I thought that I would not go back and then I did. I went to the glossy yellow room for the thoroughness of the representation we enacted, the strangely freeing totality of being submerged in the banal representation, in the song of possession, because I was curious. It was a form of theatre; I was both an actor and the witness. And as an actor, I was, for myself, both an attending figure of service – a sort of handmaid – and the lead. In this second self-dramatization I was mistaken, but that didn’t prevent the erotic thrill of the delusion. Maybe I was studying the present in the way that I knew how, like someone not quite of the present. It seemed easy, until it wasn’t. I would visit rooms like this yellow one. Others strolled on boulevards. Not all of the present was accessible. Some threads would always be bunched up, tangled, hidden on the reverse side of the garment. There, unseen, they would chafe the wearer.
Originally Courbet had depicted Jeanne Duval standing behind the poet in The Artist’s Studio. Her head is tilted downward to the right, as if she’s reading over Baudelaire’s shoulder. She seems to be holding a fan, but maybe it’s a mirror, and as he reads, she maybe looks down at her own reflection. The image is quite difficult to make out; she’s been painted over by the artist. This erasure, most of the critical texts agree, but without citing any source for the assumption, was at Baudelaire’s request. Many years later, as if in a mystic, material refusal of this obliteration, her figure became visible again; through a chemical process of degradation, the paint lost some of its initial opacity. Now, if one cares to search, or especially if studying photographs of the painting, it is just possible to make out Jeanne’s present but absent form behind the poet, the oblique slant of her neck, the top of her voluminous skirt belling out from her slight waist. Some say that the couple had been fighting, and temporarily split, which was the reason Jeanne was removed from the image. I don’t know. I can surmise that Baudelaire’s own banal shame over the colour of his mistress’s skin spurred the decision, that and his desire to hide their relationship from the scornful gaze of his family. The poet was not as socially expansive as his own construction of erotic beauty.
Baudelaire claimed that beauty always contained something bizarre; bizarre had been his exact word, which is to say: difficult to understand, because of its strangeness. Singular. When I pause with Baudelaire’s word, when I halt the automatic transposition from his French to my English, my feeling for his thinking deepens. The French word is related to bigarré – diversely coloured. In the baroque French of the Low Countries it was a word used for extremely valuable striated tulips. Yet the Italian form, used by Dante, meant angry – specifically the quality of quick flashes of anger. Then it entered courtesans’ language in the sixteenth century. Bizarre carries within it noisy outbursts, livid flushes, concubinage, and extravagant mixture. In old Spanish and Portuguese it meant brave, handsome. Did he think of Jeanne in these ways? It seems clear that Jeanne Duval was bizarre to Baudelaire in every sense of the word’s movements and histories. He exoticized her hair, and skin, and scent so intensely that Les Fleurs du mal seems to be composed of her hair, and skin, and scent. Also her gait, and her origins, or a myth of her origins, in a picturesque framing of the mixture and distance she was constrained to express. It’s not difficult for me to imagine that Baudelaire, with a grossly inevitable racism, was incapable of acknowledging to the bourgeois art-viewing public of Paris, by means of his portrait together with Jeanne, his relationship to the beauty he enjoyed privately in her second-floor room on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, and later at many other addresses. Such an erasure could then pass as tact. It is a very ugly possibility for the poet of beauty. But there are alternate theories. Some say that it was Courbet’s promoter, the critic Champfleury, who demanded Jeanne’s erasure from the painting. He is depicted seated in a black suit, between Baudelaire and Courbet. Champfleury was the critical champion of the new realism; a friend also of Baudelaire’s since the forties, he had become a novelist of renown. In his own 1857 text Le réalisme, he rejected poetry in terms that mirror a typified horror of female sexuality: ‘a proliferating substance, in submission to fashion, and in some way inexhaustible.’ I want to believe it was Champfleury, not Baudelaire, who chose to erase the image of Jeanne Duval. This painting was made in 1848, the year of the height of Baudelaire’s friendship with Courbet, and it was not exhibited until 1855. Jeanne’s erasure took place during the preparation for exhibition, several years after the painting was nominally completed, just after it had been rejected by the Exposition Universelle. In the years between, there had been a shift in the friendship of the two men, particularly in Baudelaire’s assessment of Courbet. Both were supporters and briefly participants in the 1848 February Revolution, when King Louis Philippe was ousted for an elected Republican government. Their friendship formed at this time. Courbet was an impassioned working-class provincial; Baudelaire was an angry, dispossessed bourgeois son who at that time identified with and shared many of the struggles of outsiders and the poor. Near the end of his life, thinking back to this period, he wrote: ‘My intoxication in 1848 … Desire of vengeance. Natural pleasure in demolishing. 1848 was amusing only because everyone was building Utopias like castles in Spain. 1848 was charming only by the very excess of the ridiculous.’ It’s a retroactive scorn; in his youth he did actively desire the dissolution of the old hierarchies, preserved in the bogus monarchy. He hated his stepfather, who for him represented everything about the old power that the revolutionaries wanted to erase. So in the collective intoxication of the 1840s, the poet and the painter agreed on an enemy: the king, along with the class that gained their prestige from him. But within three years the Revolution failed, and that public failure acted as a lens on their private differences. By 1851, Louis-Napoleon, the elected president of the Second Republic, had staged a coup d’état, and in 1852, he named himself Emperor Napoleon III: the country reverted to the monarchy that would last until 1870. Not only had the Revolution failed, the new regime was explicitly an empire of capital. Courbet quickly assumed the rhetoric of the new city of money, while Baudelaire completely and scornfully withdrew from the possibility of politics to his bare hotels.
In those hotels, which are public and private, and so studio-like, as well as spiritual and intellectual and sexual in marbled-through cosmographic mixture, everything does happen. Somebody weeps, somebody fucks, somebody writes a poem, somebody leaves their panties to dry on the window latch. Somebody sleeps late and dreams a novel and somebody who is late tries on all their clothes in serial frustration. Something leaks and there is mouse shit in the drawer. Strangers pretend they can love one another, which is sometimes the case. A spill of strange perfume on a red carpet has altered the mood of an era. Or humiliation finds its architecture.
In one of those rooms, I once exploded in anger at some rote insult. He threw down my book; I slapped his face. Next I felt the banal boy’s full weight behind thumbs crushing down on my trachea, his weight on my chest. This is a sure way to halt speech. With the flint-hard thought that I was experiencing my death, and a spark of surprise at the terminal simplicity of the fact, consciousness stopped. Now new time erupts – my dull shock at the fact of my aliveness – the boy having meanwhile vacated the little scene of my body. With my painful collar of bruises, the whites of my eyes engorged with blood (I wanted to say slobbering rubies to dignify the injury, I wanted to be the words of Mallarmé writing his tomb for Baudelaire, but I myself was the tomb, I was the tomb of what, I wasn’t sure, the tomb of literature – immortal pubis – or at very least the ruin), I ejected myself into the Paris night and I walked, carrying with me always now that inner piece of ruby, of flint, the tomb of what poem. The girl.
In Baudelaire’s Paris, Napoleon iii had seized control of publication, banking, and city space. This was the domestic expression of his expanding colonizing activities, in Algeria, in Indo-China, in New Caledonia, in Senegal; during his reign, France’s overseas territory tripled. In that Paris he hired Haussmann to impose a c
ity-wide system of boulevards by razing the worker neighbourhoods, appropriating thousands of degraded residential buildings, then selling the sites to developers. Entire neighbourhoods disappeared, and their inhabitants were displaced. Strictly policed censorship laws were a linguistic takeover of the city streets by the bankers. The restriction of daily lives paralleled capital’s more historically legible colonizations. The old street trades were monitored and controlled – street-singers, often provincial or foreign, until then unruly participants in a radically populist movement of news and politics in the city, were newly required to submit all of their songs to censors. Through the revolutionary period their song lyrics, set to popular tunes, had been renegade modes of publication. Song then was public and helped to form new publics. These previously itinerant artists were, in Haussmann’s new Paris, issued licences, in the form of brass tags that they were required to visibly wear. These were renewable every three months, needing repeated registration with the police. Singers could no longer wander, they were forbidden to sell their lyrics as pamphlets, and they were permitted to perform only the officially approved songs in a few designated squares. The censorship exerted on literary publishing was thorough also; in 1857, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary were tried under the new anti-obscenity laws for damaging public morals.
Public morals are so vulnerable. A poem or a novel will endanger them, a young girl’s desire will offend them, the skin colour of one’s lover will diminish them. I long for moral abundance, an obscene flourishing of the category of morality. We can admit more, rather than less, embellish the capa ciousness of the idea of the public. If I was a monstrous slut, if I close to disappeared, if I confused aesthetics with the feeling of bodily risk, if I mistook ideology for sensation, anger for bravery, if I belatedly evaded an ambivalent erasure, I was in very good company.
Only the poet was found guilty, and it is pertinent to say that of the two writers, Baudelaire lived more thoroughly and wilfully outside the systems of influence and power. Politics had become one arm of money. There was little that he hated more than money, and little that he needed as much. Courbet all the while revelled in the new publicity culture, adapting his art to promotional schemes, like his Pavilion of Realism. For Baudelaire, worse than Courbet’s success was the fact that it was based on an appropriation of the poet’s early concept of beauty – that beauty must be modern, it must be of the current moment. Courbet deformed the urgency of modern beauty to arrive at his aesthetic of realism; the real for the painter was a materialist representation only. For Baudelaire, the realism of beauty was also and necessarily immaterial, immersed in spiritual and subjective circulations. One part of beauty, irreal, would defy and resist the censors and the bankers. This was beauty’s political imaginary. It was not for appearance only. Beauty must be angry. If Baudelaire had instructed Courbet to erase the image of Jeanne Duval from the allegorical canvas, Courbet’s shameless embrace of monetized display was part of the demand. Courbet appropriated beauty to money. His allegory was the market. Baudelaire, so bitterly wracked with ambivalence, with rejection and debt, anachronistically repudiated the ideology of capital. His realism would recognize the spiritual complexity of dispossessed lives. He undoubtedly projected his aesthetic emotions on those outsiders cursed by Haussmann’s city; he loved actresses, street singers, old women, acrobats, and prostitutes. He loved Jeanne Duval. He reconstructed the baroque city he required in Le Spleen de Paris, a city whose equivocity could enfold both pleasure and doubt. In Baudelaire’s cosmos, bizarre beauty was necessarily striated with irony, anger, and refusal.
The old pleasure had been lost, and the new had not yet been made. Jeanne’s body was not her body; it was the field of an aesthetic proclamation and its withdrawal. Her body was the ground for the refracted self-identity of these bohemian cadets. Carmine-bronze-violet-tinted-blue-black, they described her to one another; they recognized each other by means of the screen of her skin. She lived, as I said, on the second floor, facing the court, with her blonde maid Louise. They had no cook and no kitchen, so the two women would go to eat together in restaurants. Their home was open to any who wished to pay a visit, and from these guests she asked for nothing, since the household was entirely provided for by her lover, Baudelaire. Furthermore she was free, said Nadar, to accept any intimate attentions, since at that time their youthful circle regarded monogamy as a sort of crime. In the afternoon, between the hours of two and four only, her door was closed; this was when Monsieur would visit her, and also every night.
Banville had first met Baudelaire strolling in the Luxembourg Gardens, by means of their common friend, the journalist Privat d’Anglemont. ‘Tiens,’ Privat d’Anglemont said to his companion, at the sight of the approach of the young poet through the foliage, ‘c’est Baudelaire’: Baudelaire, with his little pointy beard, nipped-in black velvet smock, and silver-headed walking stick, who seemed to have stepped from a van Dyck. And then the three men spent the entire night walking together in the city.
In the morning we had more whisky, and chocolate. I was puffy and slick and my lips were kissed raw, and I went to vomit behind the plastic curtain. Magnificent. There was no need for modesty. This is what beauty was for in some songs. Some say they only flirted, but my song was not that one. Later he asked if I would care to be prostituted. No, I said.
If he could pimp, I could write.
Further to the stupidity of poetry, here I will tell about the most beautiful poem I ever wrote: I once bled out a stain on a restaurant chair, which revealed to my backwards glance a map of the arrondissements of Paris – a crooked reddish-pink spiral bisected by the serpentine slash that was the Seine. This stain was the augury that brought me to my borrowed city.
What I wanted of this city, this stain, was a site for the kind of freedom I sought. Supernatural, sexual, artificial, blooming on one side.
Part loss, part object, the stain, with its irregular, permeable border, its ingressions and turbulences, its fragmentary, metonymic nature, its abundance of nested contours, limitless saturation, elisions of propriety, its regime of discontinuity and contamination, was an operating force at once fractal, mystic, and obscene. My analysis of its irregularities is shameless, followed nonetheless by a small retroactive flicker of shame, which is mildly stimulating. Like a convex mirror or a cosmology, the stain revealed a macrocosm: it was a dream city, a city within a city, a mirror within a tableau. It brought me to painting and it brought me to verse. It brought me to the impure repetition of the Baudelairean authorship within myself, its formerness and presentness entangling or continuously supplementing one another without cancelling the tenuous autonomy of the authorship itself, which seemed now to wander, seeking perhaps a temporary room within which to surge into new time, stainlike, much as Baudelaire had wandered in claustrophobic decors, in unconscious imitation of his master Poe. Within Poe’s texts the younger poet had fallen into the shadow of his own future thinking, already latent, with the haunted sense that he himself had already authored what he read. The stain retroactively transmits a singularity that evades the personal. Everything will be the same without being identical. I’ll be a feminine man whose decadent joy resists all appropriation. I’ll be untimely only.
Now we live some distance from the time of stains. We live some distance from freedom. Vigorously and joyfully, sometimes glassily, extremely anachronistically – for who would ever now with any sincerity speak of truth – at other times with a fragile paper-like feeling, I may put this beautiful truth-speaking in whose mouth? I shall put it in my own female mouth. Here I assume the stain, the stained character that transmits. I’m Hazel Brown, newly Baudelairean, the repetition of a stain animated with consciousness, pigment awash in ectoplasm. Desire awash.
The Spanish philosophy student on the marble inner stairs of the nighttime apartment building; the way he removed his glasses first to clean them with the corner of his white cotton shirt. He had approached me in a café to admire my li
ttle sketches. The sideways curve of his charming member. His charming affection for Dionysus. On those marble steps I grew the sultry wings of an angel.
The young American banker who had come to Paris to buy suits, in his dull posh hotel that I left immediately after. He could not kiss. The dark suits there out in the room in their garment bags like witnesses to an unclimactic ineptitude.
The Argentinian Hegelian who worked as a hotel clerk on the boulevard Saint-Michel, in the utopian minimalism of the student room at the Cité Universitaire. His shy lisp. Drinking linden flower tea in the night. The whispered entanglement of our two accents.
(These recollections today, Reader – the curve, the marble, the whispered dialectic – as a hard June rain splits open the unripe cherries on the tree, rots the linden flowers before they can be picked for tisane. I did then like the beauty of the boys. I’d be their glamorous thing and then I wouldn’t.)
Like most girls I knew then, trapped folklorically in their fantasy of beauty, I believed that beauty would be a part of freedom. For some time, in various settings and registers, like a scientist of freedom, I earnestly tested this belief, the belief in the necessary relationship between beauty and freedom. I really did strive. I imagined this as a pagan research. My intentions were as ardent as they were inauthentic. I had stepped into a quite common mistake. Really it was more of a pit than a mistake, but at least I would not be alone there. For my beloveds, I strove to represent beauty, without first understanding the structure of the idea of beauty. Some’s desire was a money and it bought them largesse; others’ desire made them poorer. Still others were the unwilling currency. In my unwittingly conservative gestures towards beauty, I was miming an ancient literary protocol, not having yet reached my current conclusion, which is that literature is the worst theology.
The Baudelaire Fractal Page 5