The imago image of ‘flowers of evil’: from Charles Baudelaire to Joris-Karl Huysmans

Abstract

This article examines the image of 'flowers of evil' as an imago image — an imaginary image of a real object. The term 'imago' was first used in this sense by Carl Jung in 1912. The work proposes a novel approach to investigating the image of 'flowers of evil'. The com­pa­rative historical, analytical and psychoanalytic methods of text examination revealed that, in his novel À rebours, Huysmans espouses Baudelaire's celebrated image, representing it pri­marily as a notion of something bizarre, extraordinary, transmuted and dangerous. This is achieved through the reception of the image of 'flowers of evil' embodied by Huysmans in a series of vegetative appearances, such as the collection of exotic plants, the lotus in the hands of Salome and the nidularium seen in a dream. It is concluded that Huysmans uses phy­to­nymic images to demonstrate his belief that his decadent contemporaries, personified in the cha­racter of Jean Desessent, perceive Baudelaire's work superficially, inaccurately and too lite­rally, making them accomplices in the 'burial' of everything associated with 'old' values. Therefore, as a poetic image, Baudelaire's 'flowers of evil' align with the explored 'imago' methodology as they generate multiple interpretive chains representing independent acts of creativity.