Poetry, Truth, and Human Sanctity: Baudelaire's Experimental Genre

Poetry, Truth, and Human Sanctity: Baudelaire's Experimental Genre* Edward K. Kaplan LE SPLEEN DE PARIS. PETITS POÈMES EN PROSE, no longer the poet's "neglected masterpiece," is recognized as of comparable existential value, if not poetic quality, to Les Fleurs du Mal.1 My approach to Baudelaire's work in general emphasizes the generative tensions between its esthetic (or imaginative) and ethical (or realistic) dimensions—which unify his poems, prose fables, and critical essays. Countering an undue emphasis on fragmentation and incoherence, dandyism or perversity, I explore the consistent clash between the pleasures of fantasy or exploitation of other people as objects or pretexts of reverie, versus the yearning to communicate with people and to pursue moral and metaphysical certainty. The process of idealization and literary reverie as such—and its ethical shortcomings —becomes a germinal topic of his new genre. First published as a complete collection by Charles Asselineau and Théodore de Banville in the 1869 posthumous edition, what Baudelaire provisionally called "prose poems" fulfill his self-definition as a poet and thinker. These "fables of modern consciousness"—as I prefer (somewhat awkwardly) to label them—are experiments which perform the search for truth, not only experiential, subjective truth, but also rational or even spiritual truth. The originality of this genre consists in unmasking the inevitable fragility (or ontic untruth) of poetic desire. The fundamental question of reality—as over against literature as fiction or solipsism—is the hallmark of these sophisticated fables. The author's purported dream of inventing "une prose poétique sans rythme et sans rime," is less purposeful than his claim to deliver "la description de la vie moderne, ou plutôt d'une vie moderne et abstraite,"—that is, the consciousness of his narrator, a flâneur or Parisian prowler.2 His experimental genre honors the complexity of consciousness, an amalgam of contraries, dramatizing in a variety of narrative forms a number of conventional artistic and social situations.3 This focus on content is eminently appropriate, I believe, since Baudelaire the "philosopher" is inseparable from the imaginative hedonist. In his 1861 essay on Wagner, he describes the euphoria stimulated by the overture to Lohengrin as a combination of two normally segregated modes of consciousVol . XXXIX, No. 1 15 L'Esprit Créateur ness: "Alors je conçus pleinement l'idée d'une âme se mouvant dans un lieu lumineux, d'une extase faite de volupté et de connaissance, et planant audessus et bien loin du monde naturel."4 He then specifies his goal as critic: "transformer ma volupté en connaissance." The complete poet is both dreamer and critic, inwardly hypersensitive but devoted to objective truth. Euphoria and Insight—Baudelaire's self-reflective fables advance the ethical intentionality of his lyrical verse and provide a hermeneutical key to his entire work.5 As a matter of contrast, the dynamics of reverie can be typified by two well-known verse pieces, published side by side in Les Fleurs du Mal, which depict imaginative utopias disconnecting the poet from distinct persons: "Parfum exotique" and "La Chevelure" (FM, 22-23; OCl, 25-27) develop highly charged fantasies of (non-European) women who gratify his esthetic or self-centered needs to the exclusion of their own autonomy. The poet's inward voyages are stimulated by body parts, not by the person herself. The sonnet "Parfum exotique" explicitly defines this solipsistic blend of vision, smell, and touch: Quand, les yeux fermés, en un soir chaud d'automne, Je respire l'odeur de ton sein chaleureux, Je vois se dérouler des rivages heureux Qu'éblouissent les feux d'un soleil monotone; (11. 1-4) Idealized desire feels infinite, generating poems as well as visions. His pleasure intensifies in "La Chevelure" (38 lines), which extends these quasi-erotic images, further specifying its method: "La langoureuse Asie et la brûlante Afrique, / Tout un monde lointain, absent, presque défunt, / Vit dans tes profondeurs , forêt aromatique!" (11. 6-8). The goal is to achieve an arousal that combines passivity and productive illusion, as he calls it, "féconde paresse." Je plongerai ma tête amoureuse d'ivresse Dans ce noir océan où l'autre est...