HAUBERT
57
is, Baudelaire's loudly advertised indifference to illusions of spontaneity
or of nature provides the surest index to his special kind of "serious–
ness": his continuous emphasis on the richly theatrical possibilities
of art.
Thus, in the marvelous
uSpleen' )
poem beginning
uJ'ai plus de
souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans,"
the combination of weighty ab–
straction
(uL'ennui, fruit de la morne curiosite,
/
Prend les propor–
tions de l'immortalite")
and of a trivial concreteness
(Ule suis un
vieux boudoir plein de roses fanees")
emphasizes the virtuosity with
which the poet plays with a paralyzing past rather than the sphynxlike
inertia which is the apparent subject of the poem. He is self-con–
sciously juxtaposing the most incongruous images to describe himself
(a piece of furniture, a cemetery, a boudoir, a pyramid), and the
casual solemnity with which he does this creates the poem's elusive
tone. Its richness comes from an unstable mixture of light and heavy
elements, from a refusal to settle on anyone tone, to take this
bizarrely heterogeneous self seriously,
or
to deny the
a
ennui"
and the
Uhumeur farouche"
which the poem describes. A thematic analysis of
images in
Les Fleurs du mal
could construct that problematic "self"
we find in contemporary French criticism: neither a biographical
Baudelaire nor the Baudelaire of specific artistic achievements, but
rather the coherent psychological skeleton "under" his work. But
what strikes me as far more interesting in his best poems is the way
he makes such structures irrelevant. His melodramatic self-exposures
are really leisurely self-inventions, and Baudelaire's tone invites us to
consider those inventions as the self-conscious defiance of the psy–
chology they presumably express. He is free
because
he is so hopelessly
oppressed; the enigma of
ennui
inspires the
feux d'artifice
which
Baudelaire ironically offers as autobiography. And this is the autonomy
of art which he defends less originally in
his
critical writing: the
inspirational value of a melancholy which, in the restricted space of
poetry, ignores its causes in order to produce some dazzling effects.
It's perhaps the ambiguous privilege of "realistic" prose fiction
to deplore this autonomy of the imagination while dramatizing it.
Flaubert gives us Emma Bovary's extravagantly romantic fantasies;
but he also gives us the
time
during which she waits for them to
appear as actual events. What I referred to earlier as Emma's float–
ing anxiety can be thought of most simply as her boredom with a
