Read Part I here and Part II here.

Edgar Poe [m’a] appris à raisonner.

Edgar Poe taught me how to reason.

— Charles Baudelaire, Hygiène (1887)

Paul Valéry, one of the chief architects of the phenomenon known as “French Poe,” wrote of Poe’s legacy in the English-speaking world: “the universal glory of Edgar Poe is only weak or contested in his homeland and in England. This anglo-saxon poet is strangely unknown among his own people.” [1] It seems to confirm that a prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown. We might consider Harold Bloom, canonical critic, as representative of this tendency in his reluctant attempt to identify the essence of Poe’s staying power. In the 1984 essay “Inescapable Poe,” his most thorough reflection on the author, Bloom voices skepticism about Poe’s acclaim that opens onto insoluble problems of tradition: “Poe’s survival raises perpetually the issue whether literary merit and canonical status necessarily go together. I can think of no other American writer, down to this moment, at once so inescapable and so dubious.” As against the other monuments of nineteenth-century American poetry, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, whose literary merit and cognitive power have become self-evident to their compatriots (with Bloom at the front of the pack), a different kind of effort is required to grasp the allure of Poe. Whitman himself registered an underwhelmed ambivalence in an 1880 article: “Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page — and, by final judgment, probably belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat.” Emerson, Whitman’s direct antecedent whose call for a distinctly American poetry the good gray poet answered, memorably dismissed Poe as “the jingle man.” Beyond Poe’s monomaniacal use of a metronomic meter in his verse, more general perceived deficiencies of style prompt Bloom to muse:

The critical question surely must be: how does “William Wilson” survive its bad writing? Poe’s awful diction, whether here or in “The Fall of the House of Usher” or “The Purloined Letter,” seems to demand the decent masking of a competent French translation. The tale somehow is stronger than its telling, which is to say that Poe’s actual text does not matter. What survives, despite Poe’s writing, are the psychological dynamics and mythic reverberations…. Poe can only gain by a good translation, and scarcely loses if each reader fully retells the stories to another.

Here Bloom indicates a certain separability — an autonomy even — obtaining between what necessarily appears as the work’s form and its content. But is it merely the case that what Poe has to say is compelling, while how he says it falters? Bloom was well aware of the mutual interpenetration of form and content operative in literary works, wherein each may be understood as an instance of the other: moments in an ongoing process that also involves its arrest by the critic and by the translator. Unintentionally advancing a theory of translation, Bloom speaks of the tale’s survival. The much-discussed “afterlife” of the work would then amount to what endures after the catastrophe of its birth. Poe could hope for more than a “decent masking” from those who took up the task of translating him into French — Charles Baudelaire and Stephane Mallarmé foremost among them. But what exactly requires masking? Poe’s “actual text” cannot not matter. It might matter less or differently than that of a more consummate stylist, someone with superb diction. But the “psychological dynamics and mythic reverberations” had to have first been aesthetically objectified and are inextricable from that objectification; being alive is a prerequisite to survival. “Bad” writing for “bad” feelings? The vessel that held the energy in question was not so cracked as to let it escape. Anyone can only gain by a good translation because a translation acts upon and retroactively transforms the original. Fully retelling a tale by Poe to oneself is the prototype of attempting to understand the work, its experiential reenactment from within. So what exactly is it that survives through translation? 

Bloom constantly returns to “mythology” as the essence of Poe’s power and defines the “the art of mythmaking” as not a matter of “anyone’s words, but of a particular pattern of events.” Poe’s achievements that most depend upon a narrative scaffolding appear to Bloom as his best: “Among Poe’s tales, the near-exception to what I have been saying is the longest and most ambitious, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, just as the best of Poe’s poems is the long prose poem, Eureka.” Poe’s apocalyptic tableau Eureka is, for Bloom, “unevenly written, badly repetitious, and sometimes opaque in its abstractness, but like the tales it seems not to have been composed by a particular individual. The universalism of a common nightmare informs it.” Despite his insistence on the defects of Poe’s works, Bloom ascribes no less than universality to them. Elaborating his encouragement to internalize Poe’s tales, he says of Eureka that it “gains by Valéry’s observations or by the summaries of recent critics…. Translation even into his own language always benefits Poe.” Translation into his own language means commentary and critique and includes the distinction Benjamin makes between the modes: commentary deals with a work’s “material content” and critique with its “truth content.” They both involve recapitulation of the work undertaken by its interpreter. This recapitulation changes the essence of the work by letting it become something else; translation as critique and translation as translation should reveal the non-identity of the work with itself, both in its time and over time. Maybe this isn’t only the case for badly written works. Maybe Bloom’s assessment of Poe suggests that any artwork requires criticism and even translation to become what it is, for it to survive itself. 

The length of the works partially spared by Bloom is noteworthy for its ironic confirmation of Poe’s own theory of poetry set down in “The Poetic Principle.” In this 1850 essay — highly influential for his French followers — Poe claims that a long poem does not exist, the essence of poetry is its ability to elevate the soul through transient emotional excitation, and that the poem exists only for its own sake. It is considered one of the definitive statements of l’art pour l’art, even as it comes 15 years after Théophile Gauthier’s initial proclamation of the bohemian creed. If Poe’s theory of poetry is an implicit theory of literary genre, it does not preclude the success of his own novel and prose poem, neither of which partake in a poem’s characteristic brevity and effect. The ideal of poetry endorsed by Poe might not find its fulfillment in his verse. Baudelaire translated Poe’s Pym and Eureka into French but kept his distance from the poems. He called the daunting prospect of translating them “impossible to fill [remplir]…the humility and devotion of my role as translator do not allow me to compensate for absent delights of rhythm and rhyme.” [2] Baudelaire advertises his inhibition as the due deference of the translator. Bloom might read this as an inadvertent recognition of the absence of well-wrought rhythm and rhyme in the original poems. Baudelaire’s verb “remplir” figures the cleaving of that which is inessential from that which the translator conquers and transcends through translation.  What Bloom sees as the mythmaking faculty addresses the truth content of Poe’s work. Baudelaire only translated what struck him as translatable. He compensated only where compensation presented itself as a possibility.

What did Baudelaire see in Poe, other than his own reflection: “a man who looked a little bit like me in several respects, by which I mean a part of myself”? [3] Valéry thought that Poe offered Baudelaire:

a New World of the intellect. The demon of lucidity, the genius of analysis, and the inventor of the newest and most seductive combinations of logic and imagination, of mysticism and calculation, the psychology of the exception, the literary engineer who deepened and made use of every resource his art possessed. All this presented itself to Baudelaire and enchanted him. [4] 

He specifies what proves most generative in Poe. These features of Poe’s oeuvre do not exist independently of their being perceived and being made fruitful. Valéry articulated Baudelaire’s actualization of them, thereby achieving it again (or for the first time) and differently. In notes on Baudelaire for his Arcades Project, Benjamin located the decisive basis of the French poet’s production in “the relation of tension in which, for him, a highly intensified sensitivity stands to a highly concentrated contemplation.” [5] Benjamin’s characterization condenses the array of dynamic contradictions enumerated by Valéry. Poe was an inventor and literary engineer — an innovator of the aesthetic forces of production. Valéry fills out this depiction of Poe, writing: “The air in this literature is rarified like in a laboratory. There we endlessly contemplate the glorification of the will applying itself to induction and analysis. It is as if Poe would like to wrest speech from the prophets and attribute to it a monopoly on rational explanation.” [6] Baudelaire himself found Poe to be “the first American who, strictly speaking, made a tool of his style. His poetry, profound and plaintive, is nonetheless finely crafted [ouvragée], pure, right, and shining like a piece of crystal jewelry.” [7] Baudelaire’s image evokes something like a diamond hammer, all the stronger for its opulence. Poe’s living dead labor congeals in his variously well- and over- wrought poems. Despite appearing to Baudelaire as a tool, Poe’s work in his self-conception sought a reprieve from direct utility. Poetry was to address itself to man’s sense of the beautiful and nothing else. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, poetry and the poet had no choice but to specialize and differentiate themselves as commodities from all else on offer. They had to carve out a niche into which no other ware could step foot. Poe’s view and Baudelaire’s acquiescence to it are symptomatic of modernity, i.e. capitalism. As Valéry writes: “Poe understood that modern poetry had to conform to the tendency of an age that insisted upon the ever-cleaner separation between domains of activity, and which could pretend to produce its own object, and produce it in a sort of pure state .” [8] Poe charted a new course for literary production, a course which he attempted to follow. How successful at it was Poe himself? It depends on where this “himself” ends. Baudelaire advanced farther down the path than his precursor could have. Valéry holds that Baudelaire’s oeuvre fulfills Poe’s program, achieving a form adequate to the age and summoning effects that pushed beyond the walls of the literary laboratory. About Poe, it has not been said that “all is charm, music, powerful and abstract sensuality….” [9]

In the “Flâneur” section of his essay “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” Benjamin ventures an account of Baudelaire’s sublation of Poe’s achievements:

The detective story, whose interest lies in a logical construction that the crime story as such need not have, appeared in France for the first time in the form of translations of Poe’s stories…. With his translations of these models, Baudelaire adopted the genre. Poe’s work was definitely absorbed in his own [Poes Werk ging durchaus in sein eigenes ein], and Baudelaire emphasizes this fact by stating his solidarity with the method in which the individual genres that Poe embraced harmonize. Poe was one of the greatest technicians of modern literature. As Valéry pointed out, he was the first to attempt the scientific story, a modern cosmogony, the description of pathological phenomena. These genres he regarded as exact products of a method for which he claimed universal validity. In this very point Baudelaire sided with him, and in Poe’s spirit he wrote: “The time is not distant when it will be understood that a literature which refuses to make its way in brotherly concord with science and philosophy is a murderous and suicidal literature.” The detective story, the most momentous among Poe’s technical achievements, was part of a literature that satisfied Baudelaire’s postulate. Its analysis constitutes part of the analysis of Baudelaire’s own work, despite the fact that Baudelaire wrote no stories of this type. The Fleurs du mal have [kennen] three of its decisive elements as disjecta membra: the victim and the scene of the crime (“Une Martyre”), the murderer (“Le Vin de l’assassin”), the masses (“Le crepuscule du soir”). The fourth element is lacking — the one that permits the intellect to break through this emotion-laden atmosphere. Baudelaire wrote no detective story because, given the structure of his instincts, it was impossible for him to identify with the detective. In him, the calculating, constructive element was on the side of the asocial and had become an integral part of cruelty. [10]

Benjamin points to the detective story as a key to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal. The non-identity of Baudelaire’s poetry and Poe’s model constitutes the nexus of the problem. Baudelaire’s production is not reducible to the admixture of material and truth content he took and transfigured from Poe, nor is it imaginable without it. The detective story survives Poe’s telling of it not only in and as the genre it established but also in and as fragments scattered throughout Baudelaire’s poems. In German, Benjamin’s formulation for what is translated above into English as “absorbed” is “Poes Werk ging durchaus in sein eigenes ein.” Benjamin uses an active verbal construction that casts Poe’s work in a subjective role; it entered into that of Baudelaire. The objective force of Poe’s discovery inheres in this language. The aesthetic technology brought forth by Poe consisted of parts potentially greater than the sum they reached in his work, the possibilities of which could only be determined by their being taken up by another artist. 

Adorno raised an example in a 1958 lecture course on aesthetics that may help clarify. He invokes the composer August Halm’s appraisal of Bach, stating: 

Bach did not create or invent the fugue but was simply the composer who was adequate to the latent potential of an objective form such as the fugue… Yet, for that objectivity to come about, for that objective spirit to realize itself, one requires precisely the full force of the subject — which is admittedly not something that freely posits elements as it likes, but which lies in the way it dissolves in this latent, non-existent objectivity and, through this dissolution, turns the non-existent, concealed form into a visible one. [11] 

In the case of Poe and Baudelaire, it is less a question of the detective story as an objective form; indeed, other writers were more adequate to it as a form than Baudelaire, who did not even attempt it. Adorno’s point speaks to Benjamin’s thought-figure of disjecta membra, which Baudelaire’s work knows [kennen]. Baudelaire dissolved the latent, non-existent objectivity of Poe’s technical achievements; he made their subjectivity visible in his poems. A new semblance of their truth content came to fruition. But, as Benjamin writes, the transmission was not complete. Precisely Baudelaire’s subjective mediation blocked the survival of the detective as a discrete persona in his poems. The full force of the subject as embodied in the idiosyncratic structure of Baudelaire’s instincts resulted in a qualitative change to the tool Poe had forged, a melting of the diamond hammer.  //

 * * *

In the final part of this essay, I closely read Baudelaire’s translation of Poe’s “Man of the Crowd.”

[1] Paul Valéry, “Situation De Baudelaire” (1924), Gallica, 1 Jan. 1970, 20, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k134058r.image. [my translation]

[2] Charles Baudelaire. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Claude Pichois.( Gallimard, 1975),  347. [my translation]

[3] Baudelaire,  348.

[4] Valéry, 7.

[5] Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” New German Critique, no. 34, trans. Mark Harrington and Lloyd Spencer, (Duke, 1985), p. 44.

[6] Valéry,  34.

[7] Baudelaire,  25.

[8] Valéry,  24.

[9] Valéry,  24.

[10]  Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings v. 4, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, (Harvard, 2004),  43.

[11] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetics: 1958/59, trans. Wieland Hoban, (Polity, 2018),  215-216.