Les Infortunes de l’imagination : Aventures et avatars d’un personnage conceptual de Baudelaire aux Postmodernes by Claude-Pierre Perez (review)

In his resourceful work Les Infortunes de l’imagination, Claude-Pierre Pérez brings into question what he calls the “death of imagination.” Using statistical analyses, Pérez’s research shows that in contemporary literary and critical discourse, the word “imagination” appears much less frequently than it did in the past. “Imagination,” once an indispensable term in literary study, has disappeared from scholarly titles and indexes. Indeed, although the word was recurrently used during the beginning half of the nineteenth-century, in the latter half of the century, it was replaced by more popular terms such as “l’imaginaire,” “l’image,” “le phantasme,” and “le symbolique.” The main objective of Pérez’s study is to consider the social and cultural implications of this lexical shift and to question whether or not it is indicative of a new paradigm. Defining his project, Pérez explains that he will focus on “les modalités ou les modulations, à travers le temps et les oeuvres, du ‘geste’ imaginatif: sa qualité plus que son contenu; son comment? plutôt que son quoi?” (17).

For its title, the introduction takes on a Beckettian phrase: “Imaginez morte imaginez.” In this brief foreword, Pérez summarizes how the word “imagination” has evolved over time, indicating subtle semantic differences between its various definitions. For example, in the first edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie (1694), imagination, defined as “la faculté de l’âme qui imagine” (10), was not associated with creative talent. Pérez notes, however, that in the fifth edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie (1798), imagination came to be described as an artist’s inventive and visionary power; it was the faculty that characterized both painters and poets. Drawing attention to this philological difference, Pérez stresses that the creative connotation of the word “imagination” is historically dated. In effect, while thinkers such as Aristotle, Montaigne and Pascal considered imagination to be an integral part of every human soul, those who regarded imagination as a creative ability, such as Baudelaire and Delacroix, attributed it solely to artists.

In his first chapter, entitled “L’éloge et le soupçon,” Pérez offers a thorough interpretation of how many different nineteenth-century figures understood imagination. Through his comprehensive study of authors such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Schwob and Hugo as well as thinkers including Charles Renouvier and Max Müller, Pérez is able to trace how the attention given to imagination in the early half of the nineteenth-century was gradually replaced by an attention given to the philosophical import of language.

Pérez begins “L’éloge et le soupçon” by studying how the nineteenth-century poet Baudelaire created a deep connection between artistic creation and imagination, which he called “la reine des facultés,” Although Baudelaire lived in Second Empire France, a period during which objectivity, realism, and the positive sciences gained widespread importance, the poet nevertheless staunchly defended the value of subjectivity and imagination. Throughout his many works, particularly in his Salon de 1859, Baudelaire puts forth that imagination has four essential functions: as phantasmagoria, it activates images; as syntax and synthesis, it develops connections; as translation, it interprets nature; and as subjectification, it presents the object to the subject. Imagination, as Baudelaire conceived it, is an inventive power that allows the artist to perceive spiritual correspondences in nature. To develop imagination, one must be eager, enthusiastic, and strongwilled. “La reine des facultés,” according to Baudelaire, is therefore inextricably related to one’s willpower or one’s instinctual drive to create art. Without willpower, one is unable to actively engage in the creative process.

In a particularly interesting section of his first chapter, Pérez chooses to focus on Marcel Schwob, noting that in the writer’s essays as well as fictional works, the word “image” appears much more frequently than the word “imagination.” According to...