Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris

Shifting Perspectives

Maria C. Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351574358
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Maria Scott's study of the operation of irony in Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris contends that the principal target of the collection's spleen is its own readership. Baudelaire, as one of the most perceptive cultural commentators of the nineteenth century, was naturally very keenly aware of the growing dominance of the bourgeoisie in France, not least as a market for art and literature. Despite being dependent on this market for his own writing, the poet was highly critical of bourgeois values and attitudes. Scott builds on existing criticism of the collection to argue that these are indirectly mocked in Le Spleen de Paris, often in the person of the poet's supposed textual alter ego. The contention is that the prose poems betray the trust of readers by way of an apparent transparency of meaning that functions to blind us to their embedded irony. Though focused on Le Spleen de Paris, Scott's study engages with the full range of Baudelaire's writings, including his art and literary criticism. Her book will be of interest not only to Baudelaire scholars but also to those engaged more generally with nineteenth-century French culture.

Chapter 1

Caricature

The July Monarchy and the Second Empire witnessed an extraordinary flourishing of the art of caricature. Varying levels of press censorship during this period encouraged cartoonists to take everyday life rather than political figures and events as the principal target of their satire. As a result, the caricature de mœurs enjoyed a particular peak during this period, the aspirations and delusions of the ever-rising Bourgeoisie offering graphic artists such as Honoré Daumier and Henry Monnier a safe, popular, and ubiquitous target.

In an article of December 1861, Charles Asselineau, Baudelaire’s close friend, goes so far as to suggest a causal link between the innately grotesque character of the bourgeoisie and the production of caricatures:

Nous voulons rire de ce qui est risible, nous moquer de ce qui est sot, caricaturer ce qui est laid et battre ce qui est méchant. Ce sera notre manière d’être sérieux, dans un temps où le ridicule, la sottise, la laideur et l’hypocrisie portent de si dignes cravates et de si majestueux gilets ruisselants de chaînes d’or.

(We want to laugh at what is laughable, mock what is idiotic, caricature what is ugly and fight what is nasty. It will be our way of being serious, at a time when ridicule, idiocy, ugliness, and hypocrisy wear such dignified ties and such majestic waistcoats dripping with gold chains.)

If imbecility and hypocrisy were fair game for caricaturists, however, so was eccentricity. Asselineau’s comment appears in the first issue of the literary review Le Boulevard. The same issue features a reprinted caricature by Émile Durandeau. It depicts two legs sticking up out of a broken bed, a black cat who casts a devilish shadow on the wall, a skeleton, a rat, a broomstick, and other instruments of sorcery. Entitled Les Nuits de M Baudelaire (The Nights of Mr Baudeliare), this is only one of several caricatures that appeared in the wake of the publication of Les Fleurs du Mal.

Baudelaire did not restrict himself to being a simple object of caricature, however. He claimed that reflections on the subject were, for him, ‘une espèce d’obsession’ (a sort of obsession). As well as his major articles on graphic caricature, begun as early as 1846 and published in 1855 and 1857, he collaborated in 1846 in the production of a satirical collection of verse and captions to accompany caricatural images of the annual art Salons. While Baudelaire did not sketch the particular images included in the Salon caricatural, he was also a gifted graphic caricaturist in his own right. Auguste Poulet-Malassis writes of the poet that ‘Il était caricaturiste dans le sens précis du mot, avec les deux facultés maîtresses de la pénétration et de l’imagination, et un don d’expression vivante et sommaire.’ (He was a caricaturist in the precise sense of the word, with the two key faculties of penetration and imagination, and a gift for lively and summary expression.)¹

In De l’essence du rire et généralement du comique dans les arts plastiques, Baudelaire outlines his theory of the comical. What he describes as ‘le comique significatif’ or ‘le comique ordinaire’ (the significant or ordinary comical) would seem to uphold the prestige of the ego, depending as it does on a sense of personal superiority with regard to the other:

moi, je ne tombe pas; moi, je marche droit; moi, mon pied est ferme et assuré. Ce n’est pas moi qui commettrais la sottise de ne pas voir un trottoir interrompu ou un pavé qui barre le chemin.²

(me, I do not fall; me, I walk straight; me, my stride is firm and confident. It is not I who would make the stupid mistake of not seeing a broken footpath or a paving stone blocking the way.)

By contrast with this consolidation of the self’s prestige, ‘le comique absolu’ (the absolute comical), identified by Baudelaire with the grotesque, springs from a kind of fragmentation of the ego even while being related to man’s sense of his superiority to nature. This is a kind of laughter that overwhelms the self-controlled, rational subject, exciting in him ‘une hilarité folle, excessive, et qui se traduit en des déchirements et des pâmoisons interminables’ (a mad, excessive hilarity that expresses itself in interminable wrenches and swoons). This form of humour is defined by the poet as creative rather than imitative, inexplicable by reason or common sense, and accessible only to intuition. More natural and innocent than the ordinary comical, the grotesque is resistant to analysis and recognizable only by the sudden laughter it produces: ‘Il n’y a qu’une vérification du grotesque, c’est le rire, et le rire subit.’ (There is only one verification of the grotesque; it is laughter, and sudden laughter.)³

In a passage from the beginning of the same essay, it is suggested that the relationship between the ego and laughter is at the very core of Baudelaire’s interest in caricature:

Chose curieuse et vraiment digne d’attention que l’introduction de cet élément insaisissable du beau jusque dans les œuvres destinées à représenter à l’homme sa propre laideur morale et physique! Et, chose non moins mystérieuse, ce spectacle lamentable excite en lui une hilarité immortelle et incorrigible. Voilà donc le véritable sujet de cet article.⁴

(Curious, and truly worthy of attention, is the way in which that elusive element of beauty is introduced even into works destined to represent to man his own moral and physical ugliness! And a no less mysterious thing is the fact that this pitiful spectacle excites in him an immortal and incorrigible hilarity. That is then the true subject of this article.)

While it is true that the viewer or reader of a caricatural representation is far more likely to laugh at the expense of his or her fellow (wo)man than to recognize himself or herself as the figure of fun,⁵ the above passage suggests that there is another kind of laughter, presumably that of the absolute comical, which is actually compatible with attacks on one’s self-image. Something similar is implied by Baudelaire’s reference a little later in the essay to the case of a man who laughs at his own fall, this so-called ‘philosophe’ (philosopher) having ‘acquis, par habitude, la force de se dédoubler rapidement et d’assister comme spectateur désintéressé aux phénomènes de son moi’ (acquired, by force of habit, the strength to split in two quickly and observe, as a disinterested spectator, the phenomena of his self).⁶ Central, then, to the poet’s theory of humour is the notion of self-transformation.

According to Baudelaire, artists, like the philosophical man, are capable of being ‘à la fois soi et un autre’ (at the same time self and other), combining an appearance of unawareness of one’s own ridiculousness with extreme self-awareness so as to provoke in their audience a pleasurable sense of personal superiority (associated with the ordinary comical) as well as a pleasurable sense of man’s superiority to nature (as in the absolute comical):

Et pour en revenir à mes primitives définitions et m’exprimer plus clairement, je dis que quand Hoffmann engendre le comique absolu, il est bien vrai qu’il le sait; mais il sait aussi que l’essence de ce comique est de paraître s’ignorer lui-même et de développer chez le spectateur, ou plutôt chez le lecteur, la joie de sa propre supériorité et la joie de la supériorité de l’homme sur la nature. Les artistes créent le comique; ayant étudié et rassemblé les éléments du comique, ils savent que tel être est comique, et qu’il ne l’est qu’à condition d’ignorer sa nature; de même que, par une loi inverse, l’artiste n’est artiste qu’à la condition d’être double et de n’ignorer aucun phénomène de sa double nature.⁷

(And to get back to my original definitions and express myself more clearly, I maintain that when Hoffmann engenders the absolute comical, it is certainly true that he knows it; but he knows also that the essence of this comicality is to seem to be oblivious to oneself and to develop in the spectator, or rather in the reader, the joy of his own superiority and the joy of man’s superiority over nature. Artists create the comical: having studied and brought together the elements of the comical, they know that such and such a creature is comical, and that he is so only on condition of being oblivious to his own nature; just as, by an inverse law, the artist is an artist only on condition of being dual and of not being oblivious to any phenomenon of his dual nature.)

The capacity for self-doubling or splitting is presented in this passage as, in the words of Michele Hannoosh, ‘The necessary feature of the comic artist.’⁸ To the extent that Le Spleen de Paris is related to the absolute comical, a particular kind of self-doubling would be likely to play a central role in it: one that presents the reader with a portrait of a highly self-aware author pretending to be self-ignorant.⁹

According to Pierre Jean Jouve, Baudelaire ‘est toujours double, multiple, il contient l’autre en même temps que lui-même’ (is always dual, multiple; he contains at once both the other and himself).¹⁰ One aspect of this duality is the poet’s apparent mastery of ironic dissimulation. On one level, his pretences seem to have been designed purely as a means of experiencing ‘la joie de sa propre supériorité’ (the joy of his own superiority); however, it would seem that the poet also sought an audience for his ruses. For example, in 1866 Baudelaire informed his mother of his planned response to an academic who had given a lecture on Les Fleurs du Mal: ‘Je me propose, quand je reverrai M. Deschanel, de le remercier. Je parie qu’il ne verra pas que je me moque de lui.’ (I intend, when next I see Mr Deschanel, to thank him. I bet he will not see that I am mocking him.)¹¹ Similarly, if in Choix de maximes consolantes sur l’amour (1846) the young poet addresses dubious flattery to his half-brother’s wife, the text is implicitly addressed to the ironic sensibility of other readers. Hiddleston, accordingly, describes the Choix as ‘a rather cruel joke’ and as ‘a kind of “spoof” designed to amuse, and possibly to mystify, the reader by a display of literary pyrotechnics’.¹² A similar dynamic is observable in the following passage from Pauvre Belgique!, wherein the poet’s exasperation at the gullibility of others serves as a very thin veil over the pleasure he takes in his own ironic superiority, a pleasure that he clearly wishes to share with the projected readers of a text he intended for publication:

Quand je me suis senti calomnier, j’ai voulu mettre un terme à cette passion nationale, en ce qui me concernait et, pauvre niais que je suis! je me suis servi de l’ironie.

A tous ceux qui me demandaient pourquoi je restais si longtemps en Belgique (car ils n’aiment pas que les étrangers restent trop longtemps) je répondais confidentiellement que j’étais mouchard.

Et on me croyait!

À d’autres que je m’étais exilé de France parce que j’y avais commis des délits d’une nature inexprimable, mais que, j’espérais bien que grâce à l’épouvantable corruption du régime français, je serais bientôt amnistié.

Et...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Caricature
• 2 Prostitution
• 3 Morality
• 4 Allegory
• 5 Aesthetics
• Conclusion
• Title Key
• Select Bibliography
• Index