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The poet as clown: Variations on a theme in nineteenth‐century French poetry
Author(s) -
King Russell S.
Publication year - 1978
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.1978.tb00744.x
Subject(s) - portrait , art , literature , poetry , comedy , theme (computing) , realism , hamlet (protein complex) , dandy , allegory , painting , character (mathematics) , white (mutation) , champion , art history , philosophy , history , biochemistry , chemistry , geometry , mathematics , archaeology , computer science , gene , operating system
The “self‐portrait as a clown” which has now become a standard allegory of the artist in twentieth‐century painting, developed particularly from nineteenth‐century models in French poetry. There was a kind of metonymic fusion of Pierrot and Harlequin, the court jester, the vagabond showman, the gypsy violinist and the white‐faced circus clown. Banville, in his Odes funambulesques (1857) was the first major poet to represent the clown as a symbolic analogue of the poet, as a tightrope walker and an acrobatic, with his “vertical” aspirations from reality to ideality. Baudelaire's portrait of the failed showman and artist as victim, Verlaine's clowns reflecting the suggestive ambiguities and plasticity of the poet's aesthetics, Mallarmé's Le Pitre châtié , Laforgue's frivolous dilettante and Hamlet‐like dandy who chooses to play the role of the white‐faced simpleton, all reveal the figure of the clown, as a blatantly proclaimed actor and champion of artifice who set himself in total contrast, physically and spiritually, with his audience and society in general. An artificial rebel against realism, he perceived more profoundly than his audience the comedy of life, that “all the world's a stage.”