Barthes liest Baudelaire und Mallarmé: Der Jahrmarkt als Mythos des Alltags

Abstract

AbstractWith its numerous offers of entertainment on the festival ground, the fair – site and event at the same time – represents an ‘extra-ordinary’ diversion with regard to the uniform working rhythm. However, because of its persistent (annual) return, it is nevertheless solidly anchored in people’s everyday lives. This article analyzes the phenomenon’s topographic and functional dimensions through the example of three prose poems by Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. It first focuses on the fairground and the fair’s heterotopic character according to Michel Foucault is carved out. Secondly, from the perspective of leisure event, the fair, according to Roland Barthes, becomes the modern myth, in which the naïve crowd of visitors functions as the reader of myths and the poems’ sophisticated speaker as mythologist. In this interpretation, the latter takes another role besides that of the poet: the speaker is the producer of myths who turns the fair into an aesthetic piece of art.