1. FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE SUBLIMINAL: FETISH AESTHETICS
1. Etymologically, allegory (Greek allo+gorein, to speak) means speaking other(wise).
2. “Chaos mouvant” is quoted from “Perte d’auréole” (Le Spleen de Paris, poem 46).
3. Antianaesthetics as disalienation rephrases Claire Lyu’s understanding of what she calls Baudelaire’s “antinarcotic” project, an idea she derives from a careful reading of Les Paradis artificiels (1860). See Claire Chi-ah Lyu, A Sun Within a Sun. The Power and the Elegance of Poetry (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006).
4. Fétiche was imported into French, via Portuguese feitiço (fabricated object) to designate the ceremonial figures brought back to Europe from West Africa by traders; and it retains that sense throughout the greater part of the nineteenth century, although Rétif de la Bretonne had identified his own foot fetishism as such at the turn of the century. See Amy Wyngard, “The Fetish in/as Text: Rétif de la Bretonne and the Development of Modern Sexual Science and French Literary Studies,” PMLA 121, no. 3 (May 2006): 662–86. Marx famously identified commodity fetishism in Das Kapital (1867); but “fetish aesthetics” is my own coinage to designate the idealizing aesthetics common to the generation of Gautier, Nerval, Flaubert, and Baudelaire, and often imagined by them in the framework of a country-city contrast (cf. Nerval’s “Sylvie” and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary). For expanded discussions of fetish aesthetics, see my “On Inventing Unknownness: the Poetry of Disenchanted Reenchantment,” French Forum 33, nos. 1–2 (2008): 15–36, and “Modern Beauty: Baudelaire, the Everyday, Cultural Studies,” Romance Studies 26, no. 3 (July 2008): 249–70.
5. See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).
6. On shamanism as a practice of “skilled revelation of skilled deception” producing such a form of transparency, see Michael Taussig, “Viscerality, Faith and Skepticism. Another Theory of Magic,” in Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
7. David Harvey’s Paris Capital of Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 2006) reproduces a number of striking images of the various forms of disruption introduced into the lives of Parisians by the city’s modernization.
8. See in particular Patrick Greaney, Untimely Beggar. Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), esp. chap. 2. David Harvey in Paris Capital of Modernity offers a careful discussion of the lives of the Parisian working class during this period which omits all reference to the street people or forains. (He does reproduce a well-known Daumier representing street musicians.) I take this as an indicator of the marginality of lives that escaped the attention of the contemporary surveys and the other accounts on which Harvey draws.
9. Gail Jones, Dreams of Speaking (Sydney: Random House, 2006).
10. See my discussion in chapters 3 and 4 of “Le Cygne,” “Les sept vieillards,” and “À une passante.”
11. Baudelaire remained interested in Gautier as a poet, despite his own new aesthetic (and political) orientation. “Les sept vieillards,” for example, owes something of its atmosphere—as well as some verbal echoes (“spectre(s) en plein jour”)—to Gautier’s very Bonapartist “Vieux de la Vieille. 15 Décembre” (in Emaux et Camées).
12. See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1975), “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” 159–235. (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963]).
13. See Mon coeur mis à nu, X (OC 1:682): “Ce que j’ai toujours trouvé de plus beau dans un théâtre, dans mon enfance, et encore maintenant, c’est le lustre—un bel objet lumineux, cristallin, compliqué, circulaire et symétrique.” (What I’ve always thought most beautiful in the theater, both in my childhood and still now, is the chandelier—an object beautiful, luminous, crystalline, complex, circular and symmetrical.)
14. Such a strategic outbreak of disorder may well be the 4-4-3-2 stanzaic structure of “Les sept vieillards,” which suggests a lame or deformed sonnet. See my article “Daylight Specter,” Yale French Studies nos. 125–26 (2014): 45–65.
2. THE MAGIC WINDOWPANE
1. See Amy Wyngard, “The Fetish in/as Text: Rétif de la Bretonne and the Development of Modern Sexual Science and French Literary Studies, 1887–1934,” PMLA 121, no. 3 (May 2006): 662–86. This article traces the prehistory of the Freudian (erotic) fetish.
2. Gérard de Nerval, “Sylvie,” in Œuvres, vol. 1, éd. Albert Béguin and Jean Richer (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1966), 247.
3. “Je n’ai pas oublié . . .” is poem 99 of the 1861 edition. Its actual date of composition is not known.
4. “Le mauvais vitrier” is poem 9 of Le Spleen de Paris (OC 1:285–87).
5. See Théophile Gautier, Poésies complètes, vol. 3, éd. René Jasinski (Paris: Nizet, 1970), 3. “Paysage” was first published in 1857. Its date of composition is unknown.
6. Gautier’s “Préface” referred to the example of Goethe shutting himself away during the Napoleonic wars in order to write the West-Östlicher Diwan (“le Divan occidental,”line 3). On the significance of the storm in Baudelaire, see also “L’Ennemi” (poem 10) and “À une passante” (poem 93) discussed in chapters 3 and 4, respectively.
7. See “Le beau navire” (poem 52).
8. The fact that the sun is itself subject to entropy was, of course, not known to Baudelaire and his contemporaries.
9. I am thinking in particular of the striking representations of the boulevard de Sébastopol and the rue de Rennes reproduced in David Harvey, Paris Capital of Modernity, 262, fig. 91.
3. FETISHISM BECOMES ALLEGORY
1. Maurice Blanchot, “La parole quotidienne,” in L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 257.
2. “Time the anthropophagous / Swallows up each human work; / Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Turk, / Down his vast oesophagus, / Pass to their sarcophagus.” (I do not know the provenance of this ditty.)
3. G. W. F. Hegel plays on these words in a famous comment from the preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit (para. 31) that M. H. Abrams adopted as an epigraph to Natural Supernaturalism: “Quite generally, the familiar (bekannt), just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood (erkannt).”
4. Friedrich Schlegel, “Zur Philosophie” (1797), Fragment 668, in Philosophische Lehrjahre I (1796–1806), ed. Ernst Behler, Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe (München: F. Schöning, 1958), 18:85.
5. Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, 178.
6. Metrically, “montrant sa jambe de statue” was possible, so it is being pointedly avoided in “A une passante.” Notice, too, that as a rhyme word, statue recalls the noisy “Vénus” / “nus” rhyme of “Je n’ai pas oublié . . . ,” with the further complication that, as a “feminine” rhyme, “statue” would normally be unavailable to rhyme with “Vénus” and “nus.” However, in “À une dame créole” (poem 61), Baudelaire subverts the rule of alternating rhymes by alternating feminine rhymes (“gloire” / “Loire”) with masculine rhymes (“manoirs” / “noirs”) that have identical vowels, so he would have been sensitive to the way the “statue” / “tue” rhyme of “À une passante” reenacts the noisy “Vénus” / “nus” rhyme of “Je n’ai pas oublié . . . .”
7. See “Pourquoi la sculpture est ennuyeuse” (OC 2:487–89) and “Sculpture” (OC 2:669–80). Although “ennuyeuse” is normally understood to mean boring, I will be suggesting that, more or less latent, in the 1846 Salon, it is the secondary sense of inconvenient, disturbing, or troublesome that emerges in the 1859 essay. Similarly allegory can be regarded as a boringly ancient figure that, in Baudelaire’s hands, becomes a signifier of modern anxiety.
8. On the nineteenth-century history of the word fétiche, see Amy Wyngard, “The Fetish in/as Text.” The sense “ugly figure of primitive worship” was the only current one at mid-century. To my knowledge, this is the only occurrence of the word in Baudelaire.
9. See Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”), 1919, in The Uncanny, trans. David McClintock (London: Penguin, 2003), 121–62. Etymologically, both English haunt and French hanter seem also to derive from the Germanic radical haim (cf. English home and French hameau).
10. Adjacent to the Cour du Louvre, Haussmann’s Place du Carrousel became the site of a Napoleonic arc de triomphe, so that the site epitomizes the adjacency of the historically new and the historically old that is thematic in the poem. Before becoming a fairground entertainment, a carrousel was a space reserved for jousting (and later equestrian parades). Jousting resonates suggestively with the shock of encounter that, I will argue, is associated with the crossing point of chiasmic allegory.
11. Another hint of chiasmus occurs when, following the opening quatrain, part 2 reprises the narrational movement of part 1 (Andromaque-swan) but in reverse order: “je pense à mon grand cygne. . .” “et puis à vous, Andromaque. . .”, before embarking, with the “négresse phtisique” of line 41, on the melancholic catalogue of instances of exile, loss, and abandonment that ends the poem on its inconclusive “à bien d’autres encor.” If part 1 is to part 2 as allegory to melancholy, the latter re-echoes that movement in the relation of its own three opening stanzas to the final three, with the poignant picture of the negress, shuffling in the mud like the swan in the dust, corresponding at the center point to the evocation in part 1 of “l’éveil du Travail,” the noisy street and the cold, clear heavens.
12. For a brilliant recent reading of “Le Cygne” as allegorical in a sense derived from Walter Benjamin’s reflection on modernity (notably in the Passagen-Werk), see Kevin Newmark, “Who Needs Poetry? Baudelaire, Benjamin and the Modernity of ‘Le Cygne,’” Comparative Literature 63, no. 3 (2011): 269–90.
4. DAYLIGHT SPECTERS: ALLEGORY AND THE WEATHER OF TIME
1. Poésies complètes de Théophile Gautier, 46–49.
2. See the appendix for the complete text and translation of “Les sept vieillards.”
3. On Baudelairean double vision, see Françoise Meltzer, Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
4. “Bare life” is Giorgio Agamben’s term for the residual character of what survives the loss of self in the “vast experiment,” as Primo Levi termed it, that was mounted in the Nazi extermination camps. See Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1998).
5. The origin of the theory of the aesthetic impact of modern beauty as “coup de foudre” lay perhaps in the understanding of color harmony as the atmospherics of painting that a younger Baudelaire had developed in the Salon de 1846 (“De la couleur”). “La bonne manière de savoir si un tableau est mélodieux est de le regarder d’assez loin pour n’en comprendre ni le sujet ni les lignes” (OC 2:425; the right way to discover whether a painting is melodic is to look at it from far enough away that neither its lines nor its subject can be discerned). Seen from a distance, the “passante” is a vision of harmony such as Baudelaire had believed in at that earlier time: as she moves closer, however, she also reveals her allegorical impact as that of the hurricane it harbors, along with insight into the power of the aesthetic as “la douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue”?
6. Léon-Paul Fargue, Haute solitude (Paris: L’imaginaire, 1941), 59. Cited in Gilles Philippe and Julien Piat, eds., La langue littéraire. Une histoire de la prose en France de Gustave Flaubert à Claude Simon (Paris: Fayard, 2009), 269.
5. IRONIC ENCOUNTER: THE POETICS OF ANONYMITY
1. “L’Albatros” is poem 2 of Les Fleurs du Mal.
2. Cf. Baudelaire’s letter to his mother of January 11, 1858: “J’ai laissé ces pièces sans titre et sans indications claires parce que j’ai horreur de prostituer les choses intimes de famille” (I left these poems titleless and without clear reference because I hate to prostitute intimate family matters) (C 1:445). The poems mentioned in my sentence are, in order of mention, poems 88, 91, 92, 100. “À une passante” (poem 93) is obviously the poem to which the anonymity of the two participants, to each other as well as to the reader, is most crucial.
3. See the famous letters to Georges Izambard and Paul Demeny of May 13 and 15, 1871. The “lettres du Voyant” are a locus classicus of the post-Baudelairean aesthetic turn to a language of noise.
4. The letter’s irony arises from the backhanded flattery of a figure on whom Baudelaire was dependent for patronage but whose establishment position, poetry, aesthetics, and politics could only be antipathetic to him. There is a parallel between the glazier attempting to sell his goods to the perverse and assumedly bourgeois narrator of “Le mauvais vitrier” and Baudelaire’s own relation to Houssaye.
5. Cf. “De l’héroïsme de la vie moderne,” section XVIII of the Salon de 1846 (OC 2:493–96).
6. See especially Dolf Oehler, Ein Höllensturz der alten Welt (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1988), translated by Guy Petitdemange as Le Spleen contre l’oubli. Juin 1868. Baudelaire, Flaubert, Heine, Herzen (Paris: Eds. Payot et Rivages, 1996), esp. chap. 6, 309–34.
7. Baudelaire’s contempt for the idea of progress—something like official doctrine under the Second Empire—is especially prominent in his writings on Edgar Allan Poe.
8. Sonya Stephens, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Marie Maclean, Narrative as Performance. The Baudelairean Experiment (London and New York: Routledge, 1988). My understanding of the cruelty of irony is akin to, and partly derived from, Debarati Sanyal’s presentation of literary irony as a form of counterviolence, in The Violence of Modernity. Baudelaire, Irony and the Politics of Form (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2006).
9. The editors in fact followed the most recent of Baudelaire’s projected plans, but by omitting the section titles made the plan invisible. See also chapter 6, note 3.
10. My understanding of genre, not as a kind of text but as the set of presuppositions governing kinds of interaction, derives from the pragmatics of genre developed in particular by Anne Freadman. See, for example, her essays “Anyone for Tennis?” “Untitled (On Genre),” and “Genre Again. Another Shot,” in, respectively, The Place of Genre in Learning: Current Debates (Geelong, AU: Deakin University Press, 1987), 71–94, Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (January 1988): 67–99, and Southern Review 23 (November 1990): 251–61.
6. “LA FORME D’UNE VILLE”: THE URBAN DIARY
1. On attention to the everyday in France since Baudelaire, see especially Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life. Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
2. Allegory makes noise the object of an interpretive practice; irony introduces noise into the communication channel by making the relation of the subject of utterance to the utterance equivocal.
3. The surviving evidence suggests that Baudelaire envisaged a volume of prose poems structured in the same manner as Les Fleurs du Mal. But he was experiencing difficulty in determining suitable categories under which to group the poems. After his death, his editors (Asselineau and Banville) adopted an order of poems that corresponded to that given in the most recent of Baudelaire’s various projects, but at the same time they suppressed Baudelaire’s proposed category headings. The outcome is that neither a thematic coherence of the poems nor an ordering of the volume as a whole is apparent. Randolph Runyon has recently demonstrated that the poems of Le Spleen (as well as of both editions of Les Fleurs du Mal) are linked to their neighbors by techniques of mainly verbal anticipation and reminiscence, a concatenation that he compares interestingly with Baudelaire’s description of Wagner’s cultivation of musical flow. (The metaphor of “le fil du temps” also comes to mind.) See R. Runyon, Intratextual Baudelaire. The Sequential Fabric of Les Fleurs du Mal and Le Spleen de Paris (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010).
4. See Roland Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur,” in Le Bruissement de la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 61–67.
5. Possibly also the original meaning of the word carrousel (a jousting ground) is in play?
6. Barbara Johnson, Défigurations du langage poétique. La seconde révolution baudelairienne (Paris: Flammarion, 1979). Baudelaire’s own notes toward his projected volume of prose poems are reproduced in OC 1:365–71 (“Reliquat du ‘Spleen de Paris’”).
7. Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck, Véracités. Ponge, Jaccottet, Roubaud, Deguy (Paris: Belin, 2009).
8. Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” in Dits et écrits 1954–1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 1:789–821.
9. Both Rimbaud quotations are from his famous letter of May 15, 1871, to Paul Demeny (the so-called “lettre du Voyant”). See A. Rimbaud, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Steve Murphy (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999), 249–54.