Materiality and Autobiography in Baudelaire's "La Pipe"

In recent years, where materiality is under discussion the name of Baudelaire is rarely far off. Owing largely to the influence of readers of de Man and Benjamin it has joined allegory and irony as a term indissociable from the work of a poet who, for all the vaunted accessibility of his work, has left us some difficult poems to mull over through no less difficult concepts. ¹ Given Baudelaire's well-known concern with the aesthetic and given also Benjamin's identification of Baudelaire as a poet of the disintegration of the aura (194), it is perhaps not surprising that this should be the case. For, according to one recent commentator, to assure "the stability of the category of the aesthetic"(Warminski, "Introduction," 3) an evasion or turning away from the text's materiality is required, just as the undoing of its stability requires a confrontation with it. The existence of both these apparently opposing trends in Baudelaire's work would thus tend to bring out materiality as a problem at its horizon. Whether considered a celebration of Art for Art's sake or an inquiry into the underside of aesthetics, Baudelaire's work would in both cases be haunted by materiality. The writer concerned with pointing out "the tatters, the cosmetics, the pulleys, the chains, the second thoughts, the scrawled-upon proofs, in short all the horrors that make up the sanctuary of art" (Baudelaire, 185; my translation) and the formalist for whom the point of writing poetry was to celebrate beauty would both ultimately be concerned with the same thing. DeMan's reading of Baudelaire's text as always containing both an enigmatic hypogram or infratext like "Correspondances" where a material vision is evident, and lyrical texts like "Obsession" that overlay it, has placed Baudelairian criticism on a path it seems set to follow for a while ("Anthropomorphism," 262).

I am not interested in contesting the coupling of materiality with Baudelaire. Instead, I want to ask how it can help us read the poems, and more especially to consider at what point in reading a Baudelaire poem it becomes useful, and perhaps even necessary, to have recourse to such an enigmatic concept in order to progress. For it is not always necessary and indeed it might even sometimes be misleading--encouraging misreading, through a confusion with materialism, if not in its loose sense of a preoccupation with material goods, then in its Marxist definition. In neither register does materialism quite fit with Baudelaire. When Baudelaire speaks of material or materialism, it is disparagingly, in opposition to the poet's preoccupation with spirit. And while it is true that an overriding interest in verbal econ-omy makes it possible to consider Baudelaire in the light of historical materialism as Benjamin has done, still, even a cursory acquaintance with Baudelairian dandyism or with such parts of Sartre's analysis as concern class solidarity and bad consciousness suggests that mainstream Marxist criticism will remain uneasy with Baudelaire. Materiality may come up inevitably in conjunction with Baudelaire, but it takes something of an effort to make materialism do so.

To ask when and where materiality arises in Baudelaire is not simply to say that one has to find its place in a literary analysis, to look for where it emerges as a problem in a language-oriented analysis. For, according to Andrzej Warminski, writing in Material Events of Paul de Man, de Man's analyses of Kant are not of "merely linguistic" problems. Rather, they are "analyses of how it is that something can, does, happen, how the 'next step' actually occurs" ("Poets," 23). The emergence of materiality, in other words, has everything to do with order, with taking steps, with things happening. That is what Warminski means when he speaks of a "material event" or material history. In asking about the point where materiality comes up as a necessary if problematic moment in a reading, we will have to consider the arrival...