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Decentering the Invitation, to Take the Trip Mary Ann Caws Qu’est-ce donc que la patrie? —Stéphane Mallarmé, Symphonie littéraire IN HOMAGE TO A CONCEPTION of setting-in (framing) and setting-out (tripping), corresponding to a central desire of absenting ourselves, let us imagine this as a three-stage voyage, rather anxious, and anxiously informed by some contemporary critical readings of Baudelaire, which I will be using in passing: in the first stage, his willed moving from same to other; in the second, his demonstration of the other in and as the self, through a self-vampirism extensive and extreme; and finally, a brief move from the verse to the prose version of Baude­ laire’s invitational stance, in the “Invitation au voyage” in the versions of 1855 and 1857 respectively—a peculiar trip in which textual versions and willed vision converge, leading to “Le Voyage” of 1859, the mental voyage we can at least salute, that Baudelaire placed last, after LesFleurs du mal as such. Some rules for the trip and the landscape as they are framed: the view will not be infinite, because only a constricted space is able to enhance and protect the desired intensity—or, if you like, the intensity of desire which is precisely the opposite of that dreaded impotence and sterility, that accedia which, like symbolist ennui, creeps into the best-willed visions, when they are not air-tight. Upon this desperate longing for air­ tightness much of the anxiety will focus. Baudelaire reflects upon the frame and its constricting possibilities in describing a painting by Penguilly d’Haridon: “The intense azure of the sky and the water, two quarters of rock which make a door open on the infinite (you know that the infinite appears deeper when it is more con­ stricted).” 1This constriction intensifies both spleen and sensuality, being as self-reflective as a poem enframed, of the kind we will look at, as it is desperate to enclose what it sees or feels. Indeed, the value of the voyage itself will be anchored finally in its own vision and the resulting enclosing work of the eye, brain, and hand. “Few people,” says Baudelaire, “are gifted with the capacity of seeing; there are fewer still who possess the power of expression.” 2That is what tripping is about: it is not about 28 Fa ll 1994 Caws going so much as about seeing, painting, saying: these actions are intense with the crimson of passion, as with the focussing-in of extreme anxiety. All of Baudelaire’s writing, verse and prose, like his criticism, means to be, and is, “partial, passionate, and political.” This is the definition of the modern itself: it is signed, like the works of Constantin Guys, with a “dazzling soul.” So this is to be an impassioned soul trip. Its goal will always be what Baudelaire uses as a motto: “To transform my volup­ tuousness into knowledge” (“Transformer ma volupté en connaissance,” 41). It’s All the Same I will start with some wills to closure, to the same read upon the same anxiety, against the leakage of and into any other. I think of the calm, the close calm, of the famously Dutch invitation to the trip of 1848 and its final words. This is the one, and we won’t be forgetting it, to Marie Daubrun, a mistress nevertheless addressed as “mon enfant, ma sœur” (“my child, my sister”). The poem announces a room where temporality seems benevolent, simply lending a lovely sheen to the surroundings announced as perfectly stable: Des meubles luisants. Polis par les ans, Décoreraient notre chambre (235) where everything is in delightful, hushed and yet sonorous correspon­ dence with what is most interior to us all: Tout y parlerait A l’âme en secret Sa douce langue natale. (236) Who wouldn’t want to set off immediately? Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, Luxe, calme et volupté. (236) Here, “volupté” has become a simple, calming pleasure, but never­ theless starts off a chain reaction of fullness, where the “luxe, calme et volupté” can spread out richly. VOL. XXXIV, NO. 3 29 L ’E sprit Créateur This...

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