Kristopher Kelley

10.17.06

Position Paper

Benjamin: On Some Motifs in Baudelaire

Walter Benjamin, in his essay On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, explores the work and motifs of Baudelaire, focusing on his volume of poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil). The historical literary position of Fleurs du Mal as the last lyric work with widespread success gives the text and Baudelaire as the poet, inherent significance.�

Benjamin uses Baudelaire, but also other figures, Proust, Bergson, and Freud, to understand the changes in the structure of the readers’ experience. Proust has developed the idea of mémoire voluntaire, a memory whose information retains no trace of the past it recalls (158). The memory can only be accessed through a physical object which holds the past within in; an interaction with which is based on chance (158). In confrontation is the mémoire involuntaire, which “bears the marks of the situation which gave rise to it” (159). Components of the mémoire involuntaire must not have been “experienced explicitly and consciously” (161). These “memories,” then which are not completely a part of a person’s consciousness are result of “shocks” according to Freud (161). The mind registers the shocks, from stimuli, in the consciousness as a defense mechanism against trauma (161). Only incidents within the mémoire involuntaire allow for poetic expression, therefore establishing the basis of the lyric poetry experience in the shock experience.

The shock experience is evident in Baudelaire, found “at the very center of his artistic work” (163). In his poetic account of the poetic work process, it is depicted in his “attitude of combat” (163). Through another excerpt, Benjamin then connects the figure of shock for Baudelaire with its connection to the metropolitan masses (165). The crowd then becomes one of the primary motifs. The urban masses “become so much a part of Baudelaire that is rare to find a description of them in his works” (167). Within the crowd, thousands of people in direct contact with each other, standing inches away, attempt to ignore the existence of, or at least minimize the effect of, the other. When Baudelaire mentions empty streets, this finds its meaning in the implied silence of the crowd (168). The masses allow for a city dweller’s love affair born from the brief contact with another’s eyes, a love “not at first sight, but at last sight” (169).

Baudelaire also speaks of the relation of the crowd to the flâneur, the “man of leisure.” While the average person in the crowd allowed being pushed around a bit, the flâneur, “demanded elbow room” and was unwilling to give up his life of leisure, a way of life gone by (172). The flâneur, then is the one who is fighting the crowd and fighting the direction, literally, in which modern day society is going. The image if the crowd, and what it stands for, is then more intimately woven with the increasingly mechanized society of isolation (175). The shock experience of someone in the crowd is allied with the worker’s “experiences at his machine” (176). The machine worker labors in futility, having no control over what happens next, and no real connection with the whole (177).

Benjamin also touches on the notions of aura and the effect of mechanical reproducibility (186). The images from the mémoire involuntaire are created in their aura (187). The images of a photograph in its presentation of a complete consciousness, lacks this quality. Baudelaire was critical of photography and the “disintegration of the aura make itself felt in his lyrical poetry,” such as in his description of eyes “that have lost their ability to look” (189).

- How “possible” is lyric poetry in contemporary times?

- Did Baudelaire succeed in “creating a cliché?”

- How does the crowd effect generation that knows nothing else?

- Would Baudelaire see emancipatory potential in the shock experience?