PATRICK ALAN MEADOWS

AT THE BEGINNING OF HIS LAIR ET LES SONGES, BACHELARD STATES that
the imaginary process ("l'imaginaire") is either propelled or stopped in
its tracks, depending upon the type of image perceived:

La valeur d'une image se mesure à l'étendue de son auréole im-
aginaire. Grâce à l'imaginaire, l'imagination est essentiellement
ouverte, évasive. Elle est dans le psychisme humain l'expérience
même de l'ouverture, l'expérience même de la nouveauté. . . .

Inversement, une image qui quitte son principe imaginaire et qui
se fixe dans une forme définitive prend peu à peu les caractères de
la perception présente. . . . Autant dire qu'une image stable et
achevée coupe les ailes à l'imagination. (7-8)

But is it not possible that in order to permit such an imaginary flight
there must exist a fixed point of departure against which all subsequent
fanciful permutations can be measured, and in relation to which these
deviations or deformations derive their own value? Rather than snipping
fancy's wings (to speak like Bachelard), could an at least occasional
return to earth--source of nourishment, bed for recuperation--not per-
haps be the condition of continued, future flapping?

If the measure of an image's value is the extent to which it motivates
the imaginary process, then, in order to determine whether such a semi-
nal image might not be defined only as "open" and "evasive," but also,
and simultaneously, as somehow "stable" and "fixed in a definitive
form" (without leading the imaginary process to entropy), we could
hardly find a more appropriate image to examine than that of the spider
web; for perhaps no other image is capable of producing more diverse
imaginative operations. Moreover, as astonishingly pervasive as it is in
many national literatures, relatively little critical commentary has been
devoted to the symbolic image of the spider web. Although the fun extent
of its significance--in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French litera-
ture alone--cannot be exhausted within the scope of an article, an ex-
ploration of this image's exceptionally wide-ranging import is, nonethe-
less, particularly well suited to the illustration of symbol-logic in
general. ¹ The plural, symbolic links established by the intellect, as they

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