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BauDebord/03: Romance&Anarchie!


3. Charles Pierre Baudelaire, 1821-1867.

I first became interested in Baudelaire as a teenager when I read a book review in Time Magazine (probably for the Isherwood translation of Selected Letters published in 1978, which I haven't read). Being an adolescent I instinctively responded with unbridled enthusiasm to the suggestion of exotic literature which promised sex, death, and especially Decadence with a capital 'D'! The copy of Les Fleurs du Mal which I aquired from the local library not disappoint me.

Baudelaire spins a hypnotic seduction over the adolescent attitude. He offers that Romantic synthesis of eros, thanatos, and rebellion.

Baudelaire had one of those tragic miserable lives which makes for entertaining reading in retrospect. His father, an artist, died when he was quite young, and his mother remarried a dashing military man, General Aupick. While Baudelaire's stepfather was perhaps not a particularly cruel person, his emphasis on discipline and patriotism guaranteed a dramatic clash of will with the dreamy, lazy young CPB. Aupick attempted to deport his stepson off to India for an arranged career with the diplomatic service, but young CPB jumped ship and returned to France after a suitably modest exotic interlude in the tropics.

When he came of age CPB claimed his inheritence, and proceeded to indulge an extravagant taste in fashionable apparel and furnishing. He squandered his fortune rapidly and was eventually reduced to an austere but somewhat disheveled style.

He was never deeply immersed in politics, although biographers note that during the revolution of 1848 he attempted to incite the mobs on the barricade to storm the estate of his stepfather.

His literary genius attracted a small group of admirers, but his awkward attempts at self-promotion alienated the influential cultural forces of the era. He suffered from a toxic combination of restless ambition crippled by debilitating self-contempt and chronic procrastination. In spite of the fact that his real motivation in life was a personal quest for spiritual redemption, he was slandered in the popular press as a decadent Satanist and humiliated when his masterpiece, the poetry compilation Les Fleurs Du Mal, was declared obscene and banned.

Much of his personal energy in the latter part of his career was devoted to a ridiculous and pathetic attempt to promote himself as a candidate for election to the prestigious Academie Francais, not that he didn't have the talent to deserve the honour in retrospect, but the pretension to expect his peers to understand him was obviously futile.

He eventually left France for Belgium to escape his creditors, until he suffered a stroke and was returned to be cared for by his mother. He died in penury, and predictably upon the verge of wide popular recognition.

His Work:

His romantic poetry was lush, sensual, and voluptuous, but it was his use of startling and sometimes extreme metaphors, such as corpus decomposition in the context of erotic verse, which attracted a perhaps sometimes understandable negative reaction. His reputation as a substance abuser was acquired through his sometimes misunderstood essay Artificial Paradise, which included a commentary on Thomas DeQuincy's Diary of an English Opium Eater and a thoughtful and clinical description of the effects of Hashish, but ironically he was hardly a proponent of mindless hedonism, and dismissed drugs as an imperfect distraction from his real purpose, which was an idealized and futile quest for a sense of aesthetic and spiritual grace.

"The clocks are ringing, It is time to get drunk: on Wine, Virtue, or Poetry, it's your choice..." With this quip he suggested that the diverging aspirations characterized by the Creative Artistic Process, or by Religious Enlightenment, or by Substance Abuse, were all in some way pointing towards a similar end, presumably a vortex which represented an abandonment of the sorrow, banality, and alienation of the ego in relation to everyday existence as we know it. This philosophy is also interpreted in a wicked little prose tableau, Le Mauvais Vitrier, in which a sadistic narrator torments a decrepit old roving window-glass street peddler for offering only clear glass panes, as it is declared that the 'real' world can only be tolerated when viewed through tinted (perhaps rose-coloured?) glass…

Les Fleurs Du Mal maintains an enduring popularity today, charming decadent young people and punk/goth musicians (and yet another connexion to punk could be deciphered through Bauldeaire's practice of alternative urban geographic exploratory ambulation, a ritual which influenced The Situationalists). However, Baudelaire's critiques on the visual arts, which were relatively well-received by his contemporaries, are not so easy to find in translation here today and not really all that directly influential on how we look at art, although it is possible some ripple effects of his thoughts could be inferred…

Baudelaire expressed a distaste for both formalism and realism, preferring 'artificiality', vivid stylization and exaggeration. He admired painters like Delacroix who explored looser and more extravagant techniques, and he encouraged the developments that led French painting from the last gasps of Romanticism to eventually evolve into Impressionism. One personal concept he described was the Theory of 'Correspondances', the exchanging of the terminology and metaphors applying to the different media of music, literature, and visual arts across a synethesistic matrix. Certainly in his personal creative medium, poetry, he was the definitive inspiration to the imaginative Symbolist poetry movement, whose avatars such as the stunning Arthur Rimbaud fed the sparks for what later became Surrealism. Baudelaire's contribution to international literary criticism was his influential promotion of the reputation of the then somewhat overlooked American gothic writer, Edgar Allen Poe..

"Hypocrite reader, my brother, my double..." Baudelaire was a pathetic and unhappy individual wholly unsuited to the real world, something some of us can relate to. Just another ineffective shaman clad in a shabby black overcoat spinning bittersweet gems of illusion to a mostly disinterested audience... yet in spite of our inherent uselessness, we continue to be born into this world, almost like the world seems to need more...

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