Baudelaire's Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony (review)

Stephens, Sonya. Baudelaire's Prose Poems. The Practice and Politics of Irony. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Pp. 181. ISBN 0-019-815877-7

This careful, clearly focused study delimits the essential characteristics of Baudelaire's Petits Poèmes en prose, no longer neglected by scholars, as the author explains in her helpful preface. In four large chapters, well documented with textual analyses (the citations remaining in French) and generous references to previous interpreters, Sonya Stephens advances our understanding of the polemics internal to the prose poems, using key texts to open these self-reflective fables (as I prefer to call them) to more sophisticated readings, showing particularly how Baudelaire deploys his political, ethical, literary, and esthetic values through various modes of irony.

Chapter 1, "Thresholds" (1-29), reviews Baudelaire's "lettre-dédicace" to Arsène Houssaye, originally published with the initial series in La Presse. Using Gérard Genette and Ross Chambers to great advantage, Stephens skillfully analyzes its complex address to the editor and to commonsensical readers. Examples of similar exchanges are "Le Miroir," "Le Chien et le flacon," the liminal piece, "L'Etranger," and "La Fausse Monnaie" - the latter being a model of the genre (25). The transactional mode of reading Baudelaire's prose poems is summarized by the problematic prayer at the end of "A une heure du matin" (29).

Chapter 2, "Lyricism and its Others" (30-71), extends our understanding of Baudelaire's ironic transactions with readers and with his own bent toward harmony. Stephens reviews a number of binary oppositions, of which "La chambre double" is the prime example. The poet's essay on Banville summarizes his own combination of passion and self-awareness: "L'âme lyrique fait des enjambées vastes comme des synthèses; l'esprit du romancier se délecte dans l'analyse" (33). An extensive analysis of "Le Thyrse" leads to observations on Liszt's and De Quincey's dualities. Significantly, Stephens's analysis of "Le Thyrse" offers the possibility of overcoming dualities through a harmonious amalgam, "the equivalent of Liszt's appreciation of Wagner as an equation"(43). Nevertheless, the corrosive effects of the prose poems remain essential.

Stephens advances an essential theoretical issue regarding the unitary subject of Le Spleen de Paris, or at least clarifies its terms. After examining Baudelaire's essay on Constantin Guys, "Le Confiteor de l'artiste," fables of the saltimbanque, and "Les Veuves," she concludes: "The power of the artist is here unequivocally stated and yet, in destabilizing the self-satisfaction of the other, there is also the implicit desta-bilization of the ironist's position. What is evident, then, is that, despite the multiplication of the self advocated in this poem, the voice of the unitary narrator remains powerful and does so because of the duplicity it manifests" (57-58; also 60-64, followed by an astute analysis of "Le Mauvais Vitrier").

The last chapters on irony as comic, grotesque, and politically oppositional discourse are the book's most valuable contributions (see 70-71 for a summary statement). Stephens takes seriously the historical and ideological setting, making effective use of Terdiman, Burton, Johnson, and others. Chapter 3, "The Politics of Form" (72-107), masterfully defines how the prose poem constitutes "a textual assault on the models(s) it contains and subverts" (72), demonstrating by deft exegesis how "the self-reflexivity, the self-referentiality of the prose poem and its discursive strategies . . . engage the reader in the perception of otherness without overt social confrontation" (74-75). The famous preface, "Aux Bourgeois," of the Salon de 1846 shows how parody attacks "the corruptive influence of the bourgeois appropriation of culture" (86), preparing us to reexamine "La Solitude," "Les Yeux des pauvres," "Assomons les pauvres!" and "Le Joujou du pauvre."

All the strands of Stephens's analysis come together in Chapter 4, "The Prose Poem and the Dualities of the Comic Art" (108-59). The...