modernism

Michel Foucault. What is Enlightenment ?
"What is Enlightenment ?" ("Qu'est-ce que les Lumières ?"), in Rabinow (P.), éd., The Foucault Reader, New York, Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 32-50.
Today when a periodical asks its readers a question, it does so in order to collect opinions on some subject about which everyone has an opinion already; there is not much likelihood of learning anything new. In the eighteenth century, editors preferred to question the public on problems that did not yet have solutions. I don't know whether or not that practice was more effective; it was unquestionably more entertaining.
In any event, in line with this custom, in November 1784 a German periodical, Berlinische Monatschrift published a response to the question: Was ist Aufklärung ? And the respondent was Kant.
A minor text, perhaps. But it seems to me that it marks the discreet entrance into the history of thought of a question that modern philosophy has not been capable of answering, but that it has never managed to get rid of, either. And one that has been repeated in various forms for two centuries now. From Hegel through Nietzsche or Max Weber to Horkheimer or Habermas, hardly any philosophy has failed to confront this same question, directly or indirectly. What, then, is this event that is called the Aufklärung and that has determined, at least in part, what we are, what we think, and what we do today ? Let us imagine that the Berlinische Monatschrift still exists and that it is asking its readers the question: What is modern philosophy ? Perhaps we could respond with an echo: modern philosophy is the philosophy that is attempting to answer the question raised so imprudently two centuries ago: Was ist Aufklärung ?
Let us linger a few moments over Kant's text. It merits attention for several reasons.
1. To this same question, Moses Mendelssohn had also replied in the same journal, just two months earlier. But Kant had not seen Mendelssohn's text when he wrote his. To be sure, the encounter of the German philosophical movement with the new development of Jewish culture does not date from this precise moment. Mendelssohn had been at that crossroads for thirty years or so, in company with Lessing. But up to this point it had been a matter of making a place for Jewish culture within German thought -- which Lessing had tried to do in Die Juden -- or else of identifying problems common to Jewish thought and to German philosophy; this is what Mendelssohn had done in his Phadon; oder, Über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele. With the two texts published in the Berlinische Monatschrift the German Aufklärung and the Jewish Haskala recognize that they belong to the same history; they are seeking to identify the common processes from which they stem. And it is perhaps a way of announcing the acceptance of a common destiny -- we now know to what drama that was to lead.
2. But there is more. In itself and within the Christian tradition, Kant's text poses a new problem.
It was certainly not the first time that philosophical thought had sought to reflect on its own present. But, speaking schematically, we may say that this reflection had until then taken three main forms.
o The present may be represented as belonging to a certain era of the world, distinct from the others through some inherent characteristics, or separated from the others by some dramatic event. Thus, in Plato's Statesman the interlocutors recognize that they belong to one of those revolutions of the world in which the world is turning backwards, with all the negative consequences that may ensue.
o The present may be interrogated in an attempt to decipher in it the heralding signs of a forthcoming event. Here we have the principle of a kind of historical hermeneutics of which Augustine might provide an example.
o The present may also be analyzed as a point of transition toward the dawning of a new world. That is what Vico describes in the last chapter of La Scienza Nuova; what he sees 'today' is 'a complete humanity ... spread abroad through all nations, for a few great monarchs rule over this world of peoples'; it is also 'Europe ... radiant with such humanity that it abounds in all the good things that make for the happiness of human life.' [1]
Now the way Kant poses the question of Aufklärung is entirely different: it is neither a world era to which one belongs, nor an event whose signs are perceived, nor the dawning of an accomplishment. Kant defines Aufklärung in an almost entirely negative way, as an Ausgang, an 'exit,' a 'way out.' In his other texts on history, Kant occasionally raises questions of origin or defines the internal teleology of a historical process. In the text on Aufklärung, he deals with the question of contemporary reality alone. He is not seeking to understand the present on the basis of a totality or of a future achievement. He is looking for a difference: What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday ?
3. I shall not go into detail here concerning this text, which is not always very clear despite its brevity. I should simply like to point out three or four features that seem to me important if we are to understand how Kant raised the philosophical question of the present day.
Kant indicates right away that the 'way out' that characterizes Enlightenment is a process that releases us from the status of 'immaturity.' And by 'immaturity,' he means a certain state of our will that makes us accept someone else's authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for. Kant gives three examples: we are in a state of 'immaturity' when a book takes the place of our understanding, when a spiritual director takes the place of our conscience, when a doctor decides for us what our diet is to be. (Let us note in passing that the register of these three critiques is easy to recognize, even though the text does not make it explicit.) In any case, Enlightenment is defined by a modification of the preexisting relation linking will, authority, and the use of reason.
We must also note that this way out is presented by Kant in a rather ambiguous manner. He characterizes it as a phenomenon, an ongoing process; but he also presents it as a task and an obligation. From the very first paragraph, he notes that man himself is responsible for his immature status. Thus it has to be supposed that he will be able to escape from it only by a change that he himself will bring about in himself. Significantly, Kant says that this Enlightenment has a Wahlspruch: now a Wahlspruch is a heraldic device, that is, a distinctive feature by which one can be recognized, and it is also a motto, an instruction that one gives oneself and proposes to others. What, then, is this instruction ? Aude sapere: 'dare to know,' 'have the courage, the audacity, to know.' Thus Enlightenment must be considered both as a process in which men participate collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished personally. Men are at once elements and agents of a single process. They may be actors in the process to the extent that they participate in it; and the process occurs to the extent that men decide to be its voluntary actors.
A third difficulty appears here in Kant's text in his use of the word "mankind", Menschheit. The importance of this word in the Kantian conception of history is well known. Are we to understand that the entire human race is caught up in the process of Enlightenment ? In that case, we must imagine Enlightenment as a historical change that affects the political and social existence of all people on the face of the earth. Or are we to understand that it involves a change affecting what constitutes the humanity of human beings ? But the question then arises of knowing what this change is. Here again, Kant's answer is not without a certain ambiguity. In any case, beneath its appearance of simplicity, it is rather complex.
Kant defines two essential conditions under which mankind can escape from its immaturity. And these two conditions are at once spiritual and institutional, ethical and political.
The first of these conditions is that the realm of obedience and the realm of the use of reason be clearly distinguished. Briefly characterizing the immature status, Kant invokes the familiar expression: 'Don't think, just follow orders'; such is, according to him, the form in which military discipline, political power, and religious authority are usually exercised. Humanity will reach maturity when it is no longer required to obey, but when men are told: 'Obey, and you will be able to reason as much as you like.' We must note that the German word used here is räsonieren; this word, which is also used in the Critiques does not refer to just any use of reason, but to a use of reason in which reason has no other end but itself: räsonieren is to reason for reasoning's sake. And Kant gives examples, these too being perfectly trivial in appearance: paying one's taxes, while being able to argue as much as one likes about the system of taxation, would be characteristic of the mature state; or again, taking responsibility for parish service, if one is a pastor, while reasoning freely about religious dogmas.
We might think that there is nothing very different here from what has been meant, since the sixteenth century, by freedom of conscience: the right to think as one pleases so long as one obeys as one must. Yet it is here that Kant brings into play another distinction, and in a rather surprising way. The distinction he introduces is between the private and public uses of reason. But he adds at once that reason must be free in its public use, and must be submissive in its private use. Which is, term for term, the opposite of what is ordinarily called freedom of conscience.
But we must be somewhat more precise. What constitutes, for Kant, this private use of reason ? In what area is it exercised ? Man, Kant says, makes a private use of reason when he is 'a cog in a machine'; that is, when he has a role to play in society and jobs to do: to be a soldier, to have taxes to pay, to be in charge of a parish, to be a civil servant, all this makes the human being a particular segment of society; he finds himself thereby placed in a circumscribed position, where he has to apply particular rules and pursue particular ends. Kant does not ask that people practice a blind and foolish obedience, but that they adapt the use they make of their reason to these determined circumstances; and reason must then be subjected to the particular ends in view. Thus there cannot be, here, any free use of reason.
On the other hand, when one is reasoning only in order to use one's reason, when one is reasoning as a reasonable being (and not as a cog in a machine), when one is reasoning as a member of reasonable humanity, then the use of reason must be free and public. Enlightenment is thus not merely the process by which individuals would see their own personal freedom of thought guaranteed. There is Enlightenment when the universal, the free, and the public uses of reason are superimposed on one another.
Now this leads us to a fourth question that must be put to Kant's text. We can readily see how the universal use of reason (apart from any private end) is the business of the subject himself as an individual; we can readily see, too, how the freedom of this use may be assured in a purely negative manner through the absence of any challenge to it; but how is a public use of that reason to be assured ? Enlightenment, as we see, must not be conceived simply as a general process affecting all humanity; it must not be conceived only as an obligation prescribed to individuals: it now appears as a political problem. The question, in any event, is that of knowing how the use of reason can take the public form that it requires, how the audacity to know can be exercised in broad daylight, while individuals are obeying as scrupulously as possible. And Kant, in conclusion, proposes to Frederick II, in scarcely veiled terms, a sort of contract -- what might be called the contract of rational despotism with free reason: the public and free use of autonomous reason will be the best guarantee of obedience, on condition, however, that the political principle that must be obeyed itself be in conformity with universal reason.
Let us leave Kant's text here. I do not by any means propose to consider it as capable of constituting an adequate description of Enlightenment; and no historian, I think, could be satisfied with it for an analysis of the social, political, and cultural transformations that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century.
Nevertheless, notwithstanding its circumstantial nature, and without intending to give it an exaggerated place in Kant's work, I believe that it is necessary to stress the connection that exists between this brief article and the three Critiques. Kant in fact describes Enlightenment as the moment when humanity is going to put its own reason to use, without subjecting itself to any authority; now it is precisely at this moment that the critique is necessary, since its role is that of defining the conditions under which the use of reason is legitimate in order to determine what can be known, what must be done, and what may be hoped. Illegitimate uses of reason are what give rise to dogmatism and heteronomy, along with illusion; on the other hand, it is when the legitimate use of reason has been clearly defined in its principles that its autonomy can be assured. The critique is, in a sense, the handbook of reason that has grown up in Enlightenment; and, conversely, the Enlightenment is the age of the critique.
It is also necessary, I think, to underline the relation between this text of Kant's and the other texts he devoted to history. These latter, for the most part, seek to define the internal teleology of time and the point toward which history of humanity is moving. Now the analysis of Enlightenment, defining this history as humanity's passage to its adult status, situates contemporary reality with respect to the overall movement and its basic directions. But at the same time, it shows how, at this very moment, each individual is responsible in a certain way for that overall process.
The hypothesis I should like to propose is that this little text is located in a sense at the crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history. It is a reflection by Kant on the contemporary status of his own enterprise. No doubt it is not the first time that a philosopher has given his reasons for undertaking his work at a particular moment. But it seems to me that it is the first time that a philosopher has connected in this way, closely and from the inside, the significance of his work with respect to knowledge, a reflection on history and a particular analysis of the specific moment at which he is writing and because of which he is writing. It is in the reflection on 'today' as difference in history and as motive for a particular philosophical task that the novelty of this text appears to me to lie.
And, by looking at it in this way, it seems to me we may recognize a point of departure: the outline of what one might call the attitude of modernity.
I know that modernity is often spoken of as an epoch, or at least as a set of features characteristic of an epoch; situated on a calendar, it would be preceded by a more or less naive or archaic premodernity, and followed by an enigmatic and troubling 'postmodernity.' And then we find ourselves asking whether modernity constitutes the sequel to the Enlightenment and its development, or whether we are to see it as a rupture or a deviation with respect to the basic principles of the 18th century.
Thinking back on Kant's text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a period of history. And by 'attitude,' I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos. And consequently, rather than seeking to distinguish the 'modern era' from the 'premodern' or 'postmodern,' I think it would be more useful to try to find out how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found itself struggling with attitudes of 'countermodernity.'
To characterize briefly this attitude of modernity, I shall take an almost indispensable example, namely, Baudelaire; for his consciousness of modernity is widely recognized as one of the most acute in the nineteenth century.
1. Modernity is often characterized in terms of consciousness of the discontinuity of time: a break with tradition, a feeling of novelty, of vertigo in the face of the passing moment. And this is indeed what Baudelaire seems to be saying when he defines modernity as 'the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent.' [2] But, for him, being modern does not lie in recognizing and accepting this perpetual movement; on the contrary, it lies in adopting a certain attitude with respect to this movement; and this deliberate, difficult attitude consists in recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it. Modernity is distinct from fashion, which does no more than call into question the course of time; modernity is the attitude that makes it possible to grasp the 'heroic' aspect of the present moment. Modernity is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the will to 'heroize' the present .
I shall restrict myself to what Baudelaire says about the painting of his contemporaries. Baudelaire makes fun of those painters who, finding nineteenth-century dress excessively ugly, want to depict nothing but ancient togas. But modernity in painting does not consist, for Baudelaire, in introducing black clothing onto the canvas. The modern painter is the one who can show the dark frock-coat as 'the necessary costume of our time,' the one who knows how to make manifest, in the fashion of the day, the essential, permanent, obsessive relation that our age entertains with death. 'The dress-coat and frock-coat not only possess their political beauty, which is an expression of universal equality, but also their poetic beauty, which is an expression of the public soul -- an immense cortège of undertaker's mutes (mutes in love, political mutes, bourgeois mutes...). We are each of us celebrating some funeral.' [3] To designate this attitude of modernity, Baudelaire sometimes employs a litotes that is highly significant because it is presented in the form of a precept: 'You have no right to despise the present.'
2. This heroization is ironical, needless to say. The attitude of modernity does not treat the passing moment as sacred in order to try to maintain or perpetuate it. It certainly does not involve harvesting it as a fleeting and interesting curiosity. That would be what Baudelaire would call the spectator's posture. The flâneur, the idle, strolling spectator, is satisfied to keep his eyes open, to pay attention and to build up a storehouse of memories. In opposition to the flâneur, Baudelaire describes the man of modernity: 'Away he goes, hurrying, searching .... Be very sure that this man ... -- this solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert -- has an aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur, an aim more general, something other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call 'modernity.' ... He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history.' As an example of modernity, Baudelaire cites the artist Constantin Guys. In appearance a spectator, a collector of curiosities, he remains 'the last to linger wherever there can be a glow of light, an echo of poetry, a quiver of life or a chord of music; wherever a passion can pose before him, wherever natural man and conventional man display themselves in a strange beauty, wherever the sun lights up the swift joys of the depraved animal.' [4]
But let us make no mistake. Constantin Guys is not a flâneur; what makes him the modern painter par excellence in Baudelaire's eyes is that, just when the whole world is falling asleep, he begins to work, and he transfigures that world. His transfiguration does not entail an annulling of reality, but a difficult interplay between the truth of what is real and the exercise of freedom; 'natural' things become 'more than natural,' 'beautiful' things become 'more than beautiful,' and individual objects appear 'endowed with an impulsive life like the soul of their creator.' [5] For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is. Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it.
3. However, modernity for Baudelaire is not simply a form of relationship to the present; it is also a mode of relationship that has to be established with oneself. The deliberate attitude of modernity is tied to an indispensable asceticism. To be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration: what Baudelaire, in the vocabulary of his day, calls dandysme. Here I shall not recall in detail the well-known passages on 'vulgar, earthy, vile nature'; on man's indispensable revolt against himself; on the 'doctrine of elegance' which imposes 'upon its ambitious and humble disciples' a discipline more despotic than the most terrible religions; the pages, finally, on the asceticism of the dandy who makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art. Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not 'liberate man in his own being'; it compels him to face the task of producing himself.
4. Let me add just one final word. This ironic heroization of the present, this transfiguring play of freedom with reality, this ascetic elaboration of the self -- Baudelaire does not imagine that these have any place in society itself, or in the body politic. They can only be produced in another, a different place, which Baudelaire calls art.
I do not pretend to be summarizing in these few lines either the complex historical event that was the Enlightenment, at the end of the eighteenth century, or the attitude of modernity in the various guises it may have taken on during the last two centuries.
I have been seeking, on the one hand, to emphasize the extent to which a type of philosophical interrogation -- one that simultaneously problematizes man's relation to the present, man's historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject -- is rooted in the Enlightenment. On the other hand, I have been seeking to stress that the thread that may connect us with the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude -- that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era. I should like to characterize this ethos very briefly.
A. Negatively
1. This ethos implies, first, the refusal of what I like to call the 'blackmail' of the Enlightenment. I think that the Enlightenment, as a set of political, economic, social, institutional, and cultural events on which we still depend in large part, constitutes a privileged domain for analysis. I also think that as an enterprise for linking the progress of truth and the history of liberty in a bond of direct relation, it formulated a philosophical question that remains for us to consider. I think, finally, as I have tried to show with reference to Kant's text, that it defined a certain manner of philosophizing.
But that does not mean that one has to be 'for' or 'against' the Enlightenment. It even means precisely that one has to refuse everything that might present itself in the form of a simplistic and authoritarian alternative: you either accept the Enlightenment and remain within the tradition of its rationalism (this is considered a positive term by some and used by others, on the contrary, as a reproach); or else you criticize the Enlightenment and then try to escape from its principles of rationality (which may be seen once again as good or bad). And w e do not break free of this blackmail by introducing 'dialectical' nuances while seeking to determine what good and bad elements there may have been in the Enlightenment.
We must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are historically determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment. Such an analysis implies a series of historical inquiries that are as precise as possible; and these inquiries will not be oriented retrospectively toward the 'essential kernel of rationality' that can be found in the Enlightenment and that would have to be preserved in any event; they will be oriented toward the 'contemporary limits of the necessary,' that is, toward what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects.
2. This permanent critique of ourselves has to avoid the always too facile confusions between humanism and Enlightenment.
We must never forget that the Enlightenment is an event, or a set of events and complex historical processes, that is located at a certain point in the development of European societies. As such, it includes elements of social transformation, types of political institution, forms of knowledge, projects of rationalization of knowledge and practices, technological mutations that are very difficult to sum up in a word, even if many of these phenomena remain important today. The one I have pointed out and that seems to me to have been at the basis of an entire form of philosophical reflection concerns only the mode of reflective relation to the present.
Humanism is something entirely different. It is a theme or rather a set of themes that have reappeared on several occasions over time in European societies; these themes always tied to value judgments have obviously varied greatly in their content as well as in the values they have preserved. Furthermore they have served as a critical principle of differentiation. In the seventeenth century there was a humanism that presented itself as a critique of Christianity or of religion in general; there was a Christian humanism opposed to an ascetic and much more theocentric humanism. In the nineteenth century there was a suspicious humanism hostile and critical toward science and another that to the contrary placed its hope in that same science. Marxism has been a humanism; so have existentialism and personalism; there was a time when people supported the humanistic values represented by National Socialism and when the Stalinists themselves said they were humanists.
From this we must not conclude that everything that has ever been linked with humanism is to be rejected but that the humanistic thematic is in itself too supple too diverse too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection. And it is a fact that at least since the seventeenth century what is called humanism has always been obliged to lean on certain conceptions of man borrowed from religion science or politics. Humanism serves to color and to justify the conceptions of man to which it is after all obliged to take recourse.
Now in this connection I believe that this thematic which so often recurs and which always depends on humanism can be opposed by the principle of a critique and a permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy: that is a principle that is at the heart of the historical consciousness that the Enlightenment has of itself. From this standpoint I am inclined to see Enlightenment and humanism in a state of tension rather than identity.
In any case it seems to me dangerous to confuse them; and further it seems historically inaccurate. If the question of man of the human species of the humanist was important throughout the eighteenth century this is very rarely I believe because the Enlightenment considered itself a humanism. It is worthwhile too to note that throughout the nineteenth century the historiography of sixteenth-century humanism which was so important for people like Saint-Beuve or Burckhardt was always distinct from and sometimes explicitly opposed to the Enlightenment and the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century had a tendency to oppose the two at least as much as to confuse them.
In any case I think that just as we must free ourselves from the intellectual blackmail of being for or against the Enlightenment we must escape from the historical and moral confusionism that mixes the theme of humanism with the question of the Enlightenment. An analysis of their complex relations in the course of the last two centuries would be a worthwhile project an important one if we are to bring some measure of clarity to the consciousness that we have of ourselves and of our past.
B. Positively
Yet while taking these precautions into account we must obviously give a more positive content to what may be a philosophical ethos consisting in a critique of what we are saying thinking and doing through a historical ontology of ourselves.
1. This philosophical ethos may be characterized as a limit-attitude. We are not talking about a gesture of rejection. We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits. But if the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge has to renounce transgressing, it seems to me that the critical question today has to be turned back into a positive one: in what is given lo us as universal necessary obligatory what place is occupied by whatever is singular contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints ? The point in brief is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that lakes the form of a possible transgression.
This entails an obvious consequence: that criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying. In that sense, this criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method. Archaeological -- and not transcendental -- in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events. And this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think. It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.
2. But if we are not to settle for the affirmation or the empty dream of freedom, it seems to me that this historico-critical attitude must also be an experimental one. I mean that this work done at the limits of ourselves must, on the one hand, open up a realm of historical inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take. This means that the historical ontology of ourselves must turn away from all projects that claim to be global or radical. In fact we know from experience that the claim to escape from the system of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another society, of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has led only to the return of the most dangerous traditions.
I prefer the very specific transformations that have proved to be possible in the last twenty years in a certain number of areas that concern our ways of being and thinking, relations to authority, relations between the sexes, the way in which we perceive insanity or illness; I prefer even these partial transformations that have been made in the correlation of historical analysis and the practical attitude, to the programs for a new man that the worst political systems have repeated throughout the twentieth century.
I shall thus characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings.
3. Still, the following objection would no doubt be entirely legitimate: if we limit ourselves to this type of always partial and local inquiry or test, do we not run the risk of letting ourselves be determined by more general structures of which we may well not be conscious, and over which we may have no control ?
To this, two responses. It is true that we have to give up hope of ever acceding to a point of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits. And from this point of view the theoretical and practical experience that we have of our limits and of the possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we are always in the position of beginning again .
But that does not mean that no work can be done except in disorder and contingency. The work in question has its generality, its systematicity, its homogeneity, and its stakes.
(a) Its Stakes
These are indicated by what might be called 'the paradox of the relations of capacity and power.' We know that the great promise or the great hope of the eighteenth century, or a part of the eighteenth century, lay in the simultaneous and proportional growth of individuals with respect to one another. And, moreover, we can see that throughout the entire history of Western societies (it is perhaps here that the root of their singular historical destiny is located -- such a peculiar destiny, so different from the others in its trajectory and so universalizing, so dominant with respect to the others), the acquisition of capabilities and the struggle for freedom have constituted permanent elements. Now the relations between the growth of capabilities and the growth of autonomy are not as simple as the eighteenth century may have believed. And we have been able to see what forms of power relation were conveyed by various technologies (whether we are speaking of productions with economic aims, or institutions whose goal is social regulation, or of techniques of communication): disciplines, both collective and individual, procedures of normalization exercised in the name of the power of the state, demands of society or of population zones, are examples. What is at stake, then, is this: How can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations ?
(b) Homogeneity
This leads to the study of what could be called 'practical systems.' Here we are taking as a homogeneous domain of reference not the representations that men give of themselves, not the conditions that determine them without their knowledge, but rather what they do and the way they do it. That is, the forms of rationality that organize their ways of doing things (this might be called the technological aspect) and the freedom with which they act within these practical systems, reacting to what others do, modifying the rules of the game, up to a certain point (this might be called the strategic side of these practices). The homogeneity of these historico-critical analyses is thus ensured by this realm of practices, with their technological side and their strategic side.
(c) Systematicity
These practical systems stem from three broad areas: relations of control over things, relations of action upon others, relations with oneself. This does not mean that each of these three areas is completely foreign to the others. It is well known that control over things is mediated by relations with others; and relations with others in turn always entail relations with oneself, and vice versa. But we have three axes whose specificity and whose interconnections have to be analyzed: the axis of knowledge, the axis of power, the axis of ethics. In other terms, the historical ontology of ourselves has to answer an open series of questions; it has to make an indefinite number of inquiries which may be multiplied and specified as much as we like, but which will all address the questions systematized as follows: How are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge ? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations ? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions ?
(d) Generality
Finally, these historico-critical investigations are quite specific in the sense that they always bear upon a material, an epoch, a body of determined practices and discourses. And yet, at least at the level of the Western societies from which we derive, they have their generality, in the sense that they have continued to recur up to our time: for example, the problem of the relationship between sanity and insanity, or sickness and health, or crime and the law; the problem of the role of sexual relations; and so on.
But by evoking this generality, I do not mean to suggest that it has to be retraced in its metahistorical continuity over time, nor that its variations have to be pursued. What must be grasped is the extent to which what we know of it, the forms of power that are exercised in it, and the experience that we have in it of ourselves constitute nothing but determined historical figures, through a certain form of problematization that defines objects, rules of action, modes of relation to oneself. The study of modes of problematization (that is, of what is neither an anthropological constant nor a chronological variation) is thus the way to analyze questions of general import in their historically unique form.
A brief summary, to conclude and to come back to Kant.
I do not know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood. Many things in our experience convince us that the historical event of the Enlightenment did not make us mature adults, and we have not reached that stage yet. However, it seems to me that a meaning can be attributed to that critical interrogation on the present and on ourselves which Kant formulated by reflecting on the Enlightenment. It seems to me that Kant's reflection is even a way of philosophizing that has not been without its importance or effectiveness during the last two centuries. The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.
This philosophical attitude has to be translated into the labor of diverse inquiries. These inquiries have their methodological coherence in the at once archaeological and genealogical study of practices envisaged simultaneously as a technological type of rationality and as strategic games of liberties; they have their theoretical coherence in the definition of the historically unique forms in which the generalities of our relations to things, to others, to ourselves, have been problematized. They have their practical coherence in the care brought to the process of putting historico-critical reflection to the test of concrete practices. I do not know whether it must be said today that the critical task still entails faith in Enlightenment; I continue to think that this task requires work on our limits, that is, a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty.
Notes:
[1] Giambattista Vico, The New Science, 3rd ed., (1744), abridged trans. T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 370, 372. [2] Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), p. 13. [3] Charles Baudelaire, 'On the Heroism of Modern Life,' in The Mirror of Art, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1955), p. 127.[4] Baudelaire, Painter, pp. 12, Il.[5] Ibid., p. 12.
KANT, FOUCAULT, AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT (Virgilio A. Rivas)
July 3, 2006
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(Published in PILOSOPIA, International Journal of Philosophy, ISSN 0115-8988, Volume 34, Number 2)
The following work discusses the philosophical problematic of enlightenment (Aukflarung) as it is taken up in the “philosophy of social transformation”—a heuristic description henceforth identified with the work of “critique,” which has become an obsession of modernity in search of a historical character. Enlightenment has never ceased to function as an influence on historical soul-searching typified by its interrogations of the past and the interpellations of possible frameworks for the future.
Since Immanuel Kant’s celebrated essay “What is enlightenment?” raises the problematization of Aukflarung, on the possibility of a historical critique and the transcending of the progressive ideals that the Enlightenment has instigated against the influences of the ancien regime, the idea of the enlightenment has evolved into an ambivalent framework for progressive and conservative projects that unhinge history from its tenacious balance. Meanwhile, Michel Foucault’s interrogations of the ambivalence of the enlightenment influence on the work of a historical critique locate this critique within the context of modernity’s exhortation to grand narratives., which is at variance with its identity as a progressive framework for reform. Foucault, therefore, recommends that “we have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers.”
INTRODUCTION
Immanuel Kant’s essay on enlightenment continues to evoke weighty concerns for the contemporary realization of a form of “critique” in spite of the temporal distance between “our” present and the past history of Enlightenment. The ideals that once fired the spirit of reason, snapping orders to men (Sapere Aude! 2) to break loose from their “self-incurred tutelage” (Foucault 1984), have never been drained of substance that continues to influence the present. Even so, our present form of rationality is far more complex than the preconditions of a particular history that set Kant’s work on a continuing past called the Enlightenment. Incidentally, Michel Foucault, in his inquiry concerning Kant’s work, stresses this observation.
Here, we will attempt to address a number of problematics in Kant’s essay that summon our analysis of a separate reading on the Enlightenment; that is, Michel Foucault’s reflection on Kant’s reflection on the Enlightenment, which produced the essay “What is enlightenment?”
At the outset, we can look at the essay as a reflective work on the Enlightenment that Kant believed was continually impinging on the patent and subtle realizations of the history of his time. Meanwhile, Foucault’s reading appears to be motivated by a larger historical experience of difference (a different history), but still coeval with the assessments of Kant. However, Foucault’s reading will also implicate an unstudied acceptance of the premises of Enlightenment philosophy that had been, notwithstanding, contributory to the advancement of modern Man. Still, Foucault will show that Kant’s concern is also the concern of the present. Enlightenment is the extant specter, refusing to oblige father-time. Hence, Foucault’s innovative retrieval of the question Was ist Aukflarung? The renewal of the question connotes a critical recovery intimately linked with the production of difference.
QUESTIONING THE ENLIGHTENMENT
History is the best witness to a continuity of the semblance between the interrogated effects of the Enlightenment and the exit points that lead to our own time. The historical space within which this semblance tensely affirms a different history is what many philosophers have tried to deliver to the imprisoning intelligibility of theory, that is, modernity. The transparency of that semblance, however, also informs the intrinsic difficulty—on the part of the historian or philosopher—of connecting the various forms that compose the filiality of seemingly different historical appearances. Technologies of producing a specific form of subjectivity, for instance, can divide the past and the present in terms of their degrees of effectuation: the impact they create on historical agents. However, as Foucault would argue, histories are histories of almost the same intent of power.
What is enlightenment? It is a question of the maturity of historical agency. This is the general subject of the essay’s interrogations, which Kant was rehearsing across his long preoccupation with his project of a critical ontology of reason. To assess the timeliness of the formulations Kant sketched in the essay will enhance its critical tact, and better, if we can summon his project of critical ontology to shed light on what can be wrongly held as an independent reflective work. Foucault’s reading is very keen on this point.
In the light of Kant’s project of critical ontology, the question of Aukflarung draws us into our own reflective condition vis-à-vis the desire to realize a “critique” of the contemporary, reckoning similar occurrences of problematics that were once part of the past order. If Kant’s essay reckons his project of critical ontology (that is, the critique of the preconditions of reason), Foucault’s reading makes an alternative reference to the technology of the self, informing that reading with a strategy of agonism3 that implicates common history. He shifts the object of critical ontology from interrogating a larger rationality (pure reason) to the production of self, of historically contingent agents as we all are. Foucault (2000: ) suggests that
The critical ontology of ourselves must be considered not certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it must be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.
Kant’s interrogations nearly approximate Foucault’s critical concern over the constitution of the self as subject. The limits of Enlightenment as a historical reason were not simply boundaries for the production of discourse endemic to the era but themselves the engines of eventuation, which run through the general mode of relating to reality, the ethos of existence. For Kant, the notion of limit is both inclusive and exclusive: reason is predisposed to know the boundaries according to which knowledge is defined. For Foucault, the notion of limit will always be informed by the mechanism of constituting forms of subjectivity that define relationships, which to a certain degree reconfigures Kant’s solution to find a universal subject if only to demand an “ethical attitude” (Foucault 1984: 372). The notion of limit is intrinsic to the practice of liberty, of disposition and orientation towards action. Baudelaire already thought of liberty as an attitude. As Foucault (1984: 90) says:
Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it.
Foucault will utilize the Baudelairean concept in an effort to seek the fault lines which characterize the problematic of the Enlightenment’s obsession with doctrinal remedies, and therefrom obtain a “permanent critique of our historical era” (Foucault 2000: 312). We are all captive of the question Was ist Aukflarung? Yet for Foucault, it is no longer possible to belabor the question with the problematizations that Kant’s essay engendered. He directs our attention to the fact that our present contingent circumstances may no longer achieve (as precise as possible) connections and identifications with the concrete problems that Kant’s Enlightenment helped to foster. New inquiries have to be developed (without derelicting the question of Aukflarung, that is, the problematic of relating to contemporary reality) which will be oriented toward the concrete desire of realizing our own critique, consistent with our constitutedness as autonomous subjects.
NEW FRONTIERS OF ENLIGHTENMENT
In his own essay on Enlightenment, Foucault may appear to suggest that we leave behind Kant’s problematization at the same time that he may prefer to give autonomy to a mode of historical existence called “enlightenment,” and instead insist on minding our own “present.” Even supposing, he is clear on one point: he refers to our own experience of difference that constitutes the limits to our reflection, action and discourse when he thinks of autonomy as a challenge to the naiveté of the Enlightenment as a given historical reason. Foucault’s notion of autonomy is critical of both Kant and Enlightenment. He suggests that criticism (or the practice of critique) must move beyond the inclusive-exclusive circuit of the condition for the possibility of reason. (Foucault’s own words are: “We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers.”) The criticism of reason must be transformed into the criticism of the singular, the contingent, and the concrete. The point of transformation resettles the history of the ontology of reason into the history of the constitution of ourselves as subjects, as free autonomous beings, which both Kant and the adherents of the Enlightenment espoused with varying effects. Foucault interrogates Kant and the Enlightenment in the same manner that “formal structures with universal value” as well as doctrinal prejudices are brought to radical questioning in most of his works. Be that as it may, the persistence of the question of Aukflarung makes of Kant a contemporary relevant interlocutor. Foucault emphasizes the significance of the brilliant philosopher from Konigsberg, his project of critical ontology and his continuing influence on the contemporary. Says Foucault (1984: 372):
…Kant says, ‘I must recognize myself as universal subject, that is, I must constitute myself in each of my actions as a universal subject by conforming to universal rules’. The old questions were reinterpreted: How can I constitute myself as a subject of ethics? Recognize myself as a subject of ethics?…Or simply this Kantian relationship to the universal which makes me ethical by conformity to practical reason? Thus Kant introduces one more way in our tradition whereby the self is not merely given but is constituted in relationship to itself as subject.
Kant’s critical ontology provides the crucial background for the critique of the constitution of the self to which Foucault commits his role as an intellectual. This leads us to look at the work of the intellectual’s critical ontology vis-à-vis his position as “an intellectual in bourgeois society” and the discourse he creates and discloses (Foucault 1977: 207). The work of critical ontology that engages Foucault as an intellectual will implicate his cultural and political position in society, in the same way that the intellectual can discover that his “responsibility for consciousness” and discourse is no longer that of being “ahead or to the side” of the collectivity who are marginalized, oppressed, and repressed. Foucault admits (with reservations) that the development of historical reflexivity has placed those whom he represents in a position where they are already aware of the concrete transformations that directly affect them and one capable of intervening actions. This makes the intellectual unnecessary as well as his critical projects (which we here identify with the project of critical ontology, that is, the interrogation of the condition of the possibility of critique). For one, it affects critique such that it negotiates its illusion of universality with local and regional or non-globalizing claims. As a result of the disenchantment of the practice of representation, which both poststructuralism and postmodernism has beckoned contemporary philosophy, the concepts of the universal intellectual and of universal critique become suspect. We can see a negotiating form of critique that admits of its contingency, for instance, in Foucault’s account of the penal discourse and its counter-discourse, he (1977: 207) says:
And when the prisoners began to speak, they possessed an individual theory of prisons, the penal system, and justice. It is this form of discourse, which ultimately matters, a discourse against power, the counter-discourse of prisoners and those we call delinquents—and not a theory about delinquency.
Foucault would also refer to critique as a “theory which is a regional system of a struggle” (Foucault 1977: 208). His constant theoretical interlocutor, Gilles Deleuze, supports this form of critique. As Foucault (1977: 208) remarks:
A theory does not totalize; it is an instrument for multiplication and it also multiplies. It is in the nature of power to totalize and it (theory) is by nature opposed to power. As soon as a theory is enmeshed in a particular point we realize that it will never possess the slightest practical importance unless it can erupt in a totally different idea.
THE CRITICAL ONTOLOGY OF OURSELVES
The shift into the critical ontology of the self highlights the disenchantment of representational critique. His reading of Kant provides a ballast to a new mode of interrogation that avoids the “indignity of speaking for others” (Foucault 1977: 209). A theory or critique must shed itself of the inner temptations of a totalizing representation before it can work against power. Foucault translates it into the praxis of a free autonomous subject that has become fully conscious of the arbitrary constraints that are imposed on it. This is what he means by “critical ontology of ourselves.”
As an intellectual and a strategist in the battle of discourse, a critic is always an adversary of power. Yet unlike the cadres and vanguards of the communist party during his time, Foucault (as a specific intellectual) thinks of the intellectual as a regional strategist. His disaffection with French Marxism and the Communist Party, sharply deepened by the events of May 1968, provokes an informed polemics against the idea of the “vanguard intellectual.” The idea of the intellectual’s responsibility for the consciousness of the collective (hence, the concept of the universal intellectual) comes under attack, implicating the dogmatism of the party. Marxism is identified with totalizing narratives, which are blind to the contingencies of the production of discourse. Particular sites of contestation are ignored in favor of a reductive globalizing narrative that arrogates all eventuations (political, social, cultural, etc.) to the self-replicating, self-diffusing movement of a single totality.
Foucault is here comparing the idea of the “universal intellectual” with that of the “specific intellectual.” His defense of the specific intellectual is consistent with his anti-humanistic views whose target is to destroy “all concrete forms of anthropological prejudice” (Foucault 1973: 342), which has yielded in history various political tendencies toward totalitarian justifications of the idea of the responsibility for Man. He traces the root of this prejudice in the modernist conception of the subject as the sovereign agent of truth. In order to accomplish the task of a general critique of reason, which he ascribes to his work, Foucault suggests that the subject must be “stripped of its creative role and analyzed as a complex and variable function of discourse” (Foucault 1977: 138). This also provides a clearer definition of his concept of power as a “multiple and mobile field of force relations where far-reaching, but never completely stable effects of domination, are produced” (Foucault 1980: 102). Kellner (1991: 51-52) observes:
Modern power is a ‘relational’ power that is ‘exercised from innumerable points’, is highly indeterminate in character, and is never something ‘acquired, seized or shared’. There is no source or centre of power to contest, nor are there any subjects holding it; power is a purely structural activity for which subjects are anonymous conduits or by-products.
In his works on ethics, Foucault brings up the notion of “games of truth” to expound the concept of power as relational. He (2000: xvi) defines games of truth as “a set of procedures that lead to a certain result, which, on the basis of its principles and rules of procedures, may be considered valid or invalid, winning or losing.” Insofar as it is a game, resistance is made possible by the multiplicity of available options vis-a-vis our relation to power in which even those who resist it are subtly, if not aesthetically, apportioned by it. Games of truth require tactical prudence and sensitivity to the singular or contingent nature of ongoing struggles to craft and wage resistance.
For Foucault, power relations inform the notion of subjectivity; subjectivity is neither a completed sense of individual uniqueness nor an intelligible ground of pure self-determination. Subjectivity reflects the diffusion of power throughout the social field. However, Foucault also rejects the tendency to identify the social coefficient of subjectivization with the concept of social determination as sui generis. The determining function of the social to create forms of subjectivity should not be considered as inherently seamless and uncontested which can render the possibility of going beyond the network of social relations that configure the directions of individuation totally futile. Freedom is not at all a utopic possibility.
The social or the body polity conditions the specific bounds of socio-political conflict, which bring into play different subject positions. He clarifies the common misconceptions that his “notion of power” has provoked. Power is not ubiquitous and omnipotent, thus, laying out the possibility of resistance. “When there is power there is resistance; and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power (Foucault 1980: 95). To say that “every human relation is to some degree a power relation” optimizes the possibility of going beyond specific domains of power through resistance. Foucault further clarifies:
There’s an optimism that consists in saying that things couldn’t be better. My optimism would consist rather in saying that so many things can be changed, fragile as they are, bound up more with circumstances than necessities, more arbitrary than self-evident, more a matter of complex but temporary historical circumstances than with inevitable anthropological constraints (Kritzman 1988: 156).
Foucault poses these “constraints” to bear upon the orthodox Marxist concept of power. He accuses Marxism of the fallacy of the repressive hypothesis (i.e., power is essentially repressive). Marxism considers the state as the ultimate source of power, legitimation, and authority, and therefore, the aim of revolution is to take hold of that power for which the proletariat claims responsibility on behalf of all oppressed classes. It views power as a dense bin of interweaving structures and relations that denies any residual implosions of power that can operate outside of the sphere of the state. Hegel is an inspiration behind this conception of power in which multiplicity is received into the single configuration of the state as its highest embodiment. The state occupies an expressive totality that arbitrates social conflicts within the realm of preserving order, security, and life. As Foucault sees it, what essentially distinguishes Marxism from capitalist ideology is the transversal of class subjectivity, replacing the oppressor class with the government led by a dictatorship of the oppressed.
Incidentally, Marxist philosophy draws inspiration from the romantic ideas of the Enlightenment. Foucault and, to some extent, Kant have issued separate warnings against an unstudied acceptance of its principles.
CONCLUSION
Foucault’s reading of Kant invites us to read the limits of our own historical reason. The task of reading our own historical rationality could not be dissociated from the question of Aukflarung, generically, a question of relating to history. The persistence of the question does not mean that it has never been answered: Enlightenment is a constant motivation for historical reading. Every historical epoch has unique soulful eventuations that drive actors to interrogate the limits of their historical existence. Every history has a “historicity” to make, to enlighten its sense of time, and to discover the conditions for the possibility of a people’s history. This urge has acquired a name for quite some time now—Enlightenment.
On the question of Aukflarung, we can situate Kant within the tradition of historical critique that he first articulated in his essay. To this extent, Foucault’s reading of Kant continues that tradition but is differently imbued with a motive to develop a “historicity” whose demand entails a complex job. Foucault’s reading reconfigures the question of Aukflarung in a new light such that it addresses a contemporary reality by reinterpreting the Kantian critique. Kant’s project of critical ontology is reconfigured into a kind of reading that implicates the “confidence of the universal.”
By evoking this implication, the project of critical ontology is now taken up to interrogate the limits that constitute what we are. The critical ontology of the self as a free autonomous subject explores possibilities for identifying the limits to the “historicity” that we make, at first, and for the most part, make us, and create new sites of determination in the process of engaging these limits. The arbitrary nature of the limits imposed on us leaves a crack in the overall architectonic of concealing the actual procedures of operation such that it adverts to the strategic-ness of the projects of power, that is, their contingent nature. These limits are not timeless immutable essences. They acquire concrete power over us through the arbitrary concealment of the subjective infrastructures that support them from within, while barring critical inquiry into the elusive objectivity of their external omnipotence. Their power is, therefore, strategically located in the social unconscious that is not unobtrusive.
Foucault, however, adds that the counter-strategy of unhinging the arbitrary sinews of power must be properly supported by a consciousness of the regional space of contestation that gives form to the operation of power as it is therein challenged by “strategic games of liberties” (Foucault 2000: 319). This kind of consciousness is no longer informed by a universalizing strategy of resistance pursuing a reformatory or liberal alternative. An ethos or an attitude, eschewing the temptations of doctrinal reliefs now informs the new consciousness. If there is a single most striking feature of Foucault’s reading of Kant’s essay, it is the challenge he poses to the arbitrary constraints on subjectivity which have been uncritically interrogated. One of the forms through which this want of critical reflexivity assumes is the extant modernist obsession with theories and doctrines that have totalizing drifts. To leave these drifts for good is the ultimate legacy of Foucault’s reading.
NOTES
1. The Enlightenment is a historical period that refers to the 18th century. Enlightenment is the subject content of that period. In studying the historical period, Kant came up with the essay on what enlightenment is.
2.. “Have courage to use your own reason.” The English translation is provided by Lewis White Beck in the 1969 and 1989 editions of Kant’s Foundations of the metaphysics of morals where the essay on enlightenment, written in 1784, appears.
3. Foucault (2000: 342) mentions this term in his work entitled The Subject and Power: “Rather than speaking of an essential antagonism, it would be better to speak of an agonism of a relationship that is at the same time a mutual incitement and struggle; less of a face-to-face confrontation that paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation.”
REFERENCES
Best, Steven and Douglas Kellner. 1991. Postmodern theory: Critical interrogations. London: Macmillan Press.
Foucault, Michel. 2000. Ethics. In Essential works of Michel Foucault. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press.
__________. 1984. Foucault reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books.
__________. 1980. History of sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books.
__________.1977. Language, counter-memory, practice. Edited with an introduction by Donald F. Bouchard. New York: Cornell University Press.
__________. 2000. Power. Essential works of Michel Foucault. Edited by James Faubion. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: The New Press.
__________. 1973. The order of things. New York: Vintage Books.
Kant, Immanuel. 1969. Foundations of the metaphysics of morals. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merill.
Kritzman, Lawrence. 1988. Michel Foucault, politics, philosophy, culture. New York: Routledge.
Submitted: 5 September 2004
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Friedrich NietzscheGod is dead quote
Friedrich Nietzsche is notable for having declared that God is dead and for having written several of his works in the presumption that man must find a new mode of being given the demise of God. Perhaps the most interesting quote on this theme appears in his The Gay Science ( aka Joyous Wisdom). A fairly full version of this key quote is set out immediately below:-

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place, and cried incessantly: "I am looking for God! I am looking for God!" As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there, he excited considerable laughter. Have you lost him, then? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they shouted and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances. "Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto." Here the madman fell silent and again regarded his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time has not come yet. The tremendous event is still on its way, still travelling - it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves." It has been further related that on that same day the madman entered divers churches and there sang a requiem. Led out and quietened, he is said to have retorted each time: "what are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchres of God?"

What Nietzsche is concerned at in relating the above is that God is dead in the hearts of modern men - killed by rationalism and science. This same God however, before becoming dead in men's hearts and minds, had provided the foundation of a "Christian-moral" defining and uniting approach to life as a shared cultural set of beliefs that had defined a social and cutural outlook within which people had lived their lives. Nietzsche seems to be suggesting that the acceptance of the Death of God will also involve the ending of accepted standards of morality and of purpose. Without the former and accepted faith based standards society is threatened by a nihilistic situation where peoples lives are not particularly constrained by considerations of morality or particularly guided by any faith related sense of purpose. What are we now to do? Given the "unbelievability" of the "God-hypothesis" Nietzsche himself seemed to favour the creation of a new set of values "faithful to the earth." This view perhaps being associable with the possibility of the "Overman" or "Superman." "I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment..."
Nietzsche Thus spoke Zarathustra
"Companions, the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators, the creator seeks -- those who write new values on new tablets. Companions, the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest. ... Fellow creators, Zarathustra seeks, fellow harvesters and fellow celebrants: what are herds and shepherds and corpses to him?"
Nietzsche Thus spoke Zarathustra
We at age-of-the-sage consider that the reports of the Death of God have been greatly exaggerated!!!
Explore "Inner Space"
It is widely known that Plato, pupil of and close friend to Socrates, accepted that Human Beings have a " Tripartite Soul " where individual Human Psychology is composed of three aspects - Wisdom-Rationality, Spirited-Will and Appetite-Desire. What is less widely appreciated is that such major World Faiths as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism see "Spirituality" as being relative to "Desire" and to "Wrath".
Explore Human Nature thru our radicalHuman Nature - Tripartite Soul page

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Culture and Anarchy
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Culture and Anarchy is a series of periodical essays by Matthew Arnold, first published in Cornhill Magazine 1867-68 and collected as a book in 1869. The preface was added in 1875.[1]
Arnold's famous piece of writing on culture established his High Victorian cultural agenda which remained dominant in debate from the 1860s until the 1950s.
According to his view advanced in the book, "Culture [...] is a study of perfection". He further wrote that: "[Culture] seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light [...]".
His often quoted phrase "[culture is] the best which has been thought and said" comes from the Preface to Culture and Anarchy:
The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.
Overview:
Matthew Arnold's famous series of essays, which were first published in book form under the title Culture and Anarchy in 1869, debate important questions about the nature of culture and society. Arnold seeks to find out what culture really is, what good it can do, and if it is really necessary. He contrasts culture, which he calls the study of perfection, with anarchy, the mood of unrest and uncertainty that pervaded mid-Victorian England. This edition reproduces the original book version, revealing the immediate historical context and controversy of the piece. The introduction and notes broaden out the interpretative approach to Arnold's text, elaborating on the complexities of the religious context. The book also reinforces the continued importance of Arnold's ideas its influences in the face of the challenges of multi-culturalism and post-modernism.
Library: http://ebookstore.sony.com/ebook/matthew-arnold/culture-and-anarchy/_/R-400000000000000082261
Anarchy
New York Times, on Sunday, November 8, had an article on sentences addressed by
a Federal judge to three members of the antigovernment Montana Freemen for conspiracy
and fraud; the article stirred my memory and concern about this paper, as well as brought
into play many of the dilemmas discussed in the Nature of Politics class. However, I do
not wish to analyze this particular article or cult, but the emergence of anarchy.
There have been theories and diagnosis of human nature: the Aristotelian, teleo-
logical view of the political animal, the Platonic, metaphorical view of the chained
caveman, the Hobbian, phobic view of savage life as inevitably ‘short’, and many
notable others. Regardless of the differences found in these, there is a common
denominator found in all. That is, human beings move from the animalistic, passive
stage to the civilized stage in order to materialize their potential in full.
In this domain, governments serve as expedients or facilitators of an anthropological
movement. The mechanism may differ from one type of government to another, but its
principal, common function is to lay and protect the foundations for a prosperous
Further, authentic pedagogy should be seen as a means of culture and not
only as mere specialization or training for possible, future employment or occupation. The latter should be guided in a very light manner. The tragic irony, however, is that the
persona of Athens fails to see the truth but does not fail to
sacrifice her most noble citizen. However,
although there may be nothing wrong in what they do, there
may be wrong in what they become.
And although interdependence within a system may hold
back those powerful from getting ahead, in no way does it
eliminate these natural dynamics. In result, capital and time saved could be invested
on urgent and valuable matters like health and research, while bond and interdependence
tighten.
If humans’ end is the political life -in the original,
Aristotelian sense - this does not assume or presuppose total
anthropocentrism or contingent politicocentrism.
The state should try to decide a question by referendum. For example, a given sum transferred from rich to poor would
enhance the welfare of the latter more than it would decrease the welfare of the former. Anarchy rejects and reacts to this dominant and flat control.
Universities should be centers of culture; education is an end in itself, and should be
seen as a quality acquired only in aspired societies.
This was a steady practice in the ancient city-states in order to encourage attendance, as
we learn through Aristophanes and Xenophon.
The boundaries between private and public life should be sensitive and responsive to
ephemeral trends, as there is no fear of any very sudden, radical change in these, only a
gradual, social evolution. Such
form of power is a pure form of c o n t r o l -a power that is here to stay.
An effective antidote to anarchy seems to be the formation of a friendly and
optimistic public policy that would project a positive human view.
Cultural Criticism
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Matthew Arnold's Cultural Criticism
Matthew Arnold’s poetry and literary criticism set the foundation for the social and cultural criticism that comprised the majority of his writing over the last 20 years of his life. His first major cultural work, Culture & Anarchy (1869), has been described as the apex of his cultural theory (Carroll 85). Its articulation of Arnold’s complex conception of Culture offers a frame by which the trajectories of his thought and writing, both leading to and stemming from this work, can be understood. Following Culture & Anarchy, Arnold turned toward religious criticism with four major publications: St. Paul and Protestantism (1870), Literature and Dogma (1873), God and the Bible (1875), and the Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877). His essays in the final years of his life backed away from religion and returned to social, cultural, and literary themes.
Culture As Pursuit of Perfection
The opening chapter of Culture & Anarchy was first printed in a magazine under the title “Culture and its Enemies” (Smart 24). As that original title suggests, the work can be read as a response to challenges (both specific arguments and general social trends) to Arnold’s cultural ideal. The purpose of the work is to define and promote this ideal, which mirrors and broadens his conception of the literary critic. As Arnold writes:
“The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.” (xi)
Arnold’s conception of perfection compels explication, and its principal features are these: it is rational and holistic, personal and social, and a process of “becoming something” rather than a thing to be possessed. This many-sided definition offers multiple fronts on which culture finds the “enemies”, or challenges, to which Arnold responds.
Perfection consists, first, in the rationalist ideal of a disinterested or “scientific passion” for “seeing things as they actually are” rather than accepting received doctrine. The challenges to culture here include the purveyors of religious or political truths, and in the social structures — of industrialization, for example — which encourage mindless and “mechanical” pursuit of accepted ends.
Second, perfection consists in a “harmonious” pursuit of beauty and intelligence in many directions: religion, art, science, philosophy, history, and literature. Arnold locates his aesthetic and intellectual ideal in Greek poetry (Carroll 41) with its “completeness and unity of consciousness” (Carroll 74). The challenges to culture, here, are those people and institutions who promote the pursuit of one of these strands to the exclusion of others, for example, in the representation of religion as a complete human ideal; the pursuit of science without morals; and the design of educational systems geared to the production of students skilled in a single profession or trade.
Perfection, as Arnold conceives it, is “an inward condition of mind and spirit (14)” combined with a moral and social passion for doing good by making the best that has been thought and said “prevail”. This move toward the social enables Arnold to distance himself from the pursuit of intellectualism for its own sake and to counteract characterizations of culture as a matter of “exclusiveness and vanity” (5). Arnold saw the interconnection of religious and national Establishments, such as Universities, as critical to fostering harmonious development at a social level (xxi).
Finally, Arnold locates his definition of perfection in the pursuit of knowledge rather than the possession of an absolute state (“Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it” [12-13]). He did believe in the existence of an objective and universal, historically grounded, aesthetic and moral ideal, and this has been a core contemporary criticism of his work. Trilling, however, emphasizes that he was not unrealistic in thinking that this ideal “could easily, or always, or completely be seen” (Introductory note).
Culture as Synthesis of Intellectualism and Moralism
Most centrally to his evolving cultural criticism, Arnold figures Culture as a means to resolve a dialectic between two historically conflicting forces which he characterizes as Hellenism and Hebraism. Hellenism, reflecting the rationalist foundation for Arnold’s definition of perfection, is the force of intelligence, the "indomitable impulse to know and adjust [ideas] perfectly” (Arnold 129). Hebraism, reflecting orthodox religious faith, is the “energy driving at practice, this paramount sense of the obligation of duty, self-control, and work” (Arnold 128-129); it is the “staunch following” that Arnold is referring to in the definition of Culture quoted above.
In Culture & Anarchy, Arnold offers Hellenism as a corrective for “rampant” Hebraism, but is careful to emphasize that this privileging is a function of the historic moment, and not of a necessary priority. His religious texts go on to focus on Hebraism by turning the concept of culture to the study of the bible, with the goal of preserving religious moral values by liberating them from literalist Christian theology. These attempts have been characterized as unsuccessful, and Arnold eventually “[gave] up all hope of uniting conventional religion with the modern spirit” (Carroll 106). In his final works, poetry comes to replace religion altogether in the pursuit of perfection.
Arnold’s Criticism in Context
In keeping with his definition of Culture as a harmonious and reasoned ideal, it was Arnold’s tendency—in fact the core of his critical art—not to oppose others’ positions in absolute terms, nor to reject tides of thought and social structures as a whole, but rather to hold them up and examine what within them was best, while subverting what he saw as limiting or misguided. In this way, he critiqued the Puritans not on the basis of their religious beliefs, but on their desire for separation from national Establishments, as this would remove them “from the main current of national life” and necessitate a singular, not harmonious, occupation with their religious machinery ’ (Arnold xxxv). Similarly, Arnold described his own values for engaging the “whole of society” in the constitution of Nations as liberal, but he critiqued Liberal politicians who lauded the empowerment of citizens while, in Arnold’s view, merely “teaching down” to and “working upon” the masses rather than engaging citizens in the pursuit of full and free thought.
Arnold’s criticism is highly historically situated, as he promoted that which he felt was most out of harmony in society at a particular moment. Thus, his advocacy of poetry as the route to perfection grew from his understanding that English society had a strong moral fibre but had lost sight of beauty and harmony. By the same account, however, Greek poetry failed to achieve perfection in Arnold’s characterization, despite its unity of beauty, harmony, and religion, because their own “moral fibre” was not yet sufficiently developed (22).
The core critiques of Arnold’s work from a contemporary perspective relate to his assumption of an objective and universal aesthetic and moral ideal. However, scholars of Arnold’s work have charged critics with misrepresenting Arnold’s writings by taking part for the whole without regard for his “subtle critical dialectic”. Further, it would certainly be an injustice to subject Arnold’s work to the wholesale dismissal that he himself resisted. Indeed, Arnold anticipated and feared such historical critique and categorization of his own work (Trilling, Introductory note). If Arnold could witness the internet, we might expect him to be uneasy if these pages offer any too comfortable summation of his contributions.
Works Cited
Arnold, Matthew. Culture & Anarchy. New York: Macmillan and Co., 1882.
Carroll, Joseph. The Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Smart, Thomas Burnett. The Bibliography of Matthew Arnold. 1892. New York: Burt Franklin, 1968.
Trilling, Lionel. Matthew Arnold. 1939. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958
Blog:
Monday, July 09, 2007
Gombrich on Malraux
"One can hardly avoid the suspicion that the voices he has lent to the art of the past are meant to drown a deep fear of the silence which would fall if Spengler were right:
Though the Wei Bodhisattvas and those of Nara, Khmer and Javanese sculpture and Sung painting do not express the same communion with the cosmos as does a Romanesque tympanum, a Dance of Shiva or the horsemen of the Parthenon, all alike express a communion of one kind or another, and so does even Rubens in The Kermesse. We need but glance at any Greek masterpiece to see at once that its triumph over the mystery-laden East does not stem from any process of the reasoning mind, but from the 'innumerable laughter of the waves'. Like a muted orchestra the surge and thunder, already so remote, of ancient tragedy accompanies but does not drown Antigone's immortal cry: 'I was not born to share in hatred but to share in love' (pp. 635-6).
Who would not prefer the driest philological gloss on the exact meaning of Antigone's 'immortal cry' (which is not a cry but a reasoned statement in a momentous argument) to this 'surge and thunder'? For if we trouble to analyse the content of the paragraph we discover, as only too often with Malraux, that it dissolves into a truism. Buddhist art (the names of the schools which produced Buddhas are mere ornament) differs in spirit from Hindoo, Greek, and Christian art but they all (including Rubens' genre) are religious. Even Greek tragedy is (and who ever doubted that?). Perhaps the rhetoric serves no other purpose than to hypnotize and bulldoze the reader. But it is surely more charitable to assume that strings of names and rows of images function like the names of divinities in ancient incantations to reassure the writer rather than the reader. They may be an expression of that authentic Angst which is the true root of the expressionist hysteria--the anxiety of that utter loneliness that would reign if art were to fail and each man remained immured in himself. To return to sanity does not mean to ignore these problems but to face them. Perhaps they are not quite as formidable as they look. They become formidable only through the adolescent 'all-or-nothing' attitude that colours so much of the writing of Malraux's generation. To the question whether we can understand the art of mentality of other periods or civilizations, or whether all is 'myth', the answer of common-sense is surely that we can understand some better, some worse, and some only after a lot of work. That we can improve our understanding by trying to restore the context, cultural, artistic, and psychological, in which any given work sprang to life but that we must resign ourselves to a certain residue of ignorance. In art, as in life, on certain elemental levels men of different civilizations have understood each other even though they were ignorant of each other's language. On others only an acute awareness of the context in which an action stands may prevent our misunderstanding. This commonplace philosophy would hardly bear stating if it had not some relevance to the 'Museum without Walls'. For it is remarkable that this Museum only contains sculptures and paintings. Where the medium of art is words we can still distinguish between degrees of understanding. True, once in a while we have witnessed a metamorphosis of works of literature which parallels the examples adduced by Malraux. The tragic Shylock or the neurotic Hamlet may be a case in point. But by and large we know it needs a greater imaginative effort to understand the Roman de la Rose than to enjoy Pride and Prejudice, and we can say why. Nor are we frequently in serious doubt whether a piece of music is intelligible to us or not. We realize that in Oriental music we cannot distinguish a dirge from a ditty because we lack familiarity with the framework of harmonic conventions on which musical meaning so largely depends. Perhaps the way out of the expressionist impass must lead through an analysis of similar relationships in the visual arts. It was the optimistic faith in the efficacy of colours and shapes as a universal language that landed us in this dizzy philosophy of myth and metamorphosis. Even shapes and colours acquire their meaning only in cultural contexts. The less we know of this context the more we are forced to dream it up. We may enjoy this challenge to our imagination and relish the sense of mystery that is aroused in us by what looks remote, exotic, and inscrutable. This is one of the reasons why our age is so ready, as Malraux says, 'to admire all it does not understand' (p. 598). But we may come to see that our fathers and grandfathers were not quite wrong, after all, when they thought that we understand certain styles better than others. That a Rembrandt self-portrait or a Watteau drawing 'means more' to us than an Aztec idol or a Negro mask. Not that we need forego the pleasure of looking at stimulating forms even where we do not understand. We also look at rocks or driftwood. Only we must try to relearn the difference between stimulation through self-projection, which, when applied to art, so often passes for 'appreciation' and that enrichment that comes from an understanding, however dim and imperfect, of what a great work of art is intended to convey.* We need not worry about these distinctions every time we look at a work of art. What matters is only that we should not surrender our sanity by losing our faith in the very possibility of finding out what a fellow human being means or meant. Critical reason may be fallible but it can still advance towards the truth by testing interpretations, by sifting the evidence, and thus widen the area of our sympathies while narrowing the scope of myths. It will need a good deal of clearing up, after the expressionist earthquake, to reconstruct the Museum on these more modest but more secure foundations. Meanwhile we owe a debt to André Malraux for having recorded with such verve and intensity the impact of this traumatic experience on a rich and sensitive mind."* I'm including the footnote Gombrich put here: "Intention in art is not everything. Neither is expression. But where the intention is missed our response to the rest will also go wrong." The passive voice in that sentence in the main text is crucial.--from E. H. Gombrich, "André Malraux and the Crisis of Expressionism" (a review of The Voices of Silence), The Burlington Magazine, vol. 96, no. 621 (Dec 1954), pp. 374-378.
Posted by ZC at 9:07 PM
8 comments:
Derek Allan said...
Gombrich's mistakes in his interpretations of Malraux are too numerous to mention. But just a little one as a sample: With a kind of snooty academic superiority Gombrich writes: 'Who would not prefer the driest philological gloss on the exact meaning of Antigone's 'immortal cry' (which is not a cry but a reasoned statement in a momentous argument) etc ...' Unfortunately, Gombrich was not quite academic enough. He apparently relied in Stewart Gilbert's translation of 'The Voices of Silence.' In the original French, Malraux does not write 'immortal cry' at all. His phrase is ‘l’immortelle ėvidence d’Antigone’.Gombrich's glib and superficial essays on Malraux are quite useless for anyone seriously interested in coming to grips with Malraux's theory of art. He never even manages to get to first base. Probably vaguely conscious of this, he resorted to silly sniping instead.
12:01 AM
Zach Campbell said...
Derek, thanks for commenting--I followed the link back to your page and see there's a treasure trove.(For the record, I should state at this point that I esteem both Gombrich & Malraux; that my basically unadorned quotation was intended as a conversation starter and not words I've put in my own mouth...)Gombrich's 'immortal cry' error--yikes! Though inexcusable under the context, the fact that the piece is a review of Gilbert's translation clarifies just why he's working with the English text and not the original French. Though one does wish he (Gombrich) would have bothered to look it up if he's making errors like the one you're pointing out. (I don't read French well enough to have anything other than the Gilbert translations of VoS and MotG, myself.)What I valued in this Gombrich excerpt, anyway, is a reaction against what I think of as a dangerous assumption of a certain through-line of certain modernist assumptions (transhistorical at best, ahistorical at worst), that may not in fact afflict Malraux, but certainly insinuates itself into writing that might take Malraux as kindred spirit, namely, the idea that all these ages and places of art are there before us equally in one big field, to be picked over for their formalist beauties, as though try trying to smooth out the space in order to get at an easy-access museum of one's own before all other considerations. Material history may get lost in the shuffle because it's no longer prickly or capable of obscurity: the shining fluorescent light of this insitution, the Museum, in our consciousness--maybe this historical development Malraux is writing about is open to some critique?In cinephilia, an analogue to this would be emphases on 'film language' to the detriment of things like language and regionalized cultural customs, such as what sometimes happened with early (silent) film theory or with the Cahiers crowd in parts. (It's a pendulum: the Cahiers critics themselves have been derided for liking Hollywood films only because they couldn't understand the language...) Yet on what terms can I really place a Rembrandt self-portrait and a Sasanian sculpture side-by-side? Two objects of beauty; but I can say much more about one than another ... I'm rambling. Thanks for commenting and for pointing out some shortcomings on Gombrich's part.
12:03 PM
Derek said...
Zach, thank you for your response. Yes, I was aware you were not necessarily agreeing with Gombrich. I hope you don’t mind if I add one or two more comments on the subject.What is most distressing about Gombrich in my view is the influence he has had on the reception of Malraux’s works in English-speaking countries. Gombrich’s 1954 review of ‘The Voices of Silence’ was reprinted in his widely read ‘Meditations on a Hobby Horse’ and he wrote similar things about Malraux in other books which had a wide readership. I quite often encounter writers in art history or the philosophy of art – even recent ones – who seem to think Gombrich is a reliable commentator where Malraux is concerned. He most certainly isn’t.Here are three of the more prominent myths Gombrich propagates:Myth 1: ‘Malraux’s theory of art is “expressionist”’ (meaning, in this context, that art is the ‘expression’ of the culture from which it comes). In fact, Malraux’s theory of art is not remotely expressionist and he quite explicitly rejects expressionist thinking on numerous occasions – including in ‘The Voices of Silence’ which Gombrich is purportedly reviewing when he makes this claim.Myth 2: ‘Malraux despised art history and art historians.’ Gombrich gets quite defensive on this point – but quite unnecessarily. Malraux certainly believed that the account of art provided by art history was not sufficient by itself, but he was not at all opposed to art history as such. In fact, was very widely read on the subject and always took a great interest in the latest discoveries, theories etc. In any case, one has only to read ‘The Voices of Silence’, for example, to realise that the book could hardly have been written by someone who took no interest in art history.Myth 3: ‘Malraux was not a “responsible scholar”, and simply made things up when it suited him.’ This has become a well-entrenched myth and Gombrich was one of the first to set it going. But, again, if one examines the evidence, there is no foundation for it whatsoever. Malraux was always very careful about his facts and often went to great lengths to verify them. (I am not suggesting he was infallible, of course, but who is in the field of art history, where, in any case, the state of knowledge is always slowly changing?) Gombrich, I might add, is hardly bullet-proof himself when it comes to being a ‘responsible scholar’. As I pointed out, for example, he was happy to criticise Malraux on a specific textual point without taking the elementary scholarly precaution of checking back to the French original – which would have told him his comment was misplaced.There is lots more to say on this topic, but I will leave it at that. In general, I regard Gombrich’s account of Malraux as little short of a travesty. His influence on the reception of Malraux in English-speaking countries has been most unfortunate. Thanks for bearing with me.PS. In my hastily written first post, ‘Stewart’ should have been ‘Stuart.’ And ‘relied in’ should of course have been ‘relied on.’
2:16 AM
chris miller said...
I can see where Gombrich has stumbled by relying on a poor translation -- but his overall argument seems to apply rather well to the fragment quoted from Malraux.Just what is Malraux telling us in that quotation other than "Greek art is better than Asian art"What does "innumerable laughter of the waves" tell us specifically about that judgment -- other than to say that it's not rational ? Was there any need to name those specific periods -- other than, as G. suggests, as a kind of magical incantation -- or an attempt to "hypnotize and bulldoze the reader"? And is "triumph" accurately used in the translation of that phrase ? If so, why would Malraux suggest that Greek art and Asian art are in some kind of conflict, and the one has defeated the other ?Is there anything, Derek, that you learned about Greek or Asian art from this quotation (plus whatever accompanying text elucidated its assertions) ?
9:05 AM
chris miller said...
On the other hand -- I hardly agree with Gombrich that "we can improve our understanding (of world art) by trying to restore the context, cultural, artistic, and psychological, in which any given work sprang to life" -- because these restorations -- and the language with which they're built -- even the very words "cultural","artistic" and "psychological" belong to our period and not to theirs.Which is to say I question the usefulness of the entire modern academic project of writing art history (other than for the sleuth work of finding and translating original texts)The visual past can speak for itself (or if it can't - no contemporary explanation is going to help it) -- not as "formalist beauties" (which would be reductive) but as completevisions -- with all the peculiarities of spirit and feeling that can be associated with things seen in the world.Could there ever be an explanation of the cultural, artistic,and psychological context of Heian Japan that might produce anything near the understanding one might get from reading ladies Murasaki and Shonagon and looking at 10th C. sculpture ?As the modern academics, like Gombrich, abjure their own taste on behalf of objectivity, their work becomes worthless (as well as unreadably dull) - while at least Malraux, for all his overblown prose, at least is taking a stand -- telling us, in the selected quotation, that among the things coming from Asia have been best have been the sculpture from Nara and the Wei Dynasty, and the painting from the Sung -- and yet even still he prefers the classic period of Greek sculpture.I certainly don't share that judgment --- but it's a memorable fact that he made it -- because he is a man of wide experience and taste.
10:54 AM
Derek said...
Hi ChrisYou and I have talked about Malraux on the Aesthetics-L list and I have not managed to convert you so I guess I won’t do so here either. But with Zach’s indulgence I will respond quickly to the points you raise. I think you are a little charitable to Gombrich describing his ‘cry’ thing as a ‘stumble.’ More like being hoist on one’s own petard. Remember, he was taking Malraux to task for not being a ‘responsible scholar’.Malraux is certainly not telling us that Greek art is better than Asian art – and such an idea is quite foreign to his thinking. He is attempting to describe the nature of Greek art. The reference to ‘triumph over the mystery-laden East’ (and I don’t have time to check the original French to see how accurate this is) does not mean that Greek art was better; it means that it aimed at something quite different and that the discovery of this something different was a triumph (this is linked to Malraux’s view of artistic creation where every change of style is seen as a discovery – an invention – not a mere deflection of something already existing. I don’t have time to go into this.). The reference to the ‘innumerable waves’ is part of Malraux’s attempt to explain that Greek culture was not – as philosophy so often tells us - simply a culture of Reason (rather like a bunch of 18th philosophes!) but fundamentally religious – very different from Eastern religions like that of Persia etc, but religious nonetheless.Malraux’s so called ‘rhetoric’ is never without purpose. Gombrich’s problem is that he is not interested in finding out what it is. Briefly put, the names are there to stress that across a wide spectrum of art – of the kind Malraux lists – there is the sense of the communion he is speaking of and that Greek art possesses it also – i.e. that Greek art, like these, and despite large differences in cultural outlook, does not simply tell us about ‘a process of the reasoning mind.’Malraux is not suggesting that Greek and Asian art are in some kind of conflict; but as I say he does see every shift in style as kind of triumph – not in a teleological sense but as a discovery. So, for example, Byzantine art was equally a triumph (victory is probably a better word – Malraux was not into triumphalism) over Greek and Roman art; Renaissance was over Byzantine, and so on. I should stress that it would be quite, quite wrong to think that Malraux thinks that Greek sculpture – classic or not – is superior to Asian. Nothing in what he writes supports that view. A key feature of Malraux’s thinking is that he places all art on the same footing whether it be Asian, Greek, Pre-Columbian or whatever. What matters to him is the quality of the art not its provenance. Gombrich himself is much more likely to think that Greek art is superior in some way – though in his later writings he does his best to conceal that view, thinking it unfashionable.Just a final word. Gombrich, along with two or three other art historians, rounded on Malraux after the publication of ‘The Voices of Silence’ and accused him of all kinds of historical ‘errors’ (as if history were just made up of pure ‘facts’ anyway!). Gombrich himself produced no evidence at all for this serious charge, apart from the ‘cry’ thing, and we see what that was worth … The others produced bits of alleged evidence and I have had occasion recently to examine it. In each case, the ‘error’ is in the reading of what Malraux is actually saying – revealing an unfortunate tendency on the part of these critics to skim him rather than read him with due care. In one or two cases the mistakes are egregious – one wonders how anyone could seriously read Malraux to be saying the things he is alleged to be saying. Nonetheless, the view, assiduously propagated by Gombrich, that Malraux is an ‘irresponsible scholar’ has become part of the mythology which is parroted to this very day. Cheers - and thanks for your reply in any case.Derek
10:43 PM
chris miller said...
What do you think Zach ?When you "glance at any Greek masterpiece" do you "see at once that its triumph over the mystery-laden East does not stem from any process of the reasoning mind, but from the 'innumerable laughter of the waves'"And if so --would this mean that "Greek art was better" ... or could it just mean that "it's aimed at something quite different and that the discovery of this something different was a triumph"I'm thinking that it's one thing to say "x's art is a triumph" --- and quite another to say "x's art is a triumph over Y"
8:43 AM
Derek said...
ChrisHis point, as the whole sentence shows, is that it is a victory via x RATHER THAN y. His target is the widespread idea he rejects that Greece was all about "processes of the reasioning mind" and that Greek art is an art of Reason. To fully undertand what he means by "victory" in this context one needs to read the section in "The Voices of Silence" on Art and Creation because his thinking here relates back to that. As I said, each new creation - each new style - for Malraux is a victory (but in a specific sense). Gombrich doesn't mention Malraux's thinking on creation (a much negected topic in aesthetics where Malraux has some fascinating things to say). I doubt if he paid it much attention. One French critic has rightly said that Malraux is 'skimmed a lot but very little read.' He might have added that he is also often quoted out of context. Malraux writes with great care and needs to be read carefully and the context is always important. Unfortunately too, Gilbert's translation often makes him sound more 'rhetorical' than he is in the original. The mistranslated Antigone's 'cry' which Gombrich wrongly gloated over is a case in point.I fear we may be overtaxing Zach's hospitality ...
http://elusivelucidity.blogspot.com/2007/07/gombrich-on-malraux.html
Andre Malraux
Contemporary Review , Oct, 1995 by Geoffrey Heptonstall
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Domnica Radulescu. Peter Lang, New York. $20. 0-8204-2296-7. `The desire to be king is foolish', said Malraux, `but everyone must seek a kingdom'. It was his belief in France which gave focus to the hitherto vague ideals which had sustained the young Malraux. His novels, with titles like L'Espoir and La Condition Humaine, were triumphs of narrative over impossible high-mindedness. Malraux lacked the discipline of a Communist, though he was one with the revolutionary left on the crisis-point of Spain. He put his faith into a transformed world while he meditated much on the relationship between art and death.
And yet his fiction itself was far from morbid. He had a sense of the absurd which allowed him to treat of serious matters lightly. This made him physically courageous. It also lent a morally dubious aspect to his nature. Malraux was heroic in many ways without forfeiting the roguish charm of an adolescent. He preferred the idea of creation to finished perfection. The truth was to be discovered in the way one saw the world rather than in the absolutes of a God-given situation. Malraux had no time for God. He did believe in humanity in general, and in France in particular.
He believed also in human beings. His expression of gratitude to Clara, his first wife (and eventually a considerable writer herself), was no formality: `Without you I should never have left bookselling'.
His homage to Charles de Gaulle is astonishingly moving in its dignified portrayal of grandeur in the reflective last days after the battles. The prose of Les Chenes qu'On Abat has the lucid elegance of a master-work. There are few books like this in the history of civilisation. The Agricola of Tacitus is one such, but I'm having trouble thinking of another.
Malraux's de Gaulle is not fiction, but it is an imaginative re-working of experience. Of course, as Malraux advised, the conversations are not verbatim records. De Gaulle didn't speak so magisterially on the grandeur of his vision as Malraux has him speak. Yet every word is true. Years of achievement -- from the Liberation to the final referendum -- are distilled into the voice of an elder statesman thinking as he watches the snow fall in the garden.
The essence of Gaullism is there: the fluid conversation between tradition and reform, between the nation and an integral Europe; the desire for coherence and the need for the radical initiative; the insistent hand of authority and the reference to the simple wishes of ordinary people.
The scale of Malraux's achievement may be judged by a picture which was displayed at the opening of the Pompidou Centre a few months after his death. A man is holding the severed, bleeding head of a freshly-slaughtered pig. Prom the pig's mouth comes the caption: Je suds l'ame d'Andre Malraux. No, the talking heads could never forgive someone who actually got up and joined in the real politics of government here and now. As Olivier Todd observed: `Can you imagine Sartre at the head of the Alsace-Lorraine brigade?'
Novelist, philosopher of art, Resistance hero, Minister of Culture: Georges Andre Malraux is not easily identified as one person. Like Simenon's Monsieur Bouvet, everyone describes him differently.
Bruce Chatwin's brief essay is perhaps the best place to start. Jean Lacouture's biography is unlikely to be surpassed, certainly not by middle-brow reporters with an imperfect command of French. Gino Raymond of Bristol University has written a useful study of Malraux's politics. Professor Raymond is particularly good on the sources, complex as they are, which translated into Malraux's idiosyncratic Gauilism.
Domnica Radulescu, a Rumanian teaching in America, has written what may be the finest, certainly the most sympathetically penetrating, criticism of Malraux's major fiction. She writes with grace and perception. Her book is a major contribution to literary scholarship. The reading is so close, yet the learning is carried so lightly. It is a model of its kind and a hope for literary appreciation against the barbarism of ideology which Malraux would have deplored.
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André Gide (1869-1951)

French writer, humanist, and moralist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. As a novelist, and still more as an intellectual figure, Gide has appealed to different audiences: a traditional psychological novelist to some, an innovative modernist to others; he was a major literary critic, social crusader, and spokesman for homosexual rights. Gide's search for self – the underlying theme of his several works – remained essentially religious. Throughout his career Gide used his writings to examine moral questions. He is as well known for his influence as a moralist and as a thinker as for his contributions to literature.
"It is not so much about events that I'm curious, as about myself. There's many a man thinks he's capable of anything, who draws back when it comes to the point... What a gulf between the imagination and the deed! And no more right to take back one's move than at chess. Pooh! If one could foresee all the risks, there'd be no interests in the game!... Between the imagination and a deed and... Hullo! the bank's come to an end. Here we are on a bridge, I think, a river..." (from The Vatican Cellars, 1952)
André Gide was born in Paris. His father, Paul Gide, a professor of law at the University of Paris, was descended from Cévennes Huguenots. He died in 1880. In SI LE GRAIN NE MEURT... (1924-26, If It Die: An Autobiography), Gide recalled that his father "spent most of the day shut up in a vast and rather dark study, into which I was only allowed when he expressly invited me." In his study he read his son works by Molière, passages from the Odyssey, and after discussing with his wife, also the first part of the Book of Job. "But the reading certainly made the deepest impression on me, not only because of the solemnity of the story, but because of the gravity of my father's voice and my mother's expression, as she sat with her eyes closed, in order alternately to signify or to shield her pious absorption, and opened them only to cast a questioning glance on me, full of love and hope." (from If It Die)
Gide was raised by three women - his Aunt Claire, the English spinster Anna Shackleton, and his Calvinist mother, Juliette Rondeaux, who devoted her life to him. In his childhood Gide was educated mostly at home - he was lonely and ill for long periods. At the age of 13, Gide fell in love with his cousin Madeleine Rondeaux; they married 12 years later, but in 1923, after twenty-seven years of unconsummated marriage, Gide had a daughter, Catherine, by another woman. Catherine's mother, Maria Van Rysselberghe, wrote about Gide's domestic life in Cahiers de la Petite Dame 1918-1945 (1973-77). Madeleine died in 1938, his unconsummated "marriage of Heaven and Hell" Gide dealt in ET NUNC MANET IN TE (1951).
Gide attended several schools. At the École Alsacienne Gide developed an interest in literature. He made friends with other aspiring writers and artists and attended the literary salons of José Maria de Heredia and Stéphane Mallarmé. In 1891 Gide made his debut as a novelist with LES CAHIERS D'ANDRÉ WALTER. He had started to write it at the age of 18. The book, published anonymously, told the story of an unhappy young man and his pure love for his cousin Emmanuèle. Next year appeared his first collection of poems, POÉSIES, but by 1900 he had practically abandoned poetry.
In 1893 and 1894 Gide traveled to North Africa, learning different moral and sexual conventions. At Biskra Gide fell ill and narrowly escaped death. These experiences gave basis for his psychological novels The Immoralist (1902), about the destructive force of hedonism and hunger for new experiences, and Strait is the Gate (1909), the counterpoint of the former work, or the "twin", as Gide called it. "The capacity to get free is nothing," says Mchael, the narrator of the Immoralist, "the capacity to be free, that is the task." In PALUDES (1895) Gide examined ironically his former life; Africa had made him accept his sexual inclinations. He became close friends with Oscar Wilde whom he met in Algiers, and whose caricature Gide drew in his memoir. The Immoralist played with the dialogue between the inner narrator and the outer narrator.
"Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors, jealous possessions of happiness." (from Fruits of the Earth)
Gide's hymn in prose and poetry to the beauty of all, Fruits of the Earth, appeared in 1897. It became in the 1920s his most popular work, influencing a generation of young writers, including the existentialists Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, to cast off all that is artificial or merely conventional. In 1909 Gide helped found the influential literary magazine Nouvelle Revue française (The New French Review). For it he wrote a large number of essays and reviews. Gide rejected nationalism in French literature. He stated that "great minds never fear influences; on the contrary, they seek them with a sort of eagerness like the eagerness of being." Gide's defense of homosexuality in CORYDON, published first privately in 1911, was violently attacked. In the 1930s he announced his conversion to Communism, which shocked his readers, but he also was rejected by his new admirers after his disillusioning trip to the Soviet Union in 1936.
In 1916 Gide started to keep a second journal, in which he recorded his search for God. His religious crisis of 1915-16 Gide analyzed in NUMQUID ET TU...? (1922). On 4 August 1922 he wrote in the journal, "I present my own ethics under the cover of Dostoevsky." Gide's interest in the Russian writer went back to his youth. In 1923 he published a book on Dostoevsky, which consisted mainly on lectures and earlier writings. Gide noted that Dostoevsky's main ideas were expressed through his characters: "He lost himself in each of the characters of his books and for this reason it is in them that he can be found again." Gide also recorded his everyday observations in his journal, examining often vices mirroring the problems of society. "10 May 1927: Many opium smokers and cocaine addicts in Zurich. Some of them, Rychner tells me, began to inject themselves during their last year at the Gymnasium; that is, when aged sixteen or seventeen. He knows one whom the professors caught using a syringe in a final examination. Cornered, he confessed that he had got his habit in class. 'Do you think anyone could endure the dullness of X's teaching without shooting up?' he asked."
After the mid-1920s Gide became a champion of society's victims, who demanded more humane conditions for criminals. He had observed social injustices more closely than many other writers from the 1890s – first as mayor of a commune in Normandy (1896), and later as a juror in Rouen (1912), and then as a special envoy of the Colonial Ministry (1925-26). In July 1925 Gide set out for a journey to the Congo with his friend Marc Allegret, returning in 1927. During this time Gide published If It Die..., which has been compared to Jacques Rousseau's Confessions.
In the novel The Counterfreiters (1926) Gide exposed the hypocrisy and self-deception with which people try to avoid sincerity. The protagonist, Edouard, keeps a journal of events in order to write a novel about the nature of reality. Another internal author - the 'pseudo-author', an intervening first person voice - comments the action. Edouard falls in love with his nephew Oliver Molinier. Through their story Gide illustrates what he considered a constructive homosexual relationship. Numerous themes are woven into the complex structure, not only the novelist writing a novel about a novelist who is writing a novel about forging. The intrigues of a gang of counterfeiters symbolize the counterfeit personalities with which people disguise themselves. The novels ends with the suicide of one of the characters.
The Pastoral Symphony (1919), written in the form of the diary, explored the hypocrisy which masquerades as Christian pity and duty. In the story a Swiss Protestant pastor adopts and educates the blind orphan Gertrude. The pastor is afraid that Gertrude loves him less than his son Jacques, and seduces the girl on the eve of an operation, which may restore her sight. After the successful operation, Gertrude understands the truth about the people around her and she commits suicide. The pastor doesn't realize his own blindness before he starts to re-examine his own thinking and behavior. The film version of the book, directed by Jean Delannoy, gained critical and popular success in 1946, but the author himself was not happy with the result. Delannoy gave Gerture her sight some two-thirds of the way through the film, not at the end. The novella, Gide claimed, "makes sense only in terms of its artistic construction. It is, in sum, a tragedy in five acts which takes on its final value only through the long night of the first four acts. The young blind girl recovers her sight only in the last pages – to her detriment as it turns out. Everything resides in this sudden rupture. They explained to me that the necessities of the screen warranted a new conception of the tale, that it had to be translated into another language." Gide's novella Isabelle exposed illusions of a young student, who falls in love with a woman pictured in a mysterious miniature. It was published in the UK in the same volume as La Symphonie Pastorale.
Gide's trip to the U.S.S.R., where he was given the place of honor at the funeral of Maxim Gorky and seated next to Stalin on various occasions, led to his famous break with Communism. André Malraux advised him not to publish his report on the journey, RETOUR DE L'URSS (1936), in which Gide made a decisive break with the Soviets. The appearence of the book at the crucial moments of the Spanish Civil War made Gide the target of Leftist wrath.
From 1942 until the end of WW II, Gide lived in North Africa. After the war Communist writers, Louis Aragon included, tarred him as a Nazi collaborator. In the 1940s Gide began receive honors, which culminated in the Nobel Prize. Gide's correspondence with his friends Francis Jammes (pub. 1948) and Paul Claudel (pub. 1949) reveals their unsuccessful attempt to convert the author to Catholicism. Among Gide's later works is THÉSÉE (1946), which contributed to the renewed use of Greek myth in the 20th century literature. Gide died on February 19, 1951. The Catholic Church placed his works on the Index in 1952. Gide's wide correspondence with Proust, Paul Claudel, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Valéry, Martin du Gard, and others started to appear regularly in 1948.
For further reading: Le Dialogue avec André Gide by C. Du Bos (1929); André Gide by R. Fernandez (1931); André Gide by J. Hytier (1938); Portrait of André Gide by Justin O'Brien (1953); Theory and Practice of the Novel: A Study of André Gide by W. Wolfgang Holdheim (1968); André Gide by G.W. Ireland (1970); Gide: A Study by Christopher D. Bettinson (1972); Portraits of Artist by Arthur E. Babock (1982); Fiction et vie sociale dans l'oeuvre d'André Gide by Alain Goulet (1985); André Gide and the Codes of Homotextuality by Emily S. Apter (1987); Réflections sur 'Les Faux-Monnayeurs' by Pierre Masson (1990); André Gide by David H. Walker (1990); Andre Gide: A Life in the Present by Alan Sheridan (1999) - Noter sur André Gide by Roger Martin du Gard - See also: Olavi Paavolainen, Saint-John Perse, Colette, Francois La Rochefoucauld, Rainer Maria Rilke
Selected works:
Andre-Paul-Guillaume Gide
Andre-Paul-Guillaume Gide(1869 - 1951)French writer, humanist, and moralist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947.
Heritage and youth.Gide was the only child of Paul Gide and his wife, Juliette Rondeaux. His father was of southern Huguenot peasant stock; his mother, a Norman heiress, although Protestant by upbringing, belonged to a northern Roman Catholic family long established at Rouen. When Gide was eight he was sent to the Ecole Alsacienne in Paris, but his education was much interrupted by neurotic bouts of ill health. After his father's early death in 1880, his well-being became the chief concern of his devoutly austere mother; often kept at home, he was taught by indifferent tutors and by his mother's governess. While in Rouen Gide formed a deep attachment for his cousin, Madeleine Rondeaux.Gide returned to the Ecole Alsacienne to prepare for his baccalaureat examination, and after passing it in 1889, he decided to spend his life in writing, music, and travel. His first work was an autobiographical study of youthful unrest entitled Les Cahiers d'Andre Walter (1891; The Notebooks of Andre Walter). Written, like most of his later works, in the first person, it uses the confessional form in which Gide was to achieve his greatest successes.
Symbolist period.In 1891 a school friend, the writer Pierre Louys, introduced Gide into the poet Stephane Mallarme's famous "Tuesday evenings," which were the centre of the French Symbolist movement, and for a time Gide was influenced by Symbolist aesthetic theories. His works "Narcissus" (1891), Le Voyage d'Urien (1893; Urien's Voyage), and "The Lovers' Attempt" (1893) belong to this period.In 1893 Gide paid his first visit to North Africa, hoping to find release there from his dissatisfaction with the restrictions imposed by his puritanically strict Protestant upbringing. Gide's contact with the Arab world and its radically different moral standards helped to liberate him from the Victorian social and sexual conventions he felt stifled by. One result of this nascent intellectual revolt against social hypocrisy was his growing awareness of his own homosexual inclinations. The lyrical prose poem Les Nourritures terrestres (1897; Fruits of the Earth) reflects Gide's personal liberation from the fear of sin and his acceptance of the need to follow his own impulses, however unconventional they may be. But after he returned to France, Gide's relief at having shed the shackles of convention evaporated in what he called the "stifling atmosphere" of the Paris salons. He satirized his surroundings in Marshlands (1894)--a brilliant parable of animals who, living always in dark caves, lose their sight because they never use it.
In 1894 Gide returned to North Africa, where he met Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, who encouraged him to admit the nature of his suppressed homosexuality. He was recalled to France because of his mother's illness, however, and she died in May 1895.
In October 1895 Gide married his cousin Madeleine, who had earlier refused him. Early in 1896 he was elected mayor of the commune of La Roque--at 27 the youngest mayor in France. He took his duties seriously but managed to complete Fruits of the Earth. It was published in 1897 and fell completely flat, although after World War I it was to become Gide's most popular and influential work. In the postwar generation, its call to each individual to express fully whatever is in him evoked an immediate response.
Great creative period.Le Promethee mal enchaine (1899; Prometheus Misbound), a return to the satirical style of Urien's Voyage and Marshland, is Gide's last discussion of man's search for individual values. His next tales mark the beginning of his great creative period. L'Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist), La Porte etroite (1909; Strait Is the Gate), and La Symphonie pastorale (1919; "The Pastoral Symphony") reflect Gide's attempts to achieve harmony in his marriage in their treatment of the problems of human relationships. They mark an important stage in his development: adapting his works' treatment and style to his concern with psychological problems. The Immoralist and Strait Is the Gate are in the prose form which Gide termed a recit; i.e., a studiedly simple but deeply ironic tale in which a first-person narrator reveals the inherent moral ambiguities of life by means of his seemingly innocuous reminiscences. In these works Gide achieves a mastery of classical construction and a pure, simple style.During most of this period Gide was suffering deep anxiety and distress. Although his love for Madeleine had given his life what he called its "mystic orientation," he found himself unable, in a close, permanent relationship, to reconcile this love with his need for freedom and for experience of every kind. Les Caves du Vatican (1914; The Vatican Swindle) marks the transition to the second phase of Gide's great creative period. He called it not a tale but a sotie, by which he meant a satirical work whose foolish or mad characters are treated farcically within an unconventional narrative structure. This was the first of his works to be violently attacked for anticlericalism.
In the early 1900s Gide had already begun to be widely known as a literary critic, and in 1908 he was foremost among those who founded La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, the literary review that was to unite progressive French writers until World War II. During World War I Gide worked in Paris, first for the Red Cross, then in a soldiers' convalescent home, and finally in providing shelter to war refugees. In 1916 he returned to Cuverville, his home since his marriage, and began to write again.
The war had intensified Gide's anguish, and early in 1916 he had begun to keep a second Journal (published in 1926 as Numquid et tu) in which he recorded his search for God. Finally, however, unable to resolve the dilemma (expressed in his statement "Catholicism is inadmissible, Protestantism is intolerable; and I feel profoundly Christian"), he resolved to achieve his own ethic, and by casting off his sense of guilt to become his true self. Now, in a desire to liquidate the past, he began his autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt (1926; If It Die . . .), an account of his life from birth to marriage that is among the great works of confessional literature. In 1918 his friendship for the young Marc Allegret caused a serious crisis in his marriage, when his wife in jealous despair destroyed her "dearest possession on earth"--his letters to her.
After the war a great change took place in Gide, and his face began to assume the serene expression of his later years. By the decision involved in beginning his autobiography and the completion in 1918 of Corydon (a Socratic dialogue in defense of homosexuality begun earlier), he had achieved at last an inner reconciliation. Corydon's publication in 1924 was disastrous, though, and Gide was violently attacked, even by his closest friends.
Gide called his next work, Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926; The Counterfeiters), his only novel. He meant by this that in conception, range, and scope it was on a vaster scale than his tales or his soties. It is the most complex and intricately constructed of his works, dealing as it does with the relatives and teachers of a group of schoolboys subject to corrupting influences both in and out of the classroom. The Counterfeiters treats all of Gide's favourite themes in a progression of discontinuous scenes and happenings that come close to approximating the texture of daily life itself.
In 1925 Gide set off for French Equatorial Africa. When he returned he published Voyage au Congo (1927; Travels in the Congo), in which he criticized French colonial policies. The compassionate, objective concern for humanity that marks the final phase of Gide's life found expression in political activities at this time. He became the champion of society's victims and outcasts, demanding more humane conditions for criminals and equality for women. For a time it seemed to him that he had found a faith in Communism. In 1936 he set out on a visit to the Soviet Union, but later expressed his disillusionment with the Soviet system in Retour de l'U.R.S.S. (1936; Return from the U.S.S.R.) and Retouches a mon retour de l'U.R.S.S. (1937; Afterthoughts on the U.S.S.R.).
Late works.In 1938 Gide's wife, Madeleine, died. After a long estrangement they had been brought together by her final illness. To him she was always the great--perhaps the only--love of his life. With the outbreak of World War II, Gide began to realize the value of tradition and to appreciate the past. In a series of imaginary interviews written in 1941 and 1942 for Le Figaro, he expressed a new concept of liberty, declaring that absolute freedom destroys both the individual and society: freedom must be linked with the discipline of tradition. From 1942 until the end of the war Gide lived in North Africa. There he wrote "Theseus," whose story symbolizes Gide's realization of the value of the past: Theseus returns to Ariadne only because he has clung to the thread of tradition.In June 1947 Gide received the first honour of his life: the Doctor of Letters of the University of Oxford. It was followed in November by the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1950 he published the last volume of his Journal, which took the record of his life up to his 80th birthday. All Gide's writings illuminate some aspect of his complex character. He is seen at his most characteristic, however, in the Journal he kept from 1889, a unique work of more than a million words in which he records his experiences, impressions, interests, and moral crises during a period of more than 60 years. After its publication he resolved to write no more.
Gide's lifelong emphasis on the self-aware and sincere individual as the touchstone of both collective and individual morality was complemented by the tolerant and enlightened views he expressed on literary, social, and political questions throughout his career. For most of his life a controversial figure, Gide was long regarded as a revolutionary for his open support of the claims of the individual's freedom of action in defiance of conventional morality. Before his death he was widely recognized as an important humanist and moralist in the great 17th-century French tradition. The integrity and nobility of his thought and the purity and harmony of style that characterize his stories, verse, and autobiographical works have ensured his place among the masters of French literature.
MAJOR WORKSCollections: Oeuvres completes, 15 vol. (1932-39; index, 1954), still awaiting completion but including items unpublished elsewhere; Romans, recits et soties, oeuvres lyriques (1958), collected fiction, with commentary and textual notes; Theatre (1947; My Theater, 1951); The Andre Gide Reader (1971).Verse and prose poetry: Les Cahiers d'Andre Walter 1891; The Notebooks of Andre Walter, 1968); Le Traite du Narcisse (1891; "Narcissus," in The Return of the Prodigal, 1953); Les Poesies d'Andre Walter (1892); La Tentative amoureuse (1893; "The Lovers' Attempt," in The Return of the Prodigal, 1953); Le Voyage d'Urien (1893; Urien's Voyage, 1964); Les Nourritures terrestres (1897; Fruits of the Earth, 1949); El Hadj (1899; Eng. trans. in The Return of the Prodigal, 1953); Amyntas (1906; Eng. trans. 1958); Le Retour de l'enfant prodigue (1907; The Return of the Prodigal, 1953); Les Nouvelles Nourritures (1935; New Fruits of the Earth, 1949).
Stories, satires, and fables: Paludes (1895; Marshlands, 1953); Le Promethee mal enchaine (1899; Prometheus Misbound, 1953); L'Immoraliste (1902; The Immoralist, 1930); La Porte etroite (1909; Strait Is the Gate, 1924); Isabelle (1911; Eng. trans. in Two Symphonies, 1931); Les Caves du Vatican (1914; The Vatican Swindle, 1925; Lafcadio's Adventures, 1927); La Symphonie pastorale (1919; "The Pastoral Symphony," in Two Symphonies, 931); L'Ecole des femmes (1929; The School for Wives, 1950); Rober (1929; "Robert," in The School for Wives, 1950); Geneieve (1936; "Genevieve; or the Unfinished Confidence," in The School for Wives, 1950); Thesee (1946; "Theseus," in Two Legends: Oedipus and Theseus, 1950).
Novel: Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1926; The Counterfeiters, 1927; also as The Coiners).
Drama: Philoctete (1899; "Philoctetes," in The Return of the Prodigal, 1953); Le Roi Candaule (1901; "King Candaules," in My Theater, 1951); Saul (1903; Eng. trans. in The Return of the Prodigal, 1953); Bethsabe (1912; "Bathsheba," in The Return of the Prodigal, 1953); Oedipe (1931; "Oedipus," in Two Legends: Oedipus and Theseus, 1950); Persephone (1934; Eng. trans. in My Theater, 1951); Le Treizieme arbre (1935); Robert, ou l'interet general (1944-45); Le Retour (1946); Les Caves du Vatican (1950).
Criticism: Pretextes (1903; Pretexts, 1959); Nouveaux pretextes (1911); Dostoievsky (1923; Eng. trans. 1925); Incidences (1924); Le Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs (1926; The Logbook of the Coiners, 1952); Essai sur Montaigne (1929; Montaigne, 1929); Divers (1931); Interviews imaginaires (1943; Imaginary Interviews, 1944); Attendu que . . . (1943); L'Enseignement de Poussin (1945; Poussin, 1947); Poetique (1947); Prefaces (1948); Rencontres (1948); Eloges (1948); Notes sur Chopin (1948; Notes on Chopin, 1949).
Travel: Voyage au Congo (1927), and Le Retour du Tchad (1928; Travels in the Congo, 1929); Dindiki (1927); Retour de l'U.R.S.S. (1936; Return from the U.S.S.R., 1937); Retouches a mon retour de l'U.R.S.S. (1937; Afterthoughts on the U.S.S.R., 1937).
Journal: Journal, 1889-1939 (1939); Journal, 1939-49 (1954), including most other autobiographical works; Journals of Andre Gide, 4 vol. (1947-51).
BIBLIOGRAPHY.Arnold Naville, Bibliographie des ecrits de Andre Gide (1949, reprinted 1971), lists Gide's published writings. Catharine Savage Brosman, An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism on Andre Gide, 1973-1988 (1990), compiles both texts by Gide and criticisms of Gide's work written in English and other major European languages that have appeared since 1973.Biographies in French include Claude Jacques Mahias, La Vie d'Andre Gide (1955), a pictorial work; Jean Lambert, Gide familier (1958), a study of Gide in his old age by his son-in-law; and Pierre de Boisdeffre, Vie d'Andre Gide, 1869-1951, 2 vol. (1970-71), a full-scale account. Jean Delay, La Jeunesse d'Andre Gide, 2 vol. (1956-67), also available in abridged translation by June Guicharnaud, The Youth of Andre Gide (1963), presents a sound, important psychoanalytical study. George D. Painter, Andre Gide: A Critical Biography (1968), provides a good introduction to Gide's life and work. Jean Schlumberger, Madeleine and Andre Gide, trans. by Richard H. Akeroyd (1980; originally published in French, 1956), covers Gide's marriage. Thomas Cordle, Andre Gide, updated ed. (1993), illuminates Gide's personal life.
Critical studies in English include Justin O'Brien, Portrait of Andre Gide (1953, reprinted 1977); Enid Starkie, Andre Gide (1953), a sympathetic brief guide based on a long friendship with Gide; Germaine Bree, Gide (1963, reprinted 1985; originally published in French, 1953); Wallace Fowlie, Andre Gide: His Life and Art (1965), an interesting account of the development of Gide's thought; Albert J. Guerard, Andre Gide, 2nd ed. (1969), by a specialist on Gide; G.W. Ireland, Andre Gide: A Study of His Creative Writings (1970), a discussion of his novels; Patrick Pollard, Andre Gide: Homosexual Moralist (1991), researching Gide's sources of sexual themes; and Michael Lucey, Gide's Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing (1995), on sexual themes.

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C.D.E. TOLTON
André Gide and Christopher Isherwood:
Two Worlds of Counterfeiters
It is very likely that among titles of famous French novels, along with
Stendhal's Le Rouge et le noir, André Gide's Les Faux-monnayeurs has been
the most frequently and thoroughly explained. The Gide title is particularly
apt, for it operates on at least three levels. In the first place the novel quite
literally deals with a band of counterfeiters using schoolboys to help circulate
their fresh coinage, a plot element that Gide gleaned from a newspaper
account. In the second place one of the central characters, who also serves
part-time as a narrative voice, is a novelist, Edouard, who is himself halt-
ingly writing a novel called Les Faux-monnayeurs. And in the third place the
world Gide paints is one in which people are capable of role-playing, hypoc-
risy, and general fakery to such an extent that 'faux-monnayeur' might
designate even the most admirable of the characters at some point or another
in the novel's development.
It is this third notion which is of interest here because there are about forty
direct references to the illusion-creating aspects of these actors in Gide's
fictitious drama, thus placing reality and illusion among the novel's most
recurrent themes. Quite clearly, among André Gide's uppermost achieve-
ments in writing Les Faux-Monnayeurs was the expression of a vital aware-
ness of the phoniness he saw pervading every aspect and every generation of
the bourgeois circles of his time. Writers like his Passavant are quite capable
of counterfeiting a literary renaissance the emptiness of which is to them all
too apparent; schoolboys (like Georges Molinier) counterfeit a love of evil
that they don't necessarily believe in; their parents counterfeit an air of
public respectability ; and lovers like Vincent Molinier and Lady Griffith or
Sarah Vedel and Bernard Profitendieu counterfeit deep and sincere emotions
where only sensuality exists.
If, by chance, one turns to The World in the Evening, a novel begun in
America by the Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood twenty-
seven years after the publication of Les Faux-monnayeurs,1 certain surpris-
ing parallels appear. As in Gide's novel, The World in the Evening is the title
not only of the Isherwood novel that one is reading but also of a novel written
by a character in the novel and discussed in the course of the action. But
i Les Faux-monnayeurs, printed by the NRF in 1925, was not distributed until 1926. The
World in the Evening, begun in 1947, was first published by Methuen in 1954.
CANADIAN REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURe/rEVUE CANADIENNE DE LITTÉRATURE COMPARÉE
crcl/rclc spring/printemps 1978
0319-051X/78/0000-0193 $01.25/© Canadian Comparative Literature Association
Page 2
194 / C.D.E. Tolton
unlike Edouard's novel-within-the-novel, which is incomplete and less than
satisfying in the part we are allowed to sample, Elizabeth Rydal's book has
been acclaimed, it would appear, as the culminating work in the illustrious
career of a Virginia Woolf-Katherine Mansfield-like writer. Elizabeth has
died before the action begins, though, and the monitoring of her published
works as well as the editing of her letters are now in the hands of her
remarried husband, Stephen Monk, twelve years her junior. Monk, as her
literary heir, has rather curiously assumed her particular aura ; thus, to those
he meets at Hollywood parties or Quaker meetings he virtually becomes
Rydal herself. To them he may as well be the author of The World in the
Evening, and for most of Isherwood's novel the reader also feels this is so,
Monk being very often an auxiliary speaker for his late wife's ideas. Like
Gide's Edouard, Stephen is, if not an author, at least a man of letters, and
with Edouard he shares the problem of a self-centred immaturity. Both men
are quite capable of irresponsibly hurting those around them, best rep-
resented by their capacity to exploit their attractiveness to both sexes. Fur-
thermore, just as Edouard narrates a great deal of Gide's novel, so does
Stephen narrate Isherwood's, interrupted only occasionally by the rather
similar voice of Elizabeth in her reported letters.
Reviewers of The World in the Evening were in most cases less than
enthusiastic. Doubtless looking for the brittle wit and irreplaceable atmo-
sphere of Good-bye to Berlin, they were instead confronted by Isherwood's
most serious novel to date. Isherwood admitted that he had spent a long time
writing it: T began writing it in 1947, put it aside to go to South America and
do a travel book, took it up again in 1951, then got involved in John van
Druten's dramatization of my story about Sally Bowles, J Am a Camera,
went to New York and England, and finally finished the novel last year. '2 The
difficulty, he explained, was that his original work turned out to be two
separate novels that had to be disentangled. Although The World in the
Evening was only the first of these, -it was a good 300 pages long, and fell
definitely into the category of his full-fledged novels, as opposed to his short
narratives such as A Single Man. As in the case of Gide, the length of a work
affects Isherwood's attitude towards its genre. In Lions and Shadows, for
example, Isherwood tells us that his reading of War and Peace completely
disenchanted him with his previous view that a novel was 'something
compact, and by the laws of its own nature fairly short.'3 One is reminded
that the French author, after writing relatively short first-person récits like
LTmmoraliste and ironical soties like Taludes, finally allowed that Les
2 Quoted by Bernard Kalb in an interview, Saturday Review, 37 (5 June 1954) 14
3 Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties (Norfolk,
Connecticut: New Directions 1947) 259
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André Gide and Christopher Isherwood / 195
Faux-monnayeurs was his first and eventually his only work complex and
weighty enough to deserve definitive classification as a roman.
The first reviewers did not hesitate to comment on the complexity of
Isherwood's structure. Kingsley Amis said: 'It is all ingeniously stage-
managed and dovetailed,' adding 'but there seems no good reason for any
particular feature of the book being as it is and not otherwise.'4 Richard
Hayes commented: 'Yet this is a novel which curiously fixes the attention,
possibly because one intuits beneath its banal surfaces the ruined design of
something large, serious and subtle.'5 Angus Wilson, speaking more ap-
preciatively, saw the novel as Woolfian: 'he [Isherwood] uses the Woolfian
technique of change of time and place, of memory, journals and letters with a
logicality of sequence and a unification of purpose that makes the reading of
the novel, even where its central theme is weakest, an absolute delight.'6 Yes
indeed. But why call this Woolfian? Why not Gidean? Had Wilson not just
described the structure of Les Faux-monnayeurs, with its blending of diary
and letters with first-person and third-person narration? Howard Mumford
Jones perhaps came closest to seeing this echo of Gide when he spoke of the
'Chinese-box' structure of the novel, although he chose Wuthering Heights
as his point of comparison.7 'Quaker Oats,' the title of Isaac Rosenfeld's
review in The Nation, tantalizingly called forth the notion of composition en
abîme that middle-aged readers associate not only with porridge boxes but
also with Flemish paintings, Les Faux-monnayeurs, and Aldous Huxley's
Point Counter Point; but Rosenfeld's title ironically referred to the spiritual
didacticism he saw in the novel: 'Now this is not fiction,' he says, 'it is a
sowing of Quaker oats.'8
Later critics have likewise picked up on the didactic aspects of the novel,
while apparently avoiding assiduously the themes (reality and illusion,
hypocrisy and sincerity) that link it most clearly with the world of Les
Faux-monnayeurs. Just what, we might ask, have they been missing?
So much of Les Faux-monnayeurs could be summed up in the young
Armand Vedel's wise statement to Olivier: 'La vie, mon vieux, n'est qu'une
comédie,'9 that it hardly seems possible or necessary to list all the examples
of the dramatic acts, scenes, statements, and gestures of Gide's actors both
young and old. Of the young lycéens, for instance, the narrator says:
4 Kingsley Amis, 'The World in the Evening. By Christopher Isherwood,' Twentieth Cen-
tury, 156 (July 1954) 89
5 Richard Hayes, 'Private Pity,' Commonweal, 60 (30 July 1954) 421
6 Angus Wilson, 'The New and Old Isherwood,' Encounter, 3 (August 1954) 68
7 Howard Mumford Jones, 'Ambivalent Trio,' Saturday Review, 37 (5 June 1954) 14
8 Isaac Rosenfeld, 'Quaker Oats,' The Nation, 179 (3 July 1954) 15
9 André Gide, Les Faux-monnayeurs, in Romans, récits et soties, œuvres lyriques (Paris:
Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1958) 1229. All subsequent quotations are taken from
this edition and appear in the text.
Page 4
196 / C.D.E. Tolton
'Chacun de ces jeunes gens, sitôt qu'il était devant les autres, jouait un
personnage et perdait presque tout naturel' (934). Soon we see Georges
Molinier feigning sleep while Bernard and Olivier talk in bed (956). Later,
Olivier will project wit and erudition to Bernard when speaking of his
examination essay on Lafontaine, although the lines he quotes are not his
own but Passavant's (1142). Armand is the most consistent of the young role
players; of his actions Olivier says: 'C'est une espèce de rôle qu'il joue'
(1021), and Bernard calls him 'contrefait' (1140). Towards the end of the
novel the children in La Pérouse's study-hour impishly convey false fear
(1217), and the narrator vows that the most deplorable aspect of Boris's death
is the influential role of Georges' insincere affection (1239).
The adults are no less immune to this dangerously contagious hypocrisy.
Lilian Griffith assumes an air of mourning so thoroughly that she convinces
herself of her own sadness (979). Passavant pretends indignation because
Vincent seems so little interested in Olivier (1055), and later pretends not to
care about losing Olivier from his life (1192-3). Madame La Perouse smiles
insincerely (1058). Laura pretends to be Edouard's wife in Saas-Fée (1076).
Oscar Molinier under his façade of wholesome virtue is having an affair with
a girl from the Olympia while his wife pretends not to see his vices or those of
their sons (1154). Rachel Vedel hides the true financial situation at the
Pension Azai's-Vedel (1127). And so on.
The world as a stage filled with actors wearing masks becomes a principal
motif in The World in the Evening. Elizabeth expresses some of her views on
life through this image. On age, for instance, she writes to Mary Scriven:
'We have to wear masks and keep pretending to be what we seem at that
particular moment.'10 Stephen inherits the image. He describes himself at a
Hollywood party: 'my masquerade as a musical-comedy Hollywood charac-
ter passed entirely unnoticed' (12). He describes the kind and idealistic Gerda
answering his question about how she liked the Quaker meeting: 'But she
merely smiled and said politely, "Very Interesting" as though we were in a
theatre at the end of a play which I'd written' (51). Gerda's daily entrances
into his sick room segment Stephen's day into dramatic acts: 'By the time
Gerda came in to get me ready for breakfast, I'd usually been awake so long
that her arrival seemed like the end of Act One of the morning, rather than
the beginning of the day' (100).
In the case of the saintly Aunt Sarah, the mask which Stephen refers to
serves to separate her from the superhuman and relates her to mere mortals:
'The whatever-it-was behind Sarah's eyes looked out at me through them, as
if through the eyeholes in a mask. And its look meant: Yes, I am always here'
10 Christopher Isherwood, The World in the Evening (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin
Books 1966) 150. Further references, all taken from this edition, appear in parentheses in the
text.
Page 5
André Gide and Christopher Isherwood / 197
(292). Sarah's mask is worn with sincerity. Others, in a more deliberate
fashion, pretend to be what they are not. Roy Griffin, 'that film-fairy, that
pansy male-impersonator who fooled nobody but himself (22) tries to prove
his virility by seducing Stephen's second wife, Jane. Jane, who seems thick-
skinned, proves to be sensitive and vulnerable. Bob Wood, who turns out to
be Dr Charles Kennedy's young lover, projects a wholesome image to Aunt
Sarah (64). And Stephen, who appears to believe that everything Elizabeth
wrote was perfect, is actually aware of her sentimentality, that her achieve-
ment did not always coincide with her intention. Gerda finds Stephen too
nice: 'I am not sure that I understand you at all. Sometimes you are too nice.
It is not quite real' (124). And when Jane, who knows Stephen better, tells
him 'To look at you, no one would ever think you could be so mean' (297),
she reiterates the dangerous deceptiveness of Stephen's appearance.
Stephen's various images - to Elizabeth, a perfect, angelic young husband ;
to Michael, an encouraging latent homosexual; to Jane, a strange and
libidinous, restlessly married playboy - emerge as excusable, since the
impression he conveys is largely involuntary, or rather, in the eyes of the
beholder. Stephen Monk, devoid of self-knowledge, buffeted by the winds of
chance, is far from devious. Stephen's behaviour, in fact, readily recalls
Edouard's statement in Les Faux-monnayeurs: 'Involontairement, incon-
sciemment, chacun des ceux êtres qui s'aiment se façonne selon l'exigence de
l'autre, travaille à ressembler à cette idole qu'il contemple dans le cœur de
l'autre' (986). Just as Gide's Laura is capable of being alternately Edouard's
child-like source of inspiration and Vincent's passionate mistress, so Stephen
is, almost by accident, different things to different people.
But Stephen's relationship with Michael Drummond and his affair with
Jane - while still married to Elizabeth - force him into a world of lies to which
Elizabeth is unusually sensitive. After his trip to El Nublo with Michael,
Stephen asks, 'Was I developing a special tone when I spoke to her, a sort of
bedside manner' (198)? His answer comes almost instantly. 'At lunch we
related all the describable incidents of our trip in detail, making them sound
so different from the reality that it was as if two other people had visited an
altogether different country.' It will be when Stephen drops his masks and
stops his lying that he will, in the last lines of the novel, be able to forgive
himself his own weakness and deceit and live the kind of authentic life that
Gide's Bernard Profitendieu had also been taught to do. Stephen's quest for
self-knowledge ends in an unspoken dictum for living which, if articulated,
could be phrased like Bernard's: Tl est bon de suivre sa pente, pourvu que ce
soit en montant' (1215).
Isherwood's novel is as open-ended as Gide's. Just as an undefined new
world opens for Bernard on his return to his family, so Stephen Monk may
choose new paths. Will he follow the saintly example of his Aunt Sarah, not
Page 6
198 / C.D.E. Tolton
so subtly promised in his own surname, or, if he finds the strength he
believes he would need, will he begin to live the homosexual life for which
Jane finds him suited? Some of the excellence of the novel is attested to by the
fact that the reader who has shared Stephen's consciousness for so many
pages cares perhaps more about his future than either Edouard's or Ber-
nard's.
A question which must inevitably arise from all of this is the extent to
which Isherwood was aware of the works of André Gide and especially Les
Faux-monnayeurs at the time of writing The World in the Evening. The
sleuth who turns to Isherwood's autobiographies finds the first clues when,
in referring to the plot of Christopher Garland, a tentative autobiographical
novel, Isherwood states: 'The mood of Christopher Garland was to be
monastic renunciation of all life's pleasures - and of all life's difficulties as
well. But Garland, like most of his kind, was only a pseudo-monk ; and so this
was only a pseudo-subject for a novel - doomed as unworkable from the
start.'11 For a Gide scholar, Christopher Garland, with its ascetic renuncia-
tion, could only be to Christopher Isherwood what the autobiographical
piece of fiction, Les Cahiers d'André Walter, had been to the young André
Gide - an early purgative act of self-discovery through art. And could the
monkish Christopher Garland be other than a preview of one of the potential
sides of Stephen Monk's character? But since the chances of Isherwood's
having actually encountered the little-read André Walter are so slight, this
could be at best a promising lead, at worst a red herring.
Later on in Lions and Shadows, Isherwood describes how he and Edward
Upward (here called Allen Chalmers) were attempting to transpose their
fanciful village of Mortmere into a book. After summarizing the plot of
Mortmere, Isherwood makes the most astonishing pronouncement: 'This
idea is largely cribbed - as many of my readers will recognize - from Gide's
Les Faux-monnayeurs.'12 It is astonishing because the plot summary bears
not the slightest resemblance to Gide's novel, which, as Isherwood admits,
he and Upward would not read until a year later. What they had read was
E.M. Forster's description of the plot in Aspects of the Novel, and this
description had excited their imagination to the extent that the novel itself
came as a disappointment:
In our impatience, we both bought copies and began reading simultaneously. We
even reported our progress to each other on a series of postcards. Chalmers wrote:
'Have just finished chapter seven. The idiot has ruined everything.' But later: 'Page
359. Gide is the greatest. Whatever he does, he can't spoil it now.' What our final
verdict was I forget. In fact, I have almost entirely forgotten what Les Faux-
ii Lions and Shadows, 123
12 Ibid. 167
Page 7
André Gide and Christopher Isherwood / 199
monnayeurs was actually about. What remains, immense, vague, profoundly excit-
ing, is my conception of Forster's conception of Gide's original idea. One day, I shall
attempt the nearly hopeless task of fixing it and writing it down.13
So far as we know, Isherwood has not yet written down this twice-removed
conception of Gide's plot. But two facts remain. First, Forster's version of Les
Faux-monnayeurs is not nearly so different from the original as is the
incipient Mortmere; second, Isherwood undeniably did read Les Faux-
monnayeurs, and might conceivably have recalled more of Gide's novel than
he cared to admit in 1947 when the early gestation of The World in the
Evening was coinciding with publicity surrounding Gide's winning of the
Nobel Prize.
It is true that Isherwood has at times very generously paid tribute in print
to those authors who have influenced him. Francis King reminds us, in fact,
of Isherwood's public acknowledgment of indebtedness to E.M. Forster,
Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Ford Madox Ford, and Aldous Hux-
ley.14 But at the same time, King goes on to say, Isherwood has ignored his
debt to Somerset Maugham, whom he sometimes more closely resembles
than these. Stephen Monk, in his relations with the Quakers and his intense
soul-searching, recalls the portrait of Larry in Maugham's The Razor's Edge,
for which, incidentally, some say Isherwood himself was the model. Isher-
wood has apparently never directly acknowledged the parallel.
On occasion, however, Isherwood has conveyed his awareness of other
authors' importance to him in a less conventional, rather indirect fashion. In
The World in the Evening, Jane Austen, for instance, receives an ambiguous
reference when one of Elizabeth Rydal's pseudo-Bloomsbury friends pre-
sents her with 'a china inkwell, "almost certainly used by Jane Austen while
she was living at Chawton" ' (142). Since neither the donor nor the recipient
seems thrilled with the gift, the reader cannot ascertain clearly from this
allusion alone what Isherwood's attitude to Austen might be. But the names
of Stephen's wives, Elizabeth and Jane, and their participation in the stylized
dialogue of Quaker parlours and even Hollywood family-rooms cannot help
but recall more specifically the Bennet girls of Pride and Prejudice and the
kind of mannered existence that Austen, of all Isherwood's predecessors,
perhaps best depicted. One wonders accordingly whether Isherwood is not
paying a similar indirect tribute to André Gide, when he gives to two of
Elizabeth Rydal's characters in A Garden with Animals the names of Laura
and Oliver, reminiscent of Laura Douviers and Olivier Molinier in Les
Faux-monnayeurs.
Such a tribute would not be based on Isherwood's initial impression of
13 Ibid., 167-8
14 Francis King, Christopher Isherwood (London: Longman Group 1976) 22
Page 8
200 / C.D.E. Tolton
André Gide, whom he once saw at the Institut Hirschfeld in 1929. Isherwood
describes the visit:
Then one afternoon, André Gide paid them a visit. He was taken on a tour of the
premises personally conducted by Hirschfeld. Live exhibits were introduced, with
such comments as: Tntergrade, Third Division.' One of these was a young man who
opened his shirt with a modest smile to display two perfectly formed female breasts.
Gide looked on, making a minimum of polite comment, judiciously fingering his
chin. He was in full costume as the Great French Novelist, complete with cape. No
doubt he thought Hirschfeld's performance hopelessly crude and un-French. Chris-
topher's Gallophobia flared up. Sneering, culture-conceited frog!15
One can imagine Gide's pose on that day and how it might be explained in
terms of the forthright Michael Drummond's reaction to Stephen Monk's
Riviera friends in 1917: 'He simply didn't care. To him, these weren't going
to be real people, because this wasn't a real place' (217).
But a man like Isherwood is surely aware, like Marcel Proust, whose work
he admired, that the personality of the man is not necessarily a reflection of
the genius of the artist. In The World in the Evening, Aunt Sarah says of the
portrait of Stephen Monk's father: 'You know, sometimes when I look at it
for a long while, it seems to me as if the real man were hidden inside it? It's as
if he didn't wish everybody to see behind the outward appearance' (290).
Apparently, at some point in the many years after Isherwood met Gide, he
devoted at least a moment to the consideration of the real man hidden
beneath that flamboyant cape; for, in the paragraph from Christopher and
his Kind, Christopher continues: in spite of the bad beginning, he would later
learn to honour Gide, the outspoken homosexual, as a heroic leader of their
mutual tribe. No doubt Isherwood's change of heart had occurred by 1947.
Can the parallels we find in the technically inventive and thematically similar
novels of these two didactic novelists be, then, pure coincidence?
Victoria College, University of Toronto
15 Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and his Kind (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux
1976) 17
Reflections on themes in Baudelaire’s
“Les fleurs du mal”


Welcome to my page of thoughts on themes in « Les fleurs du mal ». This is not planned as literary criticism, but rather a page allowing young or new readers of Baudelaire to become familiar with some of the themes and thoughts contained in the poems.



First published in 1857, “Les fleurs du mal” is a collection of poems divided into five sections:

Spleen et idéal
Les fleurs du mal
Révolte
Le vin
La mort

On its initial publication Baudelaire and his publisher were prosecuted for an “insult to public decency”, and six poems were banned. A second edition was published in 1861 which contained 32 new poems and a new section entitled “Tableaux Parisiens”.

The poems contained in this collection deal with a wide variety of themes and generally reflect the philosophical mood of the time, as well as Baudelaire’s own feelings and torment. For a page discussing some of the philosophical ideas which were prevalent at the time of writing, and which undoubtedly exercised considerable influence on Baudelaire, please click here.

Baudelaire’s poetry is remarkably clear, incisive and accessible. Although highly personal, he manages to make points which are equally applicable to all men. He considers themes such as good and evil, human nature, conflict between the spiritual and the physical, religion, death, time, discipline and self-control, boredom, destiny and artistry.

I have chosen a handful of poems (more or less at random) which illustrate these themes and ideas. However, the work which encapsulates beautifully the themes and feelings of the author is the introductory poem entitled “Au lecteur”, which touches on many of the themes expanded upon in the course of the collection, and gives the reader a clear indication of the tone and content of what is to follow.

Au lecteur (1)

La sottise, l'erreur, le péché, la lésine, Occupent nos esprits et travaillent nos corps, Et nous alimentons nos aimables remords, Comme les mendiants nourrissent leur vermine. Nos péchés sont têtus, nos repentirs sont lâches ; Nous nous faisons payer grassement nos aveux, 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. C'est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent ! Aux objets répugnants nous trouvons des appas ; Chaque jour vers l'Enfer nous descendons d'un pas, Sans horreur, à travers des ténèbres qui puent. Ainsi qu'un débauché pauvre qui baise et mange Le sein martyrisé d'une antique catin, Nous volons au passage un plaisir clandestin Que nous pressons bien fort comme une vieille orange. Serré, fourmillant, comme un million d'helminthes, Dans nos cerveaux ribote un peuple de Démons, Et, quand nous respirons, la Mort dans nos poumons Descend, fleuve invisible, avec de sourdes plaintes. Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l'incendie, N'ont pas encor brodé de leurs plaisants dessins Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins, C'est que notre âme, hélas ! n'est pas assez hardie. Mais parmi les chacals, les panthères, les lices, Les singes, les scorpions, les vautours, les serpents, Les monstres glapissants, hurlants, grognants, rampants, Dans la ménagerie infâme de nos vices, 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'œil 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 !




Baudelaire immediately introduces several of his main themes within the first four lines. He lists four somewhat negative qualities of human nature and suggests they overwhelm our minds or spirits and control our bodies. He goes on to suggest that while we may “feed” regret over this, this regret in turn “feeds” off us.

Thus Baudelaire has already introduced his somewhat jaundiced and negative (yet realistic?) view of human nature, the division between the body and soul, the concept that man has little (if any) self discipline or self-control, and of course the idea that conscience serves largely to weaken man, causing him to doubt himself, though in the next verse he suggests that this has little or no effect in real terms.

In verse two he says our “sins” are stubborn and our repentance is faint-hearted. We pay handsomely for our confessions (a dig at the Catholic Church?), but then we happily return to our murky paths, thinking we have washed away stains on our characters with a few cheap tears.

Here Baudelaire makes it clear that although we are conscious of our misdeeds, we can’t stop repeating them – we may try (or pretend) to alleviate guilt through confession or atonement, but that doesn’t stop us re-offending. Once again man’s willpower is called in to question, as is organized religion. He almost goes so far as to suggest that we are hypocritical, as we “buy” a clear conscience for a short time before once again committing the same acts.

In verse three Baudelaire personifies temptation or evil and suggests that temptation gently but steadily draws us in, and great willpower and determination of which we can be so proud on occasions is simply vaporised by this temptation.

In verse four he expands and suggests it is the devil who holds the strings which move us – man has no effective willpower or control and will always give in to his nature. In moments of clarity we may see general unpleasantness and ugliness, we recognize our wrong-doing, yet our nature causes us to see something attractive within this, and we give in to temptation. Each day we descend one step closer to Hell, without complaint, and recognising the unpleasantness and wrong-doing around us, yet we continue.

In verse five he gives a specific example of a debauched man who turns to an ancient prostitute in order to gain a fleeting moment of pleasure. He compares this act to squeezing the remaining juice from an old orange. Clearly this is a desperate act of pure physical satisfaction with no hint of love, romance or affection, and no hint of spiritual worth or beauty. This is a very clever metaphor as it not only exemplifies the division of body and soul, but also introduces the idea of “carpe diem”, by which he suggests we should squeeze every drop of life from every moment and every experience.

Verse six suggests that temptation is all around us in a million shapes and forms. It is unstoppable, in much the same way as death which comes closer with every breath of life we take. Here Baudelaire introduces the inevitability of death, underlining once again the importance of making the most of every moment as life will come to an end.

In verse seven once again we have a list of misadventures which Baudelaire finds attractive and which brighten our uneventful lives and our pitiful destinies. Life is boring and Baudelaire finds such activities preferable to banal and monotonous existence. Once again there is implied recognition of “unpleasantness” involved in these activities, yet Baudelaire finds them attractive, especially given the boredom of the alternative. However, he does seem to suggest that indulgence in such activities requires considerable strength of spirit.

The last three verses run together. In verse eight Baudelaire compares vices to a list of various creatures and animals, all displaying strength and purity of purpose (while following their nature), and also representing danger. However, in verse nine he suggests there is one more awful than any other, one vice that could destroy the world. In verse ten we are told this is boredom and we, the readers, are reminded that we know this vice just as well as Baudelaire. There should be no hint of superiority on our part for we are all the same, all brothers sharing the same vices.


This is an excellent introductory poem, which was almost certainly written after the others. It expresses themes and ideas with such clarity that it almost summarises rather than introduces the ideas Baudelaire will go on to discuss in the main body of his collection.




L’ennemi (10)

Ma jeunesse ne fut qu'un ténébreux orage, Traversé çà et là par de brillants soleils ; Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage, Qu'il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils. Voilà que j'ai touché l'automne des idées, Et qu'il faut employer la pelle et les râteaux Pour rassembler à neuf les terres inondées, Où l'eau creuse des trous grands comme des tombeaux. Et qui sait si les fleurs nouvelles que je rêve Trouveront dans ce sol lavé comme une grève Le mystique aliment qui ferait leur vigueur ? – O douleur ! ô douleur ! Le Temps mange la vie, Et l'obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le cœur Du sang que nous perdons croît et se fortifie !


In “L’ennemi” Baudelaire likens life to, or describes life by way of, weather and gardening metaphors. He has had a hard life, lightened only occasionally, and he asks if hope for the future will find some way to grow in the barren land of his life. Suddenly, in the last verse, he turns his attention to time and suggests that time consumes life and grows stronger as we grow weaker.

He goes from a beautifully (and effectively) descriptive poem to one which attaches blame and reveals anger and frustration at the thought of time consuming his life.



La destruction (78)
Sans cesse à mes côtés s'agite le Démon ; II nage autour de moi comme un air impalpable ; Je l'avale et le sens qui brûle mon poumon Et l'emplit d'un désir éternel et coupable. Parfois il prend, sachant mon grand amour de l'Art, La forme de la plus séduisante des femmes, Et, sous de spécieux prétextes de cafard, Accoutume ma lèvre à des philtres infâmes. II me conduit ainsi, loin du regard de Dieu, Haletant et brisé de fatigue, au milieu Des plaines de l'Ennui, profondes et désertes, Et jette dans mes yeux pleins de confusion Des vêtements souillés, des blessures ouvertes, Et l'appareil sanglant de la Destruction !

In “La destruction” Baudelaire again emphasises lack of willpower and recognises the “guilty” nature of his thoughts. Temptation is once again personified and he suggests that if he is feeling low, demons (or temptation) will take the shape of an attractive woman, knowing Baudelaire cannot resist such a work of art, and this takes him far from God’s gaze and influence. Once again it seems man is incapable of offering any resistance and has no control over such matters.
Temptation transports him from the land of boredom (or is this in fact depression?). Are we to see interaction with women as a form of release from self doubt and depression?
In the last verse Baudelaire recognizes unpleasant side effects of indulgence, but this is not enough to stop him.
Yes, there is some expansion of themes treated in “Au lecteur”, and some of these are expressed with slightly greater clarity, but there is little that is new, thematically speaking, although it is interesting to note discussion of depression as a possible extension of boredom.


Le reniement de Saint Pierre (90)
Qu'est-ce que Dieu fait donc de ce flot d'anathèmes Qui monte tous les jours vers ses chers Séraphins ? Comme un tyran gorgé de viande et de vins, II s'endort au doux bruit de nos affreux blasphèmes. Les sanglots des martyrs et des suppliciés Sont une symphonie enivrante sans doute, Puisque, malgré le sang que leur volupté coûte, Les cieux ne s'en sont point encore rassasiés ! – Ah! Jésus, souviens-toi du Jardin des Olives ! Dans ta simplicité tu priais à genoux Celui qui dans son ciel riait au bruit des clous Que d'ignobles bourreaux plantaient dans tes chairs vives, Lorsque tu vis cracher sur ta divinité La crapule du corps de garde et des cuisines, Et lorsque tu sentis s'enfoncer les épines Dans ton crâne où vivait l'immense Humanité ; Quand de ton corps brisé la pesanteur horrible Allongeait tes deux bras distendus, que ton sang Et ta sueur coulaient de ton front pâlissant, Quand tu fus devant tous posé comme une cible, Rêvais-tu de ces jours si brillants et si beaux Où tu vins pour remplir l'éternelle promesse, Où tu foulais, monté sur une douce ânesse, Des chemins tout jonchés de fleurs et de rameaux, Où, le cœur tout gonflé d'espoir et de vaillance, Tu fouettais tous ces vils marchands à tour de bras, Où tu fus maître enfin ? Le remords n'a-t-il pas Pénétré dans ton flanc plus avant que la lance ? – Certes, je sortirai, quant à moi, satisfait D'un monde où l'action n'est pas la sœur du rêve ; Puissé-je user du glaive et périr par le glaive ! Saint Pierre a renié Jésus... il a bien fait !

“Le reniement de Saint Pierre” offers an interesting discussion about God and Baudelaire’s attitude to religion.
He appears to suggest that God is “asleep on the job”, ignoring the situation of revolt against Him (a reflection of the Enlightenment Movement?), and even seems to suggest complacency.
He goes on to point out that martyrs die in the name of God, but that heaven does not appear to have had its fill of their pain and suffering. Baudelaire asks if God is listening, and appears to suggest a certain injustice and lack of caring as he uses empirical evidence of pain and suffering in God’s name.
He goes so far as to suggest that God may have laughed at Jesus’ suffering. Not that Baudelaire renounces Jesus – Jesus represents humanity, but he points out that God did nothing. Jesus was full of promise and hope, but Baudelaire suggests he was ultimately let down by God, and Jesus must have felt regret on his death.
This poem, perhaps more than any other, reveals the malaise felt in the late nineteenth century as the principles and challenges of the Enlightenment Movement made themselves felt. In a sense Baudelaire feels almost abandoned by God. He wants more from life – he wants direction, purpose, sense, morality. These things were in place, but they have now disappeared with the arrival of the challenge to God’s very existence and the authority of those who claim to represent Him. God is not responding to this challenge, and is allowing pain and suffering – not least the pain caused by the possibility of His non-existence!

Le vin du solitaire (96)

Le regard singulier d'une femme galante Qui se glisse vers nous comme le rayon blanc Que la lune onduleuse envoie au lac tremblant, Quand elle y veut baigner sa beauté nonchalante ; Le dernier sac d'écus dans les doigts d'un joueur ; Un baiser libertin de la maigre Adeline ; Les sons d'une musique énervante et câline, Semblable au cri lointain de l'humaine douleur, Tout cela ne vaut pas, ô bouteille profonde, Les baumes pénétrants que ta panse féconde Garde au cœur altéré du poète pieux ; Tu lui verses l'espoir, la jeunesse et la vie, – Et l'orgueil, ce trésor de toute gueuserie, Qui nous rend triomphants et semblables aux Dieux !



Here, Baudelaire lists several things which can make you feel better about the pain of life, but best of all is a bottle of wine which pours hope, youth, life and pride into its consumer – it can make you feel triumphant and equal to the gods.

Clearly Baudelaire is seeking a form of escape, and this poem reveals something of how he feels about life – as a series of insurmountable problems, and wine offers a momentary release, although he recognises the fleeting and illusory nature of this solution.



La mort des artistes (100)
Combien faut-il de fois secouer mes grelots Et baiser ton front bas, morne caricature ? Pour piquer dans le but, de mystique nature, Combien, ô mon carquois, perdre de javelots ? Nous userons notre âme en de subtils complots, Et nous démolirons mainte lourde armature, Avant de contempler la grande Créature Dont l'infernal désir nous remplit de sanglots ! Il en est qui jamais n'ont connu leur Idole, Et ces sculpteurs damnés et marqués d'un affront, Qui vont se martelant la poitrine et le front, N'ont qu'un espoir, étrange et sombre Capitole ! C'est que la Mort, planant comme un soleil nouveau, Fera s'épanouir les fleurs de leur cerveau !

Will death allow artists to meet that which has captivated and inspired them ? Will it release their spirit from physical limits and allow them to grow? Do artists gain a glimpse of what is beyond the physical to see the truth? Will death enable them to achieve a spiritual reality?

Much in Baudelaire’s poetry suggests he is lost – he doesn’t know what to believe, or whether he should believe in anything. At one moment he suggests God is responsible, the next it is the Devil who is pulling the strings. Then he decides it doesn't matter anyway – he will simply seek pleasure in his experiences because life is short and should be appreciated as such. He appears confused or at least unclear about who or what is responsible for life, but he is quite clear that he finds nature overwhelming – he feels he is not in control and is disappointed that he cannot find it in himself to rise above his nature. He sees his own shortcomings and weaknesses with remarkable clarity (and extends his criticisms to the whole of humanity), so that he understands the consequences of his actions, but finds himself incapable of altering his nature.
Baudelaire makes much of the fact that death is the end. If God does not exist, then there is no afterlife. This also brings home the fact that life is relatively short and should not be wasted. Each moment is precious and should be filled with something worthwhile, yet life is also boring and repetitive, and perhaps ultimately pointless. All the more reason, then, to seek moments of pleasure to relieve the boredom and pressing feeling that time is running out.
Baudelaire frequently emphasises the temporary nature of moments of pleasure. These are fleeting moments which make life more bearable, but the pleasure he takes from them is double-edged. He is left with the feeling that physical experience is lacking in some way – he is happy to indulge in his freedom, but regrets the lack of spirituality and the depth that would lend the experience, and a sense of control over these events.
I think this is essential to understanding the torment, despair, and spirituality which underpin Baudelaire’s "Fleurs du Mal". The key to understanding Baudelaire’s poetry is in understanding his ambivalence toward moral freedom – his overwhelming desire to indulge in the moral and sexual freedom implied by the Enlightenment Movement (indeed his inability to resist it!), but countered by his recognition of negative aspects, and his longing for something of spiritual value, accentuating his awareness of the emptiness and fleeting nature of mere physical being. This is reflected in the very title of the collection, where he finds himself attracted to something, yet recognises its harmful effect.

My thanks for taking the time to read this page. I hope you have found these notes of some help, and I would, of course, be delighted to hear from anyone wishing to discuss the subject further. I can be contacted at stuartfernie@yahoo.co.uk .

Stuart Fernie

To go to an excellent series of articles on Baudelaire, please click here.


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Charles Baudelaire
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Charles Baudelaire, photograph taken by Nadar.
Charles Pierre Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867) was one of the most influential French poets and critics of the nineteenth century, although largely unrecognized during his lifetime. Baudelaire's realistic imagery and use of symbols, metaphors, and "correspondences" inspired the French Symbolist movement of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. He was an early advocate of "art for art's sake," the defining principle of the Aesthetic (and later the Decadent) movement, and a reaction to the prevailing understanding of the role of the arts to enlighten and improve human life.
Baudelaire's most important work, Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), with its provocative themes of sex, decay, death, and spiritual and moral anomie, was labeled obscene by the French government and Baudelaire was prosecuted for offenses against religion and public decency. As the title of the work suggests, Baudelaire believed that every aspect of experience was the proper subject for artistic inquiry, and that evil and vice were potent and overlooked sources of beauty and order. His inclusive and undiscriminating perspective would profoundly influence later modernist writers.
Baudelaire's works were rooted in his Catholic background and his conception of humanity doomed by original sin, yet without salvation. His poetry is an elegiac expression of spiritual despair, a vision in which "evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate, [while] good is always the product of an art." Love particularly, in Baudelaire's poetry, is depicted as dark and purely sensuous; in "The Journey," man is "a gluttonous, lewd tyrant," a "slave of a slave," while his imagery of women is often carnal and cruel.
Baudelaire's own life mirrored his art. He became addicted to opium and contracted syphilis as an early age and once stated that "after examining scrupulously the depths of my past reveries, I realized that I have always been obsessed by the impossibility of understanding some of man's actions or thoughts, save by the hypothesis of the intervention of some exterior evil force." Reflecting on the miseries of opium addiction, he concluded that man cannot interfere in "the primordial conditions of his existence" without grave consequences and that drug-induced euphoria destroyed the "precious substance" of the will.
In addition to his career as a poet, Baudelaire is remembered as "the father of modern criticism." Baudelaire was active in the world of visual arts, corresponding closely with a number of influential French painters, among them Eugene Delacroix. Baudelaire was also a translator, and he introduced the works of Edgar Allen Poe—whom Baudelaire considered to be a kindred spirit—to a French-speaking audience with translations that are still considered classic. Baudelaire's influence on French art and literature was unrecognized in his own life, but it is now generally agreed that he is one of the most influential figures in all of nineteenth-century French letters.
Contents
[hide]
1 Life
2 Work
3 Legacy
4 Bibliography
5 Online texts
5.1 In French
5.2 In English
6 External links
7 Credits
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Life
Baudelaire was born in Paris. His father, a senior civil servant and an amateur artist, died in 1827. The following year his mother married a lieutenant colonel named Aupick, who later became a French ambassador to various courts. Baudelaire was educated in Lyon and at the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris. After gaining his degree in 1839 he decided to embark upon a literary career, and for the next two years led a somewhat irregular life. It is believed he contracted syphilis about this time. To straighten him out, his legal guardians sent him on a voyage to India in 1841. Baudelaire jumped ship, however, in the Caribbean, an experience which would change his life. Although Baudelaire only lived in the tropics for a matter of months, his poetry would return again and again to images of tropical paradise. When he returned to Paris, after less than a year's absence, he was of age and could receive his inheritance. However, in a year or two his extravagance threatened to bankrupt him, and his family obtained a decree to place his property in trust. It is in this period that he met Jeanne Duval, a mulatto woman who was to become his longest romantic association.
His art reviews of 1845 and 1846 attracted immediate attention for the boldness with which he propounded his views: many of his critical opinions were novel in their time, but have since been generally accepted. He took part with in the Revolution of 1848, and for some years was interested in republican politics, although his political views remain ambiguous. Regardless, during this time of political upheaval Baudelaire devoted himself to his writing. He was a slow and fastidious worker, and it was not until 1857 that he produced his first and most famous volume of poems, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil). The poems found a small but appreciative audience, but greater public attention was given to their subject matter. The principal themes of sex and death were considered scandalous, and the book became a by-word for unwholesomeness among mainstream critics of the day. Baudelaire, his publisher, and the printer were successfully prosecuted for creating an offense against public morals, and Les Fleurs du mal remained banned in France until 1949. In the poem "Au lecteur" ("To the Reader") that prefaces Les fleurs du mal, Baudelaire argues that there should be poems for the vulgar things in life just as there are poems for the sacred:
… If rape or arson, poison, or the knife
Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff
Of this drab canvas we accept as life—
It is because we are not bold enough!
Six of the most scandalous poems in the volume were suppressed, but printed later as Les Épaves ("The Wrecks") in Brussels, 1866. Another edition of Les fleurs du mal, without these poems, but with considerable additions, appeared in 1861.
Baudelaire had learned English in his childhood, and Gothic novels, such as Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk, became some of his favorite reading matter. In 1846 and 1847, he became acquainted with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, in which he found tales and poems which had, he claimed, long existed in his own brain but never taken shape. From this time until 1865 he was largely occupied with his translations of Poe's works, which were widely praised. These were published as Histoires extraordinaires ("Extraordinary stories") (1852), Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires ("New extraordinary stories") (1857), Aventures d'Arthur Gordon Pym ("The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym"), Eureka, and Histoires grotesques et sérieuses ("Grotesque and serious stories") (1865). Two essays on Poe are to be found in his Oeuvres complètes ("Complete works") (vols. v. and vi.).
Meanwhile his financial difficulties increased, particularly after his publisher, Poulet Malassis, went bankrupt in 1861, so, in 1864 he left Paris for Belgium, partly in the hope of selling the rights to his works. During these troubled times he began experimenting with opium, and in Brussels Baudelaire began to drink to excess. He suffered a massive stroke in 1866 and paralysis followed. The last two years of his life were spent in "maisons de santé" in Brussels and in Paris, where he died on August 31, 1867. Many of his works were published posthumously.
He is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris.
Work
Baudelaire produced a relatively small body of poetry. Nonetheless, his influence on later poets has been immense. His poetry became popular with the French Symbolists, who viewed him almost as their patron saint; he also was a major influence on a number of poets in the English-speaking world, among them Ezra Pound and Elizabeth Bishop.
His poetry is characterized by its deeply structured imagery and repeated symbols. Les Fleurs du mal infamously returns to the same images again and again: images of tropical islands, insane women, and rotting corpses. The pungency of Baudelaire's imagery, and his unwillingness to flinch from explicit descriptions, has given him a reputation as a decadent poet. Yet his poems are meant for more than shock-value. They are meant to do nothing less than to present a complete portrait of the poet's mind, however depraved or corrupted, because—as Baudelaire argues—only by creating poetry that is inclusive of everything can poetry truly become all-encompassing, self-enclosed, and hence, beautiful. His revealing poem "Destruction," from Les Fleurs du mal suggests the poet's insouciant interest in illicit experience and sensation:
"Destruction"
Always the Demon fidgets here beside me
And swims around, impalpable as air:
I drink him, feel him burn the lungs inside me
With endless evil longings and despair.
Sometimes, knowing my love of Art, he uses
Seductive forms of women: and has thus,
With specious, hypocritical excuses,
Accustomed me to philtres infamous.
Leading me way worn into wastes untrod
Of boundless Boredom, out of sight of God,
Using all baits to compass my abduction,
Into my eyes, confused and full of woe,
Soiled clothes and bleeding gashes he will throw
And all the grim regalia of Destruction.
"La Destruction"
Sans cesse à mes côtés s'agite le Démon;
II nage autour de moi comme un air impalpable;
Je l'avale et le sens qui brûle mon poumon
Et l'emplit d'un désir éternel et coupable.
Parfois il prend, sachant mon grand amour de l'Art,
La forme de la plus séduisante des femmes,
Et, sous de spécieux prétextes de cafard,
Accoutume ma lèvre à des philtres infâmes.
II me conduit ainsi, loin du regard de Dieu,
Haletant et brisé de fatigue, au milieu
Des plaines de l'Ennui, profondes et désertes,
Et jette dans mes yeux pleins de confusion
Des vêtements souillés, des blessures ouvertes,
Et l'appareil sanglant de la Destruction!
Besides Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire published relatively few poems. He was devastated by the poor reception of Les Fleurs du mal; he had envisioned it as the perfect example of his poetic thinking, and when it failed to achieve acclaim, Baudelaire devoted most of his energies to other types of writing, such as translating Poe. He spent decades on that project as well as writing for various periodicals. However, he would continue to write occasional poems, and towards the end of his life he published one poem, "The Swan," which many critics consider to be his greatest single work. Baudelaire's later poems show a degree of restraint and maturity lacking in the excesses of Les Fleur du mal. More than one critic has lamented that had Baudelaire continued writing poetry, he might have held an even greater place in the poetic pantheon.
His other works include Petits Poèmes en prose ("Small Prose Poems"); a series of art reviews published in the Pays, Exposition universelle ("Country, World Fair"); studies on Gustave Flaubert (in Lartisge, October 18, 1857); on Theophile Gautier (Revue contemporaine, September, 1858); various articles contributed to Eugene Crepet's Poètes francais; and Un Dernier Chapitre de l'histoire des oeuvres de Balzac ("A Final Chapter of the history of works of Balzac") (1880).
Legacy
Charles Baudelaire is among the most important French writers of the nineteenth century, rivaling in his impact on modern poetry that of Gustave Flaubert upon the novel. Influenced by but transcending the Romanticism of Victor Hugo, who showed a similar interest in the street life of Paris, Baudelaire explored the unbounded experience of the self in an urban environment in the throes of the Industrial Revolution. Baudelaire's defiant genius probed taboo aspects of life and examined the psychological and moral complexity of modern man decades before writers such as Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and Stéphane Mallarmé.
A poet of intense, visceral power, Baudelaire prompted later writers to eschew moral judgments and thus elevate art and technique above moral and ethical concerns. Later writers would find sanction in Baudelaire to dwell on ever more sinister and depraved aspects of the human condition. Modern preoccupation with the self in poetry, fiction, theater, film, and visual arts can be traced to the lonely figure of Baudelaire, alienated from community and unmoored from moral and religious restraint.
His life was burdened with debts, misunderstanding, illness, and excesses, and his work unremittingly reflects inner despair. But the originality and boldness of his poetry, prose, criticism, and translations have influenced the modern conception of the artistic enterprise to the present day.
Bibliography
The Flowers of Evil
Charles Baudelaire

Context

Born in Paris in 1821, Charles Baudelaire has long been recognized as not only one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century but also a forefather of modern art. Baudelaire lived during a tumultuous time in French history and his work was impacted by a number of political events. However, his personal life was also turbulent: One of the most scarring episodes of his life was the death of his father in 1827 and his mother's hasty remarriage to a general in the French army. Baudelaire detested his stepfather both personally and as a symbol of the corrupt July monarchy established following the 1830 Revolution. He went to great lengths to upset his stepfather, squandering his inheritance and living a bohemian lifestyle. Worried about his behavior, his family sent him on a trip across the Mediterranean, whose exotic beauty left a lasting impression on the young poet.

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Shortly after Baudelaire's return to Paris, the 1848 Revolution overthrew the July monarch and established a republic in France for the first time in more than fifty years. Baudelaire greeted the revolution with enthusiasm, fighting among the barricades and openly defying his stepfather in public. However, his joy soon turned to disenchantment when Louis Napoleon, the original Napoleon's nephew, overthrew the Second Republic in 1851. Louis Napoleon's coup d'état instituted the Second Empire, ending the hopes for a republican form of government that men like Baudelaire favored. His disenchantment then turned to despair when Louis Napoleon began an intense rebuilding and public works project aimed at modernizing Paris. Baudelaire was horrified with the destruction of the ancient and medieval sections of Paris that he had called his home. His longing for the "old" Paris would play a major role in his poetry.

Baudelaire's disgust with politics led to a rejection of reality in favor of an obsessive fantasy world inspired by drugs, the exotic beauty of the Mediterranean, and the search for love. He was strongly influenced in this regard not only by his experiences along the Mediterranean but also by Edgar Allen Poe, whose writings he translated into French. Baudelaire was fascinated by Poe's evocation of the dark side of the imagination, and he found a comparably sinister seductiveness in the paintings of Eugene Delacroix and Edouard Manet, as well as the music of Wagner. These themes and influences play a predominant role in Baudelaire's 1857 collection of poetry, The Flowers of Evil, which juxtaposed the negative themes of exile, decay, and death with an ideal universe of happiness.

Baudelaire's exotic themes quickly caught the attention of the government, which condemned The Flowers of Evil for immorality. Unlike his friend, Gustave Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary was also put on trial, Baudelaire lost his case, had to pay a fine, and was forced to remove some poems from the collection. Baudelaire was devastated by this rejection of his work, which he attributed to the hypocrisy of a bourgeoisie incapable of understanding artistic innovation. Yet at the same time, he saw the condemnation of his work as the culmination of the different themes and events that had shaped his artistic talent since his youth: no achievement of beauty could be unaccompanied by bitterness and disappointments. Indeed, with this philosophy, Baudelaire shifted the attention of the art world to the darker side of life, inspiring contemporary and future artists to new levels of perception and provocation.