MARSHALL BERMAN
217
Baudelaire shows how modern city life forces these new moves on
everyone; but he shows, too, how in doing this it also paradoxically
enforces new modes of freedom. A man who knows how to move in and
around and through the traffic can go anywhere, down any of the
endless urban corridors where traffic itself is free to go. This mobility
opens up a great wealth of new experiences and activities for the urban
masses. Moralists and people of culture will condemn these popular
urban pursuits as low, vulgar, sordid, empty of social or spiritual
value. But when Baudelaire's poet lets his halo go, and keeps moving,
he makes a great discovery. He finds, to his amazement, that the aura of
artistic purity and sanctity is only incidental, not essential, to art, and
that poetry can thrive just as well, and maybe even better, on the other
side of the boulevard, in those, low, "unpoetic" places like
un mauvais
lieu
where this poem itself is born. One of the paradoxes of modernity,
as Baudelaire sees it here, is that its poets will become more deeply and
authentically poetic by becoming more like ordinary men.
If
he throws
himself into the moving chaos of everyday life in the modern world-a
life of which the new traffic is a primary symbol-he can appropriate
this life for art. The "bad poet" in this world is the poet who hopes to
keep his purity intact by keeping off the streets, free from the risks of
traffic. Baudelaire wants works of art that will be born in the midst of
the traffic, that will spring from its anarchic energy, from the incessant
danger and terror of being there, from the precarious pride and
exhilaration of the man who has survived so far. Thus "Loss of a
Halo" turns out to be a declaration of something gained, a rededication
of the poet's powers to a new kind of art. His
mouvements brusques,
those sudden leaps and swerves so crucial for everyday survival in the
city streets, turn out to be sources of creative power as well. In the
century
to
come, these moves will become paradigmatic gestures of
modernist art and thought. (Forly years later, with the coming, or
rather the naming, of the Brooklyn Dodgers, popular culture will
produce its own ironic version of this modernist faith. The name
expresse the way in which urban survival skills-specifically, skill at
dodging traffic [they were at first called the
Trolley
DodgersJ-can
transcend utility and take on new modes of meaning and value in sport
as in art. Baudelaire would have loved the symbolism, as many of his
twentieth-century successors did.)
Ironies proliferate from this primal scene. The halo that falls into
the mire of the macadam is endangered, but not destroyed; instead, it is
carried along and incorporated into the general flow of traffic. One
salient feature of the commodity economy, as Marx explains, is the
