Critical Essay | Critical Essay by John Jeremy

Critical Essay by John Jeremy

SOURCE: "Samuel Cramer—Eclectic or Individualist?," in Nottingham French Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1, May, 1981, pp. 10-21.

In the following essay, Jeremy maintains that the protagonist of La Fanfarlo is a writer who lacks the intense focus and aesthetic vision of an artistic genius, and therefore represents Baudelaire's fear about himself

Baudelaire criticism has long been familiar with the idea of Samuel Cramer as the poet's alter ego and of a Baudelaire who treats his fictional counterpart with indulgent irony—"un Baudelaire dont Baudelaire se détache" as Ferran calls him [in L'esthéstique de Baudelaire, 1933]—in order to mock and no doubt also to exorcize his own weaknesses, and to examine, within the secure boundaries of fictional invention, the complexities of his own nature. [In "Baudelaire and Samuel Cramer", Australian Journal of French Studies 6, nos. 2-3] C. A. Hackett goes further. "Above all, it seems that he needed, at this moment...
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