Dictionnaire des symboles

Plût au ciel que le lecteur, enhardi et devenu momentanément féroce comme ce qu’ il lit, trouve, sans se désorienter, son chemin abrupt et sauvage, à travers les marécages désolés de ces pages sombres et pleines de poison ; car, à moins qu’ il n’ apporte dans sa lecture une logique rigoureuse et une tension d’ esprit égale au moins à sa défiance, les émanations mortelles de ce livre imbiberont son âme comme l’ eau le sucre. Il n’ est pas bon que tout le monde lise les pages qui vont suivre ; quelques-uns seuls savoureront ce fruit amer sans danger. Par conséquent, âme timide, avant de pénétrer plus loin dans de pareilles landes inexplorées, dirige tes talons en arrière et non en avant. écoute bien ce que je te dis : dirige tes talons en arrière et non en avant, comme les yeux d’ un fils qui se détourne respectueusement de la contemplation auguste de la face maternelle ; ou, plutôt, comme un angle à perte de vue de grues frileuses méditant beaucoup, qui, pendant l’ hiver, vole puissamment à travers le silence, toutes voiles tendues, vers un point déterminé de l’ horizon, d’ où tout à coup part un vent étrange et fort, précurseur de la tempête. La grue la plus vieille et qui forme à elle seule l’ avant-garde, voyant cela, branle la tête comme une personne raisonnable, conséquemment son bec aussi qu’ elle fait p 24

/pdf/les-chants-de-maldoror-58a7of3a2a.pdf

Les Chants de Maldoror

France Fin de Siècle

\n Widely considered the first French-language photo narrative, the use of images in Bruges-la-Morte (1892) tends to occlude as much as it reveals. Drawing on archives and contemporary debates about the image, this article contends that photography structures the novel on a formal level by reinforcing its poetics of analogy, a project that connects Georges Rodenbach’s oeuvre to the larger symbolist movement from Baudelaire to Mallarmé. Rodenbach’s novel attempts to invent a tradition of symbolist prose, which provocatively locates a shared likeness in otherwise dissimilar literary and pictorial practices. The aura of Bruges is used to explore the nature and limits of analogy—a term shared by symbolism and photography—leading to a critique of forms of identification that conflate difference with similitude.

Demons of AnalogyLikeness and Photography in Bruges-la-Morte

La querelle de la statue de Baudelaire (août-décembre 1892)

How could an apparently apolitical poem (about a virgin princess and a knight errant) correspond with a poet’s anarchic beliefs? In the 1890s, symbolists like Pierre Quillard claimed that their isolation and production of ‘ivory tower’ poetry constituted a critique of the constraints placed on individuals by society. My paper argues that, in light of national anxieties over depopulation and homosexuality, the symbolists’ various defences of non-procreative sexualities provide one means of understanding why they would claim that their isolationist aestheticism effectively undermined ‘la societe’. Following the analysis of pertinent texts from two prominent symbolists (Quillard and Henri de Regnier), my study concludes with a consideration of an apparently unstudied episode in which an anarchist periodical, L’Endehors, was prosecuted for defending homosexuality.

Sexual freedom and anarchist individualism in French symbolism’s ivory tower:

Or un architecte n'est pas necessairement lui-meme construit en materiaux precieux. Valery Les Grenades Dures grenades entr' ouvertes Cedant a 1'exces de vos grains Je crois voir des fronts souverains Eclates de leurs decouvertes! Si les soleils par vous subis, O grenades entre-baillees, Vous ont fait d'orgueil travaillees Craquer les cloisons de rubis, Et que si l'or sec de l'ecorce A la demande d'une force Creve en gemmes rouges de jus, Cette lumineuse rupture Fait rever une ame que j'eus De sa secrete architecture. Le Vin perdu J'ai quelque jour, dans 1'Ocean, (Mais je ne sais plus sous quels cieux) Jete, comme offrande au neant, Tout un peu de vin precieux ... Qui voulut ta perte, o liqueur? J'obeis peut-etre au devin? Peut-etre au souci de mon coeur, Songeant au sang, versant le vin? Sa transparence accoutumee Apres une rose fumee Reprit aussi pure la mer ... Perdu ce vin, ivres les ondes! ... J'ai vu bondir dans l'air amer Les figures les plus profondes ... Introduction Because of their discussion of his own mode of composition, Paul Valery's essays create a sense of continuity between his critical ideas and his poetic creations. These essays have served to form an idea of him as an almost excessively intellectual poet, one who wrote dozens of drafts for each of his poems, a math enthusiast who said of beginning a poem that "un probleme de ce genre admet une infinite de solutions" (Valery 1957, 1338-39). It may seem puzzling then, that Rainer Maria Rilke should have been so drawn to Valery on both a literary and personal level, given that the usual thumbnail sketch provided of Rilke is that of an enraptured poet caught up in fleeting moments of inspiration. One explanation suggested for Rilke's admiration of poems such as "Palmes" would be "le genie de la France, ce sens du dessin, cette lucide contrainte [que Rilke] convoitait comme antidote a la facilite de son elan et de son emotivite" (Lang 1953, 17). From this point of view, the poetry of "le metallique Valery" (Lang 1953, 39), being deliberately and carefully calculated, could share little of the sense of ephemerality and personal investment of Rilke's. I intend to propose a different view of Valery by studying two consecutive poems from Charmes which, rather than azur, are characterized by a somewhat atypically rosy palette: "Les Grenades" and "Le Vin perdu." Through the image of ripening fruit, the first of these in particular recalls Blanchot's discussion of Rilkean patience in accomplishing death. Telle est la tache, et qui nous invite une fois de plus a rapprocher le travail poetique et le travail par lequel nous devons mourir (...) L'image de la lente maturite du fruit, de l'invisible croissance de ce fruit qu'est l'enfant, nous suggere l'idee d'un travail sans hate (Blanchot 1955, 160-161). My reading will attempt to establish how, in Valery's two poems, the end of the long poetic process equally implies death for the poet himself. In the course of this argument, the two sonnets will be put into relation with analogies of harmony between music, architecture and the body suggested in Valery's essay "Poesie et pensee abstraite." Valery's essay deals with the tension between visceral inspiration and the structured, intellectual refinement of that inspiration. Ince observes that "many critics" wish "to see Charmes as a series of poems giving a chronological exposition to the various phases of poetic creation" (Ince 1956,40). I do see these two sonnets as containing figures which relate to the genesis of the poem, but more specifically they represent the poet's release of the poem from the interior, closed space of his mind to the outside world. As much may be read into the opening quatrain of "Les Grenades": "Je crois voir des fronts souverains / Eclates de leurs decouvertes" (Valery 1929, 97). Although I believe that the two sonnets deserve to be discussed together in part because they figure the relinquishing of a poem, I first intend to explore how both of them also relate to the rhythmic inception and development of Valery's poetry. …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/40552540

Blood and Rhythmic Analogies in Valéry's Charmes

The Messianic Redemption of French Symbolist Aesthetic Theory

My article proposes a reading of Valery's essay, “Avenir de la litterature” (1928), which foresaw literature becoming a dead language. This fate of literature is due not just to future readers’ lack of interpretive effort, but also their lack of effortlessness in reading. To contextualize this point, my essay draws on earlier speculations, made by some of Valery's contemporaries, about orthographic reform and the potential scission of French into separate languages. These speculations invite an analogy between basic literacy (effortless recognition of written words) and advanced literacy (effortless comprehension of verse conventions). Without readers accustomed to comprehending poems with some degree of facility, the reasoning goes, poetry is no longer a living language.

Paul Valéry and Poetic Literacy

Building on work by scholars such as Michel Murat and Philippe Forest, I argue for the interrelation of two notions—circumstance and rhyme—in Aragon's Occupation-era essays. These essays defend “circumstantial” over “pure” poetry and promote rhyme and reason's compatibility. In keeping with those values, historical and visual analogies (“rhymes”) abound in the Resistance poetry of Aragon's Musee Grevin (1943), whose title foretells fascist leaders' derisory future as immobile, waxen afterimages. Its central poem, by casting Hitler as Goethe's “Sorcerer's Apprentice,” depicts language's power to enchant or immobilize. Furthermore, Aragon's poem itself develops an illusion of imprecatory power exerted over the Fuhrer. It does so, I argue, by engaging with readers' memory for sound, idiom, and history. Rhymes and familiar fixed expressions lend inexorability to the poet's pronouncements. And by “rhyming” historical circumstances (downfallen autocrats) with contemporary circumstances (fascists in powe...

Rhymed Circumstances in Aragon's Musée Grévin

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