SOURCE: "The Function of Literature in Baudelaire's La F anfarlo," in L'esprit créateur, Vol. XXVIII, No. 1, Spring, 1988, pp. 42-55.

In the following essay, Hannoosh contends that the relationship depicted in La Fanfarlo between the characters and literature provides the key to understanding the novella.

Baudelaire's La Fanfarlo is a story replete with books, writers, readers, and critics, and yet the function of literature in the narrative has prompted no systematic study. Most of the major elements of the plot turn around a literary object: Samuel is introduced immediately as a writer, and his character defined in terms of his method of reading and the contradictory contents of a "typical" nineteenth-century artist's library; his first encounter with Madame de Cosmelly is dominated by a novel of Walter Scott's, and the second by his own volume of poetry, Les Orfraies-, he contrives to meet La Fanfarlo by means of...