Destabilizing the Other in Baudelaire-Bertrand-Rimbaud

Abstract

This joint article proposes a comparative encounter involving Baudelaire-Bertrand-Rimbaud to show that pieces of verse and prose by Charles Baudelaire and Aloysius Bertrand are as much about split identities as Arthur Rimbaud's poetry foregrounding the demise of Cartesian unity in the I. We assess the other as a locus of contrasts in the verse of Bertrand's "Boutade bacchique" and Baudelaire's "Alchimie de la douleur" from Les fleurs du mal, then distinguish prose-based manifestations of the other in Baudelaire's Le spleen de Paris alongside Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit, before considering others as a heterogeneous collective in Rimbaud's "Parade" from Illuminations.