-‘D'où vous vient, disiez-vous, cette tristesse étrange,
Montant comme la mer
sur le roc noir et nu?’
The Man
When Charles-Pierre Baudelaire was but six years old, his father died,
leaving his mother a substantial inheritance. To this misfortune others would
follow, all losses and defeats neither extraordinary –as the youths of Rimbaud
or Genet were to be replete of— nor commonplace. Some twenty months after
becoming a widow, Catherine Archimbaut-Dufays, Baudelaire’s mother, remarried: this
time to a neighbor who held the title of Lieutenant Colonel. Young Charles felt
betrayed and predictably turned his ire against his stepfather, whom he would
always despise. These opening facts, when transferred to the ambit of his works,
translate into a sense of rebelliousness, dissatisfaction and an ardent longing
for escape.
As a young
man, he was expelled from boarding school for systematically disobeying its
rules. He showed habile avoidance of his stepfather’s schemes. He wanted for
young Charles a diplomatic career: instead, the latter declared he would pursue
literature, and soon after started abusing drugs and frequenting brothels. It
was during one of these idylls with prostitutes when he most likely contracted
the syphilis that would, in time, end his life. Indeed, sex and narcotics being
a characteristic circumvention of tormented men, Baudelaire lived in a cloud of
ephemeral pleasures. The effect these vices create, namely a displacement of
consciousness outside the subject, will
be examined afterwards in the context of one of his poems. For Baudelaire,
these addictions were as normal as they were necessary. Yet his quest was not a
circular one –as the search of pleasure for pleasure’s sake would be—, rather,
it was propelled by the terror of the other,
which under his pen takes the name of Ennui.
In the poem
“To the Reader”, he writes:
There is one uglier,
more wicked and more foul than all!
Although he does not
make great gesture or great cries,
He would gladly make
the earth a shambles
And swallow the
world in a yawn;
It is boredom! His
eyes weeping an involuntary tear,
He dreams of gibbets
as he smokes his hookah.
You know him,
reader, this delicate monster,
-Hypocrite reader
–my twin- my brother![1]
These last stanzas of the poem are an
approximation, by use of antithesis, to the central Baudelarian problem of
boredom, inasmuch as they reflect the poet’s dichotomic view: if not Vice, then
Ennui; if not excess, then lethargy. For Baudelaire, everything existed and
revolved around one of the two extremes of Horror.
In the context of his works, Paradise
is an Ideal of decadent romanticism; something once possessed and now forever lost,
invaluable in retrospective. The lifestyle he led, that sort of dancing at the
verge of the abyss, was perhaps a surrogate for what he desired: an impossible
regression to childhood, those brief happy years spent in the company of a
mother later unrecognizable, metamorphosed –he believed— by his stepfather’s
influence. Catherine’s opinion of Charles –she usually avoided discussing her
son in society— was illustrated in his poem “The Blessing,” although one feels
as if it were really his stepfather’s judgement –hers only by proxy.
Even if there were a Paradise, Hell
would be preferable. For as Augusto Monterroso pointed out, the unsurpassable
defect of Heaven is that, from up there, Heaven can’t be regarded.
The City
Baudelaire
spent most of his life in Paris. The city, for him, was another symbol of
terrible dualism. Only the City of Lights could have satiated his libertine
desires (as well as artistic needs, namely access to books, museums, etc.), and
yet for Charles the city was but an additional incarnation of Hell. He abhorred
that vast, tumultuous space overflowing with people; the highly efficient
machine of a metropolis, consuming and wasting away, graced by a moral ruleset
and well-delineated traditions and watched over by the dignified bourgeois, the
tireless judges presiding. Those feelings were to be physicalized after
the publication of the Flowers of Evil, which was censured and put Baudelaire in
a courtroom.
According to
Vargas Llosa, there are three main motivations for the writing of literature:
historical (e.g. Carlyle), personal experience (García Márquez, Munro) and
cultural (Borges, Pound). Although they often overlap, one usually stands above
the rest. This is one of many respects in which Baudelaire is exceptional: all
three converge in a similar degree.
Let us take
a quick look at them:
First: a loathing
of French society has been pointed out above, especially regarding the uncultured,
materialist bourgeoisie. In the political field, his vision also failed to
align with the reality of his epoch (or vice versa, as he would have argued). This
can be illustrated by his words:
“There is no form of
rational and assured government save an aristocracy. […] There are but three
beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to
kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born
for the stable, that is to say, to practice what they call professions.”[2]
(This line of thinking, if we exclude the priest, is in agreement with what
Carlyle or Nietzsche would have held. The same applies for certain political
ideologies that would later, in the XXth century, emerge using their ideas as
stepping stones.)
Second: the dreadful
feeling that the past shall always be brighter that the future and, more
specifically, the experience of his childhood, are the starting point of his
conception of Paradise, a reaction to more blissful times forever gone. The
last vestige of those days was the epistolary relationship Baudelaire held with
his mother, whom he constantly asked for money. He often claimed to be on the
verge of receiving a big advance from his publishers for a novel he had written
(he had written no such thing, and never would). Surely he would be able to pay
her back after that breakthrough. When not pecuniary, many pages sent to Catherine
are indistinguishable from a love letter, as he talks of his “passion” for her
and recounts carriage rides or walks in the countryside together.
Third:
Baudelaire opposed the artistic movement that preceded him, namely Naturalism
or Realism; a form of literature that, in true Aristotelian spirit, acts as a
mirror of reality. It is descriptive, slow, with an attention to detail that
verges on weariness. Quite antipodean, The Flowers of Evil gave birth to
Symbolism, a movement that negates, in a limpid Hegelian dialectic, its
antecedent. Symbolism gave a protagonist light back to the Ideal. For, is
matter not but a cage for thought? What beauty is there to be found in an idle
quotidian life, in redundancy and Ennui, in decadence and carrion? It seems the
only answer could have been this chimerical poetry, whose effect on humanity is
scarcely fading away today. As for Baudelaire’s opinion on the literature of Nature,
we find two main sources. One is his sonnet “Correspondences”, which has been
viewed as the key to his aesthetics –instead of having its usual significance,
the word Nature acts as a stylistic medium: “Nature is a temple where living
pillars / At times allow confused words to come forth; / There man passes
through forests of symbols / Which observe him with familiar eyes.” The other is his
contribution to Fernand Desnoyers, who asked him to compose some verses on
Nature for a volume he was editing. He did, albeit adding some preliminary
words: “[Shall I write] about the woods, the great oaks, the greenery, the
insects –and, I imagine, the sun? […] You are well aware that I am incapable of
waxing emotional over plants and that my spirit is impervious to this singular
new religion, which will always have, I believe, a certain hint of the shocking
about it for every spiritual being.”
In “The Swan”,
Baudelaire laments the changes Paris was going through at the time (i.e.
buildings demolished to connect the Louvre and the Tuileries park), using the
images of Andromache and an escaped bird wandering by the “newly built”
Carrousel du Louvre –yet the narrative is allegorical; we encounter Paris as a
metaphor, Paris as a deeply personal anguish put forth, through the printed
word, into the collective consciousness.
Now, to
further pursue the custom of avoidance found in our poet, let us turn our gaze
onto the places of residency that he took up in Paris. One can easily find a
full list online. In total, he lived in over forty apartments, occasionally
returning to the same street he had occupied before, except this time in a
different building. It is not hard to come upon a textual elucidation of this
unusual practice. His prose poem titled “Anywhere Out of the World” contains
the famous quote:
“Il me semble que je serais
toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas”
“I have the
impression that I would always be happy there where I am not”
It is a pity that the line loses all
musicality when translated into English. The poem refers a conversation between
Charles and his soul, in which the man proposes moving to Lisbon, Rotterdam,
Batavia (now called Jakarta), etc. His attempts are fruitless; his soul remains
silent. Finally, the soul can no longer be quiet and it “explodes, and cries
out to [him] in great wisdom:
“Anywhere at all! Provided it is outside of this world!”
True
dissatisfaction sprouts from within and has, of course, little to do with
spatial change. It should be noted that, in the poem, there is a separation
between the person and the Other. This psychological rupture impedes well-being;
the mind becomes an unavoidable battlefield. Traditionally, confrontation in
literature had sprung from external devices (i.e. conflict that lies outside the characters): Julien Sorel
suffers over a forbidden love; Emma Bovary fights, in her way, social
conventions forced upon her gender; “Hell is other people”, would write Sartre
nearly a century later. For Baudelaire, ad
interim, our greatest enemy dwells within ourselves.
The Flowers of Evil
The
circumstances that gave birth to this book, Baudelaire’s magnum opus, are not entirely clear. Scholars agree that the poet
had been writing and collecting the poems that would compose the book for
years. He had occasionally published single poems in magazines.
Its
publication was explosive. Not only was it criticized by the public and
censored by the government, but also attacked by poets that deemed the pages
unremarkable.
In 1857, Baudelaire
was prosecuted for offending public morals. The court’s decision was a fine of
three hundred francs and the obligation to eliminate six poems from future
editions of the book. The prosecuting attorney, Ernest Pinard, was the same man
that had carried legal proceedings against Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Indeed,
the State was attacking almost simultaneously the first modern novel and book
of poems.
Baudelaire
would add new poems to the following editions. Yet, even by the time of the
last edition he had the chance to prepare, published one year after his death
(which happened in 1867), the originally banned poems were nowhere to be found.
The world would have to wait until 1949, when an ad hoc committee was designated to review the forbidden poems. They
were found acceptable and subsequently published.
The reaction
his book warranted must not have surprised Baudelaire. He never held a good
opinion of the public, which he considered coarse and incapable of appreciating
fine art. In his eyes, one should never… “offer them a delicate perfume. It exasperates them.” Instead,
one ought to “give them only carefully selected garbage.”
It goes
without saying that readers and writers hold a symbiotic relationship: one
cannot exist without the other. Baudelaire was at once blessed and cursed. He
intuitively knew that his poetry belonged to another time, that his role would
have to be paternalistic. And he accepted his fate in stoic fashion.
Although not
dying an inconnu, his true genius was only recognized after his premature
death. Poe, Kafka and Dickinson come to mind. References to Death as something
both liberating and desirable plague The Flowers of Evil. The burden of the artist,
that ironic responsibility that Baudelaire enforced, seemed to him at times a
load too wearisome.
The sonnet
“Ill Luck” can be read as a lucid assessment of himself as an artist; he
acknowledges that “art is long and time is short” and that the poet is like a
“flower regretfully pouring / Its
perfume sweet as a secret / In solitary shades.” For he knew an honest writer
must be courageous. Baudelaire never gave in to what Balzac called having a
“certain commercial surface for exploitation”, the same lucrative mechanism
that was to abate Gautier’s pen. He dedicated his life to an admittedly pathetic
profession, shut up voluntarily writing and rewriting, always struggling
financially and avoiding creditors. For literature is often an all-in bet on a
rigged game. It is the promise of a seat in History’s stands; the alternative
admiration and reprobation of the critics, demolishing a life’s works only to
repent upon examining the debris. How many people could wholeheartedly throw
themselves into this chasm? Roberto Bolaño immortalized this feeling upon
saying that writing is “knowing how to stick your head into the darkness,
knowing how to jump into the void, being aware that, basically, literature is a
dangerous profession. To run on the verge of a precipice: a bottomless abyss on
one side and, on the other, the faces one loves, the smiling faces one loves,
and books, and friends, and food. And to accept this evidence, even if it
weighs no more than the slab over every dead writer.”
Upon reading
the poems in The Flowers of Evil, one feels bedazzled by the sheer force of
verses that, even if at times awkwardly rhymed, leave a more lasting impression
than the most musical –but banal— poet. It comes as no surprise, thus, that
history has granted him the place he deserves, and that his compositions are
still gaining in force one hundred and fifty years later.
The Malady
Baudelaire’s
health took a quick turn for the worse from 1866 thanks to the syphilis he had
contracted years earlier. An attack inside a church in Namur was the beginning
of the end: he would spend the last year of his life half-crippled and mute. He
died in Paris on August 31st, 1867, at the age of 46.
He was
buried in the Montparnasse cemetery, beside his mother and stepfather.
Nowadays, the austere tomb finds a happy contrast in the perennially present
flowers left there by his readers. The pilgrimage to his final resting place
also puts us in the vicinity of the remains of Sartre, de Beauvoir, Maupassant,
Beckett, Cortázar and Vallejo. They all shared a love for Baudelaire.
He greatly
influenced the succeeding generation, which produced poets such as Rimbaud,
Verlaine and Mallarmé. Later on, he would do the same for Walter Benjamin,
Proust, Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and many, many others. In reality,
any attempt to measure just how far the branches of his influence spread would
be in vain. Baudelaire is a surge that sweeps everything in its way:
consciously or otherwise, modern echoes of his lines are easy to come across.
He paved the way to a new poetical form and towards the repossession and
liberation of language.
His very last efforts were divided into the preparation of a new edition
of the Flowers of Evil and the writing of new poems; even after being left
partially crippled by his disease, he managed to be laborious and keep the
ever-latent Ennui at bay. After the incident in Namur, he was admitted into a Parisian
hospital: the malady’s final havoc was underway. One can imagine Charles,
aphasic and semi-paralyzed, staring out a window. And yet one must imagine him
happy, like Camus’ Sisyphus: happy although he was forced to roll an enormous
boulder up a hill as a punishment, over and over again for eternity. One could
imagine the poet as a privileged Sisyphus, for sooner or later he is granted an
exit: he may cease his labor and rest. The difference being that the poet
leaves and his rock remains. And now it has come our turn, not to push it, but
to gladly carry such beautiful baggage.
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