Hit Pause and to Shell with It – Daydreaming Academic Poetics of the Ideal Domicile Amidst the OverEXposuRE of Contemporaneity

domiciles. Solid, their beauty matched only by the imperviousness of their “stalwart bodies”, the shells Gabriel admires in Their mother’s friend’s cabinet “cannot be torn from the rocks, not even by the strongest Julia Nikiel, Katedra Anglistyki i Amerykanistyki, Instytut Językoznawstawa i Literaturoznawstwa, Wydział Neofilologiczny, Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, Pl. Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej 4a, 20-031 Lublin, Phone: 0048815372654, julia.nikiel@mail.umcs.pl, http:/ /orcid.org/0000-0002-5893-4477 Kamil Rusiłowicz, Katedra Literatury i Kultury Amerykańskiej, Instytut Literaturoznawstwa, Wydział Nauk Humanistycznych, Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Al. Racławickie 14, 20-950 Lublin, kamil.rusilowicz@kul.pl, http:/ /orcid.org/0000-0001-8324-5115 Julia Nikiel, Kamil Rusiłowicz 2 hands, nor in the roughest weather” (p. 41). Allegedly, the shells withstand everything they are exposed too. It comes as no surprise then that at a certain point Gabriel starts dreaming about hiding in and inhabiting a shell. Retreating further and further into Themselves, They come to believe that Their mind is “composed of one nacreous coil, [Their] thoughts sweeping upward under the influence of a lucent tide, the whole protected by a layering of scales” (p. 34). Drifting to sleep in Their scallop-shaped bed, Gabriel finally arrives at a theory about the existence of abstract spaces which house and mirror people’s utmost desires. They call these spaces the Dreamful Architecture of Unfulfilled Desire. In order to find one’s space, one has to (day)dream it. Once found, the space becomes a form of Ideal Architecture of Fulfilled Desire, the dreamer’s Ideal Domicile, a mental sanctuary for the unconscious which promotes further (day)dreaming and prompts its inhabitant to float away from the real world and into reverie. While, from the very beginning, “Roseveine” reads like a Ducornetesque – surreal, erotic, carnal – rendition of Gaston Bachelard’s poetics and theories, it is Gabriel’s choice of a shell as Their Ideal Domicile that ultimately positions Ducornet’s story within Bachelard’s “phenomenology of the imagination”, i.e. his exploration of poetic images as lived e