Seeing Double
Baudelaire's Modernity
The poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) has been labeled the very icon of modernity, the scribe of the modern city, and an observer of an emerging capitalist culture. Seeing Double reconsiders this iconic literary figure and his fraught relationship with the nineteenth-century world by examining the way in which he viewed the increasing dominance of modern life. In doing so, it revises some of our most common assumptions about the unresolved tensions that emerged in Baudelaire’s writing during a time of political and social upheaval.
Françoise Meltzer argues that Baudelaire did not simply describe the contradictions of modernity; instead, his work embodied and recorded them, leaving them unresolved and often less than comprehensible. Baudelaire’s penchant for looking simultaneously backward to an idealized past and forward to an anxious future, while suspending the tension between them, is part of what Meltzer calls his “double vision”—a way of seeing that produces encounters that are doomed to fail, poems that can’t advance, and communications that always seem to falter. In looking again at the poet and his work, Seeing Double helps to us to understand the prodigious transformations at stake in the writing of modern life.
“Francoise Meltzer’s rich and suggestive study ranges widely over nineteenth-century thought and art to explore the bifurcated vision of modernity that Baudelaire’s work registers and into which the prose and verse poems lead the reader.”
“Seeing Double is a truly original study of Baudelaire’s gaze, in his recording of dualities in what Walter Benjamin called his ‘photographic plates,’ without the kind of understanding that was to come later. Meltzer’s own wide reading and understanding compose an intricately-woven texture from the poet’s verse and prose poems, the influences upon them, and their reception by various interpreters of the modernist visions that Baudelaire prefigured.”
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Beliefs (Assommons les pauvres!)
Homo Duplex
More Duplexities
Maistre
Proudhon’s Spirits of Contradiction
Splitting the Difference: The Poem
Appendix: “Assommons les pauvres!”
Chapter 2. Seeing (A une passante)
The Will to Know
Images and Afterimages: The Poem
Certainty
Scopic Syllepsis
Which Is the Real One?
Optical Gaps
Energy: The Baroque
Appendix: “A une passante”
Chapter 3. Money (La chambre double)
Expenditure
Words Pay No Debts
Depletion: The Poem
Reversibility
Which Room Is Counterfeit?
The Other Side of the Coin
Appendix: “La chambre double”
Chapter 4. Time (Harmonie du soir)
God, Graves, and Scholars
In Memory of the Present
Angels Doing Time
Harmonics: The Poem
And Time and the World Are Ever in Flight
Appendix: “Harmonie du soir”
Conclusion
IndexLiterature and Literary Criticism: Poetry | Romance Languages
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