Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris: Shifting Perspectives (review)

It might be said that confusion reigns supreme in Baudelaire studies: especially in works dealing with Le Spleen de Paris, no two minds think alike in their way of dealing with the problem of the narrative voice. How closely allied with the biographical Charles Baudelaire is the first person narrator of the poems? How much is this "je" related to the first person voices in other works, such as the Salon de 1859, De l'essence du rire, or Le Peintre de la vie moderne? Or even, how similar is the poet-narrator of any one of the prose poems to the narrator-poet of the next?

In Shifting Perspectives, Maria Scott capitalizes on this confusion. Rather than attempting a grand unifying theory that might allow us once and for all to "settle" the question of the narrative voice, she explores and exploits its unsettledness. What if, she suggests, our inability to pin down the narrative voice is a reflection neither of psychological stresses in the historical author, nor (just) of a complex aesthetic that combines contradictory elements, but rather of Baudelaire's desire to pull the wool over our eyes? Following Armand Fraisse's prompt from 1857, she joins in asking whether Baudelaire's work might be "une mystification colossale" (203), a gigantic, creative hoax in which he parodies morality, beauty and poetry in such detail, and embedded in so many mises en abyme, that the bourgeois reader is not even aware he is being mocked.

This is an interesting if somewhat disconcerting thesis. While it runs the risk of reducing Le Spleen de Paris to bile and vituperation, it has the allure of fitting with the evidence Scott provides. Indeed, she is working in the wake of a few other critics (the present reviewer included) who have suggested that the prose poems are often covert, duplicitous operations. To illustrate her method of reading, she employs the felicitous image of anamorphosis, that Renaissance technique of oblique rendering most famously employed by Holbein: "Anamorphosis exploits the limitations of vision in much the same way as I am suggesting that Baudelaire's prose poetry takes advantage of the mental blind-spots of readers. Anamorphic works of art may be totally, partially, or not at all legible to a frontal gaze, but what they have in common with one another is their inscription of an image that reveals itself only to an angled gaze" (10). Of course, this kind of gaze is represented explicitly (although such explicitness would seem paradoxical in a representation of anamorphosis) in the 1861 poem, "Le Masque," where it is only by changing the angle of one's perspective that the sincère face of the statue becomes visible.

Scott's job will be to view the prose poems from several different angles, each corresponding to a chapter: "Caricature," "Prostitution," "Morality," "Allegory," and "Aesthetics". In each section, Scott skews our vision by inviting us to read by way of other texts – other works by Baudelaire or works against which Baudelaire seems to be playing. Thus, for example, she offers a reading of "La Solitude" that takes us through references to Pascal, partially via La Bruyère, Edgar Poe, and Sainte-Beuve. In this medley of citations, it is hard to tell exactly whom Baudelaire's narrator cites, and which passages may be deliberate misquotations. Moreover, given the poet's complaints about authors who do nothing but quote other authors, it is unclear whether these borrowings are to be taken as serious reflections or as ironic examples of artistic pabulum.

Similarly, in "Le Mauvais Vitrier," we are left with this conundrum: "Rather than representing the Baudelairean artist, therefore, the narrator of 'Le Mauvais Vitrier' might be interpreted as the target of the poet's contempt" (193). Put another way, either the poem is a kind of ars poetica, or . . . it is the exact opposite. Time and again Scott will point to the difficulty of getting to the bottom of a poem, for...