Hyperacuity — Baudelaire’s Late Fragments
It is a peculiar quality of great intellects — and in our aesthetic era it is only artists who can be intellects at all — to repeatedly synthesize disparate images and aesthetic values, playfully examining appearances in different forms over the course of a lifetime. It might even be called an obsession, with the artist unusually compelled to understand imagery at first only dim, and taken as a whole, exudes a mysteriously particular attraction to them alone, an interest that develops as their own playful activity forms and brings to life something once vague, subjective, and merely whimsical. But if they’re successful, it hardly ends with them. In Baudelaire's case, his coherence binds a continuity of aesthetic values that formally transcends chronology — the poor man's history. Baudelaire's Late Fragments reveal such rare continuity via the consistency of his passions for Poe, immoralism, Dandyism, artifice, spirituality, crowds, ruins, decor, color, contradiction, beauty, and political upheaval, to name a few. In Baudelaire Today (1953), Wallace Fowlie writes, "Baudelaire was obsessed by a small number of problems to which he returned ceaselessly. They were all present in him at the beginning of his career and all present in his earliest poems." If there is “late style” for artists in general, it may be a lush, overgrown naïveté coming into charged confrontation with increased self-understanding and knowledge — in this final showdown naïveté is unexpectedly excited by demystification, and in turn naive imagination allows for inspired critical insights otherwise foreclosed to academic rationality. In Baudelaire’s last 1859 salon review, he argues that criticism without imagination is hardly capable of being criticism at all. If there is a late Baudelaire, it may be in this attempt to synthesize disparate images into a "composite style" that lavishly evokes the manifold appearances of “society” in its most comprehensive state of disintegration and spiritual ruin. Some of this book contains drafts of prose poems from Paris Spleen, which we see in the process of their crystallizing ideation over many years. Like Nietzsche, Baudelaire had already by the 1920s been dragged through convoluted metaphysical debates and pseudo-psychologizing by the French left intellectuals, but what his journals reveal is a writer who cuts through all the artless academicism with a lucid simplicity and a mind acutely alert to aesthetic values he feels the need to convey with a clarity and palpability not seen since. Due to this hyperacuity, Baudelaire is a poet-philosopher who illuminates how modern self-examination can stoke a naive and exciting discovery of imagination — the “Queen of the faculties” — instead of stifling it. In other words, he’s not a Romantic.
Unlike Poe, Baudelaire didn't leave behind theories on the craft of writing, but his fragmented notes offer similar insights into his art that are perhaps more educational. That so much of the late fragments are notes for writing gives them an almost pedagogical quality via his acute reflections on worthwhile subjects for critique, and how he might go about writing through them. A passage lists types of "beautiful airs"; a writer could conceivably write an entire book filling out the stories for which Baudelaire listed specific titles but never wrote the prose; his articulated thematic sections offer a portfolio of objects of critique still compelling to contemporary sensibilities; he references books on regional dialects like the dos and don'ts of French and then lists various phrases from it (a real time capsule). The fragments will connect with anyone who loves lists. Baudelaire's main project for the first half of this book likewise takes up the incomplete tasks and ruins of a dead writer: Poe's challenge for an impossible book of personal confession, titled My Heart Laid Bare. He articulates an aesthetic mode for this writing of ruthless self-criticism: "Apply to the notion of joy, of feeling oneself alive, the idea of the hyperacuity of the senses, which Poe applied to the notion of pain. Create a work through the sheer logic of contraries, the path lies open, against the grain."
Félicien Rops (1833–1898), cover illustration for Les Épaves (Scraps) by Charles Baudelaire (1866), Wikimedia Commons.
Democratized and Syphilized
By sincerely exposing his heart in literary form, the social side of Baudelaire — no less 19th century Paris — is also revealed. As late as the 1860s he's still sarcastically challenging Proudhon. His prose piece from Paris Spleen, “Let's Beat Up The Poor!,” we learn, originally ended with an appeal to the Socialist: "What do you say to that, Civilian Proudhon?" “Let's Beat Up The Poor!” is one of a few allegories in Paris Spleen for the duplicitous character of so-called democracy under capitalism. His later criticism of democratic constitutions illumine fears, or practical ignorance of freedom by the masses, something wrong in this new heaven on earth:
Constitutions are made of paper. Manners and morals are everything. — Belgian “freedom" is a mere word. It's there on paper, but it doesn't exist, because nobody feels the need for it.
He sides with the deserter and has notes for developing this character, this "military man as comedian … The defense of the deserter facing court-martial."
Baudelaire reveals his 1848 revolutionary fervor as a joy in destruction.
Taking natural pleasure in demolition.
…
Let us add that when one wants to talk to them about actual revolution they are terrified. Old maids. ME, if I agree to be a republican, I am fully conscious of doing evil. Yes! Long Live the Revolution!
Forever! What the hell!
But as for myself, I'm not taken in! I was never taken in! I say Long Live the Revolution! the way I would say: Long Live Destruction! Long Live Expiation! Long Live Punishment! Long Live Death!
Not only would I be happy to be the victim, but I wouldn't mind being the executioner either — to feel the Revolution from both sides!
We all carry the republican spirit in our veins, just as we carry the pox in our marrow. We are Democratized and Syphilized.
Félicien Rops (1833–1898), Les Sataniques. Satan Sowing Tares (1882), coloured aquatint, 25.7 x 18 cm, Musée Provincial Félicien Rops, Namur, Belgium. Wikimedia Commons.
What progressive since has been so real with themself? Who since has been so drunk on some rare form of dialectics that aims to see phenomena as self-contradictory? When he repeats such insights in his notes, the reader wonders, Did he simply forget it from the day before, remembering the thought, or was he intentionally trying to emblazon it on his mind so he couldn't forget? Baudelaire lays his heart bare on this, and as elsewhere with his direct candor or "hyperacuity" uncovers some shameful taboo, or some sordid proof of duplicity and ironic self-betrayal, chilled by abject spiritual emptiness… yet beguiling the reader’s imagination with new vistas of ruin, no less suggestive of the emotional alienation of new humans who either must simply endure such degenerescence or otherwise take authorship and responsibility for it. With Baudelaire dawns the profound realization that the beautiful may be dissonant. After Baudelaire, beauty without spleen is impossible. Running on a literary engine of contradiction, Baudelaire is sincere even about irony — "I am truly debauched. I enjoy orgies, to which I bring the condiment of irony." (Do people bring condiments to orgies?)
The Degradation of Hearts
Baudelaire's aesthetic disgust with the masses pervades his Late Fragments, and it's a real pleasure to read such an indictment! The indictment stands, lucid and contemporary. He offers up an early critique of authoritarianism in section 44 of My Heart Laid Bare, titled “Politics” —
POLITICS.
In sum, in the eyes of history and of the French people, the great glory of Napoleon III will have been to prove that the first comer can, by seizing the telegraph and the National Printing Press, govern a great nation.
Those who believe that these things can be accomplished without the permission of the masses are imbeciles — as are those who believe that glory issues only from virtue.
Dictators are the servants of the masses — nothing more — a rotten role to play, to be sure—and their glory is the result of their having accommodated their minds to the general idiocy of the nation.
It is perhaps the first mass psychology of the Bonapartism that would later become Fascism. It's also in these journals that Baudelaire writes one of the profoundest insights into the meaning of the changes in the industrial era. It's not always easy to locate, so I quote it here at length:
The human imagination can conceive of republics or of other communitarian states that would be worthy of some glory — if directed by holy men, by certain aristocrats. But it is not specifically in the political institutions that one will observe the effect of universal ruin, or of universal progress — it hardly matters to what name it goes by. It will be seen in the degradation of the human heart. Need I mention that whatever remains of politics will have to combat the onslaught of widespread animality and that the governments will be forced — just to maintain themselves and create a phantom of order — to resort to methods that would cause men of today to shudder, callous though they already be? — At that point, the son will flee his family, not at age eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his precocious greed; he will flee, not to seek out heroic adventures, not to rescue some damsel imprisoned in a tower, not to immortalize his garret with sublime thoughts, but to start a business, to make money, to compete with his vile papa, the founder and shareholder of a newspaper that provides such daily enlightenment as will make Le Siècle of those days seem like a regular hotbed of superstition. — At that point, those who stray from the course, those who have fallen from their station, those who have gone through several lovers, those who are sometimes called Angels in recognition of and in gratitude for the absolute insouciance that flares forth like some haphazard flame from lives as logical as well as evil — at that point, I say, these creatures will be pitilessly well behaved, having acquired a wisdom that will condemn everything, except money — everything, even errors of the senses! — At that time, everything that resembles virtue, indeed, everything that does not thirst for riches, will be considered merely ridiculous. Justice, if justice still obtains during these fortunate times, will banish all citizens incapable of amassing wealth. — Your wife, O Bourgeois, your chaste better half, whose lawful weddedness you find so poetic, will henceforth introduce into your legal arrangement a despicable practice beyond reproach. The loving and watchful guardian of your strongbox, she will be the perfect ideal of the kept woman. Your daughter, mature beyond her years, will dream while still in the cradle that she is selling herself for millions. And you yourself, O Bourgeois — even less a poet than you are today — you will find nothing wrong with this, you will regret nothing. For there are things in man that grow stronger and more prosperous as others slacken and go into decline: thanks to the progress of these times, all that will remain of your insides will be your bowels! These times are perhaps quite near; who knows whether they are not already upon us, and whether the coarsening of our nature is not the sole obstacle preventing us from recognizing the atmosphere we breathe.
The translator offers a clarifying history on the profound effect that this prophetic critique had on Nietzsche when he discovered Baudelaire later in life (though Baudelaire immediately follows this with a confession that he's not a prophet). We also learn that Nietzsche sensed Baudelaire's rare Wagnerian spirit before he was aware of Baudelaire's Tannhäuser essay. Baudelaire's statement, so seemingly obvious, so lucid because it also seemed what was necessary to say, cannot be emphasized enough at a time when the masses are obsessed with reforming institutions but are totally deluded when it comes to sincerely understanding what they really want — or, in Nietzsche's terms, what they value — in their heart of hearts. Another insight that Nietzsche shared was Baudelaire's repeated insistence that society does its best to prevent the emergence of great people that could change society. Not merely about the great men, Baudelaire was sensitive to how such a phenomenon revealed self-defeating and contradictory mores of Bourgeois society. The insight that history has been made by a few individuals scattered throughout the ages, those few who took the path that "lies open, against the grain" shows up in Nietzsche, often. Baudelaire even uses the term "herd,” but more often describes the masses as moving "in packs." For Baudelaire, the masses are more like dogs than cows, but are nevertheless crude animals led by their noses. So long as there are self-deluded masses, "crowds in love with the crushing whip" (“The Voyage”), Baudelaire is relevant. And here the crowds, our feebly dependent ancestors, are depicted in their infancy with a contradictory luxuriousness of poetic form that reveals their basest instincts and boring aesthetic consonance. Baudelaire's ultimate question regarding whether or not we're able to recognize the conditions in which we find ourselves still tasks us with finding a suitable form or practice through which we can perceive and take into our own hands the reality and meaning of spiritual degradation. He seems to demand something like immanent critique. Short of this, it's all deepening delusion and coarsening of senses.
Félicien Rops, Pornocracy
Rops, Les Sataniques. L'Offrande, 1882
Painting and Visual Art in the Industrial Era
This coarsening of the senses is on voluptuous display in the final section, “Belgium Disrobed,” a journal of Baudelaire's self-exiled travels through a Belgium he loved to hate. The perspective is that of an alien doing ethnography or a ghost from beyond the grave walking amongst sketchy moderns. “Belgium Disrobed” was meant to be a book with thematized sections not unlike The Arcades Project, but was never completed.
He has insights into the origin of the culture industry via painting — the prioritization of second-hand exchange and information value over aesthetic experience:
Having spent three hours quoting the various market prices, they think they have held forth on painting.
…
Everybody here is an art dealer.
Regarding new art in "Americanized" Belgium, he despises how minor and realist it is in the absurd attention to insignificant details:
Coarseness of its art.
Minute depictions of everything that lacks life
Philosophy of the Belgian painters. Philosophy of our friend Courbet, a self-serving exporter of this poison. ("Only paint what you see! Therefore you are only allowed to paint what I see.)
Baudelaire offers perhaps the first critique of the new public art, a crude "municipal" art lacking beauty:
Our Belgian confrères are unaware of the great art of decorative painting. Instead of this great art (which in the past existed in the Jesuit churches), all one finds here is municipal painting (always the municipality, the township), which amounts to large-scale anecdotal painting.
Repulsed by this new coarsening, turning towards the dignified past as a critique of his own moment, he develops an incomplete theory attempting "to define a Jesuit style" — exaltation for a kind of Rococo with "delightful bad taste." His notes for the "Jesuit style" are gorgeous evocations of Catholic luxury and an intimate kind of opulence:
The church of La Chapelle
A polychrome crucifix and above it, Nuestra Señora de la Soledad (Our Lady of Solitude).
The outfit of a beguine nun. In full mourning, large veils, black and white, cloak of black muslin.
Life-size.
Diadem of gold encrusted with glass jewels.
Halo of gold with rays.
Heavy rosary, which must come from her convent.
Her face is painted.
Terrific [terrible] color, terrific style of the Spaniards.
(De Quincey's "Our Ladies of Sorrow").
A white skeleton peeking out of a black marble tomb suspended on the wall…
An extremely composite style. A salmagundi of styles. Chessboards. — Chandeliers in gold. — Mourning in marble — black and white. Theatrical confessionals. There's a bit of a theater and bit of the Boudoir in Jesuit decor. The craftmanship of the wood sculpture from Malines or Louvain.
Catholic luxury in the extreme sacristy or boudoir sense.
The coquetries of Religion.
Calvaries and Madonnas.
Eye-catching modern style in the architecture of the houses. Blue granite. A moderate blend of Renaissance and Rococo…
The Town Hall (pink marble and gold)
He's very sensitive to color, describing Delacroix's "sinister bouquet" of The Tiger Hunt with its "colors brilliant and dark, penetrating harmony… Green, lilac, dark green, soft lilac, vermillion, dark red," as well as the "blacks, pinks, and silvers" of the composite Jesuit church style.
Delacroix, The Tiger Hunt
In Belgium, Baudelaire meets Félicien Rops, who long survived Baudelaire to become an important symbolist painter explicitly influenced by Baudelaire's ideas on painting…
The only true artist (in the sense that I perhaps alone understand the term artist) that I have come across in Belgium.
…
worth extensive study.
Baudelaire also finds a
superb painting of Silenus, labeled Van Dyck, should be attributed to Jordaens.
Possibly Anthony Van Dyck, Drunken Silenus Supported by Satyrs
An addendum includes a letter criticizing the “sleight of hand” of pretentious social artists like Victor Hugo:
Let's briefly talk about the real purpose of this great jubilee. You are well aware, Monsieur, that in 1848 that literary school of 1830 entered into an adulterous alliance with democracy, an alliance at once monstrous and bizarre. Olympio renounced his famous doctrine of art for art's sake, and ever since then, he and his family and his disciples have not ceased to preach the cause of the people, to speak for the people, to display themselves, whenever the occasion arises, as the friends and ardent benefactors of the people. "A tender and profound love for the people!" Ever since then, the only thing they have managed to love in literature has taken on the colors of revolution and philanthropy. Shakespeare is a socialist. He was never aware of the fact, but no matter. There are critics who, playing on paradox, have already tried to twist Balzac — a monarchist who swore by the throne and the altar — into an advocate of subversion and demolition. We are too familiar with this sort of sleight of hand.
(Recall Trotsky criticizing bad artists who "love the people terribly.")
Hatred of Beauty
“Belgium Disrobed” is a brilliant lodestar of negativity! It is instructional for the writer in its self-reflection on what details a writer could pay special attention to, as well as promulgating its own unique form of confession formed into modern, poetic lists that are evocative, critical, and concise. Observations and thought scraps are concatenated and condensed to only the essential words and images, and when adjacently arrayed in this paratactic style, these fragmentary cross-sections of "forests of symbols" can project a colorful flickering of disparate imagery and thought figures into the mind of his "hypocrite reader." Symbolist writing as comprehensive critique of universal ruin, this precursor to The Arcades Project is rich with particular examples of fashion, conversation habits, architecture, physiognomy, cuisine, taxonomies of goods, and so on. It's broken up into sections like “Belgian Customs,” “Entertainment,” etc. If ever a writer were forgetting worthy objects of critique or how to think through materiality, “Belgium Disrobed” offers a plethora of reminders for what is of central importance to the modern human (even when it's articulated through its absence). He writes some hyperacute, humorous sketches depicting the barbarization of language:
148 • BRUSSELS
Belgian Expressions.
The ministry has just posited an act which…
Ever since its inception, the ministry has yet to posit a single act.
A gravedigger dug up a coffin, smashed up the casket, raped the corpse (inasmuch as one can rape something inert), and stole the jewelry that had been buried with the deceased. – The gravedigger’s lawyer: "I shall prove that my client has not posited any of the acts of which he stands accused."
“Belgium Disrobed” evokes with that irreverent Baudelairean languor and analytical commitment the vulgarized mores of emerging modernity — a Belgium that was derided by Baudelaire, no less than he was captivated by it, because it was a counterfeit heaven on earth. Revolted yet transfixed, Baudelaire observes new mores such as "Positivism in Belgium"; "Hatred of beauty"; "Hatred of poetry." "Barbaric" Belgium is a germ of a petty and resentful conformism grown into customs we know all too well today…
7 • BRUSSELS CUSTOMS
Small-town mentality. Jealousies. Calumnies. Defamations.
Noses in other people's business. Pleasure in the misfortune of others.
Products of laziness and incompetence.
8 • BRUSSELS CUSTOMS
Spirit of obedience and CONFORMITY.
Spirit of associability.
Numberless Societies (the remains of earlier Guilds).
On the individual level, laziness of thought.
By coming together into associations, individuals relieve themselves of the burden of having to think on their own.
…
126 • BRUSSELS
GENERAL FEATURES
Multitude of festivals.
Everything an excuse for a festival.
…
127 • BRUSSELS
CUSTOMS. ENTERTAINMENT
When at a concert, the Belgian accompanies the melody with his foot or cane, to make it clear that he is following it.
Félicien Rops (1833-1898) Een begrafenis in het Waalse land (1863) litho - Musée Félicien Rops
Rops, Death at the Ball
If ever one lost their critical mojo, turning to a random page of “Belgium Disrobed” will send a jolt of critical energy straight to the negative faculty. No mere lunatic ravings on his syphilized deathbed, Baudelaire's critical senses were hyperacute in his highly stylized, abject literary caricatures of Belgian life/our life. His literary ambitions to paint Belgium as a facsimile of France were clear and efficient: to "kill two birds with one stone." “Belgium Disrobed” is really about artifice in a new, democratic world that is as confused about its values as it is productive and doggedly progressive. But considering his remarks of these crude moderns' inabilty to understand "disinterested speculation" at all, it raises the question… For whom is this critique written? Who isn't already too coarse to understand? We read Baudelaire today from a condition that is far more degraded than even his Belgium. But it was also Baudelaire's contradictory spirit that implied some parts of us may not simply resist this decay, but revel in it; that ruin of one thing implies possibility of another. If Baudelaire were not so disgusted, he might not have had the capacity to register all the details with such a revelatory hyperacuity. This special kind of acute disgust makes “Belgium Disrobed” a fine literary non-finito, but also a document more illuminating of our present social conditions than even the most trendy pseudo-political wheel-spinning. For those few first men who are interested in reading these sketches of spiritual decay with some leftover ruin of disinterested speculation, it is a comedic and lascivious portrait of society in composite form, where heaven and hell are brought to earth by wretched humans that "stalked a god" (Poe).