FLEURS DU MAL OR SECOND-HAND ROSES?: Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, and the ‘Originality of the Avant-Garde’

Baudelaire refers in his first essay on Théophile Gautier (1859) to the ‘fraîcheurs enchanteresses’ and ‘profondeurs fuyantes’ yielded by the medium of watercolour, which invites a reading of his unearthing of a romantic Gautier as a prescription for the ‘watercolouring’ of his own lyric. If Paris's environment was tinted black as a spiking population and industrial zeal made their marks on the metropolis, Baudelaire's washing over of the urban landscape allowed vivid colours to bleed through the ‘fange’. In his early urban poems from Albertus (1832), Gautier's overall tint of an ethereal atmosphere as well as absorption of chaos and din into a lulling, muted harmony establish the balmy ‘mise en scène’ that Baudelaire produces at the outset of the ‘Tableaux parisiens’ (Les Fleurs du mal, 1861). With a reading of Baudelaire's ‘Tableaux parisiens’ as at once a response and departure from Gautier, or a meeting point where nostalgia ironically informs an avant-garde poetics, I show in this paper how Baudelaire's luminescent and fluid traces of color in his urban poems, no matter how washed or pale, vividly resist the inky plumes of the Second Empire.

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Vigor e naufrágio: a modernidade ambivalente de Arthur Rimbaud / Vigor and Shipwreck: Arthur Rimbaud’s Ambivalent Modernity

Caligrama Revista de Estudos Românicos ◽

10.17851/2238-3824.25.2.133-147 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 25 (2) ◽

pp. 133

Author(s):

Eduardo Veras

Keyword(s):

Arthur Rimbaud ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Fleurs Du Mal

Resumo: Este artigo pretende discutir a famosa afirmação “Il faut être absolument moderne” (“Devemos ser absolutamente modernos”), feita por Arthur Rimbaud, no poema final de Une saison en enfer. Para tanto, analiso, além do referido poema, trechos das célebres “Lettres du voyant”, endereçada por Rimbaud a Paul Demeny em maio de 1871, e do poema “Le bateau ivre”. Em diálogo com teóricos que se ocuparam do conceito de modernidade e seus paradoxos, em especial Antoine Compagnon e Henri Meschonnic, procuro demonstrar que o discurso de Rimbaud sobre o moderno é essencialmente ambivalente, revelando menos uma pretensa antecipação da doutrina vanguardista do novo que o impasse sem solução no qual se inscreve a obra do poeta de Charleville. Tal impasse é apresentado no artigo a partir das imagens do vigor e do naufrágio e de um breve esboço de comparação com a poética de Baudelaire, representada em especial pelo poema derradeiro de Les fleurs du mal, “Le Voyage”.Palavras-chave: Rimbaud; modernidade; Baudelaire; ambivalência; vigor; naufrágio.Abstract: This article aims to discuss the famous statement “Il faut être absolument moderne” (“One must be absolutely modern”), made by Arthur Rimbaud, in the final poem of Une saison en Enfer. To that end, I analyze, in addition to the aforementioned poem, excerpts from one of the famous “Lettres du voyant”, addressed by Rimbaud to Paul Demeny in May 1871, and the poem “Le bateau ivre”. In dialogue with theorists who dealt with the concept of modernity and its paradoxes, especially Antoine Compagnon and Henri Meschonnic, I try to demonstrate that Rimbaud’s discourse on modernity is essentially ambivalent, revealing more the impasse without solution in which the work of the poet of Charleville is inscribed than an alleged anticipation of the avant-garde doctrine of the new. The article presents this impasse without solution based on images of vigor and shipwreck and a brief sketch of comparison with Baudelaire’s poetics, represented in particular by Les Fleurs du mal’s ultimate poem, “Le Voyage”.Keywords: Rimbaud; modernity; Baudelaire; ambivalence; vigor; shipwreck.

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Natalie Barney’s Missed Marriages

10.3828/liverpool/9781789628128.003.0006 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 107-122

Author(s):

Melanie C. Hawthorne

Keyword(s):

National Belonging ◽

Lesbian Identity ◽

American Citizen ◽

Marriage Contract ◽

Romaine Brooks ◽

Natalie Barney

Although a coeval of Romaine Brooks, Natalie Barney (1876-1972) managed to steer a happier middle course in which she openly embraced a lesbian identity while avoiding (for the most part) questions of national belonging. The celebrated hostess of an international salon in interwar Paris, Barney retained more autonomy by remaining unmarried and nationally unattached. She flirted with marriage proposals, others claimed she was married, and she indeed once signed a marriage contract with another woman (though a legally unenforcable one), but she remained unattached, a status reflected in her transnational situation as an American citizen living as a denizen of Paris.

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