Boire ou ne pas boire, telle est la question

Abstract

« Don’t we all have our delicacies? » Alphonse Karr wonders in his « Introduction » to The Physiology of Taste by Brillat-Savarin. Indeed, we’ve lauded wine from Homer and the Classical Antiquity to modern times: all we have to do is take a quick look at the 20th century and stop at De Quincey’s Confessions, Edgar Allan Poe’s « paradises », the Hoffmannian correspondence between wine and music, the Balzacian Treatise on Modern Stimulants and the Flaubertian / Baudelairean physical or liberating, spiritual or mystical poetics of drunkenness through wine. As nepenthes, identified with opium and hashish, the use of wine is metaphorical and oxymoric from a social viewpoint, from a moral perspective, and when it comes to its philosophical and alchemical mission. A « Totem Drink », according to Barthes, its aesthetic function leads to the multiplication of individuality and the creation of a third person, the superior man or the artist par excellence.

Keywords

• alchemy
• wine
• drunkenness
• moral value
• literary creation