Thinking Poetry

Philosophical Approaches to Nineteenth-Century French Poetry

J. Acquisto, J. Acquisto

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137329288
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

This volume of essays seeks to establish a dialogue between poetry and philosophy where each could be said to read the other and announces important new paths for a reinvigorated study of lyric poetry in the decades to come.

Chapter 1

Baudelaire through Kierkegaard*

Art, Fallibility, and Faith

Edward K. Kaplan

I am convinced that God is love; this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity.

—Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

O Creator! Can monsters exist in the eyes of the only One who knows why they exist, how they were made and how they might have been able not to be made?

—Baudelaire, “Miss Scalpel”

BOTH SØREN KIERKEGAARD (1813–55) AND CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (1821–67) invented unique literary genres in order to launch spiritual revolutions. Their various works can be interpreted in terms of aesthetic, ethical, and religious dimensions of human experience. The esthetic favors the quest for ideal beauty and sensory or imaginative stimulation—what Kierkegaard calls “immediacy.” The ethical confronts fantastical impulses with the reality of other beings, human or otherwise; Kierkegaard labels this system of moral values the “universal.” The religious dimension points to the “Absolute,” a mode of experience beyond words, beyond concepts. The reality of God is “incommensurable” with the “ethical,” whereas the “esthetic” ignores morality, transcendent meaning, or God. These categories are not always separable in life.

Historical, biographical, and spiritual parallels help clarify how Baudelaire and Kierkegaard faced basic perplexities. Both authors were excessively self-reflective and both repudiated the trivialization of art, morality, and religion, as they sought to preserve their personal integrity against “the crowd”—as Kierkegaard put it, “defrauded by the Other.” On an intimate level, both men were social and metaphysical bachelors bereft of confident relationships with lovers, family, friends, community, nation, and church. They shared the conviction that only the “Single One” can stand before God or absolute Truth.1 Both felt (and were) deeply “misunderstood,” yet both continued purposely to defend their values without compromise.

They attacked mediocrity, prejudice, self-deception, and complacency with the rhetorical technique of “ethical irony,” a discrepancy between statement and meaning, such as the appearance of evil intent or perversity, designed to provoke an ethical response. (It is a form of Socratic irony.)2 With open hostility, Baudelaire repudiated the hypocrisy of France’s bourgeois values and the bigotry of his country’s dominant Catholic Church. Kierkegaard, writing in his own name or under pseudonyms, repudiated the superficiality of the official Danish church and challenged his fellow Christians courageously to scrutinize themselves and become authentic before God. And both were haunted by sin and by the very fact of human finitude.

Baudelaire’s poetry irritated conventional literary taste (and French government authorities) with its penchant for the macabre, ugliness, and perversity; while Kierkegaard, pseudonymous author of The Seducer’s Diary (part one of Either/Or, 1843), fostered the illusion of his own profligacy, especially during the period he notoriously broke his engagement with Regine Olsen.

The ambiguous lyricism of Les Fleurs du Mal (1857; second, definitive ed., 1861, usually translated as “The Flowers of Evil”) effected a worldwide literary revolution, which Victor Hugo recognized as “un frisson nouveau” (“a new shudder” or sensibility).3 Baudelaire indeed practiced an aesthetic paradox: “flowers” (or beauty) emerge from “evil” (or vice).

I characterize Baudelaire’s “terrible moralité” (horrifying morality) as “ethical irony,” a provocative Socratic dialogue with the reader. The poetic persona appears to relish cruelty, cynicism, the compulsion to escape, and lustful or criminal moods; these “corrupt” postures may incite conformist readers to anger or resistance but also, hopefully, to self-critical insight—if the reader does not construe the poet’s “immorality” literally, as the final word.4 Poems that appeal to selfish, prurient, or harmful impulses should, implicitly, spur us to look within and confront our conscience.

The Existential Presupposition

Both thinkers begin with the self. Baudelaire famously admitted that he was tormented and energized by internal contradictions: “As a child, I felt in my heart two contradictory impulses, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life” (OC1: 703). Translated into theological terms, “two simultaneous attractions, one toward Satan, the other toward God” (OC1: 682–83). Les Fleurs du Mal both performs and anatomizes these dualities, polarities between good and evil, “spleen and the ideal,” depression and transcendental imagination. The self remains torn, either “dispersed” or “concentrated.”5 No synthesis appears on the horizon.

The self as such becomes the battleground. Yet to interpret Baudelaire’s poetry only in terms of binary opposites neglects its deeper drive to surpass rigid dualistic categories. Despite dramatic evidence to the contrary, the poet does not seek primarily to escape from the world through limitless reverie (or “voluptuous pleasure”)—the domain of “the aesthetic”; rather, Baudelaire seeks to overcome contradictions in order, ultimately, to reconcile infinite dreams with finite reality.

My reading of Baudelaire, inspired by Yves Bonnefoy who himself was inspired by Kierkegaard, emphasizes the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal in which the poet embraces as ultimately precious that which actually exists—the domain of “the ethical.”6 The “religious” dimension—or God as absolute reality—remains implicit for Baudelaire, except at two or three exceptional moments, examined later in this chapter.7

Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death (1849) maps out the ideal human consciousness as “a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity; in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self” (SD 146).8 Kierkegaard’s analysis points to the ultimate necessity of religious faith: “This then is the formula which describes the condition of the self when despair is completely eradicated: by relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself the self is grounded transparently in the Power which posited it.”9

Religious confidence, however, separates Baudelaire and Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard posits the existence of God the Creator, God the ground of human being, and his faith rings loud and clear: “I am convinced that God is love; this thought has for me a primitive lyrical validity. When it is present to me, I am unspeakably blissful, when it is absent, I long for it more vehemently than the lover for his object; but I do not believe, this courage is lacking” (FT 44–45). The word “lyrical” points to an intrinsic connection of faith with the person’s essential self. Baudelaire, for his part, did not meet God (or the forgiving Christ) on the other side of the paradox.

Poetry, however, as Baudelaire lived and wrote it in the postromantic era, might provide flashes of radical self-understanding. “Au lecteur” (“To the reader”), which opens Les Fleurs du Mal, takes for granted the fragility of free will as humankind’s inexorable fallen condition.

The poem presents three sorts of “vice.” First are pervasive weaknesses: “La sottise, l’erreur, le péché, la lésine” (“Stupidity, error, sin, stinginess”). The poet then ironically deplores the “shameful” fact that we are too weak to commit crimes that require passion, “le viol, le poison, le poignard, l’incendie” (“rape, poisoning, murder, arson”), as if murder were more noble than stinginess (itself, semantically, a degraded form of avarice). This is a crucial example of ethical irony: the poet does not literally promote lethal crimes; rather, he admires self-assertion and free will, even passion, within the context of moral responsibility—but he does so indirectly. Nor does he just blame the devil. The ending insists that the worst “vice” is Ennui or despair, over which the person must gain control:

C’est l’Ennui! –l’oeil chargé d’un pleur involontaire,

Il rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka.

Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,

—Hypocrite lecteur, —mon semblable, —mon frère! (OC1: 6)

[It is Ennui! —its eyes filled with involuntary tears,

It dreams of scaffolds while smoking an opium pipe.

You know it, readers, that finicky monster,

—Hypocritical reader, —my peer, —my brother!]

Usually translated as “boredom,” ennui is apathy or depression, melancholy that functions as a pathological defense against the anxiety of life itself. The final line of “Au lecteur,” which T. S. Eliot quotes at the end of “The Waste Land” (section one), directly challenges readers.

Insult and aggression rip at the reader’s veil of denial or self-deception. After all, most of us are loath to acknowledge that our desires are rife with anxiety or despair. By attacking the reader as “hypocritical,” the poet not only repudiates overt dishonesty; he also recognizes a universal (or ethical) bond between victims: “mon semblable” (my peer). The final word asserts the poet’s intimate identification with and compassion for “mon frère” (my brother). Such is Baudelaire’s ironic method of establishing solidarity with his readers.

Baudelaire and Kierkegaard both assume existential anxiety as intrinsic to the human condition. Ennui is both a major symptom of and a defense against despair: as Kierkegaard asserts, “there lives not one single man who after all is not to some extent in despair, in whose inmost parts there does not dwell a disquietude, a perturbation, a discord, an anxious dread of an unknown something, or of a something he does not even dare to make acquaintance with, dread of possibility of life, or dread of himself” (SD 155). Kierkegaard uplifts readers by demanding that we become spirit, though we endure suffering along the way. Baudelaire, whom such faith eludes, concentrates on anxiety as a source of insight.

We might accordingly retranslate Baudelaire’s title, Les Fleurs du Mal, which summarizes this existential presupposition, as The Flowers of Affliction. In French, the word mal can signify illness, physical or emotional pain, or active evil. Simone Weil, the intrepid philosopher of anguish, understands le malheur (affliction) in its broad sense as a basic ontological condition.10 Baudelaire’s implicit understanding is probably closest to that of Paul Ricœur, who interprets original sin as “fallibility,” a universal human potential for wrongdoing, our finite condition rather than an ineffaceable impulse to harm others (Ricœur 123–24).

Conversion to the Ethical

Baudelaire’s interpreters still tend to feature his “esthetic” escapes from the frustrations imposed upon desire. The original version of Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) emphasized the dualistic implications of its first and largest section, “Spleen and Ideal.” Subsequent sections confirm the impossibility of evading time, except temporarily through fantasies, drugs, acts of sex and violence, and idealized memories. “Wine,” “Flowers of Evil,” “Revolt,” and “Death” develop this otherworldly (or aesthetic) view.

A radical conversion, however, took place between the first and second editions, between 1857 and 1861.11 Major changes in the structure and content of the second edition surpass a poetry of escape in favor of a poetry of finitude. The most obvious innovation is the new second section, “Tableaux parisiens” (Parisian pictures). These and other poems added in 1861 demonstrate how Baudelaire reconciled himself with imperfect realities and even found solace in this acceptance.

Kierkegaard’s famous passage on “the knight of faith” in Fear and Trembling (1843) guides my interpretation of Baudelaire and others who strive to reconcile temporality and the Absolute. Here is Kierkegaard’s evocation of the paradox of modern faith that Baudelaire strove to actualize in literature without being able to conceptualize it. Its first decisive movement is that of “resignation,” relinquishing his dreams of perfection:

With infinite resignation he has drained the cup of life’s profound sadness, he knows the bliss of the infinite, he senses the pain of renouncing everything, the dearest things he possesses in the world, and yet finiteness tastes to him just as good as to one who never knew anything higher, for his continuance in the finite did not bear a trace of the cowed and fearful spirit produced by the process of training; and yet he has this sense of security in enjoying it, as though the finite life were the surest thing of all. And yet, and yet the whole earthly form he exhibits is a new creation by virtue of the absurd. He resigned everything infinitely, and then grasped everything again by virtue of the absurd. (FT 51)

How can a visionary sanctify life in its imperfection? A conceptual apparatus b...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Contributors