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.
