Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) (review)

Choosing Les Fleurs du Mal and Madame Bovary as exemplary monuments of "contemporary modernity," Marder approaches them through Walter Benjamin's analysis of "the increasing atrophy of [our] experience" as we endure the overstimulation of modern life. She seeks inscriptions of the resulting disorders of time and memory in these texts by Baudelaire and Flaubert. Combining Lyotard with Jameson, she defines modernity not as a period, but as a way of experiencing time. Because we have lost touch with other ways of keeping time, she claims, we must repeatedly use revolutions to reset the clock, seeing catastrophe as progress (4-5).

In applying German theories of the 1930s to French books of the 1850s to explain the U.S. in 2000, Marder eliminates the distance between her proof texts and us by concealing it. She fails to recognize the real cultural changes reflected by Baudelaire and Flaubert: the decline of religious faith, the desacralization of art, and rampant commercialization. Her lower-casing the Mal of Baudelaire's original, intended title adds an iatrogenic dimension to the disorders of memory by erasing his allegorical-religious obsession; her omitting Flaubert's sub-title Mœurs de province obliterates his sense of rural place, where people are forever behind the times. Because she seeks evidence in explicit themes, excluding the implicatures of mimesis, she observes "we discover no clear traces of the 'shock experience' of modernity in Madame Bovary. Nor do we find any powerful evocation of 'voluntary and involuntary' memory" (8). Therefore she doesn't register, for example, the powerful onslaught of commerce and industrial development in Yonville: the new "chemin de grande vicinalité"; the ugly cotton mill under construction; Lheureux's methodical creation of new consumer needs through exotic imported products; his calculating use of credit to ruin his neighbors and to appropriate their property; and his plans to monopolize transportation. Nor does she realize that involuntary memories contribute to the core of Emma's, Charles's, and even père Rouault's psyche.

Marder offers two chapters on Les Fleurs du Mal, three on Madame Bovary, and no conclusion. Her translations of Baudelaire are jarring; their rhythms, sonorities, and diction show little sensitivity to poetry (Norman R. Shapiro is infinitely better). The first chapter, "Women Tell Time," examines how woman's speech in Baudelaire always shocks, because it recalls the painful necessity of living in time. Silenced, and distanced by being projected onto and into the sky, Baudelaire's alienated female figures function as "a lie that shields him from his own shattered perception of the world" (35). But he cannot escape his awareness that he needs the lie. The firmament degenerates to fetishized hair, which loops back to the real, inadequate person. After this interesting beginning, the last fifteen pages of this chapter lose intensity, and the discussion dissipates without conveying the full force of ontological fragmentation in Baudelaire. The emphasis on "the poet's" disavowals overlooks the powerful ironic insights of the prose poems - it is as if we tried to read "Manfred" straight, without mentioning Don Juan, or "Les Nuits" without Fantasio. Marder could rightly retort, however, that Baudelaire's misogyny persists even in his Romantic Irony.

Chapter 2, "Flat Death: Snapshots of History" (68-87) begins nostalgically: "any reflection on and of history encounters the trauma of how to be present not only to what has passed, but also to the activity of its passing" (68; the phrase "the trauma of how" betrays fundamental confusions: trauma is inflicted; "how" is enacted). Marder proceeds by analyzing how Benjamin's analysis of Baudelaire's "A une passante" in two essays depends on the critic's discovering a hidden "figure of history" in the poem. Linking the poet's valedictory phrase "fugitive beauté" here to the definition of modernity in "Le Peintre...