Do Fabulists Believe their own Fables?
Posted: Sun Jan 10, 2021 3:26 pm
Here's a true story (cough) illustrating why I don't credit arguments that depend crucially on what ancient writers or their audiences "must have believed."
Charles Baudelaire (d. 1867) was one of the great poets of modern times, with an exceptionally vivid imagination.
In 1841, at age 20, he was sent on a voyage to Calcutta by his father, who didn't want Charles to waste his life in the haunts of the Latin Quarter. But when he docked at Mauritius, Charles decided he had enough. After 3 weeks dawdling in the tropical grass, and a layover at the isle of Reunion, he sailed for France on the ship L'Alcide on November 4, 1841.
Charles Baudelaire (d. 1867) was one of the great poets of modern times, with an exceptionally vivid imagination.
In 1841, at age 20, he was sent on a voyage to Calcutta by his father, who didn't want Charles to waste his life in the haunts of the Latin Quarter. But when he docked at Mauritius, Charles decided he had enough. After 3 weeks dawdling in the tropical grass, and a layover at the isle of Reunion, he sailed for France on the ship L'Alcide on November 4, 1841.
However, after he returned to Paris, he always claimed to have gone to Calcutta, and he described to Asselineau how he had joined up with traders and had gone with them into the interior of India. He also gave blood-curdling accounts of the cruel treatment he had suffered at the hands of the crew, and left his friends with the impression that he had been press-ganged, and taken by force on a pirate ship. He told the stories well and, as they improved with each telling, he had great success with his friends, and they never tired of hearing the tale of his adventures on the high seas with the buccaneers.
...These tales were all believed by his friends, and many of them were repeated subsequently as true facts by biographers.
...He had a talent for description, for evoking lands which he had only seen in imagination, and the fact that he found an audience ready to appreciate his gifts, only added to the zest of his excitement and spurred him on to further efforts. When he had told the story several times he could no longer separate what was true from what was fiction, and he later never remembered that he had not, in reality, gone to Calcutta.
Baudelaire, by Enid Starkie (1958), pp. 66-67.
...These tales were all believed by his friends, and many of them were repeated subsequently as true facts by biographers.
...He had a talent for description, for evoking lands which he had only seen in imagination, and the fact that he found an audience ready to appreciate his gifts, only added to the zest of his excitement and spurred him on to further efforts. When he had told the story several times he could no longer separate what was true from what was fiction, and he later never remembered that he had not, in reality, gone to Calcutta.
Baudelaire, by Enid Starkie (1958), pp. 66-67.