Abstract
The notion of the library is at the heart of this year's lecture. Starting from the specific context of the debate it provoked in the columns of the newspaper Le Temps, in October 1905, the analysis of the image of the new stars shows the difficulty of a literal and univocal interpretation and allows for the emergence of a more psychological interpretation, placing greater emphasis on the author's childhood memories - of his voyage from Cuba to Europe - and on the superimposition of family time and historical time. While sailing to Europe, the young Heredia discovered the new stars of the northern hemisphere. The sonnet thus reverses the point of view, and raises the question of whether the library of new stars is a library of the northern or southern hemisphere. The difficulties of interpretation raised by the image show that it would be wrong to see in it only an astronomical referent. It could be seen as the result of poetic license ; in other words, the image's poetic effect comes at the price of its astronomical accuracy. This poetic license leads us to consider the poet's art, in a tradition that includes Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire and Paul Valéry, as a probabilistic art, insofar as the creator is led to choose an image that ensures the greatest effectiveness with the public. Without realizing it, the poet in the process of creating applies Bayes' theorem.
In modern poetry, the criterion of poetry's adequacy to reality is not a discriminating criterion : reference is less important than coherence. It's precisely for this reason that it's worth exploring the library of new stars, in the knowledge that the notion of library covers a broader reality than that of intertextuality (defined as a network of positively observable references from one text to another). We can thus use the neologism probabliothèque to designate sets of texts or occurrences that intervene in a more or less probable way in the genealogy of another text, figure or image, and in the understanding we can form of it.
