The ghost of God: Studies in the nineteenth-century poetics and aesthetics of chance. Baudelaire, Mallarme, Proust

This dissertation provides an archeology of the twentieth century's introduction of the philosophical problem of chance into literary and aesthetic practice, through a series of readings of salient moments in which the topos of chance appears in the poetry, poetics and aesthetics of the nineteenth century, particularly in France. Paralleling its growing importance in contemporaneous science and philosophy, chance emerges as a creative and methodological problem and simultaneously is manifested in a number of poetic tropes. One may witness the emergence of a poetics of chance in Baudelaire, such as in the evolution of his use of Delacroix's statement that "Nature is a dictionary," related to his reworking of the romantic notions of fantasy and imagination. Another such trope is that of the pavé, a figure whose relation to chance we trace in Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Proust. Mallarmé's own lifelong struggle with the poetics of chance is then analyzed, from his early adoption of Poe's Philosophy of Composition according to which no accident is permitted in poetry, to his attempt to abolish chance "homeopathically" in Igitur, to his final admission that chance cannot be abolished in Un Coup de dés and his effort to integrate it partially in Le Livre. Long before its use by Surrealists and certain post-war artists, chance was an aesthetic and poetic problem whose modern form grew out of romantic idealism, not out of realism, and whose difficult existence would deeply inform much modernist work.