Gender Genre Reverie

8/3/2019 Gender Genre Reverie

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The Gender and Genre of ReverieAuthor(s): Grard Genette and Thas E. MorganReviewed work(s):Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Winter, 1994), pp. 357-370Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable 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 Craty-lusland], Gerard Genette analyzes the history of an important nterdisciplinarygenre: "mimology." eginning with Plato's Cratylus and continuing through he

structuralist poetics of Roman Jakobson, mimology s reverie or imaginatively di-rected daydreaming n the possible connections between words and things. Mimol-

ogy always involves two major kinds of speculation on language in relation to theworld: sound symbolism or the ear and graphic symbolism or the eye. ThroughoutMimologics, Genette pursues the contradictions nd detours by which mimologybecomes nstitutionalized s the ground of the truths expounded by philosophers,grammarians, hilologists, and linguists.

As a genre of writing, mimology ims to compensate or and also to hide theirremediable gap between sign and thing in all natural languages, or what n chap-

ter 12 Genette alls the "defect f natural languages" [d6faut des langues]. Themimologist evotes his time to inventing linkages between he sounds and shapes ofwords, on one hand, and the items or creatures o which he believes they refer, on the

other. The mimologist may be a serious logician, such as Leibniz, or a playful poet,such as Francis Ponge. In either case, mimologics ntails a two-step process: irst,multiple inks between words and things are forged through he process of reverieor mimology; hen, these word/thing associations are rationalized and justified inmimologism hrough concepts such as motivation, naturalness, expressiveness-

All citations refer to pages in current English translations, where available, which attimes have been slightly altered.

Critical Inquiry 20 (Winter 1994)

Fromn G6rard Genette's Mimologiques opyright @1976 by tditions du Seuil. This translation copyright @ 1993 by the

University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved. This publication published by arrangement with the University of Ne-

braska Press.

357


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358 Gerard Genette The Gender of Reverie

concepts hat recur across the discourses of human sciences as well as within aes-thetics.

Chapter 17, entitled "Le Genre de la riverie," caps Genette's iscussion of theworkings of mimology n systems fphilosophy chapters -11) and of poetics chap-ters 12-16). Genette hows how Gaston Bachelard's books on the elements air, ire,water, arth) all point toward a central model setforth in La Po6tique de la rev-erie [The Poetics of Reverie]. Most striking about Bachelard's ontribution s a"word-dreamer" reveur de mots] is his concern-not to say, his obsession-withthe gender of nouns [le genre des noms]. Briefly put, Bachelard exualizes every-thing: whenever he hears the letter 1spoken, he sees feminine beings; wherever hesees the letter a written, he feels the "profundity" f water [1'eau, em.: water]. In

this way, Genette explains, "sexualizing everie gets bound up with the theme ofmimology: t consists injustifying the gender of a noun through a relation of confor-mity between hat gender and the sexual identity metaphorically iven to the objectnamed."

Equally significant is Bachelard's unstinting privileging of femininity as the

key to all reverie, he ground of all creativity both n phenomenology nd in poetry.What are the implications of this gender marking or the relationship between hediscourses of philosophy and literature? What role do feminist theory and psycho-analysis have to play in adjudicating his relationship? Genette closes chapter 17

with a provocative double gesture: while acknowledging a Freudian reading ofBachelard's everies on words, he opens up the possibility f a deconstructive re)vi-sion f he enre fmimologytselfhroughender

Marriage is a mystery; nd what mystery? The emblem of the unionof Jesus Christ with his church. And what would have happened tothis mystery if the word Church had happened to be masculine in

Latin?-STENDHAL, De l'amour

Gerard Genette is Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudesen Sciences Sociales where he teaches aesthetics and poetics. His principalworks in French include Figures (1966), Figures II (1969), Figures III(1972), Introduction l'architexte 1979; in English, 1992), and Seuils (1987).His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is "Structure and Func-tions of the Title in Literature" (Summer 1988). Thais E. Morgan teachescritical theory and nineteenth-century studies for the Englishdepartmentand the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at Arizona State Univer-

sity. She has published on gender theory, semiotics, Victorian poetry, and

pedagogy. Her translation of G6rard Genette's Mimologiques (1976) isforthcoming.


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Critical Inquiry Winter 1994 359

Like Charles Nodier or Michel Leiris, whom he cites and discusses

several times, Bachelard is what he himself calls a "word-dreamer" [riveurde mots], and we have already seen the terms in which he acknowledges hisspecial debt to the Dictionnaire raisonni des onomatopies ranfaises.' Today,Bachelard is often reproached for his indifference to poetic craft and tothe total structure of those works in which he seems to look only for asort of fragmentary pretext for reverie-a line here, an "image" there,without much attention to their context and even less to their composi-tional function. This relative indifference could of course be of the samenature, and stem from the same motives, as that indifference which we

were able to detect in Nodier himself, through an anticipatory oppositionbetween his linguistic quietism and his Mallarmean will to "compensatefor 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 orfoil of language and educator of our linguistic sensibility. In its more indi-rect way, but just as much as the mimological gloss, the "poetic image"(PS, p. xii), through an unprecedented but silently expected parallel, alsohas the role of "causing to resonate in the hollow of words" a "distantecho" 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 profoundresonance: "Bu her de seves, an unspoken word, the sacred seed of a new

language, which must think the world through poetry"; "an image-thought-phrase like Joubert's ('the flame is wet fire') is an exploit of ex-

pression. The spoken word surpasses thought."3 This is because "we arenot able to meditate within a prelinguistic zone" (PS, p. xix); "language

1. On Nodier, see Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination ofMatter trans. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas, Tex., 1983), pp. 189-90, hereafter abbreviated WD;L' Air et les songes: Essai sur l'imagination du mouvement Paris, 1943), p. 272 (where Nodier isreferred to as "our good teacher"), hereafter abbreviated AS; The Poetics of Reverie, trans.Daniel Russell (New York, 1969), p.31, hereafter abbreviated PR; and La Flamme d'une chan-delle (Paris, 1961), p. 42.

On Leiris, see Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston, 1969), p. 147,hereafter abbreviated PS; and La Terre t les reveries de la volonti (Paris, 1948), p. 278.

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 shortof the

true, originary,and

comprehensive language. Engagingin

secondary mimologism,Mallarme seeks "to compensate for the failing in natural languages," Genette argues, bywriting poetry. Words and sounds are specially arranged in Mallarmean "verse" [vers] inorder to raise the natural language of French to this Cratylian ideal.-TRANs.

2. Genette analyzes the Dictionnaire raisonne des onomatopiesfranfaises 1808) and otherworks by Charles Nodier in chapter 8, entitled "Onomatopoetics" [Onomatopodtique], n Mi-mologics. Nodier practices a systematic yet imaginative mimologism and this is what attractedBachelard to his riveries on words.-TRANS.

3. Bachelard, La Flamme d'une chandelle, pp. 42, 74, 23.


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is always a step ahead of our thinking, a bit more effervescent than ourlove" (AS, p. 288), always "at the command post of the imagination."4

Thus, the poetic event, always instantaneous and free of structuralrelations, because it is always closer to the single vocable, can be for Bach-elard, in Barthes's phrase, an object of reading, of pleasure, of happyreverie, 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 toword reveries [reveries e mots]-in an obviously double sense: first, thereare words that dream (see PS, p. 146); we only have to listen to thesewords dreaming in order to dream them in turn, 'just as the child listensto the sea in a seashell" (PR, p. 49). And despite certain protests againstthe "unjust privileging of sonorities," the natural inclination of this rev-erie really lies, as with Nodier, in mimophonic nterpretation (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 "malaiseof the light" condenses into clashing and trembling syllables; piauler [topule] is another, "in the minor mode, with tearful eyes";6 vaste [vast] isthe "'power of the spoken word,' " a "respiratory vocable," which teachesus 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, mi-asme [miasma] is "a sort of silent onomatopoeia of disgust"; 7riviere [river],grenouille [frog], gargouille [gargoyle], glaieul [gladiolus] are "waterwords," 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 asound that suddenly found its image in stone," fashioned, like itself, to

"spew the gutteral insults of water" (WD, p. 192); the poets are right-experience notwithstanding-to make glaieul an aquatic flower, for"where song is concerned, realism is always wrong.... The gladiolus,then, is a special sigh of the river ... the melancholy water in half-

mourning ... a soft sob forgotten" (WD, p. 191). It is easy to discern inthis latter gloss the unacknowledged role of indirect motivation (mourn-ing, 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 verbalsonorities. Because

4. Bachelard, La Terre t les reveries de la volonti, p. 8.5. See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, rans. Richard Miller (New York, 1975),

p. 37.6. Bachelard, La Flamme d'une chandelle, pp. 42, 45.7. Bachelard, La Terre t la reverie du repos (Paris, 1948), p. 68.


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the ear is much more receptive than we suppose, it quite readilyaccepts a certain degree of transposition in imitation, and before

long it imitates the first imitation. With his joy of hearing man com-bines the joy of active speaking, the joy of his whole physiognomywhich expresses a talent for imitation. Sound is only one part of mimolo-gism. [WD, p. 189]

As we can see, Bachelard merely follows and illustrates one of thefamiliar paths of Cratylian reverie here. His specific contribution-andalso, 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, interpretationof a

phenomenonthat two clever grammarians (one a psychiatrist) earlier termed, appro-priately, the "sexusemblance" [sexuisemblance] f substantives.8

Everyone knows that the distinction of grammatical gender is nei-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 theneuter (inanimate) intervenes, with the masculine/feminine oppositionbeing reserved in principle for animate and sexed beings. In this case,the phenomenon of sexusemblance cannot occur since no inanimate sig-

nified is marked by a pseudosexual index; thisis

what happensin En-

glish, at least when no expressive or poetic intention occasions recourseto personification, a figure of speech that immediately imposes a choiceof sex. (This essentially poetic figure also has a familiar, even popularusage: car or ship, for example, are often feminized in idiomatic usage.)On the other hand, the effect of sexusemblance can appear once the useof the neuter is no longer rigorously systematic and once certain inani-mate 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 ofinanimate things into masculine and feminine is thus highly capricious,

8. Jacques Damourette and Edouard Pichon, "Sexuisemblance du substantif nominal,"Des mots a la pensee: Essai de grammaire de la languefrangaise, 8 vols. (Paris, 1911-52), 1: 354-423. However, for these authors, sexusemblance apparently was an a priori motivation of

grammatical gender, a "perpetual metaphor through which things, both material and im-material, all find themselves assigned a sex," and according to which the original creator-

speakers of language divided objects, including the inanimate, into masculine and feminine(Pichon, "La Polarisation masculin-f6minin," L' Evolution psychiatrique [1934]: 67; hereafterabbreviated "PMF"). In contrast, I take sexusemblance o mean a

metaphoricalsexualization

induced a posteriori from the grammatical gender of words, itself generally inherited froman entirely mechanical evolution.

9. "What a great service French does us-a passionate language which has not wantedto 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 Pierre-

Joseph Proudhon calls "giving sexes to one's words" (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, "Essai de

grammaire generale," in Nicolas Bergier, Les Elimens primitifs des langues [1764; Besangon,1837], p. 265; hereafter abbreviated "EG").


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tant analogy to that great NATURAL ISTINCTION, hich (according toMilton) animates he World. 2

It is clear how sexualizing reverie gets bound up with the theme of

mimology. It consists injustifying the gender of a noun through a relationof conformity between that gender and the sexual identity metaphori-cally given to the object named. This motivation is a partial one, since itbears upon only one aspect and not the entirety of the vocable. WithBachelard, it could be said that the feminine gender of the French wordeau [water] is well suited to the "femininity" of the aquatic element, butthis does not imply that the sound, for example, or the graphisme of this

word has something feminine about it. Present also is a purely and, as itwere, abstractly grammatical motivation that concerns the gender itselfand not its material morphological mark. This kind of motivation, there-fore, should not be confused with that variety of classical mimologismwhich 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" [len-teur] of feminine endings.'" Likewise, Proudhon observed that "in all nat-ural languages the feminine ending [originally, according to him, a mark

of the diminutive] was softer, more delicate, one might say, than the mas-culine: 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 re-ceived the strongest and most perfect impress; the feminine gender tookon a less sharply defined and more ponderous form. In the masculine

gender the consonants and short vowels dominate, in contrast to the longvowels in the feminine gender."'4 And according to Renan, "if a and i are

characteristically feminine vowels in all natural languages, it is probablybecause these vowels are better suited to the female organ than the virilesounds o and ou."'5 In principle, this morphophonic motivation appliesto properly feminine (animate) nouns such as lupa versus lupus or louve

12. James Harris, Hermes: or, A Philosophical nquiry Concerning Language and UniversalGrammar London, 1751), p. 44; hereafter abbreviated H. This hypothesis does not seem tohave 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 tohave proceeded less according to fixed rule" (Hugh Blair, "Structure of Language," Lectureson Rhetoric and 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'origine du langage, trans. Fernand de Wegmann (Paris, 1859),pp. 43-44.

15. Ernest Renan, De l'origine du langage, in Oeuvres compldtes, d. Henriette Psichari, 10vols. (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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character, or at least one or the other of its characteristics, in terms of

femininity or masculinity. This interpretation itself presupposes an ana-

logical extension of the definition of the sexes, and of course this exten-sion, 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,

we may conceive such SUBSTANTIVES o have been considered, asmasculine, which were "conspicuous for the Attributes of impartingor communicating; or which were by nature active, strong, and effi-

cacious, and that indiscriminately whether to good or to bad; orwhich had claim to Eminence, either laudable or otherwise." TheFeminine on the contrary were "such, as were conspicuous for theAttributes either of receiving, of containing, or of producing andbringing 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 thanMasculine." [H, pp. 44-45]

Thus, the sun is generally masculine because it gives light, heat, and fe-

cundating energy; the moon is feminine because its reflected beams aremore subdued.19 The sky is masculine as the source of fertilizing rains,the earth feminine as the mother of all living creatures; the ocean couldhave been feminine as the receptacle of all waters, but its terrible powertipped the scale in favor of the masculine. For the same reason, time,God, sleep, and death are most often masculine; virtue is feminine dueto its charm and its beauty, vice masculine for its ugliness, Fortune femi-nine due to its caprices, and so on.20

19. Here, Harris is relying above all on Greek and Latin usage and on the personifica-tions in English poetics.

20. As often in this type of analysis concerning purely hypothetical collective represen-tations, it is impossible to distinguish between objective conjecture and unconscious projec-tion as the point of departure. We find this ambiguity in Meillet himself regarding what hecalls 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 religiouscharacter is felt in a much more lively way than that of "day," because it has somethingmore mysterious, has a feminine name everywhere.... The "sky," rom which fertiliz-ing 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 conceivedof as male, and the path as female" (Meillet, "Essai de chronologie des langues: La Theoriedu f6minin," Bulletin de la socidtd e linguistique de 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 simplehere, being directly borrowed from the characteristics of (the masculine

idea of) the sexual relation: the male is active, powerful, and plain; thefemale is passive, fertile, and pretty. We have encountered this opposi-tional theme in Bernardin and Proudhon, and, inevitably, it is againfound in Bachelard, except for a few nuances: the feminine value of fertil-

ity disappears almost entirely, and when he comes across it in Proudhon,Bachelard rejects it as a superficial rationalization; also, he reproachesProudhon for leaving the motif of inferior size unresolved, but he hardlydeals with it himself. For Bachelard, the real theme of the feminine isrevealed 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 exter-nal action and exploitation: "To love things according to their use belongsto the masculine. They are the counters for our actions, for our energeticactions" (PR, pp. 31-32). The feminine is the gender of contemplationand intimate communion with a natural profundity: "but to love thingsintimately, for themselves, in the unhurried ways of the feminine, is toenter 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 tendto attribute o our distant Indo-European ancestors," and which "we must really expect toencounter 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 undifferenti-ated, and in particular everthing that is compared to the young of animals, still at anage when sex does not count; everything to which we attribute an individual soul, itssource of independent and unpredictable activity; everything that is fixed by a precise,methodical and somehow material determination; and to put into the feminine mate-rial substances presented as purely abstract outside any phenomenon; everything thatis in the process of undergoing an exogenous activity; everything that evokes a fecun-dity without variety, capable of indefinitely repeating the same type of productiveactivity.... These notions on the psychological signification of the distribution of gen-der already show us, although they may still be imperfect, that we are dealing with ametaphor of sex. This is especially striking for the feminine: woman is passive, womanis a mother, an egg-laying creature which man fertilizes. ["PMF," p. 70]

And Pichon also says:

Our natural language seems to tend to putin

thefeminine

objects,results or residues

of an exogenous activity (ex.: "la blessure" the wound]), devices whose productive activ-ity is always the same (ex.: "la batteuse" the egg-beater]), and finally material substancesconceived of as purely abstract outside of any event (ex.: "la bonti" [goodness]). Thepsychological allusion to the feminine sex is clear in all three cases: the female pos-sessed, the egg-layer, and the divine ?akti paredre [divine consort] of each god are stillnotions fully alive in the depths of our French soul. [Pichon, "Genre et questions con-nexes: Sur les pas de Mlle. Durand," Le Franpais moderne 6 (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/la mort (sleep/death), le berceaulla berce cradle/crib), "in which one knows true rest, sinceone sleeps in the feminine" (PR, p. 48)-a telling formula-"the faithfulwristwatch and the exact stopwatch" (PR, p. 47), "the friendly lamp andthe 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 lan-

guage to another permits a "conquest of the feminine" and hence-a

typical inference-an "enrichment of the entire poem" (PR, p. 33), fortu-itously turning the tables on "the extraordinary inversion" (in German)which makes the sun feminine and the moon masculine, a linguistic scan-dal, 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], ofRhin and Rh6ne, "linguistic monsters" that betray the "femininity of truewater," which is illustrated in contrast by the names of those true rivieres

[tributary rivers] such as Aube and Moselle, and-so much for geographi-cal terminology-Seine and Loire (PR, p. 30); or, further, by the masculin-ity of Brunnen (brook), which contrasts with the correct femininity offon-taine (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 truthof water in the masculine, "but it is undoubtedly a temptation of the devilto try dreaming in a language which is not the mother tongue. I must befaithful to myfontaine as my source" (PR, p. 34).

21. Not all of them: certain couples seem more conventional, such as l'orgueil/la vaniti

[pride/vanity], or insignificant, such as le coffret/la terrine [vanity box/cooking terrine], laglace/le miroir [looking-glass/mirror], lafeuille/lefeuillet [page/leaf], le bois/laforit [woods/for-est], la nuee/le nuage [storm cloud/cloud], la vouivre/le dragon [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 (Damour-ette and Pichon, "Sexuisemblance du substantif nominal," p. 354). Here is a typical illustra-tion 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 evento people. The addition of a neuter gender was an interesting improvement, under thecondition that it be used with discretion. Instead, we see the unleashing of a malignantwill toward mispresentation in general. The moon becomes a masculine being, and thesun 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 neutralization of woman herself, to whichthe German language is furiously devoted (das Weib, das 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, whichis essentially masculine (see WD, p. 5).23 Still, in a moment of extreme

indulgence and conciliation, Bachelard discovers or welcomes the femi-

ninity of la flamme, the flame of la chandelle (candle), slow burning andsilent. For its part, the earth is feminine and at least once is opposed tothe 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 commandsmasculine dreams reves], and earthly reveries come partly from the will [lavolonte], a feminine word for a virile reality, and partly from repose [lerepos], 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 mascu-line realm above, while earth and water share the feminine empirebelow.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 [levin]-always the soul of the French: "For the person who dreams substances at their deepsource, water and wine are liquid enemies. They are only mixed for medicine. A wine cutwith anything, a wine cut with water-the wisdom of the French language makes no mis-take-is truly a wine which has lost its virility" (Bachelard, La Terre t les reveries du repos,pp. 326-27).

24. The key terms in Bachelard's phenomenology here, songe, reve, and reverie, belongto a semantic triad in French that does not quite correspond to the English oppositionbetween dream and daydream. Before the romantics, songe designated a sleeping dream [Lat.,somnium] and, by extension, an illusion or fancy. In the nineteenth century, reve began to beused instead to mean the imagery experienced during sleep, and again by extension, illu-sion, or unreality. See Freud's theory of dreams as wish fulfillments in The Interpretation fDreams, n The Standard Edition of the Complete sychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. anded. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), vols. 4 and 5. Likewise, after Jean-JacquesRousseau, riverie took on new value as an imaginative, creative kind of daydreaming. Fi-

nally, in the context of Bachelard's phenomenology, reverie-always creative and always inthe 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. Butthe influence of gender is even more palpable in the case of certain nouns (which Pichoncalls figurative) for animal species, which current parlance masculinizes or feminizes as a

group; everyoneknows 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 theimagination of children or folklore: le rat [rat] and la souris [mouse], le crapaud [toad] and lagrenouille [frog], le pigeon [pigeon] and la colombe dove], and so on.

The reasons given for these arbitrary divisions by some linguists are even more reveal-ing of a sexualizing interpretation: "If certain animals have feminine names without basisin their sex, it is only small animals, especially insects" ("CG," p. 231). "A generic term canbecome 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, "wellfounded or otherwise," as Harris said. As we have seen, however, this is

not Bachelard's way, or, more precisely, his emphasis lies almost entirelyon the compensatory countervalorization that exalts the feminine as pro-fundity [profondeur], that is, as inferiority maintained but valorized assuch.26 The empire of the feminine represents a profundity that is re-

ceptive, calming, and conciliatory--that of the refuge, the maternal"breast," of course, the return to the security and embrace of the womb.Thus, The Poetics of 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 itswake a more topical peculiarity: the fact that Bachelard's pages on femi-

ninity are also and first of all a chapter on reverie, and that reverie itselfis for him an essentially feminine activity (which is not to say a woman'sactivity). The dominant pair here is reverie versus reve (imagining versus

dreaming)-"in sum, ... the dream is masculine, the reverie is femi-nine"-that derives directly from the fundamental opposition, borrowed

from Jung, between anima and animus (PR, p. 29). Always feminine, rev-erie is so because it can only invest a feminine object, and, in his turn, inorder 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, self-

contemplative reverie; as aptly suggested in Bachelard's title, it is a reverie

upon reverie. We ought, therefore, to interrogate Bachelard's valorizationof the feminine only through this other (and same) valorization, which isthat of reverie, whose feminization, among other things, is so stronglyopposed to Freud's "daydream" [reve diurne], itself masculine twice over,both in gender (le reve) and genre (lejour). Such is not our purpose. Onthe other hand, if the "femininity" of reverie is due to the investment ofan "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 betweenthe 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 befeminine, like the ant; in contrast, the elephant, majestic, brave, intelligent, awesome,is masculine. ["PMF," p. 75]

O Ahab, was she, your whale [la baleine], acking in courage and intelligence?26. On an analogous effect in the pairjour/nuit [day/night], see Genette, Figures I (Paris,

1969), pp. 102-9.


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370 Girard Genette The Gender of Reverie

rity of sameness, lack of differentiation, identity, then mimological rev-erie, 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 reas-suring and blissful, even passive, identity between word and thing, lan-

guage and world, which is projected onto verbal reality. In this sense,mimologism is not just one among many linguistic reveries. It is the rev-erie 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 playsupon the French word propre n several senses here. The reverie of language concerns its

"own" dentity with itself-an "illusion" since words are not things and there always remainsa "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'snotion of the feminine as "lack." If Bachelard's "reverie upon reverie" is indeed a femininiz-

ing activity, then he would seem to risk the privileges of the masculine position in the same

waythat the Minister does in

stealingthe

Queen'sletter in

EdgarAllen Poe's "The Pur-

loined Letter." See Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,"' trans. JeffreyMehlman, YaleFrench Studies, no. 48 [1972]: 38-72.)

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, JacquesDerrida would represent the Hermogenist or conventionalist position, as, for example, inhis deconstruction of the "proper" through the play of identity and diffirance in JacquesDerrida, Of Grammatology, rans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976).-TRANS.

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Gender Genre Reverie