coldhearted scientist وداد

I never know when modernity starts: 1492? 1637? 1789? This article says it is with Baudelaire, and we are quoting from it.

Consider Flaubert’s smooth and instantaneous leap from “moral history” into “feelings.” This elision offers an unintended but eloquent verdict on what is great and strange about Baudelaire’s poetry: its unmatched capacity to transmute public existence into private torments and then return them to the public sphere, through the symbolic medium of his famed “correspondences.”

The generation in question is the workshop wherein modernity was assembled, Baudelaire its glowering emissary. This is true, in part, for his ambiguous participation in the century’s central political episode, from the February Revolution of 1848 to Louis Bonaparte’s 1851 coup d’état.

If Baudelaire is a missing character in Sentimental Education, he is equally an absent presence in the other great moral history of midcentury France, Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

English can scarcely capture the formal feeling, though generations of translators have tried; at the same time, no one misses the cry for, and against, the sudden remaking of the material world.

[O]n the one hand, the waning but inescapable power of the aristocracy, observing the old forms behind the stolid facades of western Paris. On the other, the mercurial bustle of the marketplace, that perpetual parade with its confetti made from a million receipts. By the end of the nineteenth century this confrontation has largely been settled; in The Flowers of Evil it is a mythic drama, voluptuary and awful, one way of life arriving as another passes away.

[W]hat is the situation for which the prose poem offered a language where none had existed before, and thus took hold? Baudelaire names this himself, in a passage of such inarguable clarity that it has become an axiom of modern art: “Which of us has not, in his ambitious days, dreamt the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple enough and striking enough to suit lyrical movements of the soul, undulations of reverie, the flip-flops of consciousness.” He continues: “Above all, it’s from being in crowded towns, from the criss-cross of their innumerable ways, that this obsessive ideal is born.” [Note to self: I must cross post this and relate it to prose poetry in LORCA and also some poetic prose of VALLEJO.]

The city is not a thing, not even a stage (as it appears in lesser accounts of Baudelaire and of modernity in general). It is a set of relations, shifting and elusive but for all that the base circumstance from which others arise, including objects, events, people. It is a bit like saying that the solar system isn’t made of planets but of gravity–a gravity that is modifiable, historically specific and can reveal itself only through moments and instants. Thoughts, politics, poetry might rail against this situation, but this cannot gainsay the fact that they arise from it as well. [Emphasis added]

“A room resembling a reverie,” Baudelaire begins the poem “Double Bedroom”–but it is not a reverie into which he can fall. He cannot resist the awful lure of the street, with its “chaos of mud and snow, criss-crossed by a thousand carriages, sparkling with toys and toffee, crawling with greed and despair, standard delirium of a metropolis, made to disturb the brain of the sturdiest solitary.” One exists only in the darkly shining parade within which one disappears. No ideas but in crowds–this is the book’s axiom.

[T]he demiurges and demons, moons that speak and the Dionysian staff of the thyrsus…don’t open a channel to some universal story but exactly the reverse; they underscore the breaking of tradition. Like the angel of “Lost Halo,” they are debauched in an instant. The modern seduces effortlessly, and its promises are not mistaken.

Again and again the poet struggles to step outside: “Finally! Alone!” he cries out in “One A.M.” “Finally! the tyranny of the human face has disappeared and from now on my sufferings will be my own.” At one point he reaches back to The Flowers of Evil for a dream of escape, repeating a title from that volume: “Invitation to the Voyage.” The earlier version is a triple sonnet of sensual longing, a last vestige of aristocratic ease that still might endure somewhere. Returning here as a prose block, the similar language seems out of place, a vitriolic travesty….

Again and again he goes looking for [“the beautiful language of my century”]; the secret he knows is that it is to be found exacctly “in movement and in a prostitution.” This passage is the stroll of the flâneur, that jaundiced inspector of modernity…the private citizen invented by public existence.

“The interior is passing away….” wrote the Goncourt brothers, incomparable chronicles of Paris, in 1860…. Baudelaire’s grasp is…subtler…: the interior will now be itself a public fact. Otherwise it is finally unsatisfactory, intolerable…. “[Enjoying the crowd is an art.” Granted, it is an art that will require “a taste for travesty and masque, along with hatred of home and passion for travel.” Here he does not mean the escape fantasy of “Invitation.” Rather, it is the tormented excursion into modernity.

“Who walks alone with his thoughts draws a singular intoxication from this universal communion.”

Baudelaire is an excellent poet, and blogger.

Axé.