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

This rewarding book argues that Baudelaire's notoriously ambiguous prose poems are designed to snare readers by making them laugh along with jokes which ultimately rebound on them. In a sophisticated take on self-referentiality, Maria Scott carefully dissects the mechanisms used to manipulate readers. She shows that irony inevitably evades precisely the kinds of readers which it targets, but that readers who recognize the duplicity are embracing the duality which is central to Baudelaire's creative vision. Critics now generally agree that the narrators of these poems are not expressing Baudelaire's own opinions, and Scott extends this by showing how readers who confuse the two even momentarily will be blinded and fall into textual traps. Even those speakers who invite the reader's complicity turn out to be figures of fun who cannot be aligned with Baudelaire. Her argument proceeds by a series of elegant close readings, which are absolutely meticulous in distinguishing between the author and the bogus narrators. This textual analysis is combined throughout with well-documented discussion of the context. Pithily entitled chapters explore how duplicity operates in five key areas, beginning with 'caricature'. Drawing on Baudelaire's theory of laughter, this shows how Le Spleen de Paris exemplifies his notion of the absolute comical. Bogus narrators mock others in order to assert their superiority, but, as they also mock the flaws of both Baudelaire and his reader, the poems enact the self-mockery characteristic of the absolute comical. A chapter on 'prostitution' argues that readers are made to collude with narrators who focus on the surface beauty of prostitutes rather than on their suffering. Reading between the lines of 'Mademoiselle Bistouri' reveals the woman to be a victim of society who has undergone an abortion. A chapter on 'morality' shows how apparently didactic narrators expose the self-interest of philanthropy and satirize bourgeois reliance on received morality. A chapter on 'allegory' tackles the most self-reflexive poems, whose very theme is the deceptiveness of literal meaning. The final chapter on 'aesthetics' shows how poet figures contradict Baudelaire's critical writings, notably his belief in the role of the imagination. In the prose poems, poets fail to seek analogies and spiritual reality beyond surfaces, and commit a range of poetic crimes: they submit passively to nature, worship external form, use clichés, believe that creation is effortless, and are blinded by materialism and self-infatuation. Readers who mistake these unreliable narrators as mouthpieces for the author are shown to reveal their own misunderstanding of Baudelaire's aesthetic. This is a thought-provoking book, which advances ideas in an understated manner, and leaves us to ponder the implications. The Baudelaire who emerges is profoundly ethical, an advocate of self-knowledge, and deeply protective of his more Romantic artistic ideals. Scott shows how he uses textual duplicity to enact and entrap bourgeois hypocrisy, and her main concern is to expose the reading dynamic rather than to impose an ideological agenda. The book is lucidly written throughout and is a valuable contribution to the expanding body of work on Baudelaire's prose.