In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Nineteenth Century French Studies 31.1&2 (2002) 160-163



[Access article in PDF]

Book Review

Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity


Patricia A. Ward, ed. Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2001. Pp. xii + 230. ISBN 0-8265-1377-8

Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity pays unwitting tribute to Paul Valéry's characterization of modernity as the enduring sphere for "the most disparate ideas and the most conflicting principles of life and knowledge." Certain of its fourteen essays (honoring the life work of Claude Pichois) happily explore various mani-festations of what the introduction names the enigma of modernity (x). The other essays (the best to my mind) question this enigma, opposing to it the continued dynamic of Baudelaire's modernity as the potential antidote to (literary) history's desire to embrace this same modernity only to better overcome it by confining it to a measurable era.

Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity opens with the section "Aesthetic Categories" and with Michel Brix's "Modern Beauty versus Platonist Beauty," a rehearsal of the argument that, unlike the neo-Platonism of the Jena Romantics, [End Page 160] Baudelaire's relativism divorces the Beautiful from the Good. William Franke's "Linguistic Turning of the Symbol" complicates Baudelaire's modernity. Franke contrasts poetic relativism to the symbol's supposed revelatory, natural, and ana-logical universality, to note that this universality verges on an ideality unrelated "to anything beyond the purely linguistic sphere" (21). Such is the symbol's "double aspect": it strives toward the real only better to retreat into the decidedly non-romantic reduction of all things to the absolute of language. In so depriving itself of its temporal object, the symbol ensures its own demise. In "Gautier as Seer of the Origins of Modernity in Baudelaire," Lois Cassandra Hamrick argues that the poets' experience of modernity's aesthetic relativity can be grasped only by considering the stakes of transposing the temporal dimension of sight into poetical vision.

"Poetry and Painting" is one of the stronger, if least well named, sections of Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity. It opens with Sima Godfrey's "Strangers in the Park," which traces Edouard Manet and Baudelaire's aesthetic kinship not to their affinity for similar subject matter, but to their equally similar modernist techniques. Godfrey's analysis of Manet's La Musique aux Tuileries and Baudelaire's prose poem "Les Veuves" argues that art historians have remained blind to the poetic inter-textuality and "art critical insight" of these respective works. Critical blindness is similarly at stake in "The Subject of Le Peintre de la vie moderne," in which Timothy Raser pointedly asks whether Baudelaire's essay might not be "about nothing" (64). "About nothing" since, as Raser neatly demonstrates, Le Peintre de la vie moderne is neither the objective representation of a given artist's life nor simply a semiotic exercise in not meaning what it says, and nor solely the modernist writerly allegory of its own aporetic endeavor (to re-present the transience of beauty's presence). Finally, Raser most resoundingly suggests that Le Peintre de la vie moderne does not express, as Paul de Man would have it, an exemplary theory of modernity. The insight to be glimpsed from such radical negativity is that, in systematically displacing the essay's own subject matter, it blinds literary and art historians alike. Raser thus amply succeeds in suggesting that modernism is an experience (hardly solely aesthetic) the consequences of which are yet to come. Kevin Newmark's "Off the Charts: Walter Benjamin's Depiction of Baudelaire" also reflects on Le Peintre de la vie moderne, to suggest that Baudelaire's writings point most clearly and confoundedly toward an unknown that is neither past nor present, neither here nor there, on the map of literary-historical representations. They point towards Baudelaire's unrepresentable "incognito" (Benjamin), which spells the undoing of every painterly representational model of poetry that defines itself as a form of strategic violence seeking to round up all events to constrain them to a traditional mapping of human history. For New-mark, this...

pdf