Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th-Century Media by Marit Grøtta

Abstract

Reviewed by: Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th-Century Media by Marit Grøtta Aimée Boutin Marit Grøtta. Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and 19th-Century Media. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 216 pp. Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics invites us to look back at Charles Baudelaire’s writings through the specificity and historicity of new technologies of vision rather than with the naked eye alone. Norwegian scholar Marit Grøtta argues that Baudelaire was not only taken with the cult of images of his era; rather, he reflected on the act of “seeing, framing, and interpreting [End Page 143] images” and responded to a new perceptual regime (8). The book analyses a thought-provoking combination of media—ranging from newspapers and photographs to optical toys and pre-cinematic devices, such as the kaleidoscope, the phenakistiscope, the stereoscope, the panorama, and the phantasmagoria—to study similarities between Baudelaire’s encounters with different media and assess how media played a role in shaping his idea of modernity. The eye-catching cover design by Eleanor Rose based on a phenakistiscope disk does an excellent job of conveying the significance of media and movement to this study. In her Introduction, Grøtta carefully builds a solid theoretical framework one block at a time. The entire book is clearly argued and logically presented. In line with the recent upswing in interest in Le Spleen de Paris, Grøtta’s analysis focuses on the prose poems rather than Les Fleurs du mal. As a work of visual studies, Baudelaire’s Media Aesthetics builds on the scholarship of Tom Gunning and Jonathan Crary for whom “the gaze of the flâneur” signaled in the book’s subtitle is a shorthand for the mediated gaze of the mobile spectator of the big modern city. The argument’s two main anchors are Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, who provide the essential theoretical tools to build on the four main concepts Grøtta deploys: movement, montage, mediation, and play. The first chapter focuses on newspapers, which are laid out using the principle of montage, and require a new kind of reader equipped to deal with fragmentation and speed. Newspapers shape visual experience, thus producing a new kind of visibility (33). Chapter one builds on critical discourse on nineteenth-century French literature and the press, and more specifically on Baudelaire’s relationship to the newspaper to argue that the poet’s vision of urban life was mediated through the newspaper. The combination of anecdote and allegory in his poems also creates tension between different modes of reading that suggest the influence of the newspaper on his aesthetics (39). The second chapter on photographs takes a fresh path down a well-traveled road in Baudelairean studies; most recently Françoise Meltzer in Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity (Chicago, 2011) and Tim Raser in Baudelaire and Photography: Finding the Painter of Modern Life (Legenda 2015) have written about the poet and art critic’s visual aesthetic and his condemnation of photography in the Salon de 1859. Though well known, Baudelaire’s attack on photography does not tell the whole story; chapter two reconsiders the use of photographic images in three prose poems (“Les Fenêtres,” “Mademoiselle Bistouri,” and “Le Joueur généreux”) that draw [End Page 144] on the camera’s gaze and framing. Grøtta examines the framed view in “Les Fenêtres” in terms of the “dispositive” of photograph and caption, meaning that she reads the “window-image” of the woman in “Les Fenêtres” and the poet’s writings or literalization of the image as corresponding to a photograph and its caption. After an analysis of the violence of photography in “Mademoiselle Bistouri,” Grøtta turns her attention to the traffic in souls as trade or circulation in/of images and carte de visite photography in “Le Joueur généreux.” As a “poet in the age of technological reproducibility” (71), Baudelaire is interested not only in photography’s ability to arrest images but also to put them into circulation. In this way, argues Grøtta, Baudelaire “battle[s] the passive consumption of images encouraged by the...