The Arcades Project - Operi

· . . what would become of poetry in passing through a head organized, for example,
like that of Caligula or Heliogabalus" (p. 376).-"Thus, like the old Goethe
who transformed himself into a seller of Turkish pastilles in his Divnn . .. , the
author of Les Fleurs du mnl turned villainous, blasphemous, impious for the sake
of his thought" (pp. 375-376). Barbey cl'Aurevilly, XIX Siecle: Les Oeuvres
et les hommes, vol. 3, Les Poetes (Paris, 1862). [J23a,1]
"(,A critic (M. Thierry, in Le Moniteur) made the point recently in a very fine
appreciation: to discover the parentage of this implacable poetry . .. one must go
back to Dante . .. !" (p. 379). This analogy Barbey makes emphatically his own:
"'Dante's muse looked dreamily on the Inferno; that of'Les Fleurs du mnl breathes
it in through inflamed nostrils, as a horse inhales shrapnel" (p. 380). Barbey
d'Aurevilly, XIXc Siecle: Les Oeuvres et les h01nmes, vol. 3, Les Poetes (Paris,
1862). [J23a,2]
Bat'bey d' Aurevilly on Dupont: "Cain triumphs over the gentle Abel in this man ' 8
talent and thinking-the Cain who is coarse, ravenous, envious, and fierce, and
who has gone to the cities to consume the dregs of accumulated resentments and
share in the false ideas that triumph there!" Barbey d'Aurevilly, Le XIXe Siecle:
Les Oeuvres et les h01nmes, vol. 3, Les Poetes (Paris, 1862), p. 242 ('''M. Pierre
Dupont"). [J23a,3]
A manuscript of Goethe's "'Nachtgedanken" bears the notation, "Modeled on the
Greek." [J23a,4]
At the age of eleven, Baudelaire experienced first hand the workers' rebellion of
1832 in Lyons. It appears that no trace remained in him of any impressions that
event might have left. [J23a,5]
"'One of the arguments he makes to his guardian, Ancelle, is rather curious. It
seems to him that "the new Napoleonic regime, after illustrations depicting the
battlefield, ought to seek illustrations depicting the arts and letters. '" Alphonse
Socho, I,a Vie des Fleurs du mal (Paris, 1928), p. 172. [J23a,6]
The sense of "the abyssal" is to be defined as "meaning!' Such a sense is always
allegorical. [J24,1]
With Blanqui, the cosmos has become an abyss. Baudelaire's abyss is starless; it
should not be defined as cosmic space. But even less is it the exotic space of
theology. It is a secularized space: the abyss of knowledge and of meanings.
What constitutes its historical index? In Blanqui, the abyss has the historical
index of mechanistic natural science. In Baudelaire, doesn't it have the social
index of nouveau!i? Is not the arbitrariness of allegory a twin to that of fashion?
[J24,2]