Displacements of Parental Space: American Poetry and French Symbolism

Abstract

The unadulterated American symbolist in the tradition of Baudelaire's Correspondances is Norman O. Brown, who wrote in Love's Body: Symbolical consciousness, the erotic sense of reality, is a return to the principle of ancient animistic science, mystical participation, but now for the first time freely; instead of religion, poetry.1 Even if it is possible to read Baudelaire in this way, by a series of palimpsestuous superpositions intent on a single objet perdu, the mother, such is no longer the way we read him much less Mallarm6, whom Jean-Pierre Richard dis-intricated from the web of nostalgias. If, Richard argued, Baudelaire's anterior life was a haunting lost unity which language failed to restore, on this score resembles Baudelaire very little: the 'green paradise' is lost forever to him, and so all he wants to do is to manufacture a modern paradise of his own, a new linguistic virginity. ... .2 How will Mallarm6 proceed? Instead of an abysmal descent within the words, he will effect his metamorphosis between the words, in the play afforded by the gaps. The point is capital. For it