![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
The figure of the flâneur haunts the pages of Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris. As first-person narrator, man, woman, protagonist, or passer-by, the flâneur presence lends continuity to this collection of fifty seemingly disparate prose poems. The flâneur has also become almost inseparable from the backdrop of the city and its streets, which in mid-nineteenth-century Paris were crowded, muddy, and smelly. The purpose of this essay is to rethink the Baudelairean flâneur, and the prose poems, through olfactory perception. Odours inhabit intimate spaces and invade public environments, thus facilitating a process of mutual permeation, or, to use a word favoured in Baudelaire’s writing, a mutual penetration. An analysis of both the theory and practice of flânerie in the prose poems reveals that smell and flânerie function similarly as experiences of volatility, transience, intimation, and penetration in Le Spleen de Paris. Here textual references to the olfactory go beyond mimetic realism, contributing to a poetics of flânerie central to the prose poem experiment.
Notes
1 Continuity (or resistance to continuity) has been a focus of scholarship on Le Spleen de Paris. The late 1970s saw a revival of interest in the prose poems, which only grew in subsequent decades. See the following: Caws, Carpenter, Evans, Hiddleston, Johnson, Kaplan, Krueger, Maclean, Metzidakis, Scott (2005), Stephens, and Terdiman.
2 Both titles appear in Baudelaire’s notes, and have been used in editions of the prose poems and in critical works. Scholars disagree on which (if any) titles mentioned or used in pre-publication should be considered definitive.
3 See Marie Maclean’s Narrative as Performance: The Baudelairean Experiment. Maclean draws upon speech act theory in the textual analysis of narrative dynamics and discursive strategies in the prose poems.
4 Claude Pichois provides a detailed publication history of ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’ (OC, ii, 2: 1413–20).
5 For the purpose of this essay I will focus on the Baudelairean concept of flânerie. Of course, the flâneur figure predates Baudelaire, and has evolved in various ways.
6 Any discussion of literalisation or dramatisation of abstract or figurative language in the prose poems begins with Barbara Johnson’s groundbreaking Défigurations du langage poétique: la seconde révolution baudelairienne.
7 For detailed accounts of the filth and odour problem in nineteenth-century Paris, see Barnes, Corbin, Parent-Duchâtelet and Vigarello.
8 See Cohen, Rindisbacher, and Stamelman for discussions of smell in Baudelaire’s poetry.
9 See Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet’s extensive, firsthand account and analysis.
10 See Stamelman for a history of the perfume industry in France.
11 The limits of Benjamin’s reading and visual perspective have been discussed in Lauster, Nesci, and Rignall. Howes deals with the problem of a narrow focus on visual perception, from the perspective of anthropology.
12 My use of the term perception is informed by Paul Rodaway’s chapter on ‘Perception Theory and the Senses’ in Sensual Geographies: Body, Sense and Place (10–38).
13 ‘It was now fully night-fall, and a thick humid fog hung over the city, soon ending in a settled and heavy rain. This change of weather had an odd effect upon the crowd, the whole of which was at once put into new commotion, and overshadowed by a world of umbrellas. The waver, the jostle, and the hum increased in a tenfold degree. For my own part I did not much regard the rain-the lurking of an old fever in my system rendering the moisture somewhat too dangerously pleasant. Tying a handkerchief about my mouth, I kept on’ (Thompson, 2004: 236).
14 See Nesci for feminist readings of flânerie.
15 There is a sort of rhetorical disembodiment of the flâneur in the first half of ‘Les Veuves’, which opens with third-person commentary. Poets and philosophers first appear as objects of inquiry, and not speaking subjects. The narrative distance soon decreases, beginning with ‘Avez-vous quelquefois aperçu […]?’ (292). The narrative ‘je’ eventually becomes a flâneur character in this street scene (293).
16 See Vigarello for a thorough history of bathing, and for discussion of changing perceptions of the health risks and benefits of allowing water to penetrate the skin.
17 Maria Scott (2004–05) analyses allegory and intertextuality in Baudelaire’s ‘Le Chien et le Flacon’ and ‘Les Bons Chiens’.
18 Although it is beyond the scope of this essay, it is worth noting that the definition of Baudelairean flânerie could (and perhaps should) take into account not only ‘that aimless stroller who loses himself in the crowd, who has no destination and goes wherever curiosity directs his or her steps’ (White, 2001: 16), but also the more purposeful world traveller, or global flâneur. As Baudelaire emphasizes in ‘Peintre’, Constantin Guys ‘est, par nature, très voyageur et très cosmopolite. Je savais qu’il avait été longtemps attaché à un journal anglais illustré, et qu’on y avait publié des gravures d’après ses croquis de voyage (Espagne, Turquie, Crimée)’ (689); and, ‘Homme du monde, c’est-à-dire homme du monde entier, homme qui comprend le monde et les raisons mystérieuses et légitimes de tous ses usages […] Il s’intéresse au monde entier; il veut savoir, comprendre, apprécier tout ce qui se passe à la surface de notre sphéroïde’ (OC, 2: 689).
19 In Hygiène de la beauté (1890), Dr Ernest Monin recommends, for dry hair, an oil blend containing goudron (tar oil) (132). Goudron was also used in alopecia treatments (269 and 279), and in perfumed soap. In an 1857 perfumery manual (published in England and France), G. W. Septimus Piesse describes a recently patented process for creating artificial almond oil using a tar oil base. The product was not a dead ringer for essential almond oil, but it was good enough for scented soaps and some perfumes, its use reportedly ‘quite common in Paris’ (23–24). Since tar was also used to waterproof the hulls of ships, the odor of goudron in these verse and prose poems reinforces the connection between women, cosmetics, and exoticism, connoting at once everyday hair products and voyage on the sea.
20 Ross Chambers discusses the relationship between poetry, ‘becoming-essay-like’, and the ‘shock of knowing’ that arises from everyday encounters in urban settings. He deals specifically with the role of poetry in cultural studies, and analyses Baudelaire’s verse poems. His argument resonates with many aspects of Baudelaire’s hybridization of poetry and prose.
21 See in particular Howes, 2003: ch. 7, ‘Oedipus In/Out of the Trobriands: A Sensuous Critique of Freudian Theory’ (176–203).
22 We see throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and even today), that becoming civilized involves, in part, separation from savagery through deodorization: ‘Smelling and sniffing are associated with animal behavior. If olfaction were his most important sense, man’s linguistic incapacity to describe olfactory sensations would turn him into a creature tied to his environment’ (Corbin, 1982: 6).
23 Commentary on the paucity of words available to describe smell appears in works on olfaction by cultural historians, anthropologists, literary critics, biologists, and historians including (but hardly limited to): Corbin (1982: 13); Howes (2003: 9); Porteous (2006: 91–92); Rindisbacher (1992: v); Rodaway (1994: 65–67).
24 See Aynesworth’s discussion of sacred prostitution in ‘Humanity and Monstrosity in Le Spleen de Paris’ (1982).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Cheryl Leah Krueger
Cheryl Krueger is the author of The Art of Procrastination: Baudelaire’s Poetry in Prose. Her articles on French literature and film have appeared in scholarly journals including French Forum, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Literature/Film Quarterly, Romance Notes, and Women in French Studies.
Correspondence to: Cheryl Krueger, Department of French Language and Literature, PO 400770, University of VA, Charlottesville, VA, 22904, USA. Email: [email protected]