“Les Névroses” de Maurice Rollinat: une tentative de retour/recours fin-de-siècle à la nature

Abstract

Maurice Rollinat’s Les Nevroses (1883) exhibits a distinctively original feature as a work of poetry; it draws on two kinds of inspiration that are usually regarded as categorically opposed if not categorially exclusive, that, artificialist, of decadent poetry, on the one hand, and that, naturist, of rustic poetry, on the other. A close reading of the work suggests that the relationships between these two poetic trends are to be conceived not only in terms of opposition, as critics would normally do, but also in terms of hybridization. We intend here to draw attention to the main aspects of this singular hybridization of aesthetic codes and values, and to capture its global symbolic motivation by presenting it as a tentative decadent return/resort to nature. Through this aesthetic gesture, as we will suggest, Rollinat extends the “quivering” of modern sensitivity to natural order. By doing so, he allows for the use of pastoral and animal motifs which are usually excluded from poetic representation of fin-de-siecle modernity. Conversely, he also provides a new possibility of revitalisation or regeneration for the Baudelairian poetic paradigm. We will postulate that the fact that this possibility remains in the end unexploited by other poets and that Rollinat came to be associated, both in the eyes of his contemporaries and in the memory of posterity, with a rather unfortunate epigone of Baudelaire could be attributed to two reasons: his poetic ethos generally maladapted to decadent aesthetics and, more importantly, the radicalism of his endeavour which brings the decadent logic of the sensation to a point of self-contradiction pragmatically untenable.