The Decadent Republic of Letters. Matthew Potolsky
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with notes. He could not resist the desire to return to the marvelous or terrifying visions, the subtle conceptions, which he had encountered in a previous storm; they were old acquaintances [conaissances] which peremptorily called to him, and in order to renew relations with them, he took the most perilous but straightest road” (OC II, 315; PML 89).
This passage subtly assimilates Poe’s drinking at once to writing and to social engagement, and describes the private decisions of the writer as forms of engagement with the public. Poe drinks in much the same way a diligent writer uses notes: as a mnemonic device to recover valuable impressions, ideas, or quotations. This act of recovery is always social, a means of renewing relations with “old acquaintances.” In much the same way, Poe’s ability to a dazzle an audience with his drunken monologues becomes exemplary of the relationship between great writers and their audiences. Commenting on his “lack of delicacy in the matter of a public” while drinking, Baudelaire compares Poe with “other great and original minds for whom any company was good company.” The relationship between artist and audience, in this regard, is “a kind of brotherhood [fraternité] based on contempt” (OC II, 313; PML 87).
The Legend of Poe
In an undated entry in his Journaux intimes, Baudelaire writes: “De Maistre and Edgar Poe taught me how to think [m’ont appris à raisonner]” (OC I, 669; IJ 57; trans. modified). This passage is often quoted as evidence of Baudelaire’s increasing devotion after 1852 to the reactionary political views of Maistre, views that Baudelaire frequently compares to Poe’s. The opening sections of “Notes nouvelles” are in large part a compendium of antidemocratic and anti-American aphorisms from Poe’s Marginalia and other prose, which Baudelaire claims Maistre would have admired. As Burton notes, however, Baudelaire writes that Maistre and Poe taught him how to think, not what to think.22 All three, that is, share a reactionary disdain for democracy and mass modernity, but the lesson Baudelaire learns from his mentors cannot be reduced to identifiable political positions. He borrows concepts from Maistre that help him define the political underpinnings of modern literary culture, but he is by no means slavishly devoted to his reactionary defense of throne and altar. Rather, he yokes Poe and Maistre to conceptualize the political origins of the postrevolutionary malaise from which artists and writers suffer. Poe becomes a kind of Maistrian hero, whose fate reveals the important relationship between modern literary production and modern political systems.
Both the 1852 essay and the 1856 essay quote admiringly from Maistre’s 1821 work Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg [St. Petersburg Evenings], but it is in the revised version that Baudelaire brings out the full implications of Maistre’s theories for his account of Poe. As I noted above, the 1856 essay drops the explicit references to the Revolution that make up most of the original passages in the 1852 text, instead emphasizing a new paradigm for understanding Poe’s republican virtue that was merely implicit in the first essay, and which leads directly back to Maistre: martyrdom. Baudelaire casts Poe as a kind of literary saint, “canonizes” him as writer and quasi-religious icon at one and the same time: “I am adding a new saint to the martyrology” (OC II, 297; PML 70). Comparing America to the decadent Roman Empire, he describes Poe as one of the “sacrificial souls” whom Providence hurls “into hostile surroundings, like Christian martyrs into the circus” (OC II, 296; PML 69). He draws on the narrative resources of hagiography, calling Poe’s life a “legend,” detailing his persecution, first by American public opinion, and then, post-humously, by his Judas-like literary executor, Rufus Griswold, and casting his miserable death as a willing self-sacrifice.23 Baudelaire insists that Poe’s legend is exemplary. He offers him not as a model for imitation but, again in the tradition of Christian hagiography, as a source of comfort for the community and a motivation for good conduct. Poe sacrifices himself for beauty, putting the collective good above the individual life. And as with the original Christian martyrs, his sacrifice demonstrates both the saint’s devotion and the cruelty and hypocrisy of the tyrant who torments him.
Baudelaire’s allusions to the tradition of hagiography draw on Maistre’s theory of sacrificial substitution or “reversibility [réversibilité],” which applies to modern politics the Christian principle that the death of one innocent can save an entire community.24 Maistre devotes the ninth dialogue of the Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg to this doctrine. Given the imprint of original sin, he explains, there is no wholly innocent human being, and all worldly suffering is justified in the eyes of God. Human life is properly and necessarily soaked in blood, but the public perception of suffering can have important effects for the community. While the punishment of the obviously guilty person will satisfy the community’s sense of justice, the suffering of the apparently good one can have a redemptive quality: “When one reflects that these sufferings are not only useful for the just but that they can by religious acceptance be turned to the profit of the guilty, and that in suffering they really sacrifice for all men, one will agree that in fact it is impossible to imagine a sight more worthy of the divinity.”25 Salvation through blood is integral to the order of Providence in human history, and Maistre insists upon the contemporary political significance of the theory. His first major work, Considerations sur la France [Considerations on France] (1797), which Baudelaire also read, interprets the French Revolution as a providential intervention in human affairs, designed to strengthen the monarchy and punish the advocates of republican rule. Reproducing Christ’s death on the cross in the context of modern politics, the public execution of the great “innocent” Louis XVI offers proof of the guiding hand of Providence in human affairs and, by demonstrating the tyrannous bloodlust of his executioners, provides the downtrodden aristocrats and their sympathizers with a powerful martyr to rally around.26
Baudelaire does not argue for Poe’s Christ-like innocence, but he casts the legend of the American writer’s life in terms that clearly resonate with Maistre’s doctrine of reversibility. He repeatedly associates Poe with the divine. From an early age, and despite his poverty, Poe is exceptional: “He was truly marked by Nature, like those occasional figures in the street which rivet the observer’s eye and haunt his memory” (OC II, 309; PML 83). Singularly beautiful and graceful, he has an intense devotion to the eternal, to beauty, and to the supernatural order that goes conspicuously against the grain of the pursuit of material goods that defines his sociopolitical context. In “Notes nouvelles,” Baudelaire presents Poe as a teacher who argues for the divinity of beauty. Summarizing Poe’s essay “The Poetic Principle,” he suggests that the desire for beauty is akin to the desire for the afterlife: “It is this admirable and immortal instinct for Beauty that makes us consider the Earth and its shows as a glimpse, a correspondence of Heaven…. It is at once by means of and through poetry, by means of and through music, that the soul gets an inkling of the glories that lie beyond the grave; and when an exquisite poem melts us to tears, those tears are not the proof of an excess of pleasure, but rather evidence of a certain petulant, impatient sorrow—of a nervous postulation—of a nature exiled amid the imperfect, and eager to seize immediately, on this very earth, upon a revealed paradise” (OC II, 334; PML 107–8). Attended in life and mourned after death, like Christ, by his beloved “mother” (actually his mother-in-law, the serendipitously named Maria Clemm), Poe suffers for the glory of divine Beauty. At the end of the 1852 essay, Baudelaire compares Poe explicitly to Christ: “I should willingly say of him and of a special class of men what the catechism says of our Lord: ‘He has suffered much for us’ ” (OC II, 288; BOP 85). In Mon coeur mis à nu, he reports that he prays every day “to God, source of all power and justice; to my father, to Mariette and to Poe, as intercessors” (OC I, 673; IJ 61).
The cruel tyrant that martyrs Poe is public opinion, a phenomenon Baudelaire traces to the individualism inherent in the democratic order.27 Public opinion threatens the liberty of artists by pressing its (false) claims of equality. Even more than legal equality, American democracy valorizes equality of opinion—a position fundamentally at odds with Baudelaire’s belief in an aristocracy of taste—and in so doing effectively undermines the very liberties modern republics like America claim to secure for their citizens. Baudelaire’s account of American literary culture appeals directly to the traditional republican conception of political decadence as a substitution of private interest for the public good. America is a nation that “begins with decadence and starts off where the others leave off,” where the public never ceases