If, as I have suggested, Baudelaire is at the cusp of a transition in aesthetic history from a literature of the communicable—whose condition is the denegation of noise—to a literature of unlimited readability, grounded in a confrontation with noise as the poetic other, our starting point lies in the fetish aesthetics of early to mid-nineteenth-century France, under the aegis of a theory of “ideal beauty.” If the Romantic sublime functioned as what M. H. Abrams baptized “natural supernaturalism”—an aesthetics turned by definition toward the natural environment and implying wonderment or awe as its most appropriate response—fetish beauty, in contrast, is associated with life in the new industrial and commercial cities, such as London or Paris. As a supernaturalism of the urban everyday, it was a new form of (pseudo)transcendence, one dependent for its effect—unlike the sublime—on artifice, that is, on human agency.
In fetish aesthetics, wonderment is still tinged with a sense of the sacred, then. But it also seems less associated with responses of awe, wonderment, or sublime terror than with a purely aesthetic and reflective enjoyment: beauty experienced and appreciated, that is, as a form of the desirable, and consequently tinged as much with erotic and even commercial desirability as with a religious or quasi-religious response in the presence of the transcendent. In this way, aesthetic fetishism—which was never so named or perhaps even recognized as such in the period itself—has features that associate it in one way with religious fetishism, already identified in the Enlightenment era, but in others with erotic fetishism, a phenomenon first identified by Rétif de la Bretonne but not formally acknowledged until the era of Alfred Binet and Sigmund Freud. And finally the fetishism of commodities famously identified by Marx in Das Kapital (1867) is also entirely relevant.1
In writers such as Nerval and Flaubert, then, what we would now call fetishism, never identified as such, is clearly described and frequently associated at the same time with a tension between the countryside and the “modern” environment of Paris which had already begun to make rural life seem dated, provincial, and old-fashioned. But in these writers there is also clear discomfort about the relation of an idealizing understanding of beauty to the perceived vulgarity of fetishistic desire and its objects. Desire like that of Emma Bovary, for instance, or of the narrator of “Sylvie,” who describes with some precision the dynamics of fetish when he writes: “Aimer une religieuse sous la forme d’une actrice” (To love a nun in the shape of an actress), and adds: “il y a de quoi devenir fou” (is enough to drive one mad).2 For here, beauty understood as the desirable is less a given, and a sublime manifestation of the sacred (for which in Nerval’s story the lost Adrienne is a figure) than it is a phenomenon both strange and artificial—manufactured, as it were, by devices and tricks of art, and thus a matter of technè or, in Nerval’s telling turn of phrase, of forme. For forme is a word that applies simultaneously, here, to the practice of artistic form (Aurélie’s costuming, as a device of the theatrical) and to the shapely physical figure of the actress. Nerval’s allegory in “Sylvie” is thus clearly legible: urban art, that of Aurélie, has something simultaneously disturbing and vulgar about it, something that distinguishes it, as acting or stagecraft, both from the natural simplicity of a country Sylvie (when she was young) and from the sublimity of the sacred, which is associated with the saintly nun Adrienne, now lost to death. Aurélie’s material body, heightened as it is by aesthetic artifice, strangely recalls the sacred and offers itself as a substitute for it, even though, as forms of beauty, they are as incompatible as a strutting actress plying her trade and a nun.
What I will want to suggest in what follows, then, is that if Baudelaire’s intervention in the history of idealizing fetish aesthetics, understood as a function of artistic form, entails a similar sense of artificiality, and hence of misfit or incongruity, then we can trace what seems to have been, in him, a growing mistrust of an art of the ideal dependent on techniques that could produce only an illusion of compatibility between levels of experience as distant as a sense of the sacred and the material triviality of the urban everyday. Baudelaire’s apparently effortless mastery of such an art of proximity is beautifully illustrated by the early poem: “Je n’ai pas oublié . . .” (poem 99), which went unpublished until 1857 and was incorporated into the “Tableaux parisiens” section of the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, as if it was in some sense a poem of Paris.3 But in it we can also detect the source of the poet’s future discontent with an aesthetic of fetishistic illusionism that is tellingly associated, here, with the transforming, purifying and even sacralizing—but also deceptive—magic of nostalgia.
Je n’ai pas oublié, voisine de la ville,
Notre blanche maison, petite mais tranquille;
Sa Pomone de plâtre et sa vieille Vénus
Dans un bosquet chétif cachant leurs membres nus,
Et le soleil, le soir, ruisselant et superbe,
Qui, derrière la vitre où se brisait sa gerbe,
Semblait, grand œil ouvert dans le ciel curieux,
Contempler nos dîners longs et silencieux,
Répandant largement ses beaux reflets de cierge
Sur la nappe frugale et les rideaux de serge.
(I have not forgotten the house we lived in then,
it was just outside of town, a little white house
in a skimpy grove that hid the naked limbs
of plaster goddesses—the Venus was chipped!
Nor those seemingly endless evenings when the sun
whose rays ignited every windowpane
seemed, like a wide eye in the wondering sky,
to contemplate our long silent meals,
kindling more richly than any candlelight
the cheap curtains and the much-laundered cloth.)
Let us begin, then, with the denegation of time in line 1 of this idealizing poem. To say “Je n’ai pas oublié” is not the same as saying “Je me souviens” (I remember). Time’s entropic effect is being specifically denied here, in a statement that therefore simultaneously acknowledges that effect, by recognizing the fact of forgetting. And the careful balancing of the opening alexandrine’s two hemistichs associates the denial of time with the idea of voisinage, or vicinity. Spatial proximity functions as an agent of the form of temporal denial, the denial of distance in time, that is called nostalgia, a word the poem does not need to use because it is implicit in the overemphatic antiphrasis of the opening words. (Antiphrasis often works in French as an intensifier.) The proximity to the city of the remembered “blanche maison” (situated, as we know from the biographical evidence, in what was then the village of Neuilly), cancels time’s distance, while the rhyme that associates ville and tranquille simultaneously contrasts the tranquil house with the implied bustle and busyness of life in town, which is thus indirectly indicated as the site of the speaker’s nostalgic reminiscing.
But proximity is also the crucial device of fetishizing, as Freud pointed out. For an inaccessible object of desire, the fetishizing subject substitutes, by metonymy, an accessible but also proximate alternative—a shoe, a garter, or a stocking displaces the unattainable sexual organ, for instance—so that the substitute object acquires, as its aura or atmosphere, the desirable properties of the true object of desire that is beyond reach. Indeed there is, as it were, an exchange of properties, as the desirable acquires the property of attainability while the attainable, which might otherwise be despised as ordinary, familiar, and without interest, becomes desirable in its turn. In this way, the Neuilly of many summers ago becomes close, while noisy Paris benefits from the remembered innocence and calm of the “blanche maison” (notice the hint of purity in the preposed adjective blanche). But if this is the mechanism of fetish, the fact that it is a mechanism or device (a trope) simultaneously admits the possibility of partial or complete malfunctioning, that is, of noise—a form of static or interference that can be ignored, but which needs to be ignored because it threatens the system of illusion from within.
And in the same way, this poem’s overall function is to bring about, by means of a poetic operation that mimes the enhancing effect of nostalgic memory, a kind of fetishizing redemption, whereby the banality and shabby poverty of what, in Baudelaire’s youth, was not quite yet the banlieue (the two words are etymologically related) become suffused in a transformative light, while poetic noise is similarly dispelled by harmonious sound. In this way, what the poem describes as nostalgic enhancement is also what it performs, on its own behalf, through the work of its poetic form; and what is “chétif” (line 3) or “frugale” (line 10) is rendered generous and beautiful (line 9: “beaux reflets de cierge”), this effect being ascribed to the largesse of the setting sun—but also to the refraction of a “vitre” (line 6). It is as if a supernatural source of light, figured by a natural phenomenon, joins forces with an artificial verbal intervention that doubles for and enacts the work of poetic form, and in so doing produces an effect of semblance (cf. “semblait,” line 7), the sun adapting its transcendence to a more human scale as it comes to “seem” a contemplative eye (line 5), while the human dwelling is bathed in the transformative light of the beyond. The “nappe frugale” and the “rideaux de serge” are made over by the “nappe de lumière”—the phrase is inescapable—resulting from the work of the sun and the windowpane, and the resulting glow produces an aura of the sacred. (It is necessary to remember that nineteenth-century glass was quite faulty and contained bubbles of air, so that the glow would be that of warm summer evening sunshine dappled by the glass like the “reflets de cierge” of line 9, suggestive of religious ceremony). Meanwhile the poem’s own frugal rhyme of lines 3–4 (“Vénus” / “nus” is technically a “rime pauvre,” impoverished rhyme, or even a “rime suffisante,” sufficient rhyme) is similarly redeemed by the harmonian wealth, the generosity of the hemistich-long “rhyming” of “ses beaux reflets de cierge” with “et les rideaux de serge” (not just “cierge” / “serge,” but also “de cierge” / “de serge”; “beaux” and “rideaux”; “ses” and “les” together with a 4/2 distribution of the rhythmic accent pattern in each of the paired hemistichs). And the instrumental “vitre” displays its own relation to the poem (understood) as performing the magic of poiesis, in that it is recognizably a phonetic amalgam of consonants from line 3 (“plâtre,” “vieille Vénus”) and the rhyme vowel “i” of lines 1–2 (“ville” / “tranquille”). As a form of artifice, it derives from the urban environment, and like the statues of the garden, it is a product of art.
And the vitre, the statues, and the sun will all reappear in Baudelaire’s later poetry, albeit in a transformed guise. The benign and generous divinity will acquire a more sinister and threatening visage, or rather will yield to a re-envisioning of the sacred in terms, now of le Mal. And the garden statues will make a reappearance—once Baudelaire has revised the opinion of statuary he expresses in the Salon de 1846—as something like emissaries of this new, disastrous, divinity: awe-inspiring allegorical figures with power to shock, dismay, and dispel comfortable illusions. Similarly, where the sun is a welcome supper guest in the Neuilly poem, the “Pomone de plâtre” and the “vieille Vénus”—as themselves domesticated representations of pre-Christian divinities demurely concealing their “membres nus”—will come to be viewable, in retrospect, as having foreshadowed the statue of the Commendatore in Mozart and da Ponte’s Don Giovanni, a key figure in Baudelaire’s imaginary, who demonstrates the uncanny power of walking in order to make a visit of retribution at a more festive supper than the domestic meal in “Je n’ai pas oublié . . . .” And, in the same retrospective view, the dappling of the sun’s evening glow by the windowpane seems to look forward to the spectrality of the apparitions that emerge out of the city’s noisy atmosphere in some of Baudelaire’s great poems of 1859–61, most evidently the “spectre en plein jour” (daylight specter) of “Les sept vieillards” (see line 2).
My claim in later chapters will be, then, that the transformed figures of the statuesque that emerge over time in Baudelaire’s poetic imagination—the passante (passerby), the swan/Andromache, the vieillards (old men)—are not solely manifestations of the sinister sacrality that was to supersede in his writing the benign divinity of the sun, but also manifestations whose refracting medium is no longer the magic windowpane but the city noise that constitutes the atmosphere of Paris and will become the new medium of a sacred of le Mal. That is why, for my argument, the most significant moment in all Baudelaire is in the prose poem, “Le mauvais vitrier” (“The Bad Glazier”), when the poet narrator throws his window wide open to the noise of the city, in a gesture that encapsulates Baudelaire’s own (never complete) renunciation of the magical refracting windowpane of idealizing aesthetics in favor of an atmospherics of noise—one that, by this time, will have shed its supernatural reference completely.4 Such a gesture represents the inevitable return, within a fetishizing aesthetics, of the inescapable but repressed component of the ordinary and the unbeautiful that makes the fetish such a noisy phenomenon, jostling the mundane and the sublime into uncomfortable proximity.
In such a light, the “vicinity” of urban Paris to the “blanche maison” of “Je n’ai pas oublié . . .” is of a piece with the copresence in the poem (indeed the carefully symmetrical positioning) of the moment of noisy rhyme that is the “Vénus” / “nus” stumble and of the plethoric hemistichs that seek to repair or redeem it at the poem’s end. For just as the stumble at lines 4–5 constitutes noise only because it is positionally presented as a rhyme—one that passes muster by benefiting from a technicality—the final magnificent hemistichs do not technically rhyme at all (except for the final words). If the words that stumble were not placed at the line-ends, they would count as part of the harmonious word music at which this poem excels; and inversely the (pseudo)rhyming at lines 9–10 might be more accurately described as word music rather than what I called “hemistich rhyming.” For (like word music) it too incorporates plenty of parasitic noise: “reflets” and “rideaux” do not rhyme, although the words clearly resemble each other in certain ways, and the repetitious “de” at syllable 11 of each alexandrine, like the mismatched syllabic pair “ses beaux” / “et les” at the “attaque” of each hemistich (i.e., at syllables 7–8) produces a kind of stutter that is mitigated only by the sweeping rhythmic patterning and the fact that such utilitarian words as et, ses, and de always tend to pass unnoticed in any overall effect of splendor, just as they do in word music. They are “just” background static.
If we recognize this presence of noise in the poem as a signal, however, we can see that the poem is intimating here its recognition of the inseparability of harmony and noise, order and disorder, the beautiful and the ugly in poetry whose relation to the transcendence of a manifestly unattainable sacred—here the munificence of the sun’s natural light, “ruisselant et superbe”—must inevitably be a matter of artifice. That is, the relation must be mediated, for example, by the refractive magic of an intervening “vitre” that can produce only “reflets de cierge,” and whose phonetic relation to the garden statuary we noticed a moment ago. The shabby statues and the magic windowpane are forms of art, then; and indeed of modern art: the art of a world itself become modern and whose nostalgia for a sense of the sacred no longer available betrays that unfamiliar world’s lost connection to a tradition now become irrelevant. A disenchanted art of artificial re-enchantment, then, and one plagued by “noise within the system.”
But we can glimpse something of Baudelaire’s sense of a path forward—more by way of further exploration of a recalcitrant problem, I suggest, than as a matter of real progress—in two post-1848 poems that had appeared in the 1857 Fleurs du Mal but were then artfully regrouped and repositioned in 1861, following the trial that Baudelaire had found so painful, so as to signify in relation one to the other. Placed now at the liminal position of the new “Tableaux parisiens” section, they read in sequence as enacting a renunciation of idealizing art—the art figured by the windowpane—and define a new relation to the sun, one that is programmatic for this whole group of poems concerning Paris.
Sans prendre garde à l’ouragan
Qui fouettait mes vitres fermées,
Moi, j’ai fait Emaux et Camées.
(Without noticing the hurricane
that lashed my closed windowpane,
I wrote Enamels and Cameos.)
Théophile Gautier, “Préface,” Emaux et Camées
Paysage
Je veux, pour composer chastement mes églogues,
Coucher auprès du ciel, comme les astrologues,
Et, voisin des clochers, écouter en rêvant
Leurs hymnes solennels, emportés par le vent.
Les deux mains au menton, du haut de ma mansarde,
Je verrai l’atelier, qui chante et qui bavarde;
Les tuyaux, les clochers, ces mâts de la cité,
Et les grands ciels qui font rêver d’éternité.
Il est doux, à travers les brumes, de voir naître
L’étoile dans l’azur, la lampe à la fenêtre,
Les fleuves de charbon monter au firmament
Et la lune verser son pâle enchantement.
Je verrai les printemps, les étés, les automnes;
Et quand viendra l’hiver aux neiges monotones,
Je fermerai partout portières et volets
Pour bâtir dans la nuit mes féeriques palais.
Alors, je rêverai des horizons bleuâtres,
Des jardins, des jets d’eau pleurant dans les albâtres,
Des baisers, des oiseaux chantant soir et matin,
Et tout ce que l’Idylle a de plus enfantin.
L’Émeute, tempêtant vainement à ma vitre,
Ne fera pas lever mon front de mon pupitre;
Car je serai plongé dans cette volupté
D’évoquer le Printemps avec ma volonté,
De tirer un soleil de mon cœur, et de faire
De mes pensers brûlants une tiède atmosphère.
Parisian Landscape
To make my eclogues proper, I must sleep
hard by heaven—like the astrologers—
and being the belfries’ neighbor, hear in my dreams
their solemn anthems fading on the wind.
My garret view, perused attentively,
reveals the workshops and their singing slaves,
the city’s masts—steeples and chimneypots—
and above that fleet, a blue eternity.
How sweet to see the first star in the sky,
the first lamp at the window through the mist,
the coalsmoke streaming upward, and the moon
shedding a pale enchantment on it all!
From there I’ll watch the easy seasons pass
and when the tedious winter snows me in,
I’ll close my shutters, draw the curtains snug,
and build my Spanish castles in the dark,
dreaming of alluring distances,
of sobbing fountains and of birds that sing
endless obbligatos to my trysts—
of everything in Idylls that’s inane!
A revolution down in the street will not
distract me from my desk, for I shall be
committed to that almost carnal joy
of fastening the springtime to my will,
drawing the sun from my heart, and by my zeal
persuading Paris to become a South.
Le Soleil
Le long du vieux faubourg, où pendent aux masures
Les persiennes, abri des secrètes luxures,
Quand le soleil cruel frappe à traits redoublés
Sur la ville et les champs, sur les toits et les blés,
Je vais m’exercer seul à ma fantasque escrime,
Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime,
Trébuchant sur les mots comme sure les pavés,
Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés.
Ce père nourricier, ennemi des chloroses,
Éveille dans les champs les vers comme les roses;
Il fait s’évaporer les soucis vers le ciel,
Et remplit les cerveaux et les ruches de miel.
C’est lui qui rajeunit les porteurs de béquilles
Et les rend gais et doux comme des jeunes filles,
Et commande aux moissons de croître et de mûrir
Dans le cœur immortel qui toujours veut fleurir!
Quand, ainsi qu’un poète, il descend dans les villes,
Il ennoblit le sort des choses les plus viles,
Et s’introduit en roi, sans bruit et sans valets,
Dans tous les hôpitaux et dans tous les palais.
Late in this cruel season when the sun
scourges alike the city and the fields,
parching the stubble and sinking into slums
where shuttered hovels hide vile appetites,
I venture out alone to drill myself
in what must seem an eerie fencing-match,
dueling in dark corners for a rhyme
and stumbling over words like cobblestones
where now and then realities collide
with lines I dreamed of writing long ago.
What greensickness could stand up to the sun,
that towering foster father who dissolves
anxieties into air like morning mist,
ripening here a verse and there a rose
with honey on the tongue as in the hive?
Who but the sun persuades the lame to dance
as if their canes were maypoles, governing
the resurrection of the harrowed fields,
and for the secret harvest of the heart
commands immortal wheat to grow again!
When, with a poet’s will, the sun descends
into the cities like a king incognito,
impartially visiting palace and hospital,
the fate of all things vile is glorified.
The descente dans la rue enacted by means of these two poems entails a leave-taking, then, from the idealizing poetry of the vitre. This word, featured in “Je n’ai pas oublié . . . ,” had figured prominently in 1851, in the liminal “Préface” to Emaux et Camées by Théophile Gautier. But in Gautier it functions as a signifier of aesthetic autonomy from the storms (“l’ouragan”) of history; and Baudelaire’s line, “L’Emeute, tempêtant vainement à ma vitre,” positioned toward the end of “Paysage,” clearly refers to Gautier’s poem, and endorses its purport, leaving the immediate proximity of “Le Soleil” to imply irony, contestation, or debate of any kind between the two poets.5 For the debate, in fact, seems rather to concern more directly the word atmosphère, which, figuring as the last word of “Paysage,” looks forward from there to “Le Soleil”—again implicitly—by virtue of the subjectivist implications of the couplet that encapsulates the tenor of the whole poem it concludes. Baudelaire, I think, does not wish to contest Gautier’s aesthetics directly. He prefers, for fairly obvious reasons (such as his friendship and prominently expressed admiration for the celebrated and successful “Théo”), to do so by working a kind of irony by juxtaposition. As a consequence, the crucial problem that is never made explicit in all this careful distancing on Baudelaire’s part is that of the relation of poetry to history. But the reference to the storm in both Gautier’s poem and Baudelaire’s alludes unmistakably to the events of 1848 and their sequel.6
Having referenced Gautier in this way by invoking his protective vitre, “Paysage” goes on, then, to define idealizing poetry—poetry written under the protection of the windowpane—in terms of a certain voluptuousness, “cette volupté”
De tirer un soleil de mon coeur, et de faire
De mes pensers brûlants une tiède atmosphère.
It will be around this question of the relation of poetry and the poet to the sun that the debate between “Paysage” and “Le Soleil” will be explicitly staged. In “Paysage,” the sun is recruited, indeed co-opted, somewhat as it was in “Je n’ai pas oublié . . .”; but now it is as if it were at best the poet’s coadjutor, and at worst (since it is winter) his absentee assistant, one whose temporary defection can be readily compensated for by the production of the subjective warmth that creates, it seems, an entirely artificial, fabricated atmosphere. And it is this stuffy, subjective, and self-enclosed atmosphere—“Je fermerai partout portières et volets”—that by implication “Le soleil” rejects. It does so first by staging the springtime return of “le soleil cruel” after its eclipse by the season of fogs and of moonlight, and second by reposing the question of poetic making (the aesthetic production of “atmosphere”) in the objectivist terms of the (sunlit) city street. What place can there be for a vitre—whether magic in its function or protective—when the poet descends into the street and, in doing so, finds he must face up to an encounter with history, the product of time and contingency, instead of turning from it and taking refuge in an idealizing poetry that denies these forces?
“Paysage”
In “Paysage,” then, the poet in his garret with his eye to the windowpane is capable of replacing the sun (which itself was a “grand oeil ouvert dans le ciel curieux” in “Je n’ai pas oublié . . .”); and thus of embracing a contemplative stance and a panoramic perspective. Such a stance is able—notably in winter, and at night—to bring the “cité” (line 7) into idealizing proximity with “les grands ciels qui font rêver d’éternité” (line 8). Furthermore, city poetry of this kind is compatible—precisely because it is idealizing—with pastoral genres and modes (“mes églogues,” line 1), and this by virtue of an ability that, in “Le Soleil,” will be attributed to the sun alone: that of shining equally, with its “traits redoublés,” on city and country alike (“la ville et les champs,” line 4), and consequently ennobling—note the monarchical metaphor—“les choses les plus viles” (line 18). And finally, this spatial proximity of city and country underlies an even more fundamental function of idealizing, subjective, and long-distance vision, that of denying the relevance of time: for the poet looking out over the city all year long, winter simply becomes the season when poetic imagination (“Je rêverai,” line 7) supplants the absent sun, so that the poet’s idyllic and idealizing vision of the city—in which plumes of industrial smoke become “fleuves de charbon,” for example—may continue uninterrupted:
Je verrai les printemps, les étés, les automnes,
Et quand viendra l’hiver
...................
Je fermerai partout portières et volets
Pour bâtir dans la nuit mes féeriques palais
This gift for creating a “tiède atmosphere” out of his own subjectivity (his “pensers brûlants,” line 26) is something the poet has apparently learned from this experience of night as the absence of sunshine, and more particularly from autumn mists, starlight, and the nocturnal moon (which is, of course, like an alternative sun in its power to “verser son pâle enchantement,” line 12). That is why there is a clear semantic correspondence between the opening lines of the poem’s second section (“Il est doux, à travers les brumes, de voir naître / L’étoile dans l’azur”) and its closing lines:
De tirer un soleil de mon coeur, et de faire
De mes pensers brûlants une tiède atmosphère.
But this final shift into subjective mode also implies, most tellingly of all, a new function for la vitre, which now ceases to be an instrument of poeticizing vision (“voir naître,” line 9; “Je verrai,” line 13) as in a sense it had already been in “Je n’ai pas oublié . . . ,” to become purely protective, shielding the poet at his “pupitre” (line 22) from the tempests of history. And it is this subjectivizing vitre, then, with its unmistakable echo of Gautier, that will be ironized by the juxtaposition of “Paysage” with “Le Soleil,” as I have already suggested.
“Le Soleil”
Abandoning the vitre, then, together with the contemplative posture and the denial of time to which “Je n’ai pas oublié . . .” had already subscribed (while assigning to the windowpane a refractive role, however, that implied a more humble stance on the part of the poet toward the majestic sun), “Le Soleil” retains the kingly power and generosity ascribed to the sun in that earlier poem, albeit implicitly diminished in “Paysage” by the poem’s promotion of the poet’s autonomy. “Le Soleil” does so, however, to present the relation of the poet to the sun quite differently from both of these previous poems, although contrasting most markedly with “Paysage.” For now the poet measures his own poetic powers against those of the sun quite explicitly, and in a relation of quasi-rivalry. He does this by comparing them to those of the sun in relation to the crucial poetic practice of rhyme, which now becomes explicitly thematic (whereas in “Je n’ai pas oublié . . .” it had appeared only as a nonthematized practice, and as something like the “reflets de cierge” of that poem—like them, I mean, in the sense that it appeared there as a merely imitative or derived way of conveying the idealizing power of sunlight, itself only softened and refracted by virtue of its objective correlative: the “vitre”).
No longer “voisin des clochers” but descending instead into the street, the poet pursues his atmospherics of the city under the dreary conditions defined by the “vieux faubourg,” with its hanging shutters and the vulgarity of its “secrètes luxures.” There is no longer any prospect of his taking the panoramic, distancing view. That privilege, and its power of reconciling nature and culture, the countryside and the modern urban environment, now belong exclusively to the sun, which exercises its magisterial powers of idealizing rhyming in stark contrast with the poet’s restriction to the shabby realities of his own, working-class-cum-Bohemian, neighborhood. These include the realities of spatial (cf., “le long du vieux faubourg”) and correlatively of temporal extension, within whose constraints he must find a way to work that perfect coincidence of the different—of palaces and poorhouses, kings and valets—that is rhyme.
Understood in this way—and in the absence of the magical windowpane—as a newly explicit figure for fetish aesthetics, rhyme thus becomes the terrain on which the gulf between the powers of the sun and the efforts of the poet to match them become evident. For the sun requires no mediator to do its work of rhyming: it “s’introduit en roi, sans bruit et sans valets, / Dans tous les hôpitaux et dans tous les palais.” The poet, on the other hand, cannot rhyme except by means of the linguistic mediation that defines verse: his humble work in the street consists of pursuing those elusive “vers depuis longtemps rêvés” that might permit him, “parfois,” to imitate, in his own way, the regal work of illumination and ennoblement that sunshine so perfectly and effortlessly achieves. Where the sun works noiselessly, then, and unaided by “servants,” the poet must contend with the noise that is the inevitable consequence of the phenomenon of mediation, be it in time or in space. The racket of the noisy city street along which the poet pursues his erratic, stumbling path is correlative to the digressivity required of poetry in its search for perfect rhymes in the world of extension, a world in which immediacy is the exclusive privilege of the sun. That is, the poet must face the stumbling block of randomness and chance, “le hasard.” His progress along the street becomes a “fantasque escrime” (line 5), an odd, unpredictable fencingaround that contrasts with the surety of the sun’s “traits re-doublés” (line 3), the double-striking efficiency of solar swordmanship. And if these fencing metaphors still imply a certain nobility that the poet shares with the sun, that is perhaps thanks only to those miraculous “vers depuis longtemps rêvés” (line 8) that he sometimes encounters. These rare successes notwithstanding, it is the contrast between the “cruel” accuracy and efficiency of solar striking and the uncertainty and randomness, the sheer clumsiness to which the poet is reduced in his dependency on the contingencies of chance, that most surely constitutes the point of the poem. We are truly far from the enchanting world of “Paysage” and its “tiède atmosphère,” so readily generated out of “pensers brûlants.”
Poetry, then, has become a strange and erratic fencing match. It is no longer fought with the weapon of light, the sun’s now exclusive rapier, nor yet with the comfortably subjective illusions of “pensers brûlants,” both of these now discarded options being associated with the no longer relevant windowpane. It can only be fought on the plane of rhyme, both with and against words and the things they refer to: recalcitrant words like pavé (which, however, just happens to rhyme with the uplifting rêvé) as well as noble words like palais (which rhymes uncomfortably with valets). Or to put it a little more specifically, it is actually verse that constitutes the poet’s weaponry, since it is only the extension of the line of verse that makes available the resources of both rhyme and rhythm.
For the poet’s battling with the contingent has, as it were, a double goal: to acknowledge the noisy, material, sorry reality of the urban, whose microcosm is the (also extended) street in all its barely concealed depravity and all-too-evident haphazard disorder; yet still to produce, out of those unpromising materials, the effect of beauty, through the rhymes and rhythms of verse. Such beauty is understood, fetish fashion, as capable of “ennobling” the vile, in the manner of the sun, by conferring on it an aura that refers to an otherwise inaccessible sphere of transcendent and awe-inspiring, sunlike majesty. So whereas the structure of fetish remains pertinent to Baudelaire’s poetic imagination, its structural noise has greatly increased with this new acknowledgement of the sheer inescapable presence of fetish’s shabby and vulgar material component. Which means in turn that the fetish has itself become a much noisier phenomenon, less smooth and magical in its working, and newly complicated by awareness of the problematics of mediation. For the necessity of mediation arises in a world of temporal and spatial distance, along with the fact of difference that is its consequence. How, then, to create the desired harmony out of the babble of irreconcilable differences that are, of course, both the consequence and the cause, or motor, of human history?
It is rhyme that presents itself precisely as the outcome of this necessary negotiation of harmony and difference, one that is itself mediated by the intervening metrical line. For, at the cost of introducing distance into the apparent immediacy of the rhyming words, lines of verse—which also rhyme rhythmically, as it were, among themselves—supply the semantic modulation that naturalizes the phonetic and semantic difference of words like pavé and rêvé or valets and palais, and thus produces the effect of harmony. They represent the work of form that is crucial to an aesthetics of fetish as a mode of “artificial supernaturalism.” The hitch, however, is that this magic doesn’t always work. As we saw at the mid-point of “Je n’ai pas oublié . . . ,” and as a quick check of the rhymes of “Le Soleil” will confirm, rhymes can be ugly, and many are simply banal. Rhyme is subject to hasard, rhyming is chancy; and one can only hope to stumble sometimes over a salvific “vers depuis longtemps rêvé,” rather than just a paving stone.
But as the existence of such only rare “vers rêvés” testifies, verse is itself as capable of imperfection as rhyme itself; and not coincidentally lines 1 and 2 of “Le Soleil” display how readily verse, like the poet of lines 3–4, can stumble. There is the awkward enjambment of an inverted phrase, perhaps intended to suggest that the shutters are hanging askew; and a line so metrically noisy as to almost defy scansion. In “Le long du vieux faubourg, où pendent aux masures / Les persiennes, abri des secrètes luxures,” the second line qualifies as an alexandrine only if “persiennes” counts as three syllables. But if the word is pronounced “per-si-ennes” this result is achieved at the cost of a classically frowned upon (but not strictly forbidden) unpronounced silent e immediately preceding the caesura. And alternatively, if “persiennes” becomes “per-sien-nes,” pronouncing the final e, it becomes necessary (in order to avoid an ugly hiatus) to make the liaison with “abri,” across the intervening comma, with the result that the line now finds itself both equipped with an extra syllable and bereft of its caesura. There are only bad options. Meanwhile the rhyme “masures” / “luxures,” far from working a magical redemption of the “masures,” simply confirms the irreparable indignity of the neighborhood (hovels shelter licentiousness, which has its natural home in tumbledown living quarters).
True, the four concluding lines of the strophe countermand, and perhaps correct, these opening disasters with metrically correct rhythms and two sets of uplifting rhymes:
Je vais m’exercer seul à ma fantasque escrime,
Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime,
Trébuchant sur les mots comme sur les pavés,
Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés.
Here, “rime” seems to absolve “escrime” from its suggestion of randomness, as “pavés” is transformed by “rêvés,” while the metrical regularity is such (6/6; 6/6) that sets of internal paradigmatic equivalences, simultaneously positional and semantic, impose themselves on the attention and form “rhythmic rhymes.” In the initial position, “Je vais,” and especially “Flairant,” “Trébuchant” and “Heurtant,” but also (in lines 5–6) “fantasque” and “hasards” in (roughly) equivalent places, and (in lines 7–8) “mots” and “vers” at the caesura—as well, perhaps, as “coins” (line 6)—all form parallels that suggest nonphonetic rhyme in this way. But if these lines exemplify Classical ideals of firmly balanced prosody, they also present poetic work, thematically, as a matter of fencing around, sniffing out, stumbling and bumping into things in ungainly fashion; and it would clearly be an error to assume that this kind of dissonance between the thematic and the prosodic is not intended to signify, as an element of the poem’s readability.
For the lines in question clearly lack the regal quality of, say, the final lines of “Je n’ai pas oublié . . .” and, striking one as almost caricatural in relation to their stiff classical model, they hardly qualify as exemplars of “vers depuis longtemps rêvés.” This is especially the case if one is mindful of Baudelaire’s own professed dream of poetic beauty as a complex, graceful, and subtly moving system, like a ship at sea under full sail.7 These inadequately beautiful lines are in a relation of structural equivalence with the corresponding quatrain that ends the poem, where it is the sun now that is celebrated and described as descending into the city “ainsi qu’un poète,” in order to “ennoblir le sort des choses les plus viles” (in lines 4–6), but also as penetrating “en roi” into the city’s poorhouses and palaces, which are thus, like the “valets” and “palais” at the rhyme of the final lines, rendered as poetically equivalent by virtue of the sun’s suprapoetic power, its “traits redoublés.” It is this double identity of the sun—like a poet and like a king—that in this poem the human poet has renounced by leaving his garret and stepping out into the street. Along with the sun’s related power of reconciling the country and the city by means of its “traits redoublés,” he has largely lost even the ability to “ennoble” the urban environment to which he is now confined, obliged as he is to battle with “les hasards de la rime.” If, at a time now in the past, ordinary poets could once hope, like the sun, to render the countryside beautiful (or at least to render the beauty of the countryside), the modern poet’s action is now reduced to the city, whose poetic treatment, unlike nature, requires precisely those regal privileges that—in contradistinction to the sun—he lacks. He must work, henceforth, with his own, purely human means.
Which is doubtless the point that is driven home by the central strophe. These lines mediate between the strophe devoted to the poet and the strophe devoted to the sun, and they do so—I suggest—by praising the sun’s transcendent powers in the mediocre verse of the poet condemned to the city. This new dissonance of the thematic and the formal, recalling (while reversing the terms) that of lines 3–6 by means of the strophe’s cheap pastiche of the run-of-mill verse—mediocre versification, unremarkable rhymes, embarrassingly bad puns—thus exemplifies the distance now separating the urban poet’s work and that of the sun, the awareness of a virtually unbridgeable distance, itself productive of noise, that arises in a world extended in time and in space, as figured by the city street. Here such dissonance, it seems, is the rule: and successful mediation of the poet-sun gap a hazardous undertaking only rarely crowned with success.8 The little series of puns is instructive in this respect. They exemplify the kind of simultaneity of double reference (country-city, nature-culture) that is otherwise the sun’s prerogative: “vers” refers to earthworms and to poetic verse (line 10); “soucis” to cares and to marigolds (line 11), while “miel”—although this is not strictly a pun, I think—relates gustatory sweetness and mental balm (line 12). But they are also so facile (“vers”), so contrived (“soucis”), or so banal (“miel”) that what they emphasize in the end is the ungainliness of the poet’s own démarche, corresponding in this way to his lurching progress along the street. Thus they reinforce the general sense of noise and mediocrity that this section conveys.
These mediating lines tell us that noise is the inescapable accompaniment to city life that the poet of the modern must face in his effort to make beauty from the mundane. The question for Baudelaire, in future poems, will be, then, no longer how to produce harmonious verses that deny the presence and power of noise and seek to cancel it out, but rather how to incorporate this defining noisiness of urban life into an aesthetics that might somehow be capable of doing justice to noise’s pervasive and inescapable, if mostly ignored, presence. How to envisage a noisy form of beauty, or the beauty of noise? How to produce a certain supernaturalism out of a world no longer benignly governed so much as it is subject to forces of disorder, entropy, and chaos; and this by virtue of its involvement in time, extension, the problematics of mediation, as well—something we have yet to see—as the destructive force that is history?
The outcome of this new quest will be the great poems written in the years 1859–61 that are at the core of the “Tableaux parisiens.” In them, we will encounter a new vision of the cosmic structure of the world: one that amends the harmonious worldview so characteristic of the utopian 1840s that Baudelaire came eventually to despise, and substitutes the anguished apprehension of a noisy cosmic environment, one obscurely governed by the sinister supernatural forces of le mal and productive of the uncomfortable form of awareness that is disalienation.
This new cosmic vision will retain the fetish structure of a sphere of ordinariness and daily life and an other, inaccessible sphere of the supernatural or the sacred, between which a foggy and uncanny sphere of strangeness, a noisy atmosphere, is on occasion perceptible—an atmosphere to which the poet-become-flâneur is both sensitive and uniquely attentive. But this fetish structure will no longer be subject to a poetics of metaphor, but rather a matter of allegory and chiasmus. Such figures, we can note immediately, are homologous with rhyme (and more closely so than is metaphor) in that they too incorporate the sense of noisiness that arises from the mediation of difference. They are aware of the distance that metaphor seeks to deny. Exit the sun, then, from Baudelaire’s world, be it the benign and generous sun of “Je n’ai pas oublié . . .” or the cruel divinity in its regal might—the sun of metaphor—that exercises so accurately its “traits redoublés.” And enter the statue, the “spectre en plein jour,” the figures of the swan and the passante, obscure envoys emerging out of the urban atmosphere as striking objects of encounter, stumbled upon in the street, and as messengers of a distantly glimpsed stratum of transcendence, so remote henceforth as to appear, on occasion, void. But a transcendence that is now understood as sinister and threatening, indeed as punitive, in that its power is revealed most inescapably in the noise and devastation, the rubble of human history: the shambles, for example, that large sections of the old city of Paris were to become in the course of the rapid and radical “modernization” that was undertaken, under the Second Empire, by Baron Haussmann.9