Illuminations, page 20
Marx had good reason to stress the great fluidity of the connection between segments in manual labour. This connection appears to the factory worker on an assembly line in an independent, objectified form. Independently of the worker’s volition, the article being worked on comes within his range of action and moves away from him just as arbitrarily. ‘It is a common characteristic of all capitalist production …,’ wrote Marx, ‘that the worker does not make use of the working conditions. The working conditions make use of the worker; but it takes machinery to give this reversal a technically concrete form.’ In working with machines, workers learn to co-ordinate ‘their own movements with the uniformly constant movements of an automaton.’ These words shed a peculiar light on the absurd kind of uniformity with which Poe wants to saddle the crowd – uniformities of attire and behaviour, but also a uniformity of facial expression. Those smiles provide food for thought. They are probably the familiar kind, as expressed in the phrase ‘keep smiling’; in that context they function as a mimetic shock absorber. ‘All machine work,’ it is said in the above context, ‘requires early drilling of the worker.’ This drill must be differentiated from practice. Practice, which was the sole determinant in craftsmanship, still had a function in manufacturing. With it as the basis, ‘each particular area of production finds its appropriate technical form in experience and slowly perfects it.’ To be sure, it quickly crystallizes it, ‘as soon as a certain degree of maturity has been attained.’ On the other hand, this same manufacturing produces ‘in every handicraft it seizes a class of so-called unskilled labourers which the handicraft system strictly exclused. In developing the greatly simplified specialty to the point of virtuosity at the cost of the work capacity as a whole, it starts turning the lack of any development into a specialty. In addition to ranks we get the simple division of workers into the skilled and the unskilled.’ The unskilled worker is the one most deeply degraded by the drill of the machines. His work has been sealed off from experience; practice counts for nothing there.10 What the Fun Fair achieves with its Dodgem cars and other similar amusements is nothing but a taste of the drill to which the unskilled labourer is subjected in the factory – a sample which at times was for him the entire menu; for the art of being off centre, in which the little man could acquire training in places like the Fun Fair, flourished concomitantly with unemployment. Poe’s text makes us understand the true connection between wildness and discipline. His pedestrians act as if they had adapted themselves to the machines and could express themselves only automatically. Their behaviour is a reaction to shocks. ‘If jostled, they bowed profusely to the jostlers.’
IX
The shock experience which the passer-by has in the crowd corresponds to what the worker ‘experiences’ at his machine. This does not entitle us to the assumption that Poe knew anything about industrial work processes. Baudelaire, at any rate, did not have the faintest notion of them. He was, however, captivated by a process whereby the reflecting mechanism which the machine sets off in the workman can be studied closely, as in a mirror, in the idler. If we say that this process is the game of chance, the statement may appear to be paradoxical. Where would one find a more evident contrast than the one between work and gambling? Alain puts it convincingly when he writes: ‘It is inherent in the concept of gambling … that no game is dependent on the preceding one. Gambling cares about no assured position … Winnings secured earlier are not taken into account, and in this it differs from work. Gambling gives short shrift to the weighty past on which work bases itself.’ The work which Alain has in mind here is the highly specialized kind (which, like intellectual effort, probably retains certain features of handicraft); it is not that of most factory workers, least of all the work of the unskilled. The latter, to be sure, lacks any touch of adventure, of the mirage that lures the gambler. But it certainly does not lack the futility, the emptiness, the inability to complete something which is inherent in the activity of a wage slave in a factory. Gambling even contains the workman’s gesture that is produced by the automatic operation, for there can be no game without the quick movement of the hand by which the stake is put down or a card is picked up. The jolt in the movement of a machine is like the so-called coup in a game of chance. The manipulation of the worker at the machine has no connection with the preceding operation for the very reason that it is its exact repetition. Since each operation at the machine is just as screened off from the preceding operation as a coup in a game of chance is from the one that preceded it, the drudgery of the labourer is, in its own way, a counterpart to the drudgery of the gambler. The work of both is equally devoid of substance.
There is a lithograph by Senefelder which represents a gambling club. Not one of those depicted is pursuing the game in the customary fashion. Each man is dominated by an emotion: one shows unrestrained joy; another, distrust of his partner; a third, dull despair; a fourth evinces belligerence; another is getting ready to depart from the world. All these modes of conduct share a concealed characteristic: the figures presented show us how the mechanism to which the participants in a game of chance entrust themselves seizes them body and soul, so that even in their private sphere, and no matter how agitated they may be, they are capable only of a reflex action. They behave like the pedestrians in Poe’s story. They live their lives as automatons and resemble Bergson’s fictitious characters who have completely liquidated their memories.
Baudelaire does not appear to have been a devotee of gambling, although he had words of friendly understanding, even homage, for those addicted to it. The motif which he treated in his night piece ‘Le Jeu’ was part of his view of modern times, and he considered it as part of his mission to write this poem. The image of the gambler became in Baudelaire the characteristically modern complement to the archaic image of the fencer; both are heroic figures to him. Ludwig Börne looked at things through Baudelaire’s eyes when he wrote: ‘If all the energy and passion … that are expended every year at Europe’s gambling tables … were saved, they would suffice to fashion a Roman people and a Roman history from them. But that is just it. Because every man is born a Roman, bourgeois society seeks to de-Romanize him, and that is why there are games of chance and parlour games, novels, Italian operas, and fashionable newspapers.’ Gambling became a stock diversion of the bourgeoisie only in the nineteenth century; in the eighteenth, only the aristocracy gambled. Games of chance were disseminated by the Napoleonic armies, and they now became part of ‘fashionable living and the thousands of unsettled lives that are lived in the basements of a large city,’ part of the spectacle in which Baudelaire claimed he saw the heroic – ‘as it is characteristic of our epoch.’
If one wants to examine gambling from the psychological as well as the technical point of view, Baudelaire’s conception of it appears even more significant. It is obvious that the gambler is out to win. Yet one will not want to call his desire to win and make money a wish in the strict sense of the word. He may be inwardly motivated by greed or by some sinister determination. At any rate, his frame of mind is such that he cannot make much use of experience.11 A wish, however, is a kind of experience. ‘What one wishes for in one’s youth, one has in abundance in old age,’ said Goethe. The earlier in life one makes a wish, the greater one’s chances that it will be fulfilled. The further a wish reaches out in time, the greater the hopes for its fulfilment. But it is experience that accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and divides time. Thus a wish fulfilled is the crowning of experience. In folk symbolism, distance in space can take the place of distance in time; that is why the shooting star, which plunges into the infinite distance of space, has become the symbol of a fulfilled wish. The ivory ball which rolls into the next compartment, the next card which lies on top are the very antithesis of a falling star. The period of time encompassed by the instant in which the light of a shooting star flashes for a man is of the kind that Joubert has described with his customary assurance. ‘Time,’ he says, ‘is found even in eternity; but it is not earthly, worldly time … That time does not destroy; it merely completes.’ It is the antithesis of time in hell, the province of those who are not allowed to complete anything they have started. The disrepute of games of chance is actually based on the fact that the player himself has a hand in it. (An incorrigible patron of a lottery will not be proscribed in the same way as the gambler in a stricter sense.)
This starting all over again is the regulative idea of the game, as it is of work for wages. Thus it is highly meaningful if in Baudelaire the second-hand – ‘la Seconde’ – appears as partner of the gambler:
Souviens-toi que le Temps est un joueur avide
Qui gagne sans tricher, à tout coup! c’est la loi!fn6
In another place, Satan himself takes the place of this second. The taciturn corner of the cave to which the poem ‘Le Jeu’ relegates those who are addicted to gambling undoubtedly is part of his realm.
Voilà le noir tableau qu’en un rêve nocturne
Je vis se dérouler sous mon oeil clairvoyant,
Moi-même, dans un coin de l’antre taciturne,
Je me vis accoudé, froid, muet, enviant,
Enviant de ces gens la passion tenace.fn7
The poet does not participate in the game. He stands in his corner, no happier than those who are playing. He too has been cheated out of his experience – a modern man. The only difference is that he rejects the narcotics with which the gamblers seek to submerge the consciousness that has delivered them to the march of the second-hand.12
Et mon coeur s’effraya d’envier maint pauvre homme
Courant avec ferveur à l’abîme béant,
Et qui, soûl de son sang, préférerait en somme
La douleur à la mort et l’enfer au néant!fn8
In this last stanza Baudelaire presents impatience as the substratum of the passion for gambling. He found it in himself in its purest form. His violent temper had the expressiveness of Giotto’s Iracundia at Padua.
X
It is – if one follows Bergson – the actualization of the durée which rids man’s soul of obsession with time. Proust shared this belief, and from it he developed the lifelong exercises in which he strove to bring to light past things saturated with all the reminiscences that had worked their way into his pores during his sojourn in the unconscious. Proust was an incomparable reader of the Fleurs du mal, for he sensed that it contained kindred elements. Familiarity with Baudelaire must include Proust’s experience with him. Proust writes: ‘Time is peculiarly chopped up in Baudelaire; only a very few days open up, they are significant ones. Thus it is understandable why turns of phrases like “one evening” occur frequently in his works.’ These significant days are days of completing time, to paraphrase Joubert. They are days of recollection, not marked by any experience. They are not connected with the other days, but stand out from time. As for their substance, Baudelaire has defined it in the notion of the correspondances, a concept that in Baudelaire stands side by side and unconnected with the notion of ‘modern beauty.’
Disregarding the scholarly literature on the correspondances (the common property of the mystics; Baudelaire encounted them in Fourier’s writings), Proust no longer fusses about the artistic variations on the situation which are supplied by synaesthesia. The important thing is that the correspondances record a concept of experience which includes ritual elements. Only by appropriating these elements was Baudelaire able to fathom the full meaning of the breakdown which he, a modern man, was witnessing. Only in this way was he able to recognize in it the challenge meant for him alone, a challenge which he incorporated in the Fleurs du mal. If there really is a secret architecture in this book – and many speculations have been devoted to it – the cycle of poems that opens the volume probably is devoted to something irretrievably lost. This cycle includes two sonnets whose motif is the same. The first, entitled ‘Correspondances,’ begins with these lines:
La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.
Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.fn9
What Baudelaire meant by correspondances may be described as an experience which seeks to establish itself in crisis-proof form. This is possible only within the realm of the ritual. If it transcends this realm, it presents itself as the beautiful. In the beautiful the ritual value of art appears.13
The correspondances are the data of remembrance – not historical data, but data of prehistory. What makes festive days great and significant is the encounter with an earlier life. Baudelaire recorded this in a sonnet entitled ‘La Vie antérieure.’ The images of caves and vegetation, of clouds and waves which are evoked at the beginning of this second sonnet rise from the warm vapour of tears, tears of homesickness. ‘The wanderer looks into the tear-veiled distance, and hysterical tears [sic] well up in his eyes,’ writes Baudelaire in his review of the poems of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. There are no simultaneous correspondences, such as were cultivated by the symbolists later. The murmur of the past may be heard in the correspondences, and the canonical experience of them has its place in a previous life:
Les houles, en roulant les images des cieux,
Mêlaient d’une facon solennelle et mystique
Les tout-puissants accords de leur riche musique
Aux couleurs du couchant reflété par mes yeux.
C’est là que j’ai vécu …fn10
The fact that Proust’s restorative will remains within the limits of earthly existence, whereas Baudelaire’s transcends it, may be regarded as symptomatic of the incomparably more elemental and powerful counterforces that Baudelaire faced. And probably he nowhere achieved greater perfection than when he seems resigned to being overcome by them. ‘Recueillement’ traces the allegories of the old years against the deep sky:
… Vois se pencher les défuntes Années
Sur les balcons du ciel, en robes surannées.fn11
In these verses Baudelaire resigns himself to paying homage to times out of mind that escaped him in the guise of the outdated. When Proust in the last volume of his work reverts to the sensation that suffused him at the taste of a madeleine, he imagines the years which appear on the balcony as being loving sisters of the years of Combray. ‘In Baudelaire … these reminiscences are even more numerous. It is apparent that they are not occasioned by chance, and this, to my mind, is what gives them crucial importance. There is no one else who pursues the interconnected correspondances with such leisurely care, fastidiously and yet nonchalantly – in a woman’s smell, for instance, in the fragrance of her hair or her breasts – correspondances which then yield him lines like “the azure of the vast, vaulted sky” or “a harbour full of flames and masts.”’ These words are a confessional motto for Proust’s work. It bears a relationship to Baudelaire’s work, which has assembled the days of remembrance into a spiritual year.
But the Fleurs du mal would not be what it is if all it contained were this success. It is unique because it was able to wrest from the inefficacy of the same consolation, the breakdown of the same fervour, the failure of the same effort poems that are in no way inferior to those in which the correspondances celebrate their triumphs. ‘Spleen et idéal’ is the first of the cycles in Les Fleurs du mal. The idéal supplies the power of remembrance; the spleen musters the multitude of the seconds against it. It is their commander, just as the devil is the lord of the flies. One of the Spleen poems, ‘Le Goût du néant,’ says: ‘Le Printemps adorable a perdu son odeur!fn12 In this line Baudelaire expresses something extreme with extreme discretion; this makes it unmistakably his. The word ‘perdu’ acknowledges the present state of collapse of that experience which he once shared. The scent is the inaccessible refuge of the mémoire involontaire. It is unlikely that it will associate itself with a visual image; of all sensual impressions it will ally itself only with the same scent. If the recognition of a scent is more privileged to provide consolation than any other recollection, this may be so because it deeply drugs the sense of time. A scent may drown years in the odour it recalls. This gives a sense of measureless desolation to Baudelaire’s verse. For someone who is past experiencing, there is no consolation. Yet it is this very inability to experience that lies at the heart of rage. An angry man ‘won’t listen’; his prototype Timon rages against people indiscriminately; he is no longer capable of telling his proven friend from his mortal enemy. D’Aurevilly very perceptively recognized this condition in Baudelaire, calling him ‘a Timon with the genius of Archilochus.’ The outbreaks of rage are timed to the ticking of the seconds to which the melancholy man is slave.
