Winter 1994
Volume 20, Number 2

In Mimologiques: Voyage en Cratylie Mimologics: A Voyage into Cratylusland, Gérard Genette analyses the history of an important interdisciplinary genre: "mimology." Beginning with Plato's Cratylus and continuing through the structuralist poetics of Roman Jakobson, mimology is reverie or imaginatively directed daydreaming on the possible connections between words and things. Mimology always involves two major kinds of speculation on language in relation to the world: sound symbolism for the ear and graphic symbolism for the eye. Throughout Mimologics, Genette pursues the contradictions and detours by which mimology becomes institutionalized as the ground of the truths expounded by philosophers, grammarians, philologists, and linguists.

As a genre of writing, mimology aims to compensate for and also to hide the irremediable gap between sign and anything in all natural languages, or what in chapter 12 Genette calls the "defect of natural languages" [défaut des langues]. The mimologist devotes his time to inventing linkages between the sounds and shapes of words, on one hand and the items or creatures to 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 entails a two-step process: first, multiple links between words and things are forged through the process of reverie or mimology; then, these word/thing associations are rationalized amd justified in mimologism through concepts such as motivation, naturalness, expressiveness–concepts that recur across the discourses of human science as well as aesthetics.

Chapter 17, entitled "Le Genre de la réverie," caps Genette's discussion of the workings of mimology in systems of philosophy (chapters 1-11) and of poetics (chapters 12-16). Genette shows how Gaston Bachelard's books on the elements (air, fire, water, earth) all point toward a central model set forth in La Poétique de la réverie [The Poetics of Reverie]. Most striking about Bachelard's contribution as a "word-dreamer" [rêveur de mots] is his concern–not to say, his obsession–with the gender of nouns [le genre des noms]. Briefly put, Bachelard sexualizes everything: whenever he hears the letter l spoken, he sees feminine beings; wherever he sees the letter a written, he feels the "profundity" of water [l'eau, fem.: water]. In mimology: it consists in justifying the gender of a noun through a relation of conformity between that gender and the sexual identity metaphorically given to the object named."

Equally significant is Bachelard's unstinting privleging of femininity as the key to all reverie, the ground of all creativity both in phenomonology and in poetry. What are the implications of this gender marking for the relationship between the discourses of philosophy and literature? What role do feminist theory and psychoanalysis have to play in adjudicating this relationship? Genette closes chapter 17 wth a provocative double gesture: while acknowledging a Freudian reading of Bachelard's reveries on words, he opens up the possibility of a deconstructive (re)vision of the genre of mimoloy itself through gender.

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

 Like Charles Nodier or Michel Leiris, whom he cites and discusses several times, Bachelard is what he himself calls a "word-dreamer" [rêeur de mots], and we have already seen the terms in which he acknowledges his special debt to the Dictionnaire raisonné des onomatopées franciases.1 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 whch we were able to detect in Nodier himself, through an anticipatory opposition between his linguistic quietism and his Mallerméan will to "compensate for the failing in natural languages" by the perfection of poetry.2 When language is (envisioned as) [rêvée] 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 sensability. 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 (bûcher de sèves [a sapling pyre]; feu humide [a wet fire]) that had never met before, and revealing their profound resonance: "Bûcher de sèves, 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 expression. The spoken word surpasses thought."3 This is because "we are not able to mediate within a prelinguistic zone" (PS, p. xix); "language 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, 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 [réveries de 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 reverie really lies, as with Nodier, in mimiphonic 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 "breath with the air resting on the horizen," by virtue of that a which is "the vowel of boundlessness" (PS, pp. 196-97). In contrast, miasme [miasma] is "a sort of silent onomaopoeia of disgust";7 rivière [river], grenouille [frog], gargouille [gargoyle], glaïeul [gladiolus] are "water words," the "waggish" speech of liquid consonents (WD, p. 189); riviére never stops flowing" (WD, p. 188); grenouille, ,"phonetically–in the true phonetics of imaginaton–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 glaïeul 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 forgoten" (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 consonents" (r, l, 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 "delagating" all sensible qualities into verbal sonoroties.

1 On Nodier, see Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas, Tex., 1983), pp. 189-90, hereafter abbrevated WD; L'air et les songes: Essai sur l'imagination du mouvement (Paris, 1943), p. 272 (where Nodier is referred 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 chandelle (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 et les réveres de la volonté (Paris, 198), p. 78.
In the first section of chapter 12, in Mallarmé's view that natural languages fall short of the true, originary, and comprehensive language. Engaging in secondary mimologism, Mallarmé seeks to "compensate for the failing of natural languages," Genette argues, by writing poetry. Words and sounds are specifically arranged in Mallarméan "verse" [vers] in order to raise the natural language of French to this Cratylian ideal.–TRANS

Geacuteard Genette is Directeur d'Ecutetudes at the Eacutecole des Hautes Eacutetudes en Science Sociales where he teaches aethetics and poetics. His principal works in French include Figures (1966), Figures II (1969), Figures III (1972), Introduction agrave l'architexte (1979; in English, 1992), and Seuils (1987). His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is "Structure and Functions of the title in Literature" (Summer 1988).
Thaïs E. Morgan teaches critcal thoery and nineteenth-century studies for the English department and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program at Arizona State University. She has published on gedner theory, semiotics, Victorian poetry, and pedagogy. Her translation of Geacute Genette's Mimologiques (1976) is forthcoming.