The writer of modern life: essays on Charles Baudelaire

Citation preview

The Writer ol Modern tile Essays on €harles Baudelaire ..

WqJter Benjamin Edited by Michael W. Jennings Translated by Howard Eiland, Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingston, and Harry Zohn

The Beiknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Masschusetts, and London, England 2006

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The Writer of Modern Life

The Writer-- of Modern lile

Essays on Charles Baudelaire

WALTER BENJAMIN Edited by Michael W Jennings .

Walter Benjamin's essays on the great French lyric poet Charles Baudelaire revolutionized not just the way we think about Baudelaire, but our understanding of modernity, modernism, and Benjamin. What propels these writings is personal for Benjamin. In these essays, he challenges the

ima~e

of Baudelaire

as late-Romantic dreamer, and evokes instead the modern poet caught in a life-or-death struggle with the forces of the urban commodity capitalism that had emerged in Paris around 1850. The Baudelaire who steps forth from these pages is the flaneur who affixes images as he strolls through mercantile Paris, the ragpicker who collects urban detritus only to turn it into poetry, the modern hero willing to be marked by modern life in its contradictions and paradoxes. He is in every instance the modern artist forced to commodify his literary production: "Baudelaire knew how it stood with the poet: as a flaneur he went to the market; to look it over, as he thought, but in reality to find a buyer!' Benjamin reveals Baudelaire as a social poet of the very first

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Copyright © 2006 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Additional copyright notices appear on page 307, which constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

Introduction,byMichael W. Jennings Baudelaire

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Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century 30 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940. [Essays. English. Selections] The writer of modern life : essays on Charles Baudelaire I Walter Benjamin ; edited by Michael W. Jennings. p.cm. Selected essays from Walter Benjamin's Gesammelte Schriften. Includes bibliographical references and index. -ISBN-13: 978-o-674-02287-4 (alk.J?aper) ISBN-10: o-674-02287-4 (alk. paper) 1. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867~Criticism and interpretation. 2. Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867-Influence. I. Jennings, Michael William. II. Title. PQ2191.Z5B39713 841' .8-dc22

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The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire CentralPark 134 On Sbme.Motifs in Baudelaire ·Notes

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lntroduttion By Michael W. Jennings

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Walter Benjamin's essays on Charle~ Baudelaire from the 1930s accomplished nothing less than a wholesale reinvention of the great French poet as the representative writer of urban capitalist modernity.1 Before Benjamin's radical reorientation of our image of the poetL_Baudelaire had usually been considered in purely aesthetic terms-as a late Romantic or as a forerunner of the-French Symbolists. For Benjamin, however, Baudelaire's greatness consisted precisely in his representativeness: in the manner in which his poetryoften against its express intent-laid open the structure and mechanisms of his age. Benjamin was hardly alone among his contemporaries, of course, in his estimation oLBaudelaire as the first .fullf'"" ·" modern writer. In England, Baudelaire was a· touchstone for T. S. Eliot, who translated Baudelaire into English and produced an important essay on Baudelaire's relation to modernity. 2 In Germany, the great lyric poet Stefan George was an important link between Baudelaire and modern German writing; George's translation of Les Fleurs du mal is still in many ways unsurpassed. 3 Yet Eliot and Georgesaw in Baudelaire a writer very different from the one discovered by Benjam1n.4 For Eliot, Baudelaire was the key to adequate spiritual comprehension of modernity, an important predecessor in

Eliot's own quest to find a path informed by religion through the modern wasteland; for George, Baudelaire's poetry opened onto a vast, wholly aestheticized landscape that was proof against the indignities of the modern world. What is at stake in this comparison of Benjamin and his contemporaries is more than merely Benjamin's leftism versus the conservative-or, in the case of George, protofascist-politics of the other poets. If Eliot's Baudelaire was a key voice in the spiritual constitution of modernity, and George's Baudelaire the beacon of all genuinely modern aesthetic production, Benjamin made Baudelaire a complex object: a largely apolitical writer whose poetry we must nevertheless comprehend before we can formulate any responsible cultural politics of modernity. Benjamin resolutely refuses to attribute a single productive social or political insight to Baudelaire himself; the achievement of Benjamin's essays is their ability to expose Les Fleurs du mal as uniquely, . scathingly, terrifyingly symptomatic of Baudelaire's era-and ours. 5 \ In late 1914 or early 1915, when Walter Benjamin was all of twentytwo, he began translating individual poems from Baudelaire's great· lyric cycle Les Fleurs du mal; he returned intermittently to the poems until the early 1920s, when his translation work became intensive. In 1923, Tableaux parisiens: Deutsche Obertragung mit einem Vorwort uber die Aufgabe des Obersetzers von Walter Benjamin (Tableaux parisiens: German Translation with a Foreword Concerning the Task of the Translator, by Walter Benjamin), which included a full translation of the central section of Les Fleurs du mal, appeared in a luxury edition of five hundred. 6 Benjamin had submitted some early translations to Ernst Blass, editor of the journal Die Argonauten, in 1920, and it was Blass who introduced him to the publisher Richard Weissbach, who eventually brought out the slender volume. To Benjamin's great disappointment, neither the introduction-Benjamin's now-famous essay "The Task of the.Translator".,nor the translations themselves met with1nterest either from the educated:public or from critics/ On March 15, 1922, as part of an effort to publicize his book, Benjamin took part in an evening program dedicated to Baudelaire at the Reuss und Pollack bookshop on

MICHAEL W. )ENNINGS

Berlin's Kurfurstendamm, delivering a talk on the poet and reading from his own translations. Although he appears to have spoken frorri memory or perhaps from notes, the two brief texts included here under the title "Baudelaire" (II and III) llfe probably preliminary versions of his remarks. Both of these texts focus on binary relations within Baudelaire's works and "view of things." Much of "Baudelaire III" fixes on the chiastic relations between the terms spleen and ideal in Les Fleurs du mal. Some of the most memorable poetry in the volume is to be found in the cycle of poems called "Spleen": Pluvi6se, irrite contre la ville entiere, De son urne a grands flots verse un froid tenebreux Aux pales habitants du voisin cimetiere Et la mortalite sur les faubourgs brumeux. I

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[February, peeved at Paris, pours a gloomy torrent on the pale lessees of the graveyard next door and a mortal chill on tenants of the foggy suburbs too.] ("Spleen et ideal," LXXV: "Spleen I")

Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux, Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant tres~vieux, Qui, de ses precepteurs meprisant.les courbettes, S'ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d'autres betes. [I'm like the king of a rainy country, rich but helpless, decrepit though still a young man who scorns his fawning tutors, wastes his time on dogs and other animals, and has no fun.] ("Spleen et ideal," LXXVII: "Spleen Ul")8

Benjamin argues that the spleen we see projected here onto the cityscape and the weather is never merely a generalized melancholynot merely the state of being splenetic-but has its source in "that

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fatally fbundering, doomed flight toward the ideal;' while the ideaL ·itself rises from a ground of spleen: "it is the images of melancholy that kindle the spirit most brightly." This reversal, Benjamin is at pains to point out, takes place neither in the realm of the emotions nor in that of morals, but rather in that of perception. "What speaks to us in his poetry is not the reprehensible confi+sion of [moral] judgment but the permissible reversal of perception." The poem "Correspondances," with its invocation of the figure of synaesthesia, remains the primary evidence for such a claim; but others, such as the lovely poem "L'Invitation au voyage;' also ring changes on the notion of perceptual reversal: Mon enfant, rna soeur, Songe a la douceur D'aller la-bas vivre ensemble! Aimer a loisir, Aimer et mourir Au pays qui te ressemble! · Les soleils mouilles De ces ciels brouilles Pour man esprit ont les charmes Si mysterieux De tes traitres yeux, Brillant atravers leurs larmes.

La, tout-n'est qu'ordre et beaute, Luxe, calme et volupte. [Imagine the magic of living together there, with all the time in the world for loving each other, for loving and dying where even the landscape resembles you. The suns dissolved

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in overcast skies have the same mysterio17s charm for me as your wayward eyes through crystal tears, my sister, my child! All is order there, and elegance, pleasure, peace, and opulence.] 9 If the central motifs of this reading are still grounded in the categories through which Baudelaire had traditionally been received, the other little essay, "Baudelaire n;' breaks new ground and indeed anticipates some of the most important motifs of Benjamin's work in the 1930s. In that piece, Baudelaire emerges as a privileged reader of a special body of photographic work: till1e itself is portrayed as a photographer capturing the "essence of things" on a photograplfic .~ · • plate. These plates, of course, are negatives, and "no one can deduce from the negative ... the true essente of things as they really are." In a remarkable attempt to evoke the originality of the poet's vision, Benjamin attributes to Baudelaire not the ability to develop such a negative, but rather a "presentiment of its real pictur,e"-that is, a vis1on of it in its negative state. In "Baudelaire n;· his earliest reading of the poet, Benjamin attempts to account for a number of aspects of his vision-such as Baudelaire's insight deep into the nature of things, in a poem such as "Le Solei!": Quand, ainsi qu'u2: poete, il descend dans les villes, Il ennoblit le sort des choses les plus viles, Et s'introduit en roi, sans bruit et sans valets, Dans tous les h6pitaux et dans tous les palais. [When, with a poet's will, the sun descends into the cities like a king incognito, impartially visiting palace and hospital, the fate of all things vile is glorified.)

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• · ......Or, 'to take another example, Baudelaire's figuration of history as a multiple exposure in "Le Cygne": Andromaque, je pense avous! Ce petit fleuve, Pauvre et triste miroir ou jadis resplendit L'immense majeste de vos douleurs de veuve, Ce Simois menteur qui par vos pleurs grandit, A feconde soudain ma memoire fertile, Comme je traversais le nouveau Carrousel. [Andromache, I think of you! That stream, the sometime witness to your widowhood's enormous majesty of mourning-that mimic Simoi:s salted by your tears suddenly inundates my memory as I cross the new Place du Carrousel.] Or, to take yet _a nother example, Baudelaire's fundamental sel1_S.e-ofthe negative-as the transient and always irreversible-in "Une Charogne": Oui! Telle que vous sere~, o la reine des graces, Apres les derniers sacraments, Quand vous irez, sous l'herbe et les floraisons grasses, Moisir parmi les ossements. Alors, 6 ma beaute! Dites a la vermine Qui vous mangera de baisers, Qui j' ai gard~ la forme et 1' essence divine De mes amours decomposes! [Yes, you will come to this, my queen, after the sacraments, when you rot underground among the bones already there. But as their kisses eat you up,

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my Beauty, tell the worms I've kept the sacred essence, saved the form of my rotted loves!)1° And Benjamin finds in Baudelaire a capability analogous to the one he attributes to Kafka in his great essay of 1934: an intimate knowledge of humanity's "mythical prehistory." 11 It is no doubt this knowledge of primordial good and evil that opens the "true nature" of the photographic negative to Baudelaire's "infinite mental efforts." The centrality of the photographic metilphor, and indeed of the figure of the photographic negative, in Benjamin's first critical ehgagement with Baudelaire is anything but an accident. By late 1921, Benjamin was movirig in the orbit of th~ "G Group," a cena&: of avant-garde artists centered in Berlin. The great Hungarian artist. Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy was part of the earliest formations of the group, and Benjamin came to know him . as early as the autumn of 1921. Moholy's theories of artistic production-and especially his important essay "Production-Reproduction;' published in the avant-garde -jour;ar.De Stijl in July 1922-would preoccupy Benjamin for years to come; but in 1921 and 1922, it is clear that Moholy's photographic practice, which then consisted of experimentation with the photogram (a cameraless photograph that, to the uninitiated, appears to be a negative), played a role in Benjamin's first interpretation of Baudelaire. From the very beginnings of his critical engagement with Baudelaire's work, then, Benjamin was considering Baudelaire's poetry in conjunction with kc:;y categories of modernity and especially of the technologized cultural production that is characteristic of urban commodity capitalism. After Benjamin's bookstore talk in 1922, Baudelaire became a subterranean presence in his work for the next thirteen years. This was a time of radical change in the orientation and practice of Benjamin's criticism. In the years prior to 1924 and the completion of The Origin of German Trauerspiel, his great study of the German Baroque play of mourning, Benjamin had been intent on a reevaluation of German Romanticism, and the development of a theory of criticism

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with deep roots in that very body of work. During those years, Benjamin had written precisely one essay on twentieth-century literature, an unpublished piece on Paul Scheerbart, author of utopian science fiction. Beginning in 1924, however, he turned his attention and his energies in precipitously new directions: toward contemporary European culture, Marxist politics, and a career as a journalist and wide-ranging cultural critic. By 1926 Benjamin was embarkeq on a program of study and writing that would, he hoped, make him Germany's most widely respected voice on the modernist and avantgarde cultural production of France and the Soviet Union. His frequent visits. to Paris inspired a series of brilliant essays on Paul Valery,' Andre Gide, Julien Green, and Marcel Proust, as well as influential presentations and analyses of the French historical avantgarde. The essay "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" (1:929) presents the provisional results of his analysis of French modernism. Baudelaire, as the progenitor of French modernism, of course haunts this work, but Benjamin consistently avoided direct engagement with the poet in this period. Reflection on Baudelaire reentered his writing in the late 1920s as Benjamin began to collect material and ideas for The Arcades Projed (Das Passagen- Werk), his great history of_the_-- ~-,....._---·----~~-~~geoi~~~~...that..er!Y'fle locates the decisive historical "f:hift to the modern era, then, not so much in large-scale modificav/ ions in the socie.tal totality but rather in changes in concrete societal artifacts and ~n the way they are experienced and understood. As he put it in · a draft version of the conclusion to the essay, the creations and forms of life detenrtip_ed by commodity production "pre-

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sent themselves as a phantas~ag~ria._ ... The world that is domi~ nated by these phantasmagonas 1s-m a key word found for it b Baudelaire-the 'Modern."' 12 Benjamin worked on this enormous project until the end of his life, never bringing it to completion; in the years of his exile from fascist Germany after 1933, much of the work was supported by stipends from the Institute for Social Research. In 1935, Fritz Pollack, the co-director of the institute, suggested that Benjamin produce an expose of the project that could be shown to potential sponsors. The text "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" (included in this volume) was in .fact that expose; it thus represents Benjamin's first attempt to describe the scope and focus of The Arcades Project. Baudelaire would, at this stage of the project, have played a key, though not central role: the utopian socialist Charles Fourier, the photographer Louis Jacques Daguem!, the caricaturist Grandville (Jean Ignace -Isidore Gerard), the-constitutional monarch Louis Philippe, and the city planner Baron Georges Eugene Haussmann would have appeared alongside Baudelaire in leading .roles in the drama of modernity played out amid the arcades, panoramas, world exhibitions, and barricades of Paris. The pages given over to Baudelaire are perhaps the densest in the essay: Benjamin:' presents, in dizzying abbreviature, a number of the central motifs of his critique of modernity: the flaneur who strolls through the urban crowd as prosthetic vehicle of a new vision; the department store as phantasmagoric space of display and consumption; the commercialization and final alienation of the intelligentsia; the prostitute as concatenated image-of death and woman, "seller and sold in one"; the gradual denaturing of art as it is subsumed by commodification and fashion; and the replacement of experience by the new concept of information. These are ainong the central categories that will inform the· great essays on Baudelaire to come. As Benjamin continued to amass materialfor ·his study of the arcades, and to develop a theory adequate to that material, his friends at the !nstitute for Social Research became increasingly eager to see some part of the project in print. In 1937,- at the urging of Max

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Horkheimer, the institute's director, Benjamin reconceptualized the project as a study of Baudelaire that would draw on the central concerns of The Arcades Project as a whole. 13 He produced a detailed outline that organized excerpts from his notes under section and chapter headings. 14 The book project, which bore the workiiig title Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, would have had three parts: (1) "Baudelaire as Allegorist"; (2) "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire"; and (3) "The C()mmodity as Po-etic Object." Working feverishly throughout the s~mmer and fall of 1938 in Skovsbostrand, Denmark, where he was a guest of his friend the great German dramatist Bertolt Brecht,)3enjamin completed the middle third of the Baudelaire book and submitted this text as an essay entitled "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" to the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung (Journal for Social Research) in New York. Benjamin's first major work on Baudelaire is one of the greatdt essays of literary criticism from the twentieth century; it is also one of the most dem~nding of its reader, requiring not merely inordina:te contributions of imagination and analysis, but a thorough knowledge of Benjamin's other work. The essay begins, disconcertingly, not with a,consideration of Baudelaire's poetry, or even of Baudelaire • · e•llirriself, but with the evocation nf a particular "intellectual physiognomy": that of the conspiratorial face of the boheme. For Benjamin, the bohemians were not primarily artistes starving in garrets-think of Rodolfo and Mimi in Puccini's La Boheme-but a motley collection of amateur and professional conspirators who imagined the overthrow of the regime of Napoleon Ill, France's self-elected emperor. In the opening pages ofthe essay, Benjamin establishes relays between the tactics employed by these figures and the aesthetic strategies that characterize Baudelaire's poetic production. If "surprising proclamations and mystery-mongering, sudden sallies, and impenetrable irony were part of the raison d'etat of the Second Empire;' Benjamin says, Baudelaire's poetry is likewise driven by "the enigmatic stuff of allegory" and "the mystery-mongering of the conspirator." This physiognomic evocation of Baudelaire leads not to-a~read10

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