VI a Subjectivity of Things: Le Spleen De Paris

VI A Subjectivity of Things: Le Spleen de Paris Depuis longtemps déjà [Victor Hugo] avait montré, non pas seulement dans ses livres, mais aussi dans la parure de son existence personnelle, un grand goût pour les monuments du passé, pour les meubles pittoresques, les porcelaines, les gravures, et pour tout le mystérieux et brillant décor de la vie ancienne. Le critique dont l’œil négligerait ce détail, ne serait pas un vrai critique ; car non-seulement ce goût du beau et même du bizarre, exprimé par la plastique, confirme le caractère littéraire de Victor Hugo ; non-seulement il confirmait sa doctrine littéraire révolutionnaire, ou plutôt rénovatrice, mais encore il apparaissait comme complément indispensable d’un caractère poétique universel. Que Pascal, enflammé par l’ascétisme, s’obstine désormais à vivre entre quatre murs nus avec des chaises de paille ; qu’un curé de Saint-Roch (je ne me rappelle plus lequel) envoie, au grand scandale des prélats amoureux du comfort, tout son mobilier à l’hôtel des ventes, c’est bien, c’est beau et grand. Mais si je vois un homme de lettres, non opprimé par la misère, négliger ce qui fait la joie des yeux et l’amusement de l’imagination, je suis tenté de croire que c’est un homme de lettres fort incomplet, pour ne pas dire pis. – Baudelaire, “Victor Hugo” (1861) In the sentences of the significant prose poem “Les Foules” there speaks, with other words, the fetish itself with which Baudelaire’s sensitive nature resonated so powerfully; that empathy with inorganic things which was one of his sources of inspiration. – Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism In Baudelaire’s last great poetic work, Le Spleen de Paris, the dialectic between the sensate and the immaterial, between the prose of the world and the shaping desires of creative subject literally takes an- other form. This collection of prose poems is the first widely read and influential work in a new genre, the herald and exemplum of a “prosaic” world, an attempt, in his own words, to apply “à la descrip- tion de la vie moderne, ou plutôt d’une vie moderne et plus abstraite, 198 Material Figures le procédé” that Aloysius Bertrand applied to the painting of “la vie ancienne” in his Gaspard de la Nuit. Thus Baudelaire’s ambition to capture an “abstract” modernity through glimpses of “modern life” and snatches of overheard conversations that intimate urban modernity. With this aim, Baudelaire takes up and reworks themes and problems that obsessed him throughout his career: the idea and burden of Beauty; the interrogation of subjectivity and its mercurial qualities; the relationship between this ever-being-formed subjectivity and the phenomenal world, such as it exists outside that self; the desire to immerse the self in the phenomenal world, lose the self, as a way of becoming more “real” through sensation; the voyage as trope for this desire for sensate experience in leaving the self; the material as springboard for the imagination; and, finally, the dark side of the glance: modern blindness to modern social ills. The focus of this chapter is double, just as Baudelaire’s own interrogation of the moi/non-moi relationship is twofold: directed at the question of the relationship between the human and the inorganic, between people and things, and questions of social relationships, that is, between the subject and the other, or among people. If we consider for a moment the fate of the utopian equivalences or exchanges outlined in “Au Bourgeois,” we can see to what extent that vision of social communion has darkened, through scenarios of dysfunctional or unequal exchange and social disequilibrium. Indeed, the poor’s lack of pleasure-producing things compounded by the insensitivity of the wealthy or middle-class to this deprivation is the ethical nucleus of many of these prose poems. There is, however, no condemnation of luxury as such: the promise and lure of the sensate remains, albeit deferred to imagined experiences or a relationship of creative produc- tivity with things. For Baudelaire, as for Hugo in Baudelaire’s words, the creative calls for the sensate realm of things “qui fait la joie des yeux et l’amusement de l’imagination.” toutes ces choses pensent par moi (“Le Confiteor de l’artiste”) Bill Brown, in “Thing Theory,” draws our attention to the pre- occupation with and longing for “things” of the last century in fiction, poetry, philosophy, art, anthropology, sociology, and history, of which the emergence of new fields such as material culture studies is symp-.

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