Baudelaire (3) - sadism

Well, durr, no prizes to me for spotting a sadistic strain in Les Fleurs du Mal. I'm going to look at two poems which are both too long to quote in full: "A celle qui est trop gaie" and "Une martyre".

The first is in "Spleen et idéal", while the second is in the second part of the collection, "Les Fleurs du mal".

"A celle qui est trop gaie" was one of the poems condemned by the legal process against the 1857 edition for offence to public morality. Baudelaire's note suggests that the judges thought it had a reference to syphilis. Initially the poem is a basic love/hate lament: the loved one is too happy; why can't she share the poet's misery? Just like a bright garden can lead him to crush a flower underfoot, so her beauty can lead him to cruelty and violence, albeit only imagined. But how imagined! These are the last three quatrains (of nine).

Ainsi je voudrais, une nuit, Quand l'heure des voluptés sonne, Vers les trésors de ta personne, Comme un lâche, ramper sans bruit, Pour châtier ta chair joyeuse, Pour meurtrir ton sein pardonné, Et faire à ton flanc étonné Une blessure large et creuse, Et, vertigineuse douceur! À travers ces lèvres nouvelles, Plus éclatantes et plus belles, T'infuser mon venin, ma soeur!

Thus I should like, some night, When the hour for pleasure sounds, To creep softly, like a coward, Toward the treasures of your body, To whip your joyous flesh And bruise your pardoned breast, To make in your astonished flank A wide and gaping wound, And, intoxicating sweetness! Through those new lips, More bright, more beautiful, To infuse my venom, my sister!

Again, that's the straight translation by William Aggeler.

It's hard to read and hard to translate. The basic meaning is blatantly sadistic, and even if we say that everyone has violent thoughts, the expression of them here is detailed. It's worth looking at some of the other translations.

And so, one night, I'd like to sneak, When night has tolled the hour of pleasure, A craven thief, towards the treasure Which is your person, plump and sleek. To punish your bombastic flesh, To bruise your breast immune to pain, To farrow down your flank a lane Of gaping crimson, deep and fresh. And, most vertiginous delight! Into those lips, so freshly striking And daily lovelier to my liking — Infuse the venom of my sprite.

(Roy Campbell)

Likewise, some evening, I would creep, When midnight sounds, and everywhere The sighing of lovers fills the air, To the hushed alcove where you sleep, And waken you by violent storm, And beat you coldly till you swooned, And carve upon your perfect form, With care, a deep seductive wound — And (joy delirious and complete!) Through those bright novel lips, through this Gaudy and virgin orifice, Infuse you with my venom, sweet.

(George Dillon)

Thus I would wish, one night, When the voluptuary's hour sounds, To crawl like a coward, noiselessly, Towards the treasures of your body, In order to correct your gay flesh And beat your unbegrudging breast, To make upon your starting thigh A long and biting weal, And, sweet giddiness, Along those newly-gaping lips More vivid and more beautiful, Inject my venom, O my sister!

(Geoffrey Wagner)

I think there's a general squeamishness about "Une blessure large et creuse", which Aggeler translates quite straightforwardly as "A wide and gaping wound". Actually "deep" would be better than "gaping", but nonetheless, at least he depicts it with the same kind of forensic accuracy that the original has. Compare it with "a lane of / Gaping crimson, deep and fresh" or "a deep seductive wound".

"Une martyre" purports to (and perhaps does) describe a drawing by an old master, depicting a corpse lying on a bed, its head removed and placed on a "table de nuit". Reading this the first time I didn't notice that the gender of the body isn't explicitly revealed until late in the poem. Before then there have been suggestions, growing in strength, but I'm sure you can already guess that it turns out to be a woman. A young, beautiful woman, at that. And I didn't deliberately try to guess, but I knew well before the explicit revelation ("Elle est bien jeune encor!").

So, the woman in the painting has been killed. The poet ponders how she died:

L'homme vindicatif que tu n'as pu, vivante, Malgré tant d'amour, assouvir, Combla-t-il sur ta chair inerte et complaisante L'immensité de son désir? Réponds, cadavre impur! et par tes tresses roides Te soulevant d'un bras fiévreux, Dis-moi, tête effrayante, a-t-il sur tes dents froides Collé les suprêmes adieux?

The vengeful man whom you could not with all your love Satisfy when you were alive, Did he use your inert, complacent flesh to fill The immensity of his lust? Reply, impure cadaver! and by your stiffened tresses Raising you with a fevered arm, Tell me, ghastly head, did he glue on your cold teeth The kisses of the last farewell?

(Aggeler's translation)

Again, there's the notion that love finally expresses itself in extreme violence.

It's disturbing obviously, but unlike some of the translations we have to look at it straight on. I don't think you can avoid the conclusion that in both these poems women's bodies are seen as capable of giving pleasure but that may need to be at the cost of their lives. I think, on the whole, it's better to be dehumanised by being seen as a mountain, than by being killed or wounded. In all cases, however, there is a move to deny the independence and will of the woman; they are troublesome.

Good grief, I'm liking Baudelaire the person less and less the more I read of Baudelaire the poet.

Baudelaire (2)

I'm enjoying this week of Baudelaire. My task means that I have to know about the biography, though, which I'd normally pay less attention to. But it is interesting. As we proceed through FDM we find more reflections of Baudelaire's views of women. In my previous post, the poem was inspired by Jeanne Duval. Another woman in Baudelaire's life was Apollinaire Sabatier, aka La Présidente, who was a respected courtesan and hostess. According to French Wikipedia, everyone who knew her praised her beauty, goodness and joy. Finally, she "yielded" to Baudelaire, with unsurprising consequences. He wrote to her:

Il y a quelques jours, tu étais une divinité, ce qui est si commode, ce qui est si beau, si inviolable. Te voilà femme maintenant... (A few days ago you were a divinity, all that is right, beautiful, inviolable. Now you are just a woman.)

And he memorialised her thus:

Que diras-tu ce soir, pauvre âme solitaire, Que diras-tu, mon coeur, coeur autrefois flétri, À la très belle, à la très bonne, à la très chère, Dont le regard divin t'a soudain refleuri? — Nous mettrons notre orgueil à chanter ses louanges: Rien ne vaut la douceur de son autorité Sa chair spirituelle a le parfum des Anges Et son oeil nous revêt d'un habit de clarté. Que ce soit dans la nuit et dans la solitude Que ce soit dans la rue et dans la multitude Son fantôme dans l'air danse comme un flambeau. Parfois il parle et dit: «Je suis belle, et j'ordonne Que pour l'amour de moi vous n'aimiez que le Beau; Je suis l'Ange gardien, la Muse et la Madone.»

What will you say tonight, poor solitary soul, What will you say, my heart, heart once so withered, To the kindest, dearest, the fairest of women, Whose divine glance suddenly revived you? — We shall try our pride in singing her praises: There is nothing sweeter than to do her bidding; Her spiritual flesh has the fragrance of Angels, And when she looks upon us we are clothed with light. Be it in the darkness of night, in solitude, Or in the city street among the multitude, Her image in the air dances like a torch flame. Sometimes it speaks and says: "I am fair, I command That for your love of me you love only Beauty; I am your guardian Angel, your Muse and Madonna."

It's different. The poet transforms this woman, not into a mountainside, but into something ethereal, a "fantome", and her flesh becomes spiritual. She is idealised out of existence. The last line possibly gives the game away: this is a Catholic poem. That's an over-simplification, of course, but suggests that the influence of that religion persists and will turn up elsewhere.

Baudelaire - La Géante

I'm reading Les Fleurs du Mal by way of a bet with myself. Can I learn enough about Baudelaire in a week to outdo the contestant who has chosen this as a specialist subject on Mastermind on Friday?

As a result I have come across this poem.

Du temps que la Nature en sa verve puissante Concevait chaque jour des enfants monstrueux, J'eusse aimé vivre auprès d'une jeune géante, Comme aux pieds d'une reine un chat voluptueux. J'eusse aimé voir son corps fleurir avec son âme Et grandir librement dans ses terribles jeux; Deviner si son coeur couve une sombre flamme Aux humides brouillards qui nagent dans ses yeux; Parcourir à loisir ses magnifiques formes; Ramper sur le versant de ses genoux énormes, Et parfois en été, quand les soleils malsains, Lasse, la font s'étendre à travers la campagne, Dormir nonchalamment à l'ombre de ses seins, Comme un hameau paisible au pied d'une montagne.

At the time when Nature with a lusty spirit Was conceiving monstrous children each day, I should have liked to live near a young giantess, Like a voluptuous cat at the feet of a queen. I should have liked to see her soul and body thrive And grow without restraint in her terrible games; To divine by the mist swimming within her eyes If her heart harbored a smoldering flame; To explore leisurely her magnificent form; To crawl upon the slopes of her enormous knees, And sometimes in summer, when the unhealthy sun Makes her stretch out, weary, across the countryside, To sleep nonchalantly in the shade of her breasts, Like a peaceful hamlet below a mountainside.

(This translation by William Aggeler and several more poetic translations can be found at fleursdumal.org. I've chosen this one for its literalness.)

One thing the poem immediately illustrates is how hard it is to ignore biographical readings. The underlying story of Baudelaire's life was his relationship with his mother, complicated by her second marriage to a military man who seems to have been the antithesis of Baudelaire himself. It's the kind of upbringing that any amateur psychologist would see as ideal ground for producing a gay man, but Baudelaire was excessively heterosexual. You could use these poems as evidence towards an analysis of Baudelaire's sexuality, but I don't think that should be the purpose of criticism.

You can, however, legitimately use the context in which the poem appears. In the sequence of the 1857 edition it immediately follows "L'Idéal", in which the poet suggests that Lady Macbeth is more to his taste than the pale white roses of Gavarni's society drawings. So we can reasonably say that the poems at this point are exploring ideals of femaleness.

The first stanza refers to more ancient times; suggesting not just the mythological reality of giants, but also a lack in the present. Even without the biographical knowledge, we see here an inversion of normal relations: giants are normally male, and the image of a "voluptuous cat" is inherently female.

The second stanza continues this: the giantess is valued for her size, and her terribleness. But there's some admixture of humidity with flame.

In the third stanza, the woman is visualised as landscape. I suppose you could say that the poet expresses a kind of ownership of the landscape/woman; he climbs over it/her, with no regard for her wishes. In fact the transformation by metaphor removes her ability to even have any wishes or opinions. She is inert.

So a feminist reading of this poem is entirely plausible, and would regard it as objectifying the imagined woman, and lamenting perhaps that in modern times women aren't big-kneed and passive.

And yet, the image of the speaker is a bit pathetic. The female figure is unmoved by the male exploration. He seems irrelevant to her. The images of the man as cat and sleeping village are far from virile. The poem is certainly not a celebration of male power. On the contrary, you could see it, even without knowing what we know about Baudelaire's life, as an expression of fear and sexual ambiguity. I'm not (honestly I'm not) using this to help me understand Baudelaire the man. Why would I want to do that?

MCT: Patrocinio P Schweickart

Oh, those American names! I love the way she kept that P in the middle, just to avoid confusion, no doubt, with all the other Patricinio Schweickarts. The essay, "Reading ourselves; toward a feminist theory of reading" is actually easier to read than her name suggests.

She begins by saying that reader-response criticism, in either of its forms, elides questions of class, race and sex, proposing a privileged reader, who we may take to be white middle class. Incidentally, she talks of a divergence in reader-response views over the relative importance of the reader and the writer. I hadn't seen that. According to this, Stanley Fish and others see the reader as holding the controlling interest, while for Iser, Poulet and Riffaterre, it's the writer. (She quotes from Poulet, who still seems to me to be way off the mark.) Later in the essay she suggests that this language of control or domination is itself part of a patriarchal approach.

But the major part of the essay concerns two topics, which she thinks have to be separated: women's reading of male texts; and women's reading of female texts. She suggests that women can learn to read against male texts; by seeing the patriarchal assumptions they can reclaim what is more essential in them. There's a certain amount of reflection on her personal experience here. Why can she still enjoy reading D H Lawrence?

There's a lot more to discuss here. I wouldn't question the starting premise that a lot of male writing is inherently patriarchal, but in my liberal way I'd prefer to think that good writing always allows readers to read against it.

The second "chapter", as she puts it, is the story of how women read women. She develops a view that reading becomes much more a process of sharing. I suspect the arguments here are fallilble, for the same reason as Poulet's are.

What's obviously missing is any discussion of men reading women. It does happen, you know.

Some of the closing comments are about whether this is all rubbish anyway, since deconstructionism means that any view is equally valid. She seems to share my view here: if that's true, it's really boring, so let's act as if it isn't. She's happy to use a version of the interpretive community as the validation mechanism.

MCT: Michael Riffaterre

An entirely new name to me, Riffaterre seems to have remained fairly loyal to the semiotic approach. This essay, from 1985, after a heavy-going start turns out to be a clever and detailed examination of how translation practice highlights the "presuppositions" which are present in any literary text. This leads to the essay's title "Transposing presuppositions on the semiotics of literary translation", which really needs more work.

Let's start with the final sentence:

Perhaps the simplest way to state the difference between literary and non-literary translation is to say that the latter translates what is in the text, whereas the former must translate what the text only implies. 

The things the literary text implies are, broadly speaking, what Riffaterre means when he talks of presuppositions. For example there is an "intertext", which is the background of knowledge that a native reader may have.

The first example he looks at comes from Milton's translation of an ode of Horace. I'll skip over that to the second, which is a passage from Catullus. Depicting the moment when the Nereid Thetis sees and falls in love with Peleus, he argues that the word used to describe her partial nakedness (nutricum) has in Latin unavoidable connotations of breastfeeding, so puts motherhood forward as a concern of the poem. Nutricum literally means nurse; but in Latin it can (just about) be used metonynically to mean breast. In English, you can't do that; there just isn't a word that can hold both meanings. Riffaterre doesn't offer his own solution to this, but in the second example, he does

and this is where the essay really started to grab me. He looks at a tiny extract from a poem by Maurice Fombeure (again, never heard of him. Apparently a mid-20th century lyric poet.) One word, septembrales, is considered. Every educated Frenchman would know that this is a coinage by Rabelais, is the only adjective derived from a month's name, and connotes with wine (Rabelais's usage is in the phrase purée septembrale, a euphemism for wine.)

There's no equivalent word in English that contains both a month and the connotation of wine, so he translates "brumes septembrales" into "mists of the vintage-season".

Both examples, then, are evidence of the importance of the reader's context to understand the full implications of a literary work. I think that's the most useful thing to be taken from the essay, and you could make the point without using the term presuppositions, which seems to me too vague while appearing to be explanatory. The piece is also useful for the view on translation it gives. As always, close examination of difficult passages is enlightening.

Note
I've now looked at how Peter Green translates the Catullus passage. In a quite apposite demonstration of Riffaterre's view, he has the Nereids "mother-naked to breasts and below", expressing the maternal theme in a slightly transposed way, and also, I suppose, keeping some of the awkwardness that "nutricum" has.

MCT: Geoffrey Hartman

Hartman, like Paul de Man, was a member of the deconstructionist school associated with Yale University. He should have taught de Man something about clarity. The essay here, "The interpreter's Freud", was originally given as a lecture, and is included in a collection called Easy Pieces.

He talks about a passage from Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and one of Wordsworth's Lucy poems, "A slumber did my spirit steal".

First he looks at how Freud's dream interpretation does not reduce the dream to a simple statement of meaning, but actually complicates it, searching out and reconciling references. Then he writes, extremely perceptively, about the poem, commenting on his own reading to show that again he is exploring a range of associations that the words of the poem (and its layout on the page) throw up.

The gap in the essay is any sense of where to stop, or of how to evaluate which associations are useful or meaningful. I think there's a suggestion that you shouldn't do such an evaluation. It's part of the general drift of post-structuralist deconstructionism that all associations are valid, and that it's not possible to claim more importance for any of them.

I still don't think that can be true, or that, even if we suspect it is true, it's a useful line to follow. It's similar to the (I think) undefeatable suggestion that all actions are determined by past actions. It's no fun to hold that view, and in practice people always reflect on human actions as if they are free. Similarly, critics always and inevitably act as if some reading of a poem is a better fit. And, in practice, critics and theorists understand that some literature is better than others, in whatever sense you want to give that 'better'.  De Man talked unentertaingly about resistance to theory. One of the reasons for such resistance is that it's no fun to hold a totally relativistic view, which is what deconstructionism seems to tend towards, in its most fundamentalist form.

MCT: Lyotard and de Man

I'm back with MCT after a break, and the first essay, by Jean-François Lyotard is "Answering the question: what is postmodernism".

The simplest answer to the question is that it is the means by which modernism supersedes itself. So, Picasso was postmodern in relation to Cézanne. Unfortunately for me, Lyotard doesn't leave it there: "I would like not to remain with this slightly mechanistic meaning of the word." (p 418)

He introduces the concept of the sublime, which seems curiously old-fashioned and initially out of place. The sentiment of the sublime

takes place ... when the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept. [...] We can conceive the infinitely great, the infinitely powerful, but every presentation of an object destined to 'make visible' the absolute greatness or power appears to us painfully inadequate. Those are Ideas of which no presentation is possible. (p 417)

This comes from the section headed "Realism", and it seems to be part of an analysis of why realism has to be superseded. In the section headed "The postmodern", Lyotard looks at the way Proust and Joyce attempt to make the unrepresentable perceptible; Proust by way of sacrificing the identity of consciousness, Joyce by sacrificing the identity of writing. These discussions are barely longer than my summary; clearly Lyotard had better thought-out bases for these views, which might have made clearer what he means. But both are representatives of the modern:

Modern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unrepresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure. [...]
The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unrepresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms. [...] The [postmodern] writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. (p 419 - 420 emphasis in original)

I think this is deeply flawed reasoning. Part of the time, Lyotard is saying that postmodernism is the mechanism by which modernism arrives. But then he seems to be saying that this postmodernism, that we're experiencing now, is different. I think it's right to say that every new modernism has its new rules, which only become apparent after the work has been around for a while; that applies to Ezra Pound, for example, but also applied to Sterne. I could also question his separation of content and form.

The other point about postmodernism that Lyotard is known for, not mentioned in this essay, is that it "rejects meta-narratives", which are described in the editors' introduction as "any explanatory framework taken to connect separate items for analysis usually on the basis of some imposed value system." (p 411)  Now, that doesn't sound right, but I have nothing here to expand on that.

The second essay "The resistance to theory", by Paul de Man, was written in English, and so at least proves that translation is not a necessary ingredient of unintelligibility. It's a horrible piece of writing. It looks at the reaction (in USA) to theoretical approaches to literature, using a lot of the concepts of classical poetics and rhetoric.The argument is essentially non-theoretical approaches don't have the tools in their box to do the job properly, but that resistance to theory shouldn't be deplored because resistance is inherent in theory itself.

I really disliked this essay (can you tell?). It goes on a lot but says very little.