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Bersani to the "artist's uncontrolled and unreserved openness to other
forms of being," suggesting the essential poetic nature of ennui. (One
might question whether either emptiness or openness is the ultimate
condition of the person suffering from ennui or of the artist. Ennui
may be a secondary manifestation of a more terrible emotion: fear
raised to the pitch of panic.
In
Roland Barthes,
Barthes speaks of panic
boredom, which "might be my form of hysteria."
If
ennui is the
expression of fear, then the cultivation of it by the artist is a form of
courage
to
which the antidote may be the poem itself.)
The result of the artist's "openness" may be impotence in the
world. But art or modern art is a compensation for the impotence.
Bersani characterizes it as "a richly elusive art of shifting tones and
heterogeneous images ... corresponding to 'desire's incessant mobil–
ity.''' The qualification modern is important because there was "an
aesthetic of completeness" in the nineteenth century in which art was
not conceived and experienced at the expense of an active and effective
participation in life. Bersani cites Proust as the first great witness of the
breakdown of this aesthetic of completeness. According to Bersani,
Proust equivocates between two views: that the unity is intrinsic to
La
Comedie humane
and Wagner's tetralogy and that it is an invention of
the artist, "imposing upon [the work] retrospectively a unity, a
greatness which it does not possess." Proust is being used here to
support the currently fashionable view that the unitary self is an
artificial construction, not a given of individual life. The second view
constitutes a subversive and valuable "questioning of general cultural
assumptions about the nature of the self and the 'shapes' of human
experience." What is left unquestioned are the assumptions about
fragmentation and mobility that animate his discourse.
Bersani writes: "The metamorphoses of the woman wi th the poet's
fantasies [as in "Le Serpent qui danse"] create impressive margins of
freedom for Baudelaire, margins which allow him not only to avoid
being fixed on an impoverishing center within himself, but also to
escape any obsessive attachment to the loved one." A confidently
centered self, a capacity for an enduring love of another are precipi–
tously and uncritically transvalued into negative terms: fixity, rigidity,
impoverishment, and obsessiveness. The risks of the reality principle
are made to constitute the essence of the principle, while the risks of the
pleasure principle (the sense of transience, emptiness, impoverishment,
narcissism) are suppressed. Of course, an immanent criticism must try
to
capture the experience of marginal freedom in the poet's fantasies
and not prematurely "fix" it in a dialectic which would make it
