Heads and/Are Tails: Eccentric Conjunctions in Baudelaire's "Spleen de Paris"

Abstract

in critical pairings of Baudelaire and Mallarm6, it is generally Mallarm6 who receives attention for productively tinkering with grammar, for connecting altered or ambiguous syntax with interrogations of truth, subjectivity, and referential language. Baudelaire's writing is also held to pursue such interrogations, of course, but most often by other routes; its grammar and syntax usually seem just correct or conventional enough to remain on the fuzzy periphery of the reader's interest. To stay on the periphery is not to drop out of sight, however, and details of grammar in Baudelaire's texts sometimes expand into pressing questions about the linguistic and social construction of the subject. What I want to explore here is an exemplary instance of this expansion, involving portions of Le Spleen de Paris. The grammatical nicety in question makes its first, unobtrusive appearance in the letter of dedication that accompanied twenty of Baudelaire's prose poems when he sent them in 1862 to Arsene Houssaye, literary editor of La Presse. At the start of this now famous letter, one finds an initial image and some suggestions on what to do with it: