Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #417006 in Books
• Published on: 1998-12-31
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 374 pages

Customer Reviews

The dark seeds of modernity
Charles Baudelaire's two-volume translation, "Histoires extraordinaires pas Edgar Poë", encouraged him to experiment with the relationship the American author had forged between the activities of reading and writing. His development of the association is established in "Au Lecteur, the preface-poem to "Les Fleurs du Mal", as reader and writer alike are cast as puppets of Satan Trismégiste. It marks out the collection as the work of a poet whose inverted, heterodox form of Catholicism is as preoccupied with the forces of evil and their manifestations as that of orthodox belief. Baudelaire's characterization of Satan Trismégiste perverts the drama of the Trinity, hinting at the presence of malignant hermetic arts and questioning whether humanity would be capable of action in the absence of these forces. Baudelaire's message to his reader is that the human psyche is a sort of Pandemonium, inhabited by demons that govern every vice. There is one, the most foul power of them all, which none of us can avoid: 'C'est l'Ennui!- l'oeil chargé d'un pleur involontaire, /Il rêve d'échafauds en fumant sons houka. /Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat, /- Hypocrite lecteur,- mon semblable, - mon frère!'. The violent accusation of 'Hypocrite lecteur' hurls the author and his reader into a hermeneutic void where the subject-object dichotomy is reduced to papery dust that blurs all such distinctions in the poems that follow.

Look at "Bénediction" which is the first poem in "Les Fleurs du Mal". Baudelaire spurns subjectivity when he draws an analogy between the personae of the poet and Christ: 'Et je me soûlerai de nard, d'encens, de myrrhe, /De génuflexions, de viandes et de vins, /Pour savoir si je puis dans un coeur qui m'admire /Usurper en riant les hommages divins!' and 'Dans le pain et le vin destinés à sa bouche, /Ils mêlent de la cendre avec d'impurs crachat; /Avec hypocrisie ils jettent ce qu'il touche'. The poet associates authorial presence in the text with the Real Presence of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. This ultimate objectivity, however, was dissipated in advance when "Au Lecteur" concluded with the accusation of 'Hypocrite lecteur,- mon semblable,- mon frère!'.

The words 'hypocrite' and 'hypocrisie' are, like 'hypostasis' of the Eucharist, rooted in the Greek 'hupókris'. Their presence in "Au Lecteur" and "Bénediction" signifies 'acting' as much as 'pretence'. Baudelaire beckons subsequent poets into following these dual lines of self-erasure and self-composition, lines that T. S. Eliot was to retrace in "The Waste Land", the first section of which concludes with a ventriloquistic shriek of 'You! hypocrite lecteur! mon semblable,- mon frère!'. Accordingly, I recommend this text not only to the general reader of French poetry, but also to the student of comparative literature. Eliot's 1926 Clark Lectures laud Baudelaire as the 'parent' of metaphysical literature in France. The Anglo-American poet employs biblical rhythms to pronounce that 'Baudelaire and D'Aurevilly begat Huysmans', while 'Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier produced Mallarmé, who begat Valéry'. Baudelaire, 'plus certain other influences produced Laforgue and Corbière...and Baudelaire with other influences produced Rimbaud, who produced the contemporary surréalistes'. Eliot might have included his own name for he had tagged himself onto this textual genealogy long before his echo of "Au Lecteur", adopting Baudelaire's images of the Eucharist, foggy cities, cats, and decks of cards. (The Clark Lectures are published in "On the Definition of Metaphysical Poetry" edited and introduced by Ronald Schuchard.)

"Les Fleurs du Mal" possesses an exacerbated sensibility that flourishes into a strange beauty to expose its own corruption and with it the festering nature of the literary text per se. It is a sensibility that establishes Baudelaire as a precursor of poetic form in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.