Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Socio-Poetics of Modernism (Cambridge Studies in French)

This new study of Baudelaire's writings is the first book to apply the principles of schizoanalysis to literary history and cultural studies. By resituating psychoanalysis in its socioeconomic and cultural context, this framework provides a new and illuminating approach to the poetry and art criticism of the foremost French modernist. Professor Holland's book draws upon and transforms virtually the entire spectrum of recent Baudelaire scholarship, and demonstrates the impact of the capitalist market and Second Empire authoritarianism (as well as Baudelaire's much-discussed family circumstances) on the psychology and poetics of the writer, who abandoned his romantic idealism in favour of a modernist cynicism that has characterized modern culture ever since.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN FRENCH 4 5

BAUDELAIRE AND SCHIZOANALYSIS

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN FRENCH

General editor: Malcolm Bowie (All Souls College, Oxford) Editorial Board: R. Howard Bloch (University of California, Berkeley), Ross Chambers (University of Michigan), Antoine Gompagnon (Columbia University), Peter France (University of Edinburgh), Toril Moi (Duke University), Naomi Schor (Duke University) Recent titles in this series include 33.

LAWRENCE D. KRITZMAN

The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance 34. JERRY G. NASH

The Love Aesthetics of Maurice Sceve: Poetry and Struggle 35.

PETER FRANCE

Politeness and its Discontents: Problems in French Classical Culture 36.

MITCHELL GREENBERG

Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century Drama and Prose: The Family Romance of French Classicism 37.

TOM CONLEY

38.

MARGERY EVANS

The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing Baudelaire and Intertextuality: Poetry at the Crossroads 39. JUDITH STILL

Justice and Difference in the Works of Rousseau: Bienfaisance and Pudeur 40.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida 41. CAROL A. MOSSMAN

Politics and Narratives of Birth: Gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola 42.

DANIEL BREWER

The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France: Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing 43. ROBERTA L. KRUEGER

Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance 44. JAMES H. REID

Narration and Description in the French Realist Novel: The Temporality of Lying and Forgetting A complete list of books in the series is given at the end of the volume.

BAUDELAIRE AND SCHIZOANALYSIS The Sociopoetics of Modernism

EUGENE W. HOLLAND Department of French and Italian, The Ohio State University

CAMBRIDGE

UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521419802 © Cambridge University Press 1993 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1993 This digitally printed first paperback version 2006 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Holland, Eugene W. Baudelaire and schizoanalysis: the sociopoetics of modernism / Eugene W. Holland, p. cm. - (Cambridge studies in French: 45) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 521 41980 8 (hardback) 1. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821—1867 — Criticism and interpretation. 2. Literature and society - France - History - 19th century. 3. Modernism (Literature) - France. 4. Psychoanalysis and literature. I. Title. II. Series. PQ2191.Z5H65 1993 841'.8-dc20 92-35913 CIP ISBN-13 978-0-521-41980-2 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-41980-8 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-03134-9 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-03134-6 paperback

To the memory of my father

Contents

Preface Acknowledgments i

page xi xvii

Introduction

i

Social decoding Psychological decoding Textual decoding

PART I

2

11 17 30

POETICS

Correspondences versus beauty The romantic cycle The beauty cycle Metonymy prevails

3

43 53 67

Spleen and evil

80

"Spleen and Ideal" The spleen cycle The cycle of evil

PART II

4

43

80 86 96

PSYGHOPOETIGS

Romantic temperament and "Spleen and Ideal" The psychodynamics of experience The early art criticism The psychopoetics of "Spleen and Ideal"

IX

111 111 116 124

Contents

Modernist imagination and the "Tableaux Parisiens" The The The The

PART III

6

7

later art criticism introductory poems street scenes domestic scenes

139 148 157 166

SOGIOPOETICS

Decoding and recoding in the prose poems

177

Historical Others " Moral masochism " Historical masochism Borderline decoding Narcissistic recoding

177 186 190 197 209

The prose poem narrator

221

Historicizing borderline narcissism Super-ego failure Ego disintegration Bohemia at the heart of bourgeois society Modernity as prostitution The prose poem narrator as borderline narcissist The prose poem narrator as programmer

8

137

Conclusion The metonymy of real reference and desire The historical emergence and dispersion of the imaginary The split structure of social life in modernity

Motes Select bibliography Index

221 222 230 236 242 248 251

258 266 267 274

278 296 303

Preface

A Klee painting named " Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing... and has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. Walter Benjamin1 Perdu dans ce vilain monde, coudoye par les foules, je suis comme un homme lasse dont Poeil ne voit en arriere, dans les annees profondes, que desabusement et amertume, et devant lui qu'un orage ou rien de neuf n'est contenu, ni enseignement, ni douleur. Lost in a wasteland, jostled by the crowds, I am like a weary man who sees in the depths of the past behind him nothing but disappointment and bitterness, and before him a storm that contains nothing new, neither insight, nor grief. Charles Baudelaire2

Charles Baudelaire, c'est moil For I, too, feel like someone who sees little but bitter disappointment in the past, like someone being blown irresistibly backwards into the future, who can xi

xii

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only look aghast at the mounting piles of toxic waste and the growing numbers of homeless children that "progress" hurls at his feet. I, too, am someone who has witnessed authoritarian capitalism in the Reagan/Bush/Thatcher era crush the Utopian promise of a more democratic society under its boot-heel, just as Napoleon III destroyed the democratic ideals Baudelaire shared in the 1840s, and Hitler those Benjamin shared in the 1930s. This recurring nightmare is no historical accident: within the cyclical, boom-and-bust rhythm of capital accumulation, it recurs at the moment that democratic potential once again succumbs to the authoritarian realities of capitalism. Benjamin speaks of "wish[ing] to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to a man singled out by history at a moment of danger " ;3 for him, as for me, the figure of Baudelaire provides such an image: Charles Baudelaire, c'est nousl Baudelaire's historical "moment of danger," as this study will show, revolved around Napoleon's coup d'etat of December 1851: the romantic-socialist hopes fueling the Revolution of 1848 seemed on the verge of becoming reality in the Second Republic, only to be dashed by the founding of the Second Empire and the authoritarian reign of Napoleon III. Our own "moment of danger" did not arrive so punctually. Its corresponding dates might be 1968, the height of the antiauthoritarian counter-cultural "revolution"; and 1981, the culmination of the oil crisis begun in 1974. World War II had generated a tremendous concentration of highly productive capital which the outbreak of peace risked leaving idle. So a period of liberal largesse followed, sponsoring waves of social innovation in the civil rights, anti-war, and counter-culture movements while bankrolling "consumer society" in order to keep the wheels of industry turning. But this liberalizing phase of "capital ^-accumulation" was soon reversed in the subsequent, authoritarian phase of "capital /^-accumulation," triggered by the oil crises of 1974-81: funding for social, cultural, and political innovation was ruthlessly cut off in order to be reinvested in instruments of capital's self-expansion, including the high-tech military-industrial complex, more aggressive state action against labor, curtailment of women's

Preface

xiii

and civil rights, and so on. Though the transformation itself was not as dramatic as the coup d'etat of Baudelaire's day, the contrast between the two phases is strikingly similar, and equally dispiriting, in the two cases. That similarity made this schizoanalytic study of Baudelaire possible.4 Schizoanalysis insists on restoring the full range of social and historical factors to psychoanalytic explanations of psychic structure and proclivities. From this perspective, the claim that "Charles Baudelaire, c'est moi" is not a statement of identification with Baudelaire as an individual (with whom I personally have very little in common: I did not lose my father at the age of five, but at twenty-seven; I am not a destitute poete maudit, but a professional cultural historian; not a melancholic bachelor, but a happily married husband and father, and so on). Rather than a statement of personal identification, it is a recognition of our shared socio-historical situation and the resulting psychological configuration (here designated as "borderline narcissism") — a configuration that is epitomized in his works, but which is more or less characteristic of everyone living in market society. Hence Baudelaire's lasting acclaim as the "lyric poet in the era of high capitalism" (as Benjamin put it). For he was among the first to diagnose the conditions of existence typical of modernity, and to suffer the emergence of a specifically capitalist form of authoritarianism. That those conditions still exist and capitalist authoritarianism has not ceased recurring enables us, in Benjamin's words, to "grasp the constellation which [our] own era has formed with a specific earlier one," Baudelaire's own. At the same time, schizoanalysis insists on including psychodynamic factors in historical materialist explanations of social structure and cultural change. This inclusion is possible largely because of a certain notion of temporality that is shared by Marx - for whom " the anatomy of the human is the key to the anatomy of the ape " - and by Freud - for whom there exist not memories from childhood, but only memories of childhood. This is the form of temporality emphasized by Lacan in the notion of "deferred action" (Freud's Nachtrdglichkeit), and by Benjamin in his critique of historicism:

xiv

Preface

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between the various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that reason alone historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. An historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a specific earlier one.5 This form of temporality is crucial to schizoanalysis, as well, although the present study explores its psychodynamic more than its socio-historical implications. In focusing on Baudelaire, I have been unable to do justice here to all the complexities of schizoanalysis; that is the aim of my next book. Let me say in passing that the point of schizoanalysis is not to enter (much less settle) disputes among competing schools of psychoanalytic therapy or doctrine, but to extract what is useful for the purposes of historical analysis and social change. The Lacanian school is a special case: schizoanalysis draws heavily on Lacan, yet insists that even a stance conducive to profoundly radical (not to say revolutionary) therapy nonetheless risks appearing profoundly and " tragically" reactionary if transported into the domain of historical study unchanged. In focusing on Baudelaire alone, I have also, against my best intentions, unavoidably made him appear to be more of a special case historically speaking than he really is, however canonical he has become: it will take yet another book to show why the cultural masochism he shared with Masoch himself was not exceptional, but part of a larger pattern in late nineteenth-century history; and to show indeed that masochism, sadism, and narcissism are all fundamentally historical and cultural phenomena, before being treated as psychological ones. What a schizoanalytic study focusing on Baudelaire is able to demonstrate, nonetheless, is that authoritarianism recurs in modernity, and that it does so not merely because of "man's eternal inhumanity to man," but because of historical dynamics specific to capitalism. Historical recurrence never amounts to sheer repetition, however: it always entails repetition with a difference. Merely to draw parallels between 1848/51 and

Preface

xv

1968/81 would be no better than noting similarities in myth criticism or establishing causal connections in historicism. The point of doing schizoanalysis is not just to interpret history, but to change it. Hence the explicitly narrative cast of my reading of Baudelaire and his modernist repudiation of narrative. However out of favor it may be in some circles of high modernist criticism today, and however complex our understanding of it has become (thanks in part to that very criticism), narrative remains a fundamental form of human thought, one that is simply indispensable for thinking through historical change: things looked a certain way before; how do they look after suchand-such occurs? How, then, does the modernity we still share with Baudelaire look after modernism? At the very emergence of market society in France, Baudelaire formulated his distinctive modernism in repudiation of romanticism ; after more than a century of market rule, we are now struggling to repudiate modernism in the name of something called the "postmodern." In repudiating romanticism, Baudelaire rejected the romantic commitment to nature and woman in favor of misogyny and urban artifice; inasmuch as modernism has roots in Baudelaire, any postmodernism worthy of more than the mere name will have to be feminist and environmentalist, or amount to nothing at all.6 Repudiating modernism is not easy; real postmodernism will not occur by fiat, for most of the institutions reflecting and supporting modernism are still very much in force today, having had more than a century since Baudelaire's time to consolidate themselves. Within the academy, for example, modern (ist) disciplines are still organized to produce knowledge of literature for literature's sake, of art for art's sake, of history for history's sake, and so on. As a postmodern intervention, this schizoanalytic study aims instead to produce a resolutely anti-historicist, anti-aestheticist reading of Baudelaire, one that in the face of historical contingency willingly assumes the risk of appearing "partial" or "dated." This is not to say that I do not appreciate the lasting beauty of Baudelaire's poetry, for personally I do. But I am someone who feels that in moments of danger, there are

xvi

Preface

more important things to talk about - and I am convinced that Baudelaire was, too. Some may consider that, intending to talk about Baudelaire, I have succeeded only in talking about myself. It would certainly mean more to say that it is Baudelaire who was talking about me. He is talking about you. Michel Butor7

Acknowledgments

The ideas for this book first took shape in independent study with Chuck Wiz and Brenda Thompson at the University of California at San Diego; it is a pleasure to recall their enthusiasm and contributions. I am most grateful for generous support and encouragement in those early stages from Gilles Deleuze in Paris and Michel de Certeau in La Jolla. Several valuable secondary sources were recommended by my mother, Faith M. Holland, whose bibliographic input over the years I am pleased to acknowledge. My thanks for research assistance go to Medha Karmarkar of Ohio State, and to the W. T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire Studies at Vanderbilt University. Dick Bjornson and Vassilis Lambropoulos read the manuscript early on, giving sound advice and much-appreciated encouragement. Ross Chambers, Dick Terdiman, and Fred Jameson deserve special recognition for their careful readings, expert advice, and/or welcome encouragement at various later stages of the writing process: I cannot thank them enough. Nancy Armstrong and Sabra Webber provided shrewd insights into the publishing process, and I would like to thank Charles G. S. Williams, too, for all his help as chairperson and senior colleague. Most deserving of thanks and acknowledgment are my wife, Eliza Segura-Holland, whose clinical and political insights into schizophrenia and capitalism, and whose spirited intellectual companionship and unstinting support were crucial to writing this book; and our daughter, Lauren Louise Holland, who showed consideration far beyond her years: I thank them both with all my heart. xvn

CHAPTER I

Introduction

" Au fond de l'lnconnu pour trouver du nouveau!" To the depths of the unknown to find something new: is this the battle cry of modernism or an advertising slogan? Could it be both? What reading procedures would distinguish absolutely between the t w o ? - A n d what would be the cost to our historical understanding of Baudelaire and modernism, were such procedures to succeed? However scandalous the alleged identity of high and low, of elite and mass culture may once have seemed, it has by now become commonplace. The modernist attempt to salvage or forge some domain of authenticity over and against the wasteland of commercial culture has been swallowed whole by commercialism itself: " defamiliarization," as the Russian Formalists termed the renewal of perception through aesthetic innovation and willed distance from the ordinary, is now a wellworn advertising technique, used to confer an aura of novelty and exoticism on the most familiar and banal of commodities, from standard-brand beer to haute couture perfume. For us (and this realization surely counts as one signal of our postmodern condition), the techniques of modernism and advertising are one and the same. But can the same be said for Baudelaire himself? In one sense, no: advertising and modernism were only in their infancy in Baudelaire's day; their merger presupposes a degree of commercial oversaturation and sophistication on the part of consumers, a measure of sophistication and sheer desperation on the part of advertisers, the assimilation of modernism itself into mainstream culture — conditions that were not met in mid

2

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

nineteenth-century France. Yet in another sense, reflections on the relations between modernism and commercial culture appear throughout Baudelaire's writings. The call to explore the unknown in search of the new concludes the second of Baudelaire's three published collections of poetry (comprising the first and second editions of Les Fleurs du Mai and the posthumous edition of the Petits Poemes en prose): seen as the culmination of Baudelaire's work in verse, it may well appear as a purely modernist gesture. Read in light of his later work, however, it appears quite differently, for Baudelaire became acutely aware of the complicity between his modernist poetics and the very market society that modernism had set out to baffle and surpass; the prose poems in particular are highly selfconscious of their inextricable relations with the commercial context. My claim, then, is that the emergence of modernism for Baudelaire himself as well as for us - was and is incomprehensible apart from the transformation of culture and lived experience by the rapid installation of market society in SecondEmpire France. This is not an entirely new claim about Baudelaire, nor about modernism. Walter Benjamin characterized Baudelaire as the quintessential "lyric poet in the era of high capitalism. ' 5l Georg Lukacs, in studies of somewhat broader scope, has condemned modernism as a " reified " cultural form characteristic of market society under bourgeois rule.2 Both provide crucial insights into the relations between Baudelairean modernism and market capitalism as they emerged in mid nineteenth-century France. Yet in some important ways, Baudelaire's poetics defies these readings, for despite the notoriously varied and often contradictory positions taken by Baudelaire himself, the development of Baudelairean modernism entails an unmistakable evolution away from the poetics of metaphor in the direction of metonymy, and this modernist poetics ultimately diagnoses both Benjamin's and Lukacs's critical perspectives as premodern: as metaphysical rather than ironic; based on epistemologies of identity rather than difference; embodied in discourses that are, in the terms of this study, metaphoric rather than metonymic in form.

Introduction

3

Benjamin's study nonetheless constitutes an indispensable point of departure. He construes Baudelaire as a transitional figure who managed to salvage lyric poetry from market society's implacable erosion of shared culture and collective memory, by recourse to strictly personal recollection. By bringing Freud's theories of perception and memory into contact with the material circumstances of Second-Empire Paris, Benjamin shows how the development of a hyperconscious defense against the shocks of modern city life served Baudelaire as a resource for generating specifically modernist lyric poetry from modern urban experience itself. But the characteristic Baudelairean defense mechanism, as it appears in the "Tableaux Parisiens" section of the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai and throughout the Petits Poemes en prose, evolves beyond Benjamin's shock-defense toward splitting, a quite distinct defense mechanism with very different psychodynamics. One result will be the exploration of an explicitly anti-lyric poetry, especially evident in the prose poem collection. Baudelaire's own shift from high-anxiety hyperconsciousness to psychic splitting, I will argue, happened to occur in reaction to Napoleon Ill's founding of the Second Empire on the ruins of the Second Republic, but such splitting thereafter conforms to and illuminates one of the basic structures of capitalist society: the radical split between production and consumption that pits buyers against sellers in market transactions. One of Benjamin's central insights, that Baudelaire as lyric poet of high capitalism viscerally identified with the melancholic commodity seeking buyers on the open market, thus turns out to be right, but only half right: the Baudelairean poet, and particularly the narrator in the prose poem collection, occupies the split positions of buyer and seller in turn, without ever completely identifying with either. Such psychic splitting and the disintegration of experience epitomized in Baudelaire's writings are basic configurations of postromantic, modern personality in market society. This helps make sense of the bewildering disparity of opinion found in Baudelaire - and in Baudelaire criticism. It also explains why, as Benjamin put it, Baudelaire was bound to "find the reader at whom his work was aimed" (p. 109): the

4

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

split "structure of experience" (p. 110) conveyed in the work of this exceptional poet has become the rule in modern capitalist society. In overlooking the distinction between shock-defense and psychic splitting, Benjamin conflates distinct stages in Baudelaire's evolution from romanticism to modernism; he situates the early sonnet " Correspondances," for example, in the same historical framework as the poetically very different, later prose poem "Perte d'aureole." Lukacs, by contrast, distinguishes very sharply between modernism and movements such as romanticism and realism that preceded it. Some such periodization is indispensable for understanding Baudelaire, even if we discount Lukacs's visceral dislike of modernism and his preference for prose fiction over poetry as irrelevant for our purposes. With his key concept of " reification," Lukacs diagnoses the impact of the market on social activity and cognition: market society is characterized by the predominance of exchange-value over use-value. For Benjamin, the triumph of exchange-value meant that buyers lose all shared "organic" connections to goods and must rely instead on personal "taste," which promptly falls prey to advertising in nascent market culture. The melancholy of the poet's identification with the commodity in search of buyers reflects his loss of connection with an increasingly anonymous public of consumers. In studying the novel, Lukacs is more interested in the effects of reification on cognition, since the vocation of the realist novel he champions is to represent the totality of historical development in a given period for the purpose of understanding. Exchange-based social relations fragment and specialize social activity and cognition, with only a hope that the "invisible hand" of the market will knit specialized work and partial perspectives back together to produce a superior outcome. In addition to its deleterious results in the economic sphere, Lukacs concludes that the impact of exchange and specialization on cognition is disastrous: the cognitive use-value of cultural instruments such as the novel deteriorates sharply; the direct and total representation of history characteristic of realism drops away, abandoning the genre to evolve auto-

Introduction

5

nomously in accordance with strictly internal, primarily aesthetic laws of development. The thorough-going overhaul of European society by the market changes the very texture of prose fiction: the author shifts from the position of participant (for whom narrating history has use-value) to that of observer (whose relation both to historical content and to narrative itself is mediated by exchange-value); the dominant textual mode shifts from narration to description. Modernism for Lukacs represents the epitome of reification in high culture. For all its explanatory breadth and illumination of market culture, Lukacs's account of the emergence of modernism construes authors as passive occupants of positions determined by economic processes alone. So for Lukacs, the reactionary political views of a Balzac have absolutely no bearing on the cognitive use-value of his realism (just as the progressive views of a Zola have no redeeming impact on his naturalism). But Baudelairean modernism does not involve a passive loss of cognitive access to reality, but the active repudiation of any direct representation of the historical process. The declared intention of an early version of the verse collection that became Les Fleurs du Mai had in fact been to "trace the history of the spiritual agitations of modern youth"; this narrative design is more and more firmly suppressed in the successive editions of the verse collection; ultimately, linear narrative is explicitly and utterly repudiated, at the start of the prose poem collection. The repudiation of historical narration belongs to a set of disavowals of youthful enthusiasm that, taken together, define the emergence of Baudelairean modernism: the repudiation of romanticism, of nature, and of any supposed "harmony" with nature in favor of the artificial (which is one reason Benjamin is so wrong to locate " Correspondances" in the same historical field as "Perte d'aureole"); the repudiation of woman as "natural" and of passion, inspiration, spontaneity associated with the feminine, in favor of a virulent if inconsistent misogyny; the repudiation of democratic aspirations, political engagement, and hope for a better future, in favor of pseudoaristocratic cynicism and disdain. In Baudelaire, these disavowals amount to a repudiation of history itself: of the

6

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

revolutionary hopes of 1848 he shared with so many romantics, and especially of the coup d'etat that finally dashed those hopes and led directly to the Second Empire. Of all the many disappointments in Baudelaire's life, the rise to power of Napoleon III resonates most fully in the public texts (including the journals and notebooks); it finds an uncanny echo in the other major disappointment of his life, which fills the private correspondence: the loss of his paternal inheritance to a trusteeship imposed by his stepfather and mother. This singular coincidence makes Baudelaire the preeminent poet of

modernity. Financial dispossession - a constant threat to all under capitalism - acquaints him intimately with the contradictory extremes of market existence: once a consummate buyer (as dandy), he is now forced to sell himself (as prostitute). This private humiliation at the hands of his stepfather is compounded by the virtually simultaneous public humiliation of the democratic ideals of the Second Republic at the hands of Emperor Napoleon III. Utter dismay at the mass-authoritarian outcome of a purportedly democratic revolutionary tradition (1789, 1830, 1848) prompts the repudiation of that tradition and of romanticism as its penultimate cultural expression. Modernism is constituted on that repudiation; and it continues to inform our "modern structure of experience " as long as the contradiction remains between the democratic promise and the authoritarian realities of capitalist society. Benjamin's and Lukacs's insights, valuable as they may be, are vitiated by an overweening emphasis on identity. Benjamin identifies Baudelaire in terms of a unified personality-type (the melancholic), and collapses very different stages of development into the unity of a single historical period. In a very revealing phrase, Benjamin at one point says that "the shock experience which the passer-by has in the crowd corresponds to what the worker 'experiences' at his machine" (p. 134, my emphasis). But he thereby privileges in the Baudelairean corpus and in his own mode of analysis the very poetic mode associated with romanticism that Baudelaire ultimately rejects.3 Similarly, Lukacs identifies writers with their position in an economic process (reification), and functionalizes the unity of

Introduction

7

the literary text as representing the coherence of historical development. These identifications are not so much wrong as necessarily incomplete, requiringfurther differentiation. The name "Baudelaire" designates not a single personality or personality-type, but a split subject occupying or manifesting a number of different "personalities" and traversing two or more moments of historical development. Such psychic splitting does not simply "correspond" to the social conditions Benjamin cites in explanation of the shock-defense, any more than it merely reflects the process of reification to which Lukacs attributes modernism: it also includes a complex of reactions to specific historical experience and developments — the sting of poverty and the lure of advertising in an increasingly commercial culture, the auspicious overthrow of Louis-Philippe and the scandalous rise to power of Napoleon III in a nascent democracy, the rapid transformation of Paris and the dynamics of modern urban life - whose effects are legible throughout the Baudelairean corpus, even though history itself is nowhere represented as such in the poetic works themselves. This study thus answers the deconstructive challenge to produce a literary history that is truly responsive to historical events, without presuming that literary discourse faithfully represents a history which takes place outside the text itself.4 Baudelaire's texts, finally, are not unified but dispersed; the series of three published poetry collections does not directly represent history, but will be read in relation to and as part of a larger historical development to be reconstructed - one of whose results is precisely the modernist repudiation of linear-progressive historical narration. My aim, in a word, is to read the texts of Baudelaire in a relation to their historical contexts that is metonymic rather than metaphoric in nature, that seeks differences rather than presupposing identity between them, that constructs an " absent cause" (to invoke Althusser's term) - i.e. historical developments not represented in the texts - to account for changes (relations of difference) within the texts.5 To this end I will focus on the differences between the first and second editions of Les

8

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

Fleurs du Mai and on the differences between them and the prose collection.6 These differences are not random: in response to a host of personal and historical circumstances, specific changes were made for the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai (including but not limited to the removal of the six poems banned from the first edition by the state); the Petits Po'emes en prose differentiates itself from the verse collection by taking some of the same titles and themes, but giving them very different treatment in prose: the prose collection, to paraphrase Baudelaire, was to be the Fleurs du Mai all over again - only different. And the orientation given to these differences is a sometimes halting but nonetheless insistent shift in Baudelairean poetics away from metaphor toward metonymy. Ever since Barbey d'Aurevilly's famous remark attributing a "secret architecture" to Les Fleurs du Mai, Baudelaire scholarship has explored the question of the supposed structure of the verse collection.7 Baudelaire's own characterization may be more revealing: he spoke not of a structure with a secret architecture but of a book "with a beginning and an end." 8 And it is a book whose final poem issues a ringing challenge to explore the unknown in search of the new, to travel via the medium of poetry. The figure of "The Voyage" (the title of the final poem of the collection) combines two basic poetic principles explored in the course of Les Fleurs du Mai: the metonymy of time and the metonymy of space. At the end of the "Spleen and Ideal" section, the entropic gloom of "Spleen" culminates in "The Clock" ("L'Horloge" LXXXVII), where unremitting time counts down "thirty-six hundred times an hour" the meaningless seconds leading to death. Time is depicted here metonymically, as a purely linear succession of isolated moments, each signaling the poet's imminent demise, unconjoined by any life-project, unredeemed by any prospect of salvation. The " Tableaux Parisiens " section, by contrast, situates the poet spatially, in metonymic proximity to modern Paris. Poetry here depends on the chance encounters that befall the poet who maintains unflinching contact with the turbulent urban milieu. Traveling, of course, combines the

Introduction

9

temporal succession of moments with the spatial succession of places: following Baudelaire, it would (via Rimbaud and Gide, in Beckett, Butor, Robbe-Grillet) become one of the few remaining touchstones of modernist narrative, a kind of lastditch, zero-degree plot structure when any more elaborate pretext for narration would appear contrived and therefore undesirable. It is significant that all of these poems - " L e Voyage," "L'Horloge," and the "Tableaux Parisiens" section itselfwere added to the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai. They serve to reinforce the predominance of metonymy that is already legible in the rhetoric and organization of poems in the first edition; or more accurately, they add a thematics of metonymy for the second edition to the poetics of metonymy that already, if somewhat more obscurely, informs the first. Important scholarship on the predominance of metonymy over metaphor in Baudelaire's work has tended to distribute this opposition over his two major collections, opposing the romantic, metaphoric poetics of the verse collection to the modernist, metonymic poetics of the prose collection.9 By focusing attention on the changes Baudelaire made for the second edition of verse, I aim to show that the departure from romanticism is already legible in early poems of Les Fleurs du Mai, and that the move from the stable oppositions of romanticism into the exhilarating uncertainties of modernity is as central to the verse collection as it is characteristic of the latter's relation to the prose collection.10 While the concept of metonymy enables us to trace the development of Baudelairean poetics across the three major collections, explanation of this trajectory depends on a concept of "decoding" derived from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. 11 The range and power of this term arise from their transcription of diverse social, psychological, and cultural phenomena into a historical, poststructuralist semiotics they call "schizoanalysis." According to Deleuze and Guattari, decoding is a basic feature of capitalism; the aim here is to demonstrate its operation in texts and other cultural artifacts, in individual psychodynamics, and in the socio-economic and

io

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

cultural dynamics of market society, simultaneously. This introductory chapter outlines the functioning of decoding in these three domains: the social, the psychological, and the textual. The succeeding parts of the book then examine Baudelaire's works in each of these domains, moving from the textual (Part I: Poetics), through the psychological (Part II: Psychopoetics), to the socio-historical (Part III: Sociopoetics). At the same time, for the sake of exposition, our analysis will move through the verse collection (Parts I and II) to the prose collection (Part III) - even though both collections are marked by historical context and equally affected by the metonymy of decoding. In order to make intensive analysis of individual poems manageable in an extensive treatment of the historical evolution of Baudelairean poetics, I focus in Les Fleurs du Mai almost exclusively (though not exhaustively) on the revisions Baudelaire made for the second (1861) edition: the additions to the cycle of poems devoted to beauty; the additions and rearrangement of poems at the end of the "Spleen and Ideal" section; the inclusion of a new section entitled "Tableaux Parisiens." From the Petits Poemes en prose, I have selected poems that most clearly register the psychic splitting produced by metonymic decoding in its characteristically modernist form. I leave to the concluding chapter some methodological reflections on another schizoanalytic category I have found especially useful; there I reconsider the work of Baudelaire as an " apparatus of registration " for the processes of decoding characteristic of capitalist society at the emergence of modernism. Decoding, in the sense it is used here, has nothing to do with the process of translating an incomprehensible, "encoded" message into a more familiar code so as to enable or improve comprehension. It refers instead to processes which disrupt and subvert the very functioning of codes altogether. Although Deleuze and Guattari almost never employ the term "metonymy," I have found it useful in bringing their notion of "decoding" into simultaneous contact with the poetics and the psychodynamics of Baudelaire's texts. Like "decoding," the concept of metonymy cuts across various domains: I draw most directly on the linguistic and psychoanalytic uses of the term

Introduction

11

developed in the work of Roman Jakobson and Jacques Lacan. As the figure of travel in "Le Voyage" suggests, metonymy proves useful in this regard because it involves both time and space, both duration and context, both desire and reference. As a poststructuralist semiotics, schizoanalysis accepts many of the basic tenets of structuralism: the importance of languagelike codes of behavior and signification, the general priority of social conditioning over individual expression (of langue over parole) and of code/structure over message/substance. Its jfro^structuralism lies in the denial that various codes ever "add up " to compose a stable signifying structure or social order. The point is not that behavior and practices are no longer understood to be governed by structure, but that structures are heterogeneous - de-centered and multiple. For poststructuralism, codes are not only internally conflicted and ultimately incomplete, they also conflict among themselves, overlap and leave interstices. For schizoanalysis, decoding is important because it magnifies the interstices, illuminating and aggravating the non-cumulative, unstable nature of social codes. Schizoanalysis is at the same time a resolutely historical semiotics: it does not merely participate in poststructuralism, it also proposes to account for its emergence historically. Codes are not always equally unstable or "undecidable": rather, they are relatively unstable, and their degree of instability varies historically. It is especially under capitalism, according to schizoanalysis, that social codes become widely unstable, enabling trajectories of decoding such as Baudelaire's to intensify and proliferate. SOCIAL DECODING

The inherent instability of codes is magnified under capitalism because its social organization depends not on codes, but on the "cash nexus" of the market. Codes are central to other modes of production, where they serve as the very basis of social order. They are of secondary importance under capitalism, because here differentials between abstract, measurable quantities - the basis of surplus-value — count for more than similarities between

12

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

sensible qualities - the basis of metaphor and of codes. Hence the predilection for difference and metonymy in poststructuralism, which is a critical perspective derived in large part from the modernist and avant-garde cultural movements of nascent market society to begin with. With the predominance of exchange-value, decoded difference prevails over coded identity, as market society in Marx's phrase "strips the halo" from previous forms of social intercourse, reducing them to more strictly calculable, commercial concerns.12 Social decoding, as Fredric Jameson has remarked, has certain affinities with what Max Weber called "rationali z a t i o n " - t h e process, epitomized in the Enlightenment, by which the familiar world of experience is subjected to " rational" explanation (science) and administration (bureaucracy), where reason replaces superstition, induction and deduction replace story-telling, quantity replaces quality, and so forth.13 The distinction drawn by the English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke between "primary" and "secondary" qualities illustrates the process of decoding very aptly. The sensual experience of the color called " r e d " has become in Locke's empiricist view a mere "secondary " quality. The corresponding "primary quality" is (in our sense of the term) not a quality at all, but an abstract quantity: a range of the color-spectrum determined by measuring the wave-lengths of the light reflected. Operating in this case in the sphere of empirical science, decoding replaces the experience of sensible qualities with measurable quantities. As Weber suggests, while there may be a gain in manipulability of the empirical world to be had through "rationalized" attention to "primary" rather than "secondary" qualities, the price to be paid for such rationalization is the "disenchantment" of the world we inhabit as sentient human beings, which is rendered strictly meaningless in the process. There are, however, two important differences between rationalization and decoding. First of all, and in line with Lukacs's similar rewriting of rationalization as " reification," decoding does not inhere in some properly sociological development peculiar to institutions or culture, but in the allpervasive role of the market under capitalism. It is the market,

Introduction

13

as the very matrix of social organization under capitalism and through its systematic subordination of use-value to exchangevalue, that fosters decoding by "constantly revolutionizing production [and consumption] " in the pursuit of surplus-value. In their analysis of the dynamics of the market, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish three moments within the process named by the single terms "rationalization" and "reification." Decoding designates the "de-mystifying" operations entailed in rationalization, the bracketing or subordination of meaning so as to enable calculation. "Recoding" designates an attendant process of re-endowing experience stripped of its "original" meaning with some semblance of significance, whether that take the form of rational explanation or something else. (Recoding is a term Deleuze and Guattari rarely use themselves, since they consider capitalism to be at bottom completely meaningless; it proves indispensable, however, for the analysis of literature and culture.) Underlying both decoding and recoding lies the process of " axiomatization," which orchestrates decoding and sponsors recoding according to the logic of the capitalist economy.14 The first and still most fundamental forms of capitalist decoding bear on labor and wealth. Industrial capitalism presupposes a critical mass of workers divorced from any means of gainful employment and a critical mass of wealth available for gainful investment; it emerges when the basic capitalist axiom conjoins the one decoded mass, of labor power needing work, with the other: the mass of wealth to be invested as capital in means of production. In the course of expansion, other axioms are added: those of empirical science, linking technology to continual improvement in efficiency of the means of production; those of state policy and the judicial systems, defining the legal status and relations offeree obtaining between workers and private property; and so forth. In Baudelaire's lifetime-the "take-off" period of French industrial capitalism - decoding, axiomatization, and recoding pervade the cultural sphere: the synthetic perspective of the subscription newspaper written for a homogeneous audience of like-minded subscribers, for instance, is decoded by the "ob-

14

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

jective" reporting of isolated facts in the mass-circulation newspapers produced for the market and sold indiscriminately to anonymous readers on the street.15 At the same time (with textile manufacturing among the first sectors of the French economy to become capitalist), fashion becomes a veritable industry: henceforth advertising must continually recode consumer preferences to stimulate retail trade and absorb increasing quantities of mass-produced merchandise - what Baudelaire referred to as the "damaged goods of a good-for-nothing age" ("produitsavariesd'unsiecle vaurien" "L'Ideal" [xvm], 1-2). Due to contingent historical circumstances, the impact of the market on mid nineteenth-century French society is particularly sudden and severe. Napoleon's mass-levy armies not only revolutionized early modern European warfare, they also comprised the first proto-mass market for military suppliers and outfitters (notably for uniforms). But the defeat of Napoleon of course dispersed that market, and the Bourbon Restoration then succeeded in slowing the conversion of military markets to broader civilian ones in its efforts to restore landed wealth to its former position of privilege over manufacturing and the bourgeoisie. When the July Revolution installed the "Bourgeois Monarchy" of Louis-Philippe in 1830, however, market forces stifled under the Restoration burst forth and ran rampant: "Henceforth, the bankers shall rule!" cried one new minister.16 The reaction of the French cultural elite to the rule of the market is correspondingly acute: Flaubert remarks that "all of society has been prostituted" (adding ironically, "but the prostitutes themselves least of all"); before him, Balzac had already made prostitution the general figure for emergent capitalist social relations, as documented in La Come'die humaine. Baudelaire's relations to the market are considerably more complex than the reactionary Balzac's straightforward condemnation. For Baudelaire, the implacable subversion of an older social order by the forces of the market registers as the valorization of prostitution over and against all morality and convention. This may amount simply to making the best of a bad situation; but to the modernist, whether "The Voyage"

Introduction

15

leads through heaven or hell no longer matters - " Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe? / Au fond de l'lnconnu pour trouver du nouveauV (cxxvi, 11. 143-44) - a s long as it leads to novelty forever. The second major difference between the concepts of rationalization/reification and decoding/recoding is that the latter construe the process not thematically, as does Weber, nor epistemologically, as does the Lukacs of " Reification and Class Consciousness," but semiotically. Although the basic axioms of capitalism are a-semiotic — they involve a calculus of differentials among pure quantities — axiomatization is imbricated on both sides with sign-systems: the ones it subverts in the process of decoding, and the ones fabricated in moments of recoding. A major advantage of using semiotic terms rather than rationalization/reification is that they do not refer to bureaucratic or economic processes alone: culture, too, is a locus of decoding and recoding, and they are therefore detectable in the psyche and in literary texts as well as in social institutions. And while rationalization/reification does account well for the tendency of the arts in market society to become autonomous and progress each according to its own formal laws of development, it does not account for the modernist repudiation of modernity which gives force and direction to that development. Such repudiation can best be understood as a cultural ramification of the decoding inherent in modernity itself: the aim of modernist formal innovation would in this light be to accelerate the decoding unleashed by market forces so radically as to prevent its ever being axiomatized and recoded in the service of capital accumulation. (That capital has largely succeeded in recuperating this gambit, and modernism to that extent has failed, is as I have suggested a telling sign of our postmodern condition.) One aim of the present study, in any case, is to show how the notion of decoding can serve to designate and explore the interrelations among phenomena ranging from socio-economic processes, to psychodynamics, to forms of textuality and poetics. Once a critical threshold of decoding has been crossed, as it is in the case of Baudelaire, the system of codes (or "socio-

16

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

symbolic order") comprising a culture implodes, and the binary oppositions that once structured and sustained it no longer hold: good and evil, base and noble, nature and culture, man and woman, sacred and profane - all lose their stability and henceforth float freely, subject to dizzying reversals and perverse appropriations. Taking leave of movements such as romanticism and realism, Baudelaire rails against the "esprit de systeme" and proudly claims the right of self-contradiction; the modernist will try to make the most of modern instability: his works both exploit and aggravate it.17 Baudelaire's case epitomizes one important effect of the collapse of socio-symbolic order: the referential function of discourse becomes less completely mediated by a relatively coherent set of codes. In a perfectly organized symbolic order (were such a thing possible), all reference would pass through the defiles of the established grid of signification or master-code; all events, phenomena, experience would be understood according to the accepted definitions of good and evil, real and fictitious, and so forth. For better and for worse, decoding fosters reference to reality against the grain or through the cracks of social master-codes. A premodernist like Balzac bemoans the loss of stable signification resulting from decoding (and in retrospect appears on this issue to be, if not downright reactionary, at least hopelessly out-dated); the reception accorded modernists illustrates the obverse: the censorship trials of Flaubert and Baudelaire himself, like the public execration of works by Courbet and Manet, disclose the generally hostile reaction to reference outside the accepted aesthetic codes of Second-Empire France. 18 Of course, completely unmediated contact with reality would be just as unproductive as a perfectly organized code is impossible. Yet the goal of unmediated contact with reality is the informing principle of positivism, which emerges not coincidentally at just the same moment as literary modernism in France. 19 Though in a conventionally opposed sphere of culture, and aiming crucially for poetic rather than cognitive effects, Baudelaire, too, eschews established aesthetic codes to make reference to modern realities in some of his most charac-

Introduction

17

teristically modern works. The poetics of real reference in the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai will be examined in Parts 1 and 11, as it develops from the beauty cycle, through "Spleen and Ideal," and into the "Tableaux Parisiens." Given the modernist repudiation of direct historical representation, the shifting dynamics of real reference in the poetry are considerably illuminated by consideration (in Part 11) of the more programmatic statements Baudelaire made about reference and modernity in his art criticism. PSYCHOLOGICAL DECODING

The second major effect of the collapse of socio-symbolic order is psychological rather than referential. As the coherence of the socio-symbolic order succumbs to decoding, the elaboration of personal codes in its place becomes possible and necessary; this explains the importance of the term "recoding" for cultural study, inasmuch as individuals (and groups) are forced or enabled to compensate for the demise of comprehensive public codes with local, private codes of their own devising. Baudelaire (one among many) will thus place individual "temperament" at the center of his understanding of contemporary art and criticism. In the same vein, Michel Foucault takes the heroic invention of self through its relation to the present moment of history to be the characteristically modern attitude toward modernity, citing Baudelaire precisely as a prime example.20 The analysis of psychodynamics in market society in terms of decoding and recoding draws on the work of Jacques Lacan and especially on Deleuze and Guattari's critique of orthodox psychoanalysis in the Anti-Oedipus. For our purposes, two moments of their dialogue with Lacan are particularly important. First of all, their translation of Lacan's structurallinguistic version of psychoanalysis into fully semiotic terms enables us to discuss socio-economic and psychological processes in a single terminology, as we have said, inasmuch as Weber and Lukacs have been translated into semiotic terms as well. Lacan's linguistic symbolic order is ruled by a law of signification governing opposition, equivalence, and substitution: its fun-

18

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

damental opposition is the difference between the sexes; the law of equivalence prescribes identification with the parent of the same sex, while that of substitution proscribes the parent of the opposite sex, launching the subject on an endless search for substitute objects, which Lacan calls the " metonymy of desire." This symbolic structure and its operations are "guaranteed" by the "nom/non-du-pere," (Lacan's intentional pun for the name and the interdiction of the father), which establishes the social bond by forcing desire away from the body of the mother toward others and simultaneously translating the entire complex governing desire into the realm of social signification. In cases where the law of signification fails, particularly when the "nom/non-du-pere" is denied (or "foreclosed"), the result according to Lacan is "schizophrenia," a purely metonymic form of desire not governed by the metaphoric grammar, syntax, and lexicon of the symbolic order, linguistically conceived. Operating outside the law, "schizophrenic" desire would invest anything and everything, including the persons forbidden by the incest taboo expressed in the laws of equivalence, substitution, and opposition.21 Borrowed initially from the structural anthropology of LeviStrauss, the notion of a symbolic order once implied a matrix of concrete social determinations.22 There exists, however, a tension (if not an evolution) between the anthropological connotations of the term and an increasingly mathematical or purely logical use of it, in Levi-Strauss as well as in Lacan. Deleuze and Guattari, at any rate, insist on retaining the concrete, historical and anthropological sense of the "symbolic order"; here, I use the term "socio-symbolic order" to distinguish this sense from Lacan's own. A socio-symbolic order, semiotically conceived, comprises a more or less coherent set of social codes that govern opposition, equivalence, and substitution, establish social bonds of various kinds, and also affect social relations and communication, behavior, and cognition. Socio-symbolic orders are not (or not usually) guaranteed by the name-of-the-father, but by what we might call various " figures-of-the-despot," ranging from totem animals, to high priests and gods, to heads of state such as

Introduction

19

presidents and prime ministers.23 Schizophrenia, on this view, derives from the failure of the set of codes comprising a sociosymbolic order to maintain coherent rule over social relations, behavior, and cognition. Operating outside or in between socially established codes, with no fixed rules governing equivalence or even metaphorical resemblance, the pure metonymy of schizophrenic desire moves from one object to the next, free to invest anything and everything, indiscriminately. Schizophrenic desire may arise on occasion from the demise of a certain figure-of-the-despot, but it becomes really widespread only with the systematic decoding of social codes by the capitalist market: hence the subtitle of Deleuze and Guattari's two-volume study, Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The logico-linguistic and socio-semiotic accounts of schizophrenia do not necessarily contradict one another: presumably, inhabiting a socio-symbolic order riddled by decoding would make it more likely and far easier for individuals to deny successfully the name and law of their fathers; conversely, denial of one's father's law in a socio-symbolic order firmly centered on a strong figure-of-the-despot would be unlikely to free desire from the law to any significant extent.24 At any rate, the second moment of Deleuze and Guattari's dialogue with Lacan makes the priority of socio-historical over familial determinations of the psyche absolutely clear. Lacan himself had already insisted on the importance of Freud's concept of Nachtraglichkeit, or deferred action. On this view, the child is not "father to the man"; childhood events do not unilaterally determine adult complexes: memories of childhood become psychologically effective only ex post facto or "apres coup," as Lacan says, in light of later experiences which alone endow them with meaning. From this rejection of "infantile determinism," Deleuze and Guattari conclude that it is not mere "family romance," but the full socio-historical context that ultimately determines psychic life. To stipulate that a socio-symbolic order entails concrete social determinations means that it is subject to historical change: in this light, the case of Baudelaire is significant as an example of the psychological impact of market decoding in mid-

20

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

nineteenth-century France. At issue are the disintegration of the ego, of its various modes of processing everyday experience in terms of both cultural and personal memory, and an attendant openness to and/or threat of engulfment by the forces of the unconscious and the real. Second-generation psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel already adverted to the generalized "degeneration of the bourgeois personality" in the modern period, but had no properly psychoanalytic means of explaining it.25 Granting the importance ascribed by Lacan to the mirror stage and the ego's dependence on the Other, generalized egodisintegration as a historical trend must be understood in terms of the disintegration of the socio-symbolic order itself. One function of the symbolic Other or "master signifier" within the psyche is to anchor the metaphoric axis of identifications that constitute the sense of self and individual personality by assigning meanings to things - especially, as in the process of conventional therapy, to the events of one's life. The ego is always constructed or "integrated," according to Lacan, in line with and dependent on such an Other or signifier: this is one way he defines neurosis, and the ego as a neurotic formation. (Here, I mean the term "disintegration" to designate the failure or reversal of this constitutive process of ego-integration, not as some cataclysm befalling an originally solid entity from without.) In Lacan's Oedipal-family metaphor, of course, it is with respect to the "name-of-the-father" that the ego is constituted; for us, however, the figure-of-thedespot fulfills such a function - but does so only under certain historical conditions. For the modern period, the so-called "death of God" - or better still, concrete events like the actual death of Louis XVI during the Great Revolution (1793), or the sacking of the royal palace and the destruction of the throne during the Revolution of 1848 - these imply the collapse of the socio-symbolic order whose center the despot occupied or symbolized, and a corollary weakening of the socio-symbolic basis for ego-integration. Ego-integration is socially reinforced, according to Lacan, by entry into language and the symbolic order, which overlays on top of the recognition-scene of the mirror stage another, quite

Introduction

21

different (though equally alienating) form of identification: the duplication of self-recognition in the universe of social signification via investment of the first-person pronoun-shifter " I " and the imprimatur of a proper name. " I am Charles Baudelaire" is in principle a fundamental assertion of selfidentification, as metaphoric equivalence is (im) posed between the two terms by the copulative predicate " to be " in the present indicative. Certainly the statement " I am King Louis XVI, son of Louis XV, legitimate heir to the throne of France" — with the copulative predicate linking the shifter to a proper name magnified by a title and followed by additional metaphoric appositives - constitutes an individual identity in fixed relation to a certain form of socio-symbolic order, indeed at its very center. Here the symbolic construction of personal identity is definitive and lends it supreme stability.26 In modern society with its decoded symbolic order, however, individual personality is largely imaginary, based not on firm socio-symbolic coordinates, but on the "private" fixations of the neurotic ego. Imagine Baudelaire speaking in place of Louis X V I : " I am Charles Baudelaire, son of... Caroline Defayis, stepson of Jacques Aupick, son of long-dead Joseph-Francois Baudelaire (and recently deprived of his legacy by my stepfather!), heir apparent to... the mantle of Victor Hugo, poetlaureate of France?" It is not clear what kinds of metaphoric identifications are possible in such circumstances, nor whether diverse identifications will add up, come into conflict, or cancel one another out. The impact on individual psychology of the absence of a stable symbolic Other and the dissolution of codes in market society can be assessed in terms of decoding and recoding. In most cases, severe decoding produces trauma, for codes not only constrain, they also protect the psyche. As their coherence wanes, the psyche suffers contact with a decoded, completely meaningless "real" — Lacan's term for what lies completely outside all codes and signification, whether socio-centric (the symbolic register) or ego-centric (the imaginary register). Taken in an absolute sense, any attempt to represent the real as such is of course doomed to failure: representation inevitably

22

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

endows its object with meaning. Nevertheless, much of Baudelaire's literary work, as Benjamin was the first to recognize, is an attempt to develop poetic vehicles suited to registering the shock-experience of the real that is characteristic of modern market society — the moment at which, for example, the poet "stumbles upon words as upon paving-stones" ("Trebuch[e] sur les mots comme sur les paves," "Le Soleil" [LXXXVII], 1. 7). Benjamin identified "Spleen" hyperconsciousness as one such vehicle, but Baudelaire experiments with at least two others, whose evolution we will trace through his art criticism, in the "Tableaux Parisiens" and in the Petits Poemes en prose. If a body of poetry can in this context be considered to be, like an extended dream, an attempt to develop ex postfacto the defenses required to protect the psyche from some traumatic real event, the trauma in Baudelaire's case was the coup d'etat of Napoleon III, around which his published collections may be said to revolve in a desperate attempt to exorcise its dismaying shockvalue. Far more common than poetry, however, as a means of managing decoded contact with the real, is the process of recoding, which provides defense against the real through the constitution of personality in the imaginary register. Here again, Benjamin has identified one such personality: the romantic poet-personality of the "Ideal." But there are others - the poet of self-lacerating evil, the poet of cynical selfdistantiation, and so forth - whose evolution we will also trace through the series of published collections. The differences among these various figures are important because they show that the imaginary personalities compensating for the decoded symbolic Other in market society are themselves always susceptible to decoding in turn: the heroic invention of self in modernity is a Sisyphean task, a perpetual reinvention of self as previous "styles" of self become outmoded and are abandoned. We will see that Baudelaire's evolution from romanticism to modernism is comprised of cycles of decoding accompanied by intense contact with the real, alternating with cycles of recoding accompanied by withdrawal from the real into the construction of personality.

Introduction

23

Social life under capitalism is in general composed of such cycles of decoding and recoding, which are ultimately linked, howsoever distantly, with the decoding and recoding rhythms of capital itself. Since capital involves a calculus of differential relations among pure quantities rather than coded relations among qualities, however, it does not provide (and cannot tolerate) a symbolic Other valid for society as a whole, so recoding takes place under the aegis of other Others, instead — ranging from parents, teachers, and priests to rock stars, military officers, and elected officials. In Baudelaire's case, too, despite or perhaps because of his intense experimentation with decoded forms of experience, imaginary personalities arise that are dependent on figures which effectively occupy the place of the Other for him and sanction the construction of an ego - if only for a while. In an extraordinary psycho-biographical study of Baudelaire, Michel Butor has identified these figures and calls them "intercessors." 27 I refer to these Others as historical Others, in order to stress that they arise from the field of history (just as Napoleon III did), even though the psychodynamic relation Baudelaire entertains with them in the process of recoding is, of course, an imaginary one. The series of figures Butor identifies are Baudelaire's longtime mistress Jeanne Duval, then the people of Paris in 1848, and finally, fellow poet Edgar Allan Poe. These historical Others preside over Baudelaire the romantic, Baudelaire the revolutionary, and Baudelaire the modernist, respectively. Butor's study is unusual and particularly significant for us because it avoids construing these Others on the Lacanianlinguistic model of the name-of-the-father: instead, Baudelaire's historical Others are shown to include quite diverse social entities — momentary as well as lasting, women as well as men, groups as well as individuals — with which Baudelaire entertains very different kinds of relationships. The relationship to Poe is significantly different from the other two, in that under his aegis, the two earlier relationships are repudiated, transformed, and reincorporated only under disavowal by Baudelaire the modernist. This break with the earlier personae in favor of a modernism sanctioned by Poe is precisely the move that leads

24

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

Baudelaire beyond the shock-defense of the early works identified by Benjamin to the psychic splitting characteristic of the prose poems. The concept of splitting employed here is based on the work of Otto Kernberg as well as Lacan, both of whom - though belonging to quite different branches of post-Freudian psychoanalysis - draw directly (and selectively) on the work of Melanie Klein. Of course, Freud himself occasionally used the term Spaltung (in his work on fetishism, most notably) but he seemed somewhat ill at ease exploring what he sometimes called the " paraphrenic" afflictions - those not based on repression and symptom-formation, and therefore very different from Oedipal neurosis. Klein drew attention to the near-total disorganization of the psyche at the earliest, pre-Oedipal stages of psychic development, and particularly to a lack of object constancy resulting from the splitting of objects into disparate "good" and " b a d " versions. The one-sided nature of such partial object representations derives from the lack of synthesis of the life and death instincts that is characteristic of this stage. The function of the subsequent "depressive" stage of development, in her view, is to unify diverse part-object representations into whole objects, which entails a recognition of their " ambivalent" nature (hence the depression associated with this stage), and depends on achieving a synthesis of the life and death instincts and their derivatives. In drawing on Klein's work, Lacan and Kernberg develop the core notion of "splitting" in different directions.28 Lacan distinguishes two developmental stages within the general notion of " splitting." He calls the immature psyche in which part-object representations predominate the "corps morcele" - the body in pieces - in order to emphasize that the infant at this point lacks control of the body and its drives and has no coherent self-image. This is precisely what is obtained, according to Lacan, in the "mirror stage" (his term for Klein's "depressive stage"), when its reflection gives the maturing infant a sense of its own coherence as a "whole object." On Lacan's view, however (and here he departs sharply from the Kleinian perspective), this coherent mirror-image of a whole

Introduction

25

ego is an imaginary fiction: the concept of the "split subject" (or "barred subject," usually designated by " $ " and aligned with the bar of repression separating signifier and signified, designated by "S/s") signals the fundamental incompatibility of disparate drives with any function of unification or mastery attributable to the ego. Lacan's emphasis on the predominance of part-objects and split subjectivity sheds light on the evolution from romanticism to the alienated realism of the "Tableaux Parisiens": in its development beyond and repudiation of the nostalgic and recuperative metaphoric poetics of " Correspondances" in the imaginary register, Baudelaire's metonymic poetics deconstructs the protective stability of both social codes and lyric enunciation as an approach to registering decoded contact with the real. Where Lacan emphasizes the sheer diversity of part-objects and the split between body and ego, Kernberg focuses on the disparity between "good" and " b a d " part-objects within the pre-Oedipal psyche. What he calls "borderline conditions" (from their uncertain location somewhere on a border between neurosis and psychosis) are cases in which such disparity is so great as to prevent the synthesis of part-objects into wholeobject representations altogether. This betrays a failure to synthesize life and death instinct drive-derivatives under the aegis of the ego, which therefore fails to cohere. Primitive splitting based in pre-Oedipal relations can then later become a defense mechanism, when it serves to separate off and isolate from one another the incompatible facets of an incoherent self. Precisely this defense characterizes the prose poem collection: Baudelaire's ultimate identification with Poe secures for him an inviolable position of narcissism, enabling him to isolate threatening images of former selves (the romantic and the revolutionary, the prostitute and the dandy) by keeping them at a safe distance via the presence of the prose narrator. Lacan and Kernberg both emphasize the disintegration of the self: a failure to consolidate a coherent mirror-image of self and whole representations of objects; and a corollary reversion to part-object relations fueled by drive-derivatives of the poorly amalgamated life and death instincts, and hence oscillating

26

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

wildly between indiscriminate fusion and violent antagonism. But what Lacan sees as a universal, ontological condition (the "split subject"), Kernberg sees as a particular type of clinical case (the "borderline condition"): here, by contrast, psychic disintegration is considered neither a universal condition nor an individual case, but a preeminently historical phenomenon fostered by social decoding. And it is precisely the interface between Kernberg and Lacan regarding split subjectivity as a primordial condition and a mechanism of defense that sheds so much light on the dynamics of Baudelaire's most striking prose poems and enables us to situate them relative to the earlier verse collections in his trajectory from romanticism to modernism. Crucial to that trajectory is Baudelaire's passage through masochism. Much has been written about Baudelaire and masochism, but also about Baudelaire and sadism - testimony to the importance and severity of psychic splitting in his work.29 Here, the narrative structure typical of the works of Baudelaire's popular contemporary, Sacher-Masoch, enables us to understand the role of a certain masochism in propelling Baudelaire out of romanticism into psychic splitting and modernism, in connection with the defeat of the Second Republic by Napoleon III. 30 But whereas Masoch's stories provide narrative closure by answering the betrayal of romantic ideals with bitter (apparently "sadistic") revenge, Baudelairean modernism leaves the story unresolved, with the prose poem narrator entertaining a wide variety of often undecidable relations with repudiated former selves, ranging from the sympathetic to the mortally cruel. It therefore falls to us to reconstruct a historical trajectory left intentionally incomplete in the published work, a trajectory which leads from romanticism through Masochian masochism into the split subjectivity and partial self-repudiation typical of modern market society, which I will call borderline narcissism.31 It is in this psychic configuration that Baudelaire's prose poem narrator manages for one thing to register the split between dandy and prostitute, between buyer and seller that is so fundamental to modern life in market society, and yet occupy a position over and above that split - a position Jacques Attali calls that of the "designer" or "programmer." 32 The market

Introduction

27

function of programming is to bestow semiotic value in a context of generalized decoding which renders value entirely mobile, and to bend its perpetual definition and redefinition to the service of economic gain. Modernism and advertising may never have seemed so close — but as Baudelaire shows, they always have been. Borderline narcissism reflects or supports the programmer's ability to acknowledge and yet preside over the conflict between buying and selling that characterizes market society. For another thing, borderline narcissism enables the modernist narrator to observe from a safe distance images of former selves that have been repudiated. And what Baudelairean modernism repudiates and suppresses from the published record is revolution - the Revolution of 1848 - and more specifically the promise of a revolution that failed and the failure of a revolution that had promised so much, but ended with the definitive institution of authoritarian market rule in France. Psychic splitting in borderline narcissism is Baudelaire's only means of making the intensity of dismay at the revolution's failure bearable, given the intensity of his former enthusiasm for its promise. The modernist repudiation of narrative and suppression of history open a gap that must be acknowledged between what Baudelaire lived and what is registered in his poetry collections. It is thus imperative for us to distinguish between Baudelaire's own evolution from romantic to revolutionary to modernist, on one hand, and the development of the poetry appearing in the published works themselves, on the other. These two series are not identical; they are different, yet related: our aim will be to explore the complexities of that relation as fully as possible, without reducing one to the other. The series of historical Others comprises Jeanne Duval, the people of Paris in 1848, and Edgar Allan Poe —figureswhich give rise in turn to Baudelaire the melancholy romantic, the revolutionary, and the borderline modernist as programmer. A corresponding three-term series of "poetic Others" (were such to exist) might include nature, the judge, and the modern aristocrat. No doubt the most striking difference in this "poetic "

28

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

series is the appearance, in place of the revolutionary crowd, of the figure of conscience or the judge, by which substitution the suppression of revolution constituting Baudelairean modernism is accomplished. Nature as "poetic Other" would then correspond to Baudelaire the romantic, and the paradoxical figure of the modern aristocrat to Baudelaire the programmer. But the development of the poetry is not governed by a series of discrete Others in this way; it is far more complicated than that: it can be better approximated in terms of a series of cycles of decoding and recoding that comprise as it were the basic rhythm of evolution of the published collections. In a first cycle, the ambient decoding of the socio-symbolic order has undermined the social basis for identity-formation, exposing the modern individual to real trauma. In defense against the threat of the decoded real, the poet recodes present perception with past memories of a deeper self, in a nostalgic attempt to shore up a compensatory imaginary identity outside society in romantic harmony with nature. This stance informs the early poems of Les Fleurs du Mai, and is epitomized in " Correspondances." But as the poet's object of attention switches from the pristine beauty of nature to the sensual beauty of woman, beginning with "La Beaute," stabilizing memory is decoded by volatile fantasy, which disintegrates the objects of poetic perception along with the fantasizing self. Chapter 2 compares the metaphoric poetics of "Correspondances" with the metonymic poetics of "La Beaute," and then traces the increasing predominance of metonymic poetics, particularly in the poems added for the second edition of the collection. The cycle of decoding begun with "La Beaute" reaches its apogee, though in a diametrically opposed mood, in the "Spleen" poems, where the poetic subject and objects are so decoded as to appear completely meaningless, and the poetic act ultimately becomes an anti-lyric gesture of empty reference to the real. A second phase of recoding then occurs, at the end of the "Spleen and Ideal" section, which far from joining past with present in a self at home in nature, ironically opposes desire and prohibition, act and judgment, instead. Secretly defending himself from the exhilarating enthusiasms and shattering

Introduction

29

disappointments of the revolution, the poet revels in evil, consciously pursuing wrong for the sake of the very punishment it incurs from his own super-ego. The irony characteristic of this phase of recoding produces not the stable, recuperated self of the early poems, but a subject that virtually disappears between the pulsions of desire and the sanctions prohibiting them. Chapter 3 examines how the revisions for the second edition transform the ending of the " Spleen and Ideal" section to accentuate both the decoded metonymy of time (in the "Spleen" poems and "L'Horloge") and the recoded self-flagellation of evil (in " L'Heautontimoroumenos " and "LTrremediable"). The "Tableaux Parisiens" section then introduces a third phase of decoding, transforming the confident civics lessons of contemporary pro to-"realist" or documentary genres (the "physiognomies" and "tableaux de Paris") into a fruitless search for meaning in the modern city. As in "Spleen," decoding empties reference of meaning, but here the dreary monotony of spleen time is replaced by the cyclicity of day and night, and the real context appears as contemporary Paris. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the evolution of Baudelaire's art criticism in connection with the "Tableaux Parisiens" in order to shed additional light on the poet's negotiations of the paradoxes of real reference in modernity. In defense against the agonizing loss of meaning in the city, the poet turns inward on himself in the second half of the "Tableaux Parisiens," and a third form of recoding takes place. Instead of the ironic doubling of evil-doing and conscience, recoding now involves the cynical doubling of self-observation, as the poet examines his own desires, realizes they are delusory, but decides they are nonetheless better than the alternative, which is death. This resigned accommodation sets the stage for the new ending of Les Fleurs du Mai which invokes an endless journey beyond death as the ultimate realization of decoding in both time and space. In the Petits Poemes en prose, the ultimate embodiment of Baudelairean modernism, there are no cycles: linear narrative and history have been rejected in favor of haphazard conglomeration and the freedom to chose at random among selfcontained prose poems. Here decoding and recoding function as

30

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

it were simultaneously, rather than cyclically. Chapters 6 and 7 show that the former identities of the poet in commercial culture have been splintered by decoding, but that the fragments are nevertheless retained and put in perspective through recoding by the narrator, whose defense against the market is to stand apart and observe its ruthless operations with as much distance and reserve as can be mustered. It is in this configuration that Baudelairean modernism approaches, even as it reflects on, the dynamics of programming crucial to capitalist culture. TEXTUAL DECODING

In order to link the insights of psychoanalysis to the texture of individual poems and collections of poetry, we must consider what structural linguistics and poststructuralist discourse analysis (principally the work of Jakobson and Lacan) contribute to the specifications of decoding and recoding, metonymy and metaphor. The point of departure, of course, is Saussure, who founded modern linguistics by distinguishing diachronic from synchronic linguistics, and within the latter distinguished parole from langue, individual acts of speech from the language-system that makes them possible. The language-system according to Saussure was in turn composed of "paradigmatic" and "syntagmatic" relations, the former involving sets of language-units associated with one another by some similarity of meaning or form, the latter involving the combination of language-units into longer sequences. This may have made a satisfactory basis for structural analysis of the language-system itself, but did not prove very satisfactory for the analysis of actual discourse. The founding gesture opposing a self-contained language-system to individual acts of speech amounted, according to Derrida, to a metaphysics of structure and a metaphysics of speech.33 Saussure, the protostructuralist, imagined that langue existed inside the mind, where individuals would use it to execute speech-acts (and corresponding acts of comprehension); the poststructuralist break with metaphysics occurs with the realization that, rather than having the language-system inside us, we exist inside

Introduction

31

it. This I take to be one important sense of the Lacanian dictum, "there is no meta-language," and of his insistence that the ego forms always in dependence on the Other. Poststructuralist discourse analysis focuses on the actual process of utterance rather than on the language-system as an abstraction, and hence translates Saussure's paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations into the processes of "selection" and "combination" that comprise the production of discourse. Utterance is thus composed of two axes of discourse that Roman Jakobson has named the "metaphoric" and the "metonymic" (which should not be confused with the figures of speech of the same names).34 The metaphoric axis supports the process of selecting, from among an indefinite number of (grammatically, lexically, morphologically, phonologically) similar terms, one specific term to occupy a given position in the spoken chain. It is thus based on identity or equivalence among terms as defined by the storehouse of the language-system functioning "in absentia" (as Saussure put it) "outside" the linear time of utterance itself. The metonymic axis, by contrast, sustains the process of combining different terms contiguously to form a chain of signification "within" time, i.e. along the unfolding or disseminated duration of utterance. The metaphoric axis is thus a function of the language-system, and appears to exist as a given, outside of time, in contrast to the metonymic axis which is precisely the sequentiality of actual discourse as it is produced in context and through time. The two axes of discourse, Jakobson goes on to explain with reference to his own studies of aphasia and in terms of C. S. Peirce's pragmatic semiotics, " provide each sign with two sets of interpretants... the code and the context" (p. 75). This marks a crucial disjuncture between structural linguistics, with its focus on the code as precondition for speech, and poststructuralist discourse analysis, which examines the actual conditions of language-use in context. For as a structuralist, Saussure construes the linguistic sign in terms of value rather than meaning: a term's differential value within the language-system is defined as the intersection of all the paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations it entertains with the other terms of the

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Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

system; any question of reference is quietly excluded from the very start.35 Jakobson, by contrast, considers signs as they are used in context, a process governed by extra-linguistic (what we are calling fully "semiotic") codes as well as by the strictly linguistic code of the language-system itself.36 Two important consequences follow. First of all, given what Jakobson calls the bipolar composition of language, the opposite of determinate meaning is not meaninglessness, chaos, the abyss, and so forth (which are merely contraries of meaning): the opposite of sense is reference.37 And the vexing problem of reference is henceforth to be construed in two different ways. Conceived of metaphorically, i.e. in terms of equivalence or identity, reference equals representation: the sign captures the "essence" of its referent; or better yet, the meaning of the referent is "the same as" the meaning of the sign: M r = M s . Metaphoric reference presupposes that, as interpretants, code and context are fundamentally or potentially one, that they are or can be identical, thereby enabling an accurate or "realistic" representation of reality in discourse. Such is the mirage of the metaphysics of realism, that a final adequation of context and code is possible. Conceiving of reference metonymically, by contrast, installs some specific function, rather than equivalence, between sign and referent: M r (f) M s . The two are not imagined to be the same, but are understood to be willfully related to one another in a specific way (an epistemological position that has come to be known generally as "constructivism"). The code and the context are not one, and cannot be made identical; the difference between them must be acknowledged, even when specific subcodes are devised (as we are doing here) for the purpose of reconstructing particular aspects of the context in knowledges. The real, to paraphrase Lacan along with Wittgenstein, cannot be represented, being that which lies beyond signification; and what we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence: contrasted with the metaphysics of metaphoric reference, metonymic reference implies thorough-going epistemological irony.38 The second major consequence of analyzing signs in use in

Introduction

33

actual discourse rather than in terms of their value in the language-system is paradoxically that, although code and context cannot on any one occasion be presumed or made identical in order to represent reality in discourse, nevertheless the code comes from nowhere other than previous uses of discourse in context. The code, in other words, is not metaphysically grounded in Platonic forms, nominalist essences, or structuralist structures, but arises historically from past occasions of the "successful" production of meaning. A "sediment" of meaning, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, accrues to the signs of a code due to their repeated use in contexts past.39 This places crucial emphasis on the role of memory — both individual and "collective," i.e. sedimented in the code — for the successful production of meaning in utterance. When someone hears the statement "This is Christmas," for example, a host of recollections arise that endow both the sign for and the experience of Christmas with meaning. Some of the recollections may involve actual experiences of the auditor, others what has been read or heard in stories or advertising jingles-it makes little difference: the textual or experiential memory-chains converging on the sign "Christmas" in large part constitute its meaning for the auditor. Again, the meaning so constituted is not to be confused with what Saussure calls the "value" of the signifier <(Christmas> considered as an object of linguistic study, which involves differential relations with other signifiers. It is the result instead, as Wittgenstein insists, of repeated use of that sign in social context. The same is true, of course, of any sign, not just names of holidays: a sign's perceived meaning will derive in large part from its location in a metaphoric memory-chain of previous uses in appropriate contexts. The statement "That is a pipe" will suggest a certain meaning to, say, plumbers on the basis of the memory-chains that comprise their (professional) identity, and a different meaning to smokers based on the metaphoric memory-identifications they make with the term. Two words of caution regarding the importance of memory for discourse production and reception are necessary. For one thing, as suggested by the poly valence of the term "pipe" in the

34

Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

foregoing illustration, an individual's own memory never equals that of the "collective memory" registered in the social code; instead, each individual's memory constitutes a specific version of or stance toward the "collective memory" sedimented in the code. Or rather, collective memory simply does not exist: the social code is all there is, existing as an "absent cause" only insofar as it gets embodied diversely in the speech-acts and memories of countless individuals and discourses disseminated in time and space. This contributes to the sense in which we live strictly inside social codes rather than having them inside us; in which, as Lacan puts it, there is no meta-language: all we have as ground for the socio-symbolic codes enabling speech-acts are other speech-acts. This is also why for Lacan the "symbolic order" we inhabit is ultimately empty, radically de-centered not really an order or structure at all, but only a presumption of order and structure based on a mistaken, imaginary misconstruction of the name-of-the-father, the Other, the phallus, and so on. Not only do individuals' memory-chains differ, and thus never " add up " to a fully structured or centered socio-symbolic order, but even where there is considerable overlap in memorychains and hence general agreement about meaning, the contexts to which discourse refers are always different, specific, subject to change. So even the conventional meanings sedimented in social codes, though derived from previous "appropriate" uses in context, are never guaranteed to match the irreparable contingency of any actual context. Imagine a smoker in the context of a Magritte exhibit: confident of the match between his own memory-chains and the metaphoric axis of the shared code, he recognizes the object of representation and seesfitto declare "That is a pipe." But he thereby overlooks the specific means of representation. Someone more canny about metonymic reference might well reply "That's not a pipe: that's a picture of a pipe!" 40 To put the point another way: given the demise of the metaphysics of representation, the sediment of meaning comprising the socio-symbolic order is understood to be constitutively incapable of representing a real context in any complete or definitive way; in a decoded symbolic order, one is

Introduction

35

never prepared for the shock of the new. This, I take it, explains the appeal for Lacan of the image of the Mobius strip: we are irremediably consigned to the contingency of a given context, which can nevertheless be processed only in the terms of an already-established symbolic code. Reference to code and reference to context are equally and as it were reciprocally unstable. Cognizant of such conditions, discursive reconstructions of historical reality cautiously and self-consciously adopt ironic modes of reference that are avowedly partial, in both senses of the term: incomplete - acknowledging the uneliminable difference of the real, and also interested — representing the interests of those doing the reconstruction as well as the reality being reconstructed. Baudelaire's "Tableaux Parisiens" aspire to such a metonymic mode of referentiality; so does this study. Jakobson and Lacan thus transform Saussure's paradigmatic or associative relations within the linguistic code into the metaphoric chains of identifications in individual memory, discourse, and experience - identifications that are dependent on and formed strictly in relation to the metaphoric axis of the socio-semiotic code, in dependence on the Other of the symbolic order. This striking transformation enables us to understand recognition as indistinguishably a linguistic and a psychological event, as when an infant "thinks" "Ah-ha, that's the breast," or an adult (looking in the mirror) says "That's me" or " I t is I, Charles Baudelaire." However powerful a concept and experience recognition may be, the speaking subject's ineluctable dependence on the symbolic Other reinforces the sense in which human beings exist only and always within a symbolic order that preexists, envelops, and overdetermines them. Althusser has named the subjective and ideological aspect of identity-formation in recognition " interpellation"-the process whereby the very sense of self is forcibly produced in relation to the Other of the symbolic order.41 This has advanced our understanding of the founding psychological mechanism of ideology considerably, but it is nevertheless still too narrowly linguistic and Lacanian: what we are calling the socio-symbolic order comprises, in addition to an Other or Others, an ensemble

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Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

of social codes in and through which subjectivity is lived. And especially for capitalist society, in the absence of a single, stable Other, even more important than fixed codes in the constitution and psychodynamic effects of the socio-symbolic order are what we might call its "forms of semiosis" - what we have described as the processes of decoding and recoding. Beyond the existence, or absence, of a symbolic Other, then, the basic discursive elements of a socio-symbolic order of codes will for our purposes include: (1) an ensemble of metaphoric relations, as embodied for instance in dictionaries and thesauruses, of which the clearest expression is the copulative assertion of identity or equivalence: M 1 = M 2 ; (2) an ensemble of combinatory relations, as exemplified in syntactical structures such as subject-predicate, and of which cause-and-effect relations are a characteristic expression; (3) an ensemble of binary oppositions, most often structured in value-hierarchies, including (among others) man/woman, sacred/profane, and nature/artifice. Within a social context so defined, decoding tends to undermine all metaphoric relations, so that identity, equivalence and socially sanctioned substitution lose their stability. Decoding also disrupts the value-hierarchy of binary oppositions, of which the most visible instance in Baudelaire is no doubt good versus evil. With respect to combinatory relations, decoding in Baudelaire has relatively little effect on syntax per se (whose dissolution awaits the pen of Mallarme); on the contrary, the de-stabilization of metaphoric relations in Baudelaire's poetry brings to the fore metonymic relations of all kinds, including cause-and-effect and transitive relations generally. In much the same way, Jakobson's transformation of structural linguistics into discourse analysis also foregrounds the metonymic axis, situating the actual use of language in time and context, and thus in history - a quintessentially Baudelairean move if there ever was one! In Lacan, moreover, the metonymic axis not only sustains the unfolding of discourse over time, it also

Introduction

37

embodies the motivation of desire, driving discourse onward toward conclusion. Discourse becomes not just an allegory but an instance of desire, of its peripeties and its satisfactions. While the "metonymy of desire" propels discourse forward, the metaphoric axis supports what Lacan calls " points de capiton," where expectations created earlier are met by the successful alignment and identification of memory-chains with the codes of the symbolic order in moments of recognition.42 The result is that the utterance finally "makes sense," and a kind of discursive orgasm or sense of satisfaction is achieved. This is for Lacan ultimately a neurotic form of satisfaction not because it is discursive rather than real, but rather because the putative identity of codes and of individuals alike upon which the satisfaction of closure depends represents an imaginary fiction, if not the imaginary fiction par excellence. Given the perpetual disparity between context and code, desire in discourse is expelled from any metaphoric adequation of signifier with signified, and in reality from any metaphoric adequation of sign with referent, as from some epistemological Garden of Eden or mother's breast, forever obliged to seek vainly for substitutes over time, but also in space, where objects are sought after in the real, yet are lost as real the moment they are recognized in the symbolic or the imaginary register. This is the sense in which metonymy engages discourse in both time and space, both duration and context, both desire and reference, simultaneously. Metaphor defends the psyche against such engagement by identifying the sense of self, a fixed reality, and univocal meaning through the construction of a comfortable, integrated ego and a world of familiar, recognizable objects, both based on stable, coherent social codes. But in the absence, weakness or instability of the metaphoric axis of these codes, metonymy subverts and defies the identities of integration and recognition. At the limit designated as "schizophrenia," decoding frees metonymic engagement from all preconceived and imposed standards of identity, opposition, and substitution, leaving questions of meaning, self, and reality open to endless experimentation and reinvention. Such, for better and for worse, is the impact of market decoding in modernity.

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Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

Although no one-to-one correlation exists between the axes of discourse and specific figures of speech, one axis or the other can predominate in a given discourse or discourse-genre, and such predominance can have significant ideological implications.43 Metaphoric discourse tends to be metaphysical, and its dominant tropes organic. It is based on an essentializing syntax involving intransitive, copulative predication and stipulative definition: " this is a pipe," " that is evil," or "this means that." Copulative predication is a direct expression of the metaphoric axis - which helps explain the prevalence of the verb "to be," of thematics of being and essences, and of metaphor as trope in metaphoric poetics. And metaphor as trope represents the epitome of metaphoric discourse, in that it suppresses the predicative copula "is," and thereby makes the essential equivalence between compared terms all the stronger for being simply posited, not expressed. (Nearly all figures of speech depend ultimately on a metaphoric relation of substitution: this [figural sense] means that [literal sense], Mf = M1.) Metonymic discourse, by contrast, favors transitive predication, and in it mechanical tropes tend to predominate. It is less a matter of this being that than of this having that (possession), of this being more or less than that (comparisons of degree), of this doing that (action), of this causing that (causality), o r - more generallyof this affecting that in some way (effectivity). In this light, the evolution from a metaphoric to a metonymic poetics in a major historical figure such as Baudelaire is likely to have important ideological implications. But poststructuralist literary and cultural criticism has rarely brought discourse analysis derived from Jakobson and Lacan to bear on historical cases such as this. Lacan's own writings on literary works treat them as little more than allegories of the psyche and/or the process of psychoanalytic therapy. As illuminating as these writings are, they serve their intended purpose of training Lacanian analysts far better than they serve as models or instances of literary study. Jakobson's in-depth analysis of poetry and of specific poems in terms of metaphor and metonymy is obviously invaluable for this study of

Introduction

39

Baudelairean poetics, but for all its insight and rigor, it entirely lacks social and historical dimensions. Indeed, it is not clear whether Jakobson's analyses serve any purpose at all, beyond affirming the capabilities of the method itself to detect and record structural features in poetic discourse for their own sake, as Jonathan Culler (among others) has observed.44 Turning structuralist poetics on Jakobson's own prose, Culler has shown that structural features can be found in any and all discourse, and expressed doubts that structural analysis alone could ever tell us anything of interest about them. But as the work of Michel Foucault has amply demonstrated (in line with the conclusions of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein that grammar itself entails a world-view or ideology of its own), analysis of the discursive form of virtually any kind of text can be highly significant when read in relation to institutional and historical context.45 And Foucault is not the only postSaussurian to derive some broader significance from structurallinguistic discourse analysis. Drawing in particular on Jakobson's two axes of discourse, deconstructive critics have in a set of very close readings (including some of Baudelairean texts) aligned metaphor with the illusions of metaphysics and personal identity, and metonymy with a heroic acknowledgment of contingency and flux.46 Much of this drama indeed appears in the figure of Baudelaire, but these studies, like Jakobson's, lack (or in some cases patently eschew) a historical dimension. My contention is that the concept of decoding enables us better to understand not only the transformation of French society and culture by market society, and the effects of this transformation on personal experience, memory, and psychodynamics, but also the effects of both as registered in the poetry itself: the tendency of the metaphoric axis to lose its stability; for constraints on the substitutions permissible in discourse to weaken (if not disappear altogether); for meaning and essence to become " undecidable "; for real contexts and sensible effects to become paramount. Baudelaire not only suffered such decoding at the emergence of modernity in mid nineteenth-century France, he also promoted it in the poetic texts most characteristic of his modernism.

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Baudelaire and schizoanalysis

The aim of this study is not to celebrate the advent or longevity of this modernism, but to understand its complex historical determinations, then and now. It is to this end that posts tructuralist discourse analysis is pressed into the service of a resolutely historical reading of the Baudelairean corpus "as a whole" - that is to say, assessing all three published collections in terms of Baudelaire's historical evolution from romanticism to modernism. In tracing this trajectory, we take as our point of departure what is surely — though for all the wrong reasons — Baudelaire's best-known poem: "Correspondances."

PART I

Poetics

CHAPTER 2

Correspondences versus beauty

THE ROMANTIC CYCLE

" Correspondances" (iv) has traditionally been hailed as the centerpiece of Les Fleurs du Mai and the most direct expression of the Baudelairean aesthetic. According to the standard interpretations, this sonnet presents with "remarkable clarity and brilliance " the " eternal formulae " of romantic symbolism: the absolute intelligibility of the sensible world, the hidden unity of humankind and nature which it is the poet's privilege to decipher and represent. 1 But romanticism was a stance Baudelaire came to regard with suspicion, even disdain. Far from being the key to Les Fleurs du Mai, "Correspondances" epitomizes an aesthetic that the rest of the collection will work to undermine and ultimately to reject. Alongside or beneath whatever thematic structure the work may have, the process of decoding in Baudelaire's work leads away from the romantic poetics of "universal analogy" so exquisitely formulated in "Correspondances" toward a modernist poetics that will predominate from Les Fleurs du Mai to the Petits Poemes en prose, and which first appears in the pivotal sonnet entitled "La Beaute" (xvn). "Correspondances" figures in an introductory group of poems (the prefatory "Au lecteur" apart) 2 that reiterate the romantic topos of the misunderstood artist reviled by a philistine society (starting with "Benediction" [i]). The theme of this first cycle is usually considered to be the relation between the artist and the world, and its early poems illustrate the two extremes of this relation: abjection and exaltation. The ungainly Poet 3 is 43

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cruelly taunted by uncomprehending humanity in "L'Albatros" (n) while in "Elevation" (m) the Poet soars high above the mortifying world of earthly existence and "comprend sans effort / Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes" (11. 19-20). This inspired communion with nature becomes the subject of the famous fourth poem of the cycle:

4

8 11 14

Correspondances La Nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; L'homme y passe a travers une foret de symboles Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers. Comme de longs echos qui de loin se confondent Dans une tenebreuse et profonde unite, Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarte, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent. II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants, Doux comme des hautbois, verts comme les prairies, - Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants, Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies, Comme Tambre, le muse, le benjoin et l'encens, Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.

As the title itself suggests, this poem depicts nature as a realm of divine equivalences between the natural and the human; and the insistent repetition of "comme" implies that in this realm, everything becomes potentially identical with everything else. The first quatrain asserts this principle of equivalence most forcefully with the initial metaphor " La Nature est un temple," which is further developed in a second metaphor according to which "vivants piliers" mumble "confuses paroles." Man seems to be at home in an almost domesticated nature that speaks (albeit confusedly) and recognizes him: nature and man occupy the same position as grammatical subjects of parallel clauses within the stanza, with the adverb " y " enclosing the second in the first, thus placing man squarely within the natural realm. The second clause of the quatrain then transforms the sound imagery of whispering trees into visual terms: the forest of symbols takes note of the passer-by with familiar glances.

Correspondences versus beauty Already, an equivalence is implied between auditory and visual sensations (to which the olfactory will be added in the final stanzas). The rhyme of "paroles" with "symboles" reinforces the congruity between the familiar sights and human sounds characterizing the temple of nature. The relation between sight and sound is developed, first implicitly, then explicitly, in the second quatrain. The echoing sounds of its first line merge together (by a con-fusion reminiscent of the "confuses paroles" of the first quatrain) in a harmony characterized by visual spatial imagery: a shadowy deep unity vast as luminous night. In the last line, colors and sounds are said to echo or answer one another, along with the fragrances that lead into the final tercets. Three uses of the preposition "comme," the rhyming verbs "se confondent" and "se repondent," two succeeding parallel double complements ("une tenebreuse et profonde unite / Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarte") and the four anapests linking the triple subject with its reflexive predicate in the last line (" Les parfums, les couleurs, et les sons se repondent") - a l l contribute to the sense of harmony and unity in the quatrain and by extension, from the metaphors of the first quatrain to the repeated similes of the tercets, in the poem as a whole. This metaphoric poetics - which expresses harmonious unity and equivalence through metaphor, analogy, and simile, with its mystical correspondences enveloping man in nature — typifies the initial, romantic cycle of Les Fleurs du Mai.

The sonnet "La Beaute," by all accounts, starts a new cycle in Les Fleurs du Mai. This is so not only because of the subject of the poem, as Paul Mathias among others has remarked, but more importantly because its form questions and radically transforms the metaphoric principle of equivalence and unity that governs the introductory cycle directly preceding it.4 The subject of beauty - or perhaps more accurately, the relation between beauty and poets - is, to be sure, of crucial importance. All the more so since Beauty herself speaks here. Having discussed the condition of poets in the world and their position in society, having characterized the context of poetic activity, Baudelaire now goes right to the heart of the matter and

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addresses the object of poetry: beauty - or rather, he has Beauty address us. Beauty, it turns out, defies metaphor and comparison. She will incite poets to attempt instead a very different form of poetic investigation.

4

8 11 14

La Beaute Je suis belle, 6 mortels! comme un reve de pierre, Et mon sein, ou chacun s'est meurtri tour a tour, Est fait pour inspirer au poete un amour Eternel et muet ainsi que la matiere. Je trone dans l'azur comme un sphinx incompris; J'unis un coeur de neige a la blancheur des cygnes; Je hais le mouvement qui deplace les lignes, Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris. Les poetes, devant mes grandes attitudes, Que j'ai Fair d'emprunter aux plus fiers monuments, Consumeront leurs jours en d'austeres etudes; Car j'ai, pour fasciner ces dociles amants, De purs miroirs qui font toutes choses plus belles: Mes yeux, mes larges yeux aux clartes eternelles!

The first hemistich of the poem opposes Beauty, the singular (grammatical) subject announced in the title and immediately repeated in the initial " J e , " to her plural audience of common "mortals." This opposition of singular to plural, subject to object, constitutes the basic structure of the entire sonnet. Apart from the audience addressed in the first line, there are no plurals in the first quatrain; the last tercet is composed entirely of plurals, with the symmetrical exception of singular Beauty, who appears here again as the grammatical subject ("Carj'ai... "). The first tercet, too, is composed entirely of plurals with the exception of Beauty's "j'ai l'air ... ", while the second quatrain has plural substantives only in grammatically subordinate positions (" cygnes " is the qualification of an attribute; "lignes " the object of a dependent clause). Moreover, two crucial adjectives appearing in singular form in the first quatrain — both occupying the first quarter of an external line (first and fourth), thus forming a strong internal rhyme: "belle" and "Eternel" — are repeated, but in plural form, in the last lines of the second tercet, which they thereby constitute as the final

Correspondences versus beauty rhyming couplet of the sonnet. The same pluralization in the final tercet affects the possessive pronouns and other major semes appearing in the first quatrain: "mon sein" becomes "mes yeux"; "poete/amour" becomes "dociles amants." And in much the same way, the singular "azur," "sphinx," and "coeur" of the second quatrain become the plural "mes attitudes," " monuments," and " clartes" of the first tercet. The sonnet moves from singular to plural. The same opposition and movement seem to govern grammatical subjects in the poem: its first two sentences — i.e. the first two quatrains — each start with " J e , " and if we include "mon sein" as a synecdoche, Beauty is the grammatical subject of all seven independent clauses in the first two sentences; the third and final sentence (in the tercets), by contrast, starts with "Les poetes." This apparent symmetry is reinforced by the fact that the subjects of the dependent clauses in the first and last sentences correspond to the subjects of the independent clauses of their mirror opposite: " ou chacun . . . " (1. 2) to " Les poetes "; "Que j ' a i . . . " (1. 10) to Beauty. But the final clause of the last sentence breaks the symmetry: introduced by a striking "For I have... " - t h e only logical expression in the entire poem, explaining a relation of cause and effect - this explanation reduces the poets active in the first clause of the sentence to the status of " dociles amants," objects of Beauty's act of fascination. The poets, despite their brief appearance in line 9 as active subjects, thus become logically subordinated to the actions of Beauty: to fascinate and render more beautiful. The verb tenses of the poets' two paltry actions also distinguish them from Beauty. Their futility extends from an indefinite past - "ou chacun s'est meurtri tour a tour" - to an equally indefinite future - " Consumeront leurs jours ... " while Beauty is always portrayed in the eternal present (through the present tense and infinitives such as "fasciner"). The mode of the verbs of which Beauty is the subject reinforces both this distinction between poets and Beauty and the division of the sonnet into Beauty's singular quatrains and mortals' plural tercets. In effect, all Beauty's actions take place in the last tercet: here is where she fascinates and beautifies — and retro-

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actively induces poets to waste away their days (in the first tercet). In the quatrains, by contrast, she does not act but is. The main verbs in the first quatrain describe her being. Of the five main verbs in the second quatrain, all first person singular, only the last two express actions - which Beauty never indulges in; the others describe her role, nature and attitude: she reigns in the heavens (intransitive) rather than governing a people (transitive); "J'unis" describes her dual nature rather than a physical act of uniting; even "Je hais" expresses an emotion rather than an action. Even in the first tercet, Beauty does not actually borrow her attitudes: she only appears to — a lack of decisive action that, if anything, makes the poets' austere research even more self-defeating. Thus the quatrains are the locus of her identity, the tercets the domain of her activity. The only two adverbs of place in the poem - both in the first hemistich of a sentence and stanza, one in Beauty's quatrains, the other in the poets' tercets - directly contrast the interiority of Beauty's being in her reign ("Je trone dans l'azur... ") to the poets' relation of exteriority with respect to her ("devant mes grandes attitudes"). The displacement affecting the sonnet's two parallel teleological expressions "pour inspirer au poete un amour" and "pour fasciner ces dociles amants" —reinforces this contrast. The direct objects are the "same" —only pluralized and subjugated the second time - but the subject of the infinitives takes different forms: in the first instance it is Beauty's synecdochic heart or breast, made to "inspire" the poet; whereas in the second instance, it is one of Beauty's possessions - the pure mirrors of her eyes ("Car j ' a i . . . / De purs miroirs... ") - t h a t fascinates the poets. An interior relation of metaphoric expression is supplanted by an exterior relation of mere possession, as "inspiration" is replaced by "fascination." It is not surprising, therefore, that the only explicit comparisons in the poem, expressing equivalence, occur within the realm of Beauty's identity with her being, in the quatrains: she is beautiful " comme un reve de pierre "; she inspires " un amour / Eternel et muet ainsi que la matiere"; she reigns in the heavens " comme un sphinx incompris." These three similes are

Correspondences versus beauty not only grammatically and positionally alike - all form the last hemistich of a first or last stanza line, and the first two rhyme - but they are semantically related as well: all three propose some kind of relation between inside and outside, spirit and matter. But the relations proposed — at least in the first two instances — are so paradoxical that they undermine the force of the very comparisons they are supposed to serve. The "reve de pierre" at the end of the line 1 is ambiguous: what is beautiful about dreaming of stone? Or a dream made of stone? And in the fourth line, how could love - the most spiritual or explosive of emotions-be like matter? In light of these uncertainties, the "sein" of the second line appears especially ambiguous: is it to be taken figuratively or literally? Is breast here a synecdoche (as I suggested above) standing for the heart and soul that inspire such love? Or is that love inspired by Beauty's literal breast, by her " b u s t " - t h a t is, by something physical, something more "like matter?" And given this ambiguity, is "meurtri" in turn to be taken figuratively, as in the common expression "coeur meurtri" (a "bruised" or "broken" heart), or literally, as one might bruise oneself on a bust of stone? The image of the sphinx in the first line of the second quatrain may appear to settle these questions (by suggesting the love of statuary, perhaps, as the standard Parnassian interpretations have it), 5 but the line's end insists that the sphinx in question remains misunderstood ("incompris"). And the strange juxtaposition in the next line - "J'unis un coeur de neige a la blancheur des cygnes" - may demonstrate just how misleading external appearances can be: the swans' whiteness, suggesting innocence and purity, covers a snowy heart of coldness and cruelty. Certainly by the time we reach the world of the poets in the third stanza, correspondences between inside and outside have become completely undeterminable and appearances evidently deceiving. For from the point of view of poets transfixed by what Beauty "herself" calls - perhaps with some self-deprecating irony - her "grandes attitudes," it is impossible to determine their authenticity: she only seems to have borrowed them from the proudest monuments. If she has not borrowed them, then why does she seem to? (Or to capture the

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active verb in the French, why does she put on airs?) And if she has indeed borrowed them, are they "really" hers? No wonder the poets' love remains eternally silent: their metaphors prove unable to determine Beauty's true inner nature. The ultimate inaccessibility of a transcendent world of equivalent correspondences and sure comparisons, however, prepares Beauty's actual effectivity in the last tercet. Her essence and identity lost among questionable comparisons of equivalence, her effect on things will be measured by relative comparisons of degree: she renders things more beautiful. It is not through essences but through things that Beauty reaches poets; not by relations of interiority but of exteriority. In fact, although the poets' inspired love and austere research may lead them to believe in the wholeness and self-identity of Beauty, she affects them only metonymically: by parts ("mon sein ... / Est fait pour inspirer," "mes yeux ... pour fasciner"); by external causality ("Les poetes... / Consumeront leurs jours... / Car j ' a i . . . de purs miroirs"); and eventually via all the things she has made "more beautiful." Denied access by the "pure mirrors [of] her eyes" to Beauty's inner essence, the poets remain endlessly fascinated by proliferating images of the more and more beautiful things illuminated by them. This concluding stanza sheds new light on the ambiguity of the term "sein" noted above. On a first reading, "sein" appears to be a metaphorical synecdoche for Beauty's inner heart or soul, which inspires eternal love. But as the perplexity of comparisons and the incongruity between inside and outside increases and Beauty's inner essence becomes increasingly unfathomable, this metaphorical reading gives way to a more literal one which provokes resignation and despair: the breast does not give access to beauty through synecdoche, but has instead become concrete, shutting the poets out and defeating them, as rock-hard matter against which they bruise themselves and will forever waste away. Yet by the time we reach the last stanza, it is ultimately the beauty of things that will fascinate them anyway - despite, or even because of, lack of access to Beauty's inner nature: the loss of the metaphorical breast thus pales in contrast with the eternal splendor of the real ones that

Correspondences versus beauty Beauty's acts of beautification will bring to light. We abandon metaphor at the cost of a bruising, but it is only when "sein" is taken literally that it becomes a candidate for the process of beautification offered by the poem as its ultimate poetic resource. The elaboration of a metonymic poetics of beautification to replace the metaphorical poetics of romanticism is an important first step in the development of Baudelairean modernism. But equally important here is the manner in which such a replacement is recommended. The metaphorical reading was not simply banished from the poem: it remains an option, appears as an insistent temptation - one to which many readers have not failed to respond. Only relatively recently have critics begun to wonder whether the perplexing metaphors and comparisons might not have been intended as self-deprecating irony by Baudelaire, as a way of demonstrating how difficult is the poet's task in trying to define beauty.6 What these readings miss, however, is that in this poem, the poets' task is defined by Beauty herself. It is she who speaks throughout, she who formulates the figures found so perplexing by the mortal poets she addresses. Irony is certainly an important part of Baudelairean modernism, but in "La Beaute" its effectiveness hinges on the crucial role played by prosopopoeia (endowing inanimate objects or abstractions with speech) - which functions here to depict within the poem a version of poetic activity very different from the one the poem itself enacts. Because "La Beaute" is a complete prosopopoeia - and it is the only poem in the collection spoken entirely by a fictional person — it cannot be understood as a lyric act of communication: the " J e " of the first line cannot be that of the writer; it is clearly "Beauty" that speaks. The poem thus immediately introduces a disjunction between its communicative level, on which Beauty addresses herself to mortals, and its textual level, on which the writer addresses readers by means of Beauty's speech to mortals.7 One subset of the audience she addresses - mortals who are poets - vainly tries to make sense of the impossible metaphors she proffers, routinely getting bruised in the process and wasting away their days in austere pursuit of inner meaning.

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Readers who identify with these poets - and one cannot really read the poem without doing so to some extent - readers who take Beauty's address at face value, as a communicative act, take the metaphorical bait, so to speak: they undertake a hopeless search for Beauty's inner essence, and are of course confounded by the breast when it appears as a concrete thing. But its becoming a thing is a precondition for its becoming endlessly more beautiful: so why do the poets bother wasting their time on essences, when Beauty's mirror-eyes make all things more beautiful - a poetic effect accessible to everyone, to any mortal? All that is required to partake of such enjoyment is to refuse the lures of metaphoric essence, and to recognize that they lead nowhere. Such a stance entails or derives from the refusal to identify communicative function with textual function, to confuse writer with speaker, and the corresponding recognition of the purpose for which the writer has produced the figure of Beauty speaking. Awareness of the prosopopoeia comprising the entire poem thus suggests a particularly modern stance: one which recalls that the author is not " i n " but somehow "behind" the poem, actively projecting the figure of Beauty as speaker and that of mortals or poets as listeners. The poem must then be taken as an act of writing, rather than direct communication: one which projects a model for reading the text that is very different from the communicative model staged within it. Inasmuch as we recall the function of the writer as distinct from the speaker, we can disengage from the tortured, fruitless metaphoric search for meaning undertaken by poetlisteners, and as readers enjoy the prospect of endlessly more beautiful things. This switch in stance is central to Baudelaire; through it, he abandons lyrical romanticism for an anti-lyrical modernism: a naive, communicative reading is proffered, but is ultimately refused or undermined by an ironic or self-conscious reading that treats the poem as text rather than as a message. We will see later how and why such a modernist poetics of dual address developed in Baudelaire. For now, it is important to review the outcome of the defeat of metaphoric reading: it leads to a metonymic poetics most of whose key features already appear in

Correspondences versus beauty this pivotal sonnet. The movement of the poem opposes a dazzling multiplicity of beautiful things to the sterile and forbidding singularity of Beauty herself, in part by passing from the perplexing realm of her identity and being to the more tangible realm of her direct actions and their prolific effects. This move corresponds to a shift from interiority to exteriority, from copulative predication, similes and metaphors to transitive verbs, and from figurative to more concrete language, as concern for essential qualities and equivalence gives way to an indiscriminate interest in things and comparisons of quantity or degree: to make all things more beautiful. These differences can perhaps be summed up in the displacement of "inspiration" by "fascination" in the concluding stanza of the poem. Baudelaire grew to disdain the romantic notion of inspiration, once bragging in his journal that "inspiration always comes when a man wants i t " - i n which case it is clearly no longer a matter of inspiration at all, but of sheer force of will or discipline. The concluding phrase - " but it does not always leave when he wants it t o " ("mais elle ne s'en va pas toujours quand il le veut") - may be equally revealing: it suggests a kind of compulsive attraction to images and things, a feeling that reappears in some distinctive prose poems on window-shopping, as well as in the famous dictum: " Glorifier le culte des images (ma grande, mon unique, ma primitive passion)." 8 In "La Beaute," the force exerted by the multiplicity of glittering objects devoid of interior essence and reflected in Beauty's mirror-eyes is called "fascination": having replaced romantic inspiration, it will guide the development of Baudelaire's metonymic poetics until it is in turn replaced by "spleen." THE BEAUTY CYCLE

It should be clear that "La Beaute" undermines and replaces the metaphoric poetics characteristic of the initial romantic cycle of Les Fleurs du Mai and epitomized, perhaps, in the wellknown sonnet, " Correspondances." I now want to show how the second-edition revisions of the cycle of poems devoted to beauty reinforce and develop the central features of the meto-

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nymic poetics adumbrated in " La Beaute." Condemned in the 1857 trial of the first edition, "Les Bijoux" was replaced in subsequent editions by two new poems, "Le Masque" (xx) and "Hymne a la Beaute" (xxi). The subversion of metaphor and the poetics of dual address central to "La Beaute" reappear in "Le Masque" in the form of ironic allegory. And the project of beautification, whose increased scope and import were already signaled in the second-edition version of "La Beaute" by the replacement of "font les etoiles plus belles" with "font toutes choses plus belles" in the concluding couplet, becomes a fullblown and explicit aesthetic program in " Hymne a la Beaute." Read in the context of the cycle on beauty, "Le Masque" makes explicit the incongruity between inside and outside, meaning and vehicle, essence and embodiment, already staged as the impossibility of metaphor in "La Beaute. " 9 It is by now well known that allegory decodes metaphor and symbol. Where metaphor as trope elides the copulative in order to express metaphoric equivalence most forcefully, allegory makes significant equivalence patent: it explicitly posits meaning as a function or relation between distinct terms. Allegory thus implies transitive rather than copulative predication: it represents as it were a willed act of writing rather than a passive reading of meaning. In these respects, it already embodies key features of metonymic rather than metaphoric poetics. While Beauty defied poetic appropriation by defeating metaphor in "La Beaute," allegory in "Le Masque" shows beauty to be a lie masking the true agony of human existence. The first half of the poem describes a female figure incarnating many of the capital qualities attributed to similar figures in the immediately preceding poems ("La Geante," "LTdeal," and "La Beaute"):

5

Contemplons ce tresor de graces florentines; Dans l'ondulation de ce corps musculeux L'Elegance et la Force abondent, soeurs divines. Cette femme, morceau vraiment miraculeux, Divinement robuste, adorablement mince, Est faite pour troner sur des lits somptueux, Et charmer les loisirs d'un pontife ou d'un prince.

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- Aussi, vois ce souris fin et voluptueux Ou la Fatuite promene son extase; Ce long regard sournois, langoureux et moqueur; Ce visage mignard, tout encadre de gaze, Dont chaque trait nous dit avec un air vainqueur: "La Volupte m'appelle et 1'Amour me couronne!" A cet etre doue de tant de majeste Vois quel charme excitant la gentillesse donne! Approchons, et tournons autour de sa beaute.

This inspired description is brought to an abrupt halt by the discovery, narrated in the second half of the poem, of the true reality behind the lying mask: O blaspheme de l'art! 6 surprise fatale! La femme au corps divin, promettant le bonheur, Par le haut se termine en monstre bicephale! 20

25

Mais non! ce n'est qu'un masque, un decor suborneur, Ce visage eclaire d'une exquise grimace, Et, regarde, voici, crispee atrocement, La veritable tete, et la sincere face Renversee a l'abri de la face qui ment. Pauvre grande beaute! le magnifique fleuve De tes pleurs aboutit dans mon coeur soucieux; Ton mensonge m'enivre, et mon ame s'abreuve Aux flots que la Douleur fait jaillir de tes yeux!

Far from basking in her glory, the figure is weeping; and she weeps because, like the poets in " La Beaute," she is condemned to live in real time: 30

35

- Mais pourquoi pleure-t-elle? Elle, beaute parfaite Qui mettrait a ses pieds le genre humain vaincu, Quel mal mysterieux ronge son flanc d'athlete? - Elle pleure, insense, parce qu'elle a vecu! Et parce qu'elle vit! Mais ce qu'elle deplore Surtout, ce qui la fait fremir jusqu'aux genoux, C'est que demain, helas! il faudra vivre encore! Demain, apres-demain et toujours! — comme nous!

In both poems, the use of all three main verb tenses opposes the world of mortal existence to the world of perfect beauty, which upon reading "Le Masque" proves to be a lie.

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"Le Masque" thus in one sense makes explicit what the incongruous metaphors of "La Beaute" only suggested on careful rereading: that a direct correspondence between truth and appearance is impossible or misleading; beauty's appearance only masks her true agony. Yet in another sense, this very assertion of metaphorical non-correspondence depends on a correspondence between sensation and sense, figure and meaning at another level, a correspondence achieved by the "Allegorical Statue in the Renaissance Manner" named by the poem's subtitle. Allegory functions here as a means of explicitly making sense in order to facilitate the decoding of metaphoricity. But this allegorical truth about the impossibility of metaphor is the message of the statue, not necessarily of the poem itself. As the discursive mode shifts from description to narration in the second half of the poem, the referent of the poem turns out to be not an object but an event, not the statue described by the narrator, but an encounter with the statue at an exhibition. The allegorical lesson derived from the encounter is that beauty is condemned to live in time, tomorrow and forever-just as we are: " - comme nous!" (1. 36). But the extent of inclusion implied by this " us " is put into question by the poem's complex system of address. The " Contemplons" of the first line seems to address us as readers, just as later lines seem to enjoin us to examine the statue's magnificence: "Aussi, vois ce souris fin et voluptueux... " (1. 8). But the address of the last stanza reveals instead that the narrator has been addressing a companion all along: the person who asks in line 29 " — Mais pourquoi pleuret-elle?" and whom the narrator then calls a fool in his reply: " - Elle pleure, insense', parce qu'elle a vecu!" (1. 32). The message we were led to believe was addressed to " us " as readers turns out to be addressed instead to an interlocutor within the poem itself, now understood as staging a conversation between visitors to an exhibition such as the Salon of 1859. This is in fact where Baudelaire first saw the statue, which he discussed in his Salon of 1859 and then made the topic or pretext of "Le Masque." As in "La Beaute," though by other means, the communicative function is framed by a textual function that sets itself off as distinct: here, the communicative function

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imparting narrative meaning at the end must be understood as an event occurring within the narrative, and not as the messagecontent of the text at all - lest the reader of the poem be reduced to the status and position of the "fool" in the poem. This disjunction between communicative and textual function reproduces rhetorically the fall from the metaphoric realm of embodied essences into real time that the poem depicts narratively. Just as perfect beauty ("La Beaute") turns out not to be the truth but a mask (" Le Masque ") within the narrative, this narrative message itself turns out not to be addressed to us as readers, but framed within a text, instead. Yet even though confidence in the narrator's message is undermined in this way, reference to the real " allegorical statue " Baudelaire reviewed in his Salon ofi8jg remains in force: when the poem is added to the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai two years after its initial publication, a dedication is also added: "To Ernest Christophe, sculptor." It serves not only to specify which "allegorical statue" the subtitle is referring to, but also to supply readers with an addressee for the text preferable to the one offered within the narrative. Now, even though the narrative message is addressed to a fool, the text can satisfactorily be understood as addressed "to Ernest Christophe." Yet the poem is not really addressed to Ernest Christophe, but merely dedicated to him - for the text is not "saying anything" to, has no "message" for, the sculptor; it does not supply a message at the textual level to replace the one it subverts on the communicative level: it merely makes reference to Christophe as the person who produced the real statue exhibited in the 1859 Salon that Baudelaire reviewed. Bracketing its own meanings, the text ends up referring ultimately to its historical context of production, instead: to the context in which the sculptor addressed his statue to (among other viewers/reviewers) the poet, who in turn addressed his poem to (among other readers) the sculptor. This strategy of emptying the text of meaning the better to make reference to historical context will be more fully developed in the "Tableaux Parisiens." In the context of the beauty cycle, "Le Masque" adds "ironic allegory" to the metonymic poetics initiated in "La

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Beaute. "Just as reference according to Jakobson can be divided into two kinds, so can figures of speech, including irony and allegory, be classified as metaphoric or metonymic, though the most common are metaphoric in kind. Inasmuch as figures of speech usually depend on one term being understood as standing for another, they ultimately make sense by means of a metaphoric relation of substitution and equivalence. (Even the figure commonly called "metonymy" is metaphoric in this sense: in the expression "fifty sails," "sail" stands as an equivalent for "ship.") Irony as it is usually understood, i.e. as "meaning the opposite of what is said," is also a metaphoric figure in this sense: stable meaning is secured by a relation of equivalence operating through the exclusive disjunction of binary opposition: either this (apparent meaning) or that (opposed meaning), with no other possibilities; and since not this, therefore that. The intended, ironic meaning is the strict opposite of the stated meaning. But there is another kind of irony that involves not the opposite of what is said, but only something other than what is said. Rather than "meaning the opposite of what is said," metonymic irony entails merely "not meaning what is said. " 10 Metonymic irony forgoes determinate meaning by undermining the stability of virtual substitution on the metaphoric axis. It is this kind of irony that functions in the beauty cycle to decode the romanticism of the earlier poems, not by attacking romantic metaphors in order to replace them with better ones, but rather by attacking metaphoricity itself, and the poetic symbolism that romantic metaphoricity entails. Recourse to allegory is one way of decoding metaphoricity. Whereas metaphor implies a universe of intrinsic analogy uniting outside and inside, meaning and vehicle, in eternal harmony, allegory construes such relations in terms of extrinsic causality, temporal imbrication, and (ultimately) of pure chance. But in Baudelaire, allegory itself becomes ironic, thereby contributing to further metonymic decoding. Traditional, metaphoric allegory reinforces the metaphoric axis by equating this with that, albeit more explicitly than metaphor as trope: it can be formulated V (f) M, where (f) is a posited (rather

Correspondences versus beauty than merely implied) equivalence of vehicle (V) and meaning (M). "Le Masque," however, undermines rather than reinforces the metaphoric axis: metonymic irony reframes and subverts the allegorical message of the statue, yet without supplying any other, "deeper" message, whether by way of strict opposition (as in conventional irony) or some other metaphoric figure. This ironic stance toward allegory is in one sense a negative or privative one: the allegory is meant only for fools. In metaphoric allegory, such a subversion of determinate meaning would defeat the purpose of figure entirely, since the vehicle means nothing without its allegorical import; as romantic champions of symbolism recognized, the discovery of allegorical meaning completely exhausts its vehicle, which unlike the symbol is devoid of any value of its own. But in the metonymic allegory of "Le Masque," the subversion of meaning serves to underscore reference to context, in that the text's ultimate address refers to the real allegorical statue by Christophe: far from defeating its purpose, putting the meaning of metonymic allegory in question ironically redeems its vehicle, instead. If" Le Masque " represents an advance beyond the confusions of metaphoricity in "La Beaute" to their explicit denunciation by means of allegory, this is a self-consciously ironic allegory which can offer only a privative reading of metaphor and meaning, thereby undermining its own message. The result is a strictly "meaningless" — but not insignificant — gesture of appreciation for real things in the vecu of real time. In the context of the project inaugurated in "La Beaute," this forfeit of meaning proves to be a small price to pay for the prospect of enjoying beauty's effects in real life. "Hymne a la Beaute" then delineates the conditions under which such enjoyment may take place, by refusing metaphoric identity and the law of the excluded middle so crucial to the stability of the socio-symbolic order. Just as the metonymic irony of "La Beaute" and the ironic allegory of" Le Masque " go beyond attacking metaphors to subvert metaphoric poetics altogether, "Hymne" goes beyond the reversal of value-hierarchies to subvert the metaphoric logic of binary opposition underlying hierarchy itself.11

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At the close of the beauty cycle, "Hymne a la Beaute" represents in many respects the symmetrically reversed mirror image of "La Beaute," the sonnet that opened it. Like "La Beaute," "Hymne" moves topically from the realm of Beauty, depicted in the first four stanzas, to the world of poets, depicted in the final two (as the distribution of subject and object pronouns makes abundantly clear). But whereas "La Beaute" considered everything, even poets' experience, from Beauty's perspective, "Hymne" steadfastly maintains the perspective of the Poet in relation to her, as the framing apostrophes of the second and second-to-last lines ("O Beaute," "6 mon unique reine), and indeed the address of the title, make clear. The first part of the poem, devoted to Beauty, is comprised of two pairs of stanzas, each of which begins with an either/or question regarding the origins of Beauty, and ends with a refutation of the question itself, instead of an answer:

4

Viens-tu du ciel profond ou sors-tu de Tabime, O Beaute? Ton regard, infernal et divin, Verse confinement le bienfait et le crime, Et Ton peut pour cela te comparer au vin.

12

Tu contiens dans ton oeil le couchant et l'aurore; Tu repands des parfums comme un soir orageux; Tes baisers sont un philtre et ta bouche une amphore Qui font le heros lache et l'enfant courageux. Sors-tu du gouffre noir ou descends-tu des astres? Le Destin charme suit tes jupons comme un chien; Tu semes au hasard la joie et les desastres, Et tu gouvernes tout et ne reponds de rien.

16

Tu marches sur des morts, Beaute, dont tu te moques; De tes bijoux l'Horreur n'est pas le moins charmant, Et le Meurtre, parmi tes plus cheres breloques, Sur ton ventre orgueilleux danse amoureusement.

8

We may note that the alternatives presented in the questions themselves already decode fundamental hierarchies of the sociosymbolic order, by suggesting [contra Kant, among others) that beauty may spring from and incarnate evil rather than good. But while the questions undermine essential hierarchies by put-

Correspondences versus beauty ting heaven and hell, for example, on equal terms, the answers take decoding even further by thoroughly confusing the terms and refusing the logic in which such hierarchies are expressed. It is not with respect to semantics that the answers refute the questions. On the contrary, what enables us to recognize the responses as answers to those questions is that they share a semantic system structured by the opposition of heaven and hell. Terms such as "divin" (1. 2), "bienfait" (1. 3), 'Taurore" (1. 5), "l'enfant courageux" (1. 8), and "joie" (1. 11) align with heaven; while "infernal" (1. 2), "crime" (1. 3), "le couchant" (1. 5), "le heros lache (1. 8), and "desastres" (1. 11) align with hell. Rather than the semantics, it is the grammar and syntax - the poetics - of the responses that belie the essentializing questions that provoke them. The questions are based on a corollary of the law of identity, the law of the excluded middle: something must be either one thing or its opposite, since all other possibilities are ruled out by exclusive disjunction [either this or that). Thus metaphoric identity within socio-symbolic codes is defined and stabilized by binary opposition, as well as by strict equivalence: this is the logic underlying valuehierarchies in socio-symbolic orders. According to such logic, beauty will come from either heaven or hell, either from the blackest depths or from the heavens. Rather than accept this exclusive disjunction, the answers contain a series of conjunctions (this and that, and this and that, and...) composing a catalogue of Beauty's various effects. Like "La Beaute," the question-and-answer format moves from Beauty's essence or origins to her effects, but in "Hymne," the nature of these effects proves no more possible to identify with any certainty than her essence itself. In cases like "le bienfait et le crime" (1. 3), or "la joie et les desastres " (1. 11), one effect simply contradicts the other. In line 8, however, the effects are themselves internally contradictory and act to disrupt their objects' essences: the hero is made cowardly and the child courageous. The kinetics of Beauty prove equally confounding. The Poet's questions locate Beauty on a vertical axis: she either springs from spacious skies or rises from the abyss (1. 1), either emerges from the depths of darkness

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or descends from the firmament (1. 9), issues forth from either heaven or hell (1. 21). But the domain of her activity does not correspond to these alternatives; it occupies instead a more or less horizontal plane, where her bearing oscillates wildly between movements of concentration and dispersal ("Tu contiens dans ton oeil" versus " T u repands des parfums" 11. 5-6); between figures of close attachment and chaotic release ("Le Destin charme suit tes jupons comme un chien" vs. "Tu semes au hasard lajoie et les desastres" 11. 10-11); and between a formidable upright posture ("Tu marches sur des morts" 1. 13) and a seductive prostrate one ("le Meurtre [danse] sur ton ventre" 11. 15-16). No wonder, in a domain "governed" by chance and confusion, that the only daring and potentially significant comparison is tendered quite prosaically (complete with an explanation: "pour cela"), and only as a possibility rather than an affirmation, without guarantee of results: "Et Ton peut pour cela te comparer au vin" (1. 4). If in "La Beaute" metaphor and simile proved perplexing, here they are eschewed by the poet completely, and attributed instead to an anonymous " o n . " When the Poet is, finally, able to speak (unlike the poets of "La Beaute"), and speaks in his own voice and on his own behalf, at the end of "Hymne a la Beaute," it is because he has abandoned - with a resounding "qu'importe" that will echo crucially in later poems in the collection12 - the futile attempt to determine the origins and essence of Beauty, and is willing, even eager, simply to submit to the effects of her charms instead.

24

Que tu viennes du ciel ou de l'enfer, qu'importe, O Beaute! monstre enorme, effrayant, ingenu! Si ton oeil, ton souris, ton pied, m'ouvrent la porte D'un Infini que j'aime et n'ai jamais connu? De Satan ou de Dieu, qu'importe? Ange ou Sirene, Qu'importe, si tu rends, - fee aux yeux de velours, Rythme, parfum, lueur, 6 mon unique reine! L'univers moins hideux et les instants moins lourds?

Not only do these conclusions not answer the initial questions, they actively refuse them, and refute their binary logic as well.

Correspondences versus beauty What matters now is not the inner essence of Beauty; as before, the qualities attributable to Beauty herself appear to contradict one another: "effrayant, ingenu." More important, these contradictory qualities appear in a series which lists them without disclosing their interrelations or mitigating the ensuing confusion. What now counts above all are external parts of her body - the syntax has shifted from exclusive disjunction to paratactic enumeration of parts, not even linked with the word " a n d " : "ton oeil, ton souris, ton pied," "yeux de velours, / Rythme, parfum, lueur... " - and the effects these body-parts may have on the Poet: to open the door to an unknown yet longed-for infinity; to diminish the horror of the universe and ease the burden of time's passing moments. In "Hymne," a poetics of inclusive disjunction replaces exclusive disjunction, in order to belie and subvert essentializing dichotomies in favor of Beauty's multiple and varied effects. Yet, as ardently longed-for as they are, these effects are by no means a definitive answer, for they are posed not simply as answers, but partly also as questions. The world of poets is a universe governed by chance and without guarantees: " T u semes au hasard la joie et les desastres, / Et tu gouvernes tout et ne reponds de rien" (11. 11-12). The concluding stanzas invert the question—answer format of the first four, asserting with a bold "qu'importe" their answer to - their refusal o f - t h e "essential" questions. But this brazenly indifferent answer is itself contingent on Beauty's effectiveness: "qu'importe ...si [tu] m'ouvre[s] ... Qu'importe, si tu rends...?" (11. 21-23, 26). These fervently hoped-for possibilities that are posed by the mortal Poet regarding Beauty, and which end the poem and "close" the cycle, thus mirror and respond to the clearly superlative assertion made by Beauty to mortal poets in "La Beaute" at the beginning of the cycle: she has pure mirror eyes, she explains, that make all things more beautiful. In response, the modern Poet in a world ruled by chance can only hedge his bets and wager that for him they will, if not make all things more beautiful, at least make the universe less hideous and time's passing less grievous. While "Hymne" adopts a perspective symmetrically opposed

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to that of" La Beaute," its metonymic poetics is much the same. Both poems are structured around the opposition between subject and object; in both, a harmonious and eternal realm of intransitive inner essence is opposed to a contingent and temporal world of transitive external effects, and self-identical wholeness is contrasted with multiplicities of body-parts and possessions. Yet compared with the poets depicted in "La Beaute," the Poet of " H y m n e " has learned something: that the metaphorical realm of identity and essences is not just selfdefeating, but completely irrelevant. Not only does the Poet use no metaphors in the stanzas we examined, but with the refrain of "qu'importe" he categorically rejects questions of essence and origin in favor of transitive effects located "beyond good and evil." The beauty cycle thereby closes with an act of decoding directed at the fundamental value-hierarchies of the socio-symbolic order (heaven and hell, good and evil), and subverts them by defying binary logic altogether, alternately depicting beauty's desired effects as both good and evil, and therefore truly neither. The increasingly indeterminate nature of beauty's effects at the close of the cycle prefigures the evolution of Baudelaire's metonymic poetics beyond beautification to the sheer intensification of experience in spleen. Before moving beyond the beauty cycle, a remark about the rhetoric of its final poem is in order. For the tight symmetry of the two parts of "Hymne a la Beaute" we have just delineated - w i t h the reciprocity between the allegorical " j e " and " t u , " the logic of question and answer, answer and question, and so forth - this symmetry is broken by an anomalous stanza intervening between the sections devoted to Beauty and the Poet, set apart like a miniature portrait from the surrounding discourse of anxious internal debate:

20

L'ephemere ebloui vole vers toi, chandelle, Crepite, flambe et dit: Benissons ce flambeau! L'amoureux pantelant incline sur sa belle A Fair d'un moribond caressant son tombeau.

Semantically, the prepositional object " t o i " (1. 17) evidently refers to the second-person figure of the preceding four stanzas,

Correspondences versus beauty namely Beauty. But the mode of her figuration has here changed abruptly from allegory to metaphor, as the succeeding apostrophe, "chandelle," equates the " t o i " (presumably Beauty) with the candle whose flame will consume... literally, the dazzled mayfly ("Pephemere ebloui") that starts the line. The same change in mode of figuration has affected the Poet: for to make sense of this stanza in the context of the poem, we take "l'ephemere" on first reading to mean the Poet —either by metaphor (may-fly :poet::candle:Beauty) or by synecdoche (a part — the quality of being ephemeral — for the whole, the Poet). This metaphorical reading is supported in the next line when "l'ephemere" speaks and blesses the candle's flame, thereby confirming or even enacting the poem's religious title, "Hymn to Beauty." Indeed, given the irrelevance of Beauty's divine or infernal origin and the radical promiscuity of her effects, the phrase "Let us bless this flame" (1. 18) seems to be the only line in the poem that corresponds to the title at all. Metaphorical figuration and relations of equivalence accelerate in the next two lines. The may-fly/Poet first becomes a lover: "L'ephemere" and "L'amoureux" occupy parallel positions as subjects of the two sentences comprising this stanza. Reinforced by the rhyme scheme and semantic resonance linking "chandelle" with "belle," and the "flambeau" that kills with the cherished "tombeau," this parallelism implies an equivalence between the may-fly and lover as metaphors for the Poet that is a far cry from the explicit logic of the other stanzas and the allegorical force of the " j e " that apostrophizes Beauty and addresses her there as " T u . " This difference is sharply accentuated by the surprising appearance of third-person possessive pronouns in lines 19 and 20: "sa belle" and "son tombeau." If we were right in taking "L'ephemere" and "L'amoureux" metaphorically to be the Poet, should we not expect "ma Belle" and "mon tombeau"? The stanza would be far less disconcerting, indeed, were it to read: Ephemere, je vole envers toi, ma chandelle, Crepite, flambe et dit: Benissons ce flambeau! Amoureux pantelant, incline sur ma Belle, J'ai Fair d'un moribond caressant mon tombeau.

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But it does not, and the effect of the actual text is to evacuate the Poet as lyric subject of enunciation from the stanza where he is supposed to appear most poetical, via metaphor, and where what " h e " says comes closest to matching the sense of the title. Not only is the " j e " absent, and replaced moreover by thirdperson possessives, but the terms used metaphorically to represent the Poet are themselves only substantivized adjectives: "ephemere," "amoureux," "moribund" — as if the core substance of the Poet had disappeared beneath a welter of mere attributes and possessions. As we reach the last two lines of this curious but compelling stanza, the direction of its movement through metaphor becomes clear: the metaphorical figure of the lyric poet as ephemeral, dying lover is abruptly dismissed through the use of the third person possessive pronouns, presumably by the allegorical " I " that will stake its claim in the following stanzas of the poem; the initial "toi," referring back to the Beauty of the previous stanzas, is first equated metaphorically with "chandelle"; t h e n - b y a rhyme comprised, suggestively enough, of the third-person feminine pronoun, " elle " - equated with " belle " (itself modified by a third-person possessive " sa " ) ; and finally equated — by explicit comparison — with "son tombeau." It is no wonder, then, that the Poet abandons the figures of lyric metaphor, since they have led him directly to death. He has learned to rely instead on self-consciously ironic allegory, and to count on the ameliorative effects of Beauty's parts as they are registered in real time. Like the metonymic poetics informing the project of beautification, this anti-lyric stance will reappear in the poems devoted to spleen. Our analysis of the concluding poems of the revised beauty cycle has underscored two aspects of the metonymic poetics inaugurated in " La Beaute." The mode of dual address in " La Beaute," designed to cast doubt on the viability of romantic symbolism, takes in "Le Masque" the more explicit form of ironic allegory, where the allegory serves to decode metaphor, but is ironized in turn to undermine meaning and foreground the text's reference to context. The projected redemption of all things by Beauty's eyes, meanwhile, appears in "Hymne a la

Correspondences versus beauty Beaute" as the alleviation of human suffering through the contingent effects of Beauty's acts and body-parts, which compensate for the refusal to submit to the conventional valuehierarchies identifying her origins and essence. Partly out of a modernist preference for textual inscription rather than direct address, in which meaningful communication is subordinated to contextual reference; and partly out of a refusal of the binary oppositions, essential values, and hallowed metaphors of romantic symbolism, Baudelaire's metonymic poetics aims against the grain of (ethical, aesthetic, poetic) socio-symbolic codes to focus primarily on things. What becomes poetic is the beauty of any thing, thus of everything: in Beauty's eyes, "all things [become] more beautiful." Hence the profusion of things referred to in Baudelaire's texts: the move from singular to plural, from unicity and binarity to multiplicity, and the increasingly pervasive use of sheer enumeration. The decoded referentiality of metonymic allegory frees or strips real things of preconceived value in order to make them more beautiful, or less hideous: what counts is not their "essence" but the degree to which their beauty can be enhanced poetically and these effects of beauty multiplied indefinitely. At the same time, the contingency of this poetic enhancing-act is underscored by the accompanying "voracious irony": the poetic "charge" added to things to make them ever more superlative is not an effect of divine inspiration, but a product of worldly fascination, and this fascination is susceptible at any moment to ironic reversal leading to or resulting from the weary tedium of spleen. Were Baudelaire to forge a term for the effect of allegory in his metonymical poetics, it might well be "ironic supernaturalism." 13

METONYMY PREVAILS

"La Beaute" and the revised cycle of beauty introduce a metonymic poetics that both decodes the romantic stance expressed in the preceding poems and informs most of the rest of the collection, setting the stage for other significant revisions

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and additions to Les Fleurs du Mai, but also for critical reflections on the role of poetry in market society that occur in the Petits Poemes en prose. The most immediate effects of the revised beauty cycle, however, bear on the directly succeeding poems in the collection, particularly "Parfum exotique" (xxn), which now appears between two new poems: "Hymne a la Beaute" and "La Chevelure" (xxm), whose addition to the second edition accentuates and extends the beautification project beyond the bounds of the beauty cycle itself. The new context in which "Parfum" now appears significantly alters our reading of a sonnet that in some ways recalls the synaesthesia typical of " Correspondances" and the evocative power of other poems from the romantic cycle. Comparing "Parfum exotique" with the well-known, early sonnet "La Vie anterieure" (xn) will enable us to see how "Parfum" realizes the program of metonymic beautification announced at the end of "Hymne a la beaute." I have purposely chosen to compare two poems whose themes and tone are very similar, for it is the differences between metaphoric and metonymic poetics that truly distinguish the early cycle from later ones. For the same reason, I will - in Chapter 3 - compare one of the "Spleen" poems with another poem from the romantic cycle, to show again that metonymic poetics prevails despite the recurrence of themes. "La Vie anterieure" in many ways embodies the aesthetic epitomized in "Correspondances," from the first stanza's depiction of a former life under "majestic pillars" and "vast porticoes" (recalling the "living pillars of Nature's temple" in "Correspondances"), to the confusion of sight and sound typical of the doctrine of synaesthesia. In "Parfum exotique," similar synaesthetic "correspondences" are suggested between sight and smell, and then between smell and sound. Nevertheless, the intervention of the revised beauty cycle throws into sharp relief the very different mode of presentation of these correspondences compared with a metaphoric sonnet such as "La Vie anterieure." Parfum exotique Quand, les deux yeux fermes, en un soir chaud d'automne Je respire Podeur de ton sein chaleureux,

Correspondences versus beauty

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Je vois derouler des rivages heureux Qu'eblouissent les feux d'un soleil monotone; Une ile paresseuse oil la nature donne Des arbres singuliers et des fruits savoureux; Des hommes dont le corps est mince et vigoureux, 8 Et des femmes dont Poeil par sa franchise etonne. Guide par ton odeur vers de charmants climats, Je vois un port rempli de voiles et de mats 11 Encor tout fatigues par la vague marine, Pendant que le parfum des verts tamariniers, Qui circule dans Fair et m'enfle la narine, 14 Se mele dans mon ame au chant des mariniers.

4

The fall into time depicted in "La Beaute" and particularly in "Le Masque" echoes in the very first word of "Parfum": " Q u a n d . " This is not to say that time is absent in "La Vie anterieure," which is patently about the past, as the title indicates; but this is a completely undifferentiated past where in a sense nothing happens, as evidenced by the predominant, recurring use of the imperfect tense in five of the seven conjugated verbs. Nor do the other two conjugated verbs depict events or actions; they simply situate the Poet in the natural setting whose evocation is the poem's main point: 2 10

J'ai longtemps habite sous de vastes portiques Que les soleils teignaient de mille feux, C'est la que j'ai vecu dans les voluptes calmes, Au milieu de l'azur, des vagues, des splendeurs Et des esclaves nus ...

"Parfum exotique," on the contrary, insists on the explicitly temporal and implicitly causal relation of inhaling a fragrance and seeing with closed eyes ("Quand je respire ... Je vois ... "). The implicit causality of this temporal relation is made more explicit in the tercets: while ("Pendant que... ") the scent of tamarind trees wafts in the air, the fragrance now actively guides the Poet toward his visions (1. 9). What the Poet sees is a series of images enumerated without the relations that might obtain between them being made

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explicit: "des rivages / une ile / des hommes / et des femmes" (11. 3, 5, 7, 8). This enumeration of images contrasts with the enumeration presented in lines IO-I i of "La Vie anterieure," for the elements listed there are all objects of the preposition " Au milieu de ... " whose subject is the Poet and whose point of reference is underscored in the first line of the stanza by "C'est la que j'ai vecu": the Poet is located at the very center of the past life being evoked, whereas in "Parfum" he is merely a spectator. Indeed, the final tercet of "La Vie anterieure" suggests that it is not merely the Poet, but his deepest secret that lies at the heart of the setting evoked: nature is not only reflected in the Poet's eyes (1. 8), but may be said to revolve in an evertightening spiral around the core of his being, as adverbs of place move from "under" (1. i) through " i n " (1. 9) to "in the middle of" (1. 10). In this "former life," outer nature seems to correspond exactly (even "uniquely" 1. 13) to the Poet's inner life. By contrast, the very title "Parfum exotique" names not a whole life, but a discrete thing (a "stimulus") which initiates an almost mechanical process whose logic the poem will attempt to spell out. At the beginning of the first quatrain, with its repetition of " J e " and the present indicative (11. 2-3), the Poet appears to initiate the process: when he inhales, he sees. The end of the first and the entire second quatrain consist of the series of images provoked by inhaling the fragrance. The explicit stipulation of Poetic agency here contrasts sharply with the Poet's passivity in " La Vie anterieure " (and indeed his total absence from "Correspondances"): there, he merely lives, and it is nature that actively "colors the vast porticoes" (1. 2), "mixes [its] rich music with the colors of sunset" (11. 6-8), and so forth; here, he sees (11. 3 and 10). But by the first tercet, the process begins to appear as if it were running on automatic: the Poet still sees, but he is no longer a sovereign subject; he has become the object of the woman's fragrance that guides him (1. 9). Retrospectively, it appears as though the Poet never really initiated anything, but has merely noted the temporal and proto-causal mechanism of the process he is undergoing. Indeed in the last tercet, he is reduced

Correspondences versus beauty virtually to a nostril flared by the scent of tamarind trees. In the last line of the poem, it is true, this scent mixes "synaesthetically" with the chant of mariners; but this confusion is attributed neither to some natural agency, nor to the Poet himself: it simply takes place (through the reflexive "Se mele" 1. 14); and not in nature, but "in his soul" (1. 14). Unlike the passive Poet living at the heart of an active nature in the romantic cycle, the Poet in this sonnet intervenes between sensation and meaning — even if the apparent action of the first quatrain is reduced to the mere location of relatively autonomous poetic interchange by the last tercet. Synaesthesia has become, in line with the metonymic poetics of beautification, not a reading of "universal analogy," but a function of Poetic inscription, even if the Poet himself (or his "soul") turns out to be only the locus rather than the agent of the process. Finally, and again in the revised context of the new ending to the beauty cycle, "Parfum exotique" provides an answer to the question raised by the Poet's wager at the end of "Hymne": leaving aside the abstract question of Beauty's origins, can she - or her "rhythm, fragrance, glow" ("Hymne," 1. 27) - open the door to infinity, and make the entire universe less hideous? In the concrete case of the woman addressed in "Parfum exotique," the answer is yes. And it is not the woman herself that affects the Poet and enables him to see, but rather a part of her body — or more precisely, a part of a part: the smell of her breast (1. 2). Indeed, to say that the poem recounts an encounter with a particular woman is almost an exaggeration: this is a specific woman and not Beauty, to be sure, but here only the woman's breast and its fragrance are mentioned in the poem; the second person whom the poem addresses takes the exclusive form of possessive pronouns (11. 2 and 9); she "appears" only in parts and through the effects they produce in the Poet. This is, of course, precisely the manner of operation of womanly beauty that "Hymne" and the beauty cycle led us to expect. What matters is not the woman as an essence or a whole, but rather the flights of fancy parts of her body may set off in the poetic imagination.

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The sense of success of the beautification project and the emphasis on the intoxicating effects of women's body-parts are considerably reinforced by the addition of "La Chevelure" to the second edition, immediately following "Parfum exotique." As the title makes abundantly clear, it is the woman's hair, and not herself, that provokes the Poet's imagination. It is the woman's hair that is addressed in the first lines; and up until the very last stanza, it is "chevelure" and its metaphorical equivalents that are repeatedly addressed in the second person. Where "La Chevelure" goes beyond the earlier "Parfum exotique" in developing the poetics of beautification is in its insistence on the role of active poetic volition and desire in attaining beauty's effects. The inverted syntax of the poem's first complete sentence underscores the importance of the Poet's active wanting by isolating "Je la veux" at the beginning of line 5, and by preceding it with his motive for wanting to shake her hair: to revive the memories sleeping there.

5

O toison, moutonnant jusque sur l'encolure! O boucles! O parfum charge de nonchaloir! Extase! Pour peupler ce soir P alcove obscure Des souvenirs dormant dans cette chevelure, Je la veux agiter dans l'air comme un mouchoir!

The force of this inaugural vouloir echoes throughout the poem in the repeated use of the future tense expressing a Poetic will that, as desire, ultimately appears infinite in its own right: "J'irai la-bas" (1. n ) ; "Je plongerai ma tete... Dans ce noir ocean " (1. 21); then " mon esprit subtil... saura vous retrouver, 6 fecond paresse " (11. 23-24); and finally, 32

Longtemps! toujours! ma main dans ta criniere lourde Semera le rubis, la perle, et le saphir, Afin qu'a mon desir tu ne sois jamais sourde!

Following "Parfum exotique," "La Chevelure" appears to give an equally unequivocal and even more strenuously affirmative answer to the question of Beauty's potential effectiveness that is posed at the end of "Hymne a la Beaute." But the final stanza of the poem, like the final stanza of "Hymne a la Beaute," recasts this apparent certainty as a

Correspondences versus beauty wager: for the first time addressing the woman herself rather than her hair, the Poet promises to shower her (or more precisely to "sow her m a n e " - " [sjemera ... dans ta criniere") with jewels in the hope that she will always respond to his desire. The subjunctive following the optative construction "afin q u e . . . " (as opposed to "afin d e . . . " with an infinitive, for instance) serves to underscore the contingency of the Poet's gambit. But then the final couplet of the poem transforms the woman back into things: the place where he dreams, the flask from which he drinks the wine of memory. And this in the form of a question: is she not such a place; is she not the flask of memory? 35

N'es-tu pas l'oasis ou je reve, et la gourde Ou je hume a longs traits le vin du souvenir?

These lines appear on one reading as a serious question suddenly casting doubt on the Poet's vigorous enthusiasm: is this woman really not what I think she is? But in another sense, the poem has already answered the question: it states unequivocally in line 14 that her hair contains a dazzling dream ("Tu contiens, mer d'ebene, un eblouissant reve"). The question on this reading would be merely rhetorical and therefore positively assertive: is she not just as I say she is?! And it would affirm the ability of the Poet to achieve the effects of beauty through the exercise of volition and desire. Nevertheless, the promise of jewels aiming to secure a lasting response to the Poet's desire, the question that ends the poem, and the uncertainty even as to the kind of question it is - all suggest that the Poetic project of beautification that appears here as a willed future is a contingent one, and one which, in a world governed by chance, will never be attainable with absolute certainty. It is true, as Barbara Johnson has demonstrated, that compared to the prose "version" of this poem (entitled " U n hemisphere dans une chevelure" [17]), the verse version appears metaphorical. 14 Yet compared with " Correspondances" and the other poems of the romantic cycle, what is striking about the many equivalences proposed in " L a Chevelure" between the

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woman's hair and forests, oceans, harbors, and so on, is that they are all functions of the Poet: not hidden correspondences of nature herself, known only to an elect few, but effects of the Poetic will foregrounded in the first stanza and echoing throughout the poem in the recurring future tense. Johnson's assertion that "La Chevelure" is predominantly metaphorical derives from her concern with deconstructing the binary opposition between two genres, (metaphorical) verse and (metonymical) prose poetry. But situated in a different context - the context precisely of Les Fleurs du Mai - the verse poem that appeared metaphorical compared with its prose doublet nevertheless functions metonymically in relation to its predecessors in the romantic cycle of the collection. To put the point another way, metaphoric poetics can be decoded more than once; and indeed we might consider the "later," prose "Chevelure" as functioning - much as "Le Masque" and "Hymne a la Beaute" do with respect to "La B e a u t e " - i n order to make the decoding inscribed in the "earlier," verse "Chevelure" more explicit and hence more legible. To assert in this way that the decoding of metaphor by metonymy is already at work in the verse version of "Chevelure, " which Johnson considers comparatively metaphorical, perhaps only confirms the conclusion she herself draws from her comparison of the two versions of the poem: that the difference between metaphor and metonymy does not so much clearly distinguish verse from prose as it differentiates each from itself; on this view, decoding has everywhere " always already" begun (pp. 54-55). But Johnson's claim that "La Chevelure" is metaphorical is based not only on the preponderance of metaphors found there, but also on what she calls the Poet's "recuperation of the past" by which he is supposedly able to "attain the totality of his identity" (p. 50). We will see in Part II that integrating personal identity by recuperating the past is a program characteristic of the romantic cycle that the beautification project rejects and replaces. For now, we may note that it is not clear in what sense or on what grounds Johnson can assert that the Poet attains identity and recuperates his past by means of the head of hair invoked in this poem.

Correspondences versus beauty For one thing, contact with the head of hair does not stimulate memory alone: it is in fact more likely to provoke revery. " I n the last two lines of the poem, the woman becomes the ideal container of memories," Johnson asserts (p. 45); but the woman first becomes the place where the Poet dreams, in those last two lines, and this explicitly reiterates the " T u contiens, mer d'ebene, un eblouissant reve" of line 14, as we have seen. References to memory occur only in a subordinate conditional and an interrogative clause (11. 4-5, 34-35), whereas revery appears once in that same interrogative (11. 34-35) and once in a flat affirmative (1. 14). What is at issue in this poem is thus not memory alone, but fantasy-production in general.15 Furthermore, the poem is dominated by the future tense, not the past: the poem presents a project to be realized, not an achievement already attained. Finally, the optative of the last stanza indicates that the project's realization is by no means guaranteed, even if the rhetorical question ending the poem suggests that the Poet's desire for it will persevere indefinitely. The point I want to make here is that the apparent metaphoricity or metonymicity of a poem depends on the context in (relation to) which it is read - which is itself a decisively metonymic perspective! We have repeatedly emphasized how changing contexts (notably the revisions for the second edition of the collection) inevitably alter our perception of the relative value or weight of elements in a poem. Reading poems such as "Parfum exotique" and "La Chevelure" in line with the romantic poetics of " Correspondances" and in contrast with the stark metonymical poetics of the prose collection inevitably highlights their metaphorical features notably a semantics and imagery of synaesthesia. Reading them in the context of the revised beauty cycle that immediately precedes them, on the other hand, underscores their metonymical qualities - in particular a poetics that tends to undermine the romantic symbolism informing universal analogy and synaesthesia in the romantic cycle. I stress that metonymy tends to undermine metaphor, for my claim is not that the poems following the beauty cycle are all

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uniformly metonymic, nor even that they become increasingly metonymic according to some straightforward, linear progression throughout the rest of the collection. I do not mean to imply either that the beauty cycle can be taken in a biographical way as a simple reflection of some earth-shattering prise-deconscience on Baudelaire's part: as late as April 1861 (i.e. well after the preparation and publication of the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai, and well after the publication of some of the most important prose poems, among which " U n hemisphere dans une chevelure" [1857]), Baudelaire will cite "Correspondances" in support of a theory of "reciprocal analogy" and "indivisible totality" (although he cites only the first two verses, which may be telling).16 My claim is rather that, regardless of and perhaps even sometimes against Baudelaire's conscious intentions and most trenchant declarations, his most characteristically modern poetry registers a trajectory away from the metaphoricity of romantic symbolism, via its decoding by a metonymic poetics. This metonymic poetics may be most patent and severe in the prose poems, but it is already at work in the verse collection, as we have seen. One might even attribute some of the extraordinary energy of Les Fleurs du Mai to a tension between semantics and poetics, between metaphor and metonymy, between a romanticism being abandoned and a modernism still in the making. Indeed, it would be possible retrospectively to reread even " Correspondances" itself in light of such a tension: not (as it has most often been read, and as I reiterated at the beginning of the chapter) as crystallizing the aesthetic program of romantic symbolism, but rather as already prefiguring the move away from it, which becomes explicit in "La Beaute" and the poems added to the beauty cycle. For something unexpected starts happening in the tercets of "Correspondances," as if poetic momentum suddenly picked up and began to accelerate out of control: metaphoric balance and unity give way to metonymic parataxis and enumeration. The quatrains move smoothly between singulars and plurals: nature's temple and man are the only singulars in the first stanza, beginning the first and third lines, followed by plurals.

Correspondences versus beauty In the second stanza, plurals occupy the first and last lines, while the singular predominates in between. Substantives receive usually one, at most two complements; in the latter case (11. 6-7) they are parallel and joined symmetrically by "and." The sole exception to this pattern of singularity and symmetrical binarity occurs - perhaps significantly, as a lead into the tercets - in the last line of the second quatrain, with the triple nominative naming synaesthetic elements. But as noted above, both the (parallel anapestic) rhythm linking the triple subject to the terminal reflexive verb (so that each element is both subject and object) and the rhyme linking "se repondent" with "se confondent" in line 5 serve strongly to unify the line and the stanza as a whole. The tercets are, from the start, very different. The impersonal (and elevated or "poetic") "II est des parfums" of the first line of the tercets contrasts sharply with the "La Nature est un temple" of the first line of the quatrains: there a striking equivalence, a substantive claim, is being asserted with all the force of the metaphoric copulative "this is that"; whereas here in the tercets, all that is being said is: "There are fragrances." What follows is a list of similes that is potentially endless - if we take the lack of conjunction between the second and third simile, the comma at the end of the line, and the dash that intervenes at the beginning of the next line to signal that the enumeration of similes could continue indefinitely, but has been interrupted in mid-sentence. And as the similes multiply in number, they also increase in banality: "fresh like babies' skin" is nice enough; "mellow like oboes" will do; but "green like prairies" ? As in the case of the copulative that begins the tercet, the poetic force of simile has here been reduced to a minimum. The list then starts off in another direction: "And [there are] others [fragrances] . . . " But in the second tercet these fragrances are said not so much to be or be like something else (by metaphor or simile), but rather (metonymically) to possess a certain property: that of "having the expansiveness of infinite things." What follows this attribution of expansiveness to the other perfumes is another list... of perfumes, introduced by the term " comme " functioning here in a way slightly different from

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the straightforward similes of the second quatrain. As De Man has noted, this "comme" is ambiguous: it can refer either to having the property of expansiveness -"as do ambergris, musk, benjamin and incense," or to the perfumes themselves" [There are] other [perfumes] such as ambergris, musk, benjamin, and incense." In the first case, "comme" is still engaged in comparison, but instead of associating a single property with a discrete stimulus - as do the similes in stanza 2: freshness with babies' skin, mellowness with oboes - here the single property is distributed indiscriminately across the entire list of stimuli. In the second case, the "comme" is not comparative at all, but purely illustrative. This ambiguity is " undecidable "; but in either case, the "comme" introduces not a balanced equation, but serial enumeration.17 It would appear, then, on this reading, that "Correspondances " itself moves away from metaphor toward metonymy as it moves from cerebral to more corporeal sensations.18 The first stanza is the most forcefully metaphoric: it boldly declares that "this is that." It is also the most abstract, referring to knowing glances, words, and even symbols. The second stanza is more cautious: it only suggests that "this is like that." It is also somewhat more concrete, naming various sensations, but describing primarily the relatively cerebral senses of sight and sound. The third stanza begins with an assertion of mere existence ("There are perfumes..."), then multiplies comparisons to the point of banality. Here the concrete sense of smell predominates. The fourth stanza attributes a property instead of comparing likenesses, and ultimately enumerates tautologically: here, perfumes are no longer like babies or prairies, they are like ... perfumes; or more precisely, the quality of the "other" (1. 11) perfumes is exemplified... by other perfumes: ambergris, musk, and so on. Perhaps this is why Baudelaire in 1861 quotes only the quatrains in support of his theory of universal analogy: there, "everything becomes potentially identical with everything else," while in the tercets, everything becomes virtually indiscriminate. It is as if the poetic charge increases as stimulating sensations get closer to the body; as if in the proliferation of comparans and comparata, the poetic

Correspondences versus beauty process engaging senses and spirit gets carried away with itself - or gets carried away by corporeal sensations that "chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens" - and gets carried away from the possibility of making any meaningful or unambiguous sense whatsoever. It is not my aim to read poem by poem through the entire collection of Les Fleurs du Mai to measure in each case the relative weight of metaphor and metonymy. My argument has been that the revisions for the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai produce significant changes in context for the other poems and the collection as a whole, changes that tend to foreground the process of decoding initiated most clearly in "La Beaute." My procedure so far has been to examine the revised beauty cycle to see in what ways it reinforces the decoding already inscribed in "La Beaute," and to see how the cycle as a whole affects our reading of the poems immediately following it in the collection. I want to turn now to the end of the first section of the work, " Spleen et Ideal," to determine what effects the second-edition revisions have had and what forms the inscription of decoding takes there.

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CHAPTER 3

Spleen and evil

SPLEEN AND IDEAL

With the evident exception of the creation of an entirely new section, the "Tableaux Parisiens," no changes for the second edition are more marked, or more complex, than the revision of the end of "Spleen and Ideal." Most commentators agree that the changes give the section a clearer sense of an ending than did the first edition, which meandered to a close with some of the collection's least remarkable poems, such as "La Pipe" (LXVIII) and "La Musique" (LXIX). In the revised version, these poems have been moved from the very end to a position preceding sixteen poems — some old, some new — which now conclude the section. To be sure, this new grouping of poems — which starts with "Sepulture" (LXX) and "Une gravure fantastique" (LXXI), but also includes new poems such as "Le Gout du neant" (LXXX), "Alchimie de la douleur" (LXXXI), and "Horreur sympathique" (LXXXII) - accentuates a thematics of morbid perversity as a kind of counter-weight to the faithful optimism of the opening, romantic cycle of the section. But considerable controversy remains as to whether the overall unity of the section has been enhanced, as well as to what the significance of the new ending cycle might be. D. J. Mossop who offers the most complete, strictly thematic (and hence ultimately unsatisfactory) interpretation of the "architecture of Les Fleurs du Mai" (as per his subtitle) -commends the new positions of" L'Heautontimoroumenos" (LXXXIII) and"LTrremediable" (LXXXIV), now third- and second-to-last, for the emphasis they put on the Poet's self-imposed damnation; but he 80

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therefore must dismiss the addition of "L'Horloge" (LXXXV) at the very end of the section as an anomaly, for it does not square with the thematics of self-consciously pursued vice that for Mossop make the revised "Spleen and Ideal" section a drama of the Poet's fall from the "aspiration toward ideal beauty" of the early poems to the "hell of spleen" at the end of the section.1 It was, of course, Barbey d'Aurevilly who coined the term "secret architecture" to suggest the by now famous notion of a "structure" informing the collection. But it is important to recall that he did so in an article defending Baudelaire during his obscenity trial.2 Baudelaire, too, insisted at one point that the work be read as a whole ("dans son ensemble"), so that its "terrifying morality" would stand out - but he did so in notes to his lawyer for the same trial; he would write years later in a personal letter that he filled "that atrocious book" with all his hatred, and that the solemn oaths he swore to the contrary were nothing but lies.3 In yet another letter, he insists that the collection has not so much a stable architecture, but rather a coherent movement: " a beginning and an end"; 4 here he is ingratiating himself with Alfred de Musset, whose help he hopes to enlist in his candidacy for the Academie Frangaise. In letters to his mother regarding the second edition, Baudelaire also underscores the pre-existing framework into which he has inserted new poems, although it is clear that in many cases (particularly the "Tableaux Parisiens") it is the frame that is new, and the poems (in some cases) that are old; here, too, there is more than a hint of self-justification involved.5 My point in sketching the contexts in which Baudelaire and others insisted on the coherence of Les Fleurs du Mai is not to deny categorically the existence of a thematic structure, but to temper the attraction of too simple a notion of coherence in order to suggest that there is something else at work in the collection as well — what I have identified as a tendency toward metonymy that disrupts the metaphoric poetics conducive to stable architecture. 6 In this light, the revised ending of "Spleen and Ideal" can best be understood in terms of a tension among three different impulses: first, a stark and explicit thematic opposition to romanticism, often conducted in the latter's own

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metaphoric poetics and imagery; second, a continuing poetic subversion of metaphoric romanticism via metonymy; and finally, an increasingly explicit thematicization of metonymic poetics itself, especially compared with the beauty cycle that inaugurated it. The first of the five new poems added to the new ending of "Spleen and Ideal," entitled "Obsession" (LXXIX), embodies this tension by first of all reversing the tone of specific metaphors borrowed from the romantic cycle, and then subverting metaphoric poetics altogether. The harmonious images of man and nature characteristic of " Correspondances" and the romantic cycle as a whole are here so explicitly and utterly rejected that it is difficult to understand how "Correspondances" could ever have been taken as the key poem expressing the aesthetic program of the collection.7

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8 11 14

Obsession Grands bois, vous m'effrayez comme des cathedrales; Vous hurlez comme Porgue; et dans nos coeurs maudits, Chambres d'etemel deuil ou vibrent de vieux rales, Repondent les echos de vos De profundis. Je te hais, Ocean! tes bonds et tes tumultes, Mon esprit les retrouve en lui; ce rire amer De l'homme vaincu, plein de sanglots et d'insultes, Je Pentends dans le rire enorme de la mer. Comme tu me plairais, 6 nuit! sans ces etoiles Dont la lumiere parle un langage connu! Car je cherche le vide, et le noir, et le nu! Mais les tenebres sont elles-memes des toiles Oil vivent, jaillissant de mon oeil par milliers, Des etres disparus aux regards familiers.

The first quatrain clearly invokes the imagery of nature as place of worship from "Correspondances," but with the effect of virtually canceling it out: what conveyed mystical elevation and divine inspiration in the early poem now conveys terror and dejection, instead. And in order to accomplish this reversal, the stanza functions according to the same poetics as the earlier poem: the woods are compared in explicit similes to cathedrals

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(1. 1), and their sound to the wail of an organ (1. 2); the metaphorical apposition equating inside with outside (cursed hearts with rooms of mourning) in the following line makes the comparison that is patent in the "comme" of lines 1 and 2 all the more forceful for being implicit.8 The last line of the stanza, moreover, repeats the terms "echo" and "respond" from " Correspondances," as if to ensure that the allusion to the key words of the doctrine of correspondences and universal analogy is not missed. In a similar way, the middle line of the third stanza ("la lumiere parle un langage connu" 1. 10) echoes the imagery of nature's secret language from the romantic cycle ("Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes" 1. 20 of "Elevation"), only to reverse its valence: here it is patently something the Poet longs to escape. The second quatrain, too, reverses imagery from an early poem: the image of the sea as mirror of the soul from " L'Homme et la Mer" (xiv), which begins "Homme libre, toujours tu cheriras la mer! / La mer est ton miroir; tu contemples ton ame / Dans le deroulement infini de sa lame" (11. 1-3). But here the poetics changes radically. Present in the first stanza only as a direct object ("vous m'effrayez" 1. 1) and as part of a (plural) possessive pronoun ("nos coeurs maudits" 1. 2), the Poet suddenly appears as subject of the three main phrases comprising the second stanza: foregrounded as an active "Je " at the beginning of the first and last lines, as well as (by synecdoche: "Mon esprit") at the beginning of the second line. Nature, subject of the first quatrain, now becomes object - first of the Poet's hatred, then of his perception: the equivalences presented apodictically in the first quatrain appear here as a function of Poetic appropriation: "Mon esprit retrouve [tes bonds] en lui"; "ce rire amer / Je l'entends dans le rire enorme de la mer." Even while repeating the imagery of an earlier, metaphoric poem (in order to reverse its value), this stanza shifts its poetics in the direction of metonymy by foregrounding the agency of the Poet in the composition of comparisons and equivalences. Each of the first two stanzas presents a distinct idea in a complete sentence with no rhymes repeated. The first tercet

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starts up again, apostrophizing night this time, and ends by explaining the fear and hatred expressed in the quatrains: the Poet would shun star-light which speaks a well-known language, and now seeks a dark and barren void, "le vide, et le noir, et le n u " (1. 11). The line's unexpected repetition of " e t " (instead of the normal "le vide, noir et n u " or even "le vide, le noir, et le nu") produces not a closed set, but an open-ended series: this, and that, and that, and ... The final tercet then explains in turn why escape to the void is nonetheless futile: the language he seeks to avoid is not a part of nature, but — as we know from the poetics of the second stanza — a product of Poetic imagination; even the darkness opposed to nature's light teems with beings that spew forth by the thousands from the Poet's eye. This virtually endless proliferation of beings, adumbrated in the last line of the first tercet by the open-ended series of qualities actively sought by the Poet, emerges here (as in "Parfum exotique") as a process independent of him, beyond his control: the Poet who (as subject or agent) reviled nature in the preceding stanzas is eclipsed by a Poetic faculty which here threatens to overwhelm him. The Poet may be able to summon inspiration whenever he wants (to paraphrase Baudelaire), but he is sometimes unable to rid himself of it, as is the case here. This last tercet — perhaps contrary to expectation, since the movement of the poem seems to be in the direction of metonymy, away from the metaphoricity of the first stanza - contains the only verb of being in the poem: "sont" (1. 12), which is moreover reinforced by the emphatic " elles-memes " immediately following it and perhaps by the substantive "etres" of the last line. This verb, which bears the weight of explaining why recourse to the void is futile, poses an equivalence between shadows and " toiles." But what are the shadows " themselves " ? What can "toiles" mean in this context? Are they, by common synecdoche, paintings " i n " which the beings in question live? Or, slightly less figuratively, are they the canvasses on which the Poet (as artist) paints these beings? Are they, by extension in another direction, canvass in the form of sails? Or are they, by synecdoche, ships on which forgotten beings live? Are they, somewhat literally again, spider webs which harbor phantom

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creatures? Or are they, more figuratively, snares which trap the thousand-fold figments of an excessive imagination? If we cannot know with certainty what the shadows are, neither can we know who or what lives there: are they beings who have disappeared from our view ("Des etres, disparus aux regards familiers"), or dead souls who give us knowing looks (" Des etres disparus, aux regards familiers ") ? There is really no way to tell: as the number of fantasy images increases, so apparently does their indeterminacy. The quatrains' neat thematic opposition to the aesthetics of the romantic cycle is thus undermined by the poetics and assertions of the tercets. For the nothingness the Poet sought as an antidote to romantic idealism/symbolism proves impossible: he is faced instead with a multiplicity of images whose indeterminacy seems to grow with their proliferation. "Obsession" is a poem that initially "reverts" to metaphor in order to decode the imagery of romantic symbolism, but then proceeds to decode metaphoric poetics itself, finally displaying in the abysmal ambiguities of the phrase "sont elles-memes des toiles" the insistent uncertainties of a decoded metaphoric axis. At the end of the beauty cycle, the Poet had hoped that Beauty's effects, despite or because of her essential indeterminacy, would open the door to a longed-for infinity hitherto unknown to him ("m'ouvrent la porte / D'un Infini que j'aime et n'ai jamais connu" "Hymne" 11. 23-24). By the time we reach "Obsession," that infinity appears in a very different light: as a terrifying abyss the Poet now longs to escape. Having fallen into time ("Le Masque"), the Poet finds that time unredeemed by the hoped-for effects of beauty is a disaster, a nightmare from which he cannot awake. The only recourse, invoked in the poem immediately following "Obsession," appears to be death:

14

Et le Temps m'engloutit minute par minute, Gomme la neige immense un corps pris de roideur; Je contemple d'en haut le globe en sa rondeur Et je n'y cherche plus Pabri d'une cahute. Avalanche, veux-tu m'emporter dans ta chute?

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"Obsession" and "Le Gout du neant" conclude a cycle of eleven poems devoted to the theme of the empty infinitude of time lived in the absence of beauty, from which the Poet is unable to escape. This theme is introduced early in the cycle. "Le Mort joyeux" (LXXII) depicts a Poet ready to lie down and die so as to "sleep in oblivion" (1. 4); but as he invites the worms to consume his remains, he worries that there might be some further torture in store (11. 9-14). And in "Le Tonneau de la haine" (LXXIII), this fear of empty infinitude is in effect confirmed, first in the figure of the Danaides' vessel, which is impossible to fill, and then in the image of a perpetually drunken Hate who, unlike mortal dipsomaniacs, can never get enough vengeance to pass out under the table (11. 12—14). But the theme of the cycle is epitomized in the four " Spleen" poems that form its core. THE SPLEEN CYCLE

The spleen poems and the cycle centered on them are crucial to the new ending of "Spleen and Ideal" for two reasons. First of all, they make explicit the eclipse of memory and the renunciation of the lyric subject that remained implicit in the beauty cycle and following poems, especially in "Hymne" and " Chevelure." Secondly, they show how the failure of beauty to endow lived experience with value and meaning nonetheless does not preclude metonymic reference to context, in a poetic project of " intensification" that takes up where the project of beautification leaves off. The failure of the lyric subject in invoking memory to counteract the passage of time appears as the thematic content of "La Cloche felee" (LXXIV), which introduces the "Spleen" poems (and was itself originally entitled "Spleen"). Here the Poet's attempt to revive old memories in song is likened to the death-rattle of a dying man immobilized under a huge pile of corpses (11. 12-14). In the same vein, memory in "Spleen" no. 3, "Je suis comme le roi... " (LXXVII) culminates a series of distractions and amusements that can no longer rouse the Poetking from his lethal boredom: " Rien ne peut Pegayer, ni gibier,

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ni faucon, / Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon " (11. 5-6). Not even memory, the poem insists in the last two couplets, can "revive this dazed corpse / In which, instead of blood, flow the green waters of forgetfulness [rechauffer ce cadavre hebete / Ou coule au lieu de sang l'eau verte du Lethe] " (11. 17-18). Yet the poetics of these poems remains largely metaphoric. In one, the Poet's soul is likened to the cracked church bell of the title ("Moi, mon ame est felee... " 1. 9), unable to give voice to memory; in the other, the opening simile equating the Poet with the king of a rainy country governs the imagery of the entire poem. In "Spleen" no. 2, "J'ai plus de souvenirs . . . " (LXXVI), by contrast, the hopeless struggle of memory against the passage of time and the disappearance of the lyric subject are staged in a metonymic mode more like that of "La Beaute." The first part of the poem is marked by the repetition of " J e " in a series of futile attempts to find it adequate expression: J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans.

5

10

Un gros meuble a tiroirs encombre de bilans, De vers, de billets-doux, de proces, de romances, Avec de lourds cheveux roules dans des quittances, Cache moins de secrets que mon triste cerveau. C'est une pyramide, un immense caveau, Qui contient plus de morts que la fosse commune. - Je suis un cimetiere abhorre de la lune, Oil comme des remords se trainent de longs vers Qui s'acharnent toujours sur mes morts les plus chers. Je suis un vieux boudoir plein de roses fanees, Oil git tout un fouillis de modes surannees, Oil les pastels plaintifs et les pales Boucher, Seuls, respirent l'odeur d'un flacon debouche.

The process starts with a hyperbolic comparison ("I have more memories than... ") whose imaginary comparata (" ... than if I were a thousand years old") makes the Poet's "more" memories virtually innumerable. Comparisons then multiply, becoming more and more extravagant; emblems of memories (balance-sheets, billets-doux, ballads) appear in profusion (11. 2—3). But the emblems remain mute, their secrets (1. 5) unrevealed. And in the final comparison (" my sorry head. / It's

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a pyramid... " 11. 5-6), these secrets themselves expire, and appear more numerous in the Poet's head than corpses in the common grave (1. 6). At this point the text switches modes and posits equivalents (rather than comparisons) for the speaking subject, but these equivalents are not persons, nor even animate beings, but places totally and explicitly devoid of life: first " I am a graveyard" (1. 8), which hyperbolizes and metaphorizes the preceding comparison; then " I am an old boudoir" (1. 11) where paintings alone breathe the odor of an unstoppered bottle (11. 13-14). As in "Spleen" no. 1 and no. 4 ("Quand le ciel bas et l o u r d . . . " [LXXVIII]), the eclipse of the speaking subject leaves only places and things in its wake; indeed, the " J e " of line 11 is the last firstperson pronoun in the poem. In a text where generally speaking no rhyme repeats, the eight lines in the course of which the subject disappears (11. 11—18) all share the same rhyme, and thus stand out unmistakably. After disappearing as " J e " in a regime of equivalence (11. 11-14), the grammatical subject in the second rhymed quatrain (11. 15-19) becomes, first of all: nothing (subject of the main clause, 1. 15), accentuated as one syllable at the beginning of the alexandrin and the stanza, as if to underscore the complete elimination of the speaking " J e " ; and then: ennui (1. 17, subject of a temporal dependent clause introduced by " Q u a n d " at the beginning of line 16), the condition that in a sense (as in " Spleen " no. 1) replaces the " I " as (at least the topical) subject of the entire poem. At the same time, equivalence is forcefully rejected in favor of comparison (particularly in the phrase "Rien n'egale... " ) :

15

Je suis un vieux boudoir plein de roses fanees, Oil git tout un fouillis de modes surannees, Oil les pastels plaintifs et les pales Boucher, Seuls, respirent l'odeur d'un flacon debouche. Rien n'egale en longueur les boiteuses journees, Quand sous les lourdsfloconsdes neigeuses annees L'ennui, fruit de la morne incuriosite, Prend les proportions de Pimmortalite. - Desormais tu n'es plus, 6 matiere vivante!

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Qu'un granit entoure d'une vague epouvante, Assoupi dans le fond d'un Saharah brumeux; Un vieux sphinx ignore d'un monde insoucieux, Oublie sur la carte, et dont l'humeur farouche Ne chante qu'aux rayons du soleil qui se couche.

Whereas initially, memory appeared virtually infinite, though devoid of content, now time does: nothing is as long as the days when listless boredom assumes the dimensions of immortality. The first reading of the next line (particularly with the exclamation point at the end: " - Desormais tu n'es plus, 6 matiere vivante!") reiterates the disappearance of the subject, now addressed in the second person: "Living matter, even now you are no more [or] you already no longer exist!" But the supposed death of living matter is immediately recast by the following line as its transformation into stone instead, as "you are no more" becomes "you are no more... than a block of granite surrounded by vacant terror " (11. 19-20). Living matter - f o r instance a " j e " that would declare itself (11. 11—14) a boudoir full of old fashions, art, and perfume-bottles - living matter that is addressed in the second person is suddenly transformed into no more than matter, transformed (in a series of objectifying passive participial complements: "entoure," "assoupi," "ignore," "oublie," 11. 20-23) into a thing ignored and deserted, a thing that sings at the farthest remove from human concerns, only when day is done. So the first-person subject, full only of dead memories, disappears in the face of ennui, only to be resuscitated in the second person and immediately transformed into a third-person thing, a non-person: a rock, a sphinx. And who addressed it as " t u " ? Who depicts the forgotten song? Perhaps the Poet has doubled himself at death and now speaks from beyond the tomb, as Laurent Jenny would have it: "Thus the poetic song would arise not so much from the soul of the romantic as from the granite of his tomb itself."9 Perhaps it is Ennui personified who, having taken the measure of immortality (1. 18), is able to address the absent Poet and locate him outside the referencepoints of a heedless humanity. Whatever interpretation prevails over this indeterminacy, the dash at the beginning of line 19 and

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the sudden appearance of the second person and an apostrophe signal a change of register from the communicative mode, in which the lyric subject had addressed us as "je," to a textual mode where who or what is addressing living matter as " t u " is not clear. The effect of this switch of address, however, is patently clear: the lyric subject is transformed from living matter into stone. Bereft of speaking subject, the text stages the fate of a lyric poetry which has foundered on the death of memory and remains sunk in the limitless wastes of time. The oppressive weight of time is a recurring theme in the spleen cycle, and recalls the Poet's wager at the end of the (revised) beauty cycle: that she will "ease the burden of time's passing moments." In spleen, she clearly fails to. Or conversely: her failure - to redeem the moment - is spleen. But this failure does not signal the defeat of the metonymic poetics she inaugurated. On the contrary: metonymization continues unabated. Yet the terms of the poetic project have changed: where Beauty proposed to make all things more beautiful, here the Poet, or rather the poetic text - since this is the very moment of the Poet's disappearance as lyric subject - the text operates so as to make simply anything more intense, even the repulsive and utterly meaningless experience of boredom so typical of Baudelairean spleen. Beautification verges into sheer intensification. The eclipse of the speaking subject is not the only signal of the anti-lyrical stance of the "Spleen" poems, if Baudelaire's own characterization of lyric poetry is taken into consideration. In his essay on Gautier, Baudelaire insists that the rhythm of lyric poetry must be "elastic and smooth-flowing; nothing brusque or choppy befits it." 10 On this criterion alone, the "Spleen" poems could spell the end of the lyric in Les Fleurs du Mai; commentaries frequently mention a halting, almost staccato rhythm as one of their distinctive features.11 We have seen in "J'ai plus de souvenirs," how the Poet strives to define himself by means of a series of comparisons, each of which soon proves unsatisfactory, "gives out within a few lines, " 12 and is replaced by another in turn. The same effect of" pietinement sur place," but in a temporal rather than subjective frame, characterizes

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" Spleen " no. 2 (" Quand le ciel bas et lourd ... " ) : the repetition of " Q u a n d " at the beginning of each of the first three stanzas finally leads to a brief spurt of activity in the fourth stanza, before returning to the initial state of morbid boredom in the fifth. In both cases, the repeated term reinforces the metaphoric axis, even while contributing to the choppiness of the poems' rhythm, by returning to a fixed point of departure or nexus of associations. What is striking is that these metaphoric associations never add up and develop; they appear to start over and over again instead (as in "Spleen" no. 4), or even cancel each other out (as in "Spleen" no. 2). "Spleen" no. 1 ("Pluviose ... ") takes this attenuation of the metaphoric axis even further, by juxtaposing a series of discrete images, with neither a grammatical person (such as the u j e " in "Spleen" no. 2) nor an explicit temporal frame (such as "Quand ... tout a coup" in "Spleen" no. 4) serving to ground or unify the associations. Comparing it with a sonnet from the romantic cycle that treats precisely the same theme - the burden of time - will highlight the anti-lyric rhythm of the "Spleen" poems and further demonstrate in what sense that rhythm can be considered metonymical in its poetics.

4

8 11 14

L'Ennemi Ma jeunesse ne fut qu'un tenebreux orage, Traversee $a et la par de brillants soleils; Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage, Qu'il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils. Voila que j'ai touche l'automne des idees, Et qu'il faut employer la pelle et les rateaux Pour rassembler a neuf les terres inondees, Oil l'eau creuse des trous grands comme des tombeaux. Et qui sait si lesfleursnouvelles que je reve Trouveront dans ce sol lave comme une greve Le mystique aliment qui ferait leur vigueur? - O douleur! 6 douleur! Le Temps mange la vie, Et l'obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le coeur Du sang que nous perdons croit et se fortifie!

"L'Ennemi" (x) is organized as a cohesive metaphoric system based on the equivalence posited from the very first line between

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the poet's life and nature. The poet's life span is likened to a growing season through the development of the initial metaphor of a storm-troubled and impoverished childhood garden (11. 1-4) into images of the autumn of intellect's discontent (11. 5-8) and the hope sustained for future blossoms (11. g—11). The tragic conclusion of the final tercet itself employs the same "organic" metaphoric system in force throughout the sonnet: time devours life - what little there is left after the ravages of youth have let so little fruit ripen to nourish the poet's dreams - and drains the heart of blood.13 In "Pluviose... ", by contrast, we find not a coherent set of "organic" metaphors, but a disjointed series of images each expressing in itself the theme of weary boredom:

4

8 11 14

Pluviose, irrite contre la ville entiere, De son urne a grands flots verse un froid tenebreux Aux pales habitants du voisin cimetiere Et la mortalite sur les faubourgs brumeux. Mon chat sur le carreau cherchant une litiere Agite sans repos son corps maigre et galeux; L'ame d'un vieux poete erre dans la gouttiere Avec la triste voix d'un fantome frileux. Le bourdon se lamente, et la buche enfumee Accompagne en fausset la pendule enrhumee, Cependant qu'en un jeu plein de sales parfums, Heritage fatal d'une vieille hydropique, Le beau valet de coeurs et la dame de pique Causent sinistrement de leurs amours defunts.

Where "L'Ennemi" flows smoothly as each metaphor modulates neatly into the next, the "Spleen" poem lurches from image to image without apparent connections. No temporal indices are given to relieve the indeterminacy of the homogenous present tense, with the possible exception of "Cependant que" of line 11 which only reinforces the indifferent simultaneity ("while") of the setting or at most (by resonance with "cependant" in the negational sense of "however" or "nevertheless," as opposed to "Pendant que" or "En meme temps que") accentuates the exteriority and lack of relation between succeeding images in the poem.

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The contrast between the two poems also points up the almost total absence of the Poet from the latter, whereas the former places the Poet at its center and makes his life its guiding thread. Only the possessive pronoun " M o n " (the only firstperson pronoun in "Spleen" no. 1) — appearing in line 5 and modifying the subject of the first clause of the stanza — suggests that it is perhaps the Poet who is speaking, thereby situating him as owner of the cat and by implication as occupant of a residence the description of whose interior constitutes a large portion of the text. This suggestion is supported by the mention of "the soul of an old poet" occurring in the same position as subject of the second clause of the stanza (both subjects being determined, moreover, by predicate complements of place and semantically similar verbs of erratic motion: "sur le carreau ... agite," "erre dans la gouttiere"). On this interpretation, the two parallel independent clauses joined paratactically by the semi-colon separating them at the end-of line 6 mirror one another and are to be read in a metaphorical relation making one the virtual equivalent of the other.14 But this interpretation is belied first of all by the anonymity imposed on the "old poet's soul" by its indefinite article, " u n " ("L'ame d'un vieux poete" 1. 7), and furthermore by its expulsion (to the gutter) from the very residence whose extensive description was supposed to attest to his presence. In light of this expulsion of the poem's only figure of the poet (who thus spatially joins the chilly inhabitants of the neighboring cemetery whose status as shivering phantoms he shared anyway, 11. 2-3 and 8), it might be equally or even more plausible to refer " M o n , " in the absence of a resident, and by personification of a thing, to the residence itself. It may, in other words, be the place that is inscribed as the first person in this poem, while the phantom voice of the former (lyric) poet wanders sadly outside in the gutter. This reading refuses metaphorical status to the parallel clauses of stanza 2, treating them instead as discrete images in the metonymical sequence of images that comprises the entire poem. Whichever interpretation one chooses in the face of this indeterminacy, it is clearly the setting that predominates in this

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poem, rather than the Poet, and to the exclusion of any determinate meaning. While the Poet figures at most only as owner of his cat, the things that surround him are all personified: the rain (11. 1-4), the great bell (1. 9, recalling the carillons of "La Cloche felee"), the fireplace log (1. 9), the clock (1. 10), the deck of cards (11. 11—14). We are in effect obliged to infer the presence of the Poet (and for instance the possibility that he may be playing or shuffling cards in order to pass the time) from the setting rather than simply read his presence symbolized in/by nature. Or more precisely: we infer the condition of the (disappearing) Poet - boredom, ennui - from the emblems of that condition that comprise the surroundings. And this is one of the salient features of a discourse in which the metonymic axis predominates and the metaphoric is attenuated: reference to context prevails over stable meaning and identity. The foregrounding of the referential function in metonymic discourse may help explain the difference in "feel" between the metaphors of "L'Ennemi" and the emblems in "Spleen." For all their drama and systematic concision, the metaphorical images of the romantic sonnet seem unreal and the strong Poetic voice strangely unsituated or disembodied; whereas the emblematic images of "Spleen" - focusing ever more obsessively first on the rainy season outside, then on the residence itself, then on the hearth and mantle, finally on the pack of cards in the Poet's hands - seem palpably concrete and the setting starkly real, as if the acuteness of the ennui enhanced the acuity of the Poet's perception — or rather of poetic depiction. For having banished the Poet as speaking subject, the " Spleen" text gives voice instead to things: it is by the intensity of their depiction and not of subjective expression that spleen is to be measured. The project of intensification thus picks up where beautification left off, as the Poetic will required to appreciate beauty evaporates under the influence of spleen, along with the recourse to memory to salvage experience from the ravages of time. Metonymy continues to prevail, for splenetic intensification entails multiple and indeterminate referentiality rather than integrative identity, is based on comparisons rather than

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equations, and occupies the dispersion of real time rather than the fictive unity of remembrance. In discussing the importance of things and of reference to context in the beauty cycle, we invoked Baudelaire's term "ironic supernaturalism" to designate the poetic charge added to things to make them more beautiful; the succeeding poems then showed that beautification depended not on divine inspiration but on an increasingly carnal Poetic will. One of the ironies of such "supernaturalism" is that this poetic charge, in the absence of beauty and with the evaporation of Poetic will, can make things simply more intense. Another of its ironies is that it can make things more terrible, as well. Such is the conclusion drawn in "Alchimie de la douleur," the poem that marks the transition from spleen into evil. Its opening stanza seems to comment explicitly on the inherent ambiguity of "ironic supernaturalism," its capacity for spleen as well as beauty — to the point of citing the title of the poem that opens the spleen cycle ("Sepulture"): L'un t'eclaire avec son ardeur, L'autre en toi met son deuil, Nature! Ge qui dit a l'un: Sepulture! Dit a l'autre: Vie et splendeur! But in the next sentence, and thence throughout the four poems comprising this cycle, the Poet takes the side of evil, choosing to "change gold into iron / And paradise into hell (je change Tor en fer / Et le paradis en enfer)" (11. 9-10). In the absence of inspired faith and of beauty's fascination, the charge of intensity, it turns out, can be more surely attained through willful perversity than from even the most excruciating boredom. The turn from passively suffering spleen to actively willing evil necessarily entails a reappearance of the subject and also involves explicit thematic opposition to the romantic homilies of the opening cycle of the collection. But the subject of evil is also a subject of irony, and the thematic opposition itself is accompanied by further metonymization of poetics.

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Having started in the third person, "Alchimie de la douleur" reaffirms the role of Poetic will by switching thereafter to firstperson pronouns, concluding with four assertions of Poetic activity: Par toi je change Tor en fer Et le paradis en enfer; 11 Dans le suaire des nuages Je decouvre un cadavre cher, Et sur les celestes rivages 14 Je batis des sarcophages. In much the same way, the Poet of "Horreur sympathique" claims the light of the heavens as a mere reflection of his own infernal predilections: "Cieux... / ... vos lueurs sont le reflet / De l'enfer ou mon coeur se plait" (1. 14). Yet the actual identity of this active Poet is immediately put into question by the closing poems of the cycle, "L'Heautontimoroumenos" and "L'Irremediable." Reading these two poems side by side and in this order produces poetic effects that were no doubt illegible in the first edition, where eleven other poems separated the two. Both poems, of course, refer explicitly to irony and to the doubling of the self as mirror of itself. But in "L'Irremediable," this doubling occurs without the use of first-person pronouns. The total absence of the "first person," of the Poet himself, is an important feature of the ending of" Spleen and Ideal," and is in fact prepared by the fate of the Poet as speaking subject in the preceding poem of the pair, "L'Heautontimoroumenos":

4

8

Je te frapperai sans colere Et sans haine, comme un boucher, Gomme Moise le rocher! Et je ferai de ta paupiere, Pour abreuver mon Saharah, Jaillir les eaux de la soufFrance. Mon desir gonfle d'esperance Sur tes pleurs sales nagera

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16

20

24

28

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Comme un vaisseau qui prend le large, Et dans mon coeur qu'ils souleront Tes chers sanglots retentiront Comme un tambour qui bat la charge! Ne suis-je pas un faux accord Dans la divine symphonie, Grace a la vorace Ironie Qui me secoue et me mord ? Elle est dans ma voix, la criarde! C'est tout mon sang, ce poison noir! Je suis le sinistre miroir Oil la megere se regarde. Je suis la plaie et le couteau! Je suis le soufflet et la joue! Je suis les membres et la roue, Et la victime et le bourreau! Je suis de mon coeur le vampire, - Un de ces grands abandonnes Au rire eternel condamnes, Et qui ne peuvent plus sourire!

The first person " J e " begins the poem by positing a forceful, transitive relation to the second person that will predominate throughout the first three stanzas. At this point, the second person disappears and the syntax switches from forceful assertion to rhetorical question, and the Poet addresses not an other, but himself. It is here, of course, that "voracious Irony" (1. 15) makes her appearance, allegorized and personified by the capital " I " and the transitive relation she takes up with respect to the Poet (himself now reduced to two object-pronoun complements) in the subordinate clause that ends the stanza ("la vorace Ironie / Qui me secoue et qui me mord" 11. 15-16). She then appears to take over as subject at the beginning of the next stanza: first described as being " in " the Poet's voice (" Elle est dans ma voix, la criarde!" 1. 17), she soon becomes the Poet's very life blood ("C'est tout mon sang, ce poison noir!" 1. 18). But the Poet then returns as subject of the next phrase, only to become the mirror in which shrewish Irony - as "la criarde" of line 17 becomes "la megere" of line 20 - contemplates herself: "Je suis le sinistre miroir / Oil la megere se regarde" (1. 20). Or

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is it the Poet, his voice so suffused with shrewish irony (" Elle est la criarde dans ma voix") as to become the shrew of line 20, who here contemplates himself in the mirror? There is no way to tell: the doubling of the Poet introduced first with the disappearance of the second person and in the grammar of the rhetorical question, and now developed in the image of the mirror, makes the identity of the mirror figure impossible to determine with any certainty. This doubling then dominates the famous penultimate stanza (11. 21-25), where despite the (almost desperate?) repetition of the subject " J e , " identity collapses as the expected exclusive disjunction (either the knife or the wound, the limbs or the rack), which would assign a recognizable role to the subject, is replaced by inclusive disjunction: he is both the slap and the face, both victim and torturer. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that in the last three lines of the poem - separated by a dash signaling as it were the expiration of lyric subjectivity - the speaking self is abandoned entirely. All that remains is an anonymous, almost third-person appositive condemning the self to eternal and humorless derision (in both the active and passive senses: the act of deriding and the state of being derided). "LTrremediable" appears in this context as the logical next step in the depersonalization of lyric enunciation through the doubling and subsequent disappearance of the speaking subject. Like the first, the second poem uses the image of the mirror to figure the doubling of the subject. But there the similarity ends. Here it is not the Poet himself who becomes a mirror ("Je suis le sinistre miroir... "), but only " a heart" (1. 34) - and by extension perhaps a head (given the typography of the idiom "Tete-a-tete" in 1. 33): L'Irremediable 1

4

Une Idee, une Forme, un Etre Parti de l'azur et tombe Dans un Styx bourbeux et plombe Oil mil oeil du Ciel ne penetre; Un Ange, imprudent voyageur Qu'a tente l'amour du difforme,

Spleen and evil 8

Au fond d'un cauchemar enorme Se debattant comme un nageur,

16

Et luttant, angoisses funebres! Contre un gigantesque remous Qui va chantant comme les fous Et pirouettant dans les tenebres; Un malheureux ensorcele Dans ses tatonnements futiles, Pour fuir d'un lieu plein de reptiles, Cherchant la lumiere et la cle;

20

Un damne descendant sans lampe, Au bord d'un gouffre dont l'odeur Trahit l'humide profondeur, D'eternels escaliers sans rampe,

24

Ou veillent des monstres visqueux Dont les larges yeux de phosphore Font une nuit plus noire encore Et ne rendent visible qu'eux;

28

Un navire pris dans le pole, Comme en un piege de cristal, Gherchant par quel detroit fatal II est tombe dans cette geole;

32

Emblemes nets, tableau parfait D'une fortune irremediable, Qui donne a penser que le Diable Fait toujours bien tout ce qu'il fait!

36

Tete-a-tete sombre et limpide Qu'un coeur devenu son miroir! Puits de Verite, clair et noir, Oil tremble une etoile livide.

40

Un phare ironique, infernal, Flambeau des graces sataniques, Soulagement et gloire uniques - La conscience dans le Mai!

12

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11

T h e speaking subject is totally absent from the poem as personal pronoun. Indeed, the third-person " s o n " modifying mirror in line 34 is the only personal pronoun in the entire poem - if " p e r s o n a l " is the right word in this context. For against the

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grain of regular usage, "son" appears here as a rigorously apersonal pronoun: it refers to "coeur," which would usually be a synecdoche or metonym for someone; but in this poem that someone is never named. The closest we get to the alleged person this heart would "stand for" is "L'Irremediable" of the title - which may at first reading be taken as a substantivized adjective naming an incorrigible person. But it turns out in line 30 that what is irremediable is an abstract condition: "une fortune irremediable" —not a person, but a fate. And not a personal fate: as the indefinite pronoun insists, a generalized, anonymous one. What role can a doubling mirror play in the absence of a person to be doubled? In "L'Heautontimoroumenos," the mirror serves as pivot for the ultimate cancellation of a set of exclusive disjunctions introduced first of all by the opposition between the feminine - irony personified ("la vorace Ironie" 1. 15, "Elle est... " 1. 17), and the masculine - the Poet. In the four stanzas preceding the appearance of the mirror image, the Poet takes exclusively masculine forms, whether through possession/attribution ("mon Saharah" 1. 5, "Mon desir" 1. 7, "mon coeur" 1. 10), by comparison ("comme un boucher" 1. 2, "Comme Molse" 1. 3, "Comme un vaisseau" 1. 9), or finally in copulative predication ("Ne suis-je pas un faux accord" 1. 13). Even after the introduction of the mirror in which Irony and Poet interchange places (in the stanza where for once the Poet's possessive appears in feminine form: " ma voix"), the opposition between masculine and feminine holds sway (though without consistent distribution of the roles victim/victimizer) in the series of matched-gender pairs of the following stanza ("Je suis la plaie et le c o u t e a u ! / . . . / Et la victime et le bourreau!"). In the last stanza, however, all nouns (and pronouns) are masculine, as if the differentiation of gender had to disappear along with the speaking subject. This gender indifferentiation characterizes "LTrremediable" as well. All the substantives associated with the mirror image in the second poem are masculine (even the "Tete-atete" beginning the stanza), as are all the comparata emblematizing the absent persona except those in the very first line of the

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poem, which thus serve as a kind of transition from the opposed gender roles of "L'Heautontimoroumenos'' to the insistent repetition here of " u n " - " U n etre" (1. i), " U n Ange" (1. 5), " U n malheureux" (1. 13), " U n damne" (1. 17), " U n navire" (1. 25) - that names... no one. In fact, not only is there no personal pronoun subject in the poem, there are also no subjects whatsoever and no main predicates, all conjugated verbs appearing in clauses subordinate to the starkly apposed "emblems" (1. 29). Apposition is metaphoric in principle, since it implies equivalence through substitution of one item by the next; but here apposition is largely metonymic, inasmuch as the series of emblems forms a sequence rather than an equivalence: they describe an arc that moves from the abstract to the concrete, away from the transcendental splendor of "Une Idee, une Forme, un Etre" and " U n Ange" of the first two stanzas (all capitalized), through the substantivized adjectives "malheureux '' and '' damne,'' to the final emblem: a ship trapped at the pole (1. 25). The kinetics of the sequence follows suit: the early emblems involve a tragic fall from heaven to hell, the descent of the damned into the depths; in the final one, the ship is trapped motionless, the verbs of motion ("chercher," even "tomber") themselves taking on secondary senses which no longer imply motion at all. Moreover, the vivid metaphors characteristic of the previous stanzas have given way to simile ("Comme en un piege de cristal" 1. 26). The emblems thus appear to shed their poeticality as the sequence finally reaches its term and names only "an irremediable fortune" as its reference. Compared to the clear-cut gender oppositions and neatly balanced disjunctions surrounding the mirror in "L'Heautontimoroumenos," the mirror in "LTrremediable" functions more like a hall of mirrors, endlessly multiplying poetically fainter and fainter images of the same ... But the second stanza of the second part of the poem contains yet another masculine appositive - " Un phare ironique, infernal" (1. 37) - which suggests a very different comparison. Of course, the mention of irony here recalls the immediate context and significantly transforms the personified allegory "Ironie" of "L'Heautontimoroumenos" into a mere adjectival comp-

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lement (in fact, one of two such modifying "beacon" in the same line). But this appositive also recalls, in a broader context, the glorious beacons of the early poem of the same name ("Les Phares" [vi]), which thus provides a virtual mirror image of a former Poet or poetics in a setting where the subject is now absent and poeticality itself is on the wane. Indeed, "LTrremediable" can be considered the reversed mirror image of "Les Phares" for a number of reasons. They not only occupy roughly symmetrical positions near the beginning and end of the "Spleen and Ideal" section (in the second edition), but they also share a distinctive, extended paratactic form that sets them apart from all other poems in the collection. What appears in the later poem as the sequence of emblems we have examined appears in " Les Phares" as a set of great painters whose art worlds are described one by one in the first eight stanzas: Rubens, da Vinci, Rembrandt, and so on. But despite the similarity of paratactic form, this chain of appositives forms a strongly metaphoric set rather than a metonymic series: the art worlds really are equivalent, and are conjoined and literally made one (" [Ce] sont u n . . . " 1. 35) in the last three stanzas:

36

40

44

Ces maledictions, ces blasphemes, ces plaintes, Ces extases, ces cris, ces pleurs, ces Te Deum, Sont un echo redit par mille labyrinthes; C'est pour les coeurs mortels un divin opium! C'est un cri repete par mille sentinelles, Un ordre renvoye par mille porte-voix; C'est un phare allume sur mille citadelles, Un appel de chasseurs perdus dans les grands bois! Car c'est vraiment, Seigneur, le meilleur temoignage Que nous puissions donner de notre dignite Que cet ardent sanglot qui roule d'age en age Et vient mourir au bord de votre eternite!

The eight stanzas of description are resumed in the plurals of lines 33-34 before being reduced to " a [single] echo" in line 35, after which the singular indefinite article is repeated in each of the five succeeding lines before taking final form in a superlative (hence with definite article: "le meilleur temoignage") de-

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noting true testimony addressed to the Lord (11. 41-42). In "L'Irremediable," by contrast, the emblems barely form a set of equivalences, appearing rather as a gradated series whose devolution represents a "perfect painting [or] tableau" (1. 29) of the success of the Devil's work, rather than a prayer addressed to God. It is, of course, richly ironic that the emblems here become a painting of the Devil's work, since in the poem's romantic counterpart it was the works of painters that became a prayer. This contrast highlights in " L'Irremediable " a mode of address with which we have become familiar since the beauty cycle: with the disappearance of the speaking subject, post-lyric modernist poetry refuses speech (and afortiori speech in the form of prayer addressed to the ultimate transcendental interlocutor, God) as the model poetry presents of itself. Where " Les Phares" took paintings as prayers, here emblems are taken as... emblems: "concrete object[s] endowed with abstract meaning[s]." Whereas in "L'Heautontimoroumenos," the speaking subject appeared so as to be ironized, in "L'Irremediable" irony is explicitly named and assumed by the text, so that the speaking subject never appears at all. It is no longer through speech that the Poet expresses himself; poetry henceforth finds expression in images of things - much as if its avowed aim were simply to glorify the adoration of images: " Glorifier le culte des images (ma grande, mon unique, ma primitive passion)." 15 Yet the poem ends with one final apposed substitute for the absent persona emblematized throughout, a substitute in feminine form this time, introduced (the only time in the poem) by a definite article, followed by an exclamation point - and preceded, as if to signal an important shift of register, by a dash: " - L a conscience dans le Mai!" (1. 40). Compared to the unmitigated metonymy of the " Spleen" poems, this concluding appositive reinforces the metaphoric quality of the chain by providing a single general equivalent for the entire series of emblems. Even in the striking absence of a speaking subject, the apposed chain of emblems and virtual mirror images (reflections of "L'Heautontimoroumenos," of "Les Phares") tends to produce a phantom "consciousness" or "conscience," a

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doubled or ironic subject of the text - a phantom sujet cPenonce, as it were, shadowing the sujet (Tenonciation so rigorously eliminated from the text itself. So the cycle of evil at the end of "Spleen and Ideal," while clearly opposing the section's opening romantic cycle on the thematic plane, also reiterates in the space of four poems the assertion and subsequent evaporation of the speaking subject that characterizes the evolution of metonymic poetics from the end of the beauty cycle to spleen. Its opening sonnets - both added to the second edition — introduce an active subject of evil keenly aware of the decision to vilify rather than glorify nature, but that subject is immediately split into mutually contradicting roles in " L'Heautontimoroumenos " and then stripped of its status as first-person speaking subject in " LTrremediable." The cycle thereby concludes with a radically metonymic form of irony in which no position is available from which to stabilize and hierarchize binary opposition. If the subject is both victim and torturer, both conscience and evil, neither pole can be considered the basic one in relation to which the other could be judged. Hence the impossibility of disambiguating (and of translating) the crucial phrase "La conscience dans le Mai!" There is no way to decide which of "conscience" or "Evil" prevails over the other, so that mere "awareness" of the impossibility is the most the phrase can convey. Irony such as this subverts the value-hierarchies informing fundamental binary oppositions of the socio-symbolic order, even while keeping those oppositions in play. The arrangement of these four poems in the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai certainly serves to strengthen a sense of strongwilled perversity and self-conscious indulgence in evil that diametrically reverses the romantic idealism of the opening cycle of" Spleen and Ideal." However, the section does not end there, but with "L'Horloge," a poem added to the second edition to conclude the revised section. This addition brings to the fore the decoding of subjectivity characteristic of the metonymic poetics inaugurated by "La Beaute" and culminating in " Spleen," rather than the thematic binary opposition

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of good and evil. For the figure of the Poet is completely absent from "L'Horloge." And the text compensates for the eclipse of the Poetic voice by recourse to an extended prosopopoeia, which recalls the rhetoric of "La Beaute" (these two being the only poems in the section to make such extensive use of this figure). Only this time, the prosopopoeia itself contains a prosopopoeia, in that "the Second" (1. 9) and "Now" (1. 11) are cited as speaking within the long quotation comprising most of the poem — so that the text effectively underscores its own rhetorical figure wise en abime, as if to make it more legible. Indeed, the prosopopoeia in "L'Horloge" appears all the more explicit because it is not total: the timepiece's warning appears in quotation marks and is introduced by a brief, impersonal apostrophe: Horloge! dieu sinistre, effrayant, impassible, Dont le doigt nous menace et nous dit: " Souviens-toi! These two lines alone contain many features of the metonymic poetics of the beauty and spleen cycles: the potentially interminable paratactic list of attributes (1. 1); the allegorical personification of the timepiece (called a sinister god in line 1); the reduction of the subject presented in the first line by metonymy to one of its parts, " le doigt," which will menace and address us mortals (1. 15); the immediate mise-en-question of the allegorical figure's status by the syllepsis involving the term "doigt" (1. 2), which can refer either via personification to the finger of the time-god or more concretely to the pawl of the clock itself. The double subordinate predicate of line 2 will then accentuate the syllepsis, for while "Dont le doigt nous menace" on the one hand supports the allegorical reading, with the timegod thereby wagging his index finger at us in admonishment, " Dont le doigt nous dit," on the other hand - a strange thing to say of a finger, after all - suggests rather the ticking sound of the clock's pawl and ratchet wheel, which would thereby admonish us and represent time's menace in retrospect. The admonition itself (whoever pronounces it — and again, to insist on deciding between the two possibilities would be to miss the indeterminacy so characteristic of Baudelaire's metonymic

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poetics) this admonition recalls the oppressive atmosphere of decoded time from the "Spleen" poems, with the dreary moments ticking away one by one by one. But with the personification of time (in the clock or the time-god), it also echoes the universe ruled by chance in "Hymne a la Beaute" (the two poems in fact initially appeared together in L Artiste) and the desperate gamble taken in the projects of beautification and intensification to salvage beauty, or intense experience of any kind, from the ineluctable ravages of time: 16

Les minutes, mortel folatre, sont des gangues Qu'il ne faut pas lacher sans en extraire Tor! le Temps est un joueur avide Qui gagne sans tricher, a tout coup! c'est la loi. Tantot sonnera l'heure ou le divin Hasard,

24

Oil tout te dira: Meurs, vieux lache! il est trop tard!

The poetics of the admonition, meanwhile, recall the halting rhythm of "Spleen" no. 2 ("J'ai plus de souvenirs... ") and "Spleen" no. 4 ("Quand le ciel bas et lourd... "), as the stanzas return repeatedly to the refrain "souviens-toi" as if to hammer home the sense of time's relentless passage and the need to mobilize memory against it. If the repetition of the imperative "souviens-toi" in this context appears to evoke the potential of memory in the struggle against time, it is largely because of the syntactical relations the phrase entertains in the first four stanzas. " Souviens-toi" always appears there as an imperative without further predication that would disambiguate it, and followed by descriptions of the various tortures dealt out by the passage of time. Only in the fifth stanza (out of six) does a direct object make it clear that the imperative is not to remember something past ("souviens-toi de ce qui fut"), but to always bear in mind that time is the enemy: "Souviens-toi que le Temps est un joueur avide ... " (1. 17). Far from successfully resuscitating memory or even recommending the attempt, the poem warns of the inevitable defeat of memory by time, instead. The descriptive passages intercalated between

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the repeated command to "remember" thus appear not as motives for recalling the past, but as so many features of what it is that needs always to be kept in mind: time is an avid gambler or game-player who wins without cheating, " a tout coup!" (1. 18) — at every stroke (of the clock), at every throw (of the dice), at every shot (at the billiard table), at every move (in checkers or chess), at every turn (in any game). If its final poem is an indication, the "Spleen and Ideal" section concludes with a categorical rejection of memory and of the prospect of recuperating the identity of self metaphorically by reuniting past and present. In contrast to the cycle of evil immediately preceding it, "L'Horloge" affirms the anti-lyrical metonymic poetics that underlay the intensification of things, and that appears here in the project to salvage poetic value in a wager against the ever-present menace of splenetic time. But "L'Horloge" does not only reiterate the metonymic poetics of the beauty and spleen cycles preceding it; it also thematizes metonymy itself in the allegorical figure of decoded time, which now represents the context in which all poetic projects are pursued. It thus sets the stage for the drama of the "Tableaux Parisiens" to follow. At the same time, the diverse and striking psychodynamic effects of the eclipse of memory and integral subjectivity our poetic analysis has brought to light — ranging from the exhilarating pleasures of beauty, to the excruciating boredom of spleen, to the self-lacerating thrills of evil - call for an examination of Baudelaire's poetic supernaturalism from the perspective of psychopoetics.

PART II

Psychopoetics

CHAPTER 4

Romantic temperament and "Spleen and Ideal'

THE PSYGHODYNAMIGS OF EXPERIENCE

Walter Benjamin's germinal insight was to have read "Spleen and Ideal" in conjunction with Freud's analysis of memory and perception in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This enabled him to understand the aesthetics of both " Correspondances " and " Spleen" as facets of Baudelaire's poetic response to the crisis of experience in market society, a response he dubs the "shockdefense." Benjamin's perspective has its limitations: in making the "Spleen and Ideal" section the core of his entire reading, Benjamin neglects important developments in the "Tableaux Parisiens" and the Petits Poemes en prose; he even overlooks the importance of the projects of beautification and evilification in "Spleen and Ideal" itself; finally, he somewhat hastily merges the textual figure of the Poet with the historical figure of Baudelaire himself. On this last point, it is worth recalling that "Some Motifs in Baudelaire" was only a draft portion of a larger study of the poet that Benjamin never finished: an examination of Baudelaire's early art criticism will largely corroborate Benjamin's assessment of his historical significance, which is presented in shorthand, as it were, in the unfinished essay. Then Benjamin's psychodynamic reading of "Spleen and Ideal" can be broadened to encompass the projects of beautification and evilification, as well as correspondences and spleen. The aim will be to examine the evolution of Baudelaire's metonymic poetics and the alternating cycles of decoding and recoding in "Spleen and Ideal," as preparation for the psychopoetic reading of the "Tableaux Parisiens" in the next chapter. 111

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The essay "Some Motifs in Baudelaire" hinges on the distinction Benjamin proposes between mere "lived time" (Erlebnis) and "experience in the strict sense of the word" (Erfahrung).1 In merely "lived time," passing moments are linked by the degree-zero of relation, pure linear succession. This is the decoded form of splenetic time that appears in " L'Horloge," where the time-god counts down the meaningless sequence of minutes and seconds till death. Recollection (longterm memory) that would serve to integrate a lifetime of experience no longer functions here; recall (short-term memory) that serves to synthesize immediately lived experience is reduced to the registration of sheer seriality. In "true experience," by contrast, passing moments are integrated into meaningful life-experience via the memory-chains of recollection, the operations of which are "frequently unconscious" (Benjamin here invokes the memoire involontaire of Bergson and Proust). Successful integration of personal life-experience depends, according to Benjamin, on a framework of memorability created by the repetition of collectively observed special occasions: Where there is experience in the strict sense of the word, certain contents of the individual past combine with material of the collective past. Rituals, with their ceremonies, their festivals ... kept producing the amalgamation of these two elements of memory [individual past and collective past] over and over again. They triggered recollection and remained handles of memory [with which to grasp experience] for a lifetime, (p. 113) But the modern calendar, on Benjamin's analysis, does not integrate time in that way: the unexceptional, day-to-day passage of lived time {Erlebnis) predominates instead, broken only on weekends and by holidays, which represent the rare occasions on which individual and collective memory might realign to produce experience in the strict sense {Erfahrung)} For modern man, however, even the places of recollection [that take] the form of holidays ... are left blank... [Modern man] loses his capacity for experiencing [and] feels

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as though he is dropped from the calendar. The big-city dweller knows this feeling on Sundays; Baudelaire has it avant la lettre in one of his Spleen poems, (p. 144) Life after the decline of experience, Benjamin suggests, risks degenerating into the empty spleen time of "L'Horloge." Yet Baudelaire's poetry constitutes for Benjamin not simply an expression of the crisis of experience, but a complex reaction involving (inter alia) both defense against and compensation for the loss of collective traditions. The key hypothesis on which Benjamin bases his distinction between lived time and true experience Freud formulates as follows: "becoming conscious and leaving behind a memory trace are processes incompatible with each other" (cited by Benjamin in " Some Motifs, " p . 114). On this view, the principal role of consciousness is not so much to receive stimuli as it is to shield the rest of the psyche from them. What Freud calls the "consciousness-perception system" processes or manages sensory input by binding incoming stimuli to preexisting memorychains in order to "make sense" of them and thereby prevent trauma. In this way, consciousness integrates the function of the pleasure principle, bending it to its own purpose. The pleasure principle generally governs the reading of perceptual stimuli in terms of memory-traces left by previous satisfaction of a drive, so as to enable the organism to obtain an appropriate object and thence discharge the energy of the drive. But the ego is satisfied with the binding of stimuli itself, regardless of whether it leads to discharge or not: its primary aim is not to obtain pleasure, but merely to reduce anxiety over potential trauma from incoming stimuli. Trauma results when the shield of consciousness fails and a memory-trace is inscribed directly in the unconscious: an incident leaves a lasting, unconscious impression deep in memory precisely to the extent that it is not registered in consciousness first.3 As a modern man and urban dweller, Benjamin suggests, Baudelaire was particularly susceptible to traumatic shocks, and this for two interrelated reasons. On one hand, the decline of collective festival and traditions leaves modern man psychically exposed, without the ready handles of collective

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memory that would enable him to process experience more or less automatically. On the other hand, the rapid pace of modern city life (epitomized for Benjamin in the image of the Poet dodging horse-drawn carriages racing down Haussmann's new boulevards)4 gravely taxes the ability of the exposed psyche to protect itself. Baudelaire's response is the shock-defense. The greater the risk of traumatic shock, Benjamin explains, the more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen against stimuli; the more efficiently it is so, the less do these impressions enter experience (Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour in one's life (Erlebnis) ... Baudelaire made it his business to parry the shocks ... (p. 117)

The shock-defense thus results in the "lived time" of "L'Horloge" and the "Spleen" poems; as Benjamin puts it: "in spleen the perception of time is supernaturally keen; every second finds consciousness ready to intercept its shock" (p. 143). The shock-defense is not without serious consequences: the process "of assigning to an incident a precise point in time in consciousness at the cost of the integrity of its contents" in effect turns the incident "into a moment that has been lived (Erlebnis)" (p. 117); it thereby "sterilize[s] the incident for poetic experience" (p. 116). Baudelaire thus appears as a lyric poet whose conditions of experience threaten to preclude the possibility of writing lyric poetry. Baudelaire's response to this challenge, according to Benjamin, is the doctrine of correspondences, an "attempt to establish experience in a crisis-proof form" (p. 140, translation modified). The disintegration of experience provokes a desperate battle waged by Baudelaire to salvage some form of experience from the ravages of modernity; hence Benjamin's gloss on the title of the first section of Les Fleurs du Mai: "The ideal supplies the power of remembrance; the spleen musters the multitude of seconds against it" (p. 142). Only traumatic experience resonates deeply enough in memory to become the stuff of characteristically modern lyric poetry. In effect, Baudelaire writes his own calendar (p. 142), creating poems out of personal trauma to fill in the spaces that are left blank by the erosion of collective holidays (p. 116) and

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threatened with engulfment in the dreary emptiness of spleen time. Proust describes the Baudelairean calendar thus: "Time is peculiarly chopped u p . . . only a few days open up, they are significant ones" (cited by Benjamin in "Some Motifs," p. 139). What makes them significant is that "they are days of recollection [Erfahrung], not marked by any experience [of lived time, Erlebnis]. They are not connected with the other days, but stand out from [the passage of] time" (p. 139). Thus for Benjamin, correspondences are inseparable from an experience of the remote past: The correspondances are the data of remembrance - not historical data, but data of prehistory. What makes festive days great and significant is the encounter with an earlier life. Baudelaire recorded this in a sonnet entitled "La Vie anterieure" ... There are no simultaneous correspondences, such as were cultivated later by the Symbolists. The murmur of the past may be heard in the correspondences, and the canonical experience of them has its place in a previous life. (p. 141) But whose previous life? Whose past is heard in the murmur of correspondences? The Poet's own? - or that of some vanished collectivity? The strategic value of the calendar figure for Benjamin is that it enables him to fuse together the individual past (lodged deep in memory) of the Poet with a kind of collective past that he claims Baudelaire once shared but which is on the verge of disappearing in the poet's own lifetime. The essay's cognitive force derives from a kind of stereoscopy by which the textual persona of the Poet is seen to converge with the historical figure of Baudelaire at a moment of transition. Thus a certain line of poetry in Baudelaire "expresses ... [the] collapse of that experience which he once shared" (p. 143, my

emphasis); and at the same time, "by appropriating the ritual elements ... included in the concept of experience recorded by the correspondances... Baudelaire was able to fathom the full meaning of the breakdown which he, a modern man, was witnessing"

(p. 139, my emphasis). The weekends or "significant days" of Baudelaire's own life (as expressed in his poetry) end up fusing with the festive holidays that once cemented tradition and triggered "handles of memory" for whole societies.

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As suspect as such an assertion may seem in the condensed form given to it by Benjamin's essay, a similar but not identical formulation of socio-symbolic "breakdown" appears in Baudelaire's early art criticism. Baudelaire's own formulation reveals that, far from sharing the form of traditional experience Benjamin claims was just disappearing in the poet's lifetime, Baudelaire was already compensating for its loss: partly by appealing to the endangered tradition of great art, partly by resorting to private recollection in its stead.

THE EARLY ART CRITICISM

Baudelaire is now generally agreed to be among the most brilliant art critics of his generation, even though some aspects of his early criticism remain perplexing. This may be due to the nature of Salon criticism itself, which stretched whatever underlying presuppositions a critic may have had over (potentially) hundreds of works of art of various genres, while demanding at the same time that the critic say something interesting and accessible to a broad range of readers. In any case, one point is clear: the young Baudelaire considered a certain kind of memory to be the foundation of great art. In this light, Benjamin's invocation of "involuntary memory" to explain the aesthetics of correspondances appears perfectly appropriate and quite persuasive. " Memory is the principal criterion of art; art is a mnemonics of the beautiful (le souvenir [est] le grand criterium de l'art; l'art est une mnemotechnie du beau)," Baudelaire declares at one point in the Salon of 1846; and yet the appeal to memory must not be too explicit, for "exact imitation spoils memory (Pimitation exacte gate le souvenir)." 5 This explains Baudelaire's dislike of the paintings of Horace Vernet, who is pilloried in the same essay for having no passion and an almanac memory ("nulle passion et une memoire d'almanach"): Qui sait mieux que lui combien il y a de boutons dans chaque uniforme, quelle tournure prend une guetre ou une chaussure avachie

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par des etapes nombreuses; a quel endroit des buffeteries le cuivre des armes depose son ton vert-de-gris? (p. 250) Who knows better than he how many buttons belong on each uniform, or the anatomy of a gaiter or boot worn out by many days' marching, or the exact spot on a soldier's gear where the copper of his small arms deposits its verdigris? In contrast to the overly detailed, almanac-like memory of a Vernet, Baudelaire describes the "deep-memory" impressions left in the psyche by the quality of great painting he refers to at various points in the essay as "unity," "harmony," or "melody": Ainsi la melodie laisse dans l'esprit un souvenir profond ... La bonne maniere de savoir si un tableau est melodieux est de le regarder d'assez loin pour n'en comprendre ni le sujet ni les lignes. S'il est melodieux, il a deja un sens, et il a deja pris sa place dans le repertoire des souvenirs, (p. 232) Melody thus leaves a profound memory in the mind ... The right way to know if a picture is melodious is to look at it from far enough away to make it impossible to understand its subject or to distinguish its lines. If it is melodious, it already has a meaning, and it has already taken its place in our store of memories. It may seem perplexing that a painting seen for the very first time is described as being ''already part of our store of memories," 6 but this is precisely the circumstance Benjamin and Freud posit for perceptions' making a lasting impression on the psyche: that conscious schemes for processing experience be out of play so as to let sensations impinge on deeper layers of the psyche. It is thus when a painting is seen at a propitious distance that it has "already" imposed itself in memory, i.e. before we are consciously aware of what it is about, of exactly what it represents in a cognitive sense. Taking one's distance is not the only way to recognize great painting, however. Baudelaire distinguishes painting from sculpture partly on the grounds that painting is - in that characteristic Baudelairean expression (which Benjamin would undoubtedly translate as "shocking") - "despotic": it imposes itself on the viewer, whereas sculpture, accessible from too many

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different points of view, leaves too much to the viewer's conscious mind. "La peinture n'a qu'un point de vue; elle est exclusive et despotique: aussi l'expression du peintre est-elle bien plus forte. (Painting has only one point of view; it is exclusive and despotic: thus painterly expression is more powerful) " (p. 257). Baudelaire in fact goes to some lengths to describe the shock experience that great painting entails: Voici en six points les differentes impressions du passant devant ce tableau [si] poetiquement brutal: i° vive curiosite; 20 quelle horreur! 30 c'est mal peint, mais c'est une composition singuliere et qui ne manque pas de charme; 40 ce n'est pas aussi mal peint qu'on le croirait d'abord; 50 revoyons done ce tableau; 6° souvenir durable, (p. 243) Here are the six distinct stages of the spectator's impressions in front of so poetically brutal a painting as this: (1) lively curiosity; (2) what an abomination! (3) it is badly painted, but has an interesting composition which is not lacking in charm; (4) it is not as badly painted as one first might think; (5) let us have another look at this painting, then; (6) lasting memory. "Lasting memory (souvenir durable)": great paintings leave lasting memories, partly due to the striking impression they create at first glance; by contrast, mediocre paintings (those of Diaz, for example) leave no memories whatsoever ("ses tableaux ne laissent pas de souvenir," p. 243). But a certain shock-value and memorability are not the only aspects of Baudelaire's standard for great art. If we follow his train of thought on Decamps, we see yet another aspect of the criterion of memory: L'impression que [sa peinture] produisait... sur l'ame du spectateur etait si soudaine et si nouvelle, qu'il etait difficile de se figurer de qui elle estfille,quel avait ete le parrain de ce singulier artiste, et de quel atelier etait sorti ce talent solitaire et original, (p. 242) The impression his paintings produced on the spectator's soul was so sudden and so novel, that it was difficult tofigureout their parentage, [to determine] who had been the godfather of this singular artist, from which studio his solitary and original talent had come. Following the initial shock of a truly original painting, the viewer strives to align it with other paintings and movements.

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For the painting to appear new, its relation to tradition must not be obvious; but such a relation must nonetheless exist. Baudelaire continues: dans cent ans, les historiens auront du mal a decouvrir le maitre de M. Decamps. - Tantot il relevait des anciens maitres...de l'Ecole flamande... tantot la pompe et la trivialite de Rembrandt le preoccupaient vivement; d'autres fois on retrouvait dans ses ciels un souvenir amoureux des ciels du Lorrain. (p. 242) one hundred years from now, historians will certainly have a hard time determining who M. Decamp's teacher was. - Sometimes he appears to belong to the Flemish School... sometimes the pomp and triviality of Rembrandt seem to engross him deeply; at other times his skies recall a fond memory of the skies of [the seventeenth-century French landscape painter] le Lorrain. Thus great painting not only becomes memorable, it must also evoke memories, though not too explicitly, of other great painters in the tradition. How, to take another example, can we best appreciate the greatness of a paysagiste such as Rousseau? "Qu'on se rappelle quelques paysages de Rubens et de Rembrandt, qu'on y mele quelques souvenirs de peinture anglaise ... on pourra peut-etre se faire une idee de la magie de ses tableaux. (Recall if you will some of Rubens' and Rembrandt's landscapes, then add some memories of English painting ... and you may be able to get some idea of the magic of his paintings" (p. 256). If there is a danger of being too scrupulously faithful to the details of subject-matter (as in the case of Vernet), there is a corresponding danger of being too explicitly faithful to the painterly tradition, as well. As Baudelaire explains with respect to William Haussoullier (in the Salon of1845)? lt ls possible to "know a little too much about art... [M. Haussouillier] should be wary of his erudition" (208), for his paintings risk stating too clearly their debt to the past: Oserons-nous, apres avoir si franchement deploye nos sympathies... oserons-nous dire que le nom de Jean Bellin et de quelques Venitiens des premiers temps nous a traverse la memoire, apres notre douce contemplation? M. Haussoullier serai t-il de ces hommes qui en savent

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un peu trop long sur leur art? C'est la un fleau bien dangereux... (p. 208) Dare we, after having so frankly displayed our sympathies, say that following our pleasant contemplation of this work the names of Giovanni Bellini and some early Venetian painters crossed our memory? Is M. Haussouillier one of those men who know a little too much about their art? That is a truly dangerous scourge... The perception of a new work of art must, as Michael Fried explains, trigger ... memories of earlier works, but not only must those memories not be allowed to overwhelm ... that perception, they must remain below the threshold of conscious awareness•, investing the present with the aura and significance of memory without for a moment appearing on its stage... [Yet] neither must they quite be forgotten, for [then] they would no longer be available to come to the support of new perceptions.8 This is the balancing-act characteristic of modern art, according to Baudelaire. From it follows his rather acrobatic description of the foremost modern temperament in French painting: Delacroix is "one of the rare men who remain original even after having drawn from all the right sources, and whose indomitable individuality has alternately submitted to and thrown off the tutelage of all the grand masters (un des rares hommes qui restent originaux apres avoir puise a toutes les vraies sources, et dont Pindividualite indomptable a passe alternativement sous le joug secoue de tous les grands maitres)" (p. 235). Baudelaire thus defines great painting in terms of its capacity simultaneously to appear new (to shock), to recall nonetheless (and however vaguely) previous paintings, and to impress itself on memory (in order to become part of the tradition in turn). Throughout the essay, he refers to this characteristically romantic amalgamation of the collective past (the tradition) and the individual present (the demand for originality) as the artistic expression of "temperament" (p. 229 and passim). Temperament is indeed the touchstone of Baudelaire's early criticism; when he claims later in the essay that he has " already observed that memory is the principal criterion of art (J'ai deja remarque que le souvenir etait le grand criterium de Tart)"

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(p. 244), he has in fact not mentioned memory itself, but is referring to the role of memory that is implicit in the criterion of individual temperament announced in the first section. In explaining right at the outset the proper role of criticism (the first section is entitled "A quoi bon la critique?" ["What good is criticism?"]), Baudelaire begins by refusing perspectives that would limit the critic's appreciation to e.g. only line or only color in an artist's work. In contrast to such narrow perspectives, un point de vue plus large sera l'individualisme bien entendu: commander a l'artiste la naivete et l'expression sincere de son temperament, aidee par tous les moyens que lui fournit son metier. [Here Baudelaire appends a footnote: "A propos de l'individualisme bien entendu, voir dans le Salon de 1845 l'article sur William Haussoullier."] Qui n'a pas de temperament n'est pas digne de faire des tableaux, et — comme nous sommes las des imitateurs, et surtout des eclectiques, - doit entrer comme ouvrier au service d'un peintre a temperament. C'est ce que je demontrerai dans un des derniers chapitres. (p. 229) a broader perspective requires a proper understanding of individualism: the imperative for the artist to express his temperament with naivete and sincerity, aided by all the means provided by his talent. [Here Baudelaire appends a footnote: "On the proper understanding of individualism, see my article on William Haussoullier in the Salon of 1845" (quoted above).] Whoever lacks temperament is not worthy of painting, and - since we are tired of imitators and especially of eclectics - must apprentice himself to a painter of temperament. That is what I will show in one of the final chapters. And indeed, Section 17 of the essay (entitled "Des Ecoles et des ouvriers") spells out the socio-historical context in which temperament is assigned such an important role. For Baudelaire, the disintegration of the socio-symbolic order takes the form in the plastic arts of a generalized "doubt"; it results from an anarchic individualism which has sapped the "profound unity [of] the great tradition (l'unite profonde [de] la grande tradition)" (p. 258), leaving the field to "imitators" and "eclectics." On Baudelaire's cultural calendar of post-revolutionary France, the works of "imitators" appear too metaphoric, fixated on the repetition of preexisting styles and asserting no individuality of their own; " eclectics," conversely,

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appear too metonymic, producing a "jumble" of idiosyncratic styles bearing no meaningful relation to the past at all. Baudelaire insists that the true modern artist must strike a balance between the two, producing the distinctly new, according to the demands of romantic individualism, while retaining a certain relation (necessarily a subliminal one, given the romantic demand for "naive" originality) to the tradition. The deterioration of the great tradition requires painters to forge their own unity, relying on the faculty of memory to supplement present perception with distant (and purposely latent) echoes from the past. In a footnote appended to the attack on Vernet's "almanac memory" (cited above), Baudelaire defines the role of memory (here quoting E. T. A. Hoffmann) as follows: La veritable memoire ... ne consiste ... que dans une imagination tresvive, facile a emouvoir, et par consequent susceptible d'evoquer a l'appui de chaque sensation les scenes du passe, en les douant, comme par enchantement, de la vie et du caractere propres a chacune d'elles... (p. 25on) True memory... consists ... entirely of an imagination that is very lively, easily moved, and thus liable to evoke scenes from the past in support

of each [new] sensation, endowing them, as if by magic, with the life and character appropriate to each of them ... (my emphasis) Read in its most immediate context, the evocation of "scenes from the past" refers to scenes from previous paintings in the great tradition (and this indeed is the way that Fried as art critic reads the passage). Such a reading would tend to confirm Benjamin's view that, in the face of a disintegrating sociosymbolic order, Baudelaire tries to resuscitate or bolster the psychopoetic functions of the metaphoric axis in the form of the collective memory-chains of painterly schools and tradition which serve as hidden points de repere for modern art. But there is another way of reading Baudelaire's allusion to "scenes from the past": they would consist of scenes from the poet's or painter's own personal past rather than scenes from the collective tradition. Baudelaire invokes just such a source of memorable impressions in his analysis of Delacroix, and we may suspect that the same would apply to his own case and to his

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own ocean voyage as well: "A trip to Morocco," Baudelaire remarks of Delacroix, "seems to have left a profound impression in his soul (Un voyage au Maroc laissa dans son esprit, a ce qu'il semble, une impression profonde)" (p. 234). This quotation suggests that lasting impressions may result not only from the experience of great painting in the Western European tradition, but also from geographic and cultural dislocation which would for the traveler make that tradition largely irrelevant. The psyche under these conditions would be equally (even dangerously) "open" to traumatic experience, inasmuch as an exotic context renders the usual cultural and linguistic codes inappropriate and ineffective for protecting the psyche through the binding of incoming stimuli. In this way, Baudelaire's art criticism stages the same stereoscopy that Benjamin achieved through the figure of the calendar. The notion of "temperament" assigns a crucial role to the "power of remembrance" in modern art in the face of the deterioration of the socio-symbolic order, but it turns out that the memorable impressions Baudelaire calls upon to bolster the flagging metaphoric axis may be either traditional or personal in origin. In the Salon criticism, these two sources of memory-traces appear side by side: tradition and personal past simply coexist, the possibility of a conflict between them not sufficiently evident to provoke even an attempt at reconciliation. These two sources also coexist in the romantic cycle of Les Fleurs du Mai. While "Les Phares" reinforces the metaphoric axis by invoking the great art tradition, a poem such as " La Vie anterieure" (especially when read in the light of Baudelaire's remarks on Delacroix) reinforces the metaphoric axis in a more inward and private mode, perhaps invoking profound impressions from the poet's own past. These early poems share a metaphoric poetics in which "involuntary" memorieswhether of great art ("Les Phares"), personal trauma ("Benediction"), or exotic adventure ("La Vie anterieure") - are called upon to play a crucial role. Yet it is not the traditional but the personal sources of memory that prevail here, partly because the romantic stance favors relations with nature rather than with society. It is therefore worth distinguishing the "over-

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coding" epitomized in "Les Phares" from the "recoding" characterizing "La Vie anterieure," "L'Ennemi," and other poems in the cycle. We will then be in a position to examine the relations of Benjamin's shock-defense to the interplay of recoding and decoding throughout the section. THE PSYGHOPOETIGS OF

SPLEEN AND IDEAL

Deleuze and Guattari's reading of Lacan is helpful in this connection because it resituates various forms of coding in cultural context. As we have said, the power of the notion of socio-symbolic order stems from its simultaneous evocation of the determinations of a social formation on one hand and those of a linguistic system or structure on the other. Lacan had already translated the Freudian Oedipus complex from socialpsychological into linguistic terms, emphasizing the process of symbolic substitution that all semiotic coding enables. In socialpsychological terms, substitutability means that, in accordance with the universal prohibition against incest, the father's interdiction (Lacan's "non-du-pere") separates the child from its one-to-one relation with the mother as its original object of desire, and requires that it seek substitutes for her. (This is the role of the castration-threat in the Freudian Oedipus complex.) In linguistic terms, substitutability means that, in accordance with the arbitrariness of the sign-relation posited by Saussure, signifiers are separated from any one-to-one relation with signifieds, and instead accept various substitutes: the assignment of the father's name (Lacan's "nom-du-pere") to the mother or to the child, for example, requires that "wife of" or "child of" be substituted for "husband/father" as signifieds of the father's name. The Oedipus complex founds culture, then, by training desire to accept substitute objects (in the process Freud called sublimation) and by situating desire in a universe of signification where symbolic substitution is the law. Within a socio-symbolic order, three different modes of coding can be distinguished, depending on whether substitution is sanctioned by social norms (overcoding), individual neurosis (recoding), or language itself (simple coding).

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In the absence of any coding whatsoever, substitution would be impossible: each signified would be irrevocably fixed to a single signifier. This is the limit-case of pure psychosis, according to Lacan: with the name-of-the-father and entry into the symbolic order foreclosed, the law of signification does not apply, and so desire remains fixed upon singular objects. It is entry into the symbolic order of language - resolution of the oedipus complex, acceptance of the law of signification - that makes substitution possible. Indeed, substitution is required by the symbolic, inasmuch as the "original" object of desire (the mother, real sense-experience unmediated by language and culture) is now irretrievably "lost." So upon separation from the mother and the real as erstwhile unmediated objects, desire becomes mobile, and now moves from one object to another in endless pursuit of satisfactory substitutes: this movement constitutes the metonymic axis of desire (what Lacan calls simply "the metonymy of desire"). The metaphoric axis of desire, meanwhile, determines which substitutes are found satisfactory, and can thus bring the metonymy of desire to a momentary pause. According to Lacan, the metaphoric axis of desire is not based on organic drives, but on what he calls the "primal signifier"-a strictly meaningless, uncoded sense-impression which, upon the child's entry into language, remains outside or beneath the sphere of signification, and henceforth serves as the foundation of the unconscious.9 Subsequent repressed or traumatic material will henceforth gravitate toward this primal signifier and remain bound to it by the force of the repetition compulsion. The force of desire, of course, generates endless displacement within the unconscious, so that the primal signifier is not only originally meaningless, but also never takes on any single definitive meaning.10 It nevertheless represents the ballast that enables the metaphoric axis to serve as a kind of counterweight to the metonymy of desire. While metonymy continually displaces the repressed signified of desire along the signifying chain, metaphor successfully crosses the "bar of signification" separating signifier and signified, and momentarily knits the repressed signified to a substitute signifier. Lacan

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calls these metaphoric moments in discourse "points de capiton"; they are the linguistic form of the neurotic symptom. It is this interplay of metaphoric and metonymic axes that structures the unconscious like a language (as Lacan says). But if the original object of desire is irretrievably lost and the primal signifier utterly meaningless, how are satisfactory substitutes to be recognized? How is the metaphoric axis of equivalence structured ? What counts as a substitute for the mother, or for the primal signifier itself? For the purpose of Lacanian therapy, which prides itself on being rigorously non-normative, absolutely anything counts. The sole reason for determining the structure of a metaphoric axis is to dissolve it. The aim of therapy is to detach patients from mystified compulsory investment in one imaginary metaphoric substitute, around which the neurotic ego has been constructed, and hence enable them to pursue substitution more wisely and freely. Opposed to the imaginary, the symbolic is in Lacan the realm of unrestricted (or decoded) equivalence. And the polar opposite of absolute fixation (psychosis), as Deleuze and Guattari were the first to seize on, is schizophrenia: the pure metonymy of desire freed from any compulsory metaphoric axes whatsoever. For the purposes of cultural history and critique, however, it is not only important to determine the structures of metaphoric axes, which govern stipulative definition and hierarchized binary oppositions, among other things; it is also crucial to distinguish those metaphoric axes that are mandatory within or promoted by a given culture from those structured idiosyncratically against the grain or in opposition to cultural norms. In Lacanian therapy, such a distinction is irrelevant, inasmuch as the aim of therapy is not to adapt individuals to society by realigning their metaphoric identity-structures with the metaphoric axes stipulated by the culture, but rather to transcend metaphoric structure altogether by dissolving imaginary fixations of either kind from the perspective of the symbolic. But historically speaking, the relative weight of the social and personal metaphoric axes varies considerably. Both forms of metaphoric axis may be based ultimately on the meaningless

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and ineradicable " primal signifier" that makes humans susceptible to culture in the first place. But they are structured, and the primal signifier managed or redeemed, by master-signifiers of very different provenance. It is for this reason that we invoke Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between the metaphoric o^rcoding characteristic of the socio-symbolic order at large, which entails a socially sanctioned master-signifier such as God, and the equally metaphoric but privatized r^coding of the individual, which entails a private master-signifier such as the name-of-the-father of the nuclear family. Especially in light of Baudelaire's insistence on the role of " temperament" in his early art criticism, " Les Phares" appears to be a clear instance of overcoding. The socio-symbolic metaphoric axis defining art is reinforced by aligning great artists of the Western European tradition in an invocation to the ultimate transcendental Other or master-signifier, God, who grounds the unity of the tradition and the identity of the figures composing it. But the disintegration of the socio-symbolic order and the volatility of modern urban life render traditional codes increasingly unable to protect the psyche through the binding of perceptual input. Instead, traumatic events leave traces deep in memory. Poetic effects are achieved and experience is salvaged from the dreary monotony of spleen time when such memorytraces "involuntarily" supplement present perception, producing correspondences linking self and nature through the reunification of past and present. In this instance of personal recoding, the metaphoric axis is based on the imaginary integrity of private life-experience as it is reflected in nature: the poet is able to recollect himself and his true being insofar as nature, not the tradition or God, serves as the mirror of his soul. Homme libre, toujours tu cheriras la mer! La mer est ton miroir; tu contemples ton ame Dans le deroulement infini de sa lame ...

"L'Homme et la Mer" 11. 1-3

The correspondences program predominating in the early cycle of the collection thus stages a kind of mystical recuperation of the poefs life in nature, whereby an imaginary self is constituted at

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odds with the established social order, and experience is endowed with poetic value to the extent that perceptual stimuli trigger associations with images lodged deep in memory. Yet despite the enormous appeal of this program for most critics (up to and including Benjamin), it does not, in fact, last long nor bulk large in Les Fleurs du Mai as a whole. (Nor do memory and " temperament" remain central to Baudelaire's mature art criticism, as we will see in the next chapter.) Benjamin was right that Baudelaire assigns a special role to the power of remembrance in the face of a decoded socio-symbolic order. But this is not because Baudelaire himself actually remembered anything from earlier in his life suggesting that traditions were intact. The tradition of great art was already being overrun, as Baudelaire put it, by "imitators and eclectics"; and in the poetry itself, remembrance is predominantly personal rather than traditional in origin. Furthermore, starting as early as "La Beaute," the metaphoric poetics of the correspondences program is itself decoded by a metonymic poetics that already prevails by the end of" Spleen and Ideal." In the psychopoetics of" La Beaute," the opposition between imaginary and symbolic registers is staged in the conflict between the poem's communicative and textual functions. The imaginary reading accepts Beauty's address and pursues the metaphors she proffers, in the vain hope of determining their hidden meaning. On this reading, Beauty's breast appears as a synecdoche for the inner soul of Beauty that inspires true love in the poets; as a metaphoric figure of speech, the breast "stands for" Beauty's essential nature. Yet the correspondence between inside and outside and the "crossing of the bar of signification" such a figure of speech implies does not take place: the imaginary reading is surely an intended temptation, but as the perplexity of comparisons magnifies and Beauty appears increasingly unfathomable, metaphor proves impossible. The breast is thus no longer a symbol of Beauty's inspiring loveliness, but appears instead as a thing, and as such represents an obstacle to the poets' obsession to determine Beauty's inner essence. Release from fixation on the metaphoric breast and the un-anchoring of the points de capiton grounding metaphor then

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inaugurate the metonymy of desire and the endless search (underscored by the future tense: "Consumeront leurs jours") for the part-objects Lacan calls the "objets petit-a"-substitutes for the breast or original object of desire. With access to essence denied by the mirrors of Beauty's eyes, it is precisely the beauty of the things they enhance that will fascinate, instead. Despite — or because of— the lack of access to Beauty's inner nature, the loss of the metaphoric breast is more than compensated by the increased splendor of real things. It is a fitting irony that the poetic charge added to things in "La Beaute" appears at first to derive from the "pure mirrors" of Beauty's eyes, and that it is she who describes her effects on poets rather than the other way around. For this reading suggests that the desire that beautifies is the "desire of the Other" (in Lacan's formula). But such effects are, of course, a function of the text that presents the figure of Beauty as its porteparole. The symbolic reading recognizes the textual function of the extended prosopopoeia, and knows the Other to be an empty position or perspective, not a person. Such a reading depends on our "seeing through" the figure of speech (prosopopoeia), so that we move beyond believing in Beauty and reassign the "desire of the Other" to the functioning of the text itself. In this light, if Beauty's mirror-eyes make all things more beautiful, it is because the text has us looking into them in the first place. As Baudelaire says in another context (in the Salon de 1959, attributing the statement to the "imaginative" as opposed to the "positivist" artist): " ' J e veux illuminer les choses avec mon esprit et en projeter le reflet sur les autres esprits.'" 11 With the text's decoding of metaphor, it is the metonymy of poetic desire that sponsors the appreciation of real things. In the trajectory following " La Beaute" that we have traced, poetic desire is gradually reappropriated, starting with the gambit in " Hymne a la Beaute," and continuing in poems such as " Parfum exotique " and particularly " La Chevelure ", where poetic will figures so prominently. Yet in the absence of a metaphoric axis that would found identity, the beautified things fascinating the poet are not whole persons but part-objects. Just

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as it is not Beauty herself but only her breast, her poses, and her eyes that affect the poets in " La Beaute," it is not the woman herself but rather parts of the body (an eye, a smile, a foot, a breast, the mere scent of a breast) that exhilarate the poetic faculty in the succeeding poems. And far from calling up memory-chains that would serve to reconfirm a coherent sense of self, these part-objects provoke wild flights of fancy bordering on hallucination, instead. Not only are such part-objects not grounded in the poet's own personal imaginary, as in the memory-based program of correspondences, they are not grounded in the socio-symbolic code, either: instead of provoking a moment of recognition in which present perception is aligned with a stable metaphoric axis, present perception is linked contingently with random associations: the metaphoric axis is no longer in play, the points de capiton so shallow as to be practically ineffectual; the resulting metonymy of desire is now the very source of poetic enthusiasm and the motor of poetic production. Demystification of the correspondences program thus leads to the supplemental beautification of things through ecstaticfantasy. As the

decoding of the metaphoric axis accelerates the metonymy of desire, the evocation of memories to supplement present perception gives way to the exhilaration of purely mobile fantasy, which operates through part-objects rather than whole objects. Poetic effects are achieved not by harmonizing sensations to make sense, but by multiplying associations against the grain and beyond the bounds of common sense. Such disintegration of the objects of poetic perception also destabilizes the fantasizing self. The result is the mode of substitution Deleuze and Guattari call "schizophrenic," which is neither imaginary nor socio-symbolic, and where the metonymy of desire freed from metaphoric identity (of self and object alike) is invested both in time and in real context. The beauty-effect thus entails a mode of free substitutability that realizes the subversion of metaphoric codes (both socio-symbolic and imaginary) through the investment and inscription of poetic desire in the part-object real.12

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The thorough subversion of the socio-symbolic code and the concomitant decoded metonymy of desire have this readily recognizable effect on the content of beauty in Baudelaire's poetry: now anything goes. Since no stipulative definition of beauty any longer applies, the poetic imagination in Baudelaire will make "all things more beautiful" - even the rotting corpse of a whore, for example (in "Une Charogne" [xxix]). Beauty, on this conception, is a function of poetic imagination alone, deriving its value solely from the investment of poetic desire, regardless of the nature of the object itself. The poet is no longer reading "the language of flowers and all silent things" ("Elevation"), as it were: he has become conscious of writing the meaning of things himself. Or rather of enhancing the beauty of things: for it is not a question of changing or even considering the meaning of things, but merely of adding a poetic intensity or charge to what is already given, finally to anything at all. Furthermore, as we have seen, the project of beautification is a gambit: what does the essence of Beauty matter, the Poet cries, if parts of her body send me into ecstasy?! There are no guarantees that part-objects will continue to fascinate the poet and stimulate his imagination, as becomes clear in spleen. And most important, the affirmative answer implied in poems such as "Parfum exotique" and "La Chevelure" accompanies a process that itself undermines the stability and coherence of the speaking subject, disrupting its sense of time and place. Under the influence of beautification and in the throws of mobile fantasy, the poet is in an important sense beside himself. This threat to the coherence of the self is inherent in the process of decoding. The program of correspondences substituted personal memory-chains for the disintegrating metaphoric axes of social codes, but the beautification project then frees the imagination from dependence on even the poet's own personal past, setting it afloat in mobile fantasy-production. With the decrease in weight of the metaphoric axis in poetic production, "reference to code" (to recall Jakobson's terms) even the idiosyncratic code of the poet's own associations - gives way to "reference to context," as the project of beautification verges into a project of sheer intensification. By the time we

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reach the "Spleen" poems, decoding has accelerated to the point that memory is totally defunct and fantasy-supplementation completely exhausted. Reference to context, in bleak yet intense depictions of barren things, is all that remains. And with the complete disintegration of the metaphoric axis and shallowing-out of the points de capiton, the Poet as speaking subject utterly disappears: in "L'Horloge," as pure metonymic seriality triumphs, it is (through prosopopoeia, once again) another (Other) voice, the voice of the time-god, that addresses us in the absence of the Poet himself. What has happened, in effect, is that ego-defensive anxiety has so totally appropriated the stimulus-binding energy of the psyche that the lyric agency of the poet, which depends as Benjamin saw on memory resonances of some kind (whether social or individual), is totally eclipsed. According to the pleasure principle, drive-motivated energy in the psyche should work to bind incoming stimuli to (metaphoric) memory-chains of previous images of gratification in order to facilitate the location of such an object in reality and then satisfy the drive. But the pleasure principle also governs the reservoir of psychic energy placed at the disposal of the ego, and which serves in states of anxiety to protect the psyche from trauma by binding stimuli for the sake of recognition alone; here, drive-gratification is not involved, since it is no longer drive-energy that motivates the stimulus-binding process, but ego-defensive anxiety, instead. By the time we reach the end of "Spleen and Ideal," the sources of poetic energy are no longer grounded in drive-gratification mediated through deeper layers of memory, but derive instead from anxiety-driven ego defenses that the poet may feel are somehow alien to the lyric project itself, that Benjamin claims are incompatible with lyric (or lyricizable) experience, and that have, in any case, led to the disappearance of the lyric Poet as speaking subject. With reference to codes (traditional and now personal as well) on the wane, with beauty no longer available either by traditional definition or through fantasy production, reference to the present context comes to the fore, and the project of beautification gives way to referential intensification through ego-

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defensive anxiety. In place of protection by metaphoric recognition, focus on the passage of time shields the psyche from trauma by providing a kind of zero-degree binding of any incoming stimulus whatsoever: it occurred at such-and-such a time. This response to the decoding of the socio-symbolic order is the contrary of correspondences: instead of invoking the metaphoric axis of remembrance, spleen intensification invokes the metonymic axis of seriality. It is more akin to beautification, in that content is irrelevant: things are transformed by poetic charge alone. What distinguishes spleen from beauty is that anxiety rather than pleasure fuels the binding and endows the charge. The socio-symbolic order in modernity, if Baudelaire's testimony is any indication, has become so decoded that the drive-based subject of desire gets submerged by ego-defensive anxiety. In this light, the Lacanian claim that, with the acquisition of language, organic drives are irretrievably lost behind the screen of the primal signifier (while undeniably central to his radically anti-normative therapy) appears to be symptomatic of the modernity that Baudelaire's texts were among the first to diagnose. One of the ironies of the dialectic of this modernity is that at just the moment the individual is freed through decoding from the imposition of traditional codes, decoding also magnifies anxiety to the point of virtually precluding the possibility of what Benjamin calls "authentic" experience, of experience that bears some discernable relation to the gratification of drives.13 Under these conditions, drives can be represented only in an ironic mode - such as the satanic irony of the cycle of evil appearing after the spleen cycle near the end of "Spleen and Ideal," and epitomized in the slogan, "La conscience dans le Mai." Unlike the metonymic decoding of spleen with its banishment of the Poet, the program of evilification reinvokes the figure of the Poet - although in this recoding he appears ironically, only as a shadow of his former self. While the metaphorical recoding of the correspondences program achieved its poetic effects in reinforcing psychic wholeness through the integration of past and present, the ironic recoding of evilification produces intensity through a doubling that sunders the self into act and judgment: "Je suis la

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plaie et le couteau! / ...Et la victime et le bourreau!" In evilification, what is doubled is not united by a nostalgia linking present with past, but divided by guilt, which opposes conscience to desire for evil. The resurgence of this phantom metaphoric axis thus produces a kind of guilty evilification through ironic doubling. Intensity now derives not from nostalgically supplementing present perception with past memories, but from avidly desiring to do what is wrong while knowing full well it is wrong. At the extreme, such a conflict allows no role for the integrative ego at all: as in "LTrremediable," the subject recedes in the face of the alien pulsions of prohibited id desires, on one hand, and the equally alien super-ego prohibitions against them, on the other. Yet it is the conflict between desire and judgment that is affirmed in these poems, for it is in itself a source of searing intensities, despite the absence of a stable or sovereign poetic subject. The initial "Spleen and Ideal" section of Les Fleurs du Mai thus consists not of an alternation between two psychopoetic modes, as Benjamin's reading and perhaps the section's title suggest, but of an evolution of metonymic poetics from the romantic recoding of the correspondences program, through the decoding of beauty and spleen, to the ironic recoding of evil. The alternating cycles of recoding and decoding that characterize this evolution continue in the "Tableaux Parisiens," only to appear in a very different form in the Petits Poemes en prose. Yet these cycles are not just poetic or psychopoetic in nature: they have other determinations, most notably determination by the series of Baudelaire's historical Others, which will be examined in Part III. Benjamin is again only half right about Baudelaire: his poetry does testify to a historic moment of accelerated decoding of the socio-symbolic order, but not because it contains any true memories of a disappearing social order with authentically collective social codes. Rather, Baudelaire was subject to the kind of decoded life-experience that caused and resulted from precisely the absence of such codes, and which led him therefore to rely for his lyric poetry on personal, trauma-like memories instead. The Lacanian notion of the "primal signifier" enables us to

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understand both why the claim that Baudelaire actually remembered a previous, more authentic form of social life is unnecessary, and how the substitution of personal for social metaphoric axes is possible. As meaningless ballast in the service of psychic stability, the primal signifier supports both social and personal coding indifferently. Personal and social metaphoric axes neither originally nor ultimately coincide, as Benjamin implies, in some lost form of authentic social life: they always converge and diverge to a greater or lesser degree. Yet this degree of convergence varies historically: in a decoded socio-symbolic order — and especially for romanticism — they are likely to diverge quite significantly, as the social symbolic Other gives way to more private ones. As we will see in Part III, after Baudelaire's participation in the overthrow of King LouisPhilippe and his vehement rejection of Napoleon III as social symbolic Others, the French poet's imaginary metaphoric axis eventually aligns on the American poet, Edgar Allan Poe, as a personal symbolic Other. The notion of "primal signifier" so central to Lacanian therapy thus turns out to obscure the important historic shift, first discerned in Baudelaire's poetry by Benjamin, in the ratio of personal and social coding, which he reads as a historic shift in the ratio of ego-anxiety and drive-gratification as functions of the pleasure-principle.14 A situation of widespread decoding first induces a substitution of imaginary personal codes for declining socio-symbolic ones, but then those personal codes get decoded in turn, as nostalgic memory-supplementation in the correspondences program gives way to exhilarated fantasysupplementation in beautification. Beautification then succumbs to bare referential intensification, at the point that the relation of recognition to the body and drive-gratification becomes completely submerged in the ego-defensive anxiety of spleen. This point, as Benjamin might say, is a hallmark of modernity. Yet there is another sense in which Benjamin is only half right about the importance of both memory and boredom as crucially historic responses in Baudelaire to the disintegration of sociosymbolic order: he nowhere acknowledges their thorough and

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explicit repudiation in the " Tableaux Parisiens" section immediately following " Spleen and Ideal" in the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai - not to mention the total eclipse in the later art criticism of the criterion of memory so crucial to the earlier Salon essays. This is the focus of the next chapter.

CHAPTER 5

Modernist imagination and the " Tableaux Parisiens"

The "Spleen and Ideal" section ended in "L'Horloge" on a morbid and monotonous note, with the clock God of spleen time counting down the defeated Poet's meaningless minutes and seconds to death; the "Tableaux Parisiens" recontain and defuse the death-threat of spleen time by depicting time as cyclical rather than linear. The very first tableau, "Paysage" (LXXXVI), stages time in the cycle of the seasons, and even puts the seasons themselves in the plural ("Je verrai les printemps, les etes, les automnes " 1. 13), in order to emphasize their cyclical recurrence. "Paysage" also alludes to the cycle of day and night, invoking first the pleasures of " voir naitre / L'etoile dans l'azur et la lampe a la fenetre" (11. 9—10) at dusk, and then that of the ability to " tirer un soleil de mon coeur " during a sleepless night of work. The cyclical alternation of night and day is reinforced by the appearance of "Le Soleil" (LXXXVII) immediately following the nocturnal "Paysage" (in the second edition): as the title suggests, the action in this second poem takes place in the daytime. Indeed, the entire section is structured on the cycle of day and night. " Le Soleil" introduces a diurnal set of poems, comprising roughly the first half of the section, and this group is followed by a nocturnal set of poems, in the second half. Yet as Ross Chambers has shown, the section's frame and its arrangement of poems transform this linear day — night sequence into an endless cycle.1 The two "Crepuscule" poems which had appeared side-by-side in the first edition are now strategically placed to mark the transitions first from day to night, in " Crepuscule du soir " (xcv) at the end of the diurnal series, and then from night to day again, in 137

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" Crepuscule du matin" (cm) at the end of the nocturnal series. In this way, the dawn in the very last poem refers us back to the beginning of the section, with its alternation from night ("Paysage") to day ("Le Soleil"). Recontaining spleen time this way will have two effects. Free of the menace of time and death, Poetic will dramatically reasserts itself in the early poems of the "Tableaux Parisiens." "Paysage" starts with an assertive "Je veux" that echoes throughout with "Je verrai" and other first-person future indicatives, and ends in supremely self-confident defiance of history and nature:

25

L'Emeute, tempetant vainement a ma vitre, Ne fera pas lever mon front de mon pupitre; Gar je serai plonge dans cette volupte D'evoquer le Printemps avec ma volonte, De tirer un soleil de mon coeur, et de faire De mes pensers brulants une tiede atmosphere.

While the fate of Poetic will is an important issue in the "Tableaux Parisiens," its reappearance at the beginning of the section forms a striking contrast with " L'Horloge " at the end of "Spleen and Ideal." The second effect of the recontainment of time in cyclicity is to shift the emphasis in Baudelaire's increasingly metonymic poetics from time to space, from temporal duration to contextual reference. The two were intimately entwined in the "Spleen" poems, where the decoding of the metaphoric axis grounding the Poet's memory resulted in reference to a context of bleak objects existing in linear spleen time. Here, by contrast, with time no longer a problem, contextual reference takes place in conjunction with an apparent resurgence of Poetic will. But how is such reference possible? The decoding of the subject of memory rendered recognition problematic, and now the circumvention of linear time has rendered spleen intensification ineffectual. There is no question, of course, of the real appearing directly or simply by default as the metaphoric axis is decoded. Yet as the title of this new section suggests, Baudelaire is looking for some way to situate the poetics of real reference in the

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context of contemporary Paris, while still pursuing the decoding of memory and subjectivity initiated in "Spleen and Ideal," as he revises the collection for republication. To this end, he will draw on the well-known contemporary genre of the "tableaux de Paris," but transform its tenor and function dramatically by undermining both the mastery of the subject who deciphers modern Paris and the meaning of the scenes he encounters in the ever-changing city. Similar questions of subjectivity and reference occupy Baudelaire in the essays on art contemporary with the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai, and their treatment there sheds light on the ways in which the "Tableaux Parisiens" advance the poetics of metonymic reference beyond the dilemmas of "Spleen and Ideal." THE LATER ART CRITICISM

Section 2 of the Salon 0/1859, entitled "Le Public moderne et la photographie," rails against the realists who believe " that art is and can only be the exact reproduction of nature (que l'art est et ne peut etre que la reproduction exacte de la nature)" and who thus take Daguerre as their "messiah. " 2 This position entails not merely an aesthetic deficiency, but a logical or epistemological error; "the positivist" (so called by Baudelaire in order to "better characterize his error") "says CI want to represent things as they are, or rather as they would be supposing that I did not exist' (le positiviste dit 'Je veux representer les choses telles qu'elles sont, ou bien qu'elles seraient, en supposant que je n'existe pas') " - a stance Baudelaire dismisses by adding, "The universe without man (L'univers sans l'homme)." In polar opposition to the positivist Baudelaire proposes the "imaginative (Pimaginatif)," who declares, " I want to illuminate things with my soul and project their reflection onto other souls (Je veux illuminer les choses avec mon esprit et en projeter le reflet sur les autres esprits) " (p. 400). The positivist position elides the subject; Baudelaire will insist on its importance. But this subject is not the subject of temperament that characterized the Salon criticism of 1845 an( ^ !846: it is the

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subject of imagination. 3 The Salon of 1859 and the essay on Constantin Guys, Le peintre de la vie moderne (published in 1863, but written three to four years earlier) represent an important evolution in Baudelaire's theory of art. "Temperament" in the early Salons designated a certain relation to the past and the art tradition in which the memory of that tradition played an essential (if essentially subliminal) role. Now the key word is imagination. References to the past and to memory of the past still appear in the later criticism, but only to characterize the "artist of old": Jadis, qu'etait l'artiste (Lebrun ou David, par exemple)? Lebrun, erudition, imagination, connaissance du passe, amour du grand. David ... aussi l'amour du passe, l'amour du grand uni a l'erudition ... (P- 392) What was the artist of old (Lebrun or David, for instance) ? Lebrun: erudition, imagination, mastery of the past, love of greatness. David: ... also love of the past, love of greatness combined with erudition ... Among contemporaries, by contrast, memory of the past no longer plays such a role: the costumes and figures of a Lies "reflect a curious love of the past (un curieux amour du passe) " (my emphasis, p. 410); " M . Penguilly is also an admirer of the past. An ingenious mind, curious, hard-working... He has the scrupulousness, the ardent patience and the tidiness of a booklover. (M. Penguilly est aussi un amoureux du passe. Esprit ingenieux, curieux, laborieux... II a la minutie, la patience ardente et la proprete d'un bibliomane) " (p. 410). To be sure, the contemporary artist must distinguish himself from positivist non-art and photography by means of style, but that style is no longer to be drawn from the past. No less an artist than Ingres is criticized precisely because his style is considered not the "naturally poetic quality" of the subject-matter ("la qualite naturellement poetique du sujet qu'il faut en extraire pour la rendre plus visible"), but a "foreign poetry, usually borrowed from the past (une poesie etrangere, empruntee generalement au passe)": " M . Ingres is the victim of an obsession which always compels him to displace, to transfer, to alter the beautiful ... in order to arrive at a preconceived style (M. Ingres est victime

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d'une obsession qui le contraint sans cesse a deplacer, a transporter et a alterer le beau ... pour arriver au styleprecongu) " (P-4I2)- 4 Even Baudelaire's terms of praise for the great Delacroix have shifted in emphasis, away from the past toward novelty and surprise (toward "the shock of the new"): Je tourmente mon esprit pour en arracher quelque formule qui exprime bien la specialite d'Eugene Delacroix... D'ou vient qu'il produit la sensation de nouveaute? Que nous donne-t-il de plus que le passe?... On peut dire que, doue d'une plus riche imagination, il exprime surtout l'intime du cerveau, Paspect etonnant des choses... (pp. 403-04) I wrack my brains to find some formula that adequately expresses the special quality of Eugene Delacroix... Why is it that he produces the sensation of novelty? What does he give us that is more than the past? ... One could say that, being endowed with a richer imagination, he expresses above all what is inner-most in the mind, the astonishing side of things ... The importance of novelty in Baudelaire's new art theory recurs in Lepeintre de la vie moderne, where the artist's vision is compared to that of a convalescent or a child: "Nothing resembles what is called inspiration more than the joy with which children absorb form and color... Children see everything afresh; they are always intoxicated. (Rien ne ressemble plus a ce qu'on appelle l'inspiration, que la joie avec laquelle l'enfant absorbe la forme et la couleur... L'enfant voit tout en nouveaute; il est toujours ivre.) " 5 Rather than temperament, with its grounding in the metaphoric axes of tradition and thorough familiarity with the art of the past, artistic vision now entails a child-like openness and freedom from preconceptions - a thoroughly decoded perspective from which things are not recognized, but always experienced as if for the very first time. It is worth examining this new art theory in greater detail, for in this section of the essay - entitled "L'Artiste, homme du monde, homme des foules, enfant" — the productive naivete of infantile perception is equated with the perspective of the urban flaneur. And it is in the very next section of the essay, entitled " La Modernite," that Baudelaire will assign to the artist (poet or

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painter) of modernity the task of "extracting what is poetic from the fashions of history, of plucking the eternal from the transitory (degager de la mode ce qu'elle peut contenir de poetique dans l'historique, de tirer l'eternel du transitoire) " (p. 553), a notion that may be fruitfully compared with Baudelaire's adaptation of the tableaux de Paris tradition for his "Tableaux Parisiens." Already in the Salon 0/1859, however, there appears a tension stemming from the shift from memory-based temperament to decoded imagination, a tension that develops without prospect of resolution in the subsequent essay on Guys. In the earlier Salon criticism, temperament mediated the opposition between imitators and eclectics, providing just the right "balance" of (subliminal) reference to the tradition with (original) treatment of contemporary subject-matter. Now the terms have changed: with both personal memory and collective tradition decoded and out of play, what remains is barren, photographic realism opposed to a specious and usually anachronistic stylization; on one hand, pointless objectivity, on the other, groundless subjectivity. This polarity matches the terms of the tableaux de Paris genre as Baudelaire inherits it: an anonymous, unsystematic observer encounters random and ever-changing urban scenes. Under such conditions, how are truly artistic effects to be achieved? In his discussion of landscape painting in the Salon of i8$g, Baudelaire adopts conflicting positions on this question, apparently unaware of the evident self-contradiction. " If what we call a landscape is beautiful, it is not so in and of itself, but thanks to me, through the idea or feeling I attach to it. (Si ce que nous

appelons un paysage est beau, ce n'est pas par lui-meme, mais par moi, par ma grace propre, par l'idee ou le sentiment que j'y attache) " (p. 414, my emphasis): here personal style is crucial to art, transforming the mere replication of nature into true landscape painting. Yet just three paragraphs later, " M . Millet is looking specifically for style... [but] style brings him bad luck. Instead of simply extracting the natural poetry of the subject, [he]

wishes at all costs to add something (M. Millet cherche particulierement le style... [mais] le style lui porte malheur. Au lieu

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d'extraire simplement la poesie naturelle de son sujet, [il] veut a tout prix y ajouter quelque chose" (p. 415, my emphasis): here personal style is inimicable to art, interfering with the proper appreciation of nature's "own" poetry. For Baudelaire, true art is to be distinguished from photographic realism: this is the thrust of the entire Salon review; but how is such a distinction to be made under decoded conditions? Is the distinguishing quality something inherent in the subject-matter ("the natural poetry of the subject") or something the artist contributes to it ("the idea or feeling [he] attaches to it")? This is an issue Baudelaire will explore in more detail as he traces the workhabits of Constantin Guys, exemplary "painter of modern life." Baudelaire's account of Guys' work appears at first to establish a clear opposition between impression and expression, between passive reception and active execution, between the initial experience of modern city life and its subsequent depiction in a drawing or poem.6 The effect of such an opposition would be to attribute the distinctive quality of art to artistic volition. The passage on the artist's child-like perception of novelty cited above continues as follows: toute pensee sublime est accompagnee d'une secousse nerveuse... qui retentit jusque dans le cervelet. L'homme de genie a les nerfs solides; l'enfant les a faibles. Chez Tun, la raison a pris une place considerable; chez Pautre, la sensibilite occupe presque tout l'etre. Mais le genie n'est que Venfance retrouvee a volonte, l'enfance douee maintenant, pour s'exprimer, d'organes viriles et de P esprit analytique qui lui permet d'ordonner la somme de materiaux involontairement amassee. (P- 552) every sublime thought is accompanied by a synaptic shock... which reverberates as far as the cerebellum. The man of genius has solid nerves; the child has weak ones. In one, reason plays a considerable part; in the other, sensitivity comprises almost the entire being. But genius is nothing but childhood regained at will, a childhood now endowed, in order to express itself, with virile organs and with the analytic mind that enables him to organize the mass of material involuntarily accumulated. The initial moment of child-like sensitivity and impressionability is supposedly followed and compensated for by a moment

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of virile command and analytic mastery of the involuntarily amassed materials, in which "reason plays a considerable part" (p. 552). But in Baudelaire's actual depiction of the moment of execution in Guys' work, the process appears instead as frantic and feverish, as "an intoxicated flash of the pencil, of the brush, almost like a furor, [due to] the fear of not going fast enough, of letting the phantom escape before the synthesis has been extracted from it and laid hold of (un feu, une ivresse de crayon, de pinceau, ressemblant presque a une fureur. C'est la peur de n'aller pas assez vite, de laisser echapper le fantome avant que la synthese n'en soit extraite et saisie" (p. 555). Reasoned analysis and virile command are nowhere to be found; in fact, ideally, even the moment of execution would become completely unconscious', "ideal execution becomes as unconscious ... as digestion (l'execution ideale devienne aussi inconsciente... que Test la digestion) " (p. 555). Located neither in the object of perception nor in the willed mastery of the artist, the distinctive aesthetic moment is perhaps to be found somewhere between the two. This would be an intervening moment of "synthesis" or "composition" (as Baudelaire frequently calls it), but once again the details of his account of Guys' work make it impossible to identify with any certainty or locate securely in either subject or object. The artist-flaneur "enters the crowd as if entering an immense reservoir of electricity (entre dans la foule comme dans un immense reservoir d'electricite)" (p. 552); each surprise he is subject to registers as " a synaptic shock that reverberates as far as the cerebellum." The force and originality of Guys, Baudelaire insists, are due to his ingenuous "obeissance a l'impression" (p. 554) and to the fact that his perception has not been dulled or blunted ("emousse"). 7 Whereas the dandy-flaneur has solid nerves and remains impervious to the shocks of city life, the highly sensitive artist involuntarily absorbs these always novel impressions deep in the mind: " ...sparkles, music, resolute looks, full and serious mustaches - all this enters him in disorder; and in a few minutes, the resulting poem will already be virtually composed (scintillements, musique, regards decides, moustaches lourdes et serieuses, tout cela entre pele-mele en lui;

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et dans quelques minutes, le poeme qui en resulte sera virtuellement compose) " (p. 553, a propos of an encounter with a military regiment). Here, the aesthetic moment (of composition) seems to occur within a few moments of the initial impression, as the experience registers in memory; the passive construction ("will be ... composed ") suggests that composition is as involuntary as the impressions themselves. (But what could "already virtually composed" mean?) The very next paragraph, however, seems to place the moment of synthesis or composition several hours later, as the artist struggles to commit his impressions or memories to paper: Et les choses renaissent sur le papier, naturelles et plus que naturelles, belles et plus que belles ... La fantasmagorie a ete extraite de la nature. Tous les materiaux dont la memoire s'est encombree se classent, se rangent, s'harmonisent et subissent cette idealisation forcee qui est le resultat d'une perception enfantine, c'est-a-dire d'une perception aigue, magique a force d'ingenuite! (p. 553) And the things are reborn on paper, natural and more than natural, beautiful and more than beautiful... The phantasmagoria has been extracted from nature. All the materials with which memory stocked itself are categorized, classified, harmonized, and undergo that forced idealization which is the result of an infantile perception, that is to say a keen perception that is magical by dint of its innocence! Here again, the passive construction ("has been extracted") at a crucial moment leaves the agent or agency responsible for "extracting" the poetic from the natural indeterminate. The reflexive constructions ("se classent, se rangent, /harmonisent") governing the "materials congesting memory," meanwhile, imply an activity undertaken by the materials themselves yet separate from memory itself. That apparently autonomous activity is then recast as subject to a "forced idealization" (whose passive construction once again does not specify the agent/agency doing the forcing) which is supposed somehow to "result from" the passive "infantile perception" that marked the start of the process hours before. If the allusion to a "forced idealization resulting from infantile perception" seems to locate the moment of synthesis

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comfortably close to the initial moment of impression in the artistic process, Baudelaire's account in the next section (entitled " L'Art mnemonique") seems to relocate it once again closer to the final moment of expression: M. G.j traduisant fidelement ses propres impressions, marque avec une energie instinctive les points culminants ou lumineux d'un objet ... ou ses principales caracteristiques, quelquefois meme avec une exageration utile pour la memoire humaine... (p. 555) Faithfully translating his own impressions, M. G. brings out with an instinctive energy the salient or striking features of an object... or its principal characteristics, sometimes resorting to exaggeration as an aid to human memory... Here the artist appears actively to mark or stress the distinctively aesthetic features of his subject-matter - even if he does so with "instinctive energy" (rather than analytic command) and in the process of "translating his [initial, passive] impressions faithfully." But for or in whose memory is such "exaggeration" useful? The passage continues: ... et Timagination du spectateur, subissant a son tour cette mnemonique si despotique, voit avec nettete l'impression produite par les choses sur l'esprit de M. G. Le spectateur est ici le traducteur d'une traduction toujours claire et enivrante. (p. 555) ... and the imagination of the spectator, suffering this despotic mnemonic in turn, sees distinctly the impression things produced on M. G.'s mind. The spectator is here the translator of a translation that is always clear and intoxicating. The spectator's imagination suffers in turn this despotic mnemonic - that is, the same mnemonic the artist suffered: the apparently active stance whereby the artist was supposed to have left his distinctive mark on the work of art is transformed back into the passive suffering of a shock and reception of impressions. The artist thus occupies the same position as the (surely passive) spectator, who becomes the "translator of a translation." Nothing has been settled. Two sets of remarks are in order. First of all, whatever Baudelaire's difficulties in specifying the privileged location,

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moment, or agency of the modernist aesthetic, the effects of "so despotic a mnemonic" are never in doubt, "always clear and intoxicating": the effect of the despotic art work on the public is to transmit from artist to spectators the decoded perception of things that serves as modern art's point of departure and/or defining characteristic. The effect of the mnemonic in the art work itself is therefore not so much to change anything as simply to add a "charge" or to intensify what is given in the initial impression, to render things, as Baudelaire says here (echoing Beauty), "belles et plus que belles" (p. 553). Secondly, and in relation to the issues broached in the Salon of i8jg and Baudelaire's adaptation of the tableaux de Paris, what Baudelaire here calls "mnemonic art" is in a sense undecidable: neither a simple reproduction of the object-world, nor a pure product of artistic will or style, but something in between. Yet this undecidability is productive, and strongly resembles the poetics developed in the "Tableaux Parisiens." The art criticism of the late fifties and early sixties in fact explores terrain opened up by the metonymic poetics of the beauty cycle. If merely representing Paris were Baudelaire's concern, something like the tableaux de Paris (with its built-in observer-flaneur and its broad interest in various aspects of city life) might have served tel quel. But even while fostering reference to real context, Baudelaire's metonymic poetics also undermines the stability and coherence of the observing or reporting self, as we have seen. In this vein, the gist of the essay on Guys parallels the direction taken in the "Tableaux Parisiens": lyric subjectivity and referential representation are both canceled out, as the new section devises and deploys a poetic discourse where decoding affects both the content plane and the expression plane. On the content plane, representation in the "Tableaux Parisiens" is decoded in that any chance encounter in an ever-changing cityscape, no matter how meaningless, may produce a vivid impression; indeed, meaninglessness is the necessary precondition for obtaining really vivid impressions, inasmuch as protective recognition is thereby out of play. On the expression plane, lyric subjectivity is decoded in that poetic effects depend not on subjective mastery or control, but only on recapturing or

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"translating" what has already come to be in the elusive space/time Baudelaire refers to (necessarily somewhat incoherently) as "mnemonics." It would appear in this light to be no accident that innovation affecting the content plane of the "Tableaux Parisiens" - the choice of everyday subject-matter for poetry, the transformation of a pre-existing popular genre - is matched on the expression plane: metric and stylistic analysis has shown that the poems of the "Tableaux Parisiens" section contain the most innovative versification in the entire collection.8 Still very much in question, however, is the role of the subject in decoded poetic discourse: the "Tableaux Parisiens" dramatize this question. Baudelaire here draws directly on the contemporary tableaux de Paris, but will move sharply away from their positivist objectiverealism; he draws, too, on the beautification project from his own earlier poetry, yet will move decisively away from the wager placed there on the effectiveness of Poetic will. THE INTRODUCTORY POEMS

Baudelaire's "Tableaux Parisiens" draw on and transform a popular genre well known to his contemporaries (though largely forgotten now), the tableaux de Paris,,9 Based in part on Diderot's theory of dramatic realism and in part on the experience of rapidly changing city life, the genre originally depicts encounters between an anonymous stroller and various facets of city life: the point is, without preconceptions or systematic preparation, to draw some kind of moral or civics lesson from these chance encounters. The singularity of the genre in its initial (late eighteenth-, early nineteenth-century) stages lay in its unconventional depiction of all aspects of city life and its attempt to make snap sense out of haphazard and fleeting contact with the new and unfamiliar. Such a genre, at least in its broad outlines, suits Baudelaire's requirements admirably: the context of reference will no longer be insignificant objects which happen to be at hand, but an ever-changing cityscape; the point of view would no longer be that of a Poet mired in the melancholy of spleen time, but an observer venturing forth to

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test his mettle against the unknown. Bare temporal duration becomes historical change; pure spatial extension becomes the cityscapes of Paris. But by Baudelaire's day (already in the 1840s and certainly by the late 1850s and 1860s when Baudelaire composed most of his "Tableaux Parisiens"), the genre had evolved considerably. Mercier (in his prototypic turn-of-the-century Tableau de Paris) insisted on the valuable information his tableaux contain for those (viz. nearly everyone) less familiar with the new city than he; in the same vein, Balzac - no doubt Diderot's and Mercier's most important heir in this tradition - made similar claims throughout the novels of the Comedie humaine. But the growth of the textile industry, the mass circulation press, and of advertising — and especially the commercialization of the concept and practices of fashion — soon displace information and civics lessons to the background: the focus is now on the fugitive, on the transitory, on whatever is new for newness's sake. At the same time that new social relations were altering the aims of the genre and reducing its moral or cognitive content, the new reproduction technologies of lithography and especially daguerreotypy were changing its form, stressing the "objectivity" or photographic realism of the genre. This is the situation in which Baudelaire adapts the genre for the "Tableaux Parisiens" section and takes it in a very different direction. He certainly has no desire to revive the moralizing stance of a Diderot or a Mercier; yet he also despises photography and realism, as is abundantly clear from the art criticism contemporary with the poetry of the second edition. The Poet of the "Tableaux Parisiens" sets out instead to explore the "in between" of uncertain real reference and unstable subjectivity. Within the overall structure composed of diurnal and nocturnal poems, a preliminary cycle consisting of the first three poems reiterates the project of beautification and re-stakes the wager on poetic will, but ends with the acknowledgment that the Poet's will-to-beauty is hopelessly unrealistic. The first poem of the "Tableaux Parisiens," as we said, foregrounds Poetic will and presents time's cyclicity in terms of

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the seasons; but it does so under conditions worth examining in further detail. For one thing, the passionate and constructive activity of the Poet takes place at night, yet produces daytime scenes: what he actually sees is the moon and stars (11. 10,12), monotonous snowstorms (1. 14); what he evokes is the sun and warmer climes (11. 25-26). This evocation sets the stage for the next poem, " L e Soleil," which introduces the set of diurnal poems. Yet the nocturnal setting of " P a y s a g e " also links it " b a c k w a r d , " as it were, to the set of nocturnal poems ending with the dawn of "Crepuscule du m a t i n " at the end of the " T a b l e a u x Parisiens": in this second set of poems, too, Poetic desire figures centrally. Secondly, Poetic will is exercised not only at night, but enclosed: 15

Et quand viendra Thiver aux neiges monotones, Je fermerai partout portieres et volets, Pour batir dans la nuit mes feeriques palais

22

L'Emeute, tempetant vainement a ma vitre, Ne fera pas lever mon front de mon pupitre; Car je serai plonge...

This sense of spatial enclosure, too, links " Paysage" with the set of nocturnal poems, which are equally well designated as domestic scenes; it also establishes a sharp contrast with the immediately following poem, " L e Soleil," whose very first line situates the Poet outside, in the street: " L e long du vieux faubourg... " ( L i ) . Finally and most important, in contrasting night with day, and the Poet's actual enclosure with the spacious scenes he imagines, the poem asserts the ascendancy of Poetic will and artifice over nature, a central theme of the entire section and a crucial feature of Baudelairean modernism. Not only is time depicted as seasonally cyclical here, but it is a cycle the Poet can interrupt at will, simply by "calling forth springtime" ("evoquer le Printemps avec ma volonte" 1. 24). T h e title itself introduces this duality, for what is first presented as a " l a n d s c a p e " soon appears to be a cityscape instead, complete with chimney pots and church steeples. Yet the title may refer

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not to the Poet's setting but rather to the "childish" pastoral verses he speaks of composing and the scene he describes in the second stanza: 2

Je veux, pour composer chastement mes eglogues, Goucher aupres du ciel...

20

Alors je reverai des horizons bleuatres, Des jardins, des jets d'eau pleurant dans les albatres, Des baisers, des oiseaux chantant soir et matin, Et tout ce que l'ldylle a de plus enfantin.

In whichever sense we read the title, the poem itself moves away from the innocent calm associated with the pastoral toward an energetic pleasure associated directly with Poetic activity itself. Pastoral composition may be "chaste" (1. 1) and contemplation of the landscape characterized as " d o u x " (1. 9), but once the Poet turns away from winter "pour batir dans la nuit [s]es feeriques palais," his passion heats up:

25

Gar je serai plonge dans cette volupte D'evoquer le Printemps avec ma volonte, De tirer un soleil de mon coeur, et de faire De mes pensers bmlants une tiede atmosphere.

By the end of the poem, idyllic nature is clearly less engaging than what the Poet himself constructs ("batir" 1. 16). The attempt to forsake and indeed surpass nature through the exercise of Poetic will forms the drama of the introductory cycle, starting with " L e Soleil." The displacement of " L e Soleil" from the heart of the first, romantic section of the collection (where it followed "Benediction") to the introductory cycle of the "Tableaux Parisiens" is surely among the most striking revisions Baudelaire made for the second edition of his work, and dramatically changes the poem's impact and effects. Its new location in a section addressing the complexities of modern city life brings into predominance certain aspects of the poem that appeared secondary in the context of the earlier section devoted to the harmonies and grandeur of nature. Such a gestalt shift is

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possible because the contrast between nature and the city is inscribed in the structure of the poem itself. The tension between nature and artifice introduced in "Paysage" becomes in "Le Soleil" a relatively stark contrast between two external stanzas devoted to city life, and a middle stanza devoted to the country and nature. Le Soleil Le long du vieux faubourg, oil pendent aux masures Les persiennes, abri des secretes luxures, Quand le soleil frappe a traits redoubles Sur la ville et les champs, sur les toits et les bles, 5 Je vais m'exercer a ma fantasque escrime, Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime, Trebuchant sur les mots comme sur les paves, Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps reves. 10

15

20

Ce pere nourricier, ennemi des chloroses, Eveille dans les champs les vers comme les roses; II fait s'evaporer les soucis vers le ciel, Et remplit les cerveaux et les ruches de miel. C'est lui qui rajeunit les porteurs de bequilles Et les rend gais et doux comme des jeunes filles, Et commande aux moissons de croitre et de murir Dans le coeur immortel qui veut toujours fleurir! Quand, ainsi qu'un poete, il descend dans les villes, II ennoblit le sort des choses les plus viles, Et s'introduit en roi, sans bruit et sans valets, Dans tous les hopitaux et dans tous les palais.

Unlike the Poet of "Paysage" who shuts himself up in his tower whenever winter comes, the Poet of "Soleil" is found in the street, engaged in the kind of haphazard encounters typical of city life in the tableaux de Paris genre. Already in the first stanza, devoted to the Poet's travails in the city, the omnipresence of the sun contrasts with the restricted ambit of the Poet: " ... le soleil cruel frappe ... / Sur la ville et les champs, sur les toits et les bles " (11. 4-5). Each of the subsequent stanzas then expounds the sun's activities in one of these locales, which are directly contrasted by parallel structure: stanza 2 "dans les champs" (1. 10); stanza 3 "dans les villes" (1. 17). But there exists another structure, which opposes the two

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external stanzas to the internal one. Stanzas 1 and 3 contain markers of determinate temporality, most notably the repeated " Q u a n d " at the beginning of lines 3 and 17, but also in the adverbial complements of line 8: "Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps reves." Stanza 2, by contrast, presents the sun's actions ("eveille ... remplit... rajeunit... ") in the indeterminate or eternal present, ending with a direct allusion to a timeless "coeur immortel qui veut toujours fleurir" (1. 16). The kinetics of stanza 2 reinforce its difference from the other two: there, the sun's actions take place at a distance or from a commanding height, as it were ("eveille... fait s'evaporer... remplit... rajeunit... rend ... commande " ) ; in the third stanza, however, the sun "goes into town (descend dans les villes) " and "gets into (s'introduit... dans) " all the hospitals and palaces, moving as does the Poet in stanza 1 ("Le long des faubourgs" 1. 1), on a horizontal plane. The poem thus comprises two comprehensive superposed structures: one topical, contrasting the first stanza (on the poet) with the latter two (on the sun); the other rhetorical and formal as well as topical, opposing the interior stanza (the eternal sun in nature) with the two exterior ones (poet and sun when in the city). This second structure contains yet another, local contrast between the urban activity of the poet (stanza 1) and the urban activity of the sun (stanza 3), a comparison made explicit in the first line of the last stanza ("ainsi qu'un poete" 1. 17). This contrast is reinforced by the difference between the two parallel temporal expressions mentioned above: "Quand le soleil cruel frappe... / Je vais... " (11. 3-5) and "Quand [le soleil], ainsi qu'un poete ... descend dans les villes " (1. 17). The first " when " is a strictly temporal determination of the Poet's activity (itself spatially limited to the city) by the sun: he practices poetry when the sun shines. The second "when" is not symmetrical; rather than a determination, it marks an option: the sun can act anywhere (as is clear from line 4); when it goes into town, like a poet, it ennobles. "Le Soleil" thus adds a second opposition to the contrast between town and country it inherits from "Paysage" (as well as by implication from its relocation for the second edition from

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the pastoral first cycle to the urban "Tableaux Parisiens"): the contrast between the Poet and another poetic agency designated here as the sun. The urban poet works out (" [s]'exerce") in the street, conditions permitting, and may sometimes stumble across a long-sought verse or a lucky rhyme; the sun acts eternally and from a distance, ultimately generating a neat equivalence, reminiscent of " Correspondances," between nature and the human spirit (" remplit les cerveaux et les ruches dernier 5 ). Most of the structural features noted so far seem to favor the sun over the poet, and thus align the poem with the pastoral cycle in which it first appeared. But there are two mitigating factors which must be taken into account in any comparative judgment of their poetic abilities, and that alter the balance in favor of the Poet, instead. First of all, the "ainsi que" of line 17 that makes the comparison between sun and poet explicit, actually refers the sun to the poet as standard of comparison, rather than the other way around: when the sun, like a poet, goes into town ... Far more telling, however, is the very quality of the poetry associated with the two poetic figures. The trite images (e.g. "gais et doux comme des jeunes filles" 1. 14) and facile word-play (e.g. "Eveille dans les champs des vers comme les roses; / II fait s'evaporer les soucis vers le d e l " 11. 10-11) of the second stanza pale in comparison with the striking images and similes of the first (e.g. " Trebuchant sur les mots comme sur les paves" 1. 7), which figure among the most memorable in the entire collection. It is surely because "Le Soleil" contains instances of both urban and pastoral poetics that it can have belonged to both the romantic and modernist sections of the collection, but the contrast in quality argues for the superiority of Poetic artifice over natural harmony and correspondences. Yet the existence and specifics of the third stanza disrupt too neat a binary opposition between Poet and sun. The pertinent contrast here, which displaces the relations between town and country, nature and humankind informing the first two stanzas, is the opposition - quintessentially urban for Baudelaire between rich and poor ("les hopitaux et... les palais" 1. 20), a distinction that makes no difference to the sun's urban activity,

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which involves ennobling all things, no matter how lowly. Yet the descent of the sun into the city, especially introduced by the " Q u a n d . . . " clause echoing line 3, leads us back to the first stanza, where it clarifies the Poet's dependence on the sun: if the Poet's urban workouts depend on sunshine, it is because the sun transforms the cityscape into poetic material in the first place, by "ennobling" it. It is then a matter of chance whether the Poet will happen across the appropriate means of expression (a lucky rhyme, the right word) to capture it. As in the later art criticism, artistic or poetic agency in the poem may finally be undecidable: it may depend on both Poet and sun, yet actually take place somewhere between the two. This would explain why the Poet encounters "vers depuis longtemps reves": even his best luck in finding means of expression depends on the prior action of the sun having ennobled the cityscape to begin with. "Le Soleil" thus suggests a program for a specifically urban poetry quite different from the romantic stance figured in "Paysage," with its emphasis on a self-sufficient Poetic will steeled and exercised in lofty isolation. The project of ennoblement in fact appears closer to the earlier project of beautification, but now resituated in the context of modernism and the new section on city life. It is clear that the modern urban poet is writing rather than reading the "secret language of speechless things," and that these things are human artifacts rather than natural harmonies. As in the beautification project, it is not the Poet's personal memories that glorify present perception, but a process attributed to an Other agent, the sun, which ennobles all things in much the same way that Beauty's mirror-eyes made them more beautiful. Yet the emphasis in "Le Soleil" on chance and its explicit mention of the means of poetic expression align this new project with the view of modernist art Baudelaire developed in the Salon 0/1859 an<^ Peintre de la vie moderne. On the content plane, the poetic illumination or ennoblement of city life attributed to an Other lies completely outside the artist/ poet's control. Similarly on the expression plane, the Poet operates by luck and by accident: finding the poetic means to express that illumination is a matter of chance. In this way, " Le Soleil" proposes a new answer to the question posed by the

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wager on beautification earlier in the collection: can ennoblement of even the lowliest of things produce truly poetic effects? The answer given here is: "sometimes" (1. 8). We must not, however, be too hasty to attribute the stance of "Le Soleil" to the "Tableaux Parisiens" as a whole, for the next poem in the section answers this question in a very different way, and thereby prefigures the psychodynamics of many of the Petits Poemes en prose. In "A une mendiante rousse" (LXXXVIII), it is the Poet himself- no longer the sun of "Le Soleil" - who descends into the street and sets out to "ennoble the fate of the lowliest things," in this case a poor beggar-girl. He begins by apostrophizing her, explaining that, for him, her sickly young body has a certain charm: " Pour moi, poete chetif, / Ton jeune corps maladif... / a douceur" (11. 5—8). This rather modest and strictly personal ("pour moi") claim escalates in the next stanza into a comparison favoring the girl over a queen from a novel: " T u portes plus galamment / Qu'une reine de roman / Ses cothurnes de velours / Tes sabots lourds" (11. 9-12). The next eight stanzas seek in effect to transform the beggar-girl into a queen (to "ennoble" her), 10 first in the optative subjective: " Au lieu d'un haillon trop court, / Qu'un superbe habit de cour / Traine a plis bruyants et longs / Sur tes talons (Instead of an ill-fitting rag, let a superb court robe trail... at your feet) " (11. 13-16); then, with the transformation complete, modulating into the conditional: " T u compterais dans tes lits / Plus de baisers que de lis / Et rangerais sous tes lois / Plus d'un Valois!" (11. 41-44). This modulation into the conditional already signals the denouement presented in the last three stanzas, where the Poet, too poor himself, acknowledges his inability really to transform and ennoble the poor girl:

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- Cependant tu vas gueusant Quelque vieux debris gisant Au seuil de quelque Vefour De carrefour; Tu vas lorgnant en dessous Des bijoux de vingt-neuf sous

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Dont je ne puis, oh! pardon! Te faire don. Va done, sans autre ornement, Parfum, perles, diamant, Que ta maigre nudite, O ma beaute!

What appears new here in relation to the projects of beautification and ennoblement is acknowledgment of the irrevocable gap between imaginative transformation and the real, which will become a central theme in the Petits Poemes en prose. This by no means represents a rejection of the poetic imagination: the Poet insists till the very end that the beggar-girl is "his beauty" (1. 56, echoing the "pour moi" of 1. 5). But the riches of Poetic imagination contrast sharply with the actual poverty of the Poet himself, unable to afford even costume jewelry for the girl (11. 49-52). The preliminary cycle of the "Tableaux Parisiens" thus recapitulates the trajectory of "Spleen and Ideal," from romanticism through beautification to real reference, ending in " A une mendiante rousse" with the conclusion that the real is what resists the ennobling imagination. Poetic will, now exerted on urban artifice rather than natural harmony, dramatically reasserts itself, but in a sense ultimately fails: it is able to transform its object only through poetic discourse and in imagination, not through effective action in the real. Yet in another sense, it does not fail at all: the very failures of poetry in the face of modern urban existence become the stuff of a specifically modernist poetics that informs the structure and poems of the section as a whole. THE STREET SCENES

Nowhere is an experience typical of city life registered in greater purity than in " A une passante" (XGIII), the poem cited by Benjamin as the epitome of the shock experience in Baudelaire. It depicts the failures of the shock-defense and the limit of decoded temporality: a discrete moment severed completely from past and future, isolated even from the serial flow of lived time (Erlebnis). So violent is the shock, indeed, that in portraying

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it, Baudelaire elides the verb: " U n eclair... puis la nuit!" (1. 9). 11 In its aftermath, temporal reference oscillates wildly and uncertainly between ''eternity" and "never" ("Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'eternite? / Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici, trop tard! jamais peut-etre!" 11. 11—12), ending with an imperfect subjunctive conditional ("O toi que j'eusse aimee" 1. 14) that underscores the impossibility of ever integrating the moment back into the flow of time. This experience of discontinuity takes place, of course, in the bustling pedestrian traffic typical of the modern city: " La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait. / ... Une femme passa" (11. 1,3). In a city crowd, each person's own trajectory presumably has a certain temporal continuity, but when paths cross by chance and then instantly diverge, both continuities are interrupted, and the moment of contact stands outside of either. Not only is the metaphoric axis out of play, since this woman is someone the Poet has never seen and thus cannot recognize, but even the metonymic axis which normally supplies at least a synthesis of seriality (as depicted in "L'Horloge ") breaks down in the fleeting encounters typical of city life. Here, both forms of the shock-defense have failed. Chance encounters of this kind are not the only feature of the modern city depicted in the "Tableaux Parisiens" that defeats the shock-defense. The rapid transformation of Second-Empire Paris by Haussmann's urban renewal projects proves equally difficult to manage, as is clear in "Le Cygne" (LXXXIX) : 8

Le vieux Paris n'est plus (la forme d'une ville Change plus vite, helas! que le coeur d'un mortel)

30

Paris change! mais rien dans ma melancholie N'a bouge!

This difficulty is especially resonant when what is mobilized as a defense against change is the memory-based mode of recognition so central to the correspondences program, as occurs in " Le Cygne." While depicting the inability of memory to master the rapidly changing cityscape of modern Paris, this poem at the same time reproduces the uncertainties about poetic agency characterizing the later art criticism: is memory

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a resource called upon by the poet at will, or is it something that occurs to him involuntarily? In the poem's famous first line, the Poet faced with the shock of the "new Carrousel" (1. 6) on a stroll through a once familiar section of Paris exclaims, " Andromaque, je pense a vous!" The active verb suggests an attempt to ennoble contemporary Paris, in line with the stance of "Le Soleil" and "A une mendiante rousse" (which immediately precede "Le Cygne" in the collection). Yet it is equally possible that the thought of Andromaque is an involuntary association that suddenly occurs to him, not something he recalled at will: "Andromaque, je pense a vous! Ce petit fleuve, / ... Ce Simols menteur qui par vos pleurs grandit,/A feconde soudain ma memoire fertile" (11. 1 and 4—5); the Poet's memory appears here not as agent but as a direct object, suddenly fertilized by Andromaque's little river. The Poet remains undecidably as much the object as the subject of these thoughts in the explanation offered later in the poem: "Aussi devant ce Louvre une image m'opprime: / Je pense a mon grand cygne . . . / . . . et puis a vous, Andromaque . . . " (U- 33~34> my emphasis). Recourse to memory, moreover (whether willed or not), generates images that, far from reconciling the Poet with the new city, instead reproduce his alienation from it. The initial reference to Andromaque in exile leads to his own memory of an escaped swan scratching a dry Paris stream bed in search of water, and apparently reproaching God for withholding rain. By the time we reach the second part of the poem, everything in the city - new palaces, scaffolding, even blocks of stone - has become an occasion for allegorical reflection on his homelessness there: Paris change! mais rien dans ma melancolie N'a bouge! palais neufs, echafaudages, blocs, Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allegorie, Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que les rocs. And as indeterminate as the signs of alienation are - anything encountered on a stroll through the new city will do - so are the thoughts and images they trigger: the swan, then Andromaque,

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then a sickly black woman seeking the palm trees of Africa, then anyone at all who has lost what can never be found ("A quiconque a perdu ce qui ne se retrouve / Jamais, jamais!" 11. 45-46), and so on in an apparently random series of images. Even when the Poet tries to arrest the proliferation of images with a concluding "Ainsi" (1. 49) and by recalling the "old Memory" of the swan, sounding in the forest of his exile, the indeterminate series of equivalents nevertheless continues:

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Ainsi dans la foret ou mon esprit s'exile Un vieux Souvenir sonne a plein souffle du cor! Je pense aux matelots oublies dans une ile, Aux captifs, aux vaincus!... a bien d'autres encor!

The series might even by said to intensify: the elision in the last line suggests the possibility of endless continuation of the series at just the moment that the enumeration accelerates by reducing the complements qualifying its members to zero; and the final phrase - in contrasting the relative supplement " e n c o r " (meaning " m o r e " : [I think] of many more others as well") with the " c o r " (horn) of memory which might have grounded the series - economizes and further accelerates the enumeration by reducing mention of additional members of the series to an indeterminate "bien d'autres (many others) ". Memory in " L e Cygne" thus produces effects that are virtually the opposite of what would be expected. The Poet invokes the memory of the swan in order to make sense of his own decoded experience strolling through rapidly changing Paris. But instead of reintegrating his experience of the new Paris into memories of the old, this memory merely reproduces another scene of alienation from the city: like the swan vainly searching for water, the Poet vainly searches for familiar meanings in the unfamiliar cityscape, and by implication reproaches God for the lack of them. Memory thus brings not recognition and homecoming, but melancholy and alienation. Yet this melancholy is itself productive. Indeed, the river of Andromaque's sorrow, " C e SimoTs menteur qui par vos pleurs grandit" (1. 4), may have been what stimulated the Poet's memory in the first place. The Poet's internal exile from Paris

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and the very failure of memory to make sense of present experience in effect generate the endless series of interpretants of exile in those "many more others" as homeless as he. Paris thus appears not as a place to which meaning can be successfully attributed so that it can be represented (for it changes too fast for that): the real, modern Paris resists this kind of recognition. Rather, it is the place of/from which one speaks in/about melancholy — that is, in full cognizance of the impossibility of grounding present experience in memories of it. This may explain Baudelaire's inclination to translate Virgil's relatively mild characterization of Andromaque's "false" Simois (Latin "falsus") as "deceptive" or "lying" ("menteur" 1. 4): the poem shows that, under modern conditions, a replica or sign that evokes memories of something without also acknowledging its irretrievable absence, thereby lies. Which is to say that, along with or following perception, memory itself gets decoded here: memory does not serve as a supplement to perception, as in the poetics of correspondences; rather the very inadequacy of memory, here called melancholy (1. 29), serves to supplement the failures of perception, changing their sign, as it were, from negative to positive, from dry to wet, from meaningless to somehow heroic. Although the mood here is very different from that of the poems of beautification - melancholic as opposed to ecstatic - "Le Cygne" nonetheless finishes on a similar note of exhilaration: a series of short clauses punctuated by exclamation marks, ending with a characteristic "still more." Even this melancholic exhilaration, however, succumbs to utter defeat in the very next poem. Whereas "A une passante" and "Le Cygne" stage the failures of temporal continuity and memory, "Les Sept Vieillards" (xc) stages the failure of metaphoric poetics itself, taken to the extreme. Metaphor and metonymy usually appear in moderation and in combination, though they combine in significantly varying proportions; the psychodynamics of discourse are to a large extent determined by the predominance of one or the other.12 Extreme metonymy produced the shock-defense appearing in "L'Horloge" as the empty passage of pure linear time, where no memory-chains attach to the fleeting moments to convert them from "lived

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time" to "true experience": "every second finds consciousness ready to intercept its shock" (p. 143), but experience thereby loses "the integrity of its content" (p. 116). The passing moments of metonymical time have no content, deriving their zero-degree "meaning" solely from their ordinal relation in the series. If extreme metonymy appears as pure seriality, extreme metaphor implies total stasis: memory-chains determined by a code would be inseparably attached to each incident or signifier, assigning it a pre-established, unequivocal meaning along with fixed relations to everything else. The metonymy of desire normally displaces investment along the signifying chain, but where the metaphoric axis predominates, the force of the repetition compulsion outweighs the force of desire. Taken to the extreme, metaphor would entail infinite repetition of the absolutely identical same. The form of shock-defense based on extreme metaphor appears in "Les Sept Vieillards," where it fails even more dramatically than the metonymic defense does in "A une passante." In fact, the metaphoric doctrine of correspondences (already decoded by "Obsession" toward the end of "Spleen and Ideal") is here taken to its extreme and drives the Poet mad. The divine faculty of seeing metaphorical similarities in everything and of enriching discrete perceptions with harmonic resonances among them now appears as a terrifying recurrence of something absolutely the same. Whereas the aesthetic of correspondences nonetheless preserved difference in its revelation of similarity, here difference totally disappears, and total identity replaces mere resemblance. As if to accentuate the implicit allusion to the earlier doctrine, "Les Sept Vieillards" abounds in figures of comparison, similarity, and imitation. But such metaphoric poetics accelerates to the point that the figure of the old man begins to multiply indefinitely, and not even the passage of time differentiates: "Car je comptai sept fois, de minute en minute, / Ce sinistre vieillard qui se multipliait!" (11. 35-36). The poetics of extreme metaphor thus ultimately prove inadequate to the challenges of modern city life, arresting experience rather than enabling it, and in the end, the Poet is defeated.

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Already in the first stanza, the threats of city life appear in two forms that recur throughout the poem: the flow of mysteries that inundate the cityscape; the shock of specters that accost the passer-by even in broad daylight. The next two stanzas comprising one long, flowing sentence, the longest in the poem - develop the mysterious liquidity of the city as the setting of the Poet's morning stroll:

4

8

12

Fourmillante cite, cite pleine de reves, Ou le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant! Les mysteres coulent partout comme des seves Dans les canaux etroits du colosse puissant. Un matin, cependant que dans la triste rue Les maisons, dont la brume allongeait la hauteur, Simulaient les deux quais d'une riviere accrue, Et que, decor semblable a l'ame de l'acteur, Un brouillard sale et jaune inondait tout l'espace, Je suivais, roidissant mes nerfs comme un heros Et discutant avec mon ame deja lasse, Le faubourg secoue par les lourds tombereaux.

As he follows the suburban rivers overflowing with smog (11. 7-9), the Poet tries to bolster the courage of his flagging soul and steel his nerves to protect himself from the shocks of city life (11. 10-11), which are already prefigured in the jolts of heavy tumbrels shaking the neighborhood (1. 12). And we can almost see him on guard, flexing his poetic muscles in wary anticipation, brandishing metaphors and similes to keep the mysteries at bay: "Les mysteres ... coulent comme des seves" (1. 3); "Les maisons ... Simulaient les deux quais d'une riviere" (11. 6—7); "decor semblable a l'ame de l'acteur" (1. 8). But his defenses fail: suddenly, an old man appears before him. The shock is so severe that it registers twice, once at the beginning of the fourth stanza, then again - in a striking enjambement (which contrasts sharply with the smoothflowing, two-stanza sentence preceding it) - at the beginning of the fifth: Tout a coup, un vieillard dont les guenilles jaunes Imitaient la couleur de ce ciel pluvieux,

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Baudelaire and schizoanalysis Et dont l'aspect aurait fait pleuvoir des aumones, Sans la mechancete qui luisait dans ses yeux, M'apparut. On eut dit sa prunelle trempee Dans le fiel; son regard aiguisait les frimas, Et sa barbe a longs poils, roide comme une epee, Se projetait, pareille a celle de Judas.

The Poet parries with more metaphors, similes, comparisons: "les guenilles jaunes, / Imitaient la couleur de ce d e l " (11. 13-14); " O n eut dit sa prunelle trempee / Dans le fiel" (11. 18—18); "sa barbe ... roide comme une epee, / ... pareille a celle de J u d a s " (11. 19-20). But his fencing skills prove no match for the old man: pierced by a look-which resembles the "coup de foudre" of the "passante," but appears here as menacing rather than fascinating - the Poet will end up wounded and in retreat: "Je rentrai, je fermai ma porte / ... Blesse par le mystere et par l'absurdite!" (11. 46,48). The Poet's metaphoric defense-system - with its figures of "simulation" (1. 7), "imitation" (1. 14), and "similarity" (1. 8) - falters on contact with the old man: " On eut dit... (one might have said)" (1. 17). Anxious about city life from the start, the Poet now focuses his anxiety exclusively on the old man, but his metaphors and comparisons lack conviction, stopping at appearances or offering only alternative surmises instead of capturing his essence:

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28

II n'etait pas voute, mais casse, son echine Faisant avec sa jambe un parfait angle droit, Si bien que son baton, parachevant sa mine, Lui donnait la tournure et le pas maladroit D'un quadrupede infirme ou d'un juif a trois pattes. Dans la neige et la boue il allait en s'empetrant, Comme j'il ecrasait des morts sous ses savates, Hostile a l'univers plutot qu'indifferent.

Metaphor is the Poet's only defense here, but with the realization (already made explicit in "Obsession") that such comparisons are not true, they are proffered quite tentatively, mostly in the mode of "simulation" and "as if" (1. 27). This, of course, only aggravates his anxiety in face of the old man, the final result being that the metonymy of desire is brought to a

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grinding halt: the repetition compulsion completely appropriates the recognition-function and freezes perception altogether, fixating the Poet's perception on the figure of the old m a n :

32

Son pareil le suivait: barbe, oeil, dos, baton, loques, Nul trait ne distinguait, du meme enfer venu, Ge jumeau centenaire, et ces spectres baroques Marchaient du meme pas vers un but inconnu.

T h e Poet can now do no more than reiterate the list of features characterizing the old man ("barbe, oeil... loques") and resort to the zero-degree metonymic defense of counting off minute by minute the endless repetition of the same: " C a r je comptai sept fois, de minute en minute, / Ce sinistre vieillard qui se multipliait!" (11. 35-36). A final remark on the poem's mode of reference is in order, for metaphoric referentiality here suffers a fate akin to that of metaphoric poetics in general. Unlike the roving reporter of the tableaux de Paris, the Poet of the " T a b l e a u x Parisiens" proves unable to master the shocks of city life and derive informative lessons from them. Paris is therefore not the representational content of the poem: as a product of metaphoric poetics taken to the extreme, the poem's content amounts to little more than the hallucinations of an anxiety-ridden and thoroughly befuddled Poet-flaneur. Yet despite the failure of metaphoric poetics to represent the city, the city remains the place from which that failure is attested to and by reference to which it is to be understood. This metonymic mode of reference aligns "Les Sept Vieillards" with " L e M a s q u e " (although their mechanisms for defeating metaphoric poetics are very different). Just as " L e M a s q u e " was simultaneously an allegorical poem and a poem about an allegorical statue, so too "Les Sept Vieillards" is simultaneously a poem about the fate of poetics in modernity and a poem about modern city life: a poem in which the city defies attempts at representation as the metaphoric object of reference, yet nonetheless serves as the metonymic context of reference in relation to which the poem's explanation of its failure ultimately makes sense. In marked contrast to the conventional tableaux de Paris as

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well as the project of correspondences, the street scenes of the "Tableaux Parisiens" stage the failure of memory and metaphoric recognition to master and derive meaning from the surprising encounters typical of modern city life. The rejection of nature in favor of artifice leads to anxiety-based recognition, but decoded recognition fails to find meaning in street scenes, and the Poet of the "Tableaux Parisiens" will therefore turn his attention inward to examine the fate of desire.

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Exaspere comme un ivrogne qui voit double, Je rentrai, je fermai ma porte, epouvante, Malade et morfondu, P esprit fievreux et trouble, Blesse par le mystere et par Pabsurdite!

Wounded by the absurdity of modern existence, the Poet retreats indoors at the end of "Les Sept Vieillards," thus prefiguring the shift to domestic scenes comprising the second half of the section. THE DOMESTIC SCENES

"Le Crepuscule du soir" (xcv) marks the mid-point of the "Tableaux Parisiens," and the moment of transition, as we have said, from the diurnal to the nocturnal sets of poems. The end of the day and the arrival of night signal the arousal of desire: "Cependant des demons malsains dans Patmosphere / S'eveillent lourdement, comme des gens d'affaires / . . . La Prostitution s'allume dans les rues" (11. 11-12 and 15). Yet the poem also marks an important transition from exterior to interior: its last stanzas invite the Poet to take shelter and collect himself ("Recueille-toi, mon ame, en ce grave moment" 1. 29), and by implication to enjoy the quiet charm of home ("La douceur du foyer" 1. 38). The move from exterior to interior is in a sense more significant than the transition from day to night, given the ascendancy of artifice over nature in Baudelairean modernism. The transition from day to night is, after all, merely a natural cycle, even if it is expressly invoked in this context to neutralize the passage of linear spleen time evoked in "L'Horloge." The separation of interior from exterior, by contrast, has nothing natural about it, particularly when the move inside

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constitutes a retreat from an outside that threatens the Poet and Poetic endeavor so gravely, in that it is devoid of meaning. Given the generic conventions of the tableaux de Paris, the failure to derive meaning from the exterior scenes depicted inevitably shifts the focus to the reporting observer himself. Hence the domestic scenes are concerned not with meaning, but with desire, and with desire in many forms - memories, fantasies, dreams. The retreat from exterior to interior, from the street into the house, from questions of meaning to the issue of desire in the "Tableaux Parisiens" reiterates the shift from spleen to evil at the end of" Spleen and Ideal," except that here the split subject of desire is not racked by conscience and self-flagellation, but will only be cautiously observed from a safe distance. The move inside, the stirrings of desire, the moment of nightfall - they also evoke in this second set of poems the theme of death, foreshadowed in " Le Squelette laboureur " at the very end of the diurnal cycle, and resounding here in the concluding lines of "Le Crepuscule du soir": 30

35

Recueille-toi, mon ame, en ce grave moment, Et ferme ton oreille a ce rugissement. C'est l'heure ou les douleurs des malades s'aigrissent! La sombre Nuit les prend a la gorge; ils finissent Leur destinee et vont vers le gouffre commun; L'hopital se remplit de leurs soupirs. - Plus d'un Ne viendra plus chercher la soupe parfumee, Au coin du feu, le soir, aupres d'une ame aimee.

If the decoding of meaning leads to the problematic of desire, the decoding of desire leads directly to death. 13 Decoding releases recognition from fixation on the metaphoric axis and accelerates the metonymy of desire, spurring it onward toward the goal of satisfaction. But when the metaphoric axis has been radically decoded, it can provide no substitute objects (objets petit-a) of gratification whatsoever: the metonymy of desire thus has nowhere to stop, and leads straight to death. This is the sense in which the gamblers and whores of " L e j e u " (xcvi) are said to "prefer agony to death and hell to nothingness" (11. 23—24): any substitute gratification, no matter how painful, suffices to detour the "headlong rush into the gaping abyss" (1. 22).

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This is also the perspective from which the Poet lauds the skeleton of death in "Danse macabre" (xcvn) and shares in her mockery of the dancers who try to mask their inevitable demise with the pursuit of beauty and pleasure. Death thus decodes all modes of gratification, showing their aims to be delusory and proclaiming itself the true end of life; yet desire staves off death, providing detours to prolong the journey to the abyss. This is the quandary informing the domestic cycle of the "Tableaux Parisiens": one cannot simply affirm the metaphoric axis, since it has been thoroughly decoded; yet one cannot simply affirm pure metonymy of desire either, inasmuch as this leads directly to death. Faced with this predicament, the Poet will typically withdraw from the dilemma and take up the position of cautious observer, much as he withdraws from desire's invasion of the streets to meditate at home in "Crepuscule du soir." Nowhere is this strategy displayed more poignantly than in the opening poem of the cycle, "Le Jeu." In a dream set at night inside a gambling-house, the Poet sees himself sitting off to one side, silently watching the players and whores feverishly pursue their ends; what shocks the dreamer is that, in the dream, he actually envies their "tenacious passion": Je me vis accoude, froid, muet, enviant Enviant de ces gens la passion tenace, De ces vieilles putains la funebre gaiete. Et tous gaillardement trafiquant a ma face, 20 L'un de son vieil honneur, l'autre de sa beaute! Et mon coeur s'effraya d'envier maint pauvre homme Courant avec ferveur a l'abime beant, Et qui, soul de son sang, preferait en somme La douleur a la mort et Penfer au neant! The Poet is in a sense twice removed from the scene ("le noir tableau" 1. 13) he is describing: he is observer both within and of the dream. And it is precisely the envy which distances the dreamed-Poet from the players he observes in the first place, that in turn distances the cynical Poet-dreamer from his alterego within the dream in the second place: "Et mon coeur s'effraya d'envier maint pauvre homme . . . "

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T w o remarks are in order here. T h e doubling of the figure of the Poet in " L e J e u " and other poems of the interior cycle is a sign of recoding, just as it was in the dynamic of guilty evilification at the end of" Spleen and I d e a l . " But now doubling no longer produces the intensification of guilt (pittingjudgment against act): it appears instead in an attenuated form, as a continual moving away from the desiring self on the part of a cynical observing self. This process of self-distantiation occurs in " L e J e u " by means of frame-switching: already at a distance from those he (as subject of the utterance) envies in the dream, the Poet then (as subject of the uttering) distances himself from that envy. At the same time, the Poet's stance in " L e J e u " mirrors that of " L e C y g n e " in the exterior cycle. There, the Poet cannot simply subscribe to meaning and memory, since they are decoded, but cannot entirely abandon them either: they are transformed by the supplement of melancholy, which generates the multiple allegories of exile comprising Part II of the poem. Here, the Poet cannot simply subscribe to desire, for it is decoded by death; but he cannot entirely abandon it, either: the dreamed-Poet still envies the players' passion, even while the Poet-dreamer cynically demystifies it. In much the same way, the final poem of the domestic cycle, " R e v e parisien" (en), mirrors a poem appearing at the beginning of the exterior cycle, " A une mendiante rousse." There, Poetic will sought to ennoble a lowly figure on the street; here the Poet's desire transforms an entire " l a n d s c a p e " in a dream. But in direct contrast to the introductory poems of the section ("Paysage," " L e Soleil"), there are now no signs of nature at all:

12

J'avais banni de ces spectacles Le vegetal irregulier, Et, peintre fier de mon genie, Je savourais dans mon tableau L'enivrante monotonie Du metal, du marbre et de l'eau.

22

Non d'arbres, mais de colonnades Les etangs dormants s'entouraient,

8

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46

Nul astre d'ailleurs, nuls vestiges De soleil, meme au bas du ciel...

52

Et sur ces mouvantes merveilles Planait (terrible nouveaute! Tout pour Pceil, rien pour les oreilles!) Un silence d'eternite.

No signs of nature, no sign of life: the total and explicit exclusion of nature in favor of artifice produce the quintessentially modernist "novelty" (1. 50) of a dreamscape informed by a desire for absolute stillness, or death. Here, the dilemma of desire and death informing the entire cycle is resolved in a tour de force: desire and death simply fuse together to produce a vision of endless yet glittering monotony. In the context of the "Tableaux Parisiens" as a whole, the nocturnal vision of desire evoked at will in "Reve parisien" ("Architecte de mes feeries, / J e faisais, a ma volonte... " 11. 37-38) completes the circle leading back to "Paysage," where the Poet shuts himself in to call forth springtime through sheer force of will ("evoquer le Printemps avec ma volonte" [1. 24]) and to build his fairy castles in the dark ("Pour batir dans la nuit [s]es feeriques palais." [1. 16]). Except that now nature and life have been banished from the Poet's desire-of-death altogether. The contrast with the other dream tableau of the domestic cycle, in the initial poem " L e J e u , " is even more striking. There, the Poet appeared double, both observer 0/and represented in his dream; here, he does not appear in the dream at all: as there are no signs of life, there is no representation of the Poet. The absence of a dreamed-Poet (such as the one in " Le Jeu ") and the externality of the Poet-dreamer to the dream vision are underscored in the first lines of "Reve parisien," as the waking Poet recounts his amazement at recalling a landscape no mortal has ever seen:

4

De ce terrible paysage, Tel que jamais mortel n'en vit, Ce matin encore l'image, Vague et lointaine, me ravit.

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The vision of desire can appear eternal (1. 52) as long as it does not entail the presence of a desiring, and therefore mortal, subject. But of course, as in its pendant in the diurnal cycle, "A une mendiante rousse," the desired transformation in "Reve parisien" proves illusory: the Poet awakens in his hovel to the clock striking noon, and must immediately face the real that resists desire, the curse of mundane cares that worry his soul. And this rude awakening prepares the dawn of the last poem of the section, " Crepuscule du matin," which with its final image of laboring old Paris rubbing its eyes and shouldering its tools to go back to work, returns us to the opening poems of the diurnal cycle. The reduction of desiring subjectivity adumbrated in the Parisian dream here reaches its limit: for in "Crepuscule du matin," the Poet does not appear at all, not even as speaking subject. If the decoding of meaning in the exterior cycle led inside to the desires of the reporting subject, the decoding of desire leads in turn to the death of the subject, and to an "eternal" temporality devoid of events to report. "Le Crepuscule du matin" inscribes just such a temporality in its series of imperfect verbs - the only tense appearing in the poem - which repeatedly set the stage for an event that never occurs and an actor who nowhere appears. Thus even while "Reve parisien" and "Le Crepuscule du matin" thematically lead back to the diurnal poems at the beginning of the section, they also represent the culmination of both cycles' poetic transformations of the tableaux de Paris genre. Just as the decoding of meaning in the street scenes led inside to the observing subject and the question of its desire, the decoding of that desiring subject leads back outside to a final scene of Paris, but this time without any observing subject whatsoever. The lyric subject of memory and the anti-lyric subject of boredom from "Spleen and Ideal" are no longer in play. The observing and speaking subject is absorbed into the instance of discourse itself (the expression plane); the observed context is absorbed into the meaningless gesture of reference such discourse inevitably makes (the content plane). So although the cyclical temporal structure of the "Tableaux Parisiens" pro-

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duces no other result than to neutralize the inhibiting linearity of spleen time, the dynamics of referentiality and subjectivity change substantially across the section as a whole, ultimately locating the modernist poet in the context of modern Paris while thoroughly decoding the conventional genre of the tableaux de Paris.

The spatial structure of the "Tableaux Parisiens," meanwhile, attests to the marked split between meaning and desire that characterizes Baudelairean modernism, and which will reappear throughout the Petits Poemes en prose, as well. The decoding of the (collective as well as private) metaphoric axis in " Spleen and Ideal" fostered the kind of real reference suggested by the new section's title. Yet further decoding made real reference problematic: the unavailability of meaning in the street scenes shifted focus to domestic scenes suffused with desire. But the subject of desire is also subject to decoding, and decoding here leads to the attenuated recoding of cynical selfdistantiation, for the limit of decoded desire appears as death. Such a split between exterior and interior, between meaningrecognition and drive-gratification, recalls and exacerbates the dynamics of psychic disintegration already evident in the spleen cycle. Meaning-recognition fueled by anxiety serves only the purpose of ego-defense, here entirely divorced from objectrecognition which could serve the gratification of drives instead. But such psychic disintegration is compounded here by the decoding that affects each of the two spheres: unassimilable shock-experience "outside" thwarts meaning-recognition and weakens the synthesizing capacity of the ego, already susceptible to the destabilizing pressures of unassimilated drive-impulses "inside," thereby making the ego even more unstable. Withdrawal and obsessive self-reference then supervene in an attempt to shore up and protect the weakened ego, through the defense mechanism we have referred to as self-distantiation. Decoding is thus accompanied by a compensatory process of recoding that takes place "on the spot" (surplace) at the very site of the most intense decoding. This dual or doubled stance adopted by the Poet of the

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"Tableaux Parisiens" presents the central features of "borderline narcissism," a composite diagnostic category whose two terms correspond to decoding and recoding respectively. For our purposes, however, borderline narcissism is finally a historical rather than a psychological category, and it thus points beyond a strictly psychopoetic approach to the sociopoetics of decoding and recoding, and to the situation of Baudelaire's poetic texts in relation to their historical contexts. As central as the recurrent oscillation between decoding and recoding is to the psychopoetics ofLes Fleurs du Mai, the point of sociopoetic analysis is to explain such oscillation in historical terms. From this perspective, the cycles of decoding and recoding represent more than swings of a pendulum characterizing Baudelaire's poetry alone: they have other determinations — the determinations of real Others and ultimately of social semiosis in historical situation. For just as much as decoding depends on the historical conditions of the sociosymbolic order, recoding - the elaboration of personae - never occurs spontaneously or on one's own concerted initiative, but rather always under the aegis of determinate Others. Accounting for the poetic evolution registered in Les Fleurs du Mai will thus involve reconstructing the series of historical Others in relation to which Baudelaire devised and revised his personalities and public personae, and situating each of the three stages of recoding traced in the psychopoetics discussion in relation to one or more of these historical figures. Yet in situating the poetry in historical context, it is important not to equate (metaphorically) the evolution of the poetry with the historical transformations surrounding Baudelaire's life, but instead to acknowledge (metonymically) the differences between his published poetry and his life-history. For the poetic cycles of recoding — romantic recoding in correspondences, "satanic" recoding in evilification, and cynical recoding in self-distantiation - do not correspond in any direct way to the real Others in Baudelaire's life nor to the historical developments through which he lived. From the perspective of sociopoetics, this difference is crucial to the development and to the explanation of Baudelairean modernism.

PART III

Sociopoetics

CHAPTER 6

Decoding and recoding in the prose poems

HISTORICAL OTHERS

The series of three published collections of poetry provide one perspective on Baudelaire's life history, but it is not the only one. Essays, letters, editorial comments he made about his poetry, accounts of his life by others, and the poet's own notebooks provide other perspectives. In a remarkable study of the poet, Michel Butor takes as his point of departure a dream Baudelaire recounts in a letter to his friend, Charles Asselineau, and by association the titles Baudelaire envisaged for verse collections prior to Les Fleurs du Mai and his writings on Pierre Dupont and Edgar Allan Poe. 1 It is important to take these other documents into account: not just because any one set of documentation will differ from the others and can therefore provide valuable illumination in its own right, but because in this case, the writings on Dupont and Poe register events that are absent from the lyric poetry itself. Butor divides Baudelaire's life into "three periods... which correspond to three titles for the poems {Les Lesbiennes, Les Limbes, Les Fleurs du Mai), and, in the author's psychological life, to three successive intercessors: Jeanne [Duval], the [revolutionary] crowd [of 1848], and Edgar Poe" (p. 64). These "intercessors" represent the historical Others in relation to whom Baudelaire constructed major personalities. The titles are particularly significant because Baudelaire's dream occurs the night after his first book (the translation of Poe stories, Histoires extraordinaires) has appeared, and a book "that has just come out" also figures in the dream itself: delivering a copy of it to 177

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"the madam of a great brothel" will provide him "an opportunity to fuck one of the brothel girls en passant" (p. 11). Since Baudelaire had been "morally castrated" (Butor's term, p. 50) by the legal guardianship arranged by his stepfather which deprived him of his inheritance at the age of twentythree, publishing a book will at long last restore his manhood. Up to this point, Butor suggests, the relationship with Jeanne Duval had secretly been between two women; hence the original title for the collection of poems that will expand to become Les Fleurs du Mai, "Les Lesbiennes." The Other of Butor's first period is thus the emasculated poet's "lesbian" lover, Jeanne Duval. Inasmuch as recoding here involves supplementing present perception with memorytraces, Duval represents a perfect Other for Baudelaire, for she can evoke in the poet profound memories from two formative experiences: his very close childhood relationship with his mother, and his ocean voyage at age twenty to the South Seas. On the nature of his life-long attachment to his mother, little more need be said: Baudelaire himself as well as his critics and biographers have stressed this facet of his childhood.2 The loss in Baudelaire's case of an already aging father at age five may therefore have merely exaggerated what psychoanalysis insists is generally the case anyway: that the dependence of the preOedipal child on the care-giving mother lays down a fund of precoded memory-traces that will in large part constitute the imaginary register, before the mother-child relation is disrupted by the figure of the father and those traces overcoded by the name-of-the-father function in the symbolic order. It is thus no surprise that in the first stage of recoding, involving the recuperation through memory of an integral self mystically linked to a supernatural world, the figure of woman predominates. More needs to be said about his trip to India, however. Perhaps because Baudelaire was forced by his stepfather to take it in the first place (in order to cure him of profligacy), and then cut it short to return to Paris, or perhaps because it does not fit neatly into the chronology or structure of orthodox, "Oedipalinfantile" psychoanalysis, its importance for the early poetry has gone largely unnoticed.3

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As is so often the case, what may be equally true of Baudelaire himself appears in his art criticism, imputed to others. In his discussion of Delacroix and the probable source of "Femmes d'Alger" (in the Salon de 1846), Baudelaire says: "A trip to Morocco seems to have left a profound impression in his soul. There, he was able to study the originality and independence of movement of the native men and women at leisure (Un voyage au Maroc laissa dans son esprit, a ce qu'il semble, une impression profonde; la il put a loisir etudier l'homme et la femme dans l'independance et l'originalite native de leurs mouvements)" (p. 234). Such impressions - those registered deep in memory for having escaped ego-defensive recognition and binding at the moment of initial experience - are precisely the kind that arise to supplement present perception in many of the early poems, such as "La Vie anterieure." In this same vein, Baudelaire will (in the Salon de 1859) confess a marked weakness for certain otherwise aesthetically mediocre landscapes, solely because they are exotic: Je dois confesser en passant que, bien qu'il ne soit pas doue d'une originalite de maniere bien decidee, M. Hildebrandt... m'a cause un vif plaisir. En parcourant ces amusants albums de voyage, il me semble toujours queje revois, queje reconnais ce queje n'aijamais vu. (p. 418) I must confess in passing that even though his style is not particularly original, Mr. Hildebrandt... gave me keen pleasure. Looking through these amusing travel albums always gives me the impression that I am seeing once again and recognizing something that I have never seen. And a propos of some aesthetically far superior North African travel-landscapes of Fromentin, Baudelaire nevertheless suggests that the exotic subject-matter itself plays a role in his enjoyment: II est presumable que je suis moi-meme atteint quelque peu d'une nostalgie qui m'entraine vers le soleil; car de ces toiles lumineuses s'eleve pour moi une vapeur enivrante, qui se condense bientot en desirs et en regrets, (p. 409) It is likely that I myself am somewhat susceptible to nostalgia for the sun; for from these luminous canvases arises for me an intoxicating mist which soon condenses into desires and regrets.

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Exotic travel is conducive to such quasi-traumatic (i.e. unbound) decoded experience inasmuch as the codes at hand to manage familiar experience no longer adequately serve that function in an exotic setting. The status of these "profound impressions" is akin to those of the pre-Oedipal relation to the mother, in that they have escaped coding, but they occur well after the "Oedipal stage" and are in no way linked to the specular mother-child relation of the Lacanian imaginary. Just as important as the exotic setting itself is the fact that one of Baudelaire's first poetically mature love poems dates from this trip, as if means of expression developed to retrieve images from memory at just the same moment that decoded experience presented itself to the young poet. Shortly after staying with Autard de Bragard and his wife Emmelina in Mauritius on his way home, Baudelaire composes and sends to Emmelina a sonnet later included in Les Fleurs du Mai under the title "Aune dame Creole" (LXI). Baudelaire was captivated by the stature and beauty of this "dark-skinned enchantress" (1. 5), memories of whom will no doubt be evoked by the mulatto Jeanne Duval's own dark complexion. Indeed, to the considerable extent that Jeanne Duval conjures up for Baudelaire whatever he may know (or think he knows) about Africa and the Orient, she may evoke memories of the journey in its entirety, as well as those of Mme. de Bragard in particular; this is certainly what his comments in the art criticism about nostalgia for travel in sunnier climes suggests.4 As Baudelaire outgrows his first, "romantic" personality, the memories associated with the figure of woman as Other diminish in importance. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this is to be expected, inasmuch as the imaginary register dominated by the mother gives way, upon entry into the symbolic order, to the name-of-the-father. Yet in Baudelaire's case, memories of women diminish in importance largely because the decoding of the correspondences program replaces stable memory with mobile fantasy as supplement to perception. The beauty of woman may still serve as stimulus, but the destabilizing exhilaration she provokes exceeds the metaphoric axes of the imaginary register. What's more, Baudelaire's entry into the

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socio-symbolic order entails a repudiation of the name-of-thefather and of the name-of-the-despot, in the figures of his stepfather - General Aupick - and Emperor Napoleon III. For Baudelaire's next "intercessor," according to Butor, is the revolutionary crowd of 1848. The poet comes of age at a time of revolution, and constructs his next major personality accordingly. The title for the second proposed collection of poems, "Les Limbes," alludes to Fourier and to the period of waiting "in limbo" that he imagined would precede the triumphant arrival of the final, "harmonian" stage of human history. In publishing eleven poems (including three entitled "Spleen") under the Fourierist title "Les Limbes" (in Le Messager de VAssembled, April 1851), Baudelaire also announces a forthcoming collection that will "trace the history of the spiritual agitations of modern youth" (cited by Butor in Histoire Extraordinaire, p. 66). Even more than in the projected second title for the collection, with its direct allusion to Fourier's mystical socialism, the importance of the crowd for Baudelaire is clearly legible in the essay of August 1851 on Pierre Dupont, 5 whom Baudelaire considered the preeminent popular poet of the age, and at this point the model for poetry in general: je prefere le poete qui se met en communication permanente avec les hommes de son temps, et echange avec eux des pensees et des sentiments ... Le poete, place sur un des points de la circonference de Phumanite, renvoie sur la meme ligne en vibrations plus melodieuses la pensee humaine qui lui fut transmise... La revolution de Fevrier activa et augmenta les vibrations de la corde populaire; tous les malheurs et toutes les esperances de la Revolution firent echo dans la poesie de Pierre Dupont. (pp. 292 and 294) I prefer the poet who remains in constant communication with the people of his time, exchanging thoughts and feelings with them ... The poet, located at one point on the circumference of humanity, sends along the same line, but in more melodious vibrations, the human ideas that were communicated to him... The February Revolution heightened the resonance of the people's voice; all the misfortunes and all the hopes of the Revolution found an echo in the poetry of Pierre Dupont.

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Baudelaire will eventually repudiate such a position in (among many other places) an otherwise still sympathetic review of Dupont in 1861. But here his engagement with the Revolution of 1848 and the Second Republic is clear, and affects even his conception of art, "henceforth inseparable from morality and utility (desormais inseparable de la morale et de l'utilite) " (p. 292). By the time the verse collection was finally published in 1857, under the title Les Fleurs du Mai, Baudelaire's attitude toward the events of 1848 had changed drastically in the wake of Napoleon's coup d'etat. When they appear in the poetry at all, they figure only as an absent and irretrievable past, as in "Le Cygne," which was at first refused publication (by the Revue contemporaine) because of its allusions - evidently dangerous under Second-Empire censorship - to exiles, captives, and the vanquished of 1848, but ultimately included in the second edition with an even more direct dedication to the exiled Victor Hugo; or as a mere distraction unable to rouse the Poet from his work, as in " Paysage " (" L'Emeute, tempetant vainement a ma vitre, / Ne fera lever mon front de mon pupitre" 11. 21-22). It is impossible to decide whether Baudelaire found lyric poetry an inadequate means of expression for the Revolution of 1848, or simply found insufficient time for poetry amidst his other, more political activities. In any case, the historical disaster of December 1851 intervenes between Baudelaire's revolutionary engagement and publication of the first (1857) edition of Les Fleurs du Mai, effacing virtually all traces of the former from the latter. The figure of Edgar Allan Poe is crucial to Baudelaire at this stage, according to Butor, because it enables him in effect to contradict himself: to efface all traces of his revolutionary enthusiasm by converting it ex postfacto into a penchant for pure destruction. I say the figure of Poe not merely because, unlike Duval or the Parisian crowd, Baudelaire never encountered the American in person, but more particularly because it is the figure of Poe generated by Baudelaire's reading of him that changes so

drastically between 1848 and 1852. As Butor suggests, Poe is the one figure Baudelaire is able to hold onto while everything else

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crumbles around him in the wake of Napoleon's coup d'etat: and even this is possible only on condition that Baudelaire diametrically reverse his understanding of what Poe meant (to him) in the first place. Baudelaire first became interested in Poe upon reading some translations published in a Fourierist journal, Democratic pacijique, in 1846 or 1847. His own first translation - of "Mesmeric Revelation" - appeared in Liberte de penser in July of 1848. As the short notice accompanying his translation makes clear, in this time of revolutionary enthusiasm and Fourierist sympathies, Baudelaire takes the tale literally, invoking the names of the mystic Swedenborg and the naturalist Saint-Hilaire in praising Poe's insight into the "mysterious unity" of the natural and the supernatural. 6 Only later will Baudelaire learn that Poe explicitly abjured any relation to Swedenborgian mysticism, insisting the story was pure fiction. He is thus obliged to change his reading of "Mesmeric Revelation," to construe it not literally but ironically, not as true revelation, but as farce (as he puts it in his Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe in 1859). 7

He also learns more about the tragedy of Poe's life: whereas before he had imagined him living a full and happy life, dabbling in literature among myriad other pursuits, he now discovers the full extent of Poe's misery and the castigation to which he had been subject at the hands of critics and biographers in America.8 This discovery, together with his belated understanding of the irony in " Mesmeric Revelations," produces for Baudelaire a new Poe, a figure who will sanction his own withdrawal from political engagement, occasioned by the coup d'etat of Louis-Napoleon in 1851. As Butor explains: It is at the very moment when his democratic hopes are collapsing that he realizes that, in the very American republic which he would have eagerly proposed as a model to France a few months before, this Edgar Poe whom he so greatly admires was pursued by the same incomprehension as he himself was under the reign of Louis-Philippe ... The violence of Baudelaire's hatred will again be the measure of his disappointment, (p. 89) The incomparable appeal of the figure of Poe is that it allows Baudelaire's bitter disappointment not to show: he discovered

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Poe well before 1851; a shrewder reading of him will now enable the disillusioned poet to claim to have shared the lacerating irony Poe rains on modern democracy and progress all along. In constructing a final major personality in relation to Poe as his third Other following the debacle of 1848-51, Baudelaire maintains a semblance of personal continuity while having in fact reversed direction and severed his former political engagement almost completely.9 What he henceforth admires most in the despised and destitute American is his cynical aloofness: "He was never a dupe!" insists Baudelaire, secretly wishing the same were true of himself. The later notebooks resound with desperate attempts to rewrite history and efface his moment of weakness, of revolutionary enthusiasm: "Yes! Long live the Revolution!... But I am no dupe, I have never been a d u p e ! I say Long live the Revolution! as I would say Long live Destruction I Long live Expiation I Long live Punishment I Long live

Deathl (Oui! Vive la Revolution!... Mais moi je ne suis pas dupe, je n'ai jamais ete dupe! je dis Vive la Revolution comme je dirais: Vive la Destruction! Vive VExpiation! Vive le Chdtiment! Vive la

Mort!)" (p. 698). " T o be a dupe," explains Butor, "means above all: to take one's desires for realities, in particular to believe that the people can effectively abolish the rule of the bourgeoisie " (p. 92). Caveat desiderator: following the example he finds in the figure of Poe, Baudelaire will conclude that the best defense against getting duped (again) is to (have) become a cynic, even - or especially - with respect to his own desires. But he draws another lesson from his double-reading of Poe, as well: obliged to revise an earlier, literal reading and henceforth to factor in Poe's scathing irony, Baudelaire will, in the face of Second-Empire incomprehension and his loss of faith in democracy, build such double-reading into his own poetry. It will increasingly be designed to suggest one, rather conventional "communicative" reading on the surface, and another, ironized "textual" reading available only to an "aristocratic elite" of more canny readers. Such duplicity is already present in "La Beaute": the poets depicted in the poem futilery waste away their days trying to fathom Beauty's inner essence, proffered through a set of striking metaphors and similes; indeed, much of

Decoding and recoding in the prose poems the criticism, too, has attempted to define a Baudelairean aesthetic by making sense of these figures. But the poetics of the poem belie all such attempts, as we saw: speaking in the guise of Beauty, the poet of the poem demonstrates the superiority of a metonymic poetics better able to appreciate the beauty of things. This kind of duplicity becomes more explicit in many later poems (it was thematized in "Le Jeu"), and constitutes the very core of some of the most striking prose poems, as well. Baudelaire's life history thus divides into four stages, not the three registered as cycles of recoding in the poetry alone; and it does so despite the existence of three historical Others in relation to which Baudelaire constructs his major personalities. A romantic first stage leads the poet (and many of his contemporaries) to a second stage of revolutionary enthusiasm, which is then repudiated and converted retrospectively into ironic satanism in a third stage, culminating in the accomplished modernism of the fourth stage. The figure of Poe enables Baudelaire secretly to convert naive romanticism into modernist cynicism, and his erstwhile enthusiasm for revolutionary engagement into the satanism appearing in the published poetry. The difference between poetry and life history is thus crucial to understanding the development of Baudelairean modernism: under the aegis of Poe, Baudelaire effaces from the verse collection his period of revolutionary enthusiasm and engagement. More specifically: in reorganizing the "Spleen and Ideal" section for the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai, he substitutes the program of evilification for that enthusiasm, between the cycle of spleen poems and the "Tableaux Parisiens," in order to cover his tracks. The "sado-masochistic" intensities of self-torture evident in " L'Heautontimoroumenos " — where the Poet is both "la victime et le bourreau!" (1. 24) — recover their specific historical valence in relation to remarks on the revolution that are confined to the notebooks: "Not only would I be happy to be a victim, but I would not hate being a torturer, - to experience the Revolution both ways! (Non seulement je serais heureux d'etre victime, mais je ne halrais pas d'etre bourreau - pour sentir la Revolution des deux manieres!) " (p. 698). Baudelaire's claim to the effect that when

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he said " Long live the Revolution " he really meant " Long live Destruction" is written into the revisions for the second edition in the complete suppression of revolution from the collection. The function of self-torture and evilification in this pivotal third stage is best understood in relation to the ways "masochistic" suffering in the other stages of Baudelaire's life history is either valorized as grounds on which to construct a self, in cycles of recoding, or serves as a point of departure for historical engagement, in cycles of decoding. MORAL MASOCHISM

Of course, Baudelaire did not invent suffering or its valorization: a centuries-old tradition of suffering valorized by Christianity precedes the specifically romantic-Christian version he inherits and briefly inhabits as an educated European in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In the romantic topos, personal suffering decodes social overcoding, inasmuch as it serves as a testimonial critique of the unkept promises of postrevolutionary society. Yet, at the same time, it serves recoding by privileging the self in an imaginary mode: childish, nostalgic, emotional, imaginative. More important, romantic suffering is designed to elicit pity, and hence ultimately aims for reintegration into the social order.10 Thus in the romanticreligious terms of "Benediction," the Poet vilified by mother and wife cries

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- Soyez beni, mon Dieu, qui donnez la souffrance Comme un divin remede a nos impuretes Et comme la meilleure et la plus pure essence Qui preparent les forts aux saintes voluptes! Je sais que vous gardez une place au Poete Dans les rangs bienheureux des saintes Legions, Et que vous Vinvitez a Peternelle fete Des trones, des Vertus, des Dominations.

Suffering here serves as a means of election to the highest ranks of godly society. In the second stage, the moment of revolutionary engage-

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ment, suffering is valorized not for pity's sake, but as a source of righteous indignation and a stimulus to action. As Baudelaire says (in the essay on Dupont): II est bon que chacun de nous, une fois dans sa vie, ait eprouve la pression d'une odieuse tyrannie; il apprend a la hair. Combien de philosophes a engendres le seminaire! Gombien de natures revoltees ont pris vie aupres d'un cruel et ponctuel militaire de l'Empire! Fecondante discipline, combien nous te devons de chants de liberte! La pauvre et genereuse nature, un beau matin, fait son explosion... (P- 293) It is good for all of us, at one point in our lives, to have experienced the oppression of an odious tyranny; it teaches us to hate it. How many philosophers have been bred in seminaries! How many rebellious souls have sprung from a cruel and strict officer of the Empire! How many songs of liberty we owe to fertile discipline! The poor, generous soul, one fine day, reaches the point of explosion ...

Suffering at the hands of an unjust social order targets the society responsible for it and foments revolt. In the interpolated third stage of satanic evilification, suffering is sought neither for the pity it might elicit nor for the revolutionary enthusiasm it could inspire, but for the psychic intensities it produces. Whereas a classic Oedipal resolution would shift alignment from the mother (focus of imaginary relations) to the figure of the father and his authority as internalized in the super-ego, here the shift goes directly against the authority of the socio-symbolic order. Instead of obeying internalized socio-symbolic laws, the Poet flouts them, intentionally engaging in proscribed activities for the sheer guiltridden charge of doing wrong and knowing it: la conscience dans le Mai. Suffering is valued here as a source of pure intra-psychic intensity, which arises from the exact coincidence between what is desired and what is condemned as evil by the laws of the sociosymbolic order. Sartre has read this " coincidence " as existential masochism: Baudelaire desires whatever society defines as evil precisely because it is socially defined as evil, which allows him to shirk the responsibility of choosing authentic desires of his own. For Bersani, the "masochism" that to Sartre is an example of inauthenticity is simply part of human nature; humans are

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"sado-masochistic" in that they "masochistically" erect and submit to an internal agency that "sadistically" surveys and condemns their every desire: " in the super-ego the id, separated from itself, finds pleasure in attacking itself. The obvious sadistic aspect of the super-ego perhaps hides a more profound masochism which becomes evident if we think of the super-ego as desire turned against itself" (p. 93). As suggestive an insight into human nature as this may be, it effectively collapses desire into the law (Bersani is here following Lacan to the letter), thereby eliminating the tension between concrete individuals and specific social formations. Explaining Baudelaire's valorization of suffering will require a definition of masochism more sensitive to the particularities of social life in post-revolutionary Europe. The figure of Poe, as reread after the cataclysm of December 1851, sponsors a major restructuration of Baudelaire's relation to suffering. He now vehemently repudiates romanticism and suffering for pity's sake: only fools would suffer gladly in the vain hope of moving society to pity and thereby gaining (re)acceptance. He also violently rejects his commitment to the Second Republic and democratic ideals: only dupes would try to act on their suffering so as to end it, by changing the society responsible for it. This shift is clear from his remarks on Hegesippe Moreau: II fut un temps ou parmi les poetes il etait de mode de se plaindre... de belles et bonnes souffrances bien determinees, de la pauvrete, par exemple; on disait orgueilleusement: j'ai faim et j'ai froid!... Hegesippe donna dans ce grand travers anti-poetique. II parla de luimeme beaucoup, et pleura beaucoup sur lui-meme. II singea plus d'une fois les attitudes fatales des Antony et des Didier, mais il y joignit ce qu'il croyait une grace de plus, le regard courrouce et grognon du democrate... [I]l se jeta tout d'abord dans la foule de ceux qui s'ecrient sans cesse: O maratre nature! et qui reprochent a la societe de leur avoir vole leur part. II se fit de lui-meme un certain personnage ideal, damne, mais innocent, voue des sa naissance a des souffrances immeritees. (p. 489) There was a time when it was fashionable among poets to complain ... about very specific, true-to-life suffering - about poverty, for instance;

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one proudly declared: I am cold and hungry!... Hegesippe went astray in just this anti-poetic manner. He spoke a great deal about himself, and cried a lot over himself. He often copied the fateful poses of an Antony or a Didier, but then added what he considered an extra charm, the incensed and peevish expression of a democrat... [H]e would hurl himself first thing into the mass of those who constantly exclaim: Nature, you cruel stepmother! and reproach society for having stolen their fair share. He made himself out to be a kind of ideal figure, damned but innocent, condemned from the moment of birth to undeserved suffering. Such an indictment of course fits the earlier Baudelaire himself, the poet of "Benediction," for example, at least as well as it does Hegesippe Moreau. In contrast to the sniveling romantic, the truly great man - Baudelaire cites Gerard de Nerval and Poe, precisely - seeks to "discourage pity for his misfortunes (diminuer la pitie pour ses malheurs) " (p. 489). Rather than reproach society for the unjust suffering it has meted out, and thereby reap the glory of public sympathy, the true poet "will want to dispense with pity and will recite the snap judgment of egoism: why pity those who deserve to suffer? (voudra se dispenser de la pitie et repetera le jugement precipite de l'egolsme: pourquoi plaindre ceux qui meritent de souffrir?) " (p. 488): his suffering now places him outside and above society in a group whose rejection by society is the very sign and guarantee of their superior value. 11 As he says of Leconte de Lisle: [son] impopularite ... ne lui cause aucune tristesse ... II lui suffit d'etre populaire parmi ceux qui sont dignes eux-memes de lui plaire... [parmi] cette famille d'esprits qui ont pour tout ce qui n'est pas superieur un mepris si tranquille qu'il ne daigne meme pas s'exprimer. (P. 488) [his] unpopularity... causes him no distress ... He is content to be popular among those who are themselves worthy enough to please him ... [among] that family of minds who regard everything that is not clearly superior with so calm a disdain that it does not even bother expressing itself. Suffering no longer calls for pity and ingratiation into society; no longer prompts indignation and action to change society: it

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has become, for the new "aristocratic" elect, a silent mark of superiority placing the poet over and above society. This, as we shall see, is the stance adopted by the narrator of the prose poems. Baudelaire's masochism is thus far more productive than either Sartre or Bersani allows. It propels him out of the romanticism he inherits, through the historic events of the Revolution of 1848, and then into the ironic cynicism characteristic of Second-Empire high culture (and modern culture generally).12 The epitome of this historical form of masochism is found in the works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch himself, who was an exact contemporary of Baudelaire, and a very popular man of letters throughout Europe and especially in France, in the decades immediately following the poet's death. As Deleuze's psychodynamic study of Masoch's writings suggests, Masochian masochism had special strategic value in midnineteenth-century Europe - that is, in the period immediately following the defeat of the 1848 revolutions: the function of soliciting and enduring punishment for the Masochian masochist was to invalidate the law of the father in the socio-symbolic order and emerge triumphant oneself.13

HISTORICAL MASOCHISM

Deleuze's study contrasts the works of Masoch with those of the Marquis de Sade in order to differentiate masochism from sadism, two discrete perversions often crudely lumped together under the rubric of "sado-masochism." Although in many of Freud's texts the two violent perversions are considered mirror images, freely convertible one into the other, Deleuze draws on the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle to derive the specificity of masochism from Masoch's own literary oeuvre. Beyond the Pleasure Principle is of special interest for an examination of masochism because Freud here addresses the question of pleasure and apparent exceptions to its status as a governing principle of psychic life. Partly in an attempt to account for such exceptions, Freud explores (among other things) the relation-

Decoding and recoding in the prose poems ship between pleasure and repetition: what lies "beyond" the pleasure principle is not so much exceptions to it, but rather its grounding in repetition and the death instinct. Under the influence of the death instinct, even the pleasure principle becomes, as Freud put it, "innately conservative": repetition grounds the stimulus-binding energy that links present perception with memory-traces of past gratification, thus enabling the pleasure principle to operate and govern behavior. Usually, repetition and pleasure work hand-in-glove: we repeat what was already found pleasurable, which is to say that present perception is eroticized or "sexualized" and governed "conservatively" by (memory-traces of) gratifications past. But the relation of pleasure and repetition can vary: less usually, as in the case of trauma dreams, for instance, repetition operates independently of the pleasure principle, "de-sexualizing" perception and repeating something not pleasurable, but extremely displeasurable, traumatic. Here repetition is severed from drive-gratification, and serves instead as an egodefense to reduce anxiety, by developing ex post facto the stimulus-binding recognition-function whose absence occasioned the trauma in the first place. Under conditions of generalized decoding, as we saw in Baudelaire's case, not only specific traumas but the myriad shocks of everyday modern urban life can bolster repetition-driven recognition in defense of the ego, at the expense of more pleasure-gratifying forms of experience. Our analysis of "Les Sept Vieillards" showed how, in a hysterical extrapolation of this defense against anxiety, the repetition compulsion can even totally appropriate the recognition-function, arresting and fixating present perception altogether. Still less usually, as in the case of perversion, the desexualization of perception is accompanied by the resexualization of repetition itself. Instead of repeating what was initially found pleasurable, pleasure is found in whatever is repeated: in the repetition of psychic pain (as in trauma), and even in the physical pain of bodily torture. The question thus becomes: how can the repetition of pain — especially one's own — be found pleasurable? As regards masochism, Deleuze invokes Reik's

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clinical study and its conclusion: accepting punishment for the desired act before it occurs effectively resolves guilt and anxiety about the act, thereby sanctioning its consummation.14 We have already seen in a general way why such desperate measures for reducing anxiety might be needed, given the high levels of ego-defensive anxiety produced by modern urban life. But Deleuze goes on to ask, why would preliminary punishment serve the end of obtaining pleasure? Under what conditions does this masochistic narrative-kernel (punishment-before — > pleasure-after) become effective? This is where analysis of Masoch's fiction proves illuminating. The hero of Masoch's fiction typically arranges a mock contract whereby he willingly suffers domination and punishment at the hands of a beautiful woman. A contract is under normal circumstances of course supposed to protect and further the interests of both parties: by signing over all the power and advantages to the domineering woman, the masochist parodies the concept of contract. The functions of this fantasy parodycontract are several: first of all, it reduces anxiety about punishment by meticulously specifying when, where, and how such punishment is to be carried out; secondly, it explicitly repudiates the father, the usual authority figure, and transfers his symbolic authority to the woman. Then, by actively soliciting punishment, the contract invalidates the symbolic authority responsible for the suffering incurred: since the punishment is undeserved, blame falls on the figure meting it out, instead. With the father figure repudiated and his authority denied, the masochistic hero ends up enjoying relations with the woman which the father normally forbids.15 But these are relations of a very special kind: one might say they are an-Oedipal, or even anti-Oedipal, in nature. What the beatings suffered by the masochistic hero desexualize is genital sexuality: he emerges (Masoch's works are explicit about this) as an idealized and dephallicized being, stripped of any genital designs on the woman. (Hence the significance of Baudelaire's asexual or agenital, "lesbian" relationship with Jeanne Duval.) Not only is the father excluded and his authority denied, but even his position with respect to the woman is eliminated: what

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the hero seeks is not Oedipally to replace the father in genital relations with the woman, but to transcend carnal desire toward an idealized, an-Oedipal, sentimental relationship with her. One important result is that the masochist's super-ego is split into component parts, as the Oedipal "ego ideal" is rejected in favor of the pre-Oedipal "ideal ego." 16 The ego ideal is a precipitate of cultural norms and a condensation of social rolemodels. It serves as the standard of comparison, saying in effect: you should be like this; it supplies content for the formal operation of "conscience" (the super-ego proper) which says: you should not do that. The ego ideal thus provides internalized moral guidelines of a generalized "authority figure" in the service of the commanding super-ego. The "ideal ego," on the other hand, predates the formation of the super-ego and even the consolidation of the "mature" or "reality" ego itself: it is derived from feelings of omnipotence and connectedness with reality stemming from relations with the mother before separation from her (in a developmental stage Freud sometimes called "primary narcissism"). Polymorphous (a-genital) resexualization at the culmination of the masochistic scenario indeed produces something like a "pre-Oedipal" relation between the hero as ideal ego and the woman as phallicized oral mother. Except that the woman in this scenario is emphatically not mother, for she is not a wife: the masochistic contract is set up, as we have seen, expressly to banish the father. The woman in Masoch's fiction is not a familial but a distinctly public and even mythical figure: she most often appears as the harsh yet loving head of an agrarian commune completely devoid of masculine authority. The ideal outcome of the masochistic scenario is thus an image of a-phallic, sentimental relations between the sexes, set in an anti-authoritarian Utopia. Yet, in a way Deleuze does not fully appreciate, the masochistic scenario just described is in Masoch's fiction embedded within a narrative that produces results very different from the Utopian ideal projected by the contract.17 In Masoch's stories, the father figure supposedly excluded by the terms of the contract does indeed return; in a failure of the defense Lacan calls "foreclosure" [forelusion), what is fantasmatically denied in

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the symbolic returns unexpectedly in the real.18 And precisely by breaking the contract herself, the supposedly an-Oedipal woman in effect becomes wife and mother, going beyond the sentimentalized torture specified in the contract to an autonomous cruelty conducted in association with a phallic male lover/husband. Thus at the end of Masoch's stories, the masochistic fantasy-scenario crumbles, leaving the hero with a galling sense of having been duped and a bitter desire for revenge. And the ex-masochist hero in Masoch's stories indeed takes his revenge, with a ferocity that borders on the "sadistic." The conclusion of Masochian narrative thus represents not the anti-authoritarian Utopia of idealized relations with the preOedipal mother figure, as pictured in the masochistic scenario, but rather a vitriolic and sometimes violent cynic who now despises anyone (even or most of all himself) foolish enough to have taken his ideals and desires for reality; in effect, Masochian narrative ends on the threshold of borderline narcissism. Such is the story that Masoch told - and that his innumerable readers throughout late nineteenth-century Europe read - over and over and over again: as in a trauma-dream, this compulsion to repeat represents defensive preparation for a cataclysmic event ... that has already occurred. For Baudelaire, as for so many of his contemporaries, the event that propels historical masochism into borderline narcissism, that represents as it were the return of the father ruining the mother-and-son's anti-authoritarian Utopia, is the incredible rise to power of Napoleon III, the founding of the Second Empire on the ruins of the Second Republic.19 Social forces and social theories had matured considerably since the 1789 and 1830 revolutions, and reached their apogee in the spring of 1848 with the proposal (spear-headed by Louis Blanc) that the revolutionary government support "ateliers sociaux"-workers' "cooperatives" that would organize production completely independent of bourgeois and government authority. What prevailed instead was an economically unproductive but politically expedient compromise form of paternalistic "workfare" organized by the government, which soon proved too great a drain on the treasury to survive long in an increasingly

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conservative legislature. The closing of the inefficient "ateliers nationaux" sparked the "Journees de J u i n " (in which Baudelaire participated), which forced the government to play its hand with the massacre of thousands of the Parisian poor and working classes. Idealized romantic-socialist hopes for the Second Republic may have far outstripped its real potential from the start, but in contrast to the Bourgeois Monarchy of Louis-Philippe preceding it, in even sharper contrast to the Second Empire of Louis-Napoleon that followed, and certainly in the minds of most active participants and interested observers, the Second Republic at its best represented a longdreamt-of anti-authoritarian ideal - an ideal symbolically inaugurated, perhaps, at the moment in February 1848 when the revolutionary crowd threw the royal throne out the window of the Tuileries palace. Although Baudelaire fought on the barricades in February and June of 1848 and again in December 1851 in defense of the Second Republic, its gradual dismantling by conservative forces (in April, June, and December 1848) and the final cataclysmic disappearance of its ideals with Napoleon's coup d'etat in 1851 leaves Baudelaire, like Masoch's ex-masochists, with a galling sense of having been duped and with a bitter desire for revenge. Looking back, he will say 1848 ne fut amusant que parce que chacun y faisait des utopies comme des chateaux en Espagne. 1848 ne fut charmant que par l'exces meme du ridicule, (p. 631) 1848 was amusing only because everyone made up Utopias like castles in the air. 1848 was charming only in the excess of its absurdity. And it is revenge that prompts his characteristic naturalization of violence and destruction: Mon ivresse en 1848. De quelle nature etait cette ivresse? Gout de la vengeance. Plaisir naturel de la demolition... Toujours le gout de la destruction. Gout legitime si tout ce qui est naturel est legitime ... Ma fureur au coup d'Etat... Encore un Bonaparte! quelle honte! Se livrer a Satan, qu'est-ce que c'est?...Que l'homme enlace sa dupe sur le boulevard, ou perce sa proie dans des forets inconnues,

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n'est-il pas 1'homme eternel, c'est-a-dire ranimal de proie le plus parfait? (p. 631) My enthusiasm in 1848. What was the nature of that enthusiasm? A taste for vengeance. Natural pleasure of demolition ... As always, the penchant for destruction. A legitimate and natural penchant, if everything natural is legitimate ... My rage at the coup d'etat... Another Bonaparte! what a disgrace! What does it mean, to devote oneself to Satan?... Whether man befriends his dupe on the street, or stabs his prey in some unknown forest, is he not eternal man, that is to say, the most perfect animal of prey?

Just as in Masochian narrative, the shattering demise of Baudelaire's ideal - specifically the anti-authoritarian, democratic-socialist vision of the Second Republic - forces him to revise and reverse his relation to ideality, resulting in the defensive, bitter cynicism and haughty disdain typical of borderline narcissism. Such a defensive splitting-off of erstwhile idealism from the perspective of a disillusioned and cynical observer is registered most vividly in the Petits Poemes en prose, where it constitutes the narrative stance of the most characteristic poems. This stance does not oppose the prose collection to the verse in any simple way, however, for it culminates the development of metonymic poetics that led from the decoding of romanticism, through the projects of beautification, spleen intensification, and evilification, to the "Tableaux Parisiens" cycle, where the split between interior and exterior, desire and meaning, vain hope and weary dismay is already evident. What does distinguish the prose collection from the verse is that further evolution of this kind is no longer possible or necessary: the narrative stance prefigured in the "Tableaux Parisiens" cycle as a whole will appear in toto in the prose poems taken individually. Whereas Baudelaire had insisted that the Fleurs du Mai be read not as a mere album, but as a narrative "with a beginning and an end" which had (before the coup d'etat) been designed to " trace the history of the spiritual agitations of modern youth, " 20 narrative in the Petits Poemes en prose is eschewed altogether, and the topographical split of the "Tableaux Parisiens" cycle is

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reinscribed within individual prose poems themselves. This is part of what makes the Petits Poemes en prose the most modernist of Baudelaire's poetic works. The "Tableaux Parisiens" section had already neutralized the depressing linearity of spleen time by means of its cyclical structure; here temporal linearity will be rejected altogether. Indeed, the vehemence with which Baudelaire rejects (his own) narrative history is legible in the violence of the description of the prose collection he dedicates to Arsene Houssaye: "Chop it into many pieces, and you will see that each one can exist on its own (Hachez-la en nombreux fragments, et vous verrez que chacun peut exister a part)" (p. 146). But we need not take this striking reversal at face value: we will instead read Baudelaire's modernist repudiation of history ... historically. To this end, we need to understand how the passage from the imaginary to the symbolic register can result in borderline narcissism when the socio-symbolic order is subject to decoding, as it has been since Baudelaire's day. BORDERLINE DECODING

From the Lacanian perspective, the ego is not a foundation but a fiction, an illusion arising from the mirror stage, when "partobjects" (the breast or the penis, for example) are unified into whole objects (the mother or the father); what had been a fragmented psyche (what Lacan calls the "corps morcele") now "sees itself" as unified, albeit in the (" alienated") figure of an other self. This unified self-image will subsequently be reinforced (and further "alienated") by passage through the Oedipus complex, as the speaking child adopts the unity of the first-person pronoun " I " to refer to and conceptualize itself as a unique and "whole" social being modeled on one of its parents. The parents' role, in turn, depends in the Lacanian perspective not on biology or the nuclear family alone, but on a symbolic order that grants specific functions to each parent. In particular, the law of signification stipulates and guarantees the parameters of permissible identification and substitution, so that in speaking as " I " the child occupies a place sanctioned by the name-of-the-father within the symbolic order.

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This is, of course, only an abstract outline of the "normal" line of development. When full entry into the symbolic order falters, imaginary fixations (defining the form of symptoms) prevail, resulting in neurosis. In psychosis (for this reason sometimes considered by psychoanalysis to fall completely outside its domain), the name-of-the-father is refused altogether, and the distinction between symbolic and imaginary itself collapses. Of course, for Lacan as for Freud, the distinction between psychosis and neurosis is not an absolute one. Objectrelations psychoanalysis (notably in the work of Otto Kernberg) has in fact focused its attention on so-called "borderline conditions"- psychic formations falling on the borderline between psychosis and neurosis, where the complete "loss of reality" characteristic of psychosis does not obtain, and yet the full-fledged ego of the Oedipus complex has not developed, either. Under such conditions, Oedipal conflict and the dynamics of repression (sources of "transference neuroses") rarely appear; instead, more primitive defense mechanisms characteristic of fetishism and psychosis prevail, involving the splitting of the psyche and the denial of the reality or emotional valence of its perceptions. Although equally at odds with the notion of a unified or synthetic ego, such primitive splitting differs in certain ways from the single, specular split of Lacan's mirror stage. In its critique of ego-psychology, Lacanian psychoanalysis insists on the split instituted in the mirror stage between the scrambled ensemble of drives (the corps morcele or Vhommelette) and the fictively unified ego. Imaginary relations based on this stage, Lacan suggests, will involve the self with others perceived to be "identical" to itself, in a mode of ecstatic merger or aggressive rivalry with them. Object-relations psychoanalysis, meanwhile, focuses attention on the splitting of self that occurs when no unified self-image forms in the first place, i.e. in a preOedipal failure of the mirror stage itself. In this instance, instead of a single split between the incoherent, bodily self (the corps morcele) and a unified specular self-image, generalized splitting pervades a weakly organized ego that remains fundamentally unstable due to the predominance of unintegrated drives and

Decoding and recoding in the prose poems drive-derivatives (part-objects) from the pre-Oedipal/pre-ego state. It is such pre-Oedipal failure that results in borderline conditions. Instead of subsuming drives and drive-derivatives into its (albeit fictive) unity, the borderline ego remains heterogeneous and incoherent, ultimately unable to synthesize experience either in the short term (as suggested by "L'Horloge," where decoded time isolates each discrete second from the next) or in the long term (as in " Le Cygne," where decoded memory exacerbates separation from the past instead of resolving it). Because the borderline psyche is so weak, its characteristic defense mechanism is not repression, but denial and splitting: one part of the psyche may see danger in some thing, but will deny its reality; another part acknowledges its reality, but not the threat it represents. Borderline personalities thus exhibit a radical inconsistency, typically alternating in their attitude to a single person or object between extravagant praise (for "good" object-representations) and utter condemnation (of " b a d " object-representations). Under conditions of primitive or generalized splitting, two (or more) attitudes can coexist for a life time, Freud says, without ever affecting one another. 21 But when this primitive defense fails, the previously segregated perceptions of threat and reality reconverge, and the thing abruptly (re)appears as a real threat; as Lacan puts it, that which was foreclosed from the symbolic reappears in the real ("ce qui a ete forclos du symbolique reapparait dans le reel"). 22 This is precisely what occurs in Masochian narrative, as we have seen: the parody-contract is supposed to have symbolically foreclosed the authority of the father figure; the moment it is broken, he returns in the real. And the attitude of the Masochian narrator toward the figure of woman, as well as toward his former self and its relation to woman, shifts radically from sentimental, idealizing adulation to vicious, cynical scorn, as one would expect from Lacan's characterization of imaginary relations and Kernberg's of borderline conditions. The repetition of Masochian narrative in Masoch's popular works serves to manage and dispel this trauma; Baudelaire's prose

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poem collection, by contrast, refuses narrative resolution at just this point, to dwell on/in the trauma at its most acute. This is a defining feature of Baudelairean modernism. Rather than narrate a final passage from one state to the other, the prose poems instead oscillate " undecidably " between the extremes of idealization and cynicism, which form the predominant axes of the collection.23 At the idealizing end of the spectrum, undiminished commitment to a defunct ideal is dramatized most clearly in "Laquelle est la vraie" (38). The first paragraph describes a woman strongly reminiscent of "La Beaute," and whose very name alludes to that sonnet's strategic use of prosopopoeia: "une certaine Benedicta, qui remplissait l'atmosphere d'ideal, et dont les yeux repandaient le desir de la grandeur, de la beaute, de la gloire et de tout ce qui fait croire a l'immortalite." This " miraculous " woman turns out to be " too beautiful to live long," and the narrator buries her only a few days after meeting her. At her grave-side suddenly appears a grotesque miniature version of Benedicta who insists that she is the "real one." Trampling on the grave with a "bizarre, hysterical violence," she cries: "C'est moi, la vraie Benedicta! C'est moi, une fameuse canaille! Et pour la punition de ta folie et de ton aveuglement, tu m'aimeras telle que je suis!" The narrator denies this so furiously that, stamping his foot in turn, he ends up knee-deep in the grave, where he remains stuck, "attache, pour toujours peut-etre, a la fosse de l'ideal." Much could be said about this short poem. Let us note first of all the sudden appearance of the "real" Benedicta after the demise of the "miraculous" one: "je vis subitement une petite personne..." Then, the violence of the narrator's denial, as if he had in fact secretly suspected this "truth" all along. Finally, the striking image of" remaining, perhaps forever, bound to the grave of the ideal," an attachment whose somewhat uncertain permanence ("pour toujours peut-etre") is considerably reinforced by the sudden switch from the past tense governing the rest of the poem to the present tense, in the last line: "j'ai frappe si violemment la terre du pied que ma jambe s'est enfoncee

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jusqu'au genou ... et que ...je reste attache, pour toujours peutetre, a la fosse commune." The narrator is therefore at present still bound to the ideal... or more precisely to the grave of the ideal: recognition of its demise does not preclude continuing attachment on the narrator's part. At the other end of the spectrum, violent scorn on the part of the narrator is dramatized most vividly in " Le Mauvais Vitrier " (9). In the anecdotal portion of this long poem, the narrator tells of having invited a glazier to carry his precious merchandise up six flights of narrow stairs, only to revile him for not having any " rose-colored " panes for sale: " Comment, vous n'avez pas de couleur? des verres roses, rouges, bleus, des vitres magiques, des vitres de paradis? Impudent que vous etes! Vous osez vous promener dans des quartiers pauvres, et vous n'avez pas meme de vitres quifassent voir la vie en beau\" (my emphasis). The narrator therefore dismisses him abruptly, leans out of the window, and when the glazier emerges onto the street below, drops a flowerpot on him, knocking him over and, of course, breaking all his wares. Whatever else it may represent, this poem offers a stark contrast with "Laquelle est la vraie" at the idealizing end of the spectrum, as an example of scornful violence enacted by the narrator against a figure despised and punished precisely for not having an "ideal," or more precisely for not having any means (even obviously illusory ones) of idealizing the world. The context in which this anecdote appears, however, crucially places the narrator at one remove from the violence he enacts, in partial denial of responsibility for it. The act itself appears as a mere illustration in the narrator's disquisition on what usually contemplative souls are capable of when pushed by mysterious forces to "execute the most absurd and often dangerous of acts ": II y a des natures purement contemplative et tout a fait impropres a Faction, qui cependant, sous une impulsion mysterieuse et inconnue, agissent quelquefois avec une rapidite dont elles se seraient crues ellesmemes incapables... Le moraliste et le medecin, qui pretendent tout savoir, ne peuvent pas expliquer d'ou vient si subitement une si folle energie a ces ames paresseuses et voluptueuses, et comment, incapables d'accomplir les choses les plus simples et les plus necessaires, elles

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trouvent a une certaine minute un courage de luxe pour executer les actes les plus absurdes et souvent meme les plus dangereux...J'ai ete plus d'une fois victime de ces crises et de ces elans, qui nous autorisent a croire que des Demons malicieux se glissent en nous et nous font accomplir, a notre insu, leurs plus absurdes volontes. (my emphasis) Not only does the narrator characterize himself as in a sense " victim " as well as perpetrator of the violent act, he even claims authorization to attribute responsibility for it to malicious demons! This can, of course, be read with some degree of irony on the narrator's or poet's part, but it nonetheless suggests a keen awareness of primitive splitting as a basic psychic structure and a crucial defense mechanism. This defense mechanism operates by projecting violence onto other characters or into the scenes described by the narrator, whose role, as Bersani rightly insists, is to establish and maintain " a certain distance from violence in the Petits Poemes en prose" (p. 126). "Le Galant Tireur" (43), for instance, contains dramatic violence: a husband takes revenge for his wife's mockery of his poor marksmanship by decapitating with a single shot the doll he imagines for a moment to be her. This is already within the story only a vicarious or imaginary violence, inasmuch as the doll merely represents the wife. But more important, the typically post-masochist revenge motive is projected onto the husband by the use of the third person: the absent narrator is not implicated in the violence at all. Defensive splitting such as this characterizes nearly all the prose poems in which violence occurs. "Le Mauvais Vitrier" is in fact the only poem in which the narrator himself takes unilateral violent action; and even there, as we saw, he establishes a certain distance from that action by refusing to take responsibility for it. Defensive splitting is even more central to "Une mort heroique" (27), in which a prince invites a gifted comic actor condemned to death for treason to give a special private performance, and then has him killed just at the moment the actor's involvement in his art has made him completely oblivious to the mortal danger facing him. For anyone familiar with Baudelaire's works, the description given of the prince could very well serve as a thumbnail sketch of the poet himself:

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Amoureux passionne des beaux-arts, excellent connaisseur d'ailleurs, il etait vraiment insatiable de voluptes. Assez indifferent relativement aux hommes et a la morale, veritable artiste lui-meme, il ne connaissait d'ennemi dangereux que l'Ennui, et les efforts bizarres qu'il faisait pour fuir ou pour vaincre ce tyran du monde lui auraient certainement attire, de la part d'un historien severe, l'epithete de "monstre" ... However tempting it might be to identify the murderous prince with Baudelaire, this act of violence, too, is mediated by a narrator who passively observes the entire scene, and is in no way implicated in it. What's more, the description of the comic actor, Fancioulle, could equally well be taken as a portrait of the poet as a young revolutionary (in 1848) or rebel (in 1851): pour les personnes vouees par etat au comique, les choses serieuses ont de fatales attractions, et, bien qu'il puisse paraitre bizarre que les idees de patrie et de liberte s'emparent despotiquement du cerveau d'un histrion, un jour [il] entra dans une conspiration formee de quelques gentilshommes mecontents ... Les seigneurs en question furent arretes, ainsi que Fancioulle, et voues a une mort certaine. The narrator's sympathy for the actor (tears come to his eyes in describing the performance which combines "dans un etrange amalgame, les rayons de l'Art et la gloire du Martyre") is as patent as his admiration for the prince (whom he compares to a "young Nero [possessing] abilities greater than his kingdom"); but the narrator's presence in the poem serves to maintain an equal and nearly absolute distance from both.24 Just as the violence characterizing the narrator in "Le Mauvais Vitrier " is denied and projected onto the prince in this poem, the devotion to the ideal characterizing the narrator in "Laquelle est la vraie?" is here denied and projected onto the martyred comic actor, Fancioulle. In staging the denial and projection of both idealization and cynicism, "Une mort herolque" can be located at the intersection of two sets of poems that constitute the basic structure of the collection as a whole: one set dramatizes cynical violence with varying degrees of acceptance or denial of responsibility; the other set dramatizes idealized suffering with varying degrees of acceptance or denial of sympathy.25

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The most striking poem in this latter set is "Le Vieux Saltimbanque" (14), which forms a pendant to "Le Mauvais Vitrier." Here, the narrator comes across an aged carnival clown, spurned and neglected by the joyous throngs surrounding him. After contemplating him, the narrator suddenly "feels his throat wrung by the terrible hand of hysteria," and when he then tries to " analyze [his] sudden grief," he imagines he has just seen " l'image du vieil homme de lettres qui a survecu a la generation dont il fut le brillant amuseur; du vieux poete sans amis, sans famille, sans enfants, degrade par sa misere et par l'ingratitude publique... " Whereas the narrator of "Le Mauvais Vitrier" tried to deny responsibility for an act of violence he cannot help acknowledging as his own, here the narrator tries to deny identifying with a mode of suffering he cannot help recognizing as his own. The narrator in each case tries to split off and project something identified with himself onto an other (the malicious demons or the decrepit clown), without ever quite succeeding: the insistent identification reappears, despite the willed distantiation.26 Certain forms of distantiation had already occurred in Les Fleurs du Mai: in "Le Jeu," for instance, the observing Poet withdrew even from the envy he feels watching the gamblers and courtesans still passionate enough to "prefer misery to death and hell to nothingness." And in "L'Heautontimoroumenos," it was clearly the Poet himself, and not demons and glass-peddlers, implicated in the "self-torture" named by the title. But in the Petits Poemes en prose, primitive splitting has pushed distantiation to the point of implicating others in place of the self. If and when it occurs, self-recognition under these (borderline) conditions comes as quite a shock; this is precisely the dynamic characterized above as a failure of borderline defensive splitting, in connection with Masochian narrative: what has been symbolically denied or abolished returns unexpectedly in the real. Such moments of "rupture" pervade the prose poems, where they typically appear as rude awakenings from dreams and other forms of abrupt interruption. The crucial role of the narrator, epitomized in "Une mort herolque," is thus to (attempt to) provide protective distance

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from the disturbing scenes of suffering and violence left unintegrated and unmanaged by Baudelaire's modernist refusal of Masoch's relatively comfortable narrative resolution (which simply ends the former by recourse to the latter). As Bersani puts it: "The world is appropriated as a theater for the poet's obsessions, but the poet nonetheless ... remains a spectator... present only as an ironic consciousness" (p. 126). (His subsequent clarification is salutary: " I don't mean that Baudelaire was psychotic when he wrote these poems; he does, however, seem to have represented in them a psychotic relation to the world" [p. 128].) Bersani then goes on to suggest, however, that the prose poem narrator occupies "the position of a fully organized cognitive and moral self" (p. 133), and furthermore that the narrative point of view provided in the prose poems is that of the super-ego (pp. 134, 144, 150). But this can hardly be said of "Le Mauvais Vitrier," for instance, whose (borderline) narrator is severely rfworganized and ruthlessly insouciant in his amorality, as we have seen. Nor does the notion of " a fully organized cognitive self" apply to the narrator of "Le conjiteor de Fartiste ... (3), whose self thinks through things when they are not thinking through it " (for in the expanse of dreams, the self is soon lost!) "; or to the narrator of "Les Tentations" (2), who valiantly refuses the devil's temptations in a dream, then wakes to regret his moral fortitude; or to the narrator of "Le Joueur genereux" (29), who strikes a good bargain for his soul with a very generous devil but soon doubts his sincerity, and so ends up praying to God to make the devil keep his word! Bersani is quite right that some kind of " unifying form " (p. 133) is found in the prose poems, but it is certainly not that of a "fully organized cognitive and moral self." Nor is it provided by the perspective of the super-ego. In this connection it is important to note an asymmetry in the two sets of poems we have just surveyed: whereas sympathy with and even enthusiasm for lofty ideals are often directly expressed by the narrator in his own name, violence is always projected by him onto another character or performed in an other's name. In other words, whereas the narrator often identifies with the ideal ego, he never identifies with the perpetrator of violence, who

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could thereby be considered the re-externalized expression of a punishing conscience or super-ego.27 As noted above, "Le Mauvais Vitrier" is the only poem in which the narrator himself enacts unilateral violence on another, and here the violent act is absolutely gratuitous, inexplicable, and ultimately attributed to "malicious demons." If this were a symbolic " punishment" meted out by a super-ego incognito, it would have to be a super-ego totally devoid of content, for the narrator clearly has no defensible reason for abusing the poor glasspeddler the way he does. Such is indeed the characteristic outcome of the borderline personality's negotiation of the symbolic order: the "bad," punishing function of the super-ego (the formal operation of "conscience": thou shalt not do this) is split off from the "ego ideal" which would provide it with content and justification. The violence of the split-off or repudiated super-ego function thus appears totally gratuitous (or "demonic," as Baudelaire puts it). So the highly charged moments of ^//^-recognition on the part of the narrator involve only the ideal ego, never a super-ego. It is thus no accident that, in "Une mort herolque," the shattering moment of recognition that interrupts the actor in the middle of his perfect performance and kills him is projected onto Fancioulle, not experienced by the narrator; the motives of the perpetrator (the prince), meanwhile - surmised by the narrator to be jealousy, rancor, and wounded pride - do not carry the moral authority of a super-ego at all. The moral vacuity of the borderline super-ego function appears most clearly in "La Chambre double" (5), which Bersani cites mistakenly as an illustration of " self-recognition " (p. 131). Like "Laquelle est la vraie," the poem starts by invoking the ideal: an exquisitely decorated room complete with a beautiful idol (again reminiscent of "La Beaute"), "la souveraine des reves" with eyes ("mirettes") that "attirent, subjuguent, devorent le regard de Pimprudent qui les contemple, " and who reigns in an " eternite de delices." Suddenly, a loud knock on the door: the dream shatters. "La chambre paradisiaque, l'idole, la souveraine des reves... toute cette magie a disparu au coup brutal frappe par le Spectre." But this

Decoding and re coding in the prose poems is not a moment of self-recognition: the specter that enters is not an internalized demon of the narrator's (as in "Le Mauvais Vitrier"). On the contrary, the specter is most emphatically external. And it cannot personify the super-ego: the specter that enters is in fact identified as no one in particular, merely "un huissier qui vient me torturer au nom de la loi; une infame concubine qui vient crier misere et ajouter les trivialites de sa vie aux douleurs de la mienne; ou bien le saute-ruisseau d'un directeur de journal qui reclame la suite du manuscrit." It is thus not the super-ego, but reality itself— and particularly the realities of a morally bankrupt market society — that here brutally reappear in the real. In the highly charged moments of rupture typical of the prose poems, then, what (re) turns against the ideal is social reality itself. This dynamic is in fact explicitly thematized — that is, considered from a comfortable distance, and in this case not even by the narrator, but by his interlocutor! - in "La Corde" (30), which begins as follows: Les illusions, - me disait mon ami, - sont aussi innombrables peutetre que les rapports des hommes entre eux, ou des hommes avec les choses. Et quand l'illusion disparait, c'est-a-dire quand nous voyons Petre ou le fait tel qu'il existe en dehors de nous, nous eprouvons un bizarre sentiment, complique moitie de regret pour le fantome disparu, moitie de surprise agreable devant la nouveaute, devant le fait reel. The narrator's artist-friend goes on to recount a story that disabused him of his illusions about maternal love. It involves a poor little boy, serving as the artist's model and errand-boy, who commits suicide after the artist catches him stealing and threatens to send him back to live with his destitute parents. Imagine the agony of the artist having to break the news to the mother and then show her the body; his horror and shame when in explaining the tragedy he sees the nail and rope still hanging from the side of the armoire where the boy hanged himself; his astonishment when she stops him from throwing them out the window and asks to keep them herself, instead! The artist decides that in her grief, the mother must have wanted to keep whatever relics she could find of her son, even the rope that killed him. The next day, to the artist's surprise, requests start

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pouring in from around the neighborhood for pieces of the rope, which because of the end it served is in great demand; only then, in a characteristic shock of recognition, does he suddenly realize that the mother really wanted the rope because she could turn a tidy profit on it: " Et alors, soudainement, une lueur se fit dans mon cerveau, et je compris pourquoi la mere tenait tant a m'arracher la ficelle et par quel commerce elle entendait se consoler." Buried deep within the poem, the normal exercise of an integrated super-ego: the narrator's artist-friend scolds the boy for petty larceny, and threatens to punish him by returning him to dire poverty with his family. But the poem revolves around a shock that has little to do with this exercise: the return of the real involves the unexpected appearance of the profit motive in the place of maternal grief and affection. Note that the commercial motive itself (given the family's abject poverty) is not morally condemned by the narrator or by his interlocutor: it is simply acknowledged as one of the realities of market society - at the cost, says the narrator's friend, of one more suddenly lost illusion. The complete lack of super-ego function under borderline conditions testifies to the decoding of the modern socio-symbolic order; conversely, stripping punitive figures of authority is a principal aim of the masochistic scenario, as we have seen. The borderline personality lacks a coherent imaginary self-image due to failure of mirror-stage identification, but unlike the true psychotic, negotiates entry into the symbolic order anyway. It does so by thoroughly repudiating moral authority, thereby canceling the operations of conscience in the psyche, so that now "anything goes." The borderline personality cannot itself say " n o , " as it were — and is shocked and dismayed when reality says it for or to him. One result is the coexistence of disparate drive-derivatives and the lack of impulse-control typical of borderline personalities, illustrated vividly in "Le Mauvais Vitrier" and profusely throughout the prose poem collection and illustrated as well, if his own writings and friends' testimony are any indication, in the life of Baudelaire himself. In the absence of regulative and punitive "conscience," the "ego

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ideal" prevails in place of a super-ego, providing role-models as a standard of comparison for the borderline ego ("be like this"), but not moral rules or prohibitions. Usually, these rolemodels are transient, given the instability of the personality they are supposed to model: one ego ideal is first (over-) idealized in the service of certain momentarily dominant impulses, then brutally devalued to be replaced by another more favorable to other, newly dominant impulses. Hence the oscillation between adulation and scorn characteristic of imaginary relations and borderline conditions, as they appear throughout the prose poems. NARCISSISTIC REGODING

But under extraordinary circumstances, and even in the effective absence of a "conscience," Baudelaire finally found a permanent ego-ideal role-model perfectly suited to his own ideal ego: Edgar Allan Poe. The example of Poe not only enables him to detach himself from his idealist revolutionary enthusiasm of 1848, as Butor has shown, it also enables him to integrate his lifelong martyrdom to market society into his model of the great poet.28 For what Baudelaire belatedly learns about Poe is not only that he meant the tale "Mesmeric Revelations" ironically, but also that he was unjustly neglected and reduced to misery by a worthless commercial society of philistines in America, just as Baudelaire had been in SecondEmpire France. It is precisely such suffering, as we have seen, that marks Poe and Baudelaire as members of the elect: in contrast to the romantic hope for reconciliation and social reintegration (a la Hegesippe Moreau), their suffering places them outside and above a hopelessly corrupt and compromised society. In this way, the borderline psyche erects a narcissistic "grandiose self" over and against the society that oppresses it (and which thereby forfeits all moral authority over it); Baudelaire's masochist ideal ego reflects and reinforces itself in the ego ideal of the great writer, Edgar Allan Poe. He even goes so far as to claim as a kind of spiritual mother figure the real-life mother-in-law of Poe, whose lasting devotion to her son-in-law's literary career Baudelaire cites in his notices, and which must

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have contrasted sharply with the devastating betrayal he felt at the hands of his own mother in alliance with his stepfather: Comme cette pauvre creature se preoccupe de la reputation de son fils! Que c'est beau! que c'est grand! Admirable creature ... [pjuissent nos larmes traverser POcean, les larmes de tous ceux qui, comme ton pauvre Eddie, sont malheureux ... Puissent ces lignes, empreintes de la plus sincere et de la plus respectueuse admiration, plaire a tes yeux maternels! ton image quasi divine voltigera incessamment au-dessus du martyrologe de la litterature!29 How that poor woman cared for her son's reputation! How beautiful! How noble! Admirable creature ... may our tears cross the Ocean, the tears of all those, like your poor Eddie, who are unfortunate ... May these lines, stamped with the most sincere and respectful admiration, please your maternal eyes! Your nearly divine image will hover unceasingly over the martyrology of literature! Given the extraordinary example of Poe, Baudelaire is able both to repudiate and to redeem his miserable existence and defunct ideals in writing through the elaboration of the narcissistic prose narrator. It is here that Baudelaire's most accomplished modernism emerges. Henceforth, Baudelaire's own martyred ideal ego is reflected in the ego ideal provided by the figure of Poe: Poe represents the personal savior of ''Baudelaire-the-former-revolutionary-idealist," while at the same time cc Baudelaire-the-published-translator/critic " is personally championing Poe's cause in France and Europe. Only the reflection of the one in the Other could enable Baudelaire to write the pendant to "Une mort heroIque," "Assommons les pauvres" (49), for the violence and suffering projected equally onto the two characters observed at a safe distance in "Une mort" are here reappropriated and belong clearly to the narrator himself. Indeed, unlike "Le Mauvais Vitrier" (the only other prose poem in which a firstperson narrator himself enacts violence against another), where the narrator partly repudiates his "demonic" action, here the narrator is supremely proud of it, for it proves him superior to the romantic political theorists of 1848, and furnishes a solution to the problems of poverty, equality, and liberty, all in one succinct lesson.

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The narrator explains that, having locked himself in his room for two weeks and read himself sick of Utopian tracts from 1848 about how to make everyone happy and rich, he felt he was on the verge of a better idea for social reform, but could not quite put his finger on it. So he goes out for a walk and some refreshment, only to run into a beggar who importunes him with "un de ces regards inoubliables qui culbuteraient les trones, si l'esprit remuait la matiere, et si l'oeil d'un magnetiseur faisait murir des raisins." Suddenly (as in "Le Mauvais Vitrier"), his demon prompts him to action — for his is not an inhibiting or censorious demon like Socrates', but an affirmative one ("un grand affirmateur") —advising him that "Celui-la seul est l'egal d'un autre, qui le prouve, et celui-la seul est digne de la liberte, qui sait la conquerir." So the narrator immediately attacks the beggar and beats him mercilessly, only to witness — "6 miracle! 6 jouissance du philosophe qui verifie l'excellence de sa theorie!" - the old man jump to his feet and start beating him in turn. The narrator then stops the fight, declares the old man his equal (" Monsieur, vous etes mon e'gall"), and shares his purse with him, reminding the erstwhile beggar to administer the same treatment to whoever should ask him for charity. The beggar is a projection of the poor, martyred ideal ego of 1848, whose pitiful looks and naive theories have about as much chance of overthrowing real tyranny (Louis-Philippe, or Napoleon Bonaparte) as spirit has of moving matter or a hypnotist of ripening grapes. The " name-of-the-demon " who never says no, meanwhile, is an introjection of Poe: his example has restored a defeated idealist Baudelaire to life, enabling him to fight back and regain his pride: "Par mon energetique medication," explains the narrator, "je lui avais done rendu l'orgueil et la vie." Having (finally) understood the demonic lesson, and now cured of his idealism, Baudelaire can henceforth do the same for others: taking his leave, the former beggar swears "qu'il avait compris ma theorie, et qu'il obeirait a mes conseils." The poem thus undertakes - as a classic trauma defense - to salvage some dignity from the wreckage of real life by dismissing ideals as illusory before reality does, thereby condemning them and their proponents to idiocy. As ideal ego, identified with the poor

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crowds of 1848, Baudelaire sides with the beggar; as ego ideal, identified with Poe, Baudelaire sides with the narrator. This extraordinary mirror reflection thus compensates the writer subject to decoding with a narcissistic narrative stance: it is different facets of Baudelaire's own life that the narrator at once embodies - in his orgy of philosophical self-congratulation, having mastered his own fate by finally understanding Poe's and observes - walking off to reproduce himself by repeating the salutary lesson "of" Poe on other poor beggars ad infinitum. This narcissistic narrative stance appears throughout the prose poems, and the "obsessive self-reference" from which such narcissism derives its name is clearly illustrated in "Les Fenetres" (35), which begins with the curious but revealing assertion that "Celui qui regarde du dehors a travers une fenetre ouverte, ne voit jamais autant de choses que celui qui regarde une fenetre fermee." The window-pane has become a mirror for the poet's obsessions, and he is more fascinated by their reflection in it than concerned with seeing the real world through it. Indeed, responding to a challenge regarding the veracity of the stories he makes up, the narrator answers, "Qu'importe ce que peut etre la realite placee hors de moi, si elle m'a aide a vivre, a sentir que je suis et ce que je suis?" In a passage that recalls the dynamic of self-recognition in "Le Vieux Saltimbanque," the narrator recounts how avec son visage, avec son vetement, avec son geste, avec presque rien, j'ai refait l'histoire de cette [pauvre] femme, ou plutot sa legende, et quelquefois je me la raconte a moi-meme en pleurant. Si c'eut ete un pauvre homme, j'aurais refait la sienne tout aussi aisement. The narrator as borderline narcissist is so keenly interested in the real world because it reflects back to him versions or parts of himself that have been split off and symbolically repudiated: he is then (and only then) able to recognize and reappropriate them - or, preferably, to contemplate them from a safe distance. It is thus the perspective of borderline narcissism that gives "unifying form" to the prose poems, not that of the super-ego: the narcissist-narrator in fact shares with the super-ego only the function of self-observation; no prohibitions and no moral

Decoding and recoding in the prose poems judgments are involved. The borderline narcissist asserts or confirms his sense of superiority by separating off, and often denigrating, inferior others, who are actually projected partial selves of his own. The severe splitting characteristic of borderline conditions is thus taken over and adapted for use in the effort to master or manage others and/or other partial or former selves. This narrative stance is most clearly illustrated, no doubt, in the prose poem highlighted by Benjamin, "Perte d'aureole" (46), where the decoding of romanticism already legible in the poetics of the beauty cycle of Les Fleurs du Mai has become an explicit theme. In a brothel, the main character runs into an acquaintance who expresses surprise at finding the illustrious poet in such a "mauvais lieu." The poet immediately launches into an anecdote to explain why he is there: while dodging on-coming traffic on his way across the boulevard, he dropped his halo in the mud, and did not have the courage to retrieve it; he decided it would be better to lose his insignia than to break his neck. Then, looking on the bright side, he realized he could now " [se] promener incognito, faire des actions basses, et me livrer a la crapule, comme les simples mortels." The acquaintance expects him to advertise to get his halo back, but the poet will have none of it: dignity bores him, and he is now enjoying himself. Moreover, he imagines the fun he will have if some scribbler picks it up and dares to put it on: "Faire un heureux, quelle jouissance! et surtout un heureux qui me fera rire! Pensez a X, o u a Z ! Hein! comme ce sera drole!" It should be clear that this story-teller, like the one in "La Corde," is no moralizing judge: he is here a disdainful cynic, casually indulging in debauchery while mocking others who would still take his former status of poet seriously. Notice, too, that this story-teller is narrating at one remove (again as in " La Corde"): he is explaining himself to an acquaintance, not directly addressing the reader. And although the story-teller's derision is most obviously directed at X and Z, we also see him puffing up his own sense of self and snidely belittling his interlocutor (who resembles X and Z inasmuch as he still values the halo enough to expect the poet to try to reclaim it). His first

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reaction to the accident reveals a certain "lack of courage," which he immediately transmutes into a conscious decision not to risk his life for the halo ("Je n'ai pas eu le courage de le ramasser. J'ai juge moins desagreable de perdre mes insignes que de me faire rompre les os.") In order to make the best of this unfortunate situation, he stoops to indulge in the vulgarity of "ordinary mortals," into which category he then places his interlocutor: "Je puis maintenant me promener incognito, faire des actions basses, et me livrer a la crapule, comme les simples mortels. Et me voici, tout semblable a vous, comme vous voyez!" The narcissist's sense of self-worth depends in large part on such devaluation of others.30 But it can also involve the devaluation of one's own former selves - particularly, in Baudelaire's case, formerly idealistic selves whose illusions have been shattered by reality; the halo lost in the prose poem, then, would be precisely the one awarded the romantic Poet of "Benediction" for his suffering at the beginning of Les Fleurs du Mai. In the published prose poem, it is true, this idealistic self has completely disappeared beneath the poet's cynical stance, and has been projected onto X, Z, and the interlocutor, all of whom continue to value the outmoded ideal. But the anecdote from Baudelaire's journal on which the poem is based reads quite differently: Gomme je traversais le boulevard, et comme je mettais un peu de precipitation a eviter les voitures, mon aureole s'est detachee et est tombee dans la boue du macadam. J'eus heureusement le temps de la ramasser; mais cette idee malheureuse se glissa un instant apres dans mon esprit, que c'etait un mauvais presage; et des lors Pidee n'a plus voulu me lacher; elle ne m'a laisse aucun repos de toute la journee.31 Here, the narrator does recover the halo, and clearly still values it enough to consider even its momentary loss a bad omen. In the published version, by contrast, the once-illustrious Poet is quite happy to do without it, and takes his mocking distance from anyone foolish enough to want to retrieve it. Moreover, the loss of the halo is now not merely the subject of a story: it is an event recounted by a narrator to a listener within the poem; it has become an occasion for the narrator to exercise an invidious

Decoding and recoding in the prose poems superiority over his fictional audience. And he is now at one remove from the initial experience: Baudelaire has transmuted the original account and the uneasy feeling it provoked into the snide banter of a world-weary and slightly sullied roue. The writer thus appears in the prose poem far more comfortable with his modernism than the individual in the journal did with the modernity he found careening down the street at him in Haussmann's new Paris (even if the grandiose narrator arises partly in compensation for the sacrifice of the ideal self to modern social realities). This degree of comfort suggests that the defensive function of narcissism — to manage borderline splitting so that it does not disrupt the fragile composure of the self— is working rather smoothly here, especially when compared with the rough-edged "hysteria" (Baudelaire's term) of "Le Vieux Saltimbanque" and "Le Mauvais Vitrier." Thus, in addition to the two basic axes we have already mentioned, where cynical violence and idealized suffering are split off and projected onto partial selves, the prose poem collection also contains a third dimension, as it were: a vertical axis measuring the degree of composure attained by the narcissistic narrator in the face of such splitting. The distance from tragic or exultant suffering and violence attained by the narrators of "Une mort heroique" and "Assommons les pauvres" places them somewhat higher on such a scale than "Le Vieux Saltimbanque" and "Le Mauvais Vitrier." Still higher on this scale appears "Les Projets" (24), which resembles "Perte d'aureole" in that its superior anxietymanagement is especially visible in the revisions Baudelaire made for the final version of the poem.32 While most of the prose poems involve the conflict of political or cultural values, "Les Projets" (like "Le Vieux Saltimbanque" and even "A une mendiante rousse") stages the disparity between ideal and real in explicitly commercial terms: it manages the recurring disappointment suffered by the consumer whose real means do not match his imaginary desires. The initial version of the poem features a first-person narrator ruminating aloud to his lover as to what kind of romantic setting would best suit his desire for her. First he imagines her "dans

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un costume de cour complique et fastueux, descendant a travers l'atmosphere d'un beau soir, les degres de marbre d'un palais ..." - but then decides against such a beautiful setting: he hates kings and their palaces, and they would not feel at home there, without any intimate nooks or a place to hang a portrait of her. Next, he pictures a seaside cabin in some exotic land, with "une odeur flottante d'huile de coco, et partout un parfum indescriptible de muse" - but then decides this would cost too much ("Pourquoi cette vaste mise-en-scene? - Elle couterait beaucoup d'or, et l'or ne danse que dans la poche des imbeciles qui ne comprennent pas le Beau"). Finally, he thinks: why go to so much trouble when pleasure lies just around the corner, " a deux pas... dans le premier auberge venu"?-which he then imagines complete with "un grand feu, des faiences voyantes sur les murs, un souper passable, beaucoup de v i n . . . " But the reveries stop abruptly there, with an agonizing prise de conscience: ... Le reve! le reve! toujours le reve maudit! - II tue Faction et mange le temps! - Les reves soulagent un moment la bete devorante qui s'agite en nous. C'est un poison qui la soulage, mais qui la nourrit. Oil done trouver une coupe assez profonde et un poison assez epais pour noyer la Bete! The narrator here bemoans his lack of action and his penchant for dreaming his life away, ultimately hoping to find some way to kill the beast. The exact opposite attitude toward dreaming appears in the final version: theflaneursays to himself, upon returning home " a cette heure oil les conseils de la Sagesse ne sont plus etouffes par les bourdonnements de la vie exterieure": J'ai eu aujourd'hui, en reve, trois domiciles ou j'ai eprouve un egal plaisir. Pourquoi contraindre mon corps a changer de place, puisque mon ame voyage si lestement? Et a quoi bon executer des projets, puisque le projet est en lui-meme une jouissance suffisante? No longer morally offended by his penchant for dreaming, the flaneur here takes comfort and even pride in his ability to derive pleasure from the dreams themselves, without ever having to realize them. This is the stance of someone for whom (as Benjamin might put it) the experience of window-shopping

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without buying has become a norm. Gone are the embarrassingly vulgar reference to the prohibitive expense of the second fantasy (the seaside resort) and the overly resentful castigation of those rich enough to afford it as moronic philistines; the narrator is now above all that. Gone, too, is the reference to his hatred of kings and palaces in the first fantasy. The same three fantasies appear, and in the same order, but the switch from one to the next is here not motivated or reasoned out at all: it simply matches the sequence of scenes and images encountered in a stroll around town — first through a well-kept park (reminiscent of royal gardens), then into a print-shop (where he admires an etching of a tropical landscape), finally past a local inn (where he glimpses two smiling faces leaning out of a window). Significantly, the flaneur now rejects each preceding scene only after having caught sight of the next: a certain degree of ratiocination and the penchant for autonomous dreaming it accompanied in the initial version have both given way to pure impressionability, utter susceptibility to the fascination of things. Gone, finally, is the first-person character directly addressing his love: here, the characteristic omniscient narrator recounts the reveries and ruminations of a third-person character, instead. Although this narrator makes only one appearance, and appears even then only indirectly, it is a significant one: for it is the narrator who identifies the flaneur's moment of return chez lui as the hour when wisdom's gentle advice is finally audible above the din of the city outside. The final version of" Les Projets " thus displays a pronounced openness to the world: theflaneuris entranced by the suggestive beauty of the things he encounters around town, even to the point of being at their mercy, inasmuch as they (in) form his very thoughts and wishes. Yet this openness to impressions typical of decoded experience and the loss of ego-integrity and autonomy it entails do not provoke censure: rather, a measure of selfcontent and even self-satisfaction arises from theflaneur'sability to dispense entirely with the business of making "his" dreams a reality.33 This is because both the decoded openness and the recoded self-containment of the character of the flaneur are presented from the vantage-point of a narrator who has

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completely withdrawn from the scene to sanction only obliquely the resigned wisdom voiced in the story by theflaneurhimself. Distance has been achieved and wisdom imparted from the perspective of a narrator so far above the events recounted that he barely needs to appear in the text at all. Primitive borderline splitting pressed into the service of narcissistic mastery thus provides the "unifying form" enabling the prose poems to depict and convey a broad range of emotions without compromising or betraying the superior position and unbreachable reserve of the narrator. The borderline emotions typical of the collection range from a more or less agonizing loss of ideals, at one end of the spectrum ("Laquelle est la vraie," "Le Vieux Saltimbanque"), to a more or less violent rage against the real world responsible for that loss, at the other end of the spectrum ("Le Mauvais Vi trier," "Le Galant Tireur"). Above and even sometimes out of reach of these extremes lies the narcissistic narrative perspective whose function is to manage such emotions from a comfortable distance. The pervasive mediation of the narrator in the prose poems supports Benjamin's claim that the conditions under which Baudelaire wrote were no longer conducive to lyric poetry. The marked divergence of communicative and textual functions in the rhetoric of the verse poetry, meanwhile, takes a quite different form in the prose: the separation of narrative perspective from the emotions and actions of characters. Under the aegis of Poe as ego-ideal Other, the narcissist-narrator in some of the prose poems manages to attain a measure of resignation and even equanimity, in contrast with the meaningless agony and defensive cynicism of the "Tableaux Parisiens." Whereas the cycles of decoding in the beauty poems and the "Tableaux Parisiens" foregrounded the psychodynamics of part-objects and the meaningless real, respectively, the prose collection features primitive splitting as the final cycle of decoding in Baudelaire, as a result of the passage from masochism to borderline narcissism. It is here that the historical events of 1848-51 register with such great intensity: the urgency of repudiating his former idealism and revolutionary engage-

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ment propels Baudelaire beyond the part-object lyricism of Les Fleurs du Mai into the full-fledged splitting characteristic of Les Petits Poemes en prose: the great Baudelaire a dupe ? - Not he! Far from staging an embattled Poet's desperate struggle to salvage something from rapidly disintegrating modern experience for lyric verse, the prose poems depict disintegrated partial selves, just as permeable to impressions from within or without as the Poet of beautification, but now separated off and viewed with unbreachable reserve and from an unbridgeable distance. Such simultaneous repudiation and redemption of the former partial selves under observation is made possible in this final cycle of recoding by the figure of Edgar Allan Poe, whose greatness represents for Baudelaire the ultimate condemnation of modern, commercial society (to which they both were sacrificed), and whose irony represents the ultimate model for his own practice as a writer, which in the stance of the prose narrator takes the form of borderline narcissism. Whatever the disadvantages of borrowing a psychological term for literary-historical analysis, the effect of reading Kernberg's works together with Baudelaire's prose poems is as compelling as it is uncanny. 34 For our purposes, moreover, borderline narcissism has the distinct advantage of being a composite term.35 The "narcissistic" component serves as a defense-reaction against the "borderline" disintegration of the ego resulting from decoding, in which incompatible facets of personality are split off and segregated from one another; the grandiose (yet fragile) "narcissistic" self-image is constructed via recoding on the figure of an ego ideal rather than a superego authority, in order to mask and compensate for this underlying incompatibility and resulting instability. As a composite diagnostic term, borderline narcissism thus registers (even as it recontains as "psychological") the dual psychohistorical dynamic of decoding and recoding whose peripeties we have traced through the major works of Baudelaire, and which he himself once described in terms of the "vaporisation et ... centralisation du Moi. " 36 It remains to be seen how decoding and recoding figure in the historical contexts in which those works were written and have since become justly famous and

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canonical. The prose poem narrator clearly fits the diagnostic description of borderline narcissism; the next chapter resituates the psychoanalytic explanation of this phenomenon in the contexts of mid nineteenth-century France and modern market society.

CHAPTER 7

The prose poem narrator

HISTORIGIZING BORDERLINE NARCISSISM

One of the most important differences between Lacanian and object-relations psychoanalysis, despite their common debt to the work of Melanie Klein, involves Freud's notion of Nachtraglichkeit, or "deferred action." Kernberg and other objectrelations psychoanalysts tend to conceive of psychic causality as a linear determinism, whereby childhood experience determines later psychological disturbance (as when severe frustration during childhood, for example, later causes borderline narcissism in the adult). In the Lacanian view, by contrast, psychic causality is not linear, for the meaning(s) later attributed to earlier events count for more than the "events themselves" (which may turn out to be fictitious anyway, according to the Freud of "Infantile Sexuality"). Indeed, from his very earliest work on hysteria, Freud suggested that childhood events may become meaningful and psychologically effective only long after they occurred; as he put it in an essay entitled "Screen Memories": It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at dllfrom our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say emerge) they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of memories themselves.1 221

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Just as words appearing early in a sentence only take on meaning when read "retroactively" in the context of the completed sentence (or the entire discourse), so events occurring early in childhood only become effective apres coup, according to the Lacanian linguistic model of the psyche, when later experience endows them with meaning and traumatic impact "after the fact." In the Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari take this important Freudian insight one crucial step further than Lacan: given the temporal dynamics of Nachtrdglichkeit, actual social factors always play the determining role in psychological phenomena, not childhood experience or "family romance." Memories of infantile experience (always constructed after the fact, apres coup) serve at most as a screen onto which strictly contemporary concerns are projected and then worked through. Unfortunately, psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan excepted, perhaps) has generally mistaken these "screen memories" for the true determinants of psychic life, thus skewing psychoanalytic explanation (not to mention methods of treatment) away from the actual, socio-historical determinations of psychic life. The tendency of most psychoanalysis as a whole is to use infantile determinism in this way to screen out actual social factors by rewriting them as the familiar, familial ones. This chapter will demonstrate, to the contrary, that the determinations of borderline narcissism attributed by object-relations psychoanalysis to the family - to super-ego failure stemming from bad fathering and ego disintegration blamed on bad motheringare in fact characteristic of the socio-historical context in which Baudelaire wrote and his readers continue to live.

SUPER-EGO FAILURE

According to Kernberg, one causal factor in borderline narcissism is that a super-ego which has remained primitive and overpunitive has not been successfully integrated into the borderline psychic structure, thus allowing the ego and egoideal to fuse in the form of the narcissistic "grandiose self."

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Object-relations psychoanalysis attributes such super-ego failure and subsequent ego/ego-ideal fusion to the childhood experience of excessively harsh treatment at the hands of an authoritarian father. But in Baudelaire's case, there is little biographical evidence that he suffered mistreatment as a child from either his aging father or his stepfather.2 On the contrary, all the evidence suggests that Baudelaire enjoyed warm relations with both parents (and both fathers, in turn) throughout his childhood and well into his late teens. To be sure, his devotion to poetry instead of the career in law or government envisaged by his parents generated tensions within the Baudelaire-Aupick family when Baudelaire was a young man; the trip to the South Seas arranged by Aupick soon after Baudelaire reached majority and began spending his inheritance (from Baudelaire Sr.), followed by the imposition of the conseil judiciaire when he was twenty-three, aggravated those tensions to the breaking point. But these truly influential events all occurred well after the (supposedly) formative period of childhood; there is no reason to believe that Caroline's remarriage when Charles was five, for example, would have had any lasting effect on the future poet without the subsequent intervention of the stepfather into Baudelaire's affairs as a young man. And even here, Baudelaire's anger and disappointment register primarily with his mother, not his stepfather: as in Masochian narrative, it is she that has betrayed his ideal ego by capitulating to her new husband's plans for the conseil judiciaire. As for Aupick's role as authority figure, his efficient repression of the Lyon workers' insurrection of 1834 (when Charles was thirteen) will only make sense and enrage Baudelaire much later (apres coup), when the republican-socialist poet joins in the Revolution of 1848 and exhorts his comrades-in-arms on the barricades to go after the General ("We must go execute General Aupick! Down with Aupick! [II faut aller fusilier le General Aupick! A bas Aupick!]," Baudelaire is reported to have cried).3 Masochian masochism thus fits Baudelaire's life-experience on a number of levels — which is to say that his recourse to masochistic strategies is overdetermined by a number of factors operating in quite diverse domains. Among the most striking

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are the return of the (step-) father after the father's death, when Baudelaire was five, and the return of the authoritarian Empire after the demise of the Second Republic, when Baudelaire was thirty. But it is the later events (revolutionary engagement in 1848, the coup d'etat of Napoleon in 1851) that trigger Baudelaire's masochism, not any childhood experience in and of itself, which only becomes meaningful (or "traumatic") after the fact, apres coup. It is in his late teens or early twenties, in other words, and in response to preeminently social and political rather than strictly familial concerns, that the masochistic splitting-off and repudiation of the super-ego crucial to the development of borderline narcissism occurs in Baudelaire. Masochism responds to other social factors, as well, especially the rhythms and tensions of modern city life in general. As we have seen, the masochist's contract does not just aim to exclude the father by transferring his authority to the woman: it does so specifically in order to allay anxiety by stipulating punishment by her hand, thereby invalidating paternal authority and allowing the masochist to achieve satisfaction. I say achieve satisfaction and not experience pleasure because of the peculiarly a-genital and almost non-sexual kind of gratification the masochist enjoys in his idealized, sentimental relations with the woman. Part of what is "perverse" about Masochian masochism, in other words, is that its aim is not sexual pleasure as such but rather the reduction or elimination of anxiety: this, rather than bodily pleasure, is what the masochist achieves, by means of contractually stipulated (i.e. foreseen rather than traumatic) punishment. This aim is consistent with the psychodynamics of Baudelaire's spleen poetry and many of the "Tableaux Parisiens," where the stimulus-binding process of the repetition compulsion strives merely to ward off anxiety rather than procure pleasure, as we have seen. Some of the social conditions conducive to the predominance of ego-defensive anxiety reduction over pleasure-seeking drive gratification are delineated by Benjamin in his analysis of the shock-defense as Baudelaire's characteristic reaction to urban modernity. Among the most important for Benjamin is the urban crowd, whose multiple intersecting paths appear crucial

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to Baudelaire in his dedication of the prose poem collection to Arsene Houssaye: Quel est celui de nous qui n'a pas, dans ses jours d'ambition, reve le miracle d'une prose poetique, musicale sans rythme et sansrime,assez souple et assez heurtee pour s'adapter aux mouvements lyriques de Tame, aux ondulations de la reverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience? C'est surtout de la frequentation des villes enormes, c'est du croisement de leurs innombrables rapports que nait cet ideal obsedant.4 Who among us has not dreamt, on his more ambitious days, of the miracle of a poetical prose, musical yet without rhythm and without rhyme, versatile and abrupt enough to fit the lyric movements of the soul, the flow of revery, the jolts of consciousness ? The obsession with such an ideal arises above all from familiarity with the intersection of innumerable relations that takes place in enormous modern cities. Citing "A une passante" and "Le Soleil" as striking examples, Benjamin suggests that the sudden encounters and fleeting contacts in urban crowds were for Baudelaire a "decisive, unique experience" (p. 154). He also mentions (in connection with "Perte d'aureole") the increasing rapidity of urban traffic along Haussmann's newly widened boulevards, which required a new defensive hyperconscious awareness of carriages and horses on the part of modern Parisians. The invention of matches and photography in the mid-nineteenth century also contribute to the development of shock-defensiveness, inasmuch as they produce or reproduce immediate effects with a single, abrupt gesture. At the same time that modern urban experience becomes increasingly jarring and instantaneous, according to Benjamin, modern practices evolve in a similar direction, and render modern individuals less able or inclined to synthesize such experience into a larger framework. Most important for Benjamin is the evolution of the mass-circulation newspaper, which instead of embedding news events in a larger world view shared by writer and readers alike, as the older subscription newspapers were bound to do, simply presented isolated items

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discretely and "objectively," with no relations to other events or to any political interpretation or encompassing world view: [The modern individual] is increasingly unable to assimilate the data of the world around him [sic] by way of experience. Newspapers constitute one of the many evidences of such an inability. If it were the intention of the press to have the reader assimilate the information it supplies as part of his [sic] own experience, it would not achieve its purpose. But its intention is just the opposite, and it is achieved: to isolate what happens from the realm in which it could affect the experience of the reader. The principles of journalistic information (freshness of the news, brevity, comprehensibility, and, above all, lack of connection between the individual news items) contribute as much to this as does the make-up of the pages and the paper's style.5

The isolation of discrete happenings from synthetic experience found in newspaper reporting and reading is reinforced by such practices as gambling (which became widespread among the middle and lower classes during Baudelaire's lifetime) and the drill training associated with organized mass-manufacturing and (eventually) assembly-line production (as opposed to the apprenticeship and practice associated with artisanal and craft production). These are some of the features of modern life, according to Benjamin, that structure experience and egodefensive reactions to it in the ways that Baudelaire's readers so readily recognize. Benjamin was the first to explain the significance of "Perte d'aureole" for the prose collection, both in its repudiation of the romantic poet of the early verse poetry and in its relation to the modern urban realities which prompted that repudiation. But Benjamin overlooks the role of the narrator throughout the prose poem collection, as well as the stance of the raconteur in "Perte d'aureole" itself: the way he distances himself from the shocking experience he is recounting, and uses the halo's loss to belittle others and aggrandize himself. The high-anxiety hyperconsciousness of the shock defense certainly may have contributed to Baudelairean masochism and its perverse aim of anxiety reduction, but the prose poet's defenses have evolved beyond the part-object intensification of spleen, where "every second finds consciousness ready to intercept its shock" (p.

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143), to the primitive splitting and grandiose self characteristic of the borderline narcissist narrator. The passage from masochism to borderline narcissism in Baudelaire revolves around his experience of the calamities of June 1848 (the massacre of Parisian workers) through December 1851 (the coup (Fetat of Louis-Napoleon). Masochism stages the repudiation of the father in phantasy (in an a-genital, "lesbian" relation with the anti-Oedipal lover), but fails in reality: the father returns in the figure of Napoleon III. This figure, not Baudelaire's father or stepfather, represents the primitive, punitive super-ego that is not successfully integrated into the Baudelairean psyche. The analysis of Louis-Napoleon's rapid rise to power by Marx confirms and echoes the scandalized reaction of Baudelaire, who bitterly concluded that devant l'histoire et devant le peuple frangais, la grande gloire de Napoleon III aura ete de prouver que le premier venu peut, en s'emparant du telegraphe et de rimprimerie nationale, gouverner une grande nation.6 in the eyes of history and the French people, the great glory of Napoleon III will have been to prove that whoever seizes control of the telegraph and the State printing-office can govern a great nation. What Marx shows is that the reign of Napoleon III and the "era of high capitalism" he inaugurated spelled the eclipse of bourgeois social authority; that under the democratic conditions of the Second Republic — even after the direct, social democracy of Louis Blanc's workers' cooperatives is scuttled in favor of state-run workfare, which is in turn promptly eliminated altogether - the bourgeoisie would have to forfeit explicit political rule and curtail free cultural expression in order to maintain its economic rule intact behind the scenes. As Benjamin puts it (citing Marx), '"the bourgeoisie... through the brutal abuse of [its] own press,' called upon Napoleon c to destroy their speaking and writing segment, their politicians and literati, so that they might confidently pursue their private affairs under the protection of a strong and untrammelled government'" (p. 106). Baudelaire himself, of course, felt the

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lash of imperial censorship in the condemnation of several poems in the original Fleurs du Mai which led to the publication of the second edition (in 1861). But long before his censorship trial in 1857, Baudelaire had recoiled in disgust from Second Empire politics: "[the coup d'etat of] December 2 [1851]," he says in explaining his refusal to vote in legislative elections just three months after the event, "had the effect of physically depoliticizing m e " ; he later castigates Napoleon's seizure of power as a "disgrace." 7 This utter contempt for the socio-symbolic order of the Second Empire in effect invalidates the tyrannical super-ego figure of Napoleon III, too authoritarian for the socialdemocratic ideals Baudelaire once cherished and now must admit are defunct; such is the dynamic allegorized in " Laquelle est la vraie?". The splitting-off of a super-ego that is too primitive enables Baudelaire to fuse his self-image with the martyred ideal image of Poe - which only further invalidates the socio-symbolic order of this "era of high capitalism," inasmuch as Poe (and hence by mirror-implication Baudelaire himself) was sacrificed to a commercial society increasingly dominated by the market. Indeed, even while Napoleon III represents the figure-of-the-despot of the socio-symbolic order of Second-Empire France, and is duly targeted as such in letters and notebook entries, it is the specter of commerce that appears more often in the poetry itself. Not that the notebooks and essays do not themselves resound with vehement denunciations of commercial culture. In "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe," Baudelaire's condemnation is definitive: [L]e pretre qui offre au cruel extorqueur d'hosties humaines des victimes qui meurent honorablement, victimes qui veulent mourir, me parait un etre tout a fait doux et humain, compare au financier qui n'immole les populations qu'a son interet propre... Un pareil milieu ... n'est guere fait pour les poetes.8 [T]he priest who offers the cruel extortioner victims who die honorably, victims who want to die, seems to me altogether lenient and humane compared to the financier who immolates entire populations for his private self-interest alone ... Such a milieu ... is hardly fit for poets.

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One brief entry in the journals castigates commerce as "the lowest and vilest form of egoism (une des formes de l'egolsme, et la plus basse et la plus vile)"; a longer one on the "end of the world" pictures a horrendous society in which "anything that is not motivated by monetary gain will be considered totally ridiculous (tout ce qui ne sera pas l'ardeur vers Plutus sera repute un immense ridicule) " - only to suggest some lines later that precisely that situation may already have arrived without our having realized it.9 There can be little doubt that, for Baudelaire, market society was just as devoid of social authority as the tyrannical reign of Napoleon III that so whole-heartedly endorsed and promoted it. The mode of denunciation of commercial culture in the prose poetry is, of course, far more complex. In one mode that we have already examined, with the primitive super-ego effectively out of play, what returns in the real at the moment when defensive splitting and denial fail is neither the father nor a despot, but the realities of the market: in "La Corde," it is the profit motive which shockingly appears in place of maternal love; in " La Chambre double," it is the demands of a creditor, a kept woman, or an editor which disrupt and dispel the narrator's reveries. In " Le Vieux Saltimbanque," the dynamic of "projective identification" linking the narrator with the old carnival clown in effect places the poet at the mercy of market forces. In sharp contrast to the immobile squalor of the poor old clown, the carnival around him teems with "pleasure, profit, profligacy," and especially the euphoria of money being spent and money being made: Tout n'etait que lumiere, poussiere, cris, joie, tumulte: les uns depensaient, les autres gagnaient, les uns et les autres egalement joyeux... partout la certitude du pain pour le lendemain; partout P explosion de la vitalite. Ici la misere absolue ... The contrast between wealth and poverty appears in many of the prose poems (including "Le Joujou du pauvre" [19] and "Les Yeux des pauvres" [26]). Here, the narrator's identification with the clown situates the poet squarely in a market

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context, where he is "degraded (degrade) by misery and the public's ingratitude." This identification with the carnival clown resembles the narrator's empathy with Fancioulle in "Une mort herolque," where it appears that the idealist actor confronts a super-ego figure in the character of the prince who has condemned the conspirators to death for treason. But it is crucial to the intrigue of "Une mort herolque" that the prince does not himself execute nor murder Fancioulle: the actor dies when a cat-call from somewhere in the audience (instigated, it is true, by the prince) interrupts his command performance. Though the prince's motives for requesting Fancioulle's performance remain unknown, rumors had circulated that the conspirators were to be pardoned; the narrator thus wonders whether the prince clearly foresaw the mortal effect of the cat-call, or was testing the degree of resolve and idealism in an actor playing what might be his last role. In any case, the logic of "Une mort herolque," published (in 1863) shortly after Napoleon's first liberalization measures were instituted (in i860), crucially shifts responsibility for the demise of the performing artist from the authority figure to an anonymous public. Even when granted (perhaps only temporary) immunity from direct condemnation by the authorities, the impecunious poet in commercial culture is nevertheless always mortally susceptible to the hazards of the market and " the public's ingratitude." The complex dynamics of "Une mort herolque" thus suggest that the borderline narcissism of the prose poem narrator combines the vehement repudiation of Napoleon III with an equally vehement condemnation of a degraded and degrading commercial culture.

EGO DISINTEGRATION

The second explanation of borderline narcissism involves the disintegration not of the super-ego, but of the ego itself. Objectrelations psychoanalysis attributes the weak ego-structure and primitive splitting of the borderline psyche to ambivalent and inconsistent mothering, which induces extreme frustration in

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the child. When the mother's attitude toward the child alternates between extremes of effusive overindulgence and callous indifference, instead of occupying a middle-ground position enabling the child to synthesize feelings of love and hatred toward her into a whole object, the child's hated ("bad") and loved ("good") part-object representations of her remain unsynthesized and split apart from one another. Such splitting, as we have seen, characterizes failure of what Melanie Klein calls the "depressive" stage: under the sway of raw instinct (Eros and Thanatos), the child fails to synthesize loved and hated representations into a whole mother image, to acknowledge the bad with the good, as it were. According to the logic of the mirror stage, when a unified image of the mother as whole object fails to develop, then the child's self-image (the basis for subsequent ego-identifications) also fails. In the psychoanalytic view, then, extreme frustration in childhood prevents erotic and destructive impulses from merging, which permanently splits good and bad object- and self-representations from one another, resulting in the weak and unstable ego-structure of the borderline psyche. In Baudelaire's case, the argument has been made that his mother may have pampered him, particularly after the death of her aging first husband; one could surmise that the ensuing remarriage to the dashing and (comparatively) young Aupick may have been frustrating for the young Charles. But little evidence exists to support this; in fact, the successful military officer was himself often obliged to leave his new wife alone with her son for considerable periods of time while on assignment. Massive evidence exists, by contrast, of the real frustrations befalling Baudelaire throughout his adult life, and these actual, social factors must be taken into account. Of Baudelaire's political frustrations we have already said a great deal. Early modern French history presents a number of cycles of great expectation and severe disappointment: the unexpected promise of democracy after the Revolution of 1789, embodied in the original Paris Commune and the short-lived First Republic, is followed by the Napoleonic Empire and then the reactionary Bourbon Restoration. The July Revolution of

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1830 installs a constitutional monarchy and revives hope among romantic socialists and republicans for a return to democracy; but then electoral requirements restrict voting and officeholding to the well-to-do.10 Instead of lowering eligibility levels in response to demands for wider democratic participation, Louis-Philippe's minister, Guizot, answers with the infamous cry: "Enrichissez-vous!" The Revolution of 1848 again raises hopes and expectations, including Baudelaire's own. Anti-authoritarian direct democracy and autonomous workers' cooperatives are placed on the agenda: in the notebooks, Baudelaire specifically mentions the 15th of May (1848), the last (and unsuccessful) attempt by socialist revolutionaries (led by Blanqui) to regain control of the Republic from an increasingly conservative legislature; the poet is on the barricades during the June Days' massacre, and he takes up arms again on the 2nd of December 1851 as part of sporadic resistance to Louis-Napoleon. But the coup cTetat disillusions him to the core. As for so many other writers and artists at the time, Second-Empire France will henceforth appear to Baudelaire totally devoid of social value and moral authority, and he is obliged to take strong measures to stifle his rage and the broken ideals that fuel it. The frustration is great enough to shake Baudelaire's psychic structure to its foundations : at this point, with the transformation of masochism into borderline narcissism, primitive splitting prevails over egosyntonic anxiety-defense, splitting off the primitive authority figure of Napoleon III and repudiating him as figure-of-thedespot in the post-revolutionary socio-symbolic order. It is not his mother's (re-) marriage to General Aupick, but the return of this despot, thoroughly devoid of moral authority, to a position of real social power in mid-century France, that has such profound and lasting effects on the Baudelairean psyche and the texts Baudelaire produced. But the political potential contrasted with the actual disasters of 1848-51 is by no means the only real source of social frustration for Baudelaire. Equally intense frustrations arise from modern commercial culture, of which two aspects are particularly important. As a producer of culture, the poet must

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face the hazards of the market — those allegorized, for example, in "Une mort herolque." By the mid-nineteenth century in France, modernity has for the most part done away with the patronage-systems of the ancien regime and middle ages: the writer no longer owes fealty to religious, aristocratic, or monarchic patrons. But this "freedom" from direct obligation entails another, comparatively indirect obligation: the poet of modernity comes to depend instead on the anonymous public of the marketplace. Despite the marked growth of the literate public during this period — which fuels the explosion of daily newspapers and expands the marketability of prosefiction— Baudelaire feels keenly himself, and in the figure of Poe strongly identifies with, the frustrations of the talented poet facing a materialistic and uncomprehending public. Such frustration appears, with the characteristic shock of banal reality puncturing the poetic ideal, in the prose poem "La Soupe et les nuages" (44): at a dinner prepared by his mistress, the poet is staring out of the window contemplating the passing clouds, whose beauty he mentally compares to the eyes of his beloved. Suddenly, a violent slap on the back: his revery is interrupted by the voice of his mistress, who is asking when the "damned cloud-merchant" is going to eat his soup. The poet is frustrated by his audience's philistine lack of sensitivity and indifference to beauty. The poet's frustrations as producer of fine poetry for a degraded commercial culture are compounded by the frustrations of the consumer in the marketplace. Along with the growth of the mass-circulation press, Baudelaire's generation witnesses the development of newspaper and poster advertising and of store-window displays (first in the "arcades," later in department stores) whose effects we saw in "Les Projets." No longer restricted to an aristocratic elite, conspicuous consumption in modernity is supposedly the right of everyone, although it is in fact, of course, exercised only by those who can afford it and conspicuously denied to the innumerable poor. Such frustration afflicted Baudelaire with exceptional severity: after two

years of luxury and leisure afforded by his inheritance, the imposition of the conseil judiciaire throws him into dire poverty

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for the rest of his life; deprived of fine clothes, of the leisure to enjoy life and cultivate his sensibilities, of time free of financial pressure to write, finally of desperately needed medical care, Baudelaire dies at forty-six with roughly half of his inheritance still untouched. But Baudelaire's is the special case that proves the rule: consumer frustration becomes widespread in this " era of high capitalism" in France. Extreme differences between wealth and poverty may be common to many social orders, but in a democratic culture (unlike blatant caste systems) the unequal distribution of the pleasures of consumption becomes all the more frustrating inasmuch as everyone is supposed to be able to enjoy them, but in fact cannot. Capitalism and advertising then push such frustration to the limit, by making true satisfaction ultimately impossible: consumer society promises everyone everything, but can never allow anyone enough satisfaction ... to stop consuming. The major source of anxiety for Baudelaire is thus the problem of money, the inexorable laws of the market stemming from the career choice of poet in a commercial culture rapidly abandoning patronage of church, nobles, and king. The status of the lyric poet in an age of utilitarianism is perhaps an extreme case, but it is nonetheless emblematic of the situation of many young Frenchmen who swarm to Paris to complete their education and make a name and a life for themselves in the capital - only to discover that their numbers greatly exceed the supply of career openings. The Napoleonic promise of "careers open to talent" soon goes sour and becomes yet another source of frustration during the mid-nineteenth century, inasmuch as the comparatively broad-based educational system Napoleon I instituted to foster such talent turns out many more educated young Frenchmen than nascent French capitalism and the narrowly based constitutional monarchy can offer positions that would match their abilities and — especially — their expectations.11 More generally, the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century had placed on the cultural agenda, in Hegel's terms, the flowering of "free subjectivity" for all: the development of individual faculties and abilities for their own sake, without regard for class or station in life. In this light, the

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realities of post-revolutionary France proved profoundly disappointing. The frustrations occasioned in mid-nineteenth-century French youth by these particular historical circumstances and expectations only aggravate and highlight the widespread anxiety inherent in capitalism itself. Unlike feudal society, for example, which forcibly attaches serfs to the land they live from, the capitalist economy forcibly separates adults from the means of life (means of production and means of consumption) and subjects all material need to the defiles of the market. Separation from the means of life is one component of the process of "primitive accumulation," which in modern France sends thousands of young people from the provinces to the capital in search of gainful employment, a dazzling career, fame and fortune. To their great frustration, the other component of primitive accumulation — a supply of liquid wealth seeking gainful investment in means of production — is not yet available in an economy still dominated by conservative elements of the landed aristocracy and the long-established monarchical or imperial bourgeoisie. It is not until the influx of Australian and Californian gold following 1849 and the founding of statesponsored investment banks by Napoleon III that an adequate supply of liquid capital will become available and the French economy experience its capitalist "take-off" during the Second Empire. But in the preceding decades, with the number of French immigrants to Paris far exceeding the career opportunities available to them, a certain not-quite institutionalized but nonetheless recognized social space emerges - a kind of holding cell for the (more or less involuntarily) extended adolescence falling between the comforts of family life left behind and the (eventual) security of" real life," a steady job or career to come. This space is inhabited by students, prostitutes, petty thieves, carnival performers, scavengers, street musicians, beggars, would-be writers and artists — by the innumerable under- and unemployed of a nascent market economy. The French christened it "Bohemia"; Baudelaire would spend his entire life, and die, there.

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Bohemia must therefore be understood not simply in opposition to but as a product and reflection of bourgeois society.12 Its denizens have left the families in which they grew up, but have not found or have refused a proper position in the sociosymbolic order of market society - they have not adopted some state- or market-defined function in the new political economy. The reasons for occupying Bohemia are various: they range from mere whim to bare necessity, and include most imaginable compromises and compensations in between. For some, the sojourn in Bohemia was strictly voluntary: temporary Bohemians were merely passing through to sow wild oats on the way to successful careers in business or government. At the opposite extreme, internal exile in Bohemia was strictly involuntary and often fatal: these were the chronically underemployed and impoverished, the direct casualties of market society. Still others took up residence in Bohemia as an act of defiance against the moral bankruptcy of a crass, utilitarian society, refusing to sacrifice personal integrity to the demeaning constraints of the job market. In part because of the diversity of its residents, Bohemian attitudes cannot be construed simply as wholesale opposition to bourgeois values. For some, typically those from upperbourgeois families who are only temporarily slumming in Bohemia, a Bohemian life of free-wheeling self-indulgence represents a protest against the petty strictures and scrimpy materialism of bourgeois life. Yet for others, typically those from a petty-bourgeois milieu (and who thus cannot afford a life of self-indulgence), Bohemia is a refuge from the distracting frivolity and opulence of Paris, a place to concentrate on making an earnest living free from temptation. Far from comprising a coherent "ideology" or prise de position in opposition to bourgeois society, Bohemian attitudes are profoundly ambivalent, and in fact reflect conflicts inherent in bourgeois life itself. As Jerrold Seigel puts it, Bohemia is "less a genuine departure from the ground of bourgeois experience than an accentuation of certain of its features; the tension between work

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and indulgence, travail and jouissance, [is just as much a] part of bourgeois life" as of Bohemia (p. 123). In its very incoherence, then, Bohemia mirrors and illuminates the quandaries of bourgeois existence taken to extremes. Even if for a wide variety of very different reasons — ranging from bitter resentment to playful insouciance, from hopeless dejection to haughty disdain - Bohemia became a privileged locus of decoding directed at various aspects of the prevailing socio-symbolic order. In word and deed, Bohemia actively challenged the norms of bourgeois culture, testing its limits and experimenting with what it proscribed. Such decoding appears in the typically Bohemian gestures that flout social convention with outrageous pranks and styles of dress. Nerval would take long strolls with a pet lobster on a leash; the painter Pelletier walked his pet jackal; Gautier stunned the audience at the premiere of Hernani with his red waistcoat; secret societies allegedly ate wild boar or assiduously practiced whole repertoires of obscene songs: whatever behavior might disturb the bourgeois peace Bohemians would gladly try; for some, the aim of Bohemianism was simply to epater le bourgeois. Yet much Bohemian decoding aimed at more central bourgeois values than mere propriety. One target was romantic notions of emotional purity and love: rather than serving as a general antidote to combat the corrosive egotism of market society, romantic love had come to serve instead as mere compensation in the bourgeois domestic sphere for the unbridled competition increasingly predominant in the capitalist marketplace. In this regard, Baudelaire's attitudes were typical of Bohemia, if rather extreme: rather than a "haven in a heartless world," he considered bourgeois marriage to be a "disinfectant" invented in the last resort by the Church to diminish the dangers of real love, which was an unmitigated evil: for him, love resembled "torture or a surgical operation," and its " sole and greatest pleasure [lay] in the certainty of doing wrong (la volupte unique et supreme de l'amour git dans la certitude de faire le ma/)." 13 One alternative to love and marriage familiar to Baudelaire was prostitution, which was commonplace in Bohemia not simply because grisettes, femmes

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entretenues, and insoumises comprised a considerable proportion of the Bohemian population (and indeed the majority of the female population), but also because Bohemia held such a dim view of bourgeois marriage and the bourgeois household. A second target of Bohemian decoding is work, or at least work of the kind typically required (though offered in insufficient supply) by the new bourgeois regime. One among many, Baudelaire decries the reign of "the god of Utility" ("J'aime le souvenir des epoques nues" [v] 1. 23), reflects on "what is so vile about any job whatsoever (ce qu'il y a de vil dans une fonction quelconque)" and baldly declares at one point that "being someone useful has always seemed quite hideous to me (etre un homme utile m'a paru toujours quelque chose de bien hideux)." "Isn't work," he writes on another occasion, "the salt that preserves mummified souls? (Le travail, n'est-ce pas le sel qui conserve les ames momies?)". 14 The problem with modern work is that the accelerating division of labor generates meaningless jobs for narrow specialists: fulfilling a function in the new socio-symbolic order means denying one's personality and originality, in effect sacrificing the "free subjectivity" supposedly promised to everyone as a result of the Revolution of 1789. Baudelaire writes: Un fonctionnaire quelconque, un ministre, un directeur de theatre ou de journal, peuvent etre quelquefois des etres estimables, mais ils ne sont jamais divins. Ce sont des personnes sans personnalite, des etres sans originalite, nes pour la fonction, c'est-a-dire pour la domesticite publique. II n'existe que trois etres respectables: le pretre, le guerrier, le poete. Savoir, tuer et creer. Les autres hommes sont taillables et corveables, faits pour l'ecurie c'est-a-dire pour exercer ce qu'on appelle des

professions.15

A given functionary, minister, theater producer, or newspaper publisher might sometimes be a respectable person, but will never be divine. They are people without personality, beings without originality, born for duty, that is to say for public service. There are only three truly estimable beings: the priest, the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill, and to create. All other men, so easily tamed and indentured, are fit for the stables - that is, for what are called the professions.

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In direct contrast to the specialist functionary, Baudelaire invokes the figure of the dandy: Qu'est-ce que l'homme superieur? Ce n'est pas le specialiste... Eternelle superiority du Dandy. Qu'est-ce que le Dandy?... C'est 1'homme de loisir et d'education generate. Etre riche et aimer le travail.16 What is a superior man? It is not the specialist... Eternal superiority of the Dandy. What is a Dandy? ... A Dandy does nothing... He is a man of leisure and universal education. To be rich and like working. The ideal dandy defies the law of the market, or of the job market at least: he is emphatically not a specialist, but a man of wealth and leisure: he does nothing; when he does work, it is because he likes to, not because he must. Of course, the dandy represents Baudelaire's ideal aspirations, not his real status; he is therefore all the more acutely aware that only freedom from constant market pressures to produce in order to make a living would allow full development of the dandy's exquisite sensibilities: C'est par le loisir que j'ai, en partie, grandi. A mon grand detriment; car le loisir, sans fortune, augmente les dettes, les avanies resultant des dettes. Mais a mon grand profit, relativement a la sensibilite, a la meditation, et a la faculte du dandysme... Les autres hommes de lettres sont, pour la plupart, des vils piochers tres-ignorants.17 It is in part through leisure time that I have developed. To my great detriment, insofar as leisure time without a fortune increases one's debts and the humiliations arising from debts. But also to my great advantage, in terms of sensitivity, reflection, and the capacity for dandyism ... Other men of letters are lowly, know-nothing grinds, for the most part. The dandy of letters' leisurely cultivation of intellect confers invidious distinction in the domain of high culture just as the dandy of fashion's cultivation of personal appearance and meticulous attention to style make him stand out as superior to the crowd. Having casually escaped the law of productivity entirely, the dandy scrupulously masters the rules of conspicuous consumption in commercial democratic culture - and plays to win. Here

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too, of course, Baudelaire was actually so poor that it became increasingly difficult and eventually simply impossible for him to dress as fastidiously as true dandyism would have required. Not just a figure appearing in times of transition, the Baudelairean dandy is in effect a creature of nascent capitalism, an idealized figure of triumph over market society: someone who is able to buy the best on the retail market without ever having to stoop to selling himself on the job market. Some of the implications of Baudelaire's aspirations to the status of dandy emerge from comparing his relation to the crowd with that of his arch-romantic predecessor, Victor Hugo. As Benjamin has remarked, the modernist poet thrives in the crowd without being part of it in the way Hugo saw himself, as a citizen among citizens - and their leader and spokesman. In his preface to Lucrezia Borgia, the dramatist sings the praises of the Parisian crowd: When one sees this enlightened populace which has turned Paris into the key city of progress and which fills the theater every night, one should realize that the theater is a tribune, the theater is a pulpit.18 What Benjamin does not mention is that Baudelaire, too, in his period of revolutionary enthusiasm around 1848, thought the poet should be a man of the crowd just as much as Hugo did: in the essay on Pierre Dupont, Baudelaire declares that he "prefer[s] the poet who remains in constant communication with the people of his time, exchanging thoughts and feelings with them." 19 But the figure of Poe, as we have seen, enables Baudelaire to reverse and then efface his former enthusiasm: "As for me, I am not a dupe; I have never been dupe!" 20 The ideal of the dandy therefore includes the idea of " a vengeful callousness" ("l'idee d'une insensibilite vengeresse") :21 the peculiar turn of phrase reveals that the shocking imperturbability of the dandy is erected precisely as revenge for having been himself shocked and dismayed in an earlier incarnation. Having experienced "the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization" (which Baudelaire considers far greater than "the dangers of the forest and the plains"), the dandy enters the crowd already on the defensive, as it were - ready to parry the

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shocks or, even better (inasmuch as the best defense is a good offense), to appear shocking himself: "Whether man befriends his dupe on the street, or stabs his prey in some unknown forest, isn't he eternal man, that is to say, the most perfect animal of prey ? " 22 The dandy as former dupe becomes the perfect animal of prey: we are here very far from the romanticism of Hugo, to whom (as Benjamin puts it) "the crowd meant... the crowd of clients — the masses of his readers and his voters" (p. 66). In a single journal entry, Baudelaire writes: "What I think of voting and the right to elections. Of the rights of man. / What is so vile about any job whatsoever. A Dandy does nothing. / Can you picture a Dandy addressing the people, except to scoff at them? (Ce que je pense du vote et du droit d'elections. Des droits de l'homme. / Ce qu'il y a de vil dans une fonction quelconque. / Un Dandy ne fait rien. / Vous figurez-vous un Dandy parlant au peuple, excepte pour le bafouer?) " 23 Unlike the demagogue, the dandy enters the crowd armed with a nearly invincible sense of superiority and ready to do battle with a glance at a moment's notice. Such a stance represents one axis of Baudelaire's relation to the modern crowd. But Baudelaire's real relation to the crowd is more complicated than this, his feelings ambivalent. The modernist poet's sense of disdain for the crowd is accompanied by considerable resentment: he may feel absolutely superior to it, yet he also knows he is absolutely dependent on it: it represents his public. As much as he may aspire to the ideal market status of the dandy, who can buy without selling, Baudelaire in actuality occupies very nearly the opposite position: producing poetry for a commercial culture, he must sell himself in order to buy.24 As Benjamin puts it, Baudelaire faces the crowd in the position of the commodity seeking customers (pp. 55-58). This is one reason that he identifies himself and his art with ... prostitution: "What is art? Prostitution." 25

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Like the crowd, the figure of prostitution has evolved significantly since the early romanticism of Hugo. Already in Balzac there appears a strikingly modern treatment of prostitution that contrasts sharply with the romantic view stretching from Rousseau through Hugo to Eugene Sue, and no doubt beyond.26 The romantics tell stories of the once degraded prostitute miraculously transformed by the power of her true love for a man morally and socially superior to her. As Charles Bernheimer concludes, "in the Romantic literary tradition... the figure of the reformed prostitute is plotted to support a conservative patriarchal ideology... The loving prostitute exemplifies the renunciation of... female sexuality in submission to paternal Law" (p. 52). Prostitution in Balzac is very different. Even when he resorts to the romantic reformed-prostitute story - as he does in Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes, written in direct

competition with Sue and Les Mysteres de Paris - Balzac sets that sub-plot in a larger narrative context which changes its ideological valence dramatically. Already in Illusions perdues (of which Splendeurs is the sequel), prostitution serves as the general model for all social relations in bourgeois society. By resituating the romantic reformed-prostitute story in the larger context of the Lucien-Vautrin narrative, Splendeurs demonstrates the subversion of patriarchal ideology by the power of money even more thoroughly than Le Pere Goriot, for Vautrin turns out to represent not the law of the father, guarantor of moral order (as in the romantic story-line), but the law of the market, mechanism of perpetual exploitation. Given Balzac's political views, the triumph of the market is bemoaned as a debilitating attack on legitimate (viz. Legitimist) social authority and on stable signification in general.27 The logic of the Vautrin narrative nevertheless shows how the market has decoded the socio-symbolic order in early modern France, destabilizing even the hierarchies of law and order. At the end of Splendeurs, the epitome of market corruption becomes a mainstay of the modern state: Vautrin the arch-criminal master-capitalist becomes chief of the Parisian secret police. " I

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have no other ambition," Vautrin declares, "than to be an instrument of order and repression, instead of being corruption itself (Je n'ai pas d'autre ambition que d'etre un element d'ordre et de repression, au lieu d'etre la corruption meme)." 28 In the decoding process of the market, the law of hierarchy and the hierarchy of the law itself are thoroughly subverted. This is a feature of market society Baudelaire came to understand very well: reflecting Vautrin's fate in light of his own experience after 1848, the poet will write: " I can understand why one would desert one cause in order to know what it feels like to serve another (Je comprends qu'on deserte une cause pour savoir ce qu'on eprouve a en servir une autre)." 29 The very next line of the journal entry, however, is even more indicative of full-fledged Baudelairean modernism, for whereas Balzac closes his long narrative with a pessimistic forecast of Vautrin's fifteen years of dedicated service to the modern, liberal-democratic police state he so despised, Baudelaire characteristically refuses the comforts of narrative resolution, and instead leaves the opposition between prostitute and mastermind, dupe and animal of prey, largely undecided: " I t would perhaps be nice to alternate being victim and tormentor (II serait peut-etre doux d'etre alternativement victime et bourreau)." So side by side with aspirations to the status of dandy in Baudelaire exists the recognition of the status of the modern poet as prostitute. In Vautrin, Balzac had exposed the mechanisms of the market at the heart of modern French society; in the figures of the dandy and the prostitute, Baudelaire explores the internal tensions of market-bound existence in the heart of Bohemia. The situation of Bohemia in the midst of the opulent commercial culture of Paris brings to the fore sharp contrasts between wealth and poverty. Scenes of confrontation between rich and poor abound in the prose poem collection (e.g. "Le Joujou du pauvre" [19]). None is more poignant than "Les Yeux des pauvres" (26): faced with the hungry stares of a poor family on the sidewalk outside while dining with his mistress in a swank new cafe, the poet is touched by their avidity and feels somewhat ashamed of the plentiful luxury he has been enjoying

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on his side of the window. But when he turns back to his mistress, expecting her to share his sympathy for the poor, he is immediately disillusioned: she cannot stand the gawking faces and wants the owner to shoo them away from the window. This poem suggests for one thing, that in the urban milieu of a (juridically) caste-free democratic society composed of (legal) equals, conspicuous consumption and equally conspicuous destitution daily confront each other face to face, separated only by "chance" and a restaurant or retail display window. What Baudelaire elsewhere refers to as the "reflection of the joy of the rich in the eye of the poor (ce reflet de la joie du riche au fond de l'oeil du pauvre)" ("Les Veuves" [13]) is a familiar and telling experience in modern Paris. But this poem also reveals that gender distinctions in Baudelaire have been thoroughly decoded: the dandy's callous indifference here belongs to the woman. Whereas in "Le Mauvais Vitrier" the narrator identifies with the cruel dandy figure, the narrator here identifies instead with the poor, and finds the attitude of the dandy voiced by the woman absolutely scandalous. While Baudelaire on another occasion directly contrasts the cultivated artifice of the dandy with the abominable naturalness of woman,30 he also claims the right of selfcontradiction (here playing the role of supremely self-conscious borderline personality to the hilt), and elsewhere praises woman precisely for her mastery of guile and artifice.31 It would thus be a mistake to allocate "good" and " b a d " qualities such as artifice and nature to the binary opposition of gender difference, which like so many other oppositions has been effectively decoded: the dizzying loss of fixed identity in self-prostitution is for Baudelaire associated just as much with the experience of the poet himself as with the figure of woman — if not more.32 The prose poems are not the only texts that register the conflicts of rich and poor, buyer and seller, and the poet's ambivalent identifications. The dream Butor analyzes so thoroughly revolves around the fact that Baudelaire has finally succeeded in publishing his first book (on Poe), which had indeed appeared the day before. In his dream trip to the brothel, the poet is thus able to buy a prostitute rather than be

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one himself: having successfully sold a manuscript, he can now become a buyer instead of a seller; his work has finally paid off. In actuality, the book on Poe was not the turning point in his writing career that Baudelaire may have hoped and did, in fact, dream it would be: he remained destitute and had great difficulty placing his writing in the Parisian press. From the perspective of his actual market self-prostitution, the poet's aspirations to the status of dandy are thus largely compensatory, a form of imaginary revenge enacted by a consummate consumer for the humiliation of having to sell himself as producer on the open market. Benjamin's remarks on the role of consumer taste in a market setting are suggestive in this connection, even if they do not go far enough. "Taste develops," Benjamin explains, with the definite preponderance of commodity production over any other kind of production. As a consequence of the manufacture of products as commodities for the market, people become less and less aware of the conditions of their production ... The consumer, who is more or less expert when he gives an order to an artisan... is not usually knowledgeable when he appears as a buyer [of commodities on the open market] ... In the same measure as the expertness of a customer declines, the importance of his taste increases - both for him and for the manufacturer. For the consumer it has the value of a more or less elaborate masking of his lack of expertness. Its value to the manufacturer is [as] a fresh stimulus to consumption which in some cases is satisfied at the expense of other requirements of consumption the manufacturer would find more costly to meet. (Charles Baudelaire, pp. 104-05)

For Benjamin, taste arises from the decoding of true " artisanal" appreciation of the use-value of goods, which places consumers of mere exchange-value at the mercy of cost-conscious business interests. What this account overlooks is the importance of the emotional investment that buying even pure exchange-values represents for the Baudelairean dandy and the modern consumer. For what the mass-produced commodity loses of real quality through decoding is more than compensated for by the invidious distinction and sense of self-worth conferred on buyers through recoding, that is to say through the selection of a

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certain constellation of commodities rather than innumerable others for purchase on the open market, in accordance with and indeed as the actual realization of their "personal" taste. The aesthetics of the bourgeois interior during the Second Empire confirms the importance of the domestic sphere as a locus of compensatory recoding in market society.33 The bourgeois household is stuffed to overflowing with every knickknack and gewgaw imaginable. It is no doubt this aesthetics of compensation that Baudelaire has in mind when he describes the ideal destination of the prose "Invitation au voyage" (18) as a place where tout est riche, propre et luisant, comme une belle conscience, comme une magnifique batterie de cuisine, comme une splendide orfevrerie, comme une bijouterie bariolee! Les tresors du monde y affluent, comme dans la maison d'un homme laborieux qui a bien merite du monde entier. The mythical land of plenty is here compared to the splendors of domestic consumption and tranquility, presented simply as the well-deserved reward of the working man. But compensatory personal recoding through consumption is not limited to the household itself: avant-garde cafes and nightclubs did a lucrative business during the Second Empire and early Third Republic, catering to stolid bourgeois more than to the impecunious Bohemians that staffed them. Indeed, some of the poetry of Baudelaire himself was put to music shortly after his death and sung to well-heeled lawyers and accountants who flocked in their leisure time to Montmartre seeking relief from the dreary boredom of their self-effacing jobs in the thrills and pleasures of Bohemian nightlife. The dandy and prostitute in Baudelaire's works thus appear in this broader context as larger-than-life figures for modern consumers and producers and their conflicted relations to the market. The fate of the producer-prostitute is to sell, to sacrifice the self on the specialized job market in the pursuit of mere exchange-value; the vain hope of the consumer-dandy is to be able to buy enough to avenge and compensate for that sacrifice, to establish a sense of identity and self-worth.

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In this way, the modernist poet of Bohemia dramatizes a value-conflict between " b a d " production and "good" consumption that is central to life in market society. The splitting of good and bad self-images which object-relations psychoanalysis projects onto family relations (in the form of inconsistent mothering) is in fact a basic feature of the capitalist economy. Production and consumption are torn asunder by the body of capital and get conjoined only across ever greater distances by the mechanisms of the market, as the continuing self-expansion of capital aggravates the division and specialization of labor in production, and imposes administered commodity-based identity-formation in consumerism. With these underpinnings in tensions generated by the market, the disparities between public and private life are exacerbated :34 the good realm of domesticity, haven in a heartless world, becomes increasingly distinct from the jungle of capitalist competition, and domestic consumption becomes the compensation and reward in one realm for the oppressive " productivism" of the other. Consumers bent on redeeming their nine-to-five of toil or drudgery take "Living well is the best revenge" as their slogan. Positive though commodified leisure time and exploited work time exist side by side, without any intrinsic relations between them, separated by the gulf of the market which becomes increasingly difficult to bridge. The primitive splitting that results from failure of the mirror stage to integrate disparate drive-derivatives is thus not Oedipally resolved but further compounded upon entry into a market-based socio-symbolic order riven by the tensions of productivism and consumerism and so unable to provide integral "positions" for its members. Devoid of the overarching authority of a social "father figure" as the "constant revolution of the means of production" tends in Marx's phrase to "strip the halo" from all previous forms of social intercourse, market society breeds individuals whose primitive and mostly unsublimated ideal egos fuse an-Oedipally with the ego ideals provided by advertising, as consumerism reinforces oral relationships to a pre-Oedipal "mother figure": the retail market as provider of goods but also source of endless frustration. Such are the social

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determinations of the borderline personality, fostered not by family conditions alone, but by the basic structure and dynamic of market society under capitalism.

THE PROSE POEM NARRATOR AS BORDERLINE NARCISSIST

As central to life under capitalism as the psychodynamics of selfprostitution and conspicuous consumption are, it is important for our purposes to recall that for most of his adult life, Baudelaire himself was hard pressed to buy much of anything on the retail market, since he did not command a very high price on the market for poetry and criticism. Although the splitting-off of a primitive super-ego and the borderline disintegration of the ego are crucial for understanding his works, Baudelaire did not fuse his ex-masochist ideal ego with just any ego ideal provided by modern commercial culture, but specifically with the figure of a writer whose " bitter fate " was to have been himself martyred to such a culture because his writing was, as Baudelaire insists (his emphasis), "too far above the intellectual level of the average reader for him to be paid well {dans un style trop audessus du niveau intellectuel commun pour qu'on put le payer cher)":

Edgar Allan Poe.35 Under the aegis of Poe as ego ideal, Baudelaire's clearly failed social dandyism is reinscribed in writing itself, in the " aristocracy of taste" of writers like Poe, Gautier, and Leconte de Lisle who serve as models for the stance of the prose poem narrator. The dandy of letters has withdrawn completely from the arena of social conflict, which he now observes with haughty disdain, and enjoys the solitude that true superiority both requires and confers. In the essay on Theophile Gautier, Baudelaire writes:

L'aristocratie nous isole. J'avouerai franchement que je ne suis pas de ceux qui voient la un mal bien regrettable, et que j'ai peut-etre pousse trop loin la mauvaise humeur contre de pauvres philistins. Recriminer, faire de l'opposition, et meme reclamer la justice, n'est-ce pas s'emphilistiner quelque peu?

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On oublie a chaque instant qu'injurier une foule, c'est s'encanailler soi-meme. Places tres-haut, toute fatalite nous apparait comme justice. Saluons done, au contraire, avec tout le respect et 1'enthousiasme qu'elle merite, cette aristocratie qui fait solitude autour d'elle.36 Being aristocratic isolates us. I frankly admit that I am not one of those who consider that a truly deplorable evil, and that I may have taken my ill will against unfortunate philistines too far. Doesn't recriminating, making appeals, even demanding justice entail becoming a bit of & philistine oneself? It is easy to forget that insulting a crowd means lowering oneself to their level. From our lofty position, any fate appears just. Therefore let us rather praise, with all the respect and enthusiasm it deserves, our aristocracy for surrounding itself with solitude. The elect accept their inevitable suffering at the hands of the philistine public as a perverse form of justice: the conditions of modernity are such that modernism must elaborate itself in irremediable opposition to it, and yet transfigure that opposition, in order to salvage self-respect, into a pure and supreme indifference. In engaging in social struggle by seeking always to demonstrate his superiority to the philistine crowd, the dandy is instead contaminated by it, and the prose narrator thus withdraws his investment. But neither can the narrator be identified with the figure of the prostitute, at the other extreme of market existence: in discussing the "invincible taste for prostitution (gout invincible de la prostitution) " in the common man who "seeks oblivion for his self in the flesh of another (le besoin d'oublier son moi dans la chair exterieure) " and therefore "wants to be double (veut etre deux)," Baudelaire distinguishes the "man of genius, [who] wants to remain singular (Phomme de genie veut etre uri)." "Glory," he concludes, "consists in remaining singular, and prostituting oneself in a certain way. (La gloire, c'est rester un, et se prostituer d'une maniere particuliere.) " 37 The special kind of prostitution peculiar to the man of genius is related to but not identical with the selfprostitution we have already examined, in which the poet sells himself on the open market. It is an openness to decoded experience - pursued by means of exotic sex, hallucinogenic

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drugs, self-conscious evil, or what have you — as a way of procuring marketable poetic experience in the first place, in a context where capitalist "rationalization" and prosaic bourgeois culture have not only sterilized lived existence for lyric poetry (as Benjamin argues), but also deprived most people's experience of any real interest or excitement whatsoever. The registration and transmission of decoding is, as we have seen, the crux of much of Baudelaire's best verse poetry, from the partobject intensification of beauty and spleen through the "Tableaux Parisiens " to the endless voyage (" Le Voyage ") added as the concluding poem to the second edition of the collection. By prostituting himself in this special way, the artist is, as Bersani suggests, in effect "'sacrificing' himself-or more exactly, sacrificing a certain wholeness or integrity for the sake of those pleasurable shocks which accompany the release of desiring energies by scenes from external life" (p. 11). It is precisely in subjecting himself irrevocably to the shocks of decoded experience that Baudelaire hones his poetic sensibilities and develops a virulent modernism so well suited to compensate in his writing for the meaningless banality of bourgeois existence. But ultimately, the sacrifice proves too much, the disillusionment too bitter, the personal cost too high even for Baudelaire. The pursuit of decoded experience in which, as he says in "Le confiteor de l'artiste" (3), "all things think through me or I think by them (... in the grandeur of such revery, the self is soon lost!) (toutes ces choses pensent par moi, ou je pense par elles [car dans la grandeur de la reverie, le moi se perd vite!]) " has in effect dissolved the self too much: Toutefois, ces pensees, qu'elles viennent de moi ou s'elancent des choses, deviennent bientot trop intenses. L'energie dans la volupte cree un malaise et une souffrance positive. Mes nerfs tendus ne donnent plus que des vibrations criardes et douleureuses ... L'etude du beau est un duel ou l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'etre vaincu. The decoding characteristic of the embattled borderline idealego survives the transition from verse to prose, but only in figures of alienated partial selves now observed from a safe distance; recoding has supervened, with the figure of Poe as ego

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ideal sanctioning both the martyrdom of the ideal ego and the ironic stance of the narcissistic prose narrator. In recoil from both the miserable prostitute and the unsuccessful dandy, Baudelairean modernism continues to develop, with the prose narrator perpetually moving away from its former split positions and partial selves.38 THE PROSE POEM NARRATOR AS PROGRAMMER

In withdrawing investment from the market antinomies of buying and selling figured in the dandy and prostitute, the modernist poet in Baudelaire comes to occupy the position Jacques Attali calls the "programmer." 39 In his social and economic history of music, Attali identifies a stage at which technical developments in the means of reproduction enable sound recordings to be mass-produced. In this regime of "repetition," music is manufactured as a commodity for the market, requiring the creation and management of personal taste to give some sense of distinction to otherwise indistinguishable, mass-produced goods as a "stimulus to consumption" (in Benjamin's phrase, p. 105). In addition to the inferior quality of mass-produced goods (against which Baudelaire had railed a century before in "L'Ideal" (xvm), the poem immediately following "La Beaute" in the verse collection), capitalism's perennial crises of overproduction make the programmer's continual recoding of taste to stimulate commodity consumption absolutely central to the on-going process of capital accumulation and expansion. Commodities themselves are always of secondary importance to the capitalist, for he only "realizes" profit when he converts them back into liquid capital (cash) by selling them on the retail market. The market transaction epitomizing capital is not C—M—C, as it is for workers/consumers who sell their laborpower as a commodity in exchange for a money-wage in order to buy back as means of life the commodities they have produced; capital's market transaction is M - C - M ' : money is invested in the production of commodities only so that they may be sold at a profit (M J ). In this context, the function of the

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programmer is to endow commodities with semiotic surplusvalue in the eyes of consumers so as to promote their purchase on the retail market and thereby assure the realization of economic surplus-value in the coffers of capitalists.40 With the invention of means of recording music, according to Attali, the song-writer or pop star serves this function by endowing otherwise indistinguishable formula-music with the specious and temporary distinction of being a "hit." But endowing worthless commodities with specious semiotic value to promote consumption is, of course, the prime function of advertising, which represents market recoding in its most blatant form. At the very emergence of modern market culture, Baudelaire recognized the importance of programming — and soon realized the extent to which the project of beautification in "Spleen and Ideal" operated according to the same dynamic: the figure of Beauty as "programmer" fixes the unintegrated drive-derivatives of the consumer's ideal ego on part-object commodities simply by affirming the former in the intensifying reflection of the latter; as ego ideal, Beauty fascinates with pure-mirror eyes that " make all things more beautiful." Nowhere is Baudelaire's awareness of the complicity between programming and poetry clearer than in "Le Gateau" (15), the largely neglected pendant to the oft-commented " Assommons les pauvres." The latter ends, as we saw, with the former beggar setting out with half the narrator's purse, having promised to repeat the beating and the lesson about equality he has just received on any beggars he may encounter, who will in turn take an equal share of the purse and repeat the process with the beggars they encounter, and so on until mendicancy disappears and all men are equal. The problem is, of course, that the money will run out long before the beatings do. This is precisely the lesson of "Le Gateau": two almost-twin brothers fight so long and hard over a piece of bread charitably offered by the narrator, that it ends up in crumbs on the ground: ils s'arreterent par impossibility de continuer [puisque] il n'y avait plus, a vrai dire, aucun sujet de bataille; le morceau de pain avait disparu, et il etait eparpille en miettes semblables aux grains de sable auxquels il etait mele.

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The narrator ends up bemoaning the "perfectly fratricidal war" occasioned by rivalry between equals over a mere piece of bread. Much could be said about this poem as an allegory of market capitalism, with the nearly identical twin creatures figuring as mock-proletarians reduced to fighting between themselves for the meager offerings doled out by the charitable bourgeois narrator. But equally important are the poetics at play in the poem and the frame in which the anecdotal battle over the piece of bread is set. In the poem's title, the piece of bread in question is called " the cake." Yet the narrator cannot help laughing when he first hears this term applied to his plain bread by the creatures he encounters on a trip to the country, and he reflects ruefully at the end on what he has seen in a place where "bread is so scarce that it is called cake and is enough to cause a perfectly fratricidal war (oil le pain s'appelle gateau, friandise si rare qu'elle sufHt pour engendrer une guerre parfaitement fratricide)." It is scarcity, in a word, that generates the inflationary figure of speech that substitutes "cake" for bread. This figure of speech involves substituting for bread a term that functions as its equivalent while at the same time exaggerating its value; that is to say, it is comprised of metaphor plus hyperbole —precisely the rhetorical formula for surplus value}1

The use of the term "cake" as metaphor-plus-hyperbole in a situation of scarcity is not the only instance of inflationary discourse in the poem, however. The narrator at the beginning of the poem, on a visit to a region of " irresistible grandeur and nobility," indulges in numerous flights of hyperbole ("Mes pensees voltigeaient avec une legerete egale a celle de Patmosp h e r e . . . " ) , inflating his experience of a countryside that appears spectacular only because it is unfamiliar (rare) to him as a tourist. Under the influence of the romantic scenery - and in direct reference to one of the issues raised by "Assommons les pauvres" - the narrator even muses that the daily papers might be right in claiming that man was innately good. These idealizing flights of fancy are cut short, however, in a characteristically abrupt reversal, when fatigue and hunger bring the narrator back down to earth: he abandons the exalted language

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of simile and hyperbole, and reaches for his piece of bread and a flask containing " a special elixir sold to tourists by pharmacists in those days to be mixed when available with snow-water (un certain elixir que les pharmaciens vendaient dans ce temps-la aux touristes pour le meler dans l'occasion avec de l'eau-deneige)" - as if mixing it with "regular" water instead would make any difference! Melted snow is clearly equivalent to water, yet is presented by hyperbole as something superior: the local residents, in contrast with the idealizing poet, are thoroughly familiar with the countryside and all the more perfectly familiar with its impact on unsuspecting tourists, to whom they peddle their "special elixir." Here the generation of semiotic surplus value in a situation of false or at least selective scarcity functions blatantly as a "stimulus to consumption" in the service of economic gain. It is at this point in the account, as the narrator is cutting his bread, that the first creature appears: " a tattered little thing, dark and dishevelled, whose sunken eyes ... were devouring the piece of bread (un petit etre deguenille, noir, ebouriffe, dont les yeux creux... devoraient le morceau de pain)." Immediately following the narrator's metaphor equating hungry eyes with the process of ingestion they envision, the creature responds with his own metaphor equating the bread with cake. Having succumbed once to the metaphor-plus-hyperbole appeal of the snow-water elixir, the narrator succumbs again, to the appeal for "bread-become-cake." No sooner does he share his bread, however, than another creature appears "so perfectly resembling the first as to be taken for its twin brother (si parfaitement semblable au premier qu'on aurait pu le prendre pour son frere jumeau)," and the fight is on. As the battle heats up, so does the narrator's diction: the first creature becomes a "legitimate owner (proprietaire legitime)", the other a "usurper," the plain piece of bread becomes "precious prey (la precieuse proie) " - until finally the narrator himself ends up calling it "le gateau." Under conditions of scarcity and fratricidal rivalry, poetic inflation and the appeal of semiotic surplus-value seem universally irresistible. In his moments of reflection, of course, the narrator remains

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perfectly well aware of the difference between bread and "cake," and of the role that scarcity plays in motivating the substitution of one for the other, as well; it is the narrator, after all, who announces in conclusion that scarcity leads to poetic inflation and fratricidal war. What the narrator does not announce - that the poetics of idealizing romantic exaltation so closely resemble that of advertising hype and puffery - remains outside the scope of his awareness, and never appears at the communicative level of the poem at all. Yet it is in this light that the textual function of the poem's title is so telling: Baudelaire chose the title "Le Gateau" rather than "Le Pain" (or "La Fraternite"). Considered along with the careful modulations from poetic to prosaic language and back again, the allusion to hyperbole as sales gimmick, the role of the nearly identical twins themselves, that choice of title suggests that the poem is finally not about the piece of bread at all, but about the use and abuse of metaphorical equivalence, about the use of the term "cake" as a poetic instance or index of surplus-value: in colloquial French, the term in fact means "profit" - as in "to split the profits" {partager le gateau), which is precisely what the creatures refuse to do, and so end up with nothing. If the title and poetics of "Le Gateau" are an indication, the prose poem collection explores (among other things) the role of poet as programmer, the function of poetics in the process of endowing everyday, unusual, or even imaginary things and experiences with marketable semiotic surplus-value. Something similar might be said of the project of beautification in Les Fleurs du Mai, but there the focus on marketing is absent, or at least very difficult to discern. The dedication of the Petits Poemes en prose, by contrast, makes such a focus clear: Baudelaire has a specific audience of customers in view, and a specific marketing strategy to address them. It was Benjamin who first imagined that already in Les Fleurs, Baudelaire may have "envisaged readers to whom the reading of lyric poetry would present difficulties ... Will power and the ability to concentrate are not their strong points... " (p. 109); the collection of lyric poetry was thus " a book which from the beginning had little prospect of becoming an immediate popular success" (p. 109). The

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nature of the prose collection would change all that: made up of totally discrete items in no particular order, without beginning or end, this book would be an easy one for all concerned; to the prospective publisher (Arsene Houssaye, editor of La Presse), Baudelaire writes: Considerez, je vous prie, quelles admirables commodites cette combinaison nous offre a tous, a vous et a moi et au lecteur. Nous pouvons couper ou nous voulons, moi ma reverie, vous le manuscrit, le lecteur sa lecture; car je ne suspends pas la volonte retive de celui-ci au fil interminable d'une intrigue superflue. Enlevez une vertebre, et les deux morceaux de cette tortueuse fantaisie se rejoindront sans peine. Hachez-la en nombreux fragments, et vous verrez que chacun peut exister a part.42 Please consider the distinct advantages this plan offers everyone you, me, the reader. We can stop wherever we please: me, my revery; you, the manuscript; the reader, his reading; for I am not one to tax recalcitrant readers' will-power by stringing them along with a superfluous plot. Remove a vertebra, and the two ends of this meandering fantasy will reconnect without difficulty. Chop it into many pieces, and you will see that each one can exist on its own. The idea is to create a genre so easy of access that even the recalcitrant of will can appreciate it; as Baudelaire writes in his journal, "Creating a cliche, now that's genius. I must create a cliche (Creer un poncif, c'est le genie. / Je dois creer un poncif)." 43 The prose collection thus differs from the verse collection not just in its refusal to narrate "the spiritual history of modern youth," as we have already suggested, but also in its explicit appeal to a public of customers with as little patience for the intricacies of lyric poetry as staying-power for the long, drawn-out plots of the serialized novel - a public therefore likely to appreciate the immediate gratifications of a random assortment of purposely short prose poems, petits poemes en prose. The Petits Poemes en prose thus register the antinomies of market existence, mapping the contours of bourgeois subjectivity, delineating the modern "structure of experience" (to recall Benjamin's phrase) under capitalism: the conflicted dynamics of self-prostitution in specialized production and self-cultivation

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in conspicuous consumption, which constitute the social and historical determinations of borderline narcissism. As the quintessential Bohemian, Baudelaire lived this structure of conflict at its most intense, projecting its extremes onto the figures of the dandy and the prostitute. Yet the discovery of Poe as ego ideal enables Baudelaire to develop a medium of registration for these projections in which narrative perspective keeps them at a distance, always keeping both figures in play, but preventing definitive identification with either one of them. The poetic trajectory launched in Les Fleurs du Mai thus continues in Les Petits Poemes en prose in the stance of a narrator perpetually moving away from identification with the partial figures of himself under observation. The historic trajectory through Second-Empire French culture and society, meanwhile, catapults Baudelaire beyond the buyer-seller dialectic into the role of programmer, whose market function is to bestow value, both semiotic and economic. No longer sacrificing to develop poetic sensibilities nor hoping to gain distinction through public display, in the prose poem genre Baudelaire writes to encapsulate poetically and valorize semiotically the crux of modern market existence itself.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion

Schizoanalysis insists against the grain of orthodox psychoanalysis on the role of actual social factors in shaping psychic life. Taking the Freudian notion of "deferred action" elaborated by Lacan to its radical conclusion, Deleuze and Guattari assert that actual engagement with social life shapes the psyche by determining which early memory-traces are endowed " after the fact" with psychic effectivity and "meaning" for the adult. In the case of Baudelaire, it is not overly severe fathering but the authoritarian regime of Napoleon III that invalidates the super-ego; not memories of an indulgent Frangois-Joseph Baudelaire but discovery of the martyrdom of Edgar Allan Poe that furnishes an ego-ideal role model for Baudelaire the writer; not inconsistent mothering but the quandaries of the impoverished urban poet in nascent consumer society that induce psychic splitting and generate the key figures of prostitute and dandy appearing in the mature poetry. At its worst, psychoanalysis completely excludes social determinations from consideration; at best, it projects those determinations onto "family romance" and thereby obscures their historical origins and political implications. For schizoanalysis, desire is not formed once and for all "inside" the nuclear family and then sent forth to negotiate the "outside" world as best it can: desire knows no "inside" or "outside"; it invests the entire social formation (including, of course, local family structures); it is continually formed, deformed, and reformed in and through contact with the social milieu.1 To insist that social determinations such as the take-off of French capitalism and the demise of the Second Republic are 258

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the decisive factors shaping Baudelaire's psychic life does not mean, however, that his specific family circumstances are completely irrelevant. On the contrary, the schizoanalytic view of psychic determination enables us to conclude in retrospect that it is precisely Baudelaire's "personal" experience as a child and young man that makes his poetry a prime "registering apparatus" for effects of market decoding. From this perspective, only someone whose doting mother had remarried an ambitious military officer could register as intensely as Baudelaire the fall of the Second Republic to the authoritarian Napoleon I I I ; only someone who had lived a care-free life of leisure and luxury but was then subjected by his stepfather to financial tutelage and forced to eke out a meager existence peddling his work to profiteers and philistines could register as intensely as Baudelaire the antinomies of buying and selling in market society ... The importance of the concept of " registering " for cultural and literary studies is that it entails a metonymic rather than a metaphoric relation between text and context, between a medium or apparatus of registration and historical developments.2 Unlike notions of expression, reflection, and representation, which presuppose metaphoric relations of fundamental similarity, homology, harmony, or "fit" between text and context, the concept of registration construes the relation between text and context as a function: the actively receptive operation of an instrument through which the effects of social processes are detectable and analyzable. An apt illustration of the process of registration is provided by the seismograph, an instrument that translates processes operating over considerable distances and whose impact is complex and widespread into squiggles on a piece of paper—just as Baudelaire's writing does. Those squiggles are not "like" continental drift: they register its effects. More precisely, they register certain of its effects: the death and destruction, fires and tidal waves often resulting from earthquakes do not appear on the recording page at all - whereas the squiggles that do appear there contribute more to precise knowledge about plate tectonics than the more dramatic effects do. Only when the

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specificity of the means of registration - its specific functioning is taken into account can the apparatus be understood to illuminate the process whose effects it registers. And just as crucial as its functioning is the instrument's location with respect to the process and events being registered and to other apparatuses of registration, as well. The squiggles registered on any given seismograph become significant for the study of continental drift only in the context of a temporally and spatially dispersed matrix of registrations occurring at other times on the same instrument, at the same time on other instruments, and at other times on other instruments. In the case of Baudelaire, poetry may be the privileged apparatus of registration, but it is not the only one: as we have seen, genres such as art criticism and the tableau de Paris are important modes of registration, as are notebook entries, political action, letters, even projected book titles. All of them taken together comprise the cultural event named Baudelaire. Some are more enduring and amenable to analysis than others: the poetry compared to the political action, for example. But all (available) media of registration need to be taken into account, yet without collapsing one into another. The poetry thus does not represent Baudelaire's trajectory through mid nineteenthcentury France: it is part of it, one medium of registration among others. The series of poetic Others registered in the poetry does not reflect the series of historical Others registered in the letters and book titles: they are two different series in different media that bear a relation of (contingent, metonymic) contiguity, not (necessary, metaphoric) identity or resemblance to one another — as crucial as the relations between them may be for explaining the emergence of modernism in Baudelaire. As an object of cultural study, "Baudelaire" is ultimately nothing but the ensemble or aggregate (not to say "sum") of registrations available in any and all media. Just as important as the different functions of diverse modes of registration are within the corpus "Baudelaire" is his location in the social formation and in relation to other apparatuses of registration - the works of Flaubert and Balzac, for example. Our analysis located Baudelaire in the heart of Bohemia at mid-

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century, at the cataclysmic moment of 1848-51. He thus registers the same process of generalized prostitution that Balzac had detected at an earlier moment of its development, except that Baudelaire registers the process as a modernist rather than a Legitimist-realist like Balzac, and therefore valorizes prostitution aesthetically instead of condemning it ethically and politically.3 What has intervened between Balzac and Baudelaire is the continental divide of the nineteenth century separating early-modern from modern France: the Revolution of 1848 and the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Unlike Balzac, Baudelaire and Flaubert are situated historically on the same side of this divide. Yet the effects of the cataclysm itself register far more intensely in Baudelaire than in Flaubert. For one thing, Baudelaire's point of departure is the epitome of "personal expression," lyric poetry, whereas Flaubert writes novels which he tries to make as "impersonal" as possible. Even more important than genre for differentiating Baudelaire from Flaubert, however, is location: early in his career, Flaubert withdrew from the bourgeois society he despised to take refuge at Choiseul; Baudelaire, by contrast, remained in the thick of it, living the antinomies of bourgeois society at peak intensity in Bohemia, and was himself swept up in the Revolution of 1848 and resistance to Napoleon III. 4 Difference of milieu thus also contributes to the varying forms and intensity of registration of the cataclysm itself even among strictly contemporary modernists. In addition to determinate (generic) function and specific (socio-geographic) location, chance plays an important role in the metonymic registration of historical process. Under a decoded socio-symbolic order, various social (and linguistic) practices no longer fall under the governance of a single mastercode, but comprise a heterogeneous ensemble of multiple structures and practices increasingly disparate from one another.5 Experience in one sphere no longer corresponds with experience in another: not only is the "private" sphere increasingly distinct from the "public sphere," but family life becomes incompatible with student life, student life with professional life, artistic endeavor with commercial journalism,

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and so forth. Under conditions such as these, an individual's diverse experiences and practices never "add u p " to compose a coherent whole; they may even cancel one another out. But if by chance experiences in diverse spheres do happen to align or "resonate" with one another instead, that individual may become a registering apparatus for social processes at large: such is the case with Baudelaire. The relation between the "return-of-the-father" (General Aupick) and the "return-ofthe-despot" (Napoleon III) is not an abstract homology, but a real connection between distinct domains made under contingent circumstances by the singular figure of Charles Baudelaire. It is because of this "world-historical" coincidence that Baudelaire's modernism registers the emergence of market society in France so vividly. As a medium of registration, Baudelaire's writing neither reflects nor represents the historical process of market decoding; like a seismograph, with determinate specifications of its own, it registers effects. Unlike any merely mechanical device, however, writing constitutes a response to that process at the same time: the effects of decoding register only and always in response to decoding. Thus the dispute that has vexed some psychoanalytic criticism over the degree to which text features are to be attributed to writers' conscious intentions or to unconscious compulsions is for schizoanalysis totally irrelevant, or at best simply "undecidable." In this light, whether Baudelaire was "himself" psychotic or merely an acute observer of psychosis in others (or in himself) is beside the point. What matters is the registration of historical process, and questions as to the degree of consciousness or unconsciousness of an author simply do not arise. History provokes response in writing; writing registers effects of history: they are recto and verso of the same process of registration. History is thus always related metonymically to a text in two different ways: both as its context (producing effects) and as its referent (produced in response), rather than just one or the other. In this respect, the metonymical concept of registration in schizoanalysis follows directly from the metonymical poetics of reference in Baudelaire's poetry itself. Similarly, poetry not only registers effects 0/history, it in turn

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produces effects on history, as well. The figure of the prose poem narrator in Baudelaire programs people to take up distinctive stances toward the basic roles (buying and selling) assigned by the market under authoritarian-consumer society, while at the same time practicing the generation of semiotic surplus-value so crucial to the perpetuation of the capitalist economy itself, in what Attali calls the regime of repetition. Baudelaire's poetry registers the impact of widespread market decoding in the context of modern France; modern society in turn registers the impact of Baudelaire's poetry by canonizing it as the epitome of modernism. Rather than one entity expressing or causing another, one set or series of differences (the evolution of Baudelaire's poetry) registers effects of another process or series of differences (the evolution of French capitalism, or the process of "modernization"), which registers effects of the first set, in turn. Despite the recourse, made for expository purposes, to treating the three levels or spheres of decoding separately in the course of this study, it should be clear that distinctions among "the social," "the psychological," and "the textual" are analytic and heuristic only. The question of how to "get from" one "level" of decoding to another, of how to "relate" the social to the personal, the personal to the textual, and so on - is a false problem: it is in fact the same process of decoding, only appearing in different registers. The decoding characteristic of the capitalist economy does not exist except as registered in the experience and practices of a Baudelaire (and countless others); the decoding characteristic of modern personality is not legible except in traces left in writing (and other media) by a Baudelaire (and by others); and so on. From this perspective, "society" does not exist as a stable entity; nor does "the market" exist as a single agency: the impact of "the market" on "society" can be known only through effects. Baudelaire's poetry thus does not "reflect" or "express" the penetration and transformation of French society by the capitalist market as something happening "out there" which is then somehow represented " i n " the poetry. It would be more accurate to say that, in its own way and sphere of influence, Baudelaire's poetry is (part of)

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the process of market penetration of French society; or, better still, that this process exists only in and through the effects registered in an apparatus (with determinate specifications) such as Baudelaire's poetry and innumerable others like it (but with their own determinate specifications). There is, finally, another sense in which Baudelairean modernism must be considered part of (even dependent on) the mid nineteenth-century French milieu, yet without strictly speaking being "representative" of it. As we have seen, Baudelaire lived the buying and selling that are the heart of market society in an extreme form associated with Bohemia; in the poetry, the basic market positions register in the figures of the dandy and the prostitute. From a strictly sociological perspective, Baudelaire's life is clearly not representative of the "norms" of French society, any more than the characters in his poetry are representative of "normal" bourgeois life. Yet from another perspective, Baudelaire and his poetry are "representative" of his milieu-in much the same way a caricature "represents" the face or personality it mocks. Caricature, of course, depends on a certain likeness, but that likeness is distorted according to a particular specification or function, which exaggerates so as to make the figure look funny. In an analogous way, the statistical norms of existence in market society - the pervasive necessity of buying and selling oneself- are first of all intensified by the peculiarities of Baudelaire's life-experience, notably the coming into and subsequent loss of his inheritance which together define his trajectory through Bohemia. Baudelaire's poetry, secondly, registers those market antinomies according to its own specifications in the figures of dandy and prostitute — caricatures, as it were, of buying and selling on the capitalist market. But as we have seen, the specifications of the prose poetry in particular make it impossible to identify ourselves or Baudelaire with either figure: the narrative function is itself in flight, always keeping distance between the scenes it stages and valorizes and the perspective of the reader/writer it distinguishes and defers. Yet even here, the trajectory of a prose poem narrator who endows quotidian events with semiotic value runs the risk of

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recuperation via axiomatization by capitalism in the figure of the programmer, who serves the realization of profit by bestowing semiotic value in promotion of the economic value of commodities. In retrospect, we know that even some of the most innovative techniques of high modernism (and of the avantgarde as well) have been recuperated as mere advertising gimmicks in advanced consumer society. Baudelaire's evolving poetics thus never escapes implication in its social milieu, even while remaining singularly different from it. The claim that an individual oeuvre registers key features of capitalist development could in one sense be considered a difficult one to sustain with respect to a lyric poet such as Baudelaire: the penetration of society as a whole by the market is an extremely large-scale process, whereas lyric poetry is more narrowly concerned with strictly personal experience. In another sense, however, Baudelaire represents almost a perfect test-case for sehizoanalysis, whose single greatest advance over psychoanalysis is to have restored the social and historical dimensions to even the most apparently private of concerns heretofore relegated to the domestic sphere of "family romance." For Baudelaire not only lived the early stages of the generalized breakdown of the socio-symbolic order, he also experienced the full brunt of decoding in Bohemia, and explored its implications in and for lyric poetry as a modernist. Thus as "the lyric poet of Bohemia in the era of high capitalism" (to paraphrase Benjamin), Baudelaire vividly illustrates the process of decoding in three basic registers: the linguistic, the psychological, and the social. Finally, it is by considering, not isolated poems or pairs of poems, but rather the evolution of Baudelaire's poetics through the three editions of his two major collections that we have demonstrated how the canonical poet of modernity named Baudelaire registers crucial effects of capitalist development on cultural psychodynamics. These effects can be reviewed under three rubrics: the metonymy of real reference and desire; the emergence and dispersion of the imaginary; the split structure of social life in modernity.

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THE METONYMY OF REAL REFERENCE AND DESIRE

Decoding undermines the stability of the paradigmatic axis governing permissible substitutions of equivalence and opposition, thereby deconstructing the binary hierarchies of the socio-symbolic order. The loss of social authority in a decoded socio-symbolic order in turn weakens the prohibitive function of the super-ego in favor of the role-modeling function of multiple ego ideals. Destabilization of the socio-symbolic Other also weakens the structure of the ego itself, fostering para-personal part-object contact with the real against the grain of social codes. Yet metonymic reference to the real - particularly in "Hymne a la Beaute" and the poems of the "Tableaux Parisiens " section - takes the form in Baudelaire of contact with the explicitly historical present: the modernist registration of modernity. Ultimately, the correlative of pure metonymic reference would be "schizophrenia" - the free-form metonymy of desire no longer constrained in recognizing objects by the coded laws of substitution of the socio-symbolic order. When the decoded reference and desire of schizophrenia become too traumatically intense, however, a withdrawal from raw contact with the real and a consolidation of personal identity and objectives supervene in reversion to the comforts and constraints of metaphoricity. It was precisely the function of the socio-symbolic code to constrain desire by the authority vested in the Other, to fix its legitimate objects and objectives, to secure identity to stable positions within the social order but decoding undermines all of this. In modernity, metaphoricity is no longer grounded in a stable socio-symbolic code, it has to be constructed — and that is precisely the function of recoding: to reanchor the socially decoded metaphoric axis in the personal imaginary register.

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THE HISTORICAL EMERGENCE AND DISPERSION OF THE IMAGINARY

Romanticism constitutes a crucial though ambivalent moment of transition in the development of full-fledged modernity. It both lays claim to the flowering of and also bemoans the persistent constraints on the modern "free subjectivity" supposedly fostered by the revolutionary overthrow of a fixed sociosymbolic order. Operating its own decoding of "classical" ancien regime culture, romanticism envisions the discovery of a true self living in harmony with nature outside of all social codes and positions. The early romantic cycle of Les Fleurs du Mai documents the constitution of the imaginary in precisely this form: with the metaphoric axis of social coding on the wane, the program of correspondences attempts a mystical recuperation of the socially destabilized self in nature, through nostalgic reunification of past and present; personal recoding in the imaginary register has replaced social coding as the force of alignment on the metaphoric axis. This does not mean, of course, that Baudelaire by himself somehow invented the imaginary all at once: a history of French precursors would include the names of Rousseau, Descartes, and Montaigne, to mention just a few. But his early lyric poetry does register the historical emergence of the imaginary from private life to become a major cultural force accompanying and contributing to the general breakdown of the socio-symbolic order, as Benjamin's study first suggested. Yet Baudelaire himself goes on to demystify the romantic pretension to found personal identity on a natural self. The urban poet's program of beautification not only enhances the beauty of any thing, rather than nature alone, but also disseminates the harmonious natural self in recognizing random beautification as the contingent effect of decoded desire. What appeared in romanticism as a "discovery" of the natural self, Baudelairean modernism takes to be a completely unnatural invention, an artificial construction. But romanticism had not only envisioned the discovery of the true self outside the bounds of society: it also promoted a commitment to nature outside the

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universalizing codes of classicism. In his vehement repudiation of romanticism, Baudelaire reverses this valorization of the natural, particularly in the decoded and impersonal registering apparatus of the "Tableaux Parisiens," where the consoling harmonies of nature are completely replaced by the realities of the city, by the historical present of Second-Empire Paris. This denigration of nature in favor of artifice becomes a defining feature of his modernism, and of modernism to follow. In completely screening nature out of history, modernism effects a kind of epistemological break between recognition based on Eros - pleasure-seeking for the gratification of drives in reality — and recognition based on Thanatos — defending the ego from traumatic excess-stimulation by the real. This is what happens as the program of correspondences develops through the project of beautification into spleen intensification. Under the impact of increasingly decoded experience, stimulusbinding that had in principle linked present perception with memories of gratification past, informing recognition with need and pleasure, now gives way to a stimulus-binding bent to the service of the ego, mobilizing high-anxiety recognition solely in order to protect it from external trauma. The imaginary register is thereby most desperately needed at precisely the moment it is stripped of content: at the limit of high-anxiety ego defense, in the poetic mode we identified as "ironic allegory," empty reference to the now meaningless real implies the complete elimination of a subject of desire capable of integrating memory and drives. The rejection of even an allegorical meaning tentatively attributed to the real ultimately leaves the meaningless vehicle as a vacant gesture of "zero-degree" reference, exempt both from social coding in the symbolic register and from personal recoding in the imaginary register. Such are the psychodynamics of Baudelairean modernism at the zenith of decoding. The absolute loss of connection between instinctual drives and both social and personal meaning, as well as the rigorous distinction between the social (symbolic) and personal (imaginary) registers of meaning, are familiar themes of Lacanian

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psychoanalysis. Schizoanalysis, however, explains the prevalence of ego-defensive anxiety (and meaning-recognition) over drive-gratification (and object-recognition) historically, in terms of the primacy of exchange-value and the separation from means of life, which together constitute the defining features of market existence. The condition of being separated by the market from the means of life - from means of consumption as well as from means of production which would enable one to produce one's own means of consumption - creates anxiety by threatening life with the risk of not having or being able to earn the money required by market exchange for survival. The anxiety over separation made much of by psychoanalysis — and particularly by Lacanian psychoanalysis — turns out to be a structural feature of the capitalist economy, not merely of the weaning process.6 Furthermore, the rapid pace of change and the predominance of exchange-value in market society decode what Benjamin calls the "handles of experience" protecting the psyche, thereby increasing its susceptibility to traumatic shocks and generating additional anxiety in its defense. The modernism that registers the prevalence of anxiety over gratification is a function of market existence. In provisionally adopting a binary opposition of originally psychological terms for this distinction, and specifically in invoking "drive-gratification" as a function of the pleasure principle distinct from and somehow prior to ego-defensive anxiety, we may have conveyed the false impression that society "before modernity" was somehow more "natural" because ego-defensive recoding did not stand in the way of the gratification of ("true" organic or biological) drives. Of course no human society is natural - but neither are all societies equally anxiety-provoking.7 Nothing is more damaging to the claim to respect difference than the refusal to acknowledge and explore differences in history; the crucial historical difference identified by schizoanalysis distinguishes market society characterized by decoding from societies based on coding (of various kinds). Following Lacanian usage, imaginary recoding in the privatized individual was here opposed to integration into the social symbolic, but it was distinguished from schizophrenic en-

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gagement with the historical real, as well. In this context, imaginary recoding fueled by anxiety appears as an escape from history - with history construed as the scene where drivegratification, social oppression, individual repression, and egodefensive anxiety in varying proportions determine the functioning and real outcomes of the pleasure principle. Schizoanalysis enables and encourages us to understand varying degrees of anxiety and gratification as a function of what might be called, to adopt Marx's oxymoron, the "natural history" of the human species, and to distinguish among various "libidinal modes of production" without invoking any absolute standard of comparison.8 Such a "natural history" is the scene of the schizoanalytic real, construed as the prereflective relation of human bodies to the natural environment as mediated historically by social modes of production and coding. An exclusive emphasis on language in psychoanalysis, by contrast, would evacuate from the real any natural and historical determinations whatsoever. Since the institution of language (langue) is found in all human societies, symbolic order appears a-historical. And the effect of inhabiting a symbolic universe of meaning is to "alienate" the speaking being irrevocably from the body and its organic "needs" and drives; the split subject is relegated to personal and social registers of meaning completely divorced from the body and from history. Baudelaire and schizoanalysis enable us to diagnose such a perspective as a symptom of modernity. Drawing on Nietzsche (in place of Lacan's Heidegger), schizoanalysis understands the ego-defensive substitution of meaningrecognition for drive-gratifying 06/^-recognition to be a feature of modern nihilism, which ponders questions like "what is the meaning of life?" instead of exercising will-to-power. To go beyond the nihilism of modernism, on this view, would require bracketing questions as to the meaning of life and meaningrecognition in general in order to restore object-recognition to the operations of will-to-power. Objects would then be defined not by their " meaning," nor in the terms of some anthropology of strictly biological "need," but rather in relation to the

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libidinal and material production of the human species in and through history. It is in this vein that schizoanalysis deconstructs the opposition between symbolic and imaginary by insisting that before and beneath the metaphoric alienations of both registers, desire remains always in metonymic contact with the real of nature and history.9 Moreover, the distinction between registers itself thereby appears as a historical product: the penetration of premodern society by the market establishes the nuclear family in a distinct "domestic" sphere of reproduction as the basis of imaginary recoding (Lacan's "no/name-of-the-father"; Freud's "family romance") - separate from the "public" sphere of capitalist production, locus of the decoding of the socio-symbolic by the processes of axiomatization. The market also establishes modern individuality as a distinct "personal" space of imaginary recoding characterized by the invention of "self" through consumption; in the figure of the modern dandy, Baudelaire was among the first to define and inhabit it publicly. From the perspective of schizoanalysis, then, Lacan appears to reinforce rather than challenge the limits of modernism, in effect remaining prisoner to a kind of after-image of the very ego he is at such pains to denounce. Granted, its foundation in the mirror-image makes the ego as imaginary anchor for metaphoric self-identifications an "alienated" construct: but that leaves out of consideration the part-object relations that precede and/or escape mirror-fixation altogether. Moreover, inasmuch as the relations of ecstatic merger and murderous rivalry that Lacan attributes to the imaginary register themselves derive from the unsynthesized life and death instincts, they are equally characteristic of the pre-mirror-stage, part-object relations of the "corps morcele," as Kernberg's analysis of borderline conditions confirms. Thus, in its commitment to the centrality of the symbolic Oedipus complex, much of Lacanian psychoanalysis indiscriminately lumps together whatever is an-Oedipal under the ego-oriented rubric "imaginary," whereas schizoanalysis insists on distinguishing the ego-centered investments of the imaginary from the metonymy of part-object desire

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and real reference characteristic of schizophrenia. Especially in the decoded socio-symbolic order of capitalism, schizophrenic engagement with nature and history thus appears as the real alternative to the alienations of the privatized imaginary and reified symbolic registers alike - whence the alternating rhythms of decoding and recoding that comprise modern life, as epitomized in the case of Baudelaire. This schizoanalytic study of Baudelaire suggests that in modernity, non-ego-centered, schizophrenic engagement with the real takes two basic social forms, corresponding to drivederivatives fueled by the life and death instincts. The moment of real engagement fueled by Thanatos takes social form in the rivalry of class struggle over true democracy — whence the importance of Baudelaire's participation in the Revolution of 1848 and the intensity of his reactions to its demise at the hands of Napoleon III. 10 The moment of schizophrenic real engagement fueled by Eros, meanwhile, takes the social form of association with nature and the human species ("the people") - precisely what Baudelairean modernism suppresses via masochism in the bitterly disillusioned rejection of romanticism and revolution following the coup d'etat of 1851. In recoil from such ideal-shattering disappointment, Baudelaire withdraws from real engagement into the ironic recoding of evilification, and in revenge rewrites his former enthusiasm for revolution as a cynical predilection for pure death and destruction, revising the "Spleen and Ideal" section for the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai to end with spleen and evil. When, in a subsequent cycle of decoding, the "Tableaux Parisiens" stage yet another metonymic encounter with the real, Haussmann's Paris itself will bear the stigma of failed revolution, as we saw in "Le Cygne." Masochism is thus a crucial moment of Baudelaire's trajectory from romanticism into modernity. The return of the repudiated super-ego in Masochian narrative abruptly terminates the romantic-idealizing relation to woman, nature, the revolutionary crowd of 1848 - transforming it into vengeful rage at the loss of the ideal and the natural. Divorce from nature is, of course, a universal fate imposed by the regime of exchange-

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value under capitalism, but whereas the general public takes refuge in recoding of one form or another (ranging from the overstuffed domestic interior, to the blandishments of "mass culture," to the rampant nationalism characteristic of mid-tolate nineteenth-century France and beyond), modernism suffers the brunt of decoding in high anxiety and registers it in a tragic mode. Unlike the comparatively comforting resolution of Masochian narrative, Baudelairean modernism stages and occupies the rift between defunct ideals and an utterly bankrupt reality with uncompromising intensity. If, as we have said, spleen represents the moment of high anxiety, when under the sway of the repetition compulsion ego-defense finally prevails over drive-gratification, the "Tableaux Parisiens" represent quintessential Baudelairean high modernism, in their tragic depiction of an urban Poet hopelessly lost in the familiar surroundings of his own home town. Yet for Baudelaire, failure of the masochistic repudiation of the super-ego produces a further and absolutely singular result: not the incoherent oscillations between adulation and scorn under the sway of temporary ego ideals typical of ordinary borderline narcissism, but rather solid fusion of his martyred, romantic ideal ego with the stable ego ideal provided by the figure of Edgar Allan Poe. This enables Baudelaire to retain the contradictory positions resolved by Masochian narrative: to keep both idealism and cynicism in play, but at the same time keep both at a distance carefully maintained by the functioning of the prose poem narrator. In neglecting the role of the narrator, Benjamin's modernist reading of Baudelaire stops with the forlorn poetics of high modernism: in recoil from the victory of bourgeois commerce, Benjamin concludes, "Baudelaire battled the crowd — with the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain or the wind ... He indicated the price for which the sensation of the modern age may be had: the disintegration of the aura in the experience of shock. He paid dearly for consenting to this disintegration - but it is the law of his poetry" (p. 154). Baudelaire's adoption of Poe as ego ideal, however, propels him beyond modernism into a certain postmodernism in the figure of the programmer: it enables him to register with

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acute sensitivity the antinomies of modern market existence as lived in Bohemia, yet illuminate them poetically with some equanimity and aplomb. THE SPLIT STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL LIFE IN MODERNITY

The perpetual self-invention of "free subjectivity" defining modernity is played out in the form of alternating cycles of decoding and recoding, of daring innovation followed by hyperanxious self-consolidation, followed by renewed innovation, and so on. When history apparently grinds to a halt with the founding of the Second Empire in France, such cyclical evolution is arrested and completely transformed by the cataclysmic defeat of the ideal by the real, henceforth appearing in modernism as the static and irremediable split between prostitute and dandy, between selling and buying as basic roles on the capitalist market. In Baudelairean postmodernism, the borderline splitting suffered in nominally democratic but actually authoritarian market society is transformed via the ego-ideal role-model of Poe into the narcissistic defense of the programmer, who detaches himself and stands back from the modernist tragedy of modern existence to contemplate his former selves and endow their spectacle with poetic value.11 Baudelaire's relations to modernity are thus ultimately ambivalent: even while his modernism eschews any relation to nature, his investment in the promise and disappointments of history remains legible throughout the prose poems — for the defensive splitting of the narcissistic narrator never completely dispels the attraction to and sympathy for the figures of defeat, as we have seen. Baudelaire's postmodernism is thus unlike the "postmodernism" of today's affect-free hedonism, wherein narcissistic defensive splitting has become so hardened as to allow well-heeled yuppies to enjoy for their own sake the glitzy surfaces of new urban facades without bothering to look behind them and around the corner to witness the homeless poor huddling in doorways and eating from other people's garbage cans. This is the human reality of modern capitalism which the postmodern Baudelaire insists that we confront in so many of

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the prose poems - the face of poverty, as it were, that the prose narrator refuses to shoo away from the opulent cafe window ("Les Yeux des pauvres"). Even from above or beyond the antinomies of buying and selling, in the position of the prose poem narrator as programmer, Baudelaire refuses to forsake investment in history entirely. At this last stage of his evolution, the moments of decoding and recoding comprising distinct cycles in the verse collection are condensed in the individual prose poems into a single moment, in which recoding accompanies decoding sur place ("on the spot" or "in place"), as Deleuze and Guattari put it. Decoding - transformed by the shocks of 1848-51 and the triumph of bourgeois commerce into borderline splitting between "good" and " b a d " : between the ideal and the real and between buying and selling - now appears in the figures of prostitute and dandy, who continue to register in vivid caricature the antinomies of market existence. Recoding supervenes, meanwhile, in the figure or function of the narcissistic prose narrator, whose defensive splitting always maintains a certain distance from the scenes of violence and suffering under observation, without ever losing contact with them. For schizoanalysis, the ultimate determinations of decoding and recoding lie in the rhythms of capitalist expansion, delineated by Marx in Volume III of Capital.12 Decoding and recoding are the semiotic moments of the fundamentally asemiotic process of axiomatization that conjoins abstract "factors" of production and consumption to produce and realize surplus-value. The private appropriation of surplus-value as liquid profit then instigates another round of investment, production, sale, and consumption in the pursuit of further surplus, thereby perpetuating the process of capital accumulation on an ever-expanding scale. Viewed in the context of this on-going process, decoding designates the operations by which existing instruments of production and consumption are revolutionized by fresh investment for the sake of increased productivity and invigorated consumerism; recoding designates the moment at which the existing and privately owned instruments of production and consumption are held fixed for a

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time in order to realize maximum profit on the investment already made in them, thereby blocking further innovation in production and consumption alike. For schizoanalysis, it is this dynamic that constitutes the "motor of history" of advanced capitalist development.13 The moments of decoding and recoding in Baudelaire's life and poetry do not, of course, correspond to the moments of this dynamic directly. Instead, an ensemble of what are variously called "mediations" (Hegel), "instances" (Althusser), discursive and institutional "practices" (Foucault), or media of registration (Deleuze and Guattari) intervene "between" the economic dynamic outlined above and the dynamics of decoding and recoding in other domains; relations among these various domains are complex and historically contingent. Yet in Baudelaire's day, the take-off of French market capitalism coincides with the founding of the Second Empire; the exhilaration and promise of decoding in the cultural sphere (especially in Bohemia) is accompanied and confounded by the scandal of patently authoritarian recoding in the political sphere. In the face of this contradiction, modernism sets itself above and apart from a culture based largely on recoding and pursues decoding in ever purer and more abstract forms; the Second Empire strikes back with emblematic vehemence, bringing the entire first generation of French modernists — Baudelaire, Flaubert, and eventually Courbet - to trial for cultural and/or political Use majeste. Given his peculiar family history, the ensuing disillusionment affects Baudelaire particularly severely, propelling him through masochism into borderline narcissism. But his is the special case that proves the rule: throughout modernity, the recurrent failures of the democratic ideal promised by modern society to prevail over the continually resurgent authoritarianism spawned by capitalist recoding in defense of the private appropriation of surplusvalue produce ego-shattering disillusionment and foster narcissistic repudiation of historical engagement. So while the dynamic of capital accumulation generates the basic rhythms of decoding and recoding in market society, borderline splitting derives from the gulf between production

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and consumption that is opened by the market and continually enlarged and exacerbated by the expansion of capital. It was Benjamin who first explained Baudelaire's growing acclaim in terms of the "structure of experience" his work would share with its readers; and a particular "structure of experience" has indeed enabled Baudelaire's work to "find the reader at whom [it] was aimed" (p. 109). To designate that structure, I borrowed the category of "borderline narcissism" from psychoanalysis, but its emergence and ubiquity as a therapeutic tool and cultural diagnosis derive from the libidinal-economic structure of modern capitalism itself. Social life in modernity is split by the well-nigh universally necessary practices of buying and selling oneself on the market, lived by Baudelaire at peak intensity in Bohemia, and registered in the quintessentially Baudelairean figures of the dandy and the prostitute. They epitomize the antinomies of modern market existence that make Baudelaire our exact contemporary, self-satisfied readers, our twin brother - the mirror-image, under late capitalism, of our very selves.

Notes

PREFACE 1 Thesis ix of "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations, PP- 257-58. 2 "Fusees" no. 15 (Oeuvres completes, p. 630 [hereafter OC]). 3 Thesis vi on the Philosophy of History, Illuminations, p. 255. 4 On "historical transference" of this kind, see de Certeau, The Writing of History; and LaCapra, Soundings in Critical Theory. 5 Thesis xvm of " Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations, p. 263; translation modified. 6 While this book was being written, three studies appeared confirming my sense that misogyny and an anti-narrative stance are crucial components of modernism: Charles Bernheimer's Figures of III Repute and Robert Scholes' " I n the Brothel of Modernism: Picasso and Joyce" on misogyny, and Karl Kroeber's Retelling/Rereading on narrative. (Edward Kaplan's study, Baudelaire's Prose Poems, also appeared while this book was being written, but since it is primarily thematic in orientation, it bears little on the reading of the prose poem collection offered here.) 7 Histoire Extraordinaire, p. 170. 1

INTRODUCTION

1 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism; page references henceforth follow quotations in the text. 2 The key essays for Lukacs's view of modernism and market culture are "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," in History and Class Consciousness, esp. Section 1, " The Phenomenon of Reification"; and "Narrate or Describe," in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, pp. 110-49; s e e a ^ so hi s Studies in European Realism. 3 A similar objection is raised by Adorno: that Benjamin too quickly identifies "cultural traits" with "corresponding [Adorno's term] 278

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4 5

6

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features of the infrastructure"; for Adorno, "[Benjamin's] dialectic lacks one thing: mediation" — precisely the thing in his negative dialectics that defers, disseminates, and prevents identity. See Adorno's letters to Benjamin (particularly that of 1 o November 1938) in Aesthetics and Politics, esp. pp. 128-29. See De Man, "Anthropomorphism and Trope in Lyric," esp. pp. 254 and 262; also "Literary History and Literary Modernity." On the concept of the " absent cause," see Althusser, " Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract," in Lenin and Philosophy, pp. 229-42, esp. pp. 236-39; and " O n the Materialist Dialectic," in For Marx, pp. 163-218, esp. pp. 193-216. For readers' convenience, individual verse poems will be cited on their first mention in the text by roman numeral referring to their position in the second edition (1861) of Les Fleurs du Mai, and quotations will include line numbers; in the same vein, prose poems will be identified by arabic numeral designating their position in Petits Poemes en prose. In an article of 24 July 1857 in Le Pays, Barbey insists " il y a ici une architecture secrete, un plan calcule par le poete, meditatif et volontaire" (cited in the Crepet/Blin's critical edition, p. 247). On the "secret architecture" of Les Fleurs du Mai, see L. Benedetto, "L'Architecture des Fleurs du Mai," in ^eitschrift fur franzosische Sprache und Literatur 39 (1912): 18-70; A. Feuillerat, "L'Archi-

tecture des Fleurs du Mai," in Studies by Members of the French Department of Tale University (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941): 221-330; P. Hambly, "The Structure of Les Fleurs du Mai: Another Suggestion," Australian Journal of French Studies 8 (1971): 269-96; and M. Ruff, "Sur l'Architecture des Fleurs du Mai," Revue de Vhistoire litteraire de la France 37 (1930): 51-69, 393-402, and Chapter 9 of his Baudelaire. 8 In a letter to Vigny, Baudelaire says: " Le seul eloge que je sollicite pour ce livre est qu'on reconnaisse qu'il n'est pas un pur album et qu'il a un commencement et une fin. (The only praise I seek for this book is the recognition that it is not a mere album and that it has a beginning and an end.) " (Letter of 12 or 13 December 1861 to Alfred de Vigny, in Correspondance generate (henceforth CG), Vol. 4, no. 685, p. 9. 9 See esp. Johnson, Defigurations du langage poetique. 1 o The only study focused solely on the revisions Baudelaire made for the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai is C. Burns, " ' Architecture Secrete': Notes on the Second Edition of Les Fleurs du Mai," Nottingham French Studies 5-6 (1966): 67-79. I* is> however, purely thematic in orientation.

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11 On decoding, see their Anti-Oedipus, Vol. i of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, esp. pp. 40-43, 263-312 (33-35, 222-61). Page references will be given to both the French and English editions of this text (French [English]). 12 Marx and Engels' description in the "Communist Manifesto" of what I am calling "social decoding" reads as follows: The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the man of science into its paid wage laborers ... The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relation of production, and with them the whole relations of society... Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social condition, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air... (p. 10).

13

14

15 16 17

See Feuer, ed. Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, pp. 6-41. See Jameson, "Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of Modernism," esp. pp. 123-28. On "rationalization" in Weber, see his Economy and Society, esp. Vol. 1, Chapters 1-4; Vol. 2, Chapters 7-8; Vol. 3, Chapters 3, 10-11, 14. In addition to decoding (and recoding), axiomatization also sponsors an equally important, parallel process of deterritorialization (and reterritorialization). This process involves the disconnecting (and reconnecting) of labor-power from its material objects of investment, whereas decoding and recoding involve the investment of libido in symbolic representations rather than objects themselves. For more on the relations between decoding and deterritorialization and the evolution from the former to the latter in Deleuze and Guattari's work, see Holland, " The Anti-Oedipus: Postmodernism in Theory, or the post-Lacanian Historical Contextualization of Psychoanalysis" and "Commentary on Minor Literature." As noted in passing by Benjamin [Baudelaire, p. 113), and developed by Terdiman in Discourse/Counter-Discourse, esp. Chapter 2 on "Newspaper Culture." Louis-Philippe's first prime minister, Jacques Lafitte, himself a wealthy banker; the 1830 upheaval was known to some as "the bankers' revolution"; cf. Wright, France in Modern Times, p. 153. "Parmi les droits dont on a parle dans ces derniers temps, il y en a un qu'on a oublie ... le droit de se contredire. (Among the rights

Notes to pages 16-26

281

people have made so much of recently, one has been forgotten ... the right to contradict oneself.)" Cf. "Sur l'Album de Philoxene Boyer," OC, p. 291. 18 See Wing, The Limits of Narrative, esp. Chapter 6; and LaCapra, Madame Bovary on Trial. 19 See Jameson, "Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist: the Dissolution of the Referent and the Artificial Sublime," esp. p. 252.

20 See Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?" 21 For another critique of Lacan's excessively " linguistico-logical" conception of discourse and the unconscious, see Kristeva, "Within the Microcosm of'The Talking Cure'," esp. pp. 36-39; and in connection with borderline conditions, p. 42. 22 Although a complete archaeology of the notion of "symbolic order" in Lacan has not been done, see the remarks throughout Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (esp. Chapter 4). 23 Although the term "figures-of-the-despot" is mine, it derives from Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of despotism as a type of social formation; see the Anti-Oedipus, Partm, esp. pp. 227-62 (192-222). 24 Of course, real fathers' laws and interdictions may not be what Lacan means by the "nom/non-du-pere" at all, but he thereby completely abstracts his logico-linguistic account from real historical situations, effectively translating revolution into psychosis. The thrust of schizoanalysis is in the opposite direction, to resituate psychodynamics in history. 25 See Fenichel, " Ego-Disturbances and Their Treatment," Collected Papers, Vol. 2 (1954) pp. 109-28; and The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. 26 On the importance of naming in Lacan, see de Waelhens, Schizophrenia. 2 7 See Butor, Histoire Extraordinaire. 28 See Klein, Contributions and "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms"; Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism, esp. pp. 24-34; and Lacan, "Le Stade du miroir"; "Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse," esp. pp. 125-30, 173-75, 186-87; a n d "Subversion du sujet et dialectique du desir," esp. pp. 168-77. 29 See Laforgue, The Defeat of Baudelaire', Sartre, Baudelaire', Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud', and Blin, Le Sadisme de Baudelaire. 30 The best narrative study of Sacher-Masoch is Deleuze's Presentation de Sacher-Masoch. 31 I derive the term from Kernberg (although he does not use it extensively himself). Kernberg's analysis shows that nearly all narcissists are borderline, but borderline patients are not necess-

282

32

33 34 35 36

Notes to pages 26-32

arily narcissistic; borderline conditions are thus broader than, and include, narcissistic disorders. Both involve splitting as a crucial feature and/or basic defense-mechanism. See Attali, Noise, esp. pp. 106-09, l *8—19, 129-31; this translation has "molder" and "molding" instead of "programmer" and "programming." For the fashion industry, "designer" and "designing" are the appropriate English equivalents, but Attali's direct objects are usually people, not things, which makes "programming" the best choice. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, esp. Part 1, Chapter 2, pp. 27-73; and de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics. See Jakobson, "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbance"; page references henceforth follow quotations in the text. See Jameson, The Prison-House of Language, esp. pp. 22-39. Despite the invocation of Peirce, Jakobson seems at first to limit "reference to context" to other linguistic signs, in "Two Aspects." The remainder of the essay makes it clear, however, that the metonymic axis includes extra-linguistic contexts as well: aphasics suffering from "similarity disorder" (in whose discourse the metonymic axis therefore predominates), he says, feel unable to utter a sentence which responds neither to the cues of [their] interlocutor nor to the actual situation. The sentence " it rains " cannot be produced unless the utterer sees that it is actually raining. The deeper the utterance is embedded in the verbal or non-verbal context, the higher are the chances of its successful performance by this class of patients (p. 78, my emphasis).

The metonymic axis, in other words, supports and depends on what Jakobson elsewhere calls the "referential" function of language. For a discussion of how Lacanian psychoanalysis draws on this referential aspect of the metonymic axis, see Bernheimer, Flaubert and Kafka, esp. Chapter 1; for one theoretical formulation of how historically contingent social codes beyond langue shape discourse, see Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. 37 Distributed in a Greimasian rectangle, the semantic relations implied in Jakobsonian discourse analysis would look like this: sense

1

I

<

> reference

1

s

- s

I

I - s

s

I

I I

tautology <

I I

> non-sense

Notes to pages 32-43

283

38 Wittgenstein's famous remark occurs at the very end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; for Lacan's statement to the effect that the real is that which "resists symbolization" see Le Seminaire. Livre I, p. 80 and passim. 39 See Merleau-Ponty, " O n the Phenomenology of Language," in Signs, pp. 84-98, esp. pp. 89-92. 40 On methods of projection in representation, see Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, nos. 139-42, p. 216 and passim; for an

41

42 43 44 45

analogous discussion in Lacan, see "L 5 Instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient," esp. pp. 251-67. See Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, pp. 127-86, esp. pp. 170-82; for Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of " interpellation," see A Thousand Plateaus, p. 130. See Lacan, "L'Instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient." See White, Metahistory and Tropics of Discourse. See Culler, Structuralist Poetics, pp. 55-74, esp. pp. 57-65. Nietzsche: "We think only in the form of language - and thus believe in the ' eternal truth' of' reason'... We cease to think when we refuse to do so under the constraint of language... Rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme we cannot throw off" (The Will to Power, Book 3, no. 522; see also nos. 551 and 562). Wittgenstein: "We misunderstand the role of the ideal in our language... The ideal, as we think of it, is unshakable. You can never get outside it; you must always turn back... It is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off" {Philosophical Investigations, nos. 101-03). In Foucault, see especially The Birth of the Clinic,

Discipline and Punish, and The Archaeology of Knowledge. 46 See Johnson, The Critical Difference and Dejigurations du langage poetique.

2

C O R R E S P O N D E N C E S VERSUS BEAUTY

1 The centrality of " Correspondances" to our understanding of Baudelaire's poetry is attested to by the frequency of its anthologization and the disproportionate quantity of annotation it receives in critical editions, and is explicitly argued as well in fullblown interpretive studies such as Pommier's often cited La Mystique de Baudelaire. The quotation is from the Crepet/Blin critical edition, p. 295; they insist that the doctrine of synaesthesia expressed in "Correspondances" is "one of the major postulates governing his work ... from a technical as well as theoretical point of view" (p. 297).

284

Notes to pages 43-58

2 "Au lecteur" opens the entire collection, but is not part of the section entitled " Spleen et Ideal," and its rhetoric is very different from that of the section's first sixteen poems. 3 For reasons that will become clear, in order to make a crucial distinction parallel to the one between "author" and "narrator" in prose fiction, I capitalize "Poet" throughout when referring to the figure generated by a poetic text, and use "poet" when referring to Baudelaire (or some other writer of poetry); in the same vein, "Poetic" refers to the figure of the Poet, "poetic" to a property of the text. 4 On "La Beaute," see Crepet/Blin, p. 249; Mathias, "La Beaute" dans "Les Fleurs du Mai"; and F. Heck, "'La Beaute': Enigma of Irony," Nineteenth-Century French Studies 10 (1982): 85-95. On the beauty cycle as a whole, see Ruff, Baudelaire, pp. 61-62; Hambly, "The Structure of Les Fleurs du Mai: another suggestion," p. 277 and passsim; and K. Pung-Gu, "Les Fleurs du Mai: le cycle de la beaute feminine," Revue de Coree 10 (1979): 33-85. 5 For a Parnassian interpretation of the sonnet, see Feuillerat, " L'Architecture des Fleurs du Mai" pp. 237-38. Others link the statuary imagery with modern rather than classical sculpture, often citing the Salon of 1859 in support; see A. Frangois, "Le Sonnet sur 'La Beaute' des Fleurs du Mai," Mercure de France (1954): 259-66. The debate is reviewed by Heck in "La Beaute: Enigma of Irony." 6 Heck (ibid.) following Hubert (U Esthetique des "Fleurs du Mai") notes the irony of these self-defeating images and the dual image of the Poet produced by this irony (Baudelaire ironizing his own defeat as a Romantic poet), but flatly denies the importance of the last two lines and the poetics of the tercets as prefigurations of a very different aesthetic stance (p. 92). 7 On the importance of the difference between the communicative and textual levels for French modernism, see Chambers, Melancolie et opposition; and in general, his Story and Situation. 8 On inspiration, see "Fusees" no. 11 (OC, p. 626); on the worship of images, see "Mon coeur mis a n u " no. 53 (OC, p. 638), which goes on to glorify "le vagabondage et ce qu'on peut appeler le Bohemianisme, culte de la sensation multiplied (wanderlust and what might be called Bohemianism, a cult of multiple sensations)." 9 An insistence on the contextual determinants of meaning distinguishes this approach from recent readings of the same poem by Maclnnes, The Comical as Textual Practice in "Les Fleurs du Mai", pp. 74-80; and Wing, The Limits of Narrative, pp. 11-14. 1 o For a distinction similar to the one I am proposing here between

Notes to pages 59-81

11

12 13 14 15 16

17 18

285

metaphoric and metonymic irony, see Lang, Irony/Humor: Critical Paradigms', and for Flaubert, see Culler, The Uses of Uncertainty, esp. pp. 186-98. On schizoanalytic " deconstruction " of binary logic, see Deleuze and Guattari, the Anti-Oedipus, pp. 11-22 (5-16); on how it differs from Derridean deconstruction, see Holland, " Deterritorializing ' Deterritorialization,'" esp. pp. 55-56. Notably the ending poem "Le Voyage" (cxxvi, 1. 143), but also "L'Amour du mensonge" (XCVIII, I.23), both added to the second edition. "Deux qualites litteraires fondamentales: surnaturalisme et ironie" ("Fusees" no. 11 [OC, p. 626]). See Johnson, Defigurations du langage poetique, pp. 31-55; and for a similar treatment of the verse and prose " L'Invitation au voyage," see Johnson, The Critical Difference, pp. 23-48. The importance of fantasy and its potential for disrupting stable self-identity are confirmed by Bersani's discussion of the poem in his study of Baudelaire and Freud, pp. 35-45, esp. p. 42. In his "Richard Wagner et Tannhduser a Paris" (OC, p. 513). The fact that Baudelaire cites only the quatrains suggests a possible awareness on his part that the tercets do not remain faithful to that aesthetic. See De Man, "Anthropomorphism and Trope in Lyric," pp. 245-5 0 Though never disruptive enough to prevent the poem from being read as doctrine, the shifting aesthetics of " Correspondances" have received some critical attention: in addition to De Man, "Anthropomorphism and Trope in Lyric," see Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud, pp. 31-43; and (from a quite different perspective) Blin, Baudelaire, pp. 107-08 and 200-02. 3

SPLEEN AND EVIL

1 See Mossop, Baudelaire's Tragic Hero, pp. 160-67, 175-78; the quotation is from p. 167. 2 See Chapter 1, note 7. 3 In the famous letter to Ancelle (of 18 February 1866), Baudelaire says: " Is it necessary to tell you ... that I have put all my heart, all my tenderness, all my religion (disguised), all my hatred into this atrocious book? It is true that I will write the opposite, that I will swear to all the gods that it is a book of pure art, of monkeyshines, of juggling-tricks; and I will be lying like a tooth-puller (Faut-il vous d i r c . q u e dans ce livre atroce, j'ai mis tout mon coeur, toute ma

286

4 5

6 7 8 9 10

Notes to pages 81-103

tendresse, toute ma religion (travestie), toute ma haine? II est vrai que j'ecrirai le contraire, que je jurerai mes grands dieux que c'est un livre a"art pur, de singerie, de jonglerie', et je mentirai comme un arracheur de dents)" (CG, Vol. 5, no. 990, p. 271). Letter of 12 or 13 December 1861 to Alfred Vigny, in CG, Vol. 4, no. 685, p. 9; see Chapter 1, note 8. In the letter of 1 April 1861, apparently replying to her renewed complaints following the appearance of the second edition, he insists that the new poems "were all made to fit the framework [of the first edition] (ils etaient tous faits pour le cadre) " (CG, Vol. 3, no. 636, p. 265). Bersani makes a similar distinction in Baudelaire and Freud, p. 19. " Correspondances " was not in fact taken as the key poem in the collection by any of Baudelaire's contemporaries; see Crepet/Blin, P- 2 95On the diverse valences of "comme," see De Man, "Anthropomorphism and Trope in Lyric," esp. pp. 248-50; see also Deguy, "La Poesie en question," esp. pp. 421 and 430. See L. Jenny, " Le Poetique et le narratif," Poetique 25-28 (1976): 440-49, esp. p. 444. For the essay on Theophile Gautier, see OC, pp. 458-69; the passage reads as follows: C'est... le caractere de la vraie poesie d'avoir le flot regulier, comme les grands fleuves qui s'approchent de la mer, leur mort et leur infini, et d'eviter la precipitation et la saccade. La poesie lyrique s'elance, mais toujours d'un mouvement elastique et ondule. Tout ce qui est brusque et casse lui deplait... (pp. 467-68) It is ... in the nature of true poetry to have a steadyflow,like those great rivers approaching the sea, their death and their infinity, and never to appear hurried and abrupt. Lyric poetry does soar, but always with a smooth,flowingmotion. Nothing brusque or choppy befits it...

11 See for instance Jenny, " Le Poetique et le narratif"; Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, esp. pp. 163 and 165; andjakobson, "Une Microscopie du dernier Spleen dans Les Fleurs du Mai," Tel Quel 29 (1967): 12-24. 12 See Jenny, "Le poetique et le narratif," p. 446. 13 For a similar romantic treatment of the "seasons" of a human life span, see Lamartine's "Automne" (1819). 14 See V. Brombert, "Lyrisme et depersonnalisation: l'exemple de Baudelaire (Spleen, LXXV)," Romantisme 6 (1973): 29-37, es P- P3315 "Mon coeur mis a n u " no. 53 (OC, p. 638).

Notes to pages 112-135 4

287

R O M A N T I C T E M P E R A M E N T AND " S P L E E N AND I D E A L "

1 See Benjamin, Baudelaire, pp. 107-54; page references henceforth follow quotations in the text. 2 In addition to his Baudelaire study, see Benjamin, "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov," in Illuminations, pp. 83-109; and Godzich, "Introduction" to Chambers, Story and Situation. 3 See Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, standard edition, Vol. 18. References to the standard edition will henceforth be abbreviated as SE, followed by volume number or volume: page number(s). 4 See his brief discussion of "Perte d'aureole" (Petits Poemes en prose [46]) at the end of "Some Motifs," pp. 152—54; for an even richer treatment of the poem in historical context, see Wohlfarth, " ' Perte d'aureole': the Emergence of the Dandy." 5 See the Salon of 1846 (OC, pp. 227-61); this quotation is from p. 244; page references henceforth follow quotations in the text. 6 This is what Fried finds perplexing in "Painting Memories": " ...what are we to make of the statement that a painting just this instant seen for the first time... is already part of our store of memories?" (p. 514). 7 See the Salon 0/1845 (^C> PP- 204-24); page references henceforth follow quotations in the text. 8 See Fried, "Painting Memories," p. 521 and passim. 9 On the role of this uncoded element in the instauration of the unconscious, see Lacan's discussion of the "fort-da" game in Le Seminaire: Livre XI, pp. 60—61 and passim. 10 Rather the trauma operative in any manifest disturbance attributes ex post facto its particular meaning to the primal signifier, from which it nevertheless derives its force. On the primal signifier, see Lacan, Le Seminaire: Livre XI, pp. 188-200; and on its implications for therapy, pp. 224-28. 11 See the Salon 0/1859 (OC, pp. 391-424); this quotation is from p. 400. 12 For schizoanalysis, part-object relations productive of the real always "precede" and underlie imaginary and symbolic relations which only approach it asymptotically; see the Anti-Oedipus, pp. 34-35 (26-27) and passim. 13 This is an irony more or less completely absent from Deleuze and Guattari's perspective in the Anti-Oedipus', they appear more sensitive to it in A Thousand Plateaus, especially in Plateau 6,

288

Notes to pages 135-48

" Comment se faire un corps sans organes?" ("How do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?"). 14 In Civilization and Its Discontents (SE Vol. 21), Freud himself may be said to have contributed to such a historical appreciation of the fate of the pleasure-principle. For according to Freud, as anxiety resident in the ego increases (due to increases in repression concomitant with the "progress" of civilization), the aim of merely reducing tension by binding sensory input so as to prevent trauma overrides the aim of actually gratifying drives. See also Beyond the Pleasure Principle (SE Vol. 18).

5

M O D E R N I S T I M A G I N A T I O N AND T H E "TABLEAUX PARISIENS"

1 See Chambers, "Trois paysages urbains." 2 See the Salon 0/1859 (^^? PP- 39 I - 4 2 4) \ this quotation is from p. 395. Page references henceforth follow quotations in the text. See also the anti-realist remarks in Section 7, entitled "Paysage" (pp. 414-18). 3 As he says in concluding, " I have made it a rule to seek Imagination throughout the Salon (Je m'etais impose de chercher Tlmagination a travers le Salon)" (p. 424). 4 Baudelaire repeats this critique of Ingres in Le peintre de la vie moderne (OC, pp. 546-65), contrasting Ingres' tendency to "impose ... borrowed classical ideas" on all his subjects with Guys' fidelity to first impressions of the real, his "obeissance a l'impression... [au] fantastique reel de la vie" (p. 554). 5 Le peintre de la vie moderne, p. 552, with Baudelaire's emphasis; page references henceforth follow quotations in the text. 6 Baudelaire uses the two - drawing and writing - interchangeably in the essay, and insists at one point for example that Poe's short story is actually a tableau: " Vous souvenez-vous d'un tableau (en verite, c'est un tableau!) ecrit par la plus puissante plume de cette epoque... " (p. 551). 7 " Pour la plupart d'entre nous, surtout pour les gens d'affaires, aux yeux de qui la nature n'existe pas, si ce n'est dans ses rapports d'utilite avec leurs affaires, le fantastique reel de la vie est singulierement emousse. (For most of us - especially for businessmen, in whose eyes nature does not exist, unless it appears useful for their business - the fantastical real of life appears exceedingly dull)" (p. 554). 8 See Chesters, "Baudelaire and the Limits of Poetry." 9 See Stierle, "Baudelaire and the Tradition of the Tableau de Paris."

Notes to pages 156-83

289

10 The change in line 10 from "pipeuse d'amant" to "reine de roman" in the second edition strengthens the rapport between the action of this poem and the ennoblement practiced by the sun ("11 ennoblit le sort des choses les plus viles" 1. 18) in "Le Soleil," which now directly precedes it in the collection. 11 The temporal instantaneity characteristic of modern urban life is accentuated in the collected version of the poem: Baudelaire substitutes "Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaitre" for " . . . m ' a fait souvenir et renaitre," thereby eliminating any reference to memory and past experience. 12 On metaphor and metonymy as components of " psychopoetic structure," see Bernheimer, Flaubert and Kafka, esp. Chapter 1, "Toward a Psychopoetics of Textual Structure"; for typologies of literary discourse based on metaphor and metonymy (as suggested by Jakobson), see Barthes, Elements of Semiology, esp. p. 60; and Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing. 13 See Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 117-24 and 131-36.

6 DECODING AND RECODING IN THE PROSE POEMS

1 Butor, Histoire Extraordinaire: Essay on a Dream of Baudelaire's] page references henceforth follow quotations in the text. 2 See Pichois and Ziegler, Baudelaire, Chapters 2-4; Hemmings, Baudelaire the Damned, Chapters 1-3; and Starkie, Baudelaire, Chapters 1-2, esp. pp. 40-41. 3 For an orthodox psychoanalytic reading, see T. Bassim, La Femme dans Voeuvre de Baudelaire (Neuchatel: Maison de la Baconniere, 1974)4 Poems in the Duval cycle alluding to Africa and the Orient include "Parfum exotique," "La Chevelure," and "Sed non satiata"; see E. Ahearn, "Black Woman, White Poet: Exile and Exploitation in Baudelaire's Jeanne Duval Poems," French Review 5111-3 (1977): 212-20.

5 The date of this essay is important: it shows that Baudelaire maintained his commitment to the ideals of the Second Republic and to "revolutionary" poetry right up until the coup d'etat of December 1851, which Baudelaire would later claim "physically depoliticized " him. 6 See "Notice de 'Revelation Magnetique'" (OC, pp. 312-13); the quotation is on p. 313. 7 See "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe" (OC, pp. 346-53), esp. p. 347: "Poe was always great - not only in his nobler creations,

290

8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15

16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Notes to pages 183-200

but also as a joker. For he was never a dupe! (Poe fut toujours grand, non-seulement dans ses conceptions nobles, mais encore comme farceur. Car il ne fut jamais dupe!) " See Baudelaire's account in his dedication ofHistoires extraordinaires to Maria Clem (Poe's stepmother) (OC, p. 317). See Butor, Histoire Extraordinaire, p. 109. See Seigel, Bohemian Paris, p. 270. As Baudelaire asks about Poe: "Are there then certain souls who are destined for the altar, who are what we might call sacred, and who must go to their death and their glory through a perpetual sacrifice of themselves? (Y a-t-il done des ames vouees a l'autel, sacrees pour ainsi dire, et qui doivent marcher a la mort et a la gloire a travers un sacrifice permanent d'elles-memes?) " ("Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et ses ouvrages" [OC, p. 319]). This attitude supports what Sartre calls the "loser wins" strategy typical of Baudelaire and many of his contemporaries; see Sartre, Baudelaire and U Idiot de lafamille. See Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason', Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism) and Holland, "Narcissism from Baudelaire to Sartre." See Deleuze, Presentation de Sacher-Masoch. See Reik, Masochism in Modern Man. On the dynamics of repudiation ("foreculsion") in Lacan, see "D'une question preliminaire a tout traitement possible de la psychose," esp. pp. 72-92. On denial as a feature of borderline narcissism, see Kernberg, Borderline Conditions, pp. 31-33, 100-01. On the distinction between feelings of inferiority and guilt in relation to the super-ego, see the entries for "ideal du moi" (pp. 184-86), "moi ideal" (pp. 255-56), and "surmoi" (pp. 471-74) in Laplanche and Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse; and Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 105—10. See Deleuze, Presentation de Sacher-Masoch, pp. 34-35. Cited ibid., p. 57. Among the most prominent contemporaries similarly affected by the failure of the Second Republic, one would want to count Flaubert and Marx. As Baudelaire described his forthcoming collection in Le Messager de V Assemblee (9 April 1851); cited in Butor, Histoire Extraordinaire, p. 66. See Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, SE 23:202-04. See Laplanche and Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, pp. 163-67; the quotation is on p. 166. For another definition of modernism along these lines, see Bernheimer, Figures of III Repute.

Notes to pages 203-ig

291

24 See Starobinski, "Sur quelques repondants allegoriques du poete," esp. pp. 408 and 412. 25 Without listing the entire collection, some of the most striking examples of cynical violence with more or less responsibility include "Le Mauvais Vitrier," "Le Galant Tireur," "Une mort heroique," "La Femme sauvage et la petite-maitresse," "Assommons les pauvres," "La Fausse Monnaie," "Portraits de maitresses," and " Perte d'aureole;" depictions of idealized suffering with more or less sympathy would include " Laquelle est la vraie? " " Le Vieux Saltimbanque," "Les Fenetres," "Le Fou et la Venus," "Les Bienfaits de la lune," "Les Veuves," "Les Yeux des pauvres," and "Les Bons Chiens." 26 Hence the term "projective identification" in discussions of borderline narcissism; see Kernberg, Borderline Conditions, pp. 30-31 and 80-83. 27 The prose poem narrator has often been misconstrued in this way, notably by Bersani {Baudelaire and Freud) and Mauron {Le Dernier Baudelaire). 28 Throughout his discussions of Poe, Baudelaire vents his hatred against modern "mercantile society" (p. 318), which he likens to an immense accounting firm (p. 320), where the idea of utility dominates all else (p. 350). 29 See OC, p. 326; cited in Butor, p. 86. 30 See Wohlfarth, " c Perte d'aureole': the Emergence of the Dandy," for a beautiful account of the psycho- and socio-dynamics of this poem. 31 For the original anecdote, see Petits Poemes en prose, Kopp, ed., p. 345 ("Fusees" no. 11 [OC, p. 627]). 32 For the earlier published version of" Les Projets " (in Le Present, 24 August 1857), see Petits Poemes en prose, Kopp, ed., pp. 73-74. 33 As Wohlfarth puts it: "The elasticity of [the narrator's] double identity enables him to make the best of both worlds. He can abandon himself promiscuously to the pleasures of democracy, crowds and ' prostitution' without renouncing a hidden, potable, purely psychic sense of his own aristocracy which accompanies all his activities as a saving, distinguishing arriere-pensee." See " ' Perte d'aureole': the Emergence of the Dandy," p. 567. 34 Compare, for example, Baudelaire's "Portraits de maitresses" (42) with the case history Kernberg discusses on p. 237 of Borderline Conditions. 35 Not many cultural critics recognize the composite nature of narcissism, even though Kernberg is explicit about it: "the pathological grandiose self compensates for the generally ' ego-

292

Notes to pages

2ig-j8

weakening' effects of the primitive defensive organization [splitting], a common characteristic of narcissistic personalities and patients of a borderline personality organization." See Kernberg, Borderline Conditions, p. 269; and Holland, "Narcissism from Baudelaire to Sartre." 36 Cf. "Mon coeur mis a n u " no. 1 {OC, p. 630): "De la vaporisation et de la centralisation du Moi. Tout est la." 7

THE PROSE POEM NARRATOR

1 See Freud, " Screen Memories," SE Vol. 3; the quotation is on p. 322. 2 See Starkie, Baudelaire; and Hemmings, Baudelaire the Damned. 3 "II faut aller fusilier le General Aupick! A bas Aupick!" See Hemmings, Baudelaire the Damned, p. 92. 4 OC, p. 146. 5 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 112; see also Terdiman, Discourse/ Counter-Discourse, Chapter 2. 6 "Mon coeur mis a n u " no. 25 {OC, p. 635). 7 See the letter to Ancelle of 5 March 1852, CG, Vol. 1, no. 119, pp. 151-52; and "Mon cceur mis a n u " no. 5 {OC, p. 631). The catastrophe by no means put an end to Baudelaire's passion for politics; in 1859 he says: " I have convinced myself twenty times that I would no longer get interested in politics, yet every time a serious issue comes up, I am overtaken by curiosity and enthusiasm (Je me suis vingt fois persuade que je ne m'interesserais plus a la politique et a chaque question grave, je suis repris de curiosite et de passion)"; and as late as 1862 he still considers himself a "revolutionary at heart ([j'ai un] vieux fond d'esprit revolutionnaire)" {OC, p. 316); see also Hemmings, Baudelaire the Damned, pp. 99-100. 8 "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe" {OC, pp. 346-53); the quotation is from p. 349. See also the discussion in Pachet, Le Premier venu. 9 "Mon cceur mis a n u " no. 41 {OC, p. 639); and "Fusees" no. 15 {OC, p. 629). I o Electoral tax requirements limited suffrage to less than 1 o percent of the population; Grafia {Bohemian Versus Bourgeois, p. 13) puts the figure at 8 percent. I1 Seigel, Bohemian Paris, p . 217. 12 See ibid., pp. 5-13 and passim; and Grafia, Bohemian Versus Bourgeois. 13 OC, pp. 737, 623, 624. 14 OC, pp. 632, 631, 628.

Notes to pages 238-52 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40

293

OC, pp. 639, 632. OC, pp. 634, 632. OC, pp. 637. See Hugo's preface to Lucrezia Borgia, cited in Grana, Bohemian versus Bourgeois, p. 40. OC, p. 292. From "Pauvre Belgique" (OC, p. 698). "Fusees" no. 10 (OC, p. 626). "Fusees" no. 14 (OC, p. 628). "Mon coeur mis a n u " no. 13 (OC, p. 632). This is the explicit theme of the prose poem "A une heure du matin" (10). "Fusees" no. 1 (OC, p. 623). See Bernheimer, Figures of III Repute, and Beizer, Family Plots; references to Figures henceforth follow quotations in the text. Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis, esp. pp. 87-97, 101—1 1, 114-18. Balzac, Splendeur et misere des courtisanes (1844-47; Paris: GarnierFlammarion, 1968), p. 619. "Mon coeur mis a n u " no. 1 (OC, p. 630). "Mon coeur mis a n u " no. 3 (OC, p. 630). In "Sur l'Album de Philoxene Boyer" (OC, p. 291). On prostitution and loss of identity in Baudelaire, see Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud, esp. pp. 8-15. On bourgeois domestic aesthetics, see Williams, Dream Worlds, and Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, Chapter 13, esp. pp. 230-40. Such disparity between public and private life forms the social matrix for schizophrenia, according to Laing; see The Divided Self "Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et ses ouvrages" (OC, p. 326). OC, p. 459. "Mon coeur mis a n u " no. 36 (OC, p. 638). See Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud: " w e have in the Petits Poemes en prose a kind of austere sophistication which consists in the poet's merely moving away from his own performances. His irony is equivalent to self-withdrawals; and this casual but devastating negativity would seem to be the poet's only escape from his violent projects toward his own desires" (p. 150). But Bersani equates this withdrawn narrative perspective with the super-ego, which we have shown is not the case in Baudelaire. Attali, Noise, esp. pp. 128-32. On the relations between semiotic and economic surplus-value, see Baudrillard, Pour une critique de Veconomie politique du signe; and Godzich, "The Semiotics of Semiotics."

294

Notes to pages 253-71

41 The formula for profit is M ' = M + 6; if M ' = M is metaphor, then M ' = M + 6 is hyperbolic metaphor. 42 OC, p. 146. 43 "Fusees" no. 13 {OC, p. 628). 8

CONCLUSION

1 See the Anti-Oedipus, pp. 34-37, 114-26, 134-45 (26-30, 95-106, 113-22).

2 I have extrapolated the notion of" apparatus of registration " from the Anti-Oedipus; see esp. pp. 16-22, 89-100, 142-45 (10-16, 75-84, 119-22). 3 On the centrality of prostitution for the aesthetics of modernism, see Bernheimer, Figures of III Repute and Scholes, " I n the Brothel of Modernism". 4 Flaubert's major crisis occurs within the family, Baudelaire's in society; thus the difference between schizoanalysis and Sartre's existential psychoanalysis, which respects the boundary between family and society that Deleuze and Guattari consider a historical artifice or product; see esp. Sartre's LIdiot de lafamille. 5 This is the definition of modernity implicit in Levi-Strauss; see his "Introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss," pp. 16—20; see also Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition; and Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Plateau 9, " Micropolitique et segmentarite" ("Micropolitics and Segmentarity"). 6 This is one way schizoanalysis situates psychoanalysis historically: Freud's discovery of pure libido is possible only once it has been freed from biological and social determination by ego-centric anxiety deriving from the predominance of exchange-value over " use-value "; this is the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari claim that Freud is the "Adam Smith of psychiatry" —both abstract libido and abstract labor-power are historically functions of market capitalism. See the Anti-Oedipus, pp. 321—24 (270—71). 7 Freud himself propounds one (albeit unilinear) version of the historical assessment of social anxiety in Civilization and its Discontents (SE Vol. 21), by claiming that anxiety increases as civilization "progresses." 8 Chapter 3 of the Anti-Oedipus provides a typology of libidinal modes of production under the rubrics "Savagery, Despotism, and Civilized Men." 9 See the Anti-Oedipus, pp. 32-43, 52-53, 82-84 (25-35, 61-62, 98-100). For a similar view of how the real as contingent history "deconstructs" the imaginary/symbolic opposition, see Jameson, "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan."

Notes to pages 272-76

295

10 On class struggle and the death instinct, see Bataille, "The Notion of Expenditure " in The Accursed Share. 11 For a different view of postmodernism in Baudelaire, see Jameson, "Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist." 12 K. Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, pp. 247-60, esp. pp. 249-50; see also the Anti-Oedipus, pp. 309-310 (259-60). 13 See the Anti-Oedipus, pp. 411-19, 439~5 6 (343-5°> 3 6 6 ~ 8 0 )-

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Index

advertising 4, 7, 14, 33, 149, 233-34, 247; and modernism: 1, 27, 252-55> 265 allegory 54-59, 64-67, 105-07, 253, 268 Althusser, L. 7, 35, 276 anxiety 3, 113, 215; capitalism: 224-26, 232-35; ego-defense: 132-35, 172; masochism: 191-92; modernism: 268-74 Attali, J. 26, 251-52, 263 authoritarianism xii—xiv, 6; capitalism: 274-76; masochism: 193-96; Second Empire: 27, 223-24, 228, 232, 258-59 Balzac, Honore de 5, 14, 16, 149, 242—43, 260-61 Baudelaire, Charles Les Fleurs du Mai " A une dame Creole " 180 "A une mendiante rousse" 156—59, 169-71, 215 " A une passante" 157,161-64, 225 "L'Albatros" 44 "Alchimie de la douleur" 80, 95-96 "La Beaute" 28, 43-69, 74, 76, 79, 87, 104-05, 128-30, 184, 200, 206, 251 "Benediction" 43, 123, 151, 186, 214 "Une Charogne" 131 "La Ghevelure" 68, 72-75, 86, J 29, 131 " Gorrespondances " 4—5, 25, 28, 40-45. 53, 68-70, 73, 75-79, 82-83, i n , 154 " Crepuscule du matin " 138, 150, 171

3°3

'' Crepuscule du soir " 137,168 "Le Cygne" 158-61, 169, 182, 199, 272 "Elevation" 44, 83, 131 "L'Ennemi" 91-94, 124 "Le Gout du neant" 80, 86 " L'Heautontimoroumenos" 29, 80, 96-104, 185, 204 "L'Homme et la mer" 83, 127 "L'Horloge" 8-9, 29, 81, 104-07, 112-14, 132, 137-38, 158, 161, 166, 199 "Horreur sympathique" 80, 96 "Hymne a la beaute" 54, 59-68, 71-74, 85-86, 106, 129, 266 "L'Ideal" 14, 54, 251 "L'Irremediable" 29, 80, 96-104, 134 " L e j e u " 167-70, 185, 204 "Le Masque" 54-59, 66, 69, 74, 85, 165 "Le Mort joyeux" 86 "Obsession" 82-86, 162—64 "Parfum exotique" 68-72, 75, 84, 1 29-31 "Paysage" 137-38, 150-55, 169—70, 182 "LesPhares" 102-03,123-27 '' Reve Parisien " 169-71 '' Les Sept Vieillards " 161 -66, 191 "Le Soleil" 22, 137-38, 150-56, 159, 169, 225 "Spleen" no. 1 88,91-94 "Spleen" no. 2 87-91, 106 "Spleen" no. 3 86—87 "Spleen" no. 4 88, 91 " Le Tonneau de la haine " 86 "La Vie anterieure" 68—71, 115, 123-24, 179

3°4

Index

Petits Poemes en prose

'' Assommons les pauvres " 210-12, 215, 252-53, 29m. "La Chambre double" 206-07, 229 "Le Confiteor de l'artiste" 205, 250 "La Corde" 207—08, 213, 221 "Les Fenetres" 212, 29m. "Le Galant Tireur" 202, 218, 29m. "Le Gateau" 252—55 "L'Invitation au voyage" 246 '' Le Joueur genereux " 205 "Le Joujou du pauvre" 229, 243 "Laquelle est la vraie?" 200—01, 228, 29m. "Le Mauvais Vitrier" 201-08, 210, 215, 218, 244, 29 m. " Une mort heroique " 202—06, 210, 215, 230, 233, 29m. "Perte d'aureole" 4-5,213-15, 225—26, 29m. "Les Projets" 215-18, 233, 29m. " La Soupe et les nuages " 233 " Les Tentations " 205 "Les Veuves" 244,29m. " Le Vieux Saltimbanque " 204, 212, 215, 218, 229, 29m. "Les Yeux des pauvres" 229, 243-44, 275, 29 m. "Notes nouvelles sur E. A. Poe" 228 "Le peintre de la vie moderne" 140-47, 155 Salon of 1845 119, 121 Salon of 1846 116—23, J 7 9

Salon of1859 56-57, 139-47, 155, 179 beautification 47-54, 63-73, 90, 94-95, i n , 147, 267—68; programming: 252-55; psychodynamics of: 129—35; "Tableaux Parisiens": 148-49, i55-57> 219 Benjamin, W. xi—xiv, 2-7, 135, 267; consumption: 245; modernism: 273; Second Empire culture: 224-27; shock-defense: 22—24, 111-24; the structure of experience: 6 > 255-56, 277 Bersani, L. 250; masochism: 187—90; prose poem narrator: 205-06 binary logic 244; "Hymne a la beaute": 58—67; socio-symbolic order: 16, 36, 104, 126

Blanqui, Auguste 232 Bohemia 235-47, 257> 260-61, 264-65, 274, 276-77 borderline conditions xiii, 25-27; historical conditions: 221-22, 227-32, 248-50, 273-77; masochism: 194-200; prose poem narrator: 204—06, 208-13, 218—20 (see also narcissism; splitting) Butor, M. xvi, 9, 23, 177-84, 209, 244 capitalism xii—xiv, 2-4, 6, 19, 227-28, 240, 247-58, 263-65, 271-77; anxiety: 6, 234—35, 2^95 decoding: 9-15, 36 Chambers, R. 137 commerce 1-2, 7, 149; dandy: 239-48; prose poems: 208,215—19,228-30, 232-34 communicative function 51-52, 56-67, 90, 128, 184, 218, 255 consumption/consumer society 3-4, 14, 215-17; dandy: 6, 233-34, 239-48, 271; and programming: 251-58 correspondences (program) 83, 114-15, 158—66, 173, 180; psychodynamics of: 127-35, 267-68 defense 3-4, 157-65, 172; dandy: 240—41; decoding: 22, 28—29, in—14, 132-35, 224-26; splitting: 25—26, 191-204, 215-19, 268—75 democracy xii, 5-7, 183-84, 188-89, 227-28, 231—34, 272, 274—76 desire 124-26, 129—34, 166—72, 192-96, 258; metonymy of: 18-19, 37, 162-64, 265-66, 271 Dupont, Pierre 177, 181-82, 187, 240 evilification i n , 133-34, 169, 173, 185-87, 196,272 Flaubert, Gustave 14, 16, 260-61, 276 Fourier, Charles 181-83 Freud, S. 24, 190-93, 199; Benjamin: 3, 111-13, 117; Nachtraglichkeit:

xiii, 19, 221-22, 258 Hugo, Victor 21, 182, 240-42 imaginary (the) 126-30; decoding: 21-25, 197-99, 268-72; romanticism: 28, 178—80, 265-67 intensification 64, 86-94, 106—07, 131-38, 226, 250-52, 268

Index irony 28-29, 209, 219, 251, 272; Beauty: 49-54, 129; epistemology: 2, 32-35. 57~595 66-67, 133; e v i l : 95-104, 134, 272; and Edgar Allan Poe: 183-85, 209, 219, 251 Jakobson, R. 11, 30—39, 58, 131

Johnson, B. 73-74

Kernberg, O. 24-26, 198-99, 219-22, 271 Lacan, J. xiii-xiv, 17-26, 30-38, 124-26, 129; masochism: 193, 197—99; modernism: 133—35, 268-71; Nachtrdglichkeit: 221-22, 258 Lukacs, G. 2-7, 12-15, 17 lyric xiii, 2-3, 267; disappearance: 51-52, 65-66, 86-87, 90-93, 98—103, 114, 218-19; subjectivity: 25, 132-34, 171, 234, 255-56, 265 Mallarme, Stephane 36 market xiii, 2—6, 262—65, 269—71, 274-77; borderline conditions: 26—27, 30, 207—09, 228-30, 233-57; decoding: 10—17, 21—22, 37-39, 259 Marx, Karl xiii, 12, 227, 247, 270, 275 masochism xiv, 26, 185—96, 208-09, 223-27, 232, 272-73 memory 3, 20, 28, 33-37, 111—23, 178-80; decoding: 73-75, 86-90, 106-07, J 27-48, 158-62, 166, 268; Nachtrdglichkeit\ 221-22, 258 modernism xv, 1-10, 150—57, 166-73, 185, 210, 247—51, 260—76; decoding: 14—17, 22-23, 26—30, 39-43; narrative: 197, 200, 205, 240-43; textuality: 51-52, 103 modernity xiii-xv, 3—4, 231-35, 238, 261-77; art: 120—23, 139—43; decoding: 14-17, 20—22, 26-29, 37, 39, 133-35; structure of experience: 112-15, 155-66, 172, 190-92, 219—20, 224-26, 231-35, 241-46, 256-57 Napoleon III xii, 3, 6-7, 22-23, l&l~&% 227-32, 258-59; masochism: 194-95, 224 narcissism xiii-xiv, 25—27, 193-97, 209—32, 248-51, 273—77 (see also borderline conditions)

3°5

narrative xv, 5-7, 27—29, 204—05, 242-43, 256, Masochian: 26, 192-200, 223, 272—73 narrator 3, 25-30, 56-57, 263-64, 274-75; prose poem: 199-220, 229-30, 248-57 nature xv, 5, 267—74; decoding: 68—74, 76-77, 82-84, 92-94, 138, 142-45; repudiation: 150-57, 166, 169-70, romanticism: 27-28,43-45, 123, 127 overcoding 123-27, 186 Poe, Edgar Allan 23, 27, 177, 182—85, 233; ego ideal: 209-12, 218-19, 228, 248-51, 257-58, 273-74 pleasure principle 111-13,132-35, 190-92, 224, 268—70 postmodernism xv, 1, 15, 273-74 primal signifier 125-27, 133-35 programmer, programming 26-27, 30, 25i-57> 273-75 prosopopoeia 51-52, 105, 129, 132, 200 real (the) 17, 20—22, 28-29, 157, 161, 268-72; masochism: 194, 199, 204, 229; reference: 25,32-39,57-59, 94, 129—30, 147, 149, 172, 266 recognition 20-21, 34—37, 126, 138, 141, 172, 204-08; decoding: 130-35, 158—61, 165-67, 179, 191, 266-70 reference 11, 56-59, 94-95, 138—39, decoding: 16—17, 28-29, 66—67, 131-32; epistemology: 32-37, 147-49, J57> J 65, I 7 I - 2 , 262, 265-68 registration 10, 22, 39, 144-45, J79> 256-69, 273-77 romanticism xii, xv, 4-6, 22-23, 25-28, 120-23, 232, 240-42, 267-68; Beauty cycle: 51-53, 58-59, 66-68; " Correspondances": 43-45, 73-76; masochism: 185-90, 195—96; spleen: 80—85, 89, 91-95, 103-04; "Tableaux Parisiens": I I 5 ~57> 253-55 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von xiv, 190-96, 199, 223-24; modernism: 26, 204-05, 272-73 satanism 133, 173, 185-87, 195-96 shock 3-4, 6-7, in—14, 157—65, 172, 191, 224-26; art: 117-20, 141-46;

306

Index

borderline conditions: 204, 208, 233, 240-41, 275 socio-symbolic order 15-21, 34—36, 121-24, 187-190, 228, 232; decoding: 59-64, 127-35, 236-38, 265-67, 271—72 spleen 8, 22, 28-29, 86-95, I 3 I ~38, 172; defense: m - 1 5 , 226, 268, 273; trauma: 103—07, 127, 148, 224 splitting 3-4, 7, 24-27, 104, 274-77; historical conditions: 224-32, 247-51, 258, 274-77; prose poems: 193—206, 212-19; "Tableaux Parisiens": 167, 172

surplus-value 11-13,251-55,263, 275-76, 293n, 294n. symbolic (the) 16-23, 34~37> J 24-29, 197—99, 268—72; masochism: 192-94, 204-08 textual function 51-52, 56—57, 67, 90, 128-29, 184, 218, 255 trauma 21-22, 28, 113-14, 180, 199-200, 222-24; decoding: 123-27, 266; defense: 132-34, 191-94, 211, 268—69 value-hierarchies 36, 59-67, 104, 126, 242-43, 266

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN FRENCH

General editor: Michael Bowie (All Souls College, Oxford) Editorial Board: R. Howard Bloch (University of California, Berkeley), Ross Chambers (University of Michigan), Antoine Compagnon (Columbia University), Peter France (University of Edinburgh), Toril Moi (Duke University), Naomi Schor (Duke University) Also in the series (* denotes titles now out of print) 1. j . M. COCKING

Proust: Collected Essays on the Writer and his Art 2. LEO BERSANI

The Death of Stephane Mallarme *3.

MARIAN HOBSON

The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in EighteenthCentury France 4. L E O S P I T Z E R , translated and edited by David Bellos Essays on Seventeenth-Century French Literature 5. NORMAN BRYSON

Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix 6. ANN MOSS

Poetry and Fable: Studies in Mythological Narrative in Sixteenth-Century France 7. RHIANNON GOLDTHORPE

Sartre: Literature and Theory 8. DIANA KNIGHT

Flaubert's Characters: The Language of Illusion 9. ANDREW MARTIN

The Knowledge of Ignorance: From Genesis to Jules Verne 10. GEOFFREY BENNINGTON

Sententiousness and the Novel: Laying Down the Law in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction *II.

PENNY FLORENCE

Mallarme, Manet and Redon: Visual and Aural Signs and the Generation of Meaning 12.

CHRISTOPHER PRENDERGAST

The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, and Flaubert 13. NAOMI SEGAL

The Unintended Reader: Feminism and Manon Lescaut

14.

15.

*l6.

17.

GLIVE SCOTT

A Question of Syllables: Essays in Nineteenth-Century French Verse STIRLING HAIG

Flaubert and the Gift of Speech: Dialogue and Discourse in Four 'Modern' Novels

NATHANIEL WING

The Limits of Narrative: Essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud and Mallarme

MITCHELL GREENBERG

Corneille, Classicism and the Ruses of Symmetry *l8.

HOWARD DAVIES

Sartre and ' Les Temps Modernes'

19.

ROBERT GREER COHN

20.

CELIA BRITTON

21.

DAVID SCOTT

22.

ANN JEFFERSON

23.

DALIA JUDOVITZ

24.

Mallarme's Prose Poems: A Critical Study Claude Simon: Writing the Visible Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in NineteenthCentury France

Reading Realism in Stendhal Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity

RICHARD D. E. BURTON

Baudelaire in 1859

25.

MICHAEL MORIARTY

26.

JOHN FORRESTER

27.

JEROME SCHWARTZ

28.

DAVID BAGULEY

29.

Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida Irony and Ideology in Rabelais: Structures of Subversion

Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision LESLIE HILL

Beckett's Fiction: In Different Words

30.

F. W. LEAKEY

31.

SARAH KAY

32.

GILLIAN JONDORF

Baudelaire: Collected Essays, 1953-1988 Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry

French Renaissance Tragedy: The Dramatic Word

33-

LAWRENCE D. KRITZMAN

The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance

34.

JERRY G. NASH

35.

PETER FRANCE

36.

MITCHELL GREENBERG

37.

TOM CONLEY

38. 39.

The Love Aesthetics of Maurice Sceve: Poetry and Struggle Politeness and its Discontents: Problems in French Classical Culture Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century Drama and Prose: The Family Romance of French Classicism

The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing MARGERY EVANS

Baudelaire and Intertextuality: Poetry at the Crossroads JUDITH STILL

Justice and Difference in the Works of Rousseau: Bienfaisance and Pudeur

40.

CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON

41.

CAROL A. MOSSMAN

42.

DANIEL BREWER

System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida

43.

Politics and Narratives of Birth: Gynocolonization from Rousseau to Zola The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France: Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing ROBERTA L. KRUEGER

Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance

44. JAMES H. REID

Narration and Description in the French Realist Novel: The Temporality of Lying and Forgetting