Heightening the Lowly (Baudelaire: "Je n'ai pas oublié . . ." and "A une passante")

Abstract

"Heightening the Lowly (Baudelaire: 'Je n'ai pas oublié . . .' and 'A une passante')" Framed by a concept of fetish æsthetics that links Baudelaire and Proust's fictional painter, Elstir, the article examines the evolution of Baudelaire's fetishizing understanding of "modern beauty." It does so by asking the question: why was "Je n'ai pas oublié . . ." moved in 1861 to the new "Tableaux Parisiens" section of the Fleurs du Mal? and by proposing that the proximity of "Je n'ai pas oublié . . ." to "A une passante" figures the disharmony introduced into Baudelaire's fetishizing metaphysics by the events of 1848–51. Thus, the latter poem is itself an allegory of history as the devestatingly preteritional "passing by" that permits a glimpse of eternity as the manifestation of le mal. The statues of "Je n'ai pas oublié . . ." ("cachant leurs membres nus") and the statuesque woman of "A une passante" ("avec sa jambe de statue") together motivate an examination of the statue as fetish figure in post-1851 Baudelaire and of the "noisy chiasmus" as his new figure of a world awry – one constructed fetishistically as an x-like meeting-place where an encounter with the not-known can result only in alienated knowledge.