214
PARTISAN REVIEW
It is a strange poem, and we are apt to feel like the straight man,
knowing something's happening here but not knowing what it is.
One of the first mysteries here is that halo itself: what's it doing on
a modern poet's head in the first place?
It
is there to satirize and to
criticize one of Baudelaire's own most fervent beliefs: belief in the
holiness of art. We can find a quasi-religious devotion to art through–
out his poetry and prose. Thus, in 1855: "The artist stems only from
himself.. .. He stands security only for himself.... He dies childless.
He has been his own king, his own priest, his own god." "Loss of a
Halo" is about how Baudelaire's own god fails. But we must under–
stand that this god is worshipped not only by artists, but equally by
many "ordinary people" who believe that art and artists exist on a
plane far above them. "Loss of a Halo" takes place at the point at
which the world of art and the ordinary world converge. This is not
only a spiritual point, but a physical one, a point in the landscape of
the modern city. It is the point where the history of modernization and
the history of modernism fuse into one.
Walter Benjamin seems to have been the first to suggest the deep
affinities between Baudelaire and Marx. Although Benjamin does not
make this particular connection, readers who are familiar with Marx
will notice the striking similarity of Baudelaire's central image here to
one of the primary images of the
Communist Manifesto:
"The bour–
geoisie has stripped of its halo every activity hitherto honored and
looked up to with reverent awe. It has transformed the doctor, the
lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage–
laborers." For both men, one of the crucial experiences endemic to
modern life, and one of the central themes for modern art and thought,
is
desanctification.
Marx's theory locates this experience in a world–
historical context; Baudelaire's poetry shows how it feels from inside.
But the two men respond to this experience with rather different
emotions. In the
Manifesto,
the drama of desanctification is terrible
and tragic: Marx looks back to, and his vision embraces, heroic figures
like Oedipus at Colonnus, Lear on the heath, contending against the
elements, stripped and scorned but not subdued, creating a new dignity
out of desolation. "Eyes of the Poor" contains its own drama of
desanctification, but there the scale is intimate rather than monumen–
tal , the emotions are melancholy and romantic rather than tragic. Still,
"Eyes of the Poor" and the
Manifesto
belong to the same spiritual
world. "Loss of a Halo" confronts us with a very different spirit: here
the drama is essentially comic, the mode of expression is ironic, and the
comic irony is so successful that it masks the seriousness of the
