Time as Trauma, Poetry as Alternative: The Berezina, Lamartine, Baudelaire

Abstract: This article makes two principal arguments. First, that the experience of time in early nineteenth-century France differed significantly from current perceptions of time. Signs from the first half of the nineteenth century point to a very different experience of time, one in which the past as such—rather than the future—terrified and traumatized. Under the influence of figures such as Martin Heidegger, however, French theory and philosophy since the Second World War largely defined the human relation to time through futurity and the absolute limitation of mortality. Second, poetic texts can undermine such a coherent narrative of temporal epochs. A reading of Baudelaire's "Chant d'automne" shows how poetic forms can create simultaneous and incompatible time structures that undercut the possibility both of history in general and, more particularly, of literary history—that is, of subordinating literary temporalities to historical ones.