Baudelaire's Frisson Fraternal Horror and Enchantment in "Les Tableaux Parisiens"

Abstract

"Baudelaire's Frisson Fraternel: Horror and Enchantment in 'Les Tableaux Parisiens'" considers the significance of encounters between Baudelaire's narrator, the urban flâneur, in "Les Sept vieillards," "Les Petites vieilles," and "Les Aveugles," and grotesque, sinister, yet fascinating figures met in the street. The article demonstrates that these encounters are different in kind from other allegorical figures in the many other urban poems of Les Fleurs du Mal and Le Spleen de Paris, such as the verse poems "Le Cygne," "Le Soleil," and "Le Crépuscule du soir," and the prose texts "Les Yeux des pauvres" and "La Fausse monnaie;" this difference is attributed to a nexus of associations whose common term is an uncannily indeterminate humanity, in which life and death are increasingly indistinguishable. The fascination and anxiety evoked by these figures in the narrator and the reader alike provoke a terrible immediacy with the unconscious, an irresistible return of repressed, primitive fears, drawing us into a disturbing proximity with death.