The Gender and Genre of Reverie

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The Gender and Genre of ReverieAuthor(s): Gérard Genette and Thaïs E. MorganSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Winter, 1994), pp. 357-370Published by: The University of Chicago Press

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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 Genetteanalyzesthe historyof an important nterdisciplinary

genre: "mimology." eginning with Plato's Cratylus and continuingthrough he

structuralistpoeticsof RomanJakobson,mimologys reverieor imaginativelydi-recteddaydreaming n thepossibleconnectionsbetweenwordsand things.Mimol-

ogyalwaysinvolvestwomajorkindsof speculationon language in relationto the

world:soundsymbolismor the ear and graphicsymbolismor theeye.Throughout

Mimologics, Genettepursuesthe contradictions nd detoursbywhichmimologybecomes nstitutionalized s theground of the truthsexpoundedbyphilosophers,

grammarians, hilologists,and linguists.As a genre of writing, mimology ims to compensateor and also to hide the

irremediablegap betweensign and thingin all naturallanguages,or what n chap-

ter 12 Genette alls the "defect f naturallanguages"[d6faut des langues]. Themimologist evoteshis timeto inventing linkagesbetween hesoundsand shapesofwords,on onehand,and the itemsorcreatures o whichhe believestheyrefer,on the

other.Themimologistmaybe a seriouslogician,such as Leibniz,or a playful poet,such as FrancisPonge. In eithercase, mimologics ntails a two-stepprocess: irst,

multiple inks betweenwordsand thingsareforged through heprocessof reverie

or mimology;hen, theseword/thingassociationsare rationalizedandjustifiedin

mimologism hrough conceptssuch as motivation,naturalness,expressiveness-

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

CriticalInquiry20 (Winter 1994)

FromnG6rard 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








358 GerardGenette TheGenderof Reverie

concepts hat recur acrossthe discoursesof human sciencesas well as within aes-

thetics.

Chapter17, entitled"LeGenrede la riverie,"capsGenette's iscussionof theworkingsof mimologyn systems fphilosophy chapters -11) and ofpoetics chap-ters12-16). Genette howshow GastonBachelard'sbookson theelements air, ire,

water, arth)all point towarda centralmodelsetforth in La Po6tique de la rev-

erie [The Poetics of Reverie]. MoststrikingaboutBachelard's ontribution s a

"word-dreamer"reveur de mots] is his concern-not tosay,his obsession-with

thegenderof nouns [le genre des noms]. Brieflyput, Bachelard exualizesevery-

thing: wheneverhe hearsthe letter1spoken,he seesfeminine beings;whereverhe

sees the lettera written,hefeels the "profundity"f water [1'eau, em.: water].In

this way, Genetteexplains, "sexualizing everiegets boundup with the themeof

mimology:t consistsinjustifyingthegenderofa nounthrougha relationof confor-

mitybetween hatgenderand the sexualidentitymetaphoricallyiven to theobjectnamed."

Equallysignificantis Bachelard'sunstintingprivileging of femininityas the

keyto all reverie, heground of all creativityboth n phenomenologynd in poetry.What are the implicationsof thisgender marking or therelationshipbetween he

discoursesof philosophyand literature?Whatrole dofeminist theoryand psycho-

analysishave toplay in adjudicating hisrelationship?Genettecloseschapter17

with a provocativedoublegesture:while acknowledginga Freudianreading ofBachelard's everieson words,heopensup thepossibility f a deconstructivere)vi-sionf heenrefmimologytselfhroughender

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 Churchhad happened to be masculine in

Latin?-STENDHAL, De l'amour

Gerard Genette is Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes

en Sciences Sociales where he teaches aesthetics and poetics. His principalworks in French include Figures (1966), Figures II (1969), Figures III

(1972), Introduction l'architexte1979; in English, 1992), and Seuils(1987).

His most recent contribution to CriticalInquiryis "Structure and Func-tions of the Title in Literature" (Summer 1988). Thais E. Morgan teaches

critical 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) is

forthcoming.








CriticalInquiry Winter1994 359

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

several times, Bachelard is what he himself calls a "word-dreamer" [riveurdemots],and we have already seen the terms in which he acknowledges his

special debt to the Dictionnaireraisonni des onomatopiesranfaises.' 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 composi-tional 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 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 or

foil 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, 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 (bicherde saves [a sapling pyre]; feu humide

[a wet fire]) that had never met before, and revealing their profoundresonance: "Bu herdeseves, 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 are

not able to meditate within a prelinguistic zone" (PS, p. xix); "language

1. On Nodier, see Gaston Bachelard, Waterand Dreams:An Essayon theImaginationofMatter 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; ThePoeticsof Reverie, trans.

Daniel Russell (New York, 1969), p.31, hereafter abbreviated PR; and La Flammed'unechan-

delle (Paris, 1961), p. 42.

On Leiris, see Bachelard, ThePoeticsof Space,trans. MariaJolas (Boston, 1969), p. 147,hereafter abbreviated PS; and La Terre tles reveriesde la volonti (Paris, 1948), p. 278.

In the first secton of chapter 12, in Mimologics,entitled "Failing Natural Languages"[LeDefaut deslangues], Genette discusses Mallarme's view that natural languages fall short

of thetrue, originary,

andcomprehensive language. Engaging

insecondary 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],n Mi-

mologics.Nodier practices a systematic yet imaginative mimologism and this is what attracted

Bachelard to his riverieson words.-TRANS.

3. Bachelard, La Flammed'unechandelle,pp. 42, 74, 23.









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 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 to

word reveries [reveries e mots]-in an obviously double sense: first, there

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 rev-erie really lies, as with Nodier, in mimophonicnterpretation (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, mi-asme[miasma] is "asort of silent onomatopoeia of disgust";7riviere[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 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 in

this 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 reveriesde la volonti, p. 8.

5. See Roland Barthes, The Pleasureof theText, rans. Richard Miller (New York, 1975),

p. 37.6. Bachelard, La Flammed'unechandelle,pp. 42, 45.

7. Bachelard, La Terre tla reveriedu repos(Paris, 1948), p. 68.









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 com-bines the joy of active speaking, the joy of his whole physiognomywhich expresses a talent for imitation. Soundis onlyonepart of mimolo-

gism. [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, 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 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 sig-

nifiedis marked

by a pseudosexual index;this is what

happensin En-

glish, 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 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 motsa la pensee:Essaidegrammairede 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'Evolutionpsychiatrique [1934]: 67; hereafter

abbreviated "PMF"). In contrast, I take sexusemblanceo mean ametaphorical

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 Pierre-

Joseph 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").








362 GerardGenette The Genderof Reverie

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 hardlysuits his purposes:

I would certainly have benefited from a close study of the grammari-ans. I cannot conceal my astonishment, however, at seeing so manylinguists dispose of the problem by saying that the masculine or femi-nine of nouns comes about haphazardly. Obviously, no reason at allcan be found for this if only logical reasons are sought. Perhaps anoneiric 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 lan-

guage. Bachelard recounts the delightful conjecture of Bernardin de

Saint-Pierre, according to whom women created masculine words to des-

ignate objects endowed "with strength and power," and conversely men

created feminine words for objects endowed "withgrace 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, thanto the meer casual structure of the Word itself: 'tis of such a Gender,from having such a Termination; or from belonging perhaps to sucha Declension. In others we may imagine a more subtle kind of rea-

soning, a reasoning which discerns even in thingswithouta Sex a dis-

10. Grammatical gender is one of the least logical and most unpredictable grammaticalcategories.... This distinction, which cuts across the entire language, no longer corre-

sponds to anything in the great majority of cases: for example, certain abstract nounsare masculine, others feminine, and still others neuter without our being able to seethe 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," Linguistiquehistorique t linguistiquegenerale,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 concep-tions

indo-europ~ens,"Linguistiquehistoriquet linguistique endrale,1:228; hereafter abbrevi-

ated "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," LeFrangaismoderne5 [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).









tant analogy to that great NATURALISTINCTION,hich(according to

Milton) 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 relation

of conformity between that gender and the sexual identity metaphori-

cally 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 itwere, abstractly grammatical motivation that concerns the gender itself

and 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 took

on 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, "ifa 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 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 nquiryConcerningLanguageand Universal

GrammarLondon, 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 BellesLettres,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,d. Henriette Psichari, 10

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,









versus loup.16 It may also coincide (as we often see in Bachelard) with the

sexualizing motivation of genders for inanimate things, thereby reinforc-

ing 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, exter-

nal to the word anyway: eau [water] is feminine only through its de-

termining marks on other words (its article, its adjective) that "agree"

with it; rivitre[tributary river] is morphologically not more feminine thanfleuve [main river], nor femme [woman] than homme man], and soeur [sis-

ter] is rather less so thanfrdre[brother], just asfagus [beech tree] was less

so than poeta [poet].17What we have here, then, is a relatively abstract psycholinguistic phe-

nomenon, 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 des-

ignated object but to the designating subject. Unless, in order to harmonize the two func-

tions, one assumes, as Renan seems to here, that "feminine" objects have been named bywomen and masculine ones by men: the reverse of Bernardin's hypothesis, and certainlyless 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 philoso-

phy depends on the series of similar contrasts that follows-contrasts motivated by mascu-

linist 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 necessar-

ily intrinsic to its morphemes, but instead is marked by the article it takes (masculine, femi-

nine, 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 (thevowels e-a-u being mimologically considered feminine) and its grammatical entailments (thefeminine article, la-here elided to l'--and the feminization of all modifiers, as in l'eau

fraicheetdouce),the morphology of words such as soeurand poetahas 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 Bache-

lard'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 possiblereversal 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, o pour forth, flow], may be in play, too.-TRANS.









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 SUBSTANTIVESo have been considered, as

masculine, 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." 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 fe-

cundating 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 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 he

calls the "Indo-European conceptions" of gender:

The word for "sleep," hypnosin 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 conceived

of as male, and the path as female" (Meillet, "Essaide chronologie des langues: La Theorie

du f6minin," Bulletin de la socidtd e linguistiquede Paris 32 [1931]: 7). Pichon, who cites this

hypothesis and several analogous ones by the same author, speaks in this connection, in a









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 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 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 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 attribute o 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 undifferenti-

ated, 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 mate-

rial substances presented as purely abstract outside any phenomenon; everything that

is in the process of undergoing an exogenous activity; everything that evokes a fecun-

dity without variety, capable of indefinitely repeating the same type of productive

activity.... 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 a

metaphor 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.: "lablessure"the wound]), devices whose productive activ-

ity is always the same (ex.: "labatteuse"the egg-beater]), and finally material substancesconceived 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 pos-sessed, the egg-layer, and the divine ?aktiparedre[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 Franpaismoderne6 (Jan. 1938): 33]

In those days, "sexism" had a good conscience.









fundamental opposition inspires several of the couples that Bachelard so

enjoys pairing together:21 l'angle/lacourbe(angle/curve) (see PS, p. 146),

le courage/lapassion, le jour/la nuit (day/night), le sommeil/lamort (sleep/death), le berceaullaberce cradle/crib), "in which one knows true rest, since

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 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], 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 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 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/lemiroir[looking-glass/mirror], lafeuille/lefeuillet [page/leaf], le bois/laforit [woods/for-

est], la nuee/lenuage [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 (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 even

to 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 neutralizationof woman herself, to which

the German language is furiously devoted (dasWeib,dasMidel, dasMddchen,dasFraulein,das Frauenzimmer). Michel Tournier, Le Roi desaulnes (Paris, 1975), p. 425]









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 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 overfancies [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 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 [le

vin]-always the soul of theFrench: "For the person who dreams substances at their deepsource, 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 mis-

take-is truly a wine which has lost its virility" (Bachelard, La Terre t 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 oppositionbetween dreamand daydream.Before the romantics, songedesignated 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, illu-

sion, or unreality. See Freud's theory of dreams as wish fulfillments in TheInterpretation fDreams, n TheStandardEditionof theComplete sychologicalWorksof SigmundFreud,trans. and

ed. 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 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; everyoneknows how difficult it is to think in terms of a female version of le renard

[fox], le lMopardleopard], 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], lepigeon [pigeon] and la colombe dove], and so on.

The reasons given for these arbitrarydivisions by some linguists are even more reveal-

ing 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). "Ageneric term can

become feminine if the animal, by its grace, lightness, etc., evokes an idea of femininity: this









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 as

such.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 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 femi-

ninity 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 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, 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, self-

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

uponreverie.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 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 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], 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.








370 GirardGenette The Genderof 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 plays

upon 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 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 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's

letter in

Edgar

Allen Poe's "The Pur-

loined Letter." See Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,"' trans. Jeffrey

Mehlman, YaleFrenchStudies,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, in

his deconstruction of the "proper" through the play of identity and diffirance in Jacques

Derrida, Of Grammatology,rans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976).-TRANS.

The Gender and Genre of Reverie

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