Baudelaire and Schizo Analysis - Holland

This new study of Baudelaire's writings is the first book to
apply the principles of schizoanalysis to literary history

and cultural studies. By resituating psychoanalysis in its
socioeconomic and cultural context, this framework pro-
vides a new and illuminating approach to the poetry and
art criticism of the foremost French modernist. Professor
Holland's book draws upon and transforms virtually the
entire spectrum of recent Baudelaire scholarship, and
demonstrates the impact of the capitalist market and
Second Empire authoritarianism (as well as Baudelaire's
much-discussed family circumstances) on the psychology
and poetics of the writer, who abandoned his romantic
idealism in favour of a modernist cynicism that has
characterized modern culture ever since.
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN FRENCH 4 5
BAUDELAIRE AND SCHIZOANALYSIS

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN FRENCH
General editor: Malcolm Bowie (All Souls College, Oxford)

Editorial Board: R. Howard Bloch (University of California, Berkeley),
Ross Chambers (University of Michigan), Antoine Gompagnon
(Columbia University), Peter France (University of Edinburgh),
Toril Moi (Duke University), Naomi Schor (Duke University)
Recent titles in this series include

33. LAWRENCE D. KRITZMAN
The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French
Renaissance
34. JERRY G. NASH
The Love Aesthetics of Maurice Sceve: Poetry and Struggle
35. PETER FRANCE
Politeness and its Discontents: Problems in French Classical
Culture
36. MITCHELL GREENBERG
Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century Drama
and Prose: The Family Romance of French Classicism
37. TOM CONLEY
The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing
38. MARGERY EVANS
Baudelaire and Intertextuality: Poetry at the Crossroads
39. JUDITH STILL
Justice and Difference in the Works of Rousseau: Bienfaisance
and Pudeur
40. CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON
System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida
41. CAROL A. MOSSMAN
Politics and Narratives of Birth: Gynocolonization from
Rousseau to Zola
42. DANIEL BREWER
The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century
France: Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing
43. ROBERTA L. KRUEGER
Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French
Verse Romance
44. JAMES H. REID
Narration and Description in the French Realist Novel: The
Temporality of Lying and Forgetting
A complete list of books in the series is given at the end of the volume.
BAUDELAIRE AND
SCHIZOANALYSIS
The Sociopoetics of Modernism
EUGENE W. HOLLAND
Department of French and Italian, The Ohio State University
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo
Cambridge University Press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521419802
© Cambridge University Press 1993
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1993

This digitally printed first paperback version 2006
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Holland, Eugene W.
Baudelaire and schizoanalysis: the sociopoetics of modernism / Eugene W. Holland,
p. cm. - (Cambridge studies in French: 45)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 41980 8 (hardback)
1. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821—1867 — Criticism and interpretation.
2. Literature and society - France - History - 19th century.
3. Modernism (Literature) - France. 4. Psychoanalysis and literature. I. Title.
II. Series.
PQ2191.Z5H65 1993
841'.8-dc20 92-35913 CIP
ISBN-13 978-0-521-41980-2 hardback

ISBN-10 0-521-41980-8 hardback
ISBN-13 978-0-521-03134-9 paperback

ISBN-10 0-521-03134-6 paperback
To the memory of my father
Contents
Preface page xi
Acknowledgments xvii
i Introduction i
Social decoding 11
Psychological decoding 17
Textual decoding 30
PART I POETICS
2 Correspondences versus beauty 43
The romantic cycle 43
The beauty cycle 53
Metonymy prevails 67
3 Spleen and evil 80

"Spleen and Ideal" 80
The spleen cycle 86
The cycle of evil 96
PART II PSYGHOPOETIGS
4 Romantic temperament and "Spleen and Ideal" 111
The psychodynamics of experience 111
The early art criticism 116
The psychopoetics of "Spleen and Ideal" 124
IX
Contents
Modernist imagination and the "Tableaux

Parisiens" 137
The later art criticism 139
The introductory poems 148
The street scenes 157
The domestic scenes 166
PART III SOGIOPOETICS

6 Decoding and recoding in the prose poems 177
Historical Others 177
" Moral masochism " 186
Historical masochism 190
Borderline decoding 197
Narcissistic recoding 209
7 The prose poem narrator 221

Historicizing borderline narcissism 221
Super-ego failure 222
Ego disintegration 230
Bohemia at the heart of bourgeois society 236
Modernity as prostitution 242
The prose poem narrator as borderline narcissist 248
The prose poem narrator as programmer 251
8 Conclusion 258
The metonymy of real reference and desire 266
The historical emergence and dispersion of the
imaginary 267
The split structure of social life in modernity 274
Motes 278
Select bibliography 296
Index 303
Preface
A Klee painting named " Angelus Novus" shows an angel

looking as though he is about to move away from
something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring,
his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one
pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the
past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one
single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would
like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has
been smashed. But a storm is blowing... and has got
caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can
no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him
into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile
of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we
call progress.
Walter Benjamin1
Perdu dans ce vilain monde, coudoye par les foules, je suis
comme un homme lasse dont Poeil ne voit en arriere, dans
les annees profondes, que desabusement et amertume, et
devant lui qu'un orage ou rien de neuf n'est contenu, ni
enseignement, ni douleur.
Lost in a wasteland, jostled by the crowds, I am like a
weary man who sees in the depths of the past behind him
nothing but disappointment and bitterness, and before
him a storm that contains nothing new, neither insight,
nor grief.
Charles Baudelaire2
Charles Baudelaire, c'est moil For I, too, feel like someone who
sees little but bitter disappointment in the past, like someone
being blown irresistibly backwards into the future, who can
xi
xii Preface
only look aghast at the mounting piles of toxic waste and the
growing numbers of homeless children that "progress" hurls at
his feet. I, too, am someone who has witnessed authoritarian
capitalism in the Reagan/Bush/Thatcher era crush the Utopian
promise of a more democratic society under its boot-heel, just as
Napoleon III destroyed the democratic ideals Baudelaire shared
in the 1840s, and Hitler those Benjamin shared in the 1930s.
This recurring nightmare is no historical accident: within the
cyclical, boom-and-bust rhythm of capital accumulation, it
recurs at the moment that democratic potential once again
succumbs to the authoritarian realities of capitalism. Benjamin
speaks of "wish[ing] to retain that image of the past which
unexpectedly appears to a man singled out by history at a
moment of danger " ;3 for him, as for me, the figure of Baudelaire
provides such an image: Charles Baudelaire, c'est nousl
Baudelaire's historical "moment of danger," as this study
will show, revolved around Napoleon's coup d'etat of December
1851: the romantic-socialist hopes fueling the Revolution of
1848 seemed on the verge of becoming reality in the Second
Republic, only to be dashed by the founding of the Second
Empire and the authoritarian reign of Napoleon III. Our own
"moment of danger" did not arrive so punctually. Its cor-
responding dates might be 1968, the height of the anti-
authoritarian counter-cultural "revolution"; and 1981, the
culmination of the oil crisis begun in 1974. World War II had
generated a tremendous concentration of highly productive
capital which the outbreak of peace risked leaving idle. So a
period of liberal largesse followed, sponsoring waves of social
innovation in the civil rights, anti-war, and counter-culture
movements while bankrolling "consumer society" in order to
keep the wheels of industry turning. But this liberalizing phase
of "capital ^-accumulation" was soon reversed in the sub-
sequent, authoritarian phase of "capital /^-accumulation,"
triggered by the oil crises of 1974-81: funding for social,
cultural, and political innovation was ruthlessly cut off in order
to be reinvested in instruments of capital's self-expansion,
including the high-tech military-industrial complex, more
aggressive state action against labor, curtailment of women's
Preface xiii
and civil rights, and so on. Though the transformation itself was
not as dramatic as the coup d'etat of Baudelaire's day, the
contrast between the two phases is strikingly similar, and
equally dispiriting, in the two cases. That similarity made this
schizoanalytic study of Baudelaire possible.4
Schizoanalysis insists on restoring the full range of social and
historical factors to psychoanalytic explanations of psychic
structure and proclivities. From this perspective, the claim that
"Charles Baudelaire, c'est moi" is not a statement of identi-
fication with Baudelaire as an individual (with whom I
personally have very little in common: I did not lose my father
at the age of five, but at twenty-seven; I am not a destitute poete
maudit, but a professional cultural historian; not a melancholic
bachelor, but a happily married husband and father, and so
on). Rather than a statement of personal identification, it is a
recognition of our shared socio-historical situation and the
resulting psychological configuration (here designated as "bor-
derline narcissism") — a configuration that is epitomized in his
works, but which is more or less characteristic of everyone living
in market society. Hence Baudelaire's lasting acclaim as the
"lyric poet in the era of high capitalism" (as Benjamin put it).
For he was among the first to diagnose the conditions of
existence typical of modernity, and to suffer the emergence of a
specifically capitalist form of authoritarianism. That those
conditions still exist and capitalist authoritarianism has not
ceased recurring enables us, in Benjamin's words, to "grasp the
constellation which [our] own era has formed with a specific
earlier one," Baudelaire's own.
At the same time, schizoanalysis insists on including psycho-
dynamic factors in historical materialist explanations of social
structure and cultural change. This inclusion is possible largely
because of a certain notion of temporality that is shared by
Marx - for whom " the anatomy of the human is the key to the
anatomy of the ape " - and by Freud - for whom there exist not
memories from childhood, but only memories of childhood.
This is the form of temporality emphasized by Lacan in the
notion of "deferred action" (Freud's Nachtrdglichkeit), and by
Benjamin in his critique of historicism:
xiv Preface
Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection

between the various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is
for that reason alone historical. It became historical posthumously, as
it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of
years. An historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling
the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the
constellation which his own era has formed with a specific earlier one.5
This form of temporality is crucial to schizoanalysis, as well,
although the present study explores its psychodynamic more
than its socio-historical implications. In focusing on Baudelaire,
I have been unable to do justice here to all the complexities of
schizoanalysis; that is the aim of my next book. Let me say in
passing that the point of schizoanalysis is not to enter (much less
settle) disputes among competing schools of psychoanalytic
therapy or doctrine, but to extract what is useful for the
purposes of historical analysis and social change. The Lacanian
school is a special case: schizoanalysis draws heavily on Lacan,
yet insists that even a stance conducive to profoundly radical
(not to say revolutionary) therapy nonetheless risks appearing
profoundly and " tragically" reactionary if transported into the
domain of historical study unchanged. In focusing on Baude-
laire alone, I have also, against my best intentions, unavoidably
made him appear to be more of a special case historically
speaking than he really is, however canonical he has become: it
will take yet another book to show why the cultural masochism
he shared with Masoch himself was not exceptional, but part of
a larger pattern in late nineteenth-century history; and to show
indeed that masochism, sadism, and narcissism are all funda-
mentally historical and cultural phenomena, before being
treated as psychological ones.
What a schizoanalytic study focusing on Baudelaire is able to
demonstrate, nonetheless, is that authoritarianism recurs in
modernity, and that it does so not merely because of "man's
eternal inhumanity to man," but because of historical dynamics
specific to capitalism. Historical recurrence never amounts to
sheer repetition, however: it always entails repetition with a
difference. Merely to draw parallels between 1848/51 and
Preface xv
1968/81 would be no better than noting similarities in myth
criticism or establishing causal connections in historicism. The
point of doing schizoanalysis is not just to interpret history, but
to change it. Hence the explicitly narrative cast of my reading
of Baudelaire and his modernist repudiation of narrative.
However out of favor it may be in some circles of high modernist
criticism today, and however complex our understanding of it
has become (thanks in part to that very criticism), narrative
remains a fundamental form of human thought, one that is
simply indispensable for thinking through historical change:
things looked a certain way before; how do they look after such-
and-such occurs? How, then, does the modernity we still share
with Baudelaire look after modernism?
At the very emergence of market society in France, Baudelaire
formulated his distinctive modernism in repudiation of ro-
manticism ; after more than a century of market rule, we are
now struggling to repudiate modernism in the name of
something called the "postmodern." In repudiating roman-
ticism, Baudelaire rejected the romantic commitment to nature
and woman in favor of misogyny and urban artifice; inasmuch
as modernism has roots in Baudelaire, any postmodernism
worthy of more than the mere name will have to be feminist and
environmentalist, or amount to nothing at all.6 Repudiating
modernism is not easy; real postmodernism will not occur by
fiat, for most of the institutions reflecting and supporting
modernism are still very much in force today, having had more
than a century since Baudelaire's time to consolidate themselves.
Within the academy, for example, modern (ist) disciplines are
still organized to produce knowledge of literature for literature's
sake, of art for art's sake, of history for history's sake, and so on.
As a postmodern intervention, this schizoanalytic study aims
instead to produce a resolutely anti-historicist, anti-aestheticist
reading of Baudelaire, one that in the face of historical
contingency willingly assumes the risk of appearing "partial"
or "dated." This is not to say that I do not appreciate the
lasting beauty of Baudelaire's poetry, for personally I do. But I
am someone who feels that in moments of danger, there are
xvi Preface
more important things to talk about - and I am convinced that
Baudelaire was, too.
Some may consider that, intending to talk about
Baudelaire, I have succeeded only in talking about myself.
It would certainly mean more to say that it is Baudelaire
who was talking about me. He is talking about you.
Michel Butor7
Acknowledgments
The ideas for this book first took shape in independent study
with Chuck Wiz and Brenda Thompson at the University of
California at San Diego; it is a pleasure to recall their
enthusiasm and contributions. I am most grateful for generous
support and encouragement in those early stages from Gilles
Deleuze in Paris and Michel de Certeau in La Jolla. Several
valuable secondary sources were recommended by my mother,
Faith M. Holland, whose bibliographic input over the years I
am pleased to acknowledge. My thanks for research assistance
go to Medha Karmarkar of Ohio State, and to the W. T. Bandy
Center for Baudelaire Studies at Vanderbilt University.
Dick Bjornson and Vassilis Lambropoulos read the manu-
script early on, giving sound advice and much-appreciated
encouragement. Ross Chambers, Dick Terdiman, and Fred
Jameson deserve special recognition for their careful readings,
expert advice, and/or welcome encouragement at various later
stages of the writing process: I cannot thank them enough.
Nancy Armstrong and Sabra Webber provided shrewd insights
into the publishing process, and I would like to thank Charles
G. S. Williams, too, for all his help as chairperson and senior
colleague.
Most deserving of thanks and acknowledgment are my wife,
Eliza Segura-Holland, whose clinical and political insights into
schizophrenia and capitalism, and whose spirited intellectual
companionship and unstinting support were crucial to writing
this book; and our daughter, Lauren Louise Holland, who
showed consideration far beyond her years: I thank them both
with all my heart.
xvn
CHAPTER I
Introduction
" Au fond de l'lnconnu pour trouver du nouveau!" To the depths

of the unknown to find something new: is this the battle cry of
modernism or an advertising slogan? Could it be both? What
reading procedures would distinguish absolutely between the
t w o ? - A n d what would be the cost to our historical under-
standing of Baudelaire and modernism, were such procedures to
succeed?
However scandalous the alleged identity of high and low, of
elite and mass culture may once have seemed, it has by now
become commonplace. The modernist attempt to salvage or
forge some domain of authenticity over and against the
wasteland of commercial culture has been swallowed whole by
commercialism itself: " defamiliarization," as the Russian
Formalists termed the renewal of perception through aesthetic
innovation and willed distance from the ordinary, is now a well-
worn advertising technique, used to confer an aura of novelty
and exoticism on the most familiar and banal of commodities,
from standard-brand beer to haute couture perfume. For us (and
this realization surely counts as one signal of our postmodern
condition), the techniques of modernism and advertising are
one and the same.
But can the same be said for Baudelaire himself? In one sense,
no: advertising and modernism were only in their infancy in
Baudelaire's day; their merger presupposes a degree of com-
mercial oversaturation and sophistication on the part of
consumers, a measure of sophistication and sheer desperation
on the part of advertisers, the assimilation of modernism itself
into mainstream culture — conditions that were not met in mid
2 Baudelaire and schizoanalysis
nineteenth-century France. Yet in another sense, reflections on

the relations between modernism and commercial culture
appear throughout Baudelaire's writings. The call to explore
the unknown in search of the new concludes the second of
Baudelaire's three published collections of poetry (comprising
the first and second editions of Les Fleurs du Mai and the
posthumous edition of the Petits Poemes en prose): seen as the
culmination of Baudelaire's work in verse, it may well appear as
a purely modernist gesture. Read in light of his later work,
however, it appears quite differently, for Baudelaire became
acutely aware of the complicity between his modernist poetics
and the very market society that modernism had set out to baffle
and surpass; the prose poems in particular are highly self-
conscious of their inextricable relations with the commercial
context. My claim, then, is that the emergence of modernism -
for Baudelaire himself as well as for us - was and is incom-
prehensible apart from the transformation of culture and lived
experience by the rapid installation of market society in Second-
Empire France.
This is not an entirely new claim about Baudelaire, nor about
modernism. Walter Benjamin characterized Baudelaire as the
quintessential "lyric poet in the era of high capitalism. ' 5l Georg
Lukacs, in studies of somewhat broader scope, has condemned
modernism as a " reified " cultural form characteristic of market
society under bourgeois rule.2 Both provide crucial insights into
the relations between Baudelairean modernism and market
capitalism as they emerged in mid nineteenth-century France.
Yet in some important ways, Baudelaire's poetics defies these
readings, for despite the notoriously varied and often con-
tradictory positions taken by Baudelaire himself, the devel-
opment of Baudelairean modernism entails an unmistakable
evolution away from the poetics of metaphor in the direction of
metonymy, and this modernist poetics ultimately diagnoses
both Benjamin's and Lukacs's critical perspectives as pre-
modern: as metaphysical rather than ironic; based on epistem-
ologies of identity rather than difference; embodied in dis-
courses that are, in the terms of this study, metaphoric rather
than metonymic in form.
Introduction 3
Benjamin's study nonetheless constitutes an indispensable
point of departure. He construes Baudelaire as a transitional
figure who managed to salvage lyric poetry from market
society's implacable erosion of shared culture and collective
memory, by recourse to strictly personal recollection. By
bringing Freud's theories of perception and memory into
contact with the material circumstances of Second-Empire
Paris, Benjamin shows how the development of a hyper-
conscious defense against the shocks of modern city life served
Baudelaire as a resource for generating specifically modernist
lyric poetry from modern urban experience itself.
But the characteristic Baudelairean defense mechanism, as it
appears in the "Tableaux Parisiens" section of the second
edition of Les Fleurs du Mai and throughout the Petits Poemes en
prose, evolves beyond Benjamin's shock-defense toward splitting,
a quite distinct defense mechanism with very different psycho-
dynamics. One result will be the exploration of an explicitly
anti-lyric poetry, especially evident in the prose poem collection.
Baudelaire's own shift from high-anxiety hyperconsciousness to
psychic splitting, I will argue, happened to occur in reaction to
Napoleon Ill's founding of the Second Empire on the ruins of
the Second Republic, but such splitting thereafter conforms to
and illuminates one of the basic structures of capitalist society:
the radical split between production and consumption that pits
buyers against sellers in market transactions. One of Benjamin's
central insights, that Baudelaire as lyric poet of high capitalism
viscerally identified with the melancholic commodity seeking
buyers on the open market, thus turns out to be right, but only
half right: the Baudelairean poet, and particularly the narrator
in the prose poem collection, occupies the split positions of
buyer and seller in turn, without ever completely identifying
with either. Such psychic splitting and the disintegration of
experience epitomized in Baudelaire's writings are basic con-
figurations of postromantic, modern personality in market
society. This helps make sense of the bewildering disparity of
opinion found in Baudelaire - and in Baudelaire criticism. It
also explains why, as Benjamin put it, Baudelaire was bound to
"find the reader at whom his work was aimed" (p. 109): the
split "structure of experience" (p. 110) conveyed in the work of

this exceptional poet has become the rule in modern capitalist
society.
In overlooking the distinction between shock-defense and
psychic splitting, Benjamin conflates distinct stages in Baude-
laire's evolution from romanticism to modernism; he situates
the early sonnet " Correspondances," for example, in the same
historical framework as the poetically very different, later prose
poem "Perte d'aureole." Lukacs, by contrast, distinguishes
very sharply between modernism and movements such as
romanticism and realism that preceded it. Some such periodi-
zation is indispensable for understanding Baudelaire, even if we
discount Lukacs's visceral dislike of modernism and his prefer-
ence for prose fiction over poetry as irrelevant for our purposes.
With his key concept of " reification," Lukacs diagnoses the
impact of the market on social activity and cognition: market
society is characterized by the predominance of exchange-value
over use-value. For Benjamin, the triumph of exchange-value
meant that buyers lose all shared "organic" connections to
goods and must rely instead on personal "taste," which
promptly falls prey to advertising in nascent market culture.
The melancholy of the poet's identification with the commodity
in search of buyers reflects his loss of connection with an
increasingly anonymous public of consumers. In studying the
novel, Lukacs is more interested in the effects of reification on
cognition, since the vocation of the realist novel he champions is
to represent the totality of historical development in a given
period for the purpose of understanding.
Exchange-based social relations fragment and specialize
social activity and cognition, with only a hope that the
"invisible hand" of the market will knit specialized work and
partial perspectives back together to produce a superior
outcome. In addition to its deleterious results in the economic
sphere, Lukacs concludes that the impact of exchange and
specialization on cognition is disastrous: the cognitive use-value
of cultural instruments such as the novel deteriorates sharply;
the direct and total representation of history characteristic of
realism drops away, abandoning the genre to evolve auto-
Introduction 5
nomously in accordance with strictly internal, primarily aes-
thetic laws of development. The thorough-going overhaul of
European society by the market changes the very texture of
prose fiction: the author shifts from the position of participant
(for whom narrating history has use-value) to that of observer
(whose relation both to historical content and to narrative itself
is mediated by exchange-value); the dominant textual mode
shifts from narration to description. Modernism for Lukacs
represents the epitome of reification in high culture.
For all its explanatory breadth and illumination of market
culture, Lukacs's account of the emergence of modernism
construes authors as passive occupants of positions determined
by economic processes alone. So for Lukacs, the reactionary
political views of a Balzac have absolutely no bearing on the
cognitive use-value of his realism (just as the progressive views
of a Zola have no redeeming impact on his naturalism). But
Baudelairean modernism does not involve a passive loss of
cognitive access to reality, but the active repudiation of any
direct representation of the historical process. The declared
intention of an early version of the verse collection that became
Les Fleurs du Mai had in fact been to "trace the history of the
spiritual agitations of modern youth"; this narrative design is
more and more firmly suppressed in the successive editions of
the verse collection; ultimately, linear narrative is explicitly and
utterly repudiated, at the start of the prose poem collection.
The repudiation of historical narration belongs to a set of
disavowals of youthful enthusiasm that, taken together, define
the emergence of Baudelairean modernism: the repudiation of
romanticism, of nature, and of any supposed "harmony" with
nature in favor of the artificial (which is one reason Benjamin is
so wrong to locate " Correspondances" in the same historical
field as "Perte d'aureole"); the repudiation of woman as
"natural" and of passion, inspiration, spontaneity associated
with the feminine, in favor of a virulent if inconsistent misogyny;
the repudiation of democratic aspirations, political engage-
ment, and hope for a better future, in favor of pseudo-
aristocratic cynicism and disdain. In Baudelaire, these dis-
avowals amount to a repudiation of history itself: of the
revolutionary hopes of 1848 he shared with so many romantics,

and especially of the coup d'etat that finally dashed those hopes
and led directly to the Second Empire. Of all the many
disappointments in Baudelaire's life, the rise to power of
Napoleon III resonates most fully in the public texts (including
the journals and notebooks); it finds an uncanny echo in the
other major disappointment of his life, which fills the private
correspondence: the loss of his paternal inheritance to a
trusteeship imposed by his stepfather and mother.
This singular coincidence makes Baudelaire the preeminent poet of
modernity. Financial dispossession - a constant threat to all
under capitalism - acquaints him intimately with the con-
tradictory extremes of market existence: once a consummate
buyer (as dandy), he is now forced to sell himself (as prostitute).
This private humiliation at the hands of his stepfather is
compounded by the virtually simultaneous public humiliation
of the democratic ideals of the Second Republic at the hands of
Emperor Napoleon III. Utter dismay at the mass-authoritarian
outcome of a purportedly democratic revolutionary tradition
(1789, 1830, 1848) prompts the repudiation of that tradition
and of romanticism as its penultimate cultural expression.
Modernism is constituted on that repudiation; and it continues
to inform our "modern structure of experience " as long as the
contradiction remains between the democratic promise and the
authoritarian realities of capitalist society.
Benjamin's and Lukacs's insights, valuable as they may be,
are vitiated by an overweening emphasis on identity. Benjamin
identifies Baudelaire in terms of a unified personality-type (the
melancholic), and collapses very different stages of development
into the unity of a single historical period. In a very revealing
phrase, Benjamin at one point says that "the shock experience
which the passer-by has in the crowd corresponds to what the
worker 'experiences' at his machine" (p. 134, my emphasis).
But he thereby privileges in the Baudelairean corpus and in
his own mode of analysis the very poetic mode associated
with romanticism that Baudelaire ultimately rejects.3
Similarly, Lukacs identifies writers with their position in an
economic process (reification), and functionalizes the unity of
Introduction 7
the literary text as representing the coherence of historical
development.
These identifications are not so much wrong as necessarily
incomplete, requiringfurther differentiation. The name "Baude-
laire" designates not a single personality or personality-type,
but a split subject occupying or manifesting a number of
different "personalities" and traversing two or more moments
of historical development. Such psychic splitting does not simply
"correspond" to the social conditions Benjamin cites in
explanation of the shock-defense, any more than it merely
reflects the process of reification to which Lukacs attributes
modernism: it also includes a complex of reactions to specific
historical experience and developments — the sting of poverty
and the lure of advertising in an increasingly commercial
culture, the auspicious overthrow of Louis-Philippe and the
scandalous rise to power of Napoleon III in a nascent
democracy, the rapid transformation of Paris and the dynamics
of modern urban life - whose effects are legible throughout the
Baudelairean corpus, even though history itself is nowhere
represented as such in the poetic works themselves. This study
thus answers the deconstructive challenge to produce a literary
history that is truly responsive to historical events, without
presuming that literary discourse faithfully represents a history
which takes place outside the text itself.4 Baudelaire's texts,
finally, are not unified but dispersed; the series of three
published poetry collections does not directly represent history,
but will be read in relation to and as part of a larger historical
development to be reconstructed - one of whose results is
precisely the modernist repudiation of linear-progressive his-
torical narration.
My aim, in a word, is to read the texts of Baudelaire in a
relation to their historical contexts that is metonymic rather
than metaphoric in nature, that seeks differences rather than
presupposing identity between them, that constructs an " absent
cause" (to invoke Althusser's term) - i.e. historical develop-
ments not represented in the texts - to account for changes
(relations of difference) within the texts.5 To this end I will focus
on the differences between the first and second editions of Les
Fleurs du Mai and on the differences between them and the prose
collection.6 These differences are not random: in response to a
host of personal and historical circumstances, specific changes
were made for the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai (including
but not limited to the removal of the six poems banned from the
first edition by the state); the Petits Po'emes en prose differentiates
itself from the verse collection by taking some of the same titles
and themes, but giving them very different treatment in prose:
the prose collection, to paraphrase Baudelaire, was to be the
Fleurs du Mai all over again - only different. And the orientation
given to these differences is a sometimes halting but nonetheless
insistent shift in Baudelairean poetics away from metaphor
toward metonymy.
Ever since Barbey d'Aurevilly's famous remark attributing a

"secret architecture" to Les Fleurs du Mai, Baudelaire schol-
arship has explored the question of the supposed structure of the
verse collection.7 Baudelaire's own characterization may be
more revealing: he spoke not of a structure with a secret
architecture but of a book "with a beginning and an end." 8
And it is a book whose final poem issues a ringing challenge to
explore the unknown in search of the new, to travel via the
medium of poetry. The figure of "The Voyage" (the title of the
final poem of the collection) combines two basic poetic
principles explored in the course of Les Fleurs du Mai: the
metonymy of time and the metonymy of space.
At the end of the "Spleen and Ideal" section, the entropic
gloom of "Spleen" culminates in "The Clock" ("L'Horloge"
LXXXVII), where unremitting time counts down "thirty-six
hundred times an hour" the meaningless seconds leading to
death. Time is depicted here metonymically, as a purely linear
succession of isolated moments, each signaling the poet's
imminent demise, unconjoined by any life-project, unredeemed
by any prospect of salvation. The " Tableaux Parisiens " section,
by contrast, situates the poet spatially, in metonymic proximity
to modern Paris. Poetry here depends on the chance encounters
that befall the poet who maintains unflinching contact with the
turbulent urban milieu. Traveling, of course, combines the
Introduction 9
temporal succession of moments with the spatial succession of
places: following Baudelaire, it would (via Rimbaud and Gide,
in Beckett, Butor, Robbe-Grillet) become one of the few
remaining touchstones of modernist narrative, a kind of last-
ditch, zero-degree plot structure when any more elaborate
pretext for narration would appear contrived and therefore
undesirable.
It is significant that all of these poems - " L e Voyage,"
"L'Horloge," and the "Tableaux Parisiens" section itself-
were added to the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai. They serve
to reinforce the predominance of metonymy that is already
legible in the rhetoric and organization of poems in the first
edition; or more accurately, they add a thematics of metonymy
for the second edition to the poetics of metonymy that already, if
somewhat more obscurely, informs the first. Important schol-
arship on the predominance of metonymy over metaphor in
Baudelaire's work has tended to distribute this opposition over
his two major collections, opposing the romantic, metaphoric
poetics of the verse collection to the modernist, metonymic
poetics of the prose collection.9 By focusing attention on the
changes Baudelaire made for the second edition of verse, I aim
to show that the departure from romanticism is already legible
in early poems of Les Fleurs du Mai, and that the move from the
stable oppositions of romanticism into the exhilarating un-
certainties of modernity is as central to the verse collection as it
is characteristic of the latter's relation to the prose collection.10
While the concept of metonymy enables us to trace the

development of Baudelairean poetics across the three major
collections, explanation of this trajectory depends on a concept
of "decoding" derived from the work of Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari. 11 The range and power of this term arise from
their transcription of diverse social, psychological, and cultural
phenomena into a historical, poststructuralist semiotics they
call "schizoanalysis." According to Deleuze and Guattari,
decoding is a basic feature of capitalism; the aim here is to
demonstrate its operation in texts and other cultural artifacts, in
individual psychodynamics, and in the socio-economic and
io Baudelaire and schizoanalysis
cultural dynamics of market society, simultaneously. This

introductory chapter outlines the functioning of decoding in
these three domains: the social, the psychological, and the
textual. The succeeding parts of the book then examine
Baudelaire's works in each of these domains, moving from the
textual (Part I: Poetics), through the psychological (Part II:
Psychopoetics), to the socio-historical (Part III: Sociopoetics).
At the same time, for the sake of exposition, our analysis will
move through the verse collection (Parts I and II) to the prose
collection (Part III) - even though both collections are marked
by historical context and equally affected by the metonymy of
decoding. In order to make intensive analysis of individual
poems manageable in an extensive treatment of the historical
evolution of Baudelairean poetics, I focus in Les Fleurs du Mai
almost exclusively (though not exhaustively) on the revisions
Baudelaire made for the second (1861) edition: the additions to
the cycle of poems devoted to beauty; the additions and re-
arrangement of poems at the end of the "Spleen and Ideal"
section; the inclusion of a new section entitled "Tableaux
Parisiens." From the Petits Poemes en prose, I have selected poems
that most clearly register the psychic splitting produced by
metonymic decoding in its characteristically modernist form. I
leave to the concluding chapter some methodological reflections
on another schizoanalytic category I have found especially
useful; there I reconsider the work of Baudelaire as an
" apparatus of registration " for the processes of decoding charac-
teristic of capitalist society at the emergence of modernism.
Decoding, in the sense it is used here, has nothing to do with
the process of translating an incomprehensible, "encoded"
message into a more familiar code so as to enable or improve
comprehension. It refers instead to processes which disrupt and
subvert the very functioning of codes altogether. Although
Deleuze and Guattari almost never employ the term "meton-
ymy," I have found it useful in bringing their notion of
"decoding" into simultaneous contact with the poetics and the
psychodynamics of Baudelaire's texts. Like "decoding," the
concept of metonymy cuts across various domains: I draw most
directly on the linguistic and psychoanalytic uses of the term
Introduction 11
developed in the work of Roman Jakobson and Jacques Lacan.
As the figure of travel in "Le Voyage" suggests, metonymy
proves useful in this regard because it involves both time and
space, both duration and context, both desire and reference.
As a poststructuralist semiotics, schizoanalysis accepts many
of the basic tenets of structuralism: the importance of language-
like codes of behavior and signification, the general priority of
social conditioning over individual expression (of langue over
parole) and of code/structure over message/substance. Its
jfro^structuralism lies in the denial that various codes ever "add
up " to compose a stable signifying structure or social order. The
point is not that behavior and practices are no longer
understood to be governed by structure, but that structures are
heterogeneous - de-centered and multiple. For poststructural-
ism, codes are not only internally conflicted and ultimately
incomplete, they also conflict among themselves, overlap and
leave interstices. For schizoanalysis, decoding is important
because it magnifies the interstices, illuminating and aggra-
vating the non-cumulative, unstable nature of social codes.
Schizoanalysis is at the same time a resolutely historical
semiotics: it does not merely participate in poststructuralism, it
also proposes to account for its emergence historically. Codes
are not always equally unstable or "undecidable": rather, they
are relatively unstable, and their degree of instability varies
historically. It is especially under capitalism, according to
schizoanalysis, that social codes become widely unstable,
enabling trajectories of decoding such as Baudelaire's to
intensify and proliferate.
SOCIAL DECODING
The inherent instability of codes is magnified under capitalism

because its social organization depends not on codes, but on the
"cash nexus" of the market. Codes are central to other modes
of production, where they serve as the very basis of social order.
They are of secondary importance under capitalism, because
here differentials between abstract, measurable quantities - the
basis of surplus-value — count for more than similarities between
sensible qualities - the basis of metaphor and of codes. Hence

the predilection for difference and metonymy in poststructu-
ralism, which is a critical perspective derived in large part from
the modernist and avant-garde cultural movements of nascent
market society to begin with. With the predominance of
exchange-value, decoded difference prevails over coded ident-
ity, as market society in Marx's phrase "strips the halo" from
previous forms of social intercourse, reducing them to more
strictly calculable, commercial concerns.12
Social decoding, as Fredric Jameson has remarked, has
certain affinities with what Max Weber called "rational-
i z a t i o n " - t h e process, epitomized in the Enlightenment, by
which the familiar world of experience is subjected to " rational"
explanation (science) and administration (bureaucracy), where
reason replaces superstition, induction and deduction replace
story-telling, quantity replaces quality, and so forth.13 The
distinction drawn by the English Enlightenment philosopher
John Locke between "primary" and "secondary" qualities
illustrates the process of decoding very aptly. The sensual
experience of the color called " r e d " has become in Locke's
empiricist view a mere "secondary " quality. The corresponding
"primary quality" is (in our sense of the term) not a quality at
all, but an abstract quantity: a range of the color-spectrum
determined by measuring the wave-lengths of the light reflected.
Operating in this case in the sphere of empirical science,
decoding replaces the experience of sensible qualities with
measurable quantities. As Weber suggests, while there may be a
gain in manipulability of the empirical world to be had through
"rationalized" attention to "primary" rather than "second-
ary" qualities, the price to be paid for such rationalization is the
"disenchantment" of the world we inhabit as sentient human
beings, which is rendered strictly meaningless in the process.
There are, however, two important differences between
rationalization and decoding. First of all, and in line with
Lukacs's similar rewriting of rationalization as " reification,"
decoding does not inhere in some properly sociological de-
velopment peculiar to institutions or culture, but in the all-
pervasive role of the market under capitalism. It is the market,
Introduction 13
as the very matrix of social organization under capitalism and
through its systematic subordination of use-value to exchange-
value, that fosters decoding by "constantly revolutionizing
production [and consumption] " in the pursuit of surplus-value.
In their analysis of the dynamics of the market, Deleuze and
Guattari distinguish three moments within the process named
by the single terms "rationalization" and "reification." De-
coding designates the "de-mystifying" operations entailed in
rationalization, the bracketing or subordination of meaning so
as to enable calculation. "Recoding" designates an attendant
process of re-endowing experience stripped of its "original"
meaning with some semblance of significance, whether that
take the form of rational explanation or something else.
(Recoding is a term Deleuze and Guattari rarely use themselves,
since they consider capitalism to be at bottom completely
meaningless; it proves indispensable, however, for the analysis
of literature and culture.) Underlying both decoding and
recoding lies the process of " axiomatization," which orches-
trates decoding and sponsors recoding according to the logic of
the capitalist economy.14
The first and still most fundamental forms of capitalist
decoding bear on labor and wealth. Industrial capitalism
presupposes a critical mass of workers divorced from any means
of gainful employment and a critical mass of wealth available
for gainful investment; it emerges when the basic capitalist
axiom conjoins the one decoded mass, of labor power needing
work, with the other: the mass of wealth to be invested as capital
in means of production. In the course of expansion, other
axioms are added: those of empirical science, linking technology
to continual improvement in efficiency of the means of
production; those of state policy and the judicial systems,
defining the legal status and relations offeree obtaining between
workers and private property; and so forth.
In Baudelaire's lifetime-the "take-off" period of French
industrial capitalism - decoding, axiomatization, and recoding
pervade the cultural sphere: the synthetic perspective of the
subscription newspaper written for a homogeneous audience of
like-minded subscribers, for instance, is decoded by the "ob-
jective" reporting of isolated facts in the mass-circulation

newspapers produced for the market and sold indiscriminately
to anonymous readers on the street.15 At the same time (with
textile manufacturing among the first sectors of the French
economy to become capitalist), fashion becomes a veritable
industry: henceforth advertising must continually recode con-
sumer preferences to stimulate retail trade and absorb in-
creasing quantities of mass-produced merchandise - what Bau-
delaire referred to as the "damaged goods of a good-for-nothing
age" ("produitsavariesd'unsiecle vaurien" "L'Ideal" [xvm],
1-2).
Due to contingent historical circumstances, the impact of the
market on mid nineteenth-century French society is particularly
sudden and severe. Napoleon's mass-levy armies not only
revolutionized early modern European warfare, they also
comprised the first proto-mass market for military suppliers and
outfitters (notably for uniforms). But the defeat of Napoleon of
course dispersed that market, and the Bourbon Restoration
then succeeded in slowing the conversion of military markets to
broader civilian ones in its efforts to restore landed wealth to its
former position of privilege over manufacturing and the
bourgeoisie. When the July Revolution installed the "Bourgeois
Monarchy" of Louis-Philippe in 1830, however, market forces
stifled under the Restoration burst forth and ran rampant:
"Henceforth, the bankers shall rule!" cried one new minister.16
The reaction of the French cultural elite to the rule of the
market is correspondingly acute: Flaubert remarks that "all of
society has been prostituted" (adding ironically, "but the
prostitutes themselves least of all"); before him, Balzac had
already made prostitution the general figure for emergent
capitalist social relations, as documented in La Come'die humaine.
Baudelaire's relations to the market are considerably more
complex than the reactionary Balzac's straightforward con-
demnation. For Baudelaire, the implacable subversion of an
older social order by the forces of the market registers as the
valorization of prostitution over and against all morality and
convention. This may amount simply to making the best of a
bad situation; but to the modernist, whether "The Voyage"
Introduction 15
leads through heaven or hell no longer matters - " Enfer ou
Ciel, qu'importe? / Au fond de l'lnconnu pour trouver du
nouveauV (cxxvi, 11. 143-44) - a s long as it leads to novelty
forever.
The second major difference between the concepts of ration-
alization/reification and decoding/recoding is that the latter
construe the process not thematically, as does Weber, nor
epistemologically, as does the Lukacs of " Reification and Class
Consciousness," but semiotically. Although the basic axioms of
capitalism are a-semiotic — they involve a calculus of dif-
ferentials among pure quantities — axiomatization is imbricated
on both sides with sign-systems: the ones it subverts in the
process of decoding, and the ones fabricated in moments of
recoding. A major advantage of using semiotic terms rather
than rationalization/reification is that they do not refer to
bureaucratic or economic processes alone: culture, too, is a
locus of decoding and recoding, and they are therefore
detectable in the psyche and in literary texts as well as in social
institutions. And while rationalization/reification does account
well for the tendency of the arts in market society to become
autonomous and progress each according to its own formal laws
of development, it does not account for the modernist re-
pudiation of modernity which gives force and direction to that
development. Such repudiation can best be understood as a
cultural ramification of the decoding inherent in modernity
itself: the aim of modernist formal innovation would in this light
be to accelerate the decoding unleashed by market forces so
radically as to prevent its ever being axiomatized and recoded
in the service of capital accumulation. (That capital has largely
succeeded in recuperating this gambit, and modernism to that
extent has failed, is as I have suggested a telling sign of our
postmodern condition.) One aim of the present study, in any
case, is to show how the notion of decoding can serve to
designate and explore the interrelations among phenomena
ranging from socio-economic processes, to psychodynamics, to
forms of textuality and poetics.
Once a critical threshold of decoding has been crossed, as it is
in the case of Baudelaire, the system of codes (or "socio-
symbolic order") comprising a culture implodes, and the binary

oppositions that once structured and sustained it no longer
hold: good and evil, base and noble, nature and culture, man
and woman, sacred and profane - all lose their stability and
henceforth float freely, subject to dizzying reversals and perverse
appropriations. Taking leave of movements such as roman-
ticism and realism, Baudelaire rails against the "esprit de
systeme" and proudly claims the right of self-contradiction; the
modernist will try to make the most of modern instability: his
works both exploit and aggravate it.17
Baudelaire's case epitomizes one important effect of the
collapse of socio-symbolic order: the referential function of
discourse becomes less completely mediated by a relatively
coherent set of codes. In a perfectly organized symbolic order
(were such a thing possible), all reference would pass through
the defiles of the established grid of signification or master-code;
all events, phenomena, experience would be understood ac-
cording to the accepted definitions of good and evil, real and
fictitious, and so forth. For better and for worse, decoding fosters
reference to reality against the grain or through the cracks of
social master-codes. A premodernist like Balzac bemoans the
loss of stable signification resulting from decoding (and in
retrospect appears on this issue to be, if not downright
reactionary, at least hopelessly out-dated); the reception
accorded modernists illustrates the obverse: the censorship
trials of Flaubert and Baudelaire himself, like the public
execration of works by Courbet and Manet, disclose the
generally hostile reaction to reference outside the accepted
aesthetic codes of Second-Empire France. 18
Of course, completely unmediated contact with reality would
be just as unproductive as a perfectly organized code is
impossible. Yet the goal of unmediated contact with reality is
the informing principle of positivism, which emerges not
coincidentally at just the same moment as literary modernism in
France. 19 Though in a conventionally opposed sphere of culture,
and aiming crucially for poetic rather than cognitive effects,
Baudelaire, too, eschews established aesthetic codes to make
reference to modern realities in some of his most charac-
Introduction 17
teristically modern works. The poetics of real reference in the
second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai will be examined in Parts 1
and 11, as it develops from the beauty cycle, through "Spleen
and Ideal," and into the "Tableaux Parisiens." Given the
modernist repudiation of direct historical representation, the
shifting dynamics of real reference in the poetry are considerably
illuminated by consideration (in Part 11) of the more pro-
grammatic statements Baudelaire made about reference and
modernity in his art criticism.
PSYCHOLOGICAL DECODING
The second major effect of the collapse of socio-symbolic order
is psychological rather than referential. As the coherence of the
socio-symbolic order succumbs to decoding, the elaboration of
personal codes in its place becomes possible and necessary; this
explains the importance of the term "recoding" for cultural
study, inasmuch as individuals (and groups) are forced or
enabled to compensate for the demise of comprehensive public
codes with local, private codes of their own devising. Baudelaire
(one among many) will thus place individual "temperament"
at the center of his understanding of contemporary art and
criticism. In the same vein, Michel Foucault takes the heroic
invention of self through its relation to the present moment of
history to be the characteristically modern attitude toward
modernity, citing Baudelaire precisely as a prime example.20
The analysis of psychodynamics in market society in terms of
decoding and recoding draws on the work of Jacques Lacan and
especially on Deleuze and Guattari's critique of orthodox
psychoanalysis in the Anti-Oedipus. For our purposes, two
moments of their dialogue with Lacan are particularly im-
portant. First of all, their translation of Lacan's structural-
linguistic version of psychoanalysis into fully semiotic terms
enables us to discuss socio-economic and psychological processes
in a single terminology, as we have said, inasmuch as Weber and
Lukacs have been translated into semiotic terms as well. Lacan's
linguistic symbolic order is ruled by a law of signification
governing opposition, equivalence, and substitution: its fun-
damental opposition is the difference between the sexes; the law

of equivalence prescribes identification with the parent of the
same sex, while that of substitution proscribes the parent of the
opposite sex, launching the subject on an endless search for
substitute objects, which Lacan calls the " metonymy of desire."
This symbolic structure and its operations are "guaranteed" by
the "nom/non-du-pere," (Lacan's intentional pun for the
name and the interdiction of the father), which establishes the
social bond by forcing desire away from the body of the mother
toward others and simultaneously translating the entire com-
plex governing desire into the realm of social signification. In
cases where the law of signification fails, particularly when the
"nom/non-du-pere" is denied (or "foreclosed"), the result
according to Lacan is "schizophrenia," a purely metonymic
form of desire not governed by the metaphoric grammar,
syntax, and lexicon of the symbolic order, linguistically con-
ceived. Operating outside the law, "schizophrenic" desire
would invest anything and everything, including the persons
forbidden by the incest taboo expressed in the laws of
equivalence, substitution, and opposition.21
Borrowed initially from the structural anthropology of Levi-
Strauss, the notion of a symbolic order once implied a matrix of
concrete social determinations.22 There exists, however, a
tension (if not an evolution) between the anthropological
connotations of the term and an increasingly mathematical or
purely logical use of it, in Levi-Strauss as well as in Lacan.
Deleuze and Guattari, at any rate, insist on retaining the
concrete, historical and anthropological sense of the "symbolic
order"; here, I use the term "socio-symbolic order" to
distinguish this sense from Lacan's own.
A socio-symbolic order, semiotically conceived, comprises a
more or less coherent set of social codes that govern opposition,
equivalence, and substitution, establish social bonds of various
kinds, and also affect social relations and communication,
behavior, and cognition. Socio-symbolic orders are not (or not
usually) guaranteed by the name-of-the-father, but by what we
might call various " figures-of-the-despot," ranging from totem
animals, to high priests and gods, to heads of state such as
Introduction 19
presidents and prime ministers.23 Schizophrenia, on this view,
derives from the failure of the set of codes comprising a socio-
symbolic order to maintain coherent rule over social relations,
behavior, and cognition. Operating outside or in between
socially established codes, with no fixed rules governing
equivalence or even metaphorical resemblance, the pure
metonymy of schizophrenic desire moves from one object to the
next, free to invest anything and everything, indiscriminately.
Schizophrenic desire may arise on occasion from the demise of
a certain figure-of-the-despot, but it becomes really widespread
only with the systematic decoding of social codes by the
capitalist market: hence the subtitle of Deleuze and Guattari's
two-volume study, Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
The logico-linguistic and socio-semiotic accounts of schizo-
phrenia do not necessarily contradict one another: presumably,
inhabiting a socio-symbolic order riddled by decoding would
make it more likely and far easier for individuals to deny
successfully the name and law of their fathers; conversely,
denial of one's father's law in a socio-symbolic order firmly
centered on a strong figure-of-the-despot would be unlikely to
free desire from the law to any significant extent.24 At any rate,
the second moment of Deleuze and Guattari's dialogue with
Lacan makes the priority of socio-historical over familial
determinations of the psyche absolutely clear. Lacan himself
had already insisted on the importance of Freud's concept of
Nachtraglichkeit, or deferred action. On this view, the child is not
"father to the man"; childhood events do not unilaterally
determine adult complexes: memories of childhood become
psychologically effective only ex post facto or "apres coup," as
Lacan says, in light of later experiences which alone endow
them with meaning. From this rejection of "infantile de-
terminism," Deleuze and Guattari conclude that it is not mere
"family romance," but the full socio-historical context that
ultimately determines psychic life.
To stipulate that a socio-symbolic order entails concrete
social determinations means that it is subject to historical
change: in this light, the case of Baudelaire is significant as an
example of the psychological impact of market decoding in mid-
nineteenth-century France. At issue are the disintegration of the

ego, of its various modes of processing everyday experience in
terms of both cultural and personal memory, and an attendant
openness to and/or threat of engulfment by the forces of the
unconscious and the real. Second-generation psychoanalyst
Otto Fenichel already adverted to the generalized "degener-
ation of the bourgeois personality" in the modern period, but
had no properly psychoanalytic means of explaining it.25
Granting the importance ascribed by Lacan to the mirror stage
and the ego's dependence on the Other, generalized ego-
disintegration as a historical trend must be understood in terms
of the disintegration of the socio-symbolic order itself.
One function of the symbolic Other or "master signifier"
within the psyche is to anchor the metaphoric axis of identi-
fications that constitute the sense of self and individual
personality by assigning meanings to things - especially, as in
the process of conventional therapy, to the events of one's life.
The ego is always constructed or "integrated," according to
Lacan, in line with and dependent on such an Other or
signifier: this is one way he defines neurosis, and the ego as a
neurotic formation. (Here, I mean the term "disintegration"
to designate the failure or reversal of this constitutive process of
ego-integration, not as some cataclysm befalling an originally
solid entity from without.) In Lacan's Oedipal-family meta-
phor, of course, it is with respect to the "name-of-the-father"
that the ego is constituted; for us, however, the figure-of-the-
despot fulfills such a function - but does so only under certain
historical conditions. For the modern period, the so-called
"death of God" - or better still, concrete events like the actual
death of Louis XVI during the Great Revolution (1793), or the
sacking of the royal palace and the destruction of the throne
during the Revolution of 1848 - these imply the collapse of the
socio-symbolic order whose center the despot occupied or
symbolized, and a corollary weakening of the socio-symbolic
basis for ego-integration.
Ego-integration is socially reinforced, according to Lacan, by
entry into language and the symbolic order, which overlays on
top of the recognition-scene of the mirror stage another, quite
Introduction 21
different (though equally alienating) form of identification: the
duplication of self-recognition in the universe of social sig-
nification via investment of the first-person pronoun-shifter " I "
and the imprimatur of a proper name. " I am Charles
Baudelaire" is in principle a fundamental assertion of self-
identification, as metaphoric equivalence is (im) posed between
the two terms by the copulative predicate " to be " in the present
indicative. Certainly the statement " I am King Louis XVI, son
of Louis XV, legitimate heir to the throne of France" — with the
copulative predicate linking the shifter to a proper name
magnified by a title and followed by additional metaphoric
appositives - constitutes an individual identity in fixed relation
to a certain form of socio-symbolic order, indeed at its very
center. Here the symbolic construction of personal identity is
definitive and lends it supreme stability.26
In modern society with its decoded symbolic order, however,
individual personality is largely imaginary, based not on firm
socio-symbolic coordinates, but on the "private" fixations of
the neurotic ego. Imagine Baudelaire speaking in place of Louis
X V I : " I am Charles Baudelaire, son of... Caroline Defayis,
stepson of Jacques Aupick, son of long-dead Joseph-Francois
Baudelaire (and recently deprived of his legacy by my step-
father!), heir apparent to... the mantle of Victor Hugo, poet-
laureate of France?" It is not clear what kinds of metaphoric
identifications are possible in such circumstances, nor whether
diverse identifications will add up, come into conflict, or cancel
one another out.
The impact on individual psychology of the absence of a
stable symbolic Other and the dissolution of codes in market
society can be assessed in terms of decoding and recoding. In
most cases, severe decoding produces trauma, for codes not only
constrain, they also protect the psyche. As their coherence
wanes, the psyche suffers contact with a decoded, completely
meaningless "real" — Lacan's term for what lies completely
outside all codes and signification, whether socio-centric (the
symbolic register) or ego-centric (the imaginary register).
Taken in an absolute sense, any attempt to represent the real as
such is of course doomed to failure: representation inevitably
endows its object with meaning. Nevertheless, much of Baude-

laire's literary work, as Benjamin was the first to recognize, is an
attempt to develop poetic vehicles suited to registering the
shock-experience of the real that is characteristic of modern
market society — the moment at which, for example, the poet
"stumbles upon words as upon paving-stones" ("Trebuch[e]
sur les mots comme sur les paves," "Le Soleil" [LXXXVII], 1. 7).
Benjamin identified "Spleen" hyperconsciousness as one such
vehicle, but Baudelaire experiments with at least two others,
whose evolution we will trace through his art criticism, in the
"Tableaux Parisiens" and in the Petits Poemes en prose. If a body
of poetry can in this context be considered to be, like an
extended dream, an attempt to develop ex postfacto the defenses
required to protect the psyche from some traumatic real event,
the trauma in Baudelaire's case was the coup d'etat of Napoleon
III, around which his published collections may be said to
revolve in a desperate attempt to exorcise its dismaying shock-
value.
Far more common than poetry, however, as a means of
managing decoded contact with the real, is the process of
recoding, which provides defense against the real through the
constitution of personality in the imaginary register. Here
again, Benjamin has identified one such personality: the
romantic poet-personality of the "Ideal." But there are others
- the poet of self-lacerating evil, the poet of cynical self-
distantiation, and so forth - whose evolution we will also trace
through the series of published collections. The differences
among these various figures are important because they show
that the imaginary personalities compensating for the decoded
symbolic Other in market society are themselves always
susceptible to decoding in turn: the heroic invention of self in
modernity is a Sisyphean task, a perpetual reinvention of self as
previous "styles" of self become outmoded and are abandoned.
We will see that Baudelaire's evolution from romanticism to
modernism is comprised of cycles of decoding accompanied by
intense contact with the real, alternating with cycles of recoding
accompanied by withdrawal from the real into the construction
of personality.
Introduction 23
Social life under capitalism is in general composed of such
cycles of decoding and recoding, which are ultimately linked,
howsoever distantly, with the decoding and recoding rhythms
of capital itself. Since capital involves a calculus of differential
relations among pure quantities rather than coded relations
among qualities, however, it does not provide (and cannot
tolerate) a symbolic Other valid for society as a whole, so
recoding takes place under the aegis of other Others, instead —
ranging from parents, teachers, and priests to rock stars, military
officers, and elected officials. In Baudelaire's case, too, despite
or perhaps because of his intense experimentation with decoded
forms of experience, imaginary personalities arise that are
dependent on figures which effectively occupy the place of the
Other for him and sanction the construction of an ego - if only
for a while. In an extraordinary psycho-biographical study of
Baudelaire, Michel Butor has identified these figures and calls
them "intercessors." 27 I refer to these Others as historical
Others, in order to stress that they arise from the field of history
(just as Napoleon III did), even though the psychodynamic
relation Baudelaire entertains with them in the process of
recoding is, of course, an imaginary one.
The series of figures Butor identifies are Baudelaire's long-
time mistress Jeanne Duval, then the people of Paris in 1848,
and finally, fellow poet Edgar Allan Poe. These historical
Others preside over Baudelaire the romantic, Baudelaire the
revolutionary, and Baudelaire the modernist, respectively.
Butor's study is unusual and particularly significant for us
because it avoids construing these Others on the Lacanian-
linguistic model of the name-of-the-father: instead, Baudelaire's
historical Others are shown to include quite diverse social
entities — momentary as well as lasting, women as well as men,
groups as well as individuals — with which Baudelaire entertains
very different kinds of relationships. The relationship to Poe is
significantly different from the other two, in that under his
aegis, the two earlier relationships are repudiated, transformed,
and reincorporated only under disavowal by Baudelaire the
modernist. This break with the earlier personae in favor of a
modernism sanctioned by Poe is precisely the move that leads
Baudelaire beyond the shock-defense of the early works identi-

fied by Benjamin to the psychic splitting characteristic of the
prose poems.
The concept of splitting employed here is based on the work
of Otto Kernberg as well as Lacan, both of whom - though
belonging to quite different branches of post-Freudian psycho-
analysis - draw directly (and selectively) on the work of
Melanie Klein. Of course, Freud himself occasionally used the
term Spaltung (in his work on fetishism, most notably) but he
seemed somewhat ill at ease exploring what he sometimes called
the " paraphrenic" afflictions - those not based on repression
and symptom-formation, and therefore very different from
Oedipal neurosis. Klein drew attention to the near-total
disorganization of the psyche at the earliest, pre-Oedipal stages
of psychic development, and particularly to a lack of object
constancy resulting from the splitting of objects into disparate
"good" and " b a d " versions. The one-sided nature of such
partial object representations derives from the lack of synthesis
of the life and death instincts that is characteristic of this stage.
The function of the subsequent "depressive" stage of de-
velopment, in her view, is to unify diverse part-object represen-
tations into whole objects, which entails a recognition of their
" ambivalent" nature (hence the depression associated with this
stage), and depends on achieving a synthesis of the life and
death instincts and their derivatives. In drawing on Klein's
work, Lacan and Kernberg develop the core notion of "split-
ting" in different directions.28
Lacan distinguishes two developmental stages within the
general notion of " splitting." He calls the immature psyche in
which part-object representations predominate the "corps
morcele" - the body in pieces - in order to emphasize that the
infant at this point lacks control of the body and its drives and
has no coherent self-image. This is precisely what is obtained,
according to Lacan, in the "mirror stage" (his term for Klein's
"depressive stage"), when its reflection gives the maturing
infant a sense of its own coherence as a "whole object." On
Lacan's view, however (and here he departs sharply from the
Kleinian perspective), this coherent mirror-image of a whole
Introduction 25
ego is an imaginary fiction: the concept of the "split subject"
(or "barred subject," usually designated by " $ " and aligned
with the bar of repression separating signifier and signified,
designated by "S/s") signals the fundamental incompatibility
of disparate drives with any function of unification or mastery
attributable to the ego. Lacan's emphasis on the predominance
of part-objects and split subjectivity sheds light on the evolution
from romanticism to the alienated realism of the "Tableaux
Parisiens": in its development beyond and repudiation of the
nostalgic and recuperative metaphoric poetics of " Correspon-
dances" in the imaginary register, Baudelaire's metonymic
poetics deconstructs the protective stability of both social codes
and lyric enunciation as an approach to registering decoded
contact with the real.
Where Lacan emphasizes the sheer diversity of part-objects
and the split between body and ego, Kernberg focuses on the
disparity between "good" and " b a d " part-objects within the
pre-Oedipal psyche. What he calls "borderline conditions"
(from their uncertain location somewhere on a border between
neurosis and psychosis) are cases in which such disparity is so
great as to prevent the synthesis of part-objects into whole-
object representations altogether. This betrays a failure to
synthesize life and death instinct drive-derivatives under the
aegis of the ego, which therefore fails to cohere. Primitive
splitting based in pre-Oedipal relations can then later become a
defense mechanism, when it serves to separate off and isolate
from one another the incompatible facets of an incoherent self.
Precisely this defense characterizes the prose poem collection:
Baudelaire's ultimate identification with Poe secures for him an
inviolable position of narcissism, enabling him to isolate
threatening images of former selves (the romantic and the
revolutionary, the prostitute and the dandy) by keeping them at
a safe distance via the presence of the prose narrator.
Lacan and Kernberg both emphasize the disintegration of
the self: a failure to consolidate a coherent mirror-image of self
and whole representations of objects; and a corollary reversion
to part-object relations fueled by drive-derivatives of the poorly
amalgamated life and death instincts, and hence oscillating
wildly between indiscriminate fusion and violent antagonism.

But what Lacan sees as a universal, ontological condition (the
"split subject"), Kernberg sees as a particular type of clinical
case (the "borderline condition"): here, by contrast, psychic
disintegration is considered neither a universal condition nor an
individual case, but a preeminently historical phenomenon
fostered by social decoding. And it is precisely the interface
between Kernberg and Lacan regarding split subjectivity as a
primordial condition and a mechanism of defense that sheds so
much light on the dynamics of Baudelaire's most striking prose
poems and enables us to situate them relative to the earlier verse
collections in his trajectory from romanticism to modernism.
Crucial to that trajectory is Baudelaire's passage through
masochism. Much has been written about Baudelaire and
masochism, but also about Baudelaire and sadism - testimony
to the importance and severity of psychic splitting in his work.29
Here, the narrative structure typical of the works of Baudelaire's
popular contemporary, Sacher-Masoch, enables us to under-
stand the role of a certain masochism in propelling Baudelaire
out of romanticism into psychic splitting and modernism, in
connection with the defeat of the Second Republic by Napoleon
III. 30 But whereas Masoch's stories provide narrative closure by
answering the betrayal of romantic ideals with bitter (ap-
parently "sadistic") revenge, Baudelairean modernism leaves
the story unresolved, with the prose poem narrator entertaining
a wide variety of often undecidable relations with repudiated
former selves, ranging from the sympathetic to the mortally
cruel. It therefore falls to us to reconstruct a historical trajectory
left intentionally incomplete in the published work, a trajectory
which leads from romanticism through Masochian masochism
into the split subjectivity and partial self-repudiation typical of
modern market society, which I will call borderline narcissism.31
It is in this psychic configuration that Baudelaire's prose
poem narrator manages for one thing to register the split
between dandy and prostitute, between buyer and seller that is
so fundamental to modern life in market society, and yet occupy
a position over and above that split - a position Jacques Attali
calls that of the "designer" or "programmer." 32 The market
Introduction 27
function of programming is to bestow semiotic value in a
context of generalized decoding which renders value entirely
mobile, and to bend its perpetual definition and redefinition to
the service of economic gain. Modernism and advertising may
never have seemed so close — but as Baudelaire shows, they
always have been. Borderline narcissism reflects or supports the
programmer's ability to acknowledge and yet preside over the
conflict between buying and selling that characterizes market
society.
For another thing, borderline narcissism enables the mod-
ernist narrator to observe from a safe distance images of former
selves that have been repudiated. And what Baudelairean
modernism repudiates and suppresses from the published record
is revolution - the Revolution of 1848 - and more specifically
the promise of a revolution that failed and the failure of a
revolution that had promised so much, but ended with the
definitive institution of authoritarian market rule in France.
Psychic splitting in borderline narcissism is Baudelaire's only
means of making the intensity of dismay at the revolution's
failure bearable, given the intensity of his former enthusiasm for
its promise.
The modernist repudiation of narrative and suppression of
history open a gap that must be acknowledged between what
Baudelaire lived and what is registered in his poetry collections.
It is thus imperative for us to distinguish between Baudelaire's
own evolution from romantic to revolutionary to modernist, on
one hand, and the development of the poetry appearing in the
published works themselves, on the other. These two series are
not identical; they are different, yet related: our aim will be to
explore the complexities of that relation as fully as possible,
without reducing one to the other.
The series of historical Others comprises Jeanne Duval, the
people of Paris in 1848, and Edgar Allan Poe —figureswhich
give rise in turn to Baudelaire the melancholy romantic, the
revolutionary, and the borderline modernist as programmer. A
corresponding three-term series of "poetic Others" (were such
to exist) might include nature, the judge, and the modern
aristocrat. No doubt the most striking difference in this "poetic "
series is the appearance, in place of the revolutionary crowd, of

the figure of conscience or the judge, by which substitution the
suppression of revolution constituting Baudelairean modernism
is accomplished. Nature as "poetic Other" would then cor-
respond to Baudelaire the romantic, and the paradoxical figure
of the modern aristocrat to Baudelaire the programmer. But the
development of the poetry is not governed by a series of discrete
Others in this way; it is far more complicated than that: it can
be better approximated in terms of a series of cycles of decoding
and recoding that comprise as it were the basic rhythm of
evolution of the published collections.
In a first cycle, the ambient decoding of the socio-symbolic
order has undermined the social basis for identity-formation,
exposing the modern individual to real trauma. In defense
against the threat of the decoded real, the poet recodes present
perception with past memories of a deeper self, in a nostalgic
attempt to shore up a compensatory imaginary identity outside
society in romantic harmony with nature. This stance informs
the early poems of Les Fleurs du Mai, and is epitomized in
" Correspondances." But as the poet's object of attention
switches from the pristine beauty of nature to the sensual beauty
of woman, beginning with "La Beaute," stabilizing memory is
decoded by volatile fantasy, which disintegrates the objects of
poetic perception along with the fantasizing self. Chapter 2
compares the metaphoric poetics of "Correspondances" with
the metonymic poetics of "La Beaute," and then traces the
increasing predominance of metonymic poetics, particularly in
the poems added for the second edition of the collection.
The cycle of decoding begun with "La Beaute" reaches its
apogee, though in a diametrically opposed mood, in the
"Spleen" poems, where the poetic subject and objects are so
decoded as to appear completely meaningless, and the poetic
act ultimately becomes an anti-lyric gesture of empty reference
to the real. A second phase of recoding then occurs, at the end
of the "Spleen and Ideal" section, which far from joining past
with present in a self at home in nature, ironically opposes desire
and prohibition, act and judgment, instead. Secretly defending
himself from the exhilarating enthusiasms and shattering
Introduction 29
disappointments of the revolution, the poet revels in evil,
consciously pursuing wrong for the sake of the very punishment
it incurs from his own super-ego. The irony characteristic of this
phase of recoding produces not the stable, recuperated self of the
early poems, but a subject that virtually disappears between the
pulsions of desire and the sanctions prohibiting them. Chapter
3 examines how the revisions for the second edition transform
the ending of the " Spleen and Ideal" section to accentuate both
the decoded metonymy of time (in the "Spleen" poems and
"L'Horloge") and the recoded self-flagellation of evil (in
" L'Heautontimoroumenos " and "LTrremediable").
The "Tableaux Parisiens" section then introduces a third
phase of decoding, transforming the confident civics lessons of
contemporary pro to-"realist" or documentary genres (the
"physiognomies" and "tableaux de Paris") into a fruitless
search for meaning in the modern city. As in "Spleen,"
decoding empties reference of meaning, but here the dreary
monotony of spleen time is replaced by the cyclicity of day and
night, and the real context appears as contemporary Paris.
Chapters 4 and 5 examine the evolution of Baudelaire's art
criticism in connection with the "Tableaux Parisiens" in order
to shed additional light on the poet's negotiations of the
paradoxes of real reference in modernity. In defense against the
agonizing loss of meaning in the city, the poet turns inward on
himself in the second half of the "Tableaux Parisiens," and a
third form of recoding takes place. Instead of the ironic doubling
of evil-doing and conscience, recoding now involves the cynical
doubling of self-observation, as the poet examines his own
desires, realizes they are delusory, but decides they are
nonetheless better than the alternative, which is death. This
resigned accommodation sets the stage for the new ending of Les
Fleurs du Mai which invokes an endless journey beyond death as
the ultimate realization of decoding in both time and space.
In the Petits Poemes en prose, the ultimate embodiment of
Baudelairean modernism, there are no cycles: linear narrative
and history have been rejected in favor of haphazard con-
glomeration and the freedom to chose at random among self-
contained prose poems. Here decoding and recoding function as
it were simultaneously, rather than cyclically. Chapters 6 and

7 show that the former identities of the poet in commercial
culture have been splintered by decoding, but that the
fragments are nevertheless retained and put in perspective
through recoding by the narrator, whose defense against the
market is to stand apart and observe its ruthless operations with
as much distance and reserve as can be mustered. It is in this
configuration that Baudelairean modernism approaches, even
as it reflects on, the dynamics of programming crucial to
capitalist culture.
TEXTUAL DECODING
In order to link the insights of psychoanalysis to the texture of

individual poems and collections of poetry, we must consider
what structural linguistics and poststructuralist discourse analy-
sis (principally the work of Jakobson and Lacan) contribute to
the specifications of decoding and recoding, metonymy and
metaphor. The point of departure, of course, is Saussure, who
founded modern linguistics by distinguishing diachronic from
synchronic linguistics, and within the latter distinguished parole
from langue, individual acts of speech from the language-system
that makes them possible. The language-system according to
Saussure was in turn composed of "paradigmatic" and "syn-
tagmatic" relations, the former involving sets of language-units
associated with one another by some similarity of meaning or
form, the latter involving the combination of language-units
into longer sequences. This may have made a satisfactory basis
for structural analysis of the language-system itself, but did not
prove very satisfactory for the analysis of actual discourse. The
founding gesture opposing a self-contained language-system to
individual acts of speech amounted, according to Derrida, to a
metaphysics of structure and a metaphysics of speech.33 Saus-
sure, the protostructuralist, imagined that langue existed inside
the mind, where individuals would use it to execute speech-acts
(and corresponding acts of comprehension); the poststruc-
turalist break with metaphysics occurs with the realization that,
rather than having the language-system inside us, we exist inside
Introduction 31
it. This I take to be one important sense of the Lacanian dictum,
"there is no meta-language," and of his insistence that the ego
forms always in dependence on the Other.
Poststructuralist discourse analysis focuses on the actual
process of utterance rather than on the language-system as an
abstraction, and hence translates Saussure's paradigmatic and
syntagmatic relations into the processes of "selection" and
"combination" that comprise the production of discourse.
Utterance is thus composed of two axes of discourse that Roman
Jakobson has named the "metaphoric" and the "metonymic"
(which should not be confused with the figures of speech of the
same names).34 The metaphoric axis supports the process of
selecting, from among an indefinite number of (grammatically,
lexically, morphologically, phonologically) similar terms, one
specific term to occupy a given position in the spoken chain. It
is thus based on identity or equivalence among terms as defined
by the storehouse of the language-system functioning "in
absentia" (as Saussure put it) "outside" the linear time of
utterance itself. The metonymic axis, by contrast, sustains the
process of combining different terms contiguously to form a
chain of signification "within" time, i.e. along the unfolding or
disseminated duration of utterance. The metaphoric axis is thus
a function of the language-system, and appears to exist as a
given, outside of time, in contrast to the metonymic axis which
is precisely the sequentiality of actual discourse as it is produced
in context and through time.
The two axes of discourse, Jakobson goes on to explain with
reference to his own studies of aphasia and in terms of C. S.
Peirce's pragmatic semiotics, " provide each sign with two sets of
interpretants... the code and the context" (p. 75). This marks
a crucial disjuncture between structural linguistics, with its
focus on the code as precondition for speech, and poststructu-
ralist discourse analysis, which examines the actual conditions
of language-use in context. For as a structuralist, Saussure
construes the linguistic sign in terms of value rather than
meaning: a term's differential value within the language-system
is defined as the intersection of all the paradigmatic and
syntagmatic relations it entertains with the other terms of the
system; any question of reference is quietly excluded from the

very start.35 Jakobson, by contrast, considers signs as they are
used in context, a process governed by extra-linguistic (what we
are calling fully "semiotic") codes as well as by the strictly
linguistic code of the language-system itself.36 Two important
consequences follow.
First of all, given what Jakobson calls the bipolar composition
of language, the opposite of determinate meaning is not
meaninglessness, chaos, the abyss, and so forth (which are
merely contraries of meaning): the opposite of sense is ref-
erence.37 And the vexing problem of reference is henceforth to
be construed in two different ways. Conceived of metaphori-
cally, i.e. in terms of equivalence or identity, reference equals
representation: the sign captures the "essence" of its referent;
or better yet, the meaning of the referent is "the same as" the
meaning of the sign: M r = M s . Metaphoric reference pre-
supposes that, as interpretants, code and context are funda-
mentally or potentially one, that they are or can be identical,
thereby enabling an accurate or "realistic" representation of
reality in discourse. Such is the mirage of the metaphysics of
realism, that a final adequation of context and code is possible.
Conceiving of reference metonymically, by contrast, installs
some specific function, rather than equivalence, between sign
and referent: M r (f) M s . The two are not imagined to be the
same, but are understood to be willfully related to one another
in a specific way (an epistemological position that has come to
be known generally as "constructivism"). The code and the
context are not one, and cannot be made identical; the difference
between them must be acknowledged, even when specific sub-
codes are devised (as we are doing here) for the purpose of
reconstructing particular aspects of the context in knowledges.
The real, to paraphrase Lacan along with Wittgenstein, cannot
be represented, being that which lies beyond signification; and
what we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence:
contrasted with the metaphysics of metaphoric reference,
metonymic reference implies thorough-going epistemological
irony.38
The second major consequence of analyzing signs in use in
Introduction 33
actual discourse rather than in terms of their value in the
language-system is paradoxically that, although code and
context cannot on any one occasion be presumed or made
identical in order to represent reality in discourse, nevertheless
the code comes from nowhere other than previous uses of
discourse in context. The code, in other words, is not meta-
physically grounded in Platonic forms, nominalist essences, or
structuralist structures, but arises historically from past oc-
casions of the "successful" production of meaning. A "sedi-
ment" of meaning, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, accrues to the
signs of a code due to their repeated use in contexts past.39 This
places crucial emphasis on the role of memory — both individual
and "collective," i.e. sedimented in the code — for the successful
production of meaning in utterance.
When someone hears the statement "This is Christmas," for
example, a host of recollections arise that endow both the sign
for and the experience of Christmas with meaning. Some of the
recollections may involve actual experiences of the auditor,
others what has been read or heard in stories or advertising
jingles-it makes little difference: the textual or experiential
memory-chains converging on the sign "Christmas" in large
part constitute its meaning for the auditor. Again, the meaning
so constituted is not to be confused with what Saussure calls the
"value" of the signifier <(Christmas> considered as an object
of linguistic study, which involves differential relations with
other signifiers. It is the result instead, as Wittgenstein insists, of
repeated use of that sign in social context. The same is true, of
course, of any sign, not just names of holidays: a sign's perceived
meaning will derive in large part from its location in a
metaphoric memory-chain of previous uses in appropriate
contexts. The statement "That is a pipe" will suggest a certain
meaning to, say, plumbers on the basis of the memory-chains
that comprise their (professional) identity, and a different
meaning to smokers based on the metaphoric memory-identi-
fications they make with the term.
Two words of caution regarding the importance of memory
for discourse production and reception are necessary. For one
thing, as suggested by the poly valence of the term "pipe" in the
foregoing illustration, an individual's own memory never equals
that of the "collective memory" registered in the social code;
instead, each individual's memory constitutes a specific version
of or stance toward the "collective memory" sedimented in the
code. Or rather, collective memory simply does not exist: the
social code is all there is, existing as an "absent cause" only
insofar as it gets embodied diversely in the speech-acts and
memories of countless individuals and discourses disseminated
in time and space. This contributes to the sense in which we live
strictly inside social codes rather than having them inside us; in
which, as Lacan puts it, there is no meta-language: all we have
as ground for the socio-symbolic codes enabling speech-acts are
other speech-acts. This is also why for Lacan the "symbolic
order" we inhabit is ultimately empty, radically de-centered -
not really an order or structure at all, but only a presumption of
order and structure based on a mistaken, imaginary mis-
construction of the name-of-the-father, the Other, the phallus,
and so on.
Not only do individuals' memory-chains differ, and thus
never " add up " to a fully structured or centered socio-symbolic
order, but even where there is considerable overlap in memory-
chains and hence general agreement about meaning, the
contexts to which discourse refers are always different, specific,
subject to change. So even the conventional meanings sedi-
mented in social codes, though derived from previous "ap-
propriate" uses in context, are never guaranteed to match the
irreparable contingency of any actual context. Imagine a
smoker in the context of a Magritte exhibit: confident of the
match between his own memory-chains and the metaphoric
axis of the shared code, he recognizes the object of representation
and seesfitto declare "That is a pipe." But he thereby overlooks
the specific means of representation. Someone more canny about
metonymic reference might well reply "That's not a pipe: that's
a picture of a pipe!" 40 To put the point another way: given the
demise of the metaphysics of representation, the sediment of
meaning comprising the socio-symbolic order is understood to
be constitutively incapable of representing a real context in any
complete or definitive way; in a decoded symbolic order, one is
Introduction 35
never prepared for the shock of the new. This, I take it, explains
the appeal for Lacan of the image of the Mobius strip: we are
irremediably consigned to the contingency of a given context,
which can nevertheless be processed only in the terms of an
already-established symbolic code. Reference to code and
reference to context are equally and as it were reciprocally
unstable. Cognizant of such conditions, discursive recon-
structions of historical reality cautiously and self-consciously
adopt ironic modes of reference that are avowedly partial, in
both senses of the term: incomplete - acknowledging the
uneliminable difference of the real, and also interested —
representing the interests of those doing the reconstruction as
well as the reality being reconstructed. Baudelaire's "Tableaux
Parisiens" aspire to such a metonymic mode of referentiality; so
does this study.
Jakobson and Lacan thus transform Saussure's paradigmatic
or associative relations within the linguistic code into the
metaphoric chains of identifications in individual memory,
discourse, and experience - identifications that are dependent
on and formed strictly in relation to the metaphoric axis of the
socio-semiotic code, in dependence on the Other of the symbolic
order. This striking transformation enables us to understand
recognition as indistinguishably a linguistic and a psychological
event, as when an infant "thinks" "Ah-ha, that's the breast,"
or an adult (looking in the mirror) says "That's me" or " I t is
I, Charles Baudelaire." However powerful a concept and
experience recognition may be, the speaking subject's ineluc-
table dependence on the symbolic Other reinforces the sense in
which human beings exist only and always within a symbolic
order that preexists, envelops, and overdetermines them.
Althusser has named the subjective and ideological aspect of
identity-formation in recognition " interpellation"-the pro-
cess whereby the very sense of self is forcibly produced in
relation to the Other of the symbolic order.41 This has advanced
our understanding of the founding psychological mechanism of
ideology considerably, but it is nevertheless still too narrowly
linguistic and Lacanian: what we are calling the socio-symbolic
order comprises, in addition to an Other or Others, an ensemble
of social codes in and through which subjectivity is lived. And

especially for capitalist society, in the absence of a single, stable
Other, even more important than fixed codes in the constitution
and psychodynamic effects of the socio-symbolic order are what
we might call its "forms of semiosis" - what we have described
as the processes of decoding and recoding. Beyond the existence,
or absence, of a symbolic Other, then, the basic discursive
elements of a socio-symbolic order of codes will for our purposes
include:
(1) an ensemble of metaphoric relations, as embodied for
instance in dictionaries and thesauruses, of which the
clearest expression is the copulative assertion of identity or
equivalence: M 1 = M 2 ;
(2) an ensemble of combinatory relations, as exemplified in
syntactical structures such as subject-predicate, and of
which cause-and-effect relations are a characteristic
expression;
(3) an ensemble of binary oppositions, most often structured in
value-hierarchies, including (among others) man/woman,
sacred/profane, and nature/artifice.
Within a social context so defined, decoding tends to undermine
all metaphoric relations, so that identity, equivalence and
socially sanctioned substitution lose their stability. Decoding
also disrupts the value-hierarchy of binary oppositions, of which
the most visible instance in Baudelaire is no doubt good versus
evil. With respect to combinatory relations, decoding in
Baudelaire has relatively little effect on syntax per se (whose
dissolution awaits the pen of Mallarme); on the contrary, the
de-stabilization of metaphoric relations in Baudelaire's poetry
brings to the fore metonymic relations of all kinds, including
cause-and-effect and transitive relations generally.
In much the same way, Jakobson's transformation of struc-
tural linguistics into discourse analysis also foregrounds the
metonymic axis, situating the actual use of language in time and
context, and thus in history - a quintessentially Baudelairean
move if there ever was one! In Lacan, moreover, the metonymic
axis not only sustains the unfolding of discourse over time, it also
Introduction 37
embodies the motivation of desire, driving discourse onward
toward conclusion. Discourse becomes not just an allegory but
an instance of desire, of its peripeties and its satisfactions. While
the "metonymy of desire" propels discourse forward, the
metaphoric axis supports what Lacan calls " points de capiton,"
where expectations created earlier are met by the successful
alignment and identification of memory-chains with the codes
of the symbolic order in moments of recognition.42 The result is
that the utterance finally "makes sense," and a kind of
discursive orgasm or sense of satisfaction is achieved.
This is for Lacan ultimately a neurotic form of satisfaction -
not because it is discursive rather than real, but rather because
the putative identity of codes and of individuals alike upon
which the satisfaction of closure depends represents an im-
aginary fiction, if not the imaginary fiction par excellence. Given
the perpetual disparity between context and code, desire in
discourse is expelled from any metaphoric adequation of
signifier with signified, and in reality from any metaphoric
adequation of sign with referent, as from some epistemological
Garden of Eden or mother's breast, forever obliged to seek
vainly for substitutes over time, but also in space, where objects
are sought after in the real, yet are lost as real the moment they
are recognized in the symbolic or the imaginary register. This is
the sense in which metonymy engages discourse in both time
and space, both duration and context, both desire and reference,
simultaneously. Metaphor defends the psyche against such
engagement by identifying the sense of self, a fixed reality, and
univocal meaning through the construction of a comfortable,
integrated ego and a world of familiar, recognizable objects,
both based on stable, coherent social codes. But in the absence,
weakness or instability of the metaphoric axis of these codes,
metonymy subverts and defies the identities of integration and
recognition. At the limit designated as "schizophrenia,"
decoding frees metonymic engagement from all preconceived
and imposed standards of identity, opposition, and substitution,
leaving questions of meaning, self, and reality open to endless
experimentation and reinvention. Such, for better and for
worse, is the impact of market decoding in modernity.
Although no one-to-one correlation exists between the axes of

discourse and specific figures of speech, one axis or the other can
predominate in a given discourse or discourse-genre, and such
predominance can have significant ideological implications.43
Metaphoric discourse tends to be metaphysical, and its domi-
nant tropes organic. It is based on an essentializing syntax
involving intransitive, copulative predication and stipulative
definition: " this is a pipe," " that is evil," or "this means that."
Copulative predication is a direct expression of the metaphoric
axis - which helps explain the prevalence of the verb "to be,"
of thematics of being and essences, and of metaphor as trope in
metaphoric poetics. And metaphor as trope represents the
epitome of metaphoric discourse, in that it suppresses the
predicative copula "is," and thereby makes the essential
equivalence between compared terms all the stronger for being
simply posited, not expressed. (Nearly all figures of speech
depend ultimately on a metaphoric relation of substitution: this
[figural sense] means that [literal sense], Mf = M1.) Metonymic
discourse, by contrast, favors transitive predication, and in it
mechanical tropes tend to predominate. It is less a matter of this
being that than of this having that (possession), of this being
more or less than that (comparisons of degree), of this doing that
(action), of this causing that (causality), o r - more generally-
of this affecting that in some way (effectivity). In this light, the
evolution from a metaphoric to a metonymic poetics in a major
historical figure such as Baudelaire is likely to have important
ideological implications.
But poststructuralist literary and cultural criticism has rarely
brought discourse analysis derived from Jakobson and Lacan to
bear on historical cases such as this. Lacan's own writings on
literary works treat them as little more than allegories of the
psyche and/or the process of psychoanalytic therapy. As
illuminating as these writings are, they serve their intended
purpose of training Lacanian analysts far better than they serve
as models or instances of literary study. Jakobson's in-depth
analysis of poetry and of specific poems in terms of metaphor
and metonymy is obviously invaluable for this study of
Introduction 39
Baudelairean poetics, but for all its insight and rigor, it entirely
lacks social and historical dimensions. Indeed, it is not clear
whether Jakobson's analyses serve any purpose at all, beyond
affirming the capabilities of the method itself to detect and
record structural features in poetic discourse for their own sake,
as Jonathan Culler (among others) has observed.44 Turning
structuralist poetics on Jakobson's own prose, Culler has shown
that structural features can be found in any and all discourse,
and expressed doubts that structural analysis alone could ever
tell us anything of interest about them.
But as the work of Michel Foucault has amply demonstrated
(in line with the conclusions of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein that
grammar itself entails a world-view or ideology of its own),
analysis of the discursive form of virtually any kind of text can
be highly significant when read in relation to institutional and
historical context.45 And Foucault is not the only post-
Saussurian to derive some broader significance from structural-
linguistic discourse analysis. Drawing in particular on Jakob-
son's two axes of discourse, deconstructive critics have in a set of
very close readings (including some of Baudelairean texts)
aligned metaphor with the illusions of metaphysics and personal
identity, and metonymy with a heroic acknowledgment of
contingency and flux.46 Much of this drama indeed appears in
the figure of Baudelaire, but these studies, like Jakobson's, lack
(or in some cases patently eschew) a historical dimension. My
contention is that the concept of decoding enables us better to
understand not only the transformation of French society and
culture by market society, and the effects of this transformation
on personal experience, memory, and psychodynamics, but also
the effects of both as registered in the poetry itself: the tendency
of the metaphoric axis to lose its stability; for constraints on the
substitutions permissible in discourse to weaken (if not dis-
appear altogether); for meaning and essence to become
" undecidable "; for real contexts and sensible effects to become
paramount.
Baudelaire not only suffered such decoding at the emergence
of modernity in mid nineteenth-century France, he also pro-
moted it in the poetic texts most characteristic of his modernism.
The aim of this study is not to celebrate the advent or longevity

of this modernism, but to understand its complex historical
determinations, then and now. It is to this end that posts truc-
turalist discourse analysis is pressed into the service of a
resolutely historical reading of the Baudelairean corpus "as a
whole" - that is to say, assessing all three published collections
in terms of Baudelaire's historical evolution from romanticism
to modernism. In tracing this trajectory, we take as our point of
departure what is surely — though for all the wrong reasons —
Baudelaire's best-known poem: "Correspondances."
PART I
Poetics
CHAPTER 2
Correspondences versus beauty
THE ROMANTIC CYCLE

" Correspondances" (iv) has traditionally been hailed as the
centerpiece of Les Fleurs du Mai and the most direct expression
of the Baudelairean aesthetic. According to the standard
interpretations, this sonnet presents with "remarkable clarity
and brilliance " the " eternal formulae " of romantic symbolism:
the absolute intelligibility of the sensible world, the hidden
unity of humankind and nature which it is the poet's privilege
to decipher and represent. 1 But romanticism was a stance
Baudelaire came to regard with suspicion, even disdain. Far
from being the key to Les Fleurs du Mai, "Correspondances"
epitomizes an aesthetic that the rest of the collection will work
to undermine and ultimately to reject. Alongside or beneath
whatever thematic structure the work may have, the process of
decoding in Baudelaire's work leads away from the romantic
poetics of "universal analogy" so exquisitely formulated in
"Correspondances" toward a modernist poetics that will
predominate from Les Fleurs du Mai to the Petits Poemes en prose,
and which first appears in the pivotal sonnet entitled "La
Beaute" (xvn).
"Correspondances" figures in an introductory group of
poems (the prefatory "Au lecteur" apart) 2 that reiterate the
romantic topos of the misunderstood artist reviled by a philistine
society (starting with "Benediction" [i]). The theme of this first
cycle is usually considered to be the relation between the artist
and the world, and its early poems illustrate the two extremes of
this relation: abjection and exaltation. The ungainly Poet 3 is
43
cruelly taunted by uncomprehending humanity in "L'Alba-

tros" (n) while in "Elevation" (m) the Poet soars high above
the mortifying world of earthly existence and "comprend sans
effort / Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes" (11. 19-20).
This inspired communion with nature becomes the subject of
the famous fourth poem of the cycle:
Correspondances
La Nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe a travers une foret de symboles
4 Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.
Comme de longs echos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une tenebreuse et profonde unite,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarte,
8 Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent.
II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme des hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
11 - Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,
Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme Tambre, le muse, le benjoin et l'encens,
14 Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.
As the title itself suggests, this poem depicts nature as a realm of
divine equivalences between the natural and the human; and
the insistent repetition of "comme" implies that in this realm,
everything becomes potentially identical with everything else.
The first quatrain asserts this principle of equivalence most
forcefully with the initial metaphor " La Nature est un temple,"
which is further developed in a second metaphor according to
which "vivants piliers" mumble "confuses paroles." Man
seems to be at home in an almost domesticated nature that
speaks (albeit confusedly) and recognizes him: nature and man
occupy the same position as grammatical subjects of parallel
clauses within the stanza, with the adverb " y " enclosing the
second in the first, thus placing man squarely within the natural
realm. The second clause of the quatrain then transforms the
sound imagery of whispering trees into visual terms: the forest of
symbols takes note of the passer-by with familiar glances.
Correspondences versus beauty 45
Already, an equivalence is implied between auditory and visual
sensations (to which the olfactory will be added in the final
stanzas). The rhyme of "paroles" with "symboles" reinforces
the congruity between the familiar sights and human sounds
characterizing the temple of nature.
The relation between sight and sound is developed, first
implicitly, then explicitly, in the second quatrain. The echoing
sounds of its first line merge together (by a con-fusion
reminiscent of the "confuses paroles" of the first quatrain) in a
harmony characterized by visual spatial imagery: a shadowy
deep unity vast as luminous night. In the last line, colors and
sounds are said to echo or answer one another, along with the
fragrances that lead into the final tercets. Three uses of the
preposition "comme," the rhyming verbs "se confondent" and
"se repondent," two succeeding parallel double complements
("une tenebreuse et profonde unite / Vaste comme la nuit et
comme la clarte") and the four anapests linking the triple
subject with its reflexive predicate in the last line (" Les parfums,
les couleurs, et les sons se repondent") - a l l contribute to the
sense of harmony and unity in the quatrain and by extension,
from the metaphors of the first quatrain to the repeated similes
of the tercets, in the poem as a whole. This metaphoric poetics
- which expresses harmonious unity and equivalence through
metaphor, analogy, and simile, with its mystical correspond-
ences enveloping man in nature — typifies the initial, romantic
cycle of Les Fleurs du Mai.
The sonnet "La Beaute," by all accounts, starts a new cycle
in Les Fleurs du Mai. This is so not only because of the subject of
the poem, as Paul Mathias among others has remarked, but
more importantly because its form questions and radically
transforms the metaphoric principle of equivalence and unity
that governs the introductory cycle directly preceding it.4 The
subject of beauty - or perhaps more accurately, the relation
between beauty and poets - is, to be sure, of crucial importance.
All the more so since Beauty herself speaks here. Having
discussed the condition of poets in the world and their position
in society, having characterized the context of poetic activity,
Baudelaire now goes right to the heart of the matter and
addresses the object of poetry: beauty - or rather, he has Beauty

address us. Beauty, it turns out, defies metaphor and com-
parison. She will incite poets to attempt instead a very different
form of poetic investigation.
La Beaute
Je suis belle, 6 mortels! comme un reve de pierre,
Et mon sein, ou chacun s'est meurtri tour a tour,
Est fait pour inspirer au poete un amour
4 Eternel et muet ainsi que la matiere.
Je trone dans l'azur comme un sphinx incompris;
J'unis un coeur de neige a la blancheur des cygnes;
Je hais le mouvement qui deplace les lignes,
8 Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.
Les poetes, devant mes grandes attitudes,
Que j'ai Fair d'emprunter aux plus fiers monuments,
11 Consumeront leurs jours en d'austeres etudes;
Car j'ai, pour fasciner ces dociles amants,
De purs miroirs qui font toutes choses plus belles:
14 Mes yeux, mes larges yeux aux clartes eternelles!
The first hemistich of the poem opposes Beauty, the singular
(grammatical) subject announced in the title and immediately
repeated in the initial " J e , " to her plural audience of common
"mortals." This opposition of singular to plural, subject to
object, constitutes the basic structure of the entire sonnet. Apart
from the audience addressed in the first line, there are no plurals
in the first quatrain; the last tercet is composed entirely of
plurals, with the symmetrical exception of singular Beauty, who
appears here again as the grammatical subject ("Carj'ai... ").
The first tercet, too, is composed entirely of plurals with the
exception of Beauty's "j'ai l'air ... ", while the second quatrain
has plural substantives only in grammatically subordinate
positions (" cygnes " is the qualification of an attribute; "lignes "
the object of a dependent clause). Moreover, two crucial
adjectives appearing in singular form in the first quatrain —
both occupying the first quarter of an external line (first and
fourth), thus forming a strong internal rhyme: "belle" and
"Eternel" — are repeated, but in plural form, in the last lines of
the second tercet, which they thereby constitute as the final
rhyming couplet of the sonnet. The same pluralization in the
final tercet affects the possessive pronouns and other major
semes appearing in the first quatrain: "mon sein" becomes
"mes yeux"; "poete/amour" becomes "dociles amants." And
in much the same way, the singular "azur," "sphinx," and
"coeur" of the second quatrain become the plural "mes
attitudes," " monuments," and " clartes" of the first tercet. The
sonnet moves from singular to plural.
The same opposition and movement seem to govern gram-
matical subjects in the poem: its first two sentences — i.e. the first
two quatrains — each start with " J e , " and if we include "mon
sein" as a synecdoche, Beauty is the grammatical subject of all
seven independent clauses in the first two sentences; the third
and final sentence (in the tercets), by contrast, starts with "Les
poetes." This apparent symmetry is reinforced by the fact that
the subjects of the dependent clauses in the first and last
sentences correspond to the subjects of the independent clauses
of their mirror opposite: " ou chacun . . . " (1. 2) to " Les poetes ";
"Que j ' a i . . . " (1. 10) to Beauty. But the final clause of the last
sentence breaks the symmetry: introduced by a striking "For I
have... " - t h e only logical expression in the entire poem,
explaining a relation of cause and effect - this explanation
reduces the poets active in the first clause of the sentence to the
status of " dociles amants," objects of Beauty's act of fascination.
The poets, despite their brief appearance in line 9 as active
subjects, thus become logically subordinated to the actions of
Beauty: to fascinate and render more beautiful.
The verb tenses of the poets' two paltry actions also
distinguish them from Beauty. Their futility extends from an
indefinite past - "ou chacun s'est meurtri tour a tour" - to an
equally indefinite future - " Consumeront leurs jours ... " -
while Beauty is always portrayed in the eternal present (through
the present tense and infinitives such as "fasciner"). The mode
of the verbs of which Beauty is the subject reinforces both this
distinction between poets and Beauty and the division of the
sonnet into Beauty's singular quatrains and mortals' plural
tercets. In effect, all Beauty's actions take place in the last
tercet: here is where she fascinates and beautifies — and retro-
actively induces poets to waste away their days (in the first
tercet). In the quatrains, by contrast, she does not act but is.
The main verbs in the first quatrain describe her being. Of the
five main verbs in the second quatrain, all first person singular,
only the last two express actions - which Beauty never indulges
in; the others describe her role, nature and attitude: she reigns
in the heavens (intransitive) rather than governing a people
(transitive); "J'unis" describes her dual nature rather than a
physical act of uniting; even "Je hais" expresses an emotion
rather than an action. Even in the first tercet, Beauty does not
actually borrow her attitudes: she only appears to — a lack of
decisive action that, if anything, makes the poets' austere
research even more self-defeating.
Thus the quatrains are the locus of her identity, the tercets the
domain of her activity. The only two adverbs of place in the
poem - both in the first hemistich of a sentence and stanza, one
in Beauty's quatrains, the other in the poets' tercets - directly
contrast the interiority of Beauty's being in her reign ("Je trone
dans l'azur... ") to the poets' relation of exteriority with respect
to her ("devant mes grandes attitudes"). The displacement
affecting the sonnet's two parallel teleological expressions -
"pour inspirer au poete un amour" and "pour fasciner ces
dociles amants" —reinforces this contrast. The direct objects
are the "same" —only pluralized and subjugated the second
time - but the subject of the infinitives takes different forms: in
the first instance it is Beauty's synecdochic heart or breast, made
to "inspire" the poet; whereas in the second instance, it is one
of Beauty's possessions - the pure mirrors of her eyes ("Car
j ' a i . . . / De purs miroirs... ") - t h a t fascinates the poets. An
interior relation of metaphoric expression is supplanted by an
exterior relation of mere possession, as "inspiration" is replaced
by "fascination."
It is not surprising, therefore, that the only explicit com-
parisons in the poem, expressing equivalence, occur within the
realm of Beauty's identity with her being, in the quatrains: she
is beautiful " comme un reve de pierre "; she inspires " un amour
/ Eternel et muet ainsi que la matiere"; she reigns in the
heavens " comme un sphinx incompris." These three similes are
not only grammatically and positionally alike - all form the last
hemistich of a first or last stanza line, and the first two rhyme
- but they are semantically related as well: all three propose
some kind of relation between inside and outside, spirit and
matter. But the relations proposed — at least in the first two
instances — are so paradoxical that they undermine the force of
the very comparisons they are supposed to serve. The "reve de
pierre" at the end of the line 1 is ambiguous: what is beautiful
about dreaming of stone? Or a dream made of stone? And in the
fourth line, how could love - the most spiritual or explosive of
emotions-be like matter? In light of these uncertainties, the
"sein" of the second line appears especially ambiguous: is it to
be taken figuratively or literally? Is breast here a synecdoche (as
I suggested above) standing for the heart and soul that inspire
such love? Or is that love inspired by Beauty's literal breast, by
her " b u s t " - t h a t is, by something physical, something more
"like matter?" And given this ambiguity, is "meurtri" in turn
to be taken figuratively, as in the common expression "coeur
meurtri" (a "bruised" or "broken" heart), or literally, as one
might bruise oneself on a bust of stone?
The image of the sphinx in the first line of the second quatrain
may appear to settle these questions (by suggesting the love of
statuary, perhaps, as the standard Parnassian interpretations
have it), 5 but the line's end insists that the sphinx in question
remains misunderstood ("incompris"). And the strange jux-
taposition in the next line - "J'unis un coeur de neige a la
blancheur des cygnes" - may demonstrate just how misleading
external appearances can be: the swans' whiteness, suggesting
innocence and purity, covers a snowy heart of coldness and
cruelty. Certainly by the time we reach the world of the poets in
the third stanza, correspondences between inside and outside
have become completely undeterminable and appearances
evidently deceiving. For from the point of view of poets
transfixed by what Beauty "herself" calls - perhaps with some
self-deprecating irony - her "grandes attitudes," it is imposs-
ible to determine their authenticity: she only seems to have
borrowed them from the proudest monuments. If she has not
borrowed them, then why does she seem to? (Or to capture the
active verb in the French, why does she put on airs?) And if she
has indeed borrowed them, are they "really" hers? No wonder
the poets' love remains eternally silent: their metaphors prove
unable to determine Beauty's true inner nature.
The ultimate inaccessibility of a transcendent world of
equivalent correspondences and sure comparisons, however,
prepares Beauty's actual effectivity in the last tercet. Her
essence and identity lost among questionable comparisons of
equivalence, her effect on things will be measured by relative
comparisons of degree: she renders things more beautiful. It is
not through essences but through things that Beauty reaches
poets; not by relations of interiority but of exteriority. In fact,
although the poets' inspired love and austere research may lead
them to believe in the wholeness and self-identity of Beauty, she
affects them only metonymically: by parts ("mon sein ... / Est
fait pour inspirer," "mes yeux ... pour fasciner"); by external
causality ("Les poetes... / Consumeront leurs jours... / Car
j ' a i . . . de purs miroirs"); and eventually via all the things she
has made "more beautiful." Denied access by the "pure
mirrors [of] her eyes" to Beauty's inner essence, the poets
remain endlessly fascinated by proliferating images of the more
and more beautiful things illuminated by them.
This concluding stanza sheds new light on the ambiguity of
the term "sein" noted above. On a first reading, "sein"
appears to be a metaphorical synecdoche for Beauty's inner
heart or soul, which inspires eternal love. But as the perplexity
of comparisons and the incongruity between inside and outside
increases and Beauty's inner essence becomes increasingly
unfathomable, this metaphorical reading gives way to a more
literal one which provokes resignation and despair: the breast
does not give access to beauty through synecdoche, but has
instead become concrete, shutting the poets out and defeating
them, as rock-hard matter against which they bruise themselves
and will forever waste away. Yet by the time we reach the last
stanza, it is ultimately the beauty of things that will fascinate
them anyway - despite, or even because of, lack of access to
Beauty's inner nature: the loss of the metaphorical breast thus
pales in contrast with the eternal splendor of the real ones that
Beauty's acts of beautification will bring to light. We abandon
metaphor at the cost of a bruising, but it is only when "sein" is
taken literally that it becomes a candidate for the process of
beautification offered by the poem as its ultimate poetic
resource.
The elaboration of a metonymic poetics of beautification to
replace the metaphorical poetics of romanticism is an important
first step in the development of Baudelairean modernism. But
equally important here is the manner in which such a
replacement is recommended. The metaphorical reading was
not simply banished from the poem: it remains an option,
appears as an insistent temptation - one to which many readers
have not failed to respond. Only relatively recently have critics
begun to wonder whether the perplexing metaphors and
comparisons might not have been intended as self-deprecating
irony by Baudelaire, as a way of demonstrating how difficult is
the poet's task in trying to define beauty.6 What these readings
miss, however, is that in this poem, the poets' task is defined by
Beauty herself. It is she who speaks throughout, she who
formulates the figures found so perplexing by the mortal poets
she addresses. Irony is certainly an important part of Baude-
lairean modernism, but in "La Beaute" its effectiveness hinges
on the crucial role played by prosopopoeia (endowing in-
animate objects or abstractions with speech) - which functions
here to depict within the poem a version of poetic activity very
different from the one the poem itself enacts.
Because "La Beaute" is a complete prosopopoeia - and it is
the only poem in the collection spoken entirely by a fictional
person — it cannot be understood as a lyric act of communi-
cation: the " J e " of the first line cannot be that of the writer; it
is clearly "Beauty" that speaks. The poem thus immediately
introduces a disjunction between its communicative level, on
which Beauty addresses herself to mortals, and its textual level,
on which the writer addresses readers by means of Beauty's speech
to mortals.7 One subset of the audience she addresses - mortals
who are poets - vainly tries to make sense of the impossible
metaphors she proffers, routinely getting bruised in the process
and wasting away their days in austere pursuit of inner meaning.
Readers who identify with these poets - and one cannot really
read the poem without doing so to some extent - readers who take
Beauty's address at face value, as a communicative act, take the
metaphorical bait, so to speak: they undertake a hopeless search
for Beauty's inner essence, and are of course confounded by the
breast when it appears as a concrete thing. But its becoming a
thing is a precondition for its becoming endlessly more
beautiful: so why do the poets bother wasting their time on
essences, when Beauty's mirror-eyes make all things more
beautiful - a poetic effect accessible to everyone, to any mortal?
All that is required to partake of such enjoyment is to refuse
the lures of metaphoric essence, and to recognize that they lead
nowhere. Such a stance entails or derives from the refusal to
identify communicative function with textual function, to
confuse writer with speaker, and the corresponding recognition
of the purpose for which the writer has produced the figure of
Beauty speaking. Awareness of the prosopopoeia comprising the
entire poem thus suggests a particularly modern stance: one
which recalls that the author is not " i n " but somehow
"behind" the poem, actively projecting the figure of Beauty as
speaker and that of mortals or poets as listeners. The poem must
then be taken as an act of writing, rather than direct
communication: one which projects a model for reading the text
that is very different from the communicative model staged
within it. Inasmuch as we recall the function of the writer as
distinct from the speaker, we can disengage from the tortured,
fruitless metaphoric search for meaning undertaken by poet-
listeners, and as readers enjoy the prospect of endlessly more
beautiful things.
This switch in stance is central to Baudelaire; through it, he
abandons lyrical romanticism for an anti-lyrical modernism: a
naive, communicative reading is proffered, but is ultimately
refused or undermined by an ironic or self-conscious reading
that treats the poem as text rather than as a message. We will see
later how and why such a modernist poetics of dual address
developed in Baudelaire. For now, it is important to review the
outcome of the defeat of metaphoric reading: it leads to a
metonymic poetics most of whose key features already appear in
this pivotal sonnet. The movement of the poem opposes a
dazzling multiplicity of beautiful things to the sterile and
forbidding singularity of Beauty herself, in part by passing from
the perplexing realm of her identity and being to the more
tangible realm of her direct actions and their prolific effects.
This move corresponds to a shift from interiority to exteriority,
from copulative predication, similes and metaphors to transitive
verbs, and from figurative to more concrete language, as
concern for essential qualities and equivalence gives way to an
indiscriminate interest in things and comparisons of quantity or
degree: to make all things more beautiful.
These differences can perhaps be summed up in the dis-
placement of "inspiration" by "fascination" in the concluding
stanza of the poem. Baudelaire grew to disdain the romantic
notion of inspiration, once bragging in his journal that
"inspiration always comes when a man wants i t " - i n which
case it is clearly no longer a matter of inspiration at all, but of
sheer force of will or discipline. The concluding phrase - " but it
does not always leave when he wants it t o " ("mais elle ne s'en
va pas toujours quand il le veut") - may be equally revealing:
it suggests a kind of compulsive attraction to images and things,
a feeling that reappears in some distinctive prose poems on
window-shopping, as well as in the famous dictum: " Glorifier le
culte des images (ma grande, mon unique, ma primitive
passion)." 8 In "La Beaute," the force exerted by the multi-
plicity of glittering objects devoid of interior essence and
reflected in Beauty's mirror-eyes is called "fascination": having
replaced romantic inspiration, it will guide the development
of Baudelaire's metonymic poetics until it is in turn replaced by
"spleen."
THE BEAUTY CYCLE
It should be clear that "La Beaute" undermines and replaces

the metaphoric poetics characteristic of the initial romantic cycle
of Les Fleurs du Mai and epitomized, perhaps, in the well-
known sonnet, " Correspondances." I now want to show how
the second-edition revisions of the cycle of poems devoted to
beauty reinforce and develop the central features of the meto-
nymic poetics adumbrated in " La Beaute." Condemned in the
1857 trial of the first edition, "Les Bijoux" was replaced in
subsequent editions by two new poems, "Le Masque" (xx) and
"Hymne a la Beaute" (xxi). The subversion of metaphor and
the poetics of dual address central to "La Beaute" reappear in
"Le Masque" in the form of ironic allegory. And the project of
beautification, whose increased scope and import were already
signaled in the second-edition version of "La Beaute" by the
replacement of "font les etoiles plus belles" with "font toutes
choses plus belles" in the concluding couplet, becomes a full-
blown and explicit aesthetic program in " Hymne a la Beaute."
Read in the context of the cycle on beauty, "Le Masque"
makes explicit the incongruity between inside and outside,
meaning and vehicle, essence and embodiment, already staged
as the impossibility of metaphor in "La Beaute. " 9 It is by now
well known that allegory decodes metaphor and symbol. Where
metaphor as trope elides the copulative in order to express
metaphoric equivalence most forcefully, allegory makes sig-
nificant equivalence patent: it explicitly posits meaning as a
function or relation between distinct terms. Allegory thus
implies transitive rather than copulative predication: it repre-
sents as it were a willed act of writing rather than a passive
reading of meaning. In these respects, it already embodies key
features of metonymic rather than metaphoric poetics.
While Beauty defied poetic appropriation by defeating
metaphor in "La Beaute," allegory in "Le Masque" shows
beauty to be a lie masking the true agony of human existence.
The first half of the poem describes a female figure incarnating
many of the capital qualities attributed to similar figures in the
immediately preceding poems ("La Geante," "LTdeal," and
"La Beaute"):
Contemplons ce tresor de graces florentines;
Dans l'ondulation de ce corps musculeux
L'Elegance et la Force abondent, soeurs divines.
Cette femme, morceau vraiment miraculeux,
5 Divinement robuste, adorablement mince,
Est faite pour troner sur des lits somptueux,
Et charmer les loisirs d'un pontife ou d'un prince.
- Aussi, vois ce souris fin et voluptueux
Ou la Fatuite promene son extase;
10 Ce long regard sournois, langoureux et moqueur;
Ce visage mignard, tout encadre de gaze,
Dont chaque trait nous dit avec un air vainqueur:
"La Volupte m'appelle et 1'Amour me couronne!"
A cet etre doue de tant de majeste
15 Vois quel charme excitant la gentillesse donne!
Approchons, et tournons autour de sa beaute.
This inspired description is brought to an abrupt halt by the
discovery, narrated in the second half of the poem, of the true
reality behind the lying mask:
O blaspheme de l'art! 6 surprise fatale!
La femme au corps divin, promettant le bonheur,
Par le haut se termine en monstre bicephale!
20 Mais non! ce n'est qu'un masque, un decor suborneur,
Ce visage eclaire d'une exquise grimace,
Et, regarde, voici, crispee atrocement,
La veritable tete, et la sincere face
Renversee a l'abri de la face qui ment.
25 Pauvre grande beaute! le magnifique fleuve
De tes pleurs aboutit dans mon coeur soucieux;
Ton mensonge m'enivre, et mon ame s'abreuve
Aux flots que la Douleur fait jaillir de tes yeux!
Far from basking in her glory, the figure is weeping; and she
weeps because, like the poets in " La Beaute," she is condemned
to live in real time:
- Mais pourquoi pleure-t-elle? Elle, beaute parfaite
30 Qui mettrait a ses pieds le genre humain vaincu,
Quel mal mysterieux ronge son flanc d'athlete?
- Elle pleure, insense, parce qu'elle a vecu!
Et parce qu'elle vit! Mais ce qu'elle deplore
Surtout, ce qui la fait fremir jusqu'aux genoux,
35 C'est que demain, helas! il faudra vivre encore!
Demain, apres-demain et toujours! — comme nous!
In both poems, the use of all three main verb tenses opposes the
world of mortal existence to the world of perfect beauty, which
upon reading "Le Masque" proves to be a lie.
"Le Masque" thus in one sense makes explicit what the

incongruous metaphors of "La Beaute" only suggested on
careful rereading: that a direct correspondence between truth
and appearance is impossible or misleading; beauty's ap-
pearance only masks her true agony. Yet in another sense, this
very assertion of metaphorical non-correspondence depends on
a correspondence between sensation and sense, figure and
meaning at another level, a correspondence achieved by the
"Allegorical Statue in the Renaissance Manner" named by the
poem's subtitle. Allegory functions here as a means of explicitly
making sense in order to facilitate the decoding of metaphoricity.
But this allegorical truth about the impossibility of metaphor
is the message of the statue, not necessarily of the poem itself. As
the discursive mode shifts from description to narration in the
second half of the poem, the referent of the poem turns out to be
not an object but an event, not the statue described by the
narrator, but an encounter with the statue at an exhibition. The
allegorical lesson derived from the encounter is that beauty is
condemned to live in time, tomorrow and forever-just as we
are: " - comme nous!" (1. 36). But the extent of inclusion
implied by this " us " is put into question by the poem's complex
system of address. The " Contemplons" of the first line seems to
address us as readers, just as later lines seem to enjoin us to
examine the statue's magnificence: "Aussi, vois ce souris fin et
voluptueux... " (1. 8). But the address of the last stanza reveals
instead that the narrator has been addressing a companion all
along: the person who asks in line 29 " — Mais pourquoi pleure-
t-elle?" and whom the narrator then calls a fool in his reply:
" - Elle pleure, insense', parce qu'elle a vecu!" (1. 32). The
message we were led to believe was addressed to " us " as readers
turns out to be addressed instead to an interlocutor within the
poem itself, now understood as staging a conversation between
visitors to an exhibition such as the Salon of 1859. This is in fact
where Baudelaire first saw the statue, which he discussed in his
Salon of 1859 and then made the topic or pretext of "Le
Masque." As in "La Beaute," though by other means, the
communicative function is framed by a textual function that
sets itself off as distinct: here, the communicative function
imparting narrative meaning at the end must be understood as
an event occurring within the narrative, and not as the message-
content of the text at all - lest the reader of the poem be reduced
to the status and position of the "fool" in the poem.
This disjunction between communicative and textual func-
tion reproduces rhetorically the fall from the metaphoric realm
of embodied essences into real time that the poem depicts
narratively. Just as perfect beauty ("La Beaute") turns out not
to be the truth but a mask (" Le Masque ") within the narrative,
this narrative message itself turns out not to be addressed to us
as readers, but framed within a text, instead. Yet even though
confidence in the narrator's message is undermined in this way,
reference to the real " allegorical statue " Baudelaire reviewed in
his Salon ofi8jg remains in force: when the poem is added to the
second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai two years after its initial
publication, a dedication is also added: "To Ernest Christophe,
sculptor." It serves not only to specify which "allegorical
statue" the subtitle is referring to, but also to supply readers
with an addressee for the text preferable to the one offered within
the narrative. Now, even though the narrative message is
addressed to a fool, the text can satisfactorily be understood as
addressed "to Ernest Christophe." Yet the poem is not really
addressed to Ernest Christophe, but merely dedicated to him - for
the text is not "saying anything" to, has no "message" for, the
sculptor; it does not supply a message at the textual level to
replace the one it subverts on the communicative level: it
merely makes reference to Christophe as the person who
produced the real statue exhibited in the 1859 Salon that
Baudelaire reviewed. Bracketing its own meanings, the text
ends up referring ultimately to its historical context of pro-
duction, instead: to the context in which the sculptor addressed
his statue to (among other viewers/reviewers) the poet, who in
turn addressed his poem to (among other readers) the sculptor.
This strategy of emptying the text of meaning the better to
make reference to historical context will be more fully developed
in the "Tableaux Parisiens."
In the context of the beauty cycle, "Le Masque" adds
"ironic allegory" to the metonymic poetics initiated in "La
Beaute. "Just as reference according to Jakobson can be divided

into two kinds, so can figures of speech, including irony and
allegory, be classified as metaphoric or metonymic, though the
most common are metaphoric in kind. Inasmuch as figures of
speech usually depend on one term being understood as
standing for another, they ultimately make sense by means of a
metaphoric relation of substitution and equivalence. (Even the
figure commonly called "metonymy" is metaphoric in this
sense: in the expression "fifty sails," "sail" stands as an
equivalent for "ship.") Irony as it is usually understood, i.e. as
"meaning the opposite of what is said," is also a metaphoric
figure in this sense: stable meaning is secured by a relation of
equivalence operating through the exclusive disjunction of
binary opposition: either this (apparent meaning) or that
(opposed meaning), with no other possibilities; and since not
this, therefore that. The intended, ironic meaning is the strict
opposite of the stated meaning.
But there is another kind of irony that involves not the opposite
of what is said, but only something other than what is said. Rather
than "meaning the opposite of what is said," metonymic irony
entails merely "not meaning what is said. " 10 Metonymic irony
forgoes determinate meaning by undermining the stability of
virtual substitution on the metaphoric axis. It is this kind of
irony that functions in the beauty cycle to decode the
romanticism of the earlier poems, not by attacking romantic
metaphors in order to replace them with better ones, but rather
by attacking metaphoricity itself, and the poetic symbolism that
romantic metaphoricity entails.
Recourse to allegory is one way of decoding metaphoricity.
Whereas metaphor implies a universe of intrinsic analogy
uniting outside and inside, meaning and vehicle, in eternal
harmony, allegory construes such relations in terms of extrinsic
causality, temporal imbrication, and (ultimately) of pure
chance. But in Baudelaire, allegory itself becomes ironic,
thereby contributing to further metonymic decoding. Tra-
ditional, metaphoric allegory reinforces the metaphoric axis by
equating this with that, albeit more explicitly than metaphor as
trope: it can be formulated V (f) M, where (f) is a posited (rather
than merely implied) equivalence of vehicle (V) and meaning
(M). "Le Masque," however, undermines rather than rein-
forces the metaphoric axis: metonymic irony reframes and
subverts the allegorical message of the statue, yet without
supplying any other, "deeper" message, whether by way of
strict opposition (as in conventional irony) or some other
metaphoric figure.
This ironic stance toward allegory is in one sense a negative
or privative one: the allegory is meant only for fools. In
metaphoric allegory, such a subversion of determinate meaning
would defeat the purpose of figure entirely, since the vehicle
means nothing without its allegorical import; as romantic
champions of symbolism recognized, the discovery of allegorical
meaning completely exhausts its vehicle, which unlike the
symbol is devoid of any value of its own. But in the metonymic
allegory of "Le Masque," the subversion of meaning serves to
underscore reference to context, in that the text's ultimate
address refers to the real allegorical statue by Christophe: far
from defeating its purpose, putting the meaning of metonymic
allegory in question ironically redeems its vehicle, instead.
If" Le Masque " represents an advance beyond the confusions
of metaphoricity in "La Beaute" to their explicit denunciation
by means of allegory, this is a self-consciously ironic allegory
which can offer only a privative reading of metaphor and
meaning, thereby undermining its own message. The result is a
strictly "meaningless" — but not insignificant — gesture of ap-
preciation for real things in the vecu of real time. In the context
of the project inaugurated in "La Beaute," this forfeit of
meaning proves to be a small price to pay for the prospect of
enjoying beauty's effects in real life. "Hymne a la Beaute" then
delineates the conditions under which such enjoyment may take
place, by refusing metaphoric identity and the law of the
excluded middle so crucial to the stability of the socio-symbolic
order. Just as the metonymic irony of "La Beaute" and the
ironic allegory of" Le Masque " go beyond attacking metaphors
to subvert metaphoric poetics altogether, "Hymne" goes
beyond the reversal of value-hierarchies to subvert the meta-
phoric logic of binary opposition underlying hierarchy itself.11
At the close of the beauty cycle, "Hymne a la Beaute"

represents in many respects the symmetrically reversed mirror
image of "La Beaute," the sonnet that opened it. Like "La
Beaute," "Hymne" moves topically from the realm of Beauty,
depicted in the first four stanzas, to the world of poets, depicted
in the final two (as the distribution of subject and object
pronouns makes abundantly clear). But whereas "La Beaute"
considered everything, even poets' experience, from Beauty's
perspective, "Hymne" steadfastly maintains the perspective of
the Poet in relation to her, as the framing apostrophes of the
second and second-to-last lines ("O Beaute," "6 mon unique
reine), and indeed the address of the title, make clear.
The first part of the poem, devoted to Beauty, is comprised of
two pairs of stanzas, each of which begins with an either/or
question regarding the origins of Beauty, and ends with a
refutation of the question itself, instead of an answer:
Viens-tu du ciel profond ou sors-tu de Tabime,
O Beaute? Ton regard, infernal et divin,
Verse confinement le bienfait et le crime,
4 Et Ton peut pour cela te comparer au vin.
Tu contiens dans ton oeil le couchant et l'aurore;
Tu repands des parfums comme un soir orageux;
Tes baisers sont un philtre et ta bouche une amphore
8 Qui font le heros lache et l'enfant courageux.
Sors-tu du gouffre noir ou descends-tu des astres?
Le Destin charme suit tes jupons comme un chien;
Tu semes au hasard la joie et les desastres,
12 Et tu gouvernes tout et ne reponds de rien.
Tu marches sur des morts, Beaute, dont tu te moques;
De tes bijoux l'Horreur n'est pas le moins charmant,
Et le Meurtre, parmi tes plus cheres breloques,
16 Sur ton ventre orgueilleux danse amoureusement.
We may note that the alternatives presented in the questions
themselves already decode fundamental hierarchies of the socio-
symbolic order, by suggesting [contra Kant, among others) that
beauty may spring from and incarnate evil rather than good.
But while the questions undermine essential hierarchies by put-
ting heaven and hell, for example, on equal terms, the answers
take decoding even further by thoroughly confusing the terms
and refusing the logic in which such hierarchies are expressed.
It is not with respect to semantics that the answers refute the
questions. On the contrary, what enables us to recognize the
responses as answers to those questions is that they share a
semantic system structured by the opposition of heaven and
hell. Terms such as "divin" (1. 2), "bienfait" (1. 3), 'Taurore"
(1. 5), "l'enfant courageux" (1. 8), and "joie" (1. 11) align with
heaven; while "infernal" (1. 2), "crime" (1. 3), "le couchant"
(1. 5), "le heros lache (1. 8), and "desastres" (1. 11) align with
hell. Rather than the semantics, it is the grammar and syntax
- the poetics - of the responses that belie the essentializing
questions that provoke them. The questions are based on a
corollary of the law of identity, the law of the excluded middle:
something must be either one thing or its opposite, since all
other possibilities are ruled out by exclusive disjunction [either
this or that). Thus metaphoric identity within socio-symbolic
codes is defined and stabilized by binary opposition, as well as
by strict equivalence: this is the logic underlying value-
hierarchies in socio-symbolic orders. According to such logic,
beauty will come from either heaven or hell, either from the
blackest depths or from the heavens. Rather than accept this
exclusive disjunction, the answers contain a series of con-
junctions (this and that, and this and that, and...) composing
a catalogue of Beauty's various effects. Like "La Beaute," the
question-and-answer format moves from Beauty's essence or
origins to her effects, but in "Hymne," the nature of these
effects proves no more possible to identify with any certainty
than her essence itself.
In cases like "le bienfait et le crime" (1. 3), or "la joie et les
desastres " (1. 11), one effect simply contradicts the other. In line
8, however, the effects are themselves internally contradictory
and act to disrupt their objects' essences: the hero is made
cowardly and the child courageous. The kinetics of Beauty
prove equally confounding. The Poet's questions locate Beauty
on a vertical axis: she either springs from spacious skies or rises
from the abyss (1. 1), either emerges from the depths of darkness
or descends from the firmament (1. 9), issues forth from either
heaven or hell (1. 21). But the domain of her activity does not
correspond to these alternatives; it occupies instead a more or
less horizontal plane, where her bearing oscillates wildly
between movements of concentration and dispersal ("Tu
contiens dans ton oeil" versus " T u repands des parfums" 11.
5-6); between figures of close attachment and chaotic release
("Le Destin charme suit tes jupons comme un chien" vs. "Tu
semes au hasard lajoie et les desastres" 11. 10-11); and between
a formidable upright posture ("Tu marches sur des morts" 1.
13) and a seductive prostrate one ("le Meurtre [danse] sur ton
ventre" 11. 15-16). No wonder, in a domain "governed" by
chance and confusion, that the only daring and potentially
significant comparison is tendered quite prosaically (complete
with an explanation: "pour cela"), and only as a possibility
rather than an affirmation, without guarantee of results: "Et
Ton peut pour cela te comparer au vin" (1. 4). If in "La
Beaute" metaphor and simile proved perplexing, here they are
eschewed by the poet completely, and attributed instead to an
anonymous " o n . "
When the Poet is, finally, able to speak (unlike the poets of
"La Beaute"), and speaks in his own voice and on his own
behalf, at the end of "Hymne a la Beaute," it is because he has
abandoned - with a resounding "qu'importe" that will echo
crucially in later poems in the collection12 - the futile attempt to
determine the origins and essence of Beauty, and is willing, even
eager, simply to submit to the effects of her charms instead.
Que tu viennes du ciel ou de l'enfer, qu'importe,
O Beaute! monstre enorme, effrayant, ingenu!
Si ton oeil, ton souris, ton pied, m'ouvrent la porte
24 D'un Infini que j'aime et n'ai jamais connu?
De Satan ou de Dieu, qu'importe? Ange ou Sirene,
Qu'importe, si tu rends, - fee aux yeux de velours,
Rythme, parfum, lueur, 6 mon unique reine! -
L'univers moins hideux et les instants moins lourds?
Not only do these conclusions not answer the initial questions,
they actively refuse them, and refute their binary logic as well.
What matters now is not the inner essence of Beauty; as before,
the qualities attributable to Beauty herself appear to contradict
one another: "effrayant, ingenu." More important, these
contradictory qualities appear in a series which lists them
without disclosing their interrelations or mitigating the ensuing
confusion. What now counts above all are external parts of her
body - the syntax has shifted from exclusive disjunction to
paratactic enumeration of parts, not even linked with the word
" a n d " : "ton oeil, ton souris, ton pied," "yeux de velours, /
Rythme, parfum, lueur... " - and the effects these body-parts
may have on the Poet: to open the door to an unknown yet
longed-for infinity; to diminish the horror of the universe and
ease the burden of time's passing moments. In "Hymne," a
poetics of inclusive disjunction replaces exclusive disjunction, in
order to belie and subvert essentializing dichotomies in favor of
Beauty's multiple and varied effects.
Yet, as ardently longed-for as they are, these effects are by no
means a definitive answer, for they are posed not simply as
answers, but partly also as questions. The world of poets is a
universe governed by chance and without guarantees: " T u
semes au hasard la joie et les desastres, / Et tu gouvernes tout et
ne reponds de rien" (11. 11-12). The concluding stanzas invert
the question—answer format of the first four, asserting with a
bold "qu'importe" their answer to - their refusal o f - t h e
"essential" questions. But this brazenly indifferent answer is
itself contingent on Beauty's effectiveness: "qu'importe ...si [tu]
m'ouvre[s] ... Qu'importe, si tu rends...?" (11. 21-23, 26).
These fervently hoped-for possibilities that are posed by the
mortal Poet regarding Beauty, and which end the poem and
"close" the cycle, thus mirror and respond to the clearly
superlative assertion made by Beauty to mortal poets in "La
Beaute" at the beginning of the cycle: she has pure mirror eyes,
she explains, that make all things more beautiful. In response,
the modern Poet in a world ruled by chance can only hedge his
bets and wager that for him they will, if not make all things
more beautiful, at least make the universe less hideous and
time's passing less grievous.
While "Hymne" adopts a perspective symmetrically opposed
to that of" La Beaute," its metonymic poetics is much the same.

Both poems are structured around the opposition between
subject and object; in both, a harmonious and eternal realm of
intransitive inner essence is opposed to a contingent and
temporal world of transitive external effects, and self-identical
wholeness is contrasted with multiplicities of body-parts and
possessions. Yet compared with the poets depicted in "La
Beaute," the Poet of " H y m n e " has learned something: that the
metaphorical realm of identity and essences is not just self-
defeating, but completely irrelevant. Not only does the Poet use
no metaphors in the stanzas we examined, but with the refrain
of "qu'importe" he categorically rejects questions of essence
and origin in favor of transitive effects located "beyond good
and evil." The beauty cycle thereby closes with an act of
decoding directed at the fundamental value-hierarchies of the
socio-symbolic order (heaven and hell, good and evil), and
subverts them by defying binary logic altogether, alternately
depicting beauty's desired effects as both good and evil, and
therefore truly neither. The increasingly indeterminate nature
of beauty's effects at the close of the cycle prefigures the
evolution of Baudelaire's metonymic poetics beyond beauti-
fication to the sheer intensification of experience in spleen.
Before moving beyond the beauty cycle, a remark about the
rhetoric of its final poem is in order. For the tight symmetry of
the two parts of "Hymne a la Beaute" we have just delineated
- w i t h the reciprocity between the allegorical " j e " and " t u , "
the logic of question and answer, answer and question, and so
forth - this symmetry is broken by an anomalous stanza
intervening between the sections devoted to Beauty and the
Poet, set apart like a miniature portrait from the surrounding
discourse of anxious internal debate:
L'ephemere ebloui vole vers toi, chandelle,

Crepite, flambe et dit: Benissons ce flambeau!
L'amoureux pantelant incline sur sa belle
20 A Fair d'un moribond caressant son tombeau.
Semantically, the prepositional object " t o i " (1. 17) evidently

refers to the second-person figure of the preceding four stanzas,
namely Beauty. But the mode of her figuration has here changed
abruptly from allegory to metaphor, as the succeeding apos-
trophe, "chandelle," equates the " t o i " (presumably Beauty)
with the candle whose flame will consume... literally, the
dazzled mayfly ("Pephemere ebloui") that starts the line. The
same change in mode of figuration has affected the Poet: for to
make sense of this stanza in the context of the poem, we take
"l'ephemere" on first reading to mean the Poet —either by
metaphor (may-fly :poet::candle:Beauty) or by synecdoche (a
part — the quality of being ephemeral — for the whole, the Poet).
This metaphorical reading is supported in the next line when
"l'ephemere" speaks and blesses the candle's flame, thereby
confirming or even enacting the poem's religious title, "Hymn
to Beauty." Indeed, given the irrelevance of Beauty's divine or
infernal origin and the radical promiscuity of her effects, the
phrase "Let us bless this flame" (1. 18) seems to be the only line
in the poem that corresponds to the title at all.
Metaphorical figuration and relations of equivalence ac-
celerate in the next two lines. The may-fly/Poet first becomes a
lover: "L'ephemere" and "L'amoureux" occupy parallel
positions as subjects of the two sentences comprising this stanza.
Reinforced by the rhyme scheme and semantic resonance
linking "chandelle" with "belle," and the "flambeau" that
kills with the cherished "tombeau," this parallelism implies an
equivalence between the may-fly and lover as metaphors for the
Poet that is a far cry from the explicit logic of the other stanzas
and the allegorical force of the " j e " that apostrophizes Beauty
and addresses her there as " T u . " This difference is sharply
accentuated by the surprising appearance of third-person
possessive pronouns in lines 19 and 20: "sa belle" and "son
tombeau." If we were right in taking "L'ephemere" and
"L'amoureux" metaphorically to be the Poet, should we not
expect "ma Belle" and "mon tombeau"? The stanza would be
far less disconcerting, indeed, were it to read:
Ephemere, je vole envers toi, ma chandelle,
Crepite, flambe et dit: Benissons ce flambeau!
Amoureux pantelant, incline sur ma Belle,
J'ai Fair d'un moribond caressant mon tombeau.
But it does not, and the effect of the actual text is to evacuate the
Poet as lyric subject of enunciation from the stanza where he is
supposed to appear most poetical, via metaphor, and where
what " h e " says comes closest to matching the sense of the title.
Not only is the " j e " absent, and replaced moreover by third-
person possessives, but the terms used metaphorically to
represent the Poet are themselves only substantivized adjec-
tives: "ephemere," "amoureux," "moribund" — as if the core
substance of the Poet had disappeared beneath a welter of mere
attributes and possessions.
As we reach the last two lines of this curious but compelling
stanza, the direction of its movement through metaphor
becomes clear: the metaphorical figure of the lyric poet as
ephemeral, dying lover is abruptly dismissed through the use of
the third person possessive pronouns, presumably by the
allegorical " I " that will stake its claim in the following stanzas
of the poem; the initial "toi," referring back to the Beauty of
the previous stanzas, is first equated metaphorically with
"chandelle"; t h e n - b y a rhyme comprised, suggestively
enough, of the third-person feminine pronoun, " elle " - equated
with " belle " (itself modified by a third-person possessive " sa " ) ;
and finally equated — by explicit comparison — with "son tom-
beau." It is no wonder, then, that the Poet abandons the figures
of lyric metaphor, since they have led him directly to death. He
has learned to rely instead on self-consciously ironic allegory,
and to count on the ameliorative effects of Beauty's parts as
they are registered in real time. Like the metonymic poetics
informing the project of beautification, this anti-lyric stance will
reappear in the poems devoted to spleen.
Our analysis of the concluding poems of the revised beauty
cycle has underscored two aspects of the metonymic poetics
inaugurated in " La Beaute." The mode of dual address in " La
Beaute," designed to cast doubt on the viability of romantic
symbolism, takes in "Le Masque" the more explicit form of
ironic allegory, where the allegory serves to decode metaphor,
but is ironized in turn to undermine meaning and foreground
the text's reference to context. The projected redemption of all
things by Beauty's eyes, meanwhile, appears in "Hymne a la
Beaute" as the alleviation of human suffering through the
contingent effects of Beauty's acts and body-parts, which
compensate for the refusal to submit to the conventional value-
hierarchies identifying her origins and essence. Partly out of a
modernist preference for textual inscription rather than direct
address, in which meaningful communication is subordinated
to contextual reference; and partly out of a refusal of the binary
oppositions, essential values, and hallowed metaphors of ro-
mantic symbolism, Baudelaire's metonymic poetics aims against
the grain of (ethical, aesthetic, poetic) socio-symbolic codes to
focus primarily on things. What becomes poetic is the beauty of
any thing, thus of everything: in Beauty's eyes, "all things
[become] more beautiful."
Hence the profusion of things referred to in Baudelaire's
texts: the move from singular to plural, from unicity and
binarity to multiplicity, and the increasingly pervasive use of
sheer enumeration. The decoded referentiality of metonymic
allegory frees or strips real things of preconceived value in order
to make them more beautiful, or less hideous: what counts is not
their "essence" but the degree to which their beauty can be
enhanced poetically and these effects of beauty multiplied
indefinitely. At the same time, the contingency of this poetic
enhancing-act is underscored by the accompanying "voracious
irony": the poetic "charge" added to things to make them ever
more superlative is not an effect of divine inspiration, but a
product of worldly fascination, and this fascination is susceptible
at any moment to ironic reversal leading to or resulting from the
weary tedium of spleen. Were Baudelaire to forge a term for the
effect of allegory in his metonymical poetics, it might well be
"ironic supernaturalism." 13
METONYMY PREVAILS
"La Beaute" and the revised cycle of beauty introduce a
metonymic poetics that both decodes the romantic stance
expressed in the preceding poems and informs most of the rest of
the collection, setting the stage for other significant revisions
and additions to Les Fleurs du Mai, but also for critical reflections
on the role of poetry in market society that occur in the Petits
Poemes en prose. The most immediate effects of the revised beauty
cycle, however, bear on the directly succeeding poems in the
collection, particularly "Parfum exotique" (xxn), which now
appears between two new poems: "Hymne a la Beaute" and
"La Chevelure" (xxm), whose addition to the second edition
accentuates and extends the beautification project beyond the
bounds of the beauty cycle itself. The new context in which
"Parfum" now appears significantly alters our reading of a
sonnet that in some ways recalls the synaesthesia typical of
" Correspondances" and the evocative power of other poems
from the romantic cycle. Comparing "Parfum exotique" with
the well-known, early sonnet "La Vie anterieure" (xn) will
enable us to see how "Parfum" realizes the program of
metonymic beautification announced at the end of "Hymne a
la beaute." I have purposely chosen to compare two poems
whose themes and tone are very similar, for it is the differences
between metaphoric and metonymic poetics that truly dis-
tinguish the early cycle from later ones. For the same reason, I
will - in Chapter 3 - compare one of the "Spleen" poems with
another poem from the romantic cycle, to show again that
metonymic poetics prevails despite the recurrence of themes.
"La Vie anterieure" in many ways embodies the aesthetic
epitomized in "Correspondances," from the first stanza's
depiction of a former life under "majestic pillars" and "vast
porticoes" (recalling the "living pillars of Nature's temple" in
"Correspondances"), to the confusion of sight and sound
typical of the doctrine of synaesthesia. In "Parfum exotique,"
similar synaesthetic "correspondences" are suggested between
sight and smell, and then between smell and sound. Never-
theless, the intervention of the revised beauty cycle throws into
sharp relief the very different mode of presentation of these
correspondences compared with a metaphoric sonnet such as
"La Vie anterieure."
Parfum exotique
Quand, les deux yeux fermes, en un soir chaud d'automne
Je respire Podeur de ton sein chaleureux,
Je vois derouler des rivages heureux
4 Qu'eblouissent les feux d'un soleil monotone;
Une ile paresseuse oil la nature donne
Des arbres singuliers et des fruits savoureux;
Des hommes dont le corps est mince et vigoureux,
8 Et des femmes dont Poeil par sa franchise etonne.
Guide par ton odeur vers de charmants climats,
Je vois un port rempli de voiles et de mats
11 Encor tout fatigues par la vague marine,
Pendant que le parfum des verts tamariniers,
Qui circule dans Fair et m'enfle la narine,
14 Se mele dans mon ame au chant des mariniers.
The fall into time depicted in "La Beaute" and particularly in
"Le Masque" echoes in the very first word of "Parfum":
" Q u a n d . " This is not to say that time is absent in "La Vie
anterieure," which is patently about the past, as the title
indicates; but this is a completely undifferentiated past where in
a sense nothing happens, as evidenced by the predominant,
recurring use of the imperfect tense in five of the seven
conjugated verbs. Nor do the other two conjugated verbs depict
events or actions; they simply situate the Poet in the natural
setting whose evocation is the poem's main point:
J'ai longtemps habite sous de vastes portiques
2 Que les soleils teignaient de mille feux,
C'est la que j'ai vecu dans les voluptes calmes,

10 Au milieu de l'azur, des vagues, des splendeurs
Et des esclaves nus ...
"Parfum exotique," on the contrary, insists on the explicitly
temporal and implicitly causal relation of inhaling a fragrance
and seeing with closed eyes ("Quand je respire ... Je vois ... ").
The implicit causality of this temporal relation is made more
explicit in the tercets: while ("Pendant que... ") the scent of
tamarind trees wafts in the air, the fragrance now actively
guides the Poet toward his visions (1. 9).
What the Poet sees is a series of images enumerated without
the relations that might obtain between them being made
explicit: "des rivages / une ile / des hommes / et des femmes"

(11. 3, 5, 7, 8). This enumeration of images contrasts with the
enumeration presented in lines IO-I i of "La Vie anterieure,"
for the elements listed there are all objects of the preposition
" Au milieu de ... " whose subject is the Poet and whose point of
reference is underscored in the first line of the stanza by "C'est
la que j'ai vecu": the Poet is located at the very center of the
past life being evoked, whereas in "Parfum" he is merely a
spectator. Indeed, the final tercet of "La Vie anterieure"
suggests that it is not merely the Poet, but his deepest secret that
lies at the heart of the setting evoked: nature is not only reflected
in the Poet's eyes (1. 8), but may be said to revolve in an ever-
tightening spiral around the core of his being, as adverbs of
place move from "under" (1. i) through " i n " (1. 9) to "in the
middle of" (1. 10). In this "former life," outer nature seems to
correspond exactly (even "uniquely" 1. 13) to the Poet's inner
life.
By contrast, the very title "Parfum exotique" names not a
whole life, but a discrete thing (a "stimulus") which initiates an
almost mechanical process whose logic the poem will attempt to
spell out. At the beginning of the first quatrain, with its
repetition of " J e " and the present indicative (11. 2-3), the Poet
appears to initiate the process: when he inhales, he sees. The
end of the first and the entire second quatrain consist of the
series of images provoked by inhaling the fragrance. The
explicit stipulation of Poetic agency here contrasts sharply with
the Poet's passivity in " La Vie anterieure " (and indeed his total
absence from "Correspondances"): there, he merely lives, and
it is nature that actively "colors the vast porticoes" (1. 2),
"mixes [its] rich music with the colors of sunset" (11. 6-8), and
so forth; here, he sees (11. 3 and 10).
But by the first tercet, the process begins to appear as if it were
running on automatic: the Poet still sees, but he is no longer a
sovereign subject; he has become the object of the woman's
fragrance that guides him (1. 9). Retrospectively, it appears as
though the Poet never really initiated anything, but has merely
noted the temporal and proto-causal mechanism of the process
he is undergoing. Indeed in the last tercet, he is reduced
virtually to a nostril flared by the scent of tamarind trees. In the
last line of the poem, it is true, this scent mixes "synaes-
thetically" with the chant of mariners; but this confusion is
attributed neither to some natural agency, nor to the Poet
himself: it simply takes place (through the reflexive "Se mele"
1. 14); and not in nature, but "in his soul" (1. 14). Unlike the
passive Poet living at the heart of an active nature in the
romantic cycle, the Poet in this sonnet intervenes between
sensation and meaning — even if the apparent action of the first
quatrain is reduced to the mere location of relatively auton-
omous poetic interchange by the last tercet. Synaesthesia has
become, in line with the metonymic poetics of beautification,
not a reading of "universal analogy," but a function of Poetic
inscription, even if the Poet himself (or his "soul") turns out to
be only the locus rather than the agent of the process.
Finally, and again in the revised context of the new ending to
the beauty cycle, "Parfum exotique" provides an answer to the
question raised by the Poet's wager at the end of "Hymne":
leaving aside the abstract question of Beauty's origins, can she
- or her "rhythm, fragrance, glow" ("Hymne," 1. 27) - open
the door to infinity, and make the entire universe less hideous?
In the concrete case of the woman addressed in "Parfum
exotique," the answer is yes. And it is not the woman herself
that affects the Poet and enables him to see, but rather a part of
her body — or more precisely, a part of a part: the smell of her
breast (1. 2). Indeed, to say that the poem recounts an encounter
with a particular woman is almost an exaggeration: this is a
specific woman and not Beauty, to be sure, but here only the
woman's breast and its fragrance are mentioned in the poem;
the second person whom the poem addresses takes the exclusive
form of possessive pronouns (11. 2 and 9); she "appears" only in
parts and through the effects they produce in the Poet. This is,
of course, precisely the manner of operation of womanly beauty
that "Hymne" and the beauty cycle led us to expect. What
matters is not the woman as an essence or a whole, but rather
the flights of fancy parts of her body may set off in the poetic
imagination.
The sense of success of the beautification project and the
emphasis on the intoxicating effects of women's body-parts are
considerably reinforced by the addition of "La Chevelure" to
the second edition, immediately following "Parfum exotique."
As the title makes abundantly clear, it is the woman's hair, and
not herself, that provokes the Poet's imagination. It is the
woman's hair that is addressed in the first lines; and up until the
very last stanza, it is "chevelure" and its metaphorical
equivalents that are repeatedly addressed in the second person.
Where "La Chevelure" goes beyond the earlier "Parfum
exotique" in developing the poetics of beautification is in its
insistence on the role of active poetic volition and desire in
attaining beauty's effects. The inverted syntax of the poem's
first complete sentence underscores the importance of the Poet's
active wanting by isolating "Je la veux" at the beginning of line
5, and by preceding it with his motive for wanting to shake her
hair: to revive the memories sleeping there.
O toison, moutonnant jusque sur l'encolure!
O boucles! O parfum charge de nonchaloir!
Extase! Pour peupler ce soir P alcove obscure
Des souvenirs dormant dans cette chevelure,
5 Je la veux agiter dans l'air comme un mouchoir!
The force of this inaugural vouloir echoes throughout the poem
in the repeated use of the future tense expressing a Poetic will
that, as desire, ultimately appears infinite in its own right:
"J'irai la-bas" (1. n ) ; "Je plongerai ma tete... Dans ce noir
ocean " (1. 21); then " mon esprit subtil... saura vous retrouver,
6 fecond paresse " (11. 23-24); and finally,
Longtemps! toujours! ma main dans ta criniere lourde
32 Semera le rubis, la perle, et le saphir,
Afin qu'a mon desir tu ne sois jamais sourde!
Following "Parfum exotique," "La Chevelure" appears to
give an equally unequivocal and even more strenuously
affirmative answer to the question of Beauty's potential effec-
tiveness that is posed at the end of "Hymne a la Beaute."
But the final stanza of the poem, like the final stanza of
"Hymne a la Beaute," recasts this apparent certainty as a
wager: for the first time addressing the woman herself rather
than her hair, the Poet promises to shower her (or more
precisely to "sow her m a n e " - " [sjemera ... dans ta criniere")
with jewels in the hope that she will always respond to his desire.
The subjunctive following the optative construction "afin
q u e . . . " (as opposed to "afin d e . . . " with an infinitive, for
instance) serves to underscore the contingency of the Poet's
gambit. But then the final couplet of the poem transforms the
woman back into things: the place where he dreams, the flask
from which he drinks the wine of memory. And this in the form
of a question: is she not such a place; is she not the flask of
memory?
N'es-tu pas l'oasis ou je reve, et la gourde
35 Ou je hume a longs traits le vin du souvenir?
These lines appear on one reading as a serious question suddenly
casting doubt on the Poet's vigorous enthusiasm: is this woman
really not what I think she is? But in another sense, the poem
has already answered the question: it states unequivocally in
line 14 that her hair contains a dazzling dream ("Tu contiens,
mer d'ebene, un eblouissant reve"). The question on this
reading would be merely rhetorical and therefore positively
assertive: is she not just as I say she is?! And it would affirm the
ability of the Poet to achieve the effects of beauty through the
exercise of volition and desire. Nevertheless, the promise of
jewels aiming to secure a lasting response to the Poet's desire,
the question that ends the poem, and the uncertainty even as to
the kind of question it is - all suggest that the Poetic project of
beautification that appears here as a willed future is a contingent
one, and one which, in a world governed by chance, will never
be attainable with absolute certainty.
It is true, as Barbara Johnson has demonstrated, that compared

to the prose "version" of this poem (entitled " U n hemisphere
dans une chevelure" [17]), the verse version appears meta-
phorical. 14 Yet compared with " Correspondances" and the
other poems of the romantic cycle, what is striking about the
many equivalences proposed in " L a Chevelure" between the
woman's hair and forests, oceans, harbors, and so on, is that
they are all functions of the Poet: not hidden correspondences of
nature herself, known only to an elect few, but effects of the
Poetic will foregrounded in the first stanza and echoing
throughout the poem in the recurring future tense. Johnson's
assertion that "La Chevelure" is predominantly metaphorical
derives from her concern with deconstructing the binary
opposition between two genres, (metaphorical) verse and
(metonymical) prose poetry. But situated in a different context
- the context precisely of Les Fleurs du Mai - the verse poem
that appeared metaphorical compared with its prose doublet
nevertheless functions metonymically in relation to its pre-
decessors in the romantic cycle of the collection. To put the
point another way, metaphoric poetics can be decoded more
than once; and indeed we might consider the "later," prose
"Chevelure" as functioning - much as "Le Masque" and
"Hymne a la Beaute" do with respect to "La B e a u t e " - i n
order to make the decoding inscribed in the "earlier," verse
"Chevelure" more explicit and hence more legible.
To assert in this way that the decoding of metaphor by
metonymy is already at work in the verse version of "Che-
velure, " which Johnson considers comparatively metaphorical,
perhaps only confirms the conclusion she herself draws from her
comparison of the two versions of the poem: that the difference
between metaphor and metonymy does not so much clearly
distinguish verse from prose as it differentiates each from itself;
on this view, decoding has everywhere " always already" begun
(pp. 54-55). But Johnson's claim that "La Chevelure" is
metaphorical is based not only on the preponderance of
metaphors found there, but also on what she calls the Poet's
"recuperation of the past" by which he is supposedly able to
"attain the totality of his identity" (p. 50). We will see in Part
II that integrating personal identity by recuperating the past is
a program characteristic of the romantic cycle that the
beautification project rejects and replaces. For now, we may
note that it is not clear in what sense or on what grounds
Johnson can assert that the Poet attains identity and recuperates
his past by means of the head of hair invoked in this poem.
For one thing, contact with the head of hair does not
stimulate memory alone: it is in fact more likely to provoke
revery. " I n the last two lines of the poem, the woman becomes
the ideal container of memories," Johnson asserts (p. 45); but
the woman first becomes the place where the Poet dreams, in
those last two lines, and this explicitly reiterates the " T u
contiens, mer d'ebene, un eblouissant reve" of line 14, as we
have seen. References to memory occur only in a subordinate
conditional and an interrogative clause (11. 4-5, 34-35), whereas
revery appears once in that same interrogative (11. 34-35) and
once in a flat affirmative (1. 14). What is at issue in this poem is
thus not memory alone, but fantasy-production in general.15
Furthermore, the poem is dominated by the future tense, not
the past: the poem presents a project to be realized, not an
achievement already attained. Finally, the optative of the last
stanza indicates that the project's realization is by no means
guaranteed, even if the rhetorical question ending the poem
suggests that the Poet's desire for it will persevere indefinitely.
The point I want to make here is that the apparent
metaphoricity or metonymicity of a poem depends on the
context in (relation to) which it is read - which is itself a
decisively metonymic perspective! We have repeatedly empha-
sized how changing contexts (notably the revisions for the
second edition of the collection) inevitably alter our perception
of the relative value or weight of elements in a poem. Reading
poems such as "Parfum exotique" and "La Chevelure" in line
with the romantic poetics of " Correspondances" and in
contrast with the stark metonymical poetics of the prose
collection inevitably highlights their metaphorical features -
notably a semantics and imagery of synaesthesia. Reading them
in the context of the revised beauty cycle that immediately
precedes them, on the other hand, underscores their metonymi-
cal qualities - in particular a poetics that tends to undermine
the romantic symbolism informing universal analogy and
synaesthesia in the romantic cycle.
I stress that metonymy tends to undermine metaphor, for my

claim is not that the poems following the beauty cycle are all
uniformly metonymic, nor even that they become increasingly

metonymic according to some straightforward, linear pro-
gression throughout the rest of the collection. I do not mean to
imply either that the beauty cycle can be taken in a biographical
way as a simple reflection of some earth-shattering prise-de-
conscience on Baudelaire's part: as late as April 1861 (i.e. well
after the preparation and publication of the second edition of
Les Fleurs du Mai, and well after the publication of some of the
most important prose poems, among which " U n hemisphere
dans une chevelure" [1857]), Baudelaire will cite "Corre-
spondances" in support of a theory of "reciprocal analogy"
and "indivisible totality" (although he cites only the first two
verses, which may be telling).16 My claim is rather that,
regardless of and perhaps even sometimes against Baudelaire's
conscious intentions and most trenchant declarations, his most
characteristically modern poetry registers a trajectory away
from the metaphoricity of romantic symbolism, via its decoding
by a metonymic poetics. This metonymic poetics may be most
patent and severe in the prose poems, but it is already at work
in the verse collection, as we have seen. One might even
attribute some of the extraordinary energy of Les Fleurs du Mai
to a tension between semantics and poetics, between metaphor
and metonymy, between a romanticism being abandoned and
a modernism still in the making.
Indeed, it would be possible retrospectively to reread even
" Correspondances" itself in light of such a tension: not (as it
has most often been read, and as I reiterated at the beginning of
the chapter) as crystallizing the aesthetic program of romantic
symbolism, but rather as already prefiguring the move away
from it, which becomes explicit in "La Beaute" and the poems
added to the beauty cycle. For something unexpected starts
happening in the tercets of "Correspondances," as if poetic
momentum suddenly picked up and began to accelerate out of
control: metaphoric balance and unity give way to metonymic
parataxis and enumeration.
The quatrains move smoothly between singulars and plurals:
nature's temple and man are the only singulars in the first
stanza, beginning the first and third lines, followed by plurals.
In the second stanza, plurals occupy the first and last lines,
while the singular predominates in between. Substantives
receive usually one, at most two complements; in the latter case
(11. 6-7) they are parallel and joined symmetrically by "and."
The sole exception to this pattern of singularity and symmetrical
binarity occurs - perhaps significantly, as a lead into the tercets
- in the last line of the second quatrain, with the triple
nominative naming synaesthetic elements. But as noted above,
both the (parallel anapestic) rhythm linking the triple subject to
the terminal reflexive verb (so that each element is both subject
and object) and the rhyme linking "se repondent" with "se
confondent" in line 5 serve strongly to unify the line and the
stanza as a whole.
The tercets are, from the start, very different. The impersonal
(and elevated or "poetic") "II est des parfums" of the first line
of the tercets contrasts sharply with the "La Nature est un
temple" of the first line of the quatrains: there a striking
equivalence, a substantive claim, is being asserted with all the
force of the metaphoric copulative "this is that"; whereas here
in the tercets, all that is being said is: "There are fragrances."
What follows is a list of similes that is potentially endless - if we
take the lack of conjunction between the second and third
simile, the comma at the end of the line, and the dash that
intervenes at the beginning of the next line to signal that the
enumeration of similes could continue indefinitely, but has been
interrupted in mid-sentence. And as the similes multiply in
number, they also increase in banality: "fresh like babies' skin"
is nice enough; "mellow like oboes" will do; but "green like
prairies" ? As in the case of the copulative that begins the tercet,
the poetic force of simile has here been reduced to a minimum.
The list then starts off in another direction: "And [there are]
others [fragrances] . . . " But in the second tercet these fragrances
are said not so much to be or be like something else (by
metaphor or simile), but rather (metonymically) to possess a
certain property: that of "having the expansiveness of infinite
things." What follows this attribution of expansiveness to the
other perfumes is another list... of perfumes, introduced by the
term " comme " functioning here in a way slightly different from
78 Baudelaire and schizo analysis
the straightforward similes of the second quatrain. As De Man

has noted, this "comme" is ambiguous: it can refer either to
having the property of expansiveness -"as do ambergris, musk,
benjamin and incense," or to the perfumes themselves-
" [There are] other [perfumes] such as ambergris, musk,
benjamin, and incense." In the first case, "comme" is still
engaged in comparison, but instead of associating a single
property with a discrete stimulus - as do the similes in stanza 2:
freshness with babies' skin, mellowness with oboes - here the
single property is distributed indiscriminately across the entire
list of stimuli. In the second case, the "comme" is not
comparative at all, but purely illustrative. This ambiguity is
" undecidable "; but in either case, the "comme" introduces
not a balanced equation, but serial enumeration.17
It would appear, then, on this reading, that "Correspon-
dances " itself moves away from metaphor toward metonymy as
it moves from cerebral to more corporeal sensations.18 The first
stanza is the most forcefully metaphoric: it boldly declares that
"this is that." It is also the most abstract, referring to knowing
glances, words, and even symbols. The second stanza is more
cautious: it only suggests that "this is like that." It is also
somewhat more concrete, naming various sensations, but
describing primarily the relatively cerebral senses of sight and
sound. The third stanza begins with an assertion of mere
existence ("There are perfumes..."), then multiplies com-
parisons to the point of banality. Here the concrete sense of
smell predominates. The fourth stanza attributes a property
instead of comparing likenesses, and ultimately enumerates
tautologically: here, perfumes are no longer like babies or
prairies, they are like ... perfumes; or more precisely, the quality
of the "other" (1. 11) perfumes is exemplified... by other
perfumes: ambergris, musk, and so on. Perhaps this is why
Baudelaire in 1861 quotes only the quatrains in support of his
theory of universal analogy: there, "everything becomes
potentially identical with everything else," while in the tercets,
everything becomes virtually indiscriminate. It is as if the poetic
charge increases as stimulating sensations get closer to the body;
as if in the proliferation of comparans and comparata, the poetic
process engaging senses and spirit gets carried away with itself
- or gets carried away by corporeal sensations that "chantent
les transports de l'esprit et des sens" - and gets carried away
from the possibility of making any meaningful or unambiguous
sense whatsoever.
It is not my aim to read poem by poem through the entire

collection of Les Fleurs du Mai to measure in each case the
relative weight of metaphor and metonymy. My argument has
been that the revisions for the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai
produce significant changes in context for the other poems and
the collection as a whole, changes that tend to foreground the
process of decoding initiated most clearly in "La Beaute." My
procedure so far has been to examine the revised beauty cycle to
see in what ways it reinforces the decoding already inscribed in
"La Beaute," and to see how the cycle as a whole affects our
reading of the poems immediately following it in the collection.
I want to turn now to the end of the first section of the work,
" Spleen et Ideal," to determine what effects the second-edition
revisions have had and what forms the inscription of decoding
takes there.
CHAPTER 3
Spleen and evil
SPLEEN AND IDEAL

With the evident exception of the creation of an entirely new
section, the "Tableaux Parisiens," no changes for the second
edition are more marked, or more complex, than the revision of
the end of "Spleen and Ideal." Most commentators agree that
the changes give the section a clearer sense of an ending than did
the first edition, which meandered to a close with some of the
collection's least remarkable poems, such as "La Pipe" (LXVIII)
and "La Musique" (LXIX). In the revised version, these poems
have been moved from the very end to a position preceding
sixteen poems — some old, some new — which now conclude the
section. To be sure, this new grouping of poems — which starts
with "Sepulture" (LXX) and "Une gravure fantastique"
(LXXI), but also includes new poems such as "Le Gout du
neant" (LXXX), "Alchimie de la douleur" (LXXXI), and
"Horreur sympathique" (LXXXII) - accentuates a thematics of
morbid perversity as a kind of counter-weight to the faithful
optimism of the opening, romantic cycle of the section. But
considerable controversy remains as to whether the overall
unity of the section has been enhanced, as well as to what the
significance of the new ending cycle might be. D. J. Mossop -
who offers the most complete, strictly thematic (and hence
ultimately unsatisfactory) interpretation of the "architecture of
Les Fleurs du Mai" (as per his subtitle) -commends the new
positions of" L'Heautontimoroumenos" (LXXXIII) and"LTrre-
mediable" (LXXXIV), now third- and second-to-last, for the
emphasis they put on the Poet's self-imposed damnation; but he
80
Spleen and evil 81
therefore must dismiss the addition of "L'Horloge" (LXXXV) at
the very end of the section as an anomaly, for it does not square
with the thematics of self-consciously pursued vice that for
Mossop make the revised "Spleen and Ideal" section a drama
of the Poet's fall from the "aspiration toward ideal beauty" of
the early poems to the "hell of spleen" at the end of the section.1
It was, of course, Barbey d'Aurevilly who coined the term
"secret architecture" to suggest the by now famous notion of a
"structure" informing the collection. But it is important to
recall that he did so in an article defending Baudelaire during
his obscenity trial.2 Baudelaire, too, insisted at one point that
the work be read as a whole ("dans son ensemble"), so that its
"terrifying morality" would stand out - but he did so in notes
to his lawyer for the same trial; he would write years later in a
personal letter that he filled "that atrocious book" with all his
hatred, and that the solemn oaths he swore to the contrary were
nothing but lies.3 In yet another letter, he insists that the
collection has not so much a stable architecture, but rather a
coherent movement: " a beginning and an end"; 4 here he is
ingratiating himself with Alfred de Musset, whose help he hopes
to enlist in his candidacy for the Academie Frangaise. In letters to
his mother regarding the second edition, Baudelaire also
underscores the pre-existing framework into which he has
inserted new poems, although it is clear that in many cases
(particularly the "Tableaux Parisiens") it is the frame that is
new, and the poems (in some cases) that are old; here, too, there
is more than a hint of self-justification involved.5
My point in sketching the contexts in which Baudelaire and
others insisted on the coherence of Les Fleurs du Mai is not to
deny categorically the existence of a thematic structure, but to
temper the attraction of too simple a notion of coherence in
order to suggest that there is something else at work in the
collection as well — what I have identified as a tendency toward
metonymy that disrupts the metaphoric poetics conducive to
stable architecture. 6 In this light, the revised ending of "Spleen
and Ideal" can best be understood in terms of a tension among
three different impulses: first, a stark and explicit thematic
opposition to romanticism, often conducted in the latter's own
metaphoric poetics and imagery; second, a continuing poetic

subversion of metaphoric romanticism via metonymy; and
finally, an increasingly explicit thematicization of metonymic
poetics itself, especially compared with the beauty cycle that
inaugurated it.
The first of the five new poems added to the new ending of
"Spleen and Ideal," entitled "Obsession" (LXXIX), embodies
this tension by first of all reversing the tone of specific metaphors
borrowed from the romantic cycle, and then subverting
metaphoric poetics altogether. The harmonious images of man
and nature characteristic of " Correspondances" and the
romantic cycle as a whole are here so explicitly and utterly
rejected that it is difficult to understand how "Correspon-
dances" could ever have been taken as the key poem expressing
the aesthetic program of the collection.7
Obsession
Grands bois, vous m'effrayez comme des cathedrales;
Vous hurlez comme Porgue; et dans nos coeurs maudits,
Chambres d'etemel deuil ou vibrent de vieux rales,
4 Repondent les echos de vos De profundis.
Je te hais, Ocean! tes bonds et tes tumultes,
Mon esprit les retrouve en lui; ce rire amer
De l'homme vaincu, plein de sanglots et d'insultes,
8 Je Pentends dans le rire enorme de la mer.
Comme tu me plairais, 6 nuit! sans ces etoiles
Dont la lumiere parle un langage connu!
11 Car je cherche le vide, et le noir, et le nu!
Mais les tenebres sont elles-memes des toiles
Oil vivent, jaillissant de mon oeil par milliers,
14 Des etres disparus aux regards familiers.
The first quatrain clearly invokes the imagery of nature as place
of worship from "Correspondances," but with the effect of
virtually canceling it out: what conveyed mystical elevation
and divine inspiration in the early poem now conveys terror and
dejection, instead. And in order to accomplish this reversal, the
stanza functions according to the same poetics as the earlier
poem: the woods are compared in explicit similes to cathedrals
Spleen and evil 83
(1. 1), and their sound to the wail of an organ (1. 2); the
metaphorical apposition equating inside with outside (cursed
hearts with rooms of mourning) in the following line makes the
comparison that is patent in the "comme" of lines 1 and 2 all
the more forceful for being implicit.8 The last line of the stanza,
moreover, repeats the terms "echo" and "respond" from
" Correspondances," as if to ensure that the allusion to the key
words of the doctrine of correspondences and universal analogy
is not missed. In a similar way, the middle line of the third
stanza ("la lumiere parle un langage connu" 1. 10) echoes the
imagery of nature's secret language from the romantic cycle
("Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes" 1. 20 of
"Elevation"), only to reverse its valence: here it is patently
something the Poet longs to escape.
The second quatrain, too, reverses imagery from an early
poem: the image of the sea as mirror of the soul from " L'Homme
et la Mer" (xiv), which begins "Homme libre, toujours tu
cheriras la mer! / La mer est ton miroir; tu contemples ton ame
/ Dans le deroulement infini de sa lame" (11. 1-3). But here the
poetics changes radically. Present in the first stanza only as a
direct object ("vous m'effrayez" 1. 1) and as part of a (plural)
possessive pronoun ("nos coeurs maudits" 1. 2), the Poet
suddenly appears as subject of the three main phrases com-
prising the second stanza: foregrounded as an active "Je " at the
beginning of the first and last lines, as well as (by synecdoche:
"Mon esprit") at the beginning of the second line. Nature,
subject of the first quatrain, now becomes object - first of the
Poet's hatred, then of his perception: the equivalences presented
apodictically in the first quatrain appear here as a function of
Poetic appropriation: "Mon esprit retrouve [tes bonds] en
lui"; "ce rire amer / Je l'entends dans le rire enorme de la
mer." Even while repeating the imagery of an earlier, meta-
phoric poem (in order to reverse its value), this stanza shifts its
poetics in the direction of metonymy by foregrounding the
agency of the Poet in the composition of comparisons and
equivalences.
Each of the first two stanzas presents a distinct idea in a
complete sentence with no rhymes repeated. The first tercet
starts up again, apostrophizing night this time, and ends by

explaining the fear and hatred expressed in the quatrains: the
Poet would shun star-light which speaks a well-known language,
and now seeks a dark and barren void, "le vide, et le noir, et le
n u " (1. 11). The line's unexpected repetition of " e t " (instead of
the normal "le vide, noir et n u " or even "le vide, le noir, et le
nu") produces not a closed set, but an open-ended series: this,
and that, and that, and ... The final tercet then explains in turn
why escape to the void is nonetheless futile: the language he
seeks to avoid is not a part of nature, but — as we know from the
poetics of the second stanza — a product of Poetic imagination;
even the darkness opposed to nature's light teems with beings
that spew forth by the thousands from the Poet's eye. This
virtually endless proliferation of beings, adumbrated in the last
line of the first tercet by the open-ended series of qualities
actively sought by the Poet, emerges here (as in "Parfum
exotique") as a process independent of him, beyond his control:
the Poet who (as subject or agent) reviled nature in the
preceding stanzas is eclipsed by a Poetic faculty which here
threatens to overwhelm him. The Poet may be able to summon
inspiration whenever he wants (to paraphrase Baudelaire), but
he is sometimes unable to rid himself of it, as is the case here.
This last tercet — perhaps contrary to expectation, since the
movement of the poem seems to be in the direction of metonymy,
away from the metaphoricity of the first stanza - contains the
only verb of being in the poem: "sont" (1. 12), which is
moreover reinforced by the emphatic " elles-memes " immedi-
ately following it and perhaps by the substantive "etres" of the
last line. This verb, which bears the weight of explaining why
recourse to the void is futile, poses an equivalence between
shadows and " toiles." But what are the shadows " themselves " ?
What can "toiles" mean in this context? Are they, by common
synecdoche, paintings " i n " which the beings in question live?
Or, slightly less figuratively, are they the canvasses on which the
Poet (as artist) paints these beings? Are they, by extension in
another direction, canvass in the form of sails? Or are they, by
synecdoche, ships on which forgotten beings live? Are they,
somewhat literally again, spider webs which harbor phantom
Spleen and evil 85
creatures? Or are they, more figuratively, snares which trap the
thousand-fold figments of an excessive imagination?
If we cannot know with certainty what the shadows are,
neither can we know who or what lives there: are they beings
who have disappeared from our view ("Des etres, disparus aux
regards familiers"), or dead souls who give us knowing looks
(" Des etres disparus, aux regards familiers ") ? There is really no
way to tell: as the number of fantasy images increases, so
apparently does their indeterminacy. The quatrains' neat
thematic opposition to the aesthetics of the romantic cycle is
thus undermined by the poetics and assertions of the tercets. For
the nothingness the Poet sought as an antidote to romantic
idealism/symbolism proves impossible: he is faced instead with
a multiplicity of images whose indeterminacy seems to grow
with their proliferation. "Obsession" is a poem that initially
"reverts" to metaphor in order to decode the imagery of
romantic symbolism, but then proceeds to decode metaphoric
poetics itself, finally displaying in the abysmal ambiguities of the
phrase "sont elles-memes des toiles" the insistent uncertainties
of a decoded metaphoric axis.
At the end of the beauty cycle, the Poet had hoped that Beauty's
effects, despite or because of her essential indeterminacy, would
open the door to a longed-for infinity hitherto unknown to him
("m'ouvrent la porte / D'un Infini que j'aime et n'ai jamais
connu" "Hymne" 11. 23-24). By the time we reach "Ob-
session," that infinity appears in a very different light: as a
terrifying abyss the Poet now longs to escape. Having fallen into
time ("Le Masque"), the Poet finds that time unredeemed by
the hoped-for effects of beauty is a disaster, a nightmare from
which he cannot awake. The only recourse, invoked in the poem
immediately following "Obsession," appears to be death:
Et le Temps m'engloutit minute par minute,

Gomme la neige immense un corps pris de roideur;
Je contemple d'en haut le globe en sa rondeur
14 Et je n'y cherche plus Pabri d'une cahute.
Avalanche, veux-tu m'emporter dans ta chute?
"Obsession" and "Le Gout du neant" conclude a cycle of

eleven poems devoted to the theme of the empty infinitude of
time lived in the absence of beauty, from which the Poet is
unable to escape. This theme is introduced early in the cycle.
"Le Mort joyeux" (LXXII) depicts a Poet ready to lie down and
die so as to "sleep in oblivion" (1. 4); but as he invites the worms
to consume his remains, he worries that there might be some
further torture in store (11. 9-14). And in "Le Tonneau de la
haine" (LXXIII), this fear of empty infinitude is in effect
confirmed, first in the figure of the Danaides' vessel, which is
impossible to fill, and then in the image of a perpetually
drunken Hate who, unlike mortal dipsomaniacs, can never get
enough vengeance to pass out under the table (11. 12—14). But
the theme of the cycle is epitomized in the four " Spleen" poems
that form its core.
THE SPLEEN CYCLE
The spleen poems and the cycle centered on them are crucial to
the new ending of "Spleen and Ideal" for two reasons. First of
all, they make explicit the eclipse of memory and the re-
nunciation of the lyric subject that remained implicit in the
beauty cycle and following poems, especially in "Hymne" and
" Chevelure." Secondly, they show how the failure of beauty to
endow lived experience with value and meaning nonetheless
does not preclude metonymic reference to context, in a poetic
project of " intensification" that takes up where the project of
beautification leaves off.
The failure of the lyric subject in invoking memory to
counteract the passage of time appears as the thematic content
of "La Cloche felee" (LXXIV), which introduces the "Spleen"
poems (and was itself originally entitled "Spleen"). Here the
Poet's attempt to revive old memories in song is likened to the
death-rattle of a dying man immobilized under a huge pile of
corpses (11. 12-14). In the same vein, memory in "Spleen" no.
3, "Je suis comme le roi... " (LXXVII) culminates a series of
distractions and amusements that can no longer rouse the Poet-
king from his lethal boredom: " Rien ne peut Pegayer, ni gibier,
Spleen and evil 87
ni faucon, / Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon " (11. 5-6).
Not even memory, the poem insists in the last two couplets, can
"revive this dazed corpse / In which, instead of blood, flow the
green waters of forgetfulness [rechauffer ce cadavre hebete / Ou
coule au lieu de sang l'eau verte du Lethe] " (11. 17-18). Yet the
poetics of these poems remains largely metaphoric. In one, the
Poet's soul is likened to the cracked church bell of the title
("Moi, mon ame est felee... " 1. 9), unable to give voice to
memory; in the other, the opening simile equating the Poet with
the king of a rainy country governs the imagery of the entire
poem. In "Spleen" no. 2, "J'ai plus de souvenirs . . . " (LXXVI),
by contrast, the hopeless struggle of memory against the passage
of time and the disappearance of the lyric subject are staged in
a metonymic mode more like that of "La Beaute."
The first part of the poem is marked by the repetition of " J e "
in a series of futile attempts to find it adequate expression:
J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans.
Un gros meuble a tiroirs encombre de bilans,
De vers, de billets-doux, de proces, de romances,
Avec de lourds cheveux roules dans des quittances,
5 Cache moins de secrets que mon triste cerveau.
C'est une pyramide, un immense caveau,
Qui contient plus de morts que la fosse commune.
- Je suis un cimetiere abhorre de la lune,
Oil comme des remords se trainent de longs vers
10 Qui s'acharnent toujours sur mes morts les plus chers.
Je suis un vieux boudoir plein de roses fanees,
Oil git tout un fouillis de modes surannees,
Oil les pastels plaintifs et les pales Boucher,
Seuls, respirent l'odeur d'un flacon debouche.
The process starts with a hyperbolic comparison ("I have more

memories than... ") whose imaginary comparata (" ... than if
I were a thousand years old") makes the Poet's "more"
memories virtually innumerable. Comparisons then multiply,
becoming more and more extravagant; emblems of memories
(balance-sheets, billets-doux, ballads) appear in profusion (11.
2—3). But the emblems remain mute, their secrets (1. 5)
unrevealed. And in the final comparison (" my sorry head. / It's
a pyramid... " 11. 5-6), these secrets themselves expire, and

appear more numerous in the Poet's head than corpses in the
common grave (1. 6).
At this point the text switches modes and posits equivalents
(rather than comparisons) for the speaking subject, but these
equivalents are not persons, nor even animate beings, but places
totally and explicitly devoid of life: first " I am a graveyard" (1.
8), which hyperbolizes and metaphorizes the preceding com-
parison; then " I am an old boudoir" (1. 11) where paintings
alone breathe the odor of an unstoppered bottle (11. 13-14). As
in "Spleen" no. 1 and no. 4 ("Quand le ciel bas et l o u r d . . . "
[LXXVIII]), the eclipse of the speaking subject leaves only places
and things in its wake; indeed, the " J e " of line 11 is the last first-
person pronoun in the poem.
In a text where generally speaking no rhyme repeats, the
eight lines in the course of which the subject disappears (11.
11—18) all share the same rhyme, and thus stand out un-
mistakably. After disappearing as " J e " in a regime of equiv-
alence (11. 11-14), the grammatical subject in the second
rhymed quatrain (11. 15-19) becomes, first of all: nothing
(subject of the main clause, 1. 15), accentuated as one syllable at
the beginning of the alexandrin and the stanza, as if to
underscore the complete elimination of the speaking " J e " ; and
then: ennui (1. 17, subject of a temporal dependent clause
introduced by " Q u a n d " at the beginning of line 16), the
condition that in a sense (as in " Spleen " no. 1) replaces the " I "
as (at least the topical) subject of the entire poem. At the same
time, equivalence is forcefully rejected in favor of comparison
(particularly in the phrase "Rien n'egale... " ) :
Je suis un vieux boudoir plein de roses fanees,
Oil git tout un fouillis de modes surannees,
Oil les pastels plaintifs et les pales Boucher,
Seuls, respirent l'odeur d'un flacon debouche.
15 Rien n'egale en longueur les boiteuses journees,
Quand sous les lourdsfloconsdes neigeuses annees
L'ennui, fruit de la morne incuriosite,
Prend les proportions de Pimmortalite.
- Desormais tu n'es plus, 6 matiere vivante!
Spleen and evil 89
20 Qu'un granit entoure d'une vague epouvante,
Assoupi dans le fond d'un Saharah brumeux;
Un vieux sphinx ignore d'un monde insoucieux,
Oublie sur la carte, et dont l'humeur farouche
Ne chante qu'aux rayons du soleil qui se couche.
Whereas initially, memory appeared virtually infinite, though
devoid of content, now time does: nothing is as long as the days
when listless boredom assumes the dimensions of immortality.
The first reading of the next line (particularly with the
exclamation point at the end: " - Desormais tu n'es plus, 6
matiere vivante!") reiterates the disappearance of the subject,
now addressed in the second person: "Living matter, even now
you are no more [or] you already no longer exist!" But the
supposed death of living matter is immediately recast by the
following line as its transformation into stone instead, as "you
are no more" becomes "you are no more... than a block of
granite surrounded by vacant terror " (11. 19-20). Living matter
- f o r instance a " j e " that would declare itself (11. 11—14) a
boudoir full of old fashions, art, and perfume-bottles - living
matter that is addressed in the second person is suddenly
transformed into no more than matter, transformed (in a series
of objectifying passive participial complements: "entoure,"
"assoupi," "ignore," "oublie," 11. 20-23) into a thing ignored
and deserted, a thing that sings at the farthest remove from
human concerns, only when day is done.
So the first-person subject, full only of dead memories,
disappears in the face of ennui, only to be resuscitated in the
second person and immediately transformed into a third-person
thing, a non-person: a rock, a sphinx. And who addressed it as
" t u " ? Who depicts the forgotten song? Perhaps the Poet has
doubled himself at death and now speaks from beyond the
tomb, as Laurent Jenny would have it: "Thus the poetic song
would arise not so much from the soul of the romantic as from
the granite of his tomb itself."9 Perhaps it is Ennui personified
who, having taken the measure of immortality (1. 18), is able to
address the absent Poet and locate him outside the reference-
points of a heedless humanity. Whatever interpretation prevails
over this indeterminacy, the dash at the beginning of line 19 and
the sudden appearance of the second person and an apostrophe

signal a change of register from the communicative mode, in
which the lyric subject had addressed us as "je," to a textual
mode where who or what is addressing living matter as " t u " is
not clear. The effect of this switch of address, however, is
patently clear: the lyric subject is transformed from living
matter into stone. Bereft of speaking subject, the text stages the
fate of a lyric poetry which has foundered on the death of
memory and remains sunk in the limitless wastes of time.
The oppressive weight of time is a recurring theme in the
spleen cycle, and recalls the Poet's wager at the end of the
(revised) beauty cycle: that she will "ease the burden of time's
passing moments." In spleen, she clearly fails to. Or conversely:
her failure - to redeem the moment - is spleen. But this failure
does not signal the defeat of the metonymic poetics she
inaugurated. On the contrary: metonymization continues
unabated. Yet the terms of the poetic project have changed:
where Beauty proposed to make all things more beautiful, here
the Poet, or rather the poetic text - since this is the very moment
of the Poet's disappearance as lyric subject - the text operates so
as to make simply anything more intense, even the repulsive and
utterly meaningless experience of boredom so typical of Baude-
lairean spleen. Beautification verges into sheer intensification.
The eclipse of the speaking subject is not the only signal of the
anti-lyrical stance of the "Spleen" poems, if Baudelaire's own
characterization of lyric poetry is taken into consideration. In
his essay on Gautier, Baudelaire insists that the rhythm of lyric
poetry must be "elastic and smooth-flowing; nothing brusque
or choppy befits it." 10 On this criterion alone, the "Spleen"
poems could spell the end of the lyric in Les Fleurs du Mai;
commentaries frequently mention a halting, almost staccato
rhythm as one of their distinctive features.11 We have seen in
"J'ai plus de souvenirs," how the Poet strives to define himself
by means of a series of comparisons, each of which soon proves
unsatisfactory, "gives out within a few lines, " 12 and is replaced
by another in turn. The same effect of" pietinement sur place,"
but in a temporal rather than subjective frame, characterizes
Spleen and evil 91
" Spleen " no. 2 (" Quand le ciel bas et lourd ... " ) : the repetition
of " Q u a n d " at the beginning of each of the first three stanzas
finally leads to a brief spurt of activity in the fourth stanza,
before returning to the initial state of morbid boredom in the
fifth. In both cases, the repeated term reinforces the metaphoric
axis, even while contributing to the choppiness of the poems'
rhythm, by returning to a fixed point of departure or nexus of
associations. What is striking is that these metaphoric associ-
ations never add up and develop; they appear to start over and
over again instead (as in "Spleen" no. 4), or even cancel each
other out (as in "Spleen" no. 2).
"Spleen" no. 1 ("Pluviose ... ") takes this attenuation of the
metaphoric axis even further, by juxtaposing a series of discrete
images, with neither a grammatical person (such as the u j e " in
"Spleen" no. 2) nor an explicit temporal frame (such as
"Quand ... tout a coup" in "Spleen" no. 4) serving to ground
or unify the associations. Comparing it with a sonnet from the
romantic cycle that treats precisely the same theme - the
burden of time - will highlight the anti-lyric rhythm of the
"Spleen" poems and further demonstrate in what sense that
rhythm can be considered metonymical in its poetics.
L'Ennemi
Ma jeunesse ne fut qu'un tenebreux orage,
Traversee $a et la par de brillants soleils;
Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage,
4 Qu'il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils.
Voila que j'ai touche l'automne des idees,
Et qu'il faut employer la pelle et les rateaux
Pour rassembler a neuf les terres inondees,
8 Oil l'eau creuse des trous grands comme des tombeaux.
Et qui sait si lesfleursnouvelles que je reve
Trouveront dans ce sol lave comme une greve
11 Le mystique aliment qui ferait leur vigueur?
- O douleur! 6 douleur! Le Temps mange la vie,
Et l'obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le coeur
14 Du sang que nous perdons croit et se fortifie!
"L'Ennemi" (x) is organized as a cohesive metaphoric system
based on the equivalence posited from the very first line between
the poet's life and nature. The poet's life span is likened to a
growing season through the development of the initial metaphor
of a storm-troubled and impoverished childhood garden (11.
1-4) into images of the autumn of intellect's discontent (11. 5-8)
and the hope sustained for future blossoms (11. g—11). The tragic
conclusion of the final tercet itself employs the same "organic"
metaphoric system in force throughout the sonnet: time devours
life - what little there is left after the ravages of youth have let
so little fruit ripen to nourish the poet's dreams - and drains the
heart of blood.13
In "Pluviose... ", by contrast, we find not a coherent set of
"organic" metaphors, but a disjointed series of images each
expressing in itself the theme of weary boredom:
Pluviose, irrite contre la ville entiere,
De son urne a grands flots verse un froid tenebreux
Aux pales habitants du voisin cimetiere
4 Et la mortalite sur les faubourgs brumeux.
Mon chat sur le carreau cherchant une litiere
Agite sans repos son corps maigre et galeux;
L'ame d'un vieux poete erre dans la gouttiere
8 Avec la triste voix d'un fantome frileux.
Le bourdon se lamente, et la buche enfumee
Accompagne en fausset la pendule enrhumee,
11 Cependant qu'en un jeu plein de sales parfums,
Heritage fatal d'une vieille hydropique,
Le beau valet de coeurs et la dame de pique
14 Causent sinistrement de leurs amours defunts.
Where "L'Ennemi" flows smoothly as each metaphor modu-
lates neatly into the next, the "Spleen" poem lurches from
image to image without apparent connections. No temporal
indices are given to relieve the indeterminacy of the homogenous
present tense, with the possible exception of "Cependant que"
of line 11 which only reinforces the indifferent simultaneity
("while") of the setting or at most (by resonance with
"cependant" in the negational sense of "however" or "never-
theless," as opposed to "Pendant que" or "En meme temps
que") accentuates the exteriority and lack of relation between
succeeding images in the poem.
Spleen and evil 93
The contrast between the two poems also points up the
almost total absence of the Poet from the latter, whereas the
former places the Poet at its center and makes his life its guiding
thread. Only the possessive pronoun " M o n " (the only first-
person pronoun in "Spleen" no. 1) — appearing in line 5 and
modifying the subject of the first clause of the stanza — suggests
that it is perhaps the Poet who is speaking, thereby situating
him as owner of the cat and by implication as occupant of a
residence the description of whose interior constitutes a large
portion of the text. This suggestion is supported by the mention
of "the soul of an old poet" occurring in the same position as
subject of the second clause of the stanza (both subjects being
determined, moreover, by predicate complements of place and
semantically similar verbs of erratic motion: "sur le carreau ...
agite," "erre dans la gouttiere"). On this interpretation, the
two parallel independent clauses joined paratactically by the
semi-colon separating them at the end-of line 6 mirror one
another and are to be read in a metaphorical relation making
one the virtual equivalent of the other.14
But this interpretation is belied first of all by the anonymity
imposed on the "old poet's soul" by its indefinite article, " u n "
("L'ame d'un vieux poete" 1. 7), and furthermore by its
expulsion (to the gutter) from the very residence whose
extensive description was supposed to attest to his presence. In
light of this expulsion of the poem's only figure of the poet (who
thus spatially joins the chilly inhabitants of the neighboring
cemetery whose status as shivering phantoms he shared anyway,
11. 2-3 and 8), it might be equally or even more plausible to refer
" M o n , " in the absence of a resident, and by personification of
a thing, to the residence itself. It may, in other words, be the
place that is inscribed as the first person in this poem, while the
phantom voice of the former (lyric) poet wanders sadly outside
in the gutter. This reading refuses metaphorical status to the
parallel clauses of stanza 2, treating them instead as discrete
images in the metonymical sequence of images that comprises
the entire poem.
Whichever interpretation one chooses in the face of this
indeterminacy, it is clearly the setting that predominates in this
poem, rather than the Poet, and to the exclusion of any
determinate meaning. While the Poet figures at most only as
owner of his cat, the things that surround him are all personified:
the rain (11. 1-4), the great bell (1. 9, recalling the carillons of
"La Cloche felee"), the fireplace log (1. 9), the clock (1. 10), the
deck of cards (11. 11—14). We are in effect obliged to infer the
presence of the Poet (and for instance the possibility that he may
be playing or shuffling cards in order to pass the time) from the
setting rather than simply read his presence symbolized in/by
nature. Or more precisely: we infer the condition of the
(disappearing) Poet - boredom, ennui - from the emblems of
that condition that comprise the surroundings. And this is one
of the salient features of a discourse in which the metonymic axis
predominates and the metaphoric is attenuated: reference to
context prevails over stable meaning and identity.
The foregrounding of the referential function in metonymic
discourse may help explain the difference in "feel" between the
metaphors of "L'Ennemi" and the emblems in "Spleen." For
all their drama and systematic concision, the metaphorical
images of the romantic sonnet seem unreal and the strong Poetic
voice strangely unsituated or disembodied; whereas the em-
blematic images of "Spleen" - focusing ever more obsessively
first on the rainy season outside, then on the residence itself,
then on the hearth and mantle, finally on the pack of cards in
the Poet's hands - seem palpably concrete and the setting
starkly real, as if the acuteness of the ennui enhanced the acuity
of the Poet's perception — or rather of poetic depiction. For
having banished the Poet as speaking subject, the " Spleen" text
gives voice instead to things: it is by the intensity of their
depiction and not of subjective expression that spleen is to be
measured.
The project of intensification thus picks up where beauti-
fication left off, as the Poetic will required to appreciate beauty
evaporates under the influence of spleen, along with the recourse
to memory to salvage experience from the ravages of time.
Metonymy continues to prevail, for splenetic intensification
entails multiple and indeterminate referentiality rather than
integrative identity, is based on comparisons rather than
Spleen and evil 95
equations, and occupies the dispersion of real time rather than
the fictive unity of remembrance. In discussing the importance
of things and of reference to context in the beauty cycle, we
invoked Baudelaire's term "ironic supernaturalism" to des-
ignate the poetic charge added to things to make them more
beautiful; the succeeding poems then showed that beautifi-
cation depended not on divine inspiration but on an increas-
ingly carnal Poetic will. One of the ironies of such "super-
naturalism" is that this poetic charge, in the absence of beauty
and with the evaporation of Poetic will, can make things simply
more intense. Another of its ironies is that it can make things
more terrible, as well.
Such is the conclusion drawn in "Alchimie de la douleur,"
the poem that marks the transition from spleen into evil. Its
opening stanza seems to comment explicitly on the inherent
ambiguity of "ironic supernaturalism," its capacity for spleen
as well as beauty — to the point of citing the title of the poem
that opens the spleen cycle ("Sepulture"):
L'un t'eclaire avec son ardeur,
L'autre en toi met son deuil, Nature!
Ge qui dit a l'un: Sepulture!
Dit a l'autre: Vie et splendeur!
But in the next sentence, and thence throughout the four poems
comprising this cycle, the Poet takes the side of evil, choosing to
"change gold into iron / And paradise into hell (je change Tor
en fer / Et le paradis en enfer)" (11. 9-10). In the absence of
inspired faith and of beauty's fascination, the charge of intensity,
it turns out, can be more surely attained through willful
perversity than from even the most excruciating boredom. The
turn from passively suffering spleen to actively willing evil
necessarily entails a reappearance of the subject and also
involves explicit thematic opposition to the romantic homilies of
the opening cycle of the collection. But the subject of evil is also
a subject of irony, and the thematic opposition itself is
accompanied by further metonymization of poetics.
THE CYCLE OF EVIL
Having started in the third person, "Alchimie de la douleur"

reaffirms the role of Poetic will by switching thereafter to first-
person pronouns, concluding with four assertions of Poetic
activity:
Par toi je change Tor en fer
Et le paradis en enfer;
11 Dans le suaire des nuages
Je decouvre un cadavre cher,
Et sur les celestes rivages
14 Je batis des sarcophages.
In much the same way, the Poet of "Horreur sympathique"
claims the light of the heavens as a mere reflection of his own
infernal predilections: "Cieux... / ... vos lueurs sont le reflet /
De l'enfer ou mon coeur se plait" (1. 14). Yet the actual identity
of this active Poet is immediately put into question by the
closing poems of the cycle, "L'Heautontimoroumenos" and
"L'Irremediable."
Reading these two poems side by side and in this order
produces poetic effects that were no doubt illegible in the first
edition, where eleven other poems separated the two. Both
poems, of course, refer explicitly to irony and to the doubling of
the self as mirror of itself. But in "L'Irremediable," this
doubling occurs without the use of first-person pronouns. The
total absence of the "first person," of the Poet himself, is an
important feature of the ending of" Spleen and Ideal," and is in
fact prepared by the fate of the Poet as speaking subject in the
preceding poem of the pair, "L'Heautontimoroumenos":
Je te frapperai sans colere

Et sans haine, comme un boucher,
Gomme Moise le rocher!
4 Et je ferai de ta paupiere,
Pour abreuver mon Saharah,
Jaillir les eaux de la soufFrance.
Mon desir gonfle d'esperance
8 Sur tes pleurs sales nagera
Spleen and evil 97
Comme un vaisseau qui prend le large,
Et dans mon coeur qu'ils souleront
Tes chers sanglots retentiront
12 Comme un tambour qui bat la charge!
Ne suis-je pas un faux accord
Dans la divine symphonie,
Grace a la vorace Ironie
16 Qui me secoue et me mord ?
Elle est dans ma voix, la criarde!
C'est tout mon sang, ce poison noir!
Je suis le sinistre miroir
20 Oil la megere se regarde.
Je suis la plaie et le couteau!
Je suis le soufflet et la joue!
Je suis les membres et la roue,
24 Et la victime et le bourreau!
Je suis de mon coeur le vampire,
- Un de ces grands abandonnes
Au rire eternel condamnes,
28 Et qui ne peuvent plus sourire!
The first person " J e " begins the poem by positing a forceful,
transitive relation to the second person that will predominate
throughout the first three stanzas. At this point, the second
person disappears and the syntax switches from forceful
assertion to rhetorical question, and the Poet addresses not an
other, but himself. It is here, of course, that "voracious Irony"
(1. 15) makes her appearance, allegorized and personified by the
capital " I " and the transitive relation she takes up with respect
to the Poet (himself now reduced to two object-pronoun
complements) in the subordinate clause that ends the stanza
("la vorace Ironie / Qui me secoue et qui me mord" 11. 15-16).
She then appears to take over as subject at the beginning of the
next stanza: first described as being " in " the Poet's voice (" Elle
est dans ma voix, la criarde!" 1. 17), she soon becomes the Poet's
very life blood ("C'est tout mon sang, ce poison noir!" 1. 18).
But the Poet then returns as subject of the next phrase, only to
become the mirror in which shrewish Irony - as "la criarde" of
line 17 becomes "la megere" of line 20 - contemplates herself:
"Je suis le sinistre miroir / Oil la megere se regarde" (1. 20). Or
is it the Poet, his voice so suffused with shrewish irony (" Elle est
la criarde dans ma voix") as to become the shrew of line 20, who
here contemplates himself in the mirror? There is no way to tell:
the doubling of the Poet introduced first with the disappearance
of the second person and in the grammar of the rhetorical
question, and now developed in the image of the mirror, makes
the identity of the mirror figure impossible to determine with
any certainty.
This doubling then dominates the famous penultimate stanza
(11. 21-25), where despite the (almost desperate?) repetition of
the subject " J e , " identity collapses as the expected exclusive
disjunction (either the knife or the wound, the limbs or the
rack), which would assign a recognizable role to the subject, is
replaced by inclusive disjunction: he is both the slap and the
face, both victim and torturer. It is perhaps no surprise, then,
that in the last three lines of the poem - separated by a dash
signaling as it were the expiration of lyric subjectivity - the
speaking self is abandoned entirely. All that remains is an
anonymous, almost third-person appositive condemning the self
to eternal and humorless derision (in both the active and passive
senses: the act of deriding and the state of being derided).
"LTrremediable" appears in this context as the logical next
step in the depersonalization of lyric enunciation through the
doubling and subsequent disappearance of the speaking subject.
Like the first, the second poem uses the image of the mirror to
figure the doubling of the subject. But there the similarity ends.
Here it is not the Poet himself who becomes a mirror ("Je suis
le sinistre miroir... "), but only " a heart" (1. 34) - and by
extension perhaps a head (given the typography of the idiom
"Tete-a-tete" in 1. 33):
L'Irremediable
1
Une Idee, une Forme, un Etre
Parti de l'azur et tombe
Dans un Styx bourbeux et plombe
4 Oil mil oeil du Ciel ne penetre;
Un Ange, imprudent voyageur
Qu'a tente l'amour du difforme,
Spleen and evil 99
Au fond d'un cauchemar enorme
8 Se debattant comme un nageur,
Et luttant, angoisses funebres!
Contre un gigantesque remous
Qui va chantant comme les fous
12 Et pirouettant dans les tenebres;
Un malheureux ensorcele
Dans ses tatonnements futiles,
Pour fuir d'un lieu plein de reptiles,
16 Cherchant la lumiere et la cle;
Un damne descendant sans lampe,
Au bord d'un gouffre dont l'odeur
Trahit l'humide profondeur,
20 D'eternels escaliers sans rampe,
Ou veillent des monstres visqueux
Dont les larges yeux de phosphore
Font une nuit plus noire encore
24 Et ne rendent visible qu'eux;
Un navire pris dans le pole,
Comme en un piege de cristal,
Gherchant par quel detroit fatal
28 II est tombe dans cette geole;
Emblemes nets, tableau parfait
D'une fortune irremediable,
Qui donne a penser que le Diable
32 Fait toujours bien tout ce qu'il fait!
11
Tete-a-tete sombre et limpide
Qu'un coeur devenu son miroir!
Puits de Verite, clair et noir,
36 Oil tremble une etoile livide.
Un phare ironique, infernal,
Flambeau des graces sataniques,
Soulagement et gloire uniques
40 - La conscience dans le Mai!
T h e speaking subject is totally absent from the poem as personal
pronoun. Indeed, the third-person " s o n " modifying mirror in
line 34 is the only personal pronoun in the entire poem - if
" p e r s o n a l " is the right word in this context. For against the
i oo Baudelaire and schizoanalysis
grain of regular usage, "son" appears here as a rigorously

apersonal pronoun: it refers to "coeur," which would usually
be a synecdoche or metonym for someone; but in this poem that
someone is never named. The closest we get to the alleged
person this heart would "stand for" is "L'Irremediable" of
the title - which may at first reading be taken as a substantivized
adjective naming an incorrigible person. But it turns out in line
30 that what is irremediable is an abstract condition: "une
fortune irremediable" —not a person, but a fate. And not a
personal fate: as the indefinite pronoun insists, a generalized,
anonymous one.
What role can a doubling mirror play in the absence of a
person to be doubled? In "L'Heautontimoroumenos," the
mirror serves as pivot for the ultimate cancellation of a set of
exclusive disjunctions introduced first of all by the opposition
between the feminine - irony personified ("la vorace Ironie" 1.
15, "Elle est... " 1. 17), and the masculine - the Poet. In the
four stanzas preceding the appearance of the mirror image, the
Poet takes exclusively masculine forms, whether through
possession/attribution ("mon Saharah" 1. 5, "Mon desir" 1. 7,
"mon coeur" 1. 10), by comparison ("comme un boucher" 1. 2,
"Comme Molse" 1. 3, "Comme un vaisseau" 1. 9), or finally in
copulative predication ("Ne suis-je pas un faux accord" 1. 13).
Even after the introduction of the mirror in which Irony and
Poet interchange places (in the stanza where for once the Poet's
possessive appears in feminine form: " ma voix"), the opposition
between masculine and feminine holds sway (though without
consistent distribution of the roles victim/victimizer) in the
series of matched-gender pairs of the following stanza ("Je
suis la plaie et le c o u t e a u ! / . . . / Et la victime et le bourreau!").
In the last stanza, however, all nouns (and pronouns) are
masculine, as if the differentiation of gender had to disappear
along with the speaking subject.
This gender indifferentiation characterizes "LTrremedi-
able" as well. All the substantives associated with the mirror
image in the second poem are masculine (even the "Tete-a-
tete" beginning the stanza), as are all the comparata emblema-
tizing the absent persona except those in the very first line of the
Spleen and evil 101
poem, which thus serve as a kind of transition from the opposed
gender roles of "L'Heautontimoroumenos'' to the insistent
repetition here of " u n " - " U n etre" (1. i), " U n Ange" (1. 5),
" U n malheureux" (1. 13), " U n damne" (1. 17), " U n navire"
(1. 25) - that names... no one. In fact, not only is there no
personal pronoun subject in the poem, there are also no subjects
whatsoever and no main predicates, all conjugated verbs
appearing in clauses subordinate to the starkly apposed
"emblems" (1. 29). Apposition is metaphoric in principle, since
it implies equivalence through substitution of one item by the
next; but here apposition is largely metonymic, inasmuch as the
series of emblems forms a sequence rather than an equivalence:
they describe an arc that moves from the abstract to the
concrete, away from the transcendental splendor of "Une Idee,
une Forme, un Etre" and " U n Ange" of the first two stanzas
(all capitalized), through the substantivized adjectives "mal-
heureux '' and '' damne,'' to the final emblem: a ship trapped at
the pole (1. 25). The kinetics of the sequence follows suit: the
early emblems involve a tragic fall from heaven to hell, the
descent of the damned into the depths; in the final one, the ship
is trapped motionless, the verbs of motion ("chercher," even
"tomber") themselves taking on secondary senses which no
longer imply motion at all. Moreover, the vivid metaphors
characteristic of the previous stanzas have given way to simile
("Comme en un piege de cristal" 1. 26). The emblems thus
appear to shed their poeticality as the sequence finally reaches
its term and names only "an irremediable fortune" as its
reference. Compared to the clear-cut gender oppositions and
neatly balanced disjunctions surrounding the mirror in
"L'Heautontimoroumenos," the mirror in "LTrremediable"
functions more like a hall of mirrors, endlessly multiplying
poetically fainter and fainter images of the same ...
But the second stanza of the second part of the poem contains
yet another masculine appositive - " Un phare ironique, in-
fernal" (1. 37) - which suggests a very different comparison. Of
course, the mention of irony here recalls the immediate context
and significantly transforms the personified allegory "Ironie"
of "L'Heautontimoroumenos" into a mere adjectival comp-
lement (in fact, one of two such modifying "beacon" in the

same line). But this appositive also recalls, in a broader context,
the glorious beacons of the early poem of the same name ("Les
Phares" [vi]), which thus provides a virtual mirror image of a
former Poet or poetics in a setting where the subject is now
absent and poeticality itself is on the wane.
Indeed, "LTrremediable" can be considered the reversed
mirror image of "Les Phares" for a number of reasons. They
not only occupy roughly symmetrical positions near the
beginning and end of the "Spleen and Ideal" section (in the
second edition), but they also share a distinctive, extended
paratactic form that sets them apart from all other poems in the
collection. What appears in the later poem as the sequence of
emblems we have examined appears in " Les Phares" as a set of
great painters whose art worlds are described one by one in the
first eight stanzas: Rubens, da Vinci, Rembrandt, and so on.
But despite the similarity of paratactic form, this chain of
appositives forms a strongly metaphoric set rather than a
metonymic series: the art worlds really are equivalent, and are
conjoined and literally made one (" [Ce] sont u n . . . " 1. 35) in
the last three stanzas:
Ces maledictions, ces blasphemes, ces plaintes,
Ces extases, ces cris, ces pleurs, ces Te Deum,
Sont un echo redit par mille labyrinthes;
36 C'est pour les coeurs mortels un divin opium!
C'est un cri repete par mille sentinelles,
Un ordre renvoye par mille porte-voix;
C'est un phare allume sur mille citadelles,
40 Un appel de chasseurs perdus dans les grands bois!
Car c'est vraiment, Seigneur, le meilleur temoignage
Que nous puissions donner de notre dignite
Que cet ardent sanglot qui roule d'age en age
44 Et vient mourir au bord de votre eternite!
The eight stanzas of description are resumed in the plurals of
lines 33-34 before being reduced to " a [single] echo" in line 35,
after which the singular indefinite article is repeated in each of
the five succeeding lines before taking final form in a superlative
(hence with definite article: "le meilleur temoignage") de-
Spleen and evil 103
noting true testimony addressed to the Lord (11. 41-42). In
"L'Irremediable," by contrast, the emblems barely form a set
of equivalences, appearing rather as a gradated series whose
devolution represents a "perfect painting [or] tableau" (1. 29)
of the success of the Devil's work, rather than a prayer addressed
to God.
It is, of course, richly ironic that the emblems here become a
painting of the Devil's work, since in the poem's romantic
counterpart it was the works of painters that became a prayer.
This contrast highlights in " L'Irremediable " a mode of address
with which we have become familiar since the beauty cycle:
with the disappearance of the speaking subject, post-lyric
modernist poetry refuses speech (and afortiori speech in the form
of prayer addressed to the ultimate transcendental interlocutor,
God) as the model poetry presents of itself. Where " Les Phares"
took paintings as prayers, here emblems are taken as...
emblems: "concrete object[s] endowed with abstract mean-
ing[s]." Whereas in "L'Heautontimoroumenos," the speaking
subject appeared so as to be ironized, in "L'Irremediable"
irony is explicitly named and assumed by the text, so that the
speaking subject never appears at all. It is no longer through
speech that the Poet expresses himself; poetry henceforth finds
expression in images of things - much as if its avowed aim were
simply to glorify the adoration of images: " Glorifier le culte des
images (ma grande, mon unique, ma primitive passion)." 15
Yet the poem ends with one final apposed substitute for the
absent persona emblematized throughout, a substitute in
feminine form this time, introduced (the only time in the poem)
by a definite article, followed by an exclamation point - and
preceded, as if to signal an important shift of register, by a dash:
" - L a conscience dans le Mai!" (1. 40). Compared to the
unmitigated metonymy of the " Spleen" poems, this concluding
appositive reinforces the metaphoric quality of the chain by
providing a single general equivalent for the entire series of
emblems. Even in the striking absence of a speaking subject, the
apposed chain of emblems and virtual mirror images (reflections
of "L'Heautontimoroumenos," of "Les Phares") tends to
produce a phantom "consciousness" or "conscience," a
doubled or ironic subject of the text - a phantom sujet cPenonce,

as it were, shadowing the sujet (Tenonciation so rigorously
eliminated from the text itself.
So the cycle of evil at the end of "Spleen and Ideal," while
clearly opposing the section's opening romantic cycle on the
thematic plane, also reiterates in the space of four poems the
assertion and subsequent evaporation of the speaking subject
that characterizes the evolution of metonymic poetics from the
end of the beauty cycle to spleen. Its opening sonnets - both
added to the second edition — introduce an active subject of evil
keenly aware of the decision to vilify rather than glorify nature,
but that subject is immediately split into mutually contradicting
roles in " L'Heautontimoroumenos " and then stripped of its
status as first-person speaking subject in " LTrremediable."
The cycle thereby concludes with a radically metonymic form of
irony in which no position is available from which to stabilize
and hierarchize binary opposition. If the subject is both victim
and torturer, both conscience and evil, neither pole can be
considered the basic one in relation to which the other could be
judged. Hence the impossibility of disambiguating (and of
translating) the crucial phrase "La conscience dans le Mai!"
There is no way to decide which of "conscience" or "Evil"
prevails over the other, so that mere "awareness" of the
impossibility is the most the phrase can convey. Irony such as
this subverts the value-hierarchies informing fundamental
binary oppositions of the socio-symbolic order, even while
keeping those oppositions in play.
The arrangement of these four poems in the second edition of

Les Fleurs du Mai certainly serves to strengthen a sense of strong-
willed perversity and self-conscious indulgence in evil that
diametrically reverses the romantic idealism of the opening
cycle of" Spleen and Ideal." However, the section does not end
there, but with "L'Horloge," a poem added to the second
edition to conclude the revised section. This addition brings to
the fore the decoding of subjectivity characteristic of the
metonymic poetics inaugurated by "La Beaute" and culmi-
nating in " Spleen," rather than the thematic binary opposition
Spleen and evil 105
of good and evil. For the figure of the Poet is completely absent
from "L'Horloge." And the text compensates for the eclipse of
the Poetic voice by recourse to an extended prosopopoeia,
which recalls the rhetoric of "La Beaute" (these two being the
only poems in the section to make such extensive use of this
figure). Only this time, the prosopopoeia itself contains a
prosopopoeia, in that "the Second" (1. 9) and "Now" (1. 11)
are cited as speaking within the long quotation comprising most
of the poem — so that the text effectively underscores its own
rhetorical figure wise en abime, as if to make it more legible.
Indeed, the prosopopoeia in "L'Horloge" appears all the
more explicit because it is not total: the timepiece's warning
appears in quotation marks and is introduced by a brief,
impersonal apostrophe:
Horloge! dieu sinistre, effrayant, impassible,
Dont le doigt nous menace et nous dit: " Souviens-toi!
These two lines alone contain many features of the metonymic
poetics of the beauty and spleen cycles: the potentially
interminable paratactic list of attributes (1. 1); the allegorical
personification of the timepiece (called a sinister god in line 1);
the reduction of the subject presented in the first line by
metonymy to one of its parts, " le doigt," which will menace and
address us mortals (1. 15); the immediate mise-en-question of the
allegorical figure's status by the syllepsis involving the term
"doigt" (1. 2), which can refer either via personification to the
finger of the time-god or more concretely to the pawl of the
clock itself. The double subordinate predicate of line 2 will then
accentuate the syllepsis, for while "Dont le doigt nous menace"
on the one hand supports the allegorical reading, with the time-
god thereby wagging his index finger at us in admonishment,
" Dont le doigt nous dit," on the other hand - a strange thing to
say of a finger, after all - suggests rather the ticking sound of the
clock's pawl and ratchet wheel, which would thereby admonish
us and represent time's menace in retrospect.
The admonition itself (whoever pronounces it — and again, to
insist on deciding between the two possibilities would be to miss
the indeterminacy so characteristic of Baudelaire's metonymic
poetics) this admonition recalls the oppressive atmosphere of

decoded time from the "Spleen" poems, with the dreary
moments ticking away one by one by one. But with the
personification of time (in the clock or the time-god), it also
echoes the universe ruled by chance in "Hymne a la Beaute"
(the two poems in fact initially appeared together in L Artiste)
and the desperate gamble taken in the projects of beautification
and intensification to salvage beauty, or intense experience of
any kind, from the ineluctable ravages of time:
Les minutes, mortel folatre, sont des gangues
16 Qu'il ne faut pas lacher sans en extraire Tor!
le Temps est un joueur avide

Qui gagne sans tricher, a tout coup! c'est la loi.
Tantot sonnera l'heure ou le divin Hasard,

24 Oil tout te dira: Meurs, vieux lache! il est trop tard!
The poetics of the admonition, meanwhile, recall the halting
rhythm of "Spleen" no. 2 ("J'ai plus de souvenirs... ") and
"Spleen" no. 4 ("Quand le ciel bas et lourd... "), as the
stanzas return repeatedly to the refrain "souviens-toi" as if to
hammer home the sense of time's relentless passage and the need
to mobilize memory against it.
If the repetition of the imperative "souviens-toi" in this
context appears to evoke the potential of memory in the struggle
against time, it is largely because of the syntactical relations the
phrase entertains in the first four stanzas. " Souviens-toi" always
appears there as an imperative without further predication that
would disambiguate it, and followed by descriptions of the
various tortures dealt out by the passage of time. Only in the
fifth stanza (out of six) does a direct object make it clear that the
imperative is not to remember something past ("souviens-toi de ce
qui fut"), but to always bear in mind that time is the enemy:
"Souviens-toi que le Temps est un joueur avide ... " (1. 17). Far
from successfully resuscitating memory or even recommending
the attempt, the poem warns of the inevitable defeat of memory
by time, instead. The descriptive passages intercalated between
Spleen and evil 107
the repeated command to "remember" thus appear not as
motives for recalling the past, but as so many features of what it
is that needs always to be kept in mind: time is an avid gambler
or game-player who wins without cheating, " a tout coup!" (1.
18) — at every stroke (of the clock), at every throw (of the dice),
at every shot (at the billiard table), at every move (in checkers
or chess), at every turn (in any game).
If its final poem is an indication, the "Spleen and Ideal"
section concludes with a categorical rejection of memory and of
the prospect of recuperating the identity of self metaphorically
by reuniting past and present. In contrast to the cycle of evil
immediately preceding it, "L'Horloge" affirms the anti-lyrical
metonymic poetics that underlay the intensification of things,
and that appears here in the project to salvage poetic value in a
wager against the ever-present menace of splenetic time. But
"L'Horloge" does not only reiterate the metonymic poetics of
the beauty and spleen cycles preceding it; it also thematizes
metonymy itself in the allegorical figure of decoded time, which
now represents the context in which all poetic projects are
pursued. It thus sets the stage for the drama of the "Tableaux
Parisiens" to follow. At the same time, the diverse and striking
psychodynamic effects of the eclipse of memory and integral
subjectivity our poetic analysis has brought to light — ranging
from the exhilarating pleasures of beauty, to the excruciating
boredom of spleen, to the self-lacerating thrills of evil - call for
an examination of Baudelaire's poetic supernaturalism from the
perspective of psychopoetics.
PART II
Psychopoetics
CHAPTER 4
Romantic temperament and "Spleen and Ideal'
THE PSYGHODYNAMIGS OF EXPERIENCE
Walter Benjamin's germinal insight was to have read "Spleen

and Ideal" in conjunction with Freud's analysis of memory and
perception in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This enabled him to
understand the aesthetics of both " Correspondances " and
" Spleen" as facets of Baudelaire's poetic response to the crisis of
experience in market society, a response he dubs the "shock-
defense." Benjamin's perspective has its limitations: in making
the "Spleen and Ideal" section the core of his entire reading,
Benjamin neglects important developments in the "Tableaux
Parisiens" and the Petits Poemes en prose; he even overlooks the
importance of the projects of beautification and evilification in
"Spleen and Ideal" itself; finally, he somewhat hastily merges
the textual figure of the Poet with the historical figure of
Baudelaire himself. On this last point, it is worth recalling that
"Some Motifs in Baudelaire" was only a draft portion of a
larger study of the poet that Benjamin never finished: an exami-
nation of Baudelaire's early art criticism will largely corrobo-
rate Benjamin's assessment of his historical significance, which is
presented in shorthand, as it were, in the unfinished essay. Then
Benjamin's psychodynamic reading of "Spleen and Ideal" can
be broadened to encompass the projects of beautification and
evilification, as well as correspondences and spleen. The aim
will be to examine the evolution of Baudelaire's metonymic
poetics and the alternating cycles of decoding and recoding in
"Spleen and Ideal," as preparation for the psychopoetic
reading of the "Tableaux Parisiens" in the next chapter.
111
The essay "Some Motifs in Baudelaire" hinges on the

distinction Benjamin proposes between mere "lived time"
(Erlebnis) and "experience in the strict sense of the word"
(Erfahrung).1 In merely "lived time," passing moments are
linked by the degree-zero of relation, pure linear succession.
This is the decoded form of splenetic time that appears in
" L'Horloge," where the time-god counts down the meaningless
sequence of minutes and seconds till death. Recollection (long-
term memory) that would serve to integrate a lifetime of
experience no longer functions here; recall (short-term mem-
ory) that serves to synthesize immediately lived experience is
reduced to the registration of sheer seriality. In "true ex-
perience," by contrast, passing moments are integrated into
meaningful life-experience via the memory-chains of recol-
lection, the operations of which are "frequently unconscious"
(Benjamin here invokes the memoire involontaire of Bergson and
Proust).
Successful integration of personal life-experience depends,
according to Benjamin, on a framework of memorability
created by the repetition of collectively observed special
occasions:
Where there is experience in the strict sense of the word, certain
contents of the individual past combine with material of the collective
past. Rituals, with their ceremonies, their festivals ... kept producing
the amalgamation of these two elements of memory [individual past
and collective past] over and over again. They triggered recollection
and remained handles of memory [with which to grasp experience]
for a lifetime, (p. 113)
But the modern calendar, on Benjamin's analysis, does not
integrate time in that way: the unexceptional, day-to-day
passage of lived time {Erlebnis) predominates instead, broken
only on weekends and by holidays, which represent the rare
occasions on which individual and collective memory might
realign to produce experience in the strict sense {Erfahrung)}
For modern man, however, even
the places of recollection [that take] the form of holidays ... are left
blank... [Modern man] loses his capacity for experiencing [and] feels
Romantic temperament 113
as though he is dropped from the calendar. The big-city dweller knows
this feeling on Sundays; Baudelaire has it avant la lettre in one of his
Spleen poems, (p. 144)
Life after the decline of experience, Benjamin suggests, risks
degenerating into the empty spleen time of "L'Horloge." Yet
Baudelaire's poetry constitutes for Benjamin not simply an
expression of the crisis of experience, but a complex reaction
involving (inter alia) both defense against and compensation for
the loss of collective traditions.
The key hypothesis on which Benjamin bases his distinction
between lived time and true experience Freud formulates as
follows: "becoming conscious and leaving behind a memory
trace are processes incompatible with each other" (cited by
Benjamin in " Some Motifs, " p . 114). On this view, the principal
role of consciousness is not so much to receive stimuli as it is to
shield the rest of the psyche from them. What Freud calls the
"consciousness-perception system" processes or manages sen-
sory input by binding incoming stimuli to preexisting memory-
chains in order to "make sense" of them and thereby prevent
trauma. In this way, consciousness integrates the function of the
pleasure principle, bending it to its own purpose. The pleasure
principle generally governs the reading of perceptual stimuli in
terms of memory-traces left by previous satisfaction of a drive, so
as to enable the organism to obtain an appropriate object and
thence discharge the energy of the drive. But the ego is satisfied
with the binding of stimuli itself, regardless of whether it leads
to discharge or not: its primary aim is not to obtain pleasure,
but merely to reduce anxiety over potential trauma from
incoming stimuli. Trauma results when the shield of con-
sciousness fails and a memory-trace is inscribed directly in the
unconscious: an incident leaves a lasting, unconscious im-
pression deep in memory precisely to the extent that it is not
registered in consciousness first.3
As a modern man and urban dweller, Benjamin suggests,
Baudelaire was particularly susceptible to traumatic shocks,
and this for two interrelated reasons. On one hand, the decline
of collective festival and traditions leaves modern man psy-
chically exposed, without the ready handles of collective
memory that would enable him to process experience more or

less automatically. On the other hand, the rapid pace of modern
city life (epitomized for Benjamin in the image of the Poet
dodging horse-drawn carriages racing down Haussmann's new
boulevards)4 gravely taxes the ability of the exposed psyche to
protect itself. Baudelaire's response is the shock-defense. The
greater the risk of traumatic shock, Benjamin explains,
the more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen against
stimuli; the more efficiently it is so, the less do these impressions enter
experience (Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain
hour in one's life (Erlebnis) ... Baudelaire made it his business to parry
the shocks ... (p. 117)
The shock-defense thus results in the "lived time" of "L'Hor-

loge" and the "Spleen" poems; as Benjamin puts it: "in spleen
the perception of time is supernaturally keen; every second finds
consciousness ready to intercept its shock" (p. 143).
The shock-defense is not without serious consequences: the
process "of assigning to an incident a precise point in time in
consciousness at the cost of the integrity of its contents" in effect
turns the incident "into a moment that has been lived
(Erlebnis)" (p. 117); it thereby "sterilize[s] the incident for
poetic experience" (p. 116). Baudelaire thus appears as a lyric
poet whose conditions of experience threaten to preclude the
possibility of writing lyric poetry. Baudelaire's response to this
challenge, according to Benjamin, is the doctrine of correspon-
dences, an "attempt to establish experience in a crisis-proof
form" (p. 140, translation modified). The disintegration of
experience provokes a desperate battle waged by Baudelaire to
salvage some form of experience from the ravages of modernity;
hence Benjamin's gloss on the title of the first section of Les Fleurs
du Mai: "The ideal supplies the power of remembrance; the
spleen musters the multitude of seconds against it" (p. 142).
Only traumatic experience resonates deeply enough in memory
to become the stuff of characteristically modern lyric poetry. In
effect, Baudelaire writes his own calendar (p. 142), creating
poems out of personal trauma to fill in the spaces that are left
blank by the erosion of collective holidays (p. 116) and
threatened with engulfment in the dreary emptiness of spleen
time.
Proust describes the Baudelairean calendar thus: "Time is
peculiarly chopped u p . . . only a few days open up, they are
significant ones" (cited by Benjamin in "Some Motifs," p.
139). What makes them significant is that "they are days of
recollection [Erfahrung], not marked by any experience [of lived
time, Erlebnis]. They are not connected with the other days, but
stand out from [the passage of] time" (p. 139). Thus for
Benjamin, correspondences are inseparable from an experience
of the remote past:
The correspondances are the data of remembrance - not historical data,
but data of prehistory. What makes festive days great and significant
is the encounter with an earlier life. Baudelaire recorded this in a
sonnet entitled "La Vie anterieure" ... There are no simultaneous
correspondences, such as were cultivated later by the Symbolists. The
murmur of the past may be heard in the correspondences, and the
canonical experience of them has its place in a previous life. (p. 141)
But whose previous life? Whose past is heard in the murmur of
correspondences? The Poet's own? - or that of some vanished
collectivity? The strategic value of the calendar figure for
Benjamin is that it enables him to fuse together the individual
past (lodged deep in memory) of the Poet with a kind of
collective past that he claims Baudelaire once shared but which
is on the verge of disappearing in the poet's own lifetime. The
essay's cognitive force derives from a kind of stereoscopy by
which the textual persona of the Poet is seen to converge with
the historical figure of Baudelaire at a moment of transition.
Thus a certain line of poetry in Baudelaire "expresses ... [the]
collapse of that experience which he once shared" (p. 143, my
emphasis); and at the same time, "by appropriating the ritual
elements ... included in the concept of experience recorded by
the correspondances... Baudelaire was able to fathom the full
meaning of the breakdown which he, a modern man, was witnessing"
(p. 139, my emphasis). The weekends or "significant days" of
Baudelaire's own life (as expressed in his poetry) end up fusing
with the festive holidays that once cemented tradition and
triggered "handles of memory" for whole societies.
As suspect as such an assertion may seem in the condensed
form given to it by Benjamin's essay, a similar but not identical
formulation of socio-symbolic "breakdown" appears in Baude-
laire's early art criticism. Baudelaire's own formulation reveals
that, far from sharing the form of traditional experience
Benjamin claims was just disappearing in the poet's lifetime,
Baudelaire was already compensating for its loss: partly by
appealing to the endangered tradition of great art, partly by
resorting to private recollection in its stead.
THE EARLY ART CRITICISM

Baudelaire is now generally agreed to be among the most
brilliant art critics of his generation, even though some aspects
of his early criticism remain perplexing. This may be due to the
nature of Salon criticism itself, which stretched whatever
underlying presuppositions a critic may have had over (po-
tentially) hundreds of works of art of various genres, while
demanding at the same time that the critic say something
interesting and accessible to a broad range of readers. In any
case, one point is clear: the young Baudelaire considered a
certain kind of memory to be the foundation of great art. In this
light, Benjamin's invocation of "involuntary memory" to
explain the aesthetics of correspondances appears perfectly ap-
propriate and quite persuasive.
" Memory is the principal criterion of art; art is a mnemonics
of the beautiful (le souvenir [est] le grand criterium de l'art;
l'art est une mnemotechnie du beau)," Baudelaire declares at
one point in the Salon of 1846; and yet the appeal to memory
must not be too explicit, for "exact imitation spoils memory
(Pimitation exacte gate le souvenir)." 5 This explains Baude-
laire's dislike of the paintings of Horace Vernet, who is pilloried
in the same essay for having no passion and an almanac memory
("nulle passion et une memoire d'almanach"):
Qui sait mieux que lui combien il y a de boutons dans chaque

uniforme, quelle tournure prend une guetre ou une chaussure avachie
par des etapes nombreuses; a quel endroit des buffeteries le cuivre des
armes depose son ton vert-de-gris? (p. 250)
Who knows better than he how many buttons belong on each uniform,
or the anatomy of a gaiter or boot worn out by many days' marching,
or the exact spot on a soldier's gear where the copper of his small arms
deposits its verdigris?
In contrast to the overly detailed, almanac-like memory of a
Vernet, Baudelaire describes the "deep-memory" impressions
left in the psyche by the quality of great painting he refers to at
various points in the essay as "unity," "harmony," or
"melody":
Ainsi la melodie laisse dans l'esprit un souvenir profond ... La bonne
maniere de savoir si un tableau est melodieux est de le regarder d'assez
loin pour n'en comprendre ni le sujet ni les lignes. S'il est melodieux,
il a deja un sens, et il a deja pris sa place dans le repertoire des
souvenirs, (p. 232)
Melody thus leaves a profound memory in the mind ... The right way
to know if a picture is melodious is to look at it from far enough away
to make it impossible to understand its subject or to distinguish its
lines. If it is melodious, it already has a meaning, and it has already
taken its place in our store of memories.
It may seem perplexing that a painting seen for the very first
time is described as being ''already part of our store of
memories," 6 but this is precisely the circumstance Benjamin
and Freud posit for perceptions' making a lasting impression on
the psyche: that conscious schemes for processing experience be
out of play so as to let sensations impinge on deeper layers of the
psyche. It is thus when a painting is seen at a propitious distance
that it has "already" imposed itself in memory, i.e. before we
are consciously aware of what it is about, of exactly what it
represents in a cognitive sense.
Taking one's distance is not the only way to recognize great
painting, however. Baudelaire distinguishes painting from
sculpture partly on the grounds that painting is - in that
characteristic Baudelairean expression (which Benjamin would
undoubtedly translate as "shocking") - "despotic": it imposes
itself on the viewer, whereas sculpture, accessible from too many
different points of view, leaves too much to the viewer's

conscious mind. "La peinture n'a qu'un point de vue; elle est
exclusive et despotique: aussi l'expression du peintre est-elle
bien plus forte. (Painting has only one point of view; it is
exclusive and despotic: thus painterly expression is more
powerful) " (p. 257). Baudelaire in fact goes to some lengths to
describe the shock experience that great painting entails:
Voici en six points les differentes impressions du passant devant ce
tableau [si] poetiquement brutal: i° vive curiosite; 20 quelle horreur!
30 c'est mal peint, mais c'est une composition singuliere et qui ne
manque pas de charme; 40 ce n'est pas aussi mal peint qu'on le croirait
d'abord; 50 revoyons done ce tableau; 6° souvenir durable, (p. 243)
Here are the six distinct stages of the spectator's impressions in front of
so poetically brutal a painting as this: (1) lively curiosity; (2) what an
abomination! (3) it is badly painted, but has an interesting com-
position which is not lacking in charm; (4) it is not as badly painted
as one first might think; (5) let us have another look at this painting,
then; (6) lasting memory.
"Lasting memory (souvenir durable)": great paintings leave
lasting memories, partly due to the striking impression they
create at first glance; by contrast, mediocre paintings (those of
Diaz, for example) leave no memories whatsoever ("ses
tableaux ne laissent pas de souvenir," p. 243).
But a certain shock-value and memorability are not the only
aspects of Baudelaire's standard for great art. If we follow his
train of thought on Decamps, we see yet another aspect of the
criterion of memory:
L'impression que [sa peinture] produisait... sur l'ame du spectateur
etait si soudaine et si nouvelle, qu'il etait difficile de se figurer de qui
elle estfille,quel avait ete le parrain de ce singulier artiste, et de quel
atelier etait sorti ce talent solitaire et original, (p. 242)
The impression his paintings produced on the spectator's soul was so
sudden and so novel, that it was difficult tofigureout their parentage,
[to determine] who had been the godfather of this singular artist, from
which studio his solitary and original talent had come.
Following the initial shock of a truly original painting, the
viewer strives to align it with other paintings and movements.
For the painting to appear new, its relation to tradition must
not be obvious; but such a relation must nonetheless exist.
Baudelaire continues:
dans cent ans, les historiens auront du mal a decouvrir le maitre de M.
Decamps. - Tantot il relevait des anciens maitres...de l'Ecole fla-
mande... tantot la pompe et la trivialite de Rembrandt le preoccu-
paient vivement; d'autres fois on retrouvait dans ses ciels un souvenir
amoureux des ciels du Lorrain. (p. 242)
one hundred years from now, historians will certainly have a hard
time determining who M. Decamp's teacher was. - Sometimes he
appears to belong to the Flemish School... sometimes the pomp and
triviality of Rembrandt seem to engross him deeply; at other times his
skies recall a fond memory of the skies of [the seventeenth-century
French landscape painter] le Lorrain.
Thus great painting not only becomes memorable, it must also
evoke memories, though not too explicitly, of other great painters
in the tradition. How, to take another example, can we best
appreciate the greatness of a paysagiste such as Rousseau?
"Qu'on se rappelle quelques paysages de Rubens et de
Rembrandt, qu'on y mele quelques souvenirs de peinture
anglaise ... on pourra peut-etre se faire une idee de la magie de
ses tableaux. (Recall if you will some of Rubens' and Rem-
brandt's landscapes, then add some memories of English
painting ... and you may be able to get some idea of the magic
of his paintings" (p. 256).
If there is a danger of being too scrupulously faithful to the
details of subject-matter (as in the case of Vernet), there is a
corresponding danger of being too explicitly faithful to the
painterly tradition, as well. As Baudelaire explains with respect
to William Haussoullier (in the Salon of1845)? lt ls possible to
"know a little too much about art... [M. Haussouillier] should
be wary of his erudition" (208), for his paintings risk stating too
clearly their debt to the past:
Oserons-nous, apres avoir si franchement deploye nos sympathies...
oserons-nous dire que le nom de Jean Bellin et de quelques Venitiens
des premiers temps nous a traverse la memoire, apres notre douce
contemplation? M. Haussoullier serai t-il de ces hommes qui en savent
un peu trop long sur leur art? C'est la un fleau bien dangereux...
(p. 208)
Dare we, after having so frankly displayed our sympathies, say that
following our pleasant contemplation of this work the names of
Giovanni Bellini and some early Venetian painters crossed our
memory? Is M. Haussouillier one of those men who know a little too
much about their art? That is a truly dangerous scourge...
The perception of a new work of art must, as Michael Fried
explains,
trigger ... memories of earlier works, but not only must those memories
not be allowed to overwhelm ... that perception, they must remain below
the threshold of conscious awareness•, investing the present with the aura
and significance of memory without for a moment appearing on its
stage... [Yet] neither must they quite be forgotten, for [then] they
would no longer be available to come to the support of new
perceptions.8
This is the balancing-act characteristic of modern art, according
to Baudelaire. From it follows his rather acrobatic description of
the foremost modern temperament in French painting: Dela-
croix is "one of the rare men who remain original even after
having drawn from all the right sources, and whose indomitable
individuality has alternately submitted to and thrown off the
tutelage of all the grand masters (un des rares hommes qui
restent originaux apres avoir puise a toutes les vraies sources, et
dont Pindividualite indomptable a passe alternativement sous le
joug secoue de tous les grands maitres)" (p. 235). Baudelaire
thus defines great painting in terms of its capacity simul-
taneously to appear new (to shock), to recall nonetheless (and
however vaguely) previous paintings, and to impress itself on
memory (in order to become part of the tradition in turn).
Throughout the essay, he refers to this characteristically
romantic amalgamation of the collective past (the tradition)
and the individual present (the demand for originality) as the
artistic expression of "temperament" (p. 229 and passim).
Temperament is indeed the touchstone of Baudelaire's early
criticism; when he claims later in the essay that he has " already
observed that memory is the principal criterion of art (J'ai deja
remarque que le souvenir etait le grand criterium de Tart)"
(p. 244), he has in fact not mentioned memory itself, but is
referring to the role of memory that is implicit in the criterion of
individual temperament announced in the first section. In
explaining right at the outset the proper role of criticism (the
first section is entitled "A quoi bon la critique?" ["What good
is criticism?"]), Baudelaire begins by refusing perspectives that
would limit the critic's appreciation to e.g. only line or only
color in an artist's work. In contrast to such narrow perspectives,
un point de vue plus large sera l'individualisme bien entendu:
commander a l'artiste la naivete et l'expression sincere de son
temperament, aidee par tous les moyens que lui fournit son metier.
[Here Baudelaire appends a footnote: "A propos de l'individualisme
bien entendu, voir dans le Salon de 1845 l'article sur William
Haussoullier."] Qui n'a pas de temperament n'est pas digne de faire
des tableaux, et — comme nous sommes las des imitateurs, et surtout
des eclectiques, - doit entrer comme ouvrier au service d'un peintre a
temperament. C'est ce que je demontrerai dans un des derniers
chapitres. (p. 229)
a broader perspective requires a proper understanding of individu-
alism: the imperative for the artist to express his temperament with
naivete and sincerity, aided by all the means provided by his talent.
[Here Baudelaire appends a footnote: "On the proper understanding
of individualism, see my article on William Haussoullier in the Salon of
1845" (quoted above).] Whoever lacks temperament is not worthy of
painting, and - since we are tired of imitators and especially of
eclectics - must apprentice himself to a painter of temperament. That
is what I will show in one of the final chapters.
And indeed, Section 17 of the essay (entitled "Des Ecoles et des
ouvriers") spells out the socio-historical context in which
temperament is assigned such an important role. For Baude-
laire, the disintegration of the socio-symbolic order takes the
form in the plastic arts of a generalized "doubt"; it results from
an anarchic individualism which has sapped the "profound
unity [of] the great tradition (l'unite profonde [de] la grande
tradition)" (p. 258), leaving the field to "imitators" and
"eclectics." On Baudelaire's cultural calendar of post-rev-
olutionary France, the works of "imitators" appear too
metaphoric, fixated on the repetition of preexisting styles and
asserting no individuality of their own; " eclectics," conversely,
12 2 Baudelaire and schizoanalysis
appear too metonymic, producing a "jumble" of idiosyncratic

styles bearing no meaningful relation to the past at all.
Baudelaire insists that the true modern artist must strike a
balance between the two, producing the distinctly new,
according to the demands of romantic individualism, while
retaining a certain relation (necessarily a subliminal one, given
the romantic demand for "naive" originality) to the tradition.
The deterioration of the great tradition requires painters to
forge their own unity, relying on the faculty of memory to
supplement present perception with distant (and purposely
latent) echoes from the past. In a footnote appended to the
attack on Vernet's "almanac memory" (cited above), Baude-
laire defines the role of memory (here quoting E. T. A.
Hoffmann) as follows:
La veritable memoire ... ne consiste ... que dans une imagination tres-
vive, facile a emouvoir, et par consequent susceptible d'evoquer a
l'appui de chaque sensation les scenes du passe, en les douant, comme
par enchantement, de la vie et du caractere propres a chacune
d'elles... (p. 25on)
True memory... consists ... entirely of an imagination that is very
lively, easily moved, and thus liable to evoke scenes from the past in support
of each [new] sensation, endowing them, as if by magic, with the life and
character appropriate to each of them ... (my emphasis)
Read in its most immediate context, the evocation of "scenes
from the past" refers to scenes from previous paintings in the
great tradition (and this indeed is the way that Fried as art critic
reads the passage). Such a reading would tend to confirm
Benjamin's view that, in the face of a disintegrating socio-
symbolic order, Baudelaire tries to resuscitate or bolster the
psychopoetic functions of the metaphoric axis in the form of the
collective memory-chains of painterly schools and tradition
which serve as hidden points de repere for modern art.
But there is another way of reading Baudelaire's allusion to
"scenes from the past": they would consist of scenes from the
poet's or painter's own personal past rather than scenes from the
collective tradition. Baudelaire invokes just such a source of
memorable impressions in his analysis of Delacroix, and we may
suspect that the same would apply to his own case and to his
own ocean voyage as well: "A trip to Morocco," Baudelaire
remarks of Delacroix, "seems to have left a profound impression
in his soul (Un voyage au Maroc laissa dans son esprit, a ce qu'il
semble, une impression profonde)" (p. 234). This quotation
suggests that lasting impressions may result not only from the
experience of great painting in the Western European tradition,
but also from geographic and cultural dislocation which would
for the traveler make that tradition largely irrelevant. The
psyche under these conditions would be equally (even danger-
ously) "open" to traumatic experience, inasmuch as an exotic
context renders the usual cultural and linguistic codes in-
appropriate and ineffective for protecting the psyche through
the binding of incoming stimuli. In this way, Baudelaire's art
criticism stages the same stereoscopy that Benjamin achieved
through the figure of the calendar. The notion of "tem-
perament" assigns a crucial role to the "power of remem-
brance" in modern art in the face of the deterioration of the
socio-symbolic order, but it turns out that the memorable
impressions Baudelaire calls upon to bolster the flagging
metaphoric axis may be either traditional or personal in origin.
In the Salon criticism, these two sources of memory-traces
appear side by side: tradition and personal past simply coexist,
the possibility of a conflict between them not sufficiently evident
to provoke even an attempt at reconciliation.
These two sources also coexist in the romantic cycle of Les
Fleurs du Mai. While "Les Phares" reinforces the metaphoric
axis by invoking the great art tradition, a poem such as " La Vie
anterieure" (especially when read in the light of Baudelaire's
remarks on Delacroix) reinforces the metaphoric axis in a more
inward and private mode, perhaps invoking profound impres-
sions from the poet's own past. These early poems share a
metaphoric poetics in which "involuntary" memories-
whether of great art ("Les Phares"), personal trauma ("Ben-
ediction"), or exotic adventure ("La Vie anterieure") - are
called upon to play a crucial role. Yet it is not the traditional but
the personal sources of memory that prevail here, partly because
the romantic stance favors relations with nature rather than
with society. It is therefore worth distinguishing the "over-
coding" epitomized in "Les Phares" from the "recoding"

characterizing "La Vie anterieure," "L'Ennemi," and other
poems in the cycle. We will then be in a position to examine the
relations of Benjamin's shock-defense to the interplay of
recoding and decoding throughout the section.
THE PSYGHOPOETIGS OF SPLEEN AND IDEAL

Deleuze and Guattari's reading of Lacan is helpful in this
connection because it resituates various forms of coding in
cultural context. As we have said, the power of the notion of
socio-symbolic order stems from its simultaneous evocation of
the determinations of a social formation on one hand and those
of a linguistic system or structure on the other. Lacan had
already translated the Freudian Oedipus complex from social-
psychological into linguistic terms, emphasizing the process of
symbolic substitution that all semiotic coding enables. In social-
psychological terms, substitutability means that, in accordance
with the universal prohibition against incest, the father's
interdiction (Lacan's "non-du-pere") separates the child from
its one-to-one relation with the mother as its original object of
desire, and requires that it seek substitutes for her. (This is the
role of the castration-threat in the Freudian Oedipus complex.)
In linguistic terms, substitutability means that, in accordance
with the arbitrariness of the sign-relation posited by Saussure,
signifiers are separated from any one-to-one relation with
signifieds, and instead accept various substitutes: the assign-
ment of the father's name (Lacan's "nom-du-pere") to the
mother or to the child, for example, requires that "wife of" or
"child of" be substituted for "husband/father" as signifieds of
the father's name. The Oedipus complex founds culture, then,
by training desire to accept substitute objects (in the process
Freud called sublimation) and by situating desire in a universe
of signification where symbolic substitution is the law. Within a
socio-symbolic order, three different modes of coding can be
distinguished, depending on whether substitution is sanctioned
by social norms (overcoding), individual neurosis (recoding), or
language itself (simple coding).
In the absence of any coding whatsoever, substitution would
be impossible: each signified would be irrevocably fixed to a
single signifier. This is the limit-case of pure psychosis, according
to Lacan: with the name-of-the-father and entry into the
symbolic order foreclosed, the law of signification does not
apply, and so desire remains fixed upon singular objects. It is
entry into the symbolic order of language - resolution of the
oedipus complex, acceptance of the law of signification - that
makes substitution possible. Indeed, substitution is required by
the symbolic, inasmuch as the "original" object of desire (the
mother, real sense-experience unmediated by language and
culture) is now irretrievably "lost." So upon separation from
the mother and the real as erstwhile unmediated objects, desire
becomes mobile, and now moves from one object to another in
endless pursuit of satisfactory substitutes: this movement
constitutes the metonymic axis of desire (what Lacan calls
simply "the metonymy of desire"). The metaphoric axis of
desire, meanwhile, determines which substitutes are found
satisfactory, and can thus bring the metonymy of desire to a
momentary pause.
According to Lacan, the metaphoric axis of desire is not
based on organic drives, but on what he calls the "primal
signifier"-a strictly meaningless, uncoded sense-impression
which, upon the child's entry into language, remains outside or
beneath the sphere of signification, and henceforth serves as the
foundation of the unconscious.9 Subsequent repressed or
traumatic material will henceforth gravitate toward this primal
signifier and remain bound to it by the force of the repetition
compulsion. The force of desire, of course, generates endless
displacement within the unconscious, so that the primal signifier
is not only originally meaningless, but also never takes on any
single definitive meaning.10 It nevertheless represents the ballast
that enables the metaphoric axis to serve as a kind of
counterweight to the metonymy of desire. While metonymy
continually displaces the repressed signified of desire along the
signifying chain, metaphor successfully crosses the "bar of
signification" separating signifier and signified, and momen-
tarily knits the repressed signified to a substitute signifier. Lacan
calls these metaphoric moments in discourse "points de

capiton"; they are the linguistic form of the neurotic symptom.
It is this interplay of metaphoric and metonymic axes that
structures the unconscious like a language (as Lacan says). But
if the original object of desire is irretrievably lost and the primal
signifier utterly meaningless, how are satisfactory substitutes to
be recognized? How is the metaphoric axis of equivalence
structured ? What counts as a substitute for the mother, or for
the primal signifier itself?
For the purpose of Lacanian therapy, which prides itself on
being rigorously non-normative, absolutely anything counts.
The sole reason for determining the structure of a metaphoric
axis is to dissolve it. The aim of therapy is to detach patients
from mystified compulsory investment in one imaginary meta-
phoric substitute, around which the neurotic ego has been
constructed, and hence enable them to pursue substitution
more wisely and freely. Opposed to the imaginary, the symbolic
is in Lacan the realm of unrestricted (or decoded) equivalence.
And the polar opposite of absolute fixation (psychosis), as
Deleuze and Guattari were the first to seize on, is schizophrenia:
the pure metonymy of desire freed from any compulsory
metaphoric axes whatsoever.
For the purposes of cultural history and critique, however, it
is not only important to determine the structures of metaphoric
axes, which govern stipulative definition and hierarchized
binary oppositions, among other things; it is also crucial to
distinguish those metaphoric axes that are mandatory within or
promoted by a given culture from those structured idiosyncrati-
cally against the grain or in opposition to cultural norms. In
Lacanian therapy, such a distinction is irrelevant, inasmuch as
the aim of therapy is not to adapt individuals to society by
realigning their metaphoric identity-structures with the meta-
phoric axes stipulated by the culture, but rather to transcend
metaphoric structure altogether by dissolving imaginary fixa-
tions of either kind from the perspective of the symbolic. But
historically speaking, the relative weight of the social and
personal metaphoric axes varies considerably. Both forms of
metaphoric axis may be based ultimately on the meaningless
Romantic temperament 12 7
and ineradicable " primal signifier" that makes humans sus-
ceptible to culture in the first place. But they are structured, and
the primal signifier managed or redeemed, by master-signifiers
of very different provenance. It is for this reason that we invoke
Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between the metaphoric
o^rcoding characteristic of the socio-symbolic order at large,
which entails a socially sanctioned master-signifier such as God,
and the equally metaphoric but privatized r^coding of the
individual, which entails a private master-signifier such as the
name-of-the-father of the nuclear family.
Especially in light of Baudelaire's insistence on the role of
" temperament" in his early art criticism, " Les Phares" appears
to be a clear instance of overcoding. The socio-symbolic
metaphoric axis defining art is reinforced by aligning great
artists of the Western European tradition in an invocation to the
ultimate transcendental Other or master-signifier, God, who
grounds the unity of the tradition and the identity of the figures
composing it. But the disintegration of the socio-symbolic order
and the volatility of modern urban life render traditional codes
increasingly unable to protect the psyche through the binding of
perceptual input. Instead, traumatic events leave traces deep in
memory. Poetic effects are achieved and experience is salvaged
from the dreary monotony of spleen time when such memory-
traces "involuntarily" supplement present perception, pro-
ducing correspondences linking self and nature through the
reunification of past and present. In this instance of personal
recoding, the metaphoric axis is based on the imaginary
integrity of private life-experience as it is reflected in nature: the
poet is able to recollect himself and his true being insofar as
nature, not the tradition or God, serves as the mirror of his soul.
Homme libre, toujours tu cheriras la mer!

La mer est ton miroir; tu contemples ton ame
Dans le deroulement infini de sa lame ...
"L'Homme et la Mer" 11. 1-3
The correspondences program predominating in the early cycle

of the collection thus stages a kind of mystical recuperation of the
poefs life in nature, whereby an imaginary self is constituted at
odds with the established social order, and experience is

endowed with poetic value to the extent that perceptual stimuli
trigger associations with images lodged deep in memory.
Yet despite the enormous appeal of this program for most
critics (up to and including Benjamin), it does not, in fact, last
long nor bulk large in Les Fleurs du Mai as a whole. (Nor do
memory and " temperament" remain central to Baudelaire's
mature art criticism, as we will see in the next chapter.)
Benjamin was right that Baudelaire assigns a special role to the
power of remembrance in the face of a decoded socio-symbolic
order. But this is not because Baudelaire himself actually
remembered anything from earlier in his life suggesting that
traditions were intact. The tradition of great art was already
being overrun, as Baudelaire put it, by "imitators and
eclectics"; and in the poetry itself, remembrance is predomi-
nantly personal rather than traditional in origin. Furthermore,
starting as early as "La Beaute," the metaphoric poetics of the
correspondences program is itself decoded by a metonymic
poetics that already prevails by the end of" Spleen and Ideal."
In the psychopoetics of" La Beaute," the opposition between
imaginary and symbolic registers is staged in the conflict
between the poem's communicative and textual functions. The
imaginary reading accepts Beauty's address and pursues the
metaphors she proffers, in the vain hope of determining their
hidden meaning. On this reading, Beauty's breast appears as a
synecdoche for the inner soul of Beauty that inspires true love in
the poets; as a metaphoric figure of speech, the breast "stands
for" Beauty's essential nature. Yet the correspondence between
inside and outside and the "crossing of the bar of signification"
such a figure of speech implies does not take place: the
imaginary reading is surely an intended temptation, but as the
perplexity of comparisons magnifies and Beauty appears in-
creasingly unfathomable, metaphor proves impossible. The
breast is thus no longer a symbol of Beauty's inspiring loveliness,
but appears instead as a thing, and as such represents an
obstacle to the poets' obsession to determine Beauty's inner
essence. Release from fixation on the metaphoric breast and the
un-anchoring of the points de capiton grounding metaphor then
inaugurate the metonymy of desire and the endless search
(underscored by the future tense: "Consumeront leurs jours")
for the part-objects Lacan calls the "objets petit-a"-substi-
tutes for the breast or original object of desire. With access to
essence denied by the mirrors of Beauty's eyes, it is precisely the
beauty of the things they enhance that will fascinate, instead.
Despite — or because of— the lack of access to Beauty's inner
nature, the loss of the metaphoric breast is more than
compensated by the increased splendor of real things.
It is a fitting irony that the poetic charge added to things in
"La Beaute" appears at first to derive from the "pure mirrors"
of Beauty's eyes, and that it is she who describes her effects on
poets rather than the other way around. For this reading
suggests that the desire that beautifies is the "desire of the
Other" (in Lacan's formula). But such effects are, of course, a
function of the text that presents the figure of Beauty as its porte-
parole. The symbolic reading recognizes the textual function of
the extended prosopopoeia, and knows the Other to be an
empty position or perspective, not a person. Such a reading
depends on our "seeing through" the figure of speech (proso-
popoeia), so that we move beyond believing in Beauty and
reassign the "desire of the Other" to the functioning of the text
itself. In this light, if Beauty's mirror-eyes make all things more
beautiful, it is because the text has us looking into them in the
first place. As Baudelaire says in another context (in the Salon de
1959, attributing the statement to the "imaginative" as
opposed to the "positivist" artist): " ' J e veux illuminer les
choses avec mon esprit et en projeter le reflet sur les autres
esprits.'" 11 With the text's decoding of metaphor, it is the
metonymy of poetic desire that sponsors the appreciation of real
things.
In the trajectory following " La Beaute" that we have traced,
poetic desire is gradually reappropriated, starting with the
gambit in " Hymne a la Beaute," and continuing in poems such
as " Parfum exotique " and particularly " La Chevelure ", where
poetic will figures so prominently. Yet in the absence of a
metaphoric axis that would found identity, the beautified things
fascinating the poet are not whole persons but part-objects. Just
as it is not Beauty herself but only her breast, her poses, and her
eyes that affect the poets in " La Beaute," it is not the woman
herself but rather parts of the body (an eye, a smile, a foot, a
breast, the mere scent of a breast) that exhilarate the poetic
faculty in the succeeding poems. And far from calling up
memory-chains that would serve to reconfirm a coherent sense
of self, these part-objects provoke wild flights of fancy bordering
on hallucination, instead. Not only are such part-objects not
grounded in the poet's own personal imaginary, as in the
memory-based program of correspondences, they are not
grounded in the socio-symbolic code, either: instead of pro-
voking a moment of recognition in which present perception is
aligned with a stable metaphoric axis, present perception is
linked contingently with random associations: the metaphoric
axis is no longer in play, the points de capiton so shallow as to be
practically ineffectual; the resulting metonymy of desire is now
the very source of poetic enthusiasm and the motor of poetic
production.
Demystification of the correspondences program thus leads to
the supplemental beautification of things through ecstaticfantasy. As the
decoding of the metaphoric axis accelerates the metonymy of
desire, the evocation of memories to supplement present
perception gives way to the exhilaration of purely mobile
fantasy, which operates through part-objects rather than whole
objects. Poetic effects are achieved not by harmonizing sen-
sations to make sense, but by multiplying associations against
the grain and beyond the bounds of common sense. Such
disintegration of the objects of poetic perception also destabilizes
the fantasizing self. The result is the mode of substitution
Deleuze and Guattari call "schizophrenic," which is neither
imaginary nor socio-symbolic, and where the metonymy of
desire freed from metaphoric identity (of self and object alike) is
invested both in time and in real context. The beauty-effect thus
entails a mode of free substitutability that realizes the subversion
of metaphoric codes (both socio-symbolic and imaginary)
through the investment and inscription of poetic desire in the
part-object real.12
The thorough subversion of the socio-symbolic code and the
concomitant decoded metonymy of desire have this readily
recognizable effect on the content of beauty in Baudelaire's
poetry: now anything goes. Since no stipulative definition of
beauty any longer applies, the poetic imagination in Baudelaire
will make "all things more beautiful" - even the rotting corpse
of a whore, for example (in "Une Charogne" [xxix]). Beauty,
on this conception, is a function of poetic imagination alone,
deriving its value solely from the investment of poetic desire,
regardless of the nature of the object itself. The poet is no longer
reading "the language of flowers and all silent things" ("El-
evation"), as it were: he has become conscious of writing the
meaning of things himself. Or rather of enhancing the beauty of
things: for it is not a question of changing or even considering
the meaning of things, but merely of adding a poetic intensity or
charge to what is already given, finally to anything at all.
Furthermore, as we have seen, the project of beautification is a
gambit: what does the essence of Beauty matter, the Poet cries, if
parts of her body send me into ecstasy?! There are no guarantees
that part-objects will continue to fascinate the poet and
stimulate his imagination, as becomes clear in spleen. And most
important, the affirmative answer implied in poems such as
"Parfum exotique" and "La Chevelure" accompanies a
process that itself undermines the stability and coherence of the
speaking subject, disrupting its sense of time and place. Under
the influence of beautification and in the throws of mobile
fantasy, the poet is in an important sense beside himself.
This threat to the coherence of the self is inherent in the
process of decoding. The program of correspondences sub-
stituted personal memory-chains for the disintegrating meta-
phoric axes of social codes, but the beautification project then
frees the imagination from dependence on even the poet's own
personal past, setting it afloat in mobile fantasy-production.
With the decrease in weight of the metaphoric axis in poetic
production, "reference to code" (to recall Jakobson's terms) -
even the idiosyncratic code of the poet's own associations - gives
way to "reference to context," as the project of beautification
verges into a project of sheer intensification. By the time we
reach the "Spleen" poems, decoding has accelerated to the

point that memory is totally defunct and fantasy-supplemen-
tation completely exhausted. Reference to context, in bleak yet
intense depictions of barren things, is all that remains. And with
the complete disintegration of the metaphoric axis and shallow-
ing-out of the points de capiton, the Poet as speaking subject
utterly disappears: in "L'Horloge," as pure metonymic seri-
ality triumphs, it is (through prosopopoeia, once again) another
(Other) voice, the voice of the time-god, that addresses us in the
absence of the Poet himself.
What has happened, in effect, is that ego-defensive anxiety
has so totally appropriated the stimulus-binding energy of the
psyche that the lyric agency of the poet, which depends as
Benjamin saw on memory resonances of some kind (whether
social or individual), is totally eclipsed. According to the
pleasure principle, drive-motivated energy in the psyche should
work to bind incoming stimuli to (metaphoric) memory-chains
of previous images of gratification in order to facilitate the
location of such an object in reality and then satisfy the drive.
But the pleasure principle also governs the reservoir of psychic
energy placed at the disposal of the ego, and which serves in
states of anxiety to protect the psyche from trauma by binding
stimuli for the sake of recognition alone; here, drive-gratifi-
cation is not involved, since it is no longer drive-energy that
motivates the stimulus-binding process, but ego-defensive anxi-
ety, instead. By the time we reach the end of "Spleen and
Ideal," the sources of poetic energy are no longer grounded in
drive-gratification mediated through deeper layers of memory,
but derive instead from anxiety-driven ego defenses that the
poet may feel are somehow alien to the lyric project itself, that
Benjamin claims are incompatible with lyric (or lyricizable)
experience, and that have, in any case, led to the disappearance
of the lyric Poet as speaking subject.
With reference to codes (traditional and now personal as
well) on the wane, with beauty no longer available either by
traditional definition or through fantasy production, reference
to the present context comes to the fore, and the project of
beautification gives way to referential intensification through ego-
defensive anxiety. In place of protection by metaphoric rec-
ognition, focus on the passage of time shields the psyche from
trauma by providing a kind of zero-degree binding of any
incoming stimulus whatsoever: it occurred at such-and-such a
time. This response to the decoding of the socio-symbolic order
is the contrary of correspondences: instead of invoking the
metaphoric axis of remembrance, spleen intensification invokes
the metonymic axis of seriality. It is more akin to beautification,
in that content is irrelevant: things are transformed by poetic
charge alone. What distinguishes spleen from beauty is that
anxiety rather than pleasure fuels the binding and endows the
charge. The socio-symbolic order in modernity, if Baudelaire's
testimony is any indication, has become so decoded that the
drive-based subject of desire gets submerged by ego-defensive
anxiety. In this light, the Lacanian claim that, with the
acquisition of language, organic drives are irretrievably lost
behind the screen of the primal signifier (while undeniably
central to his radically anti-normative therapy) appears to be
symptomatic of the modernity that Baudelaire's texts were
among the first to diagnose. One of the ironies of the dialectic of
this modernity is that at just the moment the individual is freed
through decoding from the imposition of traditional codes,
decoding also magnifies anxiety to the point of virtually
precluding the possibility of what Benjamin calls "authentic"
experience, of experience that bears some discernable relation
to the gratification of drives.13 Under these conditions, drives
can be represented only in an ironic mode - such as the satanic
irony of the cycle of evil appearing after the spleen cycle near the
end of "Spleen and Ideal," and epitomized in the slogan, "La
conscience dans le Mai." Unlike the metonymic decoding of
spleen with its banishment of the Poet, the program of
evilification reinvokes the figure of the Poet - although in this
recoding he appears ironically, only as a shadow of his former
self. While the metaphorical recoding of the correspondences
program achieved its poetic effects in reinforcing psychic
wholeness through the integration of past and present, the
ironic recoding of evilification produces intensity through a
doubling that sunders the self into act and judgment: "Je suis la
plaie et le couteau! / ...Et la victime et le bourreau!" In

evilification, what is doubled is not united by a nostalgia linking
present with past, but divided by guilt, which opposes con-
science to desire for evil. The resurgence of this phantom
metaphoric axis thus produces a kind of guilty evilification through
ironic doubling. Intensity now derives not from nostalgically
supplementing present perception with past memories, but
from avidly desiring to do what is wrong while knowing full well
it is wrong. At the extreme, such a conflict allows no role for the
integrative ego at all: as in "LTrremediable," the subject
recedes in the face of the alien pulsions of prohibited id desires,
on one hand, and the equally alien super-ego prohibitions
against them, on the other. Yet it is the conflict between desire
and judgment that is affirmed in these poems, for it is in itself a
source of searing intensities, despite the absence of a stable or
sovereign poetic subject.
The initial "Spleen and Ideal" section of Les Fleurs du Mai
thus consists not of an alternation between two psychopoetic
modes, as Benjamin's reading and perhaps the section's title
suggest, but of an evolution of metonymic poetics from the
romantic recoding of the correspondences program, through
the decoding of beauty and spleen, to the ironic recoding of evil.
The alternating cycles of recoding and decoding that charac-
terize this evolution continue in the "Tableaux Parisiens," only
to appear in a very different form in the Petits Poemes en prose. Yet
these cycles are not just poetic or psychopoetic in nature: they
have other determinations, most notably determination by the
series of Baudelaire's historical Others, which will be examined
in Part III. Benjamin is again only half right about Baudelaire:
his poetry does testify to a historic moment of accelerated
decoding of the socio-symbolic order, but not because it contains
any true memories of a disappearing social order with auth-
entically collective social codes. Rather, Baudelaire was subject
to the kind of decoded life-experience that caused and resulted
from precisely the absence of such codes, and which led him
therefore to rely for his lyric poetry on personal, trauma-like
memories instead.
The Lacanian notion of the "primal signifier" enables us to
understand both why the claim that Baudelaire actually
remembered a previous, more authentic form of social life is
unnecessary, and how the substitution of personal for social
metaphoric axes is possible. As meaningless ballast in the
service of psychic stability, the primal signifier supports both
social and personal coding indifferently. Personal and social
metaphoric axes neither originally nor ultimately coincide, as
Benjamin implies, in some lost form of authentic social life: they
always converge and diverge to a greater or lesser degree. Yet
this degree of convergence varies historically: in a decoded
socio-symbolic order — and especially for romanticism — they
are likely to diverge quite significantly, as the social symbolic
Other gives way to more private ones. As we will see in Part III,
after Baudelaire's participation in the overthrow of King Louis-
Philippe and his vehement rejection of Napoleon III as social
symbolic Others, the French poet's imaginary metaphoric axis
eventually aligns on the American poet, Edgar Allan Poe, as a
personal symbolic Other.
The notion of "primal signifier" so central to Lacanian
therapy thus turns out to obscure the important historic shift,
first discerned in Baudelaire's poetry by Benjamin, in the ratio
of personal and social coding, which he reads as a historic shift
in the ratio of ego-anxiety and drive-gratification as functions
of the pleasure-principle.14 A situation of widespread decoding
first induces a substitution of imaginary personal codes for
declining socio-symbolic ones, but then those personal codes get
decoded in turn, as nostalgic memory-supplementation in the
correspondences program gives way to exhilarated fantasy-
supplementation in beautification. Beautification then suc-
cumbs to bare referential intensification, at the point that the
relation of recognition to the body and drive-gratification
becomes completely submerged in the ego-defensive anxiety of
spleen. This point, as Benjamin might say, is a hallmark of
modernity.
Yet there is another sense in which Benjamin is only half right
about the importance of both memory and boredom as crucially
historic responses in Baudelaire to the disintegration of socio-
symbolic order: he nowhere acknowledges their thorough and
explicit repudiation in the " Tableaux Parisiens" section

immediately following " Spleen and Ideal" in the second edition
of Les Fleurs du Mai - not to mention the total eclipse in the later
art criticism of the criterion of memory so crucial to the earlier
Salon essays. This is the focus of the next chapter.
CHAPTER 5
Modernist imagination and the " Tableaux

Parisiens"
The "Spleen and Ideal" section ended in "L'Horloge" on a

morbid and monotonous note, with the clock God of spleen time
counting down the defeated Poet's meaningless minutes and
seconds to death; the "Tableaux Parisiens" recontain and
defuse the death-threat of spleen time by depicting time as
cyclical rather than linear. The very first tableau, "Paysage"
(LXXXVI), stages time in the cycle of the seasons, and even puts
the seasons themselves in the plural ("Je verrai les printemps,
les etes, les automnes " 1. 13), in order to emphasize their cyclical
recurrence. "Paysage" also alludes to the cycle of day and
night, invoking first the pleasures of " voir naitre / L'etoile dans
l'azur et la lampe a la fenetre" (11. 9—10) at dusk, and then that
of the ability to " tirer un soleil de mon coeur " during a sleepless
night of work. The cyclical alternation of night and day is
reinforced by the appearance of "Le Soleil" (LXXXVII) im-
mediately following the nocturnal "Paysage" (in the second
edition): as the title suggests, the action in this second poem
takes place in the daytime. Indeed, the entire section is
structured on the cycle of day and night. " Le Soleil" introduces
a diurnal set of poems, comprising roughly the first half of the
section, and this group is followed by a nocturnal set of poems,
in the second half. Yet as Ross Chambers has shown, the
section's frame and its arrangement of poems transform this
linear day — night sequence into an endless cycle.1 The two
"Crepuscule" poems which had appeared side-by-side in the
first edition are now strategically placed to mark the transitions
first from day to night, in " Crepuscule du soir " (xcv) at the end
of the diurnal series, and then from night to day again, in
137
" Crepuscule du matin" (cm) at the end of the nocturnal series.

In this way, the dawn in the very last poem refers us back to the
beginning of the section, with its alternation from night
("Paysage") to day ("Le Soleil"). Recontaining spleen time
this way will have two effects.
Free of the menace of time and death, Poetic will dramatically
reasserts itself in the early poems of the "Tableaux Parisiens."
"Paysage" starts with an assertive "Je veux" that echoes
throughout with "Je verrai" and other first-person future
indicatives, and ends in supremely self-confident defiance of
history and nature:
L'Emeute, tempetant vainement a ma vitre,

Ne fera pas lever mon front de mon pupitre;
Gar je serai plonge dans cette volupte
D'evoquer le Printemps avec ma volonte,
25 De tirer un soleil de mon coeur, et de faire
De mes pensers brulants une tiede atmosphere.
While the fate of Poetic will is an important issue in the

"Tableaux Parisiens," its reappearance at the beginning of the
section forms a striking contrast with " L'Horloge " at the end of
"Spleen and Ideal."
The second effect of the recontainment of time in cyclicity is
to shift the emphasis in Baudelaire's increasingly metonymic
poetics from time to space, from temporal duration to contextual
reference. The two were intimately entwined in the "Spleen"
poems, where the decoding of the metaphoric axis grounding
the Poet's memory resulted in reference to a context of bleak
objects existing in linear spleen time. Here, by contrast, with
time no longer a problem, contextual reference takes place in
conjunction with an apparent resurgence of Poetic will. But
how is such reference possible? The decoding of the subject of
memory rendered recognition problematic, and now the cir-
cumvention of linear time has rendered spleen intensification
ineffectual. There is no question, of course, of the real appearing
directly or simply by default as the metaphoric axis is decoded.
Yet as the title of this new section suggests, Baudelaire is looking
for some way to situate the poetics of real reference in the
Modernist imagination 139
context of contemporary Paris, while still pursuing the decoding
of memory and subjectivity initiated in "Spleen and Ideal," as
he revises the collection for republication. To this end, he will
draw on the well-known contemporary genre of the "tableaux
de Paris," but transform its tenor and function dramatically by
undermining both the mastery of the subject who deciphers
modern Paris and the meaning of the scenes he encounters in the
ever-changing city. Similar questions of subjectivity and ref-
erence occupy Baudelaire in the essays on art contemporary
with the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai, and their treatment
there sheds light on the ways in which the "Tableaux Parisiens"
advance the poetics of metonymic reference beyond the
dilemmas of "Spleen and Ideal."
THE LATER ART CRITICISM
Section 2 of the Salon 0/1859, entitled "Le Public moderne et la

photographie," rails against the realists who believe " that art is
and can only be the exact reproduction of nature (que l'art est
et ne peut etre que la reproduction exacte de la nature)" and
who thus take Daguerre as their "messiah. " 2 This position
entails not merely an aesthetic deficiency, but a logical or
epistemological error; "the positivist" (so called by Baudelaire
in order to "better characterize his error") "says CI want to
represent things as they are, or rather as they would be
supposing that I did not exist' (le positiviste dit 'Je veux
representer les choses telles qu'elles sont, ou bien qu'elles
seraient, en supposant que je n'existe pas') " - a stance Baude-
laire dismisses by adding, "The universe without man
(L'univers sans l'homme)." In polar opposition to the positivist
Baudelaire proposes the "imaginative (Pimaginatif)," who
declares, " I want to illuminate things with my soul and project
their reflection onto other souls (Je veux illuminer les choses
avec mon esprit et en projeter le reflet sur les autres esprits) " (p.
400). The positivist position elides the subject; Baudelaire will
insist on its importance.
But this subject is not the subject of temperament that
characterized the Salon criticism of 1845 an( ^ !846: it is the
subject of imagination. 3 The Salon of 1859 and the essay on

Constantin Guys, Le peintre de la vie moderne (published in 1863,
but written three to four years earlier) represent an important
evolution in Baudelaire's theory of art. "Temperament" in the
early Salons designated a certain relation to the past and the art
tradition in which the memory of that tradition played an
essential (if essentially subliminal) role. Now the key word is
imagination. References to the past and to memory of the past
still appear in the later criticism, but only to characterize the
"artist of old":
Jadis, qu'etait l'artiste (Lebrun ou David, par exemple)? Lebrun,
erudition, imagination, connaissance du passe, amour du grand.
David ... aussi l'amour du passe, l'amour du grand uni a l'erudition ...
(P- 392)
What was the artist of old (Lebrun or David, for instance) ? Lebrun:
erudition, imagination, mastery of the past, love of greatness. David:
... also love of the past, love of greatness combined with erudition ...
Among contemporaries, by contrast, memory of the past no
longer plays such a role: the costumes and figures of a Lies
"reflect a curious love of the past (un curieux amour du passe) "
(my emphasis, p. 410); " M . Penguilly is also an admirer of the
past. An ingenious mind, curious, hard-working... He has the
scrupulousness, the ardent patience and the tidiness of a book-
lover. (M. Penguilly est aussi un amoureux du passe. Esprit
ingenieux, curieux, laborieux... II a la minutie, la patience
ardente et la proprete d'un bibliomane) " (p. 410). To be sure,
the contemporary artist must distinguish himself from positivist
non-art and photography by means of style, but that style is no
longer to be drawn from the past. No less an artist than Ingres
is criticized precisely because his style is considered not the
"naturally poetic quality" of the subject-matter ("la qualite
naturellement poetique du sujet qu'il faut en extraire pour la
rendre plus visible"), but a "foreign poetry, usually borrowed
from the past (une poesie etrangere, empruntee generalement
au passe)": " M . Ingres is the victim of an obsession which
always compels him to displace, to transfer, to alter the beautiful
... in order to arrive at a preconceived style (M. Ingres est victime
d'une obsession qui le contraint sans cesse a deplacer, a
transporter et a alterer le beau ... pour arriver au styleprecongu) "
(P-4I2)- 4
Even Baudelaire's terms of praise for the great Delacroix have
shifted in emphasis, away from the past toward novelty and
surprise (toward "the shock of the new"):
Je tourmente mon esprit pour en arracher quelque formule qui
exprime bien la specialite d'Eugene Delacroix... D'ou vient qu'il
produit la sensation de nouveaute? Que nous donne-t-il de plus que le
passe?... On peut dire que, doue d'une plus riche imagination, il
exprime surtout l'intime du cerveau, Paspect etonnant des choses...
(pp. 403-04)
I wrack my brains to find some formula that adequately expresses the
special quality of Eugene Delacroix... Why is it that he produces the
sensation of novelty? What does he give us that is more than the past?
... One could say that, being endowed with a richer imagination, he
expresses above all what is inner-most in the mind, the astonishing side
of things ...
The importance of novelty in Baudelaire's new art theory recurs
in Lepeintre de la vie moderne, where the artist's vision is compared
to that of a convalescent or a child: "Nothing resembles what is
called inspiration more than the joy with which children absorb
form and color... Children see everything afresh; they are
always intoxicated. (Rien ne ressemble plus a ce qu'on appelle
l'inspiration, que la joie avec laquelle l'enfant absorbe la forme
et la couleur... L'enfant voit tout en nouveaute; il est toujours
ivre.) " 5 Rather than temperament, with its grounding in the
metaphoric axes of tradition and thorough familiarity with the
art of the past, artistic vision now entails a child-like openness
and freedom from preconceptions - a thoroughly decoded
perspective from which things are not recognized, but always
experienced as if for the very first time.
It is worth examining this new art theory in greater detail, for
in this section of the essay - entitled "L'Artiste, homme du
monde, homme des foules, enfant" — the productive naivete of
infantile perception is equated with the perspective of the urban
flaneur. And it is in the very next section of the essay, entitled " La
Modernite," that Baudelaire will assign to the artist (poet or
painter) of modernity the task of "extracting what is poetic

from the fashions of history, of plucking the eternal from the
transitory (degager de la mode ce qu'elle peut contenir de
poetique dans l'historique, de tirer l'eternel du transitoire) " (p.
553), a notion that may be fruitfully compared with Baude-
laire's adaptation of the tableaux de Paris tradition for his
"Tableaux Parisiens."
Already in the Salon 0/1859, however, there appears a tension
stemming from the shift from memory-based temperament to
decoded imagination, a tension that develops without prospect
of resolution in the subsequent essay on Guys. In the earlier
Salon criticism, temperament mediated the opposition between
imitators and eclectics, providing just the right "balance" of
(subliminal) reference to the tradition with (original) treatment
of contemporary subject-matter. Now the terms have changed:
with both personal memory and collective tradition decoded
and out of play, what remains is barren, photographic realism
opposed to a specious and usually anachronistic stylization; on
one hand, pointless objectivity, on the other, groundless
subjectivity. This polarity matches the terms of the tableaux de
Paris genre as Baudelaire inherits it: an anonymous, unsyste-
matic observer encounters random and ever-changing urban
scenes. Under such conditions, how are truly artistic effects to
be achieved?
In his discussion of landscape painting in the Salon of i8$g,
Baudelaire adopts conflicting positions on this question, ap-
parently unaware of the evident self-contradiction. " If what we
call a landscape is beautiful, it is not so in and of itself, but thanks
to me, through the idea or feeling I attach to it. (Si ce que nous
appelons un paysage est beau, ce n'est pas par lui-meme, mais
par moi, par ma grace propre, par l'idee ou le sentiment que j'y
attache) " (p. 414, my emphasis): here personal style is crucial
to art, transforming the mere replication of nature into true
landscape painting. Yet just three paragraphs later, " M . Millet
is looking specifically for style... [but] style brings him bad
luck. Instead of simply extracting the natural poetry of the subject, [he]
wishes at all costs to add something (M. Millet cherche particu-
lierement le style... [mais] le style lui porte malheur. Au lieu
d'extraire simplement la poesie naturelle de son sujet, [il] veut
a tout prix y ajouter quelque chose" (p. 415, my emphasis): here
personal style is inimicable to art, interfering with the proper
appreciation of nature's "own" poetry. For Baudelaire, true art
is to be distinguished from photographic realism: this is the
thrust of the entire Salon review; but how is such a distinction
to be made under decoded conditions? Is the distinguishing
quality something inherent in the subject-matter ("the natural
poetry of the subject") or something the artist contributes to it
("the idea or feeling [he] attaches to it")? This is an issue
Baudelaire will explore in more detail as he traces the work-
habits of Constantin Guys, exemplary "painter of modern life."
Baudelaire's account of Guys' work appears at first to
establish a clear opposition between impression and expression,
between passive reception and active execution, between the
initial experience of modern city life and its subsequent
depiction in a drawing or poem.6 The effect of such an
opposition would be to attribute the distinctive quality of art to
artistic volition. The passage on the artist's child-like perception
of novelty cited above continues as follows:
toute pensee sublime est accompagnee d'une secousse nerveuse... qui
retentit jusque dans le cervelet. L'homme de genie a les nerfs solides;
l'enfant les a faibles. Chez Tun, la raison a pris une place considerable;
chez Pautre, la sensibilite occupe presque tout l'etre. Mais le genie
n'est que Venfance retrouvee a volonte, l'enfance douee maintenant, pour
s'exprimer, d'organes viriles et de P esprit analytique qui lui permet
d'ordonner la somme de materiaux involontairement amassee.
(P- 552)
every sublime thought is accompanied by a synaptic shock... which
reverberates as far as the cerebellum. The man of genius has solid
nerves; the child has weak ones. In one, reason plays a considerable
part; in the other, sensitivity comprises almost the entire being. But
genius is nothing but childhood regained at will, a childhood now
endowed, in order to express itself, with virile organs and with the
analytic mind that enables him to organize the mass of material
involuntarily accumulated.
The initial moment of child-like sensitivity and impression-
ability is supposedly followed and compensated for by a moment
of virile command and analytic mastery of the involuntarily
amassed materials, in which "reason plays a considerable part"
(p. 552). But in Baudelaire's actual depiction of the moment of
execution in Guys' work, the process appears instead as frantic
and feverish, as "an intoxicated flash of the pencil, of the brush,
almost like a furor, [due to] the fear of not going fast enough, of
letting the phantom escape before the synthesis has been
extracted from it and laid hold of (un feu, une ivresse de crayon,
de pinceau, ressemblant presque a une fureur. C'est la peur de
n'aller pas assez vite, de laisser echapper le fantome avant que
la synthese n'en soit extraite et saisie" (p. 555). Reasoned
analysis and virile command are nowhere to be found; in fact,
ideally, even the moment of execution would become com-
pletely unconscious', "ideal execution becomes as unconscious ...
as digestion (l'execution ideale devienne aussi inconsciente...
que Test la digestion) " (p. 555).
Located neither in the object of perception nor in the willed
mastery of the artist, the distinctive aesthetic moment is perhaps
to be found somewhere between the two. This would be an
intervening moment of "synthesis" or "composition" (as
Baudelaire frequently calls it), but once again the details of his
account of Guys' work make it impossible to identify with any
certainty or locate securely in either subject or object. The
artist-flaneur "enters the crowd as if entering an immense
reservoir of electricity (entre dans la foule comme dans un
immense reservoir d'electricite)" (p. 552); each surprise he is
subject to registers as " a synaptic shock that reverberates as far
as the cerebellum." The force and originality of Guys, Baude-
laire insists, are due to his ingenuous "obeissance a l'impres-
sion" (p. 554) and to the fact that his perception has not been
dulled or blunted ("emousse"). 7 Whereas the dandy-flaneur has
solid nerves and remains impervious to the shocks of city life, the
highly sensitive artist involuntarily absorbs these always novel
impressions deep in the mind: " ...sparkles, music, resolute
looks, full and serious mustaches - all this enters him in
disorder; and in a few minutes, the resulting poem will already
be virtually composed (scintillements, musique, regards decides,
moustaches lourdes et serieuses, tout cela entre pele-mele en lui;
et dans quelques minutes, le poeme qui en resulte sera
virtuellement compose) " (p. 553, a propos of an encounter with
a military regiment). Here, the aesthetic moment (of com-
position) seems to occur within a few moments of the initial
impression, as the experience registers in memory; the passive
construction ("will be ... composed ") suggests that composition
is as involuntary as the impressions themselves. (But what could
"already virtually composed" mean?)
The very next paragraph, however, seems to place the
moment of synthesis or composition several hours later, as the
artist struggles to commit his impressions or memories to paper:
Et les choses renaissent sur le papier, naturelles et plus que naturelles,

belles et plus que belles ... La fantasmagorie a ete extraite de la nature.
Tous les materiaux dont la memoire s'est encombree se classent, se
rangent, s'harmonisent et subissent cette idealisation forcee qui est le
resultat d'une perception enfantine, c'est-a-dire d'une perception aigue,
magique a force d'ingenuite! (p. 553)
And the things are reborn on paper, natural and more than natural,
beautiful and more than beautiful... The phantasmagoria has been
extracted from nature. All the materials with which memory stocked
itself are categorized, classified, harmonized, and undergo that forced
idealization which is the result of an infantile perception, that is to say
a keen perception that is magical by dint of its innocence!
Here again, the passive construction ("has been extracted") at a

crucial moment leaves the agent or agency responsible for
"extracting" the poetic from the natural indeterminate. The
reflexive constructions ("se classent, se rangent, /harmoni-
sent") governing the "materials congesting memory," mean-
while, imply an activity undertaken by the materials themselves
yet separate from memory itself. That apparently autonomous
activity is then recast as subject to a "forced idealization"
(whose passive construction once again does not specify the
agent/agency doing the forcing) which is supposed somehow to
"result from" the passive "infantile perception" that marked
the start of the process hours before.
If the allusion to a "forced idealization resulting from
infantile perception" seems to locate the moment of synthesis
comfortably close to the initial moment of impression in the

artistic process, Baudelaire's account in the next section
(entitled " L'Art mnemonique") seems to relocate it once again
closer to the final moment of expression:
M. G.j traduisant fidelement ses propres impressions, marque avec
une energie instinctive les points culminants ou lumineux d'un objet
... ou ses principales caracteristiques, quelquefois meme avec une
exageration utile pour la memoire humaine... (p. 555)
Faithfully translating his own impressions, M. G. brings out with an
instinctive energy the salient or striking features of an object... or its
principal characteristics, sometimes resorting to exaggeration as an
aid to human memory...
Here the artist appears actively to mark or stress the distinctively
aesthetic features of his subject-matter - even if he does so with
"instinctive energy" (rather than analytic command) and in the
process of "translating his [initial, passive] impressions faith-
fully." But for or in whose memory is such "exaggeration"
useful? The passage continues:
... et Timagination du spectateur, subissant a son tour cette mnemo-
nique si despotique, voit avec nettete l'impression produite par les
choses sur l'esprit de M. G. Le spectateur est ici le traducteur d'une
traduction toujours claire et enivrante. (p. 555)
... and the imagination of the spectator, suffering this despotic
mnemonic in turn, sees distinctly the impression things produced on
M. G.'s mind. The spectator is here the translator of a translation that
is always clear and intoxicating.
The spectator's imagination suffers in turn this despotic mnemo-
nic - that is, the same mnemonic the artist suffered: the
apparently active stance whereby the artist was supposed to
have left his distinctive mark on the work of art is transformed
back into the passive suffering of a shock and reception of
impressions. The artist thus occupies the same position as the
(surely passive) spectator, who becomes the "translator of a
translation." Nothing has been settled.
Two sets of remarks are in order. First of all, whatever
Baudelaire's difficulties in specifying the privileged location,
Modernist imagination 14 7
moment, or agency of the modernist aesthetic, the effects of "so
despotic a mnemonic" are never in doubt, "always clear and
intoxicating": the effect of the despotic art work on the public
is to transmit from artist to spectators the decoded perception of
things that serves as modern art's point of departure and/or
defining characteristic. The effect of the mnemonic in the art
work itself is therefore not so much to change anything as simply
to add a "charge" or to intensify what is given in the initial
impression, to render things, as Baudelaire says here (echoing
Beauty), "belles et plus que belles" (p. 553).
Secondly, and in relation to the issues broached in the Salon of
i8jg and Baudelaire's adaptation of the tableaux de Paris, what
Baudelaire here calls "mnemonic art" is in a sense undecidable:
neither a simple reproduction of the object-world, nor a pure
product of artistic will or style, but something in between. Yet
this undecidability is productive, and strongly resembles the
poetics developed in the "Tableaux Parisiens." The art
criticism of the late fifties and early sixties in fact explores
terrain opened up by the metonymic poetics of the beauty cycle.
If merely representing Paris were Baudelaire's concern, some-
thing like the tableaux de Paris (with its built-in observer-flaneur
and its broad interest in various aspects of city life) might have
served tel quel. But even while fostering reference to real context,
Baudelaire's metonymic poetics also undermines the stability
and coherence of the observing or reporting self, as we have
seen. In this vein, the gist of the essay on Guys parallels the
direction taken in the "Tableaux Parisiens": lyric subjectivity
and referential representation are both canceled out, as the new
section devises and deploys a poetic discourse where decoding
affects both the content plane and the expression plane. On the
content plane, representation in the "Tableaux Parisiens" is
decoded in that any chance encounter in an ever-changing
cityscape, no matter how meaningless, may produce a vivid
impression; indeed, meaninglessness is the necessary precondition
for obtaining really vivid impressions, inasmuch as protective
recognition is thereby out of play. On the expression plane, lyric
subjectivity is decoded in that poetic effects depend not on
subjective mastery or control, but only on recapturing or
"translating" what has already come to be in the elusive

space/time Baudelaire refers to (necessarily somewhat incoher-
ently) as "mnemonics."
It would appear in this light to be no accident that innovation
affecting the content plane of the "Tableaux Parisiens" - the
choice of everyday subject-matter for poetry, the transformation
of a pre-existing popular genre - is matched on the expression
plane: metric and stylistic analysis has shown that the poems of
the "Tableaux Parisiens" section contain the most innovative
versification in the entire collection.8 Still very much in
question, however, is the role of the subject in decoded poetic
discourse: the "Tableaux Parisiens" dramatize this question.
Baudelaire here draws directly on the contemporary tableaux de
Paris, but will move sharply away from their positivist objective-
realism; he draws, too, on the beautification project from his
own earlier poetry, yet will move decisively away from the
wager placed there on the effectiveness of Poetic will.
THE INTRODUCTORY POEMS

Baudelaire's "Tableaux Parisiens" draw on and transform a
popular genre well known to his contemporaries (though largely
forgotten now), the tableaux de Paris,,9 Based in part on Diderot's
theory of dramatic realism and in part on the experience of
rapidly changing city life, the genre originally depicts en-
counters between an anonymous stroller and various facets of
city life: the point is, without preconceptions or systematic
preparation, to draw some kind of moral or civics lesson from
these chance encounters. The singularity of the genre in its
initial (late eighteenth-, early nineteenth-century) stages lay in
its unconventional depiction of all aspects of city life and its
attempt to make snap sense out of haphazard and fleeting
contact with the new and unfamiliar. Such a genre, at least in
its broad outlines, suits Baudelaire's requirements admirably:
the context of reference will no longer be insignificant objects
which happen to be at hand, but an ever-changing cityscape;
the point of view would no longer be that of a Poet mired in the
melancholy of spleen time, but an observer venturing forth to
test his mettle against the unknown. Bare temporal duration
becomes historical change; pure spatial extension becomes the
cityscapes of Paris.
But by Baudelaire's day (already in the 1840s and certainly
by the late 1850s and 1860s when Baudelaire composed most of
his "Tableaux Parisiens"), the genre had evolved considerably.
Mercier (in his prototypic turn-of-the-century Tableau de Paris)
insisted on the valuable information his tableaux contain for
those (viz. nearly everyone) less familiar with the new city than
he; in the same vein, Balzac - no doubt Diderot's and Mercier's
most important heir in this tradition - made similar claims
throughout the novels of the Comedie humaine. But the growth of
the textile industry, the mass circulation press, and of ad-
vertising — and especially the commercialization of the concept
and practices of fashion — soon displace information and civics
lessons to the background: the focus is now on the fugitive, on
the transitory, on whatever is new for newness's sake. At the
same time that new social relations were altering the aims of the
genre and reducing its moral or cognitive content, the new
reproduction technologies of lithography and especially daguer-
reotypy were changing its form, stressing the "objectivity" or
photographic realism of the genre.
This is the situation in which Baudelaire adapts the genre for
the "Tableaux Parisiens" section and takes it in a very different
direction. He certainly has no desire to revive the moralizing
stance of a Diderot or a Mercier; yet he also despises
photography and realism, as is abundantly clear from the art
criticism contemporary with the poetry of the second edition.
The Poet of the "Tableaux Parisiens" sets out instead to
explore the "in between" of uncertain real reference and
unstable subjectivity. Within the overall structure composed of
diurnal and nocturnal poems, a preliminary cycle consisting of
the first three poems reiterates the project of beautification and
re-stakes the wager on poetic will, but ends with the ac-
knowledgment that the Poet's will-to-beauty is hopelessly
unrealistic.
The first poem of the "Tableaux Parisiens," as we said,
foregrounds Poetic will and presents time's cyclicity in terms of
the seasons; but it does so under conditions worth examining in

further detail. For one thing, the passionate and constructive
activity of the Poet takes place at night, yet produces daytime
scenes: what he actually sees is the moon and stars (11. 10,12),
monotonous snowstorms (1. 14); what he evokes is the sun and
warmer climes (11. 25-26). This evocation sets the stage for the
next poem, " L e Soleil," which introduces the set of diurnal
poems. Yet the nocturnal setting of " P a y s a g e " also links it
" b a c k w a r d , " as it were, to the set of nocturnal poems ending
with the dawn of "Crepuscule du m a t i n " at the end of the
" T a b l e a u x Parisiens": in this second set of poems, too, Poetic
desire figures centrally.
Secondly, Poetic will is exercised not only at night, but
enclosed:
Et quand viendra Thiver aux neiges monotones,
15 Je fermerai partout portieres et volets,
Pour batir dans la nuit mes feeriques palais
L'Emeute, tempetant vainement a ma vitre,

22 Ne fera pas lever mon front de mon pupitre;
Car je serai plonge...
This sense of spatial enclosure, too, links " Paysage" with the set
of nocturnal poems, which are equally well designated as
domestic scenes; it also establishes a sharp contrast with the
immediately following poem, " L e Soleil," whose very first line
situates the Poet outside, in the street: " L e long du vieux
faubourg... " ( L i ) .
Finally and most important, in contrasting night with day,
and the Poet's actual enclosure with the spacious scenes he
imagines, the poem asserts the ascendancy of Poetic will and
artifice over nature, a central theme of the entire section and a
crucial feature of Baudelairean modernism. Not only is time
depicted as seasonally cyclical here, but it is a cycle the Poet can
interrupt at will, simply by "calling forth springtime"
("evoquer le Printemps avec ma volonte" 1. 24). T h e title itself
introduces this duality, for what is first presented as a
" l a n d s c a p e " soon appears to be a cityscape instead, complete
with chimney pots and church steeples. Yet the title may refer
not to the Poet's setting but rather to the "childish" pastoral

verses he speaks of composing and the scene he describes in the
second stanza:
Je veux, pour composer chastement mes eglogues,
2 Goucher aupres du ciel...
Alors je reverai des horizons bleuatres,

Des jardins, des jets d'eau pleurant dans les albatres,
Des baisers, des oiseaux chantant soir et matin,
20 Et tout ce que l'ldylle a de plus enfantin.
In whichever sense we read the title, the poem itself moves away
from the innocent calm associated with the pastoral toward an
energetic pleasure associated directly with Poetic activity itself.
Pastoral composition may be "chaste" (1. 1) and contemplation
of the landscape characterized as " d o u x " (1. 9), but once the
Poet turns away from winter "pour batir dans la nuit [s]es
feeriques palais," his passion heats up:
Gar je serai plonge dans cette volupte
D'evoquer le Printemps avec ma volonte,
25 De tirer un soleil de mon coeur, et de faire
De mes pensers bmlants une tiede atmosphere.
By the end of the poem, idyllic nature is clearly less engaging
than what the Poet himself constructs ("batir" 1. 16). The
attempt to forsake and indeed surpass nature through the
exercise of Poetic will forms the drama of the introductory cycle,
starting with " L e Soleil."
The displacement of " L e Soleil" from the heart of the first,

romantic section of the collection (where it followed "Ben-
ediction") to the introductory cycle of the "Tableaux Pari-
siens" is surely among the most striking revisions Baudelaire
made for the second edition of his work, and dramatically
changes the poem's impact and effects. Its new location in a
section addressing the complexities of modern city life brings
into predominance certain aspects of the poem that appeared
secondary in the context of the earlier section devoted to the
harmonies and grandeur of nature. Such a gestalt shift is
possible because the contrast between nature and the city is

inscribed in the structure of the poem itself. The tension
between nature and artifice introduced in "Paysage" becomes
in "Le Soleil" a relatively stark contrast between two external
stanzas devoted to city life, and a middle stanza devoted to the
country and nature.
Le Soleil
Le long du vieux faubourg, oil pendent aux masures
Les persiennes, abri des secretes luxures,
Quand le soleil frappe a traits redoubles
Sur la ville et les champs, sur les toits et les bles,
5 Je vais m'exercer a ma fantasque escrime,
Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime,
Trebuchant sur les mots comme sur les paves,
Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps reves.
Ce pere nourricier, ennemi des chloroses,
10 Eveille dans les champs les vers comme les roses;
II fait s'evaporer les soucis vers le ciel,
Et remplit les cerveaux et les ruches de miel.
C'est lui qui rajeunit les porteurs de bequilles
Et les rend gais et doux comme des jeunes filles,
15 Et commande aux moissons de croitre et de murir
Dans le coeur immortel qui veut toujours fleurir!
Quand, ainsi qu'un poete, il descend dans les villes,
II ennoblit le sort des choses les plus viles,
Et s'introduit en roi, sans bruit et sans valets,
20 Dans tous les hopitaux et dans tous les palais.
Unlike the Poet of "Paysage" who shuts himself up in his
tower whenever winter comes, the Poet of "Soleil" is found in
the street, engaged in the kind of haphazard encounters typical
of city life in the tableaux de Paris genre. Already in the first
stanza, devoted to the Poet's travails in the city, the omni-
presence of the sun contrasts with the restricted ambit of the
Poet: " ... le soleil cruel frappe ... / Sur la ville et les champs, sur
les toits et les bles " (11. 4-5). Each of the subsequent stanzas then
expounds the sun's activities in one of these locales, which are
directly contrasted by parallel structure: stanza 2 "dans les
champs" (1. 10); stanza 3 "dans les villes" (1. 17).
But there exists another structure, which opposes the two
external stanzas to the internal one. Stanzas 1 and 3 contain
markers of determinate temporality, most notably the repeated
" Q u a n d " at the beginning of lines 3 and 17, but also in the
adverbial complements of line 8: "Heurtant parfois des vers
depuis longtemps reves." Stanza 2, by contrast, presents the sun's
actions ("eveille ... remplit... rajeunit... ") in the indetermi-
nate or eternal present, ending with a direct allusion to a
timeless "coeur immortel qui veut toujours fleurir" (1. 16). The
kinetics of stanza 2 reinforce its difference from the other two:
there, the sun's actions take place at a distance or from a
commanding height, as it were ("eveille... fait s'evaporer...
remplit... rajeunit... rend ... commande " ) ; in the third stanza,
however, the sun "goes into town (descend dans les villes) " and
"gets into (s'introduit... dans) " all the hospitals and palaces,
moving as does the Poet in stanza 1 ("Le long des faubourgs"
1. 1), on a horizontal plane.
The poem thus comprises two comprehensive superposed
structures: one topical, contrasting the first stanza (on the poet)
with the latter two (on the sun); the other rhetorical and formal
as well as topical, opposing the interior stanza (the eternal sun
in nature) with the two exterior ones (poet and sun when in the
city). This second structure contains yet another, local contrast
between the urban activity of the poet (stanza 1) and the urban
activity of the sun (stanza 3), a comparison made explicit in the
first line of the last stanza ("ainsi qu'un poete" 1. 17). This
contrast is reinforced by the difference between the two parallel
temporal expressions mentioned above: "Quand le soleil cruel
frappe... / Je vais... " (11. 3-5) and "Quand [le soleil], ainsi
qu'un poete ... descend dans les villes " (1. 17). The first " when "
is a strictly temporal determination of the Poet's activity (itself
spatially limited to the city) by the sun: he practices poetry
when the sun shines. The second "when" is not symmetrical;
rather than a determination, it marks an option: the sun can act
anywhere (as is clear from line 4); when it goes into town, like
a poet, it ennobles.
"Le Soleil" thus adds a second opposition to the contrast
between town and country it inherits from "Paysage" (as well
as by implication from its relocation for the second edition from
the pastoral first cycle to the urban "Tableaux Parisiens"): the

contrast between the Poet and another poetic agency designated
here as the sun. The urban poet works out (" [s]'exerce") in the
street, conditions permitting, and may sometimes stumble
across a long-sought verse or a lucky rhyme; the sun acts
eternally and from a distance, ultimately generating a neat
equivalence, reminiscent of " Correspondances," between
nature and the human spirit (" remplit les cerveaux et les ruches
dernier 5 ).
Most of the structural features noted so far seem to favor the
sun over the poet, and thus align the poem with the pastoral
cycle in which it first appeared. But there are two mitigating
factors which must be taken into account in any comparative
judgment of their poetic abilities, and that alter the balance in
favor of the Poet, instead. First of all, the "ainsi que" of line 17
that makes the comparison between sun and poet explicit,
actually refers the sun to the poet as standard of comparison,
rather than the other way around: when the sun, like a poet,
goes into town ... Far more telling, however, is the very quality
of the poetry associated with the two poetic figures. The trite
images (e.g. "gais et doux comme des jeunes filles" 1. 14) and
facile word-play (e.g. "Eveille dans les champs des vers comme
les roses; / II fait s'evaporer les soucis vers le d e l " 11. 10-11) of
the second stanza pale in comparison with the striking images
and similes of the first (e.g. " Trebuchant sur les mots comme sur
les paves" 1. 7), which figure among the most memorable in the
entire collection. It is surely because "Le Soleil" contains
instances of both urban and pastoral poetics that it can have
belonged to both the romantic and modernist sections of the
collection, but the contrast in quality argues for the superiority
of Poetic artifice over natural harmony and correspondences.
Yet the existence and specifics of the third stanza disrupt too
neat a binary opposition between Poet and sun. The pertinent
contrast here, which displaces the relations between town and
country, nature and humankind informing the first two stanzas,
is the opposition - quintessentially urban for Baudelaire -
between rich and poor ("les hopitaux et... les palais" 1. 20), a
distinction that makes no difference to the sun's urban activity,
which involves ennobling all things, no matter how lowly. Yet
the descent of the sun into the city, especially introduced by the
" Q u a n d . . . " clause echoing line 3, leads us back to the first
stanza, where it clarifies the Poet's dependence on the sun: if the
Poet's urban workouts depend on sunshine, it is because the sun
transforms the cityscape into poetic material in the first place,
by "ennobling" it. It is then a matter of chance whether the
Poet will happen across the appropriate means of expression (a
lucky rhyme, the right word) to capture it. As in the later art
criticism, artistic or poetic agency in the poem may finally be
undecidable: it may depend on both Poet and sun, yet actually
take place somewhere between the two. This would explain why
the Poet encounters "vers depuis longtemps reves": even his
best luck in finding means of expression depends on the prior
action of the sun having ennobled the cityscape to begin with.
"Le Soleil" thus suggests a program for a specifically urban
poetry quite different from the romantic stance figured in
"Paysage," with its emphasis on a self-sufficient Poetic will
steeled and exercised in lofty isolation. The project of ennoble-
ment in fact appears closer to the earlier project of beautifi-
cation, but now resituated in the context of modernism and the
new section on city life. It is clear that the modern urban poet
is writing rather than reading the "secret language of speechless
things," and that these things are human artifacts rather than
natural harmonies. As in the beautification project, it is not the
Poet's personal memories that glorify present perception, but a
process attributed to an Other agent, the sun, which ennobles
all things in much the same way that Beauty's mirror-eyes made
them more beautiful. Yet the emphasis in "Le Soleil" on
chance and its explicit mention of the means of poetic expression
align this new project with the view of modernist art Baudelaire
developed in the Salon 0/1859 an<^ Peintre de la vie moderne. On the
content plane, the poetic illumination or ennoblement of city
life attributed to an Other lies completely outside the artist/
poet's control. Similarly on the expression plane, the Poet
operates by luck and by accident: finding the poetic means to
express that illumination is a matter of chance. In this way, " Le
Soleil" proposes a new answer to the question posed by the
wager on beautification earlier in the collection: can ennoble-
ment of even the lowliest of things produce truly poetic effects?
The answer given here is: "sometimes" (1. 8).
We must not, however, be too hasty to attribute the stance of

"Le Soleil" to the "Tableaux Parisiens" as a whole, for the
next poem in the section answers this question in a very different
way, and thereby prefigures the psychodynamics of many of the
Petits Poemes en prose. In "A une mendiante rousse" (LXXXVIII),
it is the Poet himself- no longer the sun of "Le Soleil" - who
descends into the street and sets out to "ennoble the fate of the
lowliest things," in this case a poor beggar-girl. He begins by
apostrophizing her, explaining that, for him, her sickly young
body has a certain charm: " Pour moi, poete chetif, / Ton jeune
corps maladif... / a douceur" (11. 5—8). This rather modest and
strictly personal ("pour moi") claim escalates in the next stanza
into a comparison favoring the girl over a queen from a novel:
" T u portes plus galamment / Qu'une reine de roman / Ses
cothurnes de velours / Tes sabots lourds" (11. 9-12). The next
eight stanzas seek in effect to transform the beggar-girl into a
queen (to "ennoble" her), 10 first in the optative subjective:
" Au lieu d'un haillon trop court, / Qu'un superbe habit de cour
/ Traine a plis bruyants et longs / Sur tes talons (Instead of an
ill-fitting rag, let a superb court robe trail... at your feet) " (11.
13-16); then, with the transformation complete, modulating
into the conditional: " T u compterais dans tes lits / Plus de
baisers que de lis / Et rangerais sous tes lois / Plus d'un Valois!"
(11. 41-44).
This modulation into the conditional already signals the
denouement presented in the last three stanzas, where the Poet,
too poor himself, acknowledges his inability really to transform
and ennoble the poor girl:
- Cependant tu vas gueusant
Quelque vieux debris gisant
Au seuil de quelque Vefour
48 De carrefour;
Tu vas lorgnant en dessous
Des bijoux de vingt-neuf sous
Dont je ne puis, oh! pardon!
52 Te faire don.
Va done, sans autre ornement,
Parfum, perles, diamant,
Que ta maigre nudite,
56 O ma beaute!
What appears new here in relation to the projects of beautifi-
cation and ennoblement is acknowledgment of the irrevocable
gap between imaginative transformation and the real, which
will become a central theme in the Petits Poemes en prose. This by
no means represents a rejection of the poetic imagination: the
Poet insists till the very end that the beggar-girl is "his beauty"
(1. 56, echoing the "pour moi" of 1. 5). But the riches of Poetic
imagination contrast sharply with the actual poverty of the Poet
himself, unable to afford even costume jewelry for the girl (11.
49-52). The preliminary cycle of the "Tableaux Parisiens"
thus recapitulates the trajectory of "Spleen and Ideal," from
romanticism through beautification to real reference, ending in
" A une mendiante rousse" with the conclusion that the real is
what resists the ennobling imagination. Poetic will, now exerted
on urban artifice rather than natural harmony, dramatically
reasserts itself, but in a sense ultimately fails: it is able to
transform its object only through poetic discourse and in
imagination, not through effective action in the real. Yet in
another sense, it does not fail at all: the very failures of poetry in
the face of modern urban existence become the stuff of a
specifically modernist poetics that informs the structure and
poems of the section as a whole.
THE STREET SCENES
Nowhere is an experience typical of city life registered in greater

purity than in " A une passante" (XGIII), the poem cited by
Benjamin as the epitome of the shock experience in Baudelaire.
It depicts the failures of the shock-defense and the limit of
decoded temporality: a discrete moment severed completely
from past and future, isolated even from the serial flow of lived
time (Erlebnis). So violent is the shock, indeed, that in portraying
it, Baudelaire elides the verb: " U n eclair... puis la nuit!" (1.
9). 11 In its aftermath, temporal reference oscillates wildly and
uncertainly between ''eternity" and "never" ("Ne te verrai-je
plus que dans l'eternite? / Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici, trop tard!
jamais peut-etre!" 11. 11—12), ending with an imperfect sub-
junctive conditional ("O toi que j'eusse aimee" 1. 14) that
underscores the impossibility of ever integrating the moment
back into the flow of time. This experience of discontinuity takes
place, of course, in the bustling pedestrian traffic typical of the
modern city: " La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait. / ...
Une femme passa" (11. 1,3). In a city crowd, each person's own
trajectory presumably has a certain temporal continuity, but
when paths cross by chance and then instantly diverge, both
continuities are interrupted, and the moment of contact stands
outside of either. Not only is the metaphoric axis out of play,
since this woman is someone the Poet has never seen and thus
cannot recognize, but even the metonymic axis which normally
supplies at least a synthesis of seriality (as depicted in "L'Hor-
loge ") breaks down in the fleeting encounters typical of city life.
Here, both forms of the shock-defense have failed.
Chance encounters of this kind are not the only feature of the
modern city depicted in the "Tableaux Parisiens" that defeats
the shock-defense. The rapid transformation of Second-Empire
Paris by Haussmann's urban renewal projects proves equally
difficult to manage, as is clear in "Le Cygne" (LXXXIX) :
Le vieux Paris n'est plus (la forme d'une ville

8 Change plus vite, helas! que le coeur d'un mortel)
Paris change! mais rien dans ma melancholie

30 N'a bouge!
This difficulty is especially resonant when what is mobilized as

a defense against change is the memory-based mode of
recognition so central to the correspondences program, as
occurs in " Le Cygne." While depicting the inability of memory
to master the rapidly changing cityscape of modern Paris, this
poem at the same time reproduces the uncertainties about
poetic agency characterizing the later art criticism: is memory
a resource called upon by the poet at will, or is it something that
occurs to him involuntarily?
In the poem's famous first line, the Poet faced with the shock
of the "new Carrousel" (1. 6) on a stroll through a once familiar
section of Paris exclaims, " Andromaque, je pense a vous!" The
active verb suggests an attempt to ennoble contemporary Paris,
in line with the stance of "Le Soleil" and "A une mendiante
rousse" (which immediately precede "Le Cygne" in the
collection). Yet it is equally possible that the thought of
Andromaque is an involuntary association that suddenly occurs
to him, not something he recalled at will: "Andromaque, je
pense a vous! Ce petit fleuve, / ... Ce Simols menteur qui par
vos pleurs grandit,/A feconde soudain ma memoire fertile"
(11. 1 and 4—5); the Poet's memory appears here not as agent but
as a direct object, suddenly fertilized by Andromaque's little
river. The Poet remains undecidably as much the object as the
subject of these thoughts in the explanation offered later in the
poem: "Aussi devant ce Louvre une image m'opprime: / Je
pense a mon grand cygne . . . / . . . et puis a vous, Andromaque . . . "
(U- 33~34> my emphasis).
Recourse to memory, moreover (whether willed or not),
generates images that, far from reconciling the Poet with the
new city, instead reproduce his alienation from it. The initial
reference to Andromaque in exile leads to his own memory of an
escaped swan scratching a dry Paris stream bed in search of
water, and apparently reproaching God for withholding rain.
By the time we reach the second part of the poem, everything in
the city - new palaces, scaffolding, even blocks of stone - has
become an occasion for allegorical reflection on his homelessness
there:
Paris change! mais rien dans ma melancolie
N'a bouge! palais neufs, echafaudages, blocs,
Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allegorie,
Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que les rocs.
And as indeterminate as the signs of alienation are - anything
encountered on a stroll through the new city will do - so are the
thoughts and images they trigger: the swan, then Andromaque,
then a sickly black woman seeking the palm trees of Africa, then
anyone at all who has lost what can never be found ("A
quiconque a perdu ce qui ne se retrouve / Jamais, jamais!" 11.
45-46), and so on in an apparently random series of images.
Even when the Poet tries to arrest the proliferation of images
with a concluding "Ainsi" (1. 49) and by recalling the "old
Memory" of the swan, sounding in the forest of his exile, the
indeterminate series of equivalents nevertheless continues:
Ainsi dans la foret ou mon esprit s'exile

Un vieux Souvenir sonne a plein souffle du cor!
Je pense aux matelots oublies dans une ile,
52 Aux captifs, aux vaincus!... a bien d'autres encor!
The series might even by said to intensify: the elision in the last
line suggests the possibility of endless continuation of the series
at just the moment that the enumeration accelerates by
reducing the complements qualifying its members to zero; and
the final phrase - in contrasting the relative supplement
" e n c o r " (meaning " m o r e " : [I think] of many more others as
well") with the " c o r " (horn) of memory which might have
grounded the series - economizes and further accelerates the
enumeration by reducing mention of additional members of the
series to an indeterminate "bien d'autres (many others) ".
Memory in " L e Cygne" thus produces effects that are
virtually the opposite of what would be expected. The Poet
invokes the memory of the swan in order to make sense of his
own decoded experience strolling through rapidly changing
Paris. But instead of reintegrating his experience of the new
Paris into memories of the old, this memory merely reproduces
another scene of alienation from the city: like the swan vainly
searching for water, the Poet vainly searches for familiar
meanings in the unfamiliar cityscape, and by implication
reproaches God for the lack of them. Memory thus brings not
recognition and homecoming, but melancholy and alienation.
Yet this melancholy is itself productive. Indeed, the river of
Andromaque's sorrow, " C e SimoTs menteur qui par vos pleurs
grandit" (1. 4), may have been what stimulated the Poet's
memory in the first place. The Poet's internal exile from Paris
and the very failure of memory to make sense of present
experience in effect generate the endless series of interpretants of
exile in those "many more others" as homeless as he. Paris thus
appears not as a place to which meaning can be successfully
attributed so that it can be represented (for it changes too fast
for that): the real, modern Paris resists this kind of recognition.
Rather, it is the place of/from which one speaks in/about
melancholy — that is, in full cognizance of the impossibility of
grounding present experience in memories of it. This may
explain Baudelaire's inclination to translate Virgil's relatively
mild characterization of Andromaque's "false" Simois (Latin
"falsus") as "deceptive" or "lying" ("menteur" 1. 4): the
poem shows that, under modern conditions, a replica or sign
that evokes memories of something without also acknowledging
its irretrievable absence, thereby lies. Which is to say that, along
with or following perception, memory itself gets decoded here:
memory does not serve as a supplement to perception, as in the
poetics of correspondences; rather the very inadequacy of
memory, here called melancholy (1. 29), serves to supplement
the failures of perception, changing their sign, as it were, from
negative to positive, from dry to wet, from meaningless to
somehow heroic. Although the mood here is very different from
that of the poems of beautification - melancholic as opposed to
ecstatic - "Le Cygne" nonetheless finishes on a similar note of
exhilaration: a series of short clauses punctuated by exclamation
marks, ending with a characteristic "still more."
Even this melancholic exhilaration, however, succumbs to
utter defeat in the very next poem. Whereas "A une passante"
and "Le Cygne" stage the failures of temporal continuity and
memory, "Les Sept Vieillards" (xc) stages the failure of
metaphoric poetics itself, taken to the extreme. Metaphor and
metonymy usually appear in moderation and in combination,
though they combine in significantly varying proportions; the
psychodynamics of discourse are to a large extent determined
by the predominance of one or the other.12 Extreme metonymy
produced the shock-defense appearing in "L'Horloge" as the
empty passage of pure linear time, where no memory-chains
attach to the fleeting moments to convert them from "lived
time" to "true experience": "every second finds consciousness

ready to intercept its shock" (p. 143), but experience thereby
loses "the integrity of its content" (p. 116). The passing
moments of metonymical time have no content, deriving their
zero-degree "meaning" solely from their ordinal relation in the
series. If extreme metonymy appears as pure seriality, extreme
metaphor implies total stasis: memory-chains determined by a
code would be inseparably attached to each incident or signifier,
assigning it a pre-established, unequivocal meaning along with
fixed relations to everything else. The metonymy of desire
normally displaces investment along the signifying chain, but
where the metaphoric axis predominates, the force of the
repetition compulsion outweighs the force of desire. Taken to
the extreme, metaphor would entail infinite repetition of the
absolutely identical same.
The form of shock-defense based on extreme metaphor
appears in "Les Sept Vieillards," where it fails even more
dramatically than the metonymic defense does in "A une
passante." In fact, the metaphoric doctrine of correspondences
(already decoded by "Obsession" toward the end of "Spleen
and Ideal") is here taken to its extreme and drives the Poet
mad. The divine faculty of seeing metaphorical similarities in
everything and of enriching discrete perceptions with harmonic
resonances among them now appears as a terrifying recurrence
of something absolutely the same. Whereas the aesthetic of
correspondences nonetheless preserved difference in its rev-
elation of similarity, here difference totally disappears, and total
identity replaces mere resemblance.
As if to accentuate the implicit allusion to the earlier doctrine,
"Les Sept Vieillards" abounds in figures of comparison,
similarity, and imitation. But such metaphoric poetics acceler-
ates to the point that the figure of the old man begins to multiply
indefinitely, and not even the passage of time differentiates:
"Car je comptai sept fois, de minute en minute, / Ce sinistre
vieillard qui se multipliait!" (11. 35-36). The poetics of extreme
metaphor thus ultimately prove inadequate to the challenges of
modern city life, arresting experience rather than enabling it,
and in the end, the Poet is defeated.
Already in the first stanza, the threats of city life appear in
two forms that recur throughout the poem: the flow of mysteries
that inundate the cityscape; the shock of specters that accost the
passer-by even in broad daylight. The next two stanzas -
comprising one long, flowing sentence, the longest in the poem
- develop the mysterious liquidity of the city as the setting of the
Poet's morning stroll:
Fourmillante cite, cite pleine de reves,
Ou le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant!
Les mysteres coulent partout comme des seves
4 Dans les canaux etroits du colosse puissant.
Un matin, cependant que dans la triste rue
Les maisons, dont la brume allongeait la hauteur,
Simulaient les deux quais d'une riviere accrue,
8 Et que, decor semblable a l'ame de l'acteur,
Un brouillard sale et jaune inondait tout l'espace,
Je suivais, roidissant mes nerfs comme un heros
Et discutant avec mon ame deja lasse,
12 Le faubourg secoue par les lourds tombereaux.
As he follows the suburban rivers overflowing with smog (11.
7-9), the Poet tries to bolster the courage of his flagging soul and
steel his nerves to protect himself from the shocks of city life (11.
10-11), which are already prefigured in the jolts of heavy
tumbrels shaking the neighborhood (1. 12). And we can almost
see him on guard, flexing his poetic muscles in wary an-
ticipation, brandishing metaphors and similes to keep the
mysteries at bay: "Les mysteres ... coulent comme des seves" (1.
3); "Les maisons ... Simulaient les deux quais d'une riviere" (11.
6—7); "decor semblable a l'ame de l'acteur" (1. 8).
But his defenses fail: suddenly, an old man appears before
him. The shock is so severe that it registers twice, once at the
beginning of the fourth stanza, then again - in a striking
enjambement (which contrasts sharply with the smooth-
flowing, two-stanza sentence preceding it) - at the beginning of
the fifth:
Tout a coup, un vieillard dont les guenilles jaunes
Imitaient la couleur de ce ciel pluvieux,
Et dont l'aspect aurait fait pleuvoir des aumones,
16 Sans la mechancete qui luisait dans ses yeux,
M'apparut. On eut dit sa prunelle trempee
Dans le fiel; son regard aiguisait les frimas,
Et sa barbe a longs poils, roide comme une epee,
20 Se projetait, pareille a celle de Judas.
The Poet parries with more metaphors, similes, comparisons:
"les guenilles jaunes, / Imitaient la couleur de ce d e l " (11.
13-14); " O n eut dit sa prunelle trempee / Dans le fiel" (11.
18—18); "sa barbe ... roide comme une epee, / ... pareille a celle de
J u d a s " (11. 19-20). But his fencing skills prove no match for the
old man: pierced by a look-which resembles the "coup de
foudre" of the "passante," but appears here as menacing rather
than fascinating - the Poet will end up wounded and in retreat:
"Je rentrai, je fermai ma porte / ... Blesse par le mystere et par
l'absurdite!" (11. 46,48).
The Poet's metaphoric defense-system - with its figures of
"simulation" (1. 7), "imitation" (1. 14), and "similarity" (1. 8)
- falters on contact with the old man: " On eut dit... (one might
have said)" (1. 17). Anxious about city life from the start, the
Poet now focuses his anxiety exclusively on the old man, but his
metaphors and comparisons lack conviction, stopping at ap-
pearances or offering only alternative surmises instead of
capturing his essence:
II n'etait pas voute, mais casse, son echine
Faisant avec sa jambe un parfait angle droit,
Si bien que son baton, parachevant sa mine,
24 Lui donnait la tournure et le pas maladroit
D'un quadrupede infirme ou d'un juif a trois pattes.
Dans la neige et la boue il allait en s'empetrant,
Comme j'il ecrasait des morts sous ses savates,
28 Hostile a l'univers plutot qu'indifferent.
Metaphor is the Poet's only defense here, but with the
realization (already made explicit in "Obsession") that such
comparisons are not true, they are proffered quite tentatively,
mostly in the mode of "simulation" and "as if" (1. 27). This, of
course, only aggravates his anxiety in face of the old man, the
final result being that the metonymy of desire is brought to a
grinding halt: the repetition compulsion completely appropri-

ates the recognition-function and freezes perception altogether,
fixating the Poet's perception on the figure of the old m a n :
Son pareil le suivait: barbe, oeil, dos, baton, loques,

Nul trait ne distinguait, du meme enfer venu,
Ge jumeau centenaire, et ces spectres baroques
32 Marchaient du meme pas vers un but inconnu.
T h e Poet can now do no more than reiterate the list of features

characterizing the old man ("barbe, oeil... loques") and resort
to the zero-degree metonymic defense of counting off minute by
minute the endless repetition of the same: " C a r je comptai sept
fois, de minute en minute, / Ce sinistre vieillard qui se
multipliait!" (11. 35-36).
A final remark on the poem's mode of reference is in order, for
metaphoric referentiality here suffers a fate akin to that of
metaphoric poetics in general. Unlike the roving reporter of the
tableaux de Paris, the Poet of the " T a b l e a u x Parisiens" proves
unable to master the shocks of city life and derive informative
lessons from them. Paris is therefore not the representational
content of the poem: as a product of metaphoric poetics taken
to the extreme, the poem's content amounts to little more than
the hallucinations of an anxiety-ridden and thoroughly be-
fuddled Poet-flaneur. Yet despite the failure of metaphoric
poetics to represent the city, the city remains the place from
which that failure is attested to and by reference to which it is to
be understood. This metonymic mode of reference aligns "Les
Sept Vieillards" with " L e M a s q u e " (although their mech-
anisms for defeating metaphoric poetics are very different). Just
as " L e M a s q u e " was simultaneously an allegorical poem and a
poem about an allegorical statue, so too "Les Sept Vieillards"
is simultaneously a poem about the fate of poetics in modernity
and a poem about modern city life: a poem in which the city
defies attempts at representation as the metaphoric object of
reference, yet nonetheless serves as the metonymic context of
reference in relation to which the poem's explanation of its
failure ultimately makes sense.
In marked contrast to the conventional tableaux de Paris as
well as the project of correspondences, the street scenes of the

"Tableaux Parisiens" stage the failure of memory and meta-
phoric recognition to master and derive meaning from the
surprising encounters typical of modern city life. The rejection
of nature in favor of artifice leads to anxiety-based recognition,
but decoded recognition fails to find meaning in street scenes,
and the Poet of the "Tableaux Parisiens" will therefore turn his
attention inward to examine the fate of desire.
Exaspere comme un ivrogne qui voit double,
Je rentrai, je fermai ma porte, epouvante,
Malade et morfondu, P esprit fievreux et trouble,
48 Blesse par le mystere et par Pabsurdite!
Wounded by the absurdity of modern existence, the Poet
retreats indoors at the end of "Les Sept Vieillards," thus
prefiguring the shift to domestic scenes comprising the second
half of the section.
THE DOMESTIC SCENES
"Le Crepuscule du soir" (xcv) marks the mid-point of the

"Tableaux Parisiens," and the moment of transition, as we
have said, from the diurnal to the nocturnal sets of poems. The
end of the day and the arrival of night signal the arousal of
desire: "Cependant des demons malsains dans Patmosphere /
S'eveillent lourdement, comme des gens d'affaires / . . . La
Prostitution s'allume dans les rues" (11. 11-12 and 15). Yet the
poem also marks an important transition from exterior to
interior: its last stanzas invite the Poet to take shelter and collect
himself ("Recueille-toi, mon ame, en ce grave moment" 1. 29),
and by implication to enjoy the quiet charm of home ("La
douceur du foyer" 1. 38). The move from exterior to interior is
in a sense more significant than the transition from day to night,
given the ascendancy of artifice over nature in Baudelairean
modernism. The transition from day to night is, after all, merely
a natural cycle, even if it is expressly invoked in this context to
neutralize the passage of linear spleen time evoked in "L'Hor-
loge." The separation of interior from exterior, by contrast, has
nothing natural about it, particularly when the move inside
constitutes a retreat from an outside that threatens the Poet and
Poetic endeavor so gravely, in that it is devoid of meaning.
Given the generic conventions of the tableaux de Paris, the failure
to derive meaning from the exterior scenes depicted inevitably
shifts the focus to the reporting observer himself. Hence the
domestic scenes are concerned not with meaning, but with
desire, and with desire in many forms - memories, fantasies,
dreams. The retreat from exterior to interior, from the street
into the house, from questions of meaning to the issue of desire
in the "Tableaux Parisiens" reiterates the shift from spleen to
evil at the end of" Spleen and Ideal," except that here the split
subject of desire is not racked by conscience and self-flagellation,
but will only be cautiously observed from a safe distance.
The move inside, the stirrings of desire, the moment of
nightfall - they also evoke in this second set of poems the theme
of death, foreshadowed in " Le Squelette laboureur " at the very
end of the diurnal cycle, and resounding here in the concluding
lines of "Le Crepuscule du soir":
Recueille-toi, mon ame, en ce grave moment,
30 Et ferme ton oreille a ce rugissement.
C'est l'heure ou les douleurs des malades s'aigrissent!
La sombre Nuit les prend a la gorge; ils finissent
Leur destinee et vont vers le gouffre commun;
L'hopital se remplit de leurs soupirs. - Plus d'un
35 Ne viendra plus chercher la soupe parfumee,
Au coin du feu, le soir, aupres d'une ame aimee.
If the decoding of meaning leads to the problematic of desire,
the decoding of desire leads directly to death. 13 Decoding
releases recognition from fixation on the metaphoric axis and
accelerates the metonymy of desire, spurring it onward toward
the goal of satisfaction. But when the metaphoric axis has been
radically decoded, it can provide no substitute objects (objets
petit-a) of gratification whatsoever: the metonymy of desire thus
has nowhere to stop, and leads straight to death. This is the
sense in which the gamblers and whores of " L e j e u " (xcvi) are
said to "prefer agony to death and hell to nothingness" (11.
23—24): any substitute gratification, no matter how painful, suf-
fices to detour the "headlong rush into the gaping abyss" (1. 22).
This is also the perspective from which the Poet lauds the
skeleton of death in "Danse macabre" (xcvn) and shares in her
mockery of the dancers who try to mask their inevitable demise
with the pursuit of beauty and pleasure.
Death thus decodes all modes of gratification, showing their
aims to be delusory and proclaiming itself the true end of life;
yet desire staves off death, providing detours to prolong the
journey to the abyss. This is the quandary informing the
domestic cycle of the "Tableaux Parisiens": one cannot simply
affirm the metaphoric axis, since it has been thoroughly
decoded; yet one cannot simply affirm pure metonymy of desire
either, inasmuch as this leads directly to death. Faced with this
predicament, the Poet will typically withdraw from the di-
lemma and take up the position of cautious observer, much as
he withdraws from desire's invasion of the streets to meditate at
home in "Crepuscule du soir."
Nowhere is this strategy displayed more poignantly than in
the opening poem of the cycle, "Le Jeu." In a dream set at
night inside a gambling-house, the Poet sees himself sitting off to
one side, silently watching the players and whores feverishly
pursue their ends; what shocks the dreamer is that, in the
dream, he actually envies their "tenacious passion":
Je me vis accoude, froid, muet, enviant
Enviant de ces gens la passion tenace,
De ces vieilles putains la funebre gaiete.
Et tous gaillardement trafiquant a ma face,
20 L'un de son vieil honneur, l'autre de sa beaute!
Et mon coeur s'effraya d'envier maint pauvre homme
Courant avec ferveur a l'abime beant,
Et qui, soul de son sang, preferait en somme
La douleur a la mort et Penfer au neant!
The Poet is in a sense twice removed from the scene ("le noir
tableau" 1. 13) he is describing: he is observer both within and
of the dream. And it is precisely the envy which distances the
dreamed-Poet from the players he observes in the first place,
that in turn distances the cynical Poet-dreamer from his alter-
ego within the dream in the second place: "Et mon coeur
s'effraya d'envier maint pauvre homme . . . "
T w o remarks are in order here. T h e doubling of the figure of

the Poet in " L e J e u " and other poems of the interior cycle is a
sign of recoding, just as it was in the dynamic of guilty
evilification at the end of" Spleen and I d e a l . " But now doubling
no longer produces the intensification of guilt (pittingjudgment
against act): it appears instead in an attenuated form, as a
continual moving away from the desiring self on the part of a
cynical observing self. This process of self-distantiation occurs in
" L e J e u " by means of frame-switching: already at a distance
from those he (as subject of the utterance) envies in the dream,
the Poet then (as subject of the uttering) distances himself from
that envy. At the same time, the Poet's stance in " L e J e u "
mirrors that of " L e C y g n e " in the exterior cycle. There, the
Poet cannot simply subscribe to meaning and memory, since
they are decoded, but cannot entirely abandon them either:
they are transformed by the supplement of melancholy, which
generates the multiple allegories of exile comprising Part II of
the poem. Here, the Poet cannot simply subscribe to desire, for
it is decoded by death; but he cannot entirely abandon it,
either: the dreamed-Poet still envies the players' passion, even
while the Poet-dreamer cynically demystifies it.
In much the same way, the final poem of the domestic cycle,
" R e v e parisien" (en), mirrors a poem appearing at the
beginning of the exterior cycle, " A une mendiante rousse."
There, Poetic will sought to ennoble a lowly figure on the street;
here the Poet's desire transforms an entire " l a n d s c a p e " in a
dream. But in direct contrast to the introductory poems of the
section ("Paysage," " L e Soleil"), there are now no signs of
nature at all:
J'avais banni de ces spectacles

8 Le vegetal irregulier,
Et, peintre fier de mon genie,
Je savourais dans mon tableau
L'enivrante monotonie
12 Du metal, du marbre et de l'eau.
Non d'arbres, mais de colonnades

22 Les etangs dormants s'entouraient,
Nul astre d'ailleurs, nuls vestiges

46 De soleil, meme au bas du ciel...
Et sur ces mouvantes merveilles

Planait (terrible nouveaute!
Tout pour Pceil, rien pour les oreilles!)
52 Un silence d'eternite.
No signs of nature, no sign of life: the total and explicit exclusion

of nature in favor of artifice produce the quintessentially
modernist "novelty" (1. 50) of a dreamscape informed by a
desire for absolute stillness, or death. Here, the dilemma of
desire and death informing the entire cycle is resolved in a tour
de force: desire and death simply fuse together to produce a
vision of endless yet glittering monotony.
In the context of the "Tableaux Parisiens" as a whole, the
nocturnal vision of desire evoked at will in "Reve parisien"
("Architecte de mes feeries, / J e faisais, a ma volonte... " 11.
37-38) completes the circle leading back to "Paysage," where
the Poet shuts himself in to call forth springtime through sheer
force of will ("evoquer le Printemps avec ma volonte" [1. 24])
and to build his fairy castles in the dark ("Pour batir dans la
nuit [s]es feeriques palais." [1. 16]). Except that now nature and
life have been banished from the Poet's desire-of-death alto-
gether. The contrast with the other dream tableau of the
domestic cycle, in the initial poem " L e J e u , " is even more
striking. There, the Poet appeared double, both observer 0/and
represented in his dream; here, he does not appear in the dream
at all: as there are no signs of life, there is no representation of
the Poet. The absence of a dreamed-Poet (such as the one in
" Le Jeu ") and the externality of the Poet-dreamer to the dream
vision are underscored in the first lines of "Reve parisien," as
the waking Poet recounts his amazement at recalling a
landscape no mortal has ever seen:
De ce terrible paysage,
Tel que jamais mortel n'en vit,
Ce matin encore l'image,
4 Vague et lointaine, me ravit.
The vision of desire can appear eternal (1. 52) as long as it does
not entail the presence of a desiring, and therefore mortal,
subject.
But of course, as in its pendant in the diurnal cycle, "A une
mendiante rousse," the desired transformation in "Reve
parisien" proves illusory: the Poet awakens in his hovel to the
clock striking noon, and must immediately face the real that
resists desire, the curse of mundane cares that worry his soul.
And this rude awakening prepares the dawn of the last poem of
the section, " Crepuscule du matin," which with its final image
of laboring old Paris rubbing its eyes and shouldering its tools to
go back to work, returns us to the opening poems of the diurnal
cycle. The reduction of desiring subjectivity adumbrated in the
Parisian dream here reaches its limit: for in "Crepuscule du
matin," the Poet does not appear at all, not even as speaking
subject. If the decoding of meaning in the exterior cycle led
inside to the desires of the reporting subject, the decoding of
desire leads in turn to the death of the subject, and to an
"eternal" temporality devoid of events to report. "Le Crepu-
scule du matin" inscribes just such a temporality in its series of
imperfect verbs - the only tense appearing in the poem - which
repeatedly set the stage for an event that never occurs and an
actor who nowhere appears.
Thus even while "Reve parisien" and "Le Crepuscule du
matin" thematically lead back to the diurnal poems at the
beginning of the section, they also represent the culmination of
both cycles' poetic transformations of the tableaux de Paris genre.
Just as the decoding of meaning in the street scenes led inside to
the observing subject and the question of its desire, the decoding
of that desiring subject leads back outside to a final scene of
Paris, but this time without any observing subject whatsoever.
The lyric subject of memory and the anti-lyric subject of
boredom from "Spleen and Ideal" are no longer in play. The
observing and speaking subject is absorbed into the instance of
discourse itself (the expression plane); the observed context is
absorbed into the meaningless gesture of reference such dis-
course inevitably makes (the content plane). So although the
cyclical temporal structure of the "Tableaux Parisiens" pro-
duces no other result than to neutralize the inhibiting linearity

of spleen time, the dynamics of referentiality and subjectivity
change substantially across the section as a whole, ultimately
locating the modernist poet in the context of modern Paris while
thoroughly decoding the conventional genre of the tableaux de
Paris.
The spatial structure of the "Tableaux Parisiens," mean-
while, attests to the marked split between meaning and desire
that characterizes Baudelairean modernism, and which will
reappear throughout the Petits Poemes en prose, as well. The
decoding of the (collective as well as private) metaphoric axis in
" Spleen and Ideal" fostered the kind of real reference suggested
by the new section's title. Yet further decoding made real
reference problematic: the unavailability of meaning in the
street scenes shifted focus to domestic scenes suffused with
desire. But the subject of desire is also subject to decoding, and
decoding here leads to the attenuated recoding of cynical self-
distantiation, for the limit of decoded desire appears as death.
Such a split between exterior and interior, between meaning-
recognition and drive-gratification, recalls and exacerbates the
dynamics of psychic disintegration already evident in the spleen
cycle. Meaning-recognition fueled by anxiety serves only the
purpose of ego-defense, here entirely divorced from object-
recognition which could serve the gratification of drives instead.
But such psychic disintegration is compounded here by the
decoding that affects each of the two spheres: unassimilable
shock-experience "outside" thwarts meaning-recognition and
weakens the synthesizing capacity of the ego, already susceptible
to the destabilizing pressures of unassimilated drive-impulses
"inside," thereby making the ego even more unstable. With-
drawal and obsessive self-reference then supervene in an
attempt to shore up and protect the weakened ego, through the
defense mechanism we have referred to as self-distantiation.
Decoding is thus accompanied by a compensatory process of
recoding that takes place "on the spot" (surplace) at the very
site of the most intense decoding.
This dual or doubled stance adopted by the Poet of the

"Tableaux Parisiens" presents the central features of "bor-
derline narcissism," a composite diagnostic category whose two
terms correspond to decoding and recoding respectively. For
our purposes, however, borderline narcissism is finally a
historical rather than a psychological category, and it thus
points beyond a strictly psychopoetic approach to the socio-
poetics of decoding and recoding, and to the situation of
Baudelaire's poetic texts in relation to their historical contexts.
As central as the recurrent oscillation between decoding and
recoding is to the psychopoetics ofLes Fleurs du Mai, the point of
sociopoetic analysis is to explain such oscillation in historical
terms. From this perspective, the cycles of decoding and
recoding represent more than swings of a pendulum charac-
terizing Baudelaire's poetry alone: they have other determi-
nations — the determinations of real Others and ultimately of
social semiosis in historical situation. For just as much as
decoding depends on the historical conditions of the socio-
symbolic order, recoding - the elaboration of personae - never
occurs spontaneously or on one's own concerted initiative, but
rather always under the aegis of determinate Others. Ac-
counting for the poetic evolution registered in Les Fleurs du Mai
will thus involve reconstructing the series of historical Others in
relation to which Baudelaire devised and revised his personali-
ties and public personae, and situating each of the three stages
of recoding traced in the psychopoetics discussion in relation to
one or more of these historical figures.
Yet in situating the poetry in historical context, it is important
not to equate (metaphorically) the evolution of the poetry with
the historical transformations surrounding Baudelaire's life, but
instead to acknowledge (metonymically) the differences between
his published poetry and his life-history. For the poetic cycles of
recoding — romantic recoding in correspondences, "satanic"
recoding in evilification, and cynical recoding in self-distan-
tiation - do not correspond in any direct way to the real Others in
Baudelaire's life nor to the historical developments through
which he lived. From the perspective of sociopoetics, this
difference is crucial to the development and to the explanation
of Baudelairean modernism.
PART III
Sociopoetics
CHAPTER 6
Decoding and recoding in the prose poems
HISTORICAL OTHERS
The series of three published collections of poetry provide one
perspective on Baudelaire's life history, but it is not the only one.
Essays, letters, editorial comments he made about his poetry,
accounts of his life by others, and the poet's own notebooks
provide other perspectives. In a remarkable study of the poet,
Michel Butor takes as his point of departure a dream Baudelaire
recounts in a letter to his friend, Charles Asselineau, and by
association the titles Baudelaire envisaged for verse collections
prior to Les Fleurs du Mai and his writings on Pierre Dupont and
Edgar Allan Poe. 1 It is important to take these other documents
into account: not just because any one set of documentation will
differ from the others and can therefore provide valuable
illumination in its own right, but because in this case, the
writings on Dupont and Poe register events that are absent from
the lyric poetry itself.
Butor divides Baudelaire's life into "three periods... which
correspond to three titles for the poems {Les Lesbiennes, Les
Limbes, Les Fleurs du Mai), and, in the author's psychological life,
to three successive intercessors: Jeanne [Duval], the [rev-
olutionary] crowd [of 1848], and Edgar Poe" (p. 64). These
"intercessors" represent the historical Others in relation to
whom Baudelaire constructed major personalities. The titles are
particularly significant because Baudelaire's dream occurs the
night after his first book (the translation of Poe stories, Histoires
extraordinaires) has appeared, and a book "that has just come
out" also figures in the dream itself: delivering a copy of it to
177
"the madam of a great brothel" will provide him "an
opportunity to fuck one of the brothel girls en passant" (p. 11).
Since Baudelaire had been "morally castrated" (Butor's term,
p. 50) by the legal guardianship arranged by his stepfather
which deprived him of his inheritance at the age of twenty-
three, publishing a book will at long last restore his manhood.
Up to this point, Butor suggests, the relationship with Jeanne
Duval had secretly been between two women; hence the original
title for the collection of poems that will expand to become Les
Fleurs du Mai, "Les Lesbiennes."
The Other of Butor's first period is thus the emasculated
poet's "lesbian" lover, Jeanne Duval. Inasmuch as recoding
here involves supplementing present perception with memory-
traces, Duval represents a perfect Other for Baudelaire, for she
can evoke in the poet profound memories from two formative
experiences: his very close childhood relationship with his
mother, and his ocean voyage at age twenty to the South Seas.
On the nature of his life-long attachment to his mother, little
more need be said: Baudelaire himself as well as his critics and
biographers have stressed this facet of his childhood.2 The loss in
Baudelaire's case of an already aging father at age five may
therefore have merely exaggerated what psychoanalysis insists
is generally the case anyway: that the dependence of the pre-
Oedipal child on the care-giving mother lays down a fund of
precoded memory-traces that will in large part constitute the
imaginary register, before the mother-child relation is disrupted
by the figure of the father and those traces overcoded by the
name-of-the-father function in the symbolic order. It is thus no
surprise that in the first stage of recoding, involving the
recuperation through memory of an integral self mystically
linked to a supernatural world, the figure of woman predomi-
nates. More needs to be said about his trip to India, however.
Perhaps because Baudelaire was forced by his stepfather to take
it in the first place (in order to cure him of profligacy), and then
cut it short to return to Paris, or perhaps because it does not fit
neatly into the chronology or structure of orthodox, "Oedipal-
infantile" psychoanalysis, its importance for the early poetry
has gone largely unnoticed.3
Decoding and recoding in the prose poems 179
As is so often the case, what may be equally true of Baudelaire
himself appears in his art criticism, imputed to others. In his
discussion of Delacroix and the probable source of "Femmes
d'Alger" (in the Salon de 1846), Baudelaire says: "A trip to
Morocco seems to have left a profound impression in his soul.
There, he was able to study the originality and independence of
movement of the native men and women at leisure (Un voyage
au Maroc laissa dans son esprit, a ce qu'il semble, une impression
profonde; la il put a loisir etudier l'homme et la femme dans
l'independance et l'originalite native de leurs mouvements)"
(p. 234). Such impressions - those registered deep in memory
for having escaped ego-defensive recognition and binding at the
moment of initial experience - are precisely the kind that arise
to supplement present perception in many of the early poems,
such as "La Vie anterieure." In this same vein, Baudelaire will
(in the Salon de 1859) confess a marked weakness for certain
otherwise aesthetically mediocre landscapes, solely because
they are exotic:
Je dois confesser en passant que, bien qu'il ne soit pas doue d'une
originalite de maniere bien decidee, M. Hildebrandt... m'a cause un
vif plaisir. En parcourant ces amusants albums de voyage, il me semble
toujours queje revois, queje reconnais ce queje n'aijamais vu. (p. 418)
I must confess in passing that even though his style is not particularly
original, Mr. Hildebrandt... gave me keen pleasure. Looking through
these amusing travel albums always gives me the impression that I am
seeing once again and recognizing something that I have never seen.
And a propos of some aesthetically far superior North African
travel-landscapes of Fromentin, Baudelaire nevertheless sug-
gests that the exotic subject-matter itself plays a role in his
enjoyment:
II est presumable que je suis moi-meme atteint quelque peu d'une
nostalgie qui m'entraine vers le soleil; car de ces toiles lumineuses
s'eleve pour moi une vapeur enivrante, qui se condense bientot en
desirs et en regrets, (p. 409)
It is likely that I myself am somewhat susceptible to nostalgia for the
sun; for from these luminous canvases arises for me an intoxicating
mist which soon condenses into desires and regrets.
Exotic travel is conducive to such quasi-traumatic (i.e. un-

bound) decoded experience inasmuch as the codes at hand to
manage familiar experience no longer adequately serve that
function in an exotic setting. The status of these "profound
impressions" is akin to those of the pre-Oedipal relation to the
mother, in that they have escaped coding, but they occur well
after the "Oedipal stage" and are in no way linked to the
specular mother-child relation of the Lacanian imaginary.
Just as important as the exotic setting itself is the fact that one
of Baudelaire's first poetically mature love poems dates from
this trip, as if means of expression developed to retrieve images
from memory at just the same moment that decoded experience
presented itself to the young poet. Shortly after staying with
Autard de Bragard and his wife Emmelina in Mauritius on his
way home, Baudelaire composes and sends to Emmelina a
sonnet later included in Les Fleurs du Mai under the title "Aune
dame Creole" (LXI). Baudelaire was captivated by the stature
and beauty of this "dark-skinned enchantress" (1. 5), memories
of whom will no doubt be evoked by the mulatto Jeanne Duval's
own dark complexion. Indeed, to the considerable extent that
Jeanne Duval conjures up for Baudelaire whatever he may
know (or think he knows) about Africa and the Orient, she may
evoke memories of the journey in its entirety, as well as those of
Mme. de Bragard in particular; this is certainly what his
comments in the art criticism about nostalgia for travel in
sunnier climes suggests.4
As Baudelaire outgrows his first, "romantic" personality, the
memories associated with the figure of woman as Other diminish
in importance. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this is to be
expected, inasmuch as the imaginary register dominated by the
mother gives way, upon entry into the symbolic order, to the
name-of-the-father. Yet in Baudelaire's case, memories of
women diminish in importance largely because the decoding of
the correspondences program replaces stable memory with
mobile fantasy as supplement to perception. The beauty of
woman may still serve as stimulus, but the destabilizing
exhilaration she provokes exceeds the metaphoric axes of the
imaginary register. What's more, Baudelaire's entry into the
socio-symbolic order entails a repudiation of the name-of-the-
father and of the name-of-the-despot, in the figures of his
stepfather - General Aupick - and Emperor Napoleon III. For
Baudelaire's next "intercessor," according to Butor, is the
revolutionary crowd of 1848. The poet comes of age at a time of
revolution, and constructs his next major personality accord-
ingly.
The title for the second proposed collection of poems, "Les
Limbes," alludes to Fourier and to the period of waiting "in
limbo" that he imagined would precede the triumphant arrival
of the final, "harmonian" stage of human history. In publishing
eleven poems (including three entitled "Spleen") under the
Fourierist title "Les Limbes" (in Le Messager de VAssembled,
April 1851), Baudelaire also announces a forthcoming collection
that will "trace the history of the spiritual agitations of modern
youth" (cited by Butor in Histoire Extraordinaire, p. 66). Even
more than in the projected second title for the collection, with its
direct allusion to Fourier's mystical socialism, the importance of
the crowd for Baudelaire is clearly legible in the essay of August
1851 on Pierre Dupont, 5 whom Baudelaire considered the
preeminent popular poet of the age, and at this point the model
for poetry in general:
je prefere le poete qui se met en communication permanente avec les

hommes de son temps, et echange avec eux des pensees et des
sentiments ... Le poete, place sur un des points de la circonference de
Phumanite, renvoie sur la meme ligne en vibrations plus melodieuses
la pensee humaine qui lui fut transmise... La revolution de Fevrier
activa et augmenta les vibrations de la corde populaire; tous les
malheurs et toutes les esperances de la Revolution firent echo dans la
poesie de Pierre Dupont. (pp. 292 and 294)
I prefer the poet who remains in constant communication with the

people of his time, exchanging thoughts and feelings with them ... The
poet, located at one point on the circumference of humanity, sends
along the same line, but in more melodious vibrations, the human
ideas that were communicated to him... The February Revolution
heightened the resonance of the people's voice; all the misfortunes and
all the hopes of the Revolution found an echo in the poetry of Pierre
Dupont.
Baudelaire will eventually repudiate such a position in (among
many other places) an otherwise still sympathetic review of
Dupont in 1861. But here his engagement with the Revolution
of 1848 and the Second Republic is clear, and affects even his
conception of art, "henceforth inseparable from morality and
utility (desormais inseparable de la morale et de l'utilite) " (p.
292).
By the time the verse collection was finally published in 1857,
under the title Les Fleurs du Mai, Baudelaire's attitude toward
the events of 1848 had changed drastically in the wake of
Napoleon's coup d'etat. When they appear in the poetry at all,
they figure only as an absent and irretrievable past, as in "Le
Cygne," which was at first refused publication (by the Revue
contemporaine) because of its allusions - evidently dangerous
under Second-Empire censorship - to exiles, captives, and the
vanquished of 1848, but ultimately included in the second
edition with an even more direct dedication to the exiled Victor
Hugo; or as a mere distraction unable to rouse the Poet from his
work, as in " Paysage " (" L'Emeute, tempetant vainement a ma
vitre, / Ne fera lever mon front de mon pupitre" 11. 21-22). It
is impossible to decide whether Baudelaire found lyric poetry an
inadequate means of expression for the Revolution of 1848, or
simply found insufficient time for poetry amidst his other, more
political activities. In any case, the historical disaster of
December 1851 intervenes between Baudelaire's revolutionary
engagement and publication of the first (1857) edition of Les
Fleurs du Mai, effacing virtually all traces of the former from the
latter.
The figure of Edgar Allan Poe is crucial to Baudelaire at this
stage, according to Butor, because it enables him in effect to
contradict himself: to efface all traces of his revolutionary
enthusiasm by converting it ex postfacto into a penchant for pure
destruction. I say the figure of Poe not merely because, unlike
Duval or the Parisian crowd, Baudelaire never encountered the
American in person, but more particularly because it is the figure
of Poe generated by Baudelaire's reading of him that changes so
drastically between 1848 and 1852. As Butor suggests, Poe is the
one figure Baudelaire is able to hold onto while everything else
crumbles around him in the wake of Napoleon's coup d'etat: and
even this is possible only on condition that Baudelaire diametri-
cally reverse his understanding of what Poe meant (to him) in
the first place.
Baudelaire first became interested in Poe upon reading some
translations published in a Fourierist journal, Democratic paci-
jique, in 1846 or 1847. His own first translation - of "Mesmeric
Revelation" - appeared in Liberte de penser in July of 1848. As
the short notice accompanying his translation makes clear, in
this time of revolutionary enthusiasm and Fourierist sympa-
thies, Baudelaire takes the tale literally, invoking the names of
the mystic Swedenborg and the naturalist Saint-Hilaire in
praising Poe's insight into the "mysterious unity" of the natural
and the supernatural. 6 Only later will Baudelaire learn that Poe
explicitly abjured any relation to Swedenborgian mysticism,
insisting the story was pure fiction. He is thus obliged to change
his reading of "Mesmeric Revelation," to construe it not
literally but ironically, not as true revelation, but as farce (as he
puts it in his Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe in 1859). 7
He also learns more about the tragedy of Poe's life: whereas
before he had imagined him living a full and happy life,
dabbling in literature among myriad other pursuits, he now
discovers the full extent of Poe's misery and the castigation to
which he had been subject at the hands of critics and
biographers in America.8 This discovery, together with his
belated understanding of the irony in " Mesmeric Revelations,"
produces for Baudelaire a new Poe, a figure who will sanction
his own withdrawal from political engagement, occasioned by
the coup d'etat of Louis-Napoleon in 1851. As Butor explains:
It is at the very moment when his democratic hopes are collapsing that
he realizes that, in the very American republic which he would have
eagerly proposed as a model to France a few months before, this Edgar
Poe whom he so greatly admires was pursued by the same in-
comprehension as he himself was under the reign of Louis-Philippe ...
The violence of Baudelaire's hatred will again be the measure of his
disappointment, (p. 89)
The incomparable appeal of the figure of Poe is that it allows
Baudelaire's bitter disappointment not to show: he discovered
Poe well before 1851; a shrewder reading of him will now enable
the disillusioned poet to claim to have shared the lacerating
irony Poe rains on modern democracy and progress all along.
In constructing a final major personality in relation to Poe as
his third Other following the debacle of 1848-51, Baudelaire
maintains a semblance of personal continuity while having in
fact reversed direction and severed his former political en-
gagement almost completely.9 What he henceforth admires
most in the despised and destitute American is his cynical
aloofness: "He was never a dupe!" insists Baudelaire, secretly
wishing the same were true of himself. The later notebooks
resound with desperate attempts to rewrite history and efface
his moment of weakness, of revolutionary enthusiasm: "Yes!
Long live the Revolution!... But I am no dupe, I have never been
a d u p e ! I say Long live the Revolution! as I would say Long live
Destruction I Long live Expiation I Long live Punishment I Long live
Deathl (Oui! Vive la Revolution!... Mais moi je ne suis pas dupe,
je n'ai jamais ete dupe! je dis Vive la Revolution comme je dirais:
Vive la Destruction! Vive VExpiation! Vive le Chdtiment! Vive la
Mort!)" (p. 698). " T o be a dupe," explains Butor, "means
above all: to take one's desires for realities, in particular to
believe that the people can effectively abolish the rule of the
bourgeoisie " (p. 92). Caveat desiderator: following the example he
finds in the figure of Poe, Baudelaire will conclude that the best
defense against getting duped (again) is to (have) become a
cynic, even - or especially - with respect to his own desires.
But he draws another lesson from his double-reading of Poe,
as well: obliged to revise an earlier, literal reading and
henceforth to factor in Poe's scathing irony, Baudelaire will, in
the face of Second-Empire incomprehension and his loss of faith
in democracy, build such double-reading into his own poetry. It
will increasingly be designed to suggest one, rather conventional
"communicative" reading on the surface, and another, ironized
"textual" reading available only to an "aristocratic elite" of
more canny readers. Such duplicity is already present in "La
Beaute": the poets depicted in the poem futilery waste away
their days trying to fathom Beauty's inner essence, proffered
through a set of striking metaphors and similes; indeed, much of
the criticism, too, has attempted to define a Baudelairean
aesthetic by making sense of these figures. But the poetics of the
poem belie all such attempts, as we saw: speaking in the guise of
Beauty, the poet of the poem demonstrates the superiority of a
metonymic poetics better able to appreciate the beauty of
things. This kind of duplicity becomes more explicit in many
later poems (it was thematized in "Le Jeu"), and constitutes
the very core of some of the most striking prose poems, as well.
Baudelaire's life history thus divides into four stages, not the
three registered as cycles of recoding in the poetry alone; and it
does so despite the existence of three historical Others in relation
to which Baudelaire constructs his major personalities. A
romantic first stage leads the poet (and many of his contempo-
raries) to a second stage of revolutionary enthusiasm, which is
then repudiated and converted retrospectively into ironic
satanism in a third stage, culminating in the accomplished
modernism of the fourth stage. The figure of Poe enables
Baudelaire secretly to convert naive romanticism into modernist
cynicism, and his erstwhile enthusiasm for revolutionary en-
gagement into the satanism appearing in the published poetry.
The difference between poetry and life history is thus crucial to
understanding the development of Baudelairean modernism:
under the aegis of Poe, Baudelaire effaces from the verse
collection his period of revolutionary enthusiasm and engage-
ment. More specifically: in reorganizing the "Spleen and
Ideal" section for the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai, he
substitutes the program of evilification for that enthusiasm,
between the cycle of spleen poems and the "Tableaux Pari-
siens," in order to cover his tracks. The "sado-masochistic"
intensities of self-torture evident in " L'Heautontimoroumenos "
— where the Poet is both "la victime et le bourreau!" (1. 24) —
recover their specific historical valence in relation to remarks on
the revolution that are confined to the notebooks: "Not only
would I be happy to be a victim, but I would not hate being a
torturer, - to experience the Revolution both ways! (Non
seulement je serais heureux d'etre victime, mais je ne halrais pas
d'etre bourreau - pour sentir la Revolution des deux
manieres!) " (p. 698). Baudelaire's claim to the effect that when
he said " Long live the Revolution " he really meant " Long live
Destruction" is written into the revisions for the second edition
in the complete suppression of revolution from the collection.
The function of self-torture and evilification in this pivotal third
stage is best understood in relation to the ways "masochistic"
suffering in the other stages of Baudelaire's life history is either
valorized as grounds on which to construct a self, in cycles of
recoding, or serves as a point of departure for historical
engagement, in cycles of decoding.
MORAL MASOCHISM
Of course, Baudelaire did not invent suffering or its valori-
zation: a centuries-old tradition of suffering valorized by
Christianity precedes the specifically romantic-Christian ver-
sion he inherits and briefly inhabits as an educated European in
the early decades of the nineteenth century. In the romantic
topos, personal suffering decodes social overcoding, inasmuch as
it serves as a testimonial critique of the unkept promises of post-
revolutionary society. Yet, at the same time, it serves recoding
by privileging the self in an imaginary mode: childish, nostalgic,
emotional, imaginative. More important, romantic suffering is
designed to elicit pity, and hence ultimately aims for re-
integration into the social order.10 Thus in the romantic-
religious terms of "Benediction," the Poet vilified by mother
and wife cries
- Soyez beni, mon Dieu, qui donnez la souffrance
Comme un divin remede a nos impuretes
Et comme la meilleure et la plus pure essence
60 Qui preparent les forts aux saintes voluptes!
Je sais que vous gardez une place au Poete
Dans les rangs bienheureux des saintes Legions,
Et que vous Vinvitez a Peternelle fete
64 Des trones, des Vertus, des Dominations.
Suffering here serves as a means of election to the highest ranks
of godly society.
In the second stage, the moment of revolutionary engage-
ment, suffering is valorized not for pity's sake, but as a source of
righteous indignation and a stimulus to action. As Baudelaire
says (in the essay on Dupont):
II est bon que chacun de nous, une fois dans sa vie, ait eprouve la
pression d'une odieuse tyrannie; il apprend a la hair. Combien de
philosophes a engendres le seminaire! Gombien de natures revoltees
ont pris vie aupres d'un cruel et ponctuel militaire de l'Empire!
Fecondante discipline, combien nous te devons de chants de liberte!
La pauvre et genereuse nature, un beau matin, fait son explosion...
(P- 293)
It is good for all of us, at one point in our lives, to have experienced the
oppression of an odious tyranny; it teaches us to hate it. How many
philosophers have been bred in seminaries! How many rebellious souls
have sprung from a cruel and strict officer of the Empire! How many
songs of liberty we owe to fertile discipline! The poor, generous soul,
one fine day, reaches the point of explosion ...
Suffering at the hands of an unjust social order targets the
society responsible for it and foments revolt.
In the interpolated third stage of satanic evilification,
suffering is sought neither for the pity it might elicit nor for the
revolutionary enthusiasm it could inspire, but for the psychic
intensities it produces. Whereas a classic Oedipal resolution
would shift alignment from the mother (focus of imaginary
relations) to the figure of the father and his authority as
internalized in the super-ego, here the shift goes directly against
the authority of the socio-symbolic order. Instead of obeying
internalized socio-symbolic laws, the Poet flouts them, in-
tentionally engaging in proscribed activities for the sheer guilt-
ridden charge of doing wrong and knowing it: la conscience dans
le Mai. Suffering is valued here as a source of pure intra-psychic
intensity, which arises from the exact coincidence between what
is desired and what is condemned as evil by the laws of the socio-
symbolic order. Sartre has read this " coincidence " as existential
masochism: Baudelaire desires whatever society defines as evil
precisely because it is socially defined as evil, which allows him to
shirk the responsibility of choosing authentic desires of his own.
For Bersani, the "masochism" that to Sartre is an example of
inauthenticity is simply part of human nature; humans are
"sado-masochistic" in that they "masochistically" erect and

submit to an internal agency that "sadistically" surveys and
condemns their every desire: " in the super-ego the id, separated
from itself, finds pleasure in attacking itself. The obvious sadistic
aspect of the super-ego perhaps hides a more profound
masochism which becomes evident if we think of the super-ego
as desire turned against itself" (p. 93). As suggestive an insight
into human nature as this may be, it effectively collapses desire
into the law (Bersani is here following Lacan to the letter),
thereby eliminating the tension between concrete individuals
and specific social formations. Explaining Baudelaire's valori-
zation of suffering will require a definition of masochism more
sensitive to the particularities of social life in post-revolutionary
Europe.
The figure of Poe, as reread after the cataclysm of December
1851, sponsors a major restructuration of Baudelaire's relation
to suffering. He now vehemently repudiates romanticism and
suffering for pity's sake: only fools would suffer gladly in the
vain hope of moving society to pity and thereby gaining
(re)acceptance. He also violently rejects his commitment to the
Second Republic and democratic ideals: only dupes would try
to act on their suffering so as to end it, by changing the society
responsible for it. This shift is clear from his remarks on
Hegesippe Moreau:
II fut un temps ou parmi les poetes il etait de mode de se plaindre...

de belles et bonnes souffrances bien determinees, de la pauvrete, par
exemple; on disait orgueilleusement: j'ai faim et j'ai froid!...
Hegesippe donna dans ce grand travers anti-poetique. II parla de lui-
meme beaucoup, et pleura beaucoup sur lui-meme. II singea plus
d'une fois les attitudes fatales des Antony et des Didier, mais il y joignit
ce qu'il croyait une grace de plus, le regard courrouce et grognon du
democrate... [I]l se jeta tout d'abord dans la foule de ceux qui
s'ecrient sans cesse: O maratre nature! et qui reprochent a la societe de
leur avoir vole leur part. II se fit de lui-meme un certain personnage
ideal, damne, mais innocent, voue des sa naissance a des souffrances
immeritees. (p. 489)
There was a time when it was fashionable among poets to complain ...
about very specific, true-to-life suffering - about poverty, for instance;
one proudly declared: I am cold and hungry!... Hegesippe went
astray in just this anti-poetic manner. He spoke a great deal about
himself, and cried a lot over himself. He often copied the fateful poses
of an Antony or a Didier, but then added what he considered an extra
charm, the incensed and peevish expression of a democrat... [H]e
would hurl himself first thing into the mass of those who constantly
exclaim: Nature, you cruel stepmother! and reproach society for
having stolen their fair share. He made himself out to be a kind of ideal
figure, damned but innocent, condemned from the moment of birth to
undeserved suffering.
Such an indictment of course fits the earlier Baudelaire himself,

the poet of "Benediction," for example, at least as well as it does
Hegesippe Moreau. In contrast to the sniveling romantic, the
truly great man - Baudelaire cites Gerard de Nerval and Poe,
precisely - seeks to "discourage pity for his misfortunes (dimi-
nuer la pitie pour ses malheurs) " (p. 489). Rather than reproach
society for the unjust suffering it has meted out, and thereby
reap the glory of public sympathy, the true poet "will want to
dispense with pity and will recite the snap judgment of egoism:
why pity those who deserve to suffer? (voudra se dispenser de la
pitie et repetera le jugement precipite de l'egolsme: pourquoi
plaindre ceux qui meritent de souffrir?) " (p. 488): his suffering
now places him outside and above society in a group whose
rejection by society is the very sign and guarantee of their
superior value. 11 As he says of Leconte de Lisle:
[son] impopularite ... ne lui cause aucune tristesse ... II lui suffit d'etre
populaire parmi ceux qui sont dignes eux-memes de lui plaire...
[parmi] cette famille d'esprits qui ont pour tout ce qui n'est pas
superieur un mepris si tranquille qu'il ne daigne meme pas s'exprimer.
(P. 488)
[his] unpopularity... causes him no distress ... He is content to be
popular among those who are themselves worthy enough to please him
... [among] that family of minds who regard everything that is not
clearly superior with so calm a disdain that it does not even bother
expressing itself.
Suffering no longer calls for pity and ingratiation into society;

no longer prompts indignation and action to change society: it
has become, for the new "aristocratic" elect, a silent mark of

superiority placing the poet over and above society. This, as we
shall see, is the stance adopted by the narrator of the prose
poems.
Baudelaire's masochism is thus far more productive than
either Sartre or Bersani allows. It propels him out of the
romanticism he inherits, through the historic events of the
Revolution of 1848, and then into the ironic cynicism charac-
teristic of Second-Empire high culture (and modern culture
generally).12 The epitome of this historical form of masochism is
found in the works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch himself, who
was an exact contemporary of Baudelaire, and a very popular
man of letters throughout Europe and especially in France, in
the decades immediately following the poet's death. As De-
leuze's psychodynamic study of Masoch's writings suggests,
Masochian masochism had special strategic value in mid-
nineteenth-century Europe - that is, in the period immediately
following the defeat of the 1848 revolutions: the function of
soliciting and enduring punishment for the Masochian maso-
chist was to invalidate the law of the father in the socio-symbolic
order and emerge triumphant oneself.13
HISTORICAL MASOCHISM
Deleuze's study contrasts the works of Masoch with those of the
Marquis de Sade in order to differentiate masochism from
sadism, two discrete perversions often crudely lumped together
under the rubric of "sado-masochism." Although in many of
Freud's texts the two violent perversions are considered mirror
images, freely convertible one into the other, Deleuze draws on
the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle to derive the specificity
of masochism from Masoch's own literary oeuvre. Beyond the
Pleasure Principle is of special interest for an examination of
masochism because Freud here addresses the question of
pleasure and apparent exceptions to its status as a governing
principle of psychic life. Partly in an attempt to account for such
exceptions, Freud explores (among other things) the relation-
ship between pleasure and repetition: what lies "beyond" the
pleasure principle is not so much exceptions to it, but rather its
grounding in repetition and the death instinct. Under the
influence of the death instinct, even the pleasure principle
becomes, as Freud put it, "innately conservative": repetition
grounds the stimulus-binding energy that links present per-
ception with memory-traces of past gratification, thus enabling
the pleasure principle to operate and govern behavior. Usually,
repetition and pleasure work hand-in-glove: we repeat what
was already found pleasurable, which is to say that present
perception is eroticized or "sexualized" and governed "con-
servatively" by (memory-traces of) gratifications past.
But the relation of pleasure and repetition can vary: less
usually, as in the case of trauma dreams, for instance, repetition
operates independently of the pleasure principle, "de-sexu-
alizing" perception and repeating something not pleasurable,
but extremely displeasurable, traumatic. Here repetition is
severed from drive-gratification, and serves instead as an ego-
defense to reduce anxiety, by developing ex post facto the
stimulus-binding recognition-function whose absence occa-
sioned the trauma in the first place. Under conditions of
generalized decoding, as we saw in Baudelaire's case, not only
specific traumas but the myriad shocks of everyday modern
urban life can bolster repetition-driven recognition in defense of
the ego, at the expense of more pleasure-gratifying forms of
experience. Our analysis of "Les Sept Vieillards" showed how,
in a hysterical extrapolation of this defense against anxiety, the
repetition compulsion can even totally appropriate the recog-
nition-function, arresting and fixating present perception alto-
gether.
Still less usually, as in the case of perversion, the desexu-
alization of perception is accompanied by the resexualization of
repetition itself. Instead of repeating what was initially found
pleasurable, pleasure is found in whatever is repeated: in the
repetition of psychic pain (as in trauma), and even in the
physical pain of bodily torture. The question thus becomes:
how can the repetition of pain — especially one's own — be found
pleasurable? As regards masochism, Deleuze invokes Reik's
clinical study and its conclusion: accepting punishment for the

desired act before it occurs effectively resolves guilt and anxiety
about the act, thereby sanctioning its consummation.14 We
have already seen in a general way why such desperate measures
for reducing anxiety might be needed, given the high levels of
ego-defensive anxiety produced by modern urban life. But
Deleuze goes on to ask, why would preliminary punishment
serve the end of obtaining pleasure? Under what conditions
does this masochistic narrative-kernel (punishment-before — >
pleasure-after) become effective? This is where analysis of
Masoch's fiction proves illuminating.
The hero of Masoch's fiction typically arranges a mock
contract whereby he willingly suffers domination and pun-
ishment at the hands of a beautiful woman. A contract is under
normal circumstances of course supposed to protect and further
the interests of both parties: by signing over all the power and
advantages to the domineering woman, the masochist parodies
the concept of contract. The functions of this fantasy parody-
contract are several: first of all, it reduces anxiety about
punishment by meticulously specifying when, where, and how
such punishment is to be carried out; secondly, it explicitly
repudiates the father, the usual authority figure, and transfers
his symbolic authority to the woman. Then, by actively
soliciting punishment, the contract invalidates the symbolic
authority responsible for the suffering incurred: since the
punishment is undeserved, blame falls on the figure meting it
out, instead. With the father figure repudiated and his authority
denied, the masochistic hero ends up enjoying relations with the
woman which the father normally forbids.15
But these are relations of a very special kind: one might say
they are an-Oedipal, or even anti-Oedipal, in nature. What the
beatings suffered by the masochistic hero desexualize is genital
sexuality: he emerges (Masoch's works are explicit about this)
as an idealized and dephallicized being, stripped of any genital
designs on the woman. (Hence the significance of Baudelaire's
asexual or agenital, "lesbian" relationship with Jeanne Duval.)
Not only is the father excluded and his authority denied, but
even his position with respect to the woman is eliminated: what
the hero seeks is not Oedipally to replace the father in genital
relations with the woman, but to transcend carnal desire toward
an idealized, an-Oedipal, sentimental relationship with her.
One important result is that the masochist's super-ego is split
into component parts, as the Oedipal "ego ideal" is rejected in
favor of the pre-Oedipal "ideal ego." 16 The ego ideal is a
precipitate of cultural norms and a condensation of social role-
models. It serves as the standard of comparison, saying in effect:
you should be like this; it supplies content for the formal
operation of "conscience" (the super-ego proper) which says:
you should not do that. The ego ideal thus provides internalized
moral guidelines of a generalized "authority figure" in the
service of the commanding super-ego. The "ideal ego," on the
other hand, predates the formation of the super-ego and even
the consolidation of the "mature" or "reality" ego itself: it is
derived from feelings of omnipotence and connectedness with
reality stemming from relations with the mother before sep-
aration from her (in a developmental stage Freud sometimes
called "primary narcissism"). Polymorphous (a-genital) re-
sexualization at the culmination of the masochistic scenario
indeed produces something like a "pre-Oedipal" relation
between the hero as ideal ego and the woman as phallicized oral
mother. Except that the woman in this scenario is emphatically
not mother, for she is not a wife: the masochistic contract is set
up, as we have seen, expressly to banish the father. The woman
in Masoch's fiction is not a familial but a distinctly public and
even mythical figure: she most often appears as the harsh yet
loving head of an agrarian commune completely devoid of
masculine authority. The ideal outcome of the masochistic
scenario is thus an image of a-phallic, sentimental relations
between the sexes, set in an anti-authoritarian Utopia.
Yet, in a way Deleuze does not fully appreciate, the
masochistic scenario just described is in Masoch's fiction em-
bedded within a narrative that produces results very different
from the Utopian ideal projected by the contract.17 In Masoch's
stories, the father figure supposedly excluded by the terms of the
contract does indeed return; in a failure of the defense Lacan
calls "foreclosure" [forelusion), what is fantasmatically denied in
the symbolic returns unexpectedly in the real.18 And precisely

by breaking the contract herself, the supposedly an-Oedipal
woman in effect becomes wife and mother, going beyond the
sentimentalized torture specified in the contract to an auton-
omous cruelty conducted in association with a phallic male
lover/husband. Thus at the end of Masoch's stories, the
masochistic fantasy-scenario crumbles, leaving the hero with a
galling sense of having been duped and a bitter desire for
revenge. And the ex-masochist hero in Masoch's stories indeed
takes his revenge, with a ferocity that borders on the "sadistic."
The conclusion of Masochian narrative thus represents not the
anti-authoritarian Utopia of idealized relations with the pre-
Oedipal mother figure, as pictured in the masochistic scenario,
but rather a vitriolic and sometimes violent cynic who now
despises anyone (even or most of all himself) foolish enough to
have taken his ideals and desires for reality; in effect, Masochian
narrative ends on the threshold of borderline narcissism. Such is
the story that Masoch told - and that his innumerable readers
throughout late nineteenth-century Europe read - over and
over and over again: as in a trauma-dream, this compulsion to
repeat represents defensive preparation for a cataclysmic event
... that has already occurred.
For Baudelaire, as for so many of his contemporaries, the
event that propels historical masochism into borderline narcis-
sism, that represents as it were the return of the father ruining
the mother-and-son's anti-authoritarian Utopia, is the incred-
ible rise to power of Napoleon III, the founding of the Second
Empire on the ruins of the Second Republic.19 Social forces and
social theories had matured considerably since the 1789 and
1830 revolutions, and reached their apogee in the spring of 1848
with the proposal (spear-headed by Louis Blanc) that the
revolutionary government support "ateliers sociaux"-work-
ers' "cooperatives" that would organize production completely
independent of bourgeois and government authority. What
prevailed instead was an economically unproductive but
politically expedient compromise form of paternalistic "work-
fare" organized by the government, which soon proved too
great a drain on the treasury to survive long in an increasingly
conservative legislature. The closing of the inefficient "ateliers
nationaux" sparked the "Journees de J u i n " (in which Baude-
laire participated), which forced the government to play its
hand with the massacre of thousands of the Parisian poor and
working classes. Idealized romantic-socialist hopes for the
Second Republic may have far outstripped its real potential
from the start, but in contrast to the Bourgeois Monarchy of
Louis-Philippe preceding it, in even sharper contrast to the
Second Empire of Louis-Napoleon that followed, and certainly
in the minds of most active participants and interested
observers, the Second Republic at its best represented a long-
dreamt-of anti-authoritarian ideal - an ideal symbolically
inaugurated, perhaps, at the moment in February 1848 when
the revolutionary crowd threw the royal throne out the window
of the Tuileries palace.
Although Baudelaire fought on the barricades in February
and June of 1848 and again in December 1851 in defense of the
Second Republic, its gradual dismantling by conservative forces
(in April, June, and December 1848) and the final cataclysmic
disappearance of its ideals with Napoleon's coup d'etat in 1851
leaves Baudelaire, like Masoch's ex-masochists, with a galling
sense of having been duped and with a bitter desire for revenge.
Looking back, he will say
1848 ne fut amusant que parce que chacun y faisait des utopies comme
des chateaux en Espagne. 1848 ne fut charmant que par l'exces meme
du ridicule, (p. 631)
1848 was amusing only because everyone made up Utopias like castles
in the air. 1848 was charming only in the excess of its absurdity.
And it is revenge that prompts his characteristic naturalization

of violence and destruction:
Mon ivresse en 1848. De quelle nature etait cette ivresse? Gout de la

vengeance. Plaisir naturel de la demolition... Toujours le gout de la
destruction. Gout legitime si tout ce qui est naturel est legitime ... Ma
fureur au coup d'Etat... Encore un Bonaparte! quelle honte!
Se livrer a Satan, qu'est-ce que c'est?...Que l'homme enlace sa
dupe sur le boulevard, ou perce sa proie dans des forets inconnues,
n'est-il pas 1'homme eternel, c'est-a-dire ranimal de proie le plus
parfait? (p. 631)
My enthusiasm in 1848. What was the nature of that enthusiasm? A
taste for vengeance. Natural pleasure of demolition ... As always, the
penchant for destruction. A legitimate and natural penchant, if
everything natural is legitimate ... My rage at the coup d'etat... Another
Bonaparte! what a disgrace!
What does it mean, to devote oneself to Satan?... Whether man
befriends his dupe on the street, or stabs his prey in some unknown
forest, is he not eternal man, that is to say, the most perfect animal of
prey?
Just as in Masochian narrative, the shattering demise of

Baudelaire's ideal - specifically the anti-authoritarian, demo-
cratic-socialist vision of the Second Republic - forces him to
revise and reverse his relation to ideality, resulting in the
defensive, bitter cynicism and haughty disdain typical of
borderline narcissism.
Such a defensive splitting-off of erstwhile idealism from the
perspective of a disillusioned and cynical observer is registered
most vividly in the Petits Poemes en prose, where it constitutes the
narrative stance of the most characteristic poems. This stance
does not oppose the prose collection to the verse in any simple
way, however, for it culminates the development of metonymic
poetics that led from the decoding of romanticism, through the
projects of beautification, spleen intensification, and evilifi-
cation, to the "Tableaux Parisiens" cycle, where the split
between interior and exterior, desire and meaning, vain hope
and weary dismay is already evident. What does distinguish the
prose collection from the verse is that further evolution of this
kind is no longer possible or necessary: the narrative stance
prefigured in the "Tableaux Parisiens" cycle as a whole will
appear in toto in the prose poems taken individually.
Whereas Baudelaire had insisted that the Fleurs du Mai be
read not as a mere album, but as a narrative "with a beginning
and an end" which had (before the coup d'etat) been designed to
" trace the history of the spiritual agitations of modern youth, " 20
narrative in the Petits Poemes en prose is eschewed altogether, and
the topographical split of the "Tableaux Parisiens" cycle is
reinscribed within individual prose poems themselves. This is
part of what makes the Petits Poemes en prose the most modernist
of Baudelaire's poetic works. The "Tableaux Parisiens" section
had already neutralized the depressing linearity of spleen time
by means of its cyclical structure; here temporal linearity will be
rejected altogether. Indeed, the vehemence with which Baude-
laire rejects (his own) narrative history is legible in the violence
of the description of the prose collection he dedicates to Arsene
Houssaye: "Chop it into many pieces, and you will see that
each one can exist on its own (Hachez-la en nombreux
fragments, et vous verrez que chacun peut exister a part)" (p.
146). But we need not take this striking reversal at face value:
we will instead read Baudelaire's modernist repudiation of
history ... historically. To this end, we need to understand how
the passage from the imaginary to the symbolic register can
result in borderline narcissism when the socio-symbolic order is
subject to decoding, as it has been since Baudelaire's day.
BORDERLINE DECODING
From the Lacanian perspective, the ego is not a foundation but

a fiction, an illusion arising from the mirror stage, when "part-
objects" (the breast or the penis, for example) are unified into
whole objects (the mother or the father); what had been a
fragmented psyche (what Lacan calls the "corps morcele")
now "sees itself" as unified, albeit in the (" alienated") figure of
an other self. This unified self-image will subsequently be
reinforced (and further "alienated") by passage through the
Oedipus complex, as the speaking child adopts the unity of the
first-person pronoun " I " to refer to and conceptualize itself as
a unique and "whole" social being modeled on one of its
parents. The parents' role, in turn, depends in the Lacanian
perspective not on biology or the nuclear family alone, but on a
symbolic order that grants specific functions to each parent. In
particular, the law of signification stipulates and guarantees the
parameters of permissible identification and substitution, so
that in speaking as " I " the child occupies a place sanctioned by
the name-of-the-father within the symbolic order.
This is, of course, only an abstract outline of the "normal"

line of development. When full entry into the symbolic order
falters, imaginary fixations (defining the form of symptoms)
prevail, resulting in neurosis. In psychosis (for this reason
sometimes considered by psychoanalysis to fall completely
outside its domain), the name-of-the-father is refused alto-
gether, and the distinction between symbolic and imaginary
itself collapses. Of course, for Lacan as for Freud, the distinction
between psychosis and neurosis is not an absolute one. Object-
relations psychoanalysis (notably in the work of Otto Kernberg)
has in fact focused its attention on so-called "borderline
conditions"- psychic formations falling on the borderline
between psychosis and neurosis, where the complete "loss of
reality" characteristic of psychosis does not obtain, and yet the
full-fledged ego of the Oedipus complex has not developed,
either. Under such conditions, Oedipal conflict and the
dynamics of repression (sources of "transference neuroses")
rarely appear; instead, more primitive defense mechanisms
characteristic of fetishism and psychosis prevail, involving the
splitting of the psyche and the denial of the reality or emotional
valence of its perceptions. Although equally at odds with the
notion of a unified or synthetic ego, such primitive splitting
differs in certain ways from the single, specular split of Lacan's
mirror stage.
In its critique of ego-psychology, Lacanian psychoanalysis
insists on the split instituted in the mirror stage between the
scrambled ensemble of drives (the corps morcele or Vhommelette)
and the fictively unified ego. Imaginary relations based on this
stage, Lacan suggests, will involve the self with others perceived
to be "identical" to itself, in a mode of ecstatic merger or
aggressive rivalry with them. Object-relations psychoanalysis,
meanwhile, focuses attention on the splitting of self that occurs
when no unified self-image forms in the first place, i.e. in a pre-
Oedipal failure of the mirror stage itself. In this instance, instead
of a single split between the incoherent, bodily self (the corps
morcele) and a unified specular self-image, generalized splitting
pervades a weakly organized ego that remains fundamentally
unstable due to the predominance of unintegrated drives and
drive-derivatives (part-objects) from the pre-Oedipal/pre-ego
state.
It is such pre-Oedipal failure that results in borderline
conditions. Instead of subsuming drives and drive-derivatives
into its (albeit fictive) unity, the borderline ego remains
heterogeneous and incoherent, ultimately unable to synthesize
experience either in the short term (as suggested by "L'Hor-
loge," where decoded time isolates each discrete second from
the next) or in the long term (as in " Le Cygne," where decoded
memory exacerbates separation from the past instead of
resolving it). Because the borderline psyche is so weak, its
characteristic defense mechanism is not repression, but denial
and splitting: one part of the psyche may see danger in some
thing, but will deny its reality; another part acknowledges its
reality, but not the threat it represents. Borderline personalities
thus exhibit a radical inconsistency, typically alternating in
their attitude to a single person or object between extravagant
praise (for "good" object-representations) and utter condem-
nation (of " b a d " object-representations). Under conditions of
primitive or generalized splitting, two (or more) attitudes can
coexist for a life time, Freud says, without ever affecting one
another. 21 But when this primitive defense fails, the previously
segregated perceptions of threat and reality reconverge, and the
thing abruptly (re)appears as a real threat; as Lacan puts it,
that which was foreclosed from the symbolic reappears in the
real ("ce qui a ete forclos du symbolique reapparait dans le
reel"). 22
This is precisely what occurs in Masochian narrative, as we
have seen: the parody-contract is supposed to have symbolically
foreclosed the authority of the father figure; the moment it is
broken, he returns in the real. And the attitude of the Masochian
narrator toward the figure of woman, as well as toward his
former self and its relation to woman, shifts radically from
sentimental, idealizing adulation to vicious, cynical scorn, as
one would expect from Lacan's characterization of imaginary
relations and Kernberg's of borderline conditions. The rep-
etition of Masochian narrative in Masoch's popular works
serves to manage and dispel this trauma; Baudelaire's prose
poem collection, by contrast, refuses narrative resolution at just

this point, to dwell on/in the trauma at its most acute. This is a
defining feature of Baudelairean modernism. Rather than
narrate a final passage from one state to the other, the prose
poems instead oscillate " undecidably " between the extremes of
idealization and cynicism, which form the predominant axes of
the collection.23
At the idealizing end of the spectrum, undiminished com-

mitment to a defunct ideal is dramatized most clearly in
"Laquelle est la vraie" (38). The first paragraph describes a
woman strongly reminiscent of "La Beaute," and whose very
name alludes to that sonnet's strategic use of prosopopoeia:
"une certaine Benedicta, qui remplissait l'atmosphere d'ideal,
et dont les yeux repandaient le desir de la grandeur, de la
beaute, de la gloire et de tout ce qui fait croire a l'immortalite."
This " miraculous " woman turns out to be " too beautiful to live
long," and the narrator buries her only a few days after meeting
her. At her grave-side suddenly appears a grotesque miniature
version of Benedicta who insists that she is the "real one."
Trampling on the grave with a "bizarre, hysterical violence,"
she cries: "C'est moi, la vraie Benedicta! C'est moi, une
fameuse canaille! Et pour la punition de ta folie et de ton
aveuglement, tu m'aimeras telle que je suis!" The narrator
denies this so furiously that, stamping his foot in turn, he ends
up knee-deep in the grave, where he remains stuck, "attache,
pour toujours peut-etre, a la fosse de l'ideal."
Much could be said about this short poem. Let us note first of
all the sudden appearance of the "real" Benedicta after the
demise of the "miraculous" one: "je vis subitement une petite
personne..." Then, the violence of the narrator's denial, as if
he had in fact secretly suspected this "truth" all along. Finally,
the striking image of" remaining, perhaps forever, bound to the
grave of the ideal," an attachment whose somewhat uncertain
permanence ("pour toujours peut-etre") is considerably rein-
forced by the sudden switch from the past tense governing the
rest of the poem to the present tense, in the last line: "j'ai frappe
si violemment la terre du pied que ma jambe s'est enfoncee
jusqu'au genou ... et que ...je reste attache, pour toujours peut-
etre, a la fosse commune." The narrator is therefore at present
still bound to the ideal... or more precisely to the grave of the
ideal: recognition of its demise does not preclude continuing
attachment on the narrator's part.
At the other end of the spectrum, violent scorn on the part of
the narrator is dramatized most vividly in " Le Mauvais Vitrier "
(9). In the anecdotal portion of this long poem, the narrator
tells of having invited a glazier to carry his precious merchandise
up six flights of narrow stairs, only to revile him for not having
any " rose-colored " panes for sale: " Comment, vous n'avez pas
de couleur? des verres roses, rouges, bleus, des vitres magiques,
des vitres de paradis? Impudent que vous etes! Vous osez vous
promener dans des quartiers pauvres, et vous n'avez pas meme de
vitres quifassent voir la vie en beau\" (my emphasis). The narrator
therefore dismisses him abruptly, leans out of the window, and
when the glazier emerges onto the street below, drops a
flowerpot on him, knocking him over and, of course, breaking
all his wares. Whatever else it may represent, this poem offers a
stark contrast with "Laquelle est la vraie" at the idealizing end
of the spectrum, as an example of scornful violence enacted by
the narrator against a figure despised and punished precisely for
not having an "ideal," or more precisely for not having any
means (even obviously illusory ones) of idealizing the world.
The context in which this anecdote appears, however,
crucially places the narrator at one remove from the violence he
enacts, in partial denial of responsibility for it. The act itself
appears as a mere illustration in the narrator's disquisition on
what usually contemplative souls are capable of when pushed
by mysterious forces to "execute the most absurd and often
dangerous of acts ":
II y a des natures purement contemplative et tout a fait impropres a

Faction, qui cependant, sous une impulsion mysterieuse et inconnue,
agissent quelquefois avec une rapidite dont elles se seraient crues elles-
memes incapables... Le moraliste et le medecin, qui pretendent tout
savoir, ne peuvent pas expliquer d'ou vient si subitement une si folle
energie a ces ames paresseuses et voluptueuses, et comment, incapables
d'accomplir les choses les plus simples et les plus necessaires, elles
trouvent a une certaine minute un courage de luxe pour executer les
actes les plus absurdes et souvent meme les plus dangereux...J'ai ete
plus d'une fois victime de ces crises et de ces elans, qui nous autorisent
a croire que des Demons malicieux se glissent en nous et nous font
accomplir, a notre insu, leurs plus absurdes volontes. (my emphasis)
Not only does the narrator characterize himself as in a sense
" victim " as well as perpetrator of the violent act, he even claims
authorization to attribute responsibility for it to malicious
demons! This can, of course, be read with some degree of irony
on the narrator's or poet's part, but it nonetheless suggests a
keen awareness of primitive splitting as a basic psychic structure
and a crucial defense mechanism.
This defense mechanism operates by projecting violence onto
other characters or into the scenes described by the narrator,
whose role, as Bersani rightly insists, is to establish and maintain
" a certain distance from violence in the Petits Poemes en prose" (p.
126). "Le Galant Tireur" (43), for instance, contains dramatic
violence: a husband takes revenge for his wife's mockery of his
poor marksmanship by decapitating with a single shot the doll
he imagines for a moment to be her. This is already within the
story only a vicarious or imaginary violence, inasmuch as the
doll merely represents the wife. But more important, the
typically post-masochist revenge motive is projected onto the
husband by the use of the third person: the absent narrator is
not implicated in the violence at all. Defensive splitting such as
this characterizes nearly all the prose poems in which violence
occurs. "Le Mauvais Vitrier" is in fact the only poem in which
the narrator himself takes unilateral violent action; and even
there, as we saw, he establishes a certain distance from that
action by refusing to take responsibility for it.
Defensive splitting is even more central to "Une mort
heroique" (27), in which a prince invites a gifted comic actor
condemned to death for treason to give a special private
performance, and then has him killed just at the moment the
actor's involvement in his art has made him completely
oblivious to the mortal danger facing him. For anyone familiar
with Baudelaire's works, the description given of the prince
could very well serve as a thumbnail sketch of the poet himself:
Amoureux passionne des beaux-arts, excellent connaisseur d'ailleurs, il
etait vraiment insatiable de voluptes. Assez indifferent relativement
aux hommes et a la morale, veritable artiste lui-meme, il ne connaissait
d'ennemi dangereux que l'Ennui, et les efforts bizarres qu'il faisait
pour fuir ou pour vaincre ce tyran du monde lui auraient certainement
attire, de la part d'un historien severe, l'epithete de "monstre" ...
However tempting it might be to identify the murderous prince

with Baudelaire, this act of violence, too, is mediated by a
narrator who passively observes the entire scene, and is in no
way implicated in it. What's more, the description of the comic
actor, Fancioulle, could equally well be taken as a portrait of the
poet as a young revolutionary (in 1848) or rebel (in 1851):
pour les personnes vouees par etat au comique, les choses serieuses ont
de fatales attractions, et, bien qu'il puisse paraitre bizarre que les idees
de patrie et de liberte s'emparent despotiquement du cerveau d'un
histrion, un jour [il] entra dans une conspiration formee de quelques
gentilshommes mecontents ... Les seigneurs en question furent arretes,
ainsi que Fancioulle, et voues a une mort certaine.
The narrator's sympathy for the actor (tears come to his eyes in
describing the performance which combines "dans un etrange
amalgame, les rayons de l'Art et la gloire du Martyre") is as
patent as his admiration for the prince (whom he compares to a
"young Nero [possessing] abilities greater than his kingdom");
but the narrator's presence in the poem serves to maintain an
equal and nearly absolute distance from both.24
Just as the violence characterizing the narrator in "Le
Mauvais Vitrier " is denied and projected onto the prince in this
poem, the devotion to the ideal characterizing the narrator in
"Laquelle est la vraie?" is here denied and projected onto the
martyred comic actor, Fancioulle. In staging the denial and
projection of both idealization and cynicism, "Une mort
herolque" can be located at the intersection of two sets of poems
that constitute the basic structure of the collection as a whole:
one set dramatizes cynical violence with varying degrees of
acceptance or denial of responsibility; the other set dramatizes
idealized suffering with varying degrees of acceptance or denial
of sympathy.25
The most striking poem in this latter set is "Le Vieux
Saltimbanque" (14), which forms a pendant to "Le Mauvais
Vitrier." Here, the narrator comes across an aged carnival
clown, spurned and neglected by the joyous throngs sur-
rounding him. After contemplating him, the narrator suddenly
"feels his throat wrung by the terrible hand of hysteria," and
when he then tries to " analyze [his] sudden grief," he imagines
he has just seen " l'image du vieil homme de lettres qui a survecu
a la generation dont il fut le brillant amuseur; du vieux poete
sans amis, sans famille, sans enfants, degrade par sa misere et
par l'ingratitude publique... " Whereas the narrator of "Le
Mauvais Vitrier" tried to deny responsibility for an act of
violence he cannot help acknowledging as his own, here the
narrator tries to deny identifying with a mode of suffering he
cannot help recognizing as his own. The narrator in each case
tries to split off and project something identified with himself
onto an other (the malicious demons or the decrepit clown),
without ever quite succeeding: the insistent identification
reappears, despite the willed distantiation.26
Certain forms of distantiation had already occurred in Les
Fleurs du Mai: in "Le Jeu," for instance, the observing Poet
withdrew even from the envy he feels watching the gamblers
and courtesans still passionate enough to "prefer misery to
death and hell to nothingness." And in "L'Heautontimo-
roumenos," it was clearly the Poet himself, and not demons and
glass-peddlers, implicated in the "self-torture" named by the
title. But in the Petits Poemes en prose, primitive splitting has
pushed distantiation to the point of implicating others in place
of the self. If and when it occurs, self-recognition under these
(borderline) conditions comes as quite a shock; this is precisely
the dynamic characterized above as a failure of borderline
defensive splitting, in connection with Masochian narrative:
what has been symbolically denied or abolished returns
unexpectedly in the real. Such moments of "rupture" pervade
the prose poems, where they typically appear as rude awaken-
ings from dreams and other forms of abrupt interruption.
The crucial role of the narrator, epitomized in "Une mort
herolque," is thus to (attempt to) provide protective distance
from the disturbing scenes of suffering and violence left
unintegrated and unmanaged by Baudelaire's modernist refusal
of Masoch's relatively comfortable narrative resolution (which
simply ends the former by recourse to the latter). As Bersani
puts it: "The world is appropriated as a theater for the poet's
obsessions, but the poet nonetheless ... remains a spectator...
present only as an ironic consciousness" (p. 126). (His sub-
sequent clarification is salutary: " I don't mean that Baudelaire
was psychotic when he wrote these poems; he does, however,
seem to have represented in them a psychotic relation to the
world" [p. 128].) Bersani then goes on to suggest, however, that
the prose poem narrator occupies "the position of a fully
organized cognitive and moral self" (p. 133), and furthermore
that the narrative point of view provided in the prose poems is
that of the super-ego (pp. 134, 144, 150). But this can hardly be
said of "Le Mauvais Vitrier," for instance, whose (borderline)
narrator is severely rfworganized and ruthlessly insouciant in his
amorality, as we have seen. Nor does the notion of " a fully
organized cognitive self" apply to the narrator of "Le conjiteor
de Fartiste ... (3), whose self thinks through things when they
are not thinking through it " (for in the expanse of dreams, the
self is soon lost!) "; or to the narrator of "Les Tentations" (2),
who valiantly refuses the devil's temptations in a dream, then
wakes to regret his moral fortitude; or to the narrator of "Le
Joueur genereux" (29), who strikes a good bargain for his soul
with a very generous devil but soon doubts his sincerity, and so
ends up praying to God to make the devil keep his word!
Bersani is quite right that some kind of " unifying form " (p. 133)
is found in the prose poems, but it is certainly not that of a "fully
organized cognitive and moral self."
Nor is it provided by the perspective of the super-ego. In this
connection it is important to note an asymmetry in the two sets
of poems we have just surveyed: whereas sympathy with and
even enthusiasm for lofty ideals are often directly expressed by
the narrator in his own name, violence is always projected by
him onto another character or performed in an other's name. In
other words, whereas the narrator often identifies with the ideal
ego, he never identifies with the perpetrator of violence, who
could thereby be considered the re-externalized expression of a

punishing conscience or super-ego.27 As noted above, "Le
Mauvais Vitrier" is the only poem in which the narrator
himself enacts unilateral violence on another, and here the
violent act is absolutely gratuitous, inexplicable, and ultimately
attributed to "malicious demons." If this were a symbolic
" punishment" meted out by a super-ego incognito, it would have
to be a super-ego totally devoid of content, for the narrator
clearly has no defensible reason for abusing the poor glass-
peddler the way he does.
Such is indeed the characteristic outcome of the borderline
personality's negotiation of the symbolic order: the "bad,"
punishing function of the super-ego (the formal operation of
"conscience": thou shalt not do this) is split off from the "ego
ideal" which would provide it with content and justification.
The violence of the split-off or repudiated super-ego function
thus appears totally gratuitous (or "demonic," as Baudelaire
puts it). So the highly charged moments of ^//^-recognition on
the part of the narrator involve only the ideal ego, never a
super-ego. It is thus no accident that, in "Une mort herolque,"
the shattering moment of recognition that interrupts the actor
in the middle of his perfect performance and kills him is
projected onto Fancioulle, not experienced by the narrator; the
motives of the perpetrator (the prince), meanwhile - surmised
by the narrator to be jealousy, rancor, and wounded pride - do
not carry the moral authority of a super-ego at all.
The moral vacuity of the borderline super-ego function
appears most clearly in "La Chambre double" (5), which
Bersani cites mistakenly as an illustration of " self-recognition "
(p. 131). Like "Laquelle est la vraie," the poem starts by
invoking the ideal: an exquisitely decorated room complete
with a beautiful idol (again reminiscent of "La Beaute"), "la
souveraine des reves" with eyes ("mirettes") that "attirent,
subjuguent, devorent le regard de Pimprudent qui les con-
temple, " and who reigns in an " eternite de delices." Suddenly,
a loud knock on the door: the dream shatters. "La chambre
paradisiaque, l'idole, la souveraine des reves... toute cette
magie a disparu au coup brutal frappe par le Spectre." But this
Decoding and re coding in the prose poems 207
is not a moment of self-recognition: the specter that enters is not
an internalized demon of the narrator's (as in "Le Mauvais
Vitrier"). On the contrary, the specter is most emphatically
external. And it cannot personify the super-ego: the specter that
enters is in fact identified as no one in particular, merely "un
huissier qui vient me torturer au nom de la loi; une infame
concubine qui vient crier misere et ajouter les trivialites de sa vie
aux douleurs de la mienne; ou bien le saute-ruisseau d'un
directeur de journal qui reclame la suite du manuscrit." It is
thus not the super-ego, but reality itself— and particularly the
realities of a morally bankrupt market society — that here
brutally reappear in the real.
In the highly charged moments of rupture typical of the prose
poems, then, what (re) turns against the ideal is social reality
itself. This dynamic is in fact explicitly thematized — that is,
considered from a comfortable distance, and in this case not
even by the narrator, but by his interlocutor! - in "La Corde"
(30), which begins as follows:
Les illusions, - me disait mon ami, - sont aussi innombrables peut-
etre que les rapports des hommes entre eux, ou des hommes avec les
choses. Et quand l'illusion disparait, c'est-a-dire quand nous voyons
Petre ou le fait tel qu'il existe en dehors de nous, nous eprouvons un
bizarre sentiment, complique moitie de regret pour le fantome disparu,
moitie de surprise agreable devant la nouveaute, devant le fait reel.
The narrator's artist-friend goes on to recount a story that
disabused him of his illusions about maternal love. It involves a
poor little boy, serving as the artist's model and errand-boy,
who commits suicide after the artist catches him stealing and
threatens to send him back to live with his destitute parents.
Imagine the agony of the artist having to break the news to the
mother and then show her the body; his horror and shame when
in explaining the tragedy he sees the nail and rope still hanging
from the side of the armoire where the boy hanged himself; his
astonishment when she stops him from throwing them out the
window and asks to keep them herself, instead! The artist
decides that in her grief, the mother must have wanted to keep
whatever relics she could find of her son, even the rope that
killed him. The next day, to the artist's surprise, requests start
pouring in from around the neighborhood for pieces of the rope,

which because of the end it served is in great demand; only then,
in a characteristic shock of recognition, does he suddenly realize
that the mother really wanted the rope because she could turn
a tidy profit on it: " Et alors, soudainement, une lueur se fit dans
mon cerveau, et je compris pourquoi la mere tenait tant a
m'arracher la ficelle et par quel commerce elle entendait se
consoler."
Buried deep within the poem, the normal exercise of an
integrated super-ego: the narrator's artist-friend scolds the boy
for petty larceny, and threatens to punish him by returning him
to dire poverty with his family. But the poem revolves around a
shock that has little to do with this exercise: the return of the
real involves the unexpected appearance of the profit motive in
the place of maternal grief and affection. Note that the
commercial motive itself (given the family's abject poverty) is
not morally condemned by the narrator or by his interlocutor:
it is simply acknowledged as one of the realities of market society
- at the cost, says the narrator's friend, of one more suddenly
lost illusion.
The complete lack of super-ego function under borderline
conditions testifies to the decoding of the modern socio-symbolic
order; conversely, stripping punitive figures of authority is a
principal aim of the masochistic scenario, as we have seen. The
borderline personality lacks a coherent imaginary self-image
due to failure of mirror-stage identification, but unlike the true
psychotic, negotiates entry into the symbolic order anyway. It
does so by thoroughly repudiating moral authority, thereby
canceling the operations of conscience in the psyche, so that now
"anything goes." The borderline personality cannot itself say
" n o , " as it were — and is shocked and dismayed when reality
says it for or to him. One result is the coexistence of disparate
drive-derivatives and the lack of impulse-control typical of
borderline personalities, illustrated vividly in "Le Mauvais
Vitrier" and profusely throughout the prose poem collection -
and illustrated as well, if his own writings and friends' testimony
are any indication, in the life of Baudelaire himself. In the
absence of regulative and punitive "conscience," the "ego
ideal" prevails in place of a super-ego, providing role-models as
a standard of comparison for the borderline ego ("be like
this"), but not moral rules or prohibitions. Usually, these role-
models are transient, given the instability of the personality they
are supposed to model: one ego ideal is first (over-) idealized in
the service of certain momentarily dominant impulses, then
brutally devalued to be replaced by another more favorable to
other, newly dominant impulses. Hence the oscillation between
adulation and scorn characteristic of imaginary relations and
borderline conditions, as they appear throughout the prose
poems.
NARCISSISTIC REGODING
But under extraordinary circumstances, and even in the

effective absence of a "conscience," Baudelaire finally found a
permanent ego-ideal role-model perfectly suited to his own
ideal ego: Edgar Allan Poe. The example of Poe not only
enables him to detach himself from his idealist revolutionary
enthusiasm of 1848, as Butor has shown, it also enables him to
integrate his lifelong martyrdom to market society into his
model of the great poet.28 For what Baudelaire belatedly learns
about Poe is not only that he meant the tale "Mesmeric
Revelations" ironically, but also that he was unjustly neglected
and reduced to misery by a worthless commercial society of
philistines in America, just as Baudelaire had been in Second-
Empire France. It is precisely such suffering, as we have seen,
that marks Poe and Baudelaire as members of the elect: in
contrast to the romantic hope for reconciliation and social
reintegration (a la Hegesippe Moreau), their suffering places
them outside and above a hopelessly corrupt and compromised
society. In this way, the borderline psyche erects a narcissistic
"grandiose self" over and against the society that oppresses it
(and which thereby forfeits all moral authority over it);
Baudelaire's masochist ideal ego reflects and reinforces itself in
the ego ideal of the great writer, Edgar Allan Poe. He even goes
so far as to claim as a kind of spiritual mother figure the real-life
mother-in-law of Poe, whose lasting devotion to her son-in-law's
literary career Baudelaire cites in his notices, and which must
have contrasted sharply with the devastating betrayal he felt at

the hands of his own mother in alliance with his stepfather:
Comme cette pauvre creature se preoccupe de la reputation de son fils!
Que c'est beau! que c'est grand! Admirable creature ... [pjuissent nos
larmes traverser POcean, les larmes de tous ceux qui, comme ton
pauvre Eddie, sont malheureux ... Puissent ces lignes, empreintes de la
plus sincere et de la plus respectueuse admiration, plaire a tes yeux
maternels! ton image quasi divine voltigera incessamment au-dessus
du martyrologe de la litterature!29
How that poor woman cared for her son's reputation! How beautiful!
How noble! Admirable creature ... may our tears cross the Ocean, the
tears of all those, like your poor Eddie, who are unfortunate ... May
these lines, stamped with the most sincere and respectful admiration,
please your maternal eyes! Your nearly divine image will hover
unceasingly over the martyrology of literature!
Given the extraordinary example of Poe, Baudelaire is able
both to repudiate and to redeem his miserable existence and
defunct ideals in writing through the elaboration of the
narcissistic prose narrator. It is here that Baudelaire's most
accomplished modernism emerges.
Henceforth, Baudelaire's own martyred ideal ego is reflected
in the ego ideal provided by the figure of Poe: Poe represents the
personal savior of ''Baudelaire-the-former-revolutionary-ideal-
ist," while at the same time cc Baudelaire-the-published-trans-
lator/critic " is personally championing Poe's cause in France
and Europe. Only the reflection of the one in the Other could
enable Baudelaire to write the pendant to "Une mort hero-
Ique," "Assommons les pauvres" (49), for the violence and
suffering projected equally onto the two characters observed at
a safe distance in "Une mort" are here reappropriated and
belong clearly to the narrator himself. Indeed, unlike "Le
Mauvais Vitrier" (the only other prose poem in which a first-
person narrator himself enacts violence against another), where
the narrator partly repudiates his "demonic" action, here the
narrator is supremely proud of it, for it proves him superior to
the romantic political theorists of 1848, and furnishes a solution
to the problems of poverty, equality, and liberty, all in one
succinct lesson.
The narrator explains that, having locked himself in his room
for two weeks and read himself sick of Utopian tracts from 1848
about how to make everyone happy and rich, he felt he was on
the verge of a better idea for social reform, but could not quite
put his finger on it. So he goes out for a walk and some
refreshment, only to run into a beggar who importunes him
with "un de ces regards inoubliables qui culbuteraient les
trones, si l'esprit remuait la matiere, et si l'oeil d'un magnetiseur
faisait murir des raisins." Suddenly (as in "Le Mauvais
Vitrier"), his demon prompts him to action — for his is not an
inhibiting or censorious demon like Socrates', but an affirmative
one ("un grand affirmateur") —advising him that "Celui-la
seul est l'egal d'un autre, qui le prouve, et celui-la seul est digne
de la liberte, qui sait la conquerir." So the narrator immediately
attacks the beggar and beats him mercilessly, only to witness —
"6 miracle! 6 jouissance du philosophe qui verifie l'excellence
de sa theorie!" - the old man jump to his feet and start beating
him in turn. The narrator then stops the fight, declares the old
man his equal (" Monsieur, vous etes mon e'gall"), and shares his
purse with him, reminding the erstwhile beggar to administer
the same treatment to whoever should ask him for charity.
The beggar is a projection of the poor, martyred ideal ego of
1848, whose pitiful looks and naive theories have about as much
chance of overthrowing real tyranny (Louis-Philippe, or Napo-
leon Bonaparte) as spirit has of moving matter or a hypnotist of
ripening grapes. The " name-of-the-demon " who never says no,
meanwhile, is an introjection of Poe: his example has restored a
defeated idealist Baudelaire to life, enabling him to fight back
and regain his pride: "Par mon energetique medication,"
explains the narrator, "je lui avais done rendu l'orgueil et la
vie." Having (finally) understood the demonic lesson, and now
cured of his idealism, Baudelaire can henceforth do the same for
others: taking his leave, the former beggar swears "qu'il avait
compris ma theorie, et qu'il obeirait a mes conseils." The poem
thus undertakes - as a classic trauma defense - to salvage some
dignity from the wreckage of real life by dismissing ideals as
illusory before reality does, thereby condemning them and their
proponents to idiocy. As ideal ego, identified with the poor
crowds of 1848, Baudelaire sides with the beggar; as ego ideal,

identified with Poe, Baudelaire sides with the narrator. This
extraordinary mirror reflection thus compensates the writer
subject to decoding with a narcissistic narrative stance: it is
different facets of Baudelaire's own life that the narrator at once
embodies - in his orgy of philosophical self-congratulation,
having mastered his own fate by finally understanding Poe's -
and observes - walking off to reproduce himself by repeating
the salutary lesson "of" Poe on other poor beggars ad infinitum.
This narcissistic narrative stance appears throughout the
prose poems, and the "obsessive self-reference" from which
such narcissism derives its name is clearly illustrated in "Les
Fenetres" (35), which begins with the curious but revealing
assertion that "Celui qui regarde du dehors a travers une
fenetre ouverte, ne voit jamais autant de choses que celui qui
regarde une fenetre fermee." The window-pane has become a
mirror for the poet's obsessions, and he is more fascinated by
their reflection in it than concerned with seeing the real world
through it. Indeed, responding to a challenge regarding the
veracity of the stories he makes up, the narrator answers,
"Qu'importe ce que peut etre la realite placee hors de moi, si
elle m'a aide a vivre, a sentir que je suis et ce que je suis?" In a
passage that recalls the dynamic of self-recognition in "Le
Vieux Saltimbanque," the narrator recounts how
avec son visage, avec son vetement, avec son geste, avec presque rien,
j'ai refait l'histoire de cette [pauvre] femme, ou plutot sa legende, et
quelquefois je me la raconte a moi-meme en pleurant. Si c'eut ete un
pauvre homme, j'aurais refait la sienne tout aussi aisement.
The narrator as borderline narcissist is so keenly interested in
the real world because it reflects back to him versions or parts of
himself that have been split off and symbolically repudiated: he
is then (and only then) able to recognize and reappropriate
them - or, preferably, to contemplate them from a safe distance.
It is thus the perspective of borderline narcissism that gives
"unifying form" to the prose poems, not that of the super-ego:
the narcissist-narrator in fact shares with the super-ego only the
function of self-observation; no prohibitions and no moral
judgments are involved. The borderline narcissist asserts or
confirms his sense of superiority by separating off, and often
denigrating, inferior others, who are actually projected partial
selves of his own. The severe splitting characteristic of borderline
conditions is thus taken over and adapted for use in the effort to
master or manage others and/or other partial or former selves.
This narrative stance is most clearly illustrated, no doubt, in the
prose poem highlighted by Benjamin, "Perte d'aureole" (46),
where the decoding of romanticism already legible in the poetics
of the beauty cycle of Les Fleurs du Mai has become an explicit
theme.
In a brothel, the main character runs into an acquaintance
who expresses surprise at finding the illustrious poet in such a
"mauvais lieu." The poet immediately launches into an
anecdote to explain why he is there: while dodging on-coming
traffic on his way across the boulevard, he dropped his halo in
the mud, and did not have the courage to retrieve it; he decided
it would be better to lose his insignia than to break his neck.
Then, looking on the bright side, he realized he could now " [se]
promener incognito, faire des actions basses, et me livrer a la
crapule, comme les simples mortels." The acquaintance expects
him to advertise to get his halo back, but the poet will have none
of it: dignity bores him, and he is now enjoying himself.
Moreover, he imagines the fun he will have if some scribbler
picks it up and dares to put it on: "Faire un heureux, quelle
jouissance! et surtout un heureux qui me fera rire! Pensez a X,
o u a Z ! Hein! comme ce sera drole!"
It should be clear that this story-teller, like the one in "La
Corde," is no moralizing judge: he is here a disdainful cynic,
casually indulging in debauchery while mocking others who
would still take his former status of poet seriously. Notice, too,
that this story-teller is narrating at one remove (again as in " La
Corde"): he is explaining himself to an acquaintance, not
directly addressing the reader. And although the story-teller's
derision is most obviously directed at X and Z, we also see him
puffing up his own sense of self and snidely belittling his
interlocutor (who resembles X and Z inasmuch as he still values
the halo enough to expect the poet to try to reclaim it). His first
reaction to the accident reveals a certain "lack of courage,"
which he immediately transmutes into a conscious decision not
to risk his life for the halo ("Je n'ai pas eu le courage de le
ramasser. J'ai juge moins desagreable de perdre mes insignes
que de me faire rompre les os.") In order to make the best of this
unfortunate situation, he stoops to indulge in the vulgarity of
"ordinary mortals," into which category he then places his
interlocutor: "Je puis maintenant me promener incognito, faire
des actions basses, et me livrer a la crapule, comme les simples
mortels. Et me voici, tout semblable a vous, comme vous
voyez!" The narcissist's sense of self-worth depends in large
part on such devaluation of others.30
But it can also involve the devaluation of one's own former
selves - particularly, in Baudelaire's case, formerly idealistic
selves whose illusions have been shattered by reality; the halo
lost in the prose poem, then, would be precisely the one awarded
the romantic Poet of "Benediction" for his suffering at the
beginning of Les Fleurs du Mai. In the published prose poem, it
is true, this idealistic self has completely disappeared beneath
the poet's cynical stance, and has been projected onto X, Z, and
the interlocutor, all of whom continue to value the outmoded
ideal. But the anecdote from Baudelaire's journal on which the
poem is based reads quite differently:
Gomme je traversais le boulevard, et comme je mettais un peu de

precipitation a eviter les voitures, mon aureole s'est detachee et est
tombee dans la boue du macadam. J'eus heureusement le temps de la
ramasser; mais cette idee malheureuse se glissa un instant apres dans
mon esprit, que c'etait un mauvais presage; et des lors Pidee n'a plus
voulu me lacher; elle ne m'a laisse aucun repos de toute la journee.31
Here, the narrator does recover the halo, and clearly still values
it enough to consider even its momentary loss a bad omen. In
the published version, by contrast, the once-illustrious Poet is
quite happy to do without it, and takes his mocking distance
from anyone foolish enough to want to retrieve it. Moreover, the
loss of the halo is now not merely the subject of a story: it is an
event recounted by a narrator to a listener within the poem; it
has become an occasion for the narrator to exercise an invidious
superiority over his fictional audience. And he is now at one
remove from the initial experience: Baudelaire has transmuted
the original account and the uneasy feeling it provoked into the
snide banter of a world-weary and slightly sullied roue. The
writer thus appears in the prose poem far more comfortable
with his modernism than the individual in the journal did with
the modernity he found careening down the street at him in
Haussmann's new Paris (even if the grandiose narrator arises
partly in compensation for the sacrifice of the ideal self to
modern social realities).
This degree of comfort suggests that the defensive function of
narcissism — to manage borderline splitting so that it does not
disrupt the fragile composure of the self— is working rather
smoothly here, especially when compared with the rough-edged
"hysteria" (Baudelaire's term) of "Le Vieux Saltimbanque"
and "Le Mauvais Vitrier." Thus, in addition to the two basic
axes we have already mentioned, where cynical violence and
idealized suffering are split off and projected onto partial selves,
the prose poem collection also contains a third dimension, as it
were: a vertical axis measuring the degree of composure
attained by the narcissistic narrator in the face of such splitting.
The distance from tragic or exultant suffering and violence
attained by the narrators of "Une mort heroique" and
"Assommons les pauvres" places them somewhat higher on
such a scale than "Le Vieux Saltimbanque" and "Le Mauvais
Vitrier." Still higher on this scale appears "Les Projets" (24),
which resembles "Perte d'aureole" in that its superior anxiety-
management is especially visible in the revisions Baudelaire
made for the final version of the poem.32 While most of the prose
poems involve the conflict of political or cultural values, "Les
Projets" (like "Le Vieux Saltimbanque" and even "A une
mendiante rousse") stages the disparity between ideal and real
in explicitly commercial terms: it manages the recurring
disappointment suffered by the consumer whose real means do
not match his imaginary desires.
The initial version of the poem features a first-person narrator
ruminating aloud to his lover as to what kind of romantic set-
ting would best suit his desire for her. First he imagines her "dans
un costume de cour complique et fastueux, descendant a

travers l'atmosphere d'un beau soir, les degres de marbre d'un
palais ..." - but then decides against such a beautiful setting: he
hates kings and their palaces, and they would not feel at home
there, without any intimate nooks or a place to hang a portrait of
her. Next, he pictures a seaside cabin in some exotic land, with
"une odeur flottante d'huile de coco, et partout un parfum
indescriptible de muse" - but then decides this would cost too
much ("Pourquoi cette vaste mise-en-scene? - Elle couterait
beaucoup d'or, et l'or ne danse que dans la poche des imbeciles
qui ne comprennent pas le Beau"). Finally, he thinks: why go
to so much trouble when pleasure lies just around the corner, " a
deux pas... dans le premier auberge venu"?-which he then
imagines complete with "un grand feu, des faiences voyantes
sur les murs, un souper passable, beaucoup de v i n . . . " But the
reveries stop abruptly there, with an agonizing prise de conscience:
... Le reve! le reve! toujours le reve maudit! - II tue Faction et mange
le temps! - Les reves soulagent un moment la bete devorante qui
s'agite en nous. C'est un poison qui la soulage, mais qui la nourrit.
Oil done trouver une coupe assez profonde et un poison assez epais
pour noyer la Bete!
The narrator here bemoans his lack of action and his penchant
for dreaming his life away, ultimately hoping to find some way
to kill the beast.
The exact opposite attitude toward dreaming appears in the
final version: theflaneursays to himself, upon returning home " a
cette heure oil les conseils de la Sagesse ne sont plus etouffes par
les bourdonnements de la vie exterieure":
J'ai eu aujourd'hui, en reve, trois domiciles ou j'ai eprouve un egal
plaisir. Pourquoi contraindre mon corps a changer de place, puisque
mon ame voyage si lestement? Et a quoi bon executer des projets,
puisque le projet est en lui-meme une jouissance suffisante?
No longer morally offended by his penchant for dreaming, the
flaneur here takes comfort and even pride in his ability to derive
pleasure from the dreams themselves, without ever having to
realize them. This is the stance of someone for whom (as
Benjamin might put it) the experience of window-shopping
without buying has become a norm. Gone are the embar-
rassingly vulgar reference to the prohibitive expense of the
second fantasy (the seaside resort) and the overly resentful
castigation of those rich enough to afford it as moronic
philistines; the narrator is now above all that. Gone, too, is the
reference to his hatred of kings and palaces in the first fantasy.
The same three fantasies appear, and in the same order, but the
switch from one to the next is here not motivated or reasoned
out at all: it simply matches the sequence of scenes and images
encountered in a stroll around town — first through a well-kept
park (reminiscent of royal gardens), then into a print-shop
(where he admires an etching of a tropical landscape), finally
past a local inn (where he glimpses two smiling faces leaning out
of a window). Significantly, the flaneur now rejects each
preceding scene only after having caught sight of the next: a
certain degree of ratiocination and the penchant for auton-
omous dreaming it accompanied in the initial version have both
given way to pure impressionability, utter susceptibility to the
fascination of things. Gone, finally, is the first-person character
directly addressing his love: here, the characteristic omniscient
narrator recounts the reveries and ruminations of a third-person
character, instead. Although this narrator makes only one
appearance, and appears even then only indirectly, it is a
significant one: for it is the narrator who identifies the flaneur's
moment of return chez lui as the hour when wisdom's gentle
advice is finally audible above the din of the city outside.
The final version of" Les Projets " thus displays a pronounced
openness to the world: theflaneuris entranced by the suggestive
beauty of the things he encounters around town, even to the
point of being at their mercy, inasmuch as they (in) form his very
thoughts and wishes. Yet this openness to impressions typical of
decoded experience and the loss of ego-integrity and autonomy
it entails do not provoke censure: rather, a measure of self-
content and even self-satisfaction arises from theflaneur'sability
to dispense entirely with the business of making "his" dreams a
reality.33 This is because both the decoded openness and the
recoded self-containment of the character of the flaneur are
presented from the vantage-point of a narrator who has
completely withdrawn from the scene to sanction only obliquely
the resigned wisdom voiced in the story by theflaneurhimself.
Distance has been achieved and wisdom imparted from the
perspective of a narrator so far above the events recounted that
he barely needs to appear in the text at all.
Primitive borderline splitting pressed into the service of narcis-

sistic mastery thus provides the "unifying form" enabling the
prose poems to depict and convey a broad range of emotions
without compromising or betraying the superior position and
unbreachable reserve of the narrator. The borderline emotions
typical of the collection range from a more or less agonizing loss
of ideals, at one end of the spectrum ("Laquelle est la vraie,"
"Le Vieux Saltimbanque"), to a more or less violent rage
against the real world responsible for that loss, at the other end
of the spectrum ("Le Mauvais Vi trier," "Le Galant Tireur").
Above and even sometimes out of reach of these extremes lies the
narcissistic narrative perspective whose function is to manage
such emotions from a comfortable distance. The pervasive
mediation of the narrator in the prose poems supports Benja-
min's claim that the conditions under which Baudelaire wrote
were no longer conducive to lyric poetry. The marked di-
vergence of communicative and textual functions in the rhetoric
of the verse poetry, meanwhile, takes a quite different form in
the prose: the separation of narrative perspective from the
emotions and actions of characters. Under the aegis of Poe as
ego-ideal Other, the narcissist-narrator in some of the prose
poems manages to attain a measure of resignation and even
equanimity, in contrast with the meaningless agony and
defensive cynicism of the "Tableaux Parisiens."
Whereas the cycles of decoding in the beauty poems and the
"Tableaux Parisiens" foregrounded the psychodynamics of
part-objects and the meaningless real, respectively, the prose
collection features primitive splitting as the final cycle of
decoding in Baudelaire, as a result of the passage from
masochism to borderline narcissism. It is here that the historical
events of 1848-51 register with such great intensity: the urgency
of repudiating his former idealism and revolutionary engage-
ment propels Baudelaire beyond the part-object lyricism of Les
Fleurs du Mai into the full-fledged splitting characteristic of Les
Petits Poemes en prose: the great Baudelaire a dupe ? - Not he! Far
from staging an embattled Poet's desperate struggle to salvage
something from rapidly disintegrating modern experience for
lyric verse, the prose poems depict disintegrated partial selves,
just as permeable to impressions from within or without as the
Poet of beautification, but now separated off and viewed with
unbreachable reserve and from an unbridgeable distance. Such
simultaneous repudiation and redemption of the former partial
selves under observation is made possible in this final cycle of
recoding by the figure of Edgar Allan Poe, whose greatness
represents for Baudelaire the ultimate condemnation of modern,
commercial society (to which they both were sacrificed), and
whose irony represents the ultimate model for his own practice
as a writer, which in the stance of the prose narrator takes the
form of borderline narcissism.
Whatever the disadvantages of borrowing a psychological
term for literary-historical analysis, the effect of reading
Kernberg's works together with Baudelaire's prose poems is as
compelling as it is uncanny. 34 For our purposes, moreover,
borderline narcissism has the distinct advantage of being a
composite term.35 The "narcissistic" component serves as a
defense-reaction against the "borderline" disintegration of the
ego resulting from decoding, in which incompatible facets of
personality are split off and segregated from one another; the
grandiose (yet fragile) "narcissistic" self-image is constructed
via recoding on the figure of an ego ideal rather than a super-
ego authority, in order to mask and compensate for this
underlying incompatibility and resulting instability. As a
composite diagnostic term, borderline narcissism thus registers
(even as it recontains as "psychological") the dual psycho-
historical dynamic of decoding and recoding whose peripeties
we have traced through the major works of Baudelaire, and
which he himself once described in terms of the "vaporisation et
... centralisation du Moi. " 36 It remains to be seen how decoding
and recoding figure in the historical contexts in which those
works were written and have since become justly famous and
canonical. The prose poem narrator clearly fits the diagnostic

description of borderline narcissism; the next chapter resituates
the psychoanalytic explanation of this phenomenon in the
contexts of mid nineteenth-century France and modern market
society.
CHAPTER 7
The prose poem narrator
HISTORIGIZING BORDERLINE NARCISSISM

One of the most important differences between Lacanian and
object-relations psychoanalysis, despite their common debt to
the work of Melanie Klein, involves Freud's notion of Nach-
traglichkeit, or "deferred action." Kernberg and other object-
relations psychoanalysts tend to conceive of psychic causality as
a linear determinism, whereby childhood experience determines
later psychological disturbance (as when severe frustration
during childhood, for example, later causes borderline narcis-
sism in the adult). In the Lacanian view, by contrast, psychic
causality is not linear, for the meaning(s) later attributed to
earlier events count for more than the "events themselves"
(which may turn out to be fictitious anyway, according to the
Freud of "Infantile Sexuality"). Indeed, from his very earliest
work on hysteria, Freud suggested that childhood events may
become meaningful and psychologically effective only long
after they occurred; as he put it in an essay entitled "Screen
Memories":
It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at dllfrom
our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we
possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they
were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories
were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did
not, as people are accustomed to say emerge) they were formed at that
time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical
accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of
memories themselves.1
221
Just as words appearing early in a sentence only take on
meaning when read "retroactively" in the context of the
completed sentence (or the entire discourse), so events occurring
early in childhood only become effective apres coup, according to
the Lacanian linguistic model of the psyche, when later
experience endows them with meaning and traumatic impact
"after the fact."
In the Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari take this important
Freudian insight one crucial step further than Lacan: given the
temporal dynamics of Nachtrdglichkeit, actual social factors
always play the determining role in psychological phenomena,
not childhood experience or "family romance." Memories of
infantile experience (always constructed after the fact, apres
coup) serve at most as a screen onto which strictly contemporary
concerns are projected and then worked through. Unfortu-
nately, psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan excepted, perhaps)
has generally mistaken these "screen memories" for the true
determinants of psychic life, thus skewing psychoanalytic
explanation (not to mention methods of treatment) away from
the actual, socio-historical determinations of psychic life. The
tendency of most psychoanalysis as a whole is to use infantile
determinism in this way to screen out actual social factors by
rewriting them as the familiar, familial ones. This chapter will
demonstrate, to the contrary, that the determinations of
borderline narcissism attributed by object-relations psycho-
analysis to the family - to super-ego failure stemming from bad
fathering and ego disintegration blamed on bad mothering-
are in fact characteristic of the socio-historical context in which
Baudelaire wrote and his readers continue to live.
SUPER-EGO FAILURE
According to Kernberg, one causal factor in borderline narcis-

sism is that a super-ego which has remained primitive and
overpunitive has not been successfully integrated into the
borderline psychic structure, thus allowing the ego and ego-
ideal to fuse in the form of the narcissistic "grandiose self."
The prose poem narrator 223
Object-relations psychoanalysis attributes such super-ego fail-
ure and subsequent ego/ego-ideal fusion to the childhood
experience of excessively harsh treatment at the hands of an
authoritarian father. But in Baudelaire's case, there is little
biographical evidence that he suffered mistreatment as a child
from either his aging father or his stepfather.2 On the contrary,
all the evidence suggests that Baudelaire enjoyed warm relations
with both parents (and both fathers, in turn) throughout his
childhood and well into his late teens. To be sure, his devotion
to poetry instead of the career in law or government envisaged
by his parents generated tensions within the Baudelaire-Aupick
family when Baudelaire was a young man; the trip to the South
Seas arranged by Aupick soon after Baudelaire reached
majority and began spending his inheritance (from Baudelaire
Sr.), followed by the imposition of the conseil judiciaire when he
was twenty-three, aggravated those tensions to the breaking
point. But these truly influential events all occurred well after
the (supposedly) formative period of childhood; there is no
reason to believe that Caroline's remarriage when Charles was
five, for example, would have had any lasting effect on the
future poet without the subsequent intervention of the step-
father into Baudelaire's affairs as a young man. And even here,
Baudelaire's anger and disappointment register primarily with
his mother, not his stepfather: as in Masochian narrative, it is
she that has betrayed his ideal ego by capitulating to her new
husband's plans for the conseil judiciaire. As for Aupick's role as
authority figure, his efficient repression of the Lyon workers'
insurrection of 1834 (when Charles was thirteen) will only make
sense and enrage Baudelaire much later (apres coup), when the
republican-socialist poet joins in the Revolution of 1848 and
exhorts his comrades-in-arms on the barricades to go after the
General ("We must go execute General Aupick! Down with
Aupick! [II faut aller fusilier le General Aupick! A bas
Aupick!]," Baudelaire is reported to have cried).3
Masochian masochism thus fits Baudelaire's life-experience
on a number of levels — which is to say that his recourse to
masochistic strategies is overdetermined by a number of factors
operating in quite diverse domains. Among the most striking
are the return of the (step-) father after the father's death, when
Baudelaire was five, and the return of the authoritarian Empire
after the demise of the Second Republic, when Baudelaire was
thirty. But it is the later events (revolutionary engagement in
1848, the coup d'etat of Napoleon in 1851) that trigger Baude-
laire's masochism, not any childhood experience in and of itself,
which only becomes meaningful (or "traumatic") after the
fact, apres coup. It is in his late teens or early twenties, in other
words, and in response to preeminently social and political
rather than strictly familial concerns, that the masochistic
splitting-off and repudiation of the super-ego crucial to the
development of borderline narcissism occurs in Baudelaire.
Masochism responds to other social factors, as well, especially
the rhythms and tensions of modern city life in general. As we
have seen, the masochist's contract does not just aim to exclude
the father by transferring his authority to the woman: it does so
specifically in order to allay anxiety by stipulating punishment
by her hand, thereby invalidating paternal authority and
allowing the masochist to achieve satisfaction. I say achieve
satisfaction and not experience pleasure because of the peculi-
arly a-genital and almost non-sexual kind of gratification the
masochist enjoys in his idealized, sentimental relations with the
woman. Part of what is "perverse" about Masochian maso-
chism, in other words, is that its aim is not sexual pleasure as
such but rather the reduction or elimination of anxiety: this,
rather than bodily pleasure, is what the masochist achieves, by
means of contractually stipulated (i.e. foreseen rather than
traumatic) punishment. This aim is consistent with the psycho-
dynamics of Baudelaire's spleen poetry and many of the
"Tableaux Parisiens," where the stimulus-binding process of
the repetition compulsion strives merely to ward off anxiety
rather than procure pleasure, as we have seen.
Some of the social conditions conducive to the predominance
of ego-defensive anxiety reduction over pleasure-seeking drive
gratification are delineated by Benjamin in his analysis of the
shock-defense as Baudelaire's characteristic reaction to urban
modernity. Among the most important for Benjamin is the
urban crowd, whose multiple intersecting paths appear crucial
to Baudelaire in his dedication of the prose poem collection to
Arsene Houssaye:
Quel est celui de nous qui n'a pas, dans ses jours d'ambition, reve le
miracle d'une prose poetique, musicale sans rythme et sansrime,assez
souple et assez heurtee pour s'adapter aux mouvements lyriques de
Tame, aux ondulations de la reverie, aux soubresauts de la conscience?
C'est surtout de la frequentation des villes enormes, c'est du
croisement de leurs innombrables rapports que nait cet ideal obse-
dant.4
Who among us has not dreamt, on his more ambitious days, of the
miracle of a poetical prose, musical yet without rhythm and without
rhyme, versatile and abrupt enough to fit the lyric movements of the
soul, the flow of revery, the jolts of consciousness ?
The obsession with such an ideal arises above all from familiarity
with the intersection of innumerable relations that takes place in
enormous modern cities.
Citing "A une passante" and "Le Soleil" as striking examples,

Benjamin suggests that the sudden encounters and fleeting
contacts in urban crowds were for Baudelaire a "decisive,
unique experience" (p. 154). He also mentions (in connection
with "Perte d'aureole") the increasing rapidity of urban traffic
along Haussmann's newly widened boulevards, which required
a new defensive hyperconscious awareness of carriages and
horses on the part of modern Parisians. The invention of
matches and photography in the mid-nineteenth century also
contribute to the development of shock-defensiveness, inasmuch
as they produce or reproduce immediate effects with a single,
abrupt gesture.
At the same time that modern urban experience becomes
increasingly jarring and instantaneous, according to Benjamin,
modern practices evolve in a similar direction, and render
modern individuals less able or inclined to synthesize such
experience into a larger framework. Most important for
Benjamin is the evolution of the mass-circulation newspaper,
which instead of embedding news events in a larger world view
shared by writer and readers alike, as the older subscription
newspapers were bound to do, simply presented isolated items
discretely and "objectively," with no relations to other events

or to any political interpretation or encompassing world view:
[The modern individual] is increasingly unable to assimilate the data
of the world around him [sic] by way of experience. Newspapers
constitute one of the many evidences of such an inability. If it were the
intention of the press to have the reader assimilate the information it
supplies as part of his [sic] own experience, it would not achieve its
purpose. But its intention is just the opposite, and it is achieved: to
isolate what happens from the realm in which it could affect the
experience of the reader. The principles of journalistic information
(freshness of the news, brevity, comprehensibility, and, above all, lack
of connection between the individual news items) contribute as much
to this as does the make-up of the pages and the paper's style.5
The isolation of discrete happenings from synthetic experience

found in newspaper reporting and reading is reinforced by such
practices as gambling (which became widespread among the
middle and lower classes during Baudelaire's lifetime) and the
drill training associated with organized mass-manufacturing
and (eventually) assembly-line production (as opposed to the
apprenticeship and practice associated with artisanal and craft
production). These are some of the features of modern life,
according to Benjamin, that structure experience and ego-
defensive reactions to it in the ways that Baudelaire's readers so
readily recognize.
Benjamin was the first to explain the significance of "Perte
d'aureole" for the prose collection, both in its repudiation of the
romantic poet of the early verse poetry and in its relation to the
modern urban realities which prompted that repudiation. But
Benjamin overlooks the role of the narrator throughout the
prose poem collection, as well as the stance of the raconteur in
"Perte d'aureole" itself: the way he distances himself from the
shocking experience he is recounting, and uses the halo's loss to
belittle others and aggrandize himself. The high-anxiety hyper-
consciousness of the shock defense certainly may have con-
tributed to Baudelairean masochism and its perverse aim of
anxiety reduction, but the prose poet's defenses have evolved
beyond the part-object intensification of spleen, where "every
second finds consciousness ready to intercept its shock" (p.
143), to the primitive splitting and grandiose self characteristic
of the borderline narcissist narrator.
The passage from masochism to borderline narcissism in
Baudelaire revolves around his experience of the calamities of
June 1848 (the massacre of Parisian workers) through Decem-
ber 1851 (the coup (Fetat of Louis-Napoleon). Masochism stages
the repudiation of the father in phantasy (in an a-genital,
"lesbian" relation with the anti-Oedipal lover), but fails in
reality: the father returns in the figure of Napoleon III. This
figure, not Baudelaire's father or stepfather, represents the
primitive, punitive super-ego that is not successfully integrated
into the Baudelairean psyche. The analysis of Louis-Napoleon's
rapid rise to power by Marx confirms and echoes the scandal-
ized reaction of Baudelaire, who bitterly concluded that
devant l'histoire et devant le peuple frangais, la grande gloire de

Napoleon III aura ete de prouver que le premier venu peut, en
s'emparant du telegraphe et de rimprimerie nationale, gouverner une
grande nation.6
in the eyes of history and the French people, the great glory of
Napoleon III will have been to prove that whoever seizes control of
the telegraph and the State printing-office can govern a great nation.
What Marx shows is that the reign of Napoleon III and the
"era of high capitalism" he inaugurated spelled the eclipse of
bourgeois social authority; that under the democratic condi-
tions of the Second Republic — even after the direct, social
democracy of Louis Blanc's workers' cooperatives is scuttled in
favor of state-run workfare, which is in turn promptly elimi-
nated altogether - the bourgeoisie would have to forfeit explicit
political rule and curtail free cultural expression in order to
maintain its economic rule intact behind the scenes. As
Benjamin puts it (citing Marx), '"the bourgeoisie... through
the brutal abuse of [its] own press,' called upon Napoleon c to
destroy their speaking and writing segment, their politicians
and literati, so that they might confidently pursue their private
affairs under the protection of a strong and untrammelled
government'" (p. 106). Baudelaire himself, of course, felt the
lash of imperial censorship in the condemnation of several
poems in the original Fleurs du Mai which led to the publication
of the second edition (in 1861). But long before his censorship
trial in 1857, Baudelaire had recoiled in disgust from Second
Empire politics: "[the coup d'etat of] December 2 [1851]," he
says in explaining his refusal to vote in legislative elections just
three months after the event, "had the effect of physically
depoliticizing m e " ; he later castigates Napoleon's seizure of
power as a "disgrace." 7
This utter contempt for the socio-symbolic order of the
Second Empire in effect invalidates the tyrannical super-ego
figure of Napoleon III, too authoritarian for the social-
democratic ideals Baudelaire once cherished and now must
admit are defunct; such is the dynamic allegorized in " Laquelle
est la vraie?". The splitting-off of a super-ego that is too
primitive enables Baudelaire to fuse his self-image with the
martyred ideal image of Poe - which only further invalidates
the socio-symbolic order of this "era of high capitalism,"
inasmuch as Poe (and hence by mirror-implication Baudelaire
himself) was sacrificed to a commercial society increasingly
dominated by the market. Indeed, even while Napoleon III
represents the figure-of-the-despot of the socio-symbolic order
of Second-Empire France, and is duly targeted as such in letters
and notebook entries, it is the specter of commerce that appears
more often in the poetry itself.
Not that the notebooks and essays do not themselves resound
with vehement denunciations of commercial culture. In "Notes
nouvelles sur Edgar Poe," Baudelaire's condemnation is defini-
tive:
[L]e pretre qui offre au cruel extorqueur d'hosties humaines des
victimes qui meurent honorablement, victimes qui veulent mourir, me
parait un etre tout a fait doux et humain, compare au financier qui
n'immole les populations qu'a son interet propre... Un pareil milieu
... n'est guere fait pour les poetes.8
[T]he priest who offers the cruel extortioner victims who die honorably,
victims who want to die, seems to me altogether lenient and humane
compared to the financier who immolates entire populations for his
private self-interest alone ... Such a milieu ... is hardly fit for poets.
One brief entry in the journals castigates commerce as "the
lowest and vilest form of egoism (une des formes de l'egolsme, et
la plus basse et la plus vile)"; a longer one on the "end of the
world" pictures a horrendous society in which "anything that
is not motivated by monetary gain will be considered totally
ridiculous (tout ce qui ne sera pas l'ardeur vers Plutus sera
repute un immense ridicule) " - only to suggest some lines later
that precisely that situation may already have arrived without
our having realized it.9 There can be little doubt that, for
Baudelaire, market society was just as devoid of social authority
as the tyrannical reign of Napoleon III that so whole-heartedly
endorsed and promoted it.
The mode of denunciation of commercial culture in the prose
poetry is, of course, far more complex. In one mode that we
have already examined, with the primitive super-ego effectively
out of play, what returns in the real at the moment when
defensive splitting and denial fail is neither the father nor a
despot, but the realities of the market: in "La Corde," it is the
profit motive which shockingly appears in place of maternal
love; in " La Chambre double," it is the demands of a creditor,
a kept woman, or an editor which disrupt and dispel the
narrator's reveries. In " Le Vieux Saltimbanque," the dynamic
of "projective identification" linking the narrator with the old
carnival clown in effect places the poet at the mercy of market
forces. In sharp contrast to the immobile squalor of the poor old
clown, the carnival around him teems with "pleasure, profit,
profligacy," and especially the euphoria of money being spent
and money being made:
Tout n'etait que lumiere, poussiere, cris, joie, tumulte: les uns
depensaient, les autres gagnaient, les uns et les autres egalement
joyeux... partout la certitude du pain pour le lendemain; partout
P explosion de la vitalite. Ici la misere absolue ...
The contrast between wealth and poverty appears in many of

the prose poems (including "Le Joujou du pauvre" [19] and
"Les Yeux des pauvres" [26]). Here, the narrator's identi-
fication with the clown situates the poet squarely in a market
context, where he is "degraded (degrade) by misery and the

public's ingratitude."
This identification with the carnival clown resembles the
narrator's empathy with Fancioulle in "Une mort herolque,"
where it appears that the idealist actor confronts a super-ego
figure in the character of the prince who has condemned the
conspirators to death for treason. But it is crucial to the intrigue
of "Une mort herolque" that the prince does not himself
execute nor murder Fancioulle: the actor dies when a cat-call
from somewhere in the audience (instigated, it is true, by the
prince) interrupts his command performance. Though the
prince's motives for requesting Fancioulle's performance remain
unknown, rumors had circulated that the conspirators were to
be pardoned; the narrator thus wonders whether the prince
clearly foresaw the mortal effect of the cat-call, or was testing
the degree of resolve and idealism in an actor playing what
might be his last role. In any case, the logic of "Une mort
herolque," published (in 1863) shortly after Napoleon's first
liberalization measures were instituted (in i860), crucially shifts
responsibility for the demise of the performing artist from the
authority figure to an anonymous public. Even when granted
(perhaps only temporary) immunity from direct condemnation
by the authorities, the impecunious poet in commercial culture
is nevertheless always mortally susceptible to the hazards of the
market and " the public's ingratitude." The complex dynamics
of "Une mort herolque" thus suggest that the borderline
narcissism of the prose poem narrator combines the vehement
repudiation of Napoleon III with an equally vehement con-
demnation of a degraded and degrading commercial culture.
EGO DISINTEGRATION
The second explanation of borderline narcissism involves the

disintegration not of the super-ego, but of the ego itself. Object-
relations psychoanalysis attributes the weak ego-structure and
primitive splitting of the borderline psyche to ambivalent and
inconsistent mothering, which induces extreme frustration in
the child. When the mother's attitude toward the child
alternates between extremes of effusive overindulgence and
callous indifference, instead of occupying a middle-ground
position enabling the child to synthesize feelings of love and
hatred toward her into a whole object, the child's hated
("bad") and loved ("good") part-object representations of her
remain unsynthesized and split apart from one another. Such
splitting, as we have seen, characterizes failure of what Melanie
Klein calls the "depressive" stage: under the sway of raw
instinct (Eros and Thanatos), the child fails to synthesize loved
and hated representations into a whole mother image, to
acknowledge the bad with the good, as it were. According to the
logic of the mirror stage, when a unified image of the mother as
whole object fails to develop, then the child's self-image (the
basis for subsequent ego-identifications) also fails. In the
psychoanalytic view, then, extreme frustration in childhood
prevents erotic and destructive impulses from merging, which
permanently splits good and bad object- and self-represen-
tations from one another, resulting in the weak and unstable
ego-structure of the borderline psyche.
In Baudelaire's case, the argument has been made that his
mother may have pampered him, particularly after the death of
her aging first husband; one could surmise that the ensuing
remarriage to the dashing and (comparatively) young Aupick
may have been frustrating for the young Charles. But little
evidence exists to support this; in fact, the successful military
officer was himself often obliged to leave his new wife alone with
her son for considerable periods of time while on assignment.
Massive evidence exists, by contrast, of the real frustrations
befalling Baudelaire throughout his adult life, and these actual,
social factors must be taken into account.
Of Baudelaire's political frustrations we have already said a
great deal. Early modern French history presents a number of
cycles of great expectation and severe disappointment: the
unexpected promise of democracy after the Revolution of 1789,
embodied in the original Paris Commune and the short-lived
First Republic, is followed by the Napoleonic Empire and then
the reactionary Bourbon Restoration. The July Revolution of
1830 installs a constitutional monarchy and revives hope among

romantic socialists and republicans for a return to democracy;
but then electoral requirements restrict voting and office-
holding to the well-to-do.10 Instead of lowering eligibility levels
in response to demands for wider democratic participation,
Louis-Philippe's minister, Guizot, answers with the infamous
cry: "Enrichissez-vous!"
The Revolution of 1848 again raises hopes and expectations,
including Baudelaire's own. Anti-authoritarian direct democ-
racy and autonomous workers' cooperatives are placed on the
agenda: in the notebooks, Baudelaire specifically mentions the
15th of May (1848), the last (and unsuccessful) attempt by
socialist revolutionaries (led by Blanqui) to regain control of the
Republic from an increasingly conservative legislature; the poet
is on the barricades during the June Days' massacre, and he
takes up arms again on the 2nd of December 1851 as part of
sporadic resistance to Louis-Napoleon. But the coup cTetat
disillusions him to the core. As for so many other writers and
artists at the time, Second-Empire France will henceforth
appear to Baudelaire totally devoid of social value and moral
authority, and he is obliged to take strong measures to stifle his
rage and the broken ideals that fuel it. The frustration is great
enough to shake Baudelaire's psychic structure to its foun-
dations : at this point, with the transformation of masochism
into borderline narcissism, primitive splitting prevails over ego-
syntonic anxiety-defense, splitting off the primitive authority
figure of Napoleon III and repudiating him as figure-of-the-
despot in the post-revolutionary socio-symbolic order. It is not
his mother's (re-) marriage to General Aupick, but the return of
this despot, thoroughly devoid of moral authority, to a position
of real social power in mid-century France, that has such
profound and lasting effects on the Baudelairean psyche and the
texts Baudelaire produced.
But the political potential contrasted with the actual disasters
of 1848-51 is by no means the only real source of social
frustration for Baudelaire. Equally intense frustrations arise
from modern commercial culture, of which two aspects are
particularly important. As a producer of culture, the poet must
face the hazards of the market — those allegorized, for example,
in "Une mort herolque." By the mid-nineteenth century in
France, modernity has for the most part done away with the
patronage-systems of the ancien regime and middle ages: the
writer no longer owes fealty to religious, aristocratic, or
monarchic patrons. But this "freedom" from direct obligation
entails another, comparatively indirect obligation: the poet of
modernity comes to depend instead on the anonymous public of
the marketplace. Despite the marked growth of the literate
public during this period — which fuels the explosion of daily
newspapers and expands the marketability of prosefiction—
Baudelaire feels keenly himself, and in the figure of Poe strongly
identifies with, the frustrations of the talented poet facing a
materialistic and uncomprehending public. Such frustration
appears, with the characteristic shock of banal reality punc-
turing the poetic ideal, in the prose poem "La Soupe et les
nuages" (44): at a dinner prepared by his mistress, the poet is
staring out of the window contemplating the passing clouds,
whose beauty he mentally compares to the eyes of his beloved.
Suddenly, a violent slap on the back: his revery is interrupted
by the voice of his mistress, who is asking when the "damned
cloud-merchant" is going to eat his soup. The poet is frustrated
by his audience's philistine lack of sensitivity and indifference to
beauty.
The poet's frustrations as producer of fine poetry for a
degraded commercial culture are compounded by the frustra-
tions of the consumer in the marketplace. Along with the
growth of the mass-circulation press, Baudelaire's generation
witnesses the development of newspaper and poster advertising
and of store-window displays (first in the "arcades," later in
department stores) whose effects we saw in "Les Projets." No
longer restricted to an aristocratic elite, conspicuous consump-
tion in modernity is supposedly the right of everyone, although
it is in fact, of course, exercised only by those who can afford it
and conspicuously denied to the innumerable poor. Such
frustration afflicted Baudelaire with exceptional severity: after two
years of luxury and leisure afforded by his inheritance, the
imposition of the conseil judiciaire throws him into dire poverty
for the rest of his life; deprived of fine clothes, of the leisure to
enjoy life and cultivate his sensibilities, of time free of financial
pressure to write, finally of desperately needed medical care,
Baudelaire dies at forty-six with roughly half of his inheritance
still untouched. But Baudelaire's is the special case that proves
the rule: consumer frustration becomes widespread in this " era
of high capitalism" in France. Extreme differences between
wealth and poverty may be common to many social orders, but
in a democratic culture (unlike blatant caste systems) the
unequal distribution of the pleasures of consumption becomes
all the more frustrating inasmuch as everyone is supposed to be
able to enjoy them, but in fact cannot. Capitalism and
advertising then push such frustration to the limit, by making
true satisfaction ultimately impossible: consumer society pro-
mises everyone everything, but can never allow anyone enough
satisfaction ... to stop consuming.
The major source of anxiety for Baudelaire is thus the
problem of money, the inexorable laws of the market stemming
from the career choice of poet in a commercial culture rapidly
abandoning patronage of church, nobles, and king. The status
of the lyric poet in an age of utilitarianism is perhaps an extreme
case, but it is nonetheless emblematic of the situation of many
young Frenchmen who swarm to Paris to complete their
education and make a name and a life for themselves in the
capital - only to discover that their numbers greatly exceed the
supply of career openings. The Napoleonic promise of "careers
open to talent" soon goes sour and becomes yet another source
of frustration during the mid-nineteenth century, inasmuch as
the comparatively broad-based educational system Napoleon I
instituted to foster such talent turns out many more educated
young Frenchmen than nascent French capitalism and the
narrowly based constitutional monarchy can offer positions
that would match their abilities and — especially — their expecta-
tions.11 More generally, the French Revolution at the end of the
eighteenth century had placed on the cultural agenda, in
Hegel's terms, the flowering of "free subjectivity" for all: the
development of individual faculties and abilities for their own
sake, without regard for class or station in life. In this light, the
realities of post-revolutionary France proved profoundly disap-
pointing.
The frustrations occasioned in mid-nineteenth-century
French youth by these particular historical circumstances and
expectations only aggravate and highlight the widespread
anxiety inherent in capitalism itself. Unlike feudal society, for
example, which forcibly attaches serfs to the land they live from,
the capitalist economy forcibly separates adults from the means
of life (means of production and means of consumption) and
subjects all material need to the defiles of the market. Separation
from the means of life is one component of the process of
"primitive accumulation," which in modern France sends
thousands of young people from the provinces to the capital in
search of gainful employment, a dazzling career, fame and
fortune. To their great frustration, the other component of
primitive accumulation — a supply of liquid wealth seeking
gainful investment in means of production — is not yet available
in an economy still dominated by conservative elements of the
landed aristocracy and the long-established monarchical or
imperial bourgeoisie. It is not until the influx of Australian and
Californian gold following 1849 and the founding of state-
sponsored investment banks by Napoleon III that an adequate
supply of liquid capital will become available and the French
economy experience its capitalist "take-off" during the Second
Empire. But in the preceding decades, with the number of
French immigrants to Paris far exceeding the career oppor-
tunities available to them, a certain not-quite institutionalized
but nonetheless recognized social space emerges - a kind of
holding cell for the (more or less involuntarily) extended
adolescence falling between the comforts of family life left
behind and the (eventual) security of" real life," a steady job or
career to come. This space is inhabited by students, prostitutes,
petty thieves, carnival performers, scavengers, street musicians,
beggars, would-be writers and artists — by the innumerable
under- and unemployed of a nascent market economy. The
French christened it "Bohemia"; Baudelaire would spend his
entire life, and die, there.
BOHEMIA AT THE HEART OF BOURGEOIS SOCIETY
Bohemia must therefore be understood not simply in opposition

to but as a product and reflection of bourgeois society.12 Its
denizens have left the families in which they grew up, but have
not found or have refused a proper position in the socio-
symbolic order of market society - they have not adopted some
state- or market-defined function in the new political economy.
The reasons for occupying Bohemia are various: they range
from mere whim to bare necessity, and include most imaginable
compromises and compensations in between. For some, the
sojourn in Bohemia was strictly voluntary: temporary Bo-
hemians were merely passing through to sow wild oats on the
way to successful careers in business or government. At the
opposite extreme, internal exile in Bohemia was strictly in-
voluntary and often fatal: these were the chronically under-
employed and impoverished, the direct casualties of market
society. Still others took up residence in Bohemia as an act of
defiance against the moral bankruptcy of a crass, utilitarian
society, refusing to sacrifice personal integrity to the demeaning
constraints of the job market.
In part because of the diversity of its residents, Bohemian
attitudes cannot be construed simply as wholesale opposition to
bourgeois values. For some, typically those from upper-
bourgeois families who are only temporarily slumming in
Bohemia, a Bohemian life of free-wheeling self-indulgence
represents a protest against the petty strictures and scrimpy
materialism of bourgeois life. Yet for others, typically those from
a petty-bourgeois milieu (and who thus cannot afford a life of
self-indulgence), Bohemia is a refuge from the distracting
frivolity and opulence of Paris, a place to concentrate on
making an earnest living free from temptation. Far from
comprising a coherent "ideology" or prise de position in oppo-
sition to bourgeois society, Bohemian attitudes are profoundly
ambivalent, and in fact reflect conflicts inherent in bourgeois
life itself. As Jerrold Seigel puts it, Bohemia is "less a genuine
departure from the ground of bourgeois experience than an
accentuation of certain of its features; the tension between work
and indulgence, travail and jouissance, [is just as much a] part of
bourgeois life" as of Bohemia (p. 123). In its very incoherence,
then, Bohemia mirrors and illuminates the quandaries of
bourgeois existence taken to extremes.
Even if for a wide variety of very different reasons — ranging
from bitter resentment to playful insouciance, from hopeless
dejection to haughty disdain - Bohemia became a privileged
locus of decoding directed at various aspects of the prevailing
socio-symbolic order. In word and deed, Bohemia actively
challenged the norms of bourgeois culture, testing its limits and
experimenting with what it proscribed. Such decoding appears
in the typically Bohemian gestures that flout social convention
with outrageous pranks and styles of dress. Nerval would take
long strolls with a pet lobster on a leash; the painter Pelletier
walked his pet jackal; Gautier stunned the audience at the
premiere of Hernani with his red waistcoat; secret societies
allegedly ate wild boar or assiduously practiced whole reper-
toires of obscene songs: whatever behavior might disturb the
bourgeois peace Bohemians would gladly try; for some, the aim
of Bohemianism was simply to epater le bourgeois.
Yet much Bohemian decoding aimed at more central
bourgeois values than mere propriety. One target was romantic
notions of emotional purity and love: rather than serving as a
general antidote to combat the corrosive egotism of market
society, romantic love had come to serve instead as mere
compensation in the bourgeois domestic sphere for the un-
bridled competition increasingly predominant in the capitalist
marketplace. In this regard, Baudelaire's attitudes were typical
of Bohemia, if rather extreme: rather than a "haven in a
heartless world," he considered bourgeois marriage to be a
"disinfectant" invented in the last resort by the Church to
diminish the dangers of real love, which was an unmitigated
evil: for him, love resembled "torture or a surgical operation,"
and its " sole and greatest pleasure [lay] in the certainty of doing
wrong (la volupte unique et supreme de l'amour git dans la
certitude de faire le ma/)." 13 One alternative to love and
marriage familiar to Baudelaire was prostitution, which was
commonplace in Bohemia not simply because grisettes, femmes
entretenues, and insoumises comprised a considerable proportion of
the Bohemian population (and indeed the majority of the
female population), but also because Bohemia held such a dim
view of bourgeois marriage and the bourgeois household.
A second target of Bohemian decoding is work, or at least
work of the kind typically required (though offered in insuf-
ficient supply) by the new bourgeois regime. One among many,
Baudelaire decries the reign of "the god of Utility" ("J'aime le
souvenir des epoques nues" [v] 1. 23), reflects on "what is so
vile about any job whatsoever (ce qu'il y a de vil dans une
fonction quelconque)" and baldly declares at one point that
"being someone useful has always seemed quite hideous to me
(etre un homme utile m'a paru toujours quelque chose de bien
hideux)." "Isn't work," he writes on another occasion, "the
salt that preserves mummified souls? (Le travail, n'est-ce pas le
sel qui conserve les ames momies?)". 14 The problem with
modern work is that the accelerating division of labor generates
meaningless jobs for narrow specialists: fulfilling a function in
the new socio-symbolic order means denying one's personality
and originality, in effect sacrificing the "free subjectivity"
supposedly promised to everyone as a result of the Revolution of
1789. Baudelaire writes:
Un fonctionnaire quelconque, un ministre, un directeur de theatre ou
de journal, peuvent etre quelquefois des etres estimables, mais ils ne
sont jamais divins. Ce sont des personnes sans personnalite, des etres
sans originalite, nes pour la fonction, c'est-a-dire pour la domesticite
publique.
II n'existe que trois etres respectables: le pretre, le guerrier, le poete.
Savoir, tuer et creer. Les autres hommes sont taillables et corveables,
faits pour l'ecurie c'est-a-dire pour exercer ce qu'on appelle des
professions.15
A given functionary, minister, theater producer, or newspaper
publisher might sometimes be a respectable person, but will never be
divine. They are people without personality, beings without orig-
inality, born for duty, that is to say for public service.
There are only three truly estimable beings: the priest, the warrior,
the poet. To know, to kill, and to create. All other men, so easily tamed
and indentured, are fit for the stables - that is, for what are called the
professions.
In direct contrast to the specialist functionary, Baudelaire
invokes the figure of the dandy:
Qu'est-ce que l'homme superieur? Ce n'est pas le specialiste...
Eternelle superiority du Dandy. Qu'est-ce que le Dandy?... C'est
1'homme de loisir et d'education generate. Etre riche et aimer le
travail.16
What is a superior man? It is not the specialist... Eternal superiority
of the Dandy. What is a Dandy? ... A Dandy does nothing... He is a
man of leisure and universal education. To be rich and like working.
The ideal dandy defies the law of the market, or of the job
market at least: he is emphatically not a specialist, but a man of
wealth and leisure: he does nothing; when he does work, it is
because he likes to, not because he must. Of course, the dandy
represents Baudelaire's ideal aspirations, not his real status; he
is therefore all the more acutely aware that only freedom from
constant market pressures to produce in order to make a living
would allow full development of the dandy's exquisite sensibili-
ties:
C'est par le loisir que j'ai, en partie, grandi. A mon grand detriment;
car le loisir, sans fortune, augmente les dettes, les avanies resultant des
dettes. Mais a mon grand profit, relativement a la sensibilite, a la
meditation, et a la faculte du dandysme... Les autres hommes de
lettres sont, pour la plupart, des vils piochers tres-ignorants.17
It is in part through leisure time that I have developed. To my great
detriment, insofar as leisure time without a fortune increases one's
debts and the humiliations arising from debts. But also to my great
advantage, in terms of sensitivity, reflection, and the capacity for
dandyism ... Other men of letters are lowly, know-nothing grinds, for
the most part.
The dandy of letters' leisurely cultivation of intellect confers
invidious distinction in the domain of high culture just as the
dandy of fashion's cultivation of personal appearance and
meticulous attention to style make him stand out as superior to
the crowd.
Having casually escaped the law of productivity entirely, the
dandy scrupulously masters the rules of conspicuous consump-
tion in commercial democratic culture - and plays to win. Here
too, of course, Baudelaire was actually so poor that it became
increasingly difficult and eventually simply impossible for him
to dress as fastidiously as true dandyism would have required.
Not just a figure appearing in times of transition, the Baude-
lairean dandy is in effect a creature of nascent capitalism, an
idealized figure of triumph over market society: someone who is
able to buy the best on the retail market without ever having to
stoop to selling himself on the job market.
Some of the implications of Baudelaire's aspirations to the
status of dandy emerge from comparing his relation to the
crowd with that of his arch-romantic predecessor, Victor Hugo.
As Benjamin has remarked, the modernist poet thrives in the
crowd without being part of it in the way Hugo saw himself, as
a citizen among citizens - and their leader and spokesman. In
his preface to Lucrezia Borgia, the dramatist sings the praises of
the Parisian crowd:
When one sees this enlightened populace which has turned Paris into
the key city of progress and which fills the theater every night, one
should realize that the theater is a tribune, the theater is a pulpit.18
What Benjamin does not mention is that Baudelaire, too, in his
period of revolutionary enthusiasm around 1848, thought the
poet should be a man of the crowd just as much as Hugo did: in
the essay on Pierre Dupont, Baudelaire declares that he
"prefer[s] the poet who remains in constant communication
with the people of his time, exchanging thoughts and feelings
with them." 19 But the figure of Poe, as we have seen, enables
Baudelaire to reverse and then efface his former enthusiasm:
"As for me, I am not a dupe; I have never been dupe!" 20 The
ideal of the dandy therefore includes the idea of " a vengeful
callousness" ("l'idee d'une insensibilite vengeresse") :21 the
peculiar turn of phrase reveals that the shocking imper-
turbability of the dandy is erected precisely as revenge for having
been himself shocked and dismayed in an earlier incarnation.
Having experienced "the daily shocks and conflicts of civili-
zation" (which Baudelaire considers far greater than "the
dangers of the forest and the plains"), the dandy enters the
crowd already on the defensive, as it were - ready to parry the
shocks or, even better (inasmuch as the best defense is a good
offense), to appear shocking himself: "Whether man befriends
his dupe on the street, or stabs his prey in some unknown forest,
isn't he eternal man, that is to say, the most perfect animal of
prey ? " 22 The dandy as former dupe becomes the perfect animal
of prey: we are here very far from the romanticism of Hugo, to
whom (as Benjamin puts it) "the crowd meant... the crowd of
clients — the masses of his readers and his voters" (p. 66). In a
single journal entry, Baudelaire writes: "What I think of voting
and the right to elections. Of the rights of man. / What is so vile
about any job whatsoever. A Dandy does nothing. / Can you
picture a Dandy addressing the people, except to scoff at them?
(Ce que je pense du vote et du droit d'elections. Des droits de
l'homme. / Ce qu'il y a de vil dans une fonction quelconque. /
Un Dandy ne fait rien. / Vous figurez-vous un Dandy parlant
au peuple, excepte pour le bafouer?) " 23 Unlike the demagogue,
the dandy enters the crowd armed with a nearly invincible sense
of superiority and ready to do battle with a glance at a
moment's notice. Such a stance represents one axis of Bau-
delaire's relation to the modern crowd.
But Baudelaire's real relation to the crowd is more com-
plicated than this, his feelings ambivalent. The modernist poet's
sense of disdain for the crowd is accompanied by considerable
resentment: he may feel absolutely superior to it, yet he also
knows he is absolutely dependent on it: it represents his public.
As much as he may aspire to the ideal market status of the
dandy, who can buy without selling, Baudelaire in actuality
occupies very nearly the opposite position: producing poetry for
a commercial culture, he must sell himself in order to buy.24 As
Benjamin puts it, Baudelaire faces the crowd in the position of
the commodity seeking customers (pp. 55-58). This is one
reason that he identifies himself and his art with ... prostitution:
"What is art? Prostitution." 25
MODERNITY AS PROSTITUTION
Like the crowd, the figure of prostitution has evolved signifi-

cantly since the early romanticism of Hugo. Already in Balzac
there appears a strikingly modern treatment of prostitution that
contrasts sharply with the romantic view stretching from
Rousseau through Hugo to Eugene Sue, and no doubt beyond.26
The romantics tell stories of the once degraded prostitute
miraculously transformed by the power of her true love for a
man morally and socially superior to her. As Charles Bern-
heimer concludes, "in the Romantic literary tradition... the
figure of the reformed prostitute is plotted to support a
conservative patriarchal ideology... The loving prostitute
exemplifies the renunciation of... female sexuality in submission
to paternal Law" (p. 52). Prostitution in Balzac is very different.
Even when he resorts to the romantic reformed-prostitute story
- as he does in Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes, written in direct
competition with Sue and Les Mysteres de Paris - Balzac sets that
sub-plot in a larger narrative context which changes its
ideological valence dramatically. Already in Illusions perdues (of
which Splendeurs is the sequel), prostitution serves as the general
model for all social relations in bourgeois society. By resituating
the romantic reformed-prostitute story in the larger context of
the Lucien-Vautrin narrative, Splendeurs demonstrates the
subversion of patriarchal ideology by the power of money even
more thoroughly than Le Pere Goriot, for Vautrin turns out to
represent not the law of the father, guarantor of moral order (as
in the romantic story-line), but the law of the market,
mechanism of perpetual exploitation.
Given Balzac's political views, the triumph of the market is
bemoaned as a debilitating attack on legitimate (viz. Legitimist)
social authority and on stable signification in general.27 The
logic of the Vautrin narrative nevertheless shows how the
market has decoded the socio-symbolic order in early modern
France, destabilizing even the hierarchies of law and order. At
the end of Splendeurs, the epitome of market corruption becomes
a mainstay of the modern state: Vautrin the arch-criminal
master-capitalist becomes chief of the Parisian secret police. " I
have no other ambition," Vautrin declares, "than to be an
instrument of order and repression, instead of being corruption
itself (Je n'ai pas d'autre ambition que d'etre un element
d'ordre et de repression, au lieu d'etre la corruption meme)." 28
In the decoding process of the market, the law of hierarchy and
the hierarchy of the law itself are thoroughly subverted. This is
a feature of market society Baudelaire came to understand very
well: reflecting Vautrin's fate in light of his own experience
after 1848, the poet will write: " I can understand why one
would desert one cause in order to know what it feels like to
serve another (Je comprends qu'on deserte une cause pour
savoir ce qu'on eprouve a en servir une autre)." 29
The very next line of the journal entry, however, is even more
indicative of full-fledged Baudelairean modernism, for whereas
Balzac closes his long narrative with a pessimistic forecast of
Vautrin's fifteen years of dedicated service to the modern,
liberal-democratic police state he so despised, Baudelaire
characteristically refuses the comforts of narrative resolution,
and instead leaves the opposition between prostitute and
mastermind, dupe and animal of prey, largely undecided: " I t
would perhaps be nice to alternate being victim and tormentor
(II serait peut-etre doux d'etre alternativement victime et
bourreau)." So side by side with aspirations to the status of
dandy in Baudelaire exists the recognition of the status of the
modern poet as prostitute. In Vautrin, Balzac had exposed the
mechanisms of the market at the heart of modern French
society; in the figures of the dandy and the prostitute, Baudelaire
explores the internal tensions of market-bound existence in the
heart of Bohemia.
The situation of Bohemia in the midst of the opulent
commercial culture of Paris brings to the fore sharp contrasts
between wealth and poverty. Scenes of confrontation between
rich and poor abound in the prose poem collection (e.g. "Le
Joujou du pauvre" [19]). None is more poignant than "Les
Yeux des pauvres" (26): faced with the hungry stares of a poor
family on the sidewalk outside while dining with his mistress in
a swank new cafe, the poet is touched by their avidity and feels
somewhat ashamed of the plentiful luxury he has been enjoying
on his side of the window. But when he turns back to his
mistress, expecting her to share his sympathy for the poor, he is
immediately disillusioned: she cannot stand the gawking faces
and wants the owner to shoo them away from the window. This
poem suggests for one thing, that in the urban milieu of a
(juridically) caste-free democratic society composed of (legal)
equals, conspicuous consumption and equally conspicuous
destitution daily confront each other face to face, separated only
by "chance" and a restaurant or retail display window. What
Baudelaire elsewhere refers to as the "reflection of the joy of the
rich in the eye of the poor (ce reflet de la joie du riche au fond
de l'oeil du pauvre)" ("Les Veuves" [13]) is a familiar and
telling experience in modern Paris.
But this poem also reveals that gender distinctions in
Baudelaire have been thoroughly decoded: the dandy's callous
indifference here belongs to the woman. Whereas in "Le
Mauvais Vitrier" the narrator identifies with the cruel dandy
figure, the narrator here identifies instead with the poor, and
finds the attitude of the dandy voiced by the woman absolutely
scandalous. While Baudelaire on another occasion directly
contrasts the cultivated artifice of the dandy with the abo-
minable naturalness of woman,30 he also claims the right of self-
contradiction (here playing the role of supremely self-conscious
borderline personality to the hilt), and elsewhere praises woman
precisely for her mastery of guile and artifice.31 It would thus be
a mistake to allocate "good" and " b a d " qualities such as
artifice and nature to the binary opposition of gender difference,
which like so many other oppositions has been effectively
decoded: the dizzying loss of fixed identity in self-prostitution is
for Baudelaire associated just as much with the experience of the
poet himself as with the figure of woman — if not more.32
The prose poems are not the only texts that register the
conflicts of rich and poor, buyer and seller, and the poet's
ambivalent identifications. The dream Butor analyzes so
thoroughly revolves around the fact that Baudelaire has finally
succeeded in publishing his first book (on Poe), which had
indeed appeared the day before. In his dream trip to the
brothel, the poet is thus able to buy a prostitute rather than be
one himself: having successfully sold a manuscript, he can now
become a buyer instead of a seller; his work has finally paid off.
In actuality, the book on Poe was not the turning point in his
writing career that Baudelaire may have hoped and did, in fact,
dream it would be: he remained destitute and had great
difficulty placing his writing in the Parisian press. From the
perspective of his actual market self-prostitution, the poet's
aspirations to the status of dandy are thus largely compensatory,
a form of imaginary revenge enacted by a consummate
consumer for the humiliation of having to sell himself as
producer on the open market.
Benjamin's remarks on the role of consumer taste in a market
setting are suggestive in this connection, even if they do not go
far enough. "Taste develops," Benjamin explains,
with the definite preponderance of commodity production over any

other kind of production. As a consequence of the manufacture of
products as commodities for the market, people become less and less
aware of the conditions of their production ... The consumer, who is
more or less expert when he gives an order to an artisan... is not
usually knowledgeable when he appears as a buyer [of commodities on
the open market] ... In the same measure as the expertness of a
customer declines, the importance of his taste increases - both for him
and for the manufacturer. For the consumer it has the value of a more
or less elaborate masking of his lack of expertness. Its value to the
manufacturer is [as] a fresh stimulus to consumption which in some
cases is satisfied at the expense of other requirements of consumption
the manufacturer would find more costly to meet. (Charles Baudelaire,
pp. 104-05)
For Benjamin, taste arises from the decoding of true " artisanal"
appreciation of the use-value of goods, which places consumers
of mere exchange-value at the mercy of cost-conscious business
interests. What this account overlooks is the importance of the
emotional investment that buying even pure exchange-values
represents for the Baudelairean dandy and the modern con-
sumer. For what the mass-produced commodity loses of real
quality through decoding is more than compensated for by the
invidious distinction and sense of self-worth conferred on buyers
through recoding, that is to say through the selection of a
certain constellation of commodities rather than innumerable
others for purchase on the open market, in accordance with and
indeed as the actual realization of their "personal" taste.
The aesthetics of the bourgeois interior during the Second
Empire confirms the importance of the domestic sphere as a
locus of compensatory recoding in market society.33 The
bourgeois household is stuffed to overflowing with every knick-
knack and gewgaw imaginable. It is no doubt this aesthetics of
compensation that Baudelaire has in mind when he describes
the ideal destination of the prose "Invitation au voyage" (18)
as a place where
tout est riche, propre et luisant, comme une belle conscience, comme
une magnifique batterie de cuisine, comme une splendide orfevrerie,
comme une bijouterie bariolee! Les tresors du monde y affluent,
comme dans la maison d'un homme laborieux qui a bien merite du
monde entier.
The mythical land of plenty is here compared to the splendors

of domestic consumption and tranquility, presented simply as
the well-deserved reward of the working man.
But compensatory personal recoding through consumption is
not limited to the household itself: avant-garde cafes and
nightclubs did a lucrative business during the Second Empire
and early Third Republic, catering to stolid bourgeois more
than to the impecunious Bohemians that staffed them. Indeed,
some of the poetry of Baudelaire himself was put to music
shortly after his death and sung to well-heeled lawyers and
accountants who flocked in their leisure time to Montmartre
seeking relief from the dreary boredom of their self-effacing jobs
in the thrills and pleasures of Bohemian nightlife. The dandy
and prostitute in Baudelaire's works thus appear in this broader
context as larger-than-life figures for modern consumers and
producers and their conflicted relations to the market. The fate
of the producer-prostitute is to sell, to sacrifice the self on the
specialized job market in the pursuit of mere exchange-value;
the vain hope of the consumer-dandy is to be able to buy enough
to avenge and compensate for that sacrifice, to establish a sense
of identity and self-worth.
In this way, the modernist poet of Bohemia dramatizes a
value-conflict between " b a d " production and "good" con-
sumption that is central to life in market society. The splitting of
good and bad self-images which object-relations psychoanalysis
projects onto family relations (in the form of inconsistent
mothering) is in fact a basic feature of the capitalist economy.
Production and consumption are torn asunder by the body of
capital and get conjoined only across ever greater distances by
the mechanisms of the market, as the continuing self-expansion
of capital aggravates the division and specialization of labor in
production, and imposes administered commodity-based iden-
tity-formation in consumerism. With these underpinnings in
tensions generated by the market, the disparities between public
and private life are exacerbated :34 the good realm of dom-
esticity, haven in a heartless world, becomes increasingly
distinct from the jungle of capitalist competition, and domestic
consumption becomes the compensation and reward in one
realm for the oppressive " productivism" of the other. Con-
sumers bent on redeeming their nine-to-five of toil or drudgery
take "Living well is the best revenge" as their slogan. Positive
though commodified leisure time and exploited work time exist
side by side, without any intrinsic relations between them,
separated by the gulf of the market which becomes increasingly
difficult to bridge.
The primitive splitting that results from failure of the mirror
stage to integrate disparate drive-derivatives is thus not
Oedipally resolved but further compounded upon entry into a
market-based socio-symbolic order riven by the tensions of
productivism and consumerism and so unable to provide
integral "positions" for its members. Devoid of the overarching
authority of a social "father figure" as the "constant revolution
of the means of production" tends in Marx's phrase to "strip
the halo" from all previous forms of social intercourse, market
society breeds individuals whose primitive and mostly unsubli-
mated ideal egos fuse an-Oedipally with the ego ideals provided
by advertising, as consumerism reinforces oral relationships to a
pre-Oedipal "mother figure": the retail market as provider of
goods but also source of endless frustration. Such are the social
determinations of the borderline personality, fostered not by

family conditions alone, but by the basic structure and dynamic
of market society under capitalism.
THE PROSE POEM NARRATOR AS BORDERLINE

NARCISSIST
As central to life under capitalism as the psychodynamics of self-
prostitution and conspicuous consumption are, it is important
for our purposes to recall that for most of his adult life,
Baudelaire himself was hard pressed to buy much of anything
on the retail market, since he did not command a very high
price on the market for poetry and criticism. Although the
splitting-off of a primitive super-ego and the borderline dis-
integration of the ego are crucial for understanding his works,
Baudelaire did not fuse his ex-masochist ideal ego with just any
ego ideal provided by modern commercial culture, but specifi-
cally with the figure of a writer whose " bitter fate " was to have
been himself martyred to such a culture because his writing was,
as Baudelaire insists (his emphasis), "too far above the intellectual
level of the average reader for him to be paid well {dans un style trop au-
dessus du niveau intellectuel commun pour qu'on put le payer cher)":
Edgar Allan Poe.35
Under the aegis of Poe as ego ideal, Baudelaire's clearly failed
social dandyism is reinscribed in writing itself, in the " ar-
istocracy of taste" of writers like Poe, Gautier, and Leconte de
Lisle who serve as models for the stance of the prose poem
narrator. The dandy of letters has withdrawn completely from
the arena of social conflict, which he now observes with haughty
disdain, and enjoys the solitude that true superiority both
requires and confers. In the essay on Theophile Gautier,
Baudelaire writes:
L'aristocratie nous isole.
J'avouerai franchement que je ne suis pas de ceux qui voient la un
mal bien regrettable, et que j'ai peut-etre pousse trop loin la mauvaise
humeur contre de pauvres philistins. Recriminer, faire de l'opposition,
et meme reclamer la justice, n'est-ce pas s'emphilistiner quelque peu?
On oublie a chaque instant qu'injurier une foule, c'est s'encanailler
soi-meme. Places tres-haut, toute fatalite nous apparait comme justice.
Saluons done, au contraire, avec tout le respect et 1'enthousiasme
qu'elle merite, cette aristocratie qui fait solitude autour d'elle.36
Being aristocratic isolates us.
I frankly admit that I am not one of those who consider that a truly
deplorable evil, and that I may have taken my ill will against
unfortunate philistines too far. Doesn't recriminating, making appeals,
even demanding justice entail becoming a bit of & philistine oneself? It
is easy to forget that insulting a crowd means lowering oneself to their
level. From our lofty position, any fate appears just. Therefore let us
rather praise, with all the respect and enthusiasm it deserves, our
aristocracy for surrounding itself with solitude.
The elect accept their inevitable suffering at the hands of the

philistine public as a perverse form of justice: the conditions of
modernity are such that modernism must elaborate itself in
irremediable opposition to it, and yet transfigure that oppo-
sition, in order to salvage self-respect, into a pure and supreme
indifference.
In engaging in social struggle by seeking always to dem-
onstrate his superiority to the philistine crowd, the dandy is
instead contaminated by it, and the prose narrator thus
withdraws his investment. But neither can the narrator be
identified with the figure of the prostitute, at the other extreme
of market existence: in discussing the "invincible taste for
prostitution (gout invincible de la prostitution) " in the common
man who "seeks oblivion for his self in the flesh of another (le
besoin d'oublier son moi dans la chair exterieure) " and therefore
"wants to be double (veut etre deux)," Baudelaire distinguishes
the "man of genius, [who] wants to remain singular (Phomme de
genie veut etre uri)." "Glory," he concludes, "consists in
remaining singular, and prostituting oneself in a certain way.
(La gloire, c'est rester un, et se prostituer d'une maniere
particuliere.) " 37 The special kind of prostitution peculiar to the
man of genius is related to but not identical with the self-
prostitution we have already examined, in which the poet sells
himself on the open market. It is an openness to decoded
experience - pursued by means of exotic sex, hallucinogenic
drugs, self-conscious evil, or what have you — as a way of

procuring marketable poetic experience in the first place, in a
context where capitalist "rationalization" and prosaic bour-
geois culture have not only sterilized lived existence for lyric
poetry (as Benjamin argues), but also deprived most people's
experience of any real interest or excitement whatsoever. The
registration and transmission of decoding is, as we have seen, the
crux of much of Baudelaire's best verse poetry, from the part-
object intensification of beauty and spleen through the "Tab-
leaux Parisiens " to the endless voyage (" Le Voyage ") added as
the concluding poem to the second edition of the collection. By
prostituting himself in this special way, the artist is, as Bersani
suggests, in effect "'sacrificing' himself-or more exactly,
sacrificing a certain wholeness or integrity for the sake of those
pleasurable shocks which accompany the release of desiring
energies by scenes from external life" (p. 11). It is precisely in
subjecting himself irrevocably to the shocks of decoded ex-
perience that Baudelaire hones his poetic sensibilities and
develops a virulent modernism so well suited to compensate in
his writing for the meaningless banality of bourgeois existence.
But ultimately, the sacrifice proves too much, the disil-
lusionment too bitter, the personal cost too high even for
Baudelaire. The pursuit of decoded experience in which, as he
says in "Le confiteor de l'artiste" (3), "all things think through
me or I think by them (... in the grandeur of such revery, the
self is soon lost!) (toutes ces choses pensent par moi, ou je pense
par elles [car dans la grandeur de la reverie, le moi se perd
vite!]) " has in effect dissolved the self too much:
Toutefois, ces pensees, qu'elles viennent de moi ou s'elancent des

choses, deviennent bientot trop intenses. L'energie dans la volupte
cree un malaise et une souffrance positive. Mes nerfs tendus ne
donnent plus que des vibrations criardes et douleureuses ... L'etude du
beau est un duel ou l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'etre vaincu.
The decoding characteristic of the embattled borderline ideal-

ego survives the transition from verse to prose, but only in
figures of alienated partial selves now observed from a safe
distance; recoding has supervened, with the figure of Poe as ego
ideal sanctioning both the martyrdom of the ideal ego and the
ironic stance of the narcissistic prose narrator. In recoil from
both the miserable prostitute and the unsuccessful dandy,
Baudelairean modernism continues to develop, with the prose
narrator perpetually moving away from its former split positions
and partial selves.38
THE PROSE POEM NARRATOR AS PROGRAMMER
In withdrawing investment from the market antinomies of

buying and selling figured in the dandy and prostitute, the
modernist poet in Baudelaire comes to occupy the position
Jacques Attali calls the "programmer." 39 In his social and
economic history of music, Attali identifies a stage at which
technical developments in the means of reproduction enable
sound recordings to be mass-produced. In this regime of
"repetition," music is manufactured as a commodity for the
market, requiring the creation and management of personal
taste to give some sense of distinction to otherwise indis-
tinguishable, mass-produced goods as a "stimulus to con-
sumption" (in Benjamin's phrase, p. 105). In addition to the
inferior quality of mass-produced goods (against which Baude-
laire had railed a century before in "L'Ideal" (xvm), the poem
immediately following "La Beaute" in the verse collection),
capitalism's perennial crises of overproduction make the pro-
grammer's continual recoding of taste to stimulate commodity
consumption absolutely central to the on-going process of
capital accumulation and expansion.
Commodities themselves are always of secondary importance
to the capitalist, for he only "realizes" profit when he converts
them back into liquid capital (cash) by selling them on the retail
market. The market transaction epitomizing capital is not
C—M—C, as it is for workers/consumers who sell their labor-
power as a commodity in exchange for a money-wage in order
to buy back as means of life the commodities they have
produced; capital's market transaction is M - C - M ' : money is
invested in the production of commodities only so that they may
be sold at a profit (M J ). In this context, the function of the
programmer is to endow commodities with semiotic surplus-
value in the eyes of consumers so as to promote their purchase
on the retail market and thereby assure the realization of
economic surplus-value in the coffers of capitalists.40 With the
invention of means of recording music, according to Attali, the
song-writer or pop star serves this function by endowing
otherwise indistinguishable formula-music with the specious
and temporary distinction of being a "hit." But endowing
worthless commodities with specious semiotic value to promote
consumption is, of course, the prime function of advertising,
which represents market recoding in its most blatant form.
At the very emergence of modern market culture, Baudelaire
recognized the importance of programming — and soon realized
the extent to which the project of beautification in "Spleen and
Ideal" operated according to the same dynamic: the figure of
Beauty as "programmer" fixes the unintegrated drive-deriva-
tives of the consumer's ideal ego on part-object commodities
simply by affirming the former in the intensifying reflection of
the latter; as ego ideal, Beauty fascinates with pure-mirror eyes
that " make all things more beautiful." Nowhere is Baudelaire's
awareness of the complicity between programming and poetry
clearer than in "Le Gateau" (15), the largely neglected
pendant to the oft-commented " Assommons les pauvres." The
latter ends, as we saw, with the former beggar setting out with
half the narrator's purse, having promised to repeat the beating
and the lesson about equality he has just received on any
beggars he may encounter, who will in turn take an equal share
of the purse and repeat the process with the beggars they
encounter, and so on until mendicancy disappears and all men
are equal. The problem is, of course, that the money will run out
long before the beatings do. This is precisely the lesson of "Le
Gateau": two almost-twin brothers fight so long and hard over
a piece of bread charitably offered by the narrator, that it ends
up in crumbs on the ground:
ils s'arreterent par impossibility de continuer [puisque] il n'y avait
plus, a vrai dire, aucun sujet de bataille; le morceau de pain avait
disparu, et il etait eparpille en miettes semblables aux grains de sable
auxquels il etait mele.
The narrator ends up bemoaning the "perfectly fratricidal
war" occasioned by rivalry between equals over a mere piece of
bread. Much could be said about this poem as an allegory of
market capitalism, with the nearly identical twin creatures
figuring as mock-proletarians reduced to fighting between
themselves for the meager offerings doled out by the charitable
bourgeois narrator. But equally important are the poetics at
play in the poem and the frame in which the anecdotal battle
over the piece of bread is set.
In the poem's title, the piece of bread in question is called
" the cake." Yet the narrator cannot help laughing when he first
hears this term applied to his plain bread by the creatures he
encounters on a trip to the country, and he reflects ruefully at
the end on what he has seen in a place where "bread is so scarce
that it is called cake and is enough to cause a perfectly fratricidal
war (oil le pain s'appelle gateau, friandise si rare qu'elle sufHt
pour engendrer une guerre parfaitement fratricide)." It is
scarcity, in a word, that generates the inflationary figure of
speech that substitutes "cake" for bread. This figure of speech
involves substituting for bread a term that functions as its
equivalent while at the same time exaggerating its value; that is
to say, it is comprised of metaphor plus hyperbole —precisely the
rhetorical formula for surplus value}1
The use of the term "cake" as metaphor-plus-hyperbole in a
situation of scarcity is not the only instance of inflationary
discourse in the poem, however. The narrator at the beginning
of the poem, on a visit to a region of " irresistible grandeur and
nobility," indulges in numerous flights of hyperbole ("Mes
pensees voltigeaient avec une legerete egale a celle de Patmos-
p h e r e . . . " ) , inflating his experience of a countryside that
appears spectacular only because it is unfamiliar (rare) to him as
a tourist. Under the influence of the romantic scenery - and in
direct reference to one of the issues raised by "Assommons les
pauvres" - the narrator even muses that the daily papers might
be right in claiming that man was innately good. These
idealizing flights of fancy are cut short, however, in a charac-
teristically abrupt reversal, when fatigue and hunger bring the
narrator back down to earth: he abandons the exalted language
of simile and hyperbole, and reaches for his piece of bread and
a flask containing " a special elixir sold to tourists by pharmacists
in those days to be mixed when available with snow-water (un
certain elixir que les pharmaciens vendaient dans ce temps-la
aux touristes pour le meler dans l'occasion avec de l'eau-de-
neige)" - as if mixing it with "regular" water instead would
make any difference! Melted snow is clearly equivalent to
water, yet is presented by hyperbole as something superior: the
local residents, in contrast with the idealizing poet, are
thoroughly familiar with the countryside and all the more
perfectly familiar with its impact on unsuspecting tourists, to
whom they peddle their "special elixir." Here the generation of
semiotic surplus value in a situation of false or at least selective
scarcity functions blatantly as a "stimulus to consumption" in
the service of economic gain.
It is at this point in the account, as the narrator is cutting his
bread, that the first creature appears: " a tattered little thing,
dark and dishevelled, whose sunken eyes ... were devouring the
piece of bread (un petit etre deguenille, noir, ebouriffe, dont les
yeux creux... devoraient le morceau de pain)." Immediately
following the narrator's metaphor equating hungry eyes with
the process of ingestion they envision, the creature responds
with his own metaphor equating the bread with cake. Having
succumbed once to the metaphor-plus-hyperbole appeal of the
snow-water elixir, the narrator succumbs again, to the appeal
for "bread-become-cake." No sooner does he share his bread,
however, than another creature appears "so perfectly resem-
bling the first as to be taken for its twin brother (si parfaitement
semblable au premier qu'on aurait pu le prendre pour son frere
jumeau)," and the fight is on. As the battle heats up, so does the
narrator's diction: the first creature becomes a "legitimate
owner (proprietaire legitime)", the other a "usurper," the
plain piece of bread becomes "precious prey (la precieuse
proie) " - until finally the narrator himself ends up calling it "le
gateau." Under conditions of scarcity and fratricidal rivalry,
poetic inflation and the appeal of semiotic surplus-value seem
universally irresistible.
In his moments of reflection, of course, the narrator remains
perfectly well aware of the difference between bread and
"cake," and of the role that scarcity plays in motivating the
substitution of one for the other, as well; it is the narrator, after
all, who announces in conclusion that scarcity leads to poetic
inflation and fratricidal war. What the narrator does not
announce - that the poetics of idealizing romantic exaltation so
closely resemble that of advertising hype and puffery - remains
outside the scope of his awareness, and never appears at the
communicative level of the poem at all. Yet it is in this light that
the textual function of the poem's title is so telling: Baudelaire
chose the title "Le Gateau" rather than "Le Pain" (or "La
Fraternite"). Considered along with the careful modulations
from poetic to prosaic language and back again, the allusion to
hyperbole as sales gimmick, the role of the nearly identical twins
themselves, that choice of title suggests that the poem is finally
not about the piece of bread at all, but about the use and abuse
of metaphorical equivalence, about the use of the term "cake"
as a poetic instance or index of surplus-value: in colloquial
French, the term in fact means "profit" - as in "to split the
profits" {partager le gateau), which is precisely what the creatures
refuse to do, and so end up with nothing.
If the title and poetics of "Le Gateau" are an indication, the
prose poem collection explores (among other things) the role of
poet as programmer, the function of poetics in the process of
endowing everyday, unusual, or even imaginary things and
experiences with marketable semiotic surplus-value. Something
similar might be said of the project of beautification in Les Fleurs
du Mai, but there the focus on marketing is absent, or at least
very difficult to discern. The dedication of the Petits Poemes en
prose, by contrast, makes such a focus clear: Baudelaire has a
specific audience of customers in view, and a specific marketing
strategy to address them. It was Benjamin who first imagined
that already in Les Fleurs, Baudelaire may have "envisaged
readers to whom the reading of lyric poetry would present
difficulties ... Will power and the ability to concentrate are not
their strong points... " (p. 109); the collection of lyric poetry
was thus " a book which from the beginning had little prospect
of becoming an immediate popular success" (p. 109). The
nature of the prose collection would change all that: made up of

totally discrete items in no particular order, without beginning
or end, this book would be an easy one for all concerned; to the
prospective publisher (Arsene Houssaye, editor of La Presse),
Baudelaire writes:
Considerez, je vous prie, quelles admirables commodites cette com-
binaison nous offre a tous, a vous et a moi et au lecteur. Nous pouvons
couper ou nous voulons, moi ma reverie, vous le manuscrit, le lecteur
sa lecture; car je ne suspends pas la volonte retive de celui-ci au fil
interminable d'une intrigue superflue. Enlevez une vertebre, et les
deux morceaux de cette tortueuse fantaisie se rejoindront sans peine.
Hachez-la en nombreux fragments, et vous verrez que chacun peut
exister a part.42
Please consider the distinct advantages this plan offers everyone -
you, me, the reader. We can stop wherever we please: me, my revery;
you, the manuscript; the reader, his reading; for I am not one to tax
recalcitrant readers' will-power by stringing them along with a
superfluous plot. Remove a vertebra, and the two ends of this
meandering fantasy will reconnect without difficulty. Chop it into
many pieces, and you will see that each one can exist on its own.
The idea is to create a genre so easy of access that even the
recalcitrant of will can appreciate it; as Baudelaire writes in his
journal, "Creating a cliche, now that's genius. I must create a
cliche (Creer un poncif, c'est le genie. / Je dois creer un
poncif)." 43 The prose collection thus differs from the verse
collection not just in its refusal to narrate "the spiritual history
of modern youth," as we have already suggested, but also in its
explicit appeal to a public of customers with as little patience for
the intricacies of lyric poetry as staying-power for the long,
drawn-out plots of the serialized novel - a public therefore
likely to appreciate the immediate gratifications of a random
assortment of purposely short prose poems, petits poemes en prose.
The Petits Poemes en prose thus register the antinomies of market

existence, mapping the contours of bourgeois subjectivity,
delineating the modern "structure of experience" (to recall
Benjamin's phrase) under capitalism: the conflicted dynamics
of self-prostitution in specialized production and self-cultivation
in conspicuous consumption, which constitute the social and
historical determinations of borderline narcissism. As the
quintessential Bohemian, Baudelaire lived this structure of
conflict at its most intense, projecting its extremes onto the
figures of the dandy and the prostitute. Yet the discovery of Poe
as ego ideal enables Baudelaire to develop a medium of
registration for these projections in which narrative perspective
keeps them at a distance, always keeping both figures in play,
but preventing definitive identification with either one of them.
The poetic trajectory launched in Les Fleurs du Mai thus
continues in Les Petits Poemes en prose in the stance of a narrator
perpetually moving away from identification with the partial
figures of himself under observation. The historic trajectory
through Second-Empire French culture and society, mean-
while, catapults Baudelaire beyond the buyer-seller dialectic
into the role of programmer, whose market function is to bestow
value, both semiotic and economic. No longer sacrificing to
develop poetic sensibilities nor hoping to gain distinction
through public display, in the prose poem genre Baudelaire
writes to encapsulate poetically and valorize semiotically the
crux of modern market existence itself.
CHAPTER 8
Conclusion
Schizoanalysis insists against the grain of orthodox psycho-

analysis on the role of actual social factors in shaping psychic
life. Taking the Freudian notion of "deferred action" elabo-
rated by Lacan to its radical conclusion, Deleuze and Guattari
assert that actual engagement with social life shapes the psyche
by determining which early memory-traces are endowed " after
the fact" with psychic effectivity and "meaning" for the adult.
In the case of Baudelaire, it is not overly severe fathering but the
authoritarian regime of Napoleon III that invalidates the
super-ego; not memories of an indulgent Frangois-Joseph
Baudelaire but discovery of the martyrdom of Edgar Allan Poe
that furnishes an ego-ideal role model for Baudelaire the writer;
not inconsistent mothering but the quandaries of the impover-
ished urban poet in nascent consumer society that induce
psychic splitting and generate the key figures of prostitute and
dandy appearing in the mature poetry. At its worst, psycho-
analysis completely excludes social determinations from con-
sideration; at best, it projects those determinations onto "family
romance" and thereby obscures their historical origins and
political implications. For schizoanalysis, desire is not formed
once and for all "inside" the nuclear family and then sent forth
to negotiate the "outside" world as best it can: desire knows no
"inside" or "outside"; it invests the entire social formation
(including, of course, local family structures); it is continually
formed, deformed, and reformed in and through contact with
the social milieu.1
To insist that social determinations such as the take-off of
French capitalism and the demise of the Second Republic are
258
Conclusion 259
the decisive factors shaping Baudelaire's psychic life does not
mean, however, that his specific family circumstances are
completely irrelevant. On the contrary, the schizoanalytic view
of psychic determination enables us to conclude in retrospect
that it is precisely Baudelaire's "personal" experience as a child
and young man that makes his poetry a prime "registering
apparatus" for effects of market decoding. From this per-
spective, only someone whose doting mother had remarried an
ambitious military officer could register as intensely as Baude-
laire the fall of the Second Republic to the authoritarian
Napoleon I I I ; only someone who had lived a care-free life of
leisure and luxury but was then subjected by his stepfather to
financial tutelage and forced to eke out a meager existence
peddling his work to profiteers and philistines could register as
intensely as Baudelaire the antinomies of buying and selling in
market society ...
The importance of the concept of " registering " for cultural
and literary studies is that it entails a metonymic rather than a
metaphoric relation between text and context, between a
medium or apparatus of registration and historical develop-
ments.2 Unlike notions of expression, reflection, and represen-
tation, which presuppose metaphoric relations of fundamental
similarity, homology, harmony, or "fit" between text and
context, the concept of registration construes the relation
between text and context as a function: the actively receptive
operation of an instrument through which the effects of social
processes are detectable and analyzable.
An apt illustration of the process of registration is provided by
the seismograph, an instrument that translates processes oper-
ating over considerable distances and whose impact is complex
and widespread into squiggles on a piece of paper—just as
Baudelaire's writing does. Those squiggles are not "like"
continental drift: they register its effects. More precisely, they
register certain of its effects: the death and destruction, fires and
tidal waves often resulting from earthquakes do not appear on
the recording page at all - whereas the squiggles that do appear
there contribute more to precise knowledge about plate
tectonics than the more dramatic effects do. Only when the
specificity of the means of registration - its specific functioning -

is taken into account can the apparatus be understood to
illuminate the process whose effects it registers. And just as
crucial as its functioning is the instrument's location with respect
to the process and events being registered and to other
apparatuses of registration, as well. The squiggles registered on
any given seismograph become significant for the study of
continental drift only in the context of a temporally and
spatially dispersed matrix of registrations occurring at other
times on the same instrument, at the same time on other
instruments, and at other times on other instruments.
In the case of Baudelaire, poetry may be the privileged
apparatus of registration, but it is not the only one: as we have
seen, genres such as art criticism and the tableau de Paris are
important modes of registration, as are notebook entries,
political action, letters, even projected book titles. All of them
taken together comprise the cultural event named Baudelaire.
Some are more enduring and amenable to analysis than others:
the poetry compared to the political action, for example. But all
(available) media of registration need to be taken into account,
yet without collapsing one into another. The poetry thus does
not represent Baudelaire's trajectory through mid nineteenth-
century France: it is part of it, one medium of registration
among others. The series of poetic Others registered in the
poetry does not reflect the series of historical Others registered
in the letters and book titles: they are two different series in
different media that bear a relation of (contingent, metonymic)
contiguity, not (necessary, metaphoric) identity or resemblance
to one another — as crucial as the relations between them may
be for explaining the emergence of modernism in Baudelaire. As
an object of cultural study, "Baudelaire" is ultimately nothing
but the ensemble or aggregate (not to say "sum") of regis-
trations available in any and all media.
Just as important as the different functions of diverse modes
of registration are within the corpus "Baudelaire" is his location
in the social formation and in relation to other apparatuses of
registration - the works of Flaubert and Balzac, for example.
Our analysis located Baudelaire in the heart of Bohemia at mid-
Conclusion 261
century, at the cataclysmic moment of 1848-51. He thus
registers the same process of generalized prostitution that Balzac
had detected at an earlier moment of its development, except
that Baudelaire registers the process as a modernist rather than
a Legitimist-realist like Balzac, and therefore valorizes pros-
titution aesthetically instead of condemning it ethically and
politically.3 What has intervened between Balzac and Baude-
laire is the continental divide of the nineteenth century
separating early-modern from modern France: the Revolution
of 1848 and the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Unlike Balzac,
Baudelaire and Flaubert are situated historically on the same
side of this divide. Yet the effects of the cataclysm itself register
far more intensely in Baudelaire than in Flaubert. For one
thing, Baudelaire's point of departure is the epitome of
"personal expression," lyric poetry, whereas Flaubert writes
novels which he tries to make as "impersonal" as possible. Even
more important than genre for differentiating Baudelaire from
Flaubert, however, is location: early in his career, Flaubert
withdrew from the bourgeois society he despised to take refuge
at Choiseul; Baudelaire, by contrast, remained in the thick of it,
living the antinomies of bourgeois society at peak intensity in
Bohemia, and was himself swept up in the Revolution of 1848
and resistance to Napoleon III. 4 Difference of milieu thus also
contributes to the varying forms and intensity of registration of
the cataclysm itself even among strictly contemporary modern-
ists.
In addition to determinate (generic) function and specific
(socio-geographic) location, chance plays an important role in
the metonymic registration of historical process. Under a
decoded socio-symbolic order, various social (and linguistic)
practices no longer fall under the governance of a single master-
code, but comprise a heterogeneous ensemble of multiple
structures and practices increasingly disparate from one an-
other.5 Experience in one sphere no longer corresponds with
experience in another: not only is the "private" sphere
increasingly distinct from the "public sphere," but family life
becomes incompatible with student life, student life with
professional life, artistic endeavor with commercial journalism,
and so forth. Under conditions such as these, an individual's

diverse experiences and practices never "add u p " to compose a
coherent whole; they may even cancel one another out. But if by
chance experiences in diverse spheres do happen to align or
"resonate" with one another instead, that individual may
become a registering apparatus for social processes at large:
such is the case with Baudelaire. The relation between the
"return-of-the-father" (General Aupick) and the "return-of-
the-despot" (Napoleon III) is not an abstract homology, but a
real connection between distinct domains made under contingent
circumstances by the singular figure of Charles Baudelaire. It is
because of this "world-historical" coincidence that Baudelaire's
modernism registers the emergence of market society in France
so vividly.
As a medium of registration, Baudelaire's writing neither
reflects nor represents the historical process of market decoding;
like a seismograph, with determinate specifications of its own, it
registers effects. Unlike any merely mechanical device, however,
writing constitutes a response to that process at the same time:
the effects of decoding register only and always in response to
decoding. Thus the dispute that has vexed some psychoanalytic
criticism over the degree to which text features are to be
attributed to writers' conscious intentions or to unconscious
compulsions is for schizoanalysis totally irrelevant, or at best
simply "undecidable." In this light, whether Baudelaire was
"himself" psychotic or merely an acute observer of psychosis in
others (or in himself) is beside the point. What matters is the
registration of historical process, and questions as to the degree
of consciousness or unconsciousness of an author simply do not
arise. History provokes response in writing; writing registers
effects of history: they are recto and verso of the same process of
registration. History is thus always related metonymically to a
text in two different ways: both as its context (producing effects)
and as its referent (produced in response), rather than just one
or the other. In this respect, the metonymical concept of
registration in schizoanalysis follows directly from the meto-
nymical poetics of reference in Baudelaire's poetry itself.
Similarly, poetry not only registers effects 0/history, it in turn
Conclusion 263
produces effects on history, as well. The figure of the prose poem
narrator in Baudelaire programs people to take up distinctive
stances toward the basic roles (buying and selling) assigned by
the market under authoritarian-consumer society, while at the
same time practicing the generation of semiotic surplus-value so
crucial to the perpetuation of the capitalist economy itself, in
what Attali calls the regime of repetition. Baudelaire's poetry
registers the impact of widespread market decoding in the
context of modern France; modern society in turn registers the
impact of Baudelaire's poetry by canonizing it as the epitome of
modernism. Rather than one entity expressing or causing
another, one set or series of differences (the evolution of
Baudelaire's poetry) registers effects of another process or series
of differences (the evolution of French capitalism, or the process
of "modernization"), which registers effects of the first set, in
turn.
Despite the recourse, made for expository purposes, to
treating the three levels or spheres of decoding separately in the
course of this study, it should be clear that distinctions among
"the social," "the psychological," and "the textual" are
analytic and heuristic only. The question of how to "get from"
one "level" of decoding to another, of how to "relate" the
social to the personal, the personal to the textual, and so on - is
a false problem: it is in fact the same process of decoding, only
appearing in different registers. The decoding characteristic of
the capitalist economy does not exist except as registered in the
experience and practices of a Baudelaire (and countless others);
the decoding characteristic of modern personality is not legible
except in traces left in writing (and other media) by a Baudelaire
(and by others); and so on. From this perspective, "society"
does not exist as a stable entity; nor does "the market" exist as
a single agency: the impact of "the market" on "society" can
be known only through effects. Baudelaire's poetry thus does
not "reflect" or "express" the penetration and transformation
of French society by the capitalist market as something
happening "out there" which is then somehow represented
" i n " the poetry. It would be more accurate to say that, in its
own way and sphere of influence, Baudelaire's poetry is (part of)
the process of market penetration of French society; or, better
still, that this process exists only in and through the effects
registered in an apparatus (with determinate specifications)
such as Baudelaire's poetry and innumerable others like it (but
with their own determinate specifications).
There is, finally, another sense in which Baudelairean
modernism must be considered part of (even dependent on) the
mid nineteenth-century French milieu, yet without strictly
speaking being "representative" of it. As we have seen,
Baudelaire lived the buying and selling that are the heart of
market society in an extreme form associated with Bohemia; in
the poetry, the basic market positions register in the figures of
the dandy and the prostitute. From a strictly sociological
perspective, Baudelaire's life is clearly not representative of the
"norms" of French society, any more than the characters in his
poetry are representative of "normal" bourgeois life. Yet from
another perspective, Baudelaire and his poetry are "represen-
tative" of his milieu-in much the same way a caricature
"represents" the face or personality it mocks. Caricature, of
course, depends on a certain likeness, but that likeness is
distorted according to a particular specification or function,
which exaggerates so as to make the figure look funny.
In an analogous way, the statistical norms of existence in
market society - the pervasive necessity of buying and selling
oneself- are first of all intensified by the peculiarities of
Baudelaire's life-experience, notably the coming into and
subsequent loss of his inheritance which together define his
trajectory through Bohemia. Baudelaire's poetry, secondly,
registers those market antinomies according to its own specifi-
cations in the figures of dandy and prostitute — caricatures, as it
were, of buying and selling on the capitalist market. But as we
have seen, the specifications of the prose poetry in particular
make it impossible to identify ourselves or Baudelaire with
either figure: the narrative function is itself in flight, always
keeping distance between the scenes it stages and valorizes and
the perspective of the reader/writer it distinguishes and defers.
Yet even here, the trajectory of a prose poem narrator who
endows quotidian events with semiotic value runs the risk of
Conclusion 265
recuperation via axiomatization by capitalism in the figure of
the programmer, who serves the realization of profit by
bestowing semiotic value in promotion of the economic value of
commodities. In retrospect, we know that even some of the most
innovative techniques of high modernism (and of the avant-
garde as well) have been recuperated as mere advertising
gimmicks in advanced consumer society. Baudelaire's evolving
poetics thus never escapes implication in its social milieu, even
while remaining singularly different from it.
The claim that an individual oeuvre registers key features of
capitalist development could in one sense be considered a
difficult one to sustain with respect to a lyric poet such as
Baudelaire: the penetration of society as a whole by the market
is an extremely large-scale process, whereas lyric poetry is more
narrowly concerned with strictly personal experience. In
another sense, however, Baudelaire represents almost a perfect
test-case for sehizoanalysis, whose single greatest advance over
psychoanalysis is to have restored the social and historical
dimensions to even the most apparently private of concerns
heretofore relegated to the domestic sphere of "family ro-
mance." For Baudelaire not only lived the early stages of the
generalized breakdown of the socio-symbolic order, he also
experienced the full brunt of decoding in Bohemia, and explored
its implications in and for lyric poetry as a modernist. Thus as
"the lyric poet of Bohemia in the era of high capitalism" (to
paraphrase Benjamin), Baudelaire vividly illustrates the process
of decoding in three basic registers: the linguistic, the psycho-
logical, and the social. Finally, it is by considering, not isolated
poems or pairs of poems, but rather the evolution of Baudelaire's
poetics through the three editions of his two major collections
that we have demonstrated how the canonical poet of modernity
named Baudelaire registers crucial effects of capitalist de-
velopment on cultural psychodynamics. These effects can be
reviewed under three rubrics: the metonymy of real reference
and desire; the emergence and dispersion of the imaginary; the
split structure of social life in modernity.
THE METONYMY OF REAL REFERENCE AND DESIRE
Decoding undermines the stability of the paradigmatic axis

governing permissible substitutions of equivalence and oppo-
sition, thereby deconstructing the binary hierarchies of the
socio-symbolic order. The loss of social authority in a decoded
socio-symbolic order in turn weakens the prohibitive function of
the super-ego in favor of the role-modeling function of multiple
ego ideals. Destabilization of the socio-symbolic Other also
weakens the structure of the ego itself, fostering para-personal
part-object contact with the real against the grain of social
codes. Yet metonymic reference to the real - particularly in
"Hymne a la Beaute" and the poems of the "Tableaux
Parisiens " section - takes the form in Baudelaire of contact with
the explicitly historical present: the modernist registration of
modernity. Ultimately, the correlative of pure metonymic
reference would be "schizophrenia" - the free-form metonymy
of desire no longer constrained in recognizing objects by the
coded laws of substitution of the socio-symbolic order.
When the decoded reference and desire of schizophrenia
become too traumatically intense, however, a withdrawal from
raw contact with the real and a consolidation of personal
identity and objectives supervene in reversion to the comforts
and constraints of metaphoricity. It was precisely the function
of the socio-symbolic code to constrain desire by the authority
vested in the Other, to fix its legitimate objects and objectives,
to secure identity to stable positions within the social order -
but decoding undermines all of this. In modernity, metaphori-
city is no longer grounded in a stable socio-symbolic code, it has
to be constructed — and that is precisely the function of
recoding: to reanchor the socially decoded metaphoric axis in
the personal imaginary register.
Conclusion 267
THE HISTORICAL EMERGENCE AND DISPERSION OF THE

IMAGINARY
Romanticism constitutes a crucial though ambivalent moment

of transition in the development of full-fledged modernity. It
both lays claim to the flowering of and also bemoans the
persistent constraints on the modern "free subjectivity" sup-
posedly fostered by the revolutionary overthrow of a fixed socio-
symbolic order. Operating its own decoding of "classical"
ancien regime culture, romanticism envisions the discovery of a
true self living in harmony with nature outside of all social codes
and positions. The early romantic cycle of Les Fleurs du Mai
documents the constitution of the imaginary in precisely this
form: with the metaphoric axis of social coding on the wane, the
program of correspondences attempts a mystical recuperation
of the socially destabilized self in nature, through nostalgic
reunification of past and present; personal recoding in the
imaginary register has replaced social coding as the force of
alignment on the metaphoric axis. This does not mean, of
course, that Baudelaire by himself somehow invented the
imaginary all at once: a history of French precursors would
include the names of Rousseau, Descartes, and Montaigne, to
mention just a few. But his early lyric poetry does register the
historical emergence of the imaginary from private life to
become a major cultural force accompanying and contributing
to the general breakdown of the socio-symbolic order, as
Benjamin's study first suggested.
Yet Baudelaire himself goes on to demystify the romantic
pretension to found personal identity on a natural self. The
urban poet's program of beautification not only enhances the
beauty of any thing, rather than nature alone, but also
disseminates the harmonious natural self in recognizing random
beautification as the contingent effect of decoded desire. What
appeared in romanticism as a "discovery" of the natural self,
Baudelairean modernism takes to be a completely unnatural
invention, an artificial construction. But romanticism had not
only envisioned the discovery of the true self outside the bounds
of society: it also promoted a commitment to nature outside the
universalizing codes of classicism. In his vehement repudiation
of romanticism, Baudelaire reverses this valorization of the
natural, particularly in the decoded and impersonal registering
apparatus of the "Tableaux Parisiens," where the consoling
harmonies of nature are completely replaced by the realities of
the city, by the historical present of Second-Empire Paris. This
denigration of nature in favor of artifice becomes a defining
feature of his modernism, and of modernism to follow.
In completely screening nature out of history, modernism
effects a kind of epistemological break between recognition
based on Eros - pleasure-seeking for the gratification of drives
in reality — and recognition based on Thanatos — defending the
ego from traumatic excess-stimulation by the real. This is what
happens as the program of correspondences develops through
the project of beautification into spleen intensification. Under
the impact of increasingly decoded experience, stimulus-
binding that had in principle linked present perception with
memories of gratification past, informing recognition with need
and pleasure, now gives way to a stimulus-binding bent to the
service of the ego, mobilizing high-anxiety recognition solely in
order to protect it from external trauma. The imaginary register
is thereby most desperately needed at precisely the moment it is
stripped of content: at the limit of high-anxiety ego defense, in
the poetic mode we identified as "ironic allegory," empty
reference to the now meaningless real implies the complete
elimination of a subject of desire capable of integrating memory
and drives. The rejection of even an allegorical meaning
tentatively attributed to the real ultimately leaves the mean-
ingless vehicle as a vacant gesture of "zero-degree" reference,
exempt both from social coding in the symbolic register and
from personal recoding in the imaginary register. Such are the
psychodynamics of Baudelairean modernism at the zenith of
decoding.
The absolute loss of connection between instinctual drives and

both social and personal meaning, as well as the rigorous
distinction between the social (symbolic) and personal (im-
aginary) registers of meaning, are familiar themes of Lacanian
Conclusion 269
psychoanalysis. Schizoanalysis, however, explains the preva-
lence of ego-defensive anxiety (and meaning-recognition) over
drive-gratification (and object-recognition) historically, in terms
of the primacy of exchange-value and the separation from
means of life, which together constitute the defining features of
market existence. The condition of being separated by the
market from the means of life - from means of consumption as
well as from means of production which would enable one to
produce one's own means of consumption - creates anxiety by
threatening life with the risk of not having or being able to earn
the money required by market exchange for survival. The
anxiety over separation made much of by psychoanalysis — and
particularly by Lacanian psychoanalysis — turns out to be a
structural feature of the capitalist economy, not merely of the
weaning process.6 Furthermore, the rapid pace of change and
the predominance of exchange-value in market society decode
what Benjamin calls the "handles of experience" protecting the
psyche, thereby increasing its susceptibility to traumatic shocks
and generating additional anxiety in its defense. The mod-
ernism that registers the prevalence of anxiety over gratification
is a function of market existence.
In provisionally adopting a binary opposition of originally
psychological terms for this distinction, and specifically in
invoking "drive-gratification" as a function of the pleasure
principle distinct from and somehow prior to ego-defensive
anxiety, we may have conveyed the false impression that society
"before modernity" was somehow more "natural" because
ego-defensive recoding did not stand in the way of the
gratification of ("true" organic or biological) drives. Of course
no human society is natural - but neither are all societies equally
anxiety-provoking.7 Nothing is more damaging to the claim to
respect difference than the refusal to acknowledge and explore
differences in history; the crucial historical difference identified
by schizoanalysis distinguishes market society characterized by
decoding from societies based on coding (of various kinds).
Following Lacanian usage, imaginary recoding in the priva-
tized individual was here opposed to integration into the social
symbolic, but it was distinguished from schizophrenic en-
gagement with the historical real, as well. In this context,
imaginary recoding fueled by anxiety appears as an escape from
history - with history construed as the scene where drive-
gratification, social oppression, individual repression, and ego-
defensive anxiety in varying proportions determine the functioning
and real outcomes of the pleasure principle. Schizoanalysis
enables and encourages us to understand varying degrees of
anxiety and gratification as a function of what might be called,
to adopt Marx's oxymoron, the "natural history" of the human
species, and to distinguish among various "libidinal modes of
production" without invoking any absolute standard of com-
parison.8
Such a "natural history" is the scene of the schizoanalytic
real, construed as the prereflective relation of human bodies to
the natural environment as mediated historically by social
modes of production and coding. An exclusive emphasis on
language in psychoanalysis, by contrast, would evacuate from
the real any natural and historical determinations whatsoever.
Since the institution of language (langue) is found in all human
societies, symbolic order appears a-historical. And the effect of
inhabiting a symbolic universe of meaning is to "alienate" the
speaking being irrevocably from the body and its organic
"needs" and drives; the split subject is relegated to personal
and social registers of meaning completely divorced from the
body and from history. Baudelaire and schizoanalysis enable us
to diagnose such a perspective as a symptom of modernity.
Drawing on Nietzsche (in place of Lacan's Heidegger), schizo-
analysis understands the ego-defensive substitution of meaning-
recognition for drive-gratifying 06/^-recognition to be a feature
of modern nihilism, which ponders questions like "what is the
meaning of life?" instead of exercising will-to-power. To go
beyond the nihilism of modernism, on this view, would require
bracketing questions as to the meaning of life and meaning-
recognition in general in order to restore object-recognition to
the operations of will-to-power. Objects would then be defined
not by their " meaning," nor in the terms of some anthropology
of strictly biological "need," but rather in relation to the
Conclusion 271
libidinal and material production of the human species in and
through history.
It is in this vein that schizoanalysis deconstructs the oppo-
sition between symbolic and imaginary by insisting that before
and beneath the metaphoric alienations of both registers, desire
remains always in metonymic contact with the real of nature
and history.9 Moreover, the distinction between registers itself
thereby appears as a historical product: the penetration of
premodern society by the market establishes the nuclear family
in a distinct "domestic" sphere of reproduction as the basis of
imaginary recoding (Lacan's "no/name-of-the-father";
Freud's "family romance") - separate from the "public"
sphere of capitalist production, locus of the decoding of the
socio-symbolic by the processes of axiomatization. The market
also establishes modern individuality as a distinct "personal"
space of imaginary recoding characterized by the invention of
"self" through consumption; in the figure of the modern
dandy, Baudelaire was among the first to define and inhabit it
publicly.
From the perspective of schizoanalysis, then, Lacan appears
to reinforce rather than challenge the limits of modernism, in
effect remaining prisoner to a kind of after-image of the very ego
he is at such pains to denounce. Granted, its foundation in the
mirror-image makes the ego as imaginary anchor for meta-
phoric self-identifications an "alienated" construct: but that
leaves out of consideration the part-object relations that precede
and/or escape mirror-fixation altogether. Moreover, inasmuch
as the relations of ecstatic merger and murderous rivalry that
Lacan attributes to the imaginary register themselves derive
from the unsynthesized life and death instincts, they are equally
characteristic of the pre-mirror-stage, part-object relations of
the "corps morcele," as Kernberg's analysis of borderline
conditions confirms. Thus, in its commitment to the centrality
of the symbolic Oedipus complex, much of Lacanian psycho-
analysis indiscriminately lumps together whatever is an-Oedi-
pal under the ego-oriented rubric "imaginary," whereas
schizoanalysis insists on distinguishing the ego-centered invest-
ments of the imaginary from the metonymy of part-object desire
and real reference characteristic of schizophrenia. Especially in
the decoded socio-symbolic order of capitalism, schizophrenic
engagement with nature and history thus appears as the real
alternative to the alienations of the privatized imaginary and
reified symbolic registers alike - whence the alternating
rhythms of decoding and recoding that comprise modern life, as
epitomized in the case of Baudelaire.
This schizoanalytic study of Baudelaire suggests that in
modernity, non-ego-centered, schizophrenic engagement with
the real takes two basic social forms, corresponding to drive-
derivatives fueled by the life and death instincts. The moment of
real engagement fueled by Thanatos takes social form in the
rivalry of class struggle over true democracy — whence the
importance of Baudelaire's participation in the Revolution of
1848 and the intensity of his reactions to its demise at the hands
of Napoleon III. 10 The moment of schizophrenic real en-
gagement fueled by Eros, meanwhile, takes the social form of
association with nature and the human species ("the people")
- precisely what Baudelairean modernism suppresses via maso-
chism in the bitterly disillusioned rejection of romanticism and
revolution following the coup d'etat of 1851. In recoil from such
ideal-shattering disappointment, Baudelaire withdraws from
real engagement into the ironic recoding of evilification, and in
revenge rewrites his former enthusiasm for revolution as a
cynical predilection for pure death and destruction, revising the
"Spleen and Ideal" section for the second edition of Les Fleurs
du Mai to end with spleen and evil. When, in a subsequent cycle
of decoding, the "Tableaux Parisiens" stage yet another
metonymic encounter with the real, Haussmann's Paris itself
will bear the stigma of failed revolution, as we saw in "Le
Cygne."
Masochism is thus a crucial moment of Baudelaire's tra-
jectory from romanticism into modernity. The return of the
repudiated super-ego in Masochian narrative abruptly termi-
nates the romantic-idealizing relation to woman, nature, the
revolutionary crowd of 1848 - transforming it into vengeful
rage at the loss of the ideal and the natural. Divorce from nature
is, of course, a universal fate imposed by the regime of exchange-
Conclusion 273
value under capitalism, but whereas the general public takes
refuge in recoding of one form or another (ranging from the
overstuffed domestic interior, to the blandishments of "mass
culture," to the rampant nationalism characteristic of mid-to-
late nineteenth-century France and beyond), modernism suffers
the brunt of decoding in high anxiety and registers it in a tragic
mode. Unlike the comparatively comforting resolution of
Masochian narrative, Baudelairean modernism stages and
occupies the rift between defunct ideals and an utterly bankrupt
reality with uncompromising intensity. If, as we have said,
spleen represents the moment of high anxiety, when under the
sway of the repetition compulsion ego-defense finally prevails
over drive-gratification, the "Tableaux Parisiens" represent
quintessential Baudelairean high modernism, in their tragic
depiction of an urban Poet hopelessly lost in the familiar
surroundings of his own home town.
Yet for Baudelaire, failure of the masochistic repudiation of
the super-ego produces a further and absolutely singular result:
not the incoherent oscillations between adulation and scorn
under the sway of temporary ego ideals typical of ordinary
borderline narcissism, but rather solid fusion of his martyred,
romantic ideal ego with the stable ego ideal provided by the
figure of Edgar Allan Poe. This enables Baudelaire to retain the
contradictory positions resolved by Masochian narrative: to
keep both idealism and cynicism in play, but at the same time
keep both at a distance carefully maintained by the functioning
of the prose poem narrator. In neglecting the role of the
narrator, Benjamin's modernist reading of Baudelaire stops
with the forlorn poetics of high modernism: in recoil from the
victory of bourgeois commerce, Benjamin concludes, "Baude-
laire battled the crowd — with the impotent rage of someone
fighting the rain or the wind ... He indicated the price for which
the sensation of the modern age may be had: the disintegration
of the aura in the experience of shock. He paid dearly for
consenting to this disintegration - but it is the law of his poetry"
(p. 154). Baudelaire's adoption of Poe as ego ideal, however,
propels him beyond modernism into a certain postmodernism in
the figure of the programmer: it enables him to register with
acute sensitivity the antinomies of modern market existence as
lived in Bohemia, yet illuminate them poetically with some
equanimity and aplomb.
THE SPLIT STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL LIFE IN MODERNITY
The perpetual self-invention of "free subjectivity" defining

modernity is played out in the form of alternating cycles of
decoding and recoding, of daring innovation followed by
hyperanxious self-consolidation, followed by renewed inno-
vation, and so on. When history apparently grinds to a halt with
the founding of the Second Empire in France, such cyclical
evolution is arrested and completely transformed by the
cataclysmic defeat of the ideal by the real, henceforth appearing
in modernism as the static and irremediable split between
prostitute and dandy, between selling and buying as basic roles
on the capitalist market. In Baudelairean postmodernism, the
borderline splitting suffered in nominally democratic but
actually authoritarian market society is transformed via the
ego-ideal role-model of Poe into the narcissistic defense of the
programmer, who detaches himself and stands back from the
modernist tragedy of modern existence to contemplate his
former selves and endow their spectacle with poetic value.11
Baudelaire's relations to modernity are thus ultimately
ambivalent: even while his modernism eschews any relation to
nature, his investment in the promise and disappointments of
history remains legible throughout the prose poems — for the
defensive splitting of the narcissistic narrator never completely
dispels the attraction to and sympathy for the figures of defeat,
as we have seen. Baudelaire's postmodernism is thus unlike the
"postmodernism" of today's affect-free hedonism, wherein
narcissistic defensive splitting has become so hardened as to
allow well-heeled yuppies to enjoy for their own sake the glitzy
surfaces of new urban facades without bothering to look behind
them and around the corner to witness the homeless poor
huddling in doorways and eating from other people's garbage
cans. This is the human reality of modern capitalism which the
postmodern Baudelaire insists that we confront in so many of
Conclusion 275
the prose poems - the face of poverty, as it were, that the prose
narrator refuses to shoo away from the opulent cafe window
("Les Yeux des pauvres"). Even from above or beyond the
antinomies of buying and selling, in the position of the prose
poem narrator as programmer, Baudelaire refuses to forsake
investment in history entirely.
At this last stage of his evolution, the moments of decoding
and recoding comprising distinct cycles in the verse collection
are condensed in the individual prose poems into a single
moment, in which recoding accompanies decoding sur place
("on the spot" or "in place"), as Deleuze and Guattari put it.
Decoding - transformed by the shocks of 1848-51 and the
triumph of bourgeois commerce into borderline splitting be-
tween "good" and " b a d " : between the ideal and the real and
between buying and selling - now appears in the figures of
prostitute and dandy, who continue to register in vivid
caricature the antinomies of market existence. Recoding super-
venes, meanwhile, in the figure or function of the narcissistic
prose narrator, whose defensive splitting always maintains a
certain distance from the scenes of violence and suffering under
observation, without ever losing contact with them.
For schizoanalysis, the ultimate determinations of decoding
and recoding lie in the rhythms of capitalist expansion,
delineated by Marx in Volume III of Capital.12 Decoding and
recoding are the semiotic moments of the fundamentally a-
semiotic process of axiomatization that conjoins abstract "fac-
tors" of production and consumption to produce and realize
surplus-value. The private appropriation of surplus-value as
liquid profit then instigates another round of investment,
production, sale, and consumption in the pursuit of further
surplus, thereby perpetuating the process of capital accumu-
lation on an ever-expanding scale. Viewed in the context of this
on-going process, decoding designates the operations by which
existing instruments of production and consumption are revolu-
tionized by fresh investment for the sake of increased pro-
ductivity and invigorated consumerism; recoding designates
the moment at which the existing and privately owned
instruments of production and consumption are held fixed for a
time in order to realize maximum profit on the investment

already made in them, thereby blocking further innovation in
production and consumption alike. For schizoanalysis, it is this
dynamic that constitutes the "motor of history" of advanced
capitalist development.13
The moments of decoding and recoding in Baudelaire's life
and poetry do not, of course, correspond to the moments of this
dynamic directly. Instead, an ensemble of what are variously
called "mediations" (Hegel), "instances" (Althusser), dis-
cursive and institutional "practices" (Foucault), or media of
registration (Deleuze and Guattari) intervene "between" the
economic dynamic outlined above and the dynamics of de-
coding and recoding in other domains; relations among these
various domains are complex and historically contingent. Yet
in Baudelaire's day, the take-off of French market capitalism
coincides with the founding of the Second Empire; the
exhilaration and promise of decoding in the cultural sphere
(especially in Bohemia) is accompanied and confounded by the
scandal of patently authoritarian recoding in the political
sphere. In the face of this contradiction, modernism sets itself
above and apart from a culture based largely on recoding and
pursues decoding in ever purer and more abstract forms; the
Second Empire strikes back with emblematic vehemence,
bringing the entire first generation of French modernists —
Baudelaire, Flaubert, and eventually Courbet - to trial for
cultural and/or political Use majeste. Given his peculiar family
history, the ensuing disillusionment affects Baudelaire par-
ticularly severely, propelling him through masochism into
borderline narcissism. But his is the special case that proves the
rule: throughout modernity, the recurrent failures of the
democratic ideal promised by modern society to prevail over
the continually resurgent authoritarianism spawned by capi-
talist recoding in defense of the private appropriation of surplus-
value produce ego-shattering disillusionment and foster narcis-
sistic repudiation of historical engagement.
So while the dynamic of capital accumulation generates the
basic rhythms of decoding and recoding in market society,
borderline splitting derives from the gulf between production
Conclusion 277
and consumption that is opened by the market and continually
enlarged and exacerbated by the expansion of capital. It was
Benjamin who first explained Baudelaire's growing acclaim in
terms of the "structure of experience" his work would share
with its readers; and a particular "structure of experience" has
indeed enabled Baudelaire's work to "find the reader at whom
[it] was aimed" (p. 109). To designate that structure, I
borrowed the category of "borderline narcissism" from psycho-
analysis, but its emergence and ubiquity as a therapeutic tool
and cultural diagnosis derive from the libidinal-economic
structure of modern capitalism itself. Social life in modernity is
split by the well-nigh universally necessary practices of buying
and selling oneself on the market, lived by Baudelaire at peak
intensity in Bohemia, and registered in the quintessentially
Baudelairean figures of the dandy and the prostitute. They
epitomize the antinomies of modern market existence that make
Baudelaire our exact contemporary, self-satisfied readers, our
twin brother - the mirror-image, under late capitalism, of our
very selves.
Notes
PREFACE
1 Thesis ix of "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations,
PP- 257-58.
2 "Fusees" no. 15 (Oeuvres completes, p. 630 [hereafter OC]).
3 Thesis vi on the Philosophy of History, Illuminations, p. 255.
4 On "historical transference" of this kind, see de Certeau, The
Writing of History; and LaCapra, Soundings in Critical Theory.
5 Thesis xvm of " Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations,
p. 263; translation modified.
6 While this book was being written, three studies appeared
confirming my sense that misogyny and an anti-narrative stance
are crucial components of modernism: Charles Bernheimer's
Figures of III Repute and Robert Scholes' " I n the Brothel of
Modernism: Picasso and Joyce" on misogyny, and Karl Kroeber's
Retelling/Rereading on narrative. (Edward Kaplan's study, Baude-
laire's Prose Poems, also appeared while this book was being
written, but since it is primarily thematic in orientation, it bears
little on the reading of the prose poem collection offered here.)
7 Histoire Extraordinaire, p. 170.
1 INTRODUCTION
1 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High
Capitalism; page references henceforth follow quotations in the
text.
2 The key essays for Lukacs's view of modernism and market culture
are "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," in
History and Class Consciousness, esp. Section 1, " The Phenomenon of
Reification"; and "Narrate or Describe," in Writer and Critic and
Other Essays, pp. 110-49; s e e a ^ so hi s Studies in European Realism.
3 A similar objection is raised by Adorno: that Benjamin too quickly
identifies "cultural traits" with "corresponding [Adorno's term]
278
Notes to pages y-g 279
features of the infrastructure"; for Adorno, "[Benjamin's] dia-
lectic lacks one thing: mediation" — precisely the thing in his
negative dialectics that defers, disseminates, and prevents identity.
See Adorno's letters to Benjamin (particularly that of 1 o November
1938) in Aesthetics and Politics, esp. pp. 128-29.
4 See De Man, "Anthropomorphism and Trope in Lyric," esp. pp.
254 and 262; also "Literary History and Literary Modernity."
5 On the concept of the " absent cause," see Althusser, " Cremonini,
Painter of the Abstract," in Lenin and Philosophy, pp. 229-42, esp.
pp. 236-39; and " O n the Materialist Dialectic," in For Marx, pp.
163-218, esp. pp. 193-216.
6 For readers' convenience, individual verse poems will be cited on
their first mention in the text by roman numeral referring to their
position in the second edition (1861) of Les Fleurs du Mai, and
quotations will include line numbers; in the same vein, prose
poems will be identified by arabic numeral designating their
position in Petits Poemes en prose.
7 In an article of 24 July 1857 in Le Pays, Barbey insists " il y a ici une
architecture secrete, un plan calcule par le poete, meditatif et
volontaire" (cited in the Crepet/Blin's critical edition, p. 247). On
the "secret architecture" of Les Fleurs du Mai, see L. Benedetto,
"L'Architecture des Fleurs du Mai," in ^eitschrift fur franzosische
Sprache und Literatur 39 (1912): 18-70; A. Feuillerat, "L'Archi-
tecture des Fleurs du Mai," in Studies by Members of the French
Department of Tale University (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1941): 221-330; P. Hambly, "The Structure of Les Fleurs du Mai:
Another Suggestion," Australian Journal of French Studies 8 (1971):
269-96; and M. Ruff, "Sur l'Architecture des Fleurs du Mai,"
Revue de Vhistoire litteraire de la France 37 (1930): 51-69, 393-402,
and Chapter 9 of his Baudelaire.
8 In a letter to Vigny, Baudelaire says: " Le seul eloge que je sollicite
pour ce livre est qu'on reconnaisse qu'il n'est pas un pur album et
qu'il a un commencement et une fin. (The only praise I seek for
this book is the recognition that it is not a mere album and that it
has a beginning and an end.) " (Letter of 12 or 13 December 1861
to Alfred de Vigny, in Correspondance generate (henceforth CG), Vol.
4, no. 685, p. 9.
9 See esp. Johnson, Defigurations du langage poetique.
1 o The only study focused solely on the revisions Baudelaire made for
the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mai is C. Burns, " ' Architecture
Secrete': Notes on the Second Edition of Les Fleurs du Mai,"
Nottingham French Studies 5-6 (1966): 67-79. I* is> however, purely
thematic in orientation.
280 Notes to pages g-16
11 On decoding, see their Anti-Oedipus, Vol. i of Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, esp. pp. 40-43, 263-312 (33-35, 222-61). Page
references will be given to both the French and English editions of
this text (French [English]).
12 Marx and Engels' description in the "Communist Manifesto" of
what I am calling "social decoding" reads as follows:
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto
honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the
physician, the lawyer, the priest, the man of science into its paid wage
laborers ... The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolution-
izing the instruments of production, and thereby the relation of
production, and with them the whole relations of society... Constant
revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social
condition, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois
epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train
of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all
new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is
solid melts into air... (p. 10).
See Feuer, ed. Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and
Philosophy, pp. 6-41.
13 See Jameson, "Beyond the Cave: Demystifying the Ideology of
Modernism," esp. pp. 123-28. On "rationalization" in Weber,
see his Economy and Society, esp. Vol. 1, Chapters 1-4; Vol. 2,
Chapters 7-8; Vol. 3, Chapters 3, 10-11, 14.
14 In addition to decoding (and recoding), axiomatization also
sponsors an equally important, parallel process of deterritori-
alization (and reterritorialization). This process involves the
disconnecting (and reconnecting) of labor-power from its material
objects of investment, whereas decoding and recoding involve the
investment of libido in symbolic representations rather than objects
themselves. For more on the relations between decoding and
deterritorialization and the evolution from the former to the latter
in Deleuze and Guattari's work, see Holland, " The Anti-Oedipus:
Postmodernism in Theory, or the post-Lacanian Historical Con-
textualization of Psychoanalysis" and "Commentary on Minor
Literature."
15 As noted in passing by Benjamin [Baudelaire, p. 113), and
developed by Terdiman in Discourse/Counter-Discourse, esp. Chap-
ter 2 on "Newspaper Culture."
16 Louis-Philippe's first prime minister, Jacques Lafitte, himself a
wealthy banker; the 1830 upheaval was known to some as "the
bankers' revolution"; cf. Wright, France in Modern Times, p. 153.
17 "Parmi les droits dont on a parle dans ces derniers temps, il y en
a un qu'on a oublie ... le droit de se contredire. (Among the rights
Notes to pages 16-26 281
people have made so much of recently, one has been forgotten ...
the right to contradict oneself.)" Cf. "Sur l'Album de Philoxene
Boyer," OC, p. 291.
18 See Wing, The Limits of Narrative, esp. Chapter 6; and LaCapra,
Madame Bovary on Trial.
19 See Jameson, "Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist: the
Dissolution of the Referent and the Artificial Sublime," esp. p.
252.
20 See Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?"
21 For another critique of Lacan's excessively " linguistico-logical"
conception of discourse and the unconscious, see Kristeva,
"Within the Microcosm of'The Talking Cure'," esp. pp. 36-39;
and in connection with borderline conditions, p. 42.
22 Although a complete archaeology of the notion of "symbolic
order" in Lacan has not been done, see the remarks throughout
Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (esp. Chapter 4).
23 Although the term "figures-of-the-despot" is mine, it derives from
Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of despotism as a type of social
formation; see the Anti-Oedipus, Partm, esp. pp. 227-62 (192-222).
24 Of course, real fathers' laws and interdictions may not be what
Lacan means by the "nom/non-du-pere" at all, but he thereby
completely abstracts his logico-linguistic account from real his-
torical situations, effectively translating revolution into psychosis.
The thrust of schizoanalysis is in the opposite direction, to resituate
psychodynamics in history.
25 See Fenichel, " Ego-Disturbances and Their Treatment," Collected
Papers, Vol. 2 (1954) pp. 109-28; and The Psychoanalytic Theory of
Neurosis.
26 On the importance of naming in Lacan, see de Waelhens,
Schizophrenia.
2 7 See Butor, Histoire Extraordinaire.
28 See Klein, Contributions and "Notes on Some Schizoid Mecha-
nisms"; Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism,
esp. pp. 24-34; and Lacan, "Le Stade du miroir"; "Fonction et
champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse," esp. pp.
125-30, 173-75, 186-87; a n d "Subversion du sujet et dialectique
du desir," esp. pp. 168-77.
29 See Laforgue, The Defeat of Baudelaire', Sartre, Baudelaire', Bersani,
Baudelaire and Freud', and Blin, Le Sadisme de Baudelaire.
30 The best narrative study of Sacher-Masoch is Deleuze's Presentation
de Sacher-Masoch.
31 I derive the term from Kernberg (although he does not use it
extensively himself). Kernberg's analysis shows that nearly all
narcissists are borderline, but borderline patients are not necess-
282 Notes to pages 26-32
arily narcissistic; borderline conditions are thus broader than, and
include, narcissistic disorders. Both involve splitting as a crucial
feature and/or basic defense-mechanism.
32 See Attali, Noise, esp. pp. 106-09, l *8—19, 129-31; this translation
has "molder" and "molding" instead of "programmer" and
"programming." For the fashion industry, "designer" and
"designing" are the appropriate English equivalents, but Attali's
direct objects are usually people, not things, which makes
"programming" the best choice.
33 See Derrida, Of Grammatology, esp. Part 1, Chapter 2, pp. 27-73;
and de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics.
34 See Jakobson, "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of
Aphasic Disturbance"; page references henceforth follow quota-
tions in the text.
35 See Jameson, The Prison-House of Language, esp. pp. 22-39.
36 Despite the invocation of Peirce, Jakobson seems at first to limit
"reference to context" to other linguistic signs, in "Two Aspects."
The remainder of the essay makes it clear, however, that the
metonymic axis includes extra-linguistic contexts as well: aphasics
suffering from "similarity disorder" (in whose discourse the
metonymic axis therefore predominates), he says,
feel unable to utter a sentence which responds neither to the cues of [their]
interlocutor nor to the actual situation. The sentence " it rains " cannot be
produced unless the utterer sees that it is actually raining. The deeper the
utterance is embedded in the verbal or non-verbal context, the higher are the
chances of its successful performance by this class of patients (p. 78, my
emphasis).
The metonymic axis, in other words, supports and depends on
what Jakobson elsewhere calls the "referential" function of
language. For a discussion of how Lacanian psychoanalysis draws
on this referential aspect of the metonymic axis, see Bernheimer,
Flaubert and Kafka, esp. Chapter 1; for one theoretical formulation
of how historically contingent social codes beyond langue shape
discourse, see Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge.
37 Distributed in a Greimasian rectangle, the semantic relations
implied in Jakobsonian discourse analysis would look like this:
sense < > reference
1 1
I s - s I
I I
I - s s I
I I
tautology < > non-sense
38 Wittgenstein's famous remark occurs at the very end of the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; for Lacan's statement to the effect
that the real is that which "resists symbolization" see Le Seminaire.
Livre I, p. 80 and passim.
39 See Merleau-Ponty, " O n the Phenomenology of Language," in
Signs, pp. 84-98, esp. pp. 89-92.
40 On methods of projection in representation, see Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations, nos. 139-42, p. 216 and passim; for an
analogous discussion in Lacan, see "L 5 Instance de la lettre dans
l'inconscient," esp. pp. 251-67.
41 See Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses:
Notes Toward an Investigation," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays, pp. 127-86, esp. pp. 170-82; for Deleuze and Guattari's
discussion of " interpellation," see A Thousand Plateaus, p. 130.
42 See Lacan, "L'Instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient."
43 See White, Metahistory and Tropics of Discourse.
44 See Culler, Structuralist Poetics, pp. 55-74, esp. pp. 57-65.
45 Nietzsche: "We think only in the form of language - and thus
believe in the ' eternal truth' of' reason'... We cease to think when
we refuse to do so under the constraint of language... Rational
thought is interpretation according to a scheme we cannot throw
off" (The Will to Power, Book 3, no. 522; see also nos. 551 and 562).
Wittgenstein: "We misunderstand the role of the ideal in our
language... The ideal, as we think of it, is unshakable. You can
never get outside it; you must always turn back... It is like a pair
of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at.
It never occurs to us to take them off" {Philosophical Investigations,
nos. 101-03). In Foucault, see especially The Birth of the Clinic,
Discipline and Punish, and The Archaeology of Knowledge.
46 See Johnson, The Critical Difference and Dejigurations du langage
poetique.
2 C O R R E S P O N D E N C E S VERSUS BEAUTY
1 The centrality of " Correspondances" to our understanding of
Baudelaire's poetry is attested to by the frequency of its antholo-
gization and the disproportionate quantity of annotation it
receives in critical editions, and is explicitly argued as well in full-
blown interpretive studies such as Pommier's often cited La
Mystique de Baudelaire. The quotation is from the Crepet/Blin
critical edition, p. 295; they insist that the doctrine of synaesthesia
expressed in "Correspondances" is "one of the major postulates
governing his work ... from a technical as well as theoretical point
of view" (p. 297).
2 "Au lecteur" opens the entire collection, but is not part of the
section entitled " Spleen et Ideal," and its rhetoric is very different
from that of the section's first sixteen poems.
3 For reasons that will become clear, in order to make a crucial
distinction parallel to the one between "author" and "narrator"
in prose fiction, I capitalize "Poet" throughout when referring to
the figure generated by a poetic text, and use "poet" when
referring to Baudelaire (or some other writer of poetry); in the
same vein, "Poetic" refers to the figure of the Poet, "poetic" to a
property of the text.
4 On "La Beaute," see Crepet/Blin, p. 249; Mathias, "La Beaute"
dans "Les Fleurs du Mai"; and F. Heck, "'La Beaute': Enigma of
Irony," Nineteenth-Century French Studies 10 (1982): 85-95. On the
beauty cycle as a whole, see Ruff, Baudelaire, pp. 61-62; Hambly,
"The Structure of Les Fleurs du Mai: another suggestion," p. 277
and passsim; and K. Pung-Gu, "Les Fleurs du Mai: le cycle de la
beaute feminine," Revue de Coree 10 (1979): 33-85.
5 For a Parnassian interpretation of the sonnet, see Feuillerat,
" L'Architecture des Fleurs du Mai" pp. 237-38. Others link the
statuary imagery with modern rather than classical sculpture,
often citing the Salon of 1859 in support; see A. Frangois, "Le
Sonnet sur 'La Beaute' des Fleurs du Mai," Mercure de France
(1954): 259-66. The debate is reviewed by Heck in "La Beaute:
Enigma of Irony."
6 Heck (ibid.) following Hubert (U Esthetique des "Fleurs du Mai")
notes the irony of these self-defeating images and the dual image of
the Poet produced by this irony (Baudelaire ironizing his own
defeat as a Romantic poet), but flatly denies the importance of the
last two lines and the poetics of the tercets as prefigurations of a
very different aesthetic stance (p. 92).
7 On the importance of the difference between the communicative
and textual levels for French modernism, see Chambers, Melancolie
et opposition; and in general, his Story and Situation.
8 On inspiration, see "Fusees" no. 11 (OC, p. 626); on the worship
of images, see "Mon coeur mis a n u " no. 53 (OC, p. 638), which
goes on to glorify "le vagabondage et ce qu'on peut appeler le
Bohemianisme, culte de la sensation multiplied (wanderlust and
what might be called Bohemianism, a cult of multiple sensations)."
9 An insistence on the contextual determinants of meaning dis-
tinguishes this approach from recent readings of the same poem by
Maclnnes, The Comical as Textual Practice in "Les Fleurs du Mai",
pp. 74-80; and Wing, The Limits of Narrative, pp. 11-14.
1 o For a distinction similar to the one I am proposing here between
metaphoric and metonymic irony, see Lang, Irony/Humor: Critical
Paradigms', and for Flaubert, see Culler, The Uses of Uncertainty, esp.
pp. 186-98.
11 On schizoanalytic " deconstruction " of binary logic, see Deleuze
and Guattari, the Anti-Oedipus, pp. 11-22 (5-16); on how it differs
from Derridean deconstruction, see Holland, " Deterritorializing
' Deterritorialization,'" esp. pp. 55-56.
12 Notably the ending poem "Le Voyage" (cxxvi, 1. 143), but also
"L'Amour du mensonge" (XCVIII, I.23), both added to the second
edition.
13 "Deux qualites litteraires fondamentales: surnaturalisme et iro-
nie" ("Fusees" no. 11 [OC, p. 626]).
14 See Johnson, Defigurations du langage poetique, pp. 31-55; and for a
similar treatment of the verse and prose " L'Invitation au voyage,"
see Johnson, The Critical Difference, pp. 23-48.
15 The importance of fantasy and its potential for disrupting stable
self-identity are confirmed by Bersani's discussion of the poem in
his study of Baudelaire and Freud, pp. 35-45, esp. p. 42.
16 In his "Richard Wagner et Tannhduser a Paris" (OC, p. 513). The
fact that Baudelaire cites only the quatrains suggests a possible
awareness on his part that the tercets do not remain faithful to that
aesthetic.
17 See De Man, "Anthropomorphism and Trope in Lyric," pp.
245-5 0 -
18 Though never disruptive enough to prevent the poem from being
read as doctrine, the shifting aesthetics of " Correspondances"
have received some critical attention: in addition to De Man,
"Anthropomorphism and Trope in Lyric," see Bersani, Baudelaire
and Freud, pp. 31-43; and (from a quite different perspective) Blin,
Baudelaire, pp. 107-08 and 200-02.
3 SPLEEN AND EVIL

1 See Mossop, Baudelaire's Tragic Hero, pp. 160-67, 175-78; the
quotation is from p. 167.
2 See Chapter 1, note 7.
3 In the famous letter to Ancelle (of 18 February 1866), Baudelaire
says: " Is it necessary to tell you ... that I have put all my heart, all
my tenderness, all my religion (disguised), all my hatred into this
atrocious book? It is true that I will write the opposite, that I will
swear to all the gods that it is a book of pure art, of monkeyshines, of
juggling-tricks; and I will be lying like a tooth-puller (Faut-il vous
d i r c . q u e dans ce livre atroce, j'ai mis tout mon coeur, toute ma
tendresse, toute ma religion (travestie), toute ma haine? II est vrai que
j'ecrirai le contraire, que je jurerai mes grands dieux que c'est un
livre a"art pur, de singerie, de jonglerie', et je mentirai comme un
arracheur de dents)" (CG, Vol. 5, no. 990, p. 271).
4 Letter of 12 or 13 December 1861 to Alfred Vigny, in CG, Vol. 4,
no. 685, p. 9; see Chapter 1, note 8.
5 In the letter of 1 April 1861, apparently replying to her renewed
complaints following the appearance of the second edition, he
insists that the new poems "were all made to fit the framework [of
the first edition] (ils etaient tous faits pour le cadre) " (CG, Vol. 3,
no. 636, p. 265).
6 Bersani makes a similar distinction in Baudelaire and Freud, p. 19.
7 " Correspondances " was not in fact taken as the key poem in the
collection by any of Baudelaire's contemporaries; see Crepet/Blin,
P- 2 95-
8 On the diverse valences of "comme," see De Man, "Anthropo-
morphism and Trope in Lyric," esp. pp. 248-50; see also Deguy,
"La Poesie en question," esp. pp. 421 and 430.
9 See L. Jenny, " Le Poetique et le narratif," Poetique 25-28 (1976):
440-49, esp. p. 444.
10 For the essay on Theophile Gautier, see OC, pp. 458-69; the
passage reads as follows:
C'est... le caractere de la vraie poesie d'avoir le flot regulier, comme les
grands fleuves qui s'approchent de la mer, leur mort et leur infini, et
d'eviter la precipitation et la saccade. La poesie lyrique s'elance, mais
toujours d'un mouvement elastique et ondule. Tout ce qui est brusque et
casse lui deplait... (pp. 467-68)
It is ... in the nature of true poetry to have a steadyflow,like those great

rivers approaching the sea, their death and their infinity, and never to
appear hurried and abrupt. Lyric poetry does soar, but always with a
smooth,flowingmotion. Nothing brusque or choppy befits it...
11 See for instance Jenny, " Le Poetique et le narratif"; Jauss, Toward
an Aesthetic of Reception, esp. pp. 163 and 165; andjakobson, "Une
Microscopie du dernier Spleen dans Les Fleurs du Mai," Tel Quel 29
(1967): 12-24.
12 See Jenny, "Le poetique et le narratif," p. 446.
13 For a similar romantic treatment of the "seasons" of a human life
span, see Lamartine's "Automne" (1819).
14 See V. Brombert, "Lyrisme et depersonnalisation: l'exemple de
Baudelaire (Spleen, LXXV)," Romantisme 6 (1973): 29-37, es P- P-
33-
15 "Mon coeur mis a n u " no. 53 (OC, p. 638).
4 R O M A N T I C T E M P E R A M E N T AND " S P L E E N
AND I D E A L "
1 See Benjamin, Baudelaire, pp. 107-54; page references henceforth
follow quotations in the text.
2 In addition to his Baudelaire study, see Benjamin, "The Story-
teller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov," in Illuminations,
pp. 83-109; and Godzich, "Introduction" to Chambers, Story and
Situation.
3 See Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, standard edition, Vol. 18.
References to the standard edition will henceforth be abbreviated
as SE, followed by volume number or volume: page number(s).
4 See his brief discussion of "Perte d'aureole" (Petits Poemes en prose
[46]) at the end of "Some Motifs," pp. 152—54; for an even richer
treatment of the poem in historical context, see Wohlfarth, " ' Perte
d'aureole': the Emergence of the Dandy."
5 See the Salon of 1846 (OC, pp. 227-61); this quotation is from
p. 244; page references henceforth follow quotations in the text.
6 This is what Fried finds perplexing in "Painting Memories":
" ...what are we to make of the statement that a painting just
this instant seen for the first time... is already part of our store of
memories?" (p. 514).
7 See the Salon 0/1845 (^C> PP- 204-24); page references henceforth
follow quotations in the text.
8 See Fried, "Painting Memories," p. 521 and passim.
9 On the role of this uncoded element in the instauration of the
unconscious, see Lacan's discussion of the "fort-da" game in Le
Seminaire: Livre XI, pp. 60—61 and passim.
10 Rather the trauma operative in any manifest disturbance attri-
butes ex post facto its particular meaning to the primal signifier,
from which it nevertheless derives its force. On the primal signifier,
see Lacan, Le Seminaire: Livre XI, pp. 188-200; and on its
implications for therapy, pp. 224-28.
11 See the Salon 0/1859 (OC, pp. 391-424); this quotation is from p.
400.
12 For schizoanalysis, part-object relations productive of the real
always "precede" and underlie imaginary and symbolic relations
which only approach it asymptotically; see the Anti-Oedipus, pp.
34-35 (26-27) and passim.
13 This is an irony more or less completely absent from Deleuze and
Guattari's perspective in the Anti-Oedipus', they appear more
sensitive to it in A Thousand Plateaus, especially in Plateau 6,
" Comment se faire un corps sans organes?" ("How do You Make
Yourself a Body Without Organs?").
14 In Civilization and Its Discontents (SE Vol. 21), Freud himself may be
said to have contributed to such a historical appreciation of the
fate of the pleasure-principle. For according to Freud, as anxiety
resident in the ego increases (due to increases in repression
concomitant with the "progress" of civilization), the aim of
merely reducing tension by binding sensory input so as to prevent
trauma overrides the aim of actually gratifying drives. See also
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (SE Vol. 18).
5 M O D E R N I S T I M A G I N A T I O N AND T H E
"TABLEAUX PARISIENS"
1 See Chambers, "Trois paysages urbains."
2 See the Salon 0/1859 (^^? PP- 39 I - 4 2 4) \ this quotation is from p.
395. Page references henceforth follow quotations in the text. See
also the anti-realist remarks in Section 7, entitled "Paysage" (pp.
414-18).
3 As he says in concluding, " I have made it a rule to seek
Imagination throughout the Salon (Je m'etais impose de chercher
Tlmagination a travers le Salon)" (p. 424).
4 Baudelaire repeats this critique of Ingres in Le peintre de la vie
moderne (OC, pp. 546-65), contrasting Ingres' tendency to "impose
... borrowed classical ideas" on all his subjects with Guys' fidelity
to first impressions of the real, his "obeissance a l'impression...
[au] fantastique reel de la vie" (p. 554).
5 Le peintre de la vie moderne, p. 552, with Baudelaire's emphasis; page
references henceforth follow quotations in the text.
6 Baudelaire uses the two - drawing and writing - interchangeably
in the essay, and insists at one point for example that Poe's short
story is actually a tableau: " Vous souvenez-vous d'un tableau (en
verite, c'est un tableau!) ecrit par la plus puissante plume de cette
epoque... " (p. 551).
7 " Pour la plupart d'entre nous, surtout pour les gens d'affaires, aux
yeux de qui la nature n'existe pas, si ce n'est dans ses rapports
d'utilite avec leurs affaires, le fantastique reel de la vie est
singulierement emousse. (For most of us - especially for business-
men, in whose eyes nature does not exist, unless it appears useful
for their business - the fantastical real of life appears exceedingly
dull)" (p. 554).
8 See Chesters, "Baudelaire and the Limits of Poetry."
9 See Stierle, "Baudelaire and the Tradition of the Tableau de Paris."
10 The change in line 10 from "pipeuse d'amant" to "reine de
roman" in the second edition strengthens the rapport between the
action of this poem and the ennoblement practiced by the sun ("11
ennoblit le sort des choses les plus viles" 1. 18) in "Le Soleil,"
which now directly precedes it in the collection.
11 The temporal instantaneity characteristic of modern urban life is
accentuated in the collected version of the poem: Baudelaire
substitutes "Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaitre" for
" . . . m ' a fait souvenir et renaitre," thereby eliminating any
reference to memory and past experience.
12 On metaphor and metonymy as components of " psychopoetic
structure," see Bernheimer, Flaubert and Kafka, esp. Chapter 1,
"Toward a Psychopoetics of Textual Structure"; for typologies of
literary discourse based on metaphor and metonymy (as suggested
by Jakobson), see Barthes, Elements of Semiology, esp. p. 60; and
Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing.
13 See Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 117-24 and 131-36.
6 DECODING AND RECODING IN THE PROSE

POEMS
1 Butor, Histoire Extraordinaire: Essay on a Dream of Baudelaire's] page
references henceforth follow quotations in the text.
2 See Pichois and Ziegler, Baudelaire, Chapters 2-4; Hemmings,
Baudelaire the Damned, Chapters 1-3; and Starkie, Baudelaire,
Chapters 1-2, esp. pp. 40-41.
3 For an orthodox psychoanalytic reading, see T. Bassim, La Femme
dans Voeuvre de Baudelaire (Neuchatel: Maison de la Baconniere,
1974)-
4 Poems in the Duval cycle alluding to Africa and the Orient include
"Parfum exotique," "La Chevelure," and "Sed non satiata"; see
E. Ahearn, "Black Woman, White Poet: Exile and Exploitation in
Baudelaire's Jeanne Duval Poems," French Review 5111-3 (1977):
212-20.
5 The date of this essay is important: it shows that Baudelaire
maintained his commitment to the ideals of the Second Republic
and to "revolutionary" poetry right up until the coup d'etat of
December 1851, which Baudelaire would later claim "physically
depoliticized " him.
6 See "Notice de 'Revelation Magnetique'" (OC, pp. 312-13); the
quotation is on p. 313.
7 See "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe" (OC, pp. 346-53), esp.
p. 347: "Poe was always great - not only in his nobler creations,
but also as a joker. For he was never a dupe! (Poe fut toujours
grand, non-seulement dans ses conceptions nobles, mais encore
comme farceur. Car il ne fut jamais dupe!) "
8 See Baudelaire's account in his dedication ofHistoires extraordinaires
to Maria Clem (Poe's stepmother) (OC, p. 317).
9 See Butor, Histoire Extraordinaire, p. 109.
10 See Seigel, Bohemian Paris, p. 270.
11 As Baudelaire asks about Poe: "Are there then certain souls who
are destined for the altar, who are what we might call sacred, and
who must go to their death and their glory through a perpetual
sacrifice of themselves? (Y a-t-il done des ames vouees a l'autel,
sacrees pour ainsi dire, et qui doivent marcher a la mort et a la
gloire a travers un sacrifice permanent d'elles-memes?) " ("Edgar
Allan Poe, sa vie et ses ouvrages" [OC, p. 319]). This attitude
supports what Sartre calls the "loser wins" strategy typical of
Baudelaire and many of his contemporaries; see Sartre, Baudelaire
and U Idiot de lafamille.
12 See Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason', Lasch, The Culture of
Narcissism) and Holland, "Narcissism from Baudelaire to Sartre."
13 See Deleuze, Presentation de Sacher-Masoch.
14 See Reik, Masochism in Modern Man.
15 On the dynamics of repudiation ("foreculsion") in Lacan, see
"D'une question preliminaire a tout traitement possible de la
psychose," esp. pp. 72-92. On denial as a feature of borderline
narcissism, see Kernberg, Borderline Conditions, pp. 31-33, 100-01.
16 On the distinction between feelings of inferiority and guilt in
relation to the super-ego, see the entries for "ideal du moi" (pp.
184-86), "moi ideal" (pp. 255-56), and "surmoi" (pp. 471-74)
in Laplanche and Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse; and Zizek,
The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 105—10.
17 See Deleuze, Presentation de Sacher-Masoch, pp. 34-35.
18 Cited ibid., p. 57.
19 Among the most prominent contemporaries similarly affected by
the failure of the Second Republic, one would want to count
Flaubert and Marx.
20 As Baudelaire described his forthcoming collection in Le Messager
de V Assemblee (9 April 1851); cited in Butor, Histoire Extraordinaire,
p. 66.
21 See Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, SE 23:202-04.
22 See Laplanche and Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, pp.
163-67; the quotation is on p. 166.
23 For another definition of modernism along these lines, see
Bernheimer, Figures of III Repute.
Notes to pages 203-ig 291
24 See Starobinski, "Sur quelques repondants allegoriques du
poete," esp. pp. 408 and 412.
25 Without listing the entire collection, some of the most striking
examples of cynical violence with more or less responsibility
include "Le Mauvais Vitrier," "Le Galant Tireur," "Une mort
heroique," "La Femme sauvage et la petite-maitresse," "Assom-
mons les pauvres," "La Fausse Monnaie," "Portraits de maitres-
ses," and " Perte d'aureole;" depictions of idealized suffering with
more or less sympathy would include " Laquelle est la vraie? " " Le
Vieux Saltimbanque," "Les Fenetres," "Le Fou et la Venus,"
"Les Bienfaits de la lune," "Les Veuves," "Les Yeux des
pauvres," and "Les Bons Chiens."
26 Hence the term "projective identification" in discussions of
borderline narcissism; see Kernberg, Borderline Conditions, pp.
30-31 and 80-83.
27 The prose poem narrator has often been misconstrued in this way,
notably by Bersani {Baudelaire and Freud) and Mauron {Le Dernier
Baudelaire).
28 Throughout his discussions of Poe, Baudelaire vents his hatred
against modern "mercantile society" (p. 318), which he likens to
an immense accounting firm (p. 320), where the idea of utility
dominates all else (p. 350).
29 See OC, p. 326; cited in Butor, p. 86.
30 See Wohlfarth, " c Perte d'aureole': the Emergence of the Dandy,"
for a beautiful account of the psycho- and socio-dynamics of this
poem.
31 For the original anecdote, see Petits Poemes en prose, Kopp, ed., p.
345 ("Fusees" no. 11 [OC, p. 627]).
32 For the earlier published version of" Les Projets " (in Le Present, 24
August 1857), see Petits Poemes en prose, Kopp, ed., pp. 73-74.
33 As Wohlfarth puts it: "The elasticity of [the narrator's] double
identity enables him to make the best of both worlds. He can
abandon himself promiscuously to the pleasures of democracy,
crowds and ' prostitution' without renouncing a hidden, potable,
purely psychic sense of his own aristocracy which accompanies all
his activities as a saving, distinguishing arriere-pensee." See " ' Perte
d'aureole': the Emergence of the Dandy," p. 567.
34 Compare, for example, Baudelaire's "Portraits de maitresses"
(42) with the case history Kernberg discusses on p. 237 of Borderline
Conditions.
35 Not many cultural critics recognize the composite nature of
narcissism, even though Kernberg is explicit about it: "the
pathological grandiose self compensates for the generally ' ego-
292 Notes to pages 2ig-j8
weakening' effects of the primitive defensive organization [split-

ting], a common characteristic of narcissistic personalities and
patients of a borderline personality organization." See Kernberg,
Borderline Conditions, p. 269; and Holland, "Narcissism from
Baudelaire to Sartre."
36 Cf. "Mon coeur mis a n u " no. 1 {OC, p. 630): "De la vaporisation
et de la centralisation du Moi. Tout est la."
7 THE PROSE POEM NARRATOR

1 See Freud, " Screen Memories," SE Vol. 3; the quotation is on p.
322.
2 See Starkie, Baudelaire; and Hemmings, Baudelaire the Damned.
3 "II faut aller fusilier le General Aupick! A bas Aupick!" See
Hemmings, Baudelaire the Damned, p. 92.
4 OC, p. 146.
5 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 112; see also Terdiman, Discourse/
Counter-Discourse, Chapter 2.
6 "Mon coeur mis a n u " no. 25 {OC, p. 635).
7 See the letter to Ancelle of 5 March 1852, CG, Vol. 1, no. 119,
pp. 151-52; and "Mon cceur mis a n u " no. 5 {OC, p. 631). The
catastrophe by no means put an end to Baudelaire's passion for
politics; in 1859 he says: " I have convinced myself twenty times
that I would no longer get interested in politics, yet every time a
serious issue comes up, I am overtaken by curiosity and enthusiasm
(Je me suis vingt fois persuade que je ne m'interesserais plus a la
politique et a chaque question grave, je suis repris de curiosite et de
passion)"; and as late as 1862 he still considers himself a
"revolutionary at heart ([j'ai un] vieux fond d'esprit revolu-
tionnaire)" {OC, p. 316); see also Hemmings, Baudelaire the
Damned, pp. 99-100.
8 "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe" {OC, pp. 346-53); the quotation
is from p. 349. See also the discussion in Pachet, Le Premier venu.
9 "Mon cceur mis a n u " no. 41 {OC, p. 639); and "Fusees" no. 15
{OC, p. 629).
I o Electoral tax requirements limited suffrage to less than 1 o percent
of the population; Grafia {Bohemian Versus Bourgeois, p. 13) puts the
figure at 8 percent.
I1 Seigel, Bohemian Paris, p . 217.
12 See ibid., pp. 5-13 and passim; and Grafia, Bohemian Versus
Bourgeois.
13 OC, pp. 737, 623, 624.
14 OC, pp. 632, 631, 628.
15 OC, pp. 639, 632.

16 OC, pp. 634, 632.
17 OC, pp. 637.
18 See Hugo's preface to Lucrezia Borgia, cited in Grana, Bohemian
versus Bourgeois, p. 40.
19 OC, p. 292.
20 From "Pauvre Belgique" (OC, p. 698).
21 "Fusees" no. 10 (OC, p. 626).
22 "Fusees" no. 14 (OC, p. 628).
24 This is the explicit theme of the prose poem "A une heure du
matin" (10).
25 "Fusees" no. 1 (OC, p. 623).
26 See Bernheimer, Figures of III Repute, and Beizer, Family Plots;
references to Figures henceforth follow quotations in the text.
27 Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis, esp. pp. 87-97, 101—1 1, 114-18.
28 Balzac, Splendeur et misere des courtisanes (1844-47; Paris: Garnier-
Flammarion, 1968), p. 619.
31 In "Sur l'Album de Philoxene Boyer" (OC, p. 291).
32 On prostitution and loss of identity in Baudelaire, see Bersani,
Baudelaire and Freud, esp. pp. 8-15.
33 On bourgeois domestic aesthetics, see Williams, Dream Worlds, and
Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, Chapter 13, esp. pp. 230-40.
34 Such disparity between public and private life forms the social
matrix for schizophrenia, according to Laing; see The Divided Self
35 "Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et ses ouvrages" (OC, p. 326).
36 OC, p. 459.
38 See Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud: " w e have in the Petits Poemes en
prose a kind of austere sophistication which consists in the poet's
merely moving away from his own performances. His irony is
equivalent to self-withdrawals; and this casual but devastating
negativity would seem to be the poet's only escape from his violent
projects toward his own desires" (p. 150). But Bersani equates this
withdrawn narrative perspective with the super-ego, which we
have shown is not the case in Baudelaire.
39 Attali, Noise, esp. pp. 128-32.
40 On the relations between semiotic and economic surplus-value, see
Baudrillard, Pour une critique de Veconomie politique du signe; and
Godzich, "The Semiotics of Semiotics."
41 The formula for profit is M ' = M + 6; if M ' = M is metaphor,
then M ' = M + 6 is hyperbolic metaphor.
42 OC, p. 146.
43 "Fusees" no. 13 {OC, p. 628).
8 CONCLUSION
1 See the Anti-Oedipus, pp. 34-37, 114-26, 134-45 (26-30, 95-106,
113-22).
2 I have extrapolated the notion of" apparatus of registration " from
the Anti-Oedipus; see esp. pp. 16-22, 89-100, 142-45 (10-16,
75-84, 119-22).
3 On the centrality of prostitution for the aesthetics of modernism,
see Bernheimer, Figures of III Repute and Scholes, " I n the Brothel of
Modernism".
4 Flaubert's major crisis occurs within the family, Baudelaire's in
society; thus the difference between schizoanalysis and Sartre's
existential psychoanalysis, which respects the boundary between
family and society that Deleuze and Guattari consider a historical
artifice or product; see esp. Sartre's LIdiot de lafamille.
5 This is the definition of modernity implicit in Levi-Strauss; see his
"Introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss," pp. 16—20; see also
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition; and Deleuze and Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, Plateau 9, " Micropolitique et segmentarite"
("Micropolitics and Segmentarity").
6 This is one way schizoanalysis situates psychoanalysis historically:
Freud's discovery of pure libido is possible only once it has been
freed from biological and social determination by ego-centric
anxiety deriving from the predominance of exchange-value over
" use-value "; this is the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari claim
that Freud is the "Adam Smith of psychiatry" —both abstract
libido and abstract labor-power are historically functions of
market capitalism. See the Anti-Oedipus, pp. 321—24 (270—71).
7 Freud himself propounds one (albeit unilinear) version of the
historical assessment of social anxiety in Civilization and its
Discontents (SE Vol. 21), by claiming that anxiety increases as
civilization "progresses."
8 Chapter 3 of the Anti-Oedipus provides a typology of libidinal
modes of production under the rubrics "Savagery, Despotism, and
Civilized Men."
9 See the Anti-Oedipus, pp. 32-43, 52-53, 82-84 (25-35, 61-62,
98-100). For a similar view of how the real as contingent history
"deconstructs" the imaginary/symbolic opposition, see Jameson,
"Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan."
10 On class struggle and the death instinct, see Bataille, "The Notion
of Expenditure " in The Accursed Share.
11 For a different view of postmodernism in Baudelaire, see Jameson,
"Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist."
12 K. Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, pp. 247-60, esp. pp. 249-50; see also the
Anti-Oedipus, pp. 309-310 (259-60).
13 See the Anti-Oedipus, pp. 411-19, 439~5 6 (343-5°> 3 6 6 ~ 8 0 )-
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Index
advertising 4, 7, 14, 33, 149, 233-34, '' Crepuscule du soir " 137,168
247; and modernism: 1, 27, "Le Cygne" 158-61, 169, 182,
252-55> 265 199, 272
allegory 54-59, 64-67, 105-07, 253, 268 "Elevation" 44, 83, 131
Althusser, L. 7, 35, 276 "L'Ennemi" 91-94, 124
anxiety 3, 113, 215; capitalism: "Le Gout du neant" 80, 86
224-26, 232-35; ego-defense: " L'Heautontimoroumenos" 29,
132-35, 172; masochism: 191-92; 80, 96-104, 185, 204
modernism: 268-74 "L'Homme et la mer" 83, 127
Attali, J. 26, 251-52, 263 "L'Horloge" 8-9, 29, 81, 104-07,
authoritarianism xii—xiv, 6; capitalism: 112-14, 132, 137-38, 158, 161,
274-76; masochism: 193-96; 166, 199
Second Empire: 27, 223-24, 228, "Horreur sympathique" 80, 96
232, 258-59 "Hymne a la beaute" 54, 59-68,
71-74, 85-86, 106, 129, 266
Balzac, Honore de 5, 14, 16, 149, "L'Ideal" 14, 54, 251
242—43, 260-61 "L'Irremediable" 29, 80, 96-104,
Baudelaire, Charles 134
Les Fleurs du Mai " L e j e u " 167-70, 185, 204
" A une dame Creole " 180 "Le Masque" 54-59, 66, 69, 74,
"A une mendiante rousse" 156—59, 85, 165
169-71, 215 "Le Mort joyeux" 86
" A une passante" 157,161-64, "Obsession" 82-86, 162—64
225 "Parfum exotique" 68-72, 75, 84,
"L'Albatros" 44 1
29-31
"Alchimie de la douleur" 80, "Paysage" 137-38, 150-55,
95-96 169—70, 182
"La Beaute" 28, 43-69, 74, 76, 79, "LesPhares" 102-03,123-27
87, 104-05, 128-30, 184, 200, '' Reve Parisien " 169-71
206, 251 '' Les Sept Vieillards " 161 -66, 191
"Benediction" 43, 123, 151, 186, "Le Soleil" 22, 137-38, 150-56,
214 159, 169, 225
"Une Charogne" 131 "Spleen" no. 1 88,91-94
"La Ghevelure" 68, 72-75, 86, "Spleen" no. 2 87-91, 106
J
29, 131 "Spleen" no. 3 86—87
" Gorrespondances " 4—5, 25, 28, "Spleen" no. 4 88, 91
40-45. 53, 68-70, 73, 75-79, " Le Tonneau de la haine " 86
82-83, i n , 154 "La Vie anterieure" 68—71, 115,
" Crepuscule du matin " 138, 150, 171 123-24, 179
3°3
3°4 Index
Petits Poemes en prose Blanqui, Auguste 232

'' Assommons les pauvres " 210-12, Bohemia 235-47, 257> 260-61, 264-65,
215, 252-53, 29m. 274, 276-77
"La Chambre double" 206-07, borderline conditions xiii, 25-27;
229 historical conditions: 221-22,
"Le Confiteor de l'artiste" 205, 250 227-32, 248-50, 273-77;
"La Corde" 207—08, 213, 221 masochism: 194-200; prose poem
"Les Fenetres" 212, 29m. narrator: 204—06, 208-13, 218—20
"Le Galant Tireur" 202, 218, (see also narcissism; splitting)
29m. Butor, M. xvi, 9, 23, 177-84, 209, 244
"Le Gateau" 252—55
capitalism xii—xiv, 2-4, 6, 19, 227-28,
"L'Invitation au voyage" 246
240, 247-58, 263-65, 271-77;
'' Le Joueur genereux " 205
anxiety: 6, 234—35, 2^95 decoding:
"Le Joujou du pauvre" 229, 243
"Laquelle est la vraie?" 200—01, 9-15, 36
228, 29m. Chambers, R. 137
"Le Mauvais Vitrier" 201-08, commerce 1-2, 7, 149; dandy: 239-48;
210, 215, 218, 244, 29 m. prose poems: 208,215—19,228-30,
" Une mort heroique " 202—06, 232-34
210, 215, 230, 233, 29m. communicative function 51-52, 56-67,
"Perte d'aureole" 4-5,213-15, 90, 128, 184, 218, 255
225—26, 29m. consumption/consumer society 3-4, 14,
"Les Projets" 215-18, 233, 29m. 215-17; dandy: 6, 233-34, 239-48,
" La Soupe et les nuages " 233 271; and programming: 251-58
" Les Tentations " 205 correspondences (program) 83, 114-15,
"Les Veuves" 244,29m. 158—66, 173, 180; psychodynamics
" Le Vieux Saltimbanque " 204, of: 127-35, 267-68
212, 215, 218, 229, 29m. defense 3-4, 157-65, 172; dandy:
"Les Yeux des pauvres" 229, 240—41; decoding: 22, 28—29,
243-44, 275, 29 m. in—14, 132-35, 224-26; splitting:
"Notes nouvelles sur E. A. Poe" 228 25—26, 191-204, 215-19, 268—75
"Le peintre de la vie moderne" democracy xii, 5-7, 183-84, 188-89,
140-47, 155 227-28, 231—34, 272, 274—76
Salon of 1845 119, 121 desire 124-26, 129—34, 166—72, 192-96,
Salon of 1846 116—23, J 7 9 258; metonymy of: 18-19, 37,
Salon of1859 56-57, 139-47, 155, 179 162-64, 265-66, 271
beautification 47-54, 63-73, 90, 94-95, Dupont, Pierre 177, 181-82, 187, 240
i n , 147, 267—68; programming:
evilification i n , 133-34, 169, 173,
252-55; psychodynamics of:
185-87, 196,272
129—35; "Tableaux Parisiens":
148-49, i55-57> 219 Flaubert, Gustave 14, 16, 260-61, 276
Benjamin, W. xi—xiv, 2-7, 135, 267; Fourier, Charles 181-83
consumption: 245; modernism: Freud, S. 24, 190-93, 199; Benjamin:
273; Second Empire culture: 3, 111-13, 117; Nachtraglichkeit:
224-27; shock-defense: 22—24, xiii, 19, 221-22, 258
111-24; the structure of experience:
6 Hugo, Victor 21, 182, 240-42
> 255-56, 277
Bersani, L. 250; masochism: 187—90; imaginary (the) 126-30; decoding:
prose poem narrator: 205-06 21-25, 197-99, 268-72;
binary logic 244; "Hymne a la romanticism: 28, 178—80, 265-67
beaute": 58—67; socio-symbolic intensification 64, 86-94, 106—07,
order: 16, 36, 104, 126 131-38, 226, 250-52, 268
Index 3°5
irony 28-29, 209, 219, 251, 272; narrative xv, 5-7, 27—29, 204—05,
Beauty: 49-54, 129; epistemology: 242-43, 256, Masochian: 26,
2, 32-35. 57~595 66-67, 133; e v i l : 192-200, 223, 272—73
95-104, 134, 272; and Edgar Allan narrator 3, 25-30, 56-57, 263-64,
Poe: 183-85, 209, 219, 251 274-75; prose poem: 199-220,
Jakobson, R. 11, 30—39, 58, 131 229-30, 248-57
Johnson, B. 73-74 nature xv, 5, 267—74; decoding: 68—74,
76-77, 82-84, 92-94, 138, 142-45;
Kernberg, O. 24-26, 198-99, 219-22, repudiation: 150-57, 166, 169-70,
271 romanticism: 27-28,43-45, 123,
Lacan, J. xiii-xiv, 17-26, 30-38, 127
124-26, 129; masochism: 193, overcoding 123-27, 186
197—99; modernism: 133—35,
268-71; Nachtrdglichkeit: 221-22, Poe, Edgar Allan 23, 27, 177, 182—85,
258 233; ego ideal: 209-12, 218-19,
Lukacs, G. 2-7, 12-15, 17 228, 248-51, 257-58, 273-74
lyric xiii, 2-3, 267; disappearance: pleasure principle 111-13,132-35,
51-52, 65-66, 86-87, 90-93, 190-92, 224, 268—70
98—103, 114, 218-19; subjectivity: postmodernism xv, 1, 15, 273-74
25, 132-34, 171, 234, 255-56, 265 primal signifier 125-27, 133-35
programmer, programming 26-27, 30,
Mallarme, Stephane 36
market xiii, 2—6, 262—65, 269—71, 25i-57> 273-75
prosopopoeia 51-52, 105, 129, 132, 200
274-77; borderline conditions:
26—27, 30, 207—09, 228-30, 233-57; real (the) 17, 20—22, 28-29, 157, 161,
decoding: 10—17, 21—22, 37-39, 268-72; masochism: 194, 199, 204,
259 229; reference: 25,32-39,57-59,
Marx, Karl xiii, 12, 227, 247, 270, 275 94, 129—30, 147, 149, 172, 266
masochism xiv, 26, 185—96, 208-09, recognition 20-21, 34—37, 126, 138, 141,
223-27, 232, 272-73 172, 204-08; decoding: 130-35,
memory 3, 20, 28, 33-37, 111—23, 158—61, 165-67, 179, 191, 266-70
178-80; decoding: 73-75, 86-90, reference 11, 56-59, 94-95, 138—39,
106-07, J 27-48, 158-62, 166, 268; decoding: 16—17, 28-29, 66—67,
Nachtrdglichkeit\ 221-22, 258 131-32; epistemology: 32-37,
modernism xv, 1-10, 150—57, 166-73, 147-49, J57> J 65, I 7 I - 2 , 262,
185, 210, 247—51, 260—76; 265-68
decoding: 14—17, 22-23, 26—30, registration 10, 22, 39, 144-45, J79>
39-43; narrative: 197, 200, 205, 256-69, 273-77
240-43; textuality: 51-52, 103 romanticism xii, xv, 4-6, 22-23, 25-28,
modernity xiii-xv, 3—4, 231-35, 238, 120-23, 232, 240-42, 267-68;
261-77; art: 120—23, 139—43; Beauty cycle: 51-53, 58-59, 66-68;
decoding: 14-17, 20—22, 26-29, " Correspondances": 43-45,
37, 39, 133-35; structure of 73-76; masochism: 185-90,
experience: 112-15, 155-66, 172, 195—96; spleen: 80—85, 89, 91-95,
190-92, 219—20, 224-26, 231-35, 103-04; "Tableaux Parisiens":
I I
241-46, 256-57 5 ~57> 253-55
Napoleon III xii, 3, 6-7, 22-23, l&l~&% Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von xiv,
227-32, 258-59; masochism: 190-96, 199, 223-24; modernism:
194-95, 224 26, 204-05, 272-73
narcissism xiii-xiv, 25—27, 193-97, satanism 133, 173, 185-87, 195-96
209—32, 248-51, 273—77 (see also shock 3-4, 6-7, in—14, 157—65, 172,
borderline conditions) 191, 224-26; art: 117-20, 141-46;
306 Index
borderline conditions: 204, 208, surplus-value 11-13,251-55,263,

233, 240-41, 275 275-76, 293n, 294n.
socio-symbolic order 15-21, 34—36, symbolic (the) 16-23, 34~37> J 24-29,
121-24, 187-190, 228, 232; 197—99, 268—72; masochism:
decoding: 59-64, 127-35, 236-38, 192-94, 204-08
265-67, 271—72
textual function 51-52, 56—57, 67, 90,
spleen 8, 22, 28-29, 86-95, I 3 I ~38,
128-29, 184, 218, 255
172; defense: m - 1 5 , 226, 268,
trauma 21-22, 28, 113-14, 180,
273; trauma: 103—07, 127, 148,
199-200, 222-24; decoding:
224
123-27, 266; defense: 132-34,
splitting 3-4, 7, 24-27, 104, 274-77;
historical conditions: 224-32, 191-94, 211, 268—69
247-51, 258, 274-77; prose poems: value-hierarchies 36, 59-67, 104, 126,
193—206, 212-19; "Tableaux 242-43, 266
Parisiens": 167, 172
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN FRENCH
General editor: Michael Bowie (All Souls College, Oxford)

Editorial Board: R. Howard Bloch (University of California, Berkeley),
Ross Chambers (University of Michigan), Antoine Compagnon
(Columbia University), Peter France (University of Edinburgh),
Toril Moi (Duke University), Naomi Schor (Duke University)
Also in the series (* denotes titles now out of print)

1. j . M. COCKING
Proust: Collected Essays on the Writer and his Art
2. LEO BERSANI
The Death of Stephane Mallarme
*3. MARIAN HOBSON
The Object of Art: The Theory of Illusion in Eighteenth-
Century France
4. L E O S P I T Z E R , translated and edited by David Bellos
Essays on Seventeenth-Century French Literature
5. NORMAN BRYSON
Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix
6. ANN MOSS
Poetry and Fable: Studies in Mythological Narrative in
Sixteenth-Century France
7. RHIANNON GOLDTHORPE
Sartre: Literature and Theory
8. DIANA KNIGHT
Flaubert's Characters: The Language of Illusion
9. ANDREW MARTIN
The Knowledge of Ignorance: From Genesis to Jules Verne
10. GEOFFREY BENNINGTON
Sententiousness and the Novel: Laying Down the Law in
Eighteenth-Century French Fiction
*II. PENNY FLORENCE
Mallarme, Manet and Redon: Visual and Aural Signs and
the Generation of Meaning
12. CHRISTOPHER PRENDERGAST
The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, and
Flaubert
13. NAOMI SEGAL
The Unintended Reader: Feminism and Manon Lescaut
14. GLIVE SCOTT
A Question of Syllables: Essays in Nineteenth-Century
French Verse
15. STIRLING HAIG
Flaubert and the Gift of Speech: Dialogue and Discourse in
Four 'Modern' Novels
*l6. NATHANIEL WING
The Limits of Narrative: Essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert,
Rimbaud and Mallarme
Corneille, Classicism and the Ruses of Symmetry
*l8. HOWARD DAVIES
Sartre and ' Les Temps Modernes'
19. ROBERT GREER COHN
Mallarme's Prose Poems: A Critical Study
20. CELIA BRITTON
Claude Simon: Writing the Visible
21. DAVID SCOTT
Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-
Century France
22. ANN JEFFERSON
Reading Realism in Stendhal
23. DALIA JUDOVITZ
Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of
Modernity
24. RICHARD D. E. BURTON
Baudelaire in 1859
25. MICHAEL MORIARTY
Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France
26. JOHN FORRESTER
The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida
27. JEROME SCHWARTZ
Irony and Ideology in Rabelais: Structures of Subversion
28. DAVID BAGULEY
Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision
29. LESLIE HILL
Beckett's Fiction: In Different Words
30. F. W. LEAKEY
Baudelaire: Collected Essays, 1953-1988
31. SARAH KAY
Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry
32. GILLIAN JONDORF
French Renaissance Tragedy: The Dramatic Word
33- LAWRENCE D. KRITZMAN
The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French
Renaissance
34. JERRY G. NASH
The Love Aesthetics of Maurice Sceve: Poetry and Struggle
35. PETER FRANCE
Politeness and its Discontents: Problems in French Classical
Culture
Subjectivity and Subjugation in Seventeenth-Century Drama
and Prose: The Family Romance of French Classicism
37. TOM CONLEY
The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing
38. MARGERY EVANS
Baudelaire and Intertextuality: Poetry at the Crossroads
39. JUDITH STILL
Justice and Difference in the Works of Rousseau: Bienfaisance
and Pudeur
40. CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON
System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida
41. CAROL A. MOSSMAN
Politics and Narratives of Birth: Gynocolonization from
Rousseau to Zola
42. DANIEL BREWER
The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century
France: Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing
43. ROBERTA L. KRUEGER
Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French
Verse Romance
44. JAMES H. REID
Narration and Description in the French Realist Novel: The
Temporality of Lying and Forgetting

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This new study of Baudelaire's writings is the first book to

apply the principles of schizoanalysis to literary history

BAUDELAIRE AND SCHIZOANALYSIS

General editor: Malcolm Bowie (All Souls College, Oxford)

Recent titles in this series include

Cambridge University Press

© Cambridge University Press 1993

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 1993

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

ISBN-13 978-0-521-41980-2 hardback

ISBN-13 978-0-521-03134-9 paperback

3 Spleen and evil 80

Modernist imagination and the "Tableaux

PART III SOGIOPOETICS

7 The prose poem narrator 221

A Klee painting named " Angelus Novus" shows an angel

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection

" Au fond de l'lnconnu pour trouver du nouveau!" To the depths

nineteenth-century France. Yet in another sense, reflections on

split "structure of experience" (p. 110) conveyed in the work of

revolutionary hopes of 1848 he shared with so many romantics,

Ever since Barbey d'Aurevilly's famous remark attributing a

While the concept of metonymy enables us to trace the

cultural dynamics of market society, simultaneously. This

The inherent instability of codes is magnified under capitalism

sensible qualities - the basis of metaphor and of codes. Hence

jective" reporting of isolated facts in the mass-circulation

symbolic order") comprising a culture implodes, and the binary

damental opposition is the difference between the sexes; the law

nineteenth-century France. At issue are the disintegration of the

endows its object with meaning. Nevertheless, much of Baude-

Baudelaire beyond the shock-defense of the early works identi-

wildly between indiscriminate fusion and violent antagonism.

series is the appearance, in place of the revolutionary crowd, of

it were simultaneously, rather than cyclically. Chapters 6 and

In order to link the insights of psychoanalysis to the texture of

system; any question of reference is quietly excluded from the

of social codes in and through which subjectivity is lived. And

Although no one-to-one correlation exists between the axes of

The aim of this study is not to celebrate the advent or longevity

Correspondences versus beauty

THE ROMANTIC CYCLE

cruelly taunted by uncomprehending humanity in "L'Alba-

addresses the object of poetry: beauty - or rather, he has Beauty

It should be clear that "La Beaute" undermines and replaces

"Le Masque" thus in one sense makes explicit what the

Beaute. "Just as reference according to Jakobson can be divided

At the close of the beauty cycle, "Hymne a la Beaute"

to that of" La Beaute," its metonymic poetics is much the same.

L'ephemere ebloui vole vers toi, chandelle,

Semantically, the prepositional object " t o i " (1. 17) evidently

C'est la que j'ai vecu dans les voluptes calmes,

explicit: "des rivages / une ile / des hommes / et des femmes"

It is true, as Barbara Johnson has demonstrated, that compared

I stress that metonymy tends to undermine metaphor, for my

uniformly metonymic, nor even that they become increasingly

the straightforward similes of the second quatrain. As De Man

It is not my aim to read poem by poem through the entire

Spleen and evil

SPLEEN AND IDEAL

metaphoric poetics and imagery; second, a continuing poetic

starts up again, apostrophizing night this time, and ends by