Deux Narcisse, miroirs des fins : essai d’interprétation hégélien

Abstract

This paper attempts to cross-read the End of Art as it is conceptualized by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and André Gide’s and Jean Lorrain’s versions of the myth of Narcissus. The most relevant mythemes such as beauty, self-love, duplication, “specularity” and death are apprehended in their recovery by fin-de-siècle aesthetics. The hermeneutic back-and-forth movement between the two texts assesses the structural symbols carrying various models of the evolution of art and formulates what Hegel could have possibly understood by this concept. The results of our interpretation are then related to certain phenomena of the history of art, and particularly of literature in the 20th century.

Keywords

• aesthetics
• french literature
• symbolism and decadence
• myth
• duplication
• specularity
• end of art
• g. w. f. hegel
• a. gide
• j. lorrain
• narcisse and narcissism