Playing Gone Home couldn’t help but bring to my mind Gaston Bachelard’s 1958 publication The Poetics of Space. Bachelard, early in the work, makes striking connections between the “house” or “home” and the fundamental daydreaming that substantiates poetry. For Bachelard, the poetic image is the unbounded power of humanity, it will always transcend time and space—that is, no space or enclosure can constrain the freedom of the human poetic imagination—and the house, in a manner of speaking, becomes home-base for dreaming. He writes, “If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace” (28). And elsewhere, he says, “To read poetry is essentially to daydream” (38). At bottom, he gives a clear correlation between art/poetry, dreaming/imagination, and house/home.
To those that might reject video games as art, Gone Home produces such a compelling narrative (what’s up with Sam??) and space (house), that in Bachelard’s mind, this could be nothing other than art. Speaking for myself, the house/space of Gone Home triggered nostalgia for my 1990s youth (e.g., Kurt Cobain poster, Nintendo) while the mystery/narrative of Sam, not to mention the “psycho” Uncle Oscar “Doc” Masan and the apparent marital issues of Katie’s and Sam’s parents, causes one to wonder (dream) what has happened in this very messy house with ominous notes and locked doors? Bachelard writes, “Poetry gives not so much a nostalgia for youth, which would be vulgar, as a nostalgia for the expressions of youth. It offers us images as we should have imagined them during the ‘original impulse’ of youth. Primal images, simple engravings are but so many invitations to start imagining again” (53). If we hold Bachelard up as a standard, Gone Home certainly invites us to revisit nostalgic expressions and dream/imagine again, particularly because we also learn, along the way, how Sam herself begins to imagine a new way of life: new house, new school, new sexuality, etc.
Another striking parallel between Gone Home and The Poetics of Space is the basement/attic dichotomy. Although the game doesn’t exactly parallel Bachelard’s analysis, there is some symmetry. He explains that the attic/roof represents the “raison d’être” and provides “shelter from the rain and sun [humankind] fears” (39). The house in Gone Home protects Katie from a torrential downpour. Only the loud thunder that seeps in reminds us of the fear of the storm. In contrast to the constructive, rational attic, Bachelard explains that the cellar takes on the form of “subterranean forces” and works “in harmony with the irrationality of the depths” (39). In a way, I think he’s really modifying the thought of Nietzsche and, perhaps, Freud, but nevertheless, the house metaphor aligns again with the lower part of the house in Gone Home that expresses the fear of the storm (in the TV room), the hidden room where the séance occurred, and the dark basement. In a way, the madness of at least the lower part of the house corresponds to Bachelard when he says, “The cellar then becomes buried madness, walled-in tragedy” (41).
Most of all, I think the house as poetry parallels Bachelard most with Sam’s ultimate departure to run away with Lonnie. Bachelard says, “[Poetic images of the house] give us back areas of being, houses in which the human being’s certainty of being is concentrated, and we have the impression that, by living in such images as these, in images that are as stabilizing as these are, we could start a new life, a life that would be our own, that would belong to us in our very depths” (53). Despite all of the suggestion of a horror story (Sam’s scary note, the psychotic uncle, thunder/storm, etc.), Gone Home ultimately gives us a happy ending: Sam finds love.
Maybe The Poetics of Space is a way-too-rosy interlocutory text for Gone Home, particularly given the frustration Sam feels with her parents and the difficulty of coming out. Nevertheless, Bachelard’s text provides some theoretical foundations for the house/home as art.
Works Cited
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. New York, NY: Penguin Group, 1964.