Aux frontières de l'expérience esthétique: le grotesque baudelairien

Abstract

This article is about the grotesque in Baudelaire. While Baudelaire's famous essay on laughter plays an important role in contemporary theories of grotesque aesthetics, his own poetic production is often left aside. In this article, I discuss how the grotesque manifests itself in works by Baudelaire that seem a priori irrelevant because of their ostensible use of ‘comique significatif’, a sort of antithesis of the grotesque. Through a discussion of Pauvre Belgique! And ‘Le Chien et le Flacon’, I argue that the baudelairian grotesque most powerfully intervenes in the mode of a distortion of the intended meaning, which leads me to distinguish its reading from a properly ‘aesthetic’ experience.