“consciousness” in Sartre’s works, that betray a sense of something like
the unconscious invading his theory.^12
How, then, is Baudelaire to escape this lived contradiction between
being and existence, “the intolerable feeling of beingde trop in the
world” (B 241 ), an emotion Sartre designates “metaphysical anguish”
(M 145 )? Suicide, Sartre suggests, is always an option for Baudelaire,
but it would destroy the contradiction without resolving it (in this
respect Beaudelaire anticipates Camus in the next century). Perhaps a
poetic objectification of his being in his own eyes and in the eyes
of others might save him from his contingency. In Sartre’s terms
Baudelaire “choseto existfor himself as hewasfor others” in their
memories (B 243 , emphasis his). In effect, it was the being-in-itself
(what Sartre would later call the practico-inert) of the past that enabled
Baudelaire to live the contradiction that his bad faith entailed: namely,
to be a freedom-thing – “I am another” (je suis un autre)(B 24 ).
Sartre calls this symbolic expression of the impossible synthesis
of freedom and thing, the Baudelairian “poetic fact” or the “spiritual,”
denoting his particular way of sustaining the poem (or his dandyish
manner of living) midway between being and nothingness, presence
and absence (B 220 ). In view of Sartre’s earlier characterization of the
aesthetic object (the imaginary) as possessing the specific quality of
“presence-absence,” it seems likely that Sartre’s poets, and the poetic
way of existing generally, are beings of the imaginary, however “realist”
they may purport to be. This is true of Baudelaire, “who reads himself in
the eyes of others and delights in theirrealof that imaginary portrait...
[This original choice] implies an extraordinary, constant concern with
the opinion of others” (B 193 , emphasis added). From the beginning
to the end of his essay, Sartre has not lost sight of this self-defining
“choice” that creates and sustains Baudelaire the poet in his singularity
as the author of just these works. “The free choice that a man makes
of himself is identified absolutely with what one calls his destiny”
(B 245 ). Sartre’s aim is to uncover the necessity that inhabits the
contingency of the lives of each of his subjects as they “choose” to
become what he reveals they are (destined to be).
(^12) In view of Pontalis’s observation about Sartre’s love/hate relation with the Freudian uncon-
scious, we shall note such shifting tendencies as they occur.
386 Existential biography: Flaubert and others