Abstract
“Poésie de charnier et d’abattoir” (Guyaux 147; “Poetry of mass graves and slaughterhouses”). This is the phrase with which Louis Goudall summarized the 18 poems that Baudelaire published under the title Les Fleursdu mal in the Revue des deux mondes in June 1855. That same year, with an essay titled “De l’Essence du rire et généralement du comique dans les arts plastiques” (“On the Essence of Laughter and on the Comic in the Plastic Arts Generally”), the poet took full responsibility for his peculiar thematic and imagistic tastes by declaring that the ugly was also home to beauty: “Chose curieuse et vraiment digne d’attention que l’introduction de cet élément insaisissable du beau jusque dans les œuvres destinées à représenter à l’homme sa propre laideur morale et physique! Et, chose non moins mystérieuse, ce spectacle lamentable excite en lui une hilarité immortelle et incorrigible.” (OC2: 526; A curious and truly attention worthy thing is the introduction of this unseizable element of the beautiful even in works destined to represent man’s own moral and physical ugliness to himself! And equally peculiar is the immortal and incorrigible hilarity that this lamentable spectacle excites in him!) The complete book of poems published in 1857 under the same title, Les Fleurs du mal, thoroughly illustrates this premise of the necessary relationship between the beautiful and human ugliness and depravity.
une caricature bien appétissante pour nous... quelque farce de boxeurs... pleine de sang caillé (a caricature quite appetizing to us... some boxers’ farce... covered in congealed blood)1
La tête se détachait du cou, une grosse tête blanche et rouge, et roulait avec bruit devant le trou du souffleur, montrant le disque saignant du cou, la vertèbre scindée, et tous les détails d’une viande de boucherie récemment taillée pour l’étalage. (The head detached itself from the neck, a big white and red head, and it rolled noisily in front of the prompter’s box, showing the bloody disk of the neck, the severed vertebra, and all the details of a piece of butcher’s meat recently cut for the stall.)
—Charles Baudelaire, “De l’essence du rire et généralement du comique dans les arts plastiques”
Je te frapperai sans colère Et sans haine, comme un boucher, [... ]”
(I shall beat you without rage Or hate,... As a butcher strikes his block.)
—Charles Baudelaire, “L’Héautontimorouménos”
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Works Cited
Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil. Eds. Marthiel and Jackson Mathews. New York: New Directions, 1989.
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Kaplan, Edward. “Baudelairean Ethics.” The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire. Ed. Rosemary Lloyd. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 87–100.
Oehler, Dolf. “Baudelaire’s Politics.” The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire. Ed. Rosemary Lloyd. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 14–30.
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Sanyal, Debarati. The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2006.
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© 2013 Joseph Acquisto
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Morisi, È. (2013). “Poésie-boucherie”. In: Acquisto, J. (eds) Thinking Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137329288_6
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