As we know him, as literary and industrial modernity knew him, Baudelaire is the creator of the prose poem. Modern, urban art, and although subjective, allied with Cartesian rigor, with an almost mathematical perfection both in its novel vision and in its literary execution. Such are the ingredients of the “new form” recreated by the French dandy, a consequence of his walks through post-revolutionary Paris, half-ruined and under reconstruction due to the modernizing fury of Baron Haussmann; a Paris—of the Second Empire of Napoleon III—turned into a pure limit, beautiful in its rubble, in its destruction, according to Baudelaire; a city that the French poet loved, suffered, and hated: an “infamous capital.”
The prose poem, created by the French “little romantics,” came from the second romantic period in France in the 1830s, this time with a high dose of “frenzy,” that is, with a more refined Gothic imprint. More than Chateaubriand or Madame de Staël, and even Victor Hugo himself, the precursor was Charles Nodier, well nourished by the strong sensations provided by German and English literature. Its main authors? Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier, Petrus Borel, Alphonse Rabbe, Aloysius Bertrand… These “minor” writers of the 19th century are those whom the French avant-garde of the 20th century claimed as the most important of their time.
If, in terms of content and stylistic execution, the prose poem preceded decadence and the artistic avant-garde in the 20th century, in Baudelaire’s hands, it was not the style or literary technique brought to perfection that was decisive, but rather the novel way of looking at—and seeing—this modern city, which was mechanically objective and, at the sametime, subjective and interior. This is what Calasso was referring to when he wrote that what was new in French was that “hunt for images without beginning or end, spurred on by the demon of analogy.” In other words: the modern writer’s ability to “see,” but only because he is a detached and unencumbered man within a crowd that is a source of renewing vitality; a skin-ego (according to Didier Anzieu), albeit cultivated in solitude; a man who wanders: a flâneur…
Thus, the industrial, mechanical, and rationalist city, captured by the gaze of the passerby, loses its materiality and is transformed into a figure of language; but at the center of that language, there is a void into which the city, language, and even the writer himself fall rapidly, which, in addition to anticipating the decline and birth of new forms of the decadent literary movement—of which Baudelaire is one of the main references—reminds us of the “destroy to create” of the scientist and fundamental theorist of anarchism, Piotr Kropotkin.
It is also interesting to note how, in its frenetic moment, the conception and writing of the prose poem coincided with the retreat of a rebellious and disappointed intelligentsia in the face of revolutionary failure in post-Napoleonic France in the 1830s; and then, in Baudelaire, we see the relationship between its writing and the revolutionary Paris of 1848, where the young French dandy took an active part in the workers’ barricades, shouting against his legal guardian, General Aupick, whom he always hated for supposedly stealing the love of his mother, Caroline Dufaÿs, a revolutionary participation from which he would later distance himself with aristocratic disdain.
More than an aesthetic, in Baudelaire’s pen, the prose poem involves a metaphysics: it springs from a subject ecstatic before “the exemplary,” before the insignificance of that exemplarity, of those bagatelles expressed in a penetrating and light form, within a Paris already fully under the sign of centralized administration, capital, and commercial consumption in all its spheres: culture and work, time and space, and even the human body. It is hard to believe, but that world is still ours. Hence its long-standing originality and tenacious survival: its renewed relevance. Although, of course, the contemporary social space is even more phantasmagorical…
It is from this subjectivity linked to capitalism that the prose poem is born; from this lost man, antihero, acrobat and tightrope walker, annihilated within an anonymous mass that will lend itself to taking all possible revenge in the 20th century, as a faithful flock within right-wing or left-wing totalitarianisms. It is not idle to point out that this is the same human being anticipated by Edgar Allan Poe in his short story “The Man of the Crowd.” And then, in the 20th century, James Joyce takes it up again in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and, more fully, in Ulysses.
Deeply musical, this prose is an incisive melody adapted to the syncopated rhythms of a fragmented subjectivity responsible for the political horrors of the totalitarianisms to come: a subjectivity raised and nourished on rancor and resentment, and ripe for study by psychoanalysis and sociology. Psychic, stylistic, and social decomposition, which Baudelaire also anticipated—with full awareness, which is what is important about him—: the breaking of social ties and commitments, the independence of the individual from the whole.
Prosaic prose, however, captures more of a momentary shock, an instant, than a temporal flow: it captures more the spleen than the ideal… but, in the same way, it transforms the spleen into the ideal: it transforms boredom, tedium, and even the grotesque into a work of art. Hence, like other readers of his work, I have always liked to see Baudelaire’s struggle in the light of the final sentence of one of his prose poems: “The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being defeated.” Kafka also notes this in a Europe already in the final stages of disaster: “Art is being dazzled by the truth. The only thing true is the light on the monstrous face that recedes.” Who does not think of Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa? Who does not think of Dante’s Boat by Eugène Delacroix, Baudelaire’s personal friend and favorite painter? And above all, who does not think of Paul Klee’s angel? That small painting which, for Benjamin—already in the midst of disaster—was a symbol and cipher of modernity in its dual movement of creation and destruction.
The prose poem is an instant condensed into words: pure transcendence or intrascendence, depending on how you look at it. Concise spirit, but never prosaic; vital, carnal, and nervous prose: the physiological foundation of a text—it has been said—that is conceived as living tissue, almost in decomposition. Irony and playfulness at the same time; irony that arises from the awareness and feeling of being, at the same time, inside and outside the game: the only possibility that the gaze has to take a healthy distance.
Consequently, there is a need for an ideal reader—us?—who establishes a loving relationship with the text, in order to evaluate and interpret it according to their own state of mind. Through this irresistible process of mixing and contamination that Benjamin spoke of, the text—reader and city—lose their essence, and it is then that the ambiguous takes the place of the authentic. With a novel language and a rigorous Cartesian method of treating language, which nevertheless does not exclude words of urban and industrial modernity, such as quinqué, vagón, reverberación, ómnibus, etc., Baudelaire attempts to give a sense of unity between the transitory and the enduring: to obtain the eternal from the transitory.
It is in this paradoxical alliance—as in his best poems—that Baudelaire remained faithful to his destiny of observing himself with a steely gaze and biting irony: the exemplary destiny of the modern writer. It is as the perfect dandy that he was that Baudelaire appropriates this image by turning the mirror around paradoxically, stripping himself of the false mask obtained by the mirror image and the invented and inverted image of a reflection. Thus he placed his burnt face of Narcissus “between the paper on which I write and myself.” Thus he established the trail of the modern “literary hero,” the centered writer, the sole subject and spectacle within his solitude: the victim and executioner he drew in one of his emblematic poems; a martyr of modernity as an ever-unfinished project that reached one of its highest moments in his prose poems.
