Baudelaire

Individualism, Dandyism and the Philosophy of History

Bernard Howells

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351199339
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"These essays take Baudelaire seriously as a thinker. Bernard Howells explores the problematics surrounding individualism and history in a number of prose texts, and situates Baudelaire within the broader contexts of nineteenth-century historical, cultural and artistic speculation, represented by Emerson, Carlyle, Joseph de Maistre, Giuseppe Ferrari and Eugene Chevreul."

Part 1
La Fanfarlo—Salon de 1846 — Journaux intimes

Chapter 1
Portrait of the Artist in 1846

Quand je crois me regarder, je m’imagine.

(ARAGON)¹

La Fanfarlo must occupy a central position in any critical account of the early Baudelaire. It is not my aim here to offer a detailed analysis of the novella, which has been undertaken very competently by a number of other commentators, ² but to explore its relation to other prose texts of 1846, to Choix de maximes consolantes sur Vamour, Conseils aux jeunes littérateurs and especially to the Salon de 1846. If we accept Claude Pichois’s dating of La Fanfarlo (OC1, 1414), these four apparently divergent texts are nearly contemporaneous. La Fanfarlo is a self-portrait of the Romantic artist in ironical mode; the Salon a meditation on Romanticism and the cultural crisis of the mid-century as reflected in the visual arts, which Baudelaire uses to state his own aesthetic creed at the outset of his career. These two texts complement and qualify each other in ways which need to be examined if we are to appreciate the complex, dynamic interplay between beliefs and uncertainties which energizes Baudelaire’s writing as a whole.³

A close set of cross-references binds together La Fanfarlo and the two aphoristic texts Conseils aux jeunes littérateurs and Choix de maximes consolantes sur Vamour. First in the form of a fictionalized self-portrait, then in the guise of general precepts and maxims, all three texts reveal a Baudelaire seeking to find his way amongst the more disquieting, paradoxical aspects of his own personality and seeking to find the right sort of emotional and intellectual attitudes to cope with these paradoxes— attitudes which vacillate between the ironical and the metaphysical or, typically, try to combine both. Baudelaire forewarns us, in Conseils, that the wisdom he is about to dispense to young writers like himself, concerned with literary and sexual success, is built up from his own past ‘bévues’ (OC2, 13) — mistakes due to impercipience about oneself and one’s relation to others, failures to perceive the real conditions of existence. Similar bévues are attributed, in the case of Baudelaire’s alter ego, Samuel Cramer, to a hyperactive imagination that cannot always distinguish between the real and the imaginary, or, within the imaginary, between the probable and the possible (OC1, 568). Cramer’s failures appear the obverse of the ideal worldly wisdom proposed in Conseils aux jeunes littérateurs, where the moralist delivers his advice with an energy bom of self-aggression, the ‘Je veux être le plus fort!9 (Corri, 371) of the dandy who is threatened by defeat and knows his own weakness. ‘Vae victis/’ (OC2, 14)— the misunderstood, ill-fated Romantic genius can be a dangerous myth; the artist always stands in relation to a public and gets the success he deserves; failure is not to be blamed on bourgeois philistinism, it is the sign of weakness and of an inability to grasp the mechanism which regulates the interaction of individual creative liberty with the other forces that go to shape public sensibility and taste. Writing is, after all, a matter of filling a certain number of pages; success comes not from inspiration but from hard work and requires a realistic sense of what one’s work is worth in money terms; poetry, of course, always pays— in the long run. Emotional or domestic disorder is not the sine qua non of genius, which thrives far better on nourishing food and an uncomplicated sex-life. So certain types of women are to be avoided at all costs, amongst them the femme honnête, who is given over, as if to a third person, to bourgeois moral ideals incompatible with the despotic imagination of the artist, and the actress, who cannot be fully possessed for similar and opposite reasons, because she is given over to the lusts and the caprice of a third party—the audience. The two ‘narrative sequences’, as they have come to be known, of La Fanfarlo involve, first, Cramer’s attempted seduction of the femme honnête par excellence, Madame de Cosmelly, and, second, his real seduction by her diametrical opposite, the actress, La Fanfarlo. The first narrates the unsuccessful attempt to woo over, in literature, a bourgeois read-ership, the second a retreat into the solipsism of the imaginary and the artificial.

There is a similar, even closer, relationship between the portrait of Samuel Cramer in La Fanfarlo and Choix de maximes consolantes sur Vamour which wams specifically against the pitfalls of what Baudelaire calls ‘paradox’, in the strong sense of a contradiction one fails to resolve satisfactorily— a contradiction which can result from a failure to follow the promptings of one’s own sensibility, or naïveté, which should always be trusted, or from a failure to understand the mechanisms of one’s own psyche. There is ‘paradox’ when an internal division in our tastes or values stops us being at one with ourselves, for example when we enter into sexual relations that run counter to our natural sympathies or temperamental needs, or when, like des Grieux, we are caught in a tragic division between our impulse to moral elevation and our attraction to moral corruption. In the latter case, ‘Vous voilà fort empêché dans vos raisonnements platoniques’ (OC1, 550)— the alleged platonic indissolubility of beauty, truth and goodness flies out of the window. It is worth noting the strong opposition made in the text between ‘paradox’ and naïveté—paradox damns, naïveté saves: ‘Rappelez-vous ceci, c’est surtout du paradoxe en amour qu’il faut se garder. C’est la naïveté qui sauve, c’est la naïveté qui rend heureux’ (OC1, 551). The distinction and opposition of these two terms recur in the portrait of Samuel Cramer at the beginning of La Fanfarlo. In aesthetic terms, the opposition between naïveté and the internal contradictions of eclecticism is the key to the Salon de 1846.

Human liberty, Baudelaire admonishes, adopting the tone and the vocabulary of the moral theologian, is more effective in avoiding the occasions of sin than in resisting them. But, if we fall, then wisdom consists in making the best of a bad job. In jocular vein: if your mistress has no bust worth speaking of, then give thanks to the Gods for her magnificent hips! If she is devoutly religious and you an impious libertine, the situation is not lost but rich in extra erotic potential— for both parties. If her face is pitted with smallpox it is possible, by an adroit manipulation of mental associations, to turn ugliness itself into a necessary condition of voluptuous pleasure and therefore of beauty, for what is ‘beauty’ if not, to quote Stendhal, ‘the promise of happiness’ (OC1, 548)? In short, in a world where most people find themselves in impossible situations most of the time, wisdom consists in consciously exercising one’s capacity for emotional casuistry. The moralist’s mock-serious purpose is to ‘énumerer tous les beaux et bons côtés de ce qu’on appelle vice et laideur morale’ (OC1, 550) in order to show that Nature knows what she is doing, that ‘tout est encore pour le mieux dans le plus mauvais des mondes possibles’ (OC1, 552). In this way ‘une vue plus synthétique des choses’ dissolves the antinomy of good and evil into an overall unity: ‘Ormuz et Arimane, vous êtes le même!’ (OC1, 550).

The ‘consoling maxims’ belong to an idiom which the narrator in La Fanfarlo refers to as the ‘patois séminariste’ of a ‘scélérat novice’ (OC1, 569), one of a selection of styles or rhetorics Cramer deploys in his attempt simultaneously to console and seduce Madame de Cosmelly. The novella offers another series of ‘consoling maxims’, this time more unctuously jesuitical than Leibnitzian in formulation, since the aim is to appeal to the mildly religious sensibilities of the femme honnête. Cramer acts out the role of Tartuffe, the ‘brutal et hypocrite comédien’ (OC1, 562), to her Elmire, proposing ‘une aimable philosophie qui sait trouver des consolations dans les objets les plus indignes en apparence’ (OC1, 562). ‘Il est une science d’aimer son prochain et de le trouver aimable, comme il est un savoir bien vivre. Plus un esprit est délicat, plus il trouve de beautés originales; plus une âme est tendre et ouverte à la divine espérance, plus elle trouve dans autrui, quelque souillé qu’il soit, de motifs d’amour; ceci est l’œuvre de la charité’ (OC1, 563). At the end of the day Cramer is discomfited by his own subterfuges, outwitted by his intended victim, who uses his patois séminariste against him.

At the end of Choix de maximes Baudelaire is at pains to defend himself against the accusation of calumny against life, and equally insistent that he is not viewing the world through rose-coloured spectacles either. His adaptation of Pangloss’s formula suggests that the optimism associated with ‘une vue plus synthétique des choses’ is maintained despite, or perhaps even because of, the accumulation of evidence to the contrary—an optimism which points back more clearly to the real incongruities (or ‘paradoxes’) of human experience than to any metaphysical unity in which they might be transcended. Moreover, Choix de maximes begins by acknowledging the inevitable distortions involved in posing as an aphorist: ‘Quiconque écrit des maximes aime charger son caractère’ (OC1, 546). Like caricature (charge), the maxim represents a truth, but one which may be exaggerated at will, either in the direction of a world-weary pessimism (‘vite, charbonnons-nous des rides’) or, as here, in the direction of an equally factitious optimism (‘enrubannons notre cœur comme un frontispice’, OC1, 546). The writer of maxims, then, is, like Cramer, fully conscious of his own ‘faculté comédienne’ (OC1, 555). Like the actor of pantomime, he is a master of disguises and cosmetics and can put on the face that best suits his role, always in anticipation of his public’s reaction. Far from offering us the reassurance of a wisdom encapsulated once and for all, Baudelaire’s ‘choice of maxims’ reflects an unsettling awareness that human attitudes derive more from a choice of persona than from some natural truth. From the outset they problematize the identity, and hence the authority, of the voice that speaks them. Choix de maximes obliquely raises issues that are explicitly thematized in the fictional self-portrait and will resurface again in a more radical form at the end of Baudelaire’s career, in the abortive project to write honestly about himself (Mon cœur mis à m). They need to be raised here as a preliminary since, despite the troubling irony, Choix de maximes is sometimes cited as straight evidence in support of a unitary philosophy of nature in the early Baudelaire.

F. W. Leakey and D. J. Kelley⁴ have persuasively demonstrated the existence of such a philosophy, centred on ‘la loi des contrastes, qui gouverne l’ordre moral et l’ordre physique’, first mentioned in Conseils aux jeunes littérateurs (OC2, 19), and on the ‘vue plus synthétique des choses’ which invites us to rise above contradictions to a unitary view of nature as the ‘résultante des contraires’ (OC1, 550). Kelley was able, for example, to demonstrate brilliantly how the law of complementary contrasts accounted for the structure of the Salon de 1846 and for Baudelaire’s critical preferences within it. Baudelaire’s first major aesthetic statement is built around the complementary opposition of Delacroix and Ingres, colour and line. But this opposition is transcended in the critical preference accorded to Delacroix on the grounds that in nature colour and form are inseparable, whereas the dessinateur who artificially separates them sets up ‘un procès éternel, une dualité fatigante’ (OC2, 458). The ‘philosophy of nature’ served Kelley so well in his exposition of the Salon because it served Baudelaire so well in structuring his own aesthetic ideas. In 1846 Baudelaire did feel he had an aesthetic and perhaps even a philosophical ‘system’, but he came to admit later that his ‘system’ had been the rationalization of his spontaneous temperamental preferences and that he had never been able to make it fit the complexity and, indeed, the conflicting nature of his own aesthetic responses: ‘J’ai essayé plus d’une fois, comme tous mes amis, de m’enfermer dans un système pour y prêcher à mon aise. Mais un système est une espèce de damnation qui nous pousse à une abjuration perpétuelle’ (OC2, 577). Like the unitary revolutionary ideologies of 1848, his ‘system’ was a ‘fille déplorable de l’utopie’ (OC2, 557): the more rigorous it sought to be, the harder it had to suppress the dissident elements and the doubt that threatened to subvert it. Or, alternatively, it could only keep itself alive by repeated accommodations, the ‘apostasies philosophiques’ (OC2, 578) which trouble the philosophical conscience. The evidence of these ‘abandonings of faith’ is apparent, even in the Salon, in all those statements which cannot be made to fit in with an optimistic philosophy of nature. And the evidence of alternative and incompatible ‘faiths’ can be detected elsewhere, for example in De l’essence du rire, a first draft of which existed in 1846. Because he scrupulously acknowledges this counter-evidence, as well as the irony surrounding formulae like the ‘vue plus synthétique des choses’, Kelley is reluctant to follow Baudelaire in talking of an intellectual ‘system’ in 1846 and prefers, quite rightly, to speak of ‘une cohérence organique de la pensée du jeune critique— cohérence qui n’exclut pas forcément le doute’.⁵ I would like to suggest, on the evidence of La Fanfarlo, that both the irony and the self-doubt are too radical to be marginalized in this way. The philosophy of nature did not occupy the whole of Baudelaire’s awareness in extent or in depth. It was not a foundation, but one way for Baudelaire to try to structure the extreme mobility of his sensibility and imagination; one determination of a consciousness that is always aware it can assume other determinations, for example the polarities of a manichean-type theology. The self-doubt is not incidental but generative. We will not fully understand the assertive, hubristic optimism of the Salon until we grasp what it is asserting itself against.

In Baudelaire’s own view, irony, that is Romantic irony, is a ‘fundamental ’ aspect of modern literature (OC1, 658). It does not appear, in 1846, as tragic or ‘vorace’ as it will become later, for example in ‘L’Héautontimorouménos’ and ‘L’Irrémédiable’, which evoke the self-torture of a consciousness irremediably divided against itself, cut off from the rest of nature and alone with its own specular image. But irony is already, in La Fanfarlo, a form of duality which cannot be recuperated within the ‘system of nature’ because it emphasizes the division of consciousness from nature and renders impossible any identification with a ‘vue synthétique’— that is, with a stable system or a stable view of self. Irony, in ‘L’Héautontimorouménos’ and ‘L’Irrémédiable’, is associated with Satanic laughter, and laughter, in De l’essence du rire, is associated with division or duality. Etymologically, of course, the ‘devil’ derives from the Greek diabolos, ‘that which divides’. Baudelaire develops the commonplace ‘le rire vient de l’idée de sa propre supériorité’ (OC2, 530, my italics but Baudelaire’s emphasis) in a characteristically subtle way. ‘Le comique,’ he writes, ‘la puissance du rire est dans le rieur et nullement dans l’objet du rire’ (OC2, 532). The idea of our own superiority is a diabolical illusion, but it is indicative of an essential division within consciousness and constitutive of consciousness, an impossibility of self-coincidence. This inner division is not necessarily the division between good and evil understood in a narrow sense— though that can be one of the forms it might take, as Baudelaire willingly dons, for the purposes of his argument, the mantle of theologian— but a division between a ‘higher’ and a ‘lower’ self. Laughter is ‘la résultante nécessaire de sa double nature contradictoire’ (OC2, 531) and is ‘essentiellement humain’ (OC2, 532), the sign of man’s ‘grandeur infinie’ with respe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• PART 1
• PART 2
• Bibliography