Dangerous Appetites: Violent Consumption in the Works of Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Césaire Open Access
Igou, Anna Elise (2013)
Abstract
In "Dangerous Appetites," I reveal the often surprising ways in which eating, generally associated with nourishment, is instead depicted as a destructive act. In each work, edible matter surpasses its assumed role as mere prop, and the violence it incites is a galvanizing force in the creative process. In the first chapter, I demonstrate how, in Madame Bovary and Salammbô, Flaubert's abstraction of food serves to elaborate his aesthetic ideal more generally. Emma Bovary is constituted, paradoxically, by her emptiness, resulting from an inability to consume as she wishes. Food, though visible everywhere, is inedible and ultimately unavailable as nourishment. In Salammbô, where consumption is conspicuously present, feasting fuels more overt acts of violence, the intoxicated soldiers who turn on each other enacting Flaubert's claim, "J'éventre des hommes avec prodigalité. Je fais du style cannibale."
Cannibalism resurfaces in my second chapter. Unlike Flaubert, Baudelaire enters into the economy of consumption he creates, posing at times as the one who eats, and at others as the one who is eaten--both "victime et bourreau." The poet's self-avowed "goût de la déstruction" is elaborated in this economy, particularly through such figures as woman and the heart, which is transformed from the metaphorical locus of affect into an anatomical heart, prone to physical harm and consumption. I argue that the pain inflicted through violent acts of consumption is a mal necessary to the creation of the text.
Flaubert and Baudelaire's explorations of exotic others, as well as Césaire's own "cannibalization" of the latter writer, lead to my final chapter on Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. For those mired in "le marais de la faim," what would intitially seem to offer nourishment ultimately does not. For even when they are fed, it is with violence, as they are stuffed with the spines of a sea urchin, for example, rather than its soft, inner flesh. I demonstrate how Césaire uses consumption as a vehicle for illustrating the violence done to a people, and most importantly, as a means of reclaiming that violence in order to move beyond it.
Table of Contents
Contents
Entrée...................................................................................................................................1
Chapter One - Nothing Consumed: The Dangerous Space of Food in Flaubert
Part One --- Madame Bovary...................................................................................13
Part Two - Salammbô............................................................................................48
Chapter Two - The Consumption of Baudelaire
Part One - Baudelaire et l'autre.............................................................................65
Part Two - Baudelaire Autophage.......................................................................103
Chapter Three - Something out of Nothing: Rewriting Consumption in Césaire's
Cahier..................................................................................................................125
Coda.................................................................................................................................197
Works Cited.....................................................................................................................203
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