Creating From Nothing: Swinburne and Baudelaire in "Ave Atque Vale"

Algernon Charles Swinburne was among the earliest English critics to praise Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal (1857). Writing in the Spectator for September 1862, Swinburne stresses the volume's "delight in problems":

It has the languid lurid beauty of close and threatening weather—a heavy, heated temperature, with dangerous hot-house scents in it; thick shadow of cloud closed about it, and fire of molten light. . . .The writer delights in problems and has a natural leaning to obscure and sorrowful things. Failure and sorrow, next to physical beauty and perfection of sound or scent, seem to have an infinite attraction for him. . . . Not the luxuries of pleasure, in their first simple form, but the sharp and cruel enjoyments of pain, the acrid relish of suffering felt or inflicted, the sides on which Nature looks unnatural, go to make up the stuff and substance of his poetry.¹

The references to the embracing of suffering and physical disgust evoke the public scandal and legal action occasioned by Les Fleurs du Mal in which Baudelaire caught the tension between the horror and the ecstasy of life. What Swinburne recognizes is that the shock of these ideas derives from the clash of opposites—suffering asks us to consider the question of pleasure just as disgust asks us to consider the question of vivid sensuous awareness. Baudelaire knew that these questions persist as questions, and Swinburne is aware that delighting in them is the mark of the Frenchman's genius—"Ave Atque Vale" is farewell to the mortal Baudelaire and hail to his vibrant verse.

Swinburne's elegy has received recent critical attention—most notably from Harold Bloom, Jerome McGann, and Peter Sacks.² They follow the traditional notion of the elegy as a competitive genre, a view that does not account for Swinburne's lingering over Baudelaire—as a corpse but also as a corpus or body of work—throughout his poem. Another perspective of the poem is the Freudian connection between the instincts of pleasure and pain and of life and death. Gilles Deleuze has developed a basis for such a reading in Difference and Repetition.³ By challenging us to think about death in non-materialist terms, Deleuze emphasizes that the death instinct is not opposed to the life instinct—but embedded in it as part of its potential. This emphasis on death as a potential that inheres in life provides an important but hitherto under-appreciated lens for viewing Swinburne's poem. By focusing on Swinburne's extensive allusions to Baudelaire's text, we appreciate the degree to which Swinburne repeats Baudelaire.

Swinburne, however, makes these allusions not to replace the older poet but to situate him in a procession of images—now inhabiting Swinburne's mind—that will also pass away. Yopie Prins has recently shown that Swinburne's fascination with the Greek poet Sappho enables him to articulate the recurrent structure of poetic vocation: "the body of the poet is sacrificed to the body of her song, and this body is sacrificed to posterity, which recollects the scattered fragments in order to recall Sappho herself as the long-lost origin of lyric poetry."⁴

In a sense, my argument simply extends the circuit of Prins's. The repetition of Baudelaire's corpse in both his and Swinburne's corpus allows both poets to imagine an "afterlife" for their work in terms of future readers (p. 116). Most importantly, regardless of whose body we situate in this process, the process itself, as Prins suggests, raises the problem of subjectivity (p. 132). However, where she sees a non-naturalized rhythm—or poetic text—as the marker for the corpse, I extend this process to the position of the reader. Thought, memory, language, and sense: these faculties all exist for Deleuze only by connection with their opposites. Recognizing these same faculties operative in "Ave Atque Vale," we also perceive the most important aspect of Swinburne's legacy. The most worthwhile kinds of artistic endeavor, as products of these human faculties, resist simple conceptualization as the work of a subject even as they incite...