We owe to Charles Baudelaire’s forays into English poetry a stark formula for our modern desire for travel. His prose poem “N’importe où hors du monde”—anywhere out of the world—reads like an invitation, one among many in his poetry, to leave behind both France and Paris and to embrace a global map that stretches in this case from Holland to an imaginary place name, Tornéo, that hovers somewhere between the Baltic Sea and Brazil.1 Travel is in order, though the destination may be unknown, as we learn from “Le voyage,” the last piece of Les Fleurs du mal. “Il faut partir / Pour partir,” the poet writes, inviting us on a journey that involves “neither steam nor sail.” But if, driven by imagination, Baudelairian travel is essentially poetic or mnemonic, we are left with an uneasy question. What purchase is there, in these lyrical flights, for a dialogue or an encounter with otherness? If, in the literary universe of the lyric, imagination reigns supreme, what guarantees do we have that poetry will accomplish anything but a solipsistic appropriation of other lands, landscapes, customs, and even subjectivities?
The history of the nineteenth-century French lyric would seem to tell the story of a missed encounter with an expanding world—unless, perhaps, we started with the wrong poet. What about Arthur Rimbaud or Marceline Desbordes-Valmore? Did they also, like Baudelaire, prefer flights into the paradises of art to the actual journey? Rimbaud, it is well known, embraced travel with unquestionable gusto: he rode trains or walked long roads as a runaway until they opened up for him the starry night of poetry. Later came a hunger for a more concrete adventure that took him, the son of a soldier and distinguished scholar of Arabic, to the heart of Abyssinia. It seems he had an extraordinary facility for languages, and Enid Starkie believes that he engaged in slave trade. But Rimbaud the explorer, it is said, abandoned poetry, though in evocative enumerations of items needed on his journey (books, instruments, a camera), in descriptions of a bazaar, or in a letter showing remnants of former illuminations, the poetry can seem reborn.2
In 1801, at the age of fourteen, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore boarded a ship with her lovelorn mother to seek fortune, theatrical or otherwise. It took them to the West Indies, where she witnessed a slave mutiny, lost her mother to yellow fever, and experienced an earthquake. Of her return, alone and destitute, we know little, but enough to recognize in George Sand’s Indiana a story like hers, of a harrowing journey across the seas and of an unwelcoming homeland. At first glance, however, the poetic works of Desbordes-Valmore reveal few traces of this voyage: a lyric or two written in Creole, a handful of poems in a semiromantic or humanitarian vein, and one long poem, “A mes soeurs” (1830), which begins beautifully in the voice of one describing a voyage (“J’étais enfant, l’enfance est écouteuse; / Sur notre beau navire emporté par le vent [I was a child, childhood likes to listen; / On our beautiful vessel carried away by the wind]”—but all too soon turns into a romance.3 These examples are arresting enough to make one wonder if the actual adventure of travel—on lurching sailing ships that might sink at any moment, or being carried, in illness and pain, by tribesmen across the Somalian desert, as happened to Rimbaud—could ever become the stuff of lyrical poetry.
The question of how the nineteenth-century lyrical poets embrace the expanding world that trains and steamers now put at their feet demands a case-by-case answer, within the broad horizon that spans from Rimbaud the adventurer at one end and Mallarmé the poet at home at the other. Consider the contrast between the former’s rich itinerary in France, Europe, and across the world (from Rotterdam to Gibraltar, across Suez to Aden, with excursions to Batavia and the Azores) and the narrow compass of the latter’s ritualistic trips between Rue de Rome (the salon in town) and Valvins (the maison de campagne), with windows that opened onto a disembodied but emblematic azur. But also note the paradoxes. Rimbaud wrote “Le bateau ivre” without having ever set eyes on the sea. Mallarmé, while toying with the idea of travel in some of his easier lyrics (with appropriately waived handkerchiefs in “Brise marine” or discernable envy for a Chinese painter in “Las de l’amer repos”), is obsessed with more ambitious journeys—journeys of the spirit that will lead him to new verbal constellations. In that other universe, traces of a shipwreck emerge from among the broken lines of Un coup de dés, and the poet no longer just rides the sea, but creates it like a demiurge, as sound, image, and rhythm in his late sonnet “A la nue accablante tu.” As for Victor Hugo, who became the first, with his Orientales, to so publicly “take a walk in the Orient,” he never left Western Europe, even in his exile, and could only be writing from books and imagination.4 Urged by a kindly doctor to take up the pen after her traumatic voyage, Desbordes-Valmore turned her imagination homeward, to evoke again and again, in dazzling imagery and miraculous verse, the Flemish landscape of her childhood. As for Gérard de Nerval, returning from the Orient with a trove of notes, tales, and memories, he wrote the story of his voyage in prose and called forth, in the richly wrought sonnets of his Chimères, an ancient pagan world lost to modern geography. The years of Nerval’s most intense poetic creation (which include Les Chimères, but also Les filles du feu and Aurélia) coincide, in reality, with an intense longing for home. The ailing poet begged to be allowed to visit his dear Valois and the small German towns of his youth, as if only familiar landscapes could nourish the writing and soothe the soul of a distraught and impoverished vagabond.
Baudelaire’s sea voyage, forced on the wayward adolescent in 1841 to dampen his enthusiasm for poetry, has become the subject of legends as well as of renewed biographical inquiries. The myth has us believe that he was eager to see the world. In Maxime Du Camp’s version, the young man went all the way to India, where he “supplied cattle for the British Army and lived I know not where and I know not how; his mother secretly sent money to her son, who rode on elephants and wrote poetry.”5 Modern biographers tell a less glamorous story. Baudelaire, they say, never made it to Malabar or Ceylon, or Hindustan, though he stopped briefly in the Cape, taking happy walks (“des promenades heureuses,” as he calls them in his notes) and collecting impressions that would eventually find their way into his poetry.6 It took years, meanwhile, until he could transform a bland notation—through subtly calibrated alchemies of imagery, rhythm, and rhyme—into a lyric for Les Fleurs du mal. We know from the sea captain who shepherded him on his trip that the budding poet was more interested in finding literary companionship than in discovering new scenery. Captain Saliz’s letter to the parents summarizes the case: “Nothing in a country and a society completely new to him has drawn his attention, or awakened the faculty of observation he is endowed with; his only contacts were with a few men of letters, barely known in a land where poetry has hardly any place. All his thoughts are fixated on the wish to return to Paris as soon as possible.”7 On arriving at Réunion, Baudelaire could indeed no longer be coaxed into disembarking, and the captain, fearing for the young man who seemed to suffer from a case of life-threatening homesickness, made arrangements for an early return. But the contemporary “Chronique de Paris” tells a more illuminating story: the young poet stubbornly refused to get on the smaller skiff that would ferry him to the island because he could not safely hold in one hand his cherished books and at the same time grab the rope.8 His muse wanted him home; the poetry could only grow on home turf while, for example, he steeped himself in the language of sixteenth-century poets. Many years later, writing in some garret in Paris, Baudelaire would summon up the exotic landscapes and bodies that he had barely wanted to see in his early voyage to create memories belatedly, retroactively.
Thus, in 1860, in an ironic reversal, the poet who was first drawn to the homegrown poetry of la douce France composes “Le cygne,” the nineteenth-century urban lyric that now reads like a poignant emblem for the nostalgia of the migrant and the exiled. There, next to the swan, the Greek princess in mourning, and the melancholy poet carrying his memories like rocks, we see, in the figure of a “négresse amaigrie et phtysique” (an emaciated and consumptive negress), clear evidence of Baudelaire’s shift of sensibility. Amidst an irretrievably changed Paris, he speaks, like a brother in exile and mercy, for the longing and pain of the alien, foreign woman of forced immigration. Later still, turning his imagination to scenes from his travels, he writes “La belle Dorothée” for his Spleen de Paris, planting sly allusions (or are they ironic denunciations?) of sexual trafficking. As he evokes, almost twenty years after the voyage, the sensuous curves of this belle, the poet is entangled in an argument with the censorious editor of his prose poems. In 1866, with the shadow of death nearing, he dictates to Catulle Mendès changes in punctuation for his verses on the same Dorothée (“Bien loin d’ici”). These are the unmistakable signs, to the last, of Baudelaire’s perfectionism and of his “tropical homesickness.”9
Meanwhile, Les Fleurs du mal, the elegant volume that for many holds a world treasure of lyrical writing, takes us to the heart of a critical dilemma that emerges from the tension (so perceptible in an age of postcolonial studies and heightened ethical sensibility) between a search for beautiful forms and a need for a proper and fair representation of otherness. This quandary is visible in the hesitations that mark the development, across the century, of a humanitarian poetic voice. It took the thirty years between Hugo’s Orientales (1829) and Baudelaire’s “Le cygne” (1860) and Le spleen de Paris (1862/1869) for the lyric to embrace a global world within an altruistic, humanitarian gesture.10 Initially, even at a local level—that is, writing of one’s neighbor (“mon semblable—mon frère,” as in Baudelaire’s famous opening)—this elevated genre of poetry could barely be reconciled with altruism. Poetic tunes, it seemed, could only be carried by the likes of “Rossini, Mozart ou Weber” (to quote Nerval’s much-loved “Fantaisie”), as one closed one’s door to the jarring cries from the street. Even the word humanitaire came with the wrong overtones, evoking unpoetic, unsavory images of poverty, rallies of men, and sentimentality.11 Not only would a poetry of the people bring an unwelcome street odor into the refined air of a poetic cénacle, it might also break a rhyme and change the color of the lexicon. So whereas Hugo famously proclaimed, “J’ai mis le bonnet rouge au vieux dictionnaire,” few seemed ready to follow in his stride.12 Baudelaire’s ultimate judgment on the poems of the worker-poet Pierre Dupont is particularly revealing: it culminates in a strong indictment against a form that he found “inconceivably slack.”13 As these damning words imply, broadening the scope of poetry meant taking chances with poetic diction.
In “Dans la rue” (“In the Street”), a poem written in moral outrage in 1831 on witnessing the massacre of the silk workers (les canuts) from her window in Lyons, Desbordes-Valmore reinvents an Antigone who begs for the victims’ proper burial—she demands des funérailles to be paid for by the state that peppered them with bullets, with mitrailles.14 But her experiment with the new rhyme is uneasy and badly served by alexandrins that are in turn shaky or too symmetrical. The challenge, for the poet who was celebrated as “the proletarian of letters” and “our lady of the people,” remains the same as the one faced by Pierre Dupont: Is it worth committing to paper an indecorous rhyme just to make a humanitarian point? Of the ten percent that constitutes Desbordes-Valmore’s political output as a poet, only a handful of lyrics are successful, most notably another piece on the canuts, “A Monsieur A. L.”15 There, in a dazzling move, and this time in perfect verse, she has a hidden nightingale sing a requiem “over a vast cemetery” until “a bomb pierces that melodious wall.” Thus, when Desbordes-Valmore fails, it is within the very terms that Baudelaire had found to praise her, namely for not having found “la formule unique du sentiment” (the algorithm for the feeling).16 When she succeeds (as with “A Monsieur A. L.”), we are left with a moving, immensely powerful lyric about civil war, the earliest perhaps in modern French poetry.
In the same years, Hugo is working on a project that looks abroad, toward the Orient. Will his Orientales solve these formal issues, move beyond the local, and perhaps even give lyric poetry its global turn? With its blend of epic and lyric poetry, Hugo’s volume reveals, above all, contradictory demands between a stylistic project and issues of representation. Presenting in one breath a relish for la couleur locale and an awareness of the underlying human drama seems nearly impossible, while putting verse in the service of bons sentiments leads to singular challenges.17 In painting, as several of Delacroix’s pictures suggest, these differences can more easily be resolved: Le Massacre de Scio definitely responds to an aesthetic of local colors, but it can, at the same time, evoke, through the direct representation of suffering bodies, the horror and plight of “other” subjects located in a faraway land. In Hugo’s poetry, however, these contradictory needs can only be answered through a change of genre. While the lyric “does” local color, the epic serves to proclaim, albeit awkwardly at times, the need to attend to the victims, and even to intervene in the battles fought in the Middle East. The impossibility of “doing” both, exotic otherness and humanitarian élan, and the challenge of combining lyrical invention with an epic reach account for some striking fault lines in Hugo’s Orientales. Thus, in “Enthousiasme” (written as an exhortation to support the Greek cause), the poet mixes his animal metaphors in an almost comical way: “En Grèce! En Grèce! . . . il faut partir! . . . Et nous verrons soudain ces tigres ottomans / Fuir avec des pieds de gazelles [To Greece we must go! . . . And suddenly we will see these ottoman tigers flee with the feet of gazelles].” A few lines later, we encounter, in a similar vein, “horses with fiery eye and muscled legs that fly across the wheat like grasshoppers.” The notes to the Pléiade edition explain that like his seventeenth-century forerunners, Hugo was often unaware of the meaning behind his metaphors. But his rhyming can be problematic too: is guitare a fitting rhyme for tartare? Or for that matter, should “sommes” (from the verb “to be”) really be made to rhyme with Sodome, the biblical city? But perhaps a worthy feeling must sometimes override literary niceties, as with Hugo’s “Navarin.” Written on the occasion of the horrific debacle the Greeks faced in their battle with the Ottoman fleet, this long poem reads like reportage, consciousness-raising, and epic celebration all at once. It evokes a battle that was the first, in Western history, for which a claim for the right to humanitarian intervention was made.18 Some awkward rhymes or mixed metaphors seem a small price to pay when the poem can give a voice to moral outrage.
Hugo’s poésie engagée offers a forceful reminder, meanwhile, that in the nineteenth-century, “going global” still meant, first and foremost, becoming a soldier—if not in actuality, then in one’s dreams. “I want to see battles, always at the front! . . . But alas, I am but a poor poet,” he writes in “Enthousiasme.” Coming from the son of one of Napoleon’s generals, this outcry seems all the more revealing: it echoes a wish to be part of the action that resonates across the prose of the 1830s, in Musset, Balzac, and Stendhal. With Baudelaire, however, poetry represents its own noble and heroic form of conquest, as is implied in his elliptical but forceful assertion in Mon coeur mis à nu: “There are only three respectable types: the priest, the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill, and to create.”19 In Les Fleurs du mal, “voyager sur une chevelure” (“to travel on a [beloved’s] hair”), metaphorically and in memory, becomes the ultimate poetic achievement: it brings an alluring ailleurs (elsewhere) to one’s very door or bed even. Epaves (Shipwrecks) is the title he chose for a volume filled with “dreams, hopes, and shipwrecked songs” that appeared posthumously in 1868. Baudelaire’s chants naufragés reappear, meanwhile, in Mallarmé’s poetic oeuvre in the shipwreck and lures of a siren present in “A la nue accablante tu” and even in the ghost of Captain Ahab in “Un coup de dés.”
But beyond this metaphorical play one detects important questions, to which Mallarmé gave a sharper edge. What happens, in an expanding world of trade and mercantile conquests, when “your act is always applied to paper” and what claims can you make for the restricted action—the “action restreinte”—that defines the modern lyric gesture?20 With a simple pun—restreinte meaning both circumscribed and held back by constraints—he identifies the predicament of a poet aware of an expanding world of enterprise and commerce, but confined to pen and paper when he wants to leave his mark on the globe. Can the lyric broaden its scope to embrace a cosmopolitan world? Only indirectly, Mallarmé seems to say, as he abandons les mots de la tribu, the words of the horde, to devote himself to an arduous and radical reconfiguration of poetic language destined to make it resemble music.21 His predecessors’ ambitions had remained more modest: they merely involved the reiteration, in the form of tropes or images, of the great themes of this era of worldly conquests.
In the meantime, the French lyric was itself a product of circulation, from books to books, between art forms, and across languages. Thus Les Orientales are born from Hugo’s immersion in books on the Orient—as befits a volume announced in the preface as “a useless book of pure poetry” due to appear when, precisely, “Oriental studies have never been pushed as far.” Like musical etudes, then, but written in words rather than notes, the lyrics of this volume make their strongest claims as exercises in poetic diction—exercises inspired by a new source “at which the poet had long desired to quench his thirst.” When Hugo aims, in his own words, at “doing a Mosque,” the expression alone announces a piece awash in pictorial references, from Turner to Delacroix. Following this pattern, the poet will “do” a captive woman, a moonlight, and, in a poem entitled “The Veil,” will present the lament of a woman awaiting her death at her brothers’ hands because she dared lift a corner of her veil. The inspiration comes from paintings or from books; the sources are eclectic and comprise borrowings from German or English works, themselves inventions or translations from other languages, as is the case when Hugo borrows from Sa’di’s Gulistan or imitates Moore’s Lalla Rookh and Byron’s Mazeppa. Add to these a few allusions to Virgil or Shakespeare’s Othello (for local color) and you are left with what appears to be, from one perspective, a truly cosmopolitan book. Yet from another, it would seem that these poems in a new tonality pave the way for the symbolists’ predilection for white and their credo of l’art pour l’art.
Such lines make it clear that the Oriental scenery of the Hugolian lyric exists less as representations than as formalized evocations. As Edward Said has argued, perhaps the only Orient that mattered to the nineteenth century existed in paintings and in books, Les Orientales one of them. Saying this is not to diminish the value of Hugo’s undertaking; rather, it is to read it in the spirit of its creator. The conquest happens in poetry, and it takes him to a country, that of art, which has “no precise geography,” leading to the claim, in the first preface, that “roadmaps for art, which would mark in red and in blue the frontiers of the possible and the impossible have yet to be seen.”
This proclamation for un art sans frontières (an art without borders) tells us clearly enough that the nineteenth-century lyric can be said to travel figuratively—because, as we just saw, in the new territory sketched out by Hugo and his followers, the adventure involves images, words, and new verse. Thus, metaphors travel while poets (neither soldiers nor sailors, but holding onto their lyres or, if they are Baudelaire, their books) have no need to cross boundaries or leave the cityscape to chart a new poetic universe. So, for instance, were it not for Hugo’s graphic imagery in “Le cri de guerre du Mufti,” “vos tranchants étriers, larges triangles d’or [your cutting spurs, large golden triangles],” Rimbaud would not have given us, in “Marine,” that most splendid of Illuminations, which starts with “Les chars d’argent et de cuivre—/ Les proues d’acier et d’argent—/ Battent l’écume [Silver and copper chariots—Steel and silver prows—batter the foam].” Paradoxically, even when it claims an eagerness for departure toward new lands, the nineteenth-century lyric travels inward, digging deeper into language, imagination, and memory.
It took Desbordes-Valmore and Baudelaire many years to turn a travel scene or impression into poetic gold, though they both crossed the oceans at an impressionable age. In its powerful evocation of the sea, her famous lyric “Les roses de Saadi” offers a stunning example of such transformation. Baudelaire’s poetry reveals numerous examples, meanwhile, of how the exotic theme can be reappropriated as part of an aesthetic quest: in chiseling these beautiful pieces, the poet draws the topography of a modern nostalgia for paradises of the imagination that exist on no map. We owe to this desire for imaginary lands some of the greatest lyrics of the century (such as “La vie antérieure,” “La chevelure,” and “L’invitation au voyage”). Yet from the perspective of our new global critical configurations, these same pieces cannot but trouble us in their misappropriation of otherness and their questionable exploitation of exotic themes. Such combinations of the erotic-masculine and of exoticism have the familiar ring of a Parisian dandy’s invitation to go abroad to experience the pleasures owed to an aristocratic mind: “Let’s go to the Indies,” says Balzac’s Henri de Marsay, “where man can deploy the sovereigns’ dominion, where no one will slander him as they would in stupid countries where the hope is to bring about a boring dream of equality.”23
For a counterpart to such colonizing views (as well as for an antidote to the elegant and abstracted poetry of solipsism and pure form), we must turn back to Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. Feeling and an altruistic élan lie at the roots of her poetry, and in her best pieces they coalesce in a perfection of form that even Baudelaire (who held women of letters in scorn and hated sentimentality) ended up praising.24 But before we consider the rhetoric of that unique body of romantic lyrics, which has been singled out for “finding its meaning in the other’s speech,” we must take another glance at her biography since it provides the most natural explanation for the originality of her poetry.25 Unlike Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Hugo, and Mallarmé, she did not learn to write in the shadow of a classical tradition: no rule-bound collège for Desbordes-Valmore, and thus neither Latin nor Greek. Instead she found her poetry in a vernacular, oral context: in the voices and songs she heard on the stage or in the street. Indeed, as an actress on tour from her early adolescence on (she was pretty, she could sing, and needed an income), she developed an ear for verse as well as a mastery of French that would have been envied by many of her childhood friends in her native Flemish town of Douai. In her travels across the country, she experienced the linguistic diversity of a country where colonizing the provinces with official, normative French remained a constant concern—from the days of Napoleon to the age of free public education. Many regions still thrived in their local dialect, and there remained stubborn enclaves where French was adopted reluctantly, like a foreign language. Thus, in the traditional Noël of the provinces, the angels would sing in French, and the shepherds in patois.26
Desbordes-Valmore’s early lyrics in Creole (she learned the language during her brief stay in the West Indies) and those she wrote later in the dialect of Douai show her responsiveness to a multilingual world.27 But French had to be the language of poetic ambition and she naturally chose it for her major lyrics about her Flemish childhood, even when palpably crafting them to capture regional colors and the inflexions of her community. Meanwhile, for someone who had left school early, full mastery of la langue lettrée clearly held its challenges: her spelling remained shaky, and she struggled with the intricacies of a noble alexandrin. Instead, she experimented to stunning effects with shorter, irregular verse forms easy to put to music and whose grammar could remain simple. Years spent on the stage might explain why some of her best elegies reveal a dramatic yet subdued inflection close to Racine in its sparse, classical beauty. Stefan Zweig, who held her poetry so high as to place it in the canon of world literature, sums up her predicament when he writes that this most gifted of lyricists had “never understood what literature was about.”28 But if, according to this theory, a woman of the lower classes could never properly join the republic of letters, her very marginality enabled her to do with ease what Baudelaire had to learn over many years (and with serious qualms about going too far), namely to show compassion and social awareness in a language that was poetry.29
Thus Desbordes-Valmore coyly turns her predicament to advantage when she opens a poem with the words, “Les femmes, je le sais, ne doivent pas écrire / J’écris pourtant [Women, I know, are not meant to write / And yet, I write],” and evokes a simple love in cadences all the more poignant for seeming so natural.30 Most of her lyrics, for instance “La chambre,” make up for a simple vocabulary and a scarcity of tropes through an inimitable perfection of rhythmical and phonemic qualities. Her unschooled but powerfully expressive voice reaches out to constituencies rarely charted by the major poetic voices of the century with the exception of Rimbaud. Like the poet who wrote about children hungering for bread (“Les effarés”) or tell-tale holes in his trousers (“Ma bohème”), she speaks for the disenfranchised—those who lead a life of humbling toil (many of them mothers) miles away from the bustling world of commercial expansion, colonial conquest, and literary ambition that shapes Balzac’s Parisian heroes or Baudelaire’s proud alienation. She expresses her sense of belonging and sympathy when she makes of “j’en étais” (“I was one of them”) a refrain for “Le puits de Notre-Dame à Douai.” The word pauvre (poor) resonates across her poetry, a sign of her compassion but also of an altruistic instinct that shapes her poetic trajectory—from the early clumsy lyrics about slaves in shackles and tears, to the poems denouncing the political massacres in Lyons, or the plight of a prisoner seen from her window.
Alternately fraternal or maternal, Desbordes-Valmore’s poetic voice elicits from her own childhood and from the harshness of a nomadic life (there were fourteen moves in her life—from garrets to cheap lodgings on top floors, in search of employment or to make a life for her children and her untalented husband) experiences as familiar to us looking at a global map of migration as they would have been to the thousands who, in her time, were lured to the city or moved around the country in pursuit of work. “Défendez aux chemins de m’emmener encore! [Tell the roads not to take me away again]”: in her reluctance to travel and her longing for home, Desbordes-Valmore may seem to resist the modernizing trends of a century of ambition, colonial enterprise, and tourism even—unless she announced, with utmost prescience, the often searing human cost of enforced mobility and exile.31
Fraternal and maternal, her voice evokes an emotion that binds the speaking poet to her readers. It also expresses a yearning whose reach is universal, even as it relies on the presentation of personal, singular impressions or experiences. The communicative force of her utterances is immediately apparent when one culls the strongest pieces from her nine published volumes (as Yves Bonnefoy did, with a poet’s unerring eye, for a volume of the collection Poésies). To read “Rêve intermittent d’une nuit triste,” “Le ruisseau de la Scarpe,” or “Une ruelle de Flandres” is to learn and to feel, once and for all, what it means to have lost a home, to have lost a child, to have known better times, or to feel cut off from one’s roots. Meanwhile, seen through the veil of memory and longing, a deeply missed world comes to us—of golden wheat fields, rose-filled gardens abuzz with bees and children, babbling brooks, and gatherings around small town wells. To such experiences, Desbordes-Valmore gives her own vivid, unforgettable words; localized or even trite as her images may seem, they come alive under her pen, as if carried by the “breath of prehistory.”32
Perhaps Hans-Robert Jauss had her in mind when he wrote that “from faraway, a world can emerge with its aura;” and if not, his words remain an apt commentary for a poetry so often driven by a longing for the past.33 There are exceptions, and one of them is her powerful lyric “Les roses de Saadi”—of interest here because it evokes an exotic theme, and a geographic rather than a temporal distance. Inspired by the Persian poem Gulistan, it summons, as a figure for love or passion, roses that fly into the wind to fall into a red tarnished sea and fill a dress, or perhaps a robe. Bonnefoy comments that in this poem “speech is at once a gift, a prayer and an exchange.”34 Indeed, no other nineteenth-century lyric comes as close to writing of a desire that is truly transitive and intersubjective. This strongly erotic piece, which revels in a confusion of persons and genders, offers a forceful reminder that the encounter with the other depends on more than mere description: it requires the invention of new rhetorical turns and modes of address. Written in the years that, according to Nerval, saw “a craze for the oriental world develop in writers’ cheap apartments or garrets,” this poem represents a radical departure from the fashion of the day.35
With Nerval, we discover another instance of a gaze turned toward otherness—but applied in his case to foreign people and landscapes. As a man committed to living by the pen and a poet, he had traveled to the Near East in 1843, to find literary inspiration and to rescue a reputation compromised by a first major mental breakdown. He packed a daguerreotype for better documentation but found it hard to elicit a fresh vision from countries that, in his words, had been “all too neatly cut up into small squares hanging on the wall” by a host of orientalist painters.36 This led him to visit lesser-known places (Cairo, Lebanon, and Syria) and to cultivate contacts with the local population. His letters show aspects of the Orient that his forerunners, Chateaubriand and Lamartine, had mostly overlooked: the cruelty of slavery, for instance, and a poverty that appalls him. However, the book that appeared eight years later, Le voyage en Orient, mixed direct observations with bookish references—many of them taken from E. W. Lane’s Les moeurs de l’Orient. What it shows above all is Nerval’s literary fascination with Oriental legends: such is their hold over his imagination that he incorporates them in the mythical construction of his poetic self.
Goethe had intimated that poetic inspiration would be found in the East, where “mehr Licht” (more light) would make the difference. But a keen awareness of the living conditions of Cairo’s poor or months spent with a real slave must have precluded, for Nerval, the poetic epiphanies promised by the master. There may indeed be more light in the Orient (“the sun is unquestionably more brilliant in those countries than in ours,” he writes), but a more brilliant sun can also be found in childhood (“it seems that one knew such a sun in one’s prime, when the organs were still fresher”).37 These words provide us with the key to Nerval’s own resistance to “poeticizing” his exotic travel. Why go abroad, when poetry can emanate from the homeland and when memories provide that precious ailleurs that feeds poetic inspiration? Thus Sylvie, his masterpiece of lyrical writing, evokes an intimate journey that takes the poet—across layers of time—to the heart of a French landscape celebrated by Ronsard (and later paraded by right-wing nationalist writers). To find his belle, Nerval’s poetic hero rides a stagecoach, and the setting in which he places her is filled with traces of Rousseau.
While the crossing of distances makes for lyrical intensity, the traveler’s destination is not necessarily a fabled city on an expanding world map: it can just be a doux point de l’Univers—a point that marks a time when one felt at home in the world.38 Nostalgia for villages nestled in the Ile-de-France is Nerval’s response to progress and modernization. As the poet reminisces about Sylvie and sylvan landscapes reached in carriages, Paris is in upheaval because of the reconstruction undertaken under Louis-Philippe, and France is building its national railway network. New colonial conquests are under way, with Algeria at the forefront and, across the seas, the abdication of Queen Aimata Pomaré.39 Signs of a successful global market, new exotic words are brought into the language: Pomaré gives her name to expensive painted silk, and the Algerian smalah is used to describe a luxury brocaded silk.40 But in those same years, Nerval, a writer fallen upon hard times, is forced to make his way back from Germany mostly on foot.
When he defines the lyric, Hegel writes that “interiority often needs objects that are completely external to express what the compressed soul can no longer say.”41 The inner turn that defines many nineteenth-century lyrics is most visible in the prose poem that Sylvie has become: as an antidote to exotic clichés, it invokes the picture of “a castle from the days of Henri IV,” of dreamy woods, and silver lakes. Seen through the glimmer of a nostalgic dream, welcoming chaumières, framed by roses or climbing vine and inhabited by simple girls, open their doors to a vagabond Orpheus. Increasingly, however, le soleil noir (black sun) of melancholia casts its own shadow, and, Nerval confesses, “nothing has brought healing to my heart, which is still afflicted with homesickness.”42 Thus, on a freezing January night of 1855, a poet who does not own a winter coat ties a noose with a string from his aunt’s apron, and finds a street lamp on which to hang himself. The ailing Nerval had become at that point one of the many poor of Paris, of which there were still in 1862, according to Baron Haussmann, one million two hundred thousand.43
While France expands outward and the city grows, the poet is locked inside and, writes Baudelaire, “he’ll remain poor and alone, but true to himself, as he stubbornly tries to pull from his brain the only decoration of his life.”44 This stark verdict invites a sociohistorical as well as a literary interpretation.45 It tells us that a feeling of alienation has led the poets inward to a world of their own making, in a move that invites them to contemplate and express this isolating, inward looking turn. Hence the new obsession for a perfect form and the search for a personalized expressive style, which together will lead to a new definition of subjectivity. In fact, the lyric’s insistent search for singularity and its emphasis on the speaking self are but the most visible (and perhaps best known) manifestation of a decisive linguistic and rhetorical shift that occurred in the nineteenth-century—a shift that lead to the reinvention of French as the language of individuation. “The singularity of the individualized Subject is built on the rubble of a community of subjects formerly ruled by a [classical and normed] language,” writes the historian of language Saint-Gérard (414). While his words aptly summarize the rhetorical and aesthetic revolution epitomized in the nineteenth-century lyric, they also evoke its striking consequences, namely a decisive break between self and other. In this new framework, words are not so much shared as uttered from within toward a newly distant, separate other. Speaking (in the sense of “speaking to”) is no longer the same when it implies a widening divide between a self and others. Thus, enriching and exhilarating as these poetic conquests may have seemed, they also consecrate a separation between self and other whose consequence might be the near incompatibility between poetic contemplation and human solidarity.
Yves Bonnefoy, in many ways a descendant of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud, attests to this separation when he marks a clear opposition between writing and action and speaks of “another who can only be encountered when one ceases to write.”46 In highlighting the poet’s withdrawal, he confirms the stance of political disenchantment and of disillusion with history that often underwrote this poetics of separation and strong individuation. Critics have come to the same conclusion. Hans-Robert Jauss made two equally meaningful discoveries when he decided to compare a large sampling of French lyrics published in 1857, the year of the condemnation of Les Fleurs du mal: first, that the lyric is “the genre that shows the most resistance to a materialist reading or a sociology of literature” (753); and second, that the poems converged around one main trope, namely that of la douceur du foyer (the sweetness of home). Hugo’s “Le rouet d’Omphale,” a lyric built around “the elegiac contemplation of a house one has left,” is but one example of poems that focus on the small, woman-centered world of everyday life (das Alltag) at the expense of masculine heroics of conquest (764).
Though born at the crossroads of modernity—at a time of urban expansion, faster travel, and renewed colonization—the lyric is clearly not ready to travel the world. “Que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes! [How grand the world by the light of the lamp],” Baudelaire exclaims in “Le voyage.” What hope is there for a global poetry, when its premises are the poet’s confinement in the face of a vast world? Even Leconte de Lisle, who shuttled back and forth between Brittany and Reunion throughout his youth and knew firsthand about “multiculturalism,” rarely gave form in verse to his rich experiences (though he did so in prose).47 As a Parnassien, he made his home with more abstruse muses, and wrote highly formalized pieces riddled with allusions to Latin, Greek, and Indian antiquity. His poetics has been described as one of estrangement and incommunicability.48 More strikingly, the poem has become for him a pure object, devoid of even the action restreinte that Mallarmé had ascribed to it.
Ultimately, however, the rich corpus of nineteenth-century poetry calls for more nuanced conclusions—if only because a number of lyrics so powerfully evoke the poet’s “incomparable privilege” of being “simultaneously himself and the other.” Lest these words (borrowed from the prose poem “Les foules”) be seen as a case of Baudelairian arrogance, let us not forget that they are also representative of the poetic stance of Desbordes-Valmore and Rimbaud. Indeed, because its focus falls increasingly on self and other caught within the narrowing compass of a mere impression or illumination, the inward-drawn lyric born in France succeeds where both tragedy (too prescriptive and staged) and the novel (too much bound to place and period) fail. Poetry remains the only literary form that can speak to our contemporary experiences in ways that transcend geographic differences—from a place beyond where “we hear the music and the sound of the soul’s profound desire.”49 Though seemingly old-fashioned, these words by Georg Lukacs appropriately evoke the need for a linguistic form that speaks a universal language even as it describes the anomie of our highly individualized modern existences. The poet’s place in a global world, he hints, is perhaps no more than the shared, sharable awareness of a “life today shaped in such a way that glances which no one notices or words which have been let fall without being heard or understood are coming to be forms in which souls communicate with one another.” Baudelaire’s “A une passante” presents a supreme example of such communication and it expresses, in the tight form of a sonnet, experiences that are as true now in Mumbai, São Paulo, and Beijing as they were yesterday in Paris or Berlin. Such coincidences tell us that the nineteenth-century French lyric has indeed “gone global” through a process of dissemination—not in a mode of conquest, but in sharing experiences that transcend geographic distances.50 It has done so when Baudelaire’s “Enivrez-vous” inspires a clip on YouTube, Rimbaud’s words in “Aube” are cited in advertising, or when the World Wide Web lists translations of nineteenth-century French lyrics in Czech, Bengali, Arabic, Portuguese, and Mandarin.
Meanwhile, what remains from this era of poetic conquest is, supremely, the book—the book as an idea and ideal of human pursuit, linguistic, philosophical, and existential. Mallarmé’s words “tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre [what there is of the world exists in order to become a book]” may have acquired an old-fashioned ring in an age of digitized words and images, but they nevertheless draw our attention to a small miracle of transmission.51 They have not lost their meaning altogether when one can open, in a rare book collection of an American library, a slim volume manufactured in England, leather-bound, gold-embossed and decorated with wood-plates and illuminated letters, of selections from Judith Gautier’s Livre de Jade. The little book speaks across a double distance: of a Far Eastern culture and of a time when a brilliant nineteenth-century woman, the unhappy wife of a poet and daughter of the champion of l’art pour l’art, learned Chinese with her tutor to try her hand at translating into free verse poems by Li-Taï-Pe, Ly-Y-Hane, and others.52 She may well have remembered Baudelaire’s warning about how vast the world becomes under a poet’s lamp, but she nevertheless chose to send her own letter to the world, in an exquisite act of linguistic transculturation as meaningful today as it must have been in 1867 when her book appeared. The critic Walter Benjamin had one word for such moments: he called them “illuminations.”
Notes
1. The English phrase appears in an essay by Edgar Allen Poe, quoted from Thomas Hood’s “Bridge of Sigh,” which Baudelaire had translated. As for “Tornéo,” the notes in the Pléiade edition suggest the error of geography is due to a mistake in the zoology book that inspired him.
2. Michel Butor suggests this in his essay on Rimbaud and travel.
3. Oeuvres poétiques, 1:168.
4. Preface to the original edition, 578.
5. Cited by Joanna Richardson, Baudelaire, 67.
7. Cited by Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler, Baudelaire, 148.
8. This story is not confirmed; see ibid., 146–47. I am inferring, meanwhile, that these books were “Ronsard and his Pléiade,” later on display in Baudelaire’s first Parisian lodgings. See Richardson, Baudelaire, 71.
9. In Swinburne’s words, cited by Richardson, Baudelaire, 69.
10. The first date corresponds to the partial publication, in three installments, in La Presse (“La belle Dorothée” was among the texts that Arsène Houssaye rejected) and the second to the posthumous publication in Baudelaire’s Oeuvres complètes, published by Michel Lévy.
11. The Grand Robert dictionary places the first usage of this term in a text by Lamartine of 1835, noting that “the word has often been pejorative, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century.”
12. “I placed a [revolutionary] red hat on the old dictionary,” l. 38. “Réponse à un acte d’accusation,” in Contemplations.
13. “Réflexions sur mes contemporains,” 777.
14. Between 1831 and 1834, the silk workers of Lyons attempted to negotiate better wages with their patrons, which led to riots, strikes, and barricades, and twice to extreme, bloody repression. Desbordes-Valmore witnessed with horror the second carnage of 1834.
15. For a discussion of Desbordes-Valmore’s “corpus politique,” see Marc Bertrand, Une femme à l’écoute de son temps, as well as his introduction to Oeuvres complètes, 6–7.
16. Baudelaire, “Marceline Desbordes-Valmore,” 746.
17. As in André Gide’s famous declaration, “On ne fait pas de la littérature avec de bons sentiments [Literature is not made with good feelings].”
19. “Mon Coeur mis à nu,” XIII, Oeuvres complètes, 1:684. It is worth noting that Baudelaire conceives of three separate vocations. In the eighteenth century, however, two officer-poets from the Ile de Bourbon, Evariste Parny and Antoine de Bertin, made a success of combining sword and pen and became famous for their classically inspired erotic poetry and elegies.
20. See “L’action restreinte,” in Oeuvres complètes, 369–73, and also Barbara Johnson’s insightful comments in “Erasing Panama.”
21. The poet’s mission, Mallarmé hints in “Le tombeau d’Edgar Poe,” is to “Bestow a purer sense on the language of the horde” (in Weinfeld’s translation, at 71).
22. “La captive,” translation modified.
23. Balzac, “La fille aux yeux d’or,” 339.
24. “Feeling,” the philosopher Mikel Dufrenne reminds us, “is that mode of opening where the person experiences a full engagement with the world . . . becoming a subject who is not only intent on mastering the object, but one who welcomes it and interiorizes it” (quoted by Michael Collot, La matière émotion, 21).
25. Christine Planté, “Le silence dans la voix de Desbordes-Valmore.” See also “Ce qu’on entend dans la voix” for a “poetic structure of address to the other” (101) and Desbordes’s “listening [écouteuse] voice” (105). I owe to this critic’s remarkable work many of the ideas on Desbordes-Valmore developed in these pages.
26. Eugen Weber discovered this when studying the linguistic map of nineteenth-century France; “Who Sang the Marseillaise?” 96.
27. Aimée Boutin speaks of Desbordes-Valmore’s “appreciation of dialect” (63).
28. Marceline Desbordes-Valmore: das Lebensbild einer Dichterin, 64. Zweig’s words must be read in the context of Jacques Rancière’s fascinating study, in La parole muette, of the development of a new notion of literature as style and form that took place in the nineteenth century.
29. This is made clear in the letter sent to a friend accompanying “Les sept vieillards,” one of Baudelaire’s more compassionate works, inspired by Hugo. He writes: “I fear that I simply overstepped the limits assigned to Poetry” (quoted by Jérôme Thélot, Baudelaire, 449).
30. “Une lettre de femme” (Letter from a Woman).
31. “Fragments: Dimanche des Rameaux,” Oeuvres poétiques.
32. In Benjamin’s evocative phrase about modern spleen and the loss of the aura. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 185.
33. Hans-Robert Jauss, “Die ästhetische Vermittlung sozialer Normen,” 770.
34. Yves Bonnefoy, preface to Poésies, 22.
35. Pierre Gascar, Gérard de Nerval et son temps, 107.
36. As he writes to Théophile Gautier. See Pichois, ed., Oeuvres complètes 1:1403.
38. Quoting the last line of Desbordes-Valmore’s “Rêve intermittent d’une nuit triste,” Poésies.
39. Aimata Pomaré IV was Queen of Tahiti, Moorea, and its dependencies between 1827 and 1877. A French protectorate since Dupetit-Thouars’s military intervention in 1842, Tahiti became a colony at her death.
40. Gascar, Gérard de Nerval et son temps, 197.
41. Cited by Collot, La matière émotion, 29.
42. Oeuvres complètes, 1:458.
43. Gascar, Gérard de Nerval et son temps, 310.
44. Quoted by Thélot, Baudelaire, 492.
45. Millet offers, in “L’éclatement poétique,” a good survey of the fraught relations between poetry, history, and politics among nineteenth-century poets.
46. Bonnefoy, Le nuage rouge, 80.
47. In the famous lyric “Le Manchy” (part of the Poèmes barbares), Baudelaire recognized, however, “an exceptional masterpiece, a true evocation suffused with the mysterious grace, beauty, and magic of a tropical world” (cited by Gothot-Mersch).
48. See Edgar Pich’s summary of Leconte de Lisle’s poetic career in Michael Jarrety’s Dictionnaire de poésie.
49. Citing Lukacs, “The New Solitude and Its Poetry,” 85. His essay focuses on Stefan George, the translator and epigone of Baudelaire, who epitomizes “a chaste lyricism [that] reproduces only the most general and symbolic experiences” (82).
50. In her richly documented article “‘The Indies’: Baudelaire’s Colonial World,” Françoise Lionnet makes a compelling case for Baudelaire’s “worldness”; see in particular 733.
51. “Le livre, instrument spirituel,” 378.
52. Judith Gautier’s parentage, as the daughter of the famous writer Théophile Gautier (in whom Baudelaire saw the “perfect magician of French letters”) and of the singer Ernesta Grisi (sister of the romantic ballerina Carlotta), placed her de facto at the center of French cultural life. She married her father’s protégé, the poet Catulle Mendès, who like herself was a fervent Wagnerite. The title of Bettina Knapp’s biography, Judith Gautier: Writer, Orientalist, Musicologist, Feminist, aptly summarizes the remarkable breadth of a vocation devoted to crossing artistic and cultural boundaries.