Ennui, Spleen, And Nothingness – A Concise Look Into Baudelaire's The Flowers Of Evil

Art for Art’s Sake 27/05/2013 David Gomes zrp408

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ENNUI, SPLEEN, AND NOTHINGNESS – A CONCISE LOOK INTO

BAUDELAIRE’S THE FLOWERS OF EVIL

David Cameira Gomes

Art for Art’s Sake

Spring 2013

English Studies

University of Copenhagen


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[…]

One creature only is most foul and false!

Though making no grand gestures, nor great cries,

He willingly would devastate the earth

And in one yawning swallow all the world;

He is Ennui! – with tear-filled eye he dreams

Of scaffolds, as he puffs his water-pipe.

Reader, you know this dainty monster too;

- Hypocrite reader, - fellowman, - my twin!]

(Charles Baudelaire, “To the Reader”)

The idea for this essay came from my desire to understand the nothingness that

pervades so many poems from The Flowers of Evil. It is a profound philosophical concept

that has spawned many debates over time and still an unsettling matter, like so many other

existentialist questions. Nevertheless, Baudelaire seems to have a firm grasp on this

concept, or at least he shows us through several different poetic voices how he handles

such an unsettling notion. The repeated use of the terms “ennui” and “spleen”, which could

easily be considered synonyms, strongly evocate the motif of nothingness. Spleen is a word

that in medieval psychology designated an organ of the four ‘humours’ which were thought

to control human behaviour. As such, in the 18th century it became associated with anxiety

and deep suicidal depression, which must have led Baudelaire to associating it with ‘ennui’,

the French word that expresses a “soul-deadening spiritual condition.” 1

The purpose of this essay is then to understand some selected poems which I deem

relevant for this discussion, and to consider how Baudelaire treats the concept of

nothingness and what implications and consequences he sees as emanating from the

experience of nothingness. To that end, my focus will be set on the following selected

poems: “Au lecteur” [To the reader], “Lethe,” and “Spleen (IV)”, which I believe bear

prominent relevance to this work. The theme of nothingness permeates each of these

1 Baudelaire, Charles (1993), The Flowers of Evil, Trans. James McGowan, Oxford, Oxford University Press. p.

351


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poems, but it’s manifested in many different ways: social alienation, fear of death,

existential dread, and others. All of these and more are the materialization of the abstract

concept of nothingness and are key to better understanding Baudelaire’s work, which is why

I will not only draw on the poems themselves and some of the existing criticism relating to

them, but have also included in this paper different comments, definitions and discussions

taken from an Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which I believe bring great insight into some key

concepts to be discussed here, and also different letters written by Baudelaire in his

personal life.

I want to start by defining the idea of nothingness and how Baudelaire repeatedly

addressed this matter in letters to his mother and in his personal diaries. Afterwards, I will

present the ways in which nothingness appears in each of the selected poems. I will then

discuss its meaning and implication in each of the poems, and finally how the poems

themselves relate to each other and to Baudelaire’s life in terms of this theme.

Existentialism

Nothingness as it appears in Baudelaire’s work is a concept that deeply resonates

with existentialism, which first emerged as a philosophical problem in the 19th century with

Kierkegaard. Even though he never used the term “existentialism”, his work thoroughly

explores the implications of concepts such as “authentic existence” and “the single

individual”2, both of which can be considered pillars of existentialism. Still, the definition of

this movement is a strenuous one, because it is defined not only by the purely philosophical

texts that it spawned, but also by its fictional works, which were arguably more influential to

the establishing of the movement than their counterpart. Steven Crowell argues that

existentialism is indeed better understood as a movement rejecting other select systematic

philosophies rather than as a systematic philosophy itself3. He also states that existentialism

“may be defined as the philosophical theory which holds that a further set of categories,

governed by the norm of authenticity, is necessary to grasp human existence.” 4 Anyhow,

2 McDonald, William, (2012) "Søren Kierkegaard", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/kierkegaard/>. 3 Crowell, Steven, (2010) "Existentialism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/existentialism/>. 4 Ibid.


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existentialism does have a prominent “quasi manifesto5”, Existentialism and Humanism6 by

the self-proclaimed existentialist Jean Paul Sartre. In it, he states that “man first of all exists,

encounters himself, surges up in the world - and defines himself afterwards”, thus denying

God’s existence. He then goes on writing that men must take responsibility for their own

behaviour, and that anguish arises from the realization that our actions are responsible for

all humanity and not only ourselves. Additionally, he describes abandonment as the

realisation that God does not exist, so “we can only rely on what depends on our will, or the

set of probabilities that make our work possible.”7 Summarily, existentialism shows how life

in inherently meaningless, and how each person is responsible for giving meaning to their

own lives by overcoming feelings of angst and despair and imposing individual value

systems on themselves and their actions.

Existential dread

We can relate these concepts to how Baudelaire conducted his personal life and how

Flowers of Evil can be better understood through this scope. One of the key personalities of

dandyism, Baudelaire expressed his strong views on the matter, writing that a dandy should

have “no profession other than elegance... no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of

beauty in their own persons... The dandy must aspire to be sublime without interruption; he

must live and sleep before a mirror.”8 It could be argued that he may have indeed lived his

life in such a way, both physically and morally. We can see how great care has been put into

practically every existing portrait or painting of the poet, which hints at a personality who

was exceptionally careful with his physical look. But more importantly, it is his literary legacy

that really shows how Baudelaire was tirelessly analysing himself and the world around him

and reacting to it. Albert Camus wrote that man has always turned to God when defining

itself, but that the dandy, who is by occupation always in opposition and only exists through

defiance, by severing himself from religion, finds himself “delivered over to the fleeting

5 Flynn, Thomas (2013), Edition "Jean-Paul Sartre", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/sartre/>. 6 From the French: L’existentialisme est un humanisme. 7 Sartre, Paul, “Existentialism is a Humanism”, translated by Adam Norman. Available at: http://archive.org/details/ExistentialismIsAHumanism 8 Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare.


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moment, to the passing days, and to wasted sensibility.”9 So, Camus continues, the dandy,

“like all people without a rule of life”, is only coherent as an actor, and:

“he can only be sure of his own existence by finding it in the expression of others'

faces. Other people are his mirror. A mirror that quickly becomes clouded, it's true,

since human capacity for attention is limited. It must be ceaselessly stimulated,

spurred on by provocation. The dandy, therefore, is always compelled to astonish.

Singularity is his vocation, excess his way to perfection. Perpetually incomplete,

always on the fringe of things, he compels others to create him, while denying their

values. He plays at life because he is unable to live it.”10

These affirmations can to some degree define Baudelaire and his Flowers of Evil, a work

which I feel great reluctance in separating from the artist. Still, Camus’s words shine an

interesting light on a poet who was constantly struggling with the idea of death and despair.

He defends that Baudelaire was living and defining himself through others because he was

unable to do so by himself, but I reckon we can also find a writer and a thinker in deep

introspection on the subject of life, death, and nothingness in many of his poems and

personal letters, and for whom the main purpose of the mirror was to find by himself a

meaning to his own life. Some poems are indeed psychologically astonishing (for example

“Une charogne”, [A Carcass]), and his life was undeniably marked by excess – the abuse of

laudanum, the frequent visits to prostitutes - but, as Erich Auerbach defends, “his dandyism

and his poses were merely a deformation imposed by the desperate struggle,” and that

“anyone who reads him feels after the very first lines that his aesthetic dandyism has

nothing in common with the pre-Parnassian and Parnassian aesthetes, with Gautier or

Leconte de Lisle.”11 Contrarily to Camus, Eirich Auerbach defends that Baudelaire only

assumed the role of the dandy because that was just another part of his struggle of looking

for meaning. This distinct approach to life is what helped define Baudelaire as the founder

of modern poetry. His social existence consisting in a greater part of fleeing creditors,

frequenting prostitutes, living in cheap hotel rooms and struggling to sell articles to journals,

9 Alber Camus, The Rebel. 10 Ibid. 11

Peyre, Henri (1962) Baudelaire, A Collection of Critical Essays, “The Aesthetic Dignity of Fleurs du mal”, Eirich Auerbach, p. 167. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J.


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contributed to a transformation of the idea of the poet in society. As McGowan states, he is

no longer seen as a “seer or a public spokesman, like Victor Hugo, Wordsworth, or Pope, but

a poète maudit, cursed and ostracized because of his commitment to poetry.” (The Flowers

of Evil, p. XXV) Moreover, T. S. Elliot goes so far as to describe Baudelaire as being “indeed

the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language, for his verse and language is the

nearest thing to a complete renovation that we have experienced. But his renovation of an

attitude towards life is no less radical and no less important.” (A Collection of Critical Essays,

p. 167)

l’Ennui

That distinguished new approach to life is also closely related to the fact that

Baudelaire as a poet was the personification of nothingness itself. It could be said that his

choice of embodying the figure of the decadent poet is not so much a legitimate personal

choice, but probably an inevitable consequence of his philosophical nature which was so

prone to slip into lapses of boredom, anxiety and sadness. We are constantly reminded of

his companionship with laziness and idleness, but, and as Charles du Bos also argues, the

poet could never find repose in them, because his “disposition could never bear the very

repose he longed for, whence the all-powerful nostalgia of the Fleurs du mal and its wide

archangel wings.”12 When he was only eighteen, the poet wrote to his mother:

“I am worse than I was at school. There I did little in class, but at least I did

something, and later, when I was dismissed, that shook me, and I still did a

little something for you – but now nothing, nothing at all, and it is no

pleasant indolence, nor poetic, no indeed, but sulky and silly… At school I

worked now and then, read, wept, sometimes got angry, but at least I lived.

Now not at all. As abject as can be, swarming with faults and no longer with

pleasing faults. If only at least this painful sight drove me to change violently,

but it doesn’t, and of all that spirit of activity that drove me now toward good

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Peyre, Henri (1962) Baudelaire, A Collection of Critical Essays, “Meditation on the Life of Baudelaire”, Charles du Bos, p. 41. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J.


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and now toward evil, I have nothing left, nothing but indolence, sulks and

boredom.” (A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 41)

We can see how even as a young man, Baudelaire recognized the feeling that was to take

over his life and his work. Even though he does not call it “ennui” or “spleen”, his

description of the feeling is in concordance with the definition of nothingness. The lack of

will to produce, even to live, the constant procrastination and wallowing plagued his life and

branded his Fleurs du mal with a poetic voice that is in a constant struggle. Charles du Bos

points out that “Baudelaire never begins by working; it takes the excess of his crisis to fling

him into work,” and that “no one ever listened more to the “fiend of procrastination.”13

Baudelaire nurtured this destructive relation with Les Fleurs du mal which could be taken as

an interesting metaphor for the title of the book: a plagued flower which is both his source

of inspiration and damnation. The poet even addressed himself the problem of the

procrastinator in him:

“Then add to this suffering one which you perhaps will not understand: when

a man’s nerves are harassed by anxieties and suffering, then the devil, in

spite of every resolve, slips into his head every morning in the shape of this

thought: Why not rest for one day in forgetfulness? Tonight, at one stroke, I

will do all I have to do – And then night comes, and the mind is overwhelmed

by the mass of things overdue; sadness crushes one’s strength, and on the

morrow the same comedy is played again, in good faith, with the same

confidence and the same conscience.” (A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 48)

The question “Why not rest for one day in forgetfulness?” defines the existentialist problem

as a whole, and is a question that appears as a theme in some poems in Fleurs du mal:

“C’est l’Ennui! – l’oeil chargé d’un pleur involontaire,

Il rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka.”

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Peyre, Henri (1962) Baudelaire, A Collection of Critical Essays, “Meditation on the Life of Baudelaire”, Charles du Bos, p. 48. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J.


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[He is Ennui! – with tear-filled eyes he dreams

Of scaffolds, as he puffs his water-pipe.] (The Flowers of Evil, p. 6)

Ennui is here personified as a figure smoking a hookah, which is a symbol of ease and luxury,

whilst dreaming of a stage, probably of a renowned life, but the tears in his eyes show his

regret in living a complacent life and not having the strength to change it.

We are fortunate enough to have been left with many personal letters from

Baudelaire in which he addresses his personal beliefs and what his own work meant to him.

In one particularly emotional letter to his mother, the poet explains what nothingness

(ennui) means to him:

“I have fallen into a ceaseless nervous terror, with frightful sleep, frightful

awakenings, and can do nothing. My copies lay a whole month on the table

before I found the courage to put them in envelopes… How hard it is, not to

think a book, but to write it without weariness. […] I feel an immense

discouragement, a feeling of unbearable isolation, an entire distrust of my

strength, a total lack of desires, inability to find any amusement whatsoever.

The odd success of my book and the quarrels it has stirred up interested me

for a while, and then I relapsed… I constantly ask myself, What use is this?

What use is that? This is the true spirit of spleen.”14

In this letter the fear of death is finally alluded to. Up until now I have only referred to the

idleness prompted by nothingness, but as the existentialist movement argues, ultimately,

nothingness rests on the concept of death. So much so, that Les Fleurs du mal has an entire

section consisting of six poems under the title La Mort [Death]. Idleness, anxiety, indolence,

boredom, are only secondary symptoms originating from the “original” existential dread.

Baudelaire wrote to his mother about his own experience of spleen in a way that is very

reminiscent of what Kierkegaard writes in his The Concept of Anxiety. In it, as Sorensen Roy

shows us, he claims that:

14 (Letters to His Mother, p. 150, dated December 30, 1857, six months after the Fleurs du mal were published.)”


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“nothingness wells up into our awareness through moods and emotions.

Emotions are intentional states; they are directed toward something. If

angered, I am angry at something. If amused, there is something I find

amusing. Free floating anxiety is often cited as a counterexample. But

Kierkegaard says that in this case the emotion is directed at nothingness.15 As

Sorensen Roy further explains, according to Heidegger, man “has several

motives to shy away from the significance of our emotional encounters with

nothingness. They are premonitions of the nothingness of death. They echo

the groundlessness of human existence.”16

Baudelaire and Religion

The next logical question would be directed at Baudelaire’s relation with religion. Surely the

ideas of nothingness, existential dread, and anxiety should directly clash with a religious

belief, namely Christianity. Still, Eirich Auerbach argues that we owe “the central trend” of

Les Fleurs du mal to the Christian tradition, but that the book is at the same time

fundamentally different and incompatible with that tradition. 17 According to Sartre, man

realizes the idea of nothingness within himself as soon as he realizes that there is no God to

justify our actions, but as we can see in Les Fleurs du mal, there is a constant allusion to the

concept of heaven and god, hell and the devil. So what exactly is the relation between Les

Fleurs du mal, and Christianity? Eirich Auerbach wrote a comprehensive list on this subject

which effectively solidifies the argument sought in this essay: First, what the poet in Les

Fleurs du mal is seeking isn’t grace or eternal beatitude, but nothingness, le Néant, or “a

kind of sensory fulfilment, the vision of a sterile, but sensuous artificiality. His

spiritualization of memory and his synesthetic symbolism are also sensory, and behind them

stands not any hope of redemption through God’s grace, but nothingness, the absolute

Somewhere-Else.”18 Secondly, “in any Christian interpretation of life, redemption by the

Incarnation and Passion of Christ is the cardinal point of universal history and the source of 15 Sorensen, Roy, (2012) "Nothingness", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/nothingness/>. 16 Ibid. 17 Peyre, Henri (1962) Baudelaire, A Collection of Critical Essays, “The Aesthetic Dignity of Fleurs du mal”, Eirich Auerbach, p. 167. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 18

Ibid.


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all hope.”19 But we do not really see the appearance of Christ in Les Fleurs du mal, excepting

the poem “Le Reniement de Saint-Pierre” [St Peter’s Denial], where he is in disagreement

with God. Thirdly, there is a distinct difference on what the corruption of the flesh means

within Les Fleurs du mal and Christianity. In Les Fleurs du mal, the condemnation of desire is

often one directed at what is physically corrupt or misshapen, and the enjoyment of young

and healthy flesh is never taken as a sin. Also, “the poet of Les Fleurs du mal knows youth,

vitality, health, only as objects of yearning and admiration – or else malignant envy.

Sometimes he wants to destroy them, but in the main he tends to spiritualize, admire, and

worship them.”20 Lastly, Auerbach concludes that “in Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire is not

striving for humility, but for pride. To be sure, he degrades himself and all earthly life, but in

the midst of his degradation he does his best to sustain his pride.”21 James McGowan

further extends these points, writing that “Baudelaire explained in a note that, like an actor,

he was simply taking on the role of spiritual rebel in order to depict this reprehensible and

blasphemous attitude in the poems of the ‘Revolt’ section of the Flowers.” (The Flowers of

Evil, p. 376)

Fleurs du mal is undeniably filled with spirituality, but it is a spirituality that is more

concerned with existentialist issues rather than faith. Nevertheless, even in his personal life

Baudelaire couldn’t remove himself from the influence that Christianity exerted over

society, and we find him praying even when in disbelief:

“In this horrible state of mind, helpless and desperate, I was again tempted

by suicide (I can tell you now that it has passed) and at all hours of the day

this temptation dogged me. That way absolute escape seemed to lie, escape

from everything. This lasted three months, and at the same time, by a

contradiction that only seems strange, I was praying constantly (to whom, to

what definite being, I absolutely do not know)… And God, you will say. I long

with all my heart (and with that sincerity only I can know) to believe that

19 Ibid. 20

Ibid. 21

Ibid.


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someone, invisible and outside me, takes an interest in my fate; but what to

do to believe this?”22

We can sense his anguish in this letter to his mother. Assailed by nothingness, a despair

nurtured by existential dread, Baudelaire turns to prayer seeking for solace. This letter

perfectly illustrates how Sartre’s theory of Existentialism can indeed materialize itself in

man. Baudelaire wishes “with all his heart” that there is indeed something as opposed to

nothing, but he cannot find it in himself the faith to believe. However, Charles du Bos also

argues that loss of faith can in some cases deepen the original belief, since that loss is not

always accompanied by the loss of conviction of sin, which, without its antidote of belief,

and above all, Christian exercise, will consume the soul.23

Baudelaire was a poet torn between the will to believe and an inescapable ennui

that overwhelms any Christian doctrine. In Mon cœur mis à nu [My hear laid bare],

Baudelaire’s personal journal, he summarizes this dualism and writes: “When a child, I felt in

my heart two contradictory feelings: the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.”24In the end,

we can really only say that Baudelaire possessed a great religious sensibility, but probably

due to his philosophical nature – he once wrote to his editor: “Philosophy is everything”25 -

he seemed to be devoid of the faith necessary to accept it without questioning.

Au lecteur [To the Reader]

The first poem in Les Fleurs du mal, “Au lecteur” [To the Reader] is, as the title

suggests, a poem addressed directly to its reader. It serves as a prologue where the poet

states his fundamental views on life and gives us a glimpse of some of the principal themes

that are to come. It is a poem about the sins and vices of humankind:

“Nos péchés sont têtus, nos repentirs sont lâches;

Nous nous faisons payer grassement nos aveux,

22 Peyre, Henri (1962) Baudelaire, A Collection of Critical Essays, “Meditation on the Life of Baudelaire”, Charles du Bos, p. 53. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 23 Id. Libid. 24 Ibid. 25

Peyre, Henri (1962) Baudelaire, A Collection of Critical Essays, “Introduction”, p. 4. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J.


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Et nous rentrons gaiement dans le chemin bourbeux,

Croyant par de vils pleurs laver toutes nos taches.

Sur l'oreiller du mal c'est Satan Trismégiste

Qui berce longuement notre esprit enchanté,

Et le riche métal de notre volonté

Est tout vaporisé par ce savant chimiste.”

[Our sins are stubborn, our contrition lax;

We offer lavishly our vows of faith

And turn back gladly to the path of filth,

Thinking mean tears will wash away our stains.

On evil’s pillow lies the alchemist

Satan Thrice-Great, who lulls our captive souls,

And all the richest metal of our will

Is vaporized by his hermetic arts.]26

In the first stanza, Baudelaire effectively sums up the human correlation with sin. It unmasks

the hypocritical state of the human faith, which is justified through the existence of a Devil

who appears on the next stanza, makes sin and vice seductive, and is the one responsible

for the sinful state of the human kind. That second stanza masterfully evocates a soothing

and indulging atmosphere, emulating the Devil who lulls the reader onto a false sense of

security, only to afterwards show us how man can easily be extinguished. Martin Turnell

acutely writes that “the hiss of the s’s makes us feel hat not merely will, but the whole man

is disintegrating in a wisp of steam.”27 The poem continues to blame the Devil for the

passion humans find in the most repugnant objects, and how we get closer to Hell by

unrelentingly seeking those passions. In the eight verse there is a catalogue of monsters

which, as Martin Turnell argues, are in a number that “can hardly be fortuitous,” either

26 Baudelaire, Charles (1993), The Flowers of Evil, “Au lecteur”. Trans. James McGowan, Oxford, Oxford University Press. p. 5 27

Turnell, Martin (1953), Baudelaire, A Study of his Poetry, London, Hamish Hamilton. p. 98


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representing the Seven Deadly Sins or, “as one writer suggests, seven of the meaner sins

which to Baudelaire seemed no less deadly.”28 In the end, despite all those creatures in their

“la ménagerie infâme de nos vices” [The infamous menagerie of vice,]29 there is one

creature who is the most foul and false – ennui.

“II en est un plus laid, plus méchant, plus immonde!

Quoiqu'il ne pousse ni grands gestes ni grands cris,

Il ferait volontiers de la terre un débris

Et dans un bâillement avalerait le monde;

C'est l'Ennui! L'oeil chargé d'un pleur involontaire,

II rêve d'échafauds en fumant son houka.

Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,

— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!”

[One creature only is most foul and false!

Though making no grand gestures, nor great cries,

He willingly would devastate the earth

And in one yawning swallow all the world;

He is Ennui! – with tear-filled eye he dreams

Of scaffolds, as he puffs his water-pipe.

Reader, you know this dainty monster too;

- Hypocrite reader, - fellowman, - my twin!] (The Flowers of Evil, p. 7)

These two stanzas show how l’Ennui, one of the many faces of nothingness, is constituted as

probably the main theme in Les Fleurs du mal. It is the one thing capable of taking over the

world. As I have written before, ennui is here embodied by a figure smoking its water-pipe

and dreaming of greatness. It could be argued that Baudelaire, who was so deeply absorbed

28 Id. Libid. 29

Baudelaire, Charles (1993), The Flowers of Evil, “Au lecteur”. Trans. James McGowan, Oxford, Oxford University Press. p. 6


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in his own nothingness, was trying to exteriorize his infirmity and show us – the reader –

that we too are affected by what is so deeply affecting him. Turnell argues that the poet is

“trying to break down our complacency, to shock us out of our convention habits, and make

us admit that we are fellow-sufferers so that we shall be ‘on his side’ in the next phase of

the attack,” (A Study of his Poetry, p. 100) but I feel that more than trying to empathize with

the reader, Baudelaire is establishing nothingness as a condition which inevitably also

affects his reader, thus, all humankind.

Spleen et idéal

We are next introduced to the “Spleen et idéal” [Spleen and the Ideal] section of Les

Fleurs du mal. It is the first and longest chapter of the book, and as suggested by the title,

comprises a set of poems which illustrate a duality within the modern man. In a review of

Asselineau’s La Double vie, Baudelaire asked: “Who among us is not a homo duplex? I mean

those whose minds have since infancy been touched with pensiveness; always double,

action and intention, dream and reality; one always harming the other, one usurping the

part of the other.” (A Study of his Poetry, p. 101) We can see how Fleurs du mal achieves the

status of being an idiosyncratic autobiography of not only Baudelaire himself, but also of the

modern man, who is so inescapably torn between ‘action and intention, dream and reality.’

I have written in the introduction that the words “spleen” and “ennui” are used throughout

Fleurs du mal as synonym terms, even more so in this first section of the book. But as

Turnell points out, “spleen seems to be a physical and ennui a moral malady.” (A Study of his

Poetry, p. 95) This polarity is obviously greyed out by the fact that a physical malady is often

manifested through its moral implications, even more so when ennui is the “sickness”.

In this section, Baudelaire fully explores what are the implications of this malady,

and also attempts to find what are the existing remedies that can protect us from it. There is

a constant tension between several dualistic conflicting impulses. At one point, “the poet is

reaching-out to something beyond the present horror, which may be called ‘God’ or

‘spirituality’ or the ‘Ideal’” (A Study of his Poetry, p. 102), but on the other hand, he is

constantly battling against the sensation of being “continually sucked back into it by spleen,

ennui, or animalité.” (A Study of his Poetry, p. 102) Baudelaire is continuously oscillating


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between two opposite ideals, but in the end, nothingness emerges victorious from that

never-ending strife.

Le Léthé, [Lethe]

The next poem to be looked at here is one which summons with true might the

obliteration of consciousness into nothingness. The title itself refers to one of the five rivers

of Hades, as described by Plato and Virgil (The Flowers of Evil, p. 360), where all who drank

from it completely forget their spiritual existence and are thus ready to be born again into

earthly bodies. The poet suggests that true forgetfulness can be achieved from within a

violent orgasm. The first two stanzas vividly evoke the feminine and masculine genitals, and

show the poet craving for a violent bodily passion: the greater the orgasm, the more

consummate the forgetfulness. It is suggested that nothingness can be temporarily avoided

by plunging into the instinctual life:

“Je veux dormir! dormir plutôt que vivre!

Dans un sommeil aussi doux que la mort,

J'étalerai mes baisers sans remords

Sur ton beau corps poli comme le cuivre.

Pour engloutir mes sanglots apaisés

Rien ne me vaut l'abîme de ta couche;

L'oubli puissant habite sur ta bouche,

Et le Léthé coule dans tes baisers.”

[I want to sleep! To sleep and not to live!

And in a sleep as sweet as death, to dream

Of spreading out my kisses without shame

On your smooth body, bright with copper sheen.

If I would swallow down my softened sobs

It must be in your bed’s profound abyss –


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Forgetfulness is moistening your breath,

Lethe itself runs smoothly in your kiss.] (The Flowers of Evil, p. 67)

The poet wishes for a double state of forgetfulness, to not sleep, and in that sleeplessness

to not be alive. But within that doubled state of nothingness, he dreams of kissing without

shame, so what in fact is strived for here is a total abandonment of rationality and self. He

longs to wallow in primal sexual instincts and find some kind of peace through them. It is

interesting to see how the word “abîme” [abyss] is here used as a place of refuge, seeing

that it appears in other poems as a symbol of negation and frustration. In the final stanza,

Baudelaire accentuates that it is nothing but carnal satisfaction that can be looked for:

“Je sucerai, pour noyer ma rancoeur,

Le népenthès et la bonne ciguë

Aux bouts charmants de cette gorge aiguë

Qui n'a jamais emprisonné de coeur.”

[My lips will suck the cure for bitterness:

Oblivion, nepenthe has its start

In the bewitching teats of those hard breasts,

That never have been harbour of a heart.]

Nothing but nepenthe, “a legendary drug to bring oblivion as a remedy for grief” (The

Flowers of Evil, p. 360) can be withdrawn from the oblivion which he compares to a woman.

“Spleen (IV)”

Afterwards, looking at the poem “Spleen – Quand le ciel bas et lourd…”, which is the final

part of a series of four poems under the same name, it can be seen as a resolution of that

small cycle. The first Spleen shows how the poet constructs a mood of loneliness which rises

from a disappointed love; the second describes how past emotions are dragged onto the

present and show the poet trapped under their weight; the third talks about the conflicting

feelings of richness and sterility which crystalize in the image of the prematurely aged


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monarch, and finally we get to the fourth instance of Spleen, which ends the cycle in the

darker tone of suicide:

“Quand le ciel bas et lourd pèse comme un couvercle

Sur l'esprit gémissant en proie aux longs ennuis,

Et que de l'horizon embrassant tout le cercle

II nous verse un jour noir plus triste que les nuits;

Quand la terre est changée en un cachot humide,

Où l'Espérance, comme une chauve-souris,

S'en va battant les murs de son aile timide

Et se cognant la tête à des plafonds pourris;

Quand la pluie étalant ses immenses traînées

D'une vaste prison imite les barreaux,

Et qu'un peuple muet d'infâmes araignées

Vient tendre ses filets au fond de nos cerveaux,

Des cloches tout à coup sautent avec furie

Et lancent vers le ciel un affreux hurlement,

Ainsi que des esprits errants et sans patrie

Qui se mettent à geindre opiniâtrement.

— Et de longs corbillards, sans tambours ni musique,

Défilent lentement dans mon âme; l'Espoir,

Vaincu, pleure, et l'Angoisse atroce, despotique,

Sur mon crâne incliné plante son drapeau noir.”

[When low and heavy sky weighs like a lid

Upon the spirit moaning in ennui,

And when, spanning the circle of the world,

It pours a black day sadder than our nights;

When earth is changed into a sweaty cell,


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In which Hope, capture, like a frantic bat,

Batters the wals with her enfeebled wing,

Striking her head against the rotting beams;

When the steady rain trailing its giant train

Descends on us like heavy prison bars,

And when a silent multitude of spiders

Spins its disgusting threads deep in our brains,

Bells all at once jump out with all their force,

And hurl about a mad cacophony

As if they were those lost and homeless souls

Who send a dogged whining to the skies.

- And long cortèges minus drum or tone

Deploy morosely through my being: Hope

The conquered, moans, and tyrant Anguish gloats –

In my bowed skull he fixed his black flag.] (The Flowers of Evil, p. 149 & 151)

It is a poem possessing an antithesis between symbolism and realism, and a contradiction

between its exalted tone and the undignified nature of the subject there handled. As

Auerbach states, “the alexandrine meter makes it clear that this is a serious poem, to be

spoken slowly and gravely”30, and the repetition of the word “quand” [when] in the first

three stanzas establishes a solemn rhythm which unfolds in the last two stanzas. The

recurrence of allegorical figures written in capital letters, Esperérance [hope], Espoir [hope],

and Agoisse [Anguish], and the “syntactical unity and rhetorical figures in the classical style

combine to lend the poem an atmosphere of somber sublimity, which is perfectly consonant

with the deep despair it expresses.”31 The physical spaces here described are all figures

symbolizing a dull, deepening and inescapable despair. They evoke metaphors which are

almost threatening: In the first stanza, a low and heavy sky is described, so heavy in fact that

30

Ibid. p. 5 31

Ibid. p.5


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it resembles a lid “Upon the spirit moaning in ennui.” The sky itself assumes the form of the

lid to a coffin to those who are laden with ennui, and who is he that who is able to escape

the sky? The second stanza summons an earthly cell, maybe covered by the lid described in

the first stanza, and probably incarcerated by the rain which “Descends on us like heavy

prison bars,” described in the third stanza, which also conjures “a silent multitude of

spiders” which “Spins its disgusting threads deep in our brains.” Escape is impossible

because every hypothetical exit is barred, both physically and psychologically. Even Hope,

embodied by the captured frantic bat has no means of escaping. In this way the repetition

of “quand” starts to lose its temporal meaning and becomes more and more the

overshadowing state that will forever hunt us. Auerbach writes that hopeless horror does

have its traditional place in literature, that it even achieves a special form of the sublime

and can lay claim to the highest dignity – as we can find in Dante, for example.32 But in

“Spleen (IV)”, the evocation of images such as the lid of the coffin in the first stanza is

incompatible with the dignity of the sublime. Even the image of spiders in the brain which is

unrealistic and symbolic is denying the poet the inward dignity of using words such as âme

or pensée, for the despairing poet’s head is occupied by spiders.33 Afterwards, in the fourth

stanza, we suddenly hear the bells furiously clanging in a “mad cacophony” and completely

disrupting the solemnity previously installed. It comes as a shock and hits the reader with an

almost tangible force; it is a combination that offends against any customary notion of

dignity and sublime. It evokes a multiplicity of images which further contribute to ascertain

the grandiosity of nothingness, like the last cry of the desperate soul who is “lost and

homeless”, the last cry before it is finally conquered once and for all eternity, as we are

shown at the end of the poem. The next and final stanza suddenly imposes back the

sepulchral silence achieved in the first three stanzas, and it is ingeniously juxtaposed against

the near deafening sounds of the previous one. We are again thrown into a perpetually

silent procession of the only possible victor: Anguish. The only thing that remains of the

poet is a bowed skull impaled by a black flag. Everything is lost, the poet has no dignity, no

hope, no God, and all is Dread. Eric Auerbach exposes his own views on the poem and

discusses its antithesis between symbolism and realism. It is obvious enough that it is not

the poet’s aim to give a realistic description of elements such as rain, bats and spiders, the

32

Ibid. p. 5 33

Ibid. p. 5


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ringing of bells, the procession, and a bowed human skull. These are all elements that

contribute to inventing a world of despair. He even argues that “the data are of so little

importance that the symbols can be changed without loss; Hope first appears as a bat, but

the end, where she weeps in defeat, suggests the image of an infant or child, certainly not a

bat.”34 Through this scope, “Spleen (IV)” can hardly be called realistic, if by realism it is

meant an attempt at reproducing outward reality. Auerbach continues:

“But since in the nineteenth century the word “realism” was associated

chiefly with the crass representation of ugly, sordid, and horrifying aspects of

life; since this was what constituted the novelty and significance of realism,

the word was applicable to ugly, gruesome images, regardless of whether

they were intended as concrete description or as symbolic metaphors. What

matters was the vividness of the evocation, and in this respect Baudelaire’s

poem is extremely realistic”35

Ultimately, this poem’s value resides on the fact that it can effectively evoke the feeling of

inescapable despair which seemed to have tormented Baudelaire himself throughout his

whole life. I believe this is the poem where the reader can get the closest to understanding,

even if only a little, what the poet may have felt. It is a climax in itself within Les Fleurs du

mal which distinctly demonstrates the burden of nothingness.

Conclusion

In the end, there are no easy abstractions to be made about a poet who expressed

himself so intensely and thought so profoundly. All the themes dear to Baudelaire are

difficult to treat because of the way in which he lived them, always in such an intense way

as to take them to intellectually vertiginous heights. We as readers are fortunate enough to

have been left with the masterpiece of modern literature gathered in Les Fleurs du mal, but

it is a book which has undeniably brought great suffering to the poet’s life. What we will

34 Peyre, Henri (1962) Baudelaire, A Collection of Critical Essays, “The Aesthetic Dignity of Fleurs du mal”, Eirich Auerbach, p. 153. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 35

Ibid.


21

never know, but can educatedly guess, is if the book in the end proved to be just another

way the poet has found to deal with nothingness in his own life. That Baudelaire could

handle such and intimidating concept with such audacity but also so poetically shows how

devoted he was to exteriorizing his own grief. But also reveals his commitment as an artist,

since he also worked tirelessly on Fleurs du mal even for years after it was published. These

are poems that handle the human condition which is always so vulnerable to feelings of

anxiety and despair, to nothingness. Ultimately, they demonstrate how nothingness is a

condition the human being is born with. Baudelaire was able to effectively deconstruct the

human nature and reveal it under a new and shocking modern light that is both rich and

beautiful. And luckily, Baudelaire has also left us with many a poem which can certainly help

in dealing with the disconcerting nothingness he has so vividly evoked: “Il faut être toujours

ivre. Tout est là: c'est l'unique question. Pour ne pas sentir l'horrible fardeau du Temps qui

brise vos épaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous enivrer sans trêve. Mais de quoi?

De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise. Mais enivrez-vous.”

[Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel

the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be

drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.

But be drunken.]36

36 Baudelaire, Charles (1864), Paris Spleen, Arthur Symons (1865-1945) translation, as

quoted by Eugene O’Neill in Long Day’s Journey into Night.


22

Bibliography

Baudelaire, Charles (1993), The Flowers of Evil, Trans. James McGowan, Oxford, Oxford

University Press.

Crowell, Steven, (2010) "Existentialism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/existentialism/>.

Flynn, Thomas (2013), Edition "Jean-Paul Sartre", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =

<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/sartre/>.

McDonald, William, (2012) "Søren Kierkegaard", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/kierkegaard/>.

Peyre, Henri (1962) Baudelaire, A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood

Cliffs, N.J.

Sartre, Paul, “Existentialism is a Humanism”, translated by Adam Norman. Available at:

http://archive.org/details/ExistentialismIsAHumanism

Turnell, Martin (1953), Baudelaire, A Study of his Poetry, London, Hamish Hamilton.

http://archive.org/details/ExistentialismIsAHumanism


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Pensum List

Total number of pages: 1224

Baudelaire, Charles (1993), The Flowers of Evil, Trans. James McGowan, Oxford, Oxford

University Press. 370 Pages.

Crowell, Steven, (2010) "Existentialism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/existentialism/>. 28 Pages.

Flynn, Thomas (2013), Edition "Jean-Paul Sartre", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =

<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/sartre/>. 17 Pages.

Hiddleston, J. A. (1999), Baudelaire and the Art of Memory, Oxford, Clarendon Press. 288

Pages.

McDonald, William, (2012) "Søren Kierkegaard", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/kierkegaard/>. 15 Pages.

Peyre, Henri (1962) Baudelaire, A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood

Cliffs, N.J. 177 Pages.

Sartre, Paul, “Existentialism is a Humanism”, translated by Adam Norman. Available at:

http://archive.org/details/ExistentialismIsAHumanism 24 Pages.

Turnell, Martin (1953), Baudelaire, A Study of his Poetry, London, Hamish Hamilton. 305

Pages.

Ennui, Spleen, And Nothingness – A Concise Look Into Baudelaire's The Flowers Of Evil

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