SIX

“La forme d’une ville”: The Urban Diary

O douleur! ô douleur! Le Temps mange la vie,
Et l’obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le coeur
Du sang que nous perdons croît et se fortifie!
(Time consumes existence, pain by pain,
and the hidden enemy that gnaws our heart
feeds on the blood we lose, and flourishes!)

L’Ennemi

The Baudelairean thematics of encounter (or of croisement) does not exhaust the poet’s sense of the secret presence, in modern life, of le Mal: time, disorder, noise, and, in short, the Enemy. The history that manifests itself in events, be they major or minor events, has a much less spectacular double in the secret, but similarly preteritional, passage of time that underlies the apparent stability of what is now called the everyday. For what feels like an enduring present is actually the chaotic becoming-future of the past and becoming-past of the future that defines a reality of incessant change, perpetual entropic flux. Here, then, is a parasitic phenomenon so discreet as to defy literary representation through purely rhetorical devices such as allegory and irony. Its representation entails a kind of literary bricolage, one whose outcome, I want to claim, is the invention of new generic modes, of which Baudelaire’s prose poem collection as it was published in 1869 is an instructive example. For it is not the representation of supposedly eternal verities but the becoming-readable of time itself as the secret atmosphere of urban life that defines the function of modes of writing and understandings of writing’s mission that thereby identify themselves as modern.1

Baudelaire’s initial response to the reality of time and noise had been, as we observed, to employ poetic form as an idealizing and hence fetishistic mode of denial. It was only following the bitter disillusionment of 1848–51, after which harmonian constructions of such a kind could only appear (self-)deceptive and illusory, that there began his long struggle to invent an alternative poetics, one that would be capable of acknowledging, through the resources of allegory and irony, and of drawing attention to, the dangerous reality of atmospheric noise. The urgency of such a disalienating project arose, in particular, from Baudelaire’s conviction that the phenomenon that is today designated, more or less neutrally (or at least scientifically), by the term entropy represented in reality a force of metaphysical danger, a sinister form of sacrality that threatened humanity with harm and destruction. In Baudelaire’s later years, Joseph de Maistre’s emphasis on original sin became for him the prevailing sense of a malevolent scourge, one unleashed, under an ironic and seemingly disengaged sky, by the long history of humanity’s turning away from nature in favor of the artifice inherent, since Troy, in urban civilization, with its consequent fall into time and noise. The melancholy of “Le Cygne,” as we saw, arises from this sense of a fall into history initiating the West’s lengthy decline, a fall and decline of which allegory is a product, and at the same time the means by which it is revealed.

That Baudelaire was fully conscious of the paradoxical character of an aesthetic project that entailed the making poetic of noise, poetry’s other, is evidenced by his consciousness of poiesis as a “fantasque escrime”: a somewhat desperate and fatally unsystematic, improvisational practice. I will distinguish now between rhetorical practices that signify noise, and formal practices that embody it, as a textual characteristic. Allegory and irony introduce noise as the object of rhetorical practices of figuration.2 But as a formalizing intervention, one that takes as its very material the force of disintegration that reduces the systematic and the constructed to formlessness and ruin, the poetic enterprise inevitably entails also, quite independently of purely rhetorical solutions like allegory or irony, another form of bricolage. This would be a search for new genres that might be capable of naturalizing and making readable the dynamics of change, erosion, and disorder at work in the textual material itself. Of such a consequence, Baudelaire may well have been at least half-conscious; for the phenomenon of genre exists precisely to facilitate different kinds of communicational interactions—in the case of literary genres the interactions of reading with writing—by activating shared presuppositions concerning the nature and purpose of such exchanges.

Writing, that is, can become (readable as) noisy—by which I mean resistant to the “normal,” harmonizing, and sense-making practice of reading—only in the context of a generic understanding of what might constitute “noisy” writing as, say, a literary practice or mode. And Baudelaire’s project of a writing of noise, necessitated by the conditions of modernity, could become recognized as such—that is, as readable—only by seeking out, or creating, readers whose own repertoire of generic expectations might include the possibility of such an enterprise as a formal manifestation of formlessness. So it is significant that the 1862 letter to Houssaye that stands at the head of most modern editions of the prose poem collection as if it were a kind of preface shows Baudelaire to have been reflecting, precisely, on the formal problematics of an urban poetics, and on its generic preconditions.

Formally speaking, these, it seems, would entail in Baudelaire’s thinking the invention of a poetry in prose. Generically they would also adapt the inherited conventions of lyric expression to the vagaries of urban consciousness:

Qui est celui . . . qui n’a pas . . . rêvé le miracle d’une prose poétique . . . assez souple et assez heurtée pour s’adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l’âme, aux ondulations de la rêverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience?

(Who is he . . . who has not . . . dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose . . . sufficiently adaptable and sufficiently abrupt to be adapted to the soul’s lyrical flights, the undulations of reverie, and the somersaults of conscience?)

(OC 1:275–76)

Baudelaire, it seems, is proposing here a generic détournement of the lyric genre by claiming the hypothetical existence of a community of dreamers supposed to be already conscious of the necessity of such a radical adaptation. For the apparently impossible enterprise (cf. “miracle”) of a poetics of noise, as a “making” devoted precisely to the principle of unmaking or dissolution, becomes feasible precisely when, and if, it can be described, and recognized, in relation to already existing genre understandings; and this is the case even if such understandings (those of the lyric in Baudelaire’s thinking) are radically violated, and—as a consequence of precisely that violation of expectations—introduce noise into the genre system itself. For, as “Le mauvais vitrier” demonstrates, the violation of a genre has generic implications of its own, and can thus bring new, and previously unthought, significations into play. In the way that a presumed transaction can be hijacked in such a way as to become a practical joke—or better, perhaps, the malicious ambush of an unsuspecting victim—the lyric can lend itself to what then passes as constituting something previously considered antinomic to the lyric: a poetics of noise.

Something of that kind must, I think, have been Baudelaire’s insight. But what I want to propose is that, in the actual event, “his” generic invention in Le Spleen de Paris turned out to be less a radical transformation of lyricism, in the way that the poet himself had apparently intended, than an accidental adaptation, owing to the author’s death and the posthumous intervention of his editors, of existing practices of collective flâneur writing; and that these collective practices—by definition unsystematic and uncoordinated—came to constitute in this way an authorial project, attributable to “Charles Baudelaire.”3 This project I will call a poet’s urban diary; and in its accidental appropriation of the noisiness of collective writing, such an invention, I suggest, came to represent a significant early site of the writerly “death of the author,” in that phrase’s Barthesian sense.4 So my own titular appropriation of the famous parenthesis of “Le Cygne” (applying the phrase “la forme d’une ville” not to the buildings and material layout of the city but to the question of the poetic form appropriate to city life), is intended to signify that the new genre brought into being by the 1869 publication of Le Spleen in the apparently random conformation that it thus came to have, is a writerly form—an écriture—devoted to the representation of the noisiness of time and change as an atmospherics of the city. “La forme d’une ville” denies subjective agency in favor of a collective experience of temporality.

In a letter to Sainte-Beuve, Baudelaire characterized the unstructured form of the collection he had still, in 1866, not managed to unify, as that of a leisurely stroll or flânerie, one that he thought reminiscent of Sainte-Beuve’s own (verse) collection of 1829, Vie, Poésies et Pensées de Joseph Delorme:

j’ai l’espoir de pouvoir montrer, un de ces jours, un nouveau Joseph Delorme accrochant sa pensée rhapsodique à chaque accident de sa flânerie et tirant de chaque objet une morale désagréable.

(I hope to be able, one of these days, to show a new Joseph Delorme attaching his rhapsodic thought to every random happenstance of his stroll and drawing from each object of his attention an unpleasant moral.)

(C 2:583)

But this characterization excludes, for example, the allegorical fables in Le Spleen, and the prose poem versions of verse lyrics, emphasizing only the texts that correspond to a poetics of everyday encounter. So rather than a flânerie structure, I want to propose in what follows that the readerly experience the collection mediates by its diary- or workbook-like structure is closer to the preteritional sense of time’s passing that is enacted in “À une passante” or even “Le Cygne.” Or rather, to an eventless version of that experience, one characteristic not of history but of the everyday, as “what is happening when nothing is happening.” This is time as the ongoing interchange of future becoming past and past becoming future, in which something is always being constructed and something always being destroyed, the so-called present being indistinguishable from this ordinarily unperceived process of perpetual entropicnegentropic flux.

A more compelling model than flânerie for the supposed present, understood as a noisy site of temporality, would be that of the chantier or construction site, so familiar to Parisians in the age of Haussmann. A construction site is by definition also a demolition site; and the messy chantier of the quartier du Doyenné that is so closely connected, in “Le Cygne,” to the poet’s memory of the suffering swan and what it signifies is consequently a model for the readerly experience of time and noise—the permanent but perpetually changing interaction of entropy and negentropy—that is mediated by the diary-like, now-this-now-that form of Le Spleen as it has reached us. I mean that the concept of work in progress has become generic here, in the form of the collection; and that in so doing it likewise comes to constitute the form of the city. For work in progress, as Baudelaire puts it, is a snake that has no head or tail because it simply continues, either all head or all tail (or both). And thus there is in fact no progress at all, just time that passes, as Baudelaire understands it, in the endless losing battle of human negentropy against the force of entropy, the threat of noise, the sign of the Enemy: more a “travail en cours” (ongoing work) than work in progress, and as much travail (in the sense of the English word) as it is actual work.

In French, the word chantier is proverbial for disorder and mess; but Baudelaire associates it also with the passing of time, on the one hand, and the concomitant action of memory on the other. “Le Cygne” carefully traces the time layering associated with the sighting of the swan, the feuilleté effect of a history that moves relentlessly forward, from the now disappeared “vieux Paris” of which the Doyenné was once a part, through the remembered construction site associated with the stranded bird, to the time of the “nouveau Carrousel” that the narrator is crossing at his moment of epiphany, when the thought of Andromache provides the allegorical key to the puzzle of the swan’s significance. These different ways of referring to the same patch of ground rehearse the changes it undergoes in passing through time, while the inevitability of such passing is played out at the start, in the switch from the present tense of the exclamation: “Andromaque, je pense à vous!” to the immediately following past tense of an explanatory narrative: “Ce petit fleuve . . . / A fécondé soudain ma mémoire fertile, / Comme je traversais le nouveau Carrousel.” No sooner has the triumphant, time-denying exclamation occurred than it has already become part of a remembered past: the past that stretches back to the “vieux Paris” (and indeed to Andromache).

So even as memory works against time, time is relentlessly moving on: negentropy takes place, but it can occur only reactively, in the context of entropy, as the poem moves into its own long mulling-over, a moving-on that is also a failure to progress. It is this interaction of negentropy and entropy that makes the messiness of the construction site, as a site of work in progress that fails to progress, so emblematic of the noisiness of time, as it is exemplified by the poem’s own endlessly backward-looking forward movement:

Je ne vois qu’en esprit tout ce camp de baraques,
Ces tas de chapiteaux ébauchés et de fûts,
Les herbes, les gros blocs verdis par l’eau des flaques
Et, brillant aux carreaux, le bric-à-brac confus.

And meanwhile the dawn racket of the street workers, associated with the awakening of “le Travail,” adds further density to the temporal connotations of this messy, noisy site where work and antiwork meet and, as it were, join endless battle, a political allusion (to the June massacres) subtending the metaphysical reference to time’s noisy flux.5

But if, as I am suggesting, Le Spleen, like “Le Cygne,” has the generic character of a chantier, the site of endlessly ongoing work and antiwork that is constitutive of time also offers a model for understanding the character of Baudelaire’s work as a whole, what is referred to as his oeuvre. Not so much an oeuvre—a word that implies completion—as it is a site where the construction of poetry takes the form of constant experimentation and change, and hence of instability and disorder rather than unity and orderly development, Baudelaire’s work is best thought of as an (allegorical) monument, in its failure to cohere and its incompletion, to the historical experience it teaches us to call modernity. Full of elisions, gaps, incoherences, afterthoughts, changes of mind and allusiveness, it constitutes a fragmentary record, one that makes readable the time that was lived, preteritionally, by an observer of remarkable sensitivity, complexity, and astuteness, in the confusion and jumble, the “chaos mouvant” of the historical construction site, the ongoing chantier, that was the rapidly growing and changing city of Paris in the era of France’s modernization.

To read such a record of constant change is in turn to be continually destabilized, “dépassé par l’événement,” obliged to revise one’s understanding. However, such a view of writing—as at one and the same time a historical detritus and an agencement or device designed to keep the reader in a permanently changing state of instability and uncertainty—is doubtless the modernizing achievement, and the art of disalienation, for which we ought to be most grateful to Baudelaire, who invented such writing as the form given by art to the city and its noisy atmosphere, that is to time. In that respect, Le Spleen de Paris, understood as a poet’s urban diary that lacks head or tail because it is all head and all tail, is the very epitome of Baudelairean poiesis, as a work in progress that denies the possibility of progress; but also of the body of his writing understood as a Nachlass, unfinished and unfinishable—more an energy than an ergon. Something left behind, abandoned—but also given over. Something left for us, to “make” of it what we can.

Baudelaire’s natural death, a consequence of time that makes Le Spleen a Nachlass, resonates strangely, then, with the metaphorical “death of the author” evidenced in the formlessness and unfinishedness that makes this heterogeneous collection readable, nevertheless, as a meaningful artistic intervention: one that gives the ever-changing city its form as a chantier, noisy with the work of time. What we are to make of what has been left to us—time’s Nachlass—is very much a matter, in other words, of the generic options available to us, and of the assumptions they entail. And it is on that understanding that I propose the following hypothesis: a suitable reading frame for Le Spleen—and by extension for the chantier-like oeuvre, or rather energeia, of which it is a fragment—is that of a certain kind of diary. A poet’s diary certainly, as I have said. But a poet’s diary that, to the extent that it constitutes a diary of urban existence, reads as a record of the so-called death of the author that is a consequence of the authorial subject’s own subordination to the erosion of time, the work of the city.

As I pointed out in chapter 5, Baudelaire’s poems of urban croisement differ from flâneur writing by virtue of the critical character of their analysis of alienated city life; as he wrote to Sainte-Beuve, he is a Joseph Delorme “tirant de chaque objet une morale désagréable” (C 2:583). Such texts also do not exhaust the wide range of different kinds of texts that make up the collection. But the tradition of flâneur writing is relevant to Le Spleen de Paris in one important way: as something like a reportage concerning the everyday it was, like news gathering in general, a collective enterprise in which individual authorship—the individual pieces were, of course, signed—was ultimately secondary to a much more general project. As an investigation of the new way of life that had been formed in the emergent social organization accompanying the industrial revolution, flâneur journalism was a kind of collective bricolage. And as such it was piecemeal in its approach, widely diverse in its interpretations, evaluations and judgments, haphazard in its choice of reportable subject matter, and variable as to style and point of view.

If it attested to the becoming newsworthy of everyday life under the conditions of modernity, its project was perhaps never clearly defined: given that it aimed in a general way to introduce citizens to the way of life of neighbors with whom they might live cheek-by-jowl without having any form of insight into their conditions of existence, was this understood or understandable as a matter of information, of entertainment, of moral judgment, or political ideology? Was it merely reportage or did it constitute literature? And what was its relation to the other modes of writing that made up the feuilleton and together defined the category of the feuilletonesque, by contrast with the more consequent journalistic reporting that belonged “above the fold”?

Perhaps its character was best defined as anecdotal, a word whose etymological sense (not previously given out, or edited) cagily fails to specify what it might be in the inédit that is of positive value, beyond its novelty. In that capacity, it constitutes a likely generic candidate for an atmospherics of the city, given its proclivity for a function that might be described as making the previously unnoticed noteworthy. And the collective character of its reporting, the jumble of its reports and the noisiness of their informational content, make it a site of nearly anonymous writing in which the so-called death of the author is, if not definitively enacted, clearly foreshadowed. Anecdotes circulate freely, without its being necessary to specify either their source, or the point they are taken to make, let alone the actual significance that point might have. However, if flâneur writing suggests in this way a relation between a writing that makes readable, as its unstated collective point, the otherwise subliminal atmosphere generated by city life and the concomitant death of the author, its suggestivity as a forerunner or prototype of Le Spleen de Paris has nothing of the precision with which Baudelaire’s writing permits us to identify the noise of time as the object of an atmospherics whose writing entails the disappearance of authorial subjectivity. So I will briefly turn to a more recent manifestation of the flâneur project.

The figure of the flâneur is, of course, no longer a familiar sight in city streets. However, the function subserved by flâneur writing remains sufficiently relevant that variants of flâneur practice survive in contemporary journalism. One such variant is what the New York Times calls its “metropolitan diary,” of which versions exist in many daily newspapers. Ordinary citizens leading presumably busy lives are invited to contribute very short pieces—occasionally poems, but ordinarily prose, and typically anecdotal in character—concerning incidents they may have observed or been involved in, in the course of their daily life in the city. Each week, the Times publishes an apparently random group of such contributions, usually with an illustration provided by a staff artist, the unstated implication being that such a collection of unrelated accounts provides more or better insight into what it is like to be a citizen of New York than, say, the work of a specifically assigned professional reporter. That is, such incidents, taken individually but also severally, are held to be simultaneously characteristic of “life in this city” and unusual enough, in their very typicality, to be striking and worthy of attention, that is, reportable. Their value lies in their being, paradoxically, even more characteristic in their rarity and particularity than are the vast majority of other anonymous encounters, transactions and croisements that occur daily, it being perhaps unnecessary to add that in this respect their point is, however, never spelled out, being allowed to emerge as a function of their relation to the other, similarly inexplicit anecdotes in whose company they appear.

The project amounts in this way to an exercise that produces noisiness—that implicit in the individual encounters as well as that arising from their collection—as implicitly meaningful. That contributors, at least, often have in mind an atmospherics of the city as an exploration of its local color is indicated, furthermore, by the frequency with which they refer, explicitly or implicitly, to prevailing myths that define the city in question. Acts of random kindness are reportable because they belie the myth of New York as an urban jungle. The “Arbor Anecdotes” sometimes published in the undergraduate newspaper of the University of Michigan, to take another example of the genre, tend to endorse overwhelmingly the myth of Ann Arbor that has prevailed since the 1960s—contrary to all evidence—as a city of bohemians, eccentrics, and weirdos. Either way, a city is defined by its atmospherics, understood as that product of its collective life and history that can be signified but not stated, and thus as the object of a task of exemplification perpetually en cours.

If no common thread is detectable in the items published in a given week, there is also, of course, no cohesion, no thematic or other thread, in the selections that appear week by week. The “Metropolitan Diary” has been a fixture of the Times for many years; one wonders how many readers recall last week’s edition in reading this week’s, or look for ways in which it may anticipate the content of the following week’s as the series extends through time and imitates, in its own way, not only time’s headless-and-tailless, all-head-and-all-tail continuity, but also the noisy, chantier-like properties of each successive moment, as time passes and passes us by. The genre of the metropolitan diary, then, is one that locates the city’s atmospheric character as a matter of readability substituting for communicability, while simultaneously identifying time as a phenomenon of change and changeability that resists stabilization through becoming known. To conflate the epistemological unavailability of the latter with the readability—which is also to say the unreadability—that characterizes the former is the function of the metropolitan diary as a genre devoted to a poetics of noise.

Le Spleen de Paris is manifestly not collectively written, and its heterogeneity derives from the versatility of the prose poem form that Baudelaire was exploring and, in part, inventing. This versatility encompasses the ironic anecdote of urban encounter (what one of the poet’s own attempts at classification called “choses parisiennes”), the “disfiguring” of lyrics in verse (as identified by Barbara Johnson), dream poems (“onéirocritie”), allegorical fables (“symboles et moralités”), and other possibilities still, including those that are suggested by the lists of ideas for future titles that Baudelaire left behind at his death.6 Taken together with the difficulty one has in detecting any principle of thematic coherence governing the order in which the poems appear, such a variety of functions strongly suggests the idea that the collection amounts to something like a poet’s workbook, constituting as it were a personal metropolitan diary, a blog dating from the era of paper, pen, and printing press. Without recognizable introduction (although “L’Étranger” is a striking characterization of the poet subject’s own alienated position of observation), and without a conclusive ending, Le Spleen reads equally well as a sort of poetic chantier, and as a poet observer’s record of time passed, one in which what becomes readable is the same secret Enemy to which, as a writing of time, the journalistic genre I am comparing it to lends itself.

However, its frequent irony, acerbic tone, and moralités désagréables also give it the tone of a critical dossier, accumulating in time like that of a juge d’instruction putting together materials for an indictment and a trial. There is a unity of critical intention and indeed of judgment here that is alien to the journalistic metropolitan diary and indeed to flâneur writing in general, more devoted to reporting than to issues of process (a word that refers both to temporal flow and to constructing a case, as in French procès, so that it is as if time, once detected, became the agent of its own critique). And it is in this that the prose poem collection, as a genre simulating time’s passing while cultivating the critical detachment of an observing bystander, conforms to an idea of “modern beauty” as an aesthetics of disalienation, the idea whose evolution we have been witnessing in this essay. We are plunged into the very sensation, or aisthesis, of time’s preteritional passing by while simultaneously finding ourselves dépassés—left behind and baffled, estranged and puzzled. This making sensible of process is a way to faire le procès of time the Enemy; and an aesthetics of noise is the agent that simultaneously makes time sensible and, by its interference in the reading process, brings about the distancing effect of its unreadability—the effect, that is, that enforces judgment.

Modern beauty, then, is an atmospherics of the city in just this sense. But the atmospherics of Le Spleen is like the window casually thrown open onto the noisy city by the narrator figure of “Le mauvais vitrier” in that it is itself—wonderfully—an unforeseen consequence, the incontrovertible and irreversible outcome of an accident; that is, of noise. The death of the author—his real death certainly, but also the metaphorical death that is loss of control over a developing, would-be oeuvre—proves to have been the necessary agency responsible for the emergence not only of a new genre but, more generally, also of new understandings of art’s defining alliance, in modernity, with the power of noise.

“Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop.” Boileau’s maxim—“Get rid of the natural, back it comes at full speed”—has become proverbial because it describes a dynamics that Freud identified, in due course, as the return of the repressed. With respect to the repression of noise, the same dynamics describes the evolution I have traced here in Baudelaire, from an illusionist poetics of fetishizing “magic” attributed to the power of form—form, that is, as antinoise—to an aisthesis of temporality, in which the noise of perpetual change itself becomes “la forme d’une ville.” Time denied, along with the disorder that is the sign of its destructive power, comes galloping back, albeit transformed—as Freud would have predicted—into a supernaturalism of history, a version of the uncanny. What the Salon de 1846 described as le merveilleux becomes a metaphysics of le mal, and poetry in turn becomes no longer an instrument of comfortable illusion, but a detector of secret presence, and an agent of disalienation in the form of “la conscience dans le Mal.”

Following the work of Elizabeth Cardonne-Arlyck, one might wish to identify such an evolution in Baudelaire as the invention of a poetics of veracity, where “veracity” names modern poetry’s ethical struggle to recognize, acknowledge, and assume into its own work of poiesis that which is definitionally alien to it: in Baudelaire’s case the city, where time reigns and is manifested as noise.7 Atmospherics is the name I have given in this book to such a poetics of veracity, evolving, as it does in Baudelaire, from the aura that surrounds objects illusorily released by fetish aesthetics from the laws of time. For Baudelaire is, in fact, not the poet conceived by Boileau, reconciling the demands of artifice with those of the natural so as to produce an art of classic balance and grace. And this is because the category of the natural is inaccessible to him, understood as it is as a space of timelessness, but one whose law has been infringed by human history, following a mythic fall identified with the creation of urban civilization and beginning with Troy. And mankind, as a consequence, is condemned, in Baudelaire’s vision, to the evil of artifice, while time—less a manifestation of the natural than evidence of the real—becomes the alien other: that which punishes both humans themselves, and their artificial creations, the agency of le Mal.

The fetishistic aura that arises from the denial of time is no less a sign of the urban, therefore, than is the “atmospherics” that makes readable time’s evil presence. Both the denial of time, as a flight into illusion, and its recognition, as an act of disalienation, are evidence of an original, and thus irredeemable fall: the eponymous “irrémédiable” of the poem that describes, as our only acceptable option, “la conscience dans le Mal.”

Closer ancestors to Baudelaire than Boileau would therefore be figures like Wordsworth, already conscious of the nature/city split, and Hölderlin, already engaged in an ethical poetics—a “poéthique”—of noise (in its German Romantic guise as “permanent digression” or the “alternation of tones”). And because Baudelaire’s inheritors are in turn the nontranscendentalist, sublimity-deprived poets of the latter part of the twentieth century—the veracious exponents, in Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck’s analysis, of a poetics of time (Ponge, Jaccottet, Roubaud, Deguy)—I would venture to count him, like Marx or Freud, among those whom Michel Foucault described as modern founders of discourse, or “fondateurs de discursivité.”8 He is the inaugurator of la beauté moderne as an ethics of aesthetic practice that entails permanent unfinishedness.

For by now it is surely a norm, not solely of poetry but of art in general, that it takes nonart, or rather antiart—and thus inevitably some manifestation of entropy—as the challenging other that it must assimilate, assume, and above all, frame (that is, make available) for reactions of awe, contemplation, curiosity, anger, fear, rejection, dejection, or, in short, for reading. It is in that way and for that reason that Baudelaire’s Nachlass has become a legacy, precisely to the extent that it failed ever to become an oeuvre.

So it is as if the chantier that Baudelaire set up continues to operate, as a “travail en cours,” in the efforts of his successors, who in turn transmit it, a still unaccomplished task, to Rimbaud’s “d’autres horribles travailleurs.” All are engaged in a vast collective effort: the struggle, to have recourse once more to Rimbaud, to trouver une langue, that is, to invent the writerly idiom, discover the genre, devise the atmospherics best suited to bespeak the terrifying power, as well as the intense fascination, exerted by poetry’s implacable and indomitable other, which I have called noise.9 The veracity of modern art, its manner of bearing witness, turns out in this way to entail, not an achievement but an endless, because never fully resolved, pursuit of the veracious.

“Le Cygne”—homologous with that collective pattern in its own representation of an endless, unresolved personal mulling over or penser à—authorizes us to identify this dynamic of the inconclusive as melancholic: melancholic because conscious of its modernity, and modern because afflicted with melancholy. For to be melancholic is to be conscious of history, as a story of loss and the sign of humanity’s fallen state: to recognize it, that is, hanging like a pall over the city. It is to be conscious of one’s alienation, then, but also and for that reason to be in a position to bear witness, to testify to that sense of estrangement and loss—and in doing so to bring to others the sad grace of disalienation, “la conscience dans le Mal.” The price to pay for this privilege of the testimonial is the endless pursuit of veracity. Nevertheless therein lies, for Baudelaire and his successors, the only dignity to which, in modernity, the practice of poetry, with its own long history, can aspire.