The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form (review)

Every age gets the writers it deserves, and in Debarati Sanyal's study of Baudelaire, this age gets the poet of ironical counter-violence. In a post 9/11 climate of trauma, Baudelaire is here reread as a writer who not only chronicled the shock of the nineteenth century but expressed opposition to its violent history through the politics of representation and form. A poetics of irony, counter-violence, and critique runs from Baudelaire to other committed ironists who range from Rachilde through Sartre and Camus to Virginie Despentes and in whose writing representation is acknowledged as betrayal by authors who nevertheless refuse the melancholy of mere testimony, contra Levinas, a theorist who surprisingly makes no appearance in Sanyal's discussion.

In simple outline, the book seeks to proffer three recontextualisatons of Baudelaire. The first focuses on his poetry's ability to show ways of recording and resisting the violence of history beyond current emphases on trauma and terror. The book, thus, attests to literature's spirit of critique by underlining the contestatory possibilities of irony. The second recontextualisation argues that the emphasis on a "crisis of representation" within studies of modernism underplays the role of literature as offering, through the interrogation of form and representation, an active critique of modernity. The third recontextualisation considers Baudelaire's legacy, especially in the twentieth century, for writers similarly concerned with commitment and engagement through literary representation. However, just as importantly, Sanyal affirms the methodological importance of close reading "when the specificity of literary discourse is imperilled by approaches that view the text as yet another cultural artefact 'reflecting' its historical context." Instead, Sanyal's admirable study works outwards from the literary text to history, emphasising its ability to engage, critique, and recontextualise.

Above all, the book claims "it is through the deployment of poetic form and specific rhetorical strategies" that Baudelaire and the other writers in Sanyal's study challenge the representational systems of a particular historical moments, while art's power lies in its "performative transmission" of suffering through modes of ironical representation, amounting to "counter-violence" in the disruptive power of form. Thus, for Sanyal, the political power of modernism is reaffirmed in a genealogy of representational engagement running from Baudelaire to the present in the oscillation between commitment and testimony that has characterized discussions of engaged literature since the Holocaust. A strand of committed ironists is consequently the focus of Sanyal's thesis which valuably reorients discussions of not only Baudelaire but the many literary writers who have critiqued modernity. The readings focus in particular on political representations of the cultural, sexual, and artistic body as sites of aesthetic contestation and representational struggle and so further challenge accusations of modernism as a literary style that retreated from history and materiality.

Sanyal sees the dominance in criticism of trauma and modernism's representational crisis as constraining, whereas attention to violence allows consideration of literature's role and the writer's agency through irony's formal opposition. As such, Baudelaire also appears in some ways as a precursor to postcolonial writers such as Rushdie and Kureishi who maintain that irony is the only available modern mode, the one way of appropriately addressing modernity. While violence more importantly admits of counter-violence, a view of history as terror results from the emphasis on trauma for Sanyal, who also points to the violence inherent in the notion that we are all victims of a traumatic history.

While trauma is too flat and victimizing a paradigm, the discourse of violence allows for a more differentiated and multiple understanding of relationships to history in line with a Foucauldian reading of power, in which the subject may take the position of "executioner, witness, bystander, accomplice and rebel" as well as victim. Violence is here posited on different levels in the writings under discussion and in critique: symbolic, structural, material, and corporeal. Ultimately, this aims at revealing a different approach to contemporary dilemmas over the visible and invisible costs...