Françoise Meltzer - Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity

FRANOISE MELTZER is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she is also professor at the Divinity School and in the College, and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. Meltzer is the author of four books, most recently For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity (2001), and coeditor of the journal Critical Inquiry.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
2011 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2011.
Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51988-3 (cloth)
ISBN-10: 0-226-51988-0 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51987-6 (ebook)

Meltzer, Franoise.

Seeing double : Baudelaires modernity / Franoise Meltzer.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51988-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-51988-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Baudelaire, Charles, 18211867Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

PQ2191.Z5M398 2011

841.8dc22

2010045692

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

SEEING DOUBLE

Baudelaires Modernity

FRANOISE MELTZER

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

FOR MY STUDENTS

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always, my deepest thanks are to my first two readers: Bernard Rubin and David Tracy. Not only are they my closest intellectual companions, they are also my dearest friends. As is Raquel Scherr, who carefully read and corrected much of this book. My sadness lies in the fact that her husband, Marc Blanchard, another dear friend, did not live to read this book and critique it.

My assistants have been patient, tolerant, and long-suffering: Josh Yumibe, Doron Galili, and Ivan Ross. I am most grateful to all three. Marie-Claude Rubin, my daughter, puts up with my writing schedules and encourages me, even when she is annoyed with my various literary obsessionsin this case, with that odd and gifted man called Baudelaire.

Marie-Hlne Huet read the manuscript and gave me encouragement as well as insightful suggestions; she has always been a wonderful influence. Ross Chambers also remains an influence and a mentor in absentia. I have done my best to remain true to his example of political and textual engagement.

Small portions of this work were published in Romanic Review. I have also greatly profited from audiences who have heard versions of this book and made suggestions: at Stanford University, Columbia University, the Universities of Coimbra and Lisbon in Portugal, the Poetics Workshop at the University of Chicago, and the Porter Institute at the University of Tel-Aviv. Thanks to Sepp Gumbrecht, Helena Buescu, Antnio Sousa Ribeiro, Marie Irene Ramalho Santos, Ziva Ben-Porat (always), Dustin Simpson, Erika Vause, Sebastien Greppo, and Elizabeth Kaminska (who has made all this doable). And to W. R. (Ralph) Johnson, who many years ago taught me the searing necessity of poetry.

Danielle Allen, then dean of the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago, generously granted me a years leave to make progress on this project. I am most grateful. The present dean, Martha Roth, has been supportive in every way possible. Alan Thomas, my superb editor, has been encouraging and judicious as always. Margaret Mahan is unsurpassed in her copyeditingsyntactically as well as substantively; I was very lucky to have her. Finally, thanks go to my graduate students, who continue to inspire me and to whom this book is dedicated.

INTRODUCTION

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. This is an error of the intellect as inevitable as that error of the eye which lets us fancy that on the horizon heaven and earth meet.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism

This is not yet another book about modernity, though that idea, with its endless definitions, runs like a badly sewn red thread throughout the study. The focus here is the poet Baudelaire and how, in the time of great transitions in which he lived, he responded as if in spite of himself with what I am here calling double vision. That is, he saw two times, or things, at onceas though his eyes, used as they were to seeing one world, could not yet assimilate, even as they focused on, a new one. He sees, in other words, both worlds simultaneouslythe Paris before Haussmann, and the Paris during and after its redevelopment; France before the revolution of 1848, and France in the increasingly triumphant capitalist culture that followed; the death throes of the ancien rgime with its unraveling social fabric, and the preening bourgeoisie with its nouveau riche self-satisfaction that touted social utilitarianism and good works to repress political guilt and crass mercantilism. Baudelaires aesthetic strabismus is born of an inability to integrate the dying world and the burgeoning onehe sees, to repeat, both at once.

He also sees his life as doubled: before his mother married the hated stepfather Aupick, and afterward; when he inherited from his father and had money, and afterward with the establishment of the conseil judiciaire that was to drive him crazy until his death. Moreover, his double vision is not limited to time: he also sees two realms at once (the ideal and the concrete), two women at once (the twinned Bndictas, for example), one work of art in two ways, and the optical illusions produced by various instruments of the eye. It is all a matter of seeing, and of seeing two contradictory things at the same time.

The visual is what seems constantly privileged in explaining the crisis of modernity, and this study is obviously no exception. Benjamin speaks of Baudelaires poetry in terms of the gaze: The gaze of the allegorist, as it falls on the city, is the gaze of the alienated man. It is the gaze of the flneur. Perhaps Baudelaire (who lived in mid-century and thus knew no cinema) was responding similarly by insisting, according to his friends, upon being continually surprised. The constant optical shocks of modernity paradoxically use countershock as a palliative.

Following Simmel, Benjamin, and Kracauer, a modernity thesis has developed, arguing that a new mode of seeing begins in the nineteenth century, triggered by the change in modern life brought on by the obvious suspects: industrialization, urban life, capitalism, and technological advances. There is an implied Whorfean notion here: that just as language can alter perception, the modern city space affects vision. The modernity thesis has been attacked on grounds that a change in the visual system of humans does not occur overnight.

Baudelaire too responds to the city with an emphasis on vision. His admiration for the painter Constantin Guys, for example, is partly based on that artists ability to take in the citys scenes as quickly as they are produced, and to sketch them from memory with frenzied rapidity. The painter of modern life must have an eagle eye, and must be at home in the chaos that city streets bring to visual perception.

The idea that modernity causes a change of perception, or even of sight itself, because of ocular overstimulation was to have an analogue in nineteenth-century science. The notion of luminiferous ether was used to explain the medium by which light is propagated. Nineteenth-century scientists such as Helmholtz, Thomson, Clausius, and Maxwell, writes Gillian Beer, were pursuing a single explanation of cosmic processes that would include light, heat, and sound and that would construe them all as motion, passing irreversibly beyond the reach of the senses and dissipating irregularly through the ether (that crucial explanatory substance that ebbed quietly out of the universe early in the twentieth century).optical apparatuses were all the rage in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the eyes ability to turn two images into one fascinates Schopenhauer in the early part of the century. The process, he writes,