134
PARTISAN REVIEW
problematic before it has been enjoyed. Bersani is superb in recaptur–
ing the experience. But it has already become problematic and appar–
ently was problematic for Baudelaire. What troubl es in Bersani 's
argument is not its experimental attitude but the strident moralism
that is barely concealed by the attitude. Bersani 's criticism operates on a
double standard. While psychic mobility is presented with
apparent
neutrality, amorally, all attempts at achieving stability are condemned
in
moral
terms.
We are told by Bersani after a vivid account of two poems in
L es
Fleurs du Mal
("Le Beau Navire" and "Les Bijoux") of the disintegra–
tive effect of fantasies generated by desire that Baudelaire's sadism "is
an attempt to stop the woman from moving, for her movements excite
desires which may both endanger her and reduce the poet's identity to a
kind of mobile fragmentariness ." This danger is asserted neutrally,
without alarm-as if Bersani does not wish this perfectly reasonabl e
desire of Baudelaire not to be
reduced
to threaten the opposed view of
the fragmentary self as a liberated self. Bersani makes nothing of the
reduction of poetic identity. I would suggest that it is precisel y
Baudelaire's need for sadic immobility that puts in jeopardy the
"ethic" of psychic mobility Bersani proposes. The dea thlike immobil–
ity (achieved through violence toward another, who may be no more
than a projection of the feminine[?] portion of the poetic self), may be
provoked by an uncontrolled psychic mobility. Biologists have taught
us that the body is conservative and desires stability-at leas t as part of
a dialectic in which the other term is adventure.
In his reading of Baudelaire, Bersani tends to associate the order–
ing or immobilizing tendency in the work with cruelty and a life
denying fixity. One is often persuaded by Bersani 's ingenious Lacan–
influenced readings of individual poems and passages from
Les
] ournaux Intimes,
but there is a large tendentious implication as in his
discussion of realistic fiction that all order is immobility and all
scattering pleasure and vitality. (The hero in realistic fiction serves a
double purpose. He is "the ideal self whom the narrator seeks to
appropriate," and he is "also the rejected [and yet fascinating] possibil–
ity of disruptive impulses which might resist being enclosed in any
structured totality at all.") The reservations about his "critical adven–
ture" does not inhibit his concluding desire to "expose ourselves once
again to Baudelaire's excitingly playful, if risky, adventure in self–
scattering and self-displacement." One can't escape the feeling that
Bersani has evacuated the terror which Baudelaire must have felt in the
experience of
disintegration.
