Poetry, Truth, and Human Sanctity: Baudelaire's Experimental

Genre

Edward K. Kaplan

L'Esprit Crateur, Volume 39, Number 1, Spring 1999, pp. 15-25 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2010.0286

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/264852/summary

Access provided by Daffodil International University (18 Nov 2017 12:09 GMT)
 Poetry, Truth, and Human Sanctity:
Baudelaire's Experimental Genre*
Edward K. Kaplan

LE SPLEEN DE PARIS. PETITS POMES EN PROSE, no longer the

poet's "neglected masterpiece," is recognized as of comparable exis-
tential value, if not poetic quality, to Les Fleurs du Mal.1 My approach
to Baudelaire's work in general emphasizes the generative tensions between
its esthetic (or imaginative) and ethical (or realistic) dimensionswhich
unify his poems, prose fables, and critical essays. Countering an undue
emphasis on fragmentation and incoherence, dandyism or perversity, I
explore the consistent clash between the pleasures of fantasy or exploitation
of other people as objects or pretexts of reverie, versus the yearning to com-
municate with people and to pursue moral and metaphysical certainty. The
process of idealization and literary reverie as suchand its ethical shortcom-
ingsbecomes a germinal topic of his new genre.
First published as a complete collection by Charles Asselineau and
Thodore de Banville in the 1869 posthumous edition, what Baudelaire pro-
visionally called "prose poems" fulfill his self-definition as a poet and thinker.
These "fables of modern consciousness"as I prefer (somewhat awkwardly)
to label themare experiments which perform the search for truth, not only
experiential, subjective truth, but also rational or even spiritual truth. The
originality of this genre consists in unmasking the inevitable fragility (or ontic
untruth) of poetic desire. The fundamental question of realityas over
against literature as fiction or solipsismis the hallmark of these sophisti-
cated fables.
The author's purported dream of inventing "une prose potique sans
rythme et sans rime," is less purposeful than his claim to deliver "la descrip-
tion de la vie moderne, ou plutt d'une vie moderne et abstraite,"that is, the
consciousness of his narrator, a flneur or Parisian prowler.2 His experimen-
tal genre honors the complexity of consciousness, an amalgam of contraries,
dramatizing in a variety of narrative forms a number of conventional artistic
and social situations.3
This focus on content is eminently appropriate, I believe, since Baudelaire
the "philosopher" is inseparable from the imaginative hedonist. In his 1861
essay on Wagner, he describes the euphoria stimulated by the overture to
Lohengrin as a combination of two normally segregated modes of conscious-

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 L'Esprit Crateur

ness: "Alors je conus pleinement l'ide d'une me se mouvant dans un lieu

lumineux, d'une extase faite de volupt et de connaissance, et planant au-
dessus et bien loin du monde naturel."4 He then specifies his goal as critic:
"transformer ma volupt en connaissance." The complete poet is both
dreamer and critic, inwardly hypersensitive but devoted to objective truth.
Euphoria and InsightBaudelaire's self-reflective fables advance the
ethical intentionality of his lyrical verse and provide a hermeneutical key to
his entire work.5 As a matter of contrast, the dynamics of reverie can be typi-
fied by two well-known verse pieces, published side by side in Les Fleurs du
Mal, which depict imaginative utopias disconnecting the poet from distinct
persons: "Parfum exotique" and "La Chevelure" (FM, 22-23; OCl, 25-27)
develop highly charged fantasies of (non-European) women who gratify his
esthetic or self-centered needs to the exclusion of their own autonomy.
The poet's inward voyages are stimulated by body parts, not by the person
herself. The sonnet "Parfum exotique" explicitly defines this solipsistic blend
of vision, smell, and touch:

Quand, les yeux ferms, en un soir chaud d'automne,

Je respire l'odeur de ton sein chaleureux,
Je vois se drouler des rivages heureux
Qu'blouissent les feux d'un soleil monotone; (11. 1-4)

Idealized desire feels infinite, generating poems as well as visions. His pleas-
ure intensifies in "La Chevelure" (38 lines), which extends these quasi-erotic
images, further specifying its method: "La langoureuse Asie et la brlante
Afrique, / Tout un monde lointain, absent, presque dfunt, / Vit dans tes pro-
fondeurs, fort aromatique!" (11. 6-8). The goal is to achieve an arousal that
combines passivity and productive illusion, as he calls it, "fconde paresse."
Je plongerai ma tte amoureuse d'ivresse
Dans ce noir ocan o l'autre est enferm;
Et mon esprit subtil que le roulis caresse
Saura vous retrouver, fconde paresse,
Infinis bercements du loisir embaum! (II. 21-25)

The key phrase "amoureuse d'ivresse" is confirmed in the next stanza which
recapitulates the sensations: "Je m'enivre ardemment des senteurs confondues
/ De l'huile de coco, du musc et du goudron" (11. 29-30). The long adverb
ardemment conveys the energy of self-expansion, savored by generations of
gratified readers who rhapsodize along with their version of an "esthetic
Baudelaire." Poetic energy is the prize.

16 Spring 1999
 Kaplan

There is, however, a considerable cost: solipsism, denial of the boundaries

between reality and delusion. In fact, the poet's "esprit subtil" ("La
Chevelure," 1. 23) advances his rational reflection. We thus observe how these
early poems successfully "transforment sa volupt en connaissance," to para-
phrase the 1861 essay. Throughout his future works, self-awareness almost
inevitably accompanies, and nourishes, imaginative ecstasy, bespeaking a
consistent quest to fathom its existential origins. Self-knowledge may
increase while liberating the desiring self.
At the onset of the journey that comprises Les Fleurs du Mal, the sonnet
"La Vie antrieure" (FM, 12; first published in the Revue des Deux Mondes,
1 June 1855)which begins: "J'ai longtemps habit sous de vastes por-
tiques"demonstrates that indulgence of poetic desire is a cognitive means,
not the final esthetic goal. First he defines the hedonistic thrust of reverie as a
sort of depersonalized eroticism: "C'est l que j'ai vcu dans les volupts
calmes" (1.9) provided by "des esclaves nus, tout imprgns d'odeurs" (1. 11).
Yet, at the end, blissful phantasms lead to the threshold of a personal insight:
"Et dont l'unique soin tait d'approfondir / Le secret douleureux qui me fai-
sait languir" (11. 13-14).
These marvelous slaves serve the poet's quest for self-understanding.
Placid sorrow and nostalgia, which confer its characteristic tone to Baude-
lairean "voluptuous pleasure," may signify a coming into consciousness of an
as-yet ungraspable meaning, or "secret." The active term approfondir (rein-
forced at the rhyme by the passive languir) evokes both knowledge and pleas-
ure. The dreamer's "secret douleureux" is probably a form of existential anx-
iety, ennui or some nagging pathos of mortality.6 More significantly, this
perception sanctions inwardness as an object of rational scrutiny.
Baudelaire's lavish self-absorption becomes at least potentially transitive,
capable of reaching another person, when the poet affirms that individual as a
subject. Around 1860, his fascination with self-aware, "moughtful" women
confirms this decisive step. His essay on Thomas de Quincey uses the British
author's italicized phrase "touched with pensiveness" to acknowledge the
inner life of women, even if concealed from his intuition.7 Yet, despite the
obvious powers of compassion, Baudelaire the critical "philosopher" remains
vigilant. While he celebrates his tender identification with "Les Petites
Vieilles" (FM, 91), for example, he admits that they titillate him: "Toutes
m'enivrent!" (1. 41), later elaborating: "Je gote votre insu, des plaisirs clan-
destins" (1.76). The poetic realist resists absorbing the ethical into the esthetic.8
Prose Poems as a Quest for TruthAlthough Baudelaire's earliest lyric
poetry conveys a significant self-reflection, the question of moral autonomy

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 L'Esprit Crateur

(a practical consequence of being a "subject") does not become a primary

topic of Les Fleurs du Mal. That essentially monological genre cannot give
sufficient voice to the other. Baudelaire's composite prose genre brings values
such as truth, justice, and communication to critical self-scrutiny. Dialogue
with other characters, and with implied readers, becomes forthright if not
explicit. Their Socratic or "ethical" irony forces readers to make decisions,
social and hermeneutic.9
The struggle to accept the moral autonomy of othersespecially
womenis a pervasive issue in Le Spleen de Paris. Typically ambiguous, our
model is one of the only three formally poetic texts, "L'Invitation au voyage"
(SP, 18).10 With a slight hint of irony, Baudelaire revises the verse piece of the
same title and specifies how the ideal woman is identical with his needs, since
she resembles the perfect city "o la cuisine elle-mme est potique, grasse et
excitante la fois; o tout vous ressemble, mon cher ange."
The narrator claims to cherish Art over Nature, and yet a rhetorical ques-
tionwithin the lyrical development itselfasserts the primacy of the reality
principle: "Vivrons-nous jamais, passerons-nous jamais dans ce tableau qu'a
peint mon esprit, ce tableau qui te ressemble?" Practical living is his genuine
value, and yet to state the obvious would jeopardize the reader's freedom to
arrive at a transformative insight. Didactic literature trivializes ethics.
A forthright repudiation of stereotypes emerges in "La Belle Dorothe"
(SP, 35; OCl, 173-74), an indirect but keen protest against the subjugation of
"exotic" women. As in the early verse piece "A une Malabaraise,"" a native
woman named Dorothe, beguiled by the French colonial presence, dreams of
a better life in Paris: "Infailliblement elle le priera [le soldat franais], la
simple crature, de lui dcrire le bal de l'Opra, et lui demandera si on peut y
aller pieds nus."12 Although carried away by dreams of becoming a mistress
(or servant) in Europe, her aspirations are blocked by the brute fact of her
sister's sexual captivity: "Dorothe est admire et choye de tous, et elle serait
parfaitement heureuse si elle n'tait oblige d'entasser piastre par piastre pour
racheter sa petite sur qui a bien onze ans, et qui est dj mre, et si belle!"
"Beautiful Dorothy" becomes good Dorothy, an ethical heroine.
Beyond the problem of fantasy is the vital density of art as such, which
often feels more authentic than empirical experience. "Les Fentres" (SP, 35)
asserts that the urban poet's vocation is to invent stories ("histoires" or
"lgendes") of old, poor, and suffering individuals. Then, at the conclusion,
he gives voice to a sceptical reader, followed by an answer:
Peut-tre me direz-vous: "Es-tu sr que cette lgende soit la vraie?" Qu'importe ce que peut tre
la ralit place hors de moi, si elle m'a aid vivre, sentir que je suis et ce que je suis."

18 Spring 1999
 Kaplan

The narrator's response is at once honest, unassuming, and paradoxical. Fic-

tion allows him to exist as a person ("sentir que je suis") and as a writer ("ce
que je suis"). This dialoguepotentially, at least, an exchange of perceptions
between author and readerformulates the fundamental "question of reality"
(as I call it), which Baudelaire's fables presuppose. Literature is an amalgam of
history and story, truth and untruth, autonomous essence and mental construct.
"La Corde" (SP, 30; OCl, 328-31) probes our cardinal moral certainties.
A painter naively describes how, preoccupied with his art, he drove a young
model to suicidal despair. More to the point is disbelief of mother love that
should underlie all ethical feeling. (We remember that the boy's mother sells
the rope of his hanging.) Baudelaire, in this indirect way, refines the quest for
truth as he analyzes the very process of disillusion. The unsettling event of
receiving realityas painful as it might beincludes the pleasure of insight:
Et quand l'illusion disparat, c'est- -dire quand nous voyons l'tre ou le fait tel qu'il existe en
dehors de nous, nous prouvons un bizarre sentiment, compliqu moiti de regret pour le fantme
disparu, moiti de surprise agrable devant la nouveaut, devant le fait rel.

With such affirmations of intellectual integrity, we must interpret with

suspicion all proclamations of perversity or moral indifference. The tantaliz-
ing coda of "Le Mauvais Vitrier" (SP, 9), used to validate Baudelaire's puta-
tive Satanism, does not resolve this rhetorical question: "Mais qu'importe
l'ternit de la damnation qui a trouv dans une seconde l'infini de la jouis-
sance?" (OCl, 287). Such mystificationsmost of which can be interpreted
as "ethical irony"14force us to reflect, and then act upon, moral judgments
and verifications of reality. The much vaunted estheticism of "Enivrez-vous"
(SP, 33), is equally suspect: "enivrez-vous sans cesse! De vin, de posie ou de
vertu, votre guise" (OCl, 337). Obviously, drugs and literature are not equal
to virtue, which requires action and not just internal vision and intense feelings.
Fables that depict failures to achieve reciprocal communication have a simi-
lar Socratic function: they recognize commitment to truth as more valuable than
the fabrication of perfect love. In "Les Yeux des pauvres" (SP, 26; OCl, 317-18),
the poet's compassion is aroused by an impoverished father and his children, but
he cannot share it with his mistress, whom he denounces as "le plus bel exemple
d'impermabilit fminine qui se puisse rencontrer." But an internai contradic-
tion alerts us to the narrator's ethical realism; this perceptive avowal contradicts
his untenable blaming of all women for non-communication:
Nous nous tions bien promis que toutes nos penses nous seraient communes l'un et l'autre,
et que nos deux mes dsormais n'en feraient plus qu'une;un rve qui n'a rien d'original, aprs
tout, si ce n'est que, rv par tous les hommes, il n'a t ralis par aucun.

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 L'Esprit Crateur

Standing Before Ultimate TruthBaudelaire cannot resolve the contra-

dictions of fact and desire on a human level alone; nor can he reconcile dif-
fering conceptions of reality from an absolute perspective. And yet he pushes
beyond, even to a sense of standing before Godsymbol of an unreachable,
but real source of transcendent morality. Despite Baudelaire's avowed anti-
clericalism, and perhaps because of it, an authentic religious dimension con-
ditions his writing, surpassing ideological polemics. I conclude with the fable
which dramatizes his fullest speculative commitment: the quest for a tran-
scendental ethics.
"Mademoiselle Bistouri," the antepenultimate fable of Le Spleen de Paris
(no. 47; OCl, 352-56), recapitulates the contradictions between desire (and
the solipsism of literature) and strivings toward reciprocal communication.
Concluding several failed dialogues, it is Baudelaire's most discerning evalu-
ation of modern consciousness.15 The narrator repudiates once and for all his
drive to project desire onto another person. He resists a woman who strives to
install her aberrations in his mind, and he vehemently refuses to surrender his
moral autonomy.
It is a strange and touching encounter. The narrator meets a lovely,
middle-aged woman walking at the capital's working-class outskirts, and they
speak. He realizes that she is obsessed with medical doctors as she repeatedly
demands that he admit, despite several denials, that he is a doctor. Without
using diagnostic terms, he discovers that she is prey to a compulsion to stalk,
and to nurture, physicians, even pretending to be ill. In fact, Mlle Bistouri
(translated as scalpel or lancet), is a hypochondriac who, delusionally, seeks
to govern a little corner of her mortality.
There are several points of identity between this woman and the narrator,
an obvious proxy of Baudelaire himself around 1867, ripened in his "climac-
teric" mid-forties,16 when he attempted, unsuccessfully, to publish this piece.
They are both marked visibly by mortality. She notices that he is aging, "Ah
! o donc avez-vous gagn ces cheveux blancs? Vous n'tiez pas ainsi, il
n'y a pas encore bien longtemps... ," while admitting later, "Je suis assez
belle femme, quoique pas trop jeune." Even her fixation on doctors, her par-
tiality to surgeons with their gowns"mme avec un peu de sang dessus!"
reflects his admitted "got de l'horreur." She is a perverse artist whose self-
prostitution is the price she pays to buttress her untruth.
Mirroring the narrator's self-absorption, she attempts to recruit the
socially alienated flneur into her mental alienation. Throughout their mono-
logical exchanges, steadfastly the narrator asserts his reality principle, refus-
ing to lie to her. Toward the conclusion he astutely asks, as would a psycho-

20 Spring 1999
 Kaplan

analyst seeking a traumatic origin: "Peux-tu te souvenir de l'poque et de

l'occasion o est ne en toi cette passion si particulire?" She cannot answer
and withdraws from even the semblance of dialogue, turning her head away,
claiming not to remember. Her eyes avoid his gaze as she succumbs sadly to
the limits which another free person imposes on her desire, and retreating,
once again, into her mental sanctum.
The story has ended. But the narrator, facing the impossibility of commu-
nicating with this generous but demented woman, acknowledges the impossi-
bility of truly entering the heart of another human being. His passion for truth
then bursts forth, without irony, without bitterness, but with righteous anger
and perplexity at her undeserved suffering. His extraordinary "prayer" to God
which completes the fablesignals Baudelaire's boldest insight into the
powers and the confines of human understanding, as it begins: "Seigneur,
mon Dieu! vous, le Crateur, vous, le Matre; vous qui avez fait la Loi et la
Libert; vous, le souverain qui laissez faire, vous, le juge qui pardonnez...."
Baudelaire addresses God as would a moral philosopher, confronting
metaphysical absurdity, but still seeking an ultimate rationale for senseless
pain. The narrator cannot comprehend the insane woman's anguish; he can
only address God the Creator over a dozen times, directly naming a transcen-
dent Source, for he still believes that people must suffer for good reason, as
he concludes:

vous qui tes plein de motifs et de causes, et qui avez peut-tre mis dans mon esprit le got de
l'horreur pour convertir mon cur, comme la gurison au bout d'une lame; Seigneur, ayez piti,
ayez piti des fous et des folles! O Crateur! peut-il exister des monstres aux yeux de Celui-l
seul qui sait pourquoi ils existent, comment ils se sont faits et comment ils auraient pu ne pas se
faire!

Conventional wisdom assumes that human distress reflects the will of a divine
lawgiver and is proper retribution for sins committed. But Mlle Bistouri
harms no one; quite the contrary. She is pure of heart if not of mind and body.
Ethically, she is an unfree agent, innocent since she cannot distinguish fallacy
from reality. The torment of such "innocent monsters" refutes the divine order.
Baudelaire defies metaphysical evil by imploring God to exercise com-
passion ("ayez piti"), a practical, moral demand, expressing an implicit trust
that divine concern exists. With customary ambiguity, he assumes the possi-
bility of an absolute order. The reflective poet is overwhelmed by injustice;
and yet, with fear, trembling, and moral anguish, he questions the raw, brute
mystery of human existence. He faces the alternative of despair or faith
unable to embrace either.

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 L'Esprit Crateur

Encompassing art and ethics, this fable has reached the frontier of reli-
gious thinking, finding conventional faith insufficient to the pursuit of justice
and truth. "Mademoiselle Bistouri" thus completes the series of anecdotes
introduced by "Portraits de matresses" (SP, 42) which murder the "perfect"
or idealized woman.17 The illusions of the insane are as irremediable as liter-
ary seduction and the bare facts of mortalityand as unfathomable, unreach-
able, as the otherness of those we might love reciprocally. So he accepts
human confines. Helpless and dismayed, he surrenders his pride by acknowl-
edging that he is but a creature and that reason and the Absolute are incom-
mensurable.
There is a positive lesson, however, which requires deft interpretation.
This fable of modern consciousness dramatizes a postmodern faith. The
Parisian prowler has failed, once and for all, to heal the spiritual wounds of
someone with whom he identifies. And yet his fruitless quest for certainty or
communion ends with a prayer, unanswered but firmly articulated. There is no
resolution, only a passionate declaration of moral certainty beyond faith: the
preciousness of each and every human being. Even a "monster" who trades
mind and body for a sado-masochistic identification with doctors is noble.
The poet's prayer to a silent God implies that, to his heart at least, all human
beings are sacred.
Entering the MillenniumBaudelaire's new literary genre, the prose
poem or fable of modern consciousness, establishes a fitting vehicle for our
post-Holocaust, post-Auschwitz era, in which all certainties must be viewed
with radical suspicion. Not lyrical monologues of what Rimbaud denounced
as "subjective poetry," but an ambiguously dialogical genrefree from idol-
atry since Baudelaire does not replace the infinite enigma with a facile dictum
("l'hrsie de l'enseignement direct"). Readers cannot indulge in stereotypi-
cal thinking.
Literary interpretation at the new millennium must reach beyond Absur-
dity, beyond binary exclusions, nuancing simplistic duels between the Ideal
and the Real, in which neither Art nor Nature survive the conflict. Surpassing
the "logic of the Absurd" ("Les Dons des fes," SP, 20), which governs the
majority of fables collected in Le Spleen de Paris, there is a simpler, and more
effective wisdom: acceptance of ultimate mystery, trust in a transcendent,
incomparable compassion, which we can strive, with only provisional suc-
cess, to imitate.
This interpretation enriches our understanding of Les Fleurs du Mal.
Among the many ironic affirmations of life's sanctity, examples of disen-
chanted compassion, in Baudelaire's work, I end with the remarkable poem,

22 Spring 1999
 Kaplan

"Le Jeu" (FM, 96; OCl, 95-96) from the section Tableaux parisiens. The poet
condenses his pessimistic paradigm of the human condition into the familiar
Balzacian image of gambling. As he observes old and decrepit whores and
compulsive risk-takers, he discovers a life-affirming courage within his own
heart: "Je me vis accoud, froid, muet, enviant, / Enviant de ces gens la pas-
sion tenace" (11. 16-17). From within his own gloom and enfeebled desire, he
embraces the contingencies of mortal life. The repeated verb envier points to
heartening energy.
Baudelairean ethical irony asserts the supreme value of conscious living.
With a tragic, almost heroic acceptance of this dilapidated community, despite
anxiety, he faces the abyss with courage and even with passion:

Et mon cur s'effraya d'envier maint pauvre homme

Courant avec ferveur l'abme bant,
Et qui, sol de son sang, prfrerait en somme
La douleur la mort et l'enfer au nant! (11. 21-24)

His drastically postmodern affirmation of life grasps the lowest common

denominator of realistic faith. Even the most degraded of fellow creatures,
suicidal and intoxicated as they might be, still choose life over death, even
avec ferveur. Understating the bitter wisdom that courageous suffering can
prevail over denial, callousness, or oblivion"La douleur la mort et l'enfer
au nant!"he denounces despair and meaninglessness.
Does Baudelaire, ultimately, trust life? There are only indirectly stated
absolute values in his works, but values there are, and vehemently defended.
Does he believe that a divine response will ever come, or that a just Creator
even exists? Baudelaire provides no explicit answers to these questions, but
his uncompromising commitment both to art and to truth comprises his
rejoinder to hopelessness.18 His very passion for truth certifies a greater con-
fidencein himself, in humankind, in literature, in an absolute source of
goodness, truth, and beautythan he would ever confess.

Brandeis University

Notes

* The original version of this paper was given at a panel on moral relativism organized by
Claudia Moscovici, Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, April 1998.
1. See Edward K. Kaplan, Baudelaire's Prose Poems, The Esthetic, the Ethical and the Reli-
gious (U of Georgia P, 1990), pref. and 9-12, with my all-too-brief references to other inter-
preters. The definitive order was based on a memorandum in Baudelaire's hand, written

Vol. XXXIX, No. 1 23

 L'Esprit Crateur

around 1865, which lists 50 pieces possessing an "architecture" or overall thematic progres-
sion. My emphasis on "unity" establishes a pragmatic hermeneutic based on sequences
Baudelaire himself published in periodicals and usually republished in the same order.
Among recent works with which my approach is congruent see Richard Stamelman, Lost
Beyond Telling (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990); Jrme Thlot, Baudelaire. Violence et posie
(Paris: Gallimard, 1993); James R. Lawler, Poetry and Moral Dialectic. Baudelaire's "Secret
Architecture" (Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1997); Nicolae Babuts, Baude-
laire. At the Limits and Beyond (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1997).
2. Quotations from Baudelaire, uvres compltes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, Edi-
tions de la Pliade, vol. 1, 1975; vol. 2, 1976; abbreviated as OCl, OC2). OCl, 275; Pichois
uses the term "experimental laboratory" to characterize the prose poems. "A Arsne Hous-
saye" first appeared as a preface to the 1862 La Presse series. My translation of the prose
poems, The Parisian Prowler (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989; second ed., 1997),
places this "letter-preface" in an appendix.
3. See Stamos Metzidakis, Repetition and Semiotics. Interpreting Prose Poems (Birmingham,
AL: Summa Publications, 1986); Marie Maclean, Narrative as Performance: The Baude-
lairean Experiment (London & New York, Routledge, 1988): "These texts include in perfect
but minimal form the Mrchen or wonder-tale, the Sage or anecdote, the fable, the allegory,
the cautionary tale, the tale-telling contest, the short story, the dialogue, the novella, the nar-
rated dream" (p. 45).
4. This and the next quotation from "Wagner et Tannhuser Paris," first published in La Revue
contemporaine (1 April 1861); OC2, 513-14. See my article, "Ecstasy and Insight: Baude-
laire's Fruitful Tensions," Romance Quarterly 45, 3 (Summer 1998): 133-42.
5. Baudelaire's critical essays repeatedly attempt to reconcile the relative and the absolute, the
temporal and the eternal, in artand, by implication, in life, long before Les Fleurs du Mal
took shape: "Toutes les beauts contiennent, comme tous les phnomnes possibles, quelque
chose d'ternel et quelque chose de transitoire, d'absolu et de particulier," Salon de 1846,
the section "De l'hrosme de la vie moderne," OC2, 493.
6. Baudelaire repeated this expression in his essay on Delacroix's painting of women, evoking
their inwardness: "On dirait qu'elles portent dans les yeux un secret douleureux, impossible
enfouir dans les profondeurs de la dissimulation." Exposition universelle (1855), OC2,594.
7. "Un Mangeur d'opium" (1860), OCl, 444; Richard D. E. Burton has convincingly studied
the radical breakthrough of Baudelaire's positive experience of femininity in Baudelaire in
1859. A Study in the Sources of Poetic Creativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988).
8. OCl, 89-91; excellent notes, 1014-21; see Baudelaire's statement in an album describing his
"irrsisible sympathie" for old women which "n'est ml d'aucun apptit sexuel," OC2, 37.
9. See Edward K. Kaplan, "Baudelaire and the Vicissitudes of Venus: Ethical Irony in Fleurs
du Mal," in Emanuel Mickel, ed., The Shaping of Text: Style, Imagery, and Structure in
French Literature. Essays in Honor of John Porter Houston (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univer-
sity Press, 1993): 113-30.
10. OCl, 301-303. See E. Kaplan, Baudelaire's Prose Poems, 81 -85; cf. Leo Bersani, Baudelaire
and Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) and especially Barbara Johnson,
Dfigurations du langage potique. La seconde rvolution baudelairienne (Paris: Flammar-
ion, 1979), 31-55.
11. "A une Malabaraise" was published in the 1840s in periodicals and eventually relegated to
LesEpaves, no. 20; OCl, 173-74; 1159-61. Cf. "Aune dame Crole" (FM, 61) which Baude-
laire included in his 20 October 1841 letter to M. Autard de Bragard; published in L'Artiste,
25 May 1845, signed Baudelaire Dufays, the first poem appearing under his name. Included
in both editions of Les F leurs du Mal. OCl, 62-63; 942-43.
12. OCl, 173-74; cf. "Bien loin d'ici," added to the 1868 edition ofi.es Fleurs du Mal, which
evokes the dark-skinned woman, naming "la chambre de Dorothe" (OCl, 145; 1118-19).
For more on stereotypes and the subjugation of women in Baudelaire's prose poems, see also
Stamos Metzidakis, "Naming the Muse: Invocation or Provocation?" in his Understanding
French Poetry: Essays for a New Millennium (New York & London: Garland, 1994), 150-53.
13. OCl, 339. The 1863 Revue Nationale italicized "ce que"; OCl, 342. For Baudelaire's (still
ironic) repudiation of what I call the "ontological fallacy" of literature see especially, "Les
Projets" (SP, 24) and "Laquelle est la vraie?" (SP, 38). See Kaplan, Baudelaire's Prose
Poems, "Theoretical Fables of Reality," 116-33.
14. The most salient example of ethical (or Socratic) irony is "Assommons les pauvres!" (SP,
49); see Kaplan, Baudelaire's Prose Poems, 42-48, 96-115, 154-59.
15. See Baudelaire's Prose Poems, 145-51, which die following analysis recapitulates and, 1
hope, refines, My perspective was influenced by Herbert Fingarette, "The Meaning of the

24 Spring 1999
 Kaplan

Law in the Book of Job," Hastings Law Review 29, 6 (July 1978): 1581-1617; and by my
study, Holiness in Words. Abraham Joshua Heschel's Poetics of Piety (Albany: SUNY Press,
1996).
16. OCl, 353-56; 1347-48. Baudelaire uses the term "climacteric" in "Portraits de matresses"
(SP, 42), OCl, 345.
17. See Kaplan, Baudelaire's Prose Poems, chap. 8, "Final Executions of Idealism: The Esthetic,
the Ethical, and the Religious," 134-51.
18. See Maurice Blanchot, "L'chec de Baudelaire," La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1947),
137-56; originally published in L'Arche 24 (1947) as an answer to Jean-Paul Sartre's nega-
tive view. For a detailed textual interpretation, see E. Kaplan, "Baudelaire and the Battle with
Finitude; 'La Mort,' Conclusion of Les Fleurs du Mal," French Forum 4, 3 (September
1979): 219-31.

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