Digesting Les Fleurs du Mal: Imaginative Spaces and Liquid Modernity in Baudelaire

The 1857 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal constructs images of consumption and digestion in ways that introduce questions of metaphysical or theological significance through the body, which mediates between the poetic word and transcendent reality. The physical act of internalizing matter becomes a vehicle for rethinking Baudelaire’s relationship to the body and the transcendent world. Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of “liquid modernity" illuminates the notion of fluidity, strongly present in the “pre-urban" 1857 Fleurs, where poetry freely circulates between inside and outside spaces and thus succeeds in mediating between the physical and the metaphysical through its negotiation of the quotidian and cosmological. (JA)