This is a post about aesthetics and ethics.
I read in passing a moment ago (thanks, internet) that "one cannot be a romantic and be self aware." I feel compelled to refute - or at least complicate - such an overwhelmingly simplistic remark (certainly made in passing, but nonetheless...)
First of all, I suppose the argument hinges on how one defines a romantic - and particularly whether or not one can be one. Is a romantic a thing of the past? What I mean, really, is: has the "romantic" receded to the realm of the symbolic? When the word is used, it connotes poetry - and by extension, the romantic poets. Well, the next question is whether or not poets are dead. In this case, I would suggest that "Poets" have receded to th symbolic. Simply writing poetry is no longer enough of a claim to Poet-hood, and "Poet" itself has become quite the dirty word - that is, until a "poet" actually becomes a "Poet" by gaining some sort of notoriety.
So, let's remove "poet" from the list of romantic adjectives for the time being, and go back to Baudelaire (not as a poet, but as a font of poetry). If we picture the albatross, ostensibly a metaphorical narrator both of Les Fleurs du Mal and of Le Spleen de Paris, it's hard to avoid a vivid sense, not only of self-awareness, but of self-consciousness. An albatross is quite comfortable gliding through the air, but can barely move on the ground and must wallow pitifully until it can catch the next breeze. While aloft, it is provided a most objective (we'll disprove this later) view of the goings-on beneath its wings. It is, however, quite a noticeable beast, and is hardly the composed, adjusted individual that Baudelaire set out to explore in his prose poems.
To be a romantic is, in my mind, to be endlessly searching for that ineffable heroism of modern life; to embrace the epic, to stand at the edge of something grand and watch all of the old gods die. The Romantic is liberating and terrifying, and that void (which is most overtly portrayed in the ever-present "wanderer above the sea of fog" leads - in my mind - directly into existentialism.
The cat, like the albatross, is an incredibly self-aware and self-conscious animal, particularly as Baudelaire constructs it. It is, however, much more put-together. If the albatross landed in the city and put on a suit, you'd have the car. He stays very much the painter of modern life; it's just that the perspective has shifted. I won't get into Baudelaire's definition of the dandy, as that's quite easy to find on its own, so I'll skip ahead to the self-awareness.
Self-awareness relies (see previous post) on some sort of socio-psychological echo-location. I don't want to argue about whether or not true self-awareness is really achievable or anything like that, but I do want to point out that romantic observations, whether they're of a grecian urn; the suicide of an artist's model; or even of April, that cruelest month; all of these things require some sort of relative location from which a gaze is directed.
A Baudelarian narrator is perhaps the most (and at the same time, least) self-aware persona in pre-modern literature. If we turn to "Le Mauvais Vitrier," we can see an example of this: the narrator almost does not know what he wants, or why he does what he does. He does know that he wants to inspect the glassman's wares, and he does know that he wants the glassman to climb several flights of stairs to reach his apartments. He does know that he wants a glass that will make the view from his rooms more beautiful - or, rather, he wants to see something new and different through his windows - and he does know that somehow, this poor man will provide him with the escape that he's seeking.
The violence of shoving the salesman back down the stairs is what brings this back to the current discussion on aesthetics. Instead of embracing a new, nicely-tinted piece of glass for hhis window, he instead creates his own "art." Pushing the glassman out of his door, listening to his livelihood crash and shatter beneath him; this is the beauty that the narrator seeks, to which he attests in the final lines of the poem - which are perhaps the most beautiful, most liberating, and most terrifying of any I've ever read:
"Et, ivre de ma folie, je lui criai furieusement: «La vie en beau! la vie en beau!»
Ces plaisanteries nerveuses ne sont pas sans péril, et on peut souvent les payer cher. Mais qu'importe l'éternité de la damnation à qui a trouvé dans une seconde l'infini de la jouissance?"
Really, aren't we talking about aesthetic pleasures here? Aren't we talking about knowing them? About knowing what we want? About exercising authenticity? About that final realization of damnation? Not of religious damnation, but of Faustian immolation - annihilating oneself in a fit of orgasmic self-awareness, an eruption of the desire for beauty that can come only at the expense of modern society?
Anyway, Baudelaire is dead. Perhaps that means that poets are dead; that romantics are dead, and all we have left are the new artist-automatons; formalists endlessly searching for inspiration in the dregs of their betters, thinking that the grotesque is nothing more than what the public finds disgusting. Perhaps we are doing nothing but romancing the superflat and making endless love to floating signifiers. I don't know - I do think, however, that romantic longings stem from nothing other than self-awareness, from a longing for a golden age that may or may not ever have existed or exist, and from that interminable search for modern-day heroism; undefined and unattainable, hobbled as we are by stunted our albatross-legs.
And thus he, too, immolated himself in a fit of post-modern circularity.
No comments:
Post a Comment