness to the origin of things; the feminine as "wisdom" or natural sensibility, "calmness," and "security";and the feminine as intellectual "profoundness" or natural sagacity. Finally, the phenomenal correlate of the feminine, or water [Lat., profundere,to pour forth, flow], may be in play, too.-TRANS.

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character, or at least one or the other of its characteristics, in terms of femininity or masculinity. This interpretation itself presupposes an analogical extension of the definition of the sexes, and of course this extension, which is anything but objective, proceeds in its turn from several typically ideological investments that would, under other circumstances, have attracted the critical notice of Bachelard as an epistemologist. Thus, as Harris writes,
to we may conceive such SUBSTANTIVES have been considered, as masculine, which were "conspicuous for the Attributes of imparting or communicating; or which were by nature active, strong, and efficacious, and that indiscriminately whether to good or to bad; or which had claim to Eminence, either laudable or otherwise." The Feminine on the contrary were "such, as were conspicuous for the Attributes either of receiving, of containing, or of producing and bringing forth; or which had more of the passive in their nature, than of the active; or which were peculiarly beautiful and amiable; or which had respect to such Excesses as were rather Feminine than Masculine." [H, pp. 44-45]

Thus, the sun is generally masculine because it gives light, heat, and fecundating energy; the moon is feminine because its reflected beams are more subdued.19 The sky is masculine as the source of fertilizing rains, the earth feminine as the mother of all living creatures; the ocean could have been feminine as the receptacle of all waters, but its terrible power tipped the scale in favor of the masculine. For the same reason, time, God, sleep, and death are most often masculine; virtue is feminine due to its charm and its beauty, vice masculine for its ugliness, Fortune feminine due to its caprices, and so on.20
19. Here, Harris is relying above all on Greek and Latin usage and on the personifications in English poetics. 20. As often in this type of analysis concerning purely hypothetical collective representations, it is impossible to distinguish between objective conjecture and unconscious projection as the point of departure. We find this ambiguity in Meillet himself regarding what he calls the "Indo-European conceptions" of gender: The word for "sleep," hypnos in Greek, somnus in Latin, etc., is masculine because "sleep" is a powerful force that submits men to its will .... "Night," whose religious character is felt in a much more lively way than that of "day,"because it has something more mysterious, has a feminine name everywhere.... The "sky,"from which fertilizing rain comes down, is masculinized and "earth," which is fertilized, is feminized; the "foot" is masculinized and the "hand," which receives, is feminized. ["CG," pp. 222, 225, 229] It is tempting to fantasize about the masculinity of the foot, but another text by Meillet gives us an unexpected interpretation: "The foot, which is placed on the path, is conceived of as male, and the path as female" (Meillet, "Essai de chronologie des langues: La Theorie de du f6minin," Bulletin de la socidtd linguistiquede Paris 32 [1931]: 7). Pichon, who cites this hypothesis and several analogous ones by the same author, speaks in this connection, in a

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Clearly, the central ground of metaphorical extension is quite simple here, being directly borrowed from the characteristics of (the masculine idea of) the sexual relation: the male is active, powerful, and plain; the female is passive, fertile, and pretty. We have encountered this oppositional theme in Bernardin and Proudhon, and, inevitably, it is again found in Bachelard, except for a few nuances: the feminine value of fertility disappears almost entirely, and when he comes across it in Proudhon, Bachelard rejects it as a superficial rationalization; also, he reproaches Proudhon for leaving the motif of inferior size unresolved, but he hardly deals with it himself. For Bachelard, the real theme of the feminine is revealed by the two characteristics attributed to "feminine sonorities," which are softness [douceur] (or sensibility [tendresse]),and unhurriedness [lenteur].What valorizes femininity is its fundamental character of depth [profondeur]and intimacy [intimite].The masculine is the gender of external action and exploitation: "To love things according to their use belongs to the masculine. They are the counters for our actions, for our energetic actions" (PR, pp. 31-32). The feminine is the gender of contemplation and intimate communion with a natural profundity: "but to love things intimately, for themselves, in the unhurried ways of the feminine, is to enter into the labyrinth of the secret nature of things" (PR, p. 32). This

revealing partial slip, of "that metaphorical mode of thought which we sometimes tend to attributeto our distant Indo-European ancestors," and which "we must really expect to encounter still existing among ourselves" ("PMF,"p. 68). Here are several very clear instances of this metaphorization. Language has a tendency to put into the masculine everything that is undifferentiated, and in particular everthing that is compared to the young of animals, still at an age when sex does not count; everything to which we attribute an individual soul, its source of independent and unpredictable activity; everything that is fixed by a precise, methodical and somehow material determination; and to put into the feminine material substances presented as purely abstract outside any phenomenon; everything that is in the process of undergoing an exogenous activity; everything that evokes a fecundity without variety, capable of indefinitely repeating the same type of productive activity.... These notions on the psychological signification of the distribution of gender already show us, although they may still be imperfect, that we are dealing with a metaphor of sex. This is especially striking for the feminine: woman is passive, woman is a mother, an egg-laying creature which man fertilizes. ["PMF,"p. 70] And Pichon also says: Our natural language seems to tend to put in the feminine objects, results or residues of an exogenous activity (ex.: "la blessure" [the wound]), devices whose productive activ[the egg-beater]), and finally material substances ity is always the same (ex.: "la batteuse" conceived of as purely abstract outside of any event (ex.: "la bonti" [goodness]). The psychological allusion to the feminine sex is clear in all three cases: the female possessed, the egg-layer, and the divine ?aktiparedre [divine consort] of each god are still notions fully alive in the depths of our French soul. [Pichon, "Genre et questions connexes: Sur les pas de Mlle. Durand," Le Franpaismoderne6 (Jan. 1938): 33] In those days, "sexism" had a good conscience.

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fundamental opposition inspires several of the couples that Bachelard so enjoys pairing together:21 l'angle/la courbe (angle/curve) (see PS, p. 146), le courage/la passion, le jour/la nuit (day/night), le sommeil/lamort (sleep/ berce(cradle/crib), "in which one knows true rest, since death), le berceaulla one sleeps in the feminine" (PR, p. 48)-a telling formula-"the faithful wristwatch and the exact stopwatch" (PR, p. 47), "the friendly lamp and the stupid lampstand" (PR, pp. 46-47), "the forbidding gateway and the welcoming door" (PR, p. 46), the "straight and vigorous" fir tree and the palm tree (feminine in the poem by Heine), with "all its fronds open, attentive to every breeze" (PR, p. 33). Here, the passage from one language to another permits a "conquest of the feminine" and hence-a typical inference-an "enrichment of the entire poem" (PR, p. 33), fortuitously turning the tables on "the extraordinary inversion" (in German) which makes the sun feminine and the moon masculine, a linguistic scandal, an exceptional failing in a natural language that gives the (French) dreamer "the impression that his reverie is being perverted" (PR, pp. 32-33).22 Other scandals include the masculinity offleuve [main river], of Rhin and Rh6ne, "linguistic monsters" that betray the "femininity of true water," which is illustrated in contrast by the names of those true rivieres [tributary rivers] such as Aube and Moselle, and-so much for geographical terminology-Seine and Loire (PR, p. 30); or, further, by the masculinity of Brunnen (brook), which contrasts with the correct femininity offontaine (fountain). Yet, to some extent, Bachelard ends up legitimizing (remotivating) this reverse reverie: "The same water does not flow from fontaine as from Brunnen," since the latter "makes a deeper noise" and "courses less smoothly"; it hints at what might be the paradoxical truth of water in the masculine, "but it is undoubtedly a temptation of the devil to try dreaming in a language which is not the mother tongue. I must be faithful to myfontaine as my source" (PR, p. 34).
21. Not all of them: certain couples seem more conventional, such as l'orgueil/lavaniti [pride/vanity], or insignificant, such as le coffret/laterrine [vanity box/cooking terrine], la glace/le miroir [looking-glass/mirror], lafeuille/lefeuillet [page/leaf], le bois/laforit [woods/forest], la nuee/le nuage [storm cloud/cloud], la vouivre/ledragon [serpent/dragon], le luth/la lyre [lute/lyre], pleurs [masc.]/larmes[fem.] [crying/weeping]. 22. The controversy over what Damourette and Pichon call the Germanic "system of distributing sexusemblance" is naturally one of the topoi of linguistic Frenchness (Damourette and Pichon, "Sexuisemblance du substantif nominal," p. 354). Here is a typical illustration from the pen of Michel Tournier, or at least from his naive "pedophorous" hero: What is completely aberrant is the sex attributed by German words to things and even to people. The addition of a neuter gender was an interesting improvement, under the condition that it be used with discretion. Instead, we see the unleashing of a malignant will toward mispresentation in general. The moon becomes a masculine being, and the sun a feminine being. Death becomes male, life neuter. Chair is also masculinized, which is crazy; on the other hand, cat is feminized, which corresponds to the very facts. But the paradox reaches its height with the neutralizationof woman herself, to which das the German language is furiously devoted (das Weib, Midel, das Mddchen,das Fraulein, das Frauenzimmer). [Michel Tournier, Le Roi des aulnes (Paris, 1975), p. 425]

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Indeed, the theme of femininity presides over all aquatic reverie and suggests a sexualizing reduction of the famous quadripartition of the four elements: water is essentially feminine and thereby opposes fire, which is essentially masculine (see WD, p. 5).23 Still, in a moment of extreme indulgence and conciliation, Bachelard discovers or welcomes the femininity of la flamme, the flame of la chandelle (candle), slow burning and silent. For its part, the earth is feminine and at least once is opposed to the sky and thus implicitly to the masculine air. So the earth inspires a (double) reverie(fem.), whereas the air presides over fancies [songes,masc.]. Of course, we have to cheat a little here, for feminine water commands masculine dreams[reves],and earthly reveries come partly from the will [la volonte], a feminine word for a virile reality, and partly from repose [le repos],a masculine word for the most feminine of states.24(It is true that femininity is above all the site for a repose that is implicitly the man's.) But the essential bipartition remains clear: air and fire divide the masculine realm above, while earth and water share the feminine empire below.25 Such a division might inspire a unilateral valorization of masculinity
23. On another level, the femininity of water is also opposed to the virility of wine [le vin]-always the soul of the French:"For the person who dreams substances at their deep source, water and wine are liquid enemies. They are only mixed for medicine. A wine cut with anything, a wine cut with water-the wisdom of the French language makes no mistake-is truly a wine which has lost its virility" (Bachelard, La Terreet les reveriesdu repos, pp. 326-27). 24. The key terms in Bachelard's phenomenology here, songe, reve, and reverie,belong to a semantic triad in French that does not quite correspond to the English opposition between dreamand daydream. Before the romantics, songe designated a sleeping dream [Lat., somnium]and, by extension, an illusion or fancy. In the nineteenth century, revebegan to be used instead to mean the imagery experienced during sleep, and again by extension, illusion, or unreality. See Freud's theory of dreams as wish fulfillments in The Interpretation of Dreams,in The StandardEdition of the Complete of PsychologicalWorks SigmundFreud,trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), vols. 4 and 5. Likewise, after Jean-Jacques Rousseau, riverie took on new value as an imaginative, creative kind of daydreaming. Finally, in the context of Bachelard's phenomenology, reverie-always creative and always in the feminine-takes place over an extended period of time ("unhurried" and "profound"), while songe [fancy] comes and goes relatively quickly, and is more easily interrupted.TRANS. 25. All of these examples illustrate the metaphorical sexuality of inanimate objects. But the influence of gender is even more palpable in the case of certain nouns (which Pichon calls figurative) for animal species, which current parlance masculinizes or feminizes as a group; everyone knows how difficult it is to think in terms of a female version of le renard [fox], le lMopard [leopard], un iliphant [elephant], or a male version of la panthdre[panther], la cigale [cicada], lafourmille [ant]; and how these purely linguistic couplings dominate the imagination of children or folklore: le rat [rat] and la souris [mouse], le crapaud [toad] and la grenouille [frog], le pigeon [pigeon] and la colombe[dove], and so on. The reasons given for these arbitrary divisions by some linguists are even more revealing of a sexualizing interpretation: "If certain animals have feminine names without basis in their sex, it is only small animals, especially insects" ("CG,"p. 231). "A generic term can become feminine if the animal, by its grace, lightness, etc., evokes an idea of femininity: this

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as the force of high-mindedness and hence as a sign of superiority, "well founded or otherwise," as Harris said. As we have seen, however, this is not Bachelard's way, or, more precisely, his emphasis lies almost entirely on the compensatory countervalorization that exalts the feminine as profundity [profondeur], that is, as inferiority maintained but valorized as such.26 The empire of the feminine represents a profundity that is receptive, calming, and conciliatory--that of the refuge, the maternal "breast," of course, the return to the security and embrace of the womb. Thus, The Poeticsof Reverie is not only a sexualizing reverie, but also a feminizing reverie, a quest for the femininity of language, in which each "conquest" is a victory and a gain, a promise of happiness. It might be tempting to relate this attitude to the usual psychological (or psychoanalytical) complex, and such an interpretation would not be entirely groundless. But it should not misrepresent or obliterate in its wake a more topical peculiarity: the fact that Bachelard's pages on femininity are also and first of all a chapter on reverie, and that reverie itself is for him an essentially feminine activity (which is not to say a woman's activity). The dominant pair here is reverieversus reve (imagining versus dreaming)-"in sum, ... the dream is masculine, the reverie is feminine"-that derives directly from the fundamental opposition, borrowed from Jung, between anima and animus (PR, p. 29). Always feminine, reverie is so because it can only invest a feminine object, and, in his turn, in order to "invest the core of feminine reverie," the analyst (genoanalyst) must "entrust [himself] to the femininity of words." Only feminine words "are reverie words, for they belong to the language of the anima" (PR, p. 30). Reverie in the feminine is thus ultimately a circular, selfcontemplative reverie; as aptly suggested in Bachelard's title, it is a reverie upon reverie.We ought, therefore, to interrogate Bachelard's valorization of the feminine only through this other (and same) valorization, which is that of reverie, whose feminization, among other things, is so strongly opposed to Freud's "daydream" [revediurne], itself masculine twice over, both in gender (le reve) and genre (lejour). Such is not our purpose. On the other hand, if the "femininity" of reverie is due to the investment of an "oedipal" desire for a return to originary intimacy, that is, to the secu-

is the case for la souris [mouse], which was masculine in Latin [mus]"(Dauzat, "Le Genre en frangais moderne," p. 205). In the figurative group, gender takes its pattern from the comparison made between the general bearing of the animal species and that of a woman or a man: for example, the mouse, scampering about and storing up its little provisions, is considered to be feminine, like the ant; in contrast, the elephant, majestic, brave, intelligent, awesome, is masculine. ["PMF,"p. 75] O Ahab, was she, your whale [la baleine],lacking in courage and intelligence? 26. On an analogous effect in the pairjour/nuit [day/night], see Genette, FiguresII (Paris, 1969), pp. 102-9.

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rity of sameness, lack of differentiation, identity, then mimological reverie, as we have repeatedly observed, is reverie par excellence, since it is a refusal of and flight from difference, a desire or nostalgia for the reassuring and blissful, even passive, identity between word and thing, language and world, which is projected onto verbal reality. In this sense, mimologism is not just one among many linguistic reveries. It is the reverie of language itself-here again in a double sense, as if language itself, forgetting the "lack" [difaut] that constitutes its being, dreams its own (and illusory) intimacy, its proper (and impossible) self-identity, its own proper (and fatal) repose.27

27. As in chapter 1 of Mimologics, where he discusses Plato's Cratylus,Genette plays upon the French word proprein several senses here. The reverie of language concerns its "own"identity with itself-an "illusion" since words are not things and there always remains a "gap" [difaut] between language and the world. (In the context of the last paragraph of chapter 17, I have chosen to translate difaut as "lack" in order to evoke Jacques Lacan's notion of the feminine as "lack."If Bachelard's "reverie upon reverie" is indeed a femininizing activity, then he would seem to risk the privileges of the masculine position in the same way that the Minister does in stealing the Queen's letter in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Purloined Letter." See Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,"' trans. Jeffrey FrenchStudies,no. 48 [1972]: 38-72.) Mehlman, Yale At the same time, the reverie of language aims at establishing the "properness" or "appropriateness" of words in relation to the things that they designate. One might thus say that Bachelard takes a Cratylist position on the origin of language. In contrast, Jacques Derrida would represent the Hermogenist or conventionalist position, as, for example, in his deconstruction of the "proper" through the play of identity and diffirance in Jacques trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976).-TRANS. Derrida, Of Grammatology,