A CADAVER IN CLOTHES: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND THE DANDY IN BAUDELAIRE

"Le Dandy... doit vivre et dormir devant un miroir." Baudelaire

Baudelaire's work is far from self-evidently autobiographical. Le Fleur du mal, for instance, cannot be easily compared to a self-declared poetic autobiography like Hugo's Contemplations where the piece of poetrys are of decidedly personal inspiration, bear dates that attach them to experience, and lay without a plausible narrative of poetic disclosure In contrast, Baudelaire's undated piece of poetrys appear impersonal and, in their emblematic character, untethered to experience. While the bard does give the collection the status of an expressive work in individual letter to Ancelle: "Faut-il vous dire, ?  vous qui ne l'avez pas plus devin?© que le autres, que dans ce livre atroce, j'ai mis tout mon coeur toute ma tendresse toute ma religion (travestie), toute ma haine?"-it is solitary to take it back right away: "Il est vrai que j'?©crirai le contraire, que je jurerai me grands Dieux que c'est un livre d'art pur de singerie, de jonglerie."1 Whatever the principle of the "secret architecture" of the collection, it is not "the growing of the poet's mind."

Nor are the individual metrical compositions clearly self-expressive. It is real that the "Spleen" poems appear to indicate mood, but the disposition in question is a dubious individual where the poet's voice is cracked, incapable of striking anything on the contrary dissonant notes or sounding a death rattle. The enterprising reader who heads to a metrical composition like "Confession" in search of a genuine autobiographical twinkling will be disappointed to discover that the confession consists of a discourse "overheard" in the false note of someone else's voice. It is real that two of the poems-"Je n'ai pas oubli?©, voisine de la ville..." and "La servante au grand coeur dont vous ?©tiez jalouse..."-are by dint of Baudelaire's own avowal retrospective. And notwithstanding even there Baudelaire insists that he has done his best to generalize and to strip away the details that might make the intimate representations identifiable.2 The famous poem upon memory, "Le Cygne," starts on the outside with a literary, not a personal reminiscence ("Andromaque, je pense ?  vous!"3) and put in motions on to recount an anecdote about an escaped swan wandering upon a construction site that, although read by means of some critics as a literal occurrence has been thought by many too neat to ring true

A similar situation obtains elsewhere in the work. direct the eye to the Artificial Paradises for the soul-searching remedy narrative of an experienced user, and you will be disappointed. Instead you find stories the author, acting as a sort of scientist, purports to have gathered from others. In Le Peintre de la vie moderne Baudelaire has eschewed the anecdotal phraseology that his friendship with the painter Constantin shores would have allowed, and has flat effaced the name that would anchor the portrait to a referent Baudelaire's biographers Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler will occasionally astonishment whether the most apparently unproblematical of autobiographical body s Baudelaire's letters to his mother, are not those of a mountebank who postures even in his most intimate moments4 In Baudelaire's body s the personal style is all on the contrary dispensed with.5

The Intimate Journals is a more promising place to gaze for an autobiographical subject. Indeed, the main piece, Mon coeur mis ?  nu was throwed as an autobiography perhaps unusual in tone, on the other hand not in structure-it was to mention one by one the story of the education of an angry man.6 on the other hand in the project as we have it, Baudelaire has avoided the narrative style that Lejeune makes a crucial trait of the genre7 We don't find a story of the past incidents of a life, and the usual accouterments of the journal entry-names, dates, places that might somehow or other affix the fragmentary reflections to the happenings of a life-are for the greatest part missing. Such names as do appear might as easily have been gleaned from a newspaper round pillar as dug out of Baudelaire's have a title to memory, so little do they sum up that is personal. When, exceptionally, the bard dates a diatribe against the bourgeoisie, he dates from the century8 Baudelaire systematically refrains from providing the sort of details-salty or sentimental-that spice Rousseau's Confessions, and accommodate with that text its aura of authenticity. Indeed, Pichois and Zeigler confes that at least individual fragment of the Fus?©es strikes them rather as a fairy tale than a recital of the facts.9 To greatest in quantity readers, these texts appear autobiographical sole if one neglects the lapidary turn of expression reminiscent of the philosophical fragment.

And nevertheless notwithstanding all that Baudelaire has done to minimize the regard to experience, there is a persistent, and infallibly not entirely wrong-headed tendency in Baudelaire criticism to read the body as autobiographical, and indeed to understand his persistent self-masking as a prototypical Baudelairian gesticulation It is not just those readers of Le Fleur du mal who have sought an anecdotal basis to the piece of poetrys of the sonnet cycles, and have tried to explain them as in the way that many confessions of the poet's relations to the various women in his life-from Sara and Jeanne Duval, to Mme Sabatier or Agathe. Alongside these uncooked attempts, there exists a more philosophically self-aware assemblage who, following Genette's idea that language can always appear to be metonymically earthed rather than metaphorically motivated, and ranging themselves with Sartre, for whom Baudelaire's work is expressive of "le choix de lui-m??me qu'il a fait (??tre ceci et non pas cela)," read the true copy as documenting the I's fundamental action of self-constitution.10 It is not anecdote on the other hand the family romance that attracts the attention; privilege is accorded the basic experience of los separation and selfidentification that lies behind the poet's greatest in quantity basic choices. Recent works through critics of such widely divergent approaches as Bernard Howells, Didier and Andr?© Hirt remain Sartrian in their belong to with identifying a sort of cogito, a decisive coming into consciousness of which the metrical compositions are the expression.11 This, despite Bataille's vigorous statement some fifty years ago that it advances our reading of the metrical compositions not one whit to undertake of the like kind an analysis.12