Sounding the Noumenal in the Phenomenal: Gaston Bachelard and José María Arguedas

Abstract

This essay offers a reading of J.M. Arguedas’s Deep Rivers in light of Bachelard’s unfolding phenomenology, as featured and ultimately described in The Poetics of Space. Through a philosophical analysis of Bachelard’s evolving thought accompanied by examples from science and poetry, we propose to show how deeply Bachelard’s phenomenology was informed by his notion of a reverberating logos rooted in a realm of noumenal latency and potentiality. The question of how one might tap into such a living, transformative logos is then raised and illustrated through our reading of key aural imagery in Arguedas’s poetic novel set in the Andean mountains.

Keywords: Phenomenon, Noumenon, Activation, Reduction, Reverberation, Logos