Saturday, September 5, 2015

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. 




[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.