Intratextual Baudelaire
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Intratextual Baudelaire Runyon_Final4Print.indb 1 1/20/2010 3:30:05 PM Runyon_Final4Print.indb 2 1/20/2010 3:30:05 PM Intratextual Baudelaire i The Sequential Fabric of the Fleurs du mal and Spleen de Paris RANDOLPH PAUL RUNYON T H E O H I O S T A T E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E ss C O L U MB us Runyon_Final4Print.indb 3 1/20/2010 3:30:06 PM Copyright © 2010 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Runyon, Randolph, 1947– Intratextual Baudelaire : the sequential fabric of the Fleurs du mal and Spleen de Paris / Randolph Paul Runyon. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1118-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1118-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9216-7 (cd-rom) 1. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821–1867. Fleurs du mal—Criticism, Textual. 2. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821–1867. Spleen de Paris—Criticism, Textual. I. Title. PQ2191.Z5R86 2010 841'.8—dc22 2009029578 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (ISBN 978-0-8142-1118-2) CD-ROM (ISBN 978-0-8142-9216-7) Cover design by Becky Kulka and Jeff Smith. Type set in Adobe Galliard. Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Runyon_Final4Print.indb 4 1/20/2010 3:30:06 PM CONTENTS i Introduction 1 CHAPTER 1 The Fabric of the First Edition: The Fleurs of 1857 17 CHAPTER 2 The Sequence Rebuilt: The Fleurs of 1861 120 CHAPTER 3 The “serpent tout entier”: Le Spleen de Paris 189 Appendix A The Order of the Poems in the 1857 and 1861 Editions 263 Appendix B The Order of the Poems in Le Spleen de Paris 269 Works Cited 271 Index to Baudelaire's Works 277 General Index 281 Runyon_Final4Print.indb 5 1/20/2010 3:30:06 PM Runyon_Final4Print.indb 6 1/20/2010 3:30:06 PM INTRODU CTION i BAUDELAIRE AssERTED more than once that the order in which he arranged his poems was meaningful. Even before the Fleurs du mal first appeared in 1857, at a time when he was negotiating for the publication of some poems in the Revue des deux mondes, he wrote to the editor: “je tiens vivement, quels que soient les morceaux que vous choisirez, à les mettre en ordre avec vous,1 de manière qu’ils se fassent, pour ainsi dire, suite” [I am very anxious, whatever pieces you choose, to put them in order with you, so that they form, so to speak, a sequence].2 He was at the editor’s mercy as to which poems would appear, yet he hoped to play a role in determining the order of those that did. That order did not exist before the editor’s selection but would depend on the poems he chose. Baudelaire would then engage in some bricolage in the Lévi-Straussian sense, to cre- ate something—in this case, a meaningful sequence—out of the materials on hand. “The ‘bricoleur,’” Lévi-Strauss writes, “is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer, he does not sub- ordinate each of them to obtaining the raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand.’”3 Commenting on this letter, F. W. Leakey writes, “the principle 1. Regarding italics in this book, I have used two different approaches. In quotations from Baudelaire’s poetic works, italics have been added for emphasis unless indicated to be present in Baudelaire’s original. For all other sources, italics can be presumed to be original unless otherwise noted. 2. In a letter to Victor de Mars on April 7, 1855. Charles Baudelaire, Correspondance, 2 vols., ed. Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler (Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 1973), I: 312 (here- after cited in text as Corr. I or II; translations are my own unless otherwise noted). Eventu- ally eighteen poems were published in the Revue des deux mondes on June 1, 1855. 3. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weight- Runyon_Final4Print.indb 1 1/20/2010 3:30:07 PM I NTRODU C T I ON Baudelaire sought to adopt in the arrangement of these poems—that of sequence, with one poem leading smoothly into the next . is one that he was able eventually to follow in his own distribution of his poems in the complete editions of 1857 and 1861.”4 Baudelaire displayed the same concern for arrangement in the months preceding the publication of the Fleurs du mal, telling his publisher he hoped that together “Nous pourrons disposer ensemble l’ordre des matières des Fleurs du mal,—ensemble, entendez-vous, car la question est importante” [We will be able to arrange together the order of the material of the Fleurs du mal—together, you understand, for the question is impor- tant] (Corr. I: 364). When Baudelaire was subjected to prosecution in 1857, when the Fleurs du mal were deemed an offense to public morals, he prepared notes for his lawyer in which he called his book “ce parfait ensemble” [this per- fect whole].5 The prosecutor was threatening to have some of the poems removed—and eventually six were. Baudelaire wanted his lawyer to argue that the collection was itself a work of art that would be destroyed if any part of it were taken away. On Baudelaire’s invitation, and to some undetermined extent with his collusion, his friend Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly wrote a defense of the book: If quoted, a poem would have only its individual value, and make no mis- take, in Baudelaire’s book each poem has, in addition to the success of its details or the glory of its thought, a very important value with respect to the whole and to its location there [une valeur très importante densemble et de situation] that must not be lost by detaching it. Artists who can see the lines beneath the luxurious efflorescence of color will clearly see that there is a secret architecture [une architecture secrète] here, a plan calculated by the poet, premeditated and intentional. Les Fleurs du mal are not lined up one after the other like just so many lyrical pieces, produced by inspi- ration, and gathered into a collection for no other reason than to bring them together. They are not so much poems as a poetic work of the stron- gest unity. From the standpoint of Art and aesthetic perception they would therefore lose a great deal by not being read in the order in which the poet, man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 17; corresponds to p. 27 of La Pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962). Margery Evans, in Baudelaire and Intertextuality: Poetry at the Crossroads (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), suggests the relevance of the concept of bricolage to the structure of Le Spleen de Paris (p. 3); I will argue that it is equally pertinent to that of Les Fleurs du mal. 4. F. W. Leakey, Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5, hereafter cited in text as FM Leakey. 5. Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, 2 vols., ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard/ Pléiade, 1975–76), I: 194; hereafter cited in text as OC I or II. Runyon_Final4Print.indb 2 1/20/2010 3:30:07 PM I NTRODU C T I ON who well knows what he is doing, has arranged them. But they would lose even more from the point of view of the moral effect of which we earlier spoke. (OC I: 1196) How much of Barbey’s statement reflected Baudelaire’s own thoughts can- not be determined. But we know that the poet approved of it enough to include it among the Articles justitatifs of which he had two hundred copies printed before his trial. The italics, Marcel Françon suggests, may be Baudelaire’s own.6 And even though Barbey’s remarks, and Baudelaire’s approval of them, were motivated by the need to deflect the prosecution’s attack, what Barbey wrote about the value the poems have by virtue of their “situation,” about what they would lose by not being read in the order Baudelaire gave them, and his assertion that the Fleurs are not so much poems in the plural as a single poetic work are consonant with Baudelaire’s concern, before and long after the prosecution, for the order in which his poems appear. Four years later, when the second edition appeared, minus the six offending poems but containing thirty-five new poems and a significant rearrangement of those retained, Baudelaire sent a copy to Alfred de Vigny and wrote, “Le seul éloge que je sollicite pour ce livre est qu’on recon- naisse qu’il n’est pas un pur album et qu’il a un commencement et une fin. Tous les poèmes nouveaux ont été faits pour être adaptés au cadre singulier que j’avais choisi” [The only praise I solicit for this book is that one rec- ognize that it is not a mere album, and that it has a beginning and an end. All the new poems were written to be adapted to the distinctive framework I had chosen] (Corr.