In today's lecture and seminar on Charles Baudelaire I want to describe address the question of how we might read Baudelaire. In the lecture I want to discuss how one might read Les Fleurs du Mal and in the seminar I want us to take a look at one particular poem.

Before we do anything though, let's quickly take a look at the history of Les Fleurs du Mal. As you already know from your lectures on Madame Bovary, 1857 was the year of trials. Both Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal were in January and August 1857 respectively indicted for "offence to public and religious morality and to good morals". Flaubert was fortunate and was acquitted with a reprimand whilst Baudelaire lost and was forced to make revisions. These revisions radically altered the work that we read today and so some description of the history and transformation of Les Fleurs du Mal is needed here.

The first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal was published in 1857 and contained 100 poems thematically arranged into five sections:

The first edition however, as I mentionned earlier, brought both Baudelaire and his publisher to court on charges of immorality and blasphemy. Baudelaire was fined and six of the poems were removed by order. These six poems remained censored until 1949 when an attorney named Falco convinced a court of appeal to overturn the decision. In 1861 a second edition was published which included the necessary ommissions and which added thirty-two new poems and a new section entitled Tableaux parisiens. Only a few of the new poems were included in this new section with another eight coming from the section called Spleen et Idéal. The format of the second edition was as follows:

In 1868 a third and final edition of Les Fleurs du Mal was posthumously published with a preface by the poet Théophile Gautier and with some additional poems not hitherto included added to the volume. Some ofthese poems, like `Receuillement' are considered amongst Baudelaire's most accomplished.

In short though, the edition of Les Fleurs du Mal we read today is essentially then, that of 1861 rather than that of 1857.

As you can see from my brief account of the history of Les Fleurs du Mal, a lot of importance was attached to the overall shape and organisation of the work. And this raises an important question: namely, how does one read a collection of poetry? Can we read the poems contained in a collection in any order we choose or is there a specific order the author designed for us to follow? Is Les Fleurs du Mal just a collection of isolated poems or does it make more sense to see it as a deliberately arranged sequence with its own internal order? Are Baudelaire's `flowers of evil' haphazardly planted or arranged into a neat formal garden?

Soon after the book's publication the writer Barbey d'Aurévilly put forward the notion of a hidden architecture - "une architecture secrète" - and in a letter to the poet Alfred de Vigny in 1861 Baudelaire himself wrote of Les Fleurs du Mal that:

The arrangement of poems in Les Fleurs du Mal is not chronological but thematic. Baudelaire has constructed a kind of plot or metaphorical itinerary. This itinerary orjourney might be said to be the journey of the human soul through the modern world and all its temptations. It might be said to record the efforts of the human soul to avoid tedium, inertia, spiritual dissatisfaction The notion of a `voyage' or `parcours' is central. Les Fleurs du Mal, with its careful architecture, is a prolonged meditation on the human condition from birth to death. The first poem `Bénédiction' concerns the birth of the poet and his subsequent rejection and the last poem `Le Voyage' is about death.

Les Fleurs du Mal begins with a prefactory poem entitled `Au Lecteur' which sets the tone and implicates both poet and reader in a savage but intimate complicity:

`Au Lecteur' is deliberately rhetorical in its unalleviated intensity and is intended to shock us out of our comfortable complacency. It is a critical tactical move as it immediately involves the reader in the text. Its use of the pronouns `nous' and `nos' establish a savage intimacy between poet and reader. The poet is the voice of our soul, the sins we have not yet committed are inhererent within us and are avoided through cowardice rather than virtue. The root of all evil is ennui - the world weariness that weakens our will and forces us to take refuge in forbidden pleasures and perverse fantasies:

Man is searching for some infinite satisfaction in life and the poems of Les Fleurs du Mal are grouped to show and illustrate the different ways in which man seeks it and to find an escape from spleen, the term Baudelaire uses to describe the boredom and feeling of emprisonment we all feel in our daily lives.

Central to Baudelaire's conception of the human condition is the notion of homo duplex, the belief that man is double, is irrevocably divided. At the centre of Baudelaire's experience of life and of his writing is the sense of man's double condition as both spirit and flesh, mind and body. Let us take a brief look at quotation 2 on your handout taken from Baudelaire's journal/notebook, Mon coeur mis à nu:

This extract is the best known and most categorical expression of Baudelaire's fundamental experience of an inner duality: on the one hand an aspiration towards God and the spiritual life; on the other an enslavement to the earthly, to the pleasures of the flesh and of the senses. Man is caught in an ongoing struggle between animalité and spiritualité, love and lust, ideal and reality. For Baudelaire Original Sin is the key to the human condition. Divine grace lacks efficacy and man through ennui falls prey to the powerful attractions of evil. However, the knowledge of and aspiration toward God remain as a potential source of redemption and salvation. As a book, Les Fleurs du Mal records the struggle of mankind against the lure of evil.

The other aspect of Baudelaire's understanding of the duality of human experience is explained in quotation 3 of your handout:

This too is central to an understanding of Baudelaire's work. There is, in Les Fleurs du Mal, a constant tension between the awareness of:

and

If you want Baudelaire's own descriptions of these two states then look at quotation 4 for a definition of spleen:

and quotation 5 which defines l'idéal:

To better understand these beliefs, we might think of Baudelaire's conception of the human condition in spatial or graphic terms. Show OHP here. Think of the human condition in terms of two axes: a moral axis (vertical) and an emotional axis. Man is constantly pulled back and forth, up and down along these two axes.

The opening or prefatory poem `Au Lecteur' dwells at length upon the negative and destructive pulls within us. However, the first section, Spleen et Idéal, deals with the struggle to find or create something affirmative, of value.

The section may be sud-divided into three smaller cycles:

i) the cycle of art

ii) the cycle of love

iii) the Spleen poems

The first twenty-one poems all relate to the question of art, to the problems encountered by the artist and to the nature of beauty. `Bénédiction' and `L'Abatros' form a general introduction. They portray the poet as the Romantics had shown him earlier: an outcast, a victim, an outsider, an exile from society. Despite this, other poems deal with the positive forces art can generate. `Élévation', `Les Phares' and `Correspondances' give the poet's vision of ecstasy. The poet is gifted with the faculty to perceive beauty, harmony and illumination. Again, this is similar to the Romantic concept of the poet as `voyant' or `visionnaire' gifted - or cursed - with an extraordinary intelligence or sensitivity. In the poem `Bohémiens en voyage' is another interesting poem in which he describes a band of wandering gypsies. In the poem, these nomadic and essentially solitary individuals have the gift of prophecy, are visionaries able to pierce the mysteries of the universe. These wandering gypsies are just one of many doubles of the poet who is, of course, himself is a kind of `voyant' and `visionnaire'. The other main point of similarity between the wandering gypsies and the poet is their sense of melancholy at having experienced fleeting happiness: "les yeux appesantis/Par le morne regret des chimères absentes" (eyes drowsy with mournful nostalgia for departed dreams lines 7-8). This is, of course, the poet who finds himself torn between idéal and spleen. The poet as seer is also the main theme of the poem `Correspondances', a poem so famous and so well-glossed that I shall let you analyse it yourself.

In other poems in the section we find many of the themes Baudelaire will pursue in his later writing: namely, the position of the poet in the modern world and the commercialization of the art object. The untitled poem beginning "J'aime le souvenir de ces époques nues" is significant for its pessimistic recoil from the squalor and ugliness and the modern world and a turning towards the world of classical antiquity. However, the poem complicates this general movement towards the classical by making the surprising claim that amidst the ugliness of the modern world can be found "des beautés inconnues". This theme of finding the beautiful in the ugly will recur throughout Les Fleurs du Mal and indeed it is something I shall come back to later.

Another poem about art with a distinctively `modern' feel is `La Muse vénale' which shows the poet at the mercy of the marketplace, obliged sell his wares to vulgar crowd who are unable to understand the beauty of his art. The poet likens himself to a street acrobat whose hides his tears behind his clowning. This theme is given a comic treatment in the prose poem `Le chien et le flacon' where the poet allows his dog to sniff from a bottle of exquisite perfume that he has just purchased. The dog however, recoils in disgust provoking the poet's anger and the comparison that the dog is like the mass audience who prefer excrement to exquisite scent. This poem reveals Baudelaire's feelings about the position of the artist or intellectual with regards to mass culture.

Baudelaire was very much like Flaubert in that they were both men who suffered and struggled for their art. They dedicated their lives to their art and refused to let it become debased by pandering to popular tastes, even if this meant a drastically reduced readership. They both refused the commodification and commercialization of their art, insisting that art should occupy an autonymous realm uncorrupted by the prevailing tastes of the marketplace. The idea of the artist driven to create a work of pure beauty, and to suffer in the process is very much the theme of the poem entitled, unsurprisingly, `La Beauté'. Beauty is described as a kind of immortal goddess. At times, beauty is articulated in the poem as a cold, immutable monument agaisnst whose chest many men have injured themselves (lines 2-4). Moreover, the presence of the verb "consumer" (line 11) suggests the self-destruction of the artist in his/her attempt to fix beauty, to set beauty down on paper. Beauty here is not to be found in the everyday, but in the ethereal zone of the azure. A poem which needs to be read alongside `La Beauté' is `L'Idéal' in which the poet defines his ideal of beauty negatively, that is to say, by what it is not.

The final poem in the cycle of art, `Hymne à la beauté' deserves special attention for its conceptualization of beauty. The first part of the poem comprizes of two pairs of stanzas, each of which beginning with an either/or question regarding the origins of beauty:

Sors-tu du gouffre noir ou descends-tu des astres?

The poet answers the question with the assertion that the question is in fact irrelevant:

De Satan ou de Dieu, qu'importe? Ange ou Sirène,

Qu'importe, si tu rends, - fée aux yeux de velours,

Rythme, parfum, lueur, ô mon unique reine! -

L'univers moins hideux et les instants moins lourds?

Although the poem begins with an apparent acceptance of certain moral value hierarchies (heaven and hell, good and evil) it ultimately concludes with a subversion of such a binary logic. The whole question of an absolute moral value hierarchy is irrelevant to the artist. The poet in his search for beauty must be indifferent to questions of morality. The poet must bracket or suspend all moral values. The artist must be morally agnostic since la beauté may be encountered in vice, sin, transgression. This particular concept helps explain some of the ambiguities of the title, Les Fleurs du Mal which can be translated, as it often is, as `flowers of evil' but also `flowers from evil' or `flowers out of evil'. Beautiful flowers may be found in evil. There is no link between morality and aesthetics.

Having written of beauty in abstract terms in `Hymne à la beauté', Baudelaire moves on to the idea of beauty embodied by or incarnated in woman. After the cycle of art poems come the cycle of love poems and here again the cycle needs to be sub-divided in four smaller units:

iv. Secondary Heroines: LVIII-LXIV (58-64)

Although I have followed conventional critical practise in sub-dividing Baudelaire's love poems into smaller cycles, it should be noted that Baudelaire himself never actually used such a term or ecouraged that his poems should be read as being `about' any single woman or group of women. The love poems are, in fact, remarkably varied in their tone: some are intimate, tender, reverent - everything one might expect from love poems in fact - whereas others are vicious, sarcastic and sadistic. Even in the love poems then, the ambivalence and mixture of contradictory emotions about the beloved are to be found.

In keeping with a whole tradition of European lyric poetry since the Renaissance, Baudelaire does not write of love on an anecdotal level. His lovers all remain nameless and thus attain a certain degree of universality. Baudelaire's love poems represent an exploration of love in its different forms, and a search for l'idéal and thus an escape from spleen through love and eroticism.

Poems 22 to 39 are all about the lover Baudelaire was most deeply attached to throughout his life, Jeanne Duval. Jeanne Duval. The woman in the poems is dark-skinned and dark-haired and the images used to describe her are full of an exotic tropicality. The poems are marked by their sensuality and their stress on the physical aspects of love and of sexual intimacy. The Jeanne Duval or black Venus poems are linked formally through certain recurrent images pertaining to heat, scent and physical abundance. The poem `Parfum exotique' is a key text here with the physicality of woman, to be more explicit, the scent of her sultry breast ("l'odeur de ton sein chaleureux") provoking in the poet an imaginative reverie of exploration and escape. One should mention the maternal associations of the image of the "sein chaleureux". Happiness is frequently regressive in Baudelaire, it is often based on a desire to return to some earlier state of intimacy, innocence and unself-conscious enjoyment of the world (cf. 1st stanza of `Le Voyage'). The poem `La Vie antérieure' is also an interesting poem to read with respect to Baudelaire's views on happiness. In `Le Balcon' - a poem which interestingly begins with the poet addressing Jeanne as both mother and lover ("Mère des souvenirs, maîtresse des maîtresses") - Baudelaire again writes of the consolation of finding happness again through memory. It is also a very self- referential poem, a poem, that is, about poetry itself. Poetry is seen as the privileged medium for evoking the past: "Je sais l'art d'évoquer les minutes heureuses".

In `La Chevelure', it is the scent of her hair that inspires another fantasy of escape to a tropical idyll. The common link between these two poems is of woman as muse inspiring the poet, provoking exotic and erotic daydreaming. Woman's physicality allows the poet escape through imagination and memory. The magical powers of the imagination which had hitherto laid dormant are reawakened through women's physicality.

On a more critical level, what we can see Baudelaire doing is to repeat and reinforce stereotypes about non-western women as sexually voracious and animal-like. Indeed, when Jeanne is described in the sonnets it is often in terms of an animal, often a cat. Even in `La Chevelure', the vocabulary used has strong animal connotations: "toison" (fleece), "moutonner" (to billow) and "encolure" (neck-line). Baudelaire in these poems, reveals himself to be very much a man of his time, reworking colonial stereotypes of the non-western woman. It is intersting to compare Baudelaire's representations of Jeanne Duval with French painting of the nineteenth century which also made use of western stereotypes about the colonial other. Just consider, for example, this claim made by Griselda Pollock in her book on the painter Paul Gauguin:

The cruelty, darkness, evil and pain of passionate, erotic love are also key themes in the first cycle. Again, this links up with the ambiguity of the title: even the beautiful can be a source of pain ("mal" means both `pain/suffering' as well as `evil'). Baudelaire, in his love poems, frequently stresses the physicality of love. This is a poetry of the body, of the body as a generator of fantasy, imagination, memory. To quote Jonathan Culler: "The woman herself, we might say, is left aside as the gestures and textures of bodies, conceived as if in memory, produce dramas or exchanges, direct fantasies, prompt utterance and reflexion" (C. Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 p.xxiv).

Poems 40 to 48 are about Madame Sabatier. Madame Sabatier was a well-known figure in Parisian salons and was worshipped by Baudelaire who treated her as a goddess. The recurrent imagery linking these poems pertain to religion and spirituality. The poem `Le Flacon' describes how the memory of Madame Sabatier will be preserved in his poetry, like perfume in a bottle, to travel to the future and be released. The Madame Sabatier cycle isn't all positive, and there are many poems which linger on the darker side of love, are marked by a sense of disillusionment, by a feeling that love may well be a deliberate self- delusion. In the poem `Semper eadem' there is a mood of cynical tristesse: love may well be very nice but it is a dream, an illusion that does not and cannot bring lasting satisfaction.

Poems 49 to 56 are dedicated to Marie Daubrun. There are a number of important poems in this cycle, notably `L'Invitation au voyage' and `Chant d'automne'.

Poems 57 to 64, the secondary heroines cycle are a bit of a mish-mash which repeat and reinforce some of the love themes explored in the other poems.

I want to conclude my introduction to Baudelaire's love poetry with the point that Baudelaire is essentially pessimistic about the possibility of fulfilled, happy love. To quote Jonathan Culler: "What is missing from Baudelaire's love poetry is the note of satisfied mutuality" (C. Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 p.xxiv).

In Baudelaire's spleen poems there is a constant tension due to an awareness of the opposition between l'idéal, the term Baudelaire uses to describe moments of ecstasy, vision and mystic communion ("les minutes heureuses" of `Le Balcon') and spleen, the term Baudelaire uses to describe moments of pathalogical depression. There are a number of poems which describe this experience and the struggle of the poet to overcome spleen and to produce art.