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  • Grotesque Figures: Baudelaire, Rousseau, and the Aesthetics of Modernity
  • Patricia A. Ward
Virginia E. Swain . Grotesque Figures: Baudelaire, Rousseau, and the Aesthetics of Modernity. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

In thinking about the issues of Baudelaire's modernity and his relation to the great writers of the eighteenth century, one might expect first to examine his interest in Diderot. Virginia Swain, however, has chosen to rethink Baudelaire's problematic relationship with Rousseau, particularly as she has reread six of the prose poems in Le Spleen de Paris. Baudelaire had originally thought of using the title "Le Promeneur solitaire" for this collection, so critics have naturally thought of Rousseau in conjunction with the later urban flâneur. For Swain, Rousseau is much more within Baudelaire's critical mind and poetic imagination—a cultural cliché and a trope. Rousseau illustrates a modernist aesthetic because he embodies the instability and play of the sign as we read Baudelaire reading Rousseau.

How Swain reaches this point is intriguing. A key portion of her study is devoted to an analysis of how Rousseau became an ideological sign in mid-nineteenth-century France as it struggled with the "memory crisis" continuously posed by the Revolution of 1789. In turn, as Rousseau was caricatured in the political culture wars of his time, a number of descriptors became attached to him, for example, l'étranger, le solitaire, le saltimbanque, le charlatan. In the prose poems, then, Rousseau functions as a caricature and a type of the alienated modern individual. Swain's approach thus is cultural, but up to a point.

She also enlarges the context for our understanding of how Rousseau functions as a caricature by placing specific prose poems beside selected texts by the eighteenth-century author. In doing this, her method is heavily influenced by Paul de Man. Thus, in looking at "Le Mauvais Vitrier," she also glosses Rousseau's discussion of the mechanics of chance and impulse in the eighth reverie. Baudelaire's prose poem problematizes the ethical claims of Rousseau. But Swain's method is still more complex. Again, with reference to "Le Mauvais Vitrier," she sees 'Rousseau' as the very figure of allegory, showing its doubleness. Baudelaire has read the original Rousseau self-portrait as an example of personification, but then he has gone on to create an allegory of that personification in his own prose poem.

Some of Swain's juxtapositions are startling. For instance, she reads "Le Vieux Saltimbanque" and "La Corde" in the context of Saint Preux's letter to Julie about the Paris Opera in La Nouvelle Héloïse (II, 23). In these readings, Swain ingeniously argues that Baudelaire overturns Rousseau's indictment of the grotesque in opera of his time, finding allegory (here linked to the grotesque) a soothing escape. Sometimes such juxtapositions lead to readings that work less well, as in the use of the entry on the opera in Rousseau's Dictionnaire de musique as a frame for reading [End Page 113] "Les Yeux des pauvres." But a reading such as that of "Le Vieux Saltimbanque" demonstrates convincingly that the figure of the charlatan, read against Rousseau as a cultural construct and as the author of problematic texts which Baudelaire somehow reworked as he wrote some of these prose poems, remains with us as the embodiment of the modern dilemma of the sign and all the traces of the past that it bears.

The theoretical frame for Swain's book is the element suggested by the phrase "grotesque figures" of her title, and this itself is a post-modernist pun. The introductory chapters set forth a theory of the grotesque and of allegory. "The grotesque names the paradox of allegory" for Baudelaire (12). We might interpret this as the doubleness of allegory that, particularly through personification, always escapes our grasp. On the other hand, one could say that Swain, in creating a fresh context for looking at Baudelaire, has created her own allegory, one in which the use of the concept of the "grotesque" also remains elusive.

Patricia A. Ward
Vanderbilt University
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