- Title
- Introduction: remembering in Paris and Paris as remembering
- Creator
- Rolls, Alistair; Johnson, Marguerite
- Relation
- Remembering Paris in Text and Film p. 1-20
- Relation
- https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newcastle/reader.action?pq-origsite=primo&ppg=10&docID=6739000
- Publisher
- Intellect
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2021
- Description
- ‘Andromaque, je pense à vous! [Andromache, I think of you!]’ (Baudelaire 1998: 172 [173]). So begins ‘Le Cygne [The Swan]’, Baudelaire’s famous lament on the pace of change in the Paris cityscape under Haussmann’s programme of urban renewal. This is a poem about Paris; it is an immediate and visceral response to the changes of the fabric of the city as it changes before the poet’s eyes. Its present tense captures this act of thinking in medias res. And yet, the object of these thoughts, we are told, is Andromache, not Paris. If Andromache and her grief, her past, are provoked by Baudelaire’s use of the present, then the Paris in which the poet is located, and on whose streets we readers are invited to position ourselves, is also and at the same time a metaphor and thus rendered absent to self. The disjuncture of this first line is metonymic of the poem, which is the site of Baudelaire’s signature chiasmata as much as it is of Haussmann’s urbanization; it is also, we argue, metonymic of Paris itself. To think of you is also, almost, not to think of you; that is, by thinking of Paris, I also think of Andromache. To think of Paris, in this framework, is to understand metaphorically what is before one’s eyes, or to hold under tension what is present and what is past, what is ‘real’ and what is legend. At the same time, if we reverse the polarity, the very writing of poetry (with its metaphors and artistic devices of a timeless past, or of the past as timelessness) is undermined here – as the poem takes shape – by the presence of the real world. The city’s refusal to settle on a given form (one metaphor gives way to another and another), that is, to hold its shape long enough for us to take it in and account for it, is embodied by this taking shape of a poem that itself eschews self-coincidence.
- Subject
- Paris; Baudelaire; poetry; metaphors
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1476245
- Identifier
- uon:49778
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781789384185
- Language
- eng
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