Da palidez ao esplendor do vermelho das rosas: cambiantes do Ennui em Baudelaire

Resumo

Aside from haunting the reader (“Au Lecteur”), nibbling on their hearts and lives (“L’Ennemi”) and ending up as an inescapable prison or desert landscape (“Le Voyage”), Charles Baudelaire’s Ennui–a swamp declared enemy to the flowers of evil–is a vicious houka smoker or a gum chewer (in Gabriella Llansol’s version), a trait made symbolic of the ethical and moral decline of a civilization.
It is now possible to assign a new value to Baudelaire’s diagnosis and treatment of the Ennui by systematizing and actualizing the debate around this entity in light of the very subject of the pandemic (either as a yawn can be seen to be transmissible or as a houka addictive). Ennui’s connection with Hippocrates’ melancholic humour and the black bile that segregates it might even be useful in
understanding the sociology of internet hate speech during the years of lockdown following the COVID-19 pandemic. “C’est l’Ennui!”: the tedium that proliferates hatred! Fortunately, the treatment is poetic and relies upon the discovery of new ways of surprise, humor and imagination: “Plonger au fond du gouffre (…) de l’Inconnu, pour trouver du nouveau!”