If allegory is a figure of readability, offering a glimpse of transcendence—albeit a transcendence of le Mal—what are we to make of the clear blue sky that the eponymous swan identifies as the source of its torments? Its cloudless purity, which would seem to suggest the absence of noise, also signifies unambiguously that the answer to the swan’s question: “Eau, quand donc pleuvras-tu? Quand tonneras-tu, foudre?” (line 23) is something like: not in the foreseeable future. If there is an atmospherics of readability here, we must identify an atmospherics of fine, clear weather.
For the poetics of le temps qu’il fait is at the opposite end of the meteorological scale, here, from the dampness and fog of “Les sept vieillards” or the hurricane in the eye of the passante, in which we read an allegory of time in the mode of history (see chapter 4). The swan’s suffering arises rather from atmospheric conditions that—very much like the “cieux / Froids et clairs” that preside over the awakening of Labor (lines 14–15)—suggest emptiness, absence, and transparency, even as they promise no end to the suffering of either the Parisian workers or the parched and stranded bird. Understandably, then, the swan appears to “adress[er] des reproches à Dieu” for His abandonment. But also, the God the swan addresses in this way is unresponsive in the way that the sky is itself “cruellement bleu,” so that God’s unresponsiveness—given Christian belief in His mercy—comes to suggest either that he is absent or that, like the sky, he is withholding a grace that it is in his power to bestow. Either thought is itself a cruel one; and the rhyming of “cruellement bleu” with “Dieu” in the final quatrain of part 1, together with that of “Ovide” and “aride,” inevitably suggests the ghost-rhyme “vide” (empty). The idea strongly hinted at in this way is, then, that the emptiness of the sky bespeaks the absence of God from heaven—but an absence experienced by the suffering swan as evidence of an act of cruelty.
In this way “Le Cygne” is consonant with the Baudelairean doctrine of the reign of Evil in the form of a transcendence that governs the stormy atmospherics of allegory. But it suggests also that such a circumstance arises for one of two reasons: it comes about either because God is absent, or else because He is an ironist. For what would it mean to address one’s reproaches to an absent God? The swan’s reproachful writhing assumes the presence of God as tormentor in the clear firmament that simultaneously indicates his apparent absence. It identifies the cruelty of its torture, therefore, as evidence of willful unavailability on the part of a supposedly benign divinity, a withholding of self that has the same structure as the nonparticipation of the subject of speech in an utterance that the subject is for that reason held to proffer ironically. It is the communicational noisiness thus generated—the noise of irony—that restores opacity, uncertainty, and doubt, that is, another form of noise (and one thus capable of generating an atmospherics), to a situation that is only apparently clear, cold, and transparent. For the swan and the divinity do communicate, although they do so wordlessly, the latter by His ironic silence, the other, equally mute, by means of (eloquent) gesture: the open beak, the obsessive shuffling of the “pieds palmés,” the neck twisted convulsively, the wings spread like those of the albatross in another, much earlier, Baudelaire poem concerning cruelty, pain, and alienation.1
We might say, then, that if the atmospherics of allegory derives from the noise that generates a readable world, there is also a less readily perceptible atmospherics of transparency—of apparent clarity and purity—that is an atmospherics of irony, corresponding counterintuitively to a certain noisy unreadability that only counterfeits legibility. This would be the unreadability of a situation rendered absurd by the fact that transcendence is to all intents and purposes absent from it, even as it is simultaneously experienced as present, and active to the extent that its absence registers as a form of cruelty, and hence as a manifestation of le Mal.
Moreover, these two forms of atmospherics—the allegorical and the ironic—are not at all incompatible, just as readability and unreadability are closely related products of, and responses to, the same phenomenon, which might be interchangeably referred to as noise or as le Mal. The absurd unreadability of a world governed, because it is structured ironically, by God’s apparent or virtual absence, is the necessary precondition for the readable presence, in the world that is structured allegorically, of an active and powerful agency of evil, hurt, and pain. In these two differing but consonant ways, the universe reveals itself as one from which the ideal—figured by the benign solar divinity of “Je n’ai pas oublié . . . ,” for instance—is irrevocably absent.
And the consciousness of le Mal, therefore, in the form of spleen or melancholy, is what remains as the only possible response to such a fallen cosmos. It is simply that melancholy, however, has an allegorical mode and an ironic mode, and that these two modes alternate therefore in Baudelaire’s late writing in the way that in Les Fleurs du Mal the exaltation of the ideal already alternated with the depressive mood of spleen. But the alternation of allegorical melancholy and ironic spleen is figured by the way a simple change of weather can bring about a “ciel cruellement bleu” or alternatively produce the threat of clouds, fog, darkness, and storm (le temps qu’il fait acting, as we’ve seen, as the atmospheric manifestation of le temps qui passe, man’s eternal Enemy). And Time itself, then, similarly varies in its manifestations between the events of history, to which allegory is a melancholic response, and its secret presence as an unnoticed and unread irony in the unremarkable happenstances of everyday life—those random happenstances out of which, in due course, the events of history themselves emerge, like time condensing into a hurricane, and to which, as they subside, they return their unhappy survivors.
And so, exactly as in the case of allegory and the threat of history in “Tableaux parisiens,” the problem of art in Le Spleen de Paris will be this: how to make perceptible, to oblivious readers, the secret unreadability of the familiar life of the city, the cruel but transparent irony that haunts the everyday and forms an atmospherics of absence? Can art employ irony on its own behalf and as an agent of disalienation, in the way that allegory functions in “Tableaux parisiens”? These are the stakes of a large and representative number of the prose poems of Le Spleen, those in which the social relations that form the purely immanent life of the civitas are shown to be governed by the same cruel irony of absence but presence that the swan experiences in its address to the unresponsive heavens.
In these poems, the sign of the ironic inscrutability of such an immanent world—one subject, for the moment, less to history’s momentous events, with their intimations of an evil transcendence, than to the kinds of narratable-because-symptomatic encounters that demonstrate the strange unreadability of what is familiar and taken for granted—will be the anonymity that is as much a marker of the urban crowd as is its multiplicity. In the verse of the “Tableaux parisiens,” the anonymity of, say, a “mendiante rousse,” the “petites vieilles,” or “les aveugles” is a phenomenon apparently taken for granted and not examined—useful even, when (quite exceptionally) poems like “Je n’ai pas oublié . . .” and “La servante au grand coeur . . .” are left untitled—that is, nameless—with a view to protecting their private significance.2 But in Le Spleen, anonymity becomes an active factor of estrangement, one that results from the ironic inaccessibility to knowledge of that which is nevertheless recognizable and familiar, and more particularly from the unreadability of the ordinary faces in the street that one may see, simultaneously present and absent, every day. An anonymity/unreadability that includes the people, not excluding oneself, with whom one may live in the closest proximity.
Titles like “L’Étranger,” “Le mauvais vitrier,” “Le vieux saltimbanque,” “Le Joujou du pauvre,” “Les Yeux des pauvres,” “Le Joueur généreux,” “Assommons les pauvres” (“The Stranger,” “The Bad Glazier,” “The Old Street Performer,” “The Poor Person’s Toy,” “The Eyes of the Poor,” “The Generous Gambler,” “Let’s Beat Up the Poor”), or even the nickname title “Mademoiselle Bistouri” (Miss Scalpel), are indicative, in this way, of the everyday ironies that are generated by the phenomenon of anonymity in a world become immanent by virtue of God’s own ironic abandonment of humans to a world of their own devising: the artificial environment of the city. Here the swan’s relation to the divinity is reproduced in the relations of a purely social world in which insight into human particularity and personhood is blocked by the familiarity and ready recognizability of generalizing categories relating to physical characteristics, social status, or one’s trade or profession.
Where encounter is the key concept of the allegorical verse poems of “Tableaux parisiens” (and chiasmus their most significant figural model), it is the word croisement, rather—a word suggestive of an encounter without meeting or without contact—that Baudelaire deploys in the famous letter to Arsène Houssaye that serves as preface to most modern editions of Le Spleen. And where allegorical encounter has the exceptional character, the singularity of an event, the crisscrossings that the prose poems sample are characterized by their frequency and hence banality (“la fréquentation des villes énormes,” “[le] croisement de leurs innombrables rapports” [OC 1:276; the frequentation of enormous cities, the intersections of their innumerable relationships]). They are endowed in this way with the familiarity that both engenders and makes invisible their strangeness, producing in this way a potential for irony. For nothing passes unnoticed more easily than an irony; yet it is their irony—the Hegelian irony of the familiar that cannot be known precisely because it is so familiar—that makes these nameless croisements so impenetrably strange. Baudelaire’s project will therefore consist of producing an effect of disalienation by enacting in his writing this ironic unreadability that is inherent, although generally invisible, in the familiar phenomenon of the urban croisement.
This was not, at least officially, the project of flâneur writing as the genre existed at the time; because they are symptomatic, Baudelaire’s anecdotes are closer in their spirit to another journalistic genre, that of the fait divers or brief item of news. Flâneur writing is generally credited with mitigating, to some extent, the effects of proximate distancing, that is of alienation, that arose in the nineteenth century as a consequence of sharp class and economic differences, on the one hand, and of urban crowding—a new and unaccustomed population density—on the other. Supposedly the educated classes, who could read, gained insight into the lives of the laboring or unemployed urban masses from the entertaining descriptions published by the mediating flâneurs. But from a Baudelairean point of view such “insight” is purely illusory. It can only reinforce the existing alienation of city dwellers by encouraging them in the illusion that it is both possible and easy for them to understand one another.
The fait divers, in contrast, has to do with the way anonymous lives that are normally a matter of indifference and casual ignorance can become newsworthy. Notable things can happen to people of no account, those who remain anonymous, as it were, even when they are named. But the twist introduced by the anecdotes of Le Spleen will be that the effects of anonymity, when people find themselves relating to one another (if relating is the word) on one of the innumerable occasions of croisement that are presented by city life, can themselves become a matter of interest, and an object of scrutiny. And this is precisely because people turn out, despite their easy recognizability (and indeed because of it), to be so ironically inscrutable, and hence unknowable, each to the other. The matter of the anecdotal prose poems that form a large part of Le Spleen consists of an investigation, then, of that mutual inscrutability and unknowability, on the occasion of a chance croisement that turns out to have symptomatic significance, like a fait divers.
However, these occasions are not narrated in the manner of typical flâneur or fait divers journalism. Intrigued by the problematic encounter that forms the poem’s happenstance subject matter, the reader is drawn into a narrative that itself duplicates, for that reader, the experience of ironic encounter. The act of reading becomes less an occasion of comprehension than it is itself a croisement, a frustrated engagement with a text that proves inscrutable. In “Tableaux parisiens,” the reader’s disalienation depends on an effect of mimesis, the poem that recounts its narrator’s shattering experience of disalienation functioning, ideally, as if it was itself, for the reader, some sort of allegorical statue. Its narrative structure—the before and after, centered on a disalienating event, of “Les sept vieillards” or “À une passante,” say—substitutes for the exploration of a statue from different points of view that Baudelaire describes in the Salon de 1859, so that the reader is led to mime, as it were, the evolving experience of the narrator’s own becoming disalienated. In the prose poems in question, however, the effect of ironic unreadability that produces disalienation is an effect of the act of reading itself, the textual irony placing the reader in a position of unbearable thirst strikingly comparable with the suffering of the swan, since it is a thirst for there to be, discoverable within the text, a site of authoritative and reliable meaning that proves to be cruelly lacking.
Vainly scrutinizing the “ciel ironique et cruellement bleu” of a text that is apparently transparent but proves to be infinitely noisy, such a reader duplicates the swan’s entreaties to God as he or she vainly searches the text for evidence of the presence of a controlling “author”—even one assumed to be cruelly and ingeniously unavailable to scrutiny. And such a search is likely to conclude in an assumption of authorial absence, or at least anonymity. The textual subject, if such there be, proves to be lacking—and to be lacking in particular the transcendent knowledge, of himself and of others, that might confer on him a status other than that of supreme ironist. It is, of course, precisely this demotion of the author, the loss of aura or halo effect to which he is subject when exposed to the “moving chaos” of the noise-filled city street, that is at issue in “Perte d’auréole.”
As figures of unreadability, then, the becoming transparent of the urban atmosphere is of a piece with the becoming blank of the textual subject and the becoming anonymous of the city poet, no longer a numinous figure but undistinguishable henceforth from the crowd of nameless others. In Baudelaire’s oeuvre, it is the cruelty of irony that thus comes to displace, albeit without replacing, the quality of supernaturalism that, according to the famous fusée (OC 1:658), is its indispensable other. And what remains is the experience of noise.
“Perte d’auréole” is mildly ironic in its tone, but as a kind of fable or parable its most immediate and pertinent relation to the practice of irony in Le Spleen lies in its exploration of the eternal Baudelaire problem of the relation of the poet, and of poetry, to the phenomenon of noise—that is of entropy—and to the motor of entropy that is time. For textual noise is the verbal manifestation of irony in the way that material disorder, disharmony, and decay are the work of time; and both pose the problem of poetic identity that attaches to the becoming anonymous of the poet, his loss of aura.
The germ of the anecdote is related in a fusée (OC 1:659), where it is significantly positioned immediately following a note concerning supernaturalism and the “symbolic” role of the ordinary:
Dans certains états d’âme presque surnaturels, la profondeur de la vie se révèle tout entière dans le spectacle, si ordinaire qu’il soit, qu’on a sous les yeux. Il en devient le symbole.
(In certain almost supernatural states of mind, life’s depth is revealed entirely in the scene before one’s eyes, however ordinary it may be. It becomes the symbol of that depth.)
The word symbole is new; but in this late jotting we are in the world of fetish aesthetics that preceded the allegorical understanding of time and history as manifestations of le Mal. This is evidence, if it is needed, that Baudelaire does not readily abandon any understanding he has once had. But what follows this note is a summary account of an imagined accident on one of the new boulevards, but with an outcome significantly different from that related in “Perte d’auréole”:
Comme je traversais le boulevard, et comme je mettais un peu de précipitation à éviter les voitures, mon auréole s’est détachée et est tombée dans la boue du macadam. J’eus heureusement le temps de la ramasser; . . .
(As I was crossing the boulevard and hopping about a bit to avoid the carriages, my halo slipped off and fell to the muddy asphalt. Fortunately I had time to retrieve it . . .)
In the context of the idealist supernaturalism of the immediately preceding fusée, not only is the dropped “auréole” the sign of poetic aura, quickly picked up and restored to its rightful place on the poet’s brow, but also the incident of its loss troubles the poet in this version: it constitutes a “mauvais présage,” he says, an evil omen; and he remains troubled by it all day. There is no hint of the equanimity the auraless poet will display about its permanent loss in the developed version published in Le Spleen.
But then, and especially when it is read in the context of this fusée version, both his equanimity over the loss of his “auréole” in the Spleen version and the heavy irony with which he expresses that equanimity begin to sound more than a little forced, and hence insincere:
je pense avec joie que quelque mauvais poète la ramassera et s’en coiffera impudemment. Faire un heureux, quelle joie!
(I reflect joyfully that some bad poet will pick it up and impudently wear it on his head. Such joy it is to make someone happy!)
This assignment to a “mauvais poète” of the action of stopping to pick the “aureole” out of the “fange du macadam”—that is, of what, in the fusée version, was his own reaction—suggests a degree of bluster in his assertion, and hence a certain dubiousness concerning the “mauvais lieu” (low dive) in which his acquaintance has recognized him: “Je me trouve bien ici” (I’m comfortable here), he asserts. This hardly suggests that he is genuinely at ease, either in his sordid surroundings or in his new, auraless, status (might they not together imply, or be taken to imply, that it is he who is the “mauvais poète”?). So it is worth specifying what Baudelaire’s contemporaries would certainly have known, that “la fange du macadam” (in the fusée “la boue du macadam”) is a euphemistic reference to the horse droppings and/or raw sewage trickling like a rivulet down the proud, new, Haussmannian boulevard.
The available options, then, for a poet whose aura has fallen victim to the conditions of urban modernity, are either to sport a damaged and excrement-stained aura like a bad poet, or to go auraless in practicing some new kind of poetry of the ordinary, and of the ordinary shorn of its “symbolic” relation to “la profondeur de la vie,” the supernatural. The choice is not an easy one. But it begins to account, perhaps, for what is in effect the “third way”—the way of ironic abstention, or absence, on the poet’s part, from his own text—that will be the marker of the prose poems of urban life in Le Spleen: a kind of denial of self by means of an actively assumed anonymity that supplies a transparent, clear-blue-sky, textual atmosphere as a substitute for the auréole no longer available to the poet in person. At the price of becoming an anonymous presence in his own text, the poet will abdicate his personal aura in favor of the noise of textual irony.
But in “Perte d’auréole” this recourse to anonymity is not available to him, since at the outset he was recognized by his acquaintance, and recognized in a “mauvais lieu” (doubtless a brothel, or perhaps a low-class drinking establishment). Recognized, that is, not just as some nameless member of the class of poets (as one might say “a workman” or “a beggar”), but in propria persona: recognized as a specific, namable individual known to exercise the profession of poet. “Eh! quoi! Vous ici mon cher? Vous dans un mauvais lieu!” (What! You here old chap? You in a low dive!). So, he blusters. And it is against that specificity and namability that, in an important group of prose poems concerning ordinary, unredeemed urban life, Baudelaire deploys the resources of authorial anonymity that are offered, as an intimation of divine inscrutability, by the practice of textual irony. Irony will solve the problem of remaining active as a poet without being recognizable in the poem, as the wearer of an auréole would be.
In this respect, “Perte d’auréole” offers something like a negative key to such a poetic practice, then. But it does so because, as a very late text (dating presumably from 1865 and unpublished in Baudelaire’s lifetime), it represents also a point of culmination in respect of the poet’s ongoing struggle, post-1848–51, to deploy the harmonizing resources of verse against the realities—extension, distance, difference, discordancy, noise, and, in short, history—of time the Enemy. Abandoning now “les hasards de la rime” (“Le Soleil”), Baudelaire’s turn to prose takes a decisive step, one of which—in the prose poem—the poet figure’s abandonment of his aura in the mud is the definitive symbol. The question now becomes how to maintain a diction recognizably poetic, without recourse to the rhythmic and rhyming resources of verse that constitutes the traditional poet’s claim to a new, if tarnished, auréole.
In the terms of the 1862 letter to Houssaye—terms symptomatically formulated in the contradictory manner of oxymoron—such a discourse would be “une prose poétique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime” (OC 1:275); and such a form of prose would be capable, also oxymoronically, of “translating” into poetry “le cri strident du Vitrier” (the Glazier’s strident cry). This, then, would be a poetry whose problematic musicality, rather than opposing noise, would arise from its capacity, as a kind of compromise formation, to accommodate to noise’s reality, as demanded by the conditions of urban life: “la fréquentation des villes énormes,” with “le croisement de leurs innombrables rapports.” “Trouver une langue” (A language to be found), Rimbaud was to write a little later, confirming Baudelaire’s conviction that a poetry of modernity must entail forms of language and modes of writing that, far from being hostile to the glazier’s ear-splitting stridency, are attuned to such discordancy.3 And it is the practice of irony, I am suggesting, that for Baudelaire performs this “miracle” of translating—in the sense of introducing—noise into a textual music; irony that densifies and makes opaque a text otherwise transparent in its prosaic ordinariness. The irony, for example, that informs the letter to Houssaye itself.4
Two familiar motifs associated with the thematics of time and of noise come to a sort of culmination, then, in the final abandonment of hostilities that is recorded in “Perte d’auréole”—less a truce, it seems, than an accommodation to the inevitable. One is that of the street as artificial river; the other that of the poet’s “fantasque escrime” as he struggles in the street with “les hasards de la rime.” The street as a river that one steps down into—the verb in French would be descendre—becomes the site of an actual fall, that of the “auréole.” Already a swollen stream in “Les sept vieillards” (line 7: “une rivière accrue”), the muddy boulevard is now a sight of nightmarish uproar, a “chaos mouvant où la mort arrive au galop” (a living chaos in which death comes at you at a gallop), as the flood of traffic (totally unregulated as it was in Baudelaire’s day) descends from all directions on the haptic pedestrian attempting to cross. The image is that of a swollen and tempestuous river. And the poet’s hops and struggles as he attempts to maintain his balance—“Je sautillais dans la rue” (I was hopping about in the street)—take the “fantasque escrime” of “Le Soleil” to a new extreme, and one with a drastic outcome as, “dans un mouvement brusque” (making a sudden movement), he loses his auréole. The descent of the poet into the street, begun at the turning point marked by “Le Soleil,” has ended in ignominious defeat. The auréole lies in the repulsive filth of the street; and the damage being done, there is no point in attempting to repair it. “Je n’ai pas eu le courage de la ramasser” (I didn’t have the heart to pick it up).
Giving up the struggle against time and noise in this way, the poet remains a poet, however. There is no sign that he has abandoned his vocation along with his lost aura—only that his conception of poetic identity has altered: “Vous seul m’avez reconnu” (You alone have recognized me), he tells his interlocutor.
Je peux maintenant me promener incognito, faire des actions basses, et me livrer à la crapule, comme les simples mortels. Et me voici, tout semblable à vous, comme vous le voyez.
(I can walk about incognito now, do vile things, and revel in dissoluteness, just like ordinary mortals. And here I am, just like you, as you see.)
He does not indicate here the strictly poetic advantages of anonymity that reside in the practice of irony. Rimbaud, for example, who will remember the idea of encrapulement as the way to a new conception of poetic calling, seems also to have read the poet’s anonymity here as a sign that poetry can work, less for the glorification of an individual lyric subject than as a communitarian practice, to be shared with “d’autres horribles travailleurs” (other horrible workers). And this croisement, in a low dive, of an anonymous poet with his equally anonymous, or at least unnamed, friend is certainly suggestive, understood as a mise en abyme of the conditions of an auraless poetic practice, of a working out, under radically transformed conditions, of a new kind of entente between poet and reader, reader and poet.
For Baudelaire, in any case—assuming “Baudelaire” to be the name of this newly anonymous convert to a poetics of noise—the die is cast. He has stumbled, literally, into an understanding of poetic practice that implies effacement, discretion, restraint: an abandonment of all forms of poetic resistance—that is, of “heroism”—in the face of the conditions of modern life.5 Rejecting his friend’s suggestion that he advertise to get his lost aura back, he seems determined instead to pursue his avocation in a new and noise-friendly, rather than noise-adversative, way. The Poet’s new effacement—as no longer what his friend calls the “buveur de quintessences” (drinker of quintessences) and the “mangeur d’ambroisie” (ambrosia eater)—implies a more modest and, as it were, lowercase practice of the poetic. And this, I am arguing, will be one in which the anonymity of the lyric self, as a necessary condition of participation in the croisements of ordinary, anonymous people that are the characteristic mode of alienated urban sociality, becomes also the condition of an act of disalienation. Not the disalienation of the Poet that we witness in the allegorical verse poems; that is now a given. But that of the reader, who will be drawn into a disalienating encounter—not just a croisement, but a genuine engagement—with the opaque transparency, the intriguing and baffling unreadability, and the cruelty, if you will, of textual irony. That is, with anonymity itself—the loss of individual personhood—made readable though the experience of textual unreadability.
If the irony the reader encounters reproduces that entailed in the urban croisements which form the subject matter of so many poems, those encounters themselves fall into different categories:
1. The meeting may be between or among figures anonymous to one another in that, although the mésentente that separates them partially or wholly escapes recognition on the part of the participants, it is perceptible to a thoughtful reader, who may draw appropriate generalizing conclusions. “Les yeux des pauvres” is an example of this category.
2. Alternatively the mésentente may be experienced by a participant as a baffled sense of an other’s opacity to reading, as in “Mademoiselle Bistouri.”
3. Finally, social differences, notably those of class and wealth, readily generate irrational acts of violence, as in “Le Gâteau,” “Assommons les pauvres,” or “Le mauvais vitrier.” The poems in this last category are frequently understood as ironic parables; and contemporary criticism tends to read them in relation to the social and political theory of the mid-nineteenth century, notably that of Proudhon, and to detect in them echoes of the disastrously divisive events of 1848–51.6
The narrator of “Le mauvais vitrier,” however, is fully aware of the irrationality of the impulse that prompts him to attack the eponymous vitrier. He speaks of “une impulsion mystérieuse,” “une force irrésistible,” “une si folle énergie,” “ces crises et ces élans” (a mysterious prompting, an irresistible force, such mad energy, these crises and sudden impulses) that govern his behavior and lead him into speculation about a malicious Demon supposedly exercising its “absurdes volontés” (absurd wishes) on him, as its hapless agent. He even interrupts his narrative after he has finally embarked on it, with a long parenthetical afterthought concerning the theological and medical categories—satanism or hysteria—that might account for his spasmodic outbursts. In short, he reveals himself to us as self-centered and self-indulgent—more concerned with his own sensations and the ins and outs of his psyche than with his victim whose stock-in-trade—that is, his livelihood—he has smashed for the thrill of it.
Readers are thus led to understand the narrator figure as the real protagonist of the poem, and the focus of its attention, treating the victim as a secondary character. They may identify him as an authorial self-portrait, for example, or speculate in turn on his social class (a typical bourgeois?) or the aesthetic impulse (“La vie en beau! La vie en beau!”) that leads him to attack the vitrier. But this is to miss something, thanks to Baudelaire’s strategic obfuscation; they enjoy the pun when the narrator lays claim to an “action d’éclat,” a “smashing” exploit, but may not reflect, for example, on the possible symbolic significance of the glazier’s stock-in-trade itself: the windowpane or vitre that his flowerpot-dropping assailant accuses of being insufficiently life enhancing. They may also fail to reflect on the valency attached to the height from which the destructive flowerpot is launched, in relation to the association of the glazier with the street and with the noise that so irritates the fastidious observer from above when he incautiously throws open his window:
j’ouvris la fenêtre, hélas! [There follows the paragraph-long parenthesis devoted to self-diagnosis. Then:] La première personne que je vis dans la rue, ce fut un vitrier dont le cri perçant, discordant monta jusqu’à moi à travers la lourde atmosphère parisienne.
(I opened the window, alas! . . . The first person I saw in the street was a glazier whose shrill, discordant cry came up to me through the heavy/sultry Parisian atmosphere.)
(OC 1:286)
What joins and divides the upstairs dweller and the denizen of the street is the phenomenon of atmosphere, “heavy” with implications, here, as well as with dust, smoke and noise (unless of course it refers to atmospheric pressure, and the oppressiveness that foretells a storm). The history I traced in chapter 2—from the sun-refracting vitre of “Je n’ai pas oublié . . .” to the protective, garret-height windowpane of “Paysage” and its abandonment in favor of a poetry of the street in direct rivalry with the sun—is implicit in “Le mauvais vitrier” and active in the discordancy the narrator encounters in opening his window to the urban scene: he who combines in his person psychological noise and the desire for an idealizing aesthetics of harmony and beauty. For the history in question is, of course, that of a search for an alternative, be it in rhyming allegory or in prosaic irony, to exactly the sort of fetish aesthetics that the narrator, with his preference for “vitres de couleur” (colored panes) over transparency and his desire for “la vie en beau” (life beautified), clearly subscribes to. Can it be then—in light of this Baudelairean background that forms the “heavy” atmosphere of the poem—that the ungainly vitrier, whose stock-in-trade makes his ascent up the stairs hazardous, who stumbles when pushed by the narrator and finally falls in a shatter of glass, is as much an inheritor of “Le soleil” and its “fantasque escrime” as is the auraless narrator of “Perte d’auréole”? And, as such, a figure of irony therefore, in the way that the narrator functions as a figure for the persistent, albeit irrational, appeal of an antagonistic aesthetics of fetish?
If so, the contradictory aesthetic trends that form the dilemma of an art of modernity are mapped here onto the brittle class relations of post-1848 and Second Empire France, and embodied in the narrative of a property owner (we know that he possesses a flower pot and the strategic balcony from which to drop it) who picks a fight with a proletarian over panes of glass. Irony readily deflates the idealist pretensions of an aesthetics of fetishism, with its pseudosupernaturalism, much as the call for “verres de couleur” mocks the sorry transparency of the vitrier’s merchandise, clouded as it is with the air bubbles that, in the days of “Je n’ai pas oublié . . .” cooperated with the sun to fetishistic effect. The two, in short, have much in common, beginning with the status they share as artifices of language or tropes. They are fraternal enemies; the (fake) depth and dimensionality of the fetish object—its atmosphere or aura—is of a piece with the (deceptive) transparency, but real opacity, of the ironic subject. And the readability of the one, the unreadability of the other, have in common their relation to noise: a relation corrective in the case of fetish, which seeks to deny it, but collusive in the case of irony, which affirms the reality of noise as constitutive.
Each the other’s other, the two are fraternal enemies, then, and their engagement in “Le mauvais vitrier,” with its reminiscence of June 1848, has much in common with the fierce fight of “Le Gâteau” (“une guerre parfaitement fratricide” [OC 1:299; a perfectly fratricidal struggle] over a bit of bread), but equally with the rich child and the poor child in “Le Joujou du pauvre,” united in their fascination with a caged rat, who laugh “fraternellement, avec des dents d’une égale blancheur” (OC 1:305 fraternally, and showing teeth equally white). Baudelaire is rewriting here the stations of his own aesthetic evolution (the fetish aesthetics of a benevolent, then malevolent, supernaturalism; the turn to irony and to prose), but doing so not at all as a history of progress—a dialectic, say, that would admit of sublation.7 Rather it might be thought of as a kind of unresolvable family bickering among the various possible responses available to art, given the conditions of modern life—conditions that include the inescapability of artifice, but also the “highs” and “lows” of aesthetic options (in the present case the fakery of tinted glass versus the pseudotransparency of ordinary glass) as well as of social life (the fraternal warfare of rich and poor, working class and bourgeoisie).
For conflict—social, political, or aesthetic—is as much a consequence of a society’s lost access to the natural as is the recourse to artifice. If fetish aesthetics responds to the lost natural by inventing a form of illusory desirability, melancholy turns back toward the past in order to lament the lost natural in the form of allegories of history, while irony in its turn responds with acerbity to the evidence of alienation that lies in the unresolvable conflicts and tensions of the everyday here and now that is something like modernity’s substitute for the natural. In this respect, what distinguishes the three aesthetic options that together define Baudelaire’s oeuvre much less as a site of unity than as a noisy and disharmonious entity, a site of difference and dispersion, is their relation to the question of modernity understood as an experience of alienation from the (supposedly) natural. For, to put it in Baudelairean terms, they each pose the question of art as an agency of “la conscience dans le mal,” that is, of disalienation.
If the everyday life of the city deprives its citizens of awareness concerning the true conditions of their existence by virtue of its very familiarity, art can contribute to their alienation through the illusions produced by nostalgic compensating mechanisms that produce objects of false, because fetishistic, desire: “la vie en beau.” Alternatively, it can deploy the techniques of allegory, relying on the reader’s identification with a narrator who relates the experience of his own disalienating encounter with the actual uncanniness of the apparently ordinary and familiar, the depth of history inherent in the here and now. Or finally, by means of the unreadability effect that arises in the presence of textual irony, it can produce an effect of readerly disidentification or estrangement, the reader experiencing the tormenting unavailability to scrutiny, the anonymity of the subject of the text, as opposed to its ostensible narrator. This is the effect of ironic distancing—not dissimilar from the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt—that the reader of Le Spleen de Paris so frequently encounters in the poems (such as “Le mauvais vitrier”) that relate cases of urban croisement.
Disalienation is not freedom from the comfortable illusions of alienation, however. Rather, as I pointed out earlier, it is an awareness of the strength of their inescapable grip on modern consciousness, including the disalienated consciousness. The flowerpot of “Le mauvais vitrier” that shatters the kind of fetishizing illusions that Baudelaire too once attached to the windowpane, does so—as far as the narrator’s view of things goes—precisely in the name of the comforts procured by such illusionism. And if the narrator’s earlier action of throwing open his window to the noisy world of the street, together with the heavy urban atmosphere it embodies, is a gesture to all intents and purposes disalienating in its effect, that same narrator immediately repents of his thoughtlessness and, the narrative suggests, in due course takes revenge by means of his act of aggression at the expense of the hapless glazier. To shatter illusions, as irony so effectively does, is not necessarily to abolish them, therefore; while to become aware of them as illusions, through disalienating gestures like throwing open a window, is also to realize the power they exert.
So if there is a germ of truth to be gained from “Le mauvais vitrier,” it might be summed up in the dual applicability of the word mauvais in the title. As a disalienating agent, the stridency of the glazier’s cry is mauvais in the sense of inadequate, while as a supplier of comfortable illusion he also fails miserably, and is accordingly punished by the narrator’s act of vengeance. Illusions can be shattered, but it is also illusory to shatter them, since the desire that prompts them is not thereby abolished, or even assuaged. The world is noisy, whether one is aware of it or not.
The prevalence of irony in Le Spleen has been recognized since the work of Sonya Stephens, which was itself preceded by Marie Maclean’s exploration of the prose poems’ narrative performativity.8 My emphasis, accordingly, has been on the significance of textual irony as an agency of readerly estrangement: the work of disalienation. However, there is another irony at work in the collection, one unintended by the author and purely circumstantial in its origin, an irony independent of the ironist. For the surviving evidence indicates that Baudelaire’s intention was to group his prose poems into categories that would together form an ordered collection of interrelated poems under a unifying title, as he had done in Les Fleurs du Mal. At the trial of the verse collection for “outrage aux moeurs” (moral indecency), his defense had been that “un livre doit être jugé dans son ensemble” (a book must be judged as a whole); and the sincerity of this stance was demonstrated by the pain he experienced when the carefully balanced “ensemble” of Les Fleurs was destroyed by the banning of a number of poems. But it is also evident from the surviving notes that at the time when his work was interrupted by his stroke, followed by his death, he had been able neither to conceive of a suitable structure for the prose poems nor to invent a satisfactory title, a problem exacerbated, furthermore, by the fact that new ideas for poems were still constantly occurring to him. It was as if the book was, not accidentally, but constitutively unfinished. The posthumous edition of 1869 prepared by Asselineau and Banville appeared, then, with a neutral title: Petits Poèmes en prose, and seems randomly ordered; if perchance new poems were discovered, there would be no structural reason not to add them to a later edition.9
The unintended irony, then, is that in this way a new genre was inadvertently invented, one that, I will propose in chapter 6, has characteristics of constitutive disorder and unfinishedness that make it uniquely compatible with the phenomenon of urban noise as well as the ongoing temporality of which, as a manifestation of entropy, such noise is evidence. This noisy genre I will call the urban diary: and it is the paradoxical character of a poet’s urban diary as a noise-friendly genre that I think deserves attention. For genre is a device that conventionally works to facilitate relatively noise-free interactions: in the case of a literary genre, the interaction of a writing and a reading.10 But what does it take, and what does it mean—what kind of generic interaction is mediated—when a genre seeks to make readable, as an atmospherics of textuality, the unreadable noise generated by the life of a city? Does such a genre generate the kind of reading-writing interaction that, following Baudelaire’s hint, might be called a croisement, a meeting at cross-purposes? Or can it be thought to mediate something akin to a genuine engagement?
Some light is thrown on this problem by “Le mauvais vitrier.” For what is this narrative if not itself a story of cross-purposes provoked by a deliberate genre infringement? The genre of commercial transaction, understood by the unwary glazier as facilitating the sale of a pane of glass, is hijacked on an irrational impulse and becomes something else instead: something like a cruel practical joke. What the glazier took for a contract turns out not to be the contract. Whether he himself gets the point of this—perceiving (a) that he has been tricked, and (b) that the real genre in which he has involuntarily participated is that of the practical joke—is immaterial. A careful reader can see that a genre becomes noisy as a function of its relation (of difference and similarity) to other genres: and that the unreadability generated by genre uncertainty—a form of noise, like the bewilderment presumably experienced by the glazier—is a question of misrecognition. Understood otherwise, that un-readability becomes the prose poem’s point, its generic raison d’être.
Le Spleen de Paris is no practical joke, but it may function a little like one, generically speaking. I mean that to read the collection in expectation of the kind of flâneur writing that understands itself as mitigating the effects of urban alienation, or alternatively as a subtly ordered ensemble of texts in the manner of Les Contemplations or Les Fleurs du Mal, is to be baffled as the consequence of a misprision. For it is precisely the collection’s failure to become an ensemble, its alienating cultivation of disunity that, disalienatingly, it offers us to be read. Un-readability is the generic feature that constitutes its point and makes it readable. The genre that subserves the representation of everyday urban temporality as the atmosphere of everyday life will necessarily be one that is itself generically noisy and uncertain, a bricolage, like a practical joke, of other genres sub-serving moments that pass and change.