Abstract
This is a book as exasperating as it is absorbing. As an enquiry into the blind field opened up by Baudelaire’s defamation of photography (Salon de 1859) in relation to Constantin Guys and Le Peintre de la vie moderne, it offers both fruitful challenges to uninspected assumptions and new itineraries of argument. In its second chapter, for example, it invites the reader to revisit Baudelaire’s critical flirtation with George Catlin’s depiction of the Amerindian and to discover adumbrations of qualities promoted in his presentation of Guys, and of the stock-in-trade of photographic reportage: the cosmopolitanism of the traveller; the predatory nature of the artist; the cultivation of perceptual speed, and of the sketchy and unfinished; and the ‘savage’ as an element in an alternative aesthetic. But the specific questions that Raser puts to himself – why did Baudelaire choose Guys, a mere reporter and illustrator, rather than, say, Manet, as his painter of modern life? How could he have overlooked photography as the painting of modern life? – are not fully confronted and, in any case, almost answer themselves: Baudelaire equates modernity with ‘minoritarian’ and deterritorializing forms of art (e.g. the ‘bizarre’) and, anyway, Manet for Baudelaire is also ‘minor’; at the time of the writing of Le Peintre de la vie moderne photography was not yet technically capable of being what it promised to be, and it is precisely the ‘proto’-Impressionists (Guys) and Impressionists of the street (Manet, Caillebotte, Degas) who provided Paris with its early ‘photography’. Given the subject, there is surprisingly little close textual analysis of Le Peintre de la vie moderne, no questions about the relation between classical forms and the subjects of ‘Tableaux parisiens’, no consideration of the perceptual procedures, or of prose as an alternative medium, in Les Petits Poèmes en prose. A closer look at Baudelaire’s treatment of Guys’s creative methods and behaviour, for example, especially the passage which describes Guys, at night, re-working the sketches he has made earlier, such that, by the end, ‘La fantasmagorie a été extraite de la nature’, would perhaps discourage Raser’s assertion that, for Baudelaire, Guys’s art is an art of designation rather than imagination (p. 81). But there are other liberties of conclusion and analogy which make the reader jib: to deduce from Baudelaire’s description of the spectator’s succumbing to Delacroix’s powers as a colourist, even before s/he is close enough to a painting to identify the subject, that subject does not interest him or that Baudelaire prizes Delacroix’s work for being something other than what he appears to paint, just does not convince, particularly as Raser fails to prolong his quotation by another sentence, in which Baudelaire praises Delacroix’s harmonization, ‘(préétablie dans le cerveau du peintre)’, of colour and subject (p. 48); and to connect Baudelaire’s observation that one of the humiliating features of sculpture, for the sculptor, is his/her inability to control its effects, so many facets has it, so many contingencies of light is it subject to, with Barthes’s notion of punctum, seems to lack all justification (p. 27). Making connections for the sake of ‘deepening’ an argument can become self-defeating: Chapter 7 calls upon Lacan (and Melanie Klein) to reveal psychic structures in Baudelaire’s antagonism to photography, but it lands Raser in distractive and digressive obligations hardly necessary to support the valuable suggestion that Baudelaire has an inbuilt need to narrativize images. These things do not help a book otherwise so frequently ignited by intellectual verve and by searching questions that help us towards genuinely new ways of constructing Baudelaire’s complicated and often prevaricating progress to modernity. The book as a whole has an exploratory structure, shifting its ground so that perspectives and emphases shift too. It examines the appeal of absence (Chapter 4), for example, or conjures up a reading of ‘Les Aveugles’ as an allegory of photography (Chapter 8), or assesses Baudelaire’s photographic legacy (Mallarmé, Benjamin, Barthes, Derrida) (Chapter 9). Its appendices contain a short history of the early developments of the daguerreotype and the calotype. What photographers of the city, one wonders, might Baudelaire himself have been familiar with – Baldus, Marville, Nègre, LeSecq? What further speculations on, and speculative histories of, this topic still await us? But this book does much to provide its subject with re-invigorating momentum.