Roberto Calasso: Literature and the Gods

But another surprise awaits us in the last paragraphs of the École païenne . First there is a blank space, then a brusque change of tone. Suddenly the voice is grave and austere, as if Baudelaire were assuming the attitude of a baroque preacher, an Abraham a Santa Clara raging against the wiles of this world: “To send passion and reason packing,” he announces,

is to do literature to death. To repudiate the efforts of the society that came before us, its philosophy and Christianity, would be to commit suicide, to reject the impulse and tools of improvement. To surround oneself exclusively with the seductions of physical art would mean in all probability to lose oneself. In the long run, the very long run, you will see, love, feel only what is beautiful, you will be unable to see anything but beauty. I use the word in its narrow sense. The world will appear to you as merely material. The mechanisms that govern its movement will long remain hidden.

May religion and philosophy return one day, forced into being by the cry of the desperate man. Such will ever be the destiny of those fools who see nothing in nature but rhythms and shapes. Yet at first philosophy will appear to them as no more than an interesting game, an amusing form of gymnastics, a fencing in the void. But how they will be punished for that! Every child whose poetic spirit is overexcited and who is not immediately presented with the stimulating spectacle of a healthy, industrious way of life, who constantly hears tell of glory and of sensual pleasure, whose senses are every day caressed, inflamed, frightened, aroused, and satisfied by works of art, will become the unhappiest of men and make others unhappy too. At twelve he will be pulling up his nanny’s skirts, and if some special skill in crime or art doesn’t raise him above the crowd, by thirty he will be dying in hospital. Forever inflamed and dissatisfied, his spirit will go abroad in the world, the busy industrious world; it will go abroad, I tell you, like a whore, yelling: Plasticity! Plasticity! Plasticity, that horrible word makes my flesh creep, plasticity has poisoned him, yet he can’t live without his poison now. He has banished reason from his heart and, as a just punishment for his crime, reason refuses to return. The happiest thing that can happen to him is that nature strike him with a terrifying call to order. And such, in fact, is the law of life: he who refuses the pure joys of honest activity can feel nothing but the terrible joys of vice. Sin contains its own hell, and from time to time nature says to pain and misery: go and destroy those rebels!

The useful, the true, the good, all that is really lovable, these things will be unknown to him. Infatuated by his exhausting dream, he will seek to infatuate and exhaust others with it. He will have no time for his mother, his nanny; he will pull his friends to pieces or love them only for their form; his wife too, if he has one, he will despise and debase.

The immoderate pleasure he takes in form will drive him to monstrous and unprecedented excesses. Swallowed up by this ferocious passion for the beautiful and the bizarre, the pretty and the picturesque, for the gradations are many, the notions of the true and the just will disappear. The frenetic passion for art is a cancer that eats up everything else; and since the drastic absence of the true and the just in art is tantamount to the absence of art, man in his entirety will disappear; excessive specialization in a single faculty can only end in emptiness … Literature must go back and temper itself once again in a more healthy atmosphere. All too soon it will become clear that a literature that refuses to develop in harmony with science and philosophy is a homicidal and indeed suicidal literature.

The passage is quite astonishing in its ambiguity. It’s as though Baudelaire were seeking to couple up his own deepest convictions to the arguments of his most implacable enemies like so many links in the same chain. Reading the piece, one is struck by a suspicion that undermines every word. The overriding impression is that of listening to some theological opponent of Baudelaire’s who has somehow been endowed with the poet’s own sharp-witted eloquence and deep sense of pathos. Not to mention his irrepressible penchant for the grotesque, evident, for example, where we have the satanic child aesthete pulling up his nanny’s skirts. Or where, like some early Monsieur Prudhomme, he appeals to the notion of “a healthy, industrious way of life,” and again to “the pure joys of honest activity.” It’s as if Baudelaire had dropped these hints on purpose to betray what is in fact a perverse game of role reversal. And yet one has to concede that where the text is not playful, its tone austere and stern, the reasoning does carry a grim conviction. It’s as if Baudelaire were evoking the figure of some Grand Inquisitor, looking ahead to the pathetic prosecutor who would seek to have Fleurs du mal condemned, and transforming him into a literary Joseph de Maistre.

But why resort to such solemn tones? Clearly something extremely menacing was going on — or rather, no, had already happened: the pagan gods had escaped from those niches in literary rhetoric where many presumed they would be forever confined. Now those niches were just empty graves while a group of noble fugitives mingled mockingly with the city crowds. It was Verlaine who would tell us the strange story, and tell it with disarming naturalness, in a juvenile sonnet entitled “Les Dieux”:

Vaincus, mais non domptés, exilés mais vivants Et malgré les édits de l’Homme et ses menaces, Ils n’ont point abdiqué, crispant leurs mains tenaces Sur des tronçons de sceptre, et rôdent dans les vents

Beaten, but not tamed, exiled but alive, Notwithstanding the edicts of man and his threats, They have not abdicated, their stubborn hands grip Stumps of scepters, and they wander in the wind.

It’s a gloomy vision. The enchanter gods wander like “rapacious ghosts” in a desolate world. The time has come for them to sound their “rebellion against Man,” represented, as it turns out, by the eternal pharmacist Homais, who is still “amazed” that he managed to chase the gods off in the first place while presently preparing to burden Humanity with the awkward weight of a capital letter. The sonnet closes with a warning:

Du Coran, des Védas et du Deutéronome,

De tous les dogmes, pleins de rage, tous les dieux

Sont sortis en campagne: Alerte! et veillons mieux.

From the Koran, from the Vedas and from Deuteronomy,

From every dogma, full of fury, all the gods Have come out into the open: Look out! and keep a better watch.

It seems that this business of the pagan gods’ return oscillates with disturbing ease between vaudeville and gothic novel. But behind these colorful scenes, Baudelaire’s unnamed Inquisitor had got wind of a more subtle danger: the emancipation of the aesthetic. It is as if he had foreseen that aesthetic justification of the world that only Nietzsche, some years later, would have the temerity to vindicate. The danger he senses lies in the possibility that the category of the Beautiful will free itself from the canonical superiors it has hitherto obeyed: the True and the Good. If this were to happen — and here our Inquisitor is enlightening—“an immoderate pleasure … in form” will develop and the “frenetic passion for art” will “eat up everything else,” so that in the end nothing will be left, not even art itself. Or, rather, what’s left is a merely aesthetic backdrop through which nonetheless (as Valéry put it) “nothingness seeps through.” But isn’t this the main criticism that has been leveled against the new literature — or at least against great literature — ever since, and starting with Baudelaire himself? The central formulations of the passage — the “immoderate pleasure … in form,” the “ferocious passion for the beautiful,” “frenetic passion for art”—will soon become Nietzsche’s “magic of the extreme” and Gottfried Benn’s fanaticism for form, which are direct and splendid descendants of Baudelaire himself. We are bound to admit, that is, that the Grand Inquisitor’s denunciation casts a long shadow. Edgar Wind was right to sense the presageful signs in his masterful Art and Anarchy .