Writing Poetry Against the Grain: Or, What Can Be Seen in “Les Yeux des pauvres”

Perhaps more dramatically foregrounded in the prose poems than in the verse of Les Fleurs du mal,¹ the Paris of the Second Empire emerges as the nucleus around which the collection of prose poems (posthumously) entitled Le Spleen de Paris forms. It is an assemblage of texts where the tectonic plates of spleen and ideal seem to drift into one another, and where the threads binding urban poverty and art emerge frequently enough for one astute critic to have dubbed it “le livre des pauvres.”² Finally, Le Spleen de Paris insists—as much as ever—on the critical link between literature and politics, between writing as a form of resistance to domination, to the erasure of memory, and as a kind of archive of the aspirations and violence of the 1848 revolution. In this essay, we seek to make a minor contribution to an already considerable and impressive scholarship on “Les Yeux des pauvres” by foregrounding the following claim(s): first, the poem’s discretely persistent gesturing towards its historical situation reveals a complex and subversive intervention of the “literary” into the ideological, of text into context, that leaves the Second Empire “myth” proclaiming the new Paris to be a democratic space in principle open to all in a pile of rubble by the poem’s excipit. The following reading proposes an interrogation of the relationship between the spectacle of absolute poverty and that of Second Empire Parisian nightlife, which considers both as metonymic designations for violence within social relations and history to which the text is anything but “imperméable.” Second, here, as in texts such as “Assommons les pauvres,” “La Fausse monnaie,” or “Un plaisant,” where the sphere of the social emerges in disfigured guises out of a blind-spot in the narrative which we might call “idiocy” (or, being radically self-absorbed), Baudelaire’s prose poem operates as the site of what we propose to conceptualize as a form of ideological dispossession: that is, a discursive practice foregrounding the material dispossession of the poor in Haussmann’s Paris, and complicating a form of subjectivity we might call “literary” (that is, the posture of a subject apt to passively, if somewhat philanthropically, consume the misery engendered by the process of production). Though it has been suggested that “Les Yeux des pauvres” may be read as a melancholic reflection on the impossibility of the Romantic ideal of spiritual communion in the era of modernity;³ a kind of apologia of imperial Paris’s broad bedazzling boulevards; or even a bitter post-lyrical re-writing of Les Fleurs du mal’s “La Beauté” (where the poet’s muse has eyes like “de purs miroirs qui font les choses plus belles”), we would like to place such accounts temporarily in suspense, without for as much displacing them, and argue that the female companion’s reaction merely renders so visible as to crever les yeux that which is covert or unstated in the narrator’s (curiously dehumanizing) compassion. Rather than an invitation to “feast our eyes” on the spectacle of Second Empire poverty, then, “Les Yeux des pauvres” is a poem that ironically sign-posts the ways in which poverty itself, like Paris, has been transformed into an object of consumption.

In the following pages, we will highlight, in descending order of spectacularity (from most to least striking), three components in “Les Yeux des pauvres” in order to draw out a relationship between the rubble surrounding the café, the peuple in the street, and a mode of writing that resists the injunction to forget the violence of the 1848 revolution in favor of the glittery desolation of the Second Empire. They are: a moment (the exchange between the narrator and his companion); an element (the description of the café mural); and a detail (the rubble). Taken together, they constitute the hard traumatic kernel haunting the kitschy splendor of the Haussmannian café, and by extension the whole orgie impériale of Second Empire Paris. Before turning an ear to the “communication breakdown” between the narrator and his companion, therefore, let...