So, Baudelaire's poetry comes out of this new confrontation encounter, mixing of
peoples in a, a the modernizing urban center that Paris is becoming.
And there are two terms that I want you to keep in mind in thinking about Baudelaire
in this regard and, and you can, Jerrold Seigel a wonderful intellectual historian
at New York University has, has talked about this in various places.
It's the, it's the, the terms are the flaneur, the flaneur, and the dandy.
Let's start with a dandy.
What's a dandy?
I asked my class this here at Wesleyan and lots of people throw out examples of, of
folks who, who overdress, who display a kind of exaggerated public persona.
And it could be in various ways so, and so, so it's certainly a, a, a, departure
from convention, but all often by using convention right?
Sometimes, we talk about it here as, as the dandy is kind of the hipster gone to
an extreme.
Here in, in the northeast, it, it often involves wearing a scarf apparently
according to my [laugh] students.
And when I was a student, it had to do with the smoking clothes cigarettes and
listening to music no one else understood.
But it was a kind of public per, presentation of difference, of difference,
of exaggerated willingness, even desire to be seen.
The dandy wants to be seen.
And so in Paris, you get this, as you walk down the boulevard, as you are strolling,
you're not just walking, you're not just strolling, you are there on display.
And the dandy is the, is willing to say, yeah, look at me, I am on display.
And so that, that figure is important for Baudelaire and his friends.
A willingness to say I want, Im not just going to wear a black suit and a black hat
and a nice cravat.
No, Im [laugh], Im here to be looked at.
Look at me.
That, that kind of aestheticizing of everyday life is what the dandy is about,
to give it a more highfalutin term aestheticizing of everyday life.
But on the other side of that is the Bohemian.
Now, the Bohemian is the person who kind of dresses down, right?
It's the rich kid on campus who always wears torn clothes.
It's the, it's the person who wants to, to hang out with, with those people who they
identify as not yet corrupted by bourgeois society.
The Bohemians are the ones who are, are living in a garret, living the, the, the
life on the margins.
Not just because they have to, they're not just poor, although they may be poor.
They're living in poverty, because they think poverty is an escape from bourgeois
convention.
And Baudelaire, as a poet, he, he vacillates between this the, the dandy and
the Bohemian.
The, the, the, the display of, of exaggerated performance and even of
wealth, or, or at least of, of, of, of costume, and the Bohemian, the exaggerated
poverty that, as a, as a political and aesthetic statement not conventional, in
either case, right?
They're both anti-conventional.
Now, this other term, flaneur, flaneur is one that is very important to Baudelaire.
And it is a city term.
It means, really, that you are strolling around, you know, flaneur, you are
strolling, the flaneurs strolls about without purpose, moving through the city
streets without going to a particular place.
Now, it's not hiking, [laugh] which, you know, that's not a healthy, we are
marching through the forest kind of thing and it's not, oh, I've got hurry up and to
get to work or go shopping, it is, it is I am, I am moving through the city.
I'm just making my way around because I don't know what I'm going to encounter.
See, the flaneur is open to suggestion.
And for Baudelaire, that's really important for the poet, that is to be open
to possibility.
You dont know what youre going to run into.
Most of us live in situations where we constrict the possibility in favor of
security or convention.
You see the people you want to see.
Segregation insures that in many places in this country and abroad, segregation by
class, by race, by gender sometimes.
But the flaneur says, no, I'm crossing those boundaries, why, I don't know,
something may happen.
Somebody who experiences the social milieu by walk, just walking around.
Somebody who to, to be, to be and to, to flanuer is to is just to walk without
goal.
It's, it's very important is you, if you don't go out to, in order to experience
the social milieu, you don't have to do that, because that would defeat, you can't
have a purpose.
So, yeah, I guess, yesterday we were in Massachusetts and, and we were, we're
going for a little hike and my, my, my daughter says, so what's the point?
Where are we going?
Because, you know, we start off, and we walk and we come back to where we left the
car.
It's called a hike, right?
And, and she goes, this is, this is always my attitude when I first got married.
I didn't understand why you'd go to a, go to a hike, and you couldn't buy something
on the way.
And so, what's the goal, where's the goal?
And I'm like, you don't have to have a goal, Sophie.
Read some Baudelaire.
She's like, daddy, you really want me to be like that?
I said, no, I just want you to read it, but there's no goal, no goal.
If youre a flaneur, you walk around.
Is there anyone you know at Wesleyen like this now?
When I was a student, there were people like that.
They looked like students, kind of, and you got closer and you realized they were
in their 30s and they'd be kind of walking around, hey, how you doing?.
Do you have classes?
You, they got [unknown], okay, did you get the test back?
And you're like, who is that guy?
I don't even know who they are.
>> [laugh].
>> Strolling about strolling about without a goal because by strolling about, Walt
Whitman called it loafing.
Loafing about, you might just discover something completely unexpected.
But if you go out to discover it, if you go out there with, I am going to discover
something, you're probably not going to get it.
[laugh] You have to be receptive rather than aggressively inquiring.
You have to loaf, or you have to be a flaneur, in Baudelaire's terms.
So Baudelaire's Paris Spleen it takes up these, themes I'm having, I'm just, I'm
looking here at my a, at my notes on my iPad.
Baudelaire takes up this, this, these themes in, in order to, to make a poetry
that res, is responsive to modernity, is responsive to the new possibilities that
modernity contains because of its disruptive capacity.
This disruptive capacity is so important to Baudelaire and even the forms of
Baudelaire's writings are key in this regard.
He doesn't write poetry in the, in the conventional sense.
In Paris Spleen, he's writing prose poems, right?
A, a hybrid.
A hybrid is what he wants.
Hybridity, again, a term that will come up in the late 20th century, again, as a, a
term of, of, of possibility.
Hybridity, again, breaks through convention.
So, let's just look at a, a an example of this in Baudelaire's case where he's, he's
taking making a poem out of an encounter with a traditional figure of the city that
he is radically disrupting.
And, and it's a poem called, The Bad Glazier.
It's a, it's a poem 9 in, in, in, this in Paris Spleen.
I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I want to remind you of this, of the
scene.
Baudelaire is, is a, a narrator is in the apartment.
Hears the call of an artisan a guy who walks around the city.
And this, this happened in regularly in the late 19th century, when we can maybe
find a picture to show you.
[unknown] did some wonderful photographs of artisans who carried their wares on
their back, alright?
They, there's a famous [unknown] picture of the artisan walking around with
lampshades, carrying lots of lampshades on his back as he walks through the city and
here, the, the, the, the sales guy, the artisan is a glazier, he's selling pieces
of glass.
He's walking around saying, glass for sale, glass for sale, right, and, and
Baudelaire hears this as one could anytime in, in, in his period, and he invites the,
the fellow up to his apartment.
And, and he, he, he calls him up and ask him to walk up all of the streets, I'm
sorry, all of the stairs to his high apartment.
Here, here it goes.
This is about 2/3 of the way through the prose poem.
The first person I noticed in the street was a glazier whose piercing and
discordant cry floated up to me through the heavy, filthy Paris air.
It would be impossible for me to say when, why I was suddenly seized by an arbitrary
and loathing of this poor men.
Hey, hey,I shouted, motioning him to come up.
And the thought that my room was 6 flights up the stairs, and that the man must be
having a terrible time getting up them with his fragile wares, added not a little
to my hilarity.
He's making this guy walk up, up, up with all his glass.
Finally, he appeared.
After looking curiously over his panes of glass one by one, I exclaimed, what, you
have no colored glass?
No pink, no red, no blue?
No magic panes, no panes of Paradise?
No panes of Paradise, you know hat I mean?
Scoundrel.
What do you mean by going into poor neighborhoods without a single glass to
make life beautiful?
And I pushed him stumbling and grumbling towards the stair.
Going out on my balcony, I picked up a little flower pot and when the glazier
appeared at the entrance below, I let my engine of war fall down perpendicularly on
the edge of his pack.
The shock knocked him over, the shock knocked him over, and falling on his back,
he succeeded in breaking the rest of his poor ambulatory stock with a shattering
noise, as of lightning striking a crystal palace.
And drunk with my madness, I shouted down at him furiously, make life beautiful,
make life beautiful.
Such erratic pranks are not without danger.
And often, one has to pay dearly for them.
But what is an eternity of damnation compared to an infinity of pleasure in a
single second?
That's the Baudelairean ethos that I want you to, to, to really focus on.
What is an eternity of damnation compared to an infinity of pleasure in a single
second?
There is no principle prior to nature or no nature that really is at stake here.
So, I, I do think it is about, I say ecstasy in the slide, and it's just, just
a, a bigger word for pleasure.
It's about the intensity of pleasure.
And, and some of you would say, well, how is that going to help anybody?
I don't care if it helps anybody.
This is a poetry thing, this isn't about helping people.
This is not about making things nice.
This is about seeking pleasure that is not bound by conformity.
That's what artists do.
You know, you want to be a bureaucratic, one of your workings and help the
community?
Do that.
But don't call yourself an artist.
You want to use art to help people learn how to read, great, you're doing literacy
training.
If you're doing art, you have to be prepared to do things that everybody else
finds disgusting.
And if you're not prepared to do that, that's fine.
Be a lawyer.
Well, actually that won't work, will it?
But, but, but at least what people won't find disgusting immediately.
>> [laugh].
>> But, but, but for Baudelaire well, this is the, this is the last part of the poem,
right?
Such erratic pranks are not without danger.
As, I mean, that's what we we've been saying.
And one often has to pay dearly for them.
The guy comes up and beats the heck out of the poet.
Actually, he's a poet.
He can, you know, he can be beaten up.
[unknown] we'll come back to that, right?
But what is an eternity of damnation compared to an infinity of pleasure in a
simple saying.
And again, thats the ethos.
This is the, this is what I mean by the intensity.
Intensity replaces morality.
It is, Baudelaire was well-aware, it is dangerous.
People paid dearly for this.
He may get his head kicked in later on for this kind of thing.
Fine, but I want Baudelaire's poetry is telling us, I want intensity, I don't want
conventionality.
And anything that you can do to, to, to pursue intensity might lead actually to
real poetry or real art.