Un Carnaval des Dieux à L'épreuve de la Modernité: Parodies et Jeux Avec la Mythologie dans L'œuvre Poétique de Banville

Abstract

The considerable contribution which Banville made to the nineteenth century's rediscovery of ancient Greece has not received the critical attention it deserves, and yet it is not only in Les Exilés, one of the monuments of the Parnassian movement, that mythology and Greek antiquity play a role. Indeed, in satirical verse such as the Odes funambulesques, Banville plays with a burlesque or melancholic mythology as a means of explaining the modern world. Thus his poetry offers the spectacle of an eccentric, heroi-comic Paris where ordinary characters are transfigured by the use of myth, the vices of the Second Empire are derided, and fallen gods appear as drunkards and rag-pickers. The constant dialogue between myth and modernity provides the aesthetic foundation of Banville's oeuvre, with its surprising, clownish and anachronistic associations of ideas, where the clash between the mythological ideal and the trivialities of contemporary Paris proves an instrument of socio-political satire.