Baudelaire: Paris Spleen
In the poems he uses recurring themes: melancholy, passage of time, the desire of the infinite, the critique of religion and morality, the mockery of the ideals that drive modern man and especially a bourgeoisie dominated by looks, money and power.
Baudelaire is certain that “paradise”, the ideal, which so often takes refuge, fleeing from the harsh reality, are simply fugitive lies, ephemeral as the beauty and pleasure. But the lie is better than l’Ennui (boredom, tedium). From this thought comes the Paris Spleen.
Paris since the late eighteenth century onwards undergoes large changes due to the rise of capitalist economy which, in turn, would bring changes to the infrastructure of the city. Spaces for consumption and entertainment, leisure and sleep would emerge: the passages, department stores, the “crystal palace”. In this regard, Amendola says:
“The great nineteenth-century metropolis is declared able to summarize the world and offer it to consumer and curiosity of its inhabitants. Passages, the department stores, universal exhibitions are the places where, at different scales, the whole world and history is offered for consumption and admiration”.
In this Paris, Baudelaire is seen by Benjamin as the model of the flaneur, the man who walks the streets in search of the debris of the modern city. He is the new hero of the modern city, one among the crowd, watching as a spectator what the crowd can not see.
This lack of communication with the environment, resulting from the daily routine is one that induces the spleen. A state of melancholy without definite cause of vital angst when extinctinguishin the novelty of what’s real. In The Flowers of Evil he describes Paris as a grey, heavy city:
“When the low, heavy sky weighs like a lid
On the groaning spirit, victim of long ennui,
And from the all-encircling horizon
Spreads over us a day gloomier than the night; (…)”
Facing this situation, we ask: What about Beauty? With great ingenuity, Baudelaire always identifies the enemy. So, all this sadness and melancholy the poet suffers, boredom, big city life that infects those souls in exile and with no light always go hand in hand with beauty. The Beauty, the most beautiful is always tinged with a subtle and profound sorrow. The saddest, the most beautiful it is.
In Spleen and Ideal (firt part of The Flowers of Evil), we find 1862 Paris Spleen’s antecedent, because of his character and thematic. That semper eadem (always the same) is understood as the experience that enables man to recognize his temporality and transcendence.
One of the poems in prose that best describes the human impulse to experience new sensations when he is immersed in a contemplative life without action is: “The poor glazier (http://divinapoesia.blogspot.com/2009/02/ el-mal-glazier-charles-baudelaire.html). An amazing story told in first person about how one day, the spleen was awakened by an irresistible force that led him to make a totally unexpected and absurd act, but enjoyable at the same time. Who has not ever felt that euphoria, that desire to do something crazy?
Cinta Blanch
If you go to Paris, become a flaneur, wander the streets aimlessly watching everything around you. To relax rent apartments in Paris to sleep with Baudelarie’s poems.?
Translated by: Maria
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