(“The Enemy”)
the optative:
Afin qu’à mon désir tu ne sois jamais sourde!
(“La chevelure”)
(So that you are never deaf to my desire!)
(“The Head of Hair”)
the resigned, or desperate:
Et mon âme dansait, dansait, vieille gabarre
Sans mâts, sur une mer monstrueuse et sans bords!
(“Les sept vieillards”)
(And my soul, an aging, mastless barge,
Danced, danced on a monstrous and limitless sea!)
(“The Seven Old Men”)
Through the exclamation mark we reach for the imperiousness of certain drives in Baudelaire’s temperament, an imperiousness he would impose on us in our turn; we remember those words from an earlier quotation: “a deeper, more willed, more despotic meaning.” But this gives a converse poignancy, or quiet assurance, or tight-lipped control, or vocal lassitude, to those poems without exclamation marks: for example, “La vie antérieure” (“The Previous Life”), “Parfum exotique” (“Exotic Perfume”), the four “Spleen” poems (only one exclamation mark between them), “Remords posthume” (“Posthumous Remorse”).
Most instances of the exclamation mark endorse Baudelaire’s more general susceptibility to the amplified and expressionistic, to be found equally in the capital letter of the personified abstraction (allegory), in his love of caricature, in his defense of makeup, and indeed in the heightened consciousness of surnaturalisme. As he himself acknowledges, “As far as art is concerned, I confess that I am no hater of excess; moderation has never seemed to me the sign of a vigorous artistic nature.” If we think of Baudelaire as a melodramatic writer, then the melodrama lies not only in his pressing need to identify, to name, the motors of moral activity, but also in his need to break bounds, in his exasperated pursuit of truths and experiences hidden from us.
In “Le peintre de la vie moderne” (“The Painter of Modern Life”), Baudelaire addresses the fear of being overwhelmed by detail. If “pêle-mêle” is one term that captures this anarchic assault, “bric-à-brac confus” (jumbled bric-à-brac) (“Le cygne” / “The Swan”) is another, and enumeration is its characteristic linguistic manifestation. But the existential threat carried by enumeration is not confined to detail:3
Mais parmi les chacals, la panthères, les lices,
Les singes, les scorpions, les vautours, les serpents,
Les monstres glapissants, hurlants, grognants, rampants,
[2>4 // 2>2>2]
Dans la ménagerie infâme de nos vices, …
(But among the jackals, the panthers, the bitch-hounds,
The monkeys, the scorpions, the vultures, the snakes,
The yelping, howling, grunting, crawling monsters,
In the squalid menagerie of our vices, …)
Enumeration extended beyond discursive control, as here in “Au lecteur,” ousts the poet from his own text and undoes structure (hierarchy, subordination): the third line in this stanza, for example, begins to sound unaccountably long and breaks the alexandrine’s characteristic four-measure shape; if the present participial form is the sustain pedal, then the poet’s voice is literally drowned out.
And if we find Baudelaire difficult to define as a political animal, partly because his views are temperamental rather than ideological, then his changeable attitude to the urban crowd is a significant feature of our uncertainty: he may, like Constantin Guys (1805–92), the journalistic graphic artist who is the subject of “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” have the vocation to “marry the crowd,” but the enumerative assault of detail is an analogue of crowd mentality: “An artist with a perfect sense of form, but used to exercising his memory and imagination above all, then finds himself as if assailed by a riot of details, all demanding justice with the fury of a crowd in love with absolute justice.” The art of writing, it seems, is in itself an indictment of “absolute equality.” Memory and imagination need a site other than the street to reaffirm their powers, and that site is the poet’s/artist’s lamplit room/studio, to which Guys each evening withdraws: “Now whilst others are sleeping, [Guys] is bent over his table, darting at a sheet of paper the same look that, shortly before, he darted at objects, fencing with his pencil, his pen, his brush, splashing water from the glass up to the ceiling, wiping his pen on his shirt, hurried, violent, busied, as if afraid that the image might elude him, quarrelsome though alone, and falling over himself.” Baudelaire assures us that Guys achieves the distilled order and harmony he is looking for. But two troubling factors persist: this creative process is still haunted by breathless enumeration; and Guys is working with the feverish speed of a plein-air artist. The street is beginning to invade the room.
The room, then, instead of acting as an aesthetic refuge, may become a place of archaizing self-delusion (“Paysage” / “Landscape”); it may be powerless to undo the frightening hallucination of the street (“Les sept vieillards”); it may surrender its promise of a timeless “supreme life” to Time and its “démoniaque cortège de Souvenirs, de Regrets, de Spasmes, de Peurs, d’Angoisses, de Cauchemars, de Colères et de Névroses” (diabolical procession of Memories, Regrets, Convulsions, Fears, Agonies, Nightmares, Rages, Neuroses)—that is, to lawless Enumeration personified (“La chambre double” / “The Double Room”). Reading through the totality of Baudelaire’s oeuvre, one might conclude that as the room becomes increasingly subject to the street, so the imagination and the memory become increasingly subject to the nerves and to temperament. Proposing this shift of emphasis suggests that capacities of mind shift toward psychophysiological responses, that the exercise of faculties shifts to the “sursauts” (sudden jolts) of susceptibility and consciousness, that continuities of memory shift to the discontinuities of passing sensation, that character traits shift to drives, intensities, nervous disorder. But even in these shifts, Baudelaire clings to older values.
If Baudelaire found the “recueillement” (quiet self-collection) of the room more difficult to indulge—reflecting perhaps his own nomadic existence, as a perpetual fugitive from creditors—and the street an increasingly necessary habitat, what kind of street is it? The first line of “Les petites vieilles” (“The Little Old Women”), “Dans les plis sinueux des vieilles capitales” (In the sinuous folds of old capital cities), gives us a glimpse of the old Paris of narrow, winding alleys, the multicursal labyrinth that confirms the city’s “inner” femininity, its secret anatomy, its unencompassable variousness. This is a medieval city in tune with Baudelaire’s allegorical and melodramatic propensities. This is the Paris that Haussmann had not entirely eradicated in his masculinist enterprise of penetrative street-planning, panoptic possession, and easy arterial access. Haussmann’s limited range of classicizing building models did not manage to expunge architectural heterogeneity; but his newly spacious Paris seemed to generate crowds, noise (“A une passante” / “To a Woman Passing By”), traffic volume (“Perte d’auréole” / “Loss of Halo” and “Le crépuscule du soir” / “Evening Twilight”), and the kaleidoscopic sensation and perceptual acceleration we see in Guys’s work. Existentially, Baudelaire is caught in between, on a building site as it were (“Le cygne”), not in a new Paris, but in a Paris in metamorphosis, and this “in between” serves only to mobilize and agitate the polarizations to which he is subject. The formal and generic uncertainties of the prose poems in Le spleen de Paris, published posthumously in 1869, express something of this agitation.
In the prose poems, the artistic heroisms of Balzac and Delacroix give way to the mock-heroics of croquis parisiens (Parisian sketches). Just as he numbers Guys among the minor poets—and perhaps he feels the same about Manet—so the Baudelaire of Le spleen de Paris seems to cast himself in a similar role. The prose poem dislocates canonic forms, acts dysfunctionally in relation to literary norms, and has no clear audience, despite a striking sociopolitical immediacy; its very generic multiplicity, the perverse instability of its streetwise mor
ality, and its rootless and variational relation to life mark it out as a new art of intersections. In rejecting rhyme and metrical measure, the prose poem rejects mnemonicity; it does not ask to be remembered, but rather puts the reader under the pressure of immediate comprehension and consumption, the pressure to be coincident with itself in the moment of reading. Rhythm in the prose poem does not, like meter in verse, map out the way in which the poem delivers itself and is to be digested. Instead it improvises itself in the reader’s mind, questions itself, interrupts its own continuities, interrogates its own impulses, is the ever-changing flux of the individual voice and of the crowd. There are no longer prosodic rules, but only performative choices (choices of tempo, pausing, phrasing, accentuation, tone, intonation), a whole theater of available dictions.
It is tempting to see the later Baudelaire as a proto-impressionist: in his insistence that beauty has within it an element of the transient and time-specific; in his sensitivity to the molecular dialogue of colors under changing conditions; in his celebration of the poetry of the street; in his flirtation with telegraphic and notational styles; in his championing of the “minor” art of Guys and his friendship with Manet. But he is just as much a proto-symbolist: in his pursuit of heightened consciousness, of surnaturalisme; in his cultivation of synesthesia and universal analogy; in his sense of the constant trafficking between the conscious, the unconscious, the prenatal, the archetypal; in his vision of reality as a palimpsest of sedimented memories and existences (Baudelaire rediscovered himself in Poe and Wagner), and as an elasticated temporality. Or he is just as much a proto-decadent: in his dandyism; in his conflicted need for, and ironic self-dissociation from, his audience; in his temperamental veering between febrility and neurasthenia; in his strategies of outrage and shock; in his inability to surmount the Fall, and the clock of mortality, by the pursuit of immediate sensation and the erasure of memory. But Baudelaire is as much modern(ist) in his irresolutions as he is in his anticipations.
Paul Verlaine (1844–96), in his suite of articles for L’Art (November–December 1865), already had the measure of Baudelaire’s modernity, describing him as “modern man with his sharpened and vibrant senses, his painfully subtle mind … in a word the bilio-nervous type par excellence, as H[ippolyte] Taine would say.” Further on, he notes that if, in Baudelaire, “the nerves from time to time derange the intellect, increasing tenfold the action of the senses,” there is always the countervailing pull toward order. Verlaine in many senses conforms to the same type. But if Baudelaire occupies a space of polarizations, Verlaine’s preferred habitat is that of indeterminacy. Baudelaire presents a poet pushed to the periphery, at home among outcasts, an urban beachcomber working alongside the rag-picker; but he takes strength from his defiant aristocracy of spirit (dandyism). Verlaine has no such consolation; his is a position of purer self-deprecation, of self-pity without an immediately visible cause. His poetry generates no social context; poems such as “La soupe du soir” (“Evening Soup”) in Jadis et naguère (Long Ago and Not So Long Ago, 1884–85) are exceptional. For that reason, Verlaine’s poems often seem to come into existence ex nihilo, summoned but unmotivated, and thus, however firm their structure, never quite knowing what their agenda is or how they might resolve themselves.
Much is made, justifiably, of Verlaine’s cultivation of the vers impair, the line with an uneven number of syllables:4
De la musique avant toute chose,
4 // 3>2
Et pour cela préfère l’Impair
4 // 2>3
Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air,
2>4>3
Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.
4 // 2>3
(“Art poétique,” Jadis et naguère)
(Music, above all else,
And for that prefer the uneven line
Vaguer and more evanescent in the air,
With nothing in it which weighs or stays.)
(“The Art of Poetry,” Jadis et naguère)
Baudelaire had made occasional use of the impair—for example, in “L’invitation au voyage” (“Invitation to Travel”) (5/7); “Le poison” (“Poison”) (12/7); “Chanson d’après-midi” (“Afternoon Song”) (7); and “La musique” (“Music”) (12/5)—but principally either to allude to its connections with the chanson, or to create discordant relationships with the alexandrine or octosyllable.
In Verlaine’s hands, its expressivity derives much more from its inherent capacity for rhythmic uncertainty. While the line of an even number of syllables either balances equal measures against each other (3>3, 4>4) or leaves between measures a clear-cut, two-syllable (or more) differentiation (2>4, 3>5, 5>1), the impair acts against equilibrium of measures and allows consecutive use of measures with only one syllable’s difference (2>3, 4>3, 4>5). In such circumstances, the poem is likely to become a rhythmic mirage, where the reader strains to hear the rhythmical contours, a design, or a controlling authority. Not only that, but we tend to half-hear, or wish to hear, the parisyllabic neighbors on either side of the imparisyllabic line: the enneasyllables of “Art poétique” make us think predominantly of slightly down-at-heel, innumerate decasyllables (with the caesura at the fourth syllable); but occasionally, as here in the third line, we may also hear, thanks to the absence of caesura, an octosyllable—but a miscalculated octosyllable, embarrassed by a slight syllabic surplus. The eleven-syllable lines of “Ariettes oubliées IV” (“Forgotten Ariettas IV”) in Romances sans paroles (Songs without Words, 1874), with their 5//6 divisions, suggest alexandrines with insufficient initial momentum:
Soyons deux enfants, // soyons deux jeunes filles
Éprises de rien//et de tout étonnées
(Let us be two children, let us be two young girls
Smitten with nothing and dazzled by everything)
The impair can produce a rhythmic equivalent of the glissando, or of microtonal variation, whose slippages and slidings demand the keenest ear.
But we are straining to detect small tonal shifts as much in vocal quality as in rhythm; and qualities of voice are to be found as much in impersonal, nonhuman agencies, as in human ones, often without any apparent enunciatory source:
Ô le frêle et frais murmure!
3>2>2
Cela gazouille et susurre,
4>3
Cela ressemble au cri doux
4>3
Que l’herbe agitée expire …
2>3>2
(“Ariettes oubliées I”)
(O the frail and fresh murmur!
It warbles and whispers,
It resembles the soft cry
Exhaled by the buffeted grass …)
This experimentation with vocal quality is also apparent in Verlaine’s cultivation of poems with only one rhyme-gender (for example, “Mandoline” [“Mandolin”], “En sourdine” [“Muted”], Ariettes oubliées II, IV, VIII, IX) or with gender alternating between stanzas rather than, as is the rule, between consecutive rhyme-pairs (for example, “L’amour par terre” [“Love Thrown Down”], “Chevaux de bois” [“Roundabout Horses”], “Birds in the Night”). Feminine rhymes, where the rhyme-word ends with an uncounted mute “e” syllable, will tend to be closed syllables (vowel + consonant [+ e])—brises/ grises, plaine/incertaine, langoureuse/amoureuse—and thus, it is argued, more prolonged, dying or reverberative, more poignant, more tender. Masculine rhymes, on the other hand, tend to be open syllables (consonant + vowel)—vent/souvent (/vã/, /suvã/), jaloux/fous (/ʒalu/, /fu/), tombera/chantera—and are thus reckoned to be more abrupt, harder on the ear, more uncompromising. Rhyme gender may generate sexist interpretations, but it allows Verlaine to explore the homosexual and the transsexual and all the ambiguities of gender.
But this cultivation of fine-grained rhythmic and tonal variation should not mask an equal and opposite effect:
Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise
Où l’Indécis au Précis se joint
(“Art poétique”)
(N
othing more prized than the ambiguous song
In which the indecisive and the precise conjoin)
What is this “Précis”? Among those elements that contribute to it, one might mention the dislocated, or dissociated, adjective. “Après trois ans” (“Three Years After”) in Poèmes saturniens (Poems under Saturn, 1866), in which the poet revisits the garden of his childhood, ends:
Même j’ai retrouvé // debout la Velléda
Dont le plâtre s’écaille // au bout de l’avenue,
—Grêle, parmi l’odeur // fade du réséda.
(I even found the Velleda still standing
Its plaster flaking at the end of the avenue,
—Fragile, amidst the sickly smell of mignonette.)
Here “Grêle” is pushed into isolation, its antecedent peculiarly uncertain; were it not for the dash, one would naturally associate it with “avenue.” It is almost as if this last line refers to the poet himself. Verlaine uses both the line break and the caesura to generate these dislocations, these rejets, these words pushed out on a limb, so that, as Jean-Pierre Richard puts it, “Their charm is precisely to be free of this origin … and to enjoy an autonomous existence, shorn of all ties, a life which is theirs alone.” So here, too, the adverb “debout” is thrust from “retrouvé” by the caesura, just as “fade” is thrust from “odeur.” In all instances we find ourselves poised between the suspension prior to the break (line-ending or caesura) and the intensified encounter with the rejet, as it seemingly enters into a more distilled, more sovereign version of itself. In “Le paysage dans le cadre des portières” (“The Landscape in the Frames of the Carriage-Doors”), the train creates a whirlwind, which pushes the adjectives (“mince,” “étrange”) into momentary and stark relief:
Où tombent les poteaux // minces du télégraphe
Dont les fils ont l’allure // étrange d’un paraphe.
(Where fall the slender telegraph poles
A History of Modern French Literature Page 58