Grotesque Figures: Baudelaire, Rousseau and the Aesthetics of Modernity (review)

As Virginia E. Swain observes in her introduction, the question of Baudelaire's relationship to Rousseau has gone largely unexamined beyond the general assumption that the poet had nothing but scorn for the believer in the innate goodness of man. Inspired by the explicit reference to the Rêveries in one of the titles Baudelaire considered for his prose poems — 'Le Promeneur solitaire' — Swain sets out to trace Rousseau's presence in Le Spleen de Paris, suggesting that many of its characters are drawn from ideological debates about France's post-revolutionary identity. Although Baudelaire seldom discusses Rousseau, Swain posits the double, hybrid figures of allegory and the grotesque, such as rococo art, as common ground between the two authors. Rousseau himself is then read allegorically, as both the literary-historical figure and the nineteenth-century poncif alternately praised and vilified in political disputes. In this context, Baudelaire's discarded title would have been highly charged, drawing attention to 'the subversive political implications of his poetic activity' (p. 73), the substance of which is analysed in detail in Chapters Four to Seven. Highlighting the structural affinity between allegory and caricature, notably the socio-political cartoon which flourished in France during this period, Swain suggests that the allegorical figure of 'Rousseau' lies behind the assorted social types which populate Baudelaire's Paris; as the prototype, then, of alienated modern man, whose discomfort stems in part from the repercussions of the Revolution, Rousseau is said to appear variously as the étranger, solitaire, saltimbanque, mendiant or fou. While it might be overstating the case to argue that Baudelaire consistently neglects to name the author of the Rêveries 'precisely to keep under wraps the primary object of his fascination — Rousseau' (p. 82), the close readings which follow draw convincingly on many useful, fresh intertexts for the prose poems. Detailed analysis shows 'Le Mauvais Vitrier', 'Le Crépuscule du soir', 'Une mort héroï que' and 'La Corde' to be dense allegorical networks constructed upon echoes of Proudhon, Sainte-Beuve and Rousseau himself in texts such as Julie; ou, la Nouvelle Héloïse or his Confessions. The allegorical continues to inform the political dimension in Swain's reading of 'Les Yeux des pauvres' as a rejection of the imperial politics of exclusion and discursive repression, in a text which imports the rhetorical structure of Rousseau's entry on opera in Dictionnaire de musique. Similarly, 'Le Vieux Saltimbanque' is said to deal with Rousseau's problematic reception in the nineteenth century by drawing on elements from his textual self-portraits. On occasion the sheer density and uncertainty of these allegorical networks can lead to a confusing conclusion such as 'The poem is and is not an attack on Rousseau' (p. 105). On the whole, though, this is a thorough and engaging exploration of a neglected area which successfully convinces the reader that rather than simply scorning him, Baudelaire makes of Rousseau a productively unstable motif for nineteenth-century France's obsession with its painful past and its need to work through the traumas of the Revolution which he had come to embody.