Reading Baudelaire's Le Spleen De Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Prose Poem by Seth Whidden;

Author:Seth Whidden; [Whidden, Seth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192666871
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2022-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

18 See the earlier discussion of admiration in the Introduction, supra.

19 For Maurice Samuels, their discourse is invented by the narrator, “a man accustomed to projecting onto others his own thoughts and feelings” and who “expects to see his carefully calibrated tenderness mirrored back to him by his lover”; see Maurice Samuels, “Baudelaire’s Boulevard Spectacle: Seeing Through ‘Les Yeux des pauvres,’” in E. S. Burt, Elissa Marder, and Kevin Newmark (eds.), Time for Baudelaire (Poetry, Theory, History), Yale French Studies, vols 125–6 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 167–82 (171).

20 While Roland Barthes uses his formulation of a quotation without inverted commas (“la citation sans guillemets”) to refer to intertextuality, the example in this poem of a quotation qui n’en est pas une is positioned similarly with respect to language, and with similar stakes: “c’est alors du langage, et non un langage, fût-il décroché, mimé, ironisé” (it is therefore from language, and not a language, whether it is disconnected, mimed, mocked) (Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte, Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed. Éric Marty [Paris: Seuil, 1994], 1509–10; original emphasis). As Barthes’s last word reminds us, the use of the citational mode—whether with or without quotation marks—is an effective vehicle for conveying irony. For an elegant discussion of Flaubert’s use of quotations, see Christopher Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986), 202–4.

21 Murphy points out the former’s social import since its additional example of unspoken speech—“on dirait que”—situates the father “en deçà de la critique sociale qui pouvait être formulée, à savoir que lorsqu’on évalue globalement l’économie du Second Empire, c’est bien l’argent du pauvre monde qui permet la fabrication de ces scènes de luxe” (beyond the social criticism which could be formulated, which is to say that when we examine the economy of the Second Empire generally it is indeed the money of the poor which allows for the construction of these scenes of luxury) (Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, 249–50; original emphasis).

22 For the sake of clarity I wish to reiterate here that the first-person pronoun “je” should not at all be taken to refer to Charles Baudelaire himself; not only does such a reading derive from an oversimplification that seriously undercuts the poet’s imaginative reach, but, as Murphy reminds us, it reasserts the kind of traditional relationship between writer and reader that Baudelaire actively sought to reject (Logiques du dernier Baudelaire, 245–6).

23 For additional examples of Baudelaire’s blending of humor and platitudes, see his “Choix de maximes consolantes sur l’amour” (OC 1: 546–52).

24 Jacques Garelli, “L’Écoute et le Regard,” L’Entrée en démesure suivi de L’Écoute et le Regard; et de Lettre aux aveugles sur l’invisible poétique (Paris: José Corti, 1995), 51–83 (82).

25 See the discussion of Baudelaire’s use of aphorism in the prose poems, particularly in the opening line of “L’Horloge,” in Chapter 1, supra.

26 Murphy picks up on another audible element in this poem: “L’enchaînement vous voulûtes vous a quelque chose de volontairement cacophonique, aux antipodes de l’euphonie à

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