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Gaston BACHELARD

Manuscrit autographe complet de la préface aux Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym d'Edgar Allan Poe

s.d. [1944], 22,5x17cm, 15 feuilles.

BACHELARD Gaston Complete autograph manuscript of his preface to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe

"The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is one of the great books about the human heart."
The handsome complete autograph manuscript signed by Gaston Bachelard of the prefeace to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe, re-published by Stock in 1944. 15 leaves in black ink with a few pencil notes by author. Numerous underlinings, deletions and corrections.
This is the second study that Gaston Bachelard devoted to Poe's work, the first - in part - being included in L'Eau et les Rêves, essai sur l'imagination de la matière [Water and Dreams, an Essay on the Imagination ofMatter], published two years before. Bachelard was Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Sorbonne at the time and was head of the Institute of the History of Science.
Poe's enigmatic maritime tale and its abrupt and incoherent ending gave rise to a number of theories of interpretation, especially in France (including from Marie Bonaparte, Léon Lemonnier, Jorge Luis Borges, and Jean Ricardou). Arthur Gordon Pym's Antarctic odyssey explores the dark relationship between Man and the cosmos, "the drama of Man confronted with the world" as Bachelard says. Bachelard's psychoanalytical approach is an introduction to the text and invites the reader to attempt a "double reading ", already tried by some (including Marie Bonaparte in her Freudian analysis of the text) which tries to uncover the hidden psychological depths of this adventure novel.
Bachelard highlights in his preface the primeval importance of the dream and the imagination as the primary force of the human spirit, maintaining that the writer's imagination was inspired more by dreams than real-world experience. In this sense, Poe is, according to him, one of "those all too rare writers who have worked their way to the limit of dreams and objective thought." The writer reveals, through the shipwrecks suffered by the sailor Pym, the pre-existence of a "dramatic dream" that would have served as inspiration. Pym's sojourn in the hold of a whaling ship, the Grampus, also comes back to an idea of a "psychological labyrinth ". Bachelard undertakes a complete and benevolent re-reading of the text through a particular prism, which he calls "dream criticism ", as opposed to literary.
The author also mentions a number of theorists on the work, and addresses a marginal note to his publisher: "I'll give the page numbers according to the set text. The references I've made are to the Calmann Lévy edition". The references to Poe's text are thus written in pencil, as well as some afterthoughts in the text.
A unique witness to the birth of a great text of the "new literary spirit" of Bachelard.
 

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