Baudelaire Without Benjamin

8/18/2019 Baudelaire Without Benjamin

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SONAM SINGH

Baudelaire withoutBenjamin: Contingency,History, Modernity

THIS ESSAY SEEKS TO DEMONSTRATE how Charles Baudelaire’s vision ofmodernity eludes Walter Benjamin’s influential reading of the poet. BecauseBaudelaire’s poetics of contingency offers conceptual resources for exploring andabiding the disorientations of modernity, its achievements are worth safeguardingand distinguishing from Benjamin’s dismissive but almost unchallenged accountof the poet’s work. By highlighting a critical tradition that has recognized thedepth of Baudelaire’s aesthetic and intellectual modernity and another that hasposed serious questions about the modernity that Benjamin offers in its stead, I

hope both to demonstrate that the visions of the two thinkers are irreconcilableand to encourage direct engagements with their actual words.It is difficult to read Benjamin without wishing to fulfill his liberatory cultural-

political project or remembering his tragic end. Doing so, however, impedes ourability to understand his work and strengthens “the ‘sad hero of the age of Fas-cism’ flavor that makes so much of the Benjamin literature,” as T.J. Clark candidlynotes, “unbearable” (45). Instead, I proceed by offering, first, an account of thereception of Benjamin as a reader of Baudelaire; second, an account of Benjamin’sliterary-critical methodology as evidenced in his essays on Baudelaire; and third,a close comparative reading of Baudelaire’s lyric “The Swan” and Benjamin’s

ninth aphorism in “On the Concept of History.” I stage an unexpected and reveal-ing correspondence between the two works to show that “The Swan” offers rathermore stunning illuminations of the modern condition than does Benjamin’s aph-orism. Both the poem and the aphorism feature incapacitated winged creatures,debris, bad weather, and, most strikingly, a speaker who stands in the present,considers the past, and ponders human disaster. However, the ethics and aesthet-ics that emerge in Baudelaire’s lyric could not be more inhospitable to Benjamin’smessianism.

Benjamin’s Aura There may be no better index of the reception of Benjamin than the collective

assent granted his ruminations on Baudelaire. Although Henri Peyre excluded

Comparative Literature 64:4DOI 10.1215/00104124-1891414 © 2012 by University of Oregon

Comparative Literature

Published by Duke University Press


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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 408

1 Jeffrey Grossman sketches some key scenes in Benjamin’s Anglophone academic reception. Henotes how willfully “critics select certain texts, emphasize certain concepts . . . and certain defini-

tions of those concepts, for which they can generally find justification in some moment(s) of his writing” (426). Udi E. Greenberg of fers a crit ique of Benjamin’s reception in intellectual culturemore broadly. At his most provocative, Greenberg suggests that Saul Friedländer’s critique of thekitsch-ification of Hitler offers a model for understanding how “the political signifier ‘Benjamin’acquired its unique appeal, and its status of cultural icon” (67). These essays could serve as corner-stones for a full account of Benjamin’s reception.

an essay by Benjamin from a 1962 volume of essays on Baudelaire on the groundsthat it was “not judged to be so enlightening or so relevant as those which have

been retained here” (2), by 1967 Richard Klein could claim that Benjamin’s“essay on Baudelaire is the most penetrating critical study of that author I haveever read” (88). Many familiar academic-cultural trends subtend the chasmbetween Peyre and Klein, but no successive academic fashion has much bluntedthe thrust of Klein’s judgment. Indeed, over the past few decades, the most pop-ular debates surrounding Benjamin have wrangled over proprietorship of hislegacy, not the content of his thought.1 Those who wish to downplay Benjamin’saffiliation with the Frankfurt School will say (along with Michael W. Jennings)that “Benjamin’s first major work on Baudelaire is one of the greatest essays ofliterary criticism from the twentieth century” (Introduction 2). And those who

wish to bolster the affiliation will say (along with Robert Kaufman) that Benja-min’s second essay on Baudelaire, revised as a result of dialogue with Theodor Adorno, “is widely regarded as one of the great twentieth-century essays on mod-ern poetry, social analysis, and critical theory” (213).

I argue here that whatever claims may be made for Benjamin as a philosopher,mystic, correspondent, revolutionary, martyr, memoirist, or stylist, his readings ofBaudelaire in both essays are inadequate. Benjamin’s critical methodology doesnot fully apprehend the fantastical rhetoricity of Baudelaire’s language and disre-gards the cognitive-aesthetic practice of The Flowers of Evil . In Benjamin we find acritic who selectively dismembers and sutures (often with little more than bio-

graphical gossip or historical anecdote) whatever elements of Baudelaire’s works will support his overarching messianic ideology. Although he clearly assumes thathis constellations will form an arresting truth, we can choose to be wary of themonster that arises: a pathetic Baudelaire who suffered and recognized others’suffering under capitalist markets and industry (or so Benjamin would ask us toconstrue the raw information impressed in the poet’s lyrics), but was too over- whelmed to analyze or ameliorate his historical situation (or so Benjamin wouldask us to construe the poet’s critical writings). Benjamin’s Baudelaire is an histori-cal cipher, an unwitting precipitate of his historical context. To say that all it takesto reveal this is a careful reading of both authors is, however, to point to a not

incidental hurdle, given the nature of much of the critical literature on Benjamin.Take, as exemplary of this literature, Jennings’s Dialectical Images: Walter Ben- jamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism , which provides a lucid account of Benjamin’sassumptions and operations as a reader. Jennings’s clarity about the persistence ofa dialectic of nihilism and mystical redemption in all stages of Benjamin’s intel-lectual career offers a well-considered warning to materialists and nonfounda-tionalists alike who would turn to Benjamin for inspiration. Jennings even hopes“that this study will give some readers pause as they” “raid . . . Benjamin’s works




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BAUDELAIRE WITHOUT BENJAMIN / 409

2 Baudelaire did not write “‘Tout autour de moi devient allégorie’ (Everything around mebecomes allegory)” (174). The apostrophizer of “The Swan” actually exclaims: “tout pour moi devi-ent allégorie” (everything for me becomes allegory). The point here is not that Jennings does notknow his Baudelaire; it is that he does not seem to worry about what the poet might say in responseto the critic.

3 In perhaps the most famous attempted rapprochement between Benjamin and deconstruction,Paul de Man (after announcing that “in the profession you are nobody unless you have said some-

thing about [‘The Task of the Translator’]”) insists than any “messianic themes” readers encounter inthat text (and that he admits he himself constantly re-encounters) must be explained away by a “verydifficult” “attentive reading” (“it takes really a long practice”) predicated upon a belief in Benjamin’s“extraordinarily refined and deliberate strategy,” a strategy of “echoing” but then somehow “displac-ing” these themes (“Conclusions” 73, 103). A deconstructive regard for, and deference to, the delib-erateness of a writer’s intended strategy is incongruous, to say the least.

for sentences and concepts” (212). Still, Jennings calls Benjamin’s first essay onBaudelaire “one of our most authoritative social readings of modern lyric

poetry,” an effort in which “Baudelaire is seen for the first time as the quintes-sential modern — alienated, spatially displaced, saturnine” (21). Likewise, whilehe acknowledges some of the essay’s “weaker juxtapositions,” Jennings neverthe-less argues that it is “constructed according to a rigorous structural principle” (32,26). I dispute this assessment below; here, I wish simply to note the marginaliza-tion of Baudelaire’s literary texts throughout Dialectical Images . Jennings quotesonly one line from Baudelaire’s lyrics in the book, and that line is quoted andtranslated incorrectly.2

This lack of corroboration takes it for granted that, in all important respects,Benjamin got Baudelaire “right.” I will turn to “The Swan” in the third part of my

essay to suggest the many ways that Baudelaire’s vision would challenge Benja-min’s, but for now I want to emphasize how commonly appreciations of Benjamin’sliterary criticism disregard the literature being criticized. Baudelaire, at least, is asignificant cultural presence in the Anglophone literary world, frequently trans-lated and always in print, often in dual-language editions. However, the seven-teenth-century German playwrights who are the chief subject of Benjamin’s ear-lier Origin of the German Mourning Play are not so readily available. Of the majorbaroque tragedies, a determined search reveals only abridged translations of Andreas Gryphius’s Leo Armenius (1646, published 1650) and Daniel Casper vonLohenstein’s Sophonisbe (1669, published 1680) in the Continuum Publishing

Company’s The German Library series. Additionally, Gryphius’s short comedy Diegeliebte Dornrose (1660), itself half of a larger dramatic unit, was translated as TheBeloved Hedgerose in a 1928 issue of the journal Poet Lore . I have located no Englishtranslations of plays by Martin Opitz or Johann Christian Hallmann. This dearthof translations is evident in the troubling but common incidence of literary schol-ars extolling and expanding upon Benjamin’s literary-critical insights in Origin without adducing any apparent independent familiarity with or concern for theactual plays. Jennings neither quotes nor cites any of them. In a similar fashion,Samuel Weber’s two remarkable essays on the mourning play book contravene theethos of deconstruction by confidently forwarding Benjamin’s insights without a

single textual reference to a German mourning play, thus implicitly placing Benja-min’s “philosophical” commentary on a higher epistemological plane than theliterary texts that occasion it.3 Jennings and Weber are hardly alone in this defer-ential attitude towards Benjamin’s readings. In an analysis of the frequency of




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4 Arendt’s insight helps explain why Benjamin’s translation “Der Schwan” (part of his famous1923 “task of translating” Baudelaire’s “Parisian Scenes”) incorrectly renders Baudelaire’s formalopening invocation (“Andromaque, je pense à vous !”) as the intimate “Ich denke dein , Androm-ache!” (Gesammelte Schriften 4.1: 17, my emphases). Benjamin is likely paying homage to Goethe’slyric “Nähe des Geliebten.”

author citations in Critical Inquiry from 1974 to 2004, Anne H. Stevens and Jay Williams reveal that Benjamin was the fourth most cited author (trailing only Der-

rida, Freud, and Foucault) and note that, among major authors cited in that jour-nal, “it is our guess that perhaps only Benjamin’s works are cited nonargumenta-tively” (223). Indeed, considering the often productive and always lively theoreticaldebates that swirl around the genealogies, texts, and legacies of Derrida, Freud,and Foucault, the tendentiousness with which Benjamin has been engaged isremarkable.

Even though cogent critiques of Benjamin are available, often from Europeanscholars, these have not been systematically elaborated upon. Indeed, literarycritics who do not concern themselves with exploring the consonance betweenBenjamin’s criticism and the literary objects of that criticism regularly denounce

anyone who addresses problematic aspects of Benjamin’s approach. An extraor-dinary example is Françoise Meltzer’s excoriation of Hannah Arendt. I take Arendt’s characteristically dispassionate, sincere, and precise summary of Benja-min’s imperfect biographical and intellectual struggle with and against humanlyinduced “dark times” as an unexhausted model for genuine critique. For example, Arendt’s observation that “the only world view that ever had a decisive influenceon” Benjamin was “Goethe’s conviction of the factual existence of an Urphän- omen ” provides great purchase on Benjamin’s construal of Baudelaire as a minortragic hero in an era without access to such transcendence (12).4 Meltzer, for herpart, denounces Arendt for suggesting that Benjamin was (in Meltzer’s breath-

less paraphrase) “politically naïve and at times unreliable” and “eccentric andinconsistent (if brilliant)” (161, 151). In her view, Benjamin simply cannot be subjected to the kind of skepticism to which she subjects Arendt: she insults Arendt’scritique as “bizarre,” “irritat[ed],” “shrill,” and “misogynist,” but never meets thebasic obligation of offering evidence that Arendt is wrong (142, 143, 144, 151).Benjamin’s profundity is for Meltzer axiomatic; he offers not a text to be read,but a life-work to be decoded.

Meltzer is also critical of Fredric Jameson’s thoughtfully ambivalent take onBenjamin, citing Jennings for support (151). Such critiques of Jameson are usuallypredicated upon an entrenched polemic against Adorno’s objections to Benja-

min’s cultural analyses. Indeed, defenders of Benjamin are rarely more exercisedthan when evaluating Benjamin’s relations with Adorno and the other membersof the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. The Institute’s editorial hand istypically taken as a desecration of Benjamin’s purer vision, and the epistolaryintellectual exchange between Adorno and Benjamin is regularly reduced to thelevel of a good soap opera or a bad tragic drama. Jennings is, again, exemplary.Rather than engaging with the substance or possible validity of Adorno’s critiqueof Benjamin, Jennings instead casts Adorno as Eve Harrington to Benjamin’sMargo Channing: “By the late 1930s, however, Adorno’s own intellectual accom-plishments led to a change in tone and a perhaps necessary denial of Benjamin’s




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The full sentence is: “Die materialistische Determination kultureller Charaktere ist möglichnur vermittelt durch den Gesamtprozeß ” (Adorno and Benjamin, Briefwechsel 367; “The materialistdetermination of cultural tra its is only possible if it is mediated through the total social process ,”Complete Correspondence 283). Adorno’s rhetoric clearly demands the same attention to a socio-eco-nomic gestalt as is attempted in the third book of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital , subtitled Der Gesamtprozeßder kapitalistischen Produktion (1894) (The Total Process of Capitalist Production ).

influence on his thought” ( Dialectical Images 30–31). He also sensationalizes theInstitute’s routine demand for revisions (essentially a “revise and resubmit”) as a

process of “dizzying reductions to which The Arcades material was subjected” andspeaks stirringly (when discussing the pruning of a baggy 90–page essay) of “moreor less violent excisions of material from the larger corpus of the Baudelaire book”(“On the Banks” 93).

Barbara Johnson — within an otherwise very fine collation of the theories ofreification and alienation —perpetuates the myth of Adorno’s uncomprehendingpresumptuousness by offering the drama of the visionary, proto-deconstructiveBenjamin battling the doctrinaire, vulgarly Marxist Adorno. For example, shereproves Adorno’s supposed obliviousness in “claiming . . . [Benjamin] was pro-ductive ‘in spite of self-alienation ’” (her emphasis) when the context of that phrase

(even in the translation Johnson cites) makes it clear that Adorno credited Benja-min’s productivity to his self-alienation (98). Shierry Weber Nicholsen’s superiortranslation of this phrase —“die Produktivität des sich selbst Entfremdeten” (Briefe14) — as “the productivity of this person estranged from himself” (“Benjamin”233–34) makes plain Johnson’s basic error. In the same vein, Johnson infers that Adorno’s call for “‘mediation’ between economic features and social historyimplies that the two domains are distinct and that there is a middle groundbetween them,” when, in fact, Adorno’s sense of mediation as needing to accountfor “the total process ” (his emphasis) clearly implies otherwise (105).5

This recurrent image of Adorno’s theoretical meanness (in multiple senses) is

bolstered by a misapprehension of basic philological details that reifies Benjamin’sscholarly achievements. Johnson speaks approvingly of “Charles Baudelaire: A LyricPoet in the Era of High Capitalism (1938),” a book that was less than half written andfor which “1938” is thus an arbitrary ascription. She decries the “rejection of TheArcades Project ,” an act that never happened, since in spite of her italics no suchthing as an “Arcades Project ” manuscript ever existed (94, 117). Johnson also doesnot mention that Adorno and the Frankfurt Institute funded the “Paris Arcades”research project and published the revised Baudelaire essay (along with others byBenjamin). Because of his characteristically piercing responses to Benjamin’s ide-alisms, Adorno is regularly reduced to the role of villain in the Benjamin legend.

George Steiner goes so far as to insinuate darkly (and entirely speculatively) thatthe “sterile” relation with “the Horkheimer-Adorno Institute” prevented Benjaminfrom aligning with “the Aby Warburg group,” and then goes on to lament that “aninvitation to London might have averted his early death” (19). Even the extraordi-narily shrewd Judith Butler, in an essay critiquing “common sense,” reproducesthe “common knowledge” of Adorno’s injury to Benjamin. Especially unwarrantedis her insinuation that Adorno “withholds work and payment and even delays theircorrespondence precisely at the moment in which Benjamin’s livelihood and lifeare imperiled” (211–12). Her defense of what she takes to be Benjamin’s method




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COMPARATIVE LITER ATURE / 412

becomes entangled with her defense of “the evanescence, if not the ineffability,” ofBenjamin’s life (214). Like the vast majority of those who censure Adorno, Butler

proceeds here on the basis of little more than decontextualized readings of asmall, popular selection of his correspondence with Benjamin. In fact, Butler’sapprobation of Benjamin’s method as one in which “the concept appears tobecome articulated only through its disarticulation as a figure” is based not on areading of his criticism but on his own self-appraisal in these letters (213–14).

Such uncritical and imprecise deployments of Benjamin have become rou-tine in contemporary literary-critical discourse. Elissa Marder’s “Flat Death:Snapshots of History” will serve as a final example. At one point, addressing Ben- jamin’s mistaken reference to the titular character of “To a Woman Passerby” asa widow, Marder concedes that “there is nothing in the poem to indicate that

the mourning woman is a ‘widow’” (75). Although this imposition should be trou-bling, Marder insists nonetheless that Benjamin’s fabrication leads us to seehow the poem “presents a vision of modernity that is permeated by the decay ofhistory” (76). This is not in any way a reading of the Baudelaire sonnet, butmerely a recapitulation of Benjamin’s theory of history and his longstandingaccount of modernity. That is, Benjamin’s explicit misreading is rationalizedbecause it validates Benjamin’s theory, with all of this based upon the faith thatBenjamin got Baudelaire “right.” The entire Baudelaire section of Marder’s bookis vexed by this kind of circularity. For example, in disagreeing with Hans Robert Jauss’s objection that, when discussing Baudelaire’s theory of modern art, “Benja-

min . . . turns the functional relationship of modernity and antiquity back into anopposition of content ” (“Reflections” 179; see, also, “Tradition” 385), Marderdeclines “entering into the specifics” of Jauss’s rigorous exposition, “in order tostress the fact that Benjamin’s argument is anything but self-evident” (71). That is, Jauss’s critique of Benjamin’s theory must be wrong because it fails to validate thecomplexity of Benjamin’s theory. History — especially the historicity of Baude-laire’s literary text — does not perturb the closed circuitry of Marder’s crit icismmachine.

As a result, we now inhabit a situation in which cultural critics regularly takeBenjamin to be beyond critical reproach. A return to Benjamin’s and Baudelaire’s

actual words is long overdue, as is a serious engagement with sympathetic critiquesof Benjamin. Adorno, Arendt, Jauss, and Jameson represent critics who honor theresoluteness with which Benjamin refuses his culture’s phantasmagorias, but whodo not allow themselves to ignore the chimeras he offers in their place. Adorno isuncompromising on this point: “Between myth and reconciliation, the poles of hisphilosophy, the subject evaporates. Before his Medusan glance, man turns intothe stage on which an objective process unfolds. For this reason Benjamin’s phi-losophy is no less a source of terror than a promise of happiness” (“Portrait” 235).In this recognition of Benjamin’s catastrophism, of his disregard for the humansubject, the human condition, and human cultural objects, Adorno anticipatesthe “shudder” of a reader no less scrupulous than Jacques Derrida. At the far endof a careful deconstruction of Benjamin’s notion of “divine violence,” a “terrified”Derrida finds himself forced to condemn Benjamin’s thought as “too messianico-marxist or archeo-eschatological for me,” as “resembl[ing] too closely . . . the verything against which one must act and think, do and speak” (1045).




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Benjamin against Baudelaire

The most adequate groundwork for analyzing Benjamin’s Baudelaire wouldbe a systematic reading of “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”(1938) and its partial revision “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939). I offerhere an abridged account of the structure and central claims of these essaysbefore considering their methodological and hermeneutic operations in greaterdetail. The first essay was a submission during Benjamin’s Paris exile to the edi-tors of the Journal of Social Research , who were themselves exiled in the UnitedStates. As I’ve noted, its rejection by Max Horkheimer and Adorno, communi-cated in a lengthy epistolary critique by the latter, is an oft-rehearsed episode inthe Benjamin legend. Benjamin envisioned this essay as the middle third ofCharles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism , eventually to be book-ended by sections on “Baudelaire as Allegorist” and “The Commodity as a Sub- ject of Poetry.” This book would have been based on over a decade’s worth ofnotes, drafts, and exposés.

The lack of theoretical mediation between singular cultural artifacts and theoverarching social analysis (Adorno’s chief objection to the first essay) notwith-standing, an editorial rejection on stylistic grounds would have been no less sur-prising, given that the essay’s three sections (totaling about 90 pages) unevenlytreat significantly divergent and often abruptly juxtaposed topics, ranging fromthe tax on wine to the Parisian periodical market to the genesis of mystery storiesto flânerie in London and Berlin to Hugo’s natural supernaturalism to Second

Empire men’s fashion to illustrator Charles Meryon’s urban imaginary, amongmany others. While no one would deny the suggestiveness of the associationsthat Benjamin limns, it is equally hard to deny the idiosyncratic and impression-istic nature of the results. The editors agreed to Benjamin’s proposal to revisethe central section, and Adorno sent another long letter offering detailed page-by-page commentary.

However, despite the fact that Benjamin’s thorough revision (“On Some Motifsin Baudelaire”) surpasses its predecessor in clarity, continuity, and conceptualiza-tion, Baudelaire comes across in an extremely unflattering light in both drafts.The three parts of “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” strive to repu-

diate the possibility of locating any theoretical insight in Baudelaire’s verse, cast-ing them instead as texts passively impressed by their encounter with the historicalforces of industrial capitalism. Even when certain lyrics are praised for capturingthe basic empirical facts of this history, Baudelaire’s attempts at analysis are dis-missed. When Baudelaire dares to imagine, as in the essay “The Painter of Mod-ern Life,” that the “constant unchangeable” forms of classical art are adaptable tomodern fashion, morality, and passions or, as in the review essay “Salon of 1846,”that modern art can glorify the heroism of “criminals and kept women” above thatrecorded in the Iliad , Benjamin avows that “one cannot say that this is a profoundanalysis” (81, 78, 82). Instead, Benjamin insists that Baudelaire’s aesthetics do

“not cope with” modernity’s “loss of nature and naiveté” and do not provide thegenuine “interpenetration with classical antiquity” evinced “in certain poems ofthe Fleurs du mal ,” poems whose “permanence” is grounded only in the “idea ofthe decrepitude of the big city” (82, 83). That is, Baudelaire’s lyrics are praised formimetically capturing, almost despite themselves and certainly despite Baudelaire,




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6 On this point Jameson cogently notes: “Benjamin’s work seems to me to be marked by a painfulstraining toward a psychic wholeness or unity of experience which the historical situation threatensto shatter at every turn” (Marxism 61).

7 Photographer Diane Arbus movingly echoes Baudelaire’s quintessentially modern outlook whenshe proposes “to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present because we tend while liv-ing here and now to perceive only what is random and barren and formless about it, while we regretthat the present is not like the past and despair of its ever becoming the future, its innumerableinscrutable habits lie in wait for their meaning.”

the decrepitude with which Benjamin’s philosophy had always arraigned the mod-ern world, whereas Baudelaire’s critical insights are denigrated for attempting to

transmogrify that sense of decrepitude into something productive.“On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” retains the basic argument of the first essay with two substantive alterations. First, it states early and axiomatically what wasonly implied late in the first essay: “shock”-ridden modern experience (now cate-gorized as Erlebnis ) is a degraded fall from premodern experience (categorized as Erfahrung ). Second, Benjamin aligns two of Baudelaire’s key concepts — spleenand ideal — with these two historical conditions, respectively. In support of hisaxiom, Benjamin marshals contemporaneous representations (in Bergson, Proust,and Freud) of memory and the discontinuous structure of consciousness. ButBenjamin also criticizes all three for failing to recognize that what they consider

universal features of human consciousness are actually cognitive limitations spe-cific to a modern world in which man “is increasingly unable to assimilate thedata of the world around him by way of experience” (158). A search for “somethingirretrievably lost” — for a once-possible “experience . . . in crisis-proof form” —becomes for Benjamin the true “secret architecture” of The Flowers of Evil and thesubterranean key to modern literature and philosophy (181, 182). Correspond-ingly, the experience of modernity’s fallen temporality, the “collapse” of experi-ence, is made to be the secret to Baudelaire’s spleen (184).

A systematic survey of Benjamin’s intellectual development would reveal hisuninterrupted belief in the inexorability of historical decline, a belief displayed

most prominently in Origin of the German Mourning Play . Baudelaire merely provides a ready nineteenth-century hook on which to extend a storyline that beginsin the seventeenth century and is now grounded in an overly literal conception ofindustrialization’s “shocks” and an overly paranoid conception of urbanization’scrowds. It is undeniable that modern life is bound to appear barren, and its aes-thetic glorification a desperate rationalization, if one sustains a metaphysical fan-tasy of a once and future socially and linguistically unmediated Erfahrung .6 This issomething Baudelaire already knew. In “The Painter of Modern Life,” he famouslynotes —almost as if in anticipation of Benjamin —that “it is much easier to decideoutright that everything about the garb of an age is absolutely ugly than to devote

oneself to the task of distilling from it the mysterious element of beauty that it maycontain” (13).7 But Benjamin’s unwillingness to engage Baudelaire’s (or Bergson’sor Proust’s or Freud’s) counter-theories, or indeed to recognize any imaginativeartifice in The Flowers of Evil , renders the textual specificity of Baudelaire’s oeuvreessentially inconsequential to Benjamin’s theoretical claims.

Almost all of the roughly forty-six poems and three prose poems cited acrossthe two essays are treated as self-evident support for the historical or theoreticalclaim at hand. Benjamin is not in the business of close reading. Only three




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8 This problematic historicism is also evident in Benjamin’s proclivity for historical hyperbole,particularly in the “Arcades” exposé: “the first establishments to”; “the first gas lighting”; “For thefirst time in the history of architecture”; “the first prefabricated iron component”; “the first appear-ance of the panoramas”; “For the last time, the worker appears”; “for the first time, the lens wasdeemed”; “for the first t ime a special display”: “the first of which takes place”; “the first physiogno-mist of the domestic interior” (Arcades 3–13). Such hyperbole is particularly vulnerable to histori-cal error and empirical correction. So, for example, to the claim that iron was the first “artificialbuilding material,” Adorno deftly rejoins, “what about bricks!” (Complete Correspondence 109).

poems, “The Ragpickers’ Wine,” “The Swan,” and “To a Woman Passerby” (theformer two cited only in the first essay) are analyzed in a non-cursory manner. A

few are not quoted at all, a few are not even identified by title, and almost all areconsidered as interchangeably sincere confessions directly attributable to thehistorical poet. A typical engagement treats a given poem as a realist account ofmid-century Parisian life, according it a sociological and biographical literalityparried from the outset by the histrionic title Baudelaire gave the collection.8 Inthis reductively historicist vein, Benjamin proffers, for example, that the lyric“Abel and Cain” is actually about the proletariat, that Satan in “The Litanies ofSatan” is actually Louis Auguste Blanqui, that “The Denial of Saint Peter” actu-ally mourns the culpably precipitous dream of a dictatorship of the proletariatin June 1848, and that the acquiescence to a bruised heart in “The Love of Lies”

actually marks, quite astonishingly, the petty bourgeoisie’s declining purchasingpower (“Paris” 22, 23, 101, 59).Much of this is arguable and appealing, offering surprisingly canny juxtaposi-

tions of text and context in a kind of cultural studies avant la lettre . Indeed, Benja-min’s charisma and endurance are in large part accounted for by his partial con-sonance with a modern critical practice that likewise gives significant weight tohistorical context, traverses freely the demarcations of cultural canons and gene-alogies, borrows theoretical support idiosyncratically from across the humanities,interrogates cultural objects more for their fissures than seams, and is animatedby a commitment to worldly justice. By posing the mourning plays and, later, Pari-

sian consumer culture and Baudelaire’s writings as distinctive social-historicalphenomena, Benjamin helps inaugurate a criticism that exits the barren terrainof arbitrary aesthetic valuations and instead appreciates the relation between eco-nomic, social, intellectual, and aesthetic production. Yet, given the widespreadappreciation for the questions Benjamin poses, it is surprising how incompletelyacknowledged, or even understood, the limitations of his answers are —and par-ticularly his inability to see Baudelaire’s poetry as something more than Les Fleursdes Hochkapitalismus or a private journal of impressions on society and politics.

Svend Erik Larsen has argued that Benjamin’s essentially Platonic concep-tion of representation leads him to treat literary texts, despite “his keen eye for

surprising parallels or associative links,” as mere epiphenomena: for Benjamin“literature comes to assume the role of an illustrative text, or of a cultural-histor-ical source for an analytical thesis on the fragmented character of the city . . . .Thus, we can pass back and forth between the literary structure and the world ofactual experience without noticing any decisive boundary” (149, 136–37). Thisconception of literature has two major implications. First, literature’s textualspecificity is erased because the “transformation from individual work into aprototypical social object is grasped without consideration of all the textual




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9 But then, as Hansen makes clear, in Benjamin’s usage “allegory” is a trivial catch-all for thelanguage of fallen man: “allegory’s failure actively underscores the gulf between matter and tran-scendence by foregrounding the conflict between artistic form and transcendent or theologicalintention” (671).

details that distinguish the work both as literature, as an individual work, and asa commodity, and which gives the various literary forms (genres, imagery, motif,

and so forth) a relatively independent historicity” (139). Second, “works or liter-ary forms that take as their theme anything other than the gestural instant on which Benjamin focuses, or that don’t directly treat the city at all, although thishardly prevents them from appearing and circulating in the urban culture —these works are marginalized in Benjamin’s oeuvre” (140).

For example, “Evening Twilight,” the most cited poem in both versions of theessay (four and three times, respectively), is adduced by Benjamin to prove theincontrovertible: that Baudelaire was aware of “the masses,” “registered” the prac-tice of prostitution, and expressed “ambivalence” about “crowds” (“Paris” 43, 57;“Motifs” 172). Yet, he surprisingly neglects the fact that the practice of prostitu-

tion is registered as a personification (“La Prostitution”), a figure whose undertak-ings are elaborated via a jarring sequence of similes.9 Initially, the nightly com-mencement of Prostitution’s trade is compared to an ant army’s egress from its hill(“Comme une fourmilière”). The army is then humanly re-figured as Prostitu-tion’s efforts are compared to an enemy combatant preparing a surprise attack(“Ainsi que l’ennemi”). Finally, Prostitution is analogized to a worm that stealsMan’s food (“Comme un ver”). An accounting for these three similes doesn’t beginto exhaust the figurative grammar of the seven lines devoted to “La Prostitution.”Furthermore, Benjamin also leaves unnoted the fact that Prostitution’s nightlyadvent is figured as an illumination facilitated, seemingly, by gaslight (“À travers les

lueurs”); that its journey, far from corresponding to the street map, clears away newoccult paths (“elle se fraye un occulte chemin”); that all these movements andtransformations, far from effecting urban degradation, transpire at the heart of acity that is already a mire (“au sein de la cité de fange”) (Œuvres complètes 1: 94–95).Instead, Benjamin simply comments that “only the mass of inhabitants permitsprostitution to spread over large parts of the city. And only the mass makes it pos-sible for the sexual object to become intoxicated with the hundred stimuli which itproduces” (“Paris” 57). How this relates to Baudelaire’s lyric is never explained.

Compare this commentary with Jonathan Culler’s, which does home in on theoccurrence of allegory. For Benjamin (when considering “The Swan,” for exam-

ple) simply noting Baudelaire’s resort to allegory is prima facie evidence for histhesis, the specific content being immaterial. Culler’s attunement to rhetoric leadshim to consider allegory’s possible functions less narrowly. He notes how “the ide-ology of a culture may be most powerfully instantiated in its production of alle-gorical agents,” and thus takes the unlikely personification — “the movement ofeerie abstraction” —of “La Prostitution” as a Baudelairean provocation, not merelya Baudelairean report (“Feminism” 188). Culler seeks to understand the force ofthis provocation, which is also present in other poems in Les Fleurs du mal , not interms of a meta-history or meta-theory, but rather within the historically specific“discursive processes in which these poems, with their unusual thematic nexus oferoticism, virginity, and barrenness, participate” (192). In “Evening Twilight,”




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10 Jennings is unperturbed: “Benjamin resolutely refuses to attribute a single productive social orpolitical insight to Baudelaire himself; the achievement of Benjamin’s essays is their ability toexpose Les Fleurs du mal as uniquely, scathingly, terrifyingly symptomatic of Baudelaire’s era —andours” (Introduction 2).

11 Bandy distinguishes Baudelaire’s ragpicker from the protagonist of a popular 1847 play, The Rag- picker of Paris , noting that despite numerous descriptive similarities, “dans le Vin des Chiffonniers , ce

n’est pas le décor qui importe, c’est la vision hallucinatoire du vieillard, c’est l’antithèse entre lamisère de son état et la noblesse de ses rêves” (583; in “The Ragpickers’ Wine,” it is not the setting thatmatters, but rather the hallucinations of the old man, the antithesis between the misery of his condi-tion and the nobility of his dreams). Badesco draws attention to the imaginative transformations thatBaudelaire’s ragpicker undergoes in successive drafts, suggesting that the “réalisme de Baudelaire, si‘réalisme il y a’, a ce souci d’élevation, de transcendance et de mystère” (83; realism of Baudelaire, ifrealism it be, has this concern for elevation, for transcendence and for mystery). See also Avni.

Culler argues, Baudelaire “counters both the religion of the virginal mother andthe reglementarian practices devoted to making the prostitute a public health

functionary, but in keeping the two most implausible qualities of the central fig-ures in these discourses —the virginity of the mother and the barrenness of theprostitute — he retains a transformative reference to them, redirecting themtoward a different result” (193). For my purposes, what is most important aboutthis reading is that it grants Baudelaire an aesthetic competence that Benjamindenies the poet at every turn: Culler emphasizes that in Baudelaire’s “transforma-tive” use of allegory “lies a good part of his ‘modernity’” (191) and that, unlikeBen jamin, he does not prejudge this modernity pejoratively.

When context does enter the picture for Benjamin, it is generally in the waythat Adorno diagnoses: Benjamin gives “conspicuous individual features from

the realm of the superstructure a ‘materialist’ turn by relating them immedi-ately, and perhaps even causally, to certain corresponding features of the sub-structure” (Complete Correspondence 283). For example, Benjamin’s discussion of“The Ragpickers’ Wine” proceeds via a brief social history of the mid-century,since “at that time motifs which appear in this poem were being publicly dis-cussed” (“Paris” 17). Benjamin covers “the tax on wine,” using as sources KarlMarx’s The Class Struggle in France 1848–1850 , a police “section head,” and another“contemporary observer” (17–18). He appends eight lines of the poem to thislesson with the perfunctory transition, “Thus in ‘The Ragpickers’ Wine’” (myemphasis). The text of these eight lines is left unexamined. Instead, he provides

further citations regarding the sociology of the ragpicker (who “fascinated hisepoch”), bolstered in turn by additional contemporary accounts, including onethat “gives the budget of a Paris ragpicker and his family for the period between1849 and 1850, presumably the time when Baudelaire’s poem was written” (19–20).This “presumably” fails to distinguish the historical stereotype from the literaryfigure, making a culture’s discursive agon an unwarranted unity and Baude-laire’s idiosyncratic deployment of discursive orthodoxies a mere symptomol-ogy.10 Marx, et al., explain a Baudelaire who exemplifies their observations inturn. Again, compare this with the analysis of Baudelaire scholars who carefullychart political and cultural contexts for “The Ragpickers’ Wine,” especially given

its multiple drafts, which were composed during the two decades spanning therise and fall of the Second Republic (see Pichois in Baudelaire’s OC 1: 1047).Building on work by W.T. Bandy and Luc Badesco, Richard D.E. Burton providesa detailed overview of contexts for Baudelaire’s revisions.11 In general terms,




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12 These tendencies are also apparent in Benjamin’s discussion of the erotic lyric “Damned Women (Delphine and Hippolyte).” Benjamin takes a complex, and undeniably problematic, med-itation on lesbian desire as essentially a journalistic exposé of the masculinization of women infactories (“Paris” 93–94). That so much of Benjamin’s misprision of Baudelaire’s texts circulatesaround representations of sexuality is surely not incidental. Benjamin’s historical nostalgia has itscorrelate in psychological nostalgia as well.

Burton argues that “readers alert to the political codes and contexts of mid-nineteenth-century France will not fail to notice how almost all the changes

Baudelaire made . . . make of this ‘definitive’ version of ‘Le Vin des chiffonniers’one of the richest, most complex and most ambiguous political poems in Baude-laire’s entire work” (Baudelaire and the Second Empire 242). What emerges in Bur-ton’s reading is a poem that deploys the convoluted representational history of“the ragpicker” (the socialist’s mascot, the bourgeois’s bogeyman, the Marxist’sscapegoat) to offer a cogent commentary on the failure of the Second Republic:“Baudelaire’s point seems to be that the (cynical) authoritarianism of Bonapart-ism is already contained in nuce in the (idealistic and Utopian) authoritarianismof republican-socialist attempts to legislate for instant human happiness and toshape human beings in accordance with some pre-existing ideological blueprint”

(257). Building on Burton, Ross Chambers recognizes under the poem’s histori-cally specific terms a compelling philosophy of history:The vacillations and torment of those who, in reality, undergo the effects of history — they are ‘tour-mentés par l’âge’ (‘âge’ in the sense, not only of old age, but also of the era, the epoch) like a lamptormented by the wind —are contrasted with the illusory benefits associated with an active making of(narrative) history. But these very illusions are simultaneously presented as compensatory indul-gences or necessary self-deceptions on the part of those whose actual fate it is to be, not the producersof history, but its ragpickers, those who stagger along, buffeted by events and picking up the débristhat history ‘throws up’ like a ‘vomissement’ but attempting also to recycle the bits and pieces into aform that might make sense of their experience. (“Recycling” 189–90)

In essence, Chambers highlights Baudelaire’s penetrating vision of politics and

poetics as necessarily provisional engagements with inexorable contingencies. Herecognizes, like Culler, Baudelaire’s modernity as something other than a fall.Benjamin, however, is quite insensible to such secular meaning-making. This

tendency is particularly apparent in his discussion of the sonnet “To a WomanPasserby,” which captures the experience of seeing a beautiful woman emergeand disappear into an urban crowd. Benjamin insists on disabusing “the poet”of his erotic delusion, since “what makes his body contract in a tremor . . . is notthe rapture of a man whose every fiber is suffused with eros ” but rather “the kindof sexual shock that can beset a lonely man.” The poem “reveal[s] the stigmata which life in a metropolis inflicts upon love” (“Motifs” 169). Since Benjamin

insists “that sexus in Baudelaire detached itself from eros [,] . . . that love which issated with the experience of the aura” and thus inaccessible in atomized moder-nity, Baudelaire’s experience must of necessity be degraded (189). As before,any possibility of Baudelaire’s poem having productive insight is slighted. Benja-min nullifies the poem’s primary apprehension: the inexorable sovereignty ofcontingency in human affairs, amplified among other ways in the poem by thepluperfect subjunctive of “you whom I would have loved” (“toi que j’eusseaimée”), the tense and mood of unconsummated opportunity (Œuvres complètes1: 93). Indeed, the sonnet does not represent the passing erotic spark as a stig-mata, but as a bittersweet pleasure of the city, or even as a rebirth (“renaître”), a

perspective that Benjamin’s historical vision cannot abide.12




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13 Indeed, Benjamin’s assessment is indistinguishable from Henry James’s: “Baudelaire had acertain groping sense of the moral complexities of life, and if the best that he succeeds in doing isto drag them down into the very turbid element in which he himself plashes and flounders, andthere present them to us much besmirched and bespattered, this was not a want of goodwill in him,but rather a dullness and permanent immaturity of v ision” (280).

14 A nostalgic search “for synthesis and totality,” as Jameson notes above, defines Benjamin’s workas well (see also Marxism 82). One thus wonders how much of Benjamin’s animus towards Baude-

laire is fueled by disidentification. T.J. Clark notes the strong transference: “The verdict on Baude-laire as secret agent in the enemy camp . . . is a verdict, hard won, on himself ” (44). In fact, a pas-tiche of citations from the first Baudelaire essay could be mistaken as autobiography: “He usuallypresents his views apodictically. Discussion is not his style”; “what impelled Baudelaire to give aradical-theological form to his radical rejection of those in power[?]”; “To his end Baudelaireremained in a bad position on the literary market”; “Baudelaire owned few of the material condi-tions of intellectual labour. From a library to an apartment there was nothing that he did not haveto do without in the course of his life” (“Paris” 12, 24, 34, 72).

There remains the common retort that Benjamin was not trying to offer closeliterary readings but rather something else: a theory, a philosophy, a tool for the

revolution. For example, after acknowledging — in a footnote — that Benjaminactually got Baudelaire wrong, Irving Wohlfarth offers a typical version of thisdefense: “Benjamin does not mention certain obvious ironies in [“The Ragpick-ers’ Wine”] which would surely complicate his reading of it if he were not propos-ing to ‘use’ the poem rather than ‘interpret’ it” (149). It would behoove those whohave in turn found such great “use” in Benjamin to worry over a tool so carelesslybuilt. In all he says on the poet, Benjamin rightly highlights Baudelaire’s prodi-gious aesthetic labor in making sense of a modern world in the absence of any visible or reassuring metahistory and metaphysics. But for him to characterizeBaudelaire’s claims for that labor, manifested, among other ways, by a commit-

ment to form and technique, as less “a great achievement of the will” than anindication of “a lack of conviction, insight, and steadiness” is, to say the very least,to misunderstand Baudelaire’s accomplishment (“Paris” 94).13 Here is Burton’srather more considered and generous assessment:In attempting to explain these shifts and switches of meaning, it will not greatly avail us to fall backon the proverbial waywardness of Baudelaire’s convictions, that alleged love of contradiction forcontradiction’s sake that has so often functioned as an all -purpose stand-by solution to any intrac-table problem arising from the poet’s work. Baudelaire’s mind proceeds by contradiction but way- ward or whimsical it is not, and if it often seems capable of espousing antithetical positions virtuallysimultaneously or of oscillating perpetually between affirmation and negation, it is not, as some would have it, through sheer capricious perversity but as part of a tortuous life -long quest for syn-

thesis and totality. (260)14

This process is vividly illustrated in “The Swan.”

Baudelaire without Benjamin

“The Swan” is especially useful for the purposes of this essay, not only becauseit is among Baudelaire’s best-known lyrics, but also because it is central to Ben- jamin’s reading of the poet. Lines from “The Swan” provide the epigraph to theBaudelaire section of both exposés for the “Arcades” project on nineteenth-century Paris. Benjamin also claims that “‘Le Cygne’ is paramount” among

those “certain poems of the Fleurs du mal ” that “presented modernism in itsinterpenetration with classical antiquity.” Whereas “the aesthetic reflections inthe theory of art” wrongly promise modernity’s potential co-equivalence with




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antique cultural achievement, “The Swan” correctly shows that, in fact, “decrep-itude constitutes the closest connection between modernism and antiquity.” This

claim for the poem’s orientation is grounded entirely in this paraphrase: “Thestature of Paris is fragile; it is surrounded by symbols of fragility —living crea-tures (the negress and the swan) and historical figures (Andromache . . .). Theircommon feature is sadness about what was and lack of hope for what is to come”(“Paris” 82). However, while sadness undoubtedly figures prominently in thepoem, fragility, decrepitude, and hopelessness do not, even if they are central toBenjamin’s theory of history. A comparison of the ninth aphorism in “On theConcept of History” and “The Swan” makes this unmistakable.

Paul Klee’s watercolor Angelus Novus is the inspiration for Benjamin’s aphorist, who describes in detail the expression and bearing of Klee’s angel, but then inter-

poses the quasi-apodictic claim that the angel of history “muß so aussehen” (Gesa- mmelte Schriften 1.2: 697–98; must look like this). His next claim —that the angel“hat das Antlitz der Vergangenheit zugewendet” (has his face turned towards thepast) — seems intended equally for Benjamin’s imagined angel and Klee’s; how-ever, in the watercolor the angel seems to be looking off to the viewer’s right. For areader invested in Benjamin’s metaphysics, the misreading of the Klee painting would be inconsequential to the aphorism’s truth-content, which is not susceptible(as is always true of metaphysics) to direct disconfirmation. Because Benjaminpresumably is not interpreting Klee, but “using” him, I will limit myself to elucidat-ing the logical structure and aporias of Benjamin’s historical vision in order to

contrast it with Baudelaire’s. Klee’s distracted angel, then, is merely an occasionfor Benjamin to send his own imagined angel aloft into a metaphysical space.Unlike us, with our earthly perspective of what “vor uns erscheint” (before usappears), the angel is not limited in what “da sieht er ” (he sees there) of humanity(Benjamin’s emphases throughout).

In an anomaly characteristic of metaphysical accounts, the aphorist from thehuman community is at this point imbued with the impossible power to focalizehis report from the supra-human angelic perspective. This contradiction persistsuntil the final sentence. For the magical angel, the spatial elevation and expansionis accompanied by an access to an extended temporality, but one quasi-apodictically

limited to past time —another imposition, here on the entirely formless, unmarkedspace in which Klee’s angel floats. Against the fixed present of humans below, whoprocess historical time sequentially and cumulatively as “eine Kette von Begeben-heiten” (a chain of events), the aphorist’s angel is accorded a comprehensive viewfrom Paradise to the present, seeing events as part of “eine einzige Katastrophe”(one big catastrophe) whose temporal and spatial source is “ein Sturm” that“weht vom Paradiese her” (a storm that blows from Paradise).

Thus, despite the angel’s redemptive wish to “das Zerschlagene zusammenfü-gen” (reassemble the smashed), the storm from Paradise “sich in seinen Flügeln verfangen hat und so stark ist, daß der Engel sie nicht mehr schließen kann” (hascaught in his wings and is so strong that the angel can no longer close them).Once these metaphysical and metahistorical coordinates are established, the nar-rative-semantic content follows readily: the loss of Paradise precludes humanendeavor, despite any good intentions, from being anything but a process that“unablässig Trümmer auf Trümmer häuft” (relentlessly piles rubble atop rubble),




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resulting in a “Trümmerhaufen” that “zum Himmel wächst” (heap of debris thatgrows skywards). This positing of an intractable supernatural force, this angelol-

ogy, would definitively re-enchant contemporary understandings by pointing outthat “was wir den Fortschritt nennen, ist dieser Sturm” (what we call progress is thisstorm). Unfortunately, this fairly simple story is not without problems, two disjunc-tions between the semantic content and the deictics of this aphorism being themost notable.

First, Benjamin draws great power from his dismissal of naive social and histori-cal positivisms that view history or society as allowing a linear progression intoever-greater freedoms and achievements. Yet he also refuses any alternative visionsof progress. By simply re-nominating “progress” as “this storm,” he replaces positiv-ism’s naiveté with a temporal schema that is no less naively linear in the path it

draws from Paradise through the present to an implied future. Indeed, a heavenlystorm lacking crosswinds and eddies has no correlate in the fluid dynamics of this world and even suggests a hidden wind machine within Benjamin’s metaphysicalsystem. Benjaminians may want to worry over this homology between positivismand theology, over the great power Benjamin draws from the positivistic anti-pos-itivist biblical cadences in which he phrases his concern.

Second, the sweeping historical argument offered is at odds with the presentismof the aphorism’s temporal markers. Where we might expect that a storm hasalways been blowing from Paradise, and that the allegorical angel of history’s wingshave always been immobilized in its current, we are instead offered the familiar

scene of a supposedly world-historical dynamic that just so happens to reach acrisis point in the writer’s lifetime. Once again, a Benjaminian may have cause to worry given yet another universal theology whose rhetorical force hinges on theexceptionalism of a present that within the logic of that theological frame hasno exceptional status.

No adequate perspective on the events of human history could produce anallegorization as linear and presentist as this. What, exactly, does this angel ofhistory represent? Conventionally, angels are relays between heaven and earth,endowed with agency, and at least potentially susceptible to Satanic influence.Benjamin’s angel, however, does not move between God and man, Paradise and

Earth, desire and actuality. This is a strange angel, indeed: incapacitated by theforce of a transcendental order of which it might, on the one hand, be a part;and lacking all agency in the terrestrial order, whose activity, on the other hand, itmight personify. It is neither an angel who personifies human history nor an angelentrusted with the care of human history. Lacking both transcendental powerand terrestrial agency, it is ordained to impotence.

In “The Swan,” Baudelaire offers a less simple account of the entanglement ofthe present with the past (Œuvres complètes 1: 85–87). The present in this case isthe Paris emerging from the urban renovations supervised by Baron Haussmannduring the Second Empire of Napoleon III. The poem’s speaker, contemplatinghis sense of displacement, is situated at the site of a completed renovation: thePlace du Carrousel between the Louvre and the then-standing Tuileries Palace.The poem commences in the midst of this rumination with an invocation (“jepense à vous!”) of an anguished exile, the Andromache of Virgil’s Aeneid , the Tro- jan hero Hector’s widow, carried to Greece as a slave of Achilles’ son Pyrrhus. The




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15 Praising new buildings, an 1855 guidebook notes that “where these now stand, dark and filthystreets, and mean-looking houses, defiled by their presence the magnificent buildings around, while the carriage-way to the Louvre was l ined with unseemly booths, where the thrifty citizenmight find any kind of commodity, from the second-hand book to the rusty nail. In the short spaceof five years, al l this has been swept away, and the noble structures now in progress date but fromthe beginning of 1852” (Galignani’s 170). Haussmann himself remarks: “Depuis ma jeunesse, l’étatdélabré de la Place du Carrousel, devant la Cour des Tuileries, me semblait être une honte pour laFrance, un aveu d’impuissance de son Gouvernement, et je lui gardais rancune” (40; Since my

youth, the dilapidated state of the Place du Carrousel, before the Court of the Tuileries, seemed tome a shame for France, a confession of the impotence of its government, and I resented it).16 Katherine Elkins notes that, unlike Horace’s conventional account in Ode 2.20, Baudelaire’s

figuration is “no longer a prophecy of his own immortality” but “reveals a strange and fatal mortal-ity” (4, 9–10), thus also helping to foreclose a reading that locates ultimate meaning in the swan’sautochthonous yearnings.

apostrophizer emblematizes her grief by imagining her tears formerly (“jadis”)enlarging a Greek river “lyingly” renamed after the Trojan Simois (“Simoïs men-

teur”). However, upending the traditional valorization of origins, the apostro-phizer proclaims that, in fact, his memory is made fecund and his poetic state-ment is inspired by this ersatz river of tears (“par vos pleurs grandit”). In a poemawash in waterways, the impoverished and sad (“Pauvre et triste”) Simois’s met-onymic inspiration initiates a refiguration of the conventional links between ori-gin, loss, melancholy, and creativity.

What Andromache’s sorrow brings to fruition is a succession of earlier visions ofthe Carrousel. The poet accentuates the disorientation of finding his habitualenvirons — even with the foreknowledge of their imminent metamorphosis —made spectral (“Je ne vois qu’en esprit”) by nostalgically recalling a site already

characterized by jarring contrasts produced by the renovation in progress.Unornamented capitals and neoclassical column shafts heaped alongside stoneblocks (“tas de chapiteaux ébauchés et de fûts . . . les gros blocs”) —all awaitingemployment — are juxtaposed w ith the makeshift premises (“ce camp debaraques”) and teeming commerce (“brillant aux carreaux, le bric-à-brac con-fus”) that characterized the network of cramped city blocks that had over timeencroached into the plaza.15 A further effort of imagining animates an earlierCarrousel that is even more inaccessible: though of the poet’s lifetime — “(laforme d’une ville / Change plus vite, hélas! Que le cœur d’un mortel)” —it isboth thematically —“mythe étrange et fatal” —and temporally —“jadis” —aligned

with the distant past of Andromache, its inhabitants blurring into quasi-mythicdaemons (“le Travail s’éveille”).In brief, the poet remembers a menagerie that stood there once, and an escaped

swan that dragged its feathers along a dry, rough path near a waterless gutter,opened its beak, and anxiously bathed its wings in the dust. And then the swanspoke, demanding to know when rain, thunder, and lightning will return (“Eau,quand donc pleuvras-tu? quand tonneras-tu, foudre?”). At this point, a reader —taken with the wrenching account of the swan’s home-lake-sickness (“le cœurplein de son beau lac natal”) —might extend the chain of displacements from newParis to old Paris, from human settlement to a menagerie, from a dry gutter to a

beautiful lake, from city to country, from culture to nature — in other words, allthe way back to a Paradise. But the desire for the redemption of a supposed Para-dise is decisively ironized by the swan’s anthropomorphization.16 Even readers




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17 I thank an anonymous reader for this journal for pointing out a further way in which this linesupports a reading of Baudelaire’s entirely terrestrial concerns: lurking behind the metaphysical“homme d’Ovide” stands the homophonic “homme de vide” (empty man).

deaf to the homophony of the Swan’s “Eau” and an apostrophizer’s “O” (seeCuller, “Apostrophe” 64), or unmindful of Baudelaire’s earlier figuration in “The

Albatross” of poets as pitifully incapacitated birds, might pause at the momentbefore the swan’s speech when the poem’s focalization blurs the apostrophizer’sconsciousness with the content of the bird’s heart. The swan’s trudge and plaints,far from voicing a “natural” desire, more plausibly disclose a figurative arraign-ment of lyric poets’ pseudo-shamanistic histrionics. Just meters from the waters ofthe Seine, this metaphysically oriented poet-swan musters little more than self-pityto alleviate the drought from which it suffers.

Thus, instead of linking Andromache and the swan as twin figures of loss andgrief, as Benjamin would when arguing for their “common feature[s],” the rheto-ric of the poem encourages us to view their aquatic yearnings as disparate aes-

thetic practices. Andromache’s generatively re-signifies and re-assembles a futureout of memories of a lost past and the materials of the present: a “lying” Troy onthe banks of a “lying” Simois. The swan’s futilely engages in an other-worldlyattempt (“Vers le ciel ironique et cruellement bleu”) to redeem inexorable losses —like man in Ovid’s cosmogony, fashioned from mud, but commanded always toglance skyward (“Vers le ciel quelquefois, comme l’homme d’Ovide”).17 Further-more, Andromache and the swan do not simply represent this aesthetic fecundityand sterility; within the structure of the poem their invocations perform it. Just asreflection on Andromache initiates the poem’s conceptual motion, so reflectionon the swan engenders conceptual paralysis, when the poet-swan’s celestial con-

vulsions (“son cou convulsif ”) bring the first section to an abrupt and inconclusiveend. Section 2 resumes with the poet fixated in his melancholy (“rien dans mamélancolie / N’a bougé!”), burdened by his memories, and oppressed by a visionof the swan. Only a recollection of the no-less-grieved Andromache’s resilience inabiding her inexorable losses —of status, freedom (“Vil bétail”), homeland, hus-band, son —releases the poet from solipsism into an ethical concern wrung froma terrestrially oriented (“en extase courbée”) distress.

Starting with an asymmetrical third “Je pense à,” quickly followed by four ellipti-cal invocations of that syntax, the conceptual ground fertilized by the proxySimois takes full flower (see Burton, Baudelaire in 1859 165). Against the abrupt,

inhuman break that sends the angel of history aloft, divorced from the humancultural object that merely occasioned his invocation, Baudelaire’s expansion ofconceptual scope is achieved through a multiplication of associations that simulta-neously extend farther into the profane world and deeper into the poet’s psyche.The wife Andromache (“femme d’Hélénus”) generates another phantasmatic woman (“la négresse”), who also yearns for a scene (“Les cocotiers absents”) froma beau pays natal (“de la superbe Afrique”). This gaunt (“amaigrie”) womanunfurls imagery of gaunt orphans (“maigres orphelins”) who are dessicated(“séchant”) like the dry lane (“pavé sec”) on which the swan plods. The disorient-ing fog (“brouillard”) behind which the black woman treads suggests the disori-enting forest (“forêt”) in which the poet’s soul (“mon esprit”) exiles itself (“s’exile”).This imagery of exile recalls the swan, ridiculous like an exile (“Comme les exilés,




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COMPARATIVE LITER ATURE / 424

18 Paul de Man notes similar nonfulfillment with similar effect in the closing of “Correspon-dences”: “Instead of analogy, we have enumeration, and an enumeration which never moves beyondthe confines of a set of particulars . . . . For what could be more perverse or corruptive for a meta-phor aspiring to transcendental totality than remaining stuck in an enumeration that never goesanywhere? If number can only be conquered by another number, if identity becomes enumeration,then there is no conquest at all” (“Anthropomorphism” 250).

ridicule”), and calls forth the abandonment of shipwrecked sailors (“matelotsoubliés dans une île”). The woman’s searching (“cherchant”) evokes a universal

experience of loss (“A quiconque a perdu ce qui ne ce retrouve”). The resultanttears (“s’abreuvent de pleurs”) recall not only the flooding tears (“pleurs gran-dit”) of Andromache that populate her Simoïs, but also the rain the swan wishesfor (“pleuvras-tu?”) in the dust (“dans la poudre”), which has become Ovidianmud (“dans la boue”) for the black woman.

The final stanza makes unmistakable the rewired connection between loss,memory, melancholy, and ethics. An old memory leads not to mute paralysis butrather to an eloquent cry of concern for the inhabitants of a radically heteroge-neous world —from an individual, presumably known woman (“la negresse”) to a vague but finite group (“quiconque”) to, in the final invocation in the fourth “Je

pense,” a proliferation of the downtrodden (“Aux captifs, aux vaincus! . . . à biend’autres encor!”). Melancholy is not overcome, but its resounding echoes draw themind to an ethical concern outside its parish. In this narrative submission to thehistorical and geographical vastness and heterogeneity of the world; in the specu-lative outward, not upward, projection of correspondences into obscure consum-mations; in the endless displacement of origins; and in an anticlimax of unknow-ability (“ . . . ”) rather than a confident universal truth (see, also, Chambers,Writing 169) Baudelaire marks his crucial difference from Benjamin. Here there isno angelic view, no cogent meta-narrative; the poet’s vision and knowledge giveout at an earthly distal, temporal, and historical range, and in this sputtering in

the face of an earth ridiculous and sublime the poem acquires its distinctive con-ceptual power.18

One needn’t subscribe to every detail of this reading to agree that “The Swan”formulates human afflictions no less comprehensively than Benjamin’s apho-rism. The poem does not, however, offer in response escape routes to the tran-scendental. Baudelaire stages the formidable challenge of practicing aestheticsand ethics in a world whose contingencies and diverse extent defeat all attemptsat mastery. He overcomes both the narcotic rigidity of an allegorical vision(“tout pour moi devient allégorie”) in which temporal events merely reflect other- worldly meanings and the temptation of casting a loss of metaphysical confi-

dence as Benjaminian “decrepitude.” Instead, he offers a non-allegorical figurefor signification in Hector’s cenotaph (“un tombeau vide”): a woman-madeconstruction marking an irrecoverable loss that incites, rather than deters, thepoet’s creation. The swan in “Le Cygne” serves to ironize a transcendentalmodel of “le signe.” If, as Benjamin says, “it is no accident that it is an allegory,”it is not a record of decrepitude, and to the extent that it “has the movement ofa cradle rocking back and forth between modernity and antiquity,” it is notbounded by Benjaminian teleologies, finding continuity instead in the intrin-sic melancholy of the human culture-making project (“Paris” 82; Arcades 356;cf. Nelson 345).




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Conclusion

Benjamin writes in a note that “es hat wenig Wert, die Position eines Baude-laire in das Netz der vorgeschobensten im Befreiungskampf der Menschheit ein-beziehen zu wollen” (Gesammelte Schriften 1.3:1161; it has little worth to want toinclude the position of a Baudelaire in the network of the most advanced in theliberation struggle of mankind). My aim in this essay has been to expose theunfounded severity of such a judgment, as well as highlight the costs of auto-matically endorsing it. Both Adorno and Derrida have alerted us to the dangerof taking Benjamin’s messianism as something more hospitable to human inter-ests than its eschatological rush to foreclose the realm of human endeavor war-rants. Martin Jay echoes their warnings:Benjamin may have wanted to salvage the redemptive project by secularizing it, but how successfulhe really was remains very much in dispute. Benjamin’s critique of the impoverishment of experi-ence . . . has been frequently admired, and his search for a way beyond the dualism of subject andobject has often struck a respondent chord. But the ultimately theological premises of his alterna-tive have rarely been scrutinized with any rigor . . . . Frankly dogmatic and based on a doctrinalbelief in the Absolute, which could somehow manifest itself in mundane experience, Benjamin’smaximalist definition of genuine experience could only be a utopian counter-factual to virtuallyeverything that is normally understood by the term. (341–42)

I have tried to argue that an analogous caution is warranted in considerations ofhis readings of Baudelaire, especially in their denigration of Baudelaire’s com-pelling attempts to transcend the easy pathos of historical decline and nostalgiafor a golden age.

The attraction, in our current theoretical imaginary, of Benjamin’s promiseto reconcile literary culture, socialist politics, and messianic faith is undeniable.In Wendy Brown’s words, “It is an opening for both the messianic dreams andthe human crafting that are erased by progressive historiography and politics.Thus does postfoundationalism potentially become at once spiritual and his-torical: its challenge to historical automatism reactivates the figures banished bythat automatism — conscious and unconscious memories, hopes, and longings”(143, 160). Her rhetoric does not, however, disguise the illusoriness of such areconciliation —for instance, in the figurative slippages in lauding the “grounds —or at least handholds or windows on possibility” thus offered. The closer we look at

Benjamin’s words, the more elusive these possibilities become.To endorse Benjamin’s vision of modernity is to refuse an alternative genealogy

of modernity that could well take, once free and clear of Benjamin’s shadow,Baudelairean “contingency” as its watchword and Baudelaire’s complex staging ofirresolvable psychic and social antagonisms as its praxis. It is to endorse a mode ofthought in which the human and the cultural are slighted as an incidental groundon which to posit an inevitable transcendental condition. It is to risk renderingour “dark times” a celestial affliction that is not susceptible to human comprehen-sion or intervention. Baudelaire’s alternative puts forward a vision in which greatcultural achievements emerge from wrestling with, instead of wishing away, “the

ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent” (“Painter” 13). Just as “every old masterhas had his own modernity,” so, he suggests, our own will only emerge from grap-pling with our era’s contingencies, however disorienting and however demoraliz-ing. In a trenchant passage, seemingly aimed squarely at his most influential twen-tieth-century reader, Baudelaire warns that the “transitory, fugitive element,




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whose metamorphoses are so rapid, must on no account be despised or dispensed with. By neglecting it, you cannot fail to tumble into the abyss of an abstract and

indeterminate beauty, like that of the first woman before the fall of man.”

Cornell University

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Baudelaire Without Benjamin

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