JEAN MORÉAS, BETWEEN AESTHETICISM AND NATIONALISTIC EGOCENTRICITY

Abstract

This article seeks to demonstrate the Hellenic aspect of the literary works of J.Moréas, Frenchauthor of Greek origins, who, after his literary failure in Greece, due to bilingualism in that period,he took up his residence in France, where, under Verlain’s influence, he got attached to the decadentmovement, in order to claim the “symbolist” label, by rejecting the esoterism of decadent poetry. Hehas developed this concept in his “Manifeste littéraire” published in 1886 and he has established thesymbolist movement, interrupting not only with the decadentism but also with France. Attached tohis ideas inspired by the movement of the “katharevoussa” that he had never abandoned, he wantedto “upholster the idea with a sensible form which, would, at least, not be destined to itself but which, serving to express itself, would remain subordinate”; this fact presupposes “an archetypical and complicated style : immaculate words, a period which bears up alternating with undulant back- sets, significant pleonasms, mysterious ellipses, suspenseful incongruity, much too audacious and polymorphic”. Penetrating this aestheticism, he turned away from symbolism, in order to establish, in 1892, the roman school, which broke up with the hermeticism and has opposed to the germano- nordic obscurity and the influences, the light of the Greco-Latin world. This new orientation has contested the classical authors’ heredity (from Racine to A.Chénier) and generated a new “literary nationalism”, expressed by Félibrige de Frédéric Mistral, by the roman renewal in Switzerland, with the cycle of the review La Voile latine and furthermore with the neoclassical aestheticism and the nationalistic commitment of Charles Maurras. His ideas about classical language were also shared by the Countess de Noailles and Maurice Barrès, the movement of “the Algerianism” and that which gave its place to the “Mediterraneanism”