Artificial supernaturalism, as an aesthetics of the ideal, entails, as we’ve seen, a denial of time. For that reason, it tends to cultivate a fetishism of near-simultaneity—of proximity in “Je n’ai pas oublié . . .” and of the sun’s “traits redoublés” in “Le Soleil”—the effect of which is to efface distance and difference, including spatial differences (country/city; city/suburban village) but also the metaphysical difference separating the ordinary and the everyday from the remote ideal.
Such an effect of rapprochement depends, in turn, on poetic practices of indifferentiation for which the model is rhyme, practices whose effect is to produce an aura or atmosphere of the beautiful that lends uncanny dignity and desirability to otherwise unworthy things. Such practices might be thought of as akin to metaphor, the trope that brings together differences without apparent mediation and implies their kinship. However, we have also seen in Baudelaire, along with an increasing awareness of rhyme’s hazardousness, a growing awareness of that which is simultaneously denied and acknowledged in poetic indifferentiation, that is, the difference, both temporal and spatial, and consequently the distance, that verse exists to mediate. Noise, then, names the disharmony that accompanies—as entropy accompanies all forms of negentropy—every attempt within the sphere of time and the contingent to construct perfectly harmonious functioning systems. And that is why it becomes necessary now to turn to Baudelaire’s effort in the latter years of his life to invent an atmospherics not of harmony but of noise, an effort entailing a rediscovery and a reevaluation of time and its various entailments: distance, difference, extension.
Le quotidien a ce trait essentiel: il ne se laisse pas saisir.
(There is this that is essential about daily life: there is no grasping it.)
Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini1
Following the disillusioning political events of 1848–51, one begins indeed to see signs in Baudelaire, around the mid-1850s, of an emerging new aesthetic project, one in which the attempted denial of time that governed the now visibly utopian aesthetics of the fetish—giving it the character of an attempted re-enchantment of a fatally disenchanted world—is displaced by a new dynamics, one not quite of disillusionment but rather of disalienation. Disillusionment would suggest the abandonment of atmospherics and the supernaturalism it implies in favor of some presumably clear-eyed vision of “how things really are.” Disalienation, however, rather than implying an escape from ignorance, arises as an awareness of the power of alienation, and as the consequent consciousness of a human inability to know. To be disalienated is not necessarily to know the truth but only to have become aware that we cannot know it, and that we are deceived if we think we do. So the fetishistic aura of aesthetic harmony, suggesting a benign transcendence, becomes the veil that conceals the transcendent from us, a veil that Baudelairean disalienation now identifies with the noisy city atmosphere that most people ignore, suggestive as it is both of a power lying beyond that veil and of our inability to know that power, except in its manifestations. And what changes, then, in the new aesthetic dispensation that occupies Baudelaire’s later years, is only the character of those manifestations—no longer benign and harmonious, but noisy, threatening, and destructive—and his consequent reassessment of the concealed force whose action they are understood to represent.
No longer a benign and generous sun, that covert force now becomes the Enemy of humanity, dubbed the Devil or Evil (“le Mal”), and variously represented as the abyss, the “gouffre” or “le sabbat des siècles” (the witches’ Sabbath of the centuries). As in the Roman sacer, Baudelaire’s sacred too proves to have both a dexter and a sinister side: and it is the sinister form of transcendent power that now becomes identified with what, in less religious terms, the third law of thermodynamics calls entropy. The malign transcendent force is now understood, in other words, as the disharmony or noise inherent in every systematic construction, and growing as the system gradually wears away and in time falls into disorder, to be replaced by another system no less subject to disorder and decline. An old rhyme speaks of “time the anthropophagous” which “swallows up each human work.”2 Apparently assuming still the supposedly eternal laws of Nature, it is this view of time—as the covertly destructive force that makes a mockery of human progress—that Baudelaire now associates with the city, and hence with modernity, and promotes to the status of supernatural power.
After the early poem “Je n’ai pas oublié . . .”—with the denial of the work of time this opening phrase makes explicit—it becomes appropriate therefore for us to consider another short and similarly autobiographical poem, “L’Ennemi” (poem 10 of Les Fleurs du Mal), a sonnet dating from 1855. Although “L’Ennemi” ended up in “Spleen et Idéal” while “Je n’ai pas oublié . . .” (doubtless by virtue of its implied contrast with “la ville” of line 1) eventually became part of “Tableaux Parisiens,” both poems construct a metaphorical space of habitation for the poetic self; one safe and protected with its “blanche maison” and its shabby garden, overseen by a benign and generous sun, the other, however, in the garden of a stormy youth, now devastated for lack of protection from the thunder and rain:
Voilà que j’ai touché l’automne des idées,
Et qu’il faut employer la pelle et les râteaux
Pour rassembler à neuf les terres inondées
Où l’eau creuse des trous grands comme des tombeaux.
(Already the autumn of ideas has come,
and I must dig and rake and dig again
if I am to reclaim the flooded soil
collapsing into holes the size of graves.)
What is most striking, perhaps, about this latter poem is the careful balance it creates between two different ways of experiencing time’s destructiveness: if the storm of youth amounts to a single lengthy and destructive event (“Ma jeunesse ne fut qu’un ténébreux orage”), what, in the poet’s now reflective maturity, calls into question any rehabilitation of his devastated life—the negentropic work of shovels and rakes—is the sapping of his powers that has simultaneously been occurring and is attributed to the temporal process of entropy that is called aging.
Time is not now manifested, then, solely as a function of a history the poem recounts (the event of the storm, coinciding with the subject’s youth, and recognizably analogous to the devastating political events of the mid-century in Baudelaire’s life). Aging has occurred also as a slow and imperceptible process by which, in parasitic fashion, growing and prospering at the expense of the life of its host, “Le Temps mange la vie” (Time consumes existence). Only the word obscur in line 13 (“l’obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le coeur” [the hidden Enemy that gnaws our heart]) hints at a differentiation along these lines between the unignorably spectacular event of the storm and the imperceptible process that gradually “gnaws away” at life. But similarly, the shift from “ma jeunesse” to “qui nous ronge le coeur”—that is, from the personal and specific to the collective and general—points toward an implication that the poem’s autobiographical emphasis tends to background. The work of time is twofold, and even those fortunate individuals who may escape the destructive events of history—that is, of public events—will still lose in the end to the less spectacular, more insidious, but no less destructive and absolutely certain effects of process time, the time of the everyday. And Baudelaire’s personal interest embraces both, given that, different as they may be experientially (the one spectacularly damaging, the other obscurely so), they work hand in hand, and are ultimately as undissociable—so the poem’s careful organization indicates—as the quatrains and tercets of a sonnet. The value of the event is as an indicator that draws attention to the underlying process, and indicates its fatal significance.
What is striking, then, is to perceive that in late Baudelaire, eventful time and everyday or process time (“eventless” time) are generally speaking treated separately. It is the resources of verse poetry that tend to be devoted to a thematics of event—of the historical and the life-changing—a thematics developed through disruptively disalienating encounters with strange and disturbing figures like the swan, the frightening sept vieillards, or the profoundly disturbing passante, And here a metaphysical dimension of modern life is implied that represents le Mal as a sinister prolongement of the supernaturalist idealism of Baudelaire’s youth. Meanwhile, the poet is also beginning to experiment with prose poetry as, among other things, a poetry of the urban everyday, the site of process time—an everyday now to all intents and purposes shorn of metaphysical dimension or reference, although still regularly explored through a thematics of urban encounter.
Given the way time’s two aspects are shown in “L’Ennemi” to participate jointly in a single work of destruction, one may legitimately wonder what are the stakes of Baudelaire’s later assignment of event and process, transcendent and immanent understandings of time, to verse and prose respectively. My sense is that, while lacking the unifying concept of entropy, it is nevertheless a question concerning the status, not so much of time per se as of time’s manifestation in the form of noise—of noise understood as constituting the atmospherics of the city, and hence the vehicle of “modern beauty”—that Baudelaire is raising. For noise raises the question of its readability: Does it signify? How does it signify? What does it signify? And it does so in a way that supports a definition of the phenomenon of disalienation as a becoming aware of the world’s noisy (un) readability.
But if noise can become in this way the signifier of time that is common to Baudelaire’s later verse and the prose poems he wrote contemporaneously, it is by virtue of the fact that the verse poetry of event and the prose poetry of process time share a common locus, which is the definitionally noisy city street. The street that is the site of everyday life—the street we have already seen (in chapter 2) the poet choose as an alternative to the fetish magic associated with the vitre—is also the place where history is made and devastating events occur: those, not only of revolution and repression, but also of urban renewal and the painful historical process (or event?) of modernization that is epitomized, in “Le Cygne,” by the work of Haussmann. For the street is, again definitionally, the place where one is not at home—the place where one encounters, therefore, that which, representing the strangeness of the other, requires to be read. What is active both in Baudelaire’s late verse and in his prose poems, therefore, is an atmosphere, one that—arising in the street—figures the disalienating semantics of the verb to encounter. For what one encounters is never the familiar, the known, the expected or the ordinary, and always that which surprises, challenges and activates a response of reading. And an encounter—as opposed to, say, a meeting—also carries a charge of sinister significance.
Modern information theory teaches that an utterance ceases to be a communicative message and becomes a readable text to the degree that noise—already present parasitically in communication—interferes in the process of its transmission and reception, blocking immediacy of understanding and constituting a form of encounter. For to become readable in this way is therefore to be unmasterable: there is no end to the act of reading, no point where the text becomes known, and the process of its reading might end. The readable is also, ultimately, the unreadable. Similarly, disalienation occurs as an awareness that the world previously experienced as familiar (in Hegel’s German: bekannt) now resists becoming known (erkannt) to the precise extent that, by virtue of its now apparent noisiness, it has become strange, that is, readable.3 The familiar, in short, has acquired an atmosphere, which endows it with interest and life to the precise extent that it excludes access to knowledge and gives rise, instead, to a sense of the object’s ultimate readability (or [un]interpretability) and consequently of the subject’s estrangement. The reader’s alienated status in relation to a world that has become (un)readable—offering no finalities, no answers, no conclusions—is not abolished, but confirmed in the moment when the world’s false familiarity falls away and its failure to be comfortably literal, its inescapably figural character of noisy readability, becomes evident.
Baudelaire’s genius, though, shows itself in this. No single literary trope can maintain for long its defamiliarizing power to make the world strange. Repeated, it becomes familiar and thus literal; it ceases to exert the power of noise to produce readability. In offering two figurations of a world governed by time—as a place where (in verse) the noise of history allegorically bespeaks an evil transcending power, and as a place (in prose) where, ironically, the noise of daily process simply exists, in its own limitless readability—he prepares for his readers an unstable and therefore uncertain and divided position of reading, in relation to the time-governed world of the city, that mirrors the unresolvable situation of knowing that one doesn’t know—the experience of an interpretability that cannot conclude—that I am calling disalienation. The two apparently irreconcilable options that are presented—time manifests itself allegorically as the transcendent power of destructive evil, but also as an absurd factor of ironic noise in the immanent relations of everyday life—place the reader in a position that recalls Friedrich Schlegel’s definition of Romantic irony as “permanent parabasis.”4 One shuttles back and forth between incompatible perceptions that nevertheless together confirm and intensify, by the very fact of their irreconcilability, the sense of the world’s noisy atmosphere of readability that constitutes the experience of disalienation. Literature’s response to the problematics of time, experienced as the noise of entropy, is then to engineer for the reader a salutary if disconcerting experience of disalienating resistance to closure.
When, in a celebrated fusée, Baudelaire writes: “Deux qualités littéraires fondamentales: surnaturalism et ironie” (OC 1:658), we are justified, then, both in noting the apparent incompatibility of these two qualities and in assuming that part of the implication of the fusée is, nevertheless, that they are codependent, and understood therefore, to work bafflingly together. “Surnaturalisme,” furthermore, can be understood to refer as much to Baudelaire’s early practice of harmonian fetish aesthetics as to his later conversion to the allegorical (but still fetishistic) treatment of time as destructive and evil; the whole phrase ultimately provides a handy summation of Baudelaire’s oeuvre as a whole, with its three-way tug of harmonian versus noisy supernaturalism but also of allegorical supernaturalism and ironic immanence, such that finally the conventional understanding of an oeuvre—as a structurally harmonious whole—is itself exploded. And in that case, my own decision to present Baudelaire’s aesthetics of atmosphere in three more or less discrete but also actively interactive parts—devoted to fetishistic supernaturalism, allegorical supernaturalism, and to the prosaic ironies of an immanent everyday, respectively—finds its own support in this brief and gnomic fusée.
Still, the fusée has particular applicability, I think, to the poet’s dual post-1848/51 project, in “Tableaux parisiens” and Le Spleen de Paris: that of exploring the essential strangeness and hence the endless readability of the city and its life—a strangeness and readability that are encapsulated in a thematics of (noisy) encounter having the street as its privileged locus. It is to that issue of encounter, in its allegorical and supernaturalist formulation, that I now turn.
L’origine de la sculpture se perd dans la nuit des temps: c’est donc un art de Caraïbes.
(The origins of sculpture are lost in the dark of time: hence it is an art of savages.)
Salon de 1846 (OC 2:487)
Singulier art qui s’enfonce dans les ténèbres des temps . . .
(A strange art that goes back to the darkness of time . . .)
Salon de 1859 (OC 2:670)
It is hard to read the description of the devastated garden in “L’Ennemi” without thinking of the understanding of allegory developed by Walter Benjamin in his essay on the Trauerspiel: “Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things.”5 When we approach “Le Cygne” (poem 89), with its memorable evocation, in relation to the figures of the swan and of Andromache, of the devastation undergone by the city of Paris in the course of its modernization by Baron Haussmann, we will inevitably be led back to this Benjaminian understanding of allegory as melancholic reflection inspired by the ruins left by what has now disappeared, an Andenken or “penser à” (thinking toward) that is exemplified in the poem by Andromache’s nostalgia, beside her “Simoïs menteur,” for a Troy now lost. (See the appendix for text and translation of “Le Cygne.”)
More characteristic of Baudelaire’s own conception of allegory, however—although ultimately not inconsistent with Benjamin’s—are the figures themselves: the displaced swan, or Andromache in exile, that are presented in the poem as occasions of encounter and objects of reflection that the poet comes across—or in vocabulary more reminiscent of “Le Soleil,” stumbles upon—in the course of his urban walking. Andromache pops up in his mind (“Andromaque, je pense à vous”) as he crosses “le nouveau Carrousel,” and she does so in response to his also chance discovery, at an earlier time, of a stranded swan in the vicinity of a disorderly building site:
Je ne vois qu’en esprit tout ce camp de baraques
................................................................
Là s’étalait jadis une ménagerie;
Là je vis, un matin . . .
...................................
Un cygne . . .
Like the “petites vieilles” of a not unrelated poem, who are described as “des êtres singuliers, décrépits et charmants,” Andromache and the swan are both “monstres” and “disloqués,” damaged and dislocated as they have been—both disjointed and exiled—by time in the form of history. Yet, like the poet of “L’Ennemi,” they all persist—the “petites vieilles,” Andromache, the swan, and all the other defeated exiles the swan poem lists—in living on, continuing to “chemine[r], stoïques et sans plaintes, / A travers le chaos des vivantes cités” (wander, stoic and inured / to all the uproar of the heedless town) (“Les petites vieilles,” poem 91). What, then, is the relation of these “êtres singuliers” (odd creatures) to the urban chaos that surrounds them and to which they are so often directly linked? And what does it mean that their fate is not exhausted by the damage done to them, but requires also an apparently absurd, if dislocated, Weiterleben?
They are, of course, living ruins. “Débris d’humanité pour l’éternité mûrs” (Rubbish ready for eternity) or “Ruines! ma famille!” (Flotsam, my family!), they were once, “Les petites vieilles” insists, “des femmes, Eponine ou Laïs” (women—Laïs or Eponine), just as Andromache, now Helenus’s wife, is also “veuve d’Hector.” Figures of loss, then, and of a certain fallenness, they are also, and as such, victims—not so much of some blind Fate as of something much more intentional and specific, described in “Les petites vieilles” as a sinister and sadistic puppet master. As “marionnettes,” then, they drag along the street; or they dance involuntarily “sans vouloir danser, pauvres sonnettes / Où se pend un Démon sans pitié” (sad doorbells / On which a merciless Devil tugs). Thus they illustrate the insight the poet had pointedly placed in the liminary poem to Les Fleurs du Mal, written in 1855, “Au Lecteur”: “C’est le diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent” (It’s the devil who holds our puppet-strings, my translation). But the image of bells savagely tugged by a pitiless Demon adds to our awareness of a cruelty done to them, a sense also of urgency and/or alarm, as if their grotesque malformation was the sign, perhaps, of an urgent and important message to be conveyed, or as if their brokenness and angularity, their disjointedness, like that of the similarly decrepit “sept vieillards,” implied some sort of warning or admonition. Is it this message carrying, then, that motivates their absurd living-on, as if it were not enough that time has broken them apart, historically, but it must also be lived out, endlessly, in a postevent everyday that, converting them from simple victims into victim messengers, makes them into figures of readability, living and walking allegories? As if history makes living people into signs of an evil cosmic or supernatural malevolence, their puppet master, while the fact of their living-on in a subsequent everyday makes that readability available, as the enigma of allegory, for those, like the poet-observer, who exist in the process time of ordinary life?
This readability is a function, in particular, of their plasticity: it is their shapedness and malleability, grotesque as it is, that betrays the work of a shaping influence, tugging on them at will. And it is in this dimensionality of shaped or misshapen form that the living objects of Baudelairean allegorical encounter reveal their kinship, as sculpted figures, with the many statues that one encounters in the public places of the city: its streets, squares, and gardens. Baudelaire’s allegorical objects of encounter have the shaped character of statues—but more particularly of statues that have somehow come alive and are able to move. As such they are uncanny figures whose mobility the poems often dwell upon, noting especially its impeded character, as in the gait, not only of the “petites vieilles,” but also of the “sept vieillards” with their “pas maladroit / D’un quadrupède infirme ou d’un Juif à trois pattes” (clumsy gait of some lame animal or three-legged Jew), and most particularly of the lost swan, “de ses pieds palmés frottant le pavé sec” (with its webbed feet clumsy on the cobblestones), and of its human equivalent, the “négresse phtisique” (consumptive negress) shuffling, haggard of eye, in the snow.
But they are uncanny too because, like the vieillards as they advance “vers un but inconnu” (toward an unknown goal), they seem, simultaneously and contradictorily, charged with a mission—one whose intended recipient is none other than the observing poet himself, who may well write, on occasion, “Là je vis . . . / un cygne” (There I saw a swan), as if the encounter were a matter of pure chance, but who also writes: “Tout à coup, un vieillard . . . / M’apparut” (Suddenly an old man . . . appeared to me, my translation), signaling in this way his sense of being singled out as the destinataire of some sort of annunciation—a privilege he understands, at best, imperfectly. “À une passante” is, of course, the classic case of this strange amalgam of the certainty of being directly targeted by a statue-like moving figure (“Moi je buvais, . . . / Dans son oeil, . . . / La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue” [I drank from her eyes . . . the grace that beckons and the joy that kills]) with an equally strong sense of disorientation and uncertainty: “Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais” (Of me you know nothing, I nothing of you). And this figure’s “jambe de statue” (line 5; statuesque leg, my translation), which may be revealed quite inadvertently, but may also be coquettishly displayed—the formulation “avec sa jambe de statue” implies only that her leg is visible—captures something like the essence of Baudelaire’s definitionally uncertain understanding of allegorical manifestations of all kinds, as they occur in the life of the city as objects of encounter. Arising in apparently aleatory circumstances, they seem nevertheless to be purposive and to have a message or meaning to deliver, even though that message’s content, and even its destination, are themselves uncertain as well. And, like the passante—herself a figure of time and specifically of history, as we will see in chapter 4—they exert the charged combination of attraction and guilt that betrays an association with sexuality, that other thinly veiled but insistent, atmospheric presence that makes the urban environment electric.
This crucial ambivalence or uncertainty of the statuesque and the allegorical, the sexual and the cosmic, is registered, finally, in a striking coincidence, across virtually the full span of Baudelaire’s creative career, of two hemistichs that each relate to the (non)display of female lower limbs. “Avec sa jambe de statue” in “A une passante” echoes, and simultaneously rewrites, “cachant leurs membres nus” (hiding their naked limbs) in “Je n’ai pas oublié . . . .”6 In condensed form, this pairing of two hemistichs can stand, then, for the dynamics of occultation and revelation—of time denied and time acknowledged—that defines the terms of Baudelaire’s historical evolution (where time, of course, implies also distance or extension, difference, and ultimately noise). But the same dynamics of denial and acknowledgement are active also in the continued and unresolved ambivalence about time and its entailments that can still be perceived in the poet’s late writing, and specifically in the baffled or at least mixed feeling, the sense of estrangement, that he brings to his perception of the everyday as a locus of the uncanny, and consequently also to his understanding of allegory in relation to the atmospherics of the noisy city. So it is not surprising that such feelings surface, finally, whenever—as in the Salons of 1846 and 1859—he is led to write essayistically about sculpture and sculptural form, and to do the theory, so to speak, of the statuesque.7
For in that writing too it is the shapedness and dimensionality of statues—along with the primordial and indeed primitive character that, for him, betrays their relation to time—that interests and simultaneously disturbs him, requiring theorization. It is not accidental that, already in “Je n’ai pas oublié . . .,” the “Pomone de plâtre” and the “vieille Vénus” (note the adjective), represent—with their concealed limbs—ancient, pre-Christian, and female divinities, and that they do so by contrast with a male god of light functioning currently and who supplants them: the sun whose generosity, aided by the vitre of art, cancels the frugality and mediocrity of the middle-class world, with its “nappe frugale” and its “rideaux de serge,” and does so by means of a device akin not to sculpture but to painting, and productive of what I called a “nappe de lumière” (with its “reflets de cierge” that strongly suggest Catholicism). This poem implicitly writes a history, and a history of progress, even as it seeks—fetishistically and as a matter of “artificial supernaturalism”—to counter the effect of time. Small wonder, then, that time thus repressed was destined to return, although not before history had again been mobilized, in the Salon de 1846, against the association of statuary with time.
Indeed we can measure the degree to which the young Baudelaire experienced sculpture as a threat to the fetishizing aesthetics of artificial or idealizing supernaturalism by noticing the intensity with which, in “Pourquoi la sculpture est ennuyeuse,” he seeks to reject it, as a survival of the archaic and the primitive: an “art de Caraïbe” and a fetish in the only sense of that word then current, that of a primitive, ugly, and hopelessly irrational religious idol.
L’origine de la sculpture se perd dans la nuit des temps: c’est donc un art de Caraïbes. En effet, nous voyons tous les peuples tailler fort adroitement des fétiches avant d’aborder la peinture, qui est un art de raisonnement profond . . . etc.
(The origins of sculpture are lost in the darkness of time: hence it is an art of savages. And indeed all peoples can be seen to sculpt skillful fetish figures before they turn to painting, which is an art of profound reasoning . . . etc.)
(OC 2:487)8
Needless to say, the sign of sculpture’s primitive status is none other than its shapedness and three-dimensionality, which is read here, not yet as evidence of an allegorical structure of thought, but as proof of sculpture’s boring because naïve naturalism. “La sculpture se rapproche de la nature” (Sculpture lies close to nature); “Brutale et positive comme la nature, elle est en même temps vague et insaisissable, parce qu’elle montre trop de faces à la fois” (Like nature brutal and positive, it is simultaneously vague and baffling, because it displays too many aspects at once). Sculpture, therefore, cannot impose a viewing perspective on the spectator, as the artifice of painting does: “Le spectateur, qui tourne autour de la figure, peut choisir cent points de vue différents, excepté le bon” (The viewer, turning about the figure, can choose a hundred different points of view other than the correct one). And, worst of all, a purely accidental circumstance may reveal some sort of beauty in a statue that, disconcertingly, the sculptor had not intended: “C’est pourquoi il est aussi difficile de se connaître en sculpture que d’en faire de mauvaise” (Hence it is as difficult to master sculpture as it is to produce a bad statue). The statue is a noisy phenomenon in that, prefiguring as it does the Freudian unconscious, it defies the rational mind, the advanced intelligence, of 1840s modernity.
It is possible, however, that this last comment (“difficile de s’y connaître”) gives away the game. Coming as it does at the culmination of a suspiciously spirited diatribe, it unintentionally reveals what it actually is that the young Baudelaire finds so “ennuyeuse”—that is, not simply boring, but also, in another sense of the word, annoying and troublesome—about sculpture. This would be the very feature of baffling and bothersome strangeness—the atmospherics—that by 1859 will have become, in a typically Baudelairean reversal, the entirely positive indicator of sculpture’s allegorical character of readability. If it is “difficile de se connaître en sculpture,” that will be the very reason why, still experiencing sculpture as disconcerting and disturbing, the later Baudelaire finds in the statue, as a fetish figure and an “art de Caraïbe,” a model of practice for a certain, fundamentally revised, art of poetry—one that, like sculpture, now requires movement of its readers, rather than imposing on them a single, privileged perspective, and does so by shifting the ground, as it were, from beneath their feet, so that—to put it mildly—it becomes “difficile de s’y connaître.” A poetry whose modernity lies, now, not in its rationality, but in its strange and elusive, but also suggestive art of infinite readability, offering as it does—like the strangeness of the everyday urban world—innumerable points of access without discernibly hierarchizing them, let alone imposing a single perspective.
So it is now by virtue of its relation to time, as a primordial figure and an art “qui se perd dans la nuit des temps”—by virtue, that is, of its noisily interpretable dimensionality and shaped-ness—that sculpture acquires a crucial function in the modern age: that of figuring, for moderns who have become so out of touch with the real nature of the world, the sinister power of Time as the unseen Enemy of human life, working as it does through the storms of history, but also as the unperceived parasite that prospers by consuming our lives. It turns out then, in 1859, that “devant un objet tiré de la nature et représenté par la sculpture, c’est-à-dire rond, fuyant, autour duquel on peut tourner librement, et comme l’objet naturel lui-même, environné d’atmosphère” (OC 2:671; in the presence of an object drawn from nature and represented by sculpture, that is, round, elusive, around which one can turn freely, and like the natural object itself surrounded by atmosphere), the peasant, the savage, “l’homme primitif,” have an incomparable advantage over moderns in the form of access to a knowledge and a truth from which the latter can only profit. For if, in 1846, Baudelaire had espoused the doctrine of aesthetic progress for the purpose of reviling the power of statuary, he is now inclined to subscribe to precisely the opposite view: “Le bas-relief est déjà un mensonge, c’est-à-dire un pas fait vers un art plus civilisé, s’éloignant autant de l’idée pure de sculpture” (OC 2:671; already a bas-relief is a lie, a step in the direction of a more civilized art, and one that accordingly departs to the same extent from the pure idea of sculpture). Pomona and Venus are rehabilitated; the doctrine of progress, espoused in the utopian 1840s but having been adopted in the interim by the Second Empire for purposes of its own, is no longer tenable. And an archaic art, one that, by virtue of its very age as well as of the dimensionality, the readability that is the sign of that age, bespeaks time and enforces movement—a necessary change of perspective—has become of crucial significance to moderns. And that is because, in becoming “civilized,” they have fallen into illusion, blindness, and error.
For it is as signifiers of Time and inscrutable bearers of atmosphere that statues haunt the modern city, like so much noise in the environment. If they seem likely to come alive at any moment—ready to walk—it is in uncanny compensation for the modern disinclination to budge from the narrow, alienated perspective that ignores the noise of existence, and as bearers, therefore, of the disalienated and disalienating message that we are the creatures, and the victims, of Time in its various unheeded manifestations. Meanwhile, we can turn about them, walking now ourselves, in hopes of glimpsing some hint of the shattering, because enlightening, perspective to which, by virtue of their allegorical readability, they wordlessly allude. For the language of statues is not speech but gesture; and allegory is the figure that makes speech itself gestural, endowing it with an indexical function, in the way that a statue too may describe or represent, but does so in order to indicate or allude.
By way of introducing his discussion of two allegorical statues by Ernest Christophe that were not exhibited at the 1859 Salon, Baudelaire begins by taking his readers on a statue-by-statue stroll through the city that amounts to a catalogue of recognized allegorical types together with the conventional urban setting that forms their habitat: libraries for Harpocrates, Apollo, and the Muses; a shrubbery or bosquet, of course, for Melancholia; churches and cemeteries for memorial statues and figures of grief; public gardens for Venus and Hebe; pompous city squares and intersections for legendary figures of glory, war, knowledge or martyrdom. Baudelaire’s intent is to contrast the trivial works submitted to the Salon with what he views as sculpture’s sacred function, “le rôle divin de la sculpture” (OC 2:670): the strange pregnancy with otherworldly significance that it derives from its allegorical character. Most of these typical figures are caught, then, in the act of a signifying gesture: “Harpocrate, un doigt posé sur la bouche, vous commande le silence” (OC 2:669–70; Harpocrates, with a finger to his lips, commands your silence); Melancholia’s gesture consists in her very stillness, as she “mire son visage auguste dans les eaux d’un bassin” (mirrors her august countenance in the waters of a pond); a skeletal corpse “soulève discrètement l’énorme couvercle de son sépulcre” (discreetly lifts the huge cover of its sepulchre); Mourning lies prostrate, “échevelée, noyée dans le ruisseau de ses larmes” (her hair awry, drowning in the stream of her tears); the love goddesses, of course, “étalent . . . les rondeurs de leurs membres charmants” (show off their charmingly rounded limbs), while famous men hold emblematic objects and may point to heaven “où ils ont sans cesse aspiré” (to which they have ceaselessly aspired), or else “désignent le sol d’où ils se sont élévés” (point to the ground from which they have risen). The injunctions, intimations, exhortations, or commands of all these gesturing figures are couched, then, in the somewhat uncanny “langage muet” (silent speech) of action strangely stilled, the frozen gesture.
And that is why, in the propitious semidarkness of libraries or chapels, the shaded verdure of shrubberies, gardens and cemeteries, the pompous solemnity of city squares and the like, sculptured representations of gesture can so readily suggest to the sensitive passerby that the statue is caught in the act of returning to life, as the skeletal corpse emerging from its tomb is so incontrovertibly doing. And also—most compellingly of all—as does the statue of the appropriately named Commendatore in the Don Juan myth, memorably brought to the stage in Mozart’s Don Giovanni:
Fussiez-vous le plus insoucieux des hommes, le plus malheureux ou le plus vil, le fantôme de pierre s’empare de vous pendant quelques minutes, et vous commande, au nom du passé, de penser aux choses qui ne sont pas de la terre.
Tel est le rôle divin de la sculpture.
(Were you the most carefree of humans, the most miserable or the most vile, the stone ghost takes hold of you for a time, and commands you, in the name of the past, to think of things not of this earth.
Such is sculpture’s divine role.)
(OC 2:670; my italics)
But notice here Baudelaire’s unobtrusive modification of the myth. The traditional Commendatore returns in the name of Heaven: Baudelaire’s figure walks in the name of the past, and thus as an envoy of Time. The stone guest, moreover, has become a stone ghost, a “fantôme de pierre,” and more like a spectral envoy of the underworld, to which he dispatches Giovanni, than of the celestial kingdom. And the fleetingness of the sense of an unholy if divine visitation (“pendant quelques minutes”) does not diminish the impression so much as it renders it more dubious, more uncanny than a heavenly annunciation is thought to be.
It matters, then, that—along with the variant of “rêve sculptural” (sculptural dream)—the word fantôme (ghost) has twice before been used of statues, in a space of less than two pages. Such insistence drives home this idea of sculpture’s fulfilling a “divine” role on earth. The hushing figure in the library is a “fantôme impérieux” (imperious ghost), and the skeletal corpse emerging from the tomb is a “fantôme décharné” (fleshless ghost); so that it is as if, by virtue of a submerged pun (décharnement suggesting acharnement), the imperiousness of the sculptural injunction were proportional to the degree of immateriality, of décharnement, achieved by the hardness of stone, making the statue a kind of oxymoron. The “rêve sculptural,” the “fantôme de pierre” paradoxically makes use of ordinary matter in order to assert a spiritual idea. Commanding us, then, by means of sculptured stone, to think of things that are not of the earth, it is in this way an agent of Baudelairean allegory—and allegory, in turn, has in Baudelaire’s understanding the ghostly power of sculpture, haunting the living—that is, inhabiting our world as part of our everyday but doing so as it were frequentatively and hence insistently, with the special emphasis of matter inspirited, the divine bodied forth, made (sculptured) flesh, or chair. (Baudelaire here is very close to anticipating Freud’s interest in the kinship of the familiar and the strange, the known and the unknown, the heimlich and the unheimlich.9)
Statues, then, are matter come fleetingly to life in order to enjoin attention to eternity, even as they continue to dwell among us, as part of the everyday world to which, ordinarily, we pay so little heed. As such, they constitute a “singulier art” (peculiar art) indeed, one that, in two senses, plunges, or as Baudelaire says, “s’enfonce dans les ténèbres du temps” (thrusts down into the darkness of time): they are archaic, but also they recede from the here and now into eternity, the darkness of time of which, in their “langage muet” (mute speech) of gesture, they speak. And their function, then, as Baudelaire says of the statue of Harpocrates at the outset, is in this way Pythagorean and pedagogical. Their gesture, or better their gestus—that is, the impact they have on us, the action they exert—is, as befits a numinous, mysterious teacher, “plein d’autorité” (well endowed with authority). This understanding of the strange, allegorical power of statues is both fully compatible with everything that is said of sculpture’s troublesomeness in the 1846 Salon, and an exact reversal of the theory laid out there of what is so boring about it. It is because it is “ennuyeuse” in both senses that it is difficult indeed to “s’y connaître” (to master it).
For finally, the statue, we learn, is a “fantôme immobile” (OC 2:671; motionless ghost), but one that solemnizes everything, “même le mouvement” (even movement), in the way that lyric poetry ennobles everything, “même la, passion” (even passion). This fourth and final recurrence of the word fantôme seems intended to resume the mystery of sculpture in a final paradox, one that suggests that what is phantasmal about statues is their ability to endow distance, extension, difference and their entailment of noise (summed up here as the “movement” that these entail) with the solemnity associated with stillness. In the way that they reconcile the everyday and the eternal, the material and the immaterial, the reassuring and the troubling, then, statues “donne[nt] à tout ce qui est humain quelque chose d’éternel et qui participe de la dureté de la matière employée” (OC 2:671; endow all that is human with something timeless that participates of the hardness of the matter it employs), an immunity from the effects of temporality. They reconcile the dignity of mobility with the indignity of the immobile, then. But they do so in the way that rhyme, as the principle of lyric poetry, “ennoblit tout, même la passion” (ennobles all, even passion)—that is, under the sole condition of submitting to the inevitability of distance, which implies movement, in its reliance on the extension represented by the line of verse. Movement, then, in Baudelaire’s thinking, is the condition of the “rêve sculptural” in the way that verse is the condition of rhyme; and we will see that Baudelaire’s verse allegories reference the cosmic rhyming they assume as their metaphysical framework by means of the figure of the imperfect chiasmus: a form of noisy, because extended, rhyme.
Meanwhile, it is the “rhyming” character of statues, their twofold composition manifested under the condition of movement, that accounts for Baudelaire’s passionate endorsement of two allegorical statues by Ernest Christophe that he now deploys—despite the fact that Christophe had not exhibited that year—as the culminating moment of his argument concerning sculpture in the 1859 Salon. He had earlier rendered them into verse, as “Le Masque” (poem 20) and “Danse macabre” (poem 92, incorporated into “Tableaux Parisiens” in 1861). The first of these figures exploits sculpture’s dimensionality by presenting a front and a back. “Vue de face” (from the front), it represents “un visage souriant et mignard, un visage de théâtre” (a smiling, appealing face, a theatrical face). But, “en faisant un pas de plus à gauche ou à droite, vous découvrez le secret de l’allégorie, . . . je veux dire la véritable tête révulsée, se pâmant dans les larmes et l’agonie” (OC 2:678; stepping a little more to the left or right, you perceive the allegory’s secret, . . . I mean the real head thrown back in a faint of tears and death agony). The second is a figurine representing “un grand squelette feminin tout prêt à partir pour la fête” a tall woman’s skeleton dressed to leave for a party, her eyes indistinguishably seeking “dans l’espace l’heure délicieuse du rendez-vous ou l’heure solennelle du sabbat inscrit au cadran invisible des siècles” (the delicious hour of a lovers’ meeting or the solemn hour of the witches’ sabbath written on the invisible clockface of the centuries), and “toute cette pensée funèbre se dress[ant] sur le piédestal d’une fastueuse crinoline” (OC 2:679; this whole funereal idea supported on the pedestal of a magnificent crinoline). This time it is for the statue to move forward, toward the spectator: “O charme du néant follement attifé” (O lure of nothingness so well tricked out), Baudelaire had written in “Danse macabre” and now repeats:
Viens-tu troubler avec ta puissante grimace,
La fête de la vie?
(Are you planning to disturb the feast of life with the power of your ugly leer?)
(lines 21–22)
If we take these two Christophe poems together, then, it seems that, as figures of allegory, statues require of the observer a complex act of reading—one that, exactly like an appreciation of rhyme, entails a double movement in time, simultaneously forward and backward. One must see beyond the illusory present to the ugly truth of a distant past (represented, as in “Le Masque,” by the figure of death), but one must also measure, as “Danse macabre” proposes, the continued impact of that remote past as it impinges on the present, the pressure that it exerts on the here and now. Baudelaire’s figure for this “rhyming” effect of allegory, with the double dynamic of convergence-divergence within time, is chiasmus: and chiasmic reading, I suggest, is one of the possible implications of the word contortions as it occurs in the final stanza—not quoted in the Salon—of “Danse macabre”:
En tout climat, sous tout soleil, la Mort t’admire
En tes contorsions, risible Humanité,
Et souvent, comme toi, se parfumant de myrrhe,
Mêle son ironie à ton insanité!
(Death in every latitude dotes on you
and your contortions, ludicrous Humanity,
and often, like you, daubing herself with myrrh,
mixes her scorn with your delirium.)
(lines 56–60)
To read an allegory, in other words—submitting to the “contorsion” its back-and-forth, convergent-divergent dynamic imposes—is to experience the irony that is the presence of Death amid the frivolity and general inconscience of life. An irony that in turn we will see represented, not only in “Le Cygne,” but also in “Les sept vieillards” and “À une passante” (see chapter 4), as arising at the crossing point of a chiasmic X; so that allegory emerges as an atmospheric space-between of spectrality constituted by the rhyming relation of past and present, but centered on an encounter with death in life. This is the encounter of which Don Giovanni’s rendezvous with the statue of the Commendatore is emblematic.
And it is such an encounter, I submit, that is produced by what I want to show to be the chiasmic patterning of “Le Cygne,” by which I mean the contortions, not unlike the swan’s own writhing beneath a “ciel ironique et cruellement bleu,” that one must perform as the swan poem proceeds, moving backward and forward at the same time. For “Le Cygne,” as we will see, is a poem about allegory that also enacts, in the structure of its first part, allegory’s own x-like structure of temporal divergence and convergence. But it is also, and likewise, a poem about the cause-and-effect relation of allegory to melancholy, and one that simultaneously reverses that relation, implicit in the positioning of parts 1 and 2, into another chiasmus. For if allegorical perception as cause induces the mood of melancholy as its effect, it is also true that melancholy in turn predisposes one to an allegorical view of existence, thus reversing their relations. The pensiveness of the poem’s mood, therefore, is not just a matter of thought, but rather an effect of the kind of thinking, compounded both of allegory and melancholy, that is an inclusive penser à, in that it is directed toward an ultimate object that thought cannot actually attain. This is the thought—exemplified by the apostrophe: “Andromaque, je pense à vous!”—that cannot extend all the way back, beyond humanity’s fall into time, to the evil eternity that, for Baudelaire, controls our fallen existence. For apostrophe is a figure of address, implying communication, but of address to that which lies beyond the normal condition of communication that is the presence of a true addressee.
Such apostrophe-like pensiveness is the “thinking-toward” that Walter Benjamin refers to by employing the word Andenken: not simply the pensiveness of melancholy, but the melancholy of allegorical awareness. Baudelaire’s word for it, though, would be rather something like reflection, or perhaps reflectivity, since for him the ultimate model of such thought, like the relation of Andromache to the swan and of the swan to Andromache, is the play of reflections, the “jeu de reflets” that is rhyme: rhyme with whose hazardousness—its subjection to, and affinity with, noise—“Le soleil” has already acquainted us (cf. chapter 2). Allegorical rhyming is a chiasmic structure of encounter that forms an atmospheric “jeu de reflets”; but that atmosphere is itself an apo-strophein that turns toward—turns its reader toward—an ultimate object of thought that lies beyond human ken. Its sign, therefore, is the X of mystery—the mystery of “subliminality.”
Au détour d’un bosquet, abritée sous de lourds ombrages, l’éternelle Mélancolie mire son visage auguste dans les eaux d’un bassin, immobile comme elle. Et le rêveur qui passe, attristé et charmé, contemplant cette grande figure aux membres robustes, mais alanguis par une peine secrète, dit: Voilà ma sœur!
(Behind a clump of trees, sheltered by dense shade, eternal Melancholy reflects her noble face in the waters of a pond that is as still as she. And the passing dreamer, both saddened and enchanted, says as he contemplates this tall figure whose strong limbs droop from a secret sadness: she is my sister!)
Salon de 1859 (OC 2:669)
Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie
N’a bougé! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs,
Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allégorie!
Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs.
“Le Cygne” (lines 29–32)
The rhyming cities of modern Paris and ancient Troy in “Le Cygne” are sites where the destructive force of time, in the guise of the events of history, produces figures that likewise rhyme allegorically—the swan and Andromache, figures whose melancholic living-on in a state of disalienation makes of them strangely disturbing “statues.” For, rather than representing a state of stillness in the act of coming to life, they reverse this relation, and seem to be living creatures stilled into near immobility by the fate that life has inflicted on them, their exile, as well as by the very reflectiveness that defines their exile from, and within, life. Reflectiveness here means both the reflective thought, the melancholy into which they are plunged in their state of disalienation, and the way their fates reflect each other allegorically, so that the poet, passing by, might well say of each “Voilà ma soeur!” Reflection refers to thought, and also to a mode of resemblance.
Reflection in both senses also implies distance and mediation, a penser à, so it is significant that the mediating figure implied here, between the swan and Andromache, is that of Aeneas, the traveler. It is his report of Andromache, in the Aeneid, that the poem references, and the turbulent history of Rome, therefore, that connects the sack of Troy with the destructive modernization of Paris, triangulating in this way the dual relations of the swan and Andromache, Paris and Troy, in the way that a line of verse provides the necessary mediation of poetic rhyme, or in the way that “tout pour moi devient allégorie” (my emphasis). For the poet too crossing “le nouveau Carrousel” (line 6) is like Aeneas traversing provincial Greece between Asia Minor and Italy; and it is in his mind that the triangulation occurs that invokes the Aeneid in response to the riddle of the swan: “Andromaque, je pense à vous!” For this reason, however, the allegorizing modern poet, with his stranded swan, is in an epigonic or imitative relation to the epic hero whom he rhymes with—a hero, however, who as a version of Ulysses is himself an imitator—as well as with that hero’s likewise epigonic Roman poet, Virgil, Rome being, in matters aesthetic and philosophical, deeply indebted to Athens. And this relation of late epigon to early epigon is, furthermore, not at all unlike that of the poor stranded swan—a bedraggled “mythe étrange et fatal” (line 24)—in relation to the once noble Andromache who has fallen in Greece from her erstwhile mythic greatness: “Veuve d’Hector, hélas! et femme d’Hélenus” (line 40).
Each of the two moderns, the swan and the poet, is a rhyme figure, then, but one even baser than their somewhat nobler, albeit already tarnished, partners-in-rhyme, be they Virgil or Andromache. In its westward-moving history (Troy-[Athens]-Rome-Paris), urban civilization cannot be said, in the world of the poem, to have experienced that history as progress, in the way that the culture of the positivist Second Empire liked to insist. Rather it has been a matter of regress, the institution of civilization itself having constituted, it seems, the original fall from grace in relation to nature and qualifying, therefore, as the prime mover of history’s long, and still ongoing decline, from the already slightly tarnished sublimity of Troy to the pathetic inanity of the swan, “avec ses gestes fous,”—“Comme les exilés, ridicule et sublime / Et rongé d’un désir sans trêve!” (lines 34–36)—the swan which, in that respect, is also akin to Paris’s (similarly spastic) petites vieilles, who likewise doggedly live on in the grip of their own cruel puppet master.
In countering in this way Second Empire ideology concerning the supposedly upward direction of history, the poem simultaneously confirms Baudelaire’s own volte-face, à propos of sculpture, on the issue of aesthetic progress. The dynamics of rhyme no longer functions, for him, amelioratively, as it once did, countering the disenchanting movement of history by ennobling the ordinary in conformity with a fetishizing aesthetics of the ideal. It functions now as an agent of that disenchantment. By espousing historical decline, moving as it does from the sublime in the direction of the ridiculous, it forms in the interim an amalgam of the two, like the swan—a state that thus indexes exile as a situation of disalienation in the mode of melancholic reflection. And allegory, the correspondingly exilic trope, becomes a penser à or Andenken that, therefore, looks nostalgically backward, toward a nobler past, and in the opposite direction from the movement of rhyme.
But allegory’s rhyming of the fallen present with the less tarnished past is also directed toward an imagined origin, the fall out of eternity into history—an origin understood as both the cause of history’s long decline and a source lost to human retrieval. The objects that allegorical thought encounters in the past are more noble than contemporary figures but nevertheless, and simultaneously, already in decline and irretrievably tarnished because always already historical. As such, though, they bear witness to an even more ancient disaster, in the way that Andromache in Greece refers us to the fall of Troy. So, like sculpture, allegory plunges—“s’enfonce” is Baudelaire’s more active verb—into “les ténèbres du temps,” but its function is to haunt the present, through the witness it bears in that way to the ancient, and disastrous, originary fall out of eternity and into history. Thus it inspires melancholic disalienation as an insight without knowledge, given that real knowledge of that ultimate and primary object cannot be attained. It is as if between us and it stretches a hazy atmosphere, the domain of allegory, an atmosphere made of the noisy rhyming of present-day figures with figures from the historical past, but serving both to uncover the existence of, and to conceal from sight, the transcendent force, outside of time, that is responsible for all the devastation, exile, and pain: le Mal. The fact of history is forced in this way on our otherwise unwilling attention, inspiring melancholic brooding in the face of its absurdity and impenetrability.
It is in light of an analysis such as this that the curious narrative structuring of part 1 of “Le Cygne” merits attention. It requires us, as we read, to follow the declining direction of history, as the narrative as narration moves forward, from the narrator’s thinking of (or about) Andromache to his previous encounter with the swan, which supplies the explanatory context for his interest in Andromache. Simultaneously, we must reconstruct from that narration a narrated story—one that, conversely, begins with the enigma of the swan and moves back to the idea of Andromache as the swan puzzle’s resolution, having recourse to the retrospective movement of thought that is allegory. The crisscross of forward-moving narration and backward-looking narrated forms a mental chiasmus, which might be formulated as “Andromache (in the narration) is to the swan what the swan (in the narrated) is to Andromache,” the forward direction of history and the retrospective thinking of allegory, its recourse to memory, being rendered compatible by the participation of each in time.
Between the two figures, then, stretches—still in the readers’ minds—a between-space of mutual reflection, the space whose “jeu de reflets” is centered, as it were, on the crossing point of the chiasmic X. It is a noisy space of transition or traversée, in which the narrator, having thought of Andromache while himself crossing “le nouveau Carrousel,” is now understood to be ambling—both mentally and physically, in space and in memory—through the “vieux” Paris of the old Doyenné neighborhood that, in 1859, no longer existed as an actual neighborhood, its clutter of old houses having been recently swept away by Haussman’s modernization of the city.10 The poem’s I reflects, then, on the pain of historical change: “Le vieux Paris n’est plus (la forme d’une ville / Change plus vite, hélas, que le cœur d’un mortel)” (lines 7–8); then he recalls, more specifically (in “Je ne vois qu’en esprit . . .”), the messy chantier—ruins of the vanished past already pointing toward “le nouveau Paris”—where, at some time before his thinking of Andromache, he had come upon the strange figure of the stranded swan. And thus the junction of the two figures is brought about: their chiasmic meeting has required a transition through time that is mimicked by the poet’s traversal of spatial extension.
But in quatrain four of the seven-quatrain section—that is, at the exact point of chiasmic crossover—what we read is this:
Là s’étalait jadis une ménagerie;
Là je vis, un matin, à l’heure où sous les cieux
Froids et clairs le Travail s’éveille, où la voirie
Pousse un sombre ouragan dans l’air silencieux,
Un cygne . . .
(lines 13–17)
What follows is the three-quatrain description of the stranded swan that exactly balances the three opening quatrains, governed as they are by Andromache and her “douleurs de veuve,” the nostalgic melancholy that in turn triggers the narrator’s similarly nostalgic reflection on the life of cities in time. And it is these thoughts that themselves connect, thanks to his “mémoire fertile,” and as if by rhyme, the swan’s situation “près d’un ruisseau sans eau” with the Trojan exile beside her own artificial river, her “Simoïs menteur.” So the bleakness of the urban dawn scene of lines 13–17 with its “cieux / froids et clairs” seems a slightly alien interpolation—until one reflects that the swan, unlike Andromache but somewhat like the narrator, is pictured in turn imploring “le ciel ironique et cruellement bleu” (line 26). The earlier mention of a remote and uncaring sky links the stranded bird, then, to a city scene that has no equivalent in Andromache’s plight: the “awakening” of the workers and the “sombre ouragan” of the street cleaners at work in the streets at dawn. The allusion, under the Empire, is necessarily oblique, but it is unmistakable. It references the tempest of history—the word ouragan will recur in “À une passante”—that awakened the Paris workers only to leave them high and dry in 1848: the uprisings or descentes dans la rue of February, then June, with the bloodbath that marked the eventual abandonment of the working class by the property-owning class, ensuring—as it turned out—the takeover of the revolution by Bonapartist imperialism. (The Place du Carrousel had been the site of a notably egregious massacre.)
At the section’s crossing point, where the two branches of the historical/allegorical chiasmus meet amid the disorder of the building site, the roar of the voirie and the noisy réveil of labor, we encounter a glimpse, then, only lightly veiled, of horror, of history’s devastating power of destruction. But the clear and cold sky also poses another question: that of an apparently empty site of transcendence, and of the abyss that, in Baudelaire’s vision, lies beyond historical time itself. Is this inscrutable heaven occupied by a cruel and evil power that controls humanity’s puppet strings? If so, that power is not in evidence here, and the cold, clear heavens are at best a site of irony: the figure that stages a subject whose presence in discourse is detectable only as a teasingly imperceptible hint or trace.
The alternative conclusion, then, is that the sky is clear, cold, and empty; that the very idea of transcendence is itself, therefore, null and void. We see here why it might be that, if allegory is the figural mode of Baudelaire’s late verse, the function of disalienation is transferred in the prose poems to irony, as the marker of an inscrutable, and indeed apparently “absent,” cosmic subject. It is also apparent that such agnosticism concerning the existence and nature of transcendence is itself a modern phenomenon, and a function of the downstream situation, in relation to the flow of time, of the swan, of the city workers, and of course, of Baudelaire himself, all of whom, unlike Andromache, must face a “ciel ironique et cruellement bleu” (see chapter 5). Closer to the source, ancient Andromache is untroubled by such issues, so that ultimately allegory, with its backward-looking perspective, begins to appear, in its Baudelairean guise, as itself a characteristically modern response to supernaturalist dubiety. If the swan has its répondant in the earlier figure of Andromache, the same is not true of Andromache herself. So the noisy atmosphere of chiasmatic reflectivity and rhyming that allegory creates, its melancholy “jeu de reflets,” functions as the ambiguously readable sign of a transcendence, cruel, ironic and now lost to direct knowledge—but a transcendence, nevertheless, and one that once was and still, therefore, may be.
What awaits the reader, in any case, at the chiasmic crossing point, is a glimpse of horror, “un éclair . . . puis la nuit!” to cite “À une passante” and its telling recourse, in those suspension points, to the hint of spectrality contained in the figure of preterition. So it is notable that if “Le Cygne” rhymes its part 1, concerned with allegory, with a part 2 that both describes and enacts the response to allegorical insight that is melancholic disalienation, the poem as a whole also proposes a second mental chiasmus, one that crosses in the space that separates the two parts. The order of the rhyme words “mélancolie” and “allégorie,” as they occur in the opening quatrain of the second part (lines 29 and 31), inverts the order in which the themes of allegory and melancholy are enacted in the overall structure of the poem:
Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie
N’a bougé! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs,
Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allégorie,
Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs.
(And “blocs” / “rocs,” by the way, anticipates the inverted rhyme of “cor” / “encor” in the final quatrain, where also “s’exile” / “île” inverts the final syllable of “mélancolie.”11) So the crisscross of narrative chiasmus that is enacted in the mind of the reader of part 1 is reproduced now in relation to the erratic relation of allegory and melancholy, melancholy and allegory—each apparently generating the other—that is enacted in the poem as a whole.
We might say, then, that the poem is not so much about allegory and melancholy per se, as it makes use of their relation of mutual reflectivity for the purpose of producing in the reader’s mind an atmosphere of reflection, chiasmic in character, at the heart of which she or he may glimpse an object of encounter beyond verbal formulation: the specter of a transcendence. Baudelaire might parse that transcendence here as that of absolute evil, le Mal; but I would want to speak too of the painful “beauty” of modernity—something like what he describes in the opening paragraphs of Le Peintre de la vie moderne as beauty’s absolute, whose vehicle is the relative beauty of the age (OC 2:685–86). By virtue of its very emptiness, the blank space that separates parts 1 and 2 of “Le Cygne” would be the sign—the cygne—of that absent visionary object, so that it is as if the chiasmic structure of Baudelairean allegory functioned, in the end, somewhat in the manner of the explicit form of classical allegory in which, for example, a blindfolded woman “represents” materially the abstraction that is the idea of Justice.
Just so, the X of a chiasmus crosses at its center point, but opens, in every direction, onto a surrounding void.12