Word: baudelairean
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...standards of either a great writer or a great man.A quick glance into the biographies behind the marbled busts of the literary pantheon is enough to reveal an abyss that separates these two distinctions. The debauched aesthetes of the 19th century, intoxicated with les fleurs du mal and the Baudelairean myth of a mysterious alchemy between vice and lyrical vision, now look frivolous from the vantage point of this more cynical era. Over time, evil has lost much of its aesthetic appeal. Society has learned to distinguish between admiration for art and abhorrence of the artist’s moral...
...critical flare and originality in the process. For instance, he illustrates Celine's disillusionment with sex with this lament from the protagonist of Journey: "Pleasure pretty soon becomes hard work." Then, for some reason, he seems to feel it is necessary to congratulate Celine by juxtaposing a similar Baudelairean observation: "after debauchery one always feels more alone, more abandoned." But the net effect is merely to emphasize how commonplace the idea really...
...that persist in the literary bloodstream. With good cause. Lowry's was a life that both offends and fascinates-which is to say it excites the voyeuristic instinct. There were his Faustian bouts with alcohol as some kind of sorcerer's abused magic potion. There were his Baudelairean rumblings at the back door to salvation. There was also some basic tight-vested Freudian neurosis and a not quite redeeming sense of irony...
...Everyman who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul." As a corollary, he who accepts the conditions of life-as Genet accepts the worst life can dish out-presumably finds his soul. The discovery would disconcert most men. Genet indeed suggests that he has fulfilled the Baudelairean aspiration to "inspire universal horror and disgust." Few books are so thoroughly nasty and disquieting as Miracle of the Rose...
...stubbornly obscurantist prose falls the shadow of a story. Its central figure is Oliveira, one of a group of frayed Left Bank intellectuals who read Carson McCullers, play old Coleman Hawkins records and dither boozily about reality. Oliveira is a man suffering from "world-ache" and Baudelairean tastes; the two go together. He is later seen in Buenos Aires, where he has gone either to look for La Maga, whom he has lost, or for his own identity, which he has never found. In the company of old friends, he meanders through bohemia, with stops at a one-ring circus...