B. Schlossman - Baudelaire-Liberté, Libertinage and Modernity

Baudelaire: Liberté, Libertinage and ModernityAuthor(s): Beryl SchlossmanSource: SubStance, Vol. 22, No. 1, Issue 70 (1993), pp. 67-80Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3684731 .

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Baudelaire: LibertY, Libertinage, and Modernity

Beryl Schlossman

Politics and Poetics

"LE MODERN STYLE" IN FRENCH LITERATURE ranges from Baudelaire's reading of Poe to the Modernism of Beckett, and the transition between these two phenomena might be located in Walter Benjamin's critique of literary modernity. Benjamin's work constitutes a double articulation that allows him to move between "revolutionary criticism" (political ideology, the Russian Revolution, Marx, Brecht, Lukacs, revolutionary art) and a critique of Proust and Valery, who deliberately distanced their works and aesthetics from political concerns. The intersection between Benjamin's two fields of focus can be located in his framework of "modernity." This con- ceptual frame arises at the crossroads of history, sociology, economics, urban architecture and politics. Their paths, passageways, and arcades map what he calls capitalism, filtered into the idiom of poetry. Benjamin's reading of modernity can best be seen in his analysis of the poetic oeuvre of Baudelaire.

Benjamin's text begins with an image of Baudelaire. The poet appears in the guise of a bohemian revolutionary, described by Marx as a "con- spirateur de profession." In two articles published in 1850,1 these revolutionaries were characterized by anger, provocation, mystification, a taste for playing devil's advocate, and a penchant for improvising strategies. Benjamin draws a parallel between Baudelaire and Auguste Blanqui, the archetypal revolutionary of the day, who enjoyed consider- able prestige and spent many years in prison. In 1886, in Die Neue Zeit, Marx and Engels described professional conspirators as black-gloved ar- tists of revolution. They wrote:

They are the alchemists of the revolution and they completely share with the earlier alchemists their confusion of ideas and their limitation/stub- bornness of obsessive ideas. (Quoted in Benjamin, 519)2

Marx's opinion of the conspirators is echoed in Benjamin's account of Baudelaire's limited political intuitions ("Il faut aller fusiller le g6ndral Aupick!")3

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68 Beryl Schlossman

However, Benjamin opens up Marx's comment to include Baudelaire's enigmatic storehouse of allegory: "With this Baudelaire's image presents itself as if automatically: the enigmatic bric-A-brac of allegory in the one, the mystery-mongering of the conspirator in the other" (Benjamin, 519). Where did Benjamin learn how enigmas and secrets articulate the cor-

respondences between poetry and politics? The connection may have been an overdetermined one, but it is certain that he discovered it in the German Trauerspiel as well as in trans-Romantic French poetry. German mourning- plays and Baudelairean poetics became the ground of his interpretation of allegory, and represent the two modes of allegory that inform his writing: baroque and modern.

Baudelaire's Revolutionary Rhetoric: Contradictions and Eroticism

Mais moi, je ne suis pas dupe! je n'ai jamais ett dupe! Je dis Vive la Rdvolution! comme je dirais: Vive la Destruction! ... Vive la Mort!-Baudelaire,

OC II, 961.

Baudelaire's equation of "vive la revolution!" with "vive la mort!" is echoed in his declared desire to be both victim and executioner: "Non seulement je serais heureux d'etre victime, mais je ne hairais pas d'etre bourreau" (961). The Sadian noirceur of his remarks springs from two cal- culated rhetorical excesses: the oxymoron "long live death" petrifies the political enterprise and contemplates it as a death mask; the avowed discourse on "democratisation" is subverted by a vocabulary of violent eroticism. Happiness and hatred-the conditional "je serais heureux"

paralleled by the quasi-classical "je ne hairais pas"-are applied to "victime" and "bourreau"-the roles played by a subject of revolution. Baudelaire uses "victim"/ "executioner" to deny the ideological premises of revolutionary politics, and to reduce the content of ideology to eroticized subjectivities. These subjectivities are interchangeable; the artist/bohemian/conspirator/flaneur sees revolution as a stage for allegorical representation. The remarks quoted above may be Baudelaire's most ex-

plicit discussion of revolution, and they occur beyond the borders of French territory, in a racist dossier entitled Pauvre Belgique!

Baudelaire's evocations of revolution cannot be separated from the eroticism that informs them. Through happiness and unhappiness associated with playing the role of "victime" and "bourreau," the question of jouissance infiltrates the statement that begins: "Je dis: Vive la revolution!"

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Baudelaire 69

The voice proclaiming "je ne suis pas dupe!" announces that the rhetoric of revolution cannot be separated from Romantic fantasies of mastery. Baudelaire's poetry subverts this fantasy with a vocabulary of erotic violence.

"L'Heautontimorouminos": From Conspiratorial Rhetoric to Irony

"L'HWautontimorouminos," one of the Fleurs du Mal, displays the

negating and theatrical power of Baudelaire's technique of pairing images. Polarized, parallel, or one to one, the significations generated by com- parisons and oppositions are the effect of rhetorical "correspondences." In Baudelaire's poetry, correspondence often brings together three (or more) elements in the "divine symphonie" to which the poem alludes:

L'WHautontimorouminos I J.G.F.

Je te frapperai sans colre Et sans haine, comme un boucher, Comme Moi'se le rocher! Et je ferai de ta paupiere,

Pour abreuver mon Sahara, Jaillir les eaux de la souffrance. Mon disir gonfl6 d'esperance Sur tes pleurs salis nagera

Comme un vaisseau qui prend le large, Et dans mon coeur qu'ils sozleront Tes chers sanglots retentiront Comme un tambour qui bat la charge!

Ne suis-je pas un faux accord Dans la divine symphonie, Grace 4 la vorace Ironie Qui me secoue et qui me mord?

Elle est dans ma voix, la criarde! C'est tout mon sang, ce poison noir! Je suis le sinistre miroir

Oi la migere se regarde!

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70 Beryl Schlossman

Je suis la plaie et le couteau! le suis le soufflet et la joue! Je suis les membres et la roue, Et la victime et le bourreau!

Je suis de mon coeur le vampire -- Un de ces grands abandonnds Au rire iternel condamnes, Et qui ne peuvent plus sourire!

As in the sonnet "Correspondances," the "comme" of Baudelaire's similes plays a decisive role in the mysterious "L'H~autontimorouminos." The rhetorical and stylistic elements of simile, metaphor, and correspondence engage the reader with the equally mysterious figures of the narrative voice, the interlocutor, the personification of irony, the shrew, and the vampire.

The poem's ostensible subject is suffering, sadistic evil, irony, and eroticism. "Je te frapperai..." is echoed by the fourth line, "Et je ferai..." The two anticipated acts of violence will be perpetrated in the future against a "tu" whose identity constitutes one of the gaps that challenges Baudelaire's readers. The "tu" neither appears nor speaks within the poem; only its anticipated sobs can be heard resonating in the heart of the narrator. The reader knows only that the object is desired by the speaker and that some sentimental value has been assigned to its "sanglots." This sentimental value is undercut by the complete disappearance of the object after the evocation of "her" sobs, imagined and interiorized by the speaker.

In a letter to Victor Mars, Baudelaire described a projected Epilogue to a series of the Fleurs du Mal published in the Revue des Deux Mondes. This

projected Epilogue resembles "L'Heautontimorouminos" so closely that some critics have seen it as the source of the poem.4 In the paraphrased Epilogue, the "tu" is characterized as "une dame." Through a series of

adjectives, the narrator ascribes to her a certain consistency: "Si vous voulez me plaire et rajeunir les desirs, soyez cruelle, menteuse, libertine, crapuleuse, et voleuse" (OC 985). However, this explicitness vanishes in "L'Heautontimorouminos." The erotic object, "tu," disappears from the poem at the moment of "her" tears and imagined sobs. The sadistic image of the speaker's desire "gonfl4 d'esperance" sailing away on the tears of his object, as in "Le Voyage," includes an image of the object as a "rocher" with its water and a "paupibre" with the "pleurs sales" that intoxicate the narrator's heart. The image expands: her tears have become an ocean, and somewhere in between subject and object, the "rocher" of the violated

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Baudelaire 71

object has become the narrator's intimate desert, "mon Sahara." The subject is "like a butcher," "like Moses," "like a sailing ship;" his object's imagined sobs are "like a drum."

When the fragile presence of the object evaporates, the personification of l'Ironie becomes the alibi for the speaker's challenge to correspondance; the power that turns sadism into masochism produces an intimate dou- bling of the self. "Je suis" is two rather than one. The rhetoric of "victime et bourreau" that appears in Pauvre Belgique! offers its negative power to this poem; it infiltrates Romantic subjectivity and explodes it from inside the "intoxicated heart" where its "dear sobs" resound. The conspiratorial rhetoric, the discourse of infiltration, is allegorized as Irony, who turns the initial roles around. The passive weeping virtual object has faded out; like his blood, the voice of the speaking subject is literally infiltrated by the voracious vampire:

Elle est dans ma voix, la criarde! C'est tout mon sang, ce poison noir! Je suis le sinistre miroir OQi la migere se regarde.

Irony, Baudelaire's black vampire, turns the tables on the narrator: her tortures replace the "chers sanglots" of Romanticism and the desired "tu" with the dark image ("le sinistre miroir") of the speaker's "rire eternel." The anticipated future tense vanishes (into the past, into the future of prophecy, or into the thin air of fantasy) with the sadistic scenarios that irony is supposed to explain. Beginning with the first line of the fourth stanza, the verbs shift to a present tense that intensifies the mysterious union of opposites in the oxymorons of the penultimate stanza. Thanks to the allegorical goddess of Irony, the speaker who says "je suis" describes himself as a series of images that include both subject and object of violent acts. These oppositions culminate in the paradox of the speaking subject who is not only possessed from the inside-voice, blood, and image-but is also the vampire who consumes his own heart. The beating of the speaker's heart is rendered as the object's sobs, before the beating of the drum invades the rhythm of the poem in the penultimate stanza, when the "self-tormenter" of the title turns on himself the violence originally in- flicted on the "tu."

In the final stanza, l'Ironie is no longer the narrator's alibi. Like the virtual beloved, she seems to have been incorporated into the speaker's heart. His blood is black poison; the "sinistre miroir" reflects her dark image. Although many poems in "Spleen et Ideal" use darkness and light

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72 Beryl Schlossman

to form paradoxical pairs and oxymorons, there is no light in "L'H6au- tontimorouminos." As in "Le Coucher du Soleil Romantique," "La nuit irresistible etablit son empire" (OC 149). The similes of a projected and fantastic voyage of desire disappear into the "sinistre miroir" where violence is turned against the speaker and internalized as an agent of destruction. In the deceptive symmetry of this stanza, the oppositions between torturer and tortured harbor secret complicities of rhyme and rhythm. Violence infiltrates the present tense and the harmony of the divine symphony.

"L'Heautontimoroumenos" indicates the basis of Baudelaire's provocative dismissal of revolution and his understanding of it as a structure of reciprocal violence. This limits political ideology to a relationship of victim and executioner. The "faux accord" the speaker evokes marks a kind of conspiracy against romantic discourse; the black violence of allegory inserts a moment of dissonance in the divine harmony of correspondence.

Voluptuous Revolutionaries

In his Notes sur Les Liaisons dangereuses, Baudelaire writes: "la R6volution a et6 faite par des voluptueux" (OC II, 68). Although the tone of the Notes is somewhat enigmatic, Baudelaire had an avowed "sympathie pour le livre." Who are the voluptuous revolutionaries? They may have something in common with the images of opposites that permeate Baudelaire's "Vive la Revolution!" These images are inscribed with the transgressions that are central in Baudelairean scenarios of jouissance. The

reciprocal identities, the roles exchanged, construct voluptd as an enigmatic contract between violence, suffering, and desire. "L'H6autontimorou- menos" circles around the inarticulable knot of jouissance at its center. It illustrates the explosion named in the "Coucher du Soleil Romantique"- an attack on the sentimental views of pleasure avowed by some of Baudelaire's predecessors and contemporaries.

The speaker in Baudelaire's "Epilogue" demands that his mistress

please him by being cruel, false, and so on. He implores her: "soyez... libertine!" (OC 985) This imperative would have no relation to "Vive la Rdvolution!" were it not for the voluptuous revolutionaries associated with Les Liaisons dangereuses. Both inside and outside of literature, the late

eighteenth century adds a specifically political and revolutionary dimen-

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sion to the religious and philosophical connections that were made in the seventeenth century between libertinage and liberted.

In 1789: Les Embl'mes de la raison, Jean Starobinski writes:

... pour ceux qui le condamnent et qui veulent l'abolir, le monde finissant prend le visage du mal: c'est 1'expression d'une volontt~ qui refuse active- ment le bien universel. (14)

The noirceur that stylizes the blackness of night with pre-Baudelairean eroticism, suffering and evil finds its most privileged representatives in the Vicomte de Valmont and Mozart-Da Ponte's Don Giovanni. It is this noirceur of eroticism that returns in Baudelaire's poetry; if Benjamin's parallel between Blanqui and Baudelaire is pursued, the return to the baroque and its violent mysteries might be seen as a compensation for Baudelaire's absence of revolutionary consciousness.

The reciprocal identification of victim and executioner takes place on the stage where Valmont and Don Giovanni allegorize unlimited jouissance and ironic distance from morality and religion. In a world of Venetian masks, carnivals and eroticized illusion, the women who are their victims have interiorized and combined the evil of transgression, the delights of seduction, and the images of an idealized object. This deadly combination of beauty, corruption and its funereal consequences, and an idealized love might be described as the poison noir, the blood of "L'Heautontimorou- menos." Its sublimity belongs to the baroque, resurrected by Les Fleurs du Mal.

"Correspondances": Valmont and Don Giovanni

In Mozart-Da Ponte's "Don Giovanni," written and performed in 1787, the blackness of libertinage is overwritten with a revolutionary libert6 in several scenes. The most explicit of these moments of moral and political subversion occurs in the finale of Act I. Interrupting the nocturnal noirceur that colors much of the opera's atmosphere, Don Giovanni's illuminated ballroom parallels the final festive scene and the flames that will end the opera. When the Trio of Masks arrives in the "sala illuminata e preparata per un gran festa di ballo," Don Giovanni greets them:

E aperto a tutti quanti, Viva la liberth! (It is open to all Long live liberty!)

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74 Beryl Schlossman

Revolutionary fervor does not enter explicitly into Don Giovanni's exclamation, "Viva la libert!,,"5 His ball recreates a Venetian carnival atmosphere of intrigue and disguise, illusion and artifice; the masked figures are free to conceal their identity. Revolutionary undertones enter Don Giovanni's exclamation when the score returns to it following the thanks uttered by the Trio of Masks. The exclamation is taken up in ensemble form by five voices, accompanied by the orchestra. Its grandeur interrupts the minuet that was heard while Don Giovanni's servant, Leporello, gave his master's instructions to the Trio. Following the sweeping chorale of "Viva la libertA!" the minuet will be played again.

The exclamation of "Viva la libertA!" interrupts the course of both the music and the narrative account of the festivities; unlike many other elements of the text, it seems to originate with the Mozart-Da Ponte score. Its

repetition by the ensemble appears as a mysterious anacoluthon, since the freedom that Don Giovanni incarnates is contested by the other members of the ensemble.

In a ballroom filled with peasants, Leporello is the only non-aristocrat to sing: "Viva la libertA!" His identification with his master lends him an aura of libertinage, in contrast to the Trio (Donna Elvira, Donn'Anna, Don Ottavio), who wear disguises in the name of the law. A deliberate pause takes carnival license out of context and into the revolutionary period, where it emerges like a symptom: "Viva la libertA!" Don Giovanni sudden- ly holds up a mirror to the late eighteenth century.

Baudelaire's Modernism-Revolt against Romanticism

Laclos used the epistolary novel to turn libertinage and its forms of seduction into a secret theater of conspiracy. Its pages unfold in boudoirs filled with mirrors; they form a network of croisements, the labyrinth of a Baudelairean Paris of Modernism. The strange figure of the voluptuous revolutionary who emerges from Baudelaire's aphoristic notes on Laclos seems to evoke the figure in black, Auguste Blanqui, before his entry onto the scene of history.

In other appearances, Baudelaire wears the black gloves of aesthetic artifice in order to maintain a distance from the personal and political sentiment (reactionary, revolutionary, progressive, etc.) displayed by figures like Lamartine and Hugo. Their writing was Baudelaire's in- heritance and his intimate adversary; for this reason, his invention of

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Modernism was both essentially Romantic and irreducibly distanced from Romanticism.

How did Baudelaire's "modern style" become a voyage to the ends of Romanticism? The new form of writing constitutes a transgression of the parameters of Romanticism. In Baudelaire's terms, Night has fallen on the Romantic Sun. The historical label of "L'Art pour l'Art" is a point of entry; it is impossible to conceive of the Baudelairean enterprise without it. On the other hand, "Art for Art's Sake" cannot account for the banishment of

sensibility, for the new interiority of memory and image, and the new relation between sensation and style, life and art.

Baudelaire takes the Romantic ideal of infinity and turns it into an artificial form of the sublime-an excess of language or style. The new "modern style" detached writing from sentiment and textual decorum- rhetorical coherence, the etiquette of appropriate subject matter, and the anti-allegorical, organic form of the Romantic symbol. Although this excess led Baudelaire before a court of law, the violence of his work has more to do with its form than with obscenity.

According to history, philology, and contemporary criticism, this ex- plosive interruption of Romanticism marks a turning point in literary style. Although Modernism is central to contemporary criticism, it remains elusive and perhaps indefinable. Its effects, however, have been felt from the latter half of the nineteenth century and through the twentieth century, in such writers as Joyce, Pound, Woolf, Proust, and Rilke.

The polemics against Baudelaire indicate that the adversaries of Modernism had a clearer understanding of what was at stake than some of the poet's defenders. During Baudelaire's trial in 1857, the prosecutor made the following remarks:

Charles Baudelaire n'appartient pas A une &cole. II ne rel&ve que de lui- meme. Son principe, sa theorie, c'est de tout peindre, de tout mettre A nu. II fouillera la nature humaine dans ses replis les plus intimes; il aura, pour la rendre, des tons vigoureux et saisissants ... il la grossira outre mesure, afin de creer l'impression, la sensation. 11 fait ainsi, peut-il dire, la contrepartie du classique, du convenu. (OC I, 1206)

Although this description was uttered as an accusation, it offers an ac- curate account of Baudelaire's aesthetic in his own terms, including the "mise A nu," the ambition to "paint everything," the use of bold color tones, the deployment of excess for the purpose of creating impression and sensation (rather than the didactic declaration and sentiment associated with earlier generations). Beyond the "convenu" of Romantic codes, in an

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76 Beryl Schlossman

arena of representation that Benjamin recognized as baroque, these terms characterize the founding aesthetic of Modernism.

Precisely because of the Modernist transgression of the "convenu," some of Baudelaire's defenders took on the ill-fated task of denying the new aesthetic. They attempted to assimilate the writing of Les Fleurs du mal to the mode of the symbol (versus allegory), by highlighting the image of literature as organic, idyllic, and rooted in nature. Edouard Thierry portrayed Baudelaire as a gardener cultivating "la nature

meurtri.re," fol-

lowing on the heels of the more conventional nature principle in literature:

La nature pacifique a donne depuis longtemps ses plus riches &chantillons ... Le maitre du lieu a realise un Eden de l'enfer ... Dans un temps oui la litt rature indiscr&te a raconte au public les moeurs de la vie de boheme ... il est venu aprbs les amusants conteurs dire A son tour l'idylle A travers champs. (OC 1187-88)

It is difficult to recognize Baudelaire and his poetics in a valorization of nature, a nostalgia for pastoral idyll, or the redemption of Hell in a triumph of heavenly innocence. Thierry's defense stages a denial of Modernism in the reactionary terminology of the adversary.

In more contemporary judgments, Baudelaire's literary explosion still resonates as subversive, obscene, and conspiratorial. In a tone that recalls the justificatory articles written in Baudelaire's defense, Erich Auerbach defends his "entirely new and consummate style." In "The Aesthetic Dig- nity of the 'Fleurs du Mal,"' he writes that Baudelaire's poems

... gave this age a new poetic style: a mixture of the base and contemptible with the sublime, a symbolic use of realistic horror, which was unprece- dented... The form, not only of modem poetry but also of the other literary genres of the century that has elapsed since then, is scarcely thinkable without "Les Fleurs du Mal." (225)

Auerbach's statement is particularly significant in light of his attempt to

apologize for the horror in Baudelaire's poems. His apologetic impulse originates in his reading of the work as a straightforward rendering of the

poet's personality.

Crossroads and Arcades

Baudelaire's poem, "Le Coucher du Soleil Romantique," acknow-

ledges the Modernist explosion of Romanticism. The idyllic mode of the

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first line is immediately undercut by the conspiratorial irony and the brusque slang of "la vie moderne" in the second line:

Le Coucher du Soleil Romantique

Que le Soleil est beau quand tout frais il se leve, Comme une explosion nous disant son bonjour! - Bienheureux celui-l4 qui peut avec amour Saluer son coucher plus glorieux qu'un reve!

Je me souviens! ... J'ai vu tout, fleur, source, sillon, Se pfamer sous son oeil comme un coeur qui palpite . .. -Courons vers l'horizon, il est tard, courons vite, Pour attraper au moins un oblique rayon!

Mais je poursuis en vain le Dieu qui se retire; L'irresistible Nuit itablit son empire, Noire, humide, funeste et pleine de frissons;

Une odeur de tombeau dans les tinebres nage, Et mon pied peureux froisse, au bord du marecage, Des crapauds imprivus et de froids limagons.

The Romantic celebration of nature is no longer possible; the explosion that undermines the beauty of the sun sounds more like modernity. The world of Les Fleurs du Mal is the empire of "l'irr sistible Nuit"-"Noire, humide, funeste et pleine de frissons"-allegorized in the poem. This sonnet, which was supposed to serve as the epilogue for Asselineau's Milanges tires d'une petite bibliothbque romantique, may be read as the epilogue to Romantic subjectivity: the narrator's ravishment includes a vision of stran- gely detached natural objects ("fleur, source, sillon") in the guise of the quivering heart of Romanticism. Removed from their Romantic coherence as elements of an idyllic Nature, these objects play new roles, as hieroglyphs of subjectivity. The exclamation of memory inscribes this poem with the aesthetic of Modernism. Transfigured by the vision of "Je me souviens!" the fragmented and distanced objects have become images in a new style.

In the preface to Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire gives an account of style that takes lyricism out of the domain of sentimentality and into a new idiom of "poetic prose," located within the frame of the modern city. The

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78 Beryl Schlossman

poetics of the Modernist sublime that unfold in Les Fleurs du Mal becomes a modern architecture of form and content:

Quel est celui de nous qui n'a pas... reve' le miracle d'une prose poetique, musicale sans rythme et sans rime, assez souple et assez heurt6e pour s'adapter aux mouvements lyriques de l'ame, aux ondulations de la reverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience? (OC 275-276)

The new idiom is miraculous, musical, and inseparable from the structure of "correspondance" that originates near the beginning of the Fleurs du mal and plays an important role throughout Baudelaire's poetic oeuvre. In the

poet's commentary, the verb "s'adapter" links the triad of oxymorons char- acterizing literary form to the spiritual, imaginative, and ethical faculties of content. Baudelaire maintains the distance between the two triads in order to affirm the artifice of art: "s'adapter" cannot be assimilated to natural or

organic expression. Like "correspondance," it maintains the entities that

mysteriously mingle together. The "fondu" of these opaque, differentiated entities cannot be assimilated to the organic "translucence" of the symbol that Coleridge evokes in his polemic against allegory. Like "correspondance," the "fondu" evoked at key moments in Modernist poetics maintains aesthetic artifice. It prefigures the vocabulary of "Prligung" - cast, imprint, coinage, stamp, and seal - that characterizes Benjamin's discus- sions of allegory and some of Lacan's polemics for a psychoanalysis beyond the positivist body of psychology.

Like Flaubert writing Madame Bovary, Baudelaire places his project in the frame of "la vie moderne, ou plut6t d'une vie moderne" and criticizes the traditional "subject" of the novel. He provocatively dismisses it as "le fil interminable d'une intrigue superflue" (OC 275). The crossings of modern life are as decisive for Le Spleen de Paris as they were for Les Fleurs du Mal; they run parallel to the allegorical painting of Rouen in Madame

Bovary that sets the stage for the recreation of Carthage, Paris, and so on, in later works. Baudelaire writes:

C'est surtout de la frequentation des villes enormes, c'est du croisement de leurs innombrables rapports que nait cet ideal obsidant. (OC 276)

This remark could serve as an epigraph for Benjamin's writings on the nineteenth century: at the crossroads or "croisements" of history, sociol-

ogy, economics, urban architecture, and politics, the artifices of modernity shape the arcades and passageways of allegory.

Baudelaire's remark locates modernity in the "croisements" of writing that link the image, correspondence, synaesthesia, and signification with the allegorical effects of the city. Modern subjectivity provides the interior

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passageway or subterranean transfer ("correspondance") where the cityscape of the flidneur takes shape in a poetic voice. The croisement of rapports in the modern city gives rise to the effects represented in many of Baudelaire's poems and Benjamin's writings. Benjamin wrote in Zentral- park,

If it is imagination that offers the correspondences to memory, then it is thought that dedicates the allegories to it. Memory brings the two together.

In Baudelaire's "Le Cygne," monuments and disguises go under-

ground; they live on in the sanctum of memory. Evanescence is made

permanent in the effects of style: "Tout pour moi devient allegorie" marks the spot where the poet has transformed the promise of authorial consistency that shaped French Romantic discourse, into the poetic voice of modernity, prefiguring Barthes's "mort de l'auteur." This death marks a decisive turn in the economy of textuality; the reign of the authorial self is declared to be over. In its place is the monument of absence, the transformed carnival, necropolis, or the Passagenwerk - the looped and labyrin- thine arcades of writing. Who reigns, now that the imperial author is dead? Barthes's "empire des signes" approaches representation from the other side of psychological consistency; like the Japanese brushstrokes and theatrical masks that emblematize Barthes's understanding of Modernism, the image of the artist emerges from Benjamin's reading of Baudelaire, along with the vision of allegory that is central to the new cityscape of Modernism. The paradise of memory, the temporal artifices of its representation as a paradise lost or a champs elysees, take us through the transfers of correspondance to the enigmatic and unfinished Zentralpark of allegory.

Emory University

ABBREVIATIONS USED

OC Oeuvres Completes, Charles Baudelaire

WORKS CITED

Auerbach, Erich. Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Minneapolis: Univ. Minnesota Press, 1984.

Baudelaire, Charles. Oeuvres Completes. Ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: Pldiade, 1975 and 1976.

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80 Beryl Schlossman

Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schwep- penhauser. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974. -. Zentralpark. In Gesammelte Schriften. Band 1, 2.

de Laclos, Pierre Choderlos. Les Liasions dangereuses. Paris: Flammarion, 1981.

Starobinski, Jean. 1789: Les Embltmes de la raison. Paris: Flammarion, 1973.

NOTES

1. Les Conspirateurs, by Adolphe Chenu, and La Naissance de la Republique en fivrier 1848, by Lucien de la Hodde, both published in Paris in 1850.

2. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations into English are my own. 3. General Aupick was Baudelaire's stepfather. 4. Claude Pichois, editor of Baudelaire's Oeuvres Complktes. See notes to the

poem. 5. References to the score of "Don Giovanni" are taken from the Neue Mozart

Ausgabe (Neue Ausgabe samtlicher Werke, ed. Wolfgang Plath and Wolfgang Rehm. (Kassel: Barenreiter, 1968), Serie II: Buhnenwerke, vol. 17. See also Don Giovanni: Texte, Materialien, Kommentare, ed. Attila Csampai and Dietmar Holland (Reinbek bei Ham- burg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1981).

6. The concept of Baudelaire's prose poetry as a reflection of a revolutionary aesthetic is developed by Barbara Johnson in Difigurations du langage poetique (Paris: Flammarion, 1982). Johnson's emphasis on a rupture between the poet's verse and his prose poems contrasts with Paul De Man's reading of the continuity of central con- cepts (e.g. correspondence) in Baudelaire's poetics. See The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

SubStance #70, 1993



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B. Schlossman - Baudelaire-Liberté, Libertinage and Modernity

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