{"title":"Imagination and Conjecture","authors":"R. Pearson","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192843319.003.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192843319.003.0014","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses the importance attributed to conjecture in Baudelaire’s writings on Théophile Gautier and Victor Hugo. It shows how Baudelaire diverges from Poe in seeing beauty not as ‘an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave’ but as a glimpse of mysteries in the here and now. Recalling the ‘conjecturisme’ of Poe’s narrative fiction, Baudelaire’s poetics of conjecture nevertheless relates more to the combination of clarity and mysteriousness that he identifies in Poe’s poetry, as also in Gautier’s. For Baudelaire, melancholy is omnipresent in Gautier’s work but mitigated by the consoling power of his verbal imagination and an ability to present in perfect definition a world inviting conjecture. In his 1861 essay on Hugo Baudelaire commends a similar poetics of conjecture, rejecting the portentous poet-lawgiver and praising the poet of mystery, not the prophet who has all the answers but the poet who prompts us to seek them.","PeriodicalId":264256,"journal":{"name":"The Beauty of Baudelaire","volume":"2016 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127511287","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Imagination and Resistance","authors":"R. Pearson","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192843319.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192843319.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Part III examines the new importance that Baudelaire attaches, following the trial of Les Fleurs du Mal, to the creative imagination as an instrument of resistance and alternative ‘government’. This chapter analyses his three essays on the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe, in which Baudelaire sees Poe as exemplifying the power of the imagination both to subvert normative thinking and to confront the destructive effects of melancholy by constructing new worlds. Baudelaire finds in Poe an image—and self-portrait—of the poet as outcast and embodiment of protest, a thinker probing the mysteries of nature in search of new explanatory laws: in short, a writer engaged in what Baudelaire calls ‘conjecturisme’. For Poe, as for Baudelaire’s alternative poet-lawgiver, beauty is a form of justice, and the public value of poetry lies not in overt didacticism but in the carefully crafted articulation of an original moral and intellectual vision.","PeriodicalId":264256,"journal":{"name":"The Beauty of Baudelaire","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114216610","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Melancholy and the Poetic Act","authors":"R. Pearson","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192843319.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192843319.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter prepares for later discussion (in Part IV) of Les Fleurs du Mal as a poetic performance by examining how for Baudelaire poetry offers a palliative to melancholy through the creativity inherent in the poetic act itself. It offers a reading of ‘Une charogne’ as a form of ars poetica in which the very process of decomposition is perceived as essential to that of (re)composition. It then discusses the four ‘Spleen’ poems as illustrations of the nothingness of melancholy being transformed by the poetic act into a plenitude of activity and spectacle: a redemption, or buying back, of life from decay, entropy, and death. For the melancholic the world is a place of contingency and clutter, whereas the poet as alternative lawgiver reassembles the familiar and proposes new patterns of significance within which to situate the mess—or ‘le Mal’—of the human condition.","PeriodicalId":264256,"journal":{"name":"The Beauty of Baudelaire","volume":"30 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123544723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Melancholy and Satan","authors":"R. Pearson","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192843319.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192843319.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter presents Baudelaire’s views on the relationship between beauty and melancholy and considers his famous definition of beauty (‘quelque chose d’ardent et de triste […] laissant carrière à la conjecture’) in the context of his radically alternative moral philosophy, embraced under the aegis of Satan. Unlike Chateaubriand and Staël, who associate melancholy historically with the advent of Christianity, Baudelaire sees melancholy as deriving from the irremediable ‘tragedy’ of human desire. Accordingly, his Satan (from the Hebrew for ‘adversary’, ‘he who resists’) is not a representative of evil and sinfulness but combines the Satan of Genesis (inviting humankind to know) with Lucifer, the rebellious angel of light who experienced both heaven and hell. Baudelaire’s Satan therefore stands for a human condition of self-conscious ill-being (‘le Mal’) in which the integrity of poetry as a form of progressive lawgiving lies in the open-eyed, no-holds-barred portrayal of the human experience of desire.","PeriodicalId":264256,"journal":{"name":"The Beauty of Baudelaire","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114291833","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Question of Intent","authors":"R. Pearson","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192843319.003.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192843319.003.0023","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines how the poet employs a range of conflicting voices, opinions, and personas throughout Le Spleen de Paris. It discusses how this polyphony has been variously interpreted as a reflection of contemporary political debates, as deliberate mystification, and as a form of antagonism. The chapter argues instead for an implied ambition to wean readers from reliance on authoritative pronouncement so that they may become lawgivers themselves—and thereby enjoy the beauty of perplexity and conjecture. The question of authorial intent is discussed with reference to Baudelaire’s dedicatory letter to Arsène Houssaye, and it is proposed that the unifying voice within the polyphony of Le Spleen de Paris is that of ‘l’Étranger’. The chapter closes with a discussion of ‘Le Mauvais Vitrier’ as an example of how the poet seeks to elicit multiple readerly responses in imitation of a kaleidoscope, etymologically ‘the means of seeing beautiful forms/ideas’.","PeriodicalId":264256,"journal":{"name":"The Beauty of Baudelaire","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130424984","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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