The term ‘cemetery’ in Romanticism is often used to explore the feelings associated with mourning and death, a stark reminder of the human condition if we follow the idea of Novalis that death is the romantic principle of life. However, Baudelaire may hold a different view of the term. In his poems, the term ‘cemetery’ evokes not only an anxious and pessimistic vision, but a posthumous life to which the poet is doomed, a conviction (condemnation) to live. For Romantic poets like Baudelaire or Novalis, literature stands for a spiritual quest and elevation, a transcendental position to which the contemporary French writer Michel Houellebecq’s view of literature runs counter. In the end of his science fiction The Possibility of an Island (2005), he builds a post-apocalyptic cemetery where the Earth is beset by a series of manmade and natural disasters. Unlike Baudelaire, who opposes esthetics and reality, Houellebecq seems to delicately and concretely transfer Romantic poetic ideals to the real world in a social science fiction which speculates about human behaviors and interactions. How is it possible that with his scientific and technic attempts, the world could be utopian? And how could we call Houellebecq a Romantic writer, the self-called descendant of Baudelaire? This is also a topic of discussion in this paper.
