V

Products of Desire in Les Fleurs du mal

Rappellerai-je encore cette série de petits poèmes de quelques strophes, qui sont des intermèdes galants ou rêveurs et qui ressemblent, les uns à des sculptures, les autres à des fleurs, d’autres à des bijoux, mais tous revêtus d’une couleur plus fine ou plus brillante que les couleurs de la Chine et de l’Inde, et tous d’une coupe plus pure et plus décidée que des objets de marbre ou de cristal ? Quiconque aime la poésie les sait par cœur. – Baudelaire, “Théophile Gautier [I]” (1859)

In the following description of a Parisian salon, Gautier gives drastic expression to the integration of the individual into the interior: “The eye, entranced, is led to the groups of ladies who, fluttering their fans, listen to the talkers half-reclining. Their eyes are sparkling like diamonds; their shoulders glisten like satin; and their lips open up like flowers.” (Artificial things come forth!) Paris et le Parisiens au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1856), p. iv (Théophile Gautier, “Introduction”). – Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

Baudelaire’s praise of Gautier’s Émaux et camées in the first pas- sage and Gautier’s evocation of a Paris salon in the second, collected by Walter Benjamin for The Arcades Project, both appraise their ob- jects with a connoisseur’s eye, a connoisseur, that is, of luxury goods whose color, whose crystalline cut may be familiar from the displays at exhibitions that both poets visited and covered in essays and reviews. As Benjamin notes, the individual is drawn into and becomes a piece with the interior in Gautier’s description. In Baudelaire’s comment, poems take shape and become vivid through an imaginary of things. Luxury products, desired objects sparkle, gleam, entice: poetry aspires to the condition of a bright, sensual world of objects. Indeed, Baudelaire’s own great work is a collection of “flowers.” 160 Material Figures

The gaze in Gautier’s passage transforms women, or parts of their bodies, into such luxury items and flowers where scent, color, and sensual form combine. As we saw in the coverage of the industrial ex- hibitions (chapter two), fascination with material objects, especially the qualities of luxury goods, grew from such spectator practices, themselves informed to some degree by reviewers’ rhetoric and vo- cabulary. Thus not only is the display of worldly goods prominent in urban spectacular life, but also they provide tropes for the beauties of bodies and poetry. Despite a sense that poetry of all the arts should be spiritual and immaterial among poets like Baudelaire, the lure of gor- geousness, the imaginary of sensual luxury, seems to pull in quite the opposite direction. Such linkages between the poetic and the realm of material goods in the nineteenth century are familiar from Walter Benjamin’s seminal study of Baudelaire, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, and from the larger work adumbrated in The Ar- cades Projects with sections or “convolutes” devoted to “Arcades, Magasins de Nouveautés, Sales Clerks,” “Fashion,” “Exhibitions, Ad- vertising, Grandville,” “The Collector,” “The Interior, the Trace,” as well as “Baudelaire” and “Literary History, Hugo.” In her chapter on Walter Benjamin in Mother Tongues, Barbara Johnson takes up the consequences of Benjamin’s approach for understanding the subject- object relationship. In her analysis of his debate with Theodor Adorno over Marxist praxis, documented in their correspondence in the 1930s, she characterizes Adorno’s Marxism as a metadiscourse with explana- tory power, while finding that Benjamin draws attention to the historical character of Marxism itself, that is, how it expresses the milieu in which it arose and how it shares expressive features with the material products of its time (113). Benjamin’s focus is on the dia- lectic between subjects and objects (115), including that between the metadiscourse, as it were, and its objects that were part of the very fashioning of that heuristic system. She defends his dialectical method against the charge that he takes the things of the world themselves as object, a “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” or a “fetishism,” con- tending that instead he “treat[s] the world itself as a fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (113). In other words, “[d]ialectial history is a history of the interaction between objects and subjects” (115). If Benjamin’s dialectical method does undermine the a priori stability of the Marxist metadiscourse in order to focus on the subject-