Miller Frank, The Mechanical Song (Baudelaire)

[Dave Monroe]

... okay, I see what I'm doing now.  Clicking on "send" out of habit
before shutting down.  Hence yet another incomplete post, but ...

Anyway, to continue, from p. 128, from Felicia Miller Frank, The
Mechanical Song: Women, Voice, and the Artificial in Nineteenth-Century
French Narrative (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995), Chapter 5,
"Baudelaire and the Painted Woman," pp. 118-119, on that nexus of the
feminine, the artificial, and modernity, with an eye towards the
resonance, possible influence of Baudelaire's The Painter of Modern Life
with/on V. (the book, the figure ...):

For Baudelaire, then, the woman is at her best by making herself appear
"supernatural" ....  In this way, Baudelair puts a spin not only on teh
discourse of art and representation ... (by promoting art as artifice
against art as truthful representation) but on Christian values as
well.  Recall ... [Joseph] de Maistre [who] states that the gospel
exalts woman ... to a "supernatural" state by raising her from her
fallen nature.  Baudelaire follows de Maistre in accepting woman as
carrying forward Eve's original sin but rewrites him by propsoing taht
what raises woman to a supernatural state is her ability to transform
her appearance through the illusory magis of dress and makeup.  She
rises above nature by looking unnatural.  Clearly one can correlate this
somewhat revisionist version of Christian doctrine (of the redemption of
Eve's fallen nature through teh arts of Jezebel) with teh image of
Villiers's future Eve, the ideal supernatural woman, fabricated by a
scientific wizard and makeup artist supreme. (128)

[There's a nice chapter on "Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of
Fascism" in Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (New York:
Knopf, 1991).  Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's L'Eve future, pub. 1886, is
the--fictional--story of a female automata, Hadaly, invented by a (still
living!) Thomas Edison.  The English trans., Tomorrow's Eve, from teh U
of Illinois Press, is now out of print, but it's currently included
under the title The Future Eve in Zone Books' The Decadent Reader.  Much
critical literature thereupon, but I'll get to that when Miller Frank
does in her next chapter ...]

In Baudelaire's very particular lexicon, the notion of the supernatural
associates the spiritual not only with the artificial, with art in the
broad sense, but with modernity as well. (128-9)

... the artist as a man of the crow, who becomes drunk from his contact
with "the fascinating union of the strange and the real" at the heart of
the most mundane modernity.  (129)

[Henri] Lemaitre contnues, "For Baudelaire's modernity is poetic only
because curisoty 'spiritualizes' itself as passion and fascination:
through the multiple play of fgascination, modernity--far from
contradicting it--becomes merged with supernaturalism." (129)

[Henri Lemaitre, "Modernite et surnaturalisme," from "his introduction
to the Garnier Freres edition of the Spleen de Paris," apparently
(ibid.) ...]

Jean-Paul Sartre proposes as the source of Baudelaire's spiritualistic
antinaturalism--of such decisive influence on the symbolists and
decadents, as well as on Villiers--not the Christian writings of Joseph
de Maistre but the influence of the utopian Saint-Simonian movement
....  He points out the invention of the expression "anti-nature" by
Comte and the incidence of the term antiphysis in the Marx-Engels
correspondence.  Thus, while thier systems may have differed, both
looked to a similar ideal: the creation of a human order that would
correct the blind forces and ills endemic to the natural order ... (129)

[... reminds me, the recent mention of synaesthesia, Joris-Karl
Huysman's A rebours, "Against Nature" in some translations.  For Sartre,
see his Baudelaire, apparently.  And note that this "anti-nature"
resonates with Dwight Eddins' characterization of gnosticism in his The
Gnostic Pynchon as well ...]

... it is undeniable that Baudelaire too felt the disturbing and
transforming groundswell of change created in teh wake of the Industrial
Revolution and that he expressed its influence in his own fashion. (130)

For Baudelaire, an important element of modernist decor was feminine
beauty enhanced by artifice.... In fact, he prefers the woman to look as
unreal as possible.  (130)

... anyone can see that the use of rice-powder ... create[s] and
abstract unity in the colour and texture of the skin, a unity, which
.... immediately approximates the human being to the statue, that is to
something superior and divine.  ([Baudelaire,] Painter, 33) (130)

[... recall Michael Berube, in Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers, on
Pynchon's "pornographies" as, perhaps, "abstract unities" ...]

The appeal Baudelaire affirms in the "abstract unity" that makes a woman
appear like a statue is charactersitic of his predilection for the cold,
teh barren, the artificial in all realms.  Sartre points out
Baudelaire's frequent recourse to "hard, sterile forms of minerals" in
his poetry, his preference for the metallic: "For him metal and, in a
general way, minerals reflecte the image of the mind.... Thus
Baudelaire's horror of life led him to choose materialization in its
purest form as a symbol of the immaterial" (Sartre, [Baudelaire,] 105)
(131)

Associated with Baudelaire's affinity for the inorganic is his
preferenjce for cold or unconscious women, what Sartre calls
Baudelaire's projection of frigidity into the other ....  Sartre notes
his dream of the "frigid angel" evoked in the poem "Une nuit que j'etais
pres d'une affreuse Juive." (131)

Baudelaire's preference for icy indifference in women does not stop
short of necrophilia ... (132)

The icy absence of teh statue or dad woman is realted to Baudelaire's
project of dandyism (a dandy is, after all, chilled out, a cool guy) and
evokes the atmosphere of stasis and death toward which it tends ...
(132)

... "Keep cool, but care" ... hm ... Terrence? ... anyway, after this,
Miller Frank takes up more generally automata, the feminine,
Cartesianism and Romanticism, and then more specifically Villiers' L'Eve
future, so I'll save that for a future eve as well, hopefully, this
eve(ning) ...