The Price of Authenticity: Modernism and Suicide in Baudelaire's "La Corde"

Because the work of art can never coincide with its subject, because it is always belated with respect to what it represents, any attempt to determine its authenticity as a function of its adequacy to its subject will fail. As several of the papers in this cluster of essays suggest, the question of authenticity must therefore be addressed on different grounds—variously described here in terms of "a kind of authenticity grounded in the fake" (Lynes), of a claim that it is "only within the realm of the artificial that the category of the authentic has any meaning" (Shumway), of paintings whose meaning resides in their non-referentiality (Rothman), of what Wilde calls "the truth of masks" (Riquelme). The poem, painting, or musical performance becomes authentic at the moment that it is adequate to its own nonmimetic nature, at the moment it owns up to its inauthenticity.

But what does it mean to be authentically inauthentic, to be a real counterfeit? If modernism entails the imperative to convey something whose significance lies in what Baudelaire calls "sa qualité essentielle de présent," then modernism confronts the question of authenticity with particular clarity. The modern is defined fundamentally in opposition to the past, that is, as that which distinguishes what is modern from what precedes it.¹ The attempt to convey the particularity of the modern, its very presentness, is then bound to fail, for the act of representation itself relegates the present to the past and can at best appear as a repetition of a lost present.² Modernism thus emerges, as Vincent Sherry reminds us in his seminar contribution, as a series of radical Nows, a tradition of the new, in which authenticity is associated not with efforts to keep the present present, but rather with transience itself. The authentic is defined by its own destruction.

* * *

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Walter Benjamin finds one of the earliest theorizations of modernist aesthetics in images of suicide in Baudelaire's writing, namely in the essay "On the Heroism of Modern Life" from the Salon of 1846. Baudelaire's references to suicide follow a series of claims that announce the advent of modernism. "It is true that the great tradition is lost, and the new tradition has not yet been created . . . . Absolute eternal beauty does not exist, or at best is a mere abstraction drawn superficially from the surface of several kinds of beauty. The element of particularity of each form of beauty comes from the passions, and just as we have our particular passions, so we have our beauty."³ Modernity, then, spells the end of an ideal of timelessness. Modern beauty, the beauty that modernist art seeks to convey, inheres in the particularity of the moment; whatever seems to transcend or survive the moment is nothing but an illusion, an abstraction. To illustrate his argument, Baudelaire turns to images of suicide:

Except for Hercules on Mount Oeta, Cato of Utica, and Cleopatra, whose suicides are not modern suicides, what other suicides do you see in classical painting? In all the lives of antiquity . . . you will not find the suicide of Jean-Jacques, or even the strange and marvelous suicide of Raphaël de Valentin [the protagonist of Balzac's La peau de chagrin].

[OC, 2:494]

In a footnote, Baudelaire explains these examples: "The first kills himself because the burning of his robe becomes intolerable; the second because he can no longer aid the cause of liberty; and that voluptuous queen because she has lost her throne and her lover; but none of them destroys themselves in order to change their skin in view of metempsychosis" (OC, 2:494). Hercules, Cato, and Cleopatra die, that is, in order to preserve and perpetuate their own self-images. In these deaths, self-determination and fate, action and reaction, converge such that how they are interpreted cannot but coincide with their intentions. Thus while particular renderings of the deaths of these ancient heroes may appear superficially different, every image of the classical suicide demonstrates the perfect correspondence of image and manner of...