Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity

278 Pages·2011·1.81 MB·English

by  Françoise Meltzer

FRANÇOISE MELTZER is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities
at the University of Chicago, where she is also professor at the Divinity School and in the College, and
chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. Meltzer is the author of four books, most recently For
Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity (2001), and coeditor of the journal Critical
Inquiry.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2011 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2011.
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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51988-3 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 0-226-51988-0 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51987-6 (ebook) Meltzer, Françoise.
Seeing double : Baudelaire’s modernity / Françoise Meltzer.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51988-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-51988-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1.
Baudelaire, Charles, 1821–1867—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
PQ2191.Z5M398 2011
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2010045692
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard
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SEEING DOUBLE
Baudelaire’s Modernity
FRANÇOISE MELTZER
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO AND LONDON
FOR MY STUDENTS
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Beliefs (Assommons les pauvres!)
Homo Duplex
More Duplexities
Maistre
Proudhon’s Spirits of Contradiction
Splitting the Difference: The Poem
Appendix: “Assommons les pauvres!”
2. Seeing (A une passante)
The Will to Know
Images and Afterimages: The Poem
Certainty
Scopic Syllepsis
Which Is the Real One?
Optical Gaps
Energy: The Baroque
Appendix: “A une passante”
3. Money (La chambre double)
Expenditure
“Words Pay No Debts”
Depletion: The Poem
Reversibility
Which Room Is Counterfeit?
The Other Side of the Coin
Appendix: “La chambre double”
4. Time (Harmonie du soir)
God, Graves, and Scholars
In Memory of the Present
Angels Doing Time
Harmonics: The Poem
And Time and the World Are Ever in Flight
Appendix: “Harmonie du soir”
4. Time (Harmonie du soir)
Conclusion
Notes
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, my deepest thanks are to my first two readers: Bernard Rubin and
David Tracy. Not only are they my closest intellectual companions, they are also
my dearest friends. As is Raquel Scherr, who carefully read and corrected much
of this book. My sadness lies in the fact that her husband, Marc Blanchard,
another dear friend, did not live to read this book and critique it.
My assistants have been patient, tolerant, and long-suffering: Josh Yumibe,
Doron Galili, and Ivan Ross. I am most grateful to all three. Marie-Claude
Rubin, my daughter, puts up with my writing schedules and encourages me,
even when she is annoyed with my various literary obsessions—in this case,
with that odd and gifted man called Baudelaire.
Marie-Hélène Huet read the manuscript and gave me encouragement as well
as insightful suggestions; she has always been a wonderful influence. Ross
Chambers also remains an influence and a mentor in absentia. I have done my
best to remain true to his example of political and textual engagement.
Small portions of this work were published in Romanic Review. I have also
greatly profited from audiences who have heard versions of this book and made
suggestions: at Stanford University, Columbia University, the Universities of
Coimbra and Lisbon in Portugal, the Poetics Workshop at the University of
Chicago, and the Porter Institute at the University of Tel-Aviv. Thanks to Sepp
Gumbrecht, Helena Buescu, António Sousa Ribeiro, Marie Irene Ramalho
Santos, Ziva Ben-Porat (always), Dustin Simpson, Erika Vause, Sebastien
Greppo, and Elizabeth Kaminska (who has made all this doable). And to W. R.
(Ralph) Johnson, who many years ago taught me the searing necessity of poetry.
Danielle Allen, then dean of the Humanities Division at the University of
Chicago, generously granted me a year’s leave to make progress on this project.
I am most grateful. The present dean, Martha Roth, has been supportive in every
way possible. Alan Thomas, my superb editor, has been encouraging and
judicious as always. Margaret Mahan is unsurpassed in her copyediting—
syntactically as well as substantively; I was very lucky to have her. Finally,
thanks go to my graduate students, who continue to inspire me and to whom this
book is dedicated.
INTRODUCTION
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the
intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets us fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth
meet.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism
This is not yet another book about modernity, though that idea, with its endless
definitions, runs like a badly sewn red thread throughout the study. The focus
here is the poet Baudelaire and how, in the time of great transitions in which he
lived, he responded as if in spite of himself with what I am here calling double
vision. That is, he saw two times, or things, at once—as though his eyes, used as
they were to seeing one world, could not yet assimilate, even as they focused on,
a new one. He sees, in other words, both worlds simultaneously—the Paris
before Haussmann, and the Paris during and after its redevelopment; France
before the revolution of 1848, and France in the increasingly triumphant
capitalist culture that followed; the death throes of the ancien régime with its
unraveling social fabric, and the preening bourgeoisie with its nouveau riche
self-satisfaction that touted social utilitarianism and “good works” to repress
political guilt and crass mercantilism. Baudelaire’s aesthetic strabismus is born
of an inability to integrate the dying world and the burgeoning one—he sees, to
repeat, both at once.
He also sees his life as doubled: before his mother married the hated
stepfather Aupick, and afterward; when he inherited from his father and had
money, and afterward with the establishment of the conseil judiciaire that was to
drive him crazy until his death. Moreover, his double vision is not limited to
time: he also sees two realms at once (the ideal and the concrete), two women at
once (the twinned Bénédictas, for example), one work of art in two ways, and
the optical illusions produced by various instruments of the eye. It is all a matter
of seeing, and of seeing two contradictory things at the same time.
The visual is what seems constantly privileged in explaining the crisis of
modernity, and this study is obviously no exception. Benjamin speaks of
Baudelaire’s poetry in terms of the gaze: “The gaze of the allegorist, as it falls on
the city, is the gaze of the alienated man. It is the gaze of the flâneur.”1 At the
same time, Benjamin describes the modern city as the place where no one, in
fact, looks at anyone else. Huge crowds jostle one another with one tacit
agreement: keeping to the right of the road to allow for the stream of people in
the other direction. In the meantime, “it occurs to no man to honor another with
so much as a glance” (182). Overstimulation, many scholars of the period
believe, is the problem of the inhabitants of the modern, nineteenth-century city.
“The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality,” writes
Georg Simmel, “consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which
results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli.”2
Siegfried Kracauer, the film theorist, describes a “cult of distraction” that
necessarily occurs in a huge city such as Berlin. The sheer necessity of the
circulation of such crowds, he writes, “transforms the life of the street into the
ineluctable street of life, giving rise to configurations which invade even
domestic space.”3 Contemplation, that earlier form of examining the world, is
impossible, as Benjamin notes, in modernity. The cinema is his example. The
cinema itself, as Tom Gunning remarks,4 by the 1890s provides a series of
visual shocks, psychic compensation for the loss of traditional modes of
experience. Pascal’s divertissement, in this view, becomes distraction. Kracauer
too uses fragmentation as a metaphor to point to the loss of shared beliefs in
modernity. Alongside the overstimulation of the new city, then, the latter part of
the nineteenth century will provide an “aesthetics of astonishment” (as Gunning
puts it, 31), as if to respond to one ocular shock with another. Parallel to the
advent of cinema, it should be added, there is what Italo Calvino calls the “crisis
of visibility” in the novel.5 Perhaps Baudelaire (who lived in mid-century and
thus knew no cinema) was responding similarly by insisting, according to his
friends, upon being continually surprised. The constant optical shocks of
modernity paradoxically use countershock as a palliative.
Following Simmel, Benjamin, and Kracauer, a “modernity thesis” has
developed, arguing that a new mode of seeing begins in the nineteenth century,
triggered by the change in modern life brought on by the obvious suspects:
industrialization, urban life, capitalism, and technological advances.6 This thesis
holds that distraction is the main symptom of such a change—an overload of
stimuli causing constant shifts in attention and thus actual physical changes in
human vision. In the words of one modernity thesis advocate, “The city’s
bombardment of heterogeneous and ephemeral stimuli fostered an edgy,
hyperactive, fragmented perceptual encounter with the world.”7 But other film
theorists argue that such a notion is too simple. Haussmann himself, it should be
noted, sought to change perception by altering the space of Paris: “He and his
planners,” writes Richard Terdiman, “foresaw that their alteration of the city
would change more than its geography. They consciously sought to alter the
habits and the perceptions of Parisians . . . His disposition of space was intended
to communicate, was meant to determine perception.”8 There is an implied
Whorfean notion here: that just as language can alter perception, the modern city
space affects vision. The modernity thesis has been attacked on grounds that a
change in the visual system of humans does not occur overnight.
According to an alternate view, what has changed has to do, rather, with
visual habits and the quality of how things are seen.9 Baudelaire too responds to
the city with an emphasis on vision. His admiration for the painter Constantin
Guys, for example, is partly based on that artist’s ability to take in the city’s
scenes as quickly as they are produced, and to sketch them from memory with
frenzied rapidity. The painter of modern life must have an “eagle eye,” and must
be at home in the chaos that city streets bring to visual perception.
The idea that modernity causes a change of perception, or even of sight itself,
because of ocular overstimulation was to have an analogue in nineteenth-century
science. The notion of luminiferous ether was used to explain the medium by
which light is propagated. Nineteenth-century scientists such as Helmholtz,
Thomson, Clausius, and Maxwell, writes Gillian Beer, “were pursuing a single
explanation of cosmic processes that would include light, heat, and sound and
that would construe them all as motion, passing irreversibly beyond the reach of
the senses and dissipating irregularly through the ether (that crucial explanatory
substance that ebbed quietly out of the universe early in the twentieth
century).”10 The unfamiliar dimension added to this theory, continues Beer,
“was the universalizing of wave theory (as thermodynamics continued to be
called) to account for all phenomena” (ibid.). This wavelike flow of energies was
seen as constantly affecting perception, particularly the visual. Gustave Le Bon,
for example, that great theorist of the crowd who is regularly cited in works on
the modern city and on modernity, also wrote on matter and its transformation
into energy in L’évolution de la matière (1905) and L’évolution des forces
(1907). The “ether” has numerous ramifications. Rosalind Krauss notes (as Beer
points out) that painters in the 1870s had to come to terms with the fact that “the
physiological screen through which light passes to the human brain is not
transparent, like a window pane; it is like a filter, involved in a set of specific
distortions.”11 The notions of filtering and distortion match the concern with
how the overstimulation of the city can work to alter perception. It is not
surprising that, as Jonathan Crary has shown,12 optical apparatuses were all the
rage in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the eye’s ability to turn two images into
one fascinates Schopenhauer in the early part of the century. “The process,” he
writes,