Baudelaire's Creole Gothic : A Postcolonial Afterlife for Les Fleurs du mal

Baudelaire’s verse poetry is informed by a pervasive Creole Gothic resonance. Two separate but related topoi, the Undead and the Living Dead, lie at the heart of the collection’s necrological imaginary of slave and zombie labour. It is this Gothic double-trope of death-in-life/life-in-death that activates the Gothic Creole strain running through Les Fleurs du mal. Ironically, those poems that seem to evoke most directly the Creole world that Baudelaire encountered in 1841, firstly in Mauritius and then in Réunion, avoid all evocation of plantation slavery. Conversely, the city poems associate modern metropolitan life with the idea of slavery, representing it as a living death and death as a merely temporary and reversible escape. The collection’s representation of this ‘living death’ foreshadows the construction (by Orlando Patterson, most notably) of transatlantic chattel slavery as ‘social death’. As for the poetic representation of the ‘Undead’, this centres on the figure of the zombie. The zombie is essentially a slave for whom death has proved no guarantee against an endless ‘living death’ of hard labour. If the Creole inflection of Baudelaire’s imagery relates primarily to the realities of industrialized plantation labour and to the chattel slavery on which it was based, it is further reinforced by indices of tropical localisation and of racial difference, more specifically pigmentation. However subliminal its resonance, this Creole Gothic strain guarantees for Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal a vivid postcolonial afterlife.

Baudelaire's Two Cosmopolitanisms

In his text on the ‘Exposition Universelle 1855’, Baudelaire upholds what he calls ‘cosmopolitisme’ as the antidote to the constraining influence of universalizing principles of taste that are meant to define beauty for all times and places. Baudelaire’s view is that such aesthetic systems close off the possibility of beauty, which, he maintains must contain an element of novelty. Accordingly, the proper attitude for the viewer (or reader or spectator) to take before a work of art is one that remains always open to novelty and to the ‘universal vitality’ out of which it springs. This attitude is the cosmopolitan one. Yet Baudelaire characterizes this attitude in ways that seem fundamentally incompatible if not diametrically opposed. On the one hand, cosmopolitanism as described in this text seems to involve the slow, lived apprenticeship in the values, ways of life, and criteria of judgement of those in other places, the better to be able to appreciate the beauty of the objects produced in them. On the other, he speaks of the appropriate attitude toward an aesthetic object — indeed toward any object that presents itself to our senses — as one resulting solely from the spectator’s exertions on his or her own mind and will, exertions by which the spectator refrains from imposing criteria of judgement upon the putative aesthetic object in order, instead, to derive one’s criteria from it. While the text on the ‘Exposition’ provides the reader with no way of resolving this contradiction, Baudelaire’s remarks on fashion in ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’ (1863) provide a dialectical resolution.

'La Vérité emphatique du geste dans les grandes circonstances de la vie' : Baudelaire, Barthes and the Hysterical Gesture

To associate Baudelaire and Barthes may seem a somewhat unlikely gesture. Barthes wrote about Baudelaire in a sustained way only once and with reference to a marginal part of the poet’s work, namely his failed theatrical projects. Yet Baudelaire remains a point of reference across the entire span of Barthes’s career, in particular as the author of a frequently cited quotation from ‘Exposition Universelle’ (1855): ‘la vérité emphatique du geste dans les grandes circonstances de la vie’. This phrase punctuates Barthes’s published work throughout, from one of his earliest essays to his very last book on photography, and is closely associated with another persistently recurring motif: the concept of numen, a term used to designate a static gesture expressing divine authority. The aim of this article is to examine the significance of Baudelaire for Barthes by investigating how he deploys the quotation from the ‘Exposition Universelle’ essay and the intertwined concept of numen. Its guiding questions are: what does Baudelaire mean for Barthes? And what does that tell us in turn about Baudelaire? Answering these questions involves tracing the intersecting trajectories of quotation and concept across Barthes's work, with a particular focus on the value to be attributed to exaggeration or excess in the communication of meaning through gesture and language, a phenomenon that both Barthes and Baudelaire associate with hysteria, as either something to be ironically assumed (Baudelaire) or ambivalently exorcized (Barthes).

Baudelaire and the Poetic Margin: Generic Resistances and Human Remainders in the Contemporary Scene

The figure of Baudelaire could be argued to have been conscripted into an excessive amount of paradigmatic constructions over the years. He becomes the name, or cultural face, of a moving configuration of essential problems in discussions of artistic work and subjectivity, and of the ‘modern regime’ – separately and in conjunction. This article analyzes Baudelaire’s afterlife as a mythological one and examines how, across a selection of ‘moments’ over the past three-quarters of a century, the pre-eminence of that figure can come to obscure the traces of a lived – synchronous – process in the oeuvre. Our ability to reconnect with those traces, it seeks to suggest, is key to an understanding of the continued ability of the Baudelaire figure to address our contemporary scene. Moving from Bourdieu’s construction of Baudelaire as nomothète in his sociology of the literary field, it revisits rival co-optations by Jouve and Sartre, in the service of aesthetic and critical ethical accounts respectively, before examining instances of the interweaving of these strands in a brief survey of broadly contemporary work. This survey concludes with a more extended focus on work by contemporary poet Cédric Demangeot, and suggests that the ‘poetic margin’ is where Baudelaire’s powerfully integrated navigation of the adversities of life and of art continues to resonate with greatest urgency.