describes, she figuratively hands the crown to Baudelaire. Awarded to victorious poets and generals alike, the wreath signifies Baudelaire’s posthumous role as the unofficial and subversive poet laureate. Rather than singing the praises of the empire, he inspires a small group of internal exiles during a moment of great disorder.
The laurel wreath is also present in another allusion in the opening paragraphs of the “Notice.” Regretting the lost sense of community he felt at the time of his first meeting with Baudelaire, Gautier looks back to a crucial moment in the classical republican imaginary: the Florentine city-state of the Renaissance. “They have passed,” he writes, “those charming leisure hours, where coteries [décamérons] of poets, artists, and beautiful women were gathered together to talk of art, literature, and love, as in the century of Boccaccio. Time, death, and the imperious necessities of life, have dispersed these free and sympathetic groups; but the memory is dear to all those who had the good fortune to be admitted to them” (F 118–19; E 10; trans. modified). The tone of this passage is elegiac, but the allusion is cutting. In The Decameron, the group of Florentine young people who tell one another stories is trying to escape the plague and the social breakdown that follows in its wake. In his introduction to the collection, Boccaccio stresses the plague’s corrosive influence on social, political, and familial order. Having come from the East, the plague manifests itself in Italy as a disorder of sociality. It spreads by contiguity, infecting healthy persons “who conversed or had any dealings with the sick.”17 Yet it also divides, separating the sick from the healthy, parents from children, husbands from wives, citizens from their city. Having all lost their families to the plague, Boccaccio’s storytellers leave the city seeking refuge in a series of country estates. But their escape is not merely escapist: in place of the old order they fashion a new imaginary republic, with a rotating leadership signified by a laurel crown, “the outward symbol of sovereign power and authority” for the group.18 Out of the ashes of one society, they form a new society based on art, complete with laws, sovereignty, and an orderly succession. Like Gautier’s bohemian counterculture, they constitute a polity apart, devoted to pleasure and self-preservation.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
