LEOBERSANI BAUDELAIRE ANDFREUD -~.'." ~. I ,.. . A QUANTUM BOOK Leo Bersani Baudelaire and Freud University of California Press Berkeley • Los Angeles· London Other books by Leo Bersani Marcd Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England Copyright © 1977 by The Regents of the University ofC alifornia ISBN 0-520-03402-3 Library of Congress Cata!og Card Number: 76-55562 Printed in the United States of America Designed by Ha! Hershey 123456789 Contents Introduction 1 1. Artists in Love 8 2. Architectural Secrets 16 3. Elevations and Ennui 23 4. Cradling 35 5. Teasing 46 6. Bits and Pieces 53 7. Desire and Death 67 8. A Spectral Id 90 9. Questions of Order 99 10. Nightmares of Narcissism and Realism 106 11. A Premature Foreclosure? 125 12. A Beggarly Ending 137 Index 152 For EIeonore Zimmermann Introduction Baudelaire's work can be viewed as an exemplary drama in our culture. It illustrates in striking fashion both the persistence and the subversion of idealistic vision in modern literature. Baudelaire continuously returns to categories discredited by the experiences evoked in his most original writing. For example, he has frequently been discussed in terms of what he a himself calls, in "Mon Coeur mis nu," "two postu lations" in human nature: "There are in every man, at every moment, two simultaneous postulations, one toward God, the other toward Satan. The invocation to God, or spirituality, is a desire to climb higher; Sa tan's invocation, or animality, is a delight in de scent." Baudelaire's work can indeed be read as a 1 dramatic confirmation of this traditional dualism be- 1. Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres completes, ed. Y-G. Le Dantec and Claude Pichois (Paris, 1961), p. 1277. All quotations from Baudelaire, unless otherwise indicated, will be from this Pleiade edition, and page references will be given in the text. All prose translations are my own. For quotations from Les Fleurs du mal, the French is indispensable; as a convenience to readers, I give in the footnotes Francis Scarfe's "plain prose translations," as he calls them, of Baudelaire's verse in Baudelaire (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1961). A warning: Scarfe presents the poems in a blend of chronological sequence and grouping by "cycles," thereby largely neglecting the order of both the 1857 and 1861 editions. I am very grateful to Francis Scarfe for his permission to use these trans lations. 2 Baudelaire and Freud tween spirit and flesh, between aspirations toward purity and an equally intense appetite for self degradation or "evil." But such a reading involves an uncritical fidelity to Baudelaire's least original version of a certain mobility in his being and in his poetry. The two "postulations"- as well as the entire moral and religious vocabulary to which they give rise in Baudelaire-can in fact be thought of as an escape from the anxieties produced by the Baudelairean dis covery of psychic mobility, of unanchored identity. Baudelaire's notion of a double postulation in hu man nature belongs to a system of vertical transcen dence. It is the psychological aspect of a more gen eral structuring of experience in terms of high and low, spirit and matter, reality and appearance, truth and error. In literature, we have long been familiar with the tensions produced by an opposition between certain realities presumed to be "given" and a heroic effort to go beyond the limits of a centered, socially defined, time-bound self But the antagonism be tween social reality and individual aspiration is itself one of the dualities formulated by the idealistic imag ination. This is not to say that the opposition doesn't exist, or even that it can't serve as a basis for revo lutionary social action. But if the type of heroic in dividuality most familiar to us has frequently been doomed to a romantic impotence, it may be because such transcendental yearnings obliquely express a cul tural compulsion regarding coherent structures and intelligible limits. One does, however, find in modem literature-roughly from Baudelaire and Lautream ont to some contemporary theatrical experiments-a Introduction 3 form of disruptive desire infinitely more concrete in its psychic effects and social implications than a re bellious idealistic vision. I'm thinking of attempts to dismiss defined structures of the self and of society which, however, do not include any faith or even interest in a "higher" or "truer" self, or in fact any transcendent reality at all "beyond" the known self Visionary literature, even when it proclaims the fail ure of visionary desires, clings to the belief that the vision was of something. We find a quite different phenomenon in what I take to be the most radical modern writing. As an alternative to both the socially defined self and the transcendent (or free or universal) self, literature has also celebrated marginal or partial selves, or, to put it in another way, a disseminated, scattered self which resists all efforts to make a unify ing structure of fragmented desire. At the extreme, there would be no privileged "place" which the self could return to as a structuring center. What would ordinarily have been thought of as psychic peripheries appear no longer to be referring to fixed centers; there are only provisional, constantly shifting centers for a self which would seem to be floating among random images collected from anywhere.2 2. This paragraph takes up some of the introductory comments in my recent book A Future jor Astyanax I Character and Desire in Literature (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1976). In the present study, I return to some of the issues raised in that book. I consider them in a more consistently Freudian framework; my aim has been to test the viability of a highly speculative psychoanalytic vocabu lary in what is a close reading of a single author. I am aware that some of my interpretations will strike very good readers ofBaude laire as outrageous violations of his work. I would therefore like to 4 Baudelaire and Freud Baudelaire's work gives us images of this psychic fragmentation at the same time that it documents a determined resistance to all such ontological floating. This tension accounts for much of the interest of Baudelaire. Like Freud, he can be located at that critical moment in our culture's history when an idealistic view of the self and of the universe is being simultane ously held onto and discredited by a psychology (if the word still applies) of the fragmented and the discon tinuous. Now we might have considered more radical versions of a fragmented, mobile self than those we will find in Baudelaire. Psychic fragmentation, self dissemination, affective discontinuity and partial selves have become ideological tenets of much con temporary thought. There is, however, good reason to be skeptical about the practical value of recent blue prints for a revolution of consciousness, and the evi dent difficulty in making even the first steps in such a say at the outset that, however uncompromisingly dogmatic much of what follows may sound, this book is intended as an experimen tal working out of a hypothesis concerning a particular form of intertextuality (relations between literary and psychoanalytic texts). And in order to provide that hypothesis with the most favorable testing conditions, I have deliberately ignored some other critical approaches which would make this study perhaps more reasonable (and palatable), but which would also reduce the value of the experiment. The traditionally liberal approach to lit erature is, as we should all know by now, far from being nondog matic; the commitment to a kind of noncommitment in the area of critical theory is itself ideologically loaded. Therefore, a surely desirable generosity toward one set of hypotheses perhaps requires-if only provisionally-an apparent inhospitality toward other approaches which, in the case ofBaudelaire at any rate, have certainly had their say. Introduction 5 revolution suggests the usefulness of stepping back and exploring more carefully and more coolly our po tentialities for both rigidity and change. In the same way that the ambivalences and even contradictions of Freud make it more instructive to explore his thought rather than the thought of Ronald Laing, it is more profitable to study a crisis in subjectivity in Baudelaire than in the programmatic subversion of the subject in Alain Robbe-Grillet. A complex and even confused resistance to the indeterminacy of being that is drama tized in Baudelaire's greatest poems will permit us to examine the phenomenon of problematic identity in ways not allowed for by the essentially pastoral, fre quently simplistic versions of the same phenomenon in contemporary writing. Freudian texts, and recent French interpretations of Freud, will be important in my reading ofBaudelaire. What is the relevance of Freudian theory to literary criticism? The question has been endlessly argued without, I feel, many interesting results. On the whole, psychoanalytically oriented criticism has been reduc tive in two respects: it interprets literature as a system of sexual symbolism, and, correlatively with this, it re-places the writer within the infantile sexual organi zation presumably indicated by his preferred symbols. Most psychoanalytic studies ofliterature have used the notion offantasy as a means ofi mmobilizing the writer (and the problem is not only a literary or even an artis tic one) in certain fixed desires or sexual scenarios. From this perspective, Freudian theory essentially but tresses a normative view of psycho-sexual growth; it