Looking into the inner life

IT is almost a cliche now that if the English have little taste for ideas disguised as literature - not much for ideas because of their empirical tradition - the French care even less for creative work without theories to support it. Literary intellectuals have had almost no public role in England unless they have also been novelists, poets or playwrights, whereas, in France, a man's imaginative writing has been a handy way of drawing attention to his ideas. The hero of Camus' The Fall put it pithily: the French, he said, had two great passions: ideas and fornication - and even fornication had something intellectual about it, as if brains saved you from feelings. Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) fitted effortlessly into the French system: wild sexual romps on the one side, a clutch of ideas on the other expressed poignantly in his infamous cycle of poems, The Flowers of Evil now considered one of the landmarks of world literature.

The Flowers of Evil is a cycle of about 70 poems grouped into six main sections, apart from the "Preface", "Spleen and Ideal", "Parisian Pictures", "Wine", "Flowers of Evil", "Revolt" and "Death". In his "Preface", Baudelaire sets out his moral and social position. There was a dualism of good and evil in man. Though Evil - or the crooked timber of humanity - dominates, there was still hope for redemption.

"Folly and error, sin and avarice/Work on our bodies, occupy our thoughts,/And we ourselves sustain our sweet regrets/As mendicants nourish their worms and lice.

"Our wrongs are stubborn, our repentance base!/We lavishly pay for confessions,/And to this muddy path gaily return,/Thinking that vile tears will our sins erase ...

"The Devil holds our strings in puppetry!/In objects vile we find attraction,/Each day we sink nearer perdition,/Unhorrified, through rank obscurity.

"As some poor libertine will bite and kiss/The bruised breast of an ancient courtesan,/We catch a passing pleasure clandestine,/Like an old orange squeeze out all its juice...

"If rape and dagger, fire and hellebore/Have not yet prinked out with designs ornate/The common canvas of our wretched fate./It is, alas, that our faint soul demurs.

"And yet among the jackals, panthers, hounds./The monkeys, serpents, vultures, scorpions,/The beasts which howl and growl and crawl and scream/And in our heinous zoo of sins abound,/There's one more hideous, evil, obscene!/Though it makes no great gesture, no great cry,/It would lay wasted the earth quite willingly,/And in a yawn engulf creation.

"Boredom! Its eyes with tears unwilling shine,/It dreams of scaffolds, smoking its cheroot,/Reader, you know this monster delicate,/Double-faced reader,-kinsman-brother mine!"

There was an inherent contradiction in all of us; ambivalence was the guiding force in life. But though sin exists and there is spleen, there still remains the ideal, the aspiration that things would work out in the end. This was the essential character of romanticism that came with the emergence of the middle classes as a political and economic force after the French revolution of 1789 in opposition to the aristocracy. Flowers, is then essentially a romantic collection of poems - a romantic concern with death and corruption, with violence, a nostalgia for the past, and a romantic longing for escape from all the bourgeois fiddle that surrounds our daily lives. Hence "Spleen".

"I have more memories than a thousand years.

"A chest-of-drawers cluttered with registers,/With poems, letters, songs, certificates,/With heavy locks of hair wrapped in receipts,/Hides fewer secrets than my mind forlorn,/It is a pyramid, a vast store-room/Which holds more dead than any sepulchres.

"... I am a graveyard which the moon abhors,/Where, like regrets, the long worms ever crawl/And on my best loved hold their carnival,/I am a boudoir full of faded flowers,/Littered by fashions of other hours,/Where plaintive pastels, pale Bouchers alone/ Breathe scent from bottles opened in days gone.

"Nothing is so long as the halting hours,/When, burdened by the snowfall of the years,/Boredom, the fruit of dismal apathy,/Take the proportions of eternity..."

(Spleen is freely utilised as a synonym or variant for ennui. But, as the word's interchangeability with ennui clearly shows, the initial and determining characteristic of spleen is boredom, and its further ingredients include inertia, a deep melancholy or a profound despair.)

All the "Spleen" poems are really intense exercises in self- analysis where Baudelaire subjects his own thoughts, fantasies and behaviour to rigorous and unsparing scrutiny. They are morally neutral in the sense that he abstains from passing judgements on the state of the mind into which he has fallen. All he does is describe his condition as faithfully as he can: "Ah! Lord, give me strength, give me courage, just look on my heart and body without disgust!"

Baudelaire's analysis of the world within is both ruthless and compassionate with "a large capacity for pleasure and an infinite capacity for grief. In "Reversibility", he looks upon himself as "angel so gay, know you the misery,/The shame, the weeping, the remorse, the grief,/The vague fears of those nights beyond belief/Which crumbles up the heart's security?/Angel so gay, know you the misery?/Angel so good, know you aversion,/The fists clenched in the dark, the bitter tears/When Vengeance calls its hellish volunteers,/And comes to captain your decision?/Angel so good, know you aversion?

Again in "The Irreparable" he asks himself: "Can we make silent old and long Remorse,/Which lives and writhes and moves/And feeds on us as worms feed on a corpse, As grubs on verdant groves?/Can we make silent old and long Remorse? ... Can one light up the dark and troubled skies/Or tear apart the gloom/More dense than pitch, where no suns set or rise,/No stars exist, no gleam?/Can one light up the dark and troubled skies?/Hope shining at the windows of the Inn,/Is snuffed out, ever dead!"

The world of Flowers is hermetically sealed and bounded by an oppressive sky and an angry God. There are no ways of escape, neither in wine nor women. The only escape is in dreams and fantasies - recollections of childhood or travels to distant and exotic places. But even in travels there is no happiness to be found as in "The Voyage" because there is no getting away from the Self.

Unlike much western literature that concerns itself with relations between man and man, passion and intellect, with family, social and class relations, Baudelaire's Flowers discusses the relations between the individual and his Self or God. To that extent, it was the precursor of the psychological novel of the 19th Century: the inner life was more highly prized than relations with fellow beings. Herein lies Baudelaire's secret, the thing that makes him so great for some, to others - because of his nihilism - so insufferable. Either way you cannot ignore him.

Strangely solitary and profound, Flowers of Evil has the usual clutch of heart searchings, passions and associations that seem to be the province of the moralist-novelist. But the miracles Baudelaire accomplishes is this: the poet lives by virtue of his own personality, with his peculiar secrets, introduced to us in all their puzzling complexity. And these problems are never abstract: indeed most palpitate with life, which conflict, struggle and assume a human guise as they do in our daily lives.

RAVI VYAS

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