Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) 9781503619203

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DEAD TIME

Cultural Memory tn

the Present Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

DEAD TIME Temporal Disorders in the Wilke ofModernity {Baudelaire and Flaubert)

Elissa Marder

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2001 by the Board ofTrustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Primed in the United States of America On acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marder, Elissa. Dead time ; temporal disorders in the wake of modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) I Elissa Marder p. cm.-(Cultural memory in the present) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8047-4071-2 (alk. paper)-ISBN o-8047-4072-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) r. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867. Fleurs du mal. 2. Flaubert, Gustave, 1821-1880. Madame Bovary. 3· Time in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PQ219I.F63 M27 2002 841'8-dc21 20010426n Typeset by BookMatters in nlr3.5 Adobe Garamond Original printing 2001

For Claire

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: "Our Contemporaries," Baudelaire and Flaubert I

2

I

Women Tell Time: Traumatic and Addictive Temporality in Les Fleurs du mal

I4

Flat Death: Snapshots of History

68

3 The Erasing of Modern Life 4

x1

Trauma, Addiction, and Temporal Bulimia in Madame Bovary

5 Madame Bovary's Perversion of Death

88 I3I 150

Notes

I89

Bibliography

2n

Index

2I9

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of years oflistening to others and learning from them. I hope that the many people who have spoken to me about this work throughout the years will hear and recognize their own voices in it. I am indebted first to my teachers at Cornell, in Paris, and at Yale who taught me how to read. Special thanks to Richard Klein, Marie Depusse, Barbara Johnson, Fredric Jameson, Peter Brooks, Denis Hollier, and most especially to Shoshana Felman. I have also enjoyed the privilege of having been taught by some of the greatest readers and thinkers of our time. This book would have been impossible and unthinkable without the enduring teaching and writings ofJacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Jean-Franc;:ois Lyotard. I have also learned from the intellectual generosity of my friends and colleagues. In particular, I extend warm thanks to: April Alliston, Kathy Aschheim, Tom Cohen, Lalitha Gopalan, Rindala El-Khoury, Emma Henderson, Tom Keenan, John Michael, Kelly Oliver, Jose Quiroga, Walid Ra' ad, Amanda Walker, and Gail Weiss. My friend Mary Quaintance inspired me to write on Baudelaire. Her own tragically unfinished writings on Baudelaire haunt these pages. Very special thanks to a number of friends and colleagues who read and commented on portions of the manuscript: Ian Balfour, Eduardo Cadava, Elisabeth Ladenson, Kevin Newmark, Marc Redfield, Avital Ronell, Naomi Schor, and Charlie Shepherdson. Other friends provided me with much needed emotional support. Heartfelt thanks to Arnold Barkus, Gabrielle Hamill, Laura Kurgan, Ivan Miller, Micah Rafferty, Vivian Selbo, and Judith Shulevitz. Sean Miller believed in me and helped to will this book into existence. Along the way, Frank Lachmann learned more about French literature than he ever thought he would. My family has given me their love and support throughout. Thanks

xu

Acknowledgments

to Dorothy Marder, Eric Marder, Eve Marder, Efrem Marder, and Barbara Marder. This book was almost entirely written while I was teaching at Emory University. There, I was blessed to have encountered a number of wonderful colleagues. I have benefited especially from conversations with Yvan Bamps, Candace Lang, Bobby Paul, and John Johnston. A number of Emory students have become close friends and colleagues. I have been fortunate to have worked with and learned from Stefanie Harris and Monica Kelley. Bruno Chaouat has read most of the book, helped translate parts of it into French, and made invaluable suggestions. Angela Hunter helped prepare the final version of the manuscript. I would like to thank the students who attended my graduate seminars at Emory. Donald Stein, former Dean of the Graduate School at Emory University, supported the project and provided funds in order to ensure its publication. I would also like to thank Elizabeth Berg and Helen Tartar at Stanford University Press. I am deeply grateful for their ongoing support of this book. My colleague Philippe Bonnefis read the entire manuscript, helped me publish portions of it in French, made impeccable corrections and elegant suggestions. Most especially, my department chair, Dalia Judovitz, gave me faith in the project and in myself. I cannot thank her enough for her remarkable, steadfast generosity. I cannot imagine having written this book without the friendship of Sharon Willis, whose intelligence, wit, and humor have been a source of inspiration for over twenty years. Cathy Caruth inspired me by her own example, and offered encouragement and guidance at every turn. She read the manuscript and helped me to understand what I was trying to say. Zrinka Stahuljak gave me love, support, and companionship while I was writing this book. I could not have done it without her. Claire Nouvet listened to every word and heard more than I was capable of saying. Her work and her voice are on every page. This book is dedicated to her, with deepest thanks and deepest love. Finally, special thanks to Geoff Bennington, who helped me finish this book and made me want to write more in the future.

Versions of Chapters 2 and 4 have been previously published in Diacritics. I thank the editors for permission to reprint them here. E.M.

Development imposes the saving of time. To go fast is to forget fast, to retain only the information that is useful afterwards, as in "rapid reading." But writing and reading which advance backwards in the direction of the unknown thing "within'' are slow. One loses one's time seeking time lost. Anamnesis is the other pole-not even that, there is no common access-the other of acceleration and abbreviation. -Jean-Franc;:ois Lyotard

Introduction "Our Contemporaries," Baudelaire and Flaubert The durarion of a lirerary work's influence srands in inverse relarion ro rhe conspicuousness of irs subjecr matter. - Walrer Benjamin

We no longer live in a time that seeks to define its own experience primarily through the work ofliterature. Although literature still exists, certainly, it has lost the job it once had. Other more immediate- and less mediated-means of communication have displaced it from its former function as a medium of collective experience. There are very few contemporary literary works-as opposed to memoirs, photography, movies, TV, popular music, internet sites, and the like-that might still have the power to solicit the sustained interest of the reading public and incite a collective response. We only occasionally talk to each other through literary works. We do not hold our common conversations in "literary" language.

Recalcitrant Readers More than half a century ago, Walter Benjamin, one of the first "cultural critics" of the twentieth century, turned his attention to this phenomenon and its implications. In his essay "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Benjamin locates the first clear signs of this transformation of the language of culture in the decline of lyric poetry.

2

Introduction

If conditions for a positive reception of lyric poetry have become less favorable, it is reasonable to assume that only in rare instances is lyric poetry in rapport with the experience of its readers. This may be due to a change in the structure of their experience. Even though one may approve of this development, one may be all the more hard put to it to say precisely in what respect there may have been a change. 1

In the "Motifs" essay, Benjamin makes it his mission to describe this "change in the structure of experience." But he is confronted with the following challenge: through what modality of language could one possibly convey the changing form and function of language itself? Curiously, and this is quite significant, he chooses to devote his attention to the language of a poet, Baudelaire, in order to derive a vocabulary for speaking about the very change in experience that had already rendered the experience of poetry "obsolete" for most readers. Benjamin decides to mediate his presentation of the experience of modernity through the language of Baudelaire's poetry for several reasons. First, he calls attention to the seemingly contradictory fact that Baudelaire's poems became widely read during the very historical period that saw a definitive decline in the popular reception of poetic works. He points out that "there has been no success on a mass scale in lyric poetry since Baudelaire." Furthermore, the appearance of Baudelaire's poetry coincided with the historical moment during which the "change in the structure of experience" first manifested itself: "The period in question dates back roughly to the middle of the last century." Benjamin then suggests that Baudelaire's poetry managed to reach even recalcitrant readers because through his poems, Baudelaire had found a way of speaking to readers both about their own experiences and about their inability to express those expenences. And this brings us to one of the central points of Benjamin's essay. He argues that the change in the structure of the "experience" in modernity derives, in part, from an overwhelming increase in external stimuli that prevents the impact of particular experiences from becoming assimilated, processed, and remembered. The increase in external stimuli extends to the realm of modes of communication. Technologies develop that are specifically designed to grasp particular experiences in their immediacy. However, Benjamin argues, the more particular experiences are recorded as unmediated impressions, the less they contribute to an enduring sense of experience. He writes:

Introduction

3

Historically, the various modes of communication have competed with one another. The replacement of the older narration by information, of information by sensation, reflects the increasing atrophy of experience. (u3)

Therefore, if "unmediated" communication cannot transmit the meaning of an experience, it makes sense that Benjamin turns to a highly "mediated" form of experience-poetry-in order to articulate the specific ways in which this change in experience makes itself felt. Through a series of close readings of Baudelaire's poems, Benjamin ultimately ascribes this "atrophy of experience" to what he calls the "shock experience" of modern life. In the time that has elapsed since Benjamin first presented his prescient description of the "shock experience" in the "Motifs" essay, the changing experience of modern life has continued to produce new and varied forms of "temporal disorders." Following Benjamin's lead, this book aims to read the temporal disorders of the present day through close readings of the temporal inscriptions of modernity that are found in the literary texts of Baudelaire and Flaubert. By reading the descriptions of time and memory that are embedded in these nineteenth-century works, we discover that-after all this time-these authors may have become our contemporaries. Many of the temporal structures associated with the so-called postmodern moment are already imprinted in their works. By returning to their texts, we can examine some of the ongoing temporal effects of modernity's unassimilated legacy.

Modernity and Its Historical Fictions Baudelaire's fame, as opposed to that of Rim baud which is more recent, has not yet known any echeance. The common difficulty in approaching the core of Baudelaire's poetry is, to speak in a formula, this: There is about this poetry still nothing out of date. -Walter Benjamin, "Central Park"

The works of Baudelaire and Flaubert have consistently assumed a peculiar place in literary and cultural history. From the time of their first publication through the present day, Les Fleurs du mal and Madame Bovary continue to shock and fascinate their readers. In r857, both works were prosecuted by Second Empire legal authorities. In 1999, both works are still read by a relatively large segment of the reading public. They are widely

4

Introduction

translated and are even treated as major works by literary traditions other than French. Although both authors expressed contempt for the culture of their day, rejected the notion of historical progress and overtly turned their backs on the future, their writings have continued to play an ongoing, active role in describing the very epoch they wanted no part of2 They are, one could say, the two authors from the nineteenth century that the twentieth century can't live without. Les Fleurs du mal and Madame Bovary remain two of the defining-and most durable-works of contemporary modernity. But before examining what our ongoing fascination with these works might tell us about the experience of modernity, we must pause for a moment to say more about the way in which this term has been invoked in recent years. Although "modernity'' is often used to designate the specific historical period that was inaugurated in the mid-nineteenth century, it is better understood as a way of experiencing time rather than as a period in time. As Jean-Fran