Le Spleen De Paris Research Articles

Surgical Imprecision and the Baudelairean poeme en prose

Though Baudelaire's Dedicace Arsene Houssaye provides a dubious manifesto of the prose poem genre, (1) it more importantly builds a network of repeated images and allusions from which, along with the other prose poems in the collection (Le Spleen de Paris or Petits Poemes en prose, 1869) the reader may piece together the prose poems' poetics. Of these, the presence of the snake, and the invitation to perform multiple surgeries on it, are among the most intriguing. Now exceedingly familiar to readers of Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire's serpent might be considered, in literary circles at least, a dead metaphor. Yet by reading beyond the anticipated symbolic power of the snake (the power of evil, the power of the phallus), and of surgery (a masculine vocation, an act of precision), one begins to understand the serpent as not just an ambiguous simulacrum of the prose poems, but a simulacrum of the prose poems' ambiguity. In Le Spleen de Paris, modulations of recognizable and ostensibly masculine acts and images not only erode articulations of gender throughout the prose poems' narrative, thematic and metaphorical systems, but in so doing, accentuate the genre ambiguity implicit in the poeme en prose. Baudelaire's serpent has become a well-known figure in the French literary menagerie, playing a crucial, metaphorical role in the characterization of would-be textual operations in Le Spleen de Paris: Mon cher ami, je vous envoje un petit ouvrage dont on ne pourrait pas dire, sans injustice, qu'il n'a ni queue ni tete, puisque tout, au contraire, y est la fois tete et queue, alternativement et reciproquement. Considerez, je vous prie, quelles admirables commodites cette combinaison nous offre tous, vous, a moi et au lecteur. Nous pouvons couper ou nous voulons, moi ma reverie, vous le manuscrit, le lecteur sa lecture; carje ne suspens pas la volonte retive de celui-ci au fil d'une intrigue superflue. Enlevez une vertebre, et les deux morceaux deette tortueuse fantaisie se rejoindront sans peine. Hachez-la en nombreux fragments, et vous verrez que chacun peut exister a part. Dans l'esperance que quelques-uns de ces troncons seront assez vivants pour vous plaire et vous amuser, j'ose vous dedier le serpent tout entier. (OCI, 275) (2) The versed reader has already encountered sundry endangered species in Baudelaire's metaphorical bestiary, among them the tortured albatross, the displaced swan, the mentally imprisoned cat (Miner 1997, 105) and the disoriented bat. It is tempting at first to rely upon this serpent, passively waiting to be clinically segmented and reattached by the reader cum surgeon, as a viable if vulnerable analog of the prose poem collection. Baudelaire's serpent appears to embody vital signs for reading the genre and the text. In fact, the characterization of the serpent and reader is at first so convincing, one easily forgives a zoological inaccuracy: while some small worms (planaria) will regenerate if cut lengthwise, no snake could survive the sort of vivisection Baudelaire prescribes. Poetic license justifies such biological imprecision, yet the figure of the serpent still conceals the anatomy of the prose poems. For the reader who approaches Le Spleen de Paris as a group of poems, the metaphor of the serpent seems in itself superfluous, more a decoy than a model for reading the collection. While Baudelaire did specify in a letter to Vigny that the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal had a beginning, an end, and a lexical order, (3) readers do not necessarily feel bound to follow poetry collections methodically from the first poem to the last. Baudelaire's references to the serpent and to the interminable thread of a superfluous plot represent a rejection of the boundaries normally imposed upon prose, not poetry, specifically the narrative prose of the novel and the short story. Even if we consider each element in the collection to be a short prose piece, the suggested dynamics of surgeon and snake, reader and text, are not obvious. …

Rethinking Modernity in Antonio Tabucchi's Narrative Work

Antonio Tabucchi' s tale titled Anywhere out of the world, published just in the middle of his volume Piccoli equivoci senza importanza (Tabucchi 1985: 71-81), is presented, from the very beginning, like the rewriting of a previous text. In this case, Tabucchi' s literary referent is the French XIXth. Century writer: Charles Baudelaire. This is not only clear from the title, which is also the title of one of his poemes en prose, but for the several quotations included in Tabucchi' s tale. Some of them remind us the BaudelairianPetits poemes enprose (Le Spleen de Paris) (Baudelaire, 1975-1976), while others refer to his poetic work, that is Les jleurs du mal, as we shall see in the present essay. In this operation of assimilation of the literary past, Tabucchi traces a path that from the beginning of Modernity, in themes as well as in forms, will lead us into its final overcoming, while proposing a re-reading of Modernity in post-modem times and from a . Postmodernist viewpoint.

The “fatal attractions” of “serious things”: Regency politics and performance in Baudelaire's Le spleen de Paris

The “fatal attractions” of “serious things”: Regency politics and performance in Baudelaire's Le spleen de Paris

Semiotic Intersections in Baudelaire and Magritte

Semiotic Intersections in Baudelaire and Magritte* Stamos Metzidakis MAGRITTE NEVER STOPPED QUESTIONING the usual ties that bind people to the objects of everyday life. Indeed, part of his originality consists in his transformation of man in general, of man as a unique being having control over his environment, to just another object living in a pictoro-poetic universe. His famous paintings that depict a crowd of identical men wearing bowler hats, falling out of the sky, like so many drops of rain ("Golconde," 1953), or creeping along me ground to the threshold of his window, like vines during harvest ("Le mois des vendanges," 1959), make this clear. In a letter addressed to Philippe Robert-Jones, the painter is quite firm on mis point. According to Magritte, the signs he chooses to produce are "des objets ... non des symboles," despite their conventional status in me world. Consequently, one might say, like Jacques Meuris, that everydiing in the Magrittian universe is "objet, toute chose est chose, quel que soit Ie genre auquel il appartient."1 Nothing in art is to be privileged a priori over anything anymore. The Belgian painter must, therefore, have understood from die beginning of his artistic career that by questioning our perceptions and representations of things, he could not help but disturb some of our deepest prejudices, whether aesthetic or otherwise. In choosing to ally himself with things rather than "knowers" of diings, Magritte finds himself thereby naturally comparable to a poet such as Francis Ponge, the audior of "Le parti pris des choses." Nonetheless, we might assume that any parallel between our painter and a poet like Ponge can be justified as much by form as by content. I allude here to the predilection for poetic prose exhibited not only by Ponge, but also, and especially, by Baudelaire in Le Spleen de Paris, Rousseau in Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, and Lautréamont in Les Chants de Maldoror, all of whom Magritte transposed into art works at one point or other. Because he was so well-read and inspired by so many sources, one could object diat I attribute too much importance to one specific style of writing, one perhaps too marginal, and not enough to others. In fact, whenever he mentions genre it seems he does so only to denounce it. It is, therefore, important to underscore mat Magrittian iconography ignores most traditional generic constraints and often derives from non-aesthetic or anti-aesthetic sources, such as those Vol. XXXIX, No. 1 71 L'Esprit Créateur found in "cheap or low-brow literature, die literature of incredible adventures: cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, Nick Carter, Arsène Lupin and so on" (Meuris 139). Yet, these sources are not unrelated to those described in a great number of prose poems, as we shall see presently. We should, therefore, recognize that Magritte always kept his distance with the notion of high "Art," in particular, widi the notion of "great" painting , whether didactic, moral or political. This explains why he insists that "l'Art appliqué [Art with a capital A] tue l'art pur."2 He consistently rejects conceptions of Platonic beauty, moralistic allegory, servile imitation, glory or concealed symbolism so dear to past artists. To prove this assertion, we need only remember his infamous paintings mat recapture, in a new perspective, portraits made by David and Manet in the nineteenth century ("Perspective I: David's Madame Récamier," 1950, and "Perspective II: Manet's Balcony," 1950, respectively). These portraits proclaim their modernity by eclipsing the conventional use of pretty bourgeois figures, and by replacing them with coffins. The same conclusion can be drawn from Magritte's answer to a question asked during an interview for Life magazine about Primavera's face in his painting called "Le Bouquet tout fait" (1957): " J'ai choisi l'image de Primavera , mais non l'idée. Je n'ai pas lu le sens allégorique que Botticelli lui aurait prêté [...]. Je ne m'intéresse pas à la philosophie, mais à l'image" (EC 612). This leads us to suppose that in Magritte's paintings one finds a sort of semiotic continuum between the mechanisms and the objectives of his...

The Disappearance of Objects in "Surmodernity": From Object-images to Meta-objects

The Disappearance of Objects in "Surmodernity": From Object-images to Meta-objects

Baudelaire's Frisson Fraternal Horror and Enchantment in "Les Tableaux Parisiens"

"Baudelaire's Frisson Fraternel: Horror and Enchantment in 'Les Tableaux Parisiens'" considers the significance of encounters between Baudelaire's narrator, the urban flâneur, in "Les Sept vieillards," "Les Petites vieilles," and "Les Aveugles," and grotesque, sinister, yet fascinating figures met in the street. The article demonstrates that these encounters are different in kind from other allegorical figures in the many other urban poems of Les Fleurs du Mal and Le Spleen de Paris, such as the verse poems "Le Cygne," "Le Soleil," and "Le Crepuscule du soir," and the prose texts "Les Yeux des pauvres" and "La Fausse monnaie;" this difference is attributed to a nexus of associations whose common term is an uncannily indeterminate humanity, in which life and death are increasingly indistinguishable. The fascination and anxiety evoked by these figures in the narrator and the reader alike provoke a terrible immediacy with the unconscious, an irresistible return of repressed, primitive fears, drawing us into a disturbing proximity with death.

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

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:

Dwelling in Possibility: Encounters with the Other in Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris

Dwelling in Possibility: Encounters with the Other in Baudelaire's <i>Le Spleen de Paris</i>

Baudelaire's prose poems: the esthetic, the ethical, and the religious in The Parisian prowler

A study of 50 prose poems Baudelaire wrote between 1857 and his death in 1867 and collected posthumously under the title Le Spleen de Paris, translated as Parisian Prowler. The author sees them as a coherent ensemble of fables of modern life that unite lyricism and critical self-awareness.

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Get access BAUDELAIRE: The Parisian Prowler. ‘Le Spleen de Paris’. ‘Pètits Poemes en prose’. Translated by EDWARD K. KAPLAN. Athens-London, University of Georgia Press, 1990. xii + 140 pp. 21 ill. Hb $19.95. Pb $9.95. Baudelaire's Prose Poems: The Esthetic, the Ethical, and the Religious in ‘The Parisian Prowler’. By EDWARD K. KAPLAN. Athens-London, University of Georgia Press, 1990. xix + 227 pp. Hb $35.00. ROSEMARY LLOYD ROSEMARY LLOYD INDIANA UNIVERSITYBLOOMINGTON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XLV, Issue 4, October 1991, Pages 477–478, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XLV.4.477 Published: 01 October 1991

The Limits of Narrative: Essays on Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud &amp; Mallarmé by Nathaniel Wing

L ’E sprit C réateur age” (28) for his death recasts the newly invented electric chair used to punish an inhuman man. Nonetheless, this book (it could have been titled “ Machine, Metaphor, and the Male Writer” ) is criticism with its convictions showing. Its mission is such that its misreadings are forgiven in a rush of gratitude for Knapp’s concern with our quality of life and her agenda for the reader’s self-awareness. This is what Jung wanted. L in da K lieoer S tillm an Nathaniel Wing. T he L imits of N arrative: E ssays on Baudelaire, F laubert, R im baud & M allarm é. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986. Pp. x + 155. $29.95. The dissolution of narrative history and concomitant dispersal of the integral, authori­ tative self in recent criticism have themselves sought authorization in a story that finds the beginnings of our modernism in Nietzsche and Mallarmé. As Nathaniel Wing shows, the restricted economy of desire in traditional narrative, based on such oppositions as self/ other, real/imaginary, past/present, and text/fact, had broken down at least a generation before Mallarmé’s “ Crise de vers” (1886). After tracing the fissures and exchanges that redistribute those oppositions in texts by the writers named in the subtitle, he explores the affiliations of literary and social change between 1848 and 1875. The first of two chapters on Baudelaire treats his use of allegory, a figure that critics (including Baudelaire) have disparaged because of its apparent fixation of meaning. When the allegorical signified stands as a sign of a prior signified, and the irony that would con­ tain allegory is itself treated ironically, the subject and its stories lose their coherence. Here Wing draws on themes from Paul de Man’s “ The Rhetoric of Temporality” to illuminate Baudelaire’s practice in Les Fleurs du mat. The following chapter, on Le Spleen de Paris, shows how the deconstructed subject attempts to reconstitute itself in narcissistic and sado­ masochistic exchanges with a double or the opposite sex (love and art being exemplary sites of the latter exchange). In less agonistic relationships, exemplified in “ Les Foules,” the textual subject loosens its hold on self-identity to enter “ a mobile and exhilarating network of differences” (40). The distance between the impersonal narrator and Emma in Madame Bovary would appear to preclude the interaction of self and other that is possible in the je-tu dyad charac­ teristic of the lyric. By approaching the issue of the narrator’s relationship to Emma through a study of her own emergence as a storyteller, Wing uncovers a hitherto unnoticed aspect of their similarity. From her first attempts to understand how the félicité, passion, and ivresse in books could have meaning in experience, Emma eventually emerges as a nar­ rator of desire in her letters to Léon. If her delusion of fulfilled desire leads necessarily to an end in its death, the illusion created by the “ impersonal” narrator, who has sacrificed a self for the permanence of aesthetic form, must follow the same trajectory to tell and finish the tale. The attempt to achieve narrative self-identity takes another form in autobiography, Une Saison en enfer here serving as Wing’s example. Traditionally, as he says, its object has been to unite the “ I” of histoire (often conveyed in the simple past tense) with the present “ I” of discours, or—in another register—the subject of the énonciation with that of the énoncé. Rimbaud’s efforts to unify the past with presence—whether by incorporating the past, rejecting it in a disruptive “ pagan tongue,” or fantasizing a future—lead unevenly toward a present discours “ in which each articulation of the / produces the mark of non­ coincidence” that cannot free itself from the past or become “ absolutely modern” by 110 S u m m e r 1990 Book Reviews creating a counter-discourse freed from the entailments of language. After a chapter on “ L’Après-midi d’un faune,” as rich in perception as those that pre­ cede it, Wing turns to Marx’s writings on the years 1848-1851 and the trials of Flaubert and Baudelaire in 1857, exploring the crossings of political...

Baudelaire and Le Spleen De Paris

The collection of prose poems known as Le Spleen de Paris is an important, puzzling, and yet relatively neglected area of Baudelaire's work. This is the first study in English that is exclusively concerned with these texts. Approaching the poems chronologically, Hiddleston focuses primarily on the position of the artist and his attitude towards his art, the often enigmatic and contradictory moral message the poems purpose to convey and, above all, the relationship between prose and poetry in this hybrid and, by the poet's own admission, dangerous genre.

Laurence Sterne and Le Spleen de Paris

LAURENCE STERNE AND LE SPLEEN DE PARIS Get access MARGERY EVANS MARGERY EVANS WARWICK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XLII, Issue 2, April 1988, Pages 165–176, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XLII.2.165 Published: 01 April 1988