Between Irony and Desire

...The author is a neo-Freudian, but he is not the crude kind of psychoanalytical critic who spends his time counting umbrellas and snakes, searching with clinical pomposity for a writer's kinks...

...For the essence of desire is its mutability, its urge always to desert the actuality of the object desired, its irrepressible tendency to disintegrate both the self and the external world into the material of fantasy...

...Les Fleurs du Mai is a splendid feat of language and imagery, and its status as a classic for more than a century has laundered the ambiguous sexuality that in 1857 perturbed even the Parisians...

...A single sentence can glitter with suggestiveness: "Deconstruction and mobility: these are the mental processes in which we discover that self-scattering which is the principal feature of Baudelairian desire...

...More than any other individual, he laid down the canons of modernism, indicating how the exter-nalization of one's vision could make it the stuff of fantasy that it eventually became in Joyce and Proust, the heirs of realism...

...He has enough knowledge of the creative process to realize that we are not talking about a person who may or may not have practiced sexual sadism, but about a poet in whose writing sadistic images played an important and necessary role...

...In brief, then: Baudelaire the ironist and dandy represents the principle of order, the social principle...

...For instance, in "Au Lecteur" the flavor of exotic nonchalance is blurred when "en fumant son houka" is translated as "he smokes his pipe...

...This is, after all, an essay, not a treatise...

...Indeed, so much mud has flowed under the bridges of literature during the last decade or so that a surface reading of his poetry is unlikely to arouse more than admiration for its marvelous sonority...

...Like Freud, he can be located in that critical moment in our culture's history when an idealistic view of the self and of the universe was being simultaneously held on to and discredited by a psychology (if the word still applies) of the fragmented and the discontinuous...

...This study is a long essay in a series called Quantum Books?short enough to be read in an evening and significant enough to be a book...

...He further claims that "Baudelaire's work gives us images of this psychic fragmentation at the same time as it documents a determined resistance to all such ontological floating...

...On one level, all that Baudelaire achieved can be accepted without too much analysis...

...The translations from the French are stylistically clumsy and at times detract substantially form the original...

...There is much here that is purposefully tentative...

...He regards these personal myths as a simplification of the poet's actual creative process, and "an escape from the anxieties produced by Baudelaire's discovery of psychic mobility, of an unanchored identity...

...There are flaws, to be sure...

...On another level, however, as Leo Bersani suggests in this book, Baudelaire can be read as a remarkable object lesson in the nature of creativity...

...Bersani begins by discussing the overt dichotomies Baudelaire deliberately cultivated—Heaven-Hell, Christ-Satan...

...Still, Bersani has turned the need to be concise to his advantage by his aphoristic style...

...author, "The Writer and Politics" Charles Baudelaire is a portentous and enigmatic figure in the history of Western literature, occupying the point where tradition breaks down into the contradictions of modernity...

...In a line made famous by T. S. Eliot, "Hypocrite lecteur,—mon sembla-ble—mon frere," the two middle words are rendered prosaically as "my fellow man," whereas what Baudelaire really meant was something closer to "my double...

...It is argued with a jargonless clarity unusual among writers who use the psychoanalytic method, and its directness is possibly a measure of the maverick nature of Bersani's Freudianism, which is more concerned with the process of creativity than with its raw materials...

...By so doing, it seems to establish a cohesiveness that Baudelaire himself did not consciously intend...

...And his dichotomies, both as a man and as a poet, were typically modern—the opposition between order and disorder, between irony and desire...

...Nevertheless, it does sketch, by a very acute analysis of the role of desire, an approach to Les Fleurs du Mai that helps elucidate the difficulty many readers have had with it—namely, that of reconciling the deliberate unity of the cycle's external structure with the recurrent psychic disorder one encounters in individual poems...

...Or, commenting on the realistic fiction of Baudelaire's contemporaries, "If the hero is an ideal self, he also embodies the danger and guilt of desire and is therefore condemned by a conscience operating through the narrator's voice...

...Or, "It is by a certain kind of moving away from perceived realities that the poet succeeds in elaborating an absence which he makes historically intelligible by calling it memory...

...A superb and seminal symbolist poet whose influence spread through England and Germany, Baudelaire was also a critic, especially of the visual arts...

...He stood, as Oscar Wilde said of himself, but perhaps more than Wilde, in a symbolic relation to his age...

...Baudelaire the poet of strange and complex desires represents the principle of disorder...

...This tension accounts for much of the interest of Baudelaire...