Baudelaire and Freud [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520328969

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BAUDELAIRE AND FREUD

ABOUT

QUANTUM BOOKS Q U A N T U M , THE UNIT OF EMITTED ENERGY. A Q U A N T U M BOOK IS A SHORT STUDY DISTINCTIVE FOR THE AUTHOR'S ABILITY T O OFFER A RICHNESS OF DETAIL AND INSIGHT WITHIN ABOUT ONE HUNDRED PAGES OF PRINT. SHORT ENOUGH T O BE READ IN AN EVENING AND SIGNIFICANT E N O U G H T O BE A BOOK.

Leo Bersani

Baudelaire and Freud

University of California Press Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

Other books by Leo Bersani Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England Copyright © 1977 by The Regents of the University of California ISBN 0 - 5 2 0 - 0 3 4 0 2 - 3 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 76—55562 Printed in the United States of America Designed by Hal Hershey 123456789

Contents

Introduction

1

1. Artists in Love

8

2. Architectural Secrets

16

3. Elevations and Ennui

23

4. Cradling 5. Teasing

35 46

6. Bits and Pieces

53

7. Desire and Death 8. A Spectral Id

67

90

9. Questions of Order

99

10. Nightmares of Narcissism and Realism 11. A Premature Foreclosure? 12. A Beggarly Ending Index

152

137

125

For Eleonore

Zimmermann

Introduction Baudelaire's work can be viewed as an exemplary drama in our culture. It illustrates in striking fashion both the persistence and the subversion of idealistic vision in modern literature. Baudelaire continuously returns to categories discredited by the experiences evoked in his most original writing. For example, he has frequently been discussed in terms of what he himself calls, in "Mon Coeur mis à nu," "two postulations" in human nature: "There are in every man, at every moment, two simultaneous postulations, one toward God, the other toward Satan. The invocation to God, or spirituality, is a desire to climb higher; Satan's invocation, or animality, is a delight in descent." 1 Baudelaire's work can indeed be read as a dramatic confirmation of this traditional dualism be1. C h a r l e s Baudelaire, Oeuvres completes, ed. Y.-G. Le D a n t e c and C l a u d e Pichois (Paris, 1961), p. 1277. All q u o t a t i o n s f r o m Baudelaire, unless o t h e r w i s e indicated, will be f r o m this Pléiade edition, and page references will be given in the text. All prose translations are m y o w n . For q u o t a t i o n s f r o m Les Fleurs du mal, the French is indispensable; as a convenience to readers, I give in the f o o t n o t e s Francis Scarfe's "plain p r o s e translations," as he calls t h e m , o f Baudelaire's verse in Baudelaire (Baltimore: P e n g u i n B o o k s , 1961). A w a r n i n g : Scarfe presents the p o e m s in a blend o f c h r o n o l o g i c a l sequence and g r o u p i n g by "cycles," t h e r e b y largely n e g l e c t i n g the o r d e r o f b o t h the 1857 and 1861 editions. I a m very g r a t e f u l t o Francis Scarfe for his permission to use these translations.

2

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and Freud

tween spirit and flesh, between aspirations toward purity and an equally intense appetite for selfdegradation or "evil." But such a reading involves an uncritical fidelity to Baudelaire's least original version of a certain mobility in his being and in his poetry. The two "postulations"—as well as the entire moral and religious vocabulary to which they give rise in Baudelaire—can in fact be thought of as an escape from the anxieties produced by the Baudelairean discovery of psychic mobility, of unanchored identity. Baudelaire's notion of a double postulation in human nature belongs to a system of vertical transcendence. It is the psychological aspect of a more general structuring of experience in terms of high and low, spirit and matter, reality and appearance, truth and error. In literature, we have long been familiar with the tensions produced by an opposition between certain realities presumed to be "given" and a heroic effort to go beyond the limits of a centered, socially defined, time-bound self. But the antagonism between social reality and individual aspiration is itself one of the dualities formulated by the idealistic imagination. This is not to say that the opposition doesn't exist, or even that it can't serve as a basis for revolutionary social action. But if the type of heroic individuality most familiar to us has frequently been doomed to a romantic impotence, it may be because such transcendental yearnings obliquely express a cultural compulsion regarding coherent structures and intelligible limits. One does, however, find in modern literature—roughly from Baudelaire and Lautréamont to some contemporary theatrical experiments—a

Introduction

3

f o r m of disruptive desire infinitely more concrete in its psychic effects and social implications than a rebellious idealistic vision. I'm thinking of attempts to dismiss defined structures of the self and of society which, however, do not include any faith or even interest in a "higher" or "truer" self, or in fact any transcendent reality at all " b e y o n d " the k n o w n self Visionary literature, even when it proclaims the failure of visionary desires, clings to the belief that the vision was of something. We find a quite different phenomenon in what I take to be the most radical modern writing. As an alternative to both the socially defined self and the transcendent (or free or universal) self, literature has also celebrated marginal or partial selves, or, to put it in another way, a disseminated, scattered self which resists all efforts to make a unifying structure of fragmented desire. At the extreme, there would be no privileged "place" which the self could return to as a structuring center. What would ordinarily have been thought of as psychic peripheries appear n o longer to be referring to fixed centers; there are only provisional, constantly shifting centers for a self which would seem to be floating among random images collected f r o m anywhere. 2 2. T h i s paragraph takes up some of the introductory c o m m e n t s in m y recent book A Future for Astyanax I Character and Desire in Literature (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1976). In the present study, I return to s o m e of the issues raised in that book. I consider t h e m in a more consistently Freudian f r a m e w o r k ; m y aim has been to test the viability of a highly speculative psychoanalytic vocabulary in w h a t is a close reading of a single author. I am aware that s o m e of m y interpretations will strike very good readers of Baudelaire as outrageous violations of his work. I w o u l d therefore like to

4

Baudelaire and Freud

Baudelaire's work gives us images of this psychic fragmentation at the same time that it documents a determined resistance to all such ontological floating. This tension accounts for much of the interest of Baudelaire. Like Freud, he can be located at that critical moment in our culture's history when an idealistic view of the self and of the universe is being simultaneously held onto and discredited by a psychology (if the word still applies) of the fragmented and the discontinuous. N o w w e might have considered more radical versions of a fragmented, mobile self than those we will find in Baudelaire. Psychic fragmentation, selfdissemination, affective discontinuity and partial selves have become ideological tenets of much contemporary thought. There is, however, good reason to be skeptical about the practical value of recent blueprints for a revolution of consciousness, and the evident difficulty in making even the first steps in such a say at the outset that, h o w e v e r u n c o m p r o m i s i n g l y dogmatic much of what f o l l o w s m a y sound, this book is intended as an experimental w o r k i n g out o f a hypothesis concerning a particular f o r m o f intertextuality (relations between literary and psychoanalytic texts). A n d in order to provide that hypothesis with the most favorable testing conditions, I have deliberately ignored some other critical approaches which w o u l d make this study perhaps m o r e reasonable (and palatable), but which w o u l d also reduce the value of the experiment. T h e traditionally liberal approach to literature is, as w e should all k n o w by n o w , far f r o m being n o n d o g matic; the c o m m i t m e n t to a kind o f noncommitment in the area of critical theory is itself ideologically loaded. Therefore, a surely desirable generosity toward one set of hypotheses perhaps requires—if only provisionally—an apparent inhospitality toward other approaches which, in the case of Baudelaire at any rate, have certainly had their say.

Introduction

5

revolution suggests the usefulness of stepping back and exploring m o r e carefully and m o r e coolly o u r p o tentialities for b o t h rigidity and change. In the same w a y that the ambivalences and even contradictions of Freud m a k e it m o r e instructive to explore his t h o u g h t rather t h a n the t h o u g h t of Ronald Laing, it is m o r e profitable to study a crisis in subjectivity in Baudelaire than in the p r o g r a m m a t i c subversion of the subject in Alain Robbe-Grillet. A c o m p l e x and even c o n f u s e d resistance to the indeterminacy of being that is d r a m a tized in Baudelaire's greatest p o e m s will p e r m i t us to e x a m i n e the p h e n o m e n o n of problematic identity in w a y s n o t allowed f o r by the essentially pastoral, f r e quently simplistic versions of the same p h e n o m e n o n in c o n t e m p o r a r y writing. Freudian texts, and recent French interpretations of Freud, will be i m p o r t a n t in m y reading of Baudelaire. W h a t is the relevance of Freudian theory to literary criticism? T h e question has been endlessly a r g u e d — w i t h o u t , I feel, m a n y interesting results. O n the whole, psychoanalytically oriented criticism has been r e d u c tive in t w o respects: it interprets literature as a system of sexual s y m b o l i s m , and, correlatively w i t h this, it re-places the writer w i t h i n the infantile sexual o r g a n i zation p r e s u m a b l y indicated by his preferred symbols. M o s t psychoanalytic studies of literature have used the n o t i o n of fantasy as a means of immobilizing the w r i t e r (and the p r o b l e m is n o t only a literary or even an artistic one) in certain fixed desires or sexual scenarios. F r o m this perspective, Freudian theory essentially b u t tresses a n o r m a t i v e view of psycho-sexual g r o w t h ; it

6

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and Freud

encourages us to think in terms of " l o w e r " and "higher" stages of development by emphasizing both the biological necessity and the desirability of a definite scheme of human growth. Freudianism thus becomes a technique for transforming the experimental play of fantasy into a rigidly structured self. But the relevance of Freudian theory to literature has little to do with either symbol hunting or the determination of the stage of sexual development in childhood—oral, anal, or phallic—at which a writer may be "fixated." A psychoanalytic theory of fantasy can be most profitably brought into analyses of literary texts not in terms of specific sexual content, but rather in terms of the mobility of fantasy, of its potential for explosive displacements. We will be operating on the fundamental Freudian assumption that no text is ever fully present to itself. There is a fantasmatic supplement, an absent extension of itself which a text never explicitly articulates but incessantly refers to, which it makes imperative only, as it were, by the high visibility of significant lacks. And what is lacking is not a fixed symbolic equivalence which, once revealed, would tell us what the text is "really saying." A frankly compulsive attention to specific texts will propel us away f r o m these same texts into a fascination with other texts having the same potential for both fixing and scattering our attention. These other texts will be both the unexpressed Baudelairean fantasies and the speculative psychoanalytic texts thanks to which we will have uncovered these fantasies but which are themselves problematic textual surfaces. All these absent texts will be treated as supplementary dis-

Introduction

7

ruptive movements which simultaneously bring a certain coherence to the given literary text and accelerate its disruptive interpretive mobility. (The modifications of Freudian theory which I will be proposing, especially in the discussions of masochism and the superego in the second half of this study, are t h e m selves vulnerable to explosive contacts with still other texts not considered here.) There is, it's true, ample justification for reductive psychoanalytic interpretation in Freud himself. But it is also possible to find in Freud the basis of a theory of fantasy as a phenomenon of psychic deconstruction. Deconstruction and mobility: these are the mental processes in which we discover that self-scattering which is the principal feature of Baudelairean desire. This discovery is important for both esthetics and psychological theory. It implies a radical questioning of traditional assumptions about the nature and stability of structuring processes in art and, more generally, in the self. Freudian theory serves the most constraining cultural enterprises in some of its statements about the history of our desiring fantasies; but it also outlines the operations of fantasy in ways which explode its own n a r r o w views of the "natural" shapes and rhythms of desire and fantasy. A similar tension can be found in Baudelaire: between the rhythms of mobile fantasy and the rigidity of a self frozen in an obscurantist opposition between God and Satan, between spirit and flesh.

1 Artists in Love L o v e is the desire to p r o s t i t u t e oneself. W h a t is art? Prostitution. (1247) W h a t is love? T h e need to g o outside oneself. M a n is an a d o r i n g animal. T o a d o r e is t o sacrifice oneself and to prostitute oneself. T h u s all love is prostitution. T h e m o s t p r o s t i t u t e d b e i n g is the S u p r e m e Being, G o d Himself, since for every individual h e is the friend a b o v e all others, since h e is the c o m m o n , inexhaustible reservoir of love. (1286-87) A w o m a n is h u n g r y and she w a n t s t o eat. T h i r s t y and she w a n t s t o drink. She is in heat and she w a n t s to be screwed. W h a t a d m i r a b l e qualities! W o m a n is natural, that is to say abominable. (1272) T h e m o r e m a n cultivates t h e arts, t h e less h e can get a h a r d - o n . A m o r e and m o r e a p p a r e n t divorce takes place b e t w e e n the spirit and t h e brute. O n l y the b r u t e has n o t r o u b l e getting a h a r d - o n , and s c r e w i n g is t h e lyricism of the masses. T o screw is t o aspire t o enter into another person, and the artist n e v e r goes outside himself. (1295-96)

Art, love, prostitution, impotence, androgyny, and divinity: Baudelaire frequently seems to be proposing

Artists in Love

9

a fundamental identity among all these terms. In the aphoristic prose of the Joumaux intimes, he makes a strikingly unstable effort to locate the sexuality of art. From the enigmatic pronouncements just quoted, we can, however, infer a kind of fantasy-logic. Art resembles love in that both the lover and the artist go outside themselves; they lose themselves in others. This is not merely poetic empathy. Baudelaire is anxious to describe something more radical than a s y m pathetic projection into other people's lives. And his feelings about the prostitution of self inherent in love and art vary wildly. In the prose poem "Les Foules," Baudelaire praises "that ineffable orgy, that holy prostitution of the soul which, in an act of poetry and charity, gives itself entirely to the unexpected and to the u n k n o w n " (244). But in "Le Confiteor de l'Artiste" (also f r o m the Petits Poemes en prose), the very energy of an ecstatic loss or drowning of the self in "the immensity of the sky and the sea" at the end of an autumnal afternoon "creates a malaise and a positive suffering. My excessively taut nerves n o w transmit only screaming and painful vibrations" (232). Finally, in the passages quoted a m o m e n t ago f r o m the Journaux intimes, the artist's availability to others is linked to the "abominable naturalness" of women. Both love and art are natural activities ("Man is an adoring animal"), and, with his usual ambivalence toward the idea of nature, Baudelaire characterizes the lover's and the artist's desires to prostitute themselves as both a holy and degrading openness. What exactly is the nature of this openness? In his essay on Constantin Guys, "Le Peintre de la

10

Baudelaire and Freud

vie m o d e r n e , " B a u d e l a i r e tells the s t o r y o f a f r i e n d — n o w "a f a m o u s p a i n t e r " — w h o , as a child, w o u l d w a t c h his father g e t t i n g dressed and " c o n t e m p l a t e , w i t h b o t h dazed a s t o n i s h m e n t and j o y , t h e m u s c l e s o f his a r m s , the g r a d a t i o n s o f his skin c o l o r i n g t i n g e d w i t h p i n k and y e l l o w , a n d t h e bluish n e t w o r k of his v e i n s . " Baudelaire s u g g e s t s that t h e child's essentially artistic c o n t e m p l a t i o n o f the w o r l d is t h e equivalent o f a violent a p p r o p r i a t i o n o f t h e self b y f o r m s alien t o it: " T h e spectacle o f e x t e r n a l life w a s already filling h i m w i t h respect a n d t a k i n g h o l d o f his m i n d [Le tableau de la vie e x t é r i e u r e le pénétrait déjà de respect et s ' e m p a r a i t de s o n cerveau]. F o r m already obsessed h i m a n d possessed h i m . " B e f o r e a n y t h i n g n e w , the child's (and the artist's) gaze is " f i x e d " a n d expresses an " a n i m a l - l i k e ecstasy [l'oeil fixe et a n i m a l e m e n t e x t a t i q u e ] . " T h e self is s u d d e n l y possessed, filled up, even s h a k e n b y a scene f r o m t h e w o r l d . "I will v e n t u r e f u r t h e r ; I m a i n t a i n that i n s p i r a t i o n is related t o cerebral congestion, and that e v e r y s u b l i m e t h o u g h t is a c c o m panied b y a n e r v o u s s h o c k o r j o l t [une secousse nerveuse], w h i c h varies in s t r e n g t h and w h i c h r e v e r berates even in t h e c e r e b e l l u m " (1159). Artistic a t t e n t i o n p r o d u c e s ecstasy and dissipates t h e s e l f ' s integrity. " T o g o o u t s i d e o n e s e l f " is e q u i v a lent t o a l l o w i n g t h e self t o be p e n e t r a t e d , t o h a v i n g it i n v a d e d , c o n g e s t e d , a n d shattered b y t h e o b j e c t s o f its attention. N o w t h e idea o f t h e artist's p r o s t i t u t i o n covers t w o radically d i f f e r e n t experiences in B a u delaire. O n t h e o n e h a n d , t h e a r t i s t - p r o s t i t u t e ' s " i n effable o r g y " o f o p e n n e s s to t h e w o r l d c o r r e s p o n d s , as w e shall see in t h e s e c o n d half o f this s t u d y , to a

Artists in Love

11

narcissistic appropriation of the w o r l d . T h e self is " l o s t " only to be relocated everywhere. In part, the description of Constantin G u y s as " h o m m e des f o u l e s " designates prostitution as a narcissistic strategy. " T o be away f r o m h o m e , and yet to feel e v e r y w h e r e at h o m e ; to see the world, to be at the center of the w o r l d and remain hidden f r o m the w o r l d , these are s o m e of the lesser pleasures of those i n d e pendent, passionate, impartial spirits w h o can be described only a w k w a r d l y in language. T h e observer is a prince w h o enjoys being incognito e v e r y w h e r e . " W h e n this observer rushes into the c r o w d , it is, as in Poe's story " T h e M a n of the C r o w d , " in o r d e r to pursue a stranger w h o seems to be his double; Poe's convalescent hero, evoked by Baudelaire in " L e Peintre de la vie m o d e r n e , " is fascinated by a m a n w h o reproduces his o w n passionate interest in c r o w d s (1160, 1158). But Baudelaire also speaks, in the essay on Guys, of the artist being shattered by otherness. H e is penetrated, congested, and shaken by the heterogeneity of " t h e spectacle of external life." T h e artist is excited by and into alien images. T h e r e is then the possibility that by prostituting himself, the artist, like the lover, will be "sacrificing" h i m s e l f — o r , m o r e exactly, sacrificing a certain wholeness or integrity for the sake of those pleasurable n e r v o u s shocks w h i c h a c c o m p a n y the release of desiring energies b y scenes f r o m external life. In the Journaux intimes, the shattering of the artist's integrity is also seen as a m o m e n t o u s sexual event. In order to be possessed by alien images, the artist m u s t o p e n himself in a w a y w h i c h Baudelaire i m m e d i a t e l y

Baudelaire and Freud

12

associates with feminine sexuality. Psychic penetrability is fantasized as sexual penetrability, and in glorifying "the cult of images" as " m y great, m y unique, my primary passion," Baudelaire is also confessing a passion which may change him into a w o m a n (1295). Michel Butor has taken the opposite position, maintaining that images of masculine sexuality are linked to the fact of being a poet for Baudelaire. But this connection has less to do with the poet's intrinsic nature than with the will necessary for composition, and especially for publication. It is true, as Butor says, that Baudelaire associates will with virility, but the loss of virility cannot be reduced to a loss of will. Instead, will is a kind of secondary virility which struggles against a much more fundamental devirilization. For Butor, the decision of Baudelaire's family in 1844 to appoint a legal guardian w h o would dole out his inheritance to him for the rest of his life "devirilized" Baudelaire. 1 But the passages we are looking at f r o m the Journaux intimes suggest that the very nature of poetic inspiration is enough to transform the poet from a man into a woman. The "abominable" feature of w o m e n is that they are "natural," and the examples of their closeness to nature all have to do with their appetite to absorb (food, drink, and the penis). They would seem to be characterized by an animal ecstasy very much like that ecstatic openness which, in "Le Peintre de la vie m o d erne," Baudelaire finds in children and in artists. The paradoxical final consequence of this line of (fantasy) reasoning is that the very sexuality of art de1. Histoire

extraordinaire

1961), pp. 40-42.

I Essai sur un reve de Baudelaire

(Paris,

Artists in Love

13

sexualizes the artist. T h e last passage f r o m theJournaux intimes quoted at the beginning of this chapter is ambiguous in this respect. " T h e more man cultivates the arts, the less he can get a hard-on." B u t the reasons which Baudelaire gives for this sexual debilitation seem to g o against what w e have just been saying. Art w o u l d n o w seem to belong to the domain of the spiritual; the artist gradually loses contact with his bodily appetites because of a divorce between his flesh and his spirit. T h e idea of going outside oneself reappears in this passage, but n o w it is connected with the antithesis o f artistic activity, with carnal appetites. Sex, brutishness, the absence o f art, and going outside oneself all belong together; on the other side, there is i m potence, spirituality, art, and a permanent selfcontainment (the artist never leaves himself). B u t even here the antithesis is somewhat qualified by the suggestion that sexual energy may not be the opposite o f art, but the only version o f art which the lower classes are capable of producing. Sex is art, but art takes the f o r m of sex only in the masses: " S c r e w i n g is the lyricism o f the masses." The " o p p o s i t i o n " between the activities o f the flesh and those o f the spirit m a y turn out to be a continuous scale o f expression for a single impulse. Furthermore, the assertion of the artist's self-protective immobility is in such profound contradiction not only with other theoretical statements, but also—as w e shall be seeing at some l e n g t h — w i t h so much of Baudelaire's poetry, that w e m a y suspect it to be a defense against Baudelaire's most p o w e r f u l l y felt experience of art. In " L e Peintre de la vie moderne," Baudelaire significantly hesitates to call

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Baudelaire and Freud

G u y s a d a n d y because o f the very quality w h i c h a c c o u n t s f o r his b e i n g an artist: his "insatiable p a s s i o n " t o see and t o feel, t o lose h i m s e l f in c r o w d s ("Sa p a s sion et sa p r o f e s s i o n , c'est d'épouser la foule"). It is b y his inability t o r e m a i n " i n s e n s i t i v e " (or s e l f - c o n t a i n e d ) that G u y s " d e t a c h e s h i m s e l f violently f r o m d a n d y i s m " (1160). 2 We m a y t h e r e f o r e c o n c l u d e that b e h i n d the explicit s t a t e m e n t f r o m the Journaux which w e h a v e j u s t considered, there is a h i d d e n assertion: t h e sexual e x p l o s i v e n e s s o f artistic activity (rather t h a n its " s p i r i t u a l i t y " ) r e n d e r s the artist i m p o t e n t . T h e c o n stant in Baudelaire's t h o u g h t w o u l d b e t h e idea o f a c o n n e c t i o n b e t w e e n art and the loss o f virility. A t times, it is the s u b l i m i t y o f art w h i c h a c c o u n t s f o r this loss; at o t h e r t i m e s — a n d , I think, m u c h m o r e i n t e r e s t i n g l y — t h e artist loses his virile i d e n t i t y through an o b s c e n e o p e n n e s s t o external reality w h i c h m a k e s h i m an artist b u t w h i c h also m a k e s h i m — a w o m a n . 3 2. Speaking of t h e s a m e passage, Sartre writes: ". . . it is clear that d a n d y i s m represents a higher ideal than p o e t r y " ; it is B a u d e laire's "sterile w i s h " for s o m e t h i n g b e y o n d p o e t r y (Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire [Paris: Gallimard, 1947] pp. 183, 196). 3. Baudelaire's attitude t o w a r d t h e artist's dual sexuality is n o t always negative. In Les Paradis artificiels, he speaks o f " a delicate skin, a distinguished accent, a kind of a n d r o g y n o u s q u a l i t y " acquired by m e n raised principally b y w o m e n ( " L ' h o m m e qui, dès le c o m m e n c e m e n t , a été l o n g t e m p s baigné dans la molle a t m o s phère de la f e m m e " ) . W i t h o u t these qualities, ". . . the r o u g h e s t and m o s t virile genius remains, as far as artistic perfection is c o n cerned, an i n c o m p l e t e b e i n g " (444-45). B u t o r sees t h e mundus muliebris as the "necessary theater" in w h i c h the artist, by an act o f will, conquers his v i r i l i t y — a n d his artistic p o w e r s . T h e devirilized male artist w h o desires w o m e n is, as B u t o r nicely concludes, a lesbian, and lesbians for Baudelaire are " t h e very s y m b o l of the a p prentice poet, of the p o e t w h o has n o t yet p u b l i s h e d " (Histoire extraordinaire, pp. 79, 8 5 - 8 6 ) .

Artists

in

Love

15

The artist is intrinsically an unanchored self. T h e energy with which he penetrates the world (or is penetrated by the world) sets him afloat a m o n g alien forms of being. And, because they repeat the poet's exceptional openness, God and lovers similarly partake of the exhilarating risks of problematic being. In love and in art, identity floats. Its wholeness can be shattered, as we have begun to see, in various ways. T h e self may be invaded by scenes f r o m the world to the point of not being able to maintain any distance f r o m them, to the point of being entirely absorbed in them. Psychic identity is also dissipated by the very force with which it is projected toward others in the same way that the orgasm dissipates the intensity of our sexual desire for others. Or, conversely, consciousness adopts an ecstatic passivity before the "spectacle of external life," a passivity which in itself transforms the poet into a woman. The Journaux intimes are thus exceptionally suggestive about the relation between poetic production and sexuality. For Baudelaire, the esthetic imagination is inseparable f r o m erotic intensities and shifting sexual identities. His w o r k is, as a result, an extraordinarily rich document about both the nature of sensual pleasure in poetic activity and the psychic dislocations implicit in poetic (erotic) fantasy.

2 Architectural

Secrets

" T h e only praise I earnestly seek for this b o o k is for people to recognize that it is not merely an album and that it has a beginning and an e n d . " 1 Baudelaire's e m phasis on the coherent wholeness of Les Fleurs du mal w o u l d seem to j u s t i f y critical efforts to describe that "secret architecture" to w h i c h Barbey d'Aurevilly referred in his 1857 essay on Baudelaire. T h e architectural metaphor is b o t h crucial and ambiguous. O n the one hand, it seems clear that Baudelaire always t h o u g h t of his p o e m s as constituting a single unified w o r k . T h e thirty-five p o e m s which he added to the 1857 edition of Les Fleurs du mal for the 1861 edition m o d i f y the content of the w o r k w i t h o u t changing the poet's architectural intention. N e w poems enter into a préexistent structure; presumably, they d o n ' t disrupt an already given structural completeness. Les Fleurs du mal is similar to A la Recherche du temps perdu in this respect: b o t h w o r k s appear to be governed by the esthetic m y t h of n o n t r a n s f o r m i n g additions. N e w passages, to take u p an image used by Proust himself in Le Temps retrouvé, are simply sewn into the book's fabric. There is already a beginning and an ending, an 1. Letter to Alfred de V i g n y , in Correspondance Générale de Charles Baudelaire, ed. Jacques C r é p e t , 6 vols. (Paris: Louis C o n a r d , 1947-53), 4:9.

Architectural Secrets

17

architectural enclosure w h i c h will c o n t a i n ( b o t h h o l d a n d limit the effectiveness o f ) w h a t is n e w . Instead o f a literary w o r k b e i n g p r o d u c e d b y c o m p o s i t i o n , w e w o u l d h a v e a w o r k p r e c e d i n g and f u n d a m e n t a l l y u n affected b y c o m p o s i t i o n a l activities. 2 B u t P r o u s t also s a w the b r e a k d o w n o f an esthetic o f c o m p l e t e n e s s in n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y art. In La Prisonnière, the n a r r a t o r speaks a m b i v a l e n t l y o f " t h e literary miscarriages o f [the c e n t u r y ' s ] greatest w r i t e r s , " o f h o w their w o r k s " p a r t i c i p a t e in t h e quality o f being—albeit marvelously—always incomplete." At the s a m e time, P r o u s t n o t e s a k i n d o f r e t r o s p e c t i v e c o m p u l s i o n t o u n i t y o n the part o f these s a m e w r i t e r s , a l t h o u g h h e himself hesitates b e t w e e n t w o v i e w s o f the u n i t y of La Comédie humaine and o f W a g n e r ' s tet r a l o g y . Is that u n i t y ( w h i c h has been " u n a w a r e o f itself, t h e r e f o r e vital a n d n o t logical") intrinsic t o the w o r k s themselves? O r is the c o m p l e t e n e s s o f these w o r k s m e r e l y an i n v e n t i v e idea about each w o r k , " a n o v e l b e a u t y " d e r i v e d f r o m the artist's selfc o n t e m p l a t i o n and w h i c h is " e x t e r i o r a n d s u p e r i o r t o 2. O n e can o f c o u r s e m a i n t a i n that t h e additions, deletions, a n d r e a r r a n g e m e n t s o f 1861 c h a n g e t h e w o r k ' s " m o r a l a r g u m e n t . " B u t I ' m interested in the n o t i o n o f c o m p l e t e n e s s itself, a n d I d o n ' t w i s h t o m a k e a case f o r any m e a n i n g in B a u d e l a i r e ' s p o e t r y w h i c h w o u l d m e r e l y a s s u m e t h e w o r k ' s architectural stability. T h o s e interested in critical a t t e m p t s t o articulate t h e "secret a r c h i t e c t u r e " o f Les Fleurs du mal m i g h t begin w i t h A l b e r t Feuillerat, L'Architecture des "Fleurs du mal" in Studies by Members of the French Department of Yale University ( N e w H a v e n , 1941); L. F. B e n e d e t t o , LArchitecture des "Fleurs du mal" in Zeitschrift fur französische Sprache und Literatur, vol. 39 (1912); and M a r c e l A. R u f f , Baudelaire (Paris, 1966), pp. 103-21.

18

Baudelaire and Freud

t h e w o r k itself, i m p o s i n g u p o n it r e t r o s p e c t i v e l y a u n i t y , a greatness w h i c h it d o e s n o t p o s s e s s ? " It is as if P r o u s t w e r e s i m u l t a n e o u s l y c o n v i n c e d o f t h e factitious n a t u r e o f such unities and n o s t a l g i c f o r a t r a d i tional esthetic w h i c h c o u l d speak o f u n i t y and c o m p l e t e n e s s n o t as critical i m p e r a t i v e s a b o u t art b u t as qualities i n h e r e n t in a u t h e n t i c art. ( T h u s t h e P r o u s tian n a r r a t o r w r i t e s that M i c h e l e t ' s prefaces t o t h e Histoire de France and t h e Histoire de la Révolution— "prefaces, that is to say pages w r i t t e n after t h e b o o k s t h e m s e l v e s " — a r e w h e r e " t h e greatest beauties in Michelet are f o u n d . " A discredited critical m y t h is p r o m o t e d — o r d e g r a d e d ? — t o t h e status o f esthetic form.3) T h e s u b v e r s i o n o f u n i t y and c o m p l e t e n e s s b o t h as d e m o n s t r a b l e attributes o f w o r k s o f art a n d as critical tenets is familiar to us in f o r m s m u c h m o r e radical t h a n t h o s e i m a g i n e d b y P r o u s t . In o u r c e n t u r y an esthetic o f m c o m p l e t i o n and f r a g m e n t a r i n e s s has c o r r e s p o n d e d t o a q u e s t i o n i n g o f general cultural a s s u m p t i o n s a b o u t t h e n a t u r e o f the self and t h e " s h a p e s " o f h u m a n e x perience. B u t in t h e artists m e n t i o n e d b y P r o u s t , as well as in Baudelaire and in P r o u s t himself, t h e f i n i s h e d architectural quality o f art is called i n t o q u e s t i o n partly as a result o f the v e r y e m p h a s i s given t o that quality. U n i t y is b e t r a y e d as p r o b l e m a t i c b y v i r t u e o f its h a v i n g b e c o m e so p r o g r a m m a t i c . Baudelaire's insistence o n t h e c o h e r e n t w h o l e n e s s o f 3. Marcel Proust, A la Recherche du temps perdu, ed. Pierre Clarac and André Ferré, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 3:160-61. I discuss the passage f r o m La Prisonnière in greater detail in Balzac to Beckett ( N e w York: O x f o r d University Press, 1970), pp. 193-97.

Architectural

Secrets

19

his b o o k — o n its having a real beginning and real ending—suggests a neatly thematic view of Les Fleurs du mal. T h e poems w o u l d have a traceable significance, and the order in which they appear w o u l d correspond to different stages of a drama w o r k i n g t o w a r d a dén o u e m e n t . Indeed, m a n y critics have sought to articulate those stages. For traditional Baudelairean criticism, Les Fleurs du mal tells a story of great spiritual intensity, of a struggle between the " t w o postulations," between the satanic and the godly in man, or, to use the title of the b o o k ' s first section, between "spleen and ideal." Thematic enclosures, however, i m mobilize the w o r k ' s significance; they put an end to the circulation of its meanings. T h e r e is another "secret architecture" in Les Fleurs du mal, one which b o t h explains the need for and subverts a stabilizing thematic architecture. T h e w o r k is organized along the lines of an approach to, and then a retreat f r o m , a conception of desire which, had it been fully triumphant, m i g h t have precluded any possibility of architectural organization. O r d e r w o u l d be nonarchitectural; or, at the very least, the poet w o u l d invite us to conceive of architectural orders as made of movable parts. Baudelaire has an exceptionally acute sense of the congeniality of m o d e r n art to a fracturing of b o t h inner and outer realities. His response to the problematic status o f art in the nineteenth century is in part w h a t m i g h t be called a transcendental escapism; but he also tries to elucidate a viable esthetic f r o m those very conditions of m o d e r n life which he rightly sees as a m a j o r threat to the moral, psychological, and structural securities of traditional art. "The beautiful is always

20

Baudelaire and Freud

bizarre"—and the bizarre is constituted by a particularity so radical as to resist any generalizing enterprise. T h e particular is not necessarily a source of the general. It is as if a kind of exhilarating meaninglessness in the fragmented, madly diversified scenes of modern life led Baudelaire to the notion of a particularity which, as it were, goes nowhere, which is not a " p a r t " of anything. "Astonishment, which is one of the great pleasures [jouissances] caused by art and literature," is the result of such an extreme variety in artistic effects that each one of them seems entirely new, unrepeatable ("Exposition universelle de 1855," 956). But B a u delaire also feels the compulsion to complete these impressions of m o d e r n art. In " D e l'Idéal et du M o d èle" (from the "Salon de 1846"), Baudelaire remarks that ". . . nothing in nature is absolute, or even c o m plete; I see only individuals." But in a footnote to this sentence, he adds: " N o t h i n g absolute:—thus, the ideal of the compass is the worst of stupidities;—neither is there anything complete:—thus it is necessary to c o m plete everything, and to rediscover each ideal" (913). Baudelaire defeats the radical nature of his o w n m o d ernism by insisting on its being complemented by an esthetic which it has already replaced. " M o d e r n i t y , " he writes in "Le Peintre de la vie moderne," "is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent; it is half of art, and the other half is the eternal and the i m m u t a b l e " (1163). Thus the bizarre, the accidental, the fragmentary, instead of having any finality in art (or in the rest of life), are merely fallen modes of being. Baudelaire combines an esthetic of modernism with a hatred of modern life, and one result of this is an attempt to

Architectural Secrets

21

j u s t i f y t h e m o d e r n i s t esthetic b y placing it w i t h i n a " l a r g e r " v i e w o f art w h i c h a l m o s t cancels it out. Les Fleurs du mal is about m e a n i n g . In his m o s t o r i g i nal p o e m s , B a u d e l a i r e is testing t h e viability o f certain w a y s o f creating sense w h i c h w o u l d m a k e sense i r r e d u c i b l e to t h e m e . Sense w o u l d , so t o speak, a l w a y s b e o n t h e m o v e ; it w o u l d b e inseparable f r o m m o b i l e fantasies. B u t , because o f Baudelaire's a m b i v a l e n t feelings a b o u t this d i s r u p t i v e discovery, t h e p o e m s w h i c h d i s m i s s an architectural t h e m a t i c s o f literature are t h e m s e l v e s enclosed w i t h i n a s t r u c t u r e o f w h a t m i g h t be called a stabilizing suspicion. T h e r e is a s h i f t i n g b e t w e e n t y p e s of m e a n i n g in Les Fleurs du mal w h i c h in itself constitutes an i m p o r t a n t m e a n i n g in t h e w o r k . B u t it is o n e w h i c h has an e x t r e m e l y a m b i g u o u s status, for, at e v e r y step in the w o r k , it implicitly refers us to the other s e n s e - m a k i n g m o d e f r o m w h i c h it is in flight. T h u s , t o f o l l o w t h e o r d e r o f p o e m s in Les Fleurs du mal m a y h e l p us to see j u s t h o w seriously that o r d e r is t h r e a t e n e d . A n d t h e threat can't be located at a n y o n e m o m e n t in t h e v o l u m e , o r at a n y o n e p e r i o d o f B a u d e laire's life. A d i s r u p t i v e m o b i l i t y of fantasy a n d t h e i m m o b i l i z a t i o n of desire are scattered t h r o u g h o u t b o t h t h e w o r k and the life (with, o f course, certain " p a s s a g e s " in b o t h w h e r e pressures, so t o speak, a c c u m u late m o r e thickly). For e x a m p l e , "Les B i j o u x " a n d " A Celle q u i est t r o p g a i e " p r e c e d e " L e B e a u n a v i r e " and " L ' I n v i t a t i o n au v o y a g e " in the 1857 e d i t i o n — a l t h o u g h t h e first t w o p o e m s can b e read as a refusal o f t h e i n d e t e r m i n a c y o f b e i n g w i t h w h i c h B a u d e l a i r e plays in " L ' I n v i t a t i o n " and " L e B e a u n a v i r e . " Also, " L e s B i j o u x " (1842) w a s w r i t t e n several years b e f o r e " L e

22

Baudelaire and Freud

Beau n a v i r e " ( p r o b a b l y 1854) a n d " L ' I n v i t a t i o n au v o y a g e " (1848 a c c o r d i n g t o M a r c e l R u f f , 1854 a c c o r d ing to A n t o i n e A d a m ) . Les Fleurs du mal has, as B a u d e laire w i s h e d it to have, " a b e g i n n i n g a n d an e n d , " b u t w h a t is b e g u n and w h a t is e n d e d is an e x p e r i m e n t that m i g h t h a v e resulted in a u n i v e r s e o f m e a n i n g in w h i c h b e g i n n i n g s and e n d i n g s w o u l d be irrelevant. To be f a i t h f u l t o the w e l l - w o r n n o t i o n o f a "secret architect u r e " in Les Fleurs du mal m a y t h e r e f o r e — c o n t r a r y to t h e usual a i m o f fidelity t o that n o t i o n in c r i t i c i s m — a c tually m e a n t r y i n g to delineate t h e process b y w h i c h an a p p a r e n t architectural center p e r v e r s e l y w o r k s against all architectural solidity.

3 Elevations

and Ennui

Les Fleurs du mal opens with s o m e of Baudelaire's m o s t famous, and least interesting, poems: "Bénédict i o n , " " L ' A l b a t r o s , " "Elévation," and "Les Phares." It is here that Baudelaire expresses most u n a m b i g u ously an idealistic view of the poet which, on the whole, Les Fleurs du mal simply dismisses. These early p o e m s pick up the most familiar romantic version of that view. T h e poet is "exiled" o n earth; other m e n misunderstand and mistreat h i m ; his only " h o m e " is " t h e luminous and serene fields" high above the " m o r b i d miasmas" of earthly existence. T h e poet, like the a w k w a r d albatross dragging its wings on the ship's deck, is the object of m e n ' s m o c k e r y and cruelty. Even his mother curses G o d for having m a d e her give birth to a poet; and his wife, after gleefully plotting to make h i m love her m o r e than he loves God, moves f r o m these " i m p i o u s farces" to the exciting dream of tearing out the poet's heart and t h r o w ing it, with disdain, to her favorite animal. T h e poet accepts his suffering and humiliation as "a divine r e m edy for our impurities." Raising his arms t o w a r d Heaven, blind to the ferocity of his fellow men, the poet dreams of the " m y s t i c c r o w n " made of " p u r e light" which God will one day place on his noble head.

24

Baudelaire and Freud

In the early p o e m s of Les Fleurs du mal, the artist's alienation is expressed either as a total removal f r o m h u m a n history or as a transcendent, nonhistorical relation to humanity. B o t h these alternatives consist in the resolving of uncertainty, conflict, and contradiction t h r o u g h a kind of vertical leap of consciousness. T h e y are solutions to a p r o b l e m which deserve to be treated as s y m p t o m s of the same problem, since they essentially involve the suppression of the p r o b l e m and its disguised repetition. Thus, in "Les Phares" the p o w e r of art seems to be to deny the reality of suffering and to present it to G o d as "le meilleur tém o i g n a g e I Q u e nous puissions donner de notre dignité." T h e curses, blasphemies, ecstasies, and tears which Baudelaire finds in the w o r k s of all the painters he has evoked in the first eight stanzas o f the p o e m become a "divine o p i u m " for the very mortals whose curses and complaints artists such as Goya and Delacroix have depicted. Represented in art, conflict and chaos magically become that which saves and directs an otherwise lost humanity: C'est un cri répété par mille sentinelles, Un ordre renvoyé par mille porte-voix; C'est un phare allumé sur mille citadelles, Un appel de chasseurs perdus dans les grands bois! 1 1. T h e i r s is a cry repeated by a t h o u s a n d sentinels, an order passed o n by a t h o u s a n d messengers, a beacon lit u p o n a t h o u s a n d citadels, t h e call of t h e h u n t s m e n lost in the w i d e w o o d s Prose translations o f Baudelaire's verse are f r o m Francis Scarfe's Baudelaire. See n o t e 1, Introduction.

Elevations and Ennui

25

"Les P h a r e s " is faithful to a f u n d a m e n t a l m y t h of Western culture: art sublimates suffering, and it can even rid us of suffering by adding s o m e t h i n g sublime t o the expression of it. In Baudelaire's p o e m , the artistic representations of suffering b e c o m e the guiding l i g h t s — " l e s p h a r e s " — f o r o u r exit f r o m suffering. N o t h i n g really has happened to h u m a n experience except that it has been m o v e d u p w a r d ; the " a r d e n t sanglot qui roule d'âge en â g e " dies out at the edge of G o d ' s eternity. "Les P h a r e s " appears to a n n o u n c e that suffering ennobles; w h a t it announces m o r e obliquely is that the ennobling of suffering eliminates it. T h e notions of the Ideal and of Ideal B e a u t y are intimately connected in Baudelaire w i t h b o t h k n o w l edge and sexuality. T h e emergence of an erotic esthetic will also involve the eroticizing of k n o w l e d g e . But in early p o e m s such as " E l é v a t i o n " and "La B e a u t é , " the sexual imagery is merely j u x t a p o s e d w i t h the epistemological claims. In " E l é v a t i o n , " the description of the poet's spirit p l u n g i n g b e y o n d the confines of the "starry spheres" suggests a sexual penetration ("Tu sillonnes gaiement l ' i m m e n s i t é p r o f o n d e / Avec une indicible et mâle volupté"), but this erotic "rising u p " seems to have n o effect on the n a t u r e of the poet's c o m p r e h e n s i o n of " t h e language of flowers and of silent things." An effortless, serene u n d e r s t a n d i n g is unaffected by the erotic energy of the leap into u n derstanding. In the same way, poets are presented as sensual lovers of beauty in "La B e a u t é " : they are bruised at her breast, and her eyes fascinate these " d o -

26

Baudelaire

and Freud

cile lovers." B u t Beauty herself is nonerotic and insensitive (she never cries or laughs, and she hates any m o v e m e n t w h i c h "displaces lines"), and her majestic attitudes, b o r r o w e d f r o m "the proudest m o n u ments," plunge the poet into "austere studies." This " d r e a m of s t o n e " ("Je suis belle, o mortels! c o m m e un reve de pierre") evokes the poet-lover's desiring energies in order to arrest them, to t r a n s f o r m t h e m into a contemplative fascination m o r e fitting to the intellectual puzzle o f a mysterious, impenetrable sphynx. But even in the early section of Les Fleurs du mal, the poet is talked about in other ways. We see the beginnings of a definition of poetic fantasy w h i c h w o u l d r e m o v e it entirely f r o m the axis of vertical transcendence. In " A u Lecteur," the p o e m which introduces Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire makes in the first eight stanzas a lurid inventory of " t h e i n f a m o u s menagerie" of h u m a n vices. T h e effect of this inventory is s o m e w h a t ambiguous, for the p a n o r a m a of h u m a n vice is so extreme, so p r o v o k i n g l y unqualified, that w e m a y find something unserious in it. T h e p o e m is perhaps mainly a demonstration of the poet's mastery of a certain insolence. H e makes an eloquent, high-handed, ingenious enumeration of obvious and slightly less obvious sins, and w e respond less to the indictment than to the virtuosity of tone and the variety of diction in the poem. A repellently realistic description o f vice alternates with the allegorization of evil; and the p o e m moves between the eloquence of a sermon and the casual, even snickering, tone of connivance in evil.

Elevations

and

Ennui

27

T h e hidden strategy of the p o e m becomes apparent in the last t w o stanzas, in Baudelaire's f a m o u s d e scription of Ennui, o u r w o r s t vice: Il en est un plus laid, plus méchant, plus immonde! Quoiqu'il ne pousse ni grands gestes ni grands cris, Il ferait volontiers de la terre un débris Et dans un bâillement avalerait le monde; C'est l'Ennui!—l'oeil chargé d'un pleur involontaire, Il rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka. Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat, —Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère! 2 B o r e d o m is n o t an evil in the same sense as, for example, self-satisfied r e m o r s e or stupidity or h y p o c risy. U n l i k e these other evils m e n t i o n e d in the p o e m , Ennui is a state in which any evil m i g h t be c o m m i t t e d . Its peculiarity is to be e m p t y ; it is precisely because there is n o t h i n g in b o r e d o m itself that it a c c o m m o dates anything. O t h e r crimes are m o r e dramatic; b o r e d o m neither makes great gestures n o r utters loud cries. It is a v a c u u m ; it w o u l d destroy the w o r l d merely by sucking it into its o w n void. B u t this is n o t too dissimilar f r o m what Baudelaire describes as the esthetic state, as the artist's uncontrolled and u n r e served openness to other f o r m s of being. 2. t h e r e is o n e e v e n uglier and m o r e w i c k e d a n d filthier t h a n all the rest! A l t h o u g h it m a k e s n o frenzied g e s t u r e s and u t t e r s n o savage cries, yet it w o u l d fain r e d u c e the earth t o ruin, it w o u l d gladly s w a l l o w t h e w o r l d in o n e g a p i n g y a w n : it is B o r e d o m , Tedium vitae, w h o w i t h an u n w i l l i n g tear in his eye d r e a m s o f g i b b e t s as he s m o k e s his pipe. You k n o w h i m , Reader, y o u k n o w that fastidious m o n s t e r — O h y p o c r i t i c a l Reader, m y f e l l o w - m a n a n d b r o t h e r !

28

Baudelaire and Freud

" A u L e c t e u r " should alert us to a crucial aspect of Les Fleurs du mal: Baudelaire is less concerned w i t h a serious classification of all the psychological and b e havioral " f l o w e r s " w h i c h constitute " e v i l " than w i t h an imaginative p r o m i s c u i t y that leaves h u m a n i t y indifferent to the ethical quality o f the wildly h e t e r o g e n e o u s scenes to w h i c h it "sacrifices" itself. We will h a v e occasion to see that crime in Baudelaire is in fact a defensive strategy against the dangers of that promiscuity. " A u Lecteur" already gives us a hint of Baudelaire's fascination w i t h the sheer m o b i l ity of fantasy, a l t h o u g h the moralistic bias of the p o e m restricts fantasy's field to a m o r e or less c o n v e n tional, predefined area of h u m a n vices. T h e poet's c o n d e m n a t i o n of Ennui as the w o r s t vice of all does, h o w e v e r , suggest that the greatest threat in Ennui is n o t the scenes w h i c h it m a y actually p r o d u c e but rather its very aptitude for p r o d u c i n g scenes. T h e i m portance of this distinction will b e c o m e apparent in Les Fleurs idu mal as soon as Baudelaire treats the p r o d u c t i v i t y of fantasy m o r e directly and drops his pose as j u d g e of certain essentially allegorized derivations of fantasy. It is already clear that Ennui p r o m o t e s strictly imaginary violence: "Il rêve d'échafauds en f u m a n t son h o u k a . " Ennui is a "delicate m o n s t e r , " an armchair v i r t u o s o of crime. In a sense, the w h o l e p o e m suggests Baudelaire's interest in s o m e t h i n g light or insubstantial in vice. T h e poetic enumeration of " t h e i n f a m o u s menagerie of o u r vices" has been an exercise in eloquence and elegance. T h e most s o m b e r i n d i c t m e n t o f h u m a n i t y has allowed Baudelaire to d e m o n s t r a t e tonal variety and indeterminacy, and

Elevations and Ennui

29

thus in his opening poem, he is already subordinating a moralistic concern w i t h "evil" (a concern parodistically illustrated by the taunting apostrophe to the reader) to a fascination w i t h the creative mobility of fantasy. A n y such relocation, h o w e v e r , requires a willingness to be frank about the operations of fantasy, and Baudelaire's taunting reference to the reader suggests a universal conspiracy to deny the violence of imagination. T h e reader is a brother in fantasy-crimes, but he also is expected to reject hypocritically this complicity. This is exactly w h a t Baudelaire does in the early p o e m s of Les Fleurs du mal. " A u Lecteur" has b o t h illustrated and explicitly stated the morally a m b i g u o u s nature of imagination, but it is immediately followed by a hypocritical denial of its o w n lesson. T h e poet becomes the noble, misunderstood, idealistic dreamer of "Bénédiction" and "Elévation"; and the guilty, devious brothers of the first p o e m are transformed, in "Les Phares," into a c o m m u n i t y of virtuous sentinels g u i d ing one another t h r o u g h the tragic course of life and offering to G o d their very misery as testimony to their worth. " A u Lecteur" creates certain reservations about the poetic idealism of the early p o e m s of Les Fleurs du mal even before that idealism is proposed. Vertical transcendence is called into question in other ways. First of all, there is uncertainty about where the ideal is. T h e most clichéd answer to this places the ideal in a C h r i s tian eternity. But Baudelaire is also t e m p t e d to locate the alternative to a present reality of misery and cruelty in the past, especially in the poet's o w n past. H o w e v e r ,

30

Baudelaire and Freud

the most personal memories are o f a past which never took place. This is the nonhistorical past o f "La Vie antérieure," which brings the possibility o f an escape into the somber tableaux o f death and time evoked in the three preceding poems ("Le Mauvais moine," " L ' E n n e m i , " and "Le Guignon"). The deliberate unreality o f the languid, voluptuous, luxurious past described in "La Vie antérieure" provides the first suggestion in Les Fleurs du mal o f the atemporal nature o f Baudelairean memory. Nostalgia for an infinitely desirable past brings the ideal down from a luminous and serene Heaven and makes it immanent to human history; an indifference to real historical time takes us one step further and implicitly redefines the ideal as the effect o f certain mental processes. The historical reality o f memories becomes inessential; both the real past and the imaginary past are evoked as the result o f an abstraction from the experience o f our senses. The mechanisms o f this process will become clear when we examine "La Chevelure." The fabulous images o f "La Vie antérieure" at least put us on the track o f something crucial: the ideality o f those " o t h e r " regions referred to by the poet (in pieces as different as "Bénédiction" and "La Vie antérieure") is not a function o f their transcendent nature but rather o f their status as mental fictions. It is by a certain kind o f moving away from perceived realities that the poet succeeds in elaborating an absence which he makes historically intelligible by calling it a memory. The senses are luxuriantly catered to in the setting o f "La Vie antérieure" by the powerful harmonies o f the

Elevations and Ennui

31

waves, rich music, the scents of the naked slaves, and the cool touch of the palm leaves on the poet's forehead. But sensuality in the p o e m is continuously being qualified b y certain intellectual operations. T h e vast porticoes are c o m p a r e d to basalt grottoes; in the second stanza the poet emphasizes reflections rather than direct perceptions (images f r o m the sky are perceived in the sea's waves, and the w a v e s ' music blends w i t h the colors of a sunset reflected by the poet's eyes); the " r e m e m b e r e d " sensual feast is m a d e s o m e w h a t insubstantial by the vague, general w o r d s used to describe it ("voluptés calmes," " s p l e n d e u r s " ) . At the end of the p o e m the reader's attention is, like that of the slaves, d r a w n a w a y f r o m all the " v o l u p t é s " of this past life t o the poet's " p a i n f u l secret." T h e nature of that secret, w h i c h m a d e the poet " l a n g u i s h , " is irrelevant. It operates most effectively in the p o e m by almost erasing the p o e m ' s tableaux; the rich h a r m o n i e s of sounds, colors, and o d o r s give w a y to a fascination w i t h an undefined (and therefore, for us, blank) inferiority. Nonetheless, it is i m p o r t a n t to emphasize the sensual richness of Baudelaire's " m e m o r i e s . " T h e idealized past w h i c h he invents is usually one in w h i c h the senses are stimulated b o t h by natural pleasures and by a p r o f u s i o n of m a n - m a d e o r n a m e n t s and f u r n i s h ings. Poetic idealization thus begins to look like the very o p p o s i t e of spiritualization; it is an abstracting process of the m i n d w h i c h returns the poet to sensual intensities. Finally, h o w e v e r , w e should not try to stop Baudelairean m o v e m e n t either on the side of the senses

32

Baudelaire and Freud

o r o n t h e side o f abstraction. T h e o v e r p o w e r i n g sensation, m e r e l y b y v i r t u e o f its s t r e n g t h , p r o p e l s us o u t o f sensation; it spiritualizes itself b y its v e r y intensity. T h i s appears t o b e o n e o f t h e m o r e neglected m e a n ings o f " C o r r e s p o n d a n c e s . " R e a d e r s o f this p o e m h a v e f r e q u e n t l y b e e n misled b y t h e r e f e r e n c e to N a t u r e as c o n t a i n i n g " f o r e s t s o f s y m b o l s " in t h e first stanza. T h i s p r e s u m a b l y refers t o a s y s t e m o f vertical c o r r e s p o n d e n c e s : the " t e m p l e " o f N a t u r e is replete w i t h s y m b o l s o f spiritual reality. In fact, the m e t a p h y s i c a l s u g g e s t i v e n e s s o f the first f o u r verses is s i m p l y d r o p p e d in the s e c o n d and t h i r d stanzas. We m o v e f r o m vertical t r a n s c e n d e n c e t o h o r i z o n t a l " u n i t y . " " L e s p a r f u m s , les c o u l e u r s et les s o n s se r é p o n d e n t " : that is, s t i m u l i o r d i n a r i l y associated w i t h o n e o f o u r senses can p r o d u c e sensations " b e l o n g i n g " t o a n o t h e r sense. B a u d e l a i r e asserts, and in the t h i r d stanza illustrates, t h e reality o f these analogies (certain p e r f u m e s , f o r e x a m p l e , are " g r e e n as fields"). " C o r r e s p o n d a n c e s " d o e s p r e s e n t itself as a d o c t r i n a i r e p o e m (thus the countless critical e f f o r t s t o e x t r a c t the doctrine, to f i n d its sources in n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y esthetics, p h i losophy, and psychology), and the doctrine which t h e p o e m espouses a n d v a g u e l y outlines has m u c h less t o d o w i t h s y m b o l i s m in N a t u r e t h a n w i t h a m e t a p h o r ical u n i t y w i t h i n N a t u r e . C o m p a r i s o n s u s i n g t h e w o r d comme o c c u r six t i m e s in the t w o m i d d l e stanzas, and w e m i g h t t h i n k o f this as a stylistic d e m o n s t r a t i o n of t h o s e " e c h o e s " o f a distant likeness w h i c h t h e p o e t asks us to hear in each o f o u r experiences. B u t t h e last f o u r verses o f " C o r r e s p o n d a n c e s " b r i n g us back to t h e m e t a p h y s i c a l l y s u g g e s t i v e aspect of the

Elevations and Ennui

33

first stanza. T h i s is done, h o w e v e r , n o t by a r e n e w e d reference to s y m b o l s in N a t u r e , b u t rather b y an a b r u p t shift in the metaphorical register. W i t h certain p e r f u m e s , the second t e r m of t h e c o m p a r i s o n can n o longer be designated; the specificity at the b e g i n n i n g of the sonnet's first tercet gives w a y to the grand v a g u e ness of the p o e m ' s concluding m o v e m e n t : Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants, Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies, —Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants, Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies, C o m m e l'ambre, le musc, le bejoin et l'encens, Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens. 3 W h a t w e can substitute f o r these " o t h e r " p e r f u m e s is "infinite t h i n g s . " T h e expression is r e m a r k a b l y (and effectively) imprecise. T h e poet is n o longer c o m p a r ing one sensory experience to another; rather, certain stimulants can, so to speak, carry the senses away f r o m themselves. T h e y d o n ' t exactly r e m i n d us of a n y t h i n g else; rather, they " e x p a n d " and they " t r a n s p o r t , " they b e c o m e "infinite t h i n g s " (beyond the senses) in their effects on the senses. Sensuality spiritualizes: the final lines of " C o r r e s p o n d a n c e s " already point to this o d d conclusion. It is as if a m a x i m a l sensual intensity passed over into the 3. There are perfumes fresh and cool as the bodies of children, mellow as oboes, green as fields; and others that are perverse, rich, and triumphant, that have the infinite expansion of infinite things—such as amber, musk, benjamin, and incense, which chant the ecstasies of the mind and senses.

34

Baudelaire

and

Freud

opposite of sensuality. Somehow that maximal point begins to create space; there is an "expansion" like that of "infinite things," and perhaps a certain emptiness insinuates itself into the plenitude of the senses. Baudelaire frequently expresses his intuition of this process as a fascination with disproportionately large forms or with the process of enlargement. In "Le Poème du haschisch," he insists that the "immense d r e a m " produced by the drug is a "natural dream"; in hashish, w e find "nothing miraculous at all, but rather our o w n nature exaggerated and magnified [le naturel excessif]" (354-55). Time and space undergo a " m o n strous g r o w t h " : the consumer of hashish "looks through the profound years with a certain melancholy pleasure and daringly plunges into infinite perspectives." In this "abnormal and tyrannical growth [accroissement]" of time and space, of feelings and ideas, lies the j o y of being intoxicated with hashish (377). Also, Baudelaire finds it easy to tolerate and even enjoy Nature, provided it is—paradoxically— dematerialized by being "unnaturally" exaggerated or enlarged. O n e of Baudelaire's most relaxed evocations of a natural landscape is in the poem "La Géante," where the poet imagines living next to a young female giant " D u temps que la Nature en sa verve puissante I Concevait chaque jour des enfants monstrueux." He would have liked to sleep "nonchalantly" in the shad o w of her breasts, like a peaceful hamlet at the foot of a mountain. The young giant is a pleasantly grotesque image of Nature expanded, and the poet's relation to her exemplifies a sensuality pacified and partially spiritualized by the exaggeration of natural forms.

4 Cradling T h e m o v e m e n t in s e n s a t i o n a w a y f r o m s e n s a t i o n is c e n t r a l t o B a u d e l a i r e ' s l o v e p o e t r y . In " L a

Cheve-

l u r e , " " L ' I n v i t a t i o n au v o y a g e , " " L e B e a u n a v i r e , " "Le Balcon," and "Les B i j o u x , " w e find Baudelaire's most complete and most original expression of a psychology of mobile desiring fantasy. C o n s i d e r the a m b i g u o u s sexuality of "La C h e v e l u r e " : O toison, moutonnant jusque sur l'encolure! O boucles! O parfum chargé de nonchaloir! Extase! Pour peupler ce soir l'alcôve obscure Des souvenirs dormant dans cette chevelure, Je la veux agiter dans l'air c o m m e un mouchoir! La langoureuse Asie et la brûlante Afrique, Tout un m o n d e lointain, absent, presque défunt, Vit dans tes profondeurs, forêt aromatique! C o m m e d'autres esprits voguent sur la musique, Le mien, ô m o n amour! nage sur ton parfum. J'irai là-bas où l'arbre et l'homme, pleins de sève, Se pâment longuement sous l'ardeur des climats; Fortes tresses, soyez la houle qui m'enlève! Tu contiens, mer d'ébène, un éblouissant rêve D e voiles, de rameurs, de flammes et de mâts: U n port retentissant où m o n âme peut boire A grands flots le parfum, le son et la couleur;

36

Baudelaire

and Freud

O ù les vaisseaux, glissant dans l'or et dans la moire, O u v r e n t leurs vastes bras p o u r e m b r a s s e r la g l o i r e D ' u n ciel pur o ù f r é m i t l'éternelle chaleur. J e plongerai m a tête a m o u r e u s e d ' i v r e s s e D a n s ce noir océan o ù l'autre est e n f e r m é ; E t m o n esprit subtil que le roulis caresse Saura v o u s retrouver, ô f é c o n d e paresse! Infinis b e r c e m e n t s du loisir e m b a u m é ! C h e v e u x bleus, pavillon de ténèbres tendues, V o u s m e rendez l'azur du ciel i m m e n s e et rond; Sur les b o r d s d u v e t é s de v o s mèches t o r d u e s J e m ' e n i v r e a r d e m m e n t des senteurs c o n f o n d u e s D e l'huile de coco, du m u s c et du g o u d r o n . L o n g t e m p s ! t o u j o u r s ! m a main dans ta crinière l o u r d e S è m e r a le rubis, la perle et le saphir, A f i n q u ' à m o n désir tu ne sois j a m a i s s o u r d e ! N ' e s - t u pas l'oasis o ù j e rêve, et la g o u r d e O ù j e h u m e à l o n g s traits le vin du s o u v e n i r ? 1 1. Hair 0 fleece, billowing down to the neck, O locks, O fragrance laden with languidness! O ecstasy! This night, to people the dark alcove of our love with all the memories that slumber in your hair, I long to wave it in the air as one waves a handkerchief. All languid Asia, blazing Africa, a whole faraway world that is absent, almost dead, survives in the depths o f this forest of aromas; and as other spirits [sail on] music, so mine, O my beloved, [floats] upon your perfume. 1 shall go there where men and trees, full of the sap of life, swoon in the ardent heats; dense tresses, be the swell that carries me away, for you contain, O sea of ebony, a dazzling dream of sails and oarsmen, flames, and masts; an echoing port where my soul may drink long waves of perfume, sound, and colour; in which the ships that glide in gold and multicoloured silk, open wide their arms to embrace the splendour of an immaculate sky that shimmers with everlasting heat;

Cradling

37

Making love is obliquely referred to several times in "La Chevelure": in the images of trees and men full of sap, of boats gliding in gold and watered silk and opening their "arms" to embrace the sky, of a head plunging into a black ocean, and, more generally, in all the references to undulating rhythms suggestive of the movements in sex of lovers' bodies. But if we see mainly this, we see just enough to admire a certain kind of cleverness: through his description of the sea and the exotic country he invokes, Baudelaire manages to communicate considerable sexual detail without ever seeming to mention sex. But there is much more to the poem than a strategic elusiveness. Or rather, it is this very elusiveness about sex which justifies our thinking of "La Chevelure" as a poem about sexual intensities. The subject of "La Chevelure" is desire. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud speaks of Wunsch (translated as "wish" in the Standard Edition) as a psychic movement [eine psychische Regung] which aims to revive perceptual memories associated with I shall plunge my head, [in love with drunkenness], into the jetblack ocean that contains the other sea; and m y subtle mind, caressed by the rolling swell, will k n o w h o w to find you there, O fertile indolence, infinite [rocking] of sweet-scented leisure! Blue hair, tent hung with shadows, you bring me the azure of the great round sky, and on the d o w n y shores of your plaited locks I g r o w drunk with the mingled scents of coconut-oil, and musk, and tar. O long, O forever, my hand in your ponderous mane will sow rubies and pearls and sapphires, so that you will ever hearken to m y desire: for you are the oasis of my dreaming, the gourd f r o m which I drink long draughts of the wine of memory.

38

Baudelaire

and

Freud

the satisfaction of a need. 2 The movement of desire is a movement of fantasy; it is an activity which p r o duces images. In a sense, desire is always a lack. T h e object is never entirely present in desire; when it is, it erases desire. But at the same time, desire is never only a lack: certain fantasies (mental movements) both provide the necessary stimulus to desire and partially satisfy it. A fantasy-satisfaction anticipates the "real" satisfaction. Before physically going toward the object of desire, w e psychically go toward it and, to a certain extent, already find pleasure in it. But going toward the object in fantasy may be equivalent to going away f r o m it. A psychologically reductive reading of Baudelaire's love poetry might speak of the poet's inability to establish any "exchange" with the desired woman, of his retreat f r o m "direct" sexuality into a private world of fantasy. In a sense Baudelaire does ignore the w o m a n ; what I'm proposing is that his turning away f r o m her is the sign of his intense desire for her. "La Chevelure" is a luxuriant demonstration of sexuality as inseparable f r o m fantasy. This means that the desire to experience even the sharpest sensation has something abstract about it. The fantasies within which desire moves are purely mental, nonconcrete ways of appropriating sensation. In "La Chevelure," desire for the loved one is satisfied as the poet moves within the intervals separating her image f r o m the other images she gives 2. The Complete

Interpretation Psychological

of Dreams,

in The Standard

Works of Sigmund

Edition

of the

Freud, e d . J a m e s S t r a c h e y

(London: Hogarth Press, 1953-66), 5:565-66. References to The Standard Edition will henceforth be abbreviated as SE.

Cradling

39

rise to in the poet's fantasies. Precisely because she is the object of desire, she initiates desires which remove the poet f r o m her; the w o m a n exists for Baudelaire, not in order to satisfy his desires, but in order to produce them. Where do the fantasies of desire originate? The references to m e m o r y in "La Chevelure" ("souvenir[s]" occurs in the first stanza and it is the final w o r d of the poem) suggest that the poem's images belong to the poet's past. The notion of desire as an attempt to resurrect a lost pleasure is crucial to Freud's ideas about object-finding in sex. In part, what seems like a rather pedestrian if unobjectionable theory of desire in Freud (we seek to revive past satisfactions) serves the imprisonment of human sexuality within familial patterns of desire. For our earliest erotic satisfactions are at the mother's breast, and it is after speaking of suckling at the mother's breast as the "prototype of every relation of love" that Freud makes his celebrated remark, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) that "the finding of an object is in fact a refinding of i t . " 3 Baudelaire's poetry both confirms and subverts this mnemonic concept of desire. In "La Chevelure," the fact that the w o m a n is nowhere in the fantasies inspired by her body suggests that, in a sense, she was never the real source of pleasure. I don't mean this in an anecdotal sense: there is no hidden meaning in the poem suggesting that this w o m a n was never really satisfying in the first place. Rather, the poet's extravagant departure f r o m the body he is lying close to 3. SE, 7:222.

40

Baudelaire

and Freud

could indicate that the past satisfactions revived in desire are themselves desiring fantasies. If we were to generalize the lesson of "La Chevelure," we would say: the objects of our sexual desires are fantasyobjects. If sexual desire is inseparable f r o m fantasy, then it is always already an interpretative movement, and any originally exciting object or event gets lost in the very excitement which it produces. The w o r k of fantasy in desire makes impossible the historical tracing of presumed sources of desire. Freud himself makes a crucial step toward this position when, in his analysis of the "Wolf M a n " case, he leaves r o o m for some doubt about whether or not his patient actually observed, at the age of one-and-a-half, a scene of anal intercourse between his parents. That scene may be a fantasy-construct, a retroactive interpretation, Freud suggests, of sex between animals. This interpretation is made possible by the "Wolf M a n ' s " o w n sexual development by the age of four (when he had the dream the analysis of which points to the scene of parental intercourse). Freud's discussion of this case strikingly illustrates his hesitation between a realistic view of the "primal scene" and an understanding of it as one of the fantasy-scenarios by which the child may both solve certain enigmas (such as birth or the difference between the sexes) and adjust the past to his present sexual needs and capacities. (It's true that the realistic view is exceptionally resilient. If the "primal scene" didn't actually take place in the individual's past, it took place in the past of the race and our m e m ory of it would then be part of our racial inheritance.

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41

T h i s phylogenetic thesis is already proposed in the "Wolf M a n " case.) 4 Jean Laplanche, taking the very passage f r o m the Three Essays w h i c h I mentioned a m o m e n t ago and which w o u l d seem to support a theory of sexual desire as an attempt to repeat the sexually satisfying possession of the real m o t h e r ' s real breast in infancy, even argues that the breast becomes an object of sexual desire (rather than merely a source of nourishment) only as an internalized fantasy-object. Sexual excitement w o u l d be identical to a psychic m o v e m e n t which submits reality to the passionate interpretations of desire. 5 This is dramatically illustrated in Baudelaire's "La C h e v e l u r e " by the total absence of the w o m a n f r o m the fantasies evoked by her presence. If the pleasure which she has given the poet has always been inseparable f r o m the operations of his desiring fantasies, the w o m a n is best r e m e m b e r e d w h e n she is continuously being forgotten. T h e objects of desire are not objects; they are crea4. It is the essay " F r o m the History o f an Infantile N e u r o s i s " (1918; in SE, 8) which is c o m m o n l y k n o w n as the "Wolf M a n " case. T h e case was first written u p in 1914. It is in his 1918 additions to the earlier version that Freud is most sympathetic to the thesis of retroactive fantasies. H o w e v e r , even in the first version he e m phasizes the fact that the child's understanding and interpretation of the "primal scene" is " d e f e r r e d " until the age of four. 5. See Vie et mort en psychanalyse (Paris: Flammarion, 1970), pp. 30-37. Laplanche's extraordinary (and highly readable) w o r k is indispensable for an understanding of recent psychoanalytic t h o u g h t in France. An excellent translation by Jeffrey M e h l m a n is n o w available: Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore: J o h n s H o p k i n s University Press, 1976).

42

Baudelaire and Freud

tive processes. In a sense, this liberates m e m o r y f r o m time. M o r e precisely, desiring fantasies are b y n o m e a n s t u r n e d o n l y t o w a r d t h e past; t h e y are p r o j e c t i v e reminiscences. T h i s is s u g g e s t e d in " L a C h e v e l u r e " b y t h e fact that t h e references to m e m o r y enclose several stanzas in w h i c h t h e d o m i n a n t tense is, either explicitly o r implicitly, the f u t u r e . T h e souvenirs o f the f o u r t h verse s e e m to a n n o u n c e a past; instead, a certain f u t u r e is energetically willed until it b e c o m e s t h e p r e s e n t (in stanza six), and finally, in the last stanza, the p o e t p r o m i s e s t o r e n e w , in t h e f u t u r e , this s u m m o n i n g u p o f an i n t o x i c a t i n g past, this process o f r e m e m b e r i n g w h i c h consists o f t h e m o s t willfully p u r s u e d p r o j e c t s . 6 T h e m o v e m e n t s in " L a C h e v e l u r e " b e t w e e n s e n s a tion and fantasy, a n d b e t w e e n the p r e s e n t and t h e f u t u r e (a f u t u r e e q u a t e d w i t h the past), d u p l i c a t e a p h y s i cal m o v e m e n t w h i c h is at t h e heart o f t h e p o e m : t h e m o v e m e n t o f r o c k i n g o r o f cradling. Bercement is, t o use a P r o u s t i a n expression, o n e of t h e " f u n d a m e n t a l n o t e s " o f B a u d e l a i r e ' s i m a g i n a t i o n . P e r h a p s the p u r e s t pleasure B a u d e l a i r e can i m a g i n e is to b e r o c k e d as b o a t s are r o c k e d o n a gentle sea. W h e n , in " L e P e i n t r e de la vie m o d e r n e , " h e speaks of the " i m m e n s e j o u i s s a n c e " o f passionately o b s e r v i n g c r o w d s o f p e o p l e in a big city, the pleasure he describes is that o f " m a k i n g o n e ' s h o m e in multiplicity, in s w a y i n g m o v e m e n t , in e v e r y t h i n g f u g i t i v e and in t h e infinite [élire d o m i c i l e 6. For an e x t r e m e l y subtle discussion of " t h e dialectics o f int o x i c a t i o n " in "La C h e v e l u r e , " and of the inebriating n a t u r e of will itself for Baudelaire, see Victor B r o m b e r t , " T h e Will to Ecstasy: T h e E x a m p l e o f Baudelaire's 'La C h e v e l u r e ' , " in Yale French Studies, no. 50 (1974).

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43

dans le nombre, dans l'ondoyant, dans le mouvement, dans le fugitif et l'infini]" (1160). Also, Baudelaire's interest in w o m e n is frequently expressed as a fascination with their swaying movements as they walk. The " b o a t " in the poem "Le Beau navire" is a woman, and her clothes are like the sails of a ship moving into the open sea "Suivant un rhythme doux, et paresseux, et lent." What is it about the sea, and especially about a boat's swaying movements, which leads Baudelaire to associate "robust ships, with their idle and homesick air," with a promise of happiness, and even to speak of the spectacle of the sea as providing "the highest idea of beauty offered to man in his transient abode"? (Journaux intimes, 1253, 1290). Most obviously, Baudelaire's association of happiness with a boat being "cradled" by the sea points to a particularly strong if sublimated m e m o r y of the bliss of being cradled in infancy. The emphasis on the sea even suggests the m e m o r y of a prenatal life in the liquid environment of the w o m b , of being carried along on an inner sea by the boat-mother's movements. But "La Chevelure" should help us to see the inadequacy of speculations about the "original" appeal of bercement; the body's pleasure in being cradled can be primarily an occasion for expanding the very notion of cradling. The fifth stanza of the poem is a climax. The verses are exclamatory; the tone is insistently willful; and it is as if this concentrated energy propelled the poet into the physical reality of his fantasies and therefore allowed for the present tense of stanza six, the "arrival" or actual realization of the dream. The climax of stanza five could also be thought of as a

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sexual climax: a powerful, culminating sexual experience is suggested by the image of the "tête amoureuse d'ivresse" plunging into the dark ocean, as well as by the association of fecundity with the state of idleness finally achieved. But at the same time that is the most abstract stanza of the entire poem. The word bercements, by its strategic placement in the stanza and in the poem, is revealed as the principal " m e m o r y " with which the poet has been seeking to fill the dark alcove. But the physical meaning of bercements is practically canceled out by the abstractions surrounding the word: "féconde paresse," "infinis," "loisir embaumé." It is as if the very desire to be gently rocked gave birth to the desire for a kind of abstract cradling. In "Fusées" (one of the sections of the Journaux intimes), Baudelaire writes that ". . . the infinite and mysterious charm which lies in the contemplation of a ship, especially of a ship in motion, " depends in part on "the successive multiplication and the generating of all the curves and imaginary figures executed in space by the real elements of the object" (1261). To watch a moving ship is to observe the passage from the "real" to the "imaginary," the actual "generating" of multiple, nonconcrete, constantly disappearing shapes by a material object. In the same way, the references in "La Chevelure" to bodies being gently rocked (in sex and on the sea) appear to "generate" an imaginary version of bercement. The swaying of a drunkenly amorous "head" in the woman's "sea" is also the "caressing" of an "esprit subtil." And this (phallic) mind enjoys being cradled by a state of being, by the infinite rocking motions of scented leisure. The meaning of bercement itself

Cradling

45

is therefore rocked between the physical and the m e n tal. B u t , as I have suggested, the entire p o e m is about a similar kind o f rocking or cradling. In the mental m o v e m e n t s o f his desire, the poet finds an abstract version o f the regularly s w a y i n g motion to w h i c h his b o d y seeks to return. T h e m e m o r y o f the bliss o f being cradled appears to have sensitized h i m to the pleasure o f the cradling m o v e m e n t in the v e r y desire to be cradled—and, b y implication, in all desire. Sexual desire, " L a C h e v e l u r e " suggests, is an appetite f o r sensations which generates the imaginary. T h u s the "infinite and mysterious c h a r m " o f a boat m o v i n g on the sea m a y be its analogy w i t h the " c h a r m " o f desiring. " L a C h e v e l u r e " gives a special twist to the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit.

The

deferred interpretation o f a childhood experience is not m a d e only as a result o f a sexual development w h i c h retroactively makes the past sexually meaningful (or even r e w o r k s it to create a sexual scenario). C r a d l i n g is partly sexualized as a result of the connection established between the lovers' bodies and gently rocking m o v e m e n t s , but bercement is also reinterpreted in order to cover the pleasure o f an ontological discovery. Scenes o f cradling m o v e m e n t (a boat on the sea, the poet being carried on the w o m a n ' s hair, an infant being rocked in a cradle) are perhaps all equally pleasurable representations o f the pleasurable m o v e m e n t s o f sexual desire.

5 Teasing If "La Chevelure" raises the question of where the w o m a n is in the poet's desire for her, Baudelaire's love poetry also raises the question of where the poet is in his desire. The mobility of the desiring imagination makes the identity of the desiring self problematic. The movement away f r o m the w o m a n ' s physical presence is also a movement away f r o m any fixed center of being in the poet. Sexuality sets into motion a kind of fantasy-machine. But it is not only the w o m a n as an identifiable, stable object of desire w h o gets lost in the turning of that machine; the poet h i m self is set afloat among his fantasies, and the more intensely he desires the less possible it becomes to say anything conclusive about his desires. The metamorphoses of the w o m a n within the poet's fantasies create impressive margins of freedom for Baudelaire, margins which allow him not only to avoid being fixed on any impoverishing center within himself, but also to escape any obsessive attachment to the loved one. All the images in "Le Serpent qui danse," for example, express a playful indefiniteness in the poet's feelings about the woman; he tries them out through a variety of comparisons which shift the w o m a n around in somewhat the same way as a "jongleur sacré" rocks a snake back and forth at the

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end o f a stick. T h e r e are, it's true, s u g g e s t i o n s o f the w o m a n ' s coldness: h e r eyes are " d e u x b i j o u x f r o i d s o ù se m ê l e I L ' o r avec le f e r , " a n d h e r saliva, w h i c h the p o e t drinks, is c o m p a r e d t o " u n flot grossi p a r la f o n t e I D e s glaciers g r o n d a n t s . " B u t the " p o r t r a i t " o f the w o m a n is m u c h less c o h e r e n t in " L e S e r p e n t qui d a n s e " than in the p o e m i m m e d i a t e l y p r e c e d i n g it, Apec ses vêtements ondoyants et nacrés, in w h i c h t h e i m a g e o f a s e r p e n t o n a stick is m e r e l y an o r n a m e n t a l aspect in the delineation o f a f i x e d character (that o f the cold, sterile w o m a n ) . In " L e S e r p e n t qui d a n s e , " p s y c h o l o g y is dissipated b y all t h e s u b s t i t u t i o n s f o r the w o m a n in the p o e t ' s vision. First o f all, as in " L a Chevelure," the poet's " â m e r ê v e u s e " — " C o m m e un navire qui s'éveille / A u v e n t d u m a t i n " — g e t s r e a d y t o depart f o r a distant land o n t h e " m e r o d o r a n t e et v a g a b o n d e " o f t h e w o m a n ' s p e r f u m e d hair. A n d that " d e p a r t u r e " is a c c o m p l i s h e d t h r o u g h a series o f slightly insolent, d e h u m a n i z i n g i m a g e s : the w o m a n ' s s h i m m e r i n g skin is like " u n e é t o f f e vacillante," h e r laziness m a k e s her childlike h e a d s w a y " a v e c la mollesse I D ' u n j e u n e é l é p h a n t , " and h e r b o d y , as she b e n d s o v e r a n d lies d o w n , is c o m p a r e d t o " u n fin vaisseau I Q u i roule b o r d sur b o r d et p l o n g e / Ses v e r g u e s dans l ' e a u . " Finally, t h e m o s t c r u d e l y sensual i m a g e o f the p o e m — t h a t o f t h e p o e t licking t h e saliva f r o m the w o m a n ' s teeth—is m e t a m o r p h o s e d into i m p e r s o n a l , g r a n d i o s e visions o f N a t u r e : t h e m e l t i n g glaciers and t h e "liquid s k y " w h i c h , at t h e end o f the p o e m , sprinkles the p o e t ' s h e a r t w i t h stars as h e drinks the i n t o x i c a t i n g saliva. Snake, elephant, and

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boat: the "real" w o m a n is dismissed by and into these images, and at the same time it becomes impossible to locate the poet's desire for her. Readers of "Le Serpent qui danse" have generally emphasized what Jean Prévost calls "the warding off of desire" by bizarre and slightly comical images. 1 But it could also be said that Baudelaire gives us desire uninhibited by psychological fascination. The w o m a n ' s physical presence is actually rendered in considerable detail in "Le Serpent qui danse," while at the same time almost every stanza of the poem illustrates the "generating" of imaginary forms as a result of the volatilizing pressure of desire on "the real elements of the object." The intense play of desire does away with the woman's body as a precise cause of precise desires. "Le Serpent qui danse" is an exercise in pure metaphor. There is a happy psychic mobility in Baudelaire. The cradling rhythms of desire and the metamorphoses which accompany them are, in poems such as "La Chevelure," "Le Serpent qui danse," "Le Parf u m " and "Le Cadre" (poems II and III of " U n Fantôme"), and "L'Invitation au voyage," sources of a luxuriant serenity. The latter poem is perhaps Baudelaire's most extraordinary achievement in the rendering of a richly indeterminate eroticism. The poet's "invitation" is actually an accumulation of withdrawn suggestions. The very first appeal to the w o m a n ' s desire is already an unanchoring of desire: 1. P r é v o s t even speaks o f a " r e m e d y for sexuality" in these images. See his Baudelaire I Essai sur l'inspiration et la création poétiques (Paris: M e r c u r e de France, 1953), pp. 251-52.

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M o n enfant, ma soeur, Songe à la douceur D'aller là-bas vivre ensemble! 2 W h o is b e i n g invited? Is the w o m a n child, sister, o r mistress? A n d w h e r e w o u l d s h e a n d t h e p o e t go? T h e v a g u e " l à - b a s , " it later t u r n s o u t , is a c o u n t r y w h i c h r e s e m b l e s the w o m a n , w h o , b y t h e e n d o f t h e first stanza, has b e c o m e a m y s t e r i o u s l y s o r r o w f u l mistress w i t h t r e a c h e r o u s eyes. T h e c o r r e s p o n d e n c e s b e t w e e n t h e c o u n t r y and the w o m a n o r t h e p o e t w o u l d s e e m t o s u g g e s t an inner landscape: Tout y parlerait A l'âme en secret Sa douce langue natale. 3 B u t t h e allegorization o f t h e c o u n t r y is s u b v e r t e d b y t h e care w i t h w h i c h its materiality is e v o k e d : m o s t o f t h e s e c o n d stanza creates the s e t t i n g o f a r o o m w i t h s h i n i n g old f u r n i t u r e , rare flowers and t h e s m e l l o f a m b e r , richly d e c o r a t e d ceilings a n d " d e e p " m i r r o r s . Finally, h o w e v e r , t h e visual e l e m e n t s o f each stanza are p u s h e d i n t o the b a c k g r o u n d b y t h e i n c a n t a t o r y a b s t r a c t i o n s of the refrain w h i c h f o l l o w s all t h r e e stanzas: "Là, t o u t n ' e s t q u ' o r d r e et beauté, I Luxe, c a l m e et v o l u p t é . " T h e v o y a g e is t h e s w a y i n g i n definiteness o f the invitation: t h e hesitation a b o u t the n a t u r e o f the relation b e t w e e n t h e p o e t a n d the 2. M y child, my sister, imagine the happiness of voyaging there to spend our lives together 3. [Everything there would] whisper in secret to our souls in their o w n gentle mother-tongue.

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woman, the mystery of her treacherous sorrow, the doubt about the place as an inner landscape or a real country, the movement between the intimate tone and concrete details of the stanzas and the austere abstractions of the refrain, and finally the alternation between verses of five syllables and verses of seven syllables (both uneven, both creating a rhythmical impression of incompleteness). The place of the loved one and of the country is unlocatable in the poet's invitation to her to accompany him there. The most sensual aspect of "L'Invitation au voyage" is perhaps its untroubled, somewhat perverse elusiveness; the poem is a tease, and with his teasing, shifting tone and his mobile attention the poet protects both his own and the w o m a n ' s indeterminacy of being. And yet there is the refrain of "L'Invitation au voyage" which provides, for all its own elusive abstractness, a kind of anchoring point of return for each of the poem's major movements. Desire dislocates attention, and Baudelaire appears to w o r k most securely with the disruptive movements of desire when movement is contained and structured by recurrence. H e is one of the most artful manipulators in the history of poetry of the phenomenon of return—from the return of individual sounds to that of an entire stanza. 4 The simultaneous operation of various levels 4. See the dazzling, exhaustive (and exhausting) analysis o f ' L e s C h a t s " by Claude Lévi-Strauss and R o m a n Jakobson, " 'Les Chats' de Baudelaire," L'Homme 2, no. 1 (1962). Michael Riffaterre has written a persuasive critique of this reading: "Describing Poetic Structures: T w o Approaches to Baudelaire's 'Les C h a t s ' , " in Structuralism, ed. Jacques E h r m a n n ( N e w York: Anchor Books, 1970). This v o l u m e originally appeared as an issue of Yale French Studies in

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o f r e c u r r e n c e — p h o n e m i c , syntactic, s e m a n t i c — i s r e s p o n s i b l e f o r the c o m p l e x m u s i c a l i t y of, f o r e x a m p l e , "Le Balcon," "Harmonie du soir," "L'Irréparable," and " M o e s t a et e r r a b u n d a . " N o t h i n g c o u l d b e m o r e alien t o Les Fleurs du mal t h a n R i m b a u d ' s chimerical a t t e m p t , in t h e Illuminations, t o e l i m i n a t e repetition. In his m o s t radical w o r k , R i m b a u d is testing t h e p o s sibility o f a p o e t i c u t t e r a n c e d e v o i d o f all s t r u c t u r a l references, an entirely n e w u t t e r a n c e w i t h o u t d e p t h a n d w i t h n o past. T h i s is also R i m b a u d ' s d r e a m f o r t h e self, f o r that " o t h e r I " w h i c h w o u l d n o t b e c o n strained b y consistency, c o n t i n u i t y , o r d e p t h . B a u delaire, o n t h e o t h e r h a n d , e m b r a c e s r e p e t i t i o n w i t h w h a t w e m i g h t call a sensual p r u d e n c e . T h e c e n t r i f u g a l m o v e m e n t of d e s i r e — t h e m o v e m e n t o f f a n tasy a w a y f r o m the object o f d e s i r e — i s controlled, at least f o r m a l l y , b y c o m p o s i t i o n a l r e t u r n s t o p o i n t s o f d e p a r t u r e . It is as if an i n t u i t i o n a b o u t desire as always elsewhere w e r e partially n e g a t e d b y d e m o n s t r a t i o n s o f the p o e m r e t u r n i n g to itself. W h e n t h a t r e t u r n is m o s t elaborately p l o t t e d , B a u d e l a i r e a n m e m o r y itself m a y b e r e d u c e d to the status o f a historically accurate r e c o r d . T h i s is t h e case in t h e i m p r e s s i v e p o e m " L e B a l c o n , " in w h i c h the p o e t e v o k e s a t i m e in the f u t u r e w h e n his mistress will r e m e m b e r a happiness w h i c h s e e m s n o w t o b e o n the p o i n t o f disappearing. T h e w o m a n is o n c e again a reservoir o f m e m o r i e s (she is a d d r e s s e d as " M è r e des s o u v e n i r s , maîtresse des maîtresses"), b u t m e m o r y 1966. R i f f a t e r r e ' s essay has been r e p r i n t e d in his Essais de stylistique structurale (Paris: F l a m m a r i o n , 1971).

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in "Le Balcon," instead of removing the poet f r o m his past, will merely return him to the m o m e n t of actual intimacy with the beloved: " C a r à quoi bon chercher tes beautés langoureuses / Ailleurs qu'en ton cher corps et qu'en ton coeur si doux?" Everything in the poem invites us to experience the pleasures of returning: the evocation of the lovers' peaceful intimacy, the use of the same line as both the first and the last verses in each of the six five-line stanzas, the internal rhymes and the structural repetitions which create the incantatory rhythms of several lines in the poem (for example: " O toi, tous mes plaisirs! ô toi, tous mes devoirs!" [line 2], " Q u e ton sein m'était doux! que ton coeur m'était bon!" [line 8], and " Q u e l'espace est profond! que le coeur est puissant!" [line 12]). "Le Balcon" has a heavy, claustrophobic beauty. The somewhat melancholy happiness it describes is submitted to so many disciplinary enclosures that w e may feel inclined to locate the subject of the poem not in its obliquely told love story, but rather in the poetic ingenuities which make our reading of the poem an experience as repetitive, or as circular, as the natural cycle, referred to in the last stanza, of the daily rising and setting of the sun. The curve of the arc along which fantasy moves is barely extended beyond the point of departure; the cradling movements of "Le Balcon" are almost indistinguishable f r o m the monotonous jouissance of sameness.

6 Bits and Pieces In "Le Balcon," we see the possibility of a certain closing in on the movements of desire. The extremes to which Baudelaire finally goes in an effort to immobilize fantasy will make more sense if we first look more closely at the unanchoring effects of desire on the poet's and the woman's identities. In much of "La Chevelure," the poet is not addressing the woman, but rather her hair. He is speaking directly to a part of her body, and as if this part could be detached: "Je la [la chevelure] veux agiter dans l'air comme un mouchoir!" The trivial image of a handkerchief being shaken in the air adds to the poet's erotic interest a note of comic insolence not unlike the comparison of the loved one to a young elephant or to a serpent at the end of a stick in "Le Serpent qui danse." Furthermore, the hair passes through various metamorphoses—from fleece to forest to ocean—under the pressure of the poet's attentive desire. Thus the poet is attracted by what almost appears to be a detachable part of the woman, a part which displays a striking aptitude for metamorphoses and displacements. A more radical version of this takes place in "Le Beau navire" and in "Les Bijoux." Here is "Le Beau navire":

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Je veux te raconter, ô molle enchanteresse! Les diverses beautés qui parent ta jeunesse; Je veux te peindre ta beauté, Où l'enfance s'allie à la maturité. Quand tu vas balayant l'air de ta jupe large, Tu fais l'effet d'un beau vaisseau qui prend le large, Chargé de toile, et va roulant Suivant un rhythme doux, et paresseux, et lent. Sur ton cou large et rond, sur tes épaules grasses, Ta tête se pavane avec d'étranges grâces; D'un air placide et triomphant Tu passes ton chemin, majestueuse enfant. Je veux te raconter, ô molle enchanteresse! Les diverses beautés qui parent ta jeunesse; Je veux te peindre ta beauté, Où l'enfance s'allie à la maturité. Ta gorge qui s'avance et qui pousse la moire, Ta gorge triomphante est une belle armoire Dont les panneaux bombés et clairs Comme les boucliers accrochent des éclairs; Boucliers provoquants, armés de pointes roses! Armoire à doux secrets, pleine de bonnes choses, De vins, de parfums, de liqueurs Qui feraient délirer les cerveaux et les coeurs! Quand tu vas balayant l'air de ta jupe large Tu fais l'effet d'un beau vaisseau qui prend le large, Chargé de toile, et va roulant Suivant un rhythme doux, et paresseux, et lent. Tes nobles jambes, sous les volants qu'elles chassent, Tourmentent les désirs obscurs et les agacent, Comme deux sorcières qui font Tourner un philtre noir dans un vase profond.

55

Bits and Pieces Tes bras, qui se joueraient des précoces hercules, Sont des boas luisants les solides émules, Faits pour serrer obstinément, C o m m e pour l'imprimer dans ton coeur, ton amant. Sur ton cou large et rond, sur tes épaules grasses, Ta tête se pavane avec d'étranges grâces; D ' u n air placide et triomphant Tu passes ton chemin, majestueuse enfant. 1

T h e a p p e a l o f c r a d l i n g r h y t h m s h a s led B a u d e l a i r e t o s o m e t h i n g m o r e radical t h a n t h e bercements

of "La

C h e v e l u r e . " In " L e B e a u n a v i r e , " t h e p o e t ' s a t t e n t i o n , in o n e sense, n e v e r w a n d e r s f r o m t h e w o m a n ; it is w h i l e h e is g a z i n g f i x e d l y at h e r in o r d e r t o n a r r a t e o r p a i n t h e r beauties t h a t a p a r t o f h e r b o d y s u d d e n l y a p p e a r s as an a r m o i r e a n d as a shield a r m e d w i t h p i n k tips. T h e p r o c e s s o f f a n t a s y - r e m o v a l in stanzas f i v e a n d six a n d again in stanzas e i g h t a n d n i n e is s i g n i f i c a n t l y 1. The Beautiful Ship I w a n t to describe to you, O tender enchantress, the various beauties w h i c h adorn y o u r y o u t h : I w a n t to depict y o u r loveliness in w h i c h childhood and m a t u r i t y c o m b i n e . W h e n y o u walk, s w e e p i n g the air w i t h y o u r a m p l e skirt, y o u give the impression of a h a n d s o m e ship setting o u t to sea w i t h all its canvas spread, and s w i n g i n g away, k e e p i n g a gentle, languid, s l o w rhythm. O n y o u r broad, r o u n d throat, on y o u r p l u m p shoulders, y o u r head s w a y s w i t h m a n y a strange grace; w i t h a placid, c o n q u e r i n g air y o u g o y o u r way, majestic child. I w a n t to describe to you, O tender enchantress, the various beauties w h i c h adorn y o u r y o u t h ; I w a n t to depict y o u r loveliness in w h i c h childhood and m a t u r i t y combine. Your j u t t i n g breast w h i c h curves the watered-silk, y o u r t r i u m phant breast is [a beautiful armoire], w h o s e r o u n d e d , b r i g h t panels catch the light like shields: p r o v o k i n g shields, a r m e d w i t h rosy

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different f r o m what we found in "La Chevelure." T h e scent of the w o m a n ' s hair in the latter poem transports the poet to other climates; it gives birth to scenes far removed f r o m the lovers' dark alcove. And the erotic nature of the "original" scene continues to be present only in the description of scenes very different f r o m it. When the poet reaches the country of his desiring i m agination, it is almost as if, rather bizarrely, he had to remember where his body really is, and his m e m o r y of sex which is at once present and absent enters indirectly through references to his "subtle m i n d " being rocked by the waves' caress and to trees and men "full of sap." In "Le Beau navire," the woman's body is not left; it becomes that which is different f r o m it. Instead of a process of willed but gently performed distancing f r o m the woman, we have sudden, unexplained metamorphoses. The poet executes a fantasymovement away f r o m the w o m a n which is not—as it tips—[an armoire] full of delicious secrets, full of good things, with wines and perfumes and liqueurs that would fill men's minds and hearts with delirium. When you walk, sweeping the air with your ample skirt, you give the impression of a handsome ship setting out to sea with all its canvas spread, and swinging away, keeping a gentle, languid, slow rhythm. Your noble legs, under the flounces which they thrust before them, torment and tease obscure desires, like twin witches stirring a black potion in a deep vessel. Your arms, which would be more than a match for an infant Hercules, are worthy rivals of glistening boas, fashioned for relentless embraces, as though to imprint your lover on your heart. On your broad, round throat, on your plump shoulders, you head sways with many a strange grace; with a placid, conquering air you go your way, majestic child.

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57

was in "La Chevelure"—an elaboration of other settings based on easily recognizable properties of a real object (from the undulating hair to the sea, f r o m the hair's scent to rare perfumes), but which is rather a leap into an otherness equated with the same. The w o m a n excites the poet's metaphorical imagination into seeing her as a succession of partial, discontinuous images. T h e " s t o r y " of her beauty (which the poet announced his intention to narrate in the first stanza) becomes a floating of fragmented attributes and meanings. It seems to me that such fragmentation can best be understood in the light of some recent reformulations of the psychoanalytic notion of a castration complex. 2 For Freud, castration is first of all a solution to a p r o b lem, that of the anatomical difference between the sexes. T h e basic assumption of sexual " t h e o r y " in early childhood would be that a penis was given to everyone. Those people w h o don't have one must have had it taken away, and little girls presumably feel the need to deny or make up for their lack of a penis. The castration complex comes later, and it is crucially linked with the Oedipus complex. The young boy fears castration as a punishment, inflicted by his father, for his sexual yearnings for his mother. In the case of 2. It's true that the "piece-by-piece" celebration of a w o m a n ' s beauty is n o t original with Baudelaire: it occurs, for example, in litanies to the Blessed Virgin and in the " B l a z o n s " of Renaissance poetry. But there is n o reason to assume that the tradition itself would be invulnerable to interpretations similar to the one p r o posed here. Furthermore Baudelaire's interest in this poetic convention is in itself something w e may legitimately wish to account for. Finding precedents for certain choices doesn't exhaust the intelligibility of the choices.

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the little girl, according to Freud, the castration c o m plex precedes the Oedipal stage and allows her to enter into the Oedipal triangle (by way of desiring the father's penis). For the little boy, the terror of castration makes possible the end of the Oedipal stage, that is, the renunciation of the mother, the entrance into the latency period, and the introjection of the threatening father as the superego or conscience. But genital castration may be only one form of the castration complex. Freud himself, in the 1917 essay " O n Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Eroticism," points out the analogy which the child establishes in fantasy between the penis and other detachable objects, especially feces and the child h i m self (who at birth detaches himself f r o m his mother's body). A chain of symbolic equations develops, the real terms of which either do in fact detach themselves f r o m the person (for example, feces, gifts, and money), or are seen as detachable in emotionally charged and frequently violent fantasies of mutilation and incorporation (penis and breasts). There has been much debate in the history of psychoanalysis about whether or not this broadening of the notion of a castration complex necessarily relocates its origins. Freud, for example, while expressing his interest in the diverse manifestations of anguish over loss of or separation f r o m a precious object, a r g u e d , in Inhibitions,

Symptoms

and

Anxi-

ety, (1926 [1925]), against Rank's view of castration anxiety as a derivative of the birth trauma. For our purposes, it will suffice simply to mention this debate about origins and to point out that the hypothesis of a first term in the symbolic "castration chain" is ex-

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t r e m e l y problematic. And this by virtue of the fact that it is impossible in psychoanalysis to isolate any t e r m f r o m the fantasy operations which, by nature, ruin the clarities of history. In their discussion of the s y m b o l i c value of the phallus, Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis reject b o t h fixed allegorical m e a n i n g s (the phallus as a sign of p o w e r or fertility) as well as the reduction of the phallus to the m a l e sexual organ. Instead, they p r o p o s e that w e think o f the phallus "as m e a n i n g [ c o m m e signification], as that w h i c h is symbolized in the m o s t diverse represent a t i o n s . " 3 T h i s r e m a r k is extremely suggestive: it points to a f o r m u l a t i o n of the castration c o m p l e x in t e r m s of an anguished preoccupation with the mobility of meaning. Each of the terms in the s y m b o l i c equation m e n t i o n e d a m o m e n t ago is s o m e t h i n g detached f r o m a " m o t h e r - b o d y , " f r o m a real or imagined totality, s o m e t h i n g w h i c h m o v e s away and is t r a n s f o r m e d . T h e r e is n o single reality " r e p r e s e n t e d " in the m o v e m e n t s of all these objects (child, feces, penis, breast, m o n e y ) ; w h a t they all have in c o m m o n is the transf o r m i n g m o v e m e n t away. In each case, a fantasy of w h o l e n e s s seems to depend on the m o v e m e n t not t a k ing place. T h e self's integrity is threatened b y the infant's separation f r o m its m o t h e r ; the b o d y ' s w h o l e ness is destroyed by the actual or fantasized loss of feces or o f the penis. T h e b o d y n o longer makes sense w h e n s o m e t h i n g d r o p s away f r o m it. 3. Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris, 1973), p. 312. T h i s e x c e p tionally u s e f u l e n c y c l o p e d i a o f p s y c h o a n a l y t i c t e r m s has been translated as The Language of Psycho-analysis by Donald N i c h o l s o n - S m i t h ( N e w York, 1974).

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O n the other hand, the phallus becomes meaningful only by detaching itself f r o m the body. It is not the phallic objects themselves which symbolize meaning. As long as the penis remains on the body, it has no general symbolic value; it is only in castration that, by threatening a constituted whole, it becomes the "figure" for a mysterious "ex-centricity" of the self—for the scattering of psychic coherence. Castration carries this symbolic value in two ways: each phallic object illustrates the phenomenon of a detachable, transformable part of a whole, and, more generally, the very quality of being detachable and movable is illustrated in the symbolic equations themselves, where moving significance is constantly moving among different representations of moving significance. If, as Freud suggests in his study of "little Hans," 4 making the distinction between having and not having a penis is an important exercise in a binary structuring of reality, the detachable penis is only one term in a chain of phallic objects all of which create, by virtue of their mobility, epistemological disarray—a "castration complex" over fragmented sense. What is it exactly which is felt to be set afloat in castration? The description of the phallus as a detachable, circulating object should remind us of Freud's description of desire. Desire is movement in the sense of being a mental activity designed to reactivate a scene connected in the past with the experience of pleasure. It immediately moves away f r o m the desired object in order to develop a desiring fantasy which already in4. "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old B o y " (1909).

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eludes a certain satisfaction. It is therefore f u n d a m e n t a l t o desire that it should constantly be detaching itself f r o m its object and finding n e w representations. T h i s p r o p e r t y of desire, w h i c h is a n o r m a l aspect of c o n scious desire, becomes m o r e p r o n o u n c e d — o n e m i g h t even say m o r e f r e n z i e d — w i t h repressed desires. M u c h of w h a t I have said a b o u t castration is reminiscent of w h a t Freud says about the behavior of desire in dreams, in neurotic s y m p t o m s (as well as in the " s y m p t o m s , " such as slips-of-the-tongue and certain misreadings, w h i c h constitute " t h e p s y c h o p a t h o l o g y of everyday life"), and in art. Repressed desires seek to be " e x - p r e s s e d , " but in order to be "pressed o u t , " they must, so to speak, b e c o m e " e x - c e n t r i c " to themselves and avoid censorship b y m o v i n g a b o u t a m o n g " i n n o c e n t " images. Displacement is one of the principal strategies of unconscious desire. But w e have been m o v i n g t o w a r d the view that displacement is crucial to a p h e n o m e n o l o g y of conscious or unconscious desire. To desire is to m o v e to other places. A n d those places are r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s — w h i c h is to say the images of fantasy. B u t the floating of desire is a menace to coherent self-definition. Perhaps the principal strategy for stabilizing the self, b o t h for individuals and for entire cultures, is t o plot the i m m o b i l i z a t i o n of desire. O n the cultural level, w h a t w e have usually called p s y c h o l o g y is precisely an effort to arrest the m o v e m e n t of desire by creating a m y t h o l o g y of an inert h u m a n nature, g o v e r n e d b y mental "faculties." T h e latter are abstractions, such as love and anger, w h i c h " c o r r e c t " the c o n tinuous m o v i n g away o f desire by p r o v i d i n g totalities

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a l w a y s f u l l y p r e s e n t to o u r experience, a l w a y s j u s t " b e h i n d " o u r b e h a v i o r as i l l u m i n a t i n g a n d u n i f y i n g causes. T h e allegorization o f desire, as B a u d e l a i r e h i m self illustrates, is a m a j o r sign o f b o t h a cultural a n d an i n d i v i d u a l repression o f desire as permanently displaced. " L e B e a u n a v i r e " is a c o m p a r a t i v e l y u n t r o u b l e d "reduction" of the w o m a n ' s b o d y to the juxtaposition of partial objects. We m o v e f r o m an abstract d e f i n i t i o n o f a w h o l e p e r s o n ' s b e a u t y ("Je v e u x te p e i n d r e ta b e a u t é / O ù l ' e n f a n c e s'allie à la m a t u r i t é " ) t o t h e m o r e c o n c r e t e vision o f a w h o l e b o d y in t h e s e c o n d stanza; the praise o f parts o f the b o d y b e g i n s in t h e first t w o verses o f the t h i r d stanza, b u t it is m o m e n t a r i l y arrested b y t h e i m a g e o f the m a j e s t i c child in t h e last t w o verses o f that stanza. T h e r e p e t i t i o n o f stanza o n e closes this t r i b u t e to totality, a n d w e n o w p r o c e e d t o a s y s t e m a t i c s u r v e y o f the w o m a n as bits a n d pieces. T h e intensification o f desire in the p o e m c o r r e s p o n d s t o v i sions o f the w o m a n ' s breasts, legs, a n d a r m s as phallic objects: detachable parts o f the b o d y w h i c h h a v e a life o f their o w n . T h e first stanza p r o m i s e s us a p o r t r a i t o f the w o m a n ' s b e a u t y , b u t it is h e r v e r y seductiveness o r desirability w h i c h r u i n s the possibility o f a portrait. T h e p r o g r e s s o f " L e Beau n a v i r e " d o c u m e n t s the d e feat o f a willed clarity o f i n t e n t i o n ("Je v e u x te raco n t e r . . .") b y t h e f r a g m e n t i n g , floating affects w h i c h a c c o m p a n y t h e e x e c u t i o n o f that i n t e n t i o n . T h e sign o f desire's d o m i n a n c e is the end o f u n i t y a n d totality, and t h e t r a n s f o r m a t i o n o f t h e p o r t r a i t i n t o several portraits at o n c e partial and m o b i l e . " L e B e a u n a v i r e " also s h o w s us that the detached phallic object is i n t e r c h a n g e a b l e w i t h o t h e r objects. M o r e precisely, w e see an i n t e r c h a n g e a b i l i t y o f i m a g e s

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in the poem which suggests the circulation of desire among various representations. In stanzas four and five, this circulation creates a certain incoherence. Different images get piled up as representations of the same object. Consequently, a linear narrative is interrupted by terms which are vastly different from one another but which are also repetitions of the same (breasts = armoire = shields, according to the energetics of desire), and the methodically executed painting announced in stanza one is abruptly destructured by the superimposing of various figures on one part of the painting. Composition is threatened by a proliferation of images which detach themselves from the composed body of the poem. 5 "Le Beau navire" allows us to examine in the detail of a single poem the process by which the closed architec5. T h e d r a m a t i c d i s c o n t i n u i t y o f t h e p o e m can o f c o u r s e be s o m e w h a t reduced b y criticism. F o r e x a m p l e , J . - D . H u b e r t s u g g e s t s a u n i f y i n g logic in t h e i m a g e s o f stanzas five a n d six: t h e a r m o i r e resembles t h e h o l d o f a s h i p (it is " f u l l o f g o o d t h i n g s " ) a n d b e c o m e s w a r l i k e t h r o u g h t h e e t y m o l o g i c a l association w i t h a n » « . Also, panneaux takes o n a nautical m e a n i n g as t h e o p e n i n g t o t h e h o l d . T h u s t h e " l e a p " f r o m t h e b o a t t o t h e a r m o i r e s t o t h e shields is r e d u c e d . (L'Esthétique des "Fleurs du mal" I Essai sur l'ambiguité poétique [Geneva, 1953] pp. 6 5 - 6 6 ) . N o n e t h e l e s s , in t h e p o e m t h e c o n t r a s t persists b e t w e e n t h e linear c o n t i n u i t y a n n o u n c e d at t h e b e g i n n i n g a n d the anti-linear, a n t i - n a r r a t i v e a c c u m u l a t i o n o f m e t a p h o r i c equivalences in stanzas five a n d six. T h a t is, an o p p o s i tion b e t w e e n t w o m o d e s o f c o m p o s i n g t h e w o m a n ' s b e a u t y (one o f w h i c h , as w e h a v e seen, i n v o l v e s " d e - c o m p o s i n g " h e r presence) c o u l d b e considered as a w a r n i n g t o criticism not t o seek t o establish t h e " r a t i o n a l i t y " o f t h e p o e m ' s images. F o r b y g i v i n g in t o this t e m p t a t i o n w e erase t h e t e n s i o n b e t w e e n a calculated n a r r a t i v e clarity and t h e f r a g m e n t e d s y n t a x o f d e s i r i n g fantasy, a tension w h i c h , it seems t o m e , is itself t h e principal m e a n i n g o f " L e B e a u navire."

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tural f o r m o f L e s Fleurs du mal is u n d e r m i n e d . I r e f e r r e d in C h a p t e r T w o t o a t e n s i o n in B a u d e l a i r e ' s p o e t r y b e t w e e n a "secret a r c h i t e c t u r e , " in w h i c h t h e secrets w o u l d be m e r e l y h i d d e n b e g i n n i n g s a n d c o n c l u s i o n s , and a n o t h e r t y p e o f o r d e r , the logic o f w h i c h w o u l d i n v o l v e t h e s h a t t e r i n g o f architectural o r d e r s . T h i s t e n sion is also an o p p o s i t i o n b e t w e e n t w o t y p e s o f m e a n ing: that w h i c h l e n d s itself t o t h e m a t i c f o r m u l a t i o n s , and a n o t h e r t y p e d e f i n a b l e p e r h a p s o n l y in t e r m s o f t h e strategies w h i c h m o v e t o w a r d (or retreat f r o m ) a d e stabilizing o f sense. " L e Beau n a v i r e " is especially i n s t r u c t i v e a b o u t these conflicts. Indeed, t h e p e d a g o g i c a l i n t e n t o f t h e p o e m is realized less in a n a r r a t i v e o r pictorial a c c o u n t o f the w o m a n ' s b e a u t y t h a n in an e x e m p l a r y display o f t w o sets o f e p i s t e m o l o g i c a l a n d esthetic a s s u m p t i o n s . T h e k n o w l e d g e o f the w o m a n p r o m i s e d in the first stanza t u r n s o u t t o b e an i m p o s sible p r o j e c t ; it is v u l n e r a b l e t o a k i n d o f i m a g e p r o d u c i n g m a c h i n e w h i c h replaces t h e w h o l e p e r s o n w i t h scattered discontinuities. A n d t h e w o m a n ' s b e a u t y travels far f r o m h e r b o d y ; it is m o v e d a r o u n d a m o n g the dislocating m e t a p h o r s o f a d e s i r i n g i m a g i n a t i o n . T h i s dislocation is a k i n d o f v i o l e n c e — b u t it is o f course the violence o f energetic m e t a p h o r i c a l activity. T h e r e is, h o w e v e r , a certain c o m p o s i t i o n a l t a m i n g o f this violence in " L e Beau n a v i r e , " a s e l f - c o n s c i o u s l y I m i g h t add that H u b e r t ' s b o o k is the best stylistic s t u d y of Lei Fleurs du mal that I k n o w . H e argues, it's true, f o r a view of t h e p o e m s w h i c h is very different f r o m m i n e : b e a u t y w o u l d b e a repudiation of m o v e m e n t , an i m m o b i l i z i n g of t h e senses. A t t h e s a m e time, H u b e r t is constantly s h o w i n g h o w a m b i g u i t y tends " t o enrich the p o e m by g i v i n g it a p o l y p h o n y o f m e a n i n g s " (p. 149)—to w h i c h I w o u l d add: an i n d e t e r m i n a c y of m e a n i n g , a mobility of meaning.

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reasoned procedural order which at least hints at a fear of that violence as more consequential, or as more literal. The whole, ordered body of the poem resists the fragmenting effect of local metaphorical feasts. Baudelaire will have only to misinterpret the violence of a desiring consciousness in order to close his work to the dynamics of desire. This is what almost happens in "Les Bijoux." A blasé man of the world is remembering an evening of erotic pleasure with a w o m a n who, in deference to his tastes, had gone to bed with him wearing only her jewels. He recalls her trying out poses which charmed him by their mixture of innocence and lewdness. The w o m a n ' s decorated and perfumed body passed, piece by piece, before her lover's "clear-sighted and serene gaze," and she succeeded in shattering the poet's calm, in dislodging his soul f r o m the "crystal rock" where it had been settled in peaceful solitude. The clinking sounds and mobile reflections of the jewels initiate a process of metamorphosis aggravated by the w o m a n ' s movements. The loved one is "broken u p " into shifting, partial designs. But the visual fantasies of unanchored or scattered identity appear to raise the specter of a more literal violence. The final image of "Les B i j o u x " is that of the w o m a n ' s body being inundated with blood: —Et la lampe s'étant résignée à mourir, Comme le foyer seul illuminait la chambre, Chaque fois qu'il poussait un flamboyant soupir, Il inondait de sang cette peau couleur d'ambre! 6 6. And as the lamp had resigned itself to die, and the hearth alone lit up the room, each time it gave a fiery sigh it [covered with] blood that amber skin.

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T h e sexual connotations of the lover's hallucination are obvious: the light f r o m the fireplace is spasmodically " p o u r e d " on the w o m a n ' s skin; it is as if each instance of spreading light were a b l o o d y ejaculation. T h e violent metaphoricity of sexual fantasy has bec o m e a fantasy of sex as literal physical violence. Is the m y t h of a unified, w h o l e self necessary to prevent the violence evoked in the last stanza of "Les Bijoux"? T h a t violence occurs immediately after the poet sees a " n e w design" on the w o m a n ' s body, that of Antiope's hips joined to a y o u n g boy's torso. T h e a n d r o g y n o u s object of desire m a y designate a sexual indefiniteness intrinsic to desire itself. Desire is excessively available to the world; that is, its appetites, generated in fantasy, exceed those which w o u l d presumably " b e l o n g " to a definite sexual identity. T h e prostituted self is an a n d r o g y n o u s self; the poet, as the Journaux intimes suggest, is also a w o m a n . Baudelaire's m i s o g yny can be understood partly in terms of a panicky effort to reject the feminine side of his o w n sexual identity, and, m o r e generally, to put an end to the psychic scattering or self-disseminations of desire. Baudelairean sadism is an attempt to stop the w o m a n f r o m moving, for her m o v e m e n t s excite desires which m a y b o t h endanger her and reduce the poet's identity to a kind of mobile fragmentariness. T h e loved one's stillness is a crucial sign of a m a j o r Baudelairean enterprise: that of immobilizing desire.

7

Desire and Death Love leads to crime. More exactly, the pleasures o f love lead to crime. In his remarkable essay on Wagner's Tannhauser, Baudelaire presents this idea within the Christian framework o f the " t w o postulations" in human nature. There is a pendulum-like movement in human experience between " t w o infinites, heaven and hell." Wagner dramatizes the inevitable duality o f love, its constant movement between a redemptive, mystical love and a ferocious, sacrificial love, "as if barbarity were inevitably destined to take its place in the drama o f love, and carnal pleasure led, according to an ineluctable Satanic logic, to the delights o f crime" (1224). What is the relation between pleasure and crime? We might begin by noting a dichotomy between two versions o f sexual pleasure in Baudelaire. On the one hand, there is the pleasurable excitement o f "La Chevelure," "Le Beau navire, and "Les B i j o u x , " an excitement linked, as we have seen, to psychic mobility. These poems have often been read in terms o f an effort to escape from the supposed immediacy o f desire. I have been arguing that, on the contrary, Baudelairean distancing from the object o f desire in these erotic poems is the sign of excited desire, and it shatters epistemological securities and ontological boundaries. Baudelaire can have an exhilarated ex-

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perience o f desire as the n o n c e n t e r e d floating o f u n a n c h o r e d partial selves. B u t h e has a n o t h e r s c e n a r i o f o r sex, o n e w h i c h can b e seen as a reaction against t h e self-displacements o f desiring fantasy. T h i s s e c o n d v e r s i o n o f sex is m o s t explicit in " S o n n e t d ' a u t o m n e . " T h e p o e t refuses t o reveal t o his m i s t r e s s his " i n f e r n a l s e c r e t , " his h e a r t ' s " b l a c k legend w r i t t e n in flame"; instead, h e pleads f o r a passionless l o v e making: Je hais la passion et l'esprit me fait mal! Aimons-nous doucement. L ' A m o u r dans sa guérite, Ténébreux, embusqué, bande son arc fatal. Je connais les engins de son vieil arsenal: Crime, horreur et folie! 1 Q u i e t sex, w i t h o u t the edge, t h e pointe, o f passion: Baudelaire aspires to an e x c i t e m e n t that w o u l d b e s o m e w h a t identical t o sleep (the w o m a n in " S o n n e t d ' a u t o m n e " is a " B e r c e u s e d o n t la m a i n a u x l o n g s s o m m e i l s m ' i n v i t e " ) . A n d t h e agitations o f desire w o u l d be r e d u c e d t o an i r r i t a t i o n o f the n e r v e s ; the l o v e r keeps an o p p r e s s i v e l y w a t c h f u l sense o f a sinister explosiveness j u s t u n d e r his erotic s o m n o l e n c e . T h e r e is a m e t e o r o l o g i c a l e q u i v a l e n t o f this state in Baudelaire. It is t h e m i s t y a u t u m n a l sky of, f o r e x a m ple, " C i e l b r o u i l l é " a n d " C h a n t d ' a u t o m n e , " a sky w h i c h t r a n s f o r m s t h e s u n f r o m a single ball o f s h a r p 1. I hate passion, and wit irks me. Let us love each other gently. Love, in his watch-tower, darkling and in ambush, is stretching his deadly b o w . I k n o w the weapons of his old arsenal—crime, horror, and madness!

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light into multitudinous rays of pale, diffused light (in "Sonnet d'automne," the "so white" and "so cold" Marguerite is, like the poet, an "autumnal sun"). This f o r m of pleasure can run into the obstacle of a w o m a n who, unlike Marguerite, will not "be silent" and "love quietly." This seems to be Baudelaire's c o m plaint in "Sed non satiata," in which the poet begs the w o m a n to lower her flame: Je ne suis pas le Styx pour t'embrasser neuf fois, Hélas! et je ne puis, Mégère libertine, Pour briser ton courage et te mettre aux abois, Dans l'enfer de ton lit devenir Proserpine!2 Ultimately, there is perhaps only one escape f r o m the "hell" of insatiable desire: the forced and permanent immobilizing of the desiring woman, that is, murder. The milder versions of this "solution" are Baudelaire's fascination with cold w o m e n and, on the esthetic level, his notion of beauty as "un rêve de pierre." In the short poem beginning "Je t'adore à l'égal de la voûte nocturne," the poet confesses to loving his "grande taciturne," his "bête implacable et cruelle," all the more because of her coldness, and even because she seems ironically to increase the distance between the poet and the "immensités bleues" of his beloved "voûte nocturne." 3 To describe sex 2. I am no Styx to embrace you ninefold, alas; and, O lecherous Megaera, I cannot, in order to break your courage and set you at bay, become Proserpine in the underworld of your bed. 3. This is, however, a singularly ambiguous poem. For example, is the poet addressing a woman or the moon in the first stanza?

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with this cold and cruel woman, the poet compares himself to w o r m s climbing on a corpse: "Je m'avance à l'attaque, et je grimpe aux assauts, / C o m m e après un cadavre un choeur de vermisseaux." Ultimate coldness is also the permanent stillness of death. Even more: the macabre image f r o m Je t'adore à l'égal de la voûte nocturne suggests a complicated strategy involving the projection of a wished-for coldness so that it may be reincorporated. Simply to make love to a frigid w o m a n is perhaps not a sufficient guarantee of immobilized desire; it would be better to be the frigid woman. And so Baudelaire is not only fascinated by the woman's corpselike coldness; it is as if he would also devour her deathly frigidity, as w o r m s devour a corpse, in order to become one with it. 4 To a certain extent, necrophilia is the Baudelairean erotic ideal; it is sex with an absolutely still partner who, at the extreme, may even be devoured. In his moments of retreat f r o m the shifting designs which desire proposes to the poet-lover, Baudelaire thus aspires to a sexuality compatible with death. Crime in Baudelaire is in the service of a certain type of erotic pleasure; the most convincing f o r m of evil in Les Fleurs du mal is one deriving f r o m sexual needs. N o w we only infer an act of violence f r o m images of frigid, corpselike w o m e n ; there are, however, a few poems in which the immobilizing attack itself is described. This 4. In another poem, the image of lovemaking as one corpse stretched out alongside another corpse is explicit: "Une nuit que j'étais près d'une affreuse juive, / Comme au long d'un cadavre un cadavre étendu." And in "Une Martyre," Baudelaire asks the dead woman in the painting which the poem claims to describe if her lover has satisfied his immense desire on her inert and docile body.

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assault may not be physical; it can be sublimated into scenes in which the poet nastily r e m i n d s a h a p p y , active w o m a n of suffering and death. In " U n e C h a r o g n e , " the poet asks the w o m a n he loves to rem e m b e r the " c h a r o g n e i n f a m e " they had seen that m o r n i n g in order to drive h o m e the lesson that she too, "la reine des graces," will o n e day be " s e m b l a b l e à cette o r d u r e . " T h e t h e m e of " U n e C h a r o g n e " is of course a cliché of love p o e t r y ; it loses s o m e of its banality in Baudelaire in the context of the sadistic project w e are considering. T h e cruelly detailed d e scription of the dead animal's stinking carcass should be placed alongside other curiously insistent r e m i n d e r s o f r e p u g n a n t realities in Les Fleurs du mal, r e m i n d e r s forced on happy, energetic w o m e n : "Réversibilité" as well as " C o n f e s s i o n , " a less familiar p o e m w h i c h c o m e s immediately after "Réversibilité," in w h i c h a w o m a n referred to as a "riche et s o n o r e i n s t r u m e n t où ne vibre / Q u e la radieuse gaieté" confesses j u s t once h e r h o r r o r of life, in a bizarre and plaintive voice w h i c h m a k e s the poet think of " u n e enfant chétive, horrible, sombre, i m m o n d e . " Baudelaire's m o s t explicit p o e m of sadistic sexuality is " A Celle qui est t r o p g a i e . " 5 T h e first f o u r stanzas p o r t r a y an attractive, j o y o u s , lively, healthy w o m a n . T h e n the poet r e m e m b e r s feeling, on days w h e n he was d r a g g i n g his " a t o n y " t h r o u g h a beautiful garden, that the sun was beating o n his chest "like i r o n y " and that his oppressed heart was humiliated by the fresh greenness of spring. A n d he " p u n i s h e d " a flower for 5. The chief competitor in Baudelaire for this distinction would be "A une Madone."

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Nature's "insolence." In the same way, the poet goes on, he would like to "chastise" the woman's "joyous flesh," and the poem ends on the fantasy of a brutal maiming of the " t o o gay" woman. The theme of p u n ishing Nature or the w o m a n for being happy when the poet is sad is only minimally interesting. M o r e worthy of our attention are the differences between the p u n ishment of Nature and the chastisement of the woman—differences which suggest that the analogy between the t w o merely provides a comparatively respectable way of explaining the wish to torture the woman. The w o m a n ' s punishment is immediately connected to sex: the poet would like to crawl silently, "like a coward," toward the "treasures" of the w o m an's body one night " Q u a n d l'heure des voluptés sonne." And he would furtively go to her bed Pour châtier ta chair joyeuse, Pour meurtrir ton sein pardonné, Et faire à ton flanc é t o n n é U n e blessure large et creuse, Et, vertigineuse douceur! A travers ces lèvres nouvelles, Plus éclatantes et plus belles, T ' i n f u s e r m o n venin, ma soeur! 6

In " A Celle qui est trop gaie," we find pleasure in the crime designed to "chastise" the w o m a n for her lively 6. in order to chastise your happy flesh, to bruise your pardoned breast and open in your astonished side a wide, deep wound, and—O blinding rapture—through those new lips, more vivid and more beautiful, infuse my poison into you, my sister.

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movements. And the crime involves nothing less than a re-creation of sexuality. As punishment for the woman's joyous sensuality, the man invents a dizzyingly sweet sexuality on her ravaged body. This ecstatic punishment is a simulacrum of "normal" sex. The wound on the woman's side is a new (wide and hollow) sexual entrance not too far from the "real" one. And, unlike the mutilation of the flower in which Nature is punished for its insolent beauty, the woman's punishment, the poet claims, actually makes her body more beautiful: the "new lips" he has made (with what instrument?) are "plus éclatantes et plus belles." But finally, these lips are there in order to change sex into murder; the woman will die not from her wound, but from the poet's venomous sperm. The substitution of a gaping wound for the woman's genitals and the poisoning of the man's sperm are simultaneous fantasies. Baudelaire's sadistic fantasy is, astonishingly, more easily recognizable as sex than the fantasies inspired by the women in "La Chevelure," "Le Beau navire" or "Les Bijoux." The simulacrum is closer to its model than the model is to itself. But in fact this may be the purpose of the simulacrum. The "trouble" with sexuality in "La Chevelure" and "Les Bijoux" is that it moves so far away from the sexual act. In "La Chevelure," this is not felt as a threat, but in the violence hinted at in "Les Bijoux" we see the possibility of a retreat from the dangerously mobile fantasies of sexual desire. The notion of violence itself is highly mobile and ambiguous. The violence of metaphorical discontinuity seems to "move" into a frighteningly real vio-

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lence, but then real violence, in " A Celle qui est trop gaie," becomes a solution to the "violent" mobility of gaiety. It is also a solution to the crazy ontological leaps in stanzas four and five of "Le Beau navire," as well as to the potentially disorienting ways in which the w o m a n is addressed (and identified) in "L'Invitation au voyage." Baudelaire n o w remakes the w o m a n ' s (and his own) sex, and then engages in afinal sexual act. The venomous ejaculation into the w o u n d at the end of " A Celle qui est trop gaie" also kills the desiring imagination. Desire will no longer "travel," and neither will the poet's being. The poet's sadism is an act of spectacular single-mindedness. T h e w o m a n ' s movements are stopped, the poet's desires are no longer scattered into various disguises, and the macabre simulacrum of sex is an unambiguous, n o n diverted penetration into a new "genital" opening. The w o r d "sister" which so incongruously ends the murderous fantasy of " A Celle qui est trop gaie" is itself a sadistic simulacrum of the same w o r d in "L'Invitation au voyage." In the latter poem, it was merely one element in the shifting patterns of the w o m a n ' s identities. In "A Celle qui est trop gaie," it is of course an ironic conclusion to the fantasy of violence, but it also expresses a finalization of the w o m a n ' s identity as the poet's spiritual companion: like him, she is n o w filled with death. In what sense is this murderous freezing of physical and psychic movement ecstatic? We should first note that while the entire fantasy at the end of "A Celle qui est trop gaie" may cause pleasure, the words "vertigineuse douceur" are associated not with the m o -

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ment of inflicting the w o u n d but rather with the poet's mortal ejaculation into the wound. The simulacrum of sexual penetration includes a simulacrum of ecstasy in sex, of an ecstasy which is both like pleasure in other poems and yet radically different f r o m it. T w o extremely dense, enigmatic, but highly suggestive passages f r o m Freud may help us here: they are f r o m "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" (1915) and " T h e Economic Problem in Masochism" (1924). 7 In the 1915 essay, Freud uses sadism and masochism in order to illustrate transformations in the objects and aims of instincts. He begins with a three-step process. The first step, which is somewhat confusingly called "sadism," is "the exercise of violence or power upon some other person as object." In step two, both the object and the aim change: the impulse to master is turned upon the self and its aim also changes f r o m active to passive. Finally, the instinct returns to an object in the world, but since its aim has become passive, another person "has to take over the role of the subject"—that is, the dominant role of step one. This last case, Freud points out, is what is usually called masochism. But he then goes on to make distinctions which profoundly m o d ify the entire scheme just proposed. The conception of sadism is made more complicated, Freud suggests, by "the circumstance that this instinct, side by side with its general aim, (or perhaps, rather, within it) fneben seinem allgemeinen Ziel (vielleicht besser: innerhalb desselben)] seems to strive towards the accomplish7. Volumes 14 and 19, respectively, in SE. T h e passage discussed f r o m "Instincts and T h e i r Vicissitudes" is in SE, 14:127-29.

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m e n t of a quite special a i m — n o t only to humiliate and master, but, in addition, to inflict pains." H o w does this happen? T h e "sadistic" child of step one is indifferent to causing pain; he w a n t s only to master the w o r l d (or one " o b j e c t " in it: his mother). Freud's answer, as Laplanche has seen, has the most radical implications for the very notion of sexuality. 8 O n c e the masochistic stage has been reached in the three-step process, the instinctual aim m a y change f r o m that of being mastered to that of experiencing pain. A n d this is possible because ". . . w e have every reason to believe that sensations of pain, like other unpleasurable sensations, spill over into sexuality [auf die Sexualerregung übergreifen] and produce a pleasurable condition for the sake of w h i c h the subject will even willingly experience the unpleasure of pain." T h e usual notion of pleasure and pain w o u l d therefore have to be revised and subordinated to a m o r e inclusive view of sexual pleasure as a c o m p o n e n t of all sensations which go beyond a certain threshold of intensity. O n e finds this position elsewhere in Freud. In " T h e E c o n o m i c Problem in M a s o c h i s m , " he refers to a section of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in which he " p u t f o r w a r d the proposition that 'in the case of a great n u m b e r of internal processes sexual excitation arises as a concomitant effect, as soon as the intensity of those processes passes b e y o n d certain quan8. See Laplanche's analysis of this passage f r o m "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" in Vie et mort en psychanalyse, pp. 150-57. T h e chapter "Agressivité et sado-masochisme" leads to some startling conclusions concerning the relation between masochism and the genesis of h u m a n sexuality.

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titative limits.' Indeed, 'it may well be that nothing of considerable importance can occur in the organism without contributing some component to the excitation of the sexual instinct.'" 9 Pleasure and pain continue to be different sensations, but, to a certain extent, they are both experienced as sexual pleasure when they are strong enough to shatter a certain stability or equilibrium of the self. The quantitative bias of Freud's argument may bother us; is there really a point on a psychic thermometer beyond which the "heat" of sensation enters into contact with sexual excitement? T h e crucial point to hold onto is the association of sexuality with the organism's experience of something excessive. Let's push the argument one step further and say that Freud may be moving toward the position that the pleasurable excitement of sexuality occurs when the body's normal range of sensation is exceeded and when the organization of the self is momentarily disturbed (deranged) by sensations somehow " b e y o n d " those compatible with psychic organization. Sexuality would be that which is intolerable to the structured self. This is, it seems to me, exactly what Baudelaire's love poetry illustrates. In "Le Beau navire" or "Les Bijoux," there is of course no way to measure the intensity of the sensations alluded to. The excitement of sexual desire in these poems is manifested as a movement of fantasy which profoundly disorients the desiring self. O r rather, the desiring self is a temporally, spatially, ontologically disoriented being, a scat9. SE, 19:163.

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tered, partial self existing n o w h e r e but in the m o v e ments of fantasy. And Baudelaire's poetry—like all a r t — w o u l d help us to see the problematic nature of any effort to dissociate sensation f r o m fantasy. Freud, in the passage just quoted, appears to be defining sexuality only in terms of a transgressed b o u n d a r y of sensory intensity. But Freud himself invites us to be skeptical of sexuality on a purely somatic basis; n o one, after all, has taught us m o r e about those processes by which h u m a n sensations immediately " m o v e i n t o " fantasies. T h e "quantitative limits" w h i c h have to be passed in order to produce sexual excitement may be measurable only in terms of the fantasy-signs of psychic deconstruction, indeterminacy, and mobility. T h e instinctual change of aim which Freud m e n tions in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" has i m p o r tant consequences for sadism. " W h e n once feeling pains has become a masochistic aim, the sadistic aim of causing pains can arise also, retrogressively; for while these pains are being inflicted on other people, they are enjoyed masochistically by the subject t h r o u g h his identification of himself w i t h the suffering object." As Laplanche emphasizes, Freud's 1915 essay is a crucial m o m e n t in the history of the contradictory stands he took on the question of primary m a s o c h i s m — a m o m e n t which will be "repressed" until the appearance of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920. In "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," Freud begins by discussing a nonsexual process in w h i c h masochism is derived f r o m sadism. T h e masochism of step three is a return to the sadistic object-relation of step one, but, because of the change of aim in step two, the subject seeks to be mas-

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tered by the other instead of mastering him. But, one page later, when we reach the passage quoted at the beginning of this paragraph, sadism has become secondary, a masochistic identification with the suffering object. We would seem, then, to have two quite different kinds of sadism existing simultaneously once the infliction of pain has become an instinctual aim: an "original," nonsexual sadism which seeks to master the world, and a derived, sexual sadism which is actually a pleasurable fantasy-identification with the intense (sexualized) pain of the victim. 10 Around 1920, however, there is a major turning point in Freudian thought which, I think, encourages us to question the idea of a difference between these two types of sadism. The theory of the death instinct leads Freud to reject the idea of an original sadistic impulse independent of masochism. In "The Economic Problem in Masochism," Freud speaks of the libidinal life instincts attempting to make the death instincts harmless; they do this by directing our impulse to destroy toward objects in the external world, and this impulse "is then called the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power." Thus step one in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" turns out to be, like the sexual sadism which is really a projected masochism, a derived sadism. The very distinction between sadism and masochism is blurred by this redefinition of both instincts in terms of projections and identifications within a single instinctual field—the 10. From here on, my discussion differs in important ways from Laplanche's analyses (especially the view I take of the relation between "nonsexual sadism" [step one] and primary masochism).

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field in which the death instinct, under pressure f r o m a life-preserving libido, moves between the self and the world. And Freud can write, with a sense of the difficulty of achieving terminological precision in such highly speculative thought: "If one is prepared to overlook a little inexactitude, it may be said that the death instinct which is operative in the organism—primal sadism—is identical with masochism." 1 1 The sexualization of destructive instincts is also explained in the light of the fate of the death instinct in " T h e Economic Problem in Masochism." In a passage quoted a couple of pages back, Freud refers to his previous theory of sexual excitement arising partly as a result of any processes in the organism passing beyond a certain threshold of intensity. But this explanation is seen as inadequate; another view is offered "which, however, is not in contradiction w i t h " the one just mentioned. This other explanation has to do with the work of the libido on the death instinct. Once this instinct has been directed to the world and become "the will to p o w e r , " a portion of it "is placed directly in the service of the sexual function," and this is "sadism proper." Another part of the death instinct "remains inside the organism and, with the help of the accompanying sexual excitation . . . becomes libidinally bound there. It is in this position that we have to recognize the original, erotogenic masochism." 1 2 H o w satisfactory is this explanation? In the new version of the processes outlined in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," the problematic nature of the relation 11. SE, 19:163-64. 12. SE, 19:163-64.

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between nonsexual and sexual sadism or masochism is made particularly clear. Already in the 1915 essay, Freud has trouble describing the relation between the two. He can account for the sexualization of pain, but he cannot quite define the mode in which sexual sadism and will-to-power sadism coexist: the aim of inflicting pain is pursued "side by side with [sadism's] general aim (or perhaps, rather, within it)." In "The Economic Problem in Masochism," the notion of sexual excitement as being initiated by a certain excess within the organism is judged to be inadequate, but in its place we seem to have little more than the abstract assertions that "a portion" of the will to power "is placed directly in the service of the sexual function," and that "erotogenic masochism" is the instinct of destruction "libidinally bound" within the organism "with the help of the accompanying sexual excitation described above" (in the passage on the exceeding of "certain quantitative limits"). H o w far are we from the tautological claim that libido libidinizes? The problem that seems to be skirted is the precise sexual nature of libido (which is also the life fact), and the relation between sexual exitement instinct and sexual death instinct

excitement

derived from the life

as a possibility

within

the

itself

"The Economic Problem in Masochism" is a search for the element of pleasure in the impulse to destroy. The essay is extremely dense, and in spite of an effort to contain the issues by breaking up masochism into three types (erotogenic, feminine, and moral), it also has an extraordinary speculative mobility. This mobility is all the more striking given the essay's single-

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minded intention, which Freud firmly states at the very beginning. He will investigate the relation between the pleasure principle and both the death instincts and the life instincts, an investigation made urgent by the " m y s t e r y " of masochism. Interestingly enough, Freud sees no mystery or danger in sadism, which would appear n o w to be definitively relegated to a secondary, derived status. The danger of masochism is its apparent capacity to paralyze the pleasure principle, the " w a t c h m a n " not only of our mental life but of life itself. How, then, does pleasure get into pain? What is pleasure? Freud first goes back to his old equivalence of pleasure with a lowering of tension; f r o m the perspective of his recent metapsychological speculations, the pleasure principle "would be entirely in the service of the death instincts, whose aim is to conduct the restlessness of life into the stability of the inorganic state." But Freud calls this view an inadequate explanation of pleasure—although by the end of the essay he will have given it an astonishing reinforcement. Sexual excitement, Freud goes on to say, proves that an increase in tension can be pleasurable. (This is particularly interesting since Freud usually speaks of the "pleasure" of sex in terms which rather fit the end of sex: if pleasure is the reduction of stimulation, it occurs only after the orgasm. Therefore there must be a "qualitative" peculiarity in pleasure. "Perhaps," Freud speculates, "it is the rhythm, the temporal sequence of the changes [der zeitliche Ablauf in den Veränderungen], rises and falls in the quantity of stimulus. We do not k n o w . " 1 3 13. SE, 19:160.

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H o w e v e r , this s u g g e s t i v e line of t h o u g h t is a b a n d o n e d and F r e u d r e t u r n s to t h e p r o b l e m o f m a s o c h istic pleasure. A f t e r a s h o r t (and u n i l l u m i n a t i n g ) p a s sage o n " f e m i n i n e " m a s o c h i s m , w e h a v e t h e passage o n the " p r i m a r y e r o t o g e n i c t y p e " f r o m w h i c h I've already q u o t e d , and finally a section o n " m o r a l m a s o c h i s m . " It is o n l y w i t h this last t y p e that F r e u d defines a sexual pleasure w h i c h is an intrinsic part o f m a s o c h i s m itself. T h e m o r a l m a s o c h i s t ' s n e e d t o b e p u n i s h e d is closely c o n n e c t e d t o the w i s h t o h a v e p a s sive sexual relations w i t h the father. B u t the n e e d t o b e p u n i s h e d derives f r o m an original itesexualization o f the f a t h e r — h i s i n t r o j e c t i o n as conscience o r t h e s u p e r e g o . " C o n s c i e n c e and m o r a l i t y h a v e arisen t h r o u g h the o v e r c o m i n g , the desexualization, o f t h e Oedipus complex; but through moral masochism m o r a l i t y b e c o m e s sexualized o n c e m o r e . . . , " 1 4 F r e u d ' s i n g e n i o u s s u g g e s t i o n is that m o r a l m a s o c h i s m is a w a y o f r e n e w i n g p a r t o f t h e sexual e x c i t e m e n t o f the O e d i p u s c o m p l e x ; t h e need t o be p u n i s h e d includes the (fantasized) pleasure o f h a v i n g sex w i t h t h e father. B u t in m a k i n g m o r a l m a s o c h i s m sexually intelligible, Freud i l l u m i n a t e s o n l y o n e m a n i f e s t a t i o n o f m a s o c h i s m in an individual's h i s t o r y : the m a n i f e s t a t i o n c o n nected to his O e d i p a l feelings, or, m o r e exactly, t o an aspect o f the O e d i p a l f a n t a s y - d r a m a . If w e w i s h t o hold o n t o t h e n o t i o n o f a p r i m a r y m a s o c h i s m , t h e i n telligibility o f sexual e x c i t e m e n t in m o r a l m a s o c h i s m is n o t v e r y h e l p f u l in e x p l a i n i n g the pleasure in " t h e p r i m a r y e r o t o g e n i c t y p e . " A n d so w e f i n d o u r s e l v e s back t o t h e enigmatically abstract m i d d l e section o f 14. SE, 19:169.

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" T h e E c o n o m i c P r o b l e m in M a s o c h i s m , " and t o t h e e x p l a n a t i o n o f the libido " m e e t i n g " t h e death instinct and seeking t o m a k e it harmless. It is o n l y b y r e t u r n i n g t o t h e m o s t radical v e r s i o n o f t h e relation b e t w e e n pleasure and t h e d e a t h instinct that w e can h o p e t o f i n d an e x p l a n a t i o n o f t h e erotic n a t u r e o f m a s o c h i s m (and, b y derivation, o f sadism). O n e of the difficulties—recognized by Freud h i m s e l f — i n the t h e o r y o f a death instinct is that, in clinical experience, the i m p u l s e to d e s t r o y is a l m o s t a l w a y s a c c o m p a n i e d b y a libidinous satisfaction. T h u s w e n e v e r see the death instinct in its " p u r e " f o r m ; as F r e u d w r i t e s in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930 [1929]), " t h e desire f o r d e s t r u c t i o n w h e n it is directed inwards m o s t l y eludes o u r p e r c e p t i o n . . . unless it is t i n g e d w i t h e r o t i c i s m . " 1 5 T h e r e is o n e w a y t o explain this m y s t e r i o u s invisibility o f the death i n stinct: w e n e v e r see it in a n o n e r o t i c f o r m because it is always already " t i n g e d w i t h e r o t i c i s m . " F r e u d ' s p o s i t i o n in " T h e E c o n o m i c P r o b l e m in M a s o c h i s m " is that t h e death instinct plus a c o u n t e r v a i l i n g libido p r o d u c e s e r o t o g e n i c m a s o c h i s m . Strictly speaking, then, the d e a t h instinct, a c c o r d i n g t o Freud, is n o t p r i m a r y m a s o c h i s m ; it b e c o m e s m a s o c h i s m o n l y w h e n it is "libidinally b o u n d " w i t h i n t h e o r g a n i s m . B u t it's p o s sible that the death instinct is e r o t o g e n i c m a s o c h i s m . T h i s w o u l d i n v o l v e o u r e m b r a c i n g the s u g g e s t i o n f r o m Beyond the Pleasure Principle that " t h e pleasure principle s e e m s actually t o serve t h e death i n s t i n c t s . " 1 6

15. SE, 21:120. 16. SE, 18:63.

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Freud himself was reluctant t o a b a n d o n the idea of an antagonism b e t w e e n the pleasure principle and the death instinct; and so, also in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a " n e w " psychic force is baptized which, unlike the pleasure principle, w o u l d be entirely o n the side of the death instinct. This is the N i r v a n a principle, by w h i c h the o r g a n i s m tends to suppress all stimulation and reduce the quantity of tension to zero. Freud's hesitations about the relation b e t w e e n pleasure and destruction are also reflected in his shifting definitions of the principle o f constancy t o w h i c h the pleasure principle is intimately linked. S o m e t i m e s " c o n s t a n c y " seems to involve a reduction of tensions to zero; at other times, it is a homeostatic force w h i c h tends to maintain the o r g a n i s m at a certain level of tension (and this may even require an increase rather than a decrease in tension at m o m e n t s w h e n it is necessary to reestablish an equilibrium between the o r g a n i s m and its environment). " T h e E c o n o m i c P r o b l e m in M a s o c h i s m " provides i m p o r t a n t clues f o r an u n d e r s t a n d i n g of Freud's f u n damental hesitation about the n a t u r e of the pleasure principle (which, w e should r e m e m b e r , was called the "unpleasure principle" in his early w o r k ) . T h e essay also suggests that the dualisms Freud continually adopts (and, m o s t notably, the dualism of the life and death instincts) b o t h express and disguise an intuition about the p r o f o u n d l y a m b i g u o u s n a t u r e of pleasure in desire. This a m b i g u i t y can perhaps be located in the inseparability of desire from death. We have seen at s o m e length that the pleasures of the desiring imagination are in Baudelaire (and, I think, generally) linked to the

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mobility of fantasy. Desire "travels," moves f r o m one representation to another. This m o v e m e n t is destructive in t w o ways. First of all, images are constantly being abandoned for other images; secondly, the entire movement is generated by the need to get rid of the irritating lack in desire, to replace the emptiness in even the most ecstatic fantasy by the (imaginary) plenitude of satisfaction. But the latter would be the end of movement, of the irritant of desire; it would be immobility, a nondesiring stillness like that of inorganic matter. In both instances, psychic unity is being shattered, but, it might be argued, in crucially different ways. The investing of multiple images with the affects of desire involves a scattering of the self; a radical indeterminacy of being is the result of a continual displacement of being. The self is always dying to its o w n centers. The activity of desiring is never merely an adequate response to stimuli; it produces, in fantasy, more "objects" of desire than the world could ever be shown to have been provided in any "real" past or present. But, simultaneously with this expansive movement, the self is also shattered by the movement toward mere evacuation. The productivity of fantasy may be only a fringe benefit of a more economical motive: the need to stop desire by finding adequate satisfactions. The fact that the very nature of desire is, so to speak, to propose excessively inadequate satisfactions is irrelevant to this implicit ideal of economy. Fantasy-satisfactions create new lacks, and therefore expand the field of desire itself; but the very phenomenon of desire is also a strategy designed to rid the organism of all needs. In discussing Baudelaire's poetry, I have spoken of

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sexuality in terms of destabilizing fantasies. Sexual excitement momentarily breaks d o w n that structure of the self which enables us to " b i n d " both internal and external stimuli within a controlling and organizing subjective wholeness. This excitement is threatening precisely because it destroys such organization and control. But if the aim of these explosive energy crises is to rid the organism of destabilizing desire, w e might postulate a sexuality exactly identical with the end of sexuality. This can be reformulated in terms of the following proposition: the sadism of step one in " I n stincts and Their Vicissitudes" is the death instinct. Freud defines that sadism as the impulse to master the world. But primary masochism is a kind of sexually exciting self-mastery or self-immobilization; it is the ecstasy of the discharged impulse, of a dissipated desire. If we dismiss the pseudochronology of steps one, two, and three of the process described in Freud's 1915 essay, we could say that erotogenic masochism is always present in the "sadistic" desire to master the world, and, conversely, that the supposedly nonsexual desire for mastery is always present in the erotic pleasures of both sadism and masochism. 1 7 In its violent projects 17. The chronology is false because of the intersubjective nature of the entire fantasy process. In the wish to master the other, we immediately encounter a resistance which redirects the desire for mastery onto the self. It seems likely that we experience simultaneously the desire to control the other, the desire to control the self, the desire to be controlled by the other, the masochistic pleasure in being mastered, and the masochistic excitement ofidentifying with the other's suffering in our sadistic violence toward him. The different steps of a process must already be accomplished at the moment the process "begins"; the various representations along a line of fantasy are merely the spelling out of an intentionality sufficiently dense to inspire the articulations of a fantasy-drama.

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toward the world, the self would also be shattered by the fantasized pleasure of its own annihilation; the wish to arrest the movements of others would include the pleasure of restless desire finally being totally evacuated. Freud, w e remember, has difficulty putting t w o explanations of masochistic pleasure together: the explanation which appeals to quantitative limits being exceeded, and the notion of libido "binding" the death instinct within the organism. What I'm proposing is that the Freudian death instinct is a m y t h actually meant to account for the inherent sexuality of death— that is, for the profoundly exciting nature of the ultimate exceeding of quantitative limits in the absolute "discharge" of death. Sexual pleasure leads to the pleasures of crime. We are n o w in a better position to appreciate the logic of Baudelaire's statement in his essay on Tannhauser. The simulacrum of sex which the poet fantasizes at the end of " A Celle qui est trop gaie" is, as we have seen, a more literal version of sex than the erotic experience of "La Chevelure." Baudelaire replaces movements of fantasy away f r o m the body with an imaginary movement toward the body. But gestures of real violence are substituted for the poet's exotic voyage, with the implicit aim of reaching absolute immobility. 1 8 And the sado-masochistic ecstasy referred to at the end of "A Celle qui est trop gaie" is the ecstasy of a sexual 18. In t h e c o n t e x t o f a w h o l l y d i f f e r e n t a r g u m e n t , J e a n - P i e r r e R i c h a r d n o t e s the " m o d e r a t i n g f u n c t i o n " o f cruelty in Baudelaire: far f r o m b e i n g a f r e n e t i c m o v e m e n t , Baudelairean s a d i s m seeks to e l i m i n a t e excess, t o reestablish a balance o f p o w e r b e t w e e n people ( " P r o f o n d e u r de B a u d e l a i r e , " in Poesie et profondeur [Paris: Seuil, 1955], p. 124).

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plunge in which the poet shares his own death with the woman's maimed body. The poet's "vertigineuse douceur" is a sadistic derivation of Freud's primary erotogenic masochism; it is a dizzying transgression of limits which has no other end but its own explosive and fatal force. The terror of motion in the apparently uncontrolled motions of sado-masochistic sexuality is betrayed— both in Baudelaire and Sade—by a fascination with corpses. 19 Violating a dead body is a kind of immobile sex. If all the movements of sexual desire are interpretive versions of the object of desire, the necrophiliac's movements are pseudomovements. Necrophilic excitement is desire's interpretation of death; but this means that the lack in necrophilic desire is death itself, and this desire seeks the satisfaction of its own end. Sexual desire in "Le Beau navire" and "Les Bijoux" produces images which, so to speak, are hooked onto the observed movements of the woman's body; but nothing productive "feeds" the necrophiliac's gaze, and the excited desire for an absolutely still body merely seeks to produce more death. 19. For an intelligent if limited discussion of Baudelaire's affinities with Sade see Georges Blin, Le Sadisme de Baudelaire (Paris, 1948). Psychoanalysis seems to m e indispensable for an understanding of sadism, and Blin w r o t e his book before the French discovered Freud. To w o r k out the logic of the idea in both Baudelaire and Sade that erotic pleasure leads to crime would, I think, be the surest way of defining what they have in c o m m o n .

8 A Spectral Id The pleasures of self-torture can be felt more directly. Baudelairean irony paralyzes desire. The most concise descriptions we have of the poet's ironic relation to himself are in "L'Irrémédiable" and "L'Héautontimorouménos." The mode of self-knowledge and of self-judgment evoked in these poems can perhaps best be understood in the light of Freud's notion of the superego. In Freudian theory, the superego is constituted by the introjection of parental authority, and especially of parental interdictions. 1 These interdictions are inseparable from two other aspects of the superego: first of all, its nature as an idealized version of the parent, and secondly, its intellectual function as an observer of the self. This complex bundle of attributes is suggested by Baudelaire's ambivalent attitude toward "la conscience dans le Mal" at the end of "L'Irrémédiable." 1. For Freud, the superego is one of the consequences of the dissolving of the Oedipus complex. O t h e r psychoanalytic theorists—most notably, Melanie Klein—place the emergence of a superego (or at least the internalizing of prohibitions) at a much earlier period in the child's life. Sandor Ferenczi points out that the child's sphincter control depends on his having assimilated certain "educational" precepts, and Klein postulates a particularly fierce superego formed by the infant's introjection of " g o o d " and " b a d " objects in the first year of life.

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Tête-à-tête sombre et limpide Qu'un coeur devenu son miroir! Puits de Vérité, clair et noir, Où tremble une étoile livide, Un phare ironique, infernal, Flambeau des grâces sataniques, Soulagement et gloire uniques, —La conscience dans le Mal!2 O u r moral consciousness is ironie and infernal, but it is also our only relief and glory. The "phare ironique" is at once ideal and demonic, and its apparently contradictory character also belongs to a superego which is simultaneously an idealization of the judging parent and a ferocious version of the parent's judgment. Freud suggests that the superego is energized by the id, that is, by desiring impulses in the unconscious. The emergence of an idealized instance of the personality would therefore legitimize instinctual forces which, however, the superego condemns. 3 The complex genesis of the superego suggests that 2. W h a t a s o m b r e , lucid e x c h a n g e [ t h e r e is, in] a heart b e c o m e its o w n m i r r o r — a well o f t r u t h , clear t h o u g h black, w h e r e i n t r e m b l e s a livid star, an ironic, infernal b e a c o n , a t o r c h o f satanic graces, [ m a n ' s ] sole relief a n d g l o r y — c o n s c i o u s n e s s in Evil. 3. F r e u d ' s v a r i o u s e f f o r t s t o d e f i n e t h e s u p e r e g o ' s characteristics are n o t entirely c o n s i s t e n t w i t h o n e a n o t h e r . In The Ego and the Id (1923), t h e s u p e r e g o a n d t h e e g o ideal a p p e a r t o b e s y n o n y m o u s . In t h e New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933 [1932]), t h e s u p e r e g o is p r e s e n t e d as a p s y c h i c s t r u c t u r e w h i c h fulfills t h r e e distinct f u n c t i o n s : s e l f - k n o w l e d g e , conscience and t h e f o r m a t i o n o f ideals (see SE, 22:66). F r e u d also w r i t e s in The Ego and the Id t h a t t h e s u p e r e g o derives f r o m t h e first o b j e c t - c a t h e x e s o f t h e id; " t h u s t h e s u p e r - e g o is a l w a y s close t o t h e id a n d can act as its r e p r e s e n t a tive vis-à-vis t h e e g o " (SE, 19:48-49).

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it m a y be the disguised representative, in the p o s t O e d i p a l personality, of the death instinct. T h e p a r e n tal a u t h o r i t y internalized in the s u p e r e g o is connected, before the resolution of the O e d i p u s complex, w i t h instinctual renunciation. In the case of a little boy, for example, the fantasized castrating father had d e m a n d e d that the child r e n o u n c e his desire f o r the m o t h e r . "Fantasized" is crucial, f o r it w o u l d be m i s leading to stop at a definition of the superego as the internalization of parental authority. T h e f a t h e r - j u d g e is already an internalized figure, a fantasy of the real father. 4 What, then, is the exact difference b e t w e e n the punishing father of O e d i p a l fantasies and a superego w h i c h p r e s u m a b l y indicates a successful resolution of Oedipal conflicts? T h e a n s w e r m a y be that the superego doesn't internalize anything; rather, it is the result of a process of self-differentiation w h i c h b o r r o w s f r o m the i m a g e of an already internalized parent. To put Freudian and Baudelairean t e r m s t o gether, w e could say that the s u p e r e g o is the id w h i c h has b e c o m e its o w n mirror. T h e fantasy parent-judge m a y d o little m o r e than p r o v i d e a m o r a l justification for the pleasure of self-destruction. In the superego, p r i m a r y erotogenic m a s o c h i s m becomes a cultural and ethical imperative. T h e i m m e n s e i m p o r t a n c e of the O e d i p u s c o m p l e x for the death instinct w o u l d be that Oedipal fantasies present the death wish in the 4. In t h e New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, F r e u d associates t h e s u p e r e g o w i t h a k i n d o f closed circle o f fantasies i m i t a t i n g o t h e r f a n t a s y - f o r m a t i o n s : " . . . a c h i l d ' s s u p e r - e g o is in fact c o n s t r u c t e d o n t h e m o d e l n o t o f its p a r e n t s b u t o f its p a r e n t s ' s u p e r - e g o " (SE, 22:67).

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f o r m of a morally and socially necessary interdiction of desire. The father's law negates incestuous desire and forces the child out of the family circle and into the world. And Freud would have us think that by sublimating this parental threat, we do indeed become social creatures, with a built-in mechanism for the control of antisocial impulses. This may be true, but the idealized parent can also be used to condemn all desire and to lead the organism to death. For in the superego the id, separated f r o m itself, finds pleasure in attacking itself. The obvious sadistic aspect of the superego perhaps hides a more profound masochism which becomes evident if we think of the superego as desire turned against itself. Thus we return to the equivalence, proposed in the last chapter, between "original" sadism (the wish to master the world) and the death instinct. The last four stanzas of "L'Héautontimorouménos" could be read as Baudelaire's lament over this equivalence. We will be looking at the structure of the entire poem in a m o ment; here is its most famous stanza: Je suis la plaie et le couteaü! Je suis le soufflet et la joue! Je suis les m e m b r e s et la roue, Et la victime et le b o u r r e a u ! 5

Baudelaire calls the oneness of the torturer and the victim Irony, the w o r d used to describe the torch of "la conscience dans le Mai" in "L'Irrémédiable." Both " L ' H é a u t o n t i m o r o u m é n o s " and "L'Irrémédi5. I am both the w o u n d and the knife, both the blow and the cheek, the limbs and the rack, the victim and the torturer.

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a b l e " are s u g g e s t i v e o f the a m b i g u i t y in " i r o n i c " self-distancing. O n t h e o n e h a n d , i r o n y s e e m s t o i n v o l v e a p a i n f u l cleavage o f the psyche. C o n s c i o u s n e s s o b s e r v e s a n d k n o w s Evil; t h e r e is a distance b e t w e e n t h e t w o . T h e p o e t t h u s s e e m s to be a r g u i n g f o r t h e hopeless duality o f o u r being. E v e n the distinction b e t w e e n smiles a n d an " e t e r n a l l a u g h " at the e n d o f " L ' H é a u t o n t i m o r o u m é n o s " w o r k s in this direction. In t h e essay " D e L ' E s s e n c e d u r i r e , " Baudelaire d e scribes a smile as " s o m e t h i n g a n a l o g o u s t o the w a g g i n g [ b a l a n c e m e n t ] o f a d o g ' s tail or a cat's p u r r i n g . " A smile expresses j o y , w h i c h m a n i f e s t s o n e n e s s o r w h o l e n e s s o f being; the satanic n a t u r e o f l a u g h t e r has t o d o w i t h its b e i n g " t h e e x p r e s s i o n o f a d u a l o r c o n t r a d i c t o r y s e n t i m e n t ; a n d that explains the c o n vulsive n a t u r e o f l a u g h t e r " (984). Smiles are o n t h e side o f bercement, o f an u n b r o k e n r h y t h m o f b e i n g ; l a u g h t e r expresses t h e duality o f h u m a n nature, its e n trapment within the " t w o postulations." O n t h e o t h e r h a n d , t h e i m a g e o f t h e self o r t h e heart as its o w n m i r r o r (an i m a g e used in b o t h " L ' H é a u t o n t i m o r o u m é n o s " and "L'Irrémédiable") appropriately s u g g e s t s that B a u d e l a i r e a n i r o n y creates an illusion o f distance. In stanza six o f " L ' I r r é m é d i a b l e , " t h e p h o s p h o r e s c e n t eyes o f viscous m o n s t e r s m a k e a " l i g h t " w h i c h is an intensification o f t h e s u r r o u n d i n g d a r k ness. Visibility is t h e result o f a greater blackness e m e r g i n g f r o m a lesser blackness. 6 In a similar w a y , 6. U n damné descendant sans lampe, Au bord d'un gouffre dont l'odeur Trahit l'humide profondeur, D'éternels escaliers sans rampe,

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i r o n y w o u l d be a lacerating separation of desire f r o m itself, a kind of functional cleavage w h i c h involves n o difference of substance. Implicitly, the entire dualistic p o s i t i o n — G o d versus Satan, spirit versus flesh—is e x p o s e d as an effort to give plausibility to the very n o t i o n of dualism. T h e " t w o p o s t u l a t i o n s , " a n o t i o n crucial to the idealism of the early p o e m s of Les Fleurs du mal, are actually f u n c t i o n s of each other. T h e spiritual dignity celebrated in "Les P h a r e s , " for example, consists of n o t h i n g m o r e than the articulation of the curses, the blasphemies, and the ecstasy w h i c h constitute o u r fallen state. In " L ' I r r é m é d i a b l e , " Baudelaire significantly speaks of "la conscience dans le M a l " : consciousness in evil, n o t of evil. A dualistic position such as Baudelaire's " t w o p o s t u l a t i o n s " — or, m o r e generally, the Christian opposition b e t w e e n G o d and Satan—obscures the field of real differences in h u m a n life by positing a pseudodifference as an irreducible a n t a g o n i s m . 7 D u a l i s m provides an illusory p r o t e c t i o n against the dangers of sameness. In psychoanalytic terms, w h a t Baudelaire calls spiritual-

O ù veillent des monstres visqueux D o n t les larges yeux de phosphore Font une nuit plus noire encore Et ne rendent visibles qu'eux a d a m n e d man, going lampless d o w n the brink of a pit whose stench hints at its watery depths, descending endless, banisterless stairs w h e r e slimy monsters glare with great phosphorescent eyes that deepen the darkness of the night and make n o u g h t but t h e m selves visible 7. Christianity, however, betrays a sense of the sameness o f opposites: Satan's origins are in God, his fall is a plunge away f r o m his o w n substance.

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ity, or " t h e postulation t o w a r d G o d , " m a y be s i m p l y an a t t e m p t to disguise a self-destructive m o v e m e n t as a conflict b e t w e e n t w o distinct or authentically i n d e pendent powers. T h e description of I r o n y as a kind of lacerating m o r a l consciousness in " L ' H é a u t o n t i m o r o u m é n o s " and " L ' I r r é m é d i a b l e " should m a k e us suspect that the objectifying of a regulatory m o r a l principle can serve to legitimize the death instinct, to confer on self-torture the authority of a divinely inspired " p o s t u l a t i o n . " "Je suis la plaie et le couteau!" implies n o clash of o p p o s i n g forces; it is rather an assertion of the f u n d a m e n t a l sameness of apparently distinct impulses. Baudelairean irony is the s h a d o w of a difference. It is a spectral repetition of desire as its o w n negation. T h e superego, it m i g h t be said, is a spectral id. T h e r e is, f r o m the very beginning, s o m e t h i n g insubstantial a b o u t the superego. U n l i k e the i m a g e of the father in O e d i p a l fantasies, it is not a fantasy-version of a real person; instead, it is an identification of a part of the self w i t h one of the s e l f s fantasies. B u t the very insubstantiality of the superego makes it an " i d e a l " i n s t r u m e n t f o r a particular kind of k n o w l e d g e . B y assigning to the superego the d o u b l e function of self-observation and s e l f - j u d g m e n t , Freud suggests the indissolubility of its m o r a l and epistemological roles. We m a y speculate that in fact the t w o roles are identical. T h e k n o w l e d g e for w h i c h the s u p e r e g o is responsible is negated desire. It is desire both petrified and etherealized, desire w i t h out affect; it is, in a w o r d , desire t r a n s f o r m e d into a concept of itself.

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B a u d e l a i r e s u g g e s t s s o m e t h i n g v e r y similar t o this in t h e " N o t e s nouvelles sur E d g a r P o e , " w h e r e h e discusses art entirely in t e r m s o f vertical c o r r e s p o n dences. It is t h r o u g h art that w e seek t o escape f r o m the i m p e r f e c t i o n o f h u m a n life a n d g r a s p a " r e v e a l e d p a r a d i s e " ; t h a n k s t o o u r " i m m o r t a l instinct f o r t h e B e a u t i f u l , " w e see the e a r t h as b e i n g in " c o r r e s p o n d e n c e " w i t h H e a v e n ( " u n e correspondance d u Ciel"), a n d in art w e catch a g l i m p s e o f " t h e s p l e n d o r s b e y o n d the t o m b . " Baudelaire goes o n t o d i s t i n g u i s h b e t w e e n t h e e n t h u s i a s m o r the spiritual e x c i t e m e n t ( " u n e n t h o u s i a s m e , u n e exitation d ' a m e " ) w h i c h expresses " h u m a n aspiration t o w a r d a s u p e r i o r B e a u t y " and " p a s s i o n w h i c h is the intoxication of the heart. . . . F o r p a s s i o n is natural, even t o o n a t u r a l n o t t o i n t r o d u c e an offensive, d i s c o r d a n t t o n e i n t o t h e r e a l m o f p u r e B e a u t y ; it is t o o familiar and t o o violent n o t t o s c a n dalize t h e p u r e Desires, the g r a c i o u s Melancholies, and the n o b l e D e s p a i r s w h i c h i n h a b i t the s u p e r n a t u r a l r e gions of P o e t r y . " 8 T h i s superficially trite passage i m plies that desire can be abolished s i m p l y b y b e i n g capitalized. It is n o t replaced b y a n y t h i n g d i f f e r e n t f r o m itself; it is s i m p l y raised t o an allegorical status. Several t h i n g s c o m e t o g e t h e r here. In the vertical leap, " N a t u r e " is denied. B u t in t h e " i d e a l " r e g i o n b e y o n d N a t u r e , w e find N a t u r e allegorized a n d categorized into "pure Desires," "gracious Melancholies" and " n o b l e D e s p a i r s . " We a p p e a r t o h a v e an o b l i q u e b u t a s t o n i s h i n g l y f a i t h f u l d e s c r i p t i o n o f processes 8. Oeuvres completes de Charles Baudelaire, ed. Jacques C r e p e t , 19 vols. (Paris: Louis C o n a r d , 1923-53), 17:xx-xxi.

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which I've been associating with the superego. The id is idealized into a superior mental faculty by placing an interdiction on itself. And we have a f o r m of selfknowledge which, as it were, is identical to the gesture which erases the small d of desire and in its place inscribes a capital D . Morally, Nature is ennobled by this erasure: discordance is eliminated and replaced by a " p u r e " and "noble" emptiness. T h e capitalization of desire also has important esthetic consequences. There is a richly elusive art of shifting tones and heterogeneous images which, as we have seen, corresponds to desire's incessant mobility, to the "infinis bercements du loisir embaumé." In such an art, abstraction, as Baudelaire suggests in the passage f r o m "Fusées" on "the infinite and mysterious charm which lies in the contemplation of a ship," is the generating of "curves and imaginary figures" by the real movements of real objects. It is the extension of the concrete into m e m o r y and fantasy. But with the negation of desire, w e have an immobile and immobilizing type of abstraction. Instead of initiating a process of endless substitutions (desire's ceaseless "traveling" a m o n g different images), abstraction is n o w a transcendence of the desiring process itself. And we move toward an art of allegory, toward a poetry of what Baudelaire calls in "L'Irrémédiable" "clear emblems" and "perfect tableaux" (a poetry illustrated by the juxtaposed and static representations of the first part of "L'Irrémédiable" itself)-

ions of Order Je te frapperai sans colère Et sans haine, comme un boucher, Comme Moïse le rocher! Et je ferai de ta paupière, Pour abreuver mon Saharah, Jaillir les eaux de la souffrance. Mon désir gonflé d'espérance Sur tes pleurs salés nagera Comme un vaisseau qui prend le large Et dans mon coeur qu'ils soûleront Tes chers sanglots retentiront Comme un tambour qui bat la charge Ne suis-je pas un faux accord Dans la divine symphonie, Grâce à la vorace Ironie Qui me secoue et qui me mord? Elle est dans ma voix, la criarde! C'est tout mon sang, ce poison noir! Je suis le sinistre miroir Où la mégère se regarde! Je suis la plaie et le couteau! Je suis le soufflet et la joue! Je suis les membres et la roue, Et la victime et le bourreau!

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Je suis de mon coeur le vampire, —Un de ces grands abandonnés Au rire éternel condamnés, Et qui ne peuvent plus sourire! 1 "L'Héautontimorouménos" records a poignant moment of hesitation when the poet, lamenting his separation from himself, seeks to escape from an existence now saturated with irony and to find once again the cradling rhythms of desire for the other. The first three stanzas are an attempted solution to the anguishing predicament described in the last four stanzas. A calculated aggressiveness is meant to save the poet from the aridity of self-conscious irony. Logically, the second section of "L'Héautontimorouménos" belongs at the beginning of the poem; w e have only to add an implicit causal conjunction to stanza four ( " C a r ne suis-je pas un faux accord . . .") to realize that the second part explains the first part. 1.

Heautontimoroumenos

I shall strike you without anger and without hate, like a butcher, as Moses struck the rock, and f r o m y o u r eyelids, to slake m y Sahara's thirst, I shall make the waters o f suffering gush forth. M y desire, big with hope, will s w i m in y o u r salt tears like a ship setting out to sea; while in m y heart, elated by y o u r weeping, y o u r beloved sobs will reverberate like a drum sounding the attack. A m I not a dissonant chord in the divine s y m p h o n y , thanks to the insatiable irony that mauls and savages me? That spitfire is in m y voice, all m y blood has turned into her black poison; I am the sinister glass in which the shrew beholds herself. I am both the w o u n d and the knife, both the b l o w and the cheek, the limbs and the rack, the victim and the torturer. I am m y o w n heart's vampire, one o f the thoroughly abandoned, condemned to eternal laughter, but w h o can never smile again.

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T h e question o f stanza sequence becomes singularly complex i f we consider "L'Heautontimoroumenos" from the perspective o f the sado-masochistic sequence proposed by Freud in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" and elaborated in the case he discusses in " A Child is Being Beaten" (1919). We find in Baudelaire's poem both the Freudian articulation o f sado-masochism into distinct steps and a masochistic identification with the victim's suffering which exposes the entire process as a single psychic " m o m e n t . " Stanza one appears to illustrate the first type o f sadism in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes." The poet dramatically announces that he will strike his mistress "without anger and without hate." There is no sexual excitement, and i f we accept Freud's suggestion that such sadism becomes sexually exciting only when the aim o f inflicting pain is present, we can say that this cold cruelty does not have pain as one o f its goals. Rather, it is the expression o f a wish to master the world, or, as we see in the next two stanzas, to make the woman alleviate the poet's anguish. But as soon as the poet begins to give his reasons for striking the woman, his sadism is, so to speak, liquefied, or affectively enriched. The woman's tears ("les eaux de la souffrance") will " w a t e r " the poet's "Sahara," and his desire, now filled with hope, "will swim" on her sobs like a boat setting out to sea. The poet wants to be intoxicated by his mistress's tears, and the sounds o f her suffering will be like drums in his heart awakening him to new conquests. What has happened to transform the passionless striking o f the

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first stanza into exalted movements o f desire which Baudelaire describes in images reminiscent o f the cradling rhythms o f desire in the earlier erotic poems o f Les Fleurs du mal? To answer this question, we will have to consider a second rearrangement o f the poem's stanzas. I suggested a moment ago that the self-torture evoked in the second part o f the poem belongs at the beginning, for it explains why the poet wishes to strike the woman. But it can also be argued that the last four stanzas belong between the two descriptions o f cruelty because only they explain the eroticizing o f cruelty, its beneficent liquefaction. In " A Child is Being Beaten," Freud divides young female patients' fantasies o f children being beaten into three distinct fantasy stages: 1) M y father is beating the child; 2) I am being beaten by my father; and 3) Someone (either undetermined or a representative o f the father, such as a teacher) is beating children. Stage three resembles stage one, but, Freud adds, " . . . the phantasy now has strong and unambiguous sexual excitement attached to it, and so provides a means for onanistic gratification." The only explanation o f this change lies in stage two, in which the child's fantasy o f being beaten "is accompanied by a high degree o f pleasure." So, as in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," it is masochistic excitement which explains the sexualizing o f the sadistic impulse. But in "Instincts," Freud is describing an ideal psychic progression; his model is a deduction from clinical experience, but it never refers to particular clinical experiences. In " A Child is Being Beaten," however, Freud considers the question o f

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w h e t h e r o r n o t t h e events r e p r e s e n t e d in these f a n tasies actually o c c u r r e d , a n d h e m a k e s t h e crucial p o i n t that t h e s e c o n d p h a s e — " t h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t a n d the m o s t m o m e n t o u s o f a l l . . . has n e v e r h a d a real existence. . . . It is a c o n s t r u c t i o n o f analysis, b u t it is n o less a necessity o n that a c c o u n t . " 2 M a s o c h i s t i c e x c i t e m e n t w o u l d t h e r e f o r e b e d e r i v e d f r o m an u n conscious fantasy-event which transforms nonsexual s a d i s m i n t o sexual sadism. We f i n d s o m e t h i n g similar in " L ' H e a u t o n t i m o r o u m e n o s . " T h e relation b e t w e e n t h e p o e t ' s cruelty t o w a r d t h e w o m a n and his cruelty t o w a r d h i m s e l f is p r e s e n t e d in a significantly dist o r t e d w a y . Structurally, his s e l f - t o r t u r e is relegated to t h e s e c o n d half o f t h e p o e m ; logically, it is t h e reas o n w h y h e b e g i n s t o t o r t u r e t h e w o m a n (in o r d e r t o e n d the i n n e r d r o u g h t created b y " v o r a c i o u s I r o n y " ) , b u t t h e effectiveness o f t h e sadistic s t r a t e g y can b e u n d e r s t o o d o n l y if w e read i n t o t h e p o e t ' s s e l f - t o r t u r e a sexual e x c i t e m e n t absent f r o m his d e s c r i p t i o n o f it a n d w h i c h explains t h e shift f r o m an affectless s a d i s m to a sadistic desire b u r s t i n g w i t h h o p e . Finally, h o w e v e r , it is possible t o t h i n k o f t h e m i d d l e m a s o c h i s t i c stage o f " L ' H e a u t o n t i m o r o u m e n o s " as identical to t h e cold cruelty o f t h e first stanza. T h e c o l d ness a n n o u n c e d in stanza o n e m a y e x p r e s s t h e fantasy o f an ideally peaceful violence. T h i s leads us t o a final speculation c o n c e r n i n g " o r i g i n a l " s a d i s m in F r e u d ' s s c h e m e o f s a d o - m a s o c h i s m in " I n s t i n c t s a n d T h e i r V i c i s s i t u d e s . " T h i s s a d i s m seems n o n e r o t i c precisely because it translates the d r e a m o f a d i s c h a r g e o f desir2. SE, 17:185. See Laplanche's discussion o f "A Child is B e i n g Beaten" in Vie et mart en psychanalyse, pp. 1 6 5 - 7 3 .

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ing energy w h i c h w o u l d n o t shatter the self into p r o ducing m o r e fantasies: rather, it w o u l d merely stop the self and others. Affectless destructiveness (directed either t o w a r d the self or t o w a r d others) w o u l d be a representation of the goal of p r i m a r y masochism, w h i c h is death, a definitive physical and emotional stillness. T h e " p l a c e " of self-torture in " L ' H e a u t o n t i m o r o u m e n o s " is, then, extremely a m b i g u o u s . " V o r acious I r o n y " explains w h y the poet wishes to strike the w o m a n , but his ability to identify w i t h her s u f f e r i n g — a n ability derived f r o m the (inferred) pleasure of the poet's o w n s u f f e r i n g — i n v i t e s us to place his self-devouring irony " b e t w e e n " the sadism of stanza one and the sadism of stanzas t w o and three. Even if the death instinct aims t o shatter the self b e y o n d all possibility of being shattered, its manifestation as s a d o - m a s o c h i s m includes the experience of a sexually exciting shattering of the self, the experience of a psychic mobility w h i c h is the sign of the life of desire. In " L ' H e a u t o n t i m o r o u m e n o s , " Baudelaire a p pears to be a f f i r m i n g the vitalizing potential of sadism in stanzas t w o and three. Finally, h o w e v e r , the actual o r d e r of the p o e m — w h i c h at first seemed " w r o n g " to u s — p r o p e r l y suggests the hopelessness of his effort. T h e liberating r h y t h m s evoked in the second and third stanzas are locked in b e t w e e n t w o versions of essentially sterile violence. " L ' H e a u t o n t i m o r o u m e n o s " thus suggests the mobility of the death instinct itself. T h e impulse to end the wild displacements of desire, unable to realize the absolute discharge of death, m o v e s a m o n g different representations of violence:

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self-torture, calculated cold cruelty toward the other, and an excited participation in the other's suffering. N o w even the cradling movements of desiring fantasy are under the aegis of the death instinct. And, bizarrely enough, it is precisely at the m o m e n t when the other has become nothing more than a projection of the poet's own lost or maimed capacity to desire that he or she will be most intently looked at. The slightly insolent turning away f r o m the other which nourished desire in "La Chevelure" or "Le Serpent qui danse" is replaced, in the "Tableaux parisiens" and the Petits Poemes en prose, by a fascinated and frequently m u r derous attention.

10

Nightmares of Narcissism and Realism The principal "character" of the "Tableaux parisiens" and the Petits Poèmes en prose is a narcissistic, hysterically sentimental, and frequently sadistic pedant. These are also Baudelaire's most "realistic" poems; many of them describe scenes f r o m contemporary Parisian life, and there is very little exotic fantasy of the sort encountered in "L'Invitation au v o y a g e " or " L a Vie antérieure." What is the relation between realism and narcissism, and between violence and intellectuality? The poet's relation to others is now one of appropriation. The "Tableaux parisiens" and the Petits Poèmes en prose record the narcissistic version of the prostituted self. The crucial texts on art as prostitution (in the Journaux intimes, the essay on Constantin Guys, and the Petits Poèmes en prose) probably all belong to the last decade of Baudelaire's life. And since the poems in prose seem to illustrate remarks from the Journaux and the Guys essay on the artist's promiscuous openness to the spectacle of external life, it's tempting to think of all these texts as variations on a single notion of art as prostitution. There is, however, a crucial difference between the penetration and con-

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gestion of the self by multiple forms of the external world (a phenomenon described in "Le Peintre de la vie moderne"), and the poet's effort to find himself repeated in the world. In the first case, the poet is invaded by, is even constituted by, irreducible difference; in the second case, differences are reduced to mirror reflections. The child w h o gluttonously takes in the world with an "oeil fixe et animalement extatique" is set afloat in a universe of alien forms. At the extreme, he would become a theatricalized self, a succession of scenes never totalized by a unifying (self-) consciousness. In a similar way, the artistprostitute, as we saw in Chapter T w o , becomes a richly problematic identity, a shattered ego available to the various partial (and even sexually indeterminate) selves celebrated in the shifting tones and modes of address of Baudelaire's erotic poetry. But in the avid narcissistic appropriation of the other, we have a false prostitution of the self. T h e poet's availability to scenes f r o m the external world is enacted as a process of partly willed, partly rejected self-recognition or self-identification. The little old w o m e n of Paris (in "Les Petites vieilles") "intoxicate" an observer whose "coeur multiplié" lives each of their imagined pasts: Mais moi, moi qui de loin tendrement vous surveille, L'oeil inquiet, fixé sur vos pas incertains, Tout comme si j'étais votre père, ô merveille! Je goûte à votre insu des plaisirs clandestins: Je vois s'épanouir vos passions novices; Sombres ou lumineux, je vis vos jours perdus;

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T h e c o n f r o n t a t i o n h e r e is typical o f the " T a b l e a u x p a r i s i e n s " and t h e Petits Poèmes en prose. T h e p o e t w a t c h e s f r o m a distance, w i t h a f i x e d and t r o u b l e d gaze, p a t h e t i c " d é b r i s d ' h u m a n i t é . " O n t h e o n e h a n d , " L e s Petites vieilles" and " L e s Sept vieillards" are m u c h m o r e realistically descriptive t h a n " L a C h e v e l u r e " o r " L e B e a u n a v i r e . " T h e p o e t ' s a t t e n t i v e gaze does p r o d u c e a picture, a fairly distinct tableau o f Parisian life. B u t these realistic v i g n e t t e s are f r e q u e n t l y c o m p o s e d o f t h e n a r r a t o r ' s conjectures, o r become dream-tableaux. What the poet "sees" and lives in "Les Petites vieilles" are his o w n fictions a b o u t the w o m e n ' s past lives. H e m a k e s little n o v e l s : in t h e s e c o n d section o f the p o e m , h e i m a g i n e s o n e o f t h e w o m e n as p l u n g e d i n t o m i s f o r t u n e b y h e r c o u n try, a n o t h e r as t h e v i c t i m o f her h u s b a n d , and a t h i r d as a M a d o n n a t o r t u r e d b y her child. T h a t is, t h e bits and pieces o f o b s e r v e d life in a b i g city p r o v i d e t h e p o e t w i t h an o p p o r t u n i t y to p u t bits and pieces t o gether, to r e c o n s t i t u t e a c o h e r e n t life f r o m an isolated i m a g e . A n d h e reconstitutes t h o s e livesfor himself: it is as if t h e p o e t could b e c o m e w h o l e o n l y b y f a b r i c a t i n g a wholeness outside himself.2 1. But I, w h o watch you tenderly f r o m afar, with m y uneasy eye fixed on your tottering steps, as t h o u g h (what next!) I were y o u r f a t h e r — u n k n o w n to you I enjoy secret pleasures: I watch your untutored passions flower, and dark or bright, I relive y o u r vanished days; my manifold heart delights in all your vices, and m y soul resplends with all y o u r virtues. 2. In the prose p o e m "Les Fenêtres," the poet invents histories for the people he glimpses through the w i n d o w s of Parisian build-

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The detached gaze which records these Parisian scenes is at the same time an intoxicated and a troubled gaze. In "Le Jeu," the poet describes the somber tableau which unfolded before his "oeil clairvoyant" in a dream one night. He dreamed of frantic poets and old courtesans in a decrepit and filthy gambling den; he saw the colorless lips, the toothless mouths, and the feverishly convulsed hands of gamblers risking their honor or even their lives with a desperate recklessness. But more interestingly, he saw himself a c c o u d é , froid, m u e t , enviant, E n v i a n t de ces g e n s la p a s s i o n tenace, D e ces vieilles putains la f u n è b r e gaieté, Et t o u s gaillardement trafiquant à m a face, L'un de s o n vieil h o n n e u r , l'autre de sa beauté! 3

But then, still in the dream, the poet became terrified of his o w n envy of these men "courant avec ferveur à l'abîme béant," w h o prefer pain to death and hell to nothingness. "Le J e u " brings us close to the profound drama of both the "Tableaux parisiens" and the Petits Poèmes en prose. The poet is n o w a cold and silent observer transfixed by envy. And his envy is an ontological hunger. The poet aspires toward other existences; he sucks them into himself. Desire in "La Chevelure" ings. He goes to bed at night proud o f having lived and suffered in others; the truth o f h i s "legends" is unimportant, for they help him to feel his o w n existence, to know what he is. 3. leaning there on m y elbows, cold, speechless, and envying, yes, envying those people's intense passion, the old bawds' dismal sprightliness, and all o f them as they cheerfully sold, under my very nose, one, his long-established honour, the other, her beauty.

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was at once full and empty. The fantasy movements initiated by the lack in desire are a partial satisfaction of desire, a filling u p of the emptiness. We also find pleasurable fantasies in the poet's rapt observation of the little old women, as well as in his envy of the gamblers' "tenacious passion," but n o w the condition for fantasy is that it be entirely performed as the reality of other lives. The poet continues to invent (he dreams of passionate gamblers and concocts a past for each little old woman), but his fantasies are, so to speak, alienated f r o m his consciousness. They come back to him in the f o r m of fascinating and intoxicating spectacles of otherness. Baudelaire's tableaux of Parisian life are instructive about the realistic imagination, and more specifically, about the nineteenth-century realistic narrator's relation to his story. The ideal narrator of realistic fiction is an absence; he reports, as Flaubert repeatedly said, on nature "as it is;" giving us both "le dessus et le dessous" of the tableau. But the most accurate metaphor for this project, that of art as a mirror of reality, also exposes its ambiguity. For what w e discover in much nineteenth-century fiction is indeed a mirror, but it is displaced: instead of the artist's w o r k having become a mirror of the world, it is the world which the artist has transformed into a mirror. The willed separation of the author f r o m the world he describes has the effect of immobilizing the author's self in allegorized social history. An impassive—or even better, wholly i m personal—narrator faces "blocks" of himself in the world. The writer of realistic fiction has implicitly denied that he himself can be an instance of mobile desir-

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i n g fantasy. As a result, his a f f e c t i v i t y is, so t o speak, relocated in a w o r l d cluttered w i t h t h i n g s w h i c h t h e n a r r a t o r has t o describe in o r d e r to see his o w n existence. Objects fill u p the realistic n o v e l as m e m o r y o b j e c t s clutter t h e p o e t ' s m i n d in B a u d e l a i r e ' s " S p l e e n " p o e m b e g i n n i n g "J'ai plus d e s o u v e n i r s q u e si j ' a v a i s mille a n s . " In Balzac, t o take t h e m o s t s t r i k i n g case, a soul appears t o b e lost a m o n g objects, i m p r i s o n e d in a w o r l d w h o s e s o m b e r a n d fascinating p r e s ence m i g h t b e described b y t h e Balzacian n a r r a t o r in t e r m s similar t o t h o s e u s e d b y B a u d e l a i r e in " L e C y g n e " to evoke t h e h e a v y i m m o b i l i t y o f a city b u r d e n e d w i t h the p o e t ' s past: Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie N ' a bougé! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs, Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allégorie, Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs. 4 Realism curiously a c c o m m o d a t e s allegory. It is as if the self-effacement r e q u i r e d b y an esthetic o f o b j e c t i v ity w e r e in fact enacted as an a t t e m p t to r e a p p r o p r i a t e a self " l o s t " in t h e w o r l d . R e a l i s m f o r m u l a t e s as esthetic d o c t r i n e a relation t o t h e w o r l d w h i c h b e l o n g s t o t h e Lacanian category of l'Imaginaire. In J a c q u e s Lacan's psychoanalytic t h e o r y , o u r relation t o the w o r l d is m a r k e d b y the I m a g i n a r y w h e n it is characterized b y an e f f o r t to m a s t e r t h e w o r l d t h r o u g h a process o f narcissistic identification w i t h it. T h e source o f t h e 4. Paris is changing, but nought in my melancholy has moved. These new pilaces and scaffoldings, blocks of stone, old suburbs—everything for me becomes an allegory, and my memories are heavier than any rocks.

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I m a g i n a r y o r d e r (and o f all later i d e n t i f i c a t o r y relations) is t h e " m i r r o r s t a g e " o f infancy. A c c o r d i n g to Lacan, this stage o c c u r s b e t w e e n the ages o f six m o n t h s a n d e i g h t e e n m o n t h s ; t h e infant, still physically h e l p less, anticipates his o w n f u t u r e physical c o o r d i n a t i o n and u n i t y b y an identification w i t h t h e i m a g e o f the o t h e r as a totalform. T h i s is equivalent t o s a y i n g t h a t the child's self is at first c o n s t i t u t e d as a n o t h e r ; t h e h u m a n self is originally an alienated self. T h e principal effect o f t h e m i r r o r stage o n i n t e r s u b j e c t i v i t y can b e f o u n d in relations o f aggressive tension in w h i c h t h e self exists o n l y as a n o t h e r a n d t h e o t h e r is seen as an alter ego. For e x a m p l e , in erotic relationships d o m i n a t e d b y the I m a g i n a r y , each l o v e r will a t t e m p t t o c a p t u r e his o w n i m a g e in t h e o t h e r . T h e subject, as Lacan p u t s it, " f i x e s h i m s e l f o n an i m a g e w h i c h alienates h i m f r o m h i m self," and w h a t h e calls his moi is t h e " o r g a n i s a t i o n passionnelle" appropriated f r o m the other. But the o t h e r resists this a p p r o p r i a t i o n , and here Lacan's d e scription o f h u m a n relationships has analogies t o Sartre's analysis (especially in L'Etre et le néant) o f o u r e f f o r t s to m a k e o t h e r p e o p l e reflectors in w h i c h w e w o u l d see ourselves as t h e objects w e w a n t to b e . 5 T h e o t h e r is seen as w i t h h o l d i n g t h e self, a n d so t h e k n o w l e d g e o n e has o f h i m t h r o u g h o n e ' s e f f o r t s to a p p r o p r i 5. B u t Lacan r e p r o a c h e s t h e existentialists f o r u n d e r s t a n d i n g "existential n e g a t i v i t y " o n l y " w i t h i n t h e limits o f a self-sufficiency of consciousness." Consequently, existentialist philosophy e n c o u r a g e s t h e illusion o f t h e s e l f s a u t o n o m y and neglects t h e "fonction de méconnaissance" w h i c h a l w a y s characterizes t h e s e l f s s t r u c t u r e s . See L a c a n ' s " L e Stade d u m i r o i r c o m m e f o r m a t e u r d e la f o n c t i o n d u J e telle qu'elle n o u s est révélée d a n s l ' e x p é r i e n c e p s y c h a n a l y t i q u e , " in Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 99.

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ate oneself in h i m is a p a r a n o i d k n o w l e d g e . Indeed, f o r Lacan t h e alienating n a t u r e o f self-identification m a k e s t h e p e r c e p t i o n o f t h e self in t h e o t h e r a p a r a n o i d p e r c e p t i o n f r o m t h e v e r y b e g i n n i n g . 6 At the s a m e t i m e , t h e a p p r o p r i a t e d self is an ideal self: t h e i n f a n t (and later t h e adult, t o the e x t e n t that his relations are lived in the I m a g i n a r y order) sees in t h e o t h e r a total f o r m , a full o r c o m p l e t e d being, w h i c h he possesses b y i d e n t i f y i n g w i t h it. A s w e can see, t h e c o n s t i t u t i o n o f the self as Lacan describes it r e s e m b l e s t h e c o n s t i t u t i o n o f a s u p e r e g o . T h e i m a g i n a r y c o n s t r u c t o f t h e self in t h e " m i r r o r s t a g e " is already b o t h an ideal and a p e r s e c u t o r y self. ( T h e p e r s e c u t o r s o f t h e p a r a n o i d patient Lacan s t u d i e d in his 1932 d o c t o r a l thesis w e r e identical to the i m a g e s o f h e r e g o ideal.) Lacan has a r g u e d that this alienated s e l f - p e r c e p t i o n p r e p a r e s t h e w a y f o r that identification w i t h t h e rival w h i c h a c c o m p a n i e s t h e r e s o l u t i o n o f t h e Oedipus complex. T h e "identificatory reorganization o f t h e s u b j e c t " w h i c h is b r o u g h t a b o u t b y t h e " i n t r o j e c t i o n o f the imago o f t h e p a r e n t o f t h e s a m e s e x " is possible because it is p r e c e d e d b y " a p r i m a r y i d e n tification [that o f t h e " m i r r o r s t a g e " ] w h i c h s t r u c t u r e s t h e subject as a rival o f h i m s e l f . " To t h e e x t e n t that this O e d i p a l r e o r g a n i z a t i o n includes the f o r m a 6. Infantile aggressivity, Lacan e m p h a s i z e s , c a n ' t b e u n d e r s t o o d o n l y as a p l a y f u l exercise o f physical s t r e n g t h . It m a n i f e s t s an a t t e m p t t o capture t h e self in t h e o t h e r . B u t , as Lacan h i m s e l f o b s c u r e l y s u g g e s t s in " L ' A g r e s s i v i t é en p s y c h a n a l y s e " (in Ecrits), t h e p a r a n o i d and a g g r e s s i v e n a t u r e o f t h e e f f o r t t o a p p r o p r i a t e a self in t h e o t h e r in i n f a n c y can p r o b a b l y be u n d e r s t o o d o n l y if w e refer t o M e l a i n e Klein's s c e n a r i o s o f v i o l e n t f a n t a s y d r a m a s w h i c h c h a r a c t e r i z e t h e i n f a n t ' s relation to his internalized " b a d o b j e c t s . "

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tion of (or a n e w preeminence for) a superego, w e m i g h t question any sharp distinction between w h a t Lacan has called primary or preparatory identification and the secondary identification which occurs only as part of a process of sublimation m a d e possible by the Oedipal stage. T h a t is, in the intrasubjective relation " w h i c h structures the subject as a rival of himself," w e m a y have not simply a " p r e p a r a t i o n " f o r the "second a r y " identification which resolves Oedipal tensions, but perhaps above all a model for the identification which presumably designates a resolution of rivalry. B o t h the ideality and the persecutory nature of the post-Oedipal superego have their analogies in the originally constituted self. 7 In a sense, then, the formation of the superego repeats the constitution of the self. But self-appropriation was simultaneous w i t h a separating f r o m the self. T h u s w e return to m y earlier suggestion concerning the superego: it is n o t so m u c h a fantasy-identification 7. For Lacan, h o w e v e r , "it is t h r o u g h the O e d i p a l identification that the subject transcends the aggressivity w h i c h is an essential part of the original subjective i n d i v i d u a t i o n . " But h e also sees the persistence in adult m o r a l life o f t h e "narcissistic s t r u c t u r e " o f t h e "aggressive t e n s i o n " w h i c h accompanies it. T h e question o f t h e extent to w h i c h these tensions belong to p o s t - O e d i p a l s u b l i m a tions and to the p o s t - O e d i p a l s u p e r e g o w o u l d deserve a separate discussion. I argue that they d o indeed belong t o this advanced stage o f d e v e l o p m e n t in m y chapter o n Racine in A Future for Astyanax. For Lacan's concept of the m i r r o r stage, see " L e Stade d u m i r o i r c o m m e f o r m a t e u r de la f o n c t i o n du Je telle qu'elle n o u s est révélée dans l'expérience p s y c h a n a l y t i q u e " and " L ' A g r e s s i v i t é en p s y c h a n a l y s e . " T h e quotes f r o m Lacan on t h e last couple of pages c o m e f r o m the Ecrits, pp. 113, 99, 117, and 119.

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w i t h a parental f i g u r e as it is an alienating d i s t a n c i n g o f t h e self f r o m itself A n d if t h e Lacanian I m a g i n a r y i d e n t i f i c a t i o n o f the self in t h e o t h e r is s i m u l t a n e o u s w i t h t h e f o r m a t i o n o f an ideal a n d p e r s e c u t o r y self, t h e n M e l a n i e Klein is r i g h t to locate t h e a p p e a r a n c e o f a s u p e r e g o in infancy r a t h e r t h a n at t h e m u c h later m o m e n t w h e n t h e child i n c o r p o r a t e s t h e O e d i p a l father. T h e r e w o u l d be n o reason t o discuss Kleinian t h e o r y as a g r o t e s q u e l y i m p r o b a b l e fable (as m o s t p s y c h o analysts do); f o r t h e f o r m a t i o n o f conscience m a y n o t r e q u i r e elaborate m e n t a l o p e r a t i o n s i n c o m p a t ible w i t h infancy. R a t h e r , if w e j u x t a p o s e K l e i n ' s p r o p o s a l s w i t h Lacan's v i e w o f self-creation t h r o u g h self-alienation in the stade du miroir, w e c o m e t o t h e c o n c l u s i o n that is i m p o s s i b l e t o c o n s t i t u t e a total self w i t h o u t creating the s u p e r e g o . A c o m p l e t e , unified, total self is an ideal, o t h e r self. It is a p s y c h o l o g i c a l m y t h which corresponds to the subjective experience o f p s y c h i c division (and n o t totality): t h e division b e t w e e n desiring i m p u l s e s and t h o s e s a m e desiring i m pulses t u r n e d against their o w n m o b i l i t y and seeking a final fatal d i s c h a r g e . 8 H o w e v e r , Lacan insists that n e i t h e r t h e subject n o r i n t e r s u b j e c t i v i t y in general can b e r e d u c e d t o t h e o r d e r o f t h e I m a g i n a r y . It is particularly i m p o r t a n t in a n a l y sis that t h e patient be led f r o m t h e o r d e r o f the I m a g i 8. T h e functions of the Freudian ego are of course much m o r e complex, and also more life-serving, than these remarks suggest. T h e ego is involved in the economizing of energy, in the blocking of internal and external stimuli which might o v e r w h e l m consciousness, and in fulfilling this function it obviously protects the organism's life.

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n a r y t o that o f t h e S y m b o l i c , b y w h i c h Lacan m e a n s a preestablished o r d e r s t r u c t u r e d like a l a n g u a g e a n d in w h i c h t h e subject can " f i n d h i m s e l f ' as a signifier w i t h i n a s y s t e m o f s y m b o l i c e x c h a n g e in the h u m a n c o m m u n i t y . T h e subject, it s h o u l d b e n o t e d , is still another, b u t h e is n o l o n g e r the I m a g i n a r y o t h e r c o n s t r u c t e d o n the illusion o f r e s e m b l a n c e , o n w h a t Lacan has called t h e " m i m e t i c t r a p [le leurre m i m é t i q u e ] . " 9 R a t h e r , t h e subject w o u l d n o w find h i m self alienated in a s y m b o l i c s y s t e m w h i c h h e shares w i t h others. T h a t s y s t e m s t r u c t u r e s t h e h u m a n u n c o n scious, and c o m m u n i c a t i o n w i t h the o t h e r can n o w be enacted t h r o u g h t h e s h i f t i n g p o s i t i o n s o f signifiers in a s y s t e m o f s y m b o l i c exchange. T h e self is still an a p p r o p r i a t e d self, b u t w h a t is a p p r o p r i a t e d is l a n g u a g e s t h e other, and n o t an ideal b u t alienated image o f an i n d i v i d u a l self. (In the r e s o l u t i o n o f t h e O e d i p u s c o m plex, this w o u l d i n v o l v e m o v i n g f r o m a specular rivalry w i t h t h e father, in w h i c h the child seeks t o take t h e f a t h e r ' s place, t o an a s s u m p t i o n o f t h e f u n c t i o n o f t h e f a t h e r and, m o s t f u n d a m e n t a l l y , o f the s y m b o l i c f a t h e r w h o , as L a w , is that w h i c h m a k e s possible all s y m b o l i c operations.) Lacan's n o t i o n o f the s y m b o l i c is difficult, a n d these f e w r e m a r k s are clearly n o t i n t e n d e d t o d o j u s t i c e to either its c o m p l e x i t i e s o r its a m b i g u i t i e s . I w a n t s i m p l y t o p o i n t o u t that Lacan e m p h a s i z e s an alternative t o a v i e w o f the subject as c o n s t i t u t e d b y a narcissistic i d e n tification w i t h t h e o t h e r . A n d I t h i n k that this a l t e r n a tive has i n t e r e s t i n g analogies w i t h t h e m o b i l i t y o f the 9. "Le Séminaire sur 'La lettre volée'," in Ecrits, p. 30.

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desiring imagination in Baudelaire. The erotic poems f r o m Les Fleurs du mal examined in the first half of this study define the desiring subject in terms of his continuously changing representations. The poet c o m municates with the loved one not by trying to capture his image in her, but rather by implicating her in an image-producing process. And the images belong neither to the poet's self nor to the w o m a n ' s self; instead, they define a community in which the constant substitution of one image for another is itself the activity of both the poet's and the w o m a n ' s desires. T h e poet's desire for the w o m a n is enacted as a process of exchange and substitution which characterizes the universally human process of desire's displacements. I introduced the Lacanian order of the Imaginary in connection with remarks on realism. The relevance of Lacan's Imaginary order to realistic fiction can be argued f r o m different points of view. First of all, there is the mode in which the projection of human feelings into landscapes and objects is enacted (a projection which, in Balzac, is so complete as to give to houses or streets the status of moral figures in an allegorical drama). We are meant to be aware of this projection not as an interpretative view of the world so intense as to result in a fusion of the passionately interpreting self and external reality but rather as an objective description by a dispassionate narrator. It is precisely such "objective" description which results in the anthropomorphic nature of the world in realistic fiction. The narrator becomes an alienated presence in the things he describes. In most realistic novels, the narrator is not a character in the story; he is an omniscient

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presence w i t h o u t a name, and he is characterized by his presentation of a w o r l d presumably distinct f r o m him. T h e passion which i n f o r m s the great descriptions of realistic fiction f r o m Balzac to Zola and Proust is the passion of wishing to capture alien forms. T h e most extreme, anxiety-ridden version of this passion is the frantic attention which Marcel brings to the world in A la Recherche du temps perdu. A n d even in the case of Proust's narrator, w h o does play a central role in his story, there is n o fully constituted character at the " p o i n t " f r o m which the description proceeds. N a r r a tive description in realistic fiction could even be t h o u g h t of as an attempt to appropriate a character for the one psychologically e m p t y or at least incomplete presence in the novel: the narrator. We find something similar in the relation between the narrator and the hero. T h e paradigm of realistic fiction has usually been defined as a confrontation between an exceptional individual and an unexceptional social milieu. This is true enough, but the hero is also confronted by a sort of partial version of himself. This, again, is the narrator of realistic fiction, a presence at once infinitely fascinated by and infinitely mistrustful of the main object of his attention. Stendhal is the clearest case of a narrator w h o s e alienated and ideal self is in the heroes of his fiction, but a similar relation exists between Balzac and Lucien de Rubempre, George Eliot and D o r o t h e a B r o o k , Melville-Ishmael and Ahab. A n d in all these cases—although once again Stendhal provides the most striking m o d e l — t h e narrator's k n o w l e d g e of his hero is deeply paranoid. H e distrusts his alienated and ideal self, and in fact he very

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o f t e n ends b y h a v i n g h i m killed. B u t this s h o u l d m a k e us suspect that in the n a r r a t o r w e see t h e subject alr e a d y p l a y i n g the m o r a l part o f t h e ideal self s role. T h e roles a n d f u n c t i o n s of the I m a g i n a r y o r d e r m a y b e d i s t r i b u t e d in very c o m p l e x fashion. If the h e r o is an ideal self, h e also e m b o d i e s t h e d a n g e r and guilt o f desire and is t h e r e f o r e c o n d e m n e d b y a conscience o p e r a t i n g t h r o u g h the n a r r a t o r ' s voice. T h e h e r o ' s d e a t h is realistically explained as t h e t r i u m p h o f m o r e o r less prosaic h i s t o r y o v e r idealism o r o v e r r e a c h i n g a m b i t i o n , b u t , in p s y c h o a n a l y t i c t e r m s , it is also i n telligible as m a n i f e s t i n g the n a r r a t o r ' s p a r a n o i d t e r r o r o f the self he w o u l d b o t h passionately a p p r o p r i a t e as an ideal a n d passionately reject as an instance o f d a n g e r o u s l y energetic desire. Finally, t h e a t t e m p t to possess a total f o r m is e x pressed in w h a t m i g h t be called t h e c o m p u l s i v e i n telligibility o f realistic fiction. T o a large extent, t h e totality w h i c h t h e n a r r a t o r discovers in the w o r l d is a totality o f sense. T h e n a r r a t o r ' s a m b i v a l e n t relation t o his h e r o i c alter ego is contained w i t h i n the larger, and essentially m o r e c o m f o r t a b l e , relation b e t w e e n the n a r r a t o r and a w o r l d he m a k e s sense of. Realistic novelists usually j u d g e n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y society w i t h great severity. B u t even w h e n t h e y a p p e a r t o b e m o s t s o m b e r a b o u t t h e m o r a l viability o f c o n t e m p o rary life, Dickens, Balzac, Stendhal, and G e o r g e Eliot m a n a g e , at least partly, t o r e d e e m the society t h e y c o n d e m n b y the very c o h e r e n c e o f their social analyses. T h e realistic novel, f o r all its a p p a r e n t l o o s e ness, is an e x t r e m e l y tight and c o h e r e n t s t r u c t u r e : it e n c o u r a g e s us t o believe in the t e m p o r a l m y t h s o f real

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beginnings and definitive endings, it portrays a w o r l d in w h i c h events always have a significance which can be articulated, and it encourages a view of the self as organized by d o m i n a n t passions or faculties. T h e straining t o w a r d coherent sense in realistic fiction w o r k s against the hero. As m y r e m a r k s a m o m e n t ago suggested, the ideality of the hero is a m b i g u o u s . N o t only is he victimized by the paranoid aspect of the Imaginary relationship; he also seems to be perceived as a doubtful totality, and therefore as a dangerous (if also desirable) alienated self. T h e h e r o in realistic fiction has a double function. H e is an alienated ideal self w h o m the narrator seeks to appropriate, but he also appears to be the rejected (and yet fascinating) possibility of disruptive impulses w h i c h m i g h t resist being enclosed in any structured totality at all. T h e sensem a k i n g procedures of realistic narrative align the narrator on the side of orders—social, moral, p s y c h o l o g i c a l — w h i c h w o u l d , and usually do, expel the hero f r o m the w o r l d of realistic fiction. T h e o r dered significance of most realistic novels objectifies a d r e a m of psychic completeness. A reliably m e a n i n g ful w o r l d becomes the narrator as he creates that w o r l d (and himself) in descriptions t h r o u g h w h i c h he simultaneously projects and captures images of completed and coherent f o r m s . 1 0 Perhaps all relations to the w o r l d dominated by the o r d e r of the Imaginary are c o n d e m n e d to a n o n p r o d u c t i v e time, that is, to the t i m e of exact repetition. 10. I discuss these ideas about realism at greater length, but w i t h o u t the aid of Lacanian categories, in chapter t w o of A Future for Astyanax.

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T h e enterprise of constituting the self in the other and of t r a n s f o r m i n g the o t h e r into an alter ego means that, ideally at any rate, all relations are perceived as relations between identical terms. A n d w i t h i n the space w h i c h separates the subject f r o m his o w n coveted i m age, time is experienced as a process of u n c a n n y reoccurrences. In realistic fiction, this takes the f o r m of characters' behavior merely manifesting w h a t w e already k n o w about characters. Sartre's complaint a b o u t the "essentializing" o f i n d i v i d u a l s in traditional fiction could be rephrased, in the terms being used here, as the u n m a s k i n g of the writer's project of reducing the events of fiction to a parade of sameness. For example, it w o u l d n o t be w h o l l y absurd to suggest that a Balzac novel becomes unnecessary as s o o n as its exposition is over. T h e entire w o r k is already contained in the p r e sentation of the w o r k , and the characters merely repeat in dialogue and action w h a t has already been established about t h e m in narrative s u m m a r i e s . T h e i r lives m i r r o r the e x p o s i t o r y portraits m a d e of t h e m at the beginning of the n o v e l . 1 1 Baudelaire gives us a n i g h t m a r i s h version of exact repetition in "Les Sept vieillards," another p o e m f r o m the "Tableaux parisiens" section of Les Fleurs du mal. T h e eery, spectral n a t u r e of a life d o m i n a t e d by the Imaginary is suggested f r o m the very beginning. In the first stanza, the poet speaks of a city "pleine de rêves, I O ù le spectre en plein j o u r raccroche le pas11. G e o r g e s Poulet speaks of Balzac's universe being reabsorbed in its Cause, o f disappearing in t h e abstract Principle w h i c h already contains it. See La Distance intérieure (Paris: Plon, 1952), pp. 122-93.

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sant." And those dreams consist of things looking like other things; they are theatrical imitations. The m o r n ing fog makes the houses seem taller than they are; as a result, "Les maisons . . . I Simulaient les deux quais d'une rivière accrue." The idea of simulation leads to an explicit reference to theater: the dirty yellow fog creats a "décor semblable à l'âme de l'acteur." It is in this theatricalized space that the poet, in the midst of a dialogue with himself ("discutant avec m o n âme déjà lasse"), comes upon a miserably poor and wickedlooking old man, a creature so " b r o k e n " that his spine makes "a perfect right angle" with his legs. This Parisian tableau then becomes frankly hallucinatory: the poet sees seven versions of the same old man ("no trait distinguished" one f r o m the other). He asks if he would have died f r o m contemplating an eighth, "Sosie inexorable, ironique et fatal, I Dégoûtant Phénix, fils et père de lui-même. " The poet doesn't recognize h i m self in these seven repetitions of the same, but it is nonetheless as if they were a theatrical representation of that separation of the self from itself which is the basis of specular self-identification. T h e allusions to theater in the poem are much more than a strategic preparation for an "unreal" scene. Together with the procession of the seven old men, these allusions remind us of the principal traits of imaginary selfidentifications. There are also elements of persecution in the nightmare of "Les Sept vieillards." The old man's eyes are shining with "méchanceté," and the poet adds that he walked as if he were trampling on dead bodies, "Hostile à l'univers plutôt qu'indiffé-

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r e n t . " And, interestingly e n o u g h , the perhaps fatal eighth old man, w h o m the poet avoids by r u s h i n g h o m e , is described as an "inexorable, ironic d o u b l e . " E v e n in "Les Sept vieillards," then, w h e r e the old m e n are not perceived as images of the poet, the p r o cess o f an exact repetition of selves alienated f r o m one a n o t h e r is connected t o a cruelly " i r o n i c " persecution. Simulation in "Les Sept vieillards" is crucially different f r o m the metaphorical activity of "La C h e v e l u r e " or " L e Beau n a v i r e . " In b o t h these latter p o e m s , m e t a p h o r is the fantasy-repetition of a desired object. B u t it is repetition as difference. W h e n the w o m a n ' s hair becomes an a r o m a t i c forest and the waves w h i c h carry the poet a w a y t o an exotic land, or in " L e Beau n a v i r e , " w h e n the w a l k i n g w o m a n ' s breasts are seen as an a r m o i r e or a shield, these images b o t h express a desire and p r o v i d e substitutes for an " o r i g i n a l " object of desire. T h e y initiate a process of difference w i t h i n repetition which illustrates the p r o d u c t i v i t y of desire, the ingenuity w i t h w h i c h it can be satisfied w i t h o u t an illusory appropriation of or identification with the other. In "Les Sept vieillards," Baudelaire suggests that ontologically t a w d r y actors inauthentically assert their identity w i t h alien selves. A n d w h e n the spectacle of an exact and impossible repetition takes place before his eyes, the poet panics; " e x a s p e r a t e d " and " t e r rified," " s i c k " and " f e v e r i s h , " he rushes h o m e and locks himself in. A n d his near m a d n e s s resembles the " d a n c i n g " of an old sailing barge on a shoreless and chaotic sea, a dance strikingly different f r o m the p e r f u m e d cradling m o v e m e n t s of "La C h e v e l u r e " :

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Vainement ma raison voulait prendre la barre; La Tempête en jouant déroutait ses efforts, Et mon âme dansait, dansait, vieille gabarre Sans mâts, sur une mer monstrueuse et sans bords! 12 12. M y reason tried to take over, but in vain; its efforts were all u n d o n e by the storm, and m y soul danced and danced like some old mastless barge on a monstrous, shoreless sea.

11 A Premature

Foreclosure?

T h e process of alienating self-identification is even m o r e explicit in the Petits Poèmes en prose than in the "Tableaux parisiens." In the p o e m s in verse, Baudelaire's " c o e u r m u l t i p l i é " lives the d r a m a s of lives w h i c h he at least begins b y recognizing as different f r o m his o w n . His excitement comes precisely f r o m his secret invasion of other existences, f r o m his slipping into roles alien to h i m . In the Petits Poèmes en prose, appropriation takes the f o r m of recognition. T h e person being w a t c h e d is o f t e n already like the o b s e r v i n g poet; the latter has only to c o n f i r m a s a m e ness w h i c h the w o r l d conveniently represents for him. T h e r e is a g o o d deal of violence and cruelty in Baudelaire's prose p o e m s . A prince c o m p a r e d to N e r o has his friend the court jester killed in " U n e M o r t h é r o ï q u e . " T h e poet cruelly humiliates a glassm a k e r in " L e Mauvais vitrier," and he beats u p an old b e g g a r in " A s s o m m o n s les pauvres!" In "La C o r d e , " a child hangs himself; the " h e r o i n e " of " M a d e m o i s e l l e B i s t o u r i " is erotically stimulated only by doctors, and she d r e a m s of a y o u n g intern c o m i n g to see her w i t h his i n s t r u m e n t case, w e a r i n g a b l o o d stained s u r g e o n ' s s m o c k . A m a n ' s savage irritation with the w o m a n he lives w i t h is dramatized in "La

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F e m m e s a u v a g e et la p e t i t e - m a î t r e s s e , " " L e Galant t i r e u r , " and " P o r t r a i t s d e m a î t r e s s e s . " T h e p o e t is n o t u n a w a r e o f all this cruelty, b u t w e d o h a v e the i m p r e s sion o f a certain distance f r o m violence in the Petits Poèmes en prose. Bizarrely, t h e p o e t ' s w o r l d l i n e s s is t h e result o f his a p p e a r i n g t o c o m e u p o n these scenes f r o m an entirely d i f f e r e n t w o r l d . T h e realistic i m a g e s o f Parisian life and the allegorical o r e v e n s u p e r n a t u r a l tableaux can get t h e s a m e t r e a t m e n t , because the p o e t is an equally dispassionate o b s e r v e r o f a city scene a n d o f his o w n fantasies. U n l i k e the case in Balzac, t h e internalization o f an object o f description in Baudelaire's p r o s e p o e m s does n o t stylistically d i s r u p t t h e d e s c r i p t i o n ' s t o n e and o r d e r . T h e w o r l d is a p p r o p r i a t e d as a theater f o r the p o e t ' s obsessions, b u t t h e p o e t nonetheless m a n a g e s to r e m a i n a spectator, to b e present o n l y as an ironic consciousness. T h e p s y c h i c division w h i c h d r e w f o r t h t h e l a m e n t s a n d t h e e x c l a m a t i o n s o f " L ' I r r é m é d i a b l e " and " L ' H é a u t o n t i m o r o u m é n o s " is n o w the f u n d a m e n t a l and u n q u e s t i o n e d c o n d i t i o n o f Baudelaire's art; " v o r a c i o u s I r o n y " p r o v i d e s the n a r r a t i v e comfort of the Petits Poèmes en prose. In his a t t e m p t s t o d i s t i n g u i s h b e t w e e n neurosis and psychosis, F r e u d speaks o f a d e f e n s e m e c h a n i s m " m u c h m o r e e n e r g e t i c a n d s u c c e s s f u l " t h a n repression w h i c h w o u l d consist o f t h e e g o r e p u d i a t i n g an u n b e a r able r e p r e s e n t a t i o n a n d its affect a n d b e h a v i n g as if this r e p r e s e n t a t i o n h a d n e v e r even reached the ego. T h i s r e p u d i a t i o n , u n l i k e t h e repression o f a sexual i m p u l s e , essentially i n v o l v e s t h e subject's relation w i t h t h e e x ternal w o r l d . A reality distinct f r o m t h e self is denied,

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and in the " W o l f M a n " case, Freud m o v e s t o w a r d the position that the crucial denial (Verwerfung is used here) is that of the absence of a penis in w o m e n . In his later w o r k , Freud frequently uses the w o r d Verleugnung t o describe the repudiation of castration, w h i c h c o m e s to be the p r o t o t y p e of all denials of reality. As Laplanche and Pontalis strikingly put it, there is, in s y m m e t r i c a l correspondence to neurotic repression, a psychotic repression in the external w o r l d (as if there w e r e a " p l a c e " in reality w h e r e certain real facts could be h i d den or, ideally, abolished). 1 M u c h has been m a d e of this Freudian line of t h o u g h t in c o n t e m p o r a r y French psychoanalytic theory, and the m o s t suggestive elaboration of Freud's idea is Lacan's n o t i o n of " f o r e c l o s u r e " (la forclusion). U s i n g as a p o i n t of departure Freud's a m b i g u i t y a b o u t w h e t h e r the object of repudiation or denial is the perceived absence of a penis or an interpretation of that absence, Lacan makes of this denial a crisis of meaning. Freud had already said that the child's (and the psychotic's) repudiation of the w o m a n ' s lack of a penis makes the subject unable to elaborate the infantile t h e o r y of castration. In C h a p t e r Six, I argued for a view of castration as a m o d e l f o r the operation of m e a n i n g itself. Fantasies of actual castration can be interpreted as sexual representations of the detachable, m o v a b l e nature of 1. Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, p. 165. In Freud, see " T h e N e u r o - P s y c h o s e s o f D e f e n c e " (1894), SE, 3 : 5 8 - 6 0 , a n d (in a d d i tion t o t h e " W o l f M a n " case), " P s y c h o - A n a l y t i c N o t e s o n an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia P a r a n o i d e s ) " (the case o f D r . Schreber, 1911), SE, 12:71; " F e t i c h i s m " (1927), SE, 2 1 : 1 5 2 - 5 7 ; and An Outline of Psychoanalysis, (1940 [1938]), SE, 2 3 : 2 0 1 - 4 .

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m e a n i n g itself. It is t h e r e f o r e necessary, to r e t u r n to Lacan's a r g u m e n t , t o s y m b o l i z e castration. B u t this i n v o l v e s a f f i r m i n g it, i n t r o d u c i n g it i n t o t h e self, m a k i n g it represent the circulation o f m e a n i n g w h i c h is the heart o f s y m b o l i c t h o u g h t . Instead, in la forclusion the child and t h e p s y c h o t i c expel castration i n t o " t h e real," b y w h i c h Lacan m e a n s " a n area w h i c h exists o u t s i d e o f s y m b o l i z a t i o n " ; t h e y are e n g a g e d in " u n e a b o l i t i o n symbolique."2 Baudelaire's Petits Poèmes en prose can be read in t h e light o f F r e u d ' s n o t i o n s o f Verwerfung and Verleugnung and Lacan's t h e o r y o f la forclusion. I d o n ' t m e a n that B a u d e l a i r e w a s p s y c h o t i c w h e n he w r o t e these p o e m s ; h e does, h o w e v e r , s e e m t o h a v e r e p r e s e n t e d in t h e m a p s y c h o t i c relation t o t h e w o r l d . Violence in t h e p r o s e p o e m s is s i m u l t a n e o u s l y seen a n d r e p u d i a t e d . 3 T h e r e is n o t denial in t h e sense o f a d i s a p p e a r a n c e o f p e r ceived realities; n o r is t h e r e a n y evidence that a sexual reality (the absence o f a penis) o r a sexual t h e o r y (of 2. " R é p o n s e au c o m m e n t a i r e de J e a n H i p p o l i t e s u r la ' V e r n e i n u n g ' de F r e u d , " in Ecrits, pp. 388 a n d 386. In this essay, Lacan describes t h e p h e n o m e n o n o f la forclusion, b u t h e is n o t yet u s i n g t h e w o r d . See also " D ' u n e q u e s t i o n p r é l i m i n a i r e à t o u t t r a i t e m e n t possible d e la p s y c h o s e , " in Ecrits, pp. 5 3 1 - 8 3 . 3. W h a t Freud called Ichspaltung, o r splitting o f t h e e g o , a l l o w s f o r a r e c o g n i t i o n o f w h a t has been r e p u d i a t e d . As F r e u d w r o t e in An Outline of Psychoanalysis: " T h e p r o b l e m o f p s y c h o s e s w o u l d b e s i m p l e a n d p e r s p i c u o u s if t h e e g o ' s d e t a c h m e n t f r o m reality c o u l d be carried t h r o u g h c o m p l e t e l y . B u t that s e e m s t o h a p p e n o n l y rarely o r p e r h a p s n e v e r " (SE, 23:201). T h e s i m u l t a n e i t y o f seeing and d e n y i n g w o u l d b e t h e equivalent, in p s y c h o s i s (and in f e t i s h ism, in c o n n e c t i o n w i t h w h i c h F r e u d discussed the p h e n o m e n o n in detail), o f t h e s i m u l t a n e o u s repression a n d r e t u r n o f t h e repressed in s y m p t o m - f o r m a t i o n . In s y m p t o m s , t h e repressed is, in a sense, acknowledged.

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castration) is being repudiated. Rather, the p s y c h o a n a lytic reading I ' m p r o p o s i n g has to be defended in m o r e general structural t e r m s : in t e r m s of the n a r r a t o r ' s relation to the w o r l d , and m o r e specifically, in t e r m s of the w a y in w h i c h he generates m e a n i n g f r o m the incidents he relates. In the Petits Poemes en prose, there has been an almost c o m p l e t e w i t h d r a w a l of affect f r o m the w o r l d . It is as if certain fantasies had been projected o n t o the w o r l d as a w a y of rejecting t h e m . Freud did c o m e to m a k e a distinction b e t w e e n Projektion and Verwerfung. In his 1911 discussion of the case o f D r . Schreber, he speaks of that w h i c h has been internally abolished c o m i n g back to the subject f r o m the w o r l d ; and he distinguishes this f r o m the projection of a repressed sensation o n t o the external w o r l d . 4 I think that the difference m a y be verifiable only in the kind of k n o w l edge w h i c h the subject has of the " r e p r e s s e d " material in b o t h cases. Projection is a frantic defense against the return of d a n g e r o u s images and sensations to the s u r faces of consciousness; therefore, the individual u r gently needs to maintain that certain representations or affects b e l o n g to the w o r l d and n o t to the self. In the psychotic m e c h a n i s m of Verleugnung or Verwerfung, on the other hand, the split b e t w e e n the o b s e r v i n g c o n sciousness and certain threatening scenes has g o n e far e n o u g h to allow f o r an almost scientific k n o w l e d g e of such scenes w h e n they appear in the w o r l d . Divested of any e m o t i o n a l u r g e n c y (whatever their content m a y be), they can be dispassionately m e t and described as if there w e r e n o need to describe t h e m dispassionately as 4. SE, 12:71.

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belonging to the world. That is, when the dangerous representations don't disappear entirely f r o m the world, they (or disguised versions of them) "disappear" in the double sense that all emotional investments have been withdrawn f r o m them and the only meaning they have for the interpreting consciousness is a more or less abstract, emblematic meaning. In t h e Petits Poèmes

en prose,

the withdrawal

of

passionate and mobile significances f r o m the world allows the Baudelairean narrator to respond to representations of his o w n violence with an appearance of o b jective, sophisticated interest. They are occasions for the display of narrative deftness as well as of a certain moral wit. But there are moments when this relation breaks down, moments of highly charged selfrecognition. These outbursts of passion on the part of the narrator superficially designate a loss of sane rationality; they can also be read as signs of the poet's effort to recover sanity. Another passage from Freud describes such attempts at recovery. In the 1914 essay " O n Narcissism: An Introduction," Freud wishes to explain the difference between the transference neuroses and schizophrenia or "paraphrenic affections." In obsessional neurosis and hysteria, Freud writes, the individual has retained his erotic relation to persons and things in fantasy. But the schizophrenic "seems really to have withdrawn his libido f r o m people and things in the external world, without replacing them by others in phantasy." What happens to this libido? Freud's answer is that it returns to the ego in the f o r m of a megalomania which then represents the mastering of this volume of libido, "and would thus be the coun-

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terpart of the introversion on to phantasies that is found in the transference neuroses." T h e failure of this narcissistic project results in hypochondria. As part of the paraphrenic's effort of recovery, ". . . the libido is once more attached to objects, after the manner of a hysteria . . . or of an obsessional neurosis. . . . " And Freud concludes with the remark that "the difference between the transference neuroses brought about in the case of this fresh kind of libidinal cathexis and the corresponding formations where the ego is normal should be able to afford us the deepest insight into the structure of our mental apparatus." 5 Baudelaire's prose poems may provide us with an important clue to this difference. Freud describes a circuit in which libido is withdrawn f r o m objects, invested in the ego, and attached once again ("after the manner of an hysteria") to objects in the world. It seems logical to suppose that when, in step three, the world is reinvested with libido, it will resemble the ego. T h e narcissism of step t w o will not be entirely abandoned; it reappears as a relation to the world. The clearest examples of this self-recognition are "Le Vieux saltimbanque" and " U n e Mort héroïque"; more oblique versions of the same phenomenon can be found in "Chacun sa chimère," "Le Mauvais vitrier," "Les Fenêtres," the last anecdote of "Portraits de maîtresses," "Laquelle est la vraie?" and, as we shall see, " A s s o m m o n s les pauvres!" In the midst of the happy and noisy holiday crowd of "Le Vieux saltimbanque," the poet is fascinated by "a poor clown, bent, broken, 5. SE,

14:74 and 1 4 : 8 6 - 8 7 .

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decrepit, the ruin of a m a n . " "Silent and immobile," the clown makes a dramatic contrast with the "joy, profit, debauchery" around him; he is "la misère absolue" in the midst of material security and "the frenetic explosion of vitality." As he watches the clown watch the crowd, the poet "felt m y throat constricted by the frightful hand of hysteria, and it seemed to me that m y eyes were offended by those stubborn tears which refuse to fall." And, "obsessed by this vision," attempting " t o analyze my sudden pain," the poet says to himself: "I have just seen the image of the old man of letters w h o has survived the generation he so brilliantly amused; the old poet without friends, without family, without children, debased by his awful poverty and by the public's ingratitude, whose tent the forgetful world no longer wishes to enter." The artist's victimization is even more shocking in " U n e Mort héroïque." Fancioulle will die as a result of his prince's vengeful and sadistic capriciousness. Once again the poet is shaken by an image of the artist, especially of the artist's capacity not to see his own impending death thanks to the ecstasy of his creations. The narrator's "pen trembles," and tears come to his eyes as he tries to describe for the reader "that unforgettable evening." "Fancioulle proved to me, in a decisive, irrefutable manner, that, more than any other source of intoxication, Art has the power to spread a veil over the terrors of the abyss; that genius can play a role at the edge of the grave with a joy which prevents it f r o m seeing the grave, for the artistic genius is lost in a paradise which excludes all ideas of death and destruction."

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The passage from " U n e Mort héroïque" brings us perilously close to the clichéd sentimentality o f " B é nédiction" and "Elévation." But the Petits Poèmes en prose give us a much richer version o f the mistreated poet. N o w we have generalizations about Art or the Poet based on an encounter between the narrator-poet and a fantasy-image o f himself. The Petits Poèmes en prose dramatize the self-splitting and the selfrepudiation which, I think, provide the affective basis for Baudelaire's sentimental idealizing o f the artist in the early poems o f Les Fleurs du mal. The identificatory scheme in the prose poems has changed somewhat from that o f the "Tableaux parisiens." In "Les Petites vieilles" and in "Le J e u , " the poet imagines himself as an emptiness which invents and assumes the forms o f other lives; but he is also the horrified observer o f lives destroyed by passions. That is, he is simultaneously the incomplete (and envious) self, and a superior, moralizing and yet fascinated observer o f the disastrous effects o f uncontrolled desires. The narrator, we might say, is like a superego suffering from the incompleteness which led to the creation o f an ideal self in the first place; he has the worst o f both worlds. In the Petits Poèmes en prose, the narrator's sentimental identifications don't seem to include any envy for an affective coherence and unity. A unifying form has already been appropriated; we are now in the position o f a fully organized cognitive and moral self which sympathizes with a self worn out by or destroyed in the midst o f its passions (which are equated with the artist's inventive energies). The coordinated, unified self is no longer an alienated image; it has been

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internalized, and it provides the narrative point of view in the prose poems. There is still a self alienated in the world, but it is a broken desiring self. It is as if the superego were contemplating with melancholy fascination the very passions f r o m which it has been derived. Baudelaire represents the persecutory instance of the self lamenting, at a distance, the fate of persecuted desire. The organized self is the narrator w h o composes each one of the tightly controlled, perfectly unified anecdotes or moral meditations of the Petits Poèmes en prose. In his dedication to Arsène Houssaye, Baudelaire misleadingly emphasizes the fragmentary nature of his prose poems. Whereas he had insisted on the " c o m p o sitional unity" of Les Fleurs du mal, he n o w invites the reader to stop reading wherever he wants, even to rem o v e a "vertebra," for there is no "superfluous plot," and the t w o pieces of the writer's truncated, meandering fantasy will come back together again without any difficulty. " C h o p [this fantasy] into numerous fragments, and you will see that each one can exist separately" (229). This can only mean that each complete prose poem could exist by itself. T h e Petits Poèmes en prose are a succession of small "total f o r m s . " Each piece is a perfectly rounded esthetic "jewel," an u n breakable whole which, however, doesn't necessarily belong anywhere in the structure of the entire volume. The book can be "truncated," but not the individual pieces. The importance of sequence in Les Fleurs du mal has to do with the poet's indecisiveness in that work: the way in which the poems of mobile desiring fantasy are placed tells us a good deal about the poet's will-

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i n g n e s s o r r e f u s a l t o b e a p e r m a n e n t l y displaced self a m o n g t h e m u l t i p l e r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s o f desire. A k i n d o f s t r u c t u r a l p r u d e n c e contains Baudelaire's erotic p o e m s w i t h i n t h e early p o e r n s o f vertical t r a n s c e n d e n c e a n d t h e later p o e m s o f i m m o b i l i z e d desire (or o f desire i r r e m e d i a b l y cut o f f f r o m a c o n d e m n i n g c o n science). B y the t i m e o f the Petits Poemes en prose, B a u delaire's denial o f t h e p s y c h i c m o b i l i t y o f his l o v e p o e m s s e e m s definitive. S e q u e n c e is t h e r e f o r e n o l o n g e r i m p o r t a n t , f o r in t h e p r o s e p o e m s the p o e t c o m p u l sively repeats a c o n f r o n t a t i o n w h i c h has already taken place and w h i c h has m e a n t t h e e n d o f a n y affective m o bility o t h e r t h a n the i m m o b i l i z i n g s a d i s m o f the s u p e r ego. B u t because t h e p o e t does r e c o g n i z e h i m s e l f in t h e old c l o w n a n d in Fancioulle, he cries w h e n he sees t h e c l o w n or tells the j e s t e r ' s story. O r rather, h e b o t h cries a n d repeats his m u r d e r o u s decision; several o f t h e pieces in B a u d e l a i r e ' s Petits Poemes en prose are cerem o n i e s o f s a d o - m a s o c h i s t i c m o u r n i n g . T h e p o e t is close t o hysteria as h e w a t c h e s t h e old c l o w n ; he is " o b s e s s e d " b y w h a t h e sees, and he tries to analyze his " s u d d e n p a i n . " T h e pain is his identification w i t h t h e c l o w n ' s s u f f e r i n g , b u t t h e p o e t ' s eyes are also " o f f e n d e d b y t h o s e s t u b b o r n tears w h i c h r e f u s e to fall." Is it t h e c l o w n ' s s u f f e r i n g w h i c h o f f e n d s the poet, o r his refusal t o s h o w his s u f f e r i n g ? If t h e p o e t is t h e c l o w n , t h e n his eyes, like t h e c l o w n ' s , w o u l d be h u m i l i a t e d b y t h e tears w h i c h w o u l d r e n d e r his pain visible to a cruel public. Yet t o t h e e x t e n t that t h e p o e t is also the p e r s e c u t i n g public, h e is sadistically o f f e n d e d b y his v i c t i m ' s refusal to cry. B u t b y c r y i n g himself, the p o e t m a k e s

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reparation for his (and the public's) cruelty toward the artist. The artist-narrator's narcissistic pity for the old clown and Fancioulle partially makes up for society's insensitivity and the prince's murderous scheme. In " O n Narcissism: An Introduction," Freud explains hypochondria as the failure of the megalomaniacal project. Pathological concern about the self would designate an inability to love the self, to reinvest libido narcissistically after it has been withdrawn from objects and persons in the world. Baudelaire's relation to the old clown and to Fancioulle is very much like this crippled f o r m of self-love: the poet's fearful sympathy for the unhappy artist is hypochondria allegorized.

12 A Beggarly Ending In m y r e a d i n g o f t h e relation b e t w e e n t h e n a r r a t o r a n d the p e r s e c u t e d artists o r u n h a p p y b e g g a r s o f t h e " T a b l e a u x p a r i s i e n s " and t h e Petits Poèmes en prose, I a m in general a g r e e m e n t w i t h C h a r l e s M a u r o n ' s " p s y c h o c r i t i c a l " i n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f B a u d e l a i r e ' s later w o r k . 1 M a u r o n distinguishes b e t w e e n a moi créateur and a moi social. T h e outcast, t h e p r o s t i t u t e , t h e actor, t h e c l o w n , a n d the artist b e l o n g t o t h e f o r m e r categ o r y ; the prince, t h e d a n d y , and t h e dispassionate n a r r a t o r - s p e c t a t o r incarnate B a u d e l a i r e ' s moi social. For M a u r o n , t h e d r a m a o f B a u d e l a i r e ' s later w o r k is the s u b o r d i n a t i o n o f the w r i t e r ' s artistic self t o his s o cial self. B a u d e l a i r e p u n i s h e s his o w n creative p r o s t i t u t i o n a n d m o v e s t o w a r d a cold, sadistic " c o n c e n t r a t i o n " o f his p o w e r s in f i g u r e s hostile to the artist's self-dissipating energies. All aggressiveness is o n the side o f t h e p r i n c e - d a n d y ( w h o r e p r e s e n t s the s u p e r e g o ' s h a r s h moralistic j u d g m e n t s o f art); t h e moi créateur is t h e helpless v i c t i m o f t h e c o n d e m n a t i o n o f the moi social. I t h i n k t h a t M a u r o n is r i g h t t o see Baudelaire, in t h e Petits Poèmes en prose, t u r n i n g against his o w n creative energies; t h e cool n a r r a t o r o f the p r o s e p o e m s is t h e sign o f a violent r e p u d i a t i o n o f B a u d e l a i r e ' s best 1. Le Dernier Baudelaire

(Paris, 1966).

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poetry. But Le Dernier Baudelaire is a thin w o r k (especially if w e c o m p a r e it to other examples of M a u r o n ' s psychocriticism, particularly to his masterful L'lnconscient dans I'oeuvre et la vie de Racine). Its a r g u m e n t s are also vitiated by vague and trite oppositions b e t w e e n art and society, dependence and independence, a g gression and poetry. When, for example, w e consider the u n a n c h o r e d identity implicit in the fantasydisplacements of the poet's erotic desires, the meaninglessness of o p p o s i n g dependence to i n d e p e n dence should be evident, and the notion of a poetry of desire as devoid of aggression or violence is exposed as a conventional piety. M u c h of M a u r o n ' s v o c a b u lary in Le Dernier Baudelaire belongs to a language the discrediting of w h i c h has been one of the achievem e n t s of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic t h e o r y has m a d e the n o t i o n of fantasy so richly problematic that w e should n o longer be able to take for granted the distinction b e t w e e n art and life, or to feel that the w o r d " c r e a t i v e " has any analytic value at all. In an original and exciting essay on the Petits Poemes en prose, J e f f r e y M e h l m a n also objects to M a u r o n ' s neat dualism b e t w e e n life and art. 2 B u t M e h l m a n goes f u r t h e r : he sees in the prince-dandy figure a disr u p t i v e force which, like M a u r o n , I find alien to that figure's sadistic repudiation of (and narcissistic identification with) Baudelaire's images of m a i m e d desire. For M e h l m a n , the p r i n c e - d a n d y affirms "a certain k i n d of metaphoricity (repetition-in-difference)" 2. "Baudelaire with Spring 1974, pp. 7-13.

Freud I Theory

and Pain,"

Diacritics,

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w h i c h goes against a tradition of metaphysical idealism represented by the b u f f o o n Fancioulle histrionically and "manically obliterating any awareness o f death in his p e r f o r m e d celebration of the m y s t e r y of life." M a u r o n falls into an idealistic trap: he c o n ceives of the artist as bearing the b u r d e n s of higher values, of suffering " u n d e r the pressure of an o p p r e s s i v e — a n d falsely n o b l e — w e i g h t . " T h e fact that Fancioulle's art d o e s n ' t save h i m in " U n e M o r t h é r o ï q u e " is to M e h l m a n the sign of Baudelaire's rej e c t i o n of any " d o m e s t i c a t i n g r e a p p r o p r i a t i o n , " his refusal of dialectic's retrieval (Aujhebung, récupération) of difference or "alienated p r o p e r t i e s . " M e h l m a n claims that the prince's genius lies in his " w r e n c h i n g h i m s e l f out of the dialectic t h r o u g h w h i c h he could only play master to Fancioulle's slave." T h e key elem e n t o f the p r i n c e - d a n d y figure in Baudelaire w o u l d be " a metaphorical process w h i c h exceeds and traverses the dandy, disrupting any narcissistic idealization of self." U n l i k e M e h l m a n , I find that metaphorical process n o t in the figures of the d a n d y or the prince, but rather in the f a n t a s y - m o v e m e n t s of Baudelaire's erotic p o e m s in Les Fleurs du mal. T h e p r i n c e - d a n d y n a r r a t o r of the Petits Poèmes en prose is the death of m e t a p h o r i c i t y ; he is a pedantic, sadistic, and guiltily narcissistic i m m o b i l i z e r of desire. Consider, as a final example, a p o e m w h i c h M e h l m a n rightly sees as c r u cial f o r his a r g u m e n t : " A s s o m m o n s les pauvres!" T h e n a r r a t o r r e m e m b e r s h a v i n g spent t w o weeks, sixteen or seventeen years b e f o r e the w r i t i n g of the p o e m , locked u p in his r o o m reading all the fashionable

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b o o k s o f the p e r i o d w h i c h dealt w i t h " t h e art o f m a k i n g p e o p l e h a p p y , wise, and rich, in t w e n t y - f o u r h o u r s . " D i z z y and s t u p e f i e d f r o m h a v i n g t h u s i n d u l g e d his " i m p a s s i o n e d taste f o r bad b o o k s , " t h e t h i r s t y n a r r a t o r h e a d s f o r a café w i t h a sense o f h a v i n g s o m e w h e r e in his h e a d " t h e idea o f an idea, s o m e t h i n g infinitely v a g u e " b u t n o n e t h e l e s s " s u p e r i o r t o all t h e old w o m e n ' s f o r m u l a s " o n w h i c h h e h a d recently g o r g e d himself. B u t h e m e e t s a b e g g a r w h o h o l d s o u t his hat to h i m " w i t h o n e o f t h o s e u n f o r g e t table l o o k s w h i c h w o u l d o v e r t u r n t h r o n e s , if spirit could m o v e m a t t e r , and if a m e s m e r i s t ' s eye could ripen g r a p e s . " Inspired b y his " g o o d D e m o n " ( w h o , u n l i k e Socrates' negative, p r o h i b i t i v e D e m o n , is " a great a f f i r m e r . . . a D e m o n of action, a D e m o n o f c o m b a t " ) , h e j u m p s o n t h e b e g g a r and practically beats h i m t o death after h e hears t h e D e m o n w h i s p e r : " O n l y h e w h o can p r o v e his equality is the equal o f a n o t h e r , and o n l y h e w h o k n o w s h o w to w i n his libe r t y is w o r t h y o f i t . " W h i l e h e is b e a t i n g t h e w e a k e n e d old m a n w i t h an e n o r m o u s b r a n c h f r o m a tree, the " a n t i q u e carcass" s u d d e n l y gets up, j u m p s o n t h e p o e t " w i t h a l o o k o f h a t r e d w h i c h s t r u c k m e as a good omen," savagely k n o c k s h i m a r o u n d , and " w i t h the s a m e tree b r a n c h , beat m e to a p u l p . " T h e d e l i g h t e d n a r r a t o r ( " T h r o u g h m y energetic m e d i c a t i o n , I h a d t h u s g i v e n h i m back b o t h p r i d e and life"), i n d i cates t o t h e b e g g a r that their " d i s c u s s i o n " is over, a n n o u n c e s that t h e y are n o w equals, shares his p u r s e w i t h h i m , and a d m o n i s h e s h i m " t o apply to all y o u r colleagues, w h e n t h e y ask y o u f o r alms, the t h e o r y w h i c h I h a v e h a d t h e pain o f t r y i n g o u t o n y o u r

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b a c k . " T h e b e g g a r , w h o has u n d e r s t o o d t h e t h e o r y , s w e a r s that he will take t h e p o e t ' s advice. M e h l m a n interestingly juxtaposes " A s s o m m o n s les p a u v r e s ! " w i t h t h e F r e u d i a n " a r c h e o l o g y o f sadistic f a n t a s y " in " I n s t i n c t s and T h e i r V i c i s s i t u d e s " a n d " A C h i l d is B e i n g B e a t e n . " F r e u d speaks, as w e h a v e seen, o f an o r i g i n a l n o n s e x u a l s a d i s m w h i c h seeks t o m a s t e r o r h u m i l i a t e t h e object. B u t t h e n h e asserts t h e existence o f a n o t h e r a i m in s a d i s m , w h i c h is t o inflict pain. T h i s s e c o n d (and sexual) s a d i s m is intelligible o n l y as a result o f a m i d d l e stage (separating t h e t w o f o r m s o f sadism f r o m each other) in w h i c h t h e s u b ject, h a v i n g t u r n e d his instinct o f m a s t e r y against himself, experiences the sexualizing o f that instinct as a result o f pain p a s s i n g b e y o n d a certain t h r e s h o l d o f intensity. In t h e final stage o f sadism, the subject masochistically e n j o y s the pain h e inflicts o n others. T h e specificity o f this pain, as M e h l m a n p u t s it, "is t o b e o d d l y afloat b e t w e e n subject a n d o b j e c t . " T h e c r u cial m a s o c h i s t i c stage is a t u r n i n g a w a y f r o m t h e o b j e c t t o be m a s t e r e d , b u t ". . . the loss o f t h e object here is n o t e n s h r i n e d within a n y i n t e r i o r i t y , b u t r a t h e r alienated . . . in t h e m a d l y m o b i l e d i s p l a c e m e n t s o f u n c o n s c i o u s f a n t a s y . " In " A s s o m m o n s les p a u v r e s ! " the n a r r a t o r b e g i n s b y b e i n g in a p o s i t i o n t o d o m i n a t e o r h u m i l i a t e t h e b e g g a r ; h e e n d s b y g e n e r a t i n g pain. A n d the F r e u d o f " A C h i l d is B e i n g B e a t e n " a u t h o r izes us t o c o n s t r u c t the i n t e r m e d i a r y m a s o c h i s t i c m o m e n t in w h i c h the object o f consciousness is lost and pain is e x p e r i e n c e d as sexually pleasurable. 3 T h e 3. The Freudian passage in question is the one I summarize in my discussion of "L'Heautontimoroumenos" (pp. 101-103).

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n a r r a t o r o f " A s s o m m o n s les p a u v r e s ! " reaches t h e stage at w h i c h t h e subject masochistically e n j o y s the pain h e sadistically inflicts o n others. B a u d e l a i r e a n douleur in this p r o s e p o e m (like masochistically exciti n g s a d i s m in " I n s t i n c t s a n d T h e i r Vicissitudes") w o u l d t h e r e f o r e be, a c c o r d i n g t o M e h l m a n , s o m e w h e r e " b e t w e e n " the p o e t and t h e b e g g a r ; it w o u l d n ' t b e l o n g t o either o f t h e m , b u t w o u l d be the e m b l e m o f the irreducible difference b e t w e e n t h e m . In this reading, B a u d e l a i r e ' s p r i n c e - d a n d y b e c o m e s a N i e t z s c h e a n hero. M e h l m a n ' s i n g e n i o u s application t o B a u d e l a i r e o f L a p l a n c h e ' s reading o f F r e u d c o n f i r m s his sense o f the relevance t o B a u d e l a i r e o f Gilles D e l e u z e ' s r e a d i n g o f N i e t z s c h e . 4 T h e g e n e r a t i o n in " A s s o m m o n s les p a u v r e s ! " o f a douleur " a f l o a t b e t w e e n t w o subjects, inflicting its pain o n t h e v e r y i n t e g r i t y o f t h e s u b j e c t , " is also the g e n e r a t i o n o f a N i e t z s c h e a n p h i l o s o p h y o f m e a n i n g as a relationship b e t w e e n d i f f e r e n t forces. W h e r e a s M a u r o n sees t h e d a n d y and t h e p r i n c e as o b l i t e r a t i n g the f o r c e o r t h e essence o f the b e g g a r and Fancioulle (and t h e r e b y a t t a c k i n g theraoi créateur), M e h l m a n sees t h e m as a f f i r m i n g a differential relationship against e f f o r t s b y t h e p r o s t i t u t e - h i s t r i o n f i g u r e to n e g a t e differences o r t o " r e t r i e v e " t h e m dialectically. T h e persecuted c l o w n o r artist o r b e g g a r w o u l d in fact be " t h e narcissist, p e r p e t u a l l y o b l i t e r a t i n g itself in (or as) t h e o t h e r , " w h e r e a s t h e d a n d y " w o u l d insist as the p e r p e t u a l l y displaced instance o f w h a t Lacan has called le symbolique. " 4. Nietzsche

et la philosophie

(Paris, 1962).

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B u t w h a t are w e to m a k e of all the d i s t u r b i n g signs of narcissistic appropriation of the o t h e r on the part of the n a r r a t o r - d a n d y in " A s s o m m o n s les pauvres!"? M e h l m a n neglects an i m p o r t a n t difference b e t w e e n the t w o p o e m s he refers to m o s t f r e q u e n t l y : w e have the reactions of b o t h the prince and the narrator of " U n e M o r t h é r o ï q u e " to Fancioulle, whereas the b e g gar of " A s s o m m o n s les pauvres!" is c o n f r o n t e d only b y the narrator. T h e prince kills Fancioulle, and the n a r r a t o r cries over him; in " A s s o m m o n s les pauvres!" it is the narrator w h o , w i t h o u t crying, beats u p the beggar. We have seen several cases of the n a r r a t o r ' s i m a g i n a r y appropriation of u n h a p p y lives: in "Les P e tites vieilles," " L e J e u , " "Le Vieux s a l t i m b a n q u e , " and " U n e M o r t h é r o ï q u e . " I have called this fascination w i t h the other a narcissistic pity f o r a m a i m e d part of the n a r r a t o r ' s self. A n d that part of the self is connected w i t h b o t h passions (in "Les Petites vieilles" and " L e J e u " ) and art (in " L e Vieux s a l t i m b a n q u e " and " U n e M o r t héroïque"). T h e n a r r a t o r ' s unsentimental reaction t o the beggar in " A s s o m m o n s les pauvres!" appears to break this pattern. B u t it does so by eliminating any possibility at all of m o b i l i t y in the princed a n d y - n a r r a t o r . T h e narrator's tears in " U n e M o r t h é r o ï q u e " at least place h i m s o m e w h e r e b e t w e e n the prince and the clown; they are signs of a failed effort at psychic recovery. Considered in the light of passages f r o m Freud's 1924 essay on narcissism, the n a r r a t o r ' s sentimental identifications w i t h u n h a p p y , persecuted figures in the "Tableaux parisiens" and the Petits Poèmes en prose dramatize his inability to love himself. Affect w i t h d r a w n f r o m the w o r l d is unsuccessfully

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invested in the self, and w h e n , as it w e r e , the narrator comes across himself in the w o r l d , he finds a f i g u r e nearly destroyed b y a cold, c o n d e m n i n g w o r l d (which is similar to the narrator's o w n o b s e r v i n g and moralistic superego). T h e narrator's narcissism in " L e V i e u x saltimbanque" and " U n e M o r t h é r o ï q u e " therefore includes s o m e uncertainty about his being: it sets h i m afloat between the cool, ironic o b s e r v e r and the d o o m e d poet-histrion. O n the other hand, in " A s sommons

les p a u v r e s ! "

any attempt w h a t e v e r

at

psychic recovery is repudiated. T h e masochistic denial o f the desiring (and potentially artistic) self is enacted as a brutal reduction o f the other to the narrator's " a r g u m e n t . " T h e narrator makes the b e g g a r identical to h i m and thereby eliminates the difference between them. In his seminar on Poe's " P u r l o i n e d Letter," Lacan speaks o f the minister as falling " i n t o the trap of the typically imaginary situation" in his efforts to hide the letter he has stolen f r o m the queen. A n d this trap is a " l e u r r e m i m é t i q u e " : the minister imitates the strategy used b y the queen, a strategy w h i c h he himself s a w through. T h e queen had left the dangerous letter on the table, in full v i e w o f the king, w h o , h o w e v e r , had seen nothing. T h e minister had seen the queen feeling safe because she s a w the king seeing nothing. She had not, h o w e v e r , seen the minister see her, and he had been able to pick up the letter and g o o f f w i t h it. With the police, the minister takes the same role the queen had taken w i t h the king: he puts the letter in a highly visible place, rightly assuming that such a strategy w o u l d not enter into the police's notions o f h o w a stolen letter

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might be hidden. But the minister also unwittingly repeats the queen's mistake. Like her, he sees that he is not being seen (by the police), but he fails to see, as Lacan puts it, "the real situation where he is seen not seeing." Poe's detective Dupin plays the same role with the minister that the minister had played with the queen, and as a result Dupin finds and steals the letter under the minister's nose. In referring to the minister, Lacan speaks not only o f a " m i m e t i c trap" but also o f the "narcissistic relation" he is engaged in, and o f his attempt to assume the impossible role o f the "absolute master." T h e minister appropriates the queen's behavior as a strategy to w i n power. His exact imitation o f the queen is designed to gain possession o f the letter and mastery over her. H e would narcissistically reduce her to his designs, and he also narcissistically assumes that no one will be astute enough to see him as he saw the queen (and this assumption is his stupidity). T h e minister imitates the queen in order to protect himself f r o m the police, but keeping the letter f r o m the police is o f course the condition o f the minister's p o w e r over the queen—so it is indeed true, as Lacan suggests, that the exact imitation o f the other (the obliterating o f differences) is equivalent, in Poe's story, to the narcissistic project o f appropriating the other, o f enjoying absolute p o w e r . 5 Roles are reversed in " A s s o m m o n s les pauvres!" but, as in Lacan's reading o f Poe's story, imitation is initiated for the purposes o f power. In the order o f the Imaginary, the appeal o f mimesis is its (deceptive) 5. " L e Séminaire sur 'La Lettre v o l é e ' , " Ecrits,

pp. 3 0 - 3 1 , 33.

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p r o m i s e o f m a k i n g the w o r l d identical t o the self. In b e a t i n g u p the b e g g a r , the n a r r a t o r seems t o be d e f e a t i n g w h a t M e h l m a n calls " a n idealistic n o t i o n o f social c h a n g e " ( w e r e m e m b e r that t h e b e g g a r h a d " o n e o f those unforgettable looks which w o u l d overturn t h r o n e s , if spirit could m o v e m a t t e r " ) . B u t w h y does t h e p o e t attack t h e b e g g a r ? H e a n s w e r s this q u e s t i o n w i t h t h e greatest clarity: it is t o s h o w h i m h o w " t o w i n " his " l i b e r t y , " h o w t o " p r o v e " t h a t he is " t h e e q u a l " o f others. T h a t is, t h e p o e t a d m i n i s t e r s a lesson in i n d e p e n d e n c e , w e m i g h t e v e n say in a u t o n o m y . H e teaches t h e b e g g a r t o be a m a s t e r r a t h e r t h a n a slave, b u t w e n e v e r leave t h e t e r m s and m o d e o f the m a s t e r slave relationship. T h i s relationship is enacted so literally as t o be s o m e w h a t comical: t h e b e g g a r is o v e r w h e l m e d b y a violent physical assault. A n d , w h o l l y w i t h i n the logic o f narcissistic fantasy, t h e sign o f t h e b e g g a r ' s e n s l a v e m e n t is his i m i t a t i o n o f t h e poet. It is w h e n h e t u r n s o n the p o e t ( w h o h a d r e g a r d e d the b e g g a r ' s " l o o k o f h a t r e d " as a "good omen") and b e g i n s t o i m i t a t e h i m that his e n s l a v e m e n t is consecrated. T h e p o e t ' s a n n o u n c e m e n t : "Sir, y o u are my equal" s h o u l d p e r h a p s be read as "Sir, y o u are identical t o m e , " or, e v e n m o r e radically, " Y o u are me." A n d the p o e m ends, m o s t a p p r o p r i a t e l y , w i t h t h e b e g g a r p r o m i s i n g t o r e p e a t t h e p o e t ' s lesson w i t h o t h e r b e g g a r s , w h o in t u r n will p r e s u m a b l y repeat it w i t h still others. Ideally, t h e p o e t ' s influence will spread e v e r y w h e r e ; in n u m e r o u s places and at n u m e r o u s times, t h e w o r l d will m i r r o r h i m . Far f r o m b e i n g p r o b l e m a t i c a l l y afloat b e t w e e n t h e p o e t and t h e b e g g a r , douleur in " A s s o m m o n s les p a u v r e s ! " will m e r e l y be r e p e a t e d (ad i n f i n i t u m ,

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w e r e it possible) as a d e m o n s t r a t i o n o f narcissistic power. T h e m o m e n t o f p a i n is the m o m e n t o f p o w e r , a n d also of pleasure. T h e s u b s t i t u t i o n o f douleur f o r plaisir at the end of the p o e m ( " t h e t h e o r y w h i c h I h a v e h a d t h e pain of t r y i n g o u t o n y o u r b a c k " ) is b y n o m e a n s an e l i m i n a t i o n o f the idea o f pleasure. Indeed, the p h r a s e is s t r i k i n g because w h e n w e read it w e can't h e l p b u t t h i n k of the absent w o r d " p l e a s u r e . " Pleasure has been crossed o u t and replaced b y pain; b u t t h e pain r e m i n d s us o f pleasure, w h i c h in fact is j u s t " u n d e r " t h e pain. T h e p o e t ' s w o r d s t o t h e b e g g a r m a k e us t h i n k o f p l e a sure and pain at t h e s a m e t i m e : t h e pleasure w e w o u l d h a v e expected is e x p r e s s e d as pain. We are certainly r e m i n d e d , as M e h l m a n says, o f F r e u d ' s " a r c h e o l o g y o f sadistic f a n t a s y . " T h e pain is felt as t h e p o e t is t r y i n g o u t his t h e o r y o n t h e old m a n ' s b a t t e r e d b o d y , t h a t is, e v e n b e f o r e the p o e t h i m s e l f is beaten up. T h e sexual e x c i t e m e n t o f s a d i s m lies in the sadist's masochistically e n j o y i n g pain, as F r e u d says, " t h r o u g h his i d e n t i f i cation o f h i m s e l f w i t h t h e s u f f e r i n g o b j e c t . " In " A s s o m m o n s les p a u v r e s ! " the p o e t ' s m a s o c h i s t i c a i m b e c o m e s literally e v i d e n t , since h e beats t h e b e g g a r in o r d e r t o m a k e t h e b e g g a r beat h i m . B u t — a n d this b r i n g s us back to m y earlier discussion o f a possible identity b e t w e e n t h e d e a t h instinct a n d t h e i m p u l s e t o m a s t e r the w o r l d — t h e p u r p o s e o f p s y c h i c m o b i l i t y here is the i m m o b i l i z i n g o f t h e self a n d o f the o t h e r . T h e p o e t acts v i o l e n t l y in o r d e r t o initiate a violent action w h i c h will p u t an e n d to his o w n activity. We d o n ' t h a v e the o n t o l o g i c a l i n d e t e r m i n a c y d e s i g n a t e d b y the p o e t ' s tears in " L e V i e u x s a l t i m b a n q u e " a n d

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" U n e M o r t h é r o ï q u e , " tears w h i c h t h r e a t e n ( t h o u g h unsuccessfully) to close the g a p b e t w e e n an ironic m o r a l i s t i c consciousness and Fancioulle's creative ecstasy. R a t h e r , t h e ironic c o n s c i o u s n e s s in " A s s o m m o n s les p a u v r e s ! " t r a n s f o r m s the b e g g a r ( w h o is s t r u c t u r a l l y assimilable t o t h e p o e t - h i s t r i o n f i g u r e o f o t h e r p o e m s ) i n t o a n o t h e r ironic consciousness. If pain is at all afloat b e t w e e n t h e p o e t and t h e b e g g a r , it is so that t h e b e g g a r m a y b e c o m e the p o e t a n d t h e p o e t m a y e x p e r i e n c e t h e d e s t r u c t i o n o f t h e possibility o f t h e b e g gar in himself. In o t h e r w o r d s , t h e e x p e r i e n c e o f pain is set afloat so that t h e differences o n w h i c h such floati n g d e p e n d s m a y be abolished. A b s o l u t e p o w e r , ideal f r e e d o m , and a t r i u m p h a n t n a r c i s s i s m responsible f o r an e p i d e m i c o f p r i m a r y m a s o c h i s m : this is the c o m plex lesson o f " A s s o m m o n s les p a u v r e s ! " T h e w o r l d , a n d n o t m e r e l y the poet, has b e c o m e t h e "sinister m i r r o r " in w h i c h the " s h r e w " — " v o r a c i o u s I r o n y " — w a t c h e s herself set o f f an endless p r o c e s s o f identical repetition. T h e r e is, finally, an a l l - e n v e l o p i n g consciousness of r e p e t i t i o n in " A s s o m m o n s les p a u v r e s ! " (and in t h e Petits Poèmes en prose in general), a consciousness e x pressed in t h e B a u d e l a i r e a n n a r r a t o r ' s ironic voice. W h e n the p o e t sees the b e g g a r ' s " a n t i q u e carcass" g e t t i n g ready f o r a c o u n t e r a t t a c k , h e cries, " O h miracle! O h t h e delight o f the p h i l o s o p h e r w h o verifies t h e excellence o f h i s t h e o r y ! " T h e status o f t h o u g h t is a m b i g u o u s in " A s s o m m o n s les p a u v r e s ! " T h e n a r r a t o r ' s discussion w i t h t h e b e g g a r is a m o c k e r y o f "all t h e e l u c u b r a t i o n s o f all t h o s e e n t r e p r e n e u r s o f public h a p p i n e s s " w h o s e theories h a d p u t h i m i n t o " a state o f

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mind approaching dizziness or stupefaction." (He gets in another dig at philosophy w h e n he compares his active, affirmative D e m o n to " p o o r Socrates' . . . prohibiting Demon.") Countless books of social theory aren't worth the narrator's dramatically practical idea; the salvation of the poor can be accomplished at once—through philosophical thrashings. But this is of course too literal a reading of the poem. " A s s o m m o n s les pauvres!" illustrates the narrator's ability to make fun of speculative theory, including his o w n philosophical inspiration. The poet is pleased by the success o f h i s "demonstration," but the comic aspects in the description o f h i s own behavior warn us not to take the denigration of bookish theories much more seriously than we take those theories themselves. The poet's démystification of abstract thought is n o w an elegantly ironic narrative act. And the concreteness of the lesson is somewhat dissipated in the emblematic nature of the tale. More importantly, the poet's tone creates a certain distance between himself and the story e tells, a distance which partly protects him f r o m our interpretation o f h i s story. As in "L'Irrémédiable," irony is the poet's "torch of satanic graces," his "sole relief and glory." But in "Assommons les pauvres!" we have a more radical form of self-splitting than in either "L'Irrémédiable" or " L ' H é a u t o n t i m o r o u m é n o s . " O n the one hand, the prose poem offers a remedy for what Baudelaire portrays elsewhere as the painful alienation of consciousness f r o m passion. N o t only is the difference between the narrator and the beggar negated; the success of the poet's lesson also depends on the beg-

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g a r ' s u n d e r s t a n d i n g that t h e lesson is to be endlessly repeated. B u t t h e n a n e w distance is created, o n e w h i c h separates the n a r r a t o r at t h e m o m e n t o f his n a r r a t i o n f r o m t h e v e r y e l i m i n a t i o n o f distance w h i c h is t h e s u b j e c t o f his tale. H e b e c o m e s ironically c o n s c i o u s of the t r i u m p h o f i r o n i c consciousness. It is as if the s u p e r e g o w e r e n o w m o v i n g a w a y from itself. Its peculiar "relief a n d g l o r y " m a y t h e r e f o r e lie n o t in t h e m o r a l a n d selfreflexive f u n c t i o n s w h i c h it is usually t h o u g h t t o e x e r cise b u t r a t h e r in its capacity to r e p u d i a t e its o w n a p t i t u d e f o r m a s o c h i s t i c r e p u d i a t i o n s o f desire. T h e s u c cessful realization o f the p s y c h o t i c d e s i g n to stop all a f f e c t i v e m o v e m e n t s actually helps t h e p o e t t o save h i m s e l f f r o m t h e success o f his design. A s a result of t h e d e a t h o f desire, o f t h e end o f all affect, t h e p o e t is o n c e again " o n the m o v e , " even if o n l y t o add s o m e t h i n g h u m o r o u s l y p r o b l e m a t i c to the e n d o f affect. B u t in this last e x a m p l e o f B a u d e l a i r e a n m o b i l i t y , w e are o f course v e r y far f r o m t h e o n t o l o g i c a l floating characteristic o f t h e erotic p o e m s in Les Fleurs du mal. Instead o f the h e t e r o g e n e o u s i m a g e s a n d the p s y c h i c i n d e t e r m i n a c y o f " L e Beau n a v i r e " o r " L ' I n v i t a t i o n au v o y a g e , " w e h a v e in thePei/i5 Poemes en prose a k i n d o f austere sophistication w h i c h consists in t h e p o e t ' s m e r e l y m o v i n g a w a y f r o m his o w n p e r f o r m a n c e s . H i s i r o n y is equivalent t o s e l f - w i t h d r a w a l s ; and this casual b u t d e v a s t a t i n g n e g a t i v i t y w o u l d s e e m t o be t h e p o e t ' s o n l y escape f r o m his violent p r o j e c t s t o w a r d his o w n desires. At the v e r y limit o f a suicidal enterprise d e s i g n e d t o e l i m i n a t e d i f f e r e n c e f r o m t h e self s h i s t o r y , d i f f e r e n c e r e t u r n s in " A s s o m m o n s les p a u v r e s ! " in t h e f o r m o f i r o n i c r e s e r v a t i o n s a b o u t an act w h i c h

A Beggarly Ending

151

abolishes difference. T h e sophistication w h i c h a p p e a r s to save t h e p o e t is also f u n d a m e n t a l l y nihilistic. O f course t h e r e is n o reason t o t h i n k o f t h e c o n c l u d i n g chapters o f this s t u d y as o f f e r i n g a central or final t r u t h a b o u t Baudelaire. Indeed, w e m i g h t best express o u r a d m i r a t i o n f o r his a c h i e v e m e n t b y r e t u r n i n g to the cradling r h y t h m s o f Les Fleurs du mal. A s a sign o f o u r o w n r e s e r v a t i o n s a b o u t a critical a d v e n t u r e w h i c h has, p e r h a p s inevitably, enclosed the p o e t w i t h i n an excessively c o h e r e n t s c h e m e , w e can e x p o s e o u r s e l v e s o n c e again t o B a u d e l a i r e ' s excitingly playful, if risky, a d v e n t u r e in self-scattering and self-displacement.

Index

Balzac, H o n o r é de, 17, 111, 117-119, 121, 126 Baudelaire, Charles " D e L'Essence du rire," 94 " D e l'Idéal et du m o d è l e , " 20 " E x p o s i t i o n universelle de 1855," 20 Les Fleurs du mal, 16-23, 133-134,139,150-151 " A Celle qui est t r o p gaie," 21, 71-74, 88 " L ' A l b a t r o s , " 23 " A u Lecteur," 2 6 - 2 9 " A une M a d o n e , " 71n Avec ses vêtements ondoyants et nacrés, 47 " L e B a l c o n , " 35, 5 1 - 5 3 " L e Beau n a v i r e , " 21, 35, 43, 53-56, 62-64, 67, 73-74, 77, 89, 108, 123, 150 "La Beauté," 25-26 " B é n é d i c t i o n , " 23, 29 133 "Les B i j o u x , " 21, 35, 53, 65-67, 73, 77, 89 " L e C a d r e , " 48 " C h a n t d ' a u t o m n e , " 68 " U n e C h a r o g n e , " 71 "La C h e v e l u r e , " 30, 35-48, 53, 55-57, 67, 73, 88, 105, 108-109, 123-124 " C i e l brouillé," 68 " C o n f e s s i o n , " 71

"Correspondances," 32-34 " E l é v a t i o n , " 23, 25, 29, 133 " L ' E n n e m i , " 30 "La G é a n t e , " 34 " L e G u i g n o n , " 30 " H a r m o n i e du s o i r , " 51 "L'Héautontimorouménos, " 90, 92-94, 96, 100-105, 126, 149 " L ' I n v i t a t i o n au v o y a g e , " 21, 35, 48-50, 74, 106, 150 " L ' I r r é m é d i a b l e , " 90, 92-96, 98, 126, 149 " L ' I r r é p a r a b l e , " 51 J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans, 111 Je t'adore à l'égal de la voûte nocturne, 6 9 - 7 0 " U n e M a r t y r e , " 70n " L e M a u v a i s m o i n e , " 30 " M o e s t a et e r r a b u n d a , " 51 " L e P a r f u m , " 48 "Les P h a r e s , " 2 3 - 2 5 , 2 9 , 95 " R é v e r s i b i l i t é , " 71 "Sed n o n satiata," 69 " L e Serpent qui d a n s e , " 46-48, 53, 105 "Sonnet d'automne," 68-69 " T a b l e a u x parisiens," 105-106, 108-110, 125, 133, 137, 143

Index Baudelaire, Charles (cont.) " L e C y g n e , " 111 " L e J e u , " 109, 131, 143 "Les Petites vieilles," 107-108, 131, 143 "Les Sept vieillards," 108, 121-123 " L a Vie antérieure," 3 0 - 3 1 , 106 Journaux intimes, 9, 1 1 - 1 5 , 6 6 , 106 "Fusées," 44, 98 " M o n coeur mis à n u , " 1 " N o t e s nouvelles sur Edgar P o e , " 97 Les Paradis artificiels, 14n " L e Poème du haschisch," 34 " L e Peintre de la vie moderne," 9 - 1 4 , 20, 42, 106-107 Petits Poemes en prose, 106-107, 125-126, 128-131, 133-135, 137-139, 148 " A s s o m m o n s les pauvres!" 125, 131, 139-143, 145-50 " C h a c u n sa chimère," 131 " L e Confiteor de l'Artiste," 9 " L a C o r d e , " 125 " L a Femme sauvage et la petite-maîtresse," 126 "Les Fenêtres," 108n, 131 "Les Foules," 9 " L e Galant tireur," 126 "Laquelle est la vraie?" 131 "Mademoiselle Bistouri," 125 " L e Mauvais vitrier," 125, 131 " U n e M o r t héroique," 125, 1 3 1 - 1 3 3 ,

153 135-136, 1 4 3 - 1 4 4 , 148 "Portraits de maîtresses," 126, 131 " L e Vieux saltimbanque," 131-132,143-144,147 Benedetto, L. F., 17n Blin, Georges, 89n B r o m b e r t , Victor, 42n Butor, Michel, 12, 14n D'Aurevilly, Barbey, 16 Deleuze, Gilles, 142 Dickens, Charles, 119 Eliot, George, 1 1 8 - 1 1 9 Ferenczi, Sandor, 90n Feuillerat, Albert, 17n Freud, Sigmund " A Child is Being B e a t e n , " 101-103, 141 "Analysis o f a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old B o y , " 60n An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 127-128n Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 78, 8 4 - 8 5 Civilization and Its Discontents, 84 " T h e E c o n o m i c Problem in Masochism," 75-76, 79-86 The Ego and the Id, 91n " F e t i c h i s m , " 127n " F r o m the History o f an Infantile N e u r o s i s " ( W o l f M a n case), 4 0 - 4 1 , 127 Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, 58 "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," 7 5 - 7 6 ,

154 78-81, 87, 101-103, 141-142 The Interpretation of Dreams, 37 "Neuro-Psychoses of Defence," 127n New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 91-92n " O n Narcissism: An Introduction," 130-131, 136 " O n Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Eroticism," 58 "Psycho-Analytic N o t e s on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)," 127n, 129 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 39, 41, 76 Houssaye, Arsène, 134 Hubert, J . - D . , 6 3 - 6 4 n Jakobson, Roman, 50n

Beaudelaire

and Freud

Laplanche, Jean, 41, 59, 76, 78, 79n, 103n, 127, 142 Lautréamont, 2 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 50n M a u r o n , Charles, 137-139, 142 M e h l m a n j e f f r e y , 138-139, 141-143, 146-147 Melville, H e r m a n , 118 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 142 Poe, Edgar Allan, " T h e M a n of the C r o w d , " 11; " T h e Purloined Letter," 144-145 Pontalis, J . - B . , 59n, 127 Poulet, Georges, 121n Prévost, Jean, 48 Proust, Marcel, 16-18, 118 Richard, Jean-Pierre, 88n Riffaterre, Michael, 50-51n R i m b a u d , Arthur, 51 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 5 Ruff, Marcel, 17n Sade, Marquis de, 89 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 14n, 112, 121 Stendhal, 118-119

Klein, Melanie, 90n, 113n, 115 Lacan, Jacques, 111-117, 127-128,142,144-145 Laing, Ronald, 5

Wagner, Richard, 17; Tannhäuser, 67, 88 Zola, Emile, 118