So this unit of the course is yet another dramatic shift. Last time we were talking about Darwin and the development of the idea of natural selection. And how Darwin made use of a utilitarian background, a romantic background, and changed the way science was considered and conducted through his extra ordinary efforts at classification and observation, classification and then theorizing. Darwin's naturalization of ethics. His naturalization of, of, morality were revolutionary at the time. And had enormous repercussions all over the world, and they still have repercussions today. But we're going to move back across the channel this, this week and in this unit we're going to be talking about two very different kinds of thinkers. Charles Baudelaire, a French poet and Friedrich Nietzsche, a, a German philosopher. Now what do they have in common? They both are concerned with intensity rather than morality, and that's a headline for this week. Intensity replaces morality. And both of them are both are thinkers who, whose work becomes very important for post-modernism much later. We'll talk more about that as we go through the reading but just as a point of orientation, Baudelaire and Nietzsche reject the hierarchies that had governed ethics, politics and aesthetics. And in so doing, developed a framework for making poetry and philosophy, respectively. That was outside of the traditional hierarchies in Western culture. And that anti-foundationalism, that's a word we'll use more towards the end of this course, their antifoundationalism. The rejection of the standard hierarchies, will be appropriated by postmodernists after the second World War. Of course, neither of them could have anticipated that at all, writing, in the second half of the 19th century. So today we're going to focus on both Baudelaire, we're going to spend quite a bit of time, just reading, the, prose poems. I'm going to use this edition of, of, Paris spleen to remind you of reading. I hope you've done the reading at home or wherever you do your reading, in a cafe, or on lying on a grassy knoll somewhere. But, we'll refresh your memory and try to organize some of those prose poems in light of the themes of this course. The headings for my discussion of Baudelaire is from dissection to permeation. And its not very elegant phrase but what I'm getting at here is that Flaubert, we talked about it few weeks ago. Flaubert emphasized this dissection was revenge. Flaubert thought that by analyzing the bourgeois society around him through narrative, by showing it in all it's horrifying banality that he was giving you a way to condemn or reject or distance yourself from it. Flaubert didn't express opinions. No he, he actually said several times, that I should not have expressed, as an artist, I should not express an opinion about the world. I, my job is like God's, to create the world. Flaubert was not a modest artist. He was the most ambitious artist. He wasn't expressing opinions but he was dissecting the world around him in a way that would distance his readers and his fellow artists from it. Baudelaire certainly engaged in a kind of dissection but for Baudelaire the point was to plunge into the world. Remember Flaubert talked about going out into the world only up to your navel he said he was, he wanted s, he wanted safe art. He didn't want, he wanted, he wanted he didn't want to get infected by the world. Baudelaire literally was willing to get infected. In fact, he, he dies of Syphilis. But he plunges himself into the world into drugs, into sex into the, the crowd. He plunges himself into the world, but that's not enough. He also needs to make, wants to make, is destined to make great art from the world. So about his times Baudelaire is, is coming of age in, in the middle of the 19th century. He is a bit of a mama's boy, I guess we could say. You can, you can, look up some biographical tit bits about Baudelaire but, but for our purposes I want you to understand that Baudelaire is a is very much torn. By his affection for and dependence on his mother, and his real hatred for his step-father. Baudelaire's mother remarries after her husband dies and, and they don't know the, the, the Baudelaire's step father is a, an army officer. And he arouses all of Baudelaire's aggression against authority against a stodgy conventionalism. His parents they, they try to send them away, they send them on a, on a, on a, a, a boat trip to just, just kind of toughen him up. Baudelaire escapes and makes his way back to Paris. The, the story is that during the revolutionary times of 1848, Baudelaire joins in the crowd of revolutionaries but he's you know, he's, he's after his stepdad. He's after authority generally, but, in general, but, you know, when they, when they, when they talk about what should we do next? What should we do next? We revolutionaries know that Baudelaire , or else we have to kill General Opique, you know[LAUGH]. That's his stepfather. He wants to just, he, he is consumed with anger against, the parental generation and, against authority. And is, is, is, willing to, to fight it. His parents, you know, his, his fah, his father died when he was quite young. His mother doted on him and she loved him greatly then she marries a new guy, a military officer. And Baudelaire's you know, he is your hipster druggie. And he is, So they say you go to school in Lyon. You know what happens to him in school? He gets kicked out of school. Why? Because, because he, he was, passing a note, someone was passing him a note in class. You know this story? Somebody was passing him a note in class, and the teacher says looks like I get this. This was, this was just a little stage Baudelaireian moment. You, we, you hadn't read the script. And, and in Baudelaire's case he said to him then, give me that note! You're passing notes? Give me the note! And Baudelaire said, I will not give it to you, Monsieur. Or words to that effect. Give me the note! I, no. I will never violate the confidence of my compatriate. Or words to that effect. And so they kick him out. Gets kicked out of school. Which Baudelaire says, whoo hoo. So his parents don't know what to do with this guy. So his parents don't know what to do with this guy. So they send him on a boat to India [laugh]. Study abroad! What are you guys laughing about? What do you think your parents do? What do you think we have here at Wesleyan? It's called exploding social tension. [laugh] Don't tell the financial. Go abroad, go abroad. I'm kidding. But they did send him on a boat to India. And he loved the boat for a while. All that immensity and all. But then he got really freaked out and needed stimulation, shall we say. And he left, he got off the boat and he made his way back to Paris. Made his way back to Paris, and then whenever revolution occurred in 1848, this we don't know, I don't know if this is true, but if it's a it's a story about Baudelaire. He's in a mob and they're running through the streets of Paris in February 1848, and they have the guns. And they're all like where should we go? Where should would go to make revolution? And he's like the General Opique. We have to kill the General Opique. Guess who that was. >> His dad. >> His stepfather. Who's that? Just don't worry, he's very powerful! We must kill him! That's so great, can you imagine that up on the bard? Like, okay, let's go get him! But they were, you know, they were a bunch of young revolutionaries who would rather be drinking and smoking dope and, and talking about poetry and so they didn't get the General Opique. So what Baudelaire does, again, this is what one says, these are stories one tells about him, it's hard to know if this really happened. But he gets a gun and he aims and he shoots, and he shoots a clock. You know that in here, the tyranny of time. What, you know what would really be a revolution? Stop this. Stop these clocks. Why do we have class during a certain amount of time? Why do we have an hour and 20 minutes on Baudelaire, an hour and 20 minutes on, on Nietzsche? Because that's the way we package your education so it's more convenient for faculty members to do their thing and go home and do their own work. It's more convenient for you to get credit by showing up in class. It doesn't really matter if you do anything. You just have to be here. It's very convenient. But for Baudelaire it's like, that's the tyranny of it, just blow it up! Shoot the clock, stop time. And then see how it feels to be in the world without an expectation that you have to be somewhere else soon. Remember, there is revolution in February, 1848. It goes, it goes, it seems to go so well, the, the conservative monarch. Well, not that conservative, Louis Phillipe, he is deposed. And, and then, but by June of 1848, the workers are massacred in the streets. They get a dictatorship by 18, end of 1851. Under Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. A kind of resurgence of conservative authority. In France and, and for our purposes with Baudelaire, most importantly what you get is the remaking of Paris. The remaking of powers. Paris. By Baron Haussmann. This is, we talk about this as the Haussmannization of Pairs. And what that means is that the city is arche, architecturally res, reconstructed, that is these Grand, Grand Beuva, the big wide streets that you know of from the pictures of Paris the Champs-lyses for example. These are constructed during this period. And, and it is an immense civic undertaking where entire neighborhoods that had been much the same for centuries, are bulldozed, they're destroyed and you've got these major arteries carved out through the center of Paris. And this is the most important modernization project in urban Europe that had ever taken place until that time. And Baudelaire's poetry is in some ways a response to that project. And I want to, just give you a few facts about it. Baron Hausmann really changes the nature of the city. Before 1840, more than 60% of Parisians don't leave their neighborhoods. They really stay in their neighborhoods all the time. You get your food there, you have your artisans there. Your, your friends and family were right in your little quartier, your little neighborhood. And that completely changes as Paris develops economic centers that people travel to in the city. And the city becomes an integrated whole, and modernization ensues. In, in the late 1850s about 20% or more of the population of the city is involved in rebuilding Paris. So from 1853 to 1870, from 1853 to 1870, Paris becomes a new kind of place. New kinds of lights, which illuminate the boulevard. New kinds of people you see all the time. You bump into people you never would have seen before, and that bumping into people you never would have seen before, that becomes the material for Baudelaire's poetry.
