Le Baton ivre

[Dave Monroe]

>From Lawrence Kramer, After the Lovedeath: Sexual Violence and teh
Making of Culture (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997), "Le Baton ivre,"
pp. 61-4:

Probably the most phallic of objects, so common as to be almost
invisible, is a stick: any of teh myriad forms of stick--ruler, scepter,
pointer, switch, wand, thyrsus, staff--that simultaneously serves a
practical function and makes a symbolic statement.  Call the general
form of this stick the rod: at once the traditional symbol of authority,
discipline, and punishment, and a simple tool for measuring, pointing,
upholding, divining, and beating.  (61)

The rod is the familiar appendage of the master, who alone is entitled
to bear and to wield it.  It embodies the coalescence of virility,
truth, and violence, as Hector Berlioz once recognized by metaphorically
idnetifying the symphony conductor's baton with both a tomahawk and, by
double entendre, the penis.  A woman who picks up the rod is taken for
ridiculous or dangerous.  The sorcerer's apprentice of legend is harried
by a pestle (not the pedestrian broom of later versions) theat he is
helpless to control.  The shrew threatens with a raised index finger,
teh dominatrix with the butt end of a whip. (61)

The rod is also the implicit referent of a typographical mark known
technically as the virgule, a term deriving from the Latin virgula,
which means "little rod."  Also known by the ominous name of the slash,
the virgule is the mark that articulates polarities: either/or,
true/false, masculine/feminine.  (62)

Yet even the rod is subject to gender synergy.  In "The Thyrsus," a
prose poem celbrating the jusic of Liszt, Baudelaire interprets teh
archaic symbol of the thyrsus as teh wmbodiment of enius.  He explainds
that the thyrsus is a simple rod or stick, which is adorned with a
garland of flowers.  In essence it is a virile form.  When he describes
the thyrsus in detail, however, the floral adornments prove to be just
as essential as the rod.  They are not really adornments at all, but
essential feminine forms taht must be present in order for the masculine
to show itself.  (62)

[and here he quotes Baudelaire's prose poem:]

The rod is your will, steady, straight, and firm, and the folwers, teh
wanderings of your will, the feminine element executing its bewitching
pirouettes around teh male.  Straight line and arabesque ... [ellipsis
in Kramer's text] all-powerful and indivisible amalgam of genius, what
analyst would have the detetable courage to divide and separate you?
(62)

[by teh way, Mary Ann Caws has a nice discussion of rococo painting, as
I recall, in terms of the "line and arabesque," see her The Eye in the
Text: Essays on Perception, Mannerist to Modern.  And now back to Kramer
...]

To some degree, this passage trades on a nineteenth-century cliche that
defines teh genius as a man whose rich humanity embraces a feminine
aspect.  There is no parallel category for women.  But the a passage
also disrupts this cliche; written in praise of intoxication, it is
intoxicated by gender delirium.  (63)

To begin with, teh "feminine element" does not subordinate itself to the
masculine rod, but instead initiates a wandering and dancing movement
taht has no clear boundaries.  This "arabesque" movement takes the rod
as a center, but not necessarily as a rule or curb.  (63)

Perhaps the most hopeful thing about this passage is the way its routine
polarization of the phallus and the flower gradually truns into
something else entirely, something dizzy and unexpected. (63)

... and so on, in either directon.  Now, first off, "my" French isn't
all too much "mine," but, from what I can tell, "le baton ivre" is "the
drunken baton."  Seems that "le bateau ivre"--"the drunken boat" (The
Ship of Fools?)--is an idiom of some sort as well, that "ivre" is
involved in all sorts of interesting phrases ...

I at first read "le baton ivre," in a moment of wishful thinking, as "le
baton ivoire" (?), "the ivory baton," but, hey, it IS rather conjured
there, no(n)?  "Ivre" as a (near) homophone, a cognate (?) of "ivoire,"
"ivory"?  Hm ...

But am also interested, obviously, in that virgule, that slash factor
there.  Not SO much in the gender issues, but, certainly, in those
notion of "line/arabesque," "genius," and so forth.  But try
substituing, say, organic/inorganic, (hu)man/machine, and so forth for
masculine/feminine, at first approximation ...

Forgot to haul along Heinrich von Kleist's "On the Marionette Theater,"
conveniently next to an "impressionistic survey of the golden age of
automata" (Jean-Claude Beaune) in Michel Feher, et al., Fragments for a
History of the Human Body, Vol. 1 (New York: Zone, 1989), but do see on
such notions as "gravity" and "grace."   Will post some excerpts when I
can ...