Baudelaire's Prose Poems: The Esthetic, the Ethical, and the Religious in The Parisian Prowler (review)

Edward Kaplan's book, Baudelaire's Prose Poems: The Esthetic, the Ethical, and the Religious in The Parisian Prowler, first published in 1990, was recently republished in paperback. While many of the prose poems have been discussed by other critics, Kaplan sets out to resurrect - and reinterpret - Charles Baudelaire's entire collection. This book, consisting of 50 numbered pieces (a heterogeneous collection that Kaplan calls fables of modern consciousness) appeared posthumously two years after the poet's death, in 1869, under the title Le Spleen de Paris. The book was a long time in the making, since Baudelaire worked on it for about ten years, between 1857-67. The poet undertakes a very ambitious project. He aims to demonstrate the essential unity in diversity of his new genre as well as capture the mood and most significant historical events of the times. His collection covers the upheavals of 1848, the 1851 coup d'état of Louis Bonaparte and his impressions of Paris during the 1850s, under the reign of Napoleon III.

Having a keen appreciation for the poet's style, message and philosophical outlook, Kaplan has masterfully translated these poems himself (and this translation is also available in paperback). If his book of critical essays on Baudelaire's prose poems deserves to be looked at with fresh eyes now, twenty years after its initial publication, it's partly because it stands the test of time. But it's also because, in my estimation, when first published, it was in some ways ahead of its times and can be even better appreciated today. Baudelaire's Prose Poems appeared in 1990, when the field of literary studies was still benefiting from the methodological rigor introduced by structuralism while also enjoying the interpretative freedom encouraged by post-structuralism. Being both reflexive and reflective in its approach, post-structuralism carried with it a certain philosophical resistance to the act of interpretation itself. Literary critics relished the richness (and slipperiness) of possible meanings and played with the aporias, or the insoluble paradoxes and internal contradictions, of literary texts.

Although published in this critical context, Kaplan's book showed that clearly de-fi ned interpretation doesn't have to be more reductive than open-ended readings. On the contrary, it can be æsthetically sensitive and complex. Which is the reason why I stated that Baudelaire's Prose Poems is even better suited for our times. Scholars currently working in the (broad) field of "Cultural Studies" seem to have incorporated some of the insights and methodological tools we learned from structuralism and post-structuralism. But we're also, once again, more receptive to clearly defined thematic and historical interpretations.

More specifically, Kaplan's book identifies and corrects two common distortions of Baudelaire's prose poems. The first reads his collection as expressing alienation and even a sense of nihilism, which are rooted in the philosophical tradition brought by Foucault, Deleuze, and other French thinkers associated with the post-structuralist movement. The second, associated with Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, regards the poet as the precursor of the deconstructive movement. It shows how the text defies interpretation, as the implied reader gets lost in the textual play of insoluble contradictions. By way of contrast, Kaplan argues that "The poet did not succumb to this theoretical futility as his fables insert the reader - with his or her reality - into a literary dialogue." He asks, "Otherwise why read? Why write books of interpretation?" (Appendix 173).

These questions aren't merely rhetorical. Indeed, it's impossible not to keep in mind a thematic approach when examining Baudelaire's prose poems. As we know - and as we teach our students - the poet explicitly addresses the themes of pleasure, sobriety and intoxication, the artist, the flâneur, women, mortality, richness versus poverty, old women, the city, good versus evil, etc. Yet these themes...