Fin de Baudelaire: autopsie d'une œuvre sans nom (review)

Jean-Louis Cornille's study is that rare exception: a critical work in French on Baudelaire's prose poems that does not regard them as the poor cousin of Les Fleurs du mal. He counters this generally dismissive francophone attitude towards Le Spleen de Paris, as well as the opposite prejudice held by many anglophone Baudelaireans who lavish praise on its quintessentially modern 'poétique de la fragmentation', by demonstrating, through meticulous close readings, that it possesses an internal logic and structural unity all of its own that rivals the much-vaunted 'architecture secrète' of the verse poems. Two main structuring principles are invoked that bear testimony to Baudelaire's practice of reworking his earlier material, both from within the collection itself and outside it. The first, 'concatenation' (a term Cornille borrows from fellow Baudelaire scholar Alain Vaillant), refers to those prose poems that provide ironic commentaries on their immediate predecessors; the second, 'circularity', refers to the 'recyclage' of larger, discrete clusters of poems: the first twenty-six prose poems not only revisit themes from Les Fleurs du mal, but they are themselves reworked by the final twenty-four. This approach could be considered too methodical were it not for the fact that Cornille pertinently relates Le Spleen de Paris to key episodes in Baudelaire's personal life. Many poems give vent to his frustrations, insecurities, and unresolved conflicts: his allusion to eight authors in 'Les Bons Chiens' recalls those eight members of the Académie française he courted in a failed bid to join its illustrious ranks; his subversion of negative gender and racial stereotypes in 'La Belle Dorothée' signals his closer bond to his lover Jeanne Duval's black mother than to his own; the fragility of political and artistic power relations in 'Une mort héroïque' and of friendship in 'La Fausse Monnaie' are vengeful allegories of his sense of profound betrayal at the hands of his publisher Arsène Houssaye. This intimate link between the biographical and the textual is further reinforced by Baudelaire's proto-Mallarmean predilection for anagrams and wordplay: to take just one memorable example, 'La Fausse Monnaie' rhymes with Arsène Houssaye. Subtle and provocative too is Cornille's contention that the boundaries between the 'autotextuel' and 'intertextuel' are sometimes blurred: 'Laquelle est la vraie' is thus arguably less inspired by Poe's 'Berenice' than it is by Baudelaire's own translation of the American's short story. Occasionally, Cornille succumbs to the danger of overinterpretation: is the 'liasse de papiers' in 'Mademoiselle Bistouri' really to be understood as an allusion to Baudelaire's earlier poems? He also slightly overstates, despite a trenchant comparison of cultural critics Walter Benjamin and Philippe Muray, Baudelaire's anti-Hugolien rejection of the occult (his debt to Swedenborg barely gets a mention). Overall, however, this perceptive study, despite the absence of an index and though primarily of interest to the specialist, intelligently repositions Le Spleen de Paris within the broader context of Baudelaire's opus and intellectual influences, including his translations and correspondence, as well as offering a timely reminder that biographical readings of great literary figures need not be anachronistic or reductive.