Today I want to continue where I left off in my last lecture and look at the other sections of Les Fleurs du Mal as they appear. You may recall that in my last lecture we only managed to get through one section - Spleen et Idéal - in today's lecture I want to read through the rest with you. It may sound like a tall order but the other sections are much smaller than Spleen et Idéal which, arguably, dominates Les Fleurs du Mal.

We start with Tableaux parisiens. This section was not present in the original 1857 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal and only appeared in the later 1861 edition. It is the most significant amendment to the original text insofar as it privileges the experience of modern urban living - something with which Baudelaire later came to be associated. Between 1857 and 1861 Baudelaire undertook a methodical examination of Paris as a potential source of poetic inspiration. He began the volume of prose poems called Le Spleen de Paris (they are sometimes referred to as Les Petits poèmes en prose) and at the same time he began work on an essay on modern art - Peintre de la vie moderne - an important aesthetic tract on the now forgotten artist Constantin Guys.

The mid to late nineteenth century, of course, witnessed a massive increase in the size of the urban population and a corresponding decrease in the size of the rural population. Urban subjects had, by the early to mid nineteenth century, penetrated the novel - in particular Eugène Sue and Balzac - but not really poetry or the visual arts. I say not really because, of course, Victor Hugo wrote a number of poems about urban injustice and what we would now call inner-city deprivation. Nonetheless, until Baudelaire at least, the city's poetic potential had not been fully realized. Baudelaire wanted to change this situation and bring modernity into poetry and painting. He was an influential art critic as the work of Manet testifies. The term `tableau' is clearly drawn from the visual arts and in the poems the poet turns outward (rather than inward) to contemplate the metropolis and its citizens. The poems thus stand in distinct contrast to the unabated introspection of Spleen et Idéal.

Baudelaire is frequently seen nowadays as a quintessentially urban poet. Indeed, much of Baudelaire's literary innovations stem from his desire to make the city a suitable source of poetic inspiration rather than finding it in the world of nature. Baudelaire, in fact, is seen as a poet like Théophile Gautier who despises nature - see Gautier's preface to Les Jeunes-France where he writes: "Je déteste la campagne: toujours des arbres, de la terre, du gazon! Qu'est-ce que cela me fait? C'est très pittoresque, d'accord, mais c'est ennuyeux à crever." - and he attempts to construct a self-consciously anti-natural aesthetic.

More important than the fashionable, dandyish anti-natural aesthetic is the belief, prevalant in Baudelaire's various writings that modern life is primarily urban. The fact that the majority of people are now town or city dwellers is the key characteristic of modernity, of modern living. The modern individual was an urban dweller susceptible to the shocks of modernity. The German critic Walter Benjamin writes of Baudelaire's own sensitivity to the traumatic shocks of the modern city. The decline in collective festivals and traditions left individuals exposed, without the necessary understanding and experience to comprehend and come to terms with the rapid pace of modern urban existence. One key phenomena of modern life was the crowd. Old, stable communities broke down and people henceforth began to live their lives around strangers. It is the city that best illustrates the fragmentation of modern living. The consciousness of the individual in the modern world is constantly confronted with disparate, dissonant experiences, with objects and encounters that do not seem to go together: the fragrant and the foul, the luxury and the squalor of the city streets and so no. Modernity is characterized by a sense of physical, social and spiritual fragmentation, by a loss of wholeness, a shattering of human connection, a destruction or disintegration of permament value, all that is solid melts into air.

Perhaps the best way of dealing with modernity, with modern life, Baudelaire suggests, is to try to develop a aesthetic response to it, to take pleasure in the shock juxtapositions, jolts, strangeness and uncertainty that modern (urban) life throws up. One should try to become a connoisseur of the fragmented experience of modernity. To quote Jonathan Culler: "If Baudelaire is seen as the prophet of modernity, it is no doubt because his lyrics can be read as asking how one can experience or come to terms with the modern world and as offering poetic consciousness as a solution - albeit a desparate one, requiring a passage through negativity" (C. Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 p.xxxi). Or else, to quote Eugene W Holland: "Baudelaire thus appears as a lyric poet whose conditions of experience threaten to preclude the possibility of writing lyric poetry. ... The disintegration of experience provokes a desperate battle waged by Baudelaire to salvage some form of experience from the ravages of modernity" (Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 p.114). This, I think, is what Baudelaire is trying to do in the Tableaux parisiens section of Les Fleurs du Mal. Baudelaire uses the figures of the people he encounters in the streets of Paris as symbols of both human weakness and aspiration. Beyond this though, Baudelaire's poems in Tableaux parisiens articulate an urban poetics, exploring the city as a site of artistic inspiration in a way it had never been explored before.

Tableaux parisiens is composed of both diurnal (day) and nocturnal (night) poems and there is thus some kind of interal coherence. As well as the allusion to painting, the title also evokes a popular minor literary prose genre, the tableaux de Paris in which a casual stroller observes the swirling city scene and makes some kind of moral observation. This minor genre is perfectly suited to Baudelaire's intention to make snap sense of the fleeting and unfamiliar experiences of the city.

The first three poems of the Tableaux parisiens in some ways develop the theme develpoed at the end of the `art cycle' in Spleen et Idéal: the possibility of poetic will to transform the ugly or the everyday. One might argue here, as Eugene W. Holland has done, that Tableaux parisiens ends with the poet's acknowledgement of the hopelessly unrealistic nature of this project. The first poem, `Paysage', sees the artist as someone trapped, emprisoned in an increasingly industrialized and overpopulated metropolis. In the first 12 lines of `Paysage' we find the poet in his garret contemplating Paris which he regards as a sort of urban idyll. A communion between the cosmos and the human world is implied:

Later in the poem winter arrives and the poet constructs an imaginary landscape. The poet turns away from nature, bypasses it to construct a parallel or virtual reality in competition with the real world. This is very much a poem about the triumph of poetic will to create beauty. It is a poem about the victory of artifice over nature. An important passage in the poem which stresses this point is to be found on lines 23-6:

Car je serai plongé dans cette volupté

D'évoquer le Printemps avec ma volonté,

De tirer un soleil de mon coeur, et de faire

De mes pensers brûlants une tiède atmosphère.

`Paysage' shows the beginnings of an attempt to forge an urban aesthetic. However, it does shows the poet in a position of detached superiority, deliberately dissociating himself from the life of the metropolis.

In `Le Soleil' Baudelaire comes closer to defining what his urban aesthetic might be about. The poet no longer closes himself off from the city. The poet is shown as a flâneur actually walking the city street at night, stumbling across strange sights and unexpected contrasts. The city is a place of accidental discovery, a living, dynamic source of inspiration:

Je vais m'exercer seul à ma fantasque escrime,

Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime,

Trébuchant sur les mots comme sur les pavés,

Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés.

It is in the chance encounters of the metropolis that the poet may find the stuff of his art, however humble the experiences and sights might initially seem. Both poet and the sun can ennoble the most banal:

What is interesting about Baudelaire's comparison here is that the sun is likened to the poet and not the other way round. It is poetic artifice and not nature that is the key term here. What Baudelaire seems to be arguing in this poem is the superiority of poetic harmony over natural beauty.

The city poems are particularly interesting for the theory of art they articulate. Nathaniel Wing glosses Baudelaire's theory of artistic creation like this:

Key exemplifications of this aesthetic can be seen in the poems `Le Crépuscule du soir' and `Le Crépuscule du matin' but it is best illustrated in the next poem `A une mendiante rousse' in which a poor beggar- girl - also probably a prostitute - is described. She exemplifies the chance encounters and the shock juxtapositions of the city being both wretched and beautiful, squalid and exquisite, a object of reverie and idealization as well as of financial exchange. It is interesting that the mendiante rousse is probably also a streetwalker. For Baudelaire, like many others struggling to represent modern life in the visual arts - and I am talikng here about Manet, Degas, Monet, Caillebotte and the other Impressionists - the prostitute became the very icon of modernity, The prostitute was seen as the key exemplification of modernity insofar as s/he represents: i) the anonymous, the cold and the unfeeling; ii) the precarious, the fleeting and the transitory and iii) the commercialized nature of human social relations since the prostitute is "both seller and commodity in one" to use Walter Benjamin's terms. The prostitute represents the commodification of social relations, a cooling off in the ways in which human beings relate to one another. However, in terms of Baudelaire's program to assert poetic will, `A une mendiante rousse' represents an acknowledgement of its failure. The poet cannot `ennoble' all he sees and the poem seems to conclude, as Eugene W. Holland has summarized it, with the admission that "the real is what resists ennobling imagination" (Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 p.157). On one level Baudelaire's project is a failure but on another level it opens up a whole new subject for modern poetry, namely poetry's inability to transform the world. A difficult point and one we shall come back t later.

I mentionned earlier that the tableaux de Paris genre which Baudelaire invokes in the title of Tableaux parisiens was all about making sense of urban experience and that this was consistent with Baudelaire's own intentions. One of the challenges that Baudelaire seems to set himself is how to represent the chaotic and ever-changing urban landscape. This is another aspect of Baudelaire's modernism. He uses fragmentation, disruption and dislocation, shock juxtapositions, images of liquidity or ghostliness to evoke an uncertain and often menacing cityscape. `A une passante', `Le Cygne', `Les Sept Vieillards' and `Les Petites vieilles' are all key exemplifications of this attempt to represent the city. In `Les Petites vieilles' traditionally the presence of internal rhymes constituted an infraction of the rules of French versification, a violation or disruption. Typically Tableaux parisiens ends with the poet's defeat from the cacophonous and illegible urban scene:

Exaspéré comme un ivrogne qui voit double

Je rentrai, je fermai ma porte, épouvanté,

Malade et morfondu, l'esprit fiévreux et trouble,

Blessé par le mystère et par l'absurdité!

The section entitled Le Vin deals with the search for escape and some form of inner peace through les paradis artificiels, the artificial paradises of stimulants like alcohol and drugs. It is a relatively short section (CIV to CVIII) of only five poems. As Baudelaire himself put it in the prose poem `Enivrez-vous' (reproduced on page 14 of the handout, quotation 17):

Alcohol and drugs are perfect stimulants for Baudelaire since they enduce both a heightened perception or apprehension of reality, a transformation of life's dull grey surfaces as well as bringing about a certain loss of self which erases inhibitions and creates a sensation of powerfulness. It is this transformation of both self and world that Baudelaire cherishes in wine. In `L'âme du vin' stages the voice of wine singing the praises of its magical powers to liberate and revivify. It claims to be the remedy to the ills of the overworked and underpaid as well as a valuable stimulant to artistic creation.

Although Baudelaire's politics are notoriously hard to define, there is an element of social protest in `L'âme du vin'. Alcohol abuse is the refuge of an exploited and alienated urban underclass driven to drink themselves into a state of oblivion, forgetting the cares of their wretched lives. Another poem in a similar vein is `Le Vin des chiffonniers'. In the poem alcohol confers a sense of power and pride onto one of the city's most downtrodden and marginalized figure, the rag-picker, who makes his living scavenging amongst the litter of Paris. There is a picture of a rag-piker on page 11 of your handout. This poem - which might equally well go in the Tableaux parisiens section - is yet another self- conscious theorization of the creation of poetry. The rag-picker who picks up what has been disgarded on the city streets is like the poet who also picks up on the débris od urban ife and turns it into something of artistic value. In fact, in the poem there are the lines "On voit un chiffonnier qui vient, hochant la tête,/Butant, et se cognant aux murs comme un poète" which makes the connection explicit.

In `Le Vin de l'assassin' wine soothes the pain and anger of the man who has just murdered his wife. Wine then offers a release from the pains inflicted by an injust social order, a cruel God but also, and this is an important point to stress, from the self-created sufferings we inflict upon ourselves. Baudelaire, in the poem `L'Héautontimorouménos' (from Spleen et Idéal) described himself - and by implication all mankind - as both victim and executioner:

Je suis la plaie et le couteau!

Je suis le soufflet et la joue!

Je suis les membres et la roue!

Et la victime et le bourreau!

Wine in these poems is an ambivalent substance: it is described in `L'âme du vin' as a gift of God to mankind ("grain précieux jeté par l'éternel Semeur") but in both `Le Vin des chiffonniers' and `Le Vin de l'assassin' it is a man-made creation which offers an escape from a cruel world created and then abandonned by God. In `Le Vin des chiffonniers', a cruel God touched by remorse gives the wretched the gift of sleep and forgetfullness but the man-made gift of wine offers the only real consolation to "ces vieux maudits qui meurent en silence".

The other thing alcohol and drugs provide is a brief glimpse of l'idéal, and as such, may be seen as analogues or even alternatives to artistic creation. The negative pull of spleen may be resisted - albeit momentarily - by indulging in the forbidden pleasures of wine.

The section entitled Les Fleurs du Mal is another short one with only nine poems. The theme that links them all is that of escape through the intensity of carnal love and through what we would now call sado- masochistic relationships. It is in this section that Baudelaire's attempt to escape spleen takes its most bizarre turn. Spleen must be avoided via an exploration of the extremities of human desire, through vice, sin and depravity, the "terribles plaisirs" and "affreuses douceurs" as Baudelaire described them in `Les Deux bonnes soeurs'.

There are three poems - `Lesbos', `Les Femmes damnées' and `Delphine et Hippolyte' two of which were removed from the 1857 edition - about lesbian lovers. Baudelaire sympathizes with their illicit desires condemed by society. For Baudelaire, the lesbian is yet another double of the artist condemned by society and occupying its margins. They, like the artist, are explorers into the unknown, the dangerous nether-world of forbidden passion and transgressive desire. They are "seekers of the infinite", drive by an overwhelming passion. They suffer the condemnation of society, of God but, most important of all, they suffer the lacerations of passion itself. Passion is the `delightful torment', the `sweet prison' to which we all willingly condemn ourselves. Here is Baudelaire in `Les Femmes damnées':

One final remark about Baudelaire's use or appropriation of lesbian desire in Les Fleurs du Mal. Baudelaire does not see men as women as entering the same kind of relationships, at the same point, with complementary sets of desires. There is, in many of Baudelaire's love poems, a sense that men and women never truly communicate with one another and that the fulfillment of desire is impossible. Baudelaire's identification with his imagined lesbians is, in part, an acknowledgement of this.

In the section entitled Les Fleurs du Mal vice and depravity is neither condemned nor condoned, but the conclusion is very much that they too are another dead end in the search for an escape from spleen. The section ends on a note of self-disgust with the poem `Voyage à Cythère' about an imagined journey to Venus's mythical island of love. The poem oscillates between optimism and pessimism, enjoying the ecstasy of physical pleasure yet aware that there is no ecape from the emptiness of life. Even in this paradise of carnal love the inevitability of death and physical decay is never far away as illustrated in the description of a filthy, putifying corpse hanging on a gibet. Its final line are particularly revealing:

Following the failure to escape through vice and depravity comes the revolt against the human condition for which God the creator is directly responsible. The poems in this section are angry and polemical in their denunciation of God the creator. There is also - and for this Baudelaire is infamous - a certain turning towards Satan.

The poem `Caïn et Abel' tells the story of the children of Adam and Eve. Cain was a farmer and Abel a shephard and they both made a sacrifice to God. However, Cain's offering was rejected and he slew his brother in his anger. In turn, God punished Cain by making his a fugitive and by branding him so that he would be recognized wherever he went. In some interpretations and in some religious paintings, Cain and Abel are seen as anticipating Christ and Judas. Traditionally then, Abel has represented good and Cain evil. Baudelaire, however, inverts this. In Baudelaire's poem, it is Cain who is the hero for his angry defiance of God. Cain is the perfect symbol for the oppressed and the exiled. Cain should rise up and complete his initial rebellion by overthrowing God.

Another poem on similiar lines in `Le Reniement de Saint Pierre'. Saint Peter was the leader of the twelve apostles and the one closest to Christ. After the arrest of Christ he denied knowing him, as Christ had earlier predicted. Saint Peter denied knowing Christ three times and on each occasion a cock crowed - again just as Christ had earlier predicted. When Saint Peter realized Christ's prophesy had been realized he burst into tears and repented. In `Le Reniement de Saint Pierre' Baudelaire claims that Saint Peter was right in denying Jesus. Why did Christ accept his fate? Why didn't he live and bring justice and joy to the world instead of meekly capitulating to a tyrannical father? The angry, militant Christ that drove the money-lenders from the temple is preferred to the martyr of the Catholic Church. In `Les Litanies de Satan' there is an inversion of the normal supplication to God. Satan here is another symbol of the dispossessed and the exiled. It is a poem that acknowledges the attraction of evil as a possible escape from spleen.

Of course, all this raising his fist against God actually presupposes His existence. Baudelaire is not an atheist or anti-Christian but profoundly Christian. Baudelaire shows us what the seventeenth-century Christian apologist Blaise Pascal called "la misère de l'homme sans Dieu", the wretchedness of man without God. One might quote T.S. Eliot (quotation 16) here:

This section concludes the volume with the idea of death as being the only escape from the weary pain of life. The most important poem here is `Le Voyage' which is, of course, about death. Although the poems in the section La Mort are about death, death also haunts many of the other poems in the book. What shadows many of the love poems for example, is the consciousness that love and physical beauty are doomed to wither and die - `Une charogne' is a particularly good example of this. Death is also present in the morbid, brooding spleen poems. So, in Les Felurs du Mal on the whole, death is seen as something that frustrates hapiness, it is a negative phenomena. In the section La Mort, death is seen as a source of happiness and consolation. If spleen can only be temporarily eluded through love, art, wine and vice, perhaps one can find lasting peace only in death. The poem `La Mort des pauvres' makes this explicit:

C'est la Mort qui console, hélas! et qui fait vivre;

Death must, I think, be understood in Christian terms here. Death represents only the cessation of earthly life and, since the soul is immortal, it marks the beginnings of another form of existence. This is the approach expressed in `La Mort des amants'. In `La Mort des amants' death is seen as a form of reconciliation. Instead of mutual misunderstandings and alienation we find a real coming together, a mutuality expresses by terms like "nos deux coeurs", "deux vastes flambeaux", "leurs doubles lumières" and "miroirs jumeaux". Moreover, the ideal of death as an awfully big adventure is expressed in the final poem `Le Voyage':

O Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps! levons l'ancre!

Ce pays nous ennuie, ô Mort! Apareillons!

Si le ciel et la mer sont noirs comme de l'encre,

Nos coeurs que tu connais sont remplis de rayons!

Verse-nous ton poison pour qu'il noue réconforte!

Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous brûle le cerveau,

Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu'importe?