The initial impetus for this essay lay in an invitation from the Department of French at the University of California, Berkeley, to give a series of seminars, of which the outlines can be read in my chapters. For their very great kindness and warm welcome, my sincere thanks go to the faculty, the staff, and the students of the Berkeley department. For their exceptional kindness and hospitality, as well as for the encouragement and intellectual stimulus their own work has provided me over many years, I owe a special debt to Michael Lucey, Debarati Sanyal, and Ann Smock.
The question underlying the Berkeley seminars was that of the uncanny “supernaturalism” that Baudelaire always seems to have understood as a crucial component of modern poetic beauty. What became of the Romantic sublime when, instead of inhabiting the countryside as Wordsworth did, poets came to live in the crowded, grimy, and usually insalubrious streets of the new cities that arose following, and as a consequence of, the Industrial Revolution?
In France, the major writers of Baudelaire’s generation—Nerval, Gautier, Flaubert—seem to have subscribed to a practice of fetishizing beauty—one not structurally different from the commodity fetishism that Marx was later to describe. Baudelaire too was a skilled practitioner of this mode of poetic artifice, and seems never to have repudiated it. But “dépolitiqué” (as he famously put it)—cleansed of the utopian political aspirations of the 1840s by the disastrous events of 1848–51 and the installation of the Second Empire—Baudelaire’s worldview became a more deeply pessimistic one.
A new urban supernaturalism entailed a reading of the atmospherics of the city as a shroud that partly concealed and partly revealed a divine but malevolent principle of sinister activity—what would now be called entropy—that he viewed as governing human history and making it a temporal phenomenon of endless decline. Imagined as a kind of city weather made of the background noise of urban life, it is this weather of time that is now identifiable as the form of supernaturalism at work in the great allegorical poems of the second (1861) edition of Les Fleurs du Mal. Tugging at the reader’s sleeve like a prostitute or a beggar, or striking like a thunderbolt in the glance of an elegant passerby, the poems seek readerly attention with a view to producing a necessary disalienation. And in the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris, the noise of city life ironically invades the collection itself, which—in the guise of the poet’s “urban diary”—bears witness to the power of entropy in its own inability to take definitive shape or to conclude.
In this way, I suggest, the supernaturalism of the sublime, in becoming poetry of the subliminal presence of noise, gives rise, in passing through the medium of Baudelaire’s historical pessimism, to a poetics of modernity that might be defined as poetry’s recognition of that which is most inimical to the poetic urge. In incorporating into poetry, as he did, that which could only be regarded as fundamentally alien to the poetic urge, Baudelaire introduced a new, modern form of beauty, and a new function of the aesthetic: a poetics of poetry’s other, its enemy; one that is informed by an exigency of veracity and motivated by the desire to bear historical witness.
I also want to thank Neil Doshi, Matthieu Dupas, and Mélissa Gélinas for their work at the computer; and special thanks go to David Caron for his trust and encouragement.
In what follows I supply translations into English of French words and phrases, as well as of quotations from Baudelaire’s essays, personal jottings, and prose poems. Translations of verse poems are those of Richard Howard in Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal (Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 1982). In discussions of prosodic detail I cite the French text only, as also on occasions where meaning is supplied by the context. With the exception of “Les sept vieillards” and “Le Cygne,” which are included with their translation in the appendix, verse poems that are the object of extended discussion are cited and translated in the text. The abbreviations OC and C refer to the Pléiade editions of Baudelaire’s Œuvres complètes and Correspondance respectively, and will be accompanied by volume and page numbers.