April 7, 2022 31scious renunciation of his Par-
nassian aesthetics of perfection
and unity but more specifically a
desertion of the harmonies of the
traditional lyric in favor of the dis-
junctions of prose.This is where his theory of les sobresauts,
or shocks, comes in: modern life itself,
with its collisions and discrepancies, is
incompatible with harmony and beauty.
Detailing the poet’s desperate
double- bookkeeping, Sieburth con-
nects his “late work” to the fact that
“when it came to money matters, he
was therefore condemned to being al-
ways late—chronically behind on his
rent, forever in arrears to his credi-
tors”—which also aligns with Michael
Fried’s observation of Baudelaire’s be-
lated relation to Romanticism.Sieburth’s lengthy introductions to
each section carefully prepare the reader
for the bombshells that follow. He traces
the influences on Baudelaire’s thought,
beginning with Edgar Allan Poe: it was
around the time that he was writing
about Poe’s magazine pieces, “Margina-
lia” and “Suggestions,” that he started
jotting down the entries for Flares
(Fusées). Poe’s scorn toward the indif-
ferent American scene, his poverty and
addiction and need to write for money,
made him Baudelaire’s “semblable,—
mon frère.” From the time he first read
him in 1847, two years before Poe died
mysteriously at the age of forty, he rec-
ognized a soul mate, and his translations
and commentaries on Poe formed a sub-
stantial part of his published oeuvre—
the most lucrative piece of it.
Baudelaire may have discovered a
path around “high poetry’s sovereign
euphonies” (and the compensatory
modernity of the prose poem) in the
“ironies of la discrépance”—Poe’s “dis-
crepancy,” with its roots in the Latin
crepare, “to rattle, creak, or crack.”
Emerson was another eye- opening
American influence, from whom he
stole an opening to a prose poem:
“Life is a hospital where each patient
is driven by the desire to change beds.”
The French aphoristic tradition was
bred in the bone, of course—Sieburth
notes that Pascal, Chateaubriand,
and La Rochefoucauld were French
moraliste models, providing an “in-
heritance of aphorism, apothegm, epi-
gram, maxim, réflexion, sentence, and
pensée”—but it was the Jesuit- trained
counter- Enlightenment philosopher Jo-
seph de Maistre and his Les soirées de
St. Petersbourg that unleashed Baude-
laire’s latent religious fervor: “Reli-
gions are the only interesting things on
earth.” Writing to his publisher: “All
literature derives from sin—I mean this
quite seriously.” Sieburth writes that
after 1861, “the modes he now favored
were rancorous irony, outright insult, or
provocative farce (bouffonerie).” They
give rise to some of his more radical
pronouncements:There are only three beings wor-
thy of respect:
The priest, the warrior, the poet.
To know, to kill, to create.
All other men are mere stable
boys doing their master’s bidding,
that is, exercising what are known
as professions.As for me, I say that the sole and
supreme pleasure of making lovelies in the certitude that one is
doing evil.—And both man and
woman know from birth that it
is in evil that all sensual pleasure
resides.Not only would I be happy to be the
victim, but I wouldn’t mind being
the executioner either—to feel the
Revolution from both sides!The intensity of Baudelaire’s scorn
increases with each section. Part 1, con-
taining Flares, Hygiene, and My Heart
Laid Bare, reads like a commonplace
book: notational, improvisational, per-
turbing, but with the feeling of the
philosophical laboratory to the prose
poems. The eleven late prose poems,
which were to be published under the
title Le spleen de Paris (reprising one
of Baudelaire’s crucial words), are
more sardonic and scandalous, like
“Let’s Beat Up the Poor!” or “Por-
traits of Mistresses”—they, too, read
like thought experiments, but those of
a Nietz schean Übermensch seeing how
far he can go. Sieburth rejects the no-
tion that Baudelaire “subscribe[d] to
all the incendiary bombs,” suggesting
that the multiple levels of irony make
for multiple readings, from divertisse-
ment to parody. (Eliot’s term for this
was “entertaining” ideas.) They were
written in Belgium, which goes some
way toward explaining their invective.
Baudelaire arrived in Brussels in
April 1864, lodging at the Hôtel du
Grand Miroir and staying for two
years, during which he accumulated, in
the words of his publisher, “a farrago of
notes” about the stupendous bêtise of
the Belgians. He hated their mercan-
tilism and materialism: “Everybody
in sales, even the rich. Everybody has
something they want to unload second-
hand.” He hated their spirit of confor-
mity: “Hatred of beauty, to complement
the hatred of wit. Not to Conform, the
ultimate crime.” He hated their phi-
listinism: “No Latin, no Greek. Pro-
fessional studies. Hatred of poetry.
Education to train engineers or bank-
ers. /No metaphysics.”
Reading Belgium Disrobed, I almost
laughed in astonishment at the extrav-
agance of hatred Baudelaire lavishes
on the little country; the book reads
as a reprise of his fury at the French
in The Salon of 1846. Belgium is like
France, only worse. But what it’s really
like is America—now and, apparently,
then: “Belgium and the United States.
The newspapers’ spoiled brats.” “How,
some twenty years ago, we used to
chant the praises of the United States
of America in all their liberty, glory,
and good fortune! Belgium inspires
similar idiocies.”
In March 1866, while visiting a ba-
roque church in Namur, in central
Belgium, Baudelaire collapsed with a
stroke; in the weeks that followed, he
descended into partial paralysis and
aphasia. He was apparently lucid, but
unable to utter anything but Non! and
a single swear word, Crénom, an abbre-
viation of sacré nom de Dieu. (A liter-
ary man to the marrow, Sieburth traces
Crénom! to “Nevermore!”) More than
a year later, still speechless, “suffering
from gangrene and bedsores,” Baude-
laire motioned for last rites and died in
his mother’s arms on August 31, 1867.
Among those attending his burial in
the Aupick family vault in Montpar-
nasse Cemetery were Félix Nadar, Paul
Verlaine, and Édouard Manet, whoseunfinished painting L’enterrement
is thought to be a recreation of that
stormy day.Baudelaire never forgave America for
what it did to Poe. In his “Notes nou-
velles sur Edgar Poe” (1859), he wrote:To burn negroes in shackles, guilty
only of having felt their black
cheeks flush with the red of honor,
to wave revolvers around in the or-
chestra pits of concert halls, to es-
tablish polygamy in the paradises
of the West which even the Savages
(a term which does them no justice
whatsoever) had not yet befouled
with these shameful utopias, to
place posters on walls, no doubt in
order to enshrine the principle of
unfettered liberty, advertising cures
for nine- month illnesses—these
are some of the striking features,
some of the moral illustrations of
the noble country of Franklin, the
inventor of shopkeeper morality,
the hero of a century given over
to matter. It is worth calling atten-
tion to these marvels of brutality,
at a time when Americanomania
has almost become a respectable
passion.To re a d Late Fragments is to realize
what an impression America made on
Baudelaire, via Poe and Emerson; it is
also to realize what a Catholic he was,
albeit a heretical one—almost gnos-
tic, as Sieburth points out, in his self-
canceling antinomies: love and hate,
God and Satan, beauty and stupidity,
feeling them “from both sides.”Theory of true civilization.
It does not entail gas, steam, or
table- turning; it entails the dimi-
nution of the traces of original sin.Sieburth notes thatBaudelaire will also associate the act
of writing with the efficacy of magic
or prayer to tap into this higher
reservoir of power. Writing here is
associated no longer with the accu-
mulation of capital but with archaic
ritual, with witchcraft, with the sor-
cerer’s performative capacity to call
up energies and voices at will.Religion, then, was the solution to
la bêtise belge, the cretinism of Amer-
ica, incipient technocracy and self-
congratulatory market democracy; it
was the solution because it took suffer-
ing as axiomatic of the human condition.
Writing to a critic who suggested that
Heinrich Heine’s miserable death was
somehow a comeuppance for the gaiety
of his poetry, Baudelaire sputtered:You are a happy man. I pity you for
being so easily happy. A man must
fall very low indeed to believe himself
happy! Or perhaps this is just a sar-
donic outburst on your part; perhaps
you are merely smiling to hide the
fox that is gnawing at your entrails.In his landmark 1863 essay “The
Painter of Modern Life,” he had writ-
ten, “A dandy may be blasé, he may
even suffer; but in this case he will
smile like the Spartan boy under the
fox’s tooth.” He signed his letter with a
drawing of a badelaire: a scimitar. QHEADED INTO
THE ABYSS
THE STORY OF OUR TIME,
AND THE FUTURE
WE’LL FACEBrian T. Watson
Brian T. Watson is an architect
and cultural critic. For eighteen
years, he was a columnist with the
Salem News in Salem, Massachusetts,
focused primarily on current affairs
and the forces that were and are
shaping societies both here and abroad.[email protected]
(781) 367-2008Paper, $13.00
e-Book, $9.99Available on AmazonIndependent of the pandemic, we are beset by
a range of unprecedented developments that
together, in this century, threaten the very
existence of civilization. The current states
of just ten forces — capitalism, technology,
the internet, politics, media, education,
human nature, the environment, population,
and transportation — are driving society in
predominantly negative ways.These forces are powerful and interconnected
and their combined dynamics will carry us
into any number of disasters well before 2100.
We have the knowledge and solutions to address
our difficulties, but for many reasons we will
not employ them.There is urgency to this story. We face many
threats, but one of them — the internet and
its hegemony and imperatives — is rapidly
changing nearly everything about our world,
including our very capacity to recognize how
profound and dangerous the changes are.Headed Into the Abyss is comprehensive. It
presents a satisfyingly round story of our
time. It crosses disciplines, connects dots, and
analyzes how each force — in synergies with
other forces — is shaping society. Individually,
we tend to see and address things in parts,
but the forces shaping our lives exist now in
ecologies that defy piecemeal solutions.Uniquely, Watson brings human nature and
trauma into his assessment of the future. People
have limitations, and these are playing a large
role even now.What it all adds up to — the big picture — is a
sobering conclusion.Mlinko 29 31 .indd 31 3 / 9 / 22 2 : 05 PM