attic of Dorian Gray's house, is a type of mask, which conceals, defends and
simulates. It also sees, its hideous eyes following the viewer as he moves. Both
Baudelaire and Wilde found that looking through a mask at oneself provides an
acute means of seeing oneself as Other. It acts, in the words of Umberto Eco, as
an imaginative 'prosthesis,'4 which extends the range of self-perception and, in
so doing, draws us closer to a version of the truth.
1
Oscar Wilde, The Picture ofDonan Gray, ed. by Isobel Murray ('The World's Classics', Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1994), p- 29. All further references will be to this edition and will be designated by the
abbreviation 'DC
2
Charles Baudelaire, La Fanfarlo, ed. by Barbara Wright & David Scott ('GF, 478, Paris, Flammanon,
1987), p. 62. All further references will be to this edition and will be designated by the abbreviation 'LF.'
3
See Jacques Dernda, Me'moms d'aveugles: I'autoportratt et autres mines (Pans, Reunion des Musees
nationaux, 1999)^. 48.
4
Umberto Eco, Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, tr. Alastair McEwen (London,
Seeker & Warburg, 1999), p. 368.
THE REMEMBERED MOMENT: BAUDELAIRE, LAFORGUE, ELIOT
ANNE HOLMES, Oxford
'In a widow's veil, mysteriously and mutely borne along by the crowd, an
unknown woman comes into the poet's field of vision'.1 This is the subject of
Baudelaire's 'A une Passante', a sonnet which encapsulated for Walter Benjamin
the spirit of the modern in lyric poetry. He argued that it could not have been
written before the city offered thtflaneurits wealth of transient impressions. The
poem describes an experience of love at first sight that is also love at last sight.
The two moments are fused: 'It is a farewell for ever that coincides with the
moment of enchantment' (ibid). Naturally this revolutionary poem has had a
following. Claude Leroy has recently traced the myth of the 'passante', as it
appears in a number of poets including Corbiere and Laforgue, through to
Mandiargues.2 Laforgue's 'Complainte de la bonne defunte', a poem treated by
Leroy, that recounts a haunting encounter, is written in the minor key and selfconsciously set against the powerful Baudelaire sonnet. That it owes its existence
to life as well as to literature is clear from a diary entry of March 1883: 'Ma belle
inconnue de l'Opera! Souvenir eternel: Elle aura ma derniere pensee a mon lit de
mort. Ideal entrevu et enfui. Je suis sur qu'elle a vu que je l'adorais et qu'elle m'en
a adore — Ou est-elle?'3
I would like to extend the comparison across languages to a T.S. Eliot poem,
'La Figlia Che Piange', which is generally acknowledged to have been written
under the sign of Laforgue.4 Its subject is not a 'passante', but it is an arresting
vision of beauty: the parting of two lovers, the girl of the tide and a man who
turns out to be the narrator of the poem. In this sense it is also a poem of last
love. The sense of obsession found in all three poems is developed even more
by Eliot than by Laforgue, who, in keeping with his general approach in the
Complaintes, treats it with an easily detectable irony. What the three poems share
is the fusion of the ephemeral moment and the unforgettable experience. In all
three cases, of course, the described scene is 'une resurrection par l'ecriture'.5
The title of Laforguer's complainte, which recalls his facetious 'Complainte de
cette bonne lune', immediately indicates that his 'defunte' is not to be taken too
seriously. This is not a tragic tale in Edgar Allan Poe style. We learn in line eight
that what has died is the dream of the girl, not the girl herself: 'Elle, loyal reve
[«•] 7
mort-ne'. The poem is, as Leroy rightly says, a 'poeme devinette'.6 Ambiguity
reigns in the 'reve mort-ne; clearly a dream that has had no sequel and is in this
sense still-born, but also a dream that is sufficiendy alive to have inspired the
writing of this poem: again in the use of the word 'connaitre' in the poem's
dismissive last line: 'Vrai, je ne l'ai jamais connue'. If the narrator has never got
to know the girl, he nevertheless 'recognised' her in his first glimpse, and that
knowledge remains.7 Laforgue's poem is set in the form of the 'pantoum
neglige', in which snatches of lines recur in different settings, making a mockery
of narrative sequence. And there is nothing that could be called narrative, just a
delicate progression towards the idea of death, as the carnation, a metaphor for
the girl's eyes, becomes more deeply veined. Repetitions in Laforgue's texts
frequently indicate inescapable situations: here it is the might-have-beens of life,
which he characterised as 'trains manques'.9
By comparison with the other two poems, Baudelaire's is straightforward. Its
fundamental originality and its dramatic force carry it to its bold, if ironic, finale:
'O toi que j'eusse aimee: o toi qui le savais'. The other two poems are clearly
'reecritures', Laforgue's of Baudelaire, Eliot's perhaps more of Laforgue,
although the word 'fugitive' is used crucially in both the Baudelaire and the Eliot
poems. Baudelaire's widow is a 'fugitive beaute' in the poem's first tercet.10
Eliot's woman, perhaps indicative of the ephemerality of emotions in modern
life, looks up with 'a fugitive resentment in [her] eyes'. Laforgue also had
introduced the idea of the 'fugitive' in his first line: 'Elle fuyait par l'avenue'.
In its descriptive technique, in the generosity of detail — setting, gesture and
pose — Eliot's poem is closer to Baudelaire than to Laforgue, whose writing
here is elliptical and minimalist, resembling the Verlaine of the early Sagesse
poems, which he admired.11 But when it comes to ironic techniques, Eliot has
clearly learnt from Laforgue and in two areas has gone beyond him. One is what
might be called moral irony. Laforgue of course mocks his narrator's daydreaming, his failure to act. 'Je rentrerai sans diner' cuts him down to size. Stillborn dreams are part of his repertoire. Eliot's narrator, however, has broken off
a relationship and the pain of the event is still with him. He evades any idea of
cruelty on his part ('fugitive resentment' on the girl's part is all he will allow) and
tries to persuade himself that the farewell could have been carried out with an
engaging casualness. They might have found 'Some way incomparably light and
deft [. . .] Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand'. (This last line is
of course a direct echo of Laforgue's 'Simple et sans foi comme un bonjour'.)
The second ironic area that Eliot develops more critically than Laforgue
follows on from this. It is the aestheticisation of experience. While this topic is
central also to Laforgue's poem, it is developed critically in 'La Figlia Che Piange'
across two conflicting images of the girl, the first answering the demands of art.
She stands in a classical setting, which contrasts totally with Baudelaire's street
scene, and flings the flowers she is holding to the ground. But this is mere
fantasy. In fact, less dramatically, she had merely turned away, and it is the 'real'
image that the narrator cannot dispel from his memory. Nor can he come to
terms with it, as the final couplet makes abundandy clear:
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon's repose.
[81]
The jarring 'cogitations', when it is the emotions that are at issue, the unnatural
stylisation of the poem's final line reinforce the image of a narrator unable to
view life except through the lenses of art. Between Laforgue's poem and Eliot's
the remembered moment has lost its innocence.
1
W. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A LyricPoet in the Era of High Capitalism (London, Verso, 1985) p. 125.
Claude Leroy, Le Mythe de la Passante (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1999).
J. Laforgue, CEuvres Completes 1, ed by J.-L. Debauve, D . Grojnowski, P Pia, P.-O. Walzer (L'Age
d'homme, Lausanne, 1986) p. 868.
4
For this particular poem, see: R. Taupin, L'Influence du symbolismeframaissurlapoesieamincaine, 191 o— 1920
(Paris, Champion, 1929) p. 229, and G. Williamson, A Reader's Guide to T.S. Eliot (London, Thames and
Hudson, 1955) pp- 84—86. For general treatment of Eliot's influence on Laforgue, see: R. Taupin, op. cit.
pp. 218—32; E. j . H. Greene, T. S. Eliot et la France (Pans, Boivin, 1951), G. Martin (ed.), Eliot in Perspective
(London, Macmillan, 1970). C. Rick's edition of Eliot's early, previously unpublished verse, T. S. Eliot,
Inventions of the March Hare (London, Faber, 1996) is the most eloquent testimony to the influence of
Laforgue.
5
C. Leroy, op. cit., p. 95.
' C. Leroy, "Elle, loyal reve mort-ne': Laforgue et le mythe de la passante' in Les Complaintes de Jules
Laforgue (Romantisme Colloques, Paris 2000) p. 113. However much of the poem is a 'poeme devinette',
it seems unnecessary to labour, as Leroy does, the homonym of its title. Laforgue would probably happily
have done without the alternative meaning of 'a dead maid'.
7
In his Amours de la quinyieme annee Laforgue wrote: 'Je ne te connais pas, mais je t'ai reconnue'.
Laforgue, OC, I., p. 488.
8
For the characteristics of the 'pantoum', see: M. Morier, Dictionnaire de poe'hque et de rhetonque (Paris,
Presses Universitaires de France, 1975).
9
—Oh! qu'ils sont chers, les trains manques!.. .
Oil |'ai passe ma vie a faillir m'embarquer.
Dimanches XXXVII Laforgue, OC, II (Lausanne, 1995), p 219.
10
The idea of flight recurs in 'Car j'ignore ou tu fuis' (1.13).
11
'Quel vrai poete—C'est celui dont |e me rapproche le plus'. Laforgue, OC, I., p. 886.
12
'Petition', Derniers Vers V. in Laforgue, OC, II., p. 313.
13
N o t only do we have the garden urn on which she leans as she stands at the top of a flight of steps, but
Eliot provides a Virgilmn epigraph to the poem: 'O quam te memorem Virgo. . .'
14
R. Taupin, who says of'La Figlia Che Piange': Tous les precedes de Laforgue y sont', singles out as
one of these devices the use of an ironic final couplet. R. Taupin, op. cit., p. 229.
2
3
REALISING 'LA VRAIE JUSTICE': A NOTE ON ALBERT CAMUS'S
MORAL TRANSPARENCY
MARK ORME, Central Lancashire
Camus's lifelong concern for social and political justice finds natural expression
on the political left which, traditionally, 'a toujours ete en lutte contre l'injustice,
l'obscurantisme et l'oppression'.1 Yet at the height of the Cold War, the conflict
between the communist and non-communist left in France threatened to destroy
that historical accolade, a prospect which Camus himself takes seriously: 'je suis
ne dans une famille, la gauche, ou je mourrai, mais dont il m'est difficile de ne
pas voir la decheance' (E, 1753). Remaining loyal to his sensibilite de gauche in his
conviction that '[s]i, enfin, la verite me paraissait a droite, j'y serais' (E, 754),
Camus refuses to follow the doctrines of Marxist ideologues; his polemics with
Jean-Marie Domenach (E, 1750—58) and France-Observateur (E, 1758—62) are
useful reminders of the contemporary debate surrounding the issue of
independence on the political left in France. Confirmation that, for Camus, the
'communist paradise' was entrenched in socialist authoritarianism is further
provided by his polemic with Sartre over UHomme revoke (1951) which sealed the
rift between the former's rejection of politico-ideological monologue and the
latter's pro-Marxist moral stance. With one notable exception — the drame
[8.] 9