Alternative Futures: Baudelaire's "Le Voyage"

Excerpted from an earlier version of "A Genealogy of Avant-Garde Orientalism," Chapter Two of my new book, Avant-gare Orientalism: The Eastern 'Other' in Twentieth-Century Travel Narrative and Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan).  

Charles Baudelaire’s avant-garde meditation on travel, “Le Voyage,”—first included in Les Fleurs du mal in the 1861 edition—echoes many of Tennyson’s earlier preoccupations, but with a dialogic cunning that removes the taint of imperial apology and replaces it with an aura of existential autonomy.  The aim of the traveler is dissociated from any motive of escape—whether from the imbecility of one’s country or the tyranny of a lover; the more concrete motive of commerce isn’t even referred to.  Instead, the impulse of Baudelaire’s traveler is always to seek the new for its own sake, even in a world where one has seen it all before.  Thus, while the traveler-narrator’s discourse in the poem is often characterized by a tone of moral resignation, a new spirit infuses the communicative exchange between world-weary narrator and his youthful listeners for whom all things distant excite curiosity in the hope of escaping the boredom of home.  While the traveler also admits to being bored on occasion, he understands too well desire’s inflationary effects, projecting mystery and depth into every apparent novelty.  Whether of cities, landscapes, or the chance formations of clouds, the pictured El Dorado in every adventurer’s mind proves a mirage, especially in retrospect.  But desire is rekindled with each new start, since the best travelers, like the best readers, continue moving on, less in anticipation of reward than in the pleasure of anticipation itself: 

But the real travelers are those who leave

For leaving’s sake alone; light hearted as balloons,

Never far removed from their own mortality,

And always saying, without knowing why, “Let’s go!”

(my translation)

Mais les vrai voyageurs sont ceux-là seuls qui partent

Pour partir; cœurs légers, semblables aux ballons,

De leur fatalité jamais ils ne s’écartent,

Et, sans savoir pourquoi, disent toujours:  Allons!

The narrator’s audience seems to enunciate, in a naïve, reiterative way (“And then?  And then what?”; “Et puis? Et puis encore?”), the fundamental impulse of going for going’s sake, and thus the relation between narrator and listener could be said to allegorize that of writer and reader in their mutual deferral of meaning to some future plenitude.  The beauty of a landscape exists primarily in the unfulfilled expectation of the viewer, the need to move always just beyond the next horizon, just as the meaning of a text can reside only in the endeavor of interpretation and vice versa, affirming endlessly Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic circle.[i]  The promised fulfillment is always beckoning and ever receding.  The poem, then, becomes a manifesto of avant-garde dissatisfactions and aestheticist uselessness, since the endeavor of travel, like reading or writing, can never yield a satisfactory object.  The kinds that do are devalued.  Thus, the sort of intoxicating leisure Tennyson disparages in moral terms becomes a virtual raison d’être in “Le Voyage”:  it is a notion identified less with lassitude and ease than with a kind of unproductive insatiability.  The leisure that either produces travel or is produced by it in turn is being celebrated, but in a strangely valueless, detached way—not as a bonus for imperial labor, but as something conscientiously and artificially dissociated from the world of work and the power struggles necessary to sustain it.  The traveler takes no stock or pride in the business of empire or other conformably hegemonic (i.e., everyday) preoccupations, even if he indirectly benefits from their ubiquity.  His chief concern is only to be “anywhere out of this world”[ii]:  Clearly the final destination—as suggested by the title of the group of poems in which “Le Voyage” appears (“La Mort”)—is death itself; Baudelaire’s traveler hankers after it with the same hunger of anticipation expressed by his audience in response to his descriptions of earlier travels.   Death becomes a comforting poison, another perfumed lotus, which can only whet his appetite for more: 

Serve us your poison that it might comfort us!

Burning in its fire, our minds wish only

To plunge to the depths of the abyss, be it Heaven or Hell,

To the depths of the Unknown to find the new!

                                                            (my translation)

Verse-nous ton poison pour qu’il nous réconforte!

Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous brûle le cerveau,

Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe?

Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!

Oddly enough, the traveler’s anticipated journey to the underworld reminds him (and presumably Baudelaire as well) of travels to China, or perhaps to anywhere East at all (“Just as we once set off for China …/ We embark on the sea of Shadows/ With the exuberance of a young passenger”[iii]).  Why is that?  With the obligatory enjoyment of exotic eastern fruits (the sleep-inducing lotus of Tennyson and Homer), an afternoon of strange pleasures is promised with the assurance that it will not end.  The somnolence and strangeness of the East conjures a realm of earthly delights which, coupled with eternity, seems eerily threatening, as if the delights might not be one’s own but those of some sadistic Other, his heavy boot on our spine (“le pied sur notre épine”).  A despot, he comforts himself by inflicting exquisite tortures on all comers to whom he nevertheless professes the friendship of a Pylades (that faithful companion of Orestes before the arrival of the Furies).  In this way the visitor is destined to find his joys turned into agonies, his agonies perpetuated without end.  Like Victor Segalen in China, the visitor to the underworld finds only himself; he becomes both torturer and tortured,[iv] a surrogate for the extremes the East itself represents—a Tithonus, after all.  For the Baudelairean Westerner, a kind of global flâneur, the East will always combine, somewhere on the back shelf of his Judeo-Christian unconscious, the beauty of sin with the unendurable horror of damnation.  But the greatest horror seems to be the Western fear of infection by “oriental” characteristics, from leprosy to over-refinement.  This includes a kind of savage civility, an undeserved power and presumption that befits one for the suffering that must come.  The traveling self, then, is made “Other” to himself in the course of moving East, though the East is never so unfamiliar as the West pretends.  It is the West’s own shadow, especially insofar as the West is represented as a place of normative selfhood, one that dreads its own disindividuation and the accompanying loss of “integrity” that entails.  The East is that lost integrity, twisted and contorted into new shapes. 

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[i] See David Couzens Hoy’s “The Critical Circle:  Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics” in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37.3 (1979): 360-363.

[ii] Original French of last line (title is in English): “N’importe où! N’importe où! Pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde.”

[iii] The French reads, “De même qu’autrefois nous partions pour la Chine … Nous nous embarquerons sur la mer des Ténèbres/ Avec le cœur joyeux d’un jeune passager” (Baudelaire, 254).

[iv] Though perhaps the definitive French literary work on China having to do with torture is Octave Mirbeau’s novel Le Jardin des supplices.  Angers, FR:  Éditions du Boucher/Société Octave Mirbeau, 2003.  See Gianna Quach’s “Mirbeau et la Chine” in Cahiers Octave Mirbeau No. 2 (1995): 87-100.

American Voices: Zora Neale Hurston

Vernacular Artifice in Their Eyes Were Watching God 

Jody, dat wuz uh mighty fine thing fuh you tuh do.  ’Tain’t everybody would have thought of it, ’cause it ain’t no everyday thought.  Freein’ dat mule makes uh mighty big man outa you.  Something like George Washington and Lincoln.  Abraham Lincoln, he had de whole United States tuh rule, so he freed de Negroes.  You got uh town, so you freed a mule.  You have tuh have power tuh free things and dat makes you lak uh king uh something.” (58)[1]  

Janie Starks, the female protagonist of Zora Neale Hurston’s most famous novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), makes this comment to her second husband Joe Starks (Jody) after an episode involving Matt Bonner’s ornery mule.  Matt, a resident of the township of Eatonville where Joe presides as mayor, is famously impecunious and many consider him justly rewarded for overworking and underfeeding his mule, a creature that seems to exhibit a mind of its own, to Matt’s great displeasure.  After some local men start baiting the mule in front of Joe’s general store, Janie rebukes them under her breath, saying the beast has “had his disposition ruint wid mistreatment” (56).  On overhearing his wife’s statement, Joe—in one of his more magnanimous moments—bargains with Matt for possession of the mule in order to give it a rest after a life of abuse, prompting Janie’s comment.  

            Though in many ways these mule stories make up part of the varied folkloric material Hurston strategically employs throughout the novel, it also allegorizes aspects of a theme raised in the first half of the book, a theme most baldly stated in Chapter Two when Janie is given a lecture by her aging grandmother: 

Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out.  Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nothin’ but what we see.  So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up.  He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it.  He hand it to his womenfolks.  De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.  Ah been prayin’ fuh it tuh be different wid you.  Lawd, Lawd, Lawd!  (14)  

            The immediate irony of Janie’s praise of her husband’s action is that although he has just exhibited the ennobling behavior of a liberator, the fact is that Janie’s aging husband, the virtual ruler of the township, has begun to oppress his wife, treating her as his own virtual mule.  After the episode in question (yet even before it), Joe tries to control his wife’s every move, forcing her to wear a head rag in his store so that no one will see her “beautiful” hair (the sign of her mixed heritage) and shooing her away from the men who gather on the front porch of his general store to chat and tell stories.  He even mocks her before the locals whenever she deviates by a jot or a tittle from his requirements of her as his wife—requirements he imposes as a sort of “New Negro” capitalist and powerbroker of a thriving, all-black township.  In a sense, Joe has become the uncharitable Matt Bonner over African-American womanhood in this novel, deviating from his earlier, more inspiring role as liberator and king, to become a mean-spirited domestic dictator rationalizing his controlling tendencies by telling Janie that she, as his wife, is a cut above everyone else and that she needs to set an example.  The example he wants her to set can only be done, apparently, by restraining her “Negro” impulses, repressing her free spirit, and avoiding unnecessary interaction with the townspeople—people Joe considers “puny” and “trashy” and whose illiterate talk he dismisses as “gum-grease” (54). 

This attitude of Joe’s becomes especially pronounced whenever Janie expresses interest in the popular tales of everyday black life being told on the front porch of the couple’s general store.  We realize from Janie’s desire to listen to and participate in these story-telling sessions that Hurston is subtly equating the rights of African-American women with the free choice of authors to decide what materials and forms might be suitable for the times.  Hurston is in a contest with her male contemporaries over story-telling rights, as it were, at a moment of cultural ferment in the African-American community typically referred to as the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances. 

            Is there a meta-fictional point to Janie’s comment apropos of relations not only between black men and women, but between black writers (of both sexes) and the community they represent—especially with regard to what constitutes appropriate subject matter and thus provides a viable aesthetic for a rising class of black intellectuals?  The difference between Joe’s and Janie’s cultural and ideological outlook has much to do with the kinds of subject matter poets and novelists such as Richard Wright and Langston Hughes were producing and ideologically espousing at the time.  Wright and Hughes were the rising stars of the African-American literati and Hurston’s Joe Starks of Eatonville—an ambitious, self-made man with political instincts and a desire for power and prestige—seems, in retrospect, to parody Hurston’s male counterparts, particularly Wright, whose Native Son would be published the following year.  Starks has come to challenge the status quo by asserting his identity as a man of action and knowledge in a bid to challenge white prejudice and complacency—the attitude that black men were irreparably inferior and could never compete with whites. 

Janie, on the other hand, seems preoccupied with the everyday, the neglected, the forgotten, the vernacular:  those aspects of African-American culture that fell through the cracks of this interracial struggle or which seemed all too picturesque or even sentimental for the new, more “modernizing” impulse toward competition and provocation.  The quintessence of this nostalgic, anthropologically-searching attitude can be seen in Hurston’s depiction of agricultural labor in the region of the Florida Everglades—“down on the muck” as her protagonists say.  But it can also be seen in Janie’s “self-actualization” as a woman protagonist, something she begins to achieve only when she talks back to—or “undercuts” (as essayist Rachel DuPlessis calls it)[1]—her second husband shortly before his death.  The process of self-actualization is only fully achieved with Janie’s choice of Tea Cake as her future husband:  her third, more exciting antidote to the domineering Starks and Logan Killicks who precede him.  Tea Cake—her sweet-talking, guitar-strumming, gambling man—is clearly the embodiment of an alternative African-American lifestyle characterized in part by his more sensitive, responsive attitude toward women, or at least toward one woman, Janie Starks.  It is a cultural style captured to some extent by the Blues, but also in the “love game” Janie anticipates enjoying with Tea Cake, something she dissociates completely from the “race after property and titles” (114).[2]  In effect, Janie is returning to the moment of sexual awakening she experienced as a teenager while fantasizing about Johnny Taylor under the “blossoming pear tree” (10) in her grandmother’s backyard.   It was a fantasy her grandmother would quickly preempt by marrying the girl off to the old, propertied farmer, Logan Killicks, just after delivering Janie the lecture quoted above.
            As Michael Awkward notes in his introduction to New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God, the issue of how best to represent the “Negro” of the time was the subject of furious debate in African-American literary circles in the Twenties and Thirties: 

In an era when Afro-American literature was viewed by many black intellectuals and white readers as an occasion for direct confrontation of white America’s racist practices and its effects on Afro-Americans, Hurston’s imaginative landscape, which generally did not include maniacal white villains or, for that matter, superhumanly proud, long suffering blacks, seemed inappropriate and hopelessly out of step.  In addition to the gender-determined nature of literary reputations during the period […] Hurston’s reputation also suffered as a consequence of disputes about how blacks ought to be portrayed in literature.  Sensitive to the need to improve white America’s perception of Afro-Americans, some powerful black intellectuals, including [Alain] Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois, believing that literature represented the most effective means by which to begin to dispel racist notions that black Americans were morally and cognitively subhuman, insisted that Afro-American writers were obligated to present Afro-Americans in the most favorable—and flattering—light possible.  (10) 

            Although Joe Starks might at first seem to fit the bill of such a character—a leader, innovator, and liberator of sorts—his patronizing, patriarchal behavior toward Janie and others provides an extremely unflattering portrait of such a figure, primarily because of his incapacity to treat women or other social dependents (or inferiors) with any respect.  As the new, undaunted representative of African-American initiative and determination, Starks is both brilliant and proud.  But the people he seems destined to represent gradually begin to chafe, like Matt Bonner’s mule, under the yoke of his domineering attitude.  They feel both slighted and intimidated and the sentiments are not unfamiliar to Joe’s wife.  Yet when Joe up and dies and Janie attaches herself to a young man her neighbors consider insufficiently provisioned with a fortune, they reveal an almost abject adherence to the kind of work ethic their former mayor imposed.  They start disparaging Tea Cake as a symbol of everything that characterized their distinctness from white society before the arrival of Mayor Starks:  their folkways, their blues, and their unambitious agrarian lifestyle.  Such things are now considered undeserving of Janie’s status as the widow of the great Joe Starks. 

            As feminist critics have been claiming since the Eighties, Janie represents a nexus of cultural codes that express a range of attitudes about race, gender, age, and class—social determinants that routinely interact, overlap, and compete.  She is a rich man’s wife who opts to work manually “down on the muck” with her new husband; she wears overalls upon returning to Eatonville in a sign of trans-gendering after her trial for murder; she is beautiful but also over forty; her hair and earlier upbringing in a white family’s house nevertheless establish her as an individual who transverses racial expectations while simultaneously risking white prejudice.  Despite these transgressive qualities, Janie expresses a concerted determination to identify with the folkways of Southern blacks through her original, self-actualizing decision to quit her position of status in Eatonville to go work in West Florida with Tea Cake as a migrant laborer.  Hurston even goes so far as to voice a political position through Janie when, in a conversation with a Mrs. Turner—the black proprietor of an eating house who perversely prefers whites to negroes or “[a]nyone who looked more white folkish than herself” (144)—Janie speaks up for the social reformer and educator Booker T. Washington.  She makes this effort of articulation in a way that seems to critique the newer discourse of double consciousness analyzed by W. E. B. DuBois in his famous book The Souls of Black Folk, where he insists on the radical modification of such consciousness.[3]  By resisting the struggle against double consciousness and thus stubbornly emphasizing black difference—even a kind of cultural insulation from white influence—Hurston is refusing to accept the bourgeois standards of white society that set the terms of that “radical modification.”  Insistent competitiveness with white society is, as Hurston suggests in her autobiography Dust on the Tracks,[4] ironically undermining black uniqueness through an over-preoccupation with racial confrontation such that blackness becomes standardized in a virtually white American mold.  As DuPlessis writes, Hurston “has a decided racial bifocality” (98), but she has it in a way that attempts to transcend, not thwart, double consciousness by acting as if racial difference, while real and present (because imposed), does not have to be decisive, absolute or unbridgeable.  Their Eyes Were Watching God tends to substantiate this attitude by avoiding introducing into the novel any white characters at all except at crucial moments:  those of Janie’s formative years in a white family’s house and again at her trial for murder (the “White House” of the law, as Claude McKay might call it).  It’s a strange kind of double-consciousness game, one that doesn’t so much address the problems of racial injustice as use racial difference as a way to confront inequities within the black community itself, especially those between men and women. 

            At the same time that Hurston’s narrative draws its female protagonist both firmly and affirmatively into Southern folk life, Janie—as the inheritor of certain white racial traits and as the romantic object of a love affair that sentimentally appeals to white sensibilities—is found “not guilty” by an all-white Florida jury at her trial for shooting Tea Cake.  Based on these values and the definitive forensic testimony revealing that she was defending herself against a man who had succumbed, unknowingly, to rabies, Janie is redeemed and set free by white society to the dismay and anger of the black male community who sees her as unfairly benefiting from privileges only a Negro female (especially one of mixed heritage) might enjoy at the expense of black males.  These males would otherwise take a proprietary attitude toward such a female (just as they did when they tried to prevent Janie from choosing Tea Cake as her mate) and thus assume her guilt in the shooting of Tea Cake.  In the end, it’s white society that grants justice in this novel, and it comes as a shock to anyone interested in American history or racial justice—especially at a time when America’s current judicial system is serving black males so abominably and when even black female victims of domestic abuse (such as Marissa Alexander) can be threatened with twenty-year sentences by state prosecutors for trying to protect themselves in their homes[5] while the same state prosecutors uphold the stand-your-ground defense of armed white assailants who murder young black men in their own neighborhoods and homes.      

            Finally, the vexed ambivalence that seems to characterize Hurston’s depiction of African-American gender and race relations emerges most conspicuously as a competition between cultural voices:  the vernacular English of Janie Starks—who tells her story to Pheoby Watson by saying, “You can tell ’em what Ah say if you wants to.  Dats just de same as me ’cause mah tongue is in mah friend’s mouf”—and the omniscient, third-person, Standard English narration provided by Hurston in the rest of the work.  By relentlessly juxtaposing these two voices and thus playing a kind of authorial double consciousness game, Hurston rhetorically re-enacts the cultural conflict between the races that the book seems otherwise to repress.  Yet she does so by way of her own, narrative appropriation of English diction to serve the cultural purposes of African-Americans, divulging in the process her virtuosity and quick-change capacity.  This act of literary artifice suggests that both rhetorical forms are a kind of verbal sleight of hand or cultivated mimicry that anyone with genuine literary talent can muster and master—regardless of race or gender.

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[1] See Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Power, Judgment, and Narrative in a Work of Zora Neale Hurston:  Feminist Cultural Studies” in New Essays on ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God.’  Michael Awkward, ed.  Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 1990: 101-102. 

[2] Another, more contemporary version can be detected in Toni Cade Bambara’s characterization of Larry in the short story “Medley.”  It’s perhaps worth noting that the female character Sweet Pea ultimately rejects Larry’s lifestyle to become a hardworking single mom focused like a beam on her daughter’s future.

[3] See W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” in The Souls of Black Folks.  New York: Penguin, 1989 (1903): 5.

[4] DuPlessis quotes Hurston from her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road, adding her own analysis: “‘I must tell the tales, sing the songs, do the dances, and repeat the raucous sayings and doings of the Negro furthest down’ (DT 177).  This aesthetic position is a conscious repudiation of the ‘better-thinking Negro’ who ‘wanted nothing to do with anything frankly Negroid….  The Spirituals, the Blues, any definitely Negroid thing was just not done’ (DT 233).” From DuPlessis: 100 (see endnote #2).

[5] She was eventually released in a plea deal.