Baudelaire: Individualism, Dandyism and the Philosophy of History (review)

Howells, Bernard. Baudelaire: Individualism, Dandyism and the Philosophy of History. Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, Legenda, 1996. Pp. 207. ISBN 1-900755-01-7

This volume, which brings together a fine collection of essays based on articles published between 1983 and 1994, makes easily accessible a valuable series of medi-tations on Baudelaire's critical writing. Dr Howells, whose methodology is primarily that of meticulous historical and contextual research, elucidates Baude-laire's thinking as it is expressed in a variety of different texts, presenting it above all from the premise that it is "never abstract or philosophically disinterested" being rather "the expression of a failed attempt to come to terms with the complexities and contradictions of his own experience."

It is this sensitivity to the poet's changing convictions at different moments of his life that makes Howells's Baudelaire so rich and so convincing a figure. Take for instance his summary of the early art salons and of La Fanfarlo: "the early prose texts [...] have an intellectual finesse and buoyancy which hardened later on, with an increasing sense of failure to achieve self-understanding, into the tendency to seek emotional reassurance in polarities." Such readings lead to a deeper and more satisfying appreciation of the poet who would later present himself as torn between the vaporization and centralization of the self, showing both how that dualism was already present in the early writings and how much what later become schematic and sclerotic was initially imbued with the energy that derives from dynamic tension. Howells offers a particularly compelling set of insights on Baudelaire as art critic, arguing that what set him apart from his contemporaries was not the key concepts he deployed nor yet his grasp of technical issues or the acuity of his judgments, admirable though all these may be, but rather the textual quality of his writing. There is indeed, as Howells affirms, a distinct pleasure in rereading the salons, a pleasure to be found in the slippery ironies, unexpected interconnections, the density of certain formulations. But Howells is not deflecting attention away from what is said here by his focus on language itself: on the contrary, he pays close attention to the connotations of those terms that have in Baudelaire's writing not just special importance but also characteristic interpretation, terms like doute, tempérament, naïveté. And he is perhaps especially helpful in exploring the theories of line and color to which Baudelaire is responding in his texts and with which he assumes his readers are fully familiar. The final chapter, which is devoted to Chevreul is a case in point.

In similar ways, Howells sets the journaux intimes in a series of provocative contexts: that of the intrinsically romantic fragment, that of contemporary life-writing and its limitations, that of the dismantling of belief in the centrality of the individual self. In addition, he sharpens the focus on them by insisting on the extent to which their nature depends in large measure on their intended readership, that restricted and highly particularized audience they envisage.

While the first part of this collection focuses on writing, the second part is more concerned with reading. This is Baudelaire as iceberg, in Claude Pichois's term, the writer whose reading lurks like a huge submerged mass, whose presence we can intuit from surface indications but whose depth, nature, and complexity continue to elude us. Howells is determined to dig away at that iceberg's submerged depths, bringing to the task a pickax of particular acuity and an awareness that Baudelaire is both eclectic and fickle in his reading, taking from Emerson and Maistre, for instance, only what he needs at a particular moment. Moreover, as he argues, the resentment characteristic of Baudelaire's later years may make certain presences - that of Emerson is a case in point - most apparent where it is most fiercely resisted. Like many of his contemporaries, Baudelaire in his later...