The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire’s place among the great poets of the Western world is undisputed, and his influence on the development of poetry since his lifetime has been enormous. In this Companion, essays by outstanding scholars illuminate Baudelaire’s writing both for the lay reader and for specialists. In addition to a survey of his life and a study of his social context, the volume includes essays on his verse and prose, analysing the extraordinary power and effectiveness of his language and style, his exploration of intoxicants like wine and opium, and his art and literary criticism. The volume also discusses the difficulties, successes and failures of translating his poetry and his continuing power to move his readers. Featuring a guide to further reading and a chronology, this Companion provides students and scholars of Baudelaire and of nineteenth-century French and European literature with a comprehensive and stimulating overview of this extraordinary poet.

ROSEMARY LLOYD is Rudy Professor of French and Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University. She is the author of Baudelaire’s World and Mallarmé: The Poet and his Circle.

THE CAMBRIDGE
COMPANION TO

BAUDELAIRE

EDITED BY

ROSEMARY LLOYD
Indiana University

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Cambridge University Press
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

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© Cambridge University Press 2005

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no reproduction of any part may take place without
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First published 2005

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
The Cambridge companion to Baudelaire / edited by Rosemary Lloyd. – 1st ed.
p.   cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 83094 x (hardback) – ISBN 0 521 53782 7 (pbk.)
1. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821–1867 – Criticism and interpretation – Handbooks, manuals, etc.
I. Lloyd, Rosemary.    II. Title.
PQ2191.Z5C24    2005
841′.8 – dc22    2005012929

ISBN-13 978-0-521-83094-2 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-83094-x hardback
ISBN-13 978-0-521-53782-7 paperback
ISBN-10 0-521-53782-7 paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In memoriam Claude Pichois

CONTENTS

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

E. S. BURT, author of a book on nineteenth-century poetry and the political space, together with diverse articles on poetry and autobiography, teaches at the University of California, Irvine. A new project on the Other in autobiography, which treats Rousseau, Baudelaire, De Quincey and Wilde, is nearing completion.

MARY ANN CAWS is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, English and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Her many areas of interest in twentieth-century avant-garde literature and art include Surrealism, poets René Char and André Breton, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group and artists Robert Motherwell and Joseph Cornell. Conceptually, one of her primary themes has been the relationship between image and text. Among many other projects, she is currently working on a study of extraordinary women writers and painters.

ROSS CHAMBERS, Professor Emeritus of the University of Michigan, has earned a distinguished reputation for his many publications on nineteenth-century French literature; in the area of critical theory, notably Room for Maneuver and Loiterature; and most recently for his exploration of AIDS diaries.

J. A. HIDDLESTON is Professor of French at Oxford University, Fellow of Exeter College since 1966 and has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature (mainly Baudelaire, Laforgue, Hugo, Nerval, Rimbaud, Supervielle and Malraux). Recent publications include Baudelaire and the Art of Memory and an edited collection of articles on Hugo, Victor Hugo, romancier de l’abîme.

JOHN E. JACKSON is Professor of French Literature at Bern University (Switzerland). He is the author of fifteen books on French and European Poetry, including La Mort Baudelaire, and Baudelaire, as well as an edition of Les Fleurs du Mal.

EDWARD K. KAPLAN is Kaiserman Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Program in Religious Studies at Brandeis University, where he teaches courses in French and comparative literature, and religious and ethical experience. He has interpreted the entire collection of fifty prose poems in Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Esthetic, the Ethical, and the Religious in ‘The Parisian Prowler’. His translation of Le Spleen de Paris, entitled The Parisian Prowler, was awarded the Lewis Galantière Prize from the American Translators Association in 1991. Professor Kaplan has also published books on Jules Michelet and the Jewish philosopher and social activist Abraham Joshua Heschel, and articles on Gaston Bachelard, Nerval, Hugo, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Baudelaire, Edmond Jabès and Yves Bonnefoy. He is especially interested in the relationship between poetic imagination, ethics and religious insight.

RACHEL KILLICK is Professor of Quebec Studies and Nineteenth-Century French Studies at the University of Leeds. She has published widely on post-Romantic French poetry (Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Valéry) and also on nineteenth-century French fiction (Hugo, Flaubert, Mérimée, Maupassant). She is the French section editor of Modern Language Review. Her current research project focuses on Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay.

ROSEMARY LLOYD is Rudy Professor of French and Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University. She is the author of several books, most recently Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle and Baudelaire’s World. Her latest book is Shimmering in a Transformed Light: The Written Still Life. She has been awarded fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation.

MARGARET MINER is Associate Professor of French at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She specialises in the interrelationship of music, literature and society in nineteenth-century France. In addition to her monograph, Resonant Gaps: Between Baudelaire and Wagner and a variety of feminist readings of Baudelaire, she has published articles on Jules Janin and Paris, and on Mallarmé, Rimbaud and music. She also has a particular interest in the fantastic and is currently working on a book devoted to music, women and the fantastic in nineteenth-century France.

DOLF OEHLER teaches in the Comparative Literature department at the University of Bonn, Germany, where he specialises in questions of European identity, the relationships between French and German literature and culture and the interplay of history and literature. He is the author of numerous articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature as well as two major studies of Baudelaire and the political context of his time: Pariser Bilder and Le Spleen contre l’oubli, juin 1848: Baudelaire, Flaubert, Heine.

CLAUDE PICHOIS was known, among many other achievements, as the editor of the Pléiade edition of Baudelaire’s Œuvres completés, his Correspondance, an edition of letters written to the poet and a diplomatic edition of Mon cœur mis à nu. He also wrote biographies of Baudelaire, his editor, Auguste Poulet-Malassis, Nerval and Colette. Until his retirement, Claude Pichois directed the Baudelaire centre at Vanderbilt University.

CLIVE SCOTT is Professor of European Literature in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of East Anglia, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His recent publications include The Poetics of French Verse: Studies in Reading, Translating Baudelaire and Channel Crossings: French and English Poetry in Dialogue 1550–2000, for which he was awarded the R. H. Gapper Book Prize. His most recent book is Translating Rimbaud’s ‘Illuminations’.

BERYL SCHLOSSMAN is the author of several books of literary criticism – Joyce’s Catholic Comedy of Language, The Orient of Style: Modernist Allegories of Conversion (a work that explores the impact of Baudelaire on Proust) and Objects of Desire: The Madonnas of Modernism – as well as Angelus Novus, a collection of poems published by Editions Virgile. She teaches literature, cinema and the arts in society at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Her poetry and short fiction are published in France as well as in the USA, and she has published some stories related to Baudelaire in the Bulletin Baudelairien and in L’Exterritorialité de la littérature allemande. She is currently working on a book about Baudelaire’s poetics.

SONYA STEPHENS is Reader in French at the University of London. She has published extensively on Baudelaire’s prose poems, including a study entitled Baudelaire’s Prose Poems. The Practice and Politics of Irony. She also edited A History of Women’s Writing in France. Her current research projects include an edited volume of essays on Baudelaire’s discursive practice across the range of his works and a book investigating the non finito as a cultural phenomenon in nineteenth-century France, The Art of the Unfinished. She is editor of ⅩⅨ The Journal of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes.

JUDITH VOLLMER is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, including Reactor, The Door Open to the Fire and Level Green; and the limited edition collection Black Butterfly. She is the recipient of the Brittingham and Cleveland State poetry prizes, the Centre for Book Arts prize, finalist honours for the Paterson Prize and poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She has also received artist residencies from the American Academy in Rome and the Corporation of Yaddo. She is Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, and a recipient of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award of the University of Pittsburgh. With Ed Ochester, she co-edits the poetry journal 5 AM.

BARBARA WRIGHT is Professor of French Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, having taught previously at the Universities of Manchester and Exeter. She is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and of the Academia Europaea. She specialises in nineteenth-century French studies, with particular reference to the interconnection between literature and painting, and has published books and articles on the works of Baudelaire, Fromentin, Gustave Moreau and Edgar Quinet. Her recent publications include Eugène Fromentin: A Life in Art and Letters and an edition of Fromentin’s Correspondance. She is currently preparing a new edition of Narcisse Berchère’s Le Désert de Suez: cinq mois dans l’Isthme.

PREFACE

Charles Baudelaire’s place among the great poets not just of France, but also of the world, is undisputed. He figures prominently in canons of European and world literature, and his influence on poets worldwide has been enormous. In addition, he is considered one of the greatest art critics, a writer whose ability to convey colour, shape and texture in language, and to infuse his analysis with passionate intensity, has had a profound effect on the development of art criticism. As a translator and critic, he played a crucial role in presenting to a French audience both the American poet and short-story writer, Edgar Allan Poe, and Thomas de Quincey, the English Romantic writer, whose study of the influence of opium on the mind reveals so much about the workings of the imagination. Baudelaire’s thinking about the strengths and limitations of the short story, revealed in his introductions to Poe’s work, and his evocation of the powerful nature of addiction, especially to substances seen as enhancing the artistic imagination, in his adaptation of De Quincey’s Confessions, continue to command attention. While he was not the first French writer to recognise the innovative genius of Richard Wagner, his study of Tannhäuser is still held to be a masterpiece both of insight and of descriptive power, the power to transform one artistic experience (music) into the modalities of another (critical writing). His literary criticism, devoted primarily to his contemporaries, is rich in insights not merely into the ambitions, restrictions and possibilities of the age, but also more particularly into his own aesthetic convictions and practice. The instigator of two poetic revolutions, as Barbara Johnson has argued, Baudelaire not only vastly extended the range of subjects and emotions available for verse-poetic treatment, increased the poetic lexicon and, especially through his manipulation of such fixed forms as the sonnet, expanded the possibilities of verse, but he also established the genre of prose poetry as we know it today, transforming it from the vehicle for the picturesque that it had become in the hands of an Aloysius Bertrand, and moulding it into the ideal expression for urban modernity. His great verse poem ‘Le Cygne’ is often considered to be the work that instigated Modernism, forging the disparate bric-a-brac of apparently chaotic contemporary existence into a means of setting the individual within both a cultural past and a physical present. Indeed, his influence on international Modernism was so far-reaching that we cannot fully understand that vital movement unless we are familiar with Baudelaire. Rimbaud saw him as a god, albeit one with feet of clay; Mallarmé and T. S. Eliot recognised him for the great genius he was; and his impact on twentieth-century poetry is both well documented and inescapable. Inspired by art, he in turn inspired artists as diverse as Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso and Nolan. His poetry has been set to music by a range of composers, and continues to challenge translators as varied and gifted as Richard Wilbur, Robert Fitzgerald, Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, Richard Howard and Norman Shapiro. Infamously portrayed by the contemporary critic Sainte-Beuve as occupying a kiosk on Russia’s remote Kamschatka peninsula, his work has been subjected to a huge range of critical analyses including those of Walter Benjamin, T. S. Eliot, Georg Lukács, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Poulet, Jean-Pierre Richard, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and many more. Baudelaire’s own cultural roots go well back into the past, drawing sustenance from the great writers of antiquity, especially Ovid and Virgil, from Dante, Rabelais and Montaigne, from thinkers such as Vauvenargues and Sade, and from artists such as Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and above all Delacroix. Thus, while his voice is unique and instantly recognisable, his work draws together many disparate strands of thought and of aesthetics.

   One of the goals of this volume has been to take full advantage of the challenging variety of Baudelaire’s work. In general, it does not adopt a text-by-text response, the different chapters being organised instead around themes and techniques, those of painting or the use of the sonnet, for example. Such an approach both highlights the great variety of Baudelaire’s corpus, and allows for a pertinent and flexible analysis of his modernity, the interdisciplinary nature of his work and thought and the complexity of his approach to ethical questions.

   Like others in the series, the present volume includes a chronology and a bibliography, as well as a list of translations of his work.

   I am deeply grateful to all my contributors, whose enthusiasm for, and commitment to, this volume have made it a truly collaborative production. I would also like to thank both Rachel de Wachter, who oversaw its early stages and Linda Bree, whose assistance over the past year has been exemplary.

Rosemary Lloyd

CHRONOLOGY

ABBREVIATIONS, REFERENCES AND TRANSLATIONS

The following abbreviations are used in this volume to refer to works by Baudelaire:

References to these works will be given in the form (OC I 75), (OC II 140), (C ⅰ 122), etc. References to other bibliographical items will be provided in full in a note on first mention, and in abbreviated form thereafter.

   All quotations are accompanied by a translation into English. The translation usually precedes the original, but the order is from time to time reversed for the sake of clarity or precision. The translations used for Les Fleurs du Mal are those of James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); those for Les Petits Poèmes en prose those of Rosemary Lloyd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Where these have been adapted acknowledgment is made in the notes. For other works, the translations are those of the authors unless otherwise specified. Titles are in French in the text: an appendix gives the English version of each title.