Imagination and Conjecture

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.

Aura de amor sobrenatural (de Apolonio de Tiana a Carlos Fuentes)

In this essay the comparative follow-up of the motive of the dis / encounter of lovers belonging to different ontological fields (life / death, wakefulness / sleep), expressed in fantastic figures such as empusas, ghosts and vampires is carried out. The starting point is a story of Apollonius of Tiana according to the text of Philostratus, which was recovered by Goethe in The Bride of Corinth, taken up by 19th century authors such as Théophile Gautier and Amado Nervo, and reworked by Carlos Fuentes in the 20th century, in his novel Aura, with the addition of an 18th century Japanese author, Ueda Akinari, who wrote stories along these lines.

Verdeurs: Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray, and the Colors of Decadence

When Basil Hallward discovers the distorted portrait of Dorian Gray in chapter 13 of Wilde's eponymous novel, he first ascribes the changes to “some wretched mineral poison” in his paints. Although the passage corresponds to the climax of the story, it has rarely been discussed from a chromatic perspective. And yet, color mattered to Wilde as well as to many of his decadent friends. Drawing on the canonical text of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which it revisits from a color perspective, this article explores the literary inscription of new, shifting chromatic materialities in order to shed light on what Théophile Gautier, in his seminal 1868 essay on Baudelaire, defined as the decadent “palette”: “veined with the greenness (verdeurs) of decomposition.”