Today on The Melbourne Flâneur vlog, I come to you from St Vincent Gardens in Albert Park, the ritziest suburb in Melbourne, where I take you behind the cover of my CD audiobook The Spleen of Melbourne: Prose Poetry & Fiction.

As I say in the video above, I love St Vincent Gardens because it has a sort of ‘place des Vosges’ feel about it with its rows of Victorian terrace-houses boxing in the leafy square. In a moment of splenetic nostalgie leaning back against les bancs in the park, I can imagine myself back in my beloved Paris in those days of heroic flânerie when the productive indolence of walking and writing was my sole occupation.

It’s therefore the perfect Melburnian setting in which to introduce you in-depth to The Spleen of Melbourne project, which unites the most Parisian city on Australian soil with the first city of flânerie.

One of the key characteristics of my flâneurial literary style as a poet in prose on The Spleen of Melbourne CD is geographical precision: I want the listener to walk alongside me in my flâneries, to see exactly in his or her mind what I have seen with my eyes, to hear what I have heard, to share with me the full sensory experience of a real place in his or her imagination.

But as flânerie is a praxis for inducing in oneself an altered state of consciousness, I also want the reader to equally walk with me through a networked conceptual landscape—almost platonic in its forms—which the built urban environment educes from me.

In other words, I want the reader to also experience the thoughts and feelings I have as I flâne about Melbourne.

This geographic precision about the Melbourne of my prose poems is in distinct contrast to the approach that Charles Baudelaire takes with respect to the Paris of his own collection of prose poems, Le Spleen de Paris (1869). For, curiously, there is a conspicuous lack of geographic specificity in Le Spleen de Paris. No streets are directly referred to—not even the inescapable Seine.

This is a curious oversight since Baudelaire is the premier poet of modernity, the first to trade in the sublimity of Nature for the marvellous spectacle of the modern urban scene. As Carol Clark says in her introduction to the Selected Poems (1996), Baudelaire is the first versifier to introduce the ‘indecorous’, ‘improper’ subject of the modern city into French prosody—and the modern city, of course, is Paris, Walter Benjamin’s ‘Capital of the Nineteenth Century’.

Far less than Les Fleurs du mal, the Paris of Le Spleen de Paris, which takes as its ostensible subject this ‘Mecca of Modernity’ whose profane empire of taste has stretched around the globe to intimately influence every city—even far-flung Melbourne—is hardly there as a unifying ambiance, an organizing theme that lends coherence to the collection.

Il est un point par lequel la nouvelle a une supériorité, même sur le poëme. Le rhythme est nécessaire au développement de l’idée de la beauté, qui est le but le plus grand et le plus noble du poëme. Or, les artifices du rhythme sont un obstacle insurmontable à cette développement minutieux de pensées et d’expressions qui a pour objet la vérité.

There is a point through which the short prose account achieves a superiority, even over the poem. Rhythm is necessary to the development of the concept of beauty, which is the greatest and noblest end of the poem. Now, the artifices of rhythm present an insurmountable obstacle to that minute development of thoughts and expressions which has truth for its end.

—Charles Baudelaire, “Nouvelles notes sur Edgar Poe”, introduction to Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires (1884, p. xii [my translation])

I don’t entirely agree with this statement, for ‘truth’—the absolute vérité—can only be expressed in its wholeness, and that is the purview of poetry. But one must step a great deal back and see things at a lower level of resolution in order to see them in their totality.

Baudelaire is correct in noticing that prose, uncorseted from the straitjacket of rhythm, has a distinct advantage over poetry in being able to report the superficial detail which makes up that totality at a high level of resolution, but this is not necessarily ‘truth’—only the factitious parts of it seen in close-up.

This is the reef against which the analytic, prosaic sentiment founders. A poet pur-sang like Baudelaire, having a holistic, totalizing vision and world-view, sees the harmonious repetition of a beautiful order—its rhythm—throughout the cosmos.

A natural prosateur like myself, by contrast, sees the discordant disjunctions, juxtapositions, enjambments and adjacencies. The lines of logical thought may ‘flow’, as a set of premises to their conclusion, but not with the harmony of rhythm. Each premise as sentence or paragraph must be ‘developed’, like a musical theme, or a leitmotiv. It must be planed and turned and set into the logical architecture only once the prosateur is certain that it can bear the logical load of the next idea to be set upon it.

Thus the Melbourne of the prose poems on The Spleen of Melbourne CD is a very ‘concrete’ city: that built environment of conceptual forms which are consubstantial with actual things the contemporary flâneur will encounter in Melbourne is explicit.

And on the other hand, the Paris of Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris is far less concretely delineated than my Melbourne. It is an implicit city.

Of course, Le Spleen de Paris is a largely ‘posthumous’ work: Published two years after Baudelaire’s death, we know that, at fifty completed pieces, he only achieved half of his projected vision for this collection before the paralyzing stroke which rendered him mute and immobile for the last year of his life.

What the book might have become if Baudelaire had lived to write another fifty prose poems is something we can only speculate on, and there’s debate in the critical literature as to whether Baudelaire even achieved his goal of a ‘poetic prose’ with the first fifty.

Having translated about a dozen of the prose poems in Le Spleen de Paris, I’m not sure myself whether many of the pieces in the collection genuinely qualify as being ‘musical without rhythm or rhyme’.

I’m not flattering myself to say that this discordant intellectual ‘music’ is something I regularly achieve in the prose poems which comprise The Spleen of Melbourne project: I’m a prosateur, and I have a more natural sense of the musical possibilities of the sentence—the sound that is linked directly to concrete sense—than Baudelaire, who more naturally inhabits the much stricter form of verse.

Moreover, the three titles that Baudelaire meditated for the collection complicates the issue of his ultimate artistic intent. Though first published—and equally known—under the title of Petits poèmes en prose (“Little Poems in Prose”), at a certain point early in the composition Baudelaire intended to call the collection “Le Rôdeur de Paris” (“The Prowler of Paris”), which sustains the view that the modern city of Paris, as a unifying subject and theme, is central to a global interpretation of the work.

I think we have to conclude, as a working hypothesis, that if as careful and precise a poet as Baudelaire declines to make explicit references to the contemporary urban scene in his prose poems (which comprise a form which lends itself more easily to explicit geographical precision than restrictive rhyming verse), then this is a deliberate æsthetic decision rather than a clumsy oversight on his part.

If, in a poem like “Le Cygne”—perhaps Baudelaire’s single greatest work in verse—as in the “Tableaux parisiens” section of Les Fleurs du mal more generally, he can find a way to make clear and explicit geographic references to the colossally disrupted Paris being pulled down and put up around him by Baron Haussmann within the restrictive straitjacket of the alexandrine, then there is no reason why he could not have taken the same high-resolution approach within the freer form of the prose poem—a form Baudelaire was essentially inventing.

Even if we allow that the corpus of prose poems Baudelaire has ultimately bequeathed to us in Le Spleen de Paris is only half-complete, there are simply too many of the fifty pieces that make some reference, however vague and anecdotal, to contemporary life in Paris under the Second Empire, for us not to provisionally conclude that his vagueness is an æsthetic strategy of some kind, though to what end it seems difficult, in light of the ‘inachevé’ nature of the work, to say.

Thus, while the Paris of Les Fleurs du mal is paradoxically ‘explicit’, clear-eyed, sharply defined, and high-resolution when it would seem that the extreme brevity, condensation and restriction of the verse form would call for a ‘softer’, more global and holistic vision of the modern city, the Paris of Le Spleen de Paris is ‘implicit’: it has this softer, vaguer quality where the freeness of the prosaic form would easily allow for cleaner lines and a sharper delineation of detail—an altogether more remorseless and unsentimental approach.

And without explicit geographic signifiers to orient us in space, Baudelaire’s mid-nineteenth-century Paris might, with a little mutatis mutandis, be any modern city anywhere.

Which leads me to propose, as I do in the sleeve booklet accompanying The Spleen of Melbourne CD, that Baudelairean Spleen, that ‘bilious melancholy’ and ‘choleric sorrow’ which Baudelaire perceived as a specific quality of modern Paris, is a mood of ‘sinister tristesse’ that attends every modern city everywhere that has been touched by the corrupting tentacle of that ‘empire of taste’ which had its Holy See aux Tuileries—including Marvellous Melbourne.

In reading Baudelaire’s tableaux parisiens redux in Le Spleen de Paris, with their hermetic discontinuity from each other, I am often reminded of those beautiful Japanese screens depicting scenes from The Tale of Genji, the salient ‘images’ of Lady Murasaki’s great novel, the high points of emotion in her long, story-like chapters being separated from each other by labyrinthine clouds of gold ground.

As I have written in one of the novelistic chapters of my Orpheid, my experience of Paris (particularly Montmartre) would be something like living in a Japanese screen where the discreet scenes of one’s existence, the high prosaic moments of flâneuristic exploit and artistic heroism dans le quotidien, were separated from one another by dense, serried hedges of cloud, as though one were wandering through a labyrinth that took in tout Paris.

One descended into the misty maze of the Métro at Lamarck-Caulaincourt and popped up again, by mysterious shifts onto other lines and arrow-led leggings through white-tiled corridors communicating between them, at some other point which had no visual continuity with it, prowled around in that milieu, learning its secret byways, how blocks, streets, whole neighbourhoods connected up with one another, and then re-descended to some other part to do the same again.

And yet somehow, a holistic sense of Paris, of the totality of its detailed organization, emerged by this flâneuristic means of random randonnée just as, in the letter to Arsène Houssaye which prefaces Le Spleen de Paris, Baudelaire proposes the ‘vertebral’ discontinuity of his work as its chief and unique virtue:

Mon cher ami, je vous envoie un petit ouvrage dont on ne pourrait pas dire, sans injustice, qu’il n’a ni queue ni tête, puisque tout, au contraire, y est à la fois tête et queue, alternativement et réciproquement. Considérez, je vous prie, quelles admirables commodités cette combinaison nous offre à tous, à vous, à moi et au lecteur. Nous pouvons couper où nous voulons, moi ma rêverie, vous le manuscrit, le lecteur sa lecture ; car je ne suspends pas la volonté rétive de celui-ci au fil interminable d’une intrigue superfine. Enlevez une vertèbre, et les deux morceaux de cette tortueuse fantaisie se rejoindront sans peine. Hachez-la en nombreux fragments, et vous verrez que chacun peut exister à part. Dans l’espérance que quelques-uns de ces tronçons seront assez vivants pour vous plaire et vous amuser, j’ose vous dédier le serpent tout entier.

My dear friend, I send you a little work of which one is not able to say, without being unjust, that it has neither top nor tail since everything in it is, on the contrary, top and tail simultaneously, alternatively, and reciprocally. Consider, if you please, what admirable convenience such a combination offers to all of us—to you, me, the reader. We can slice it and dice it as we please—me, my reverie, you, the manuscript, the reader, his reading; for I do not keep the restive attention of this latter hanging from the interminable thread of some super-fine plot. Take away a vertebra and the two pieces of this tortuous phantasy will merge together again effortlessly. Chop it up into numerous fragments and you will see that each of them can live on its own. In the hope that some of these sections are lively enough to please and amuse you, I take the liberty of dedicating the entire serpent to you.

—Charles Baudelaire, “À Arsène Houssaye”, Le Spleen de Paris (2000, p. 5 [my tranlsation])

Of course, there was no Métro in Baudelaire’s day, so he is proposing in his work, by a prophetic fantasy, the Ouroboran organization of the modern city Paris will become as a circular snake. Somehow the linear network of discreet vectors which compose the modern city of Paris as designed by Baron Haussmann form a recursive maze which feeds endlessly upon itself.

Thus, in place of geographic specificity in Le Spleen de Paris, we get a proto-Benjaminian catalogue of prototypical things commonly encountered in the implicit city—Paris in this instance, but it could be any modern city touched by Paris’s influence—repeated from prose poem to prose poem.

There is the theme of ‘the streets’ which crops up again and again as the principal linking vector. We are led from the streets back into ‘the room’ in prose poems like “La Chambre double” and “À une heure de matin”. Equally, there is the recurrent theme of ‘the park’ in “Le Fou et la Vénus” and “Les Veuves”, common ground for mutual civic enjoyment of the urban spectacle. And this theme segues into communal fêtes of marvellous spectacle, as in “Le Vieux Saltimbanque”.

A thematic organization of Le Spleen de Paris has not, as far as I know, been attempted along the Benjaminian lines of The Arcades Project (1927-40), but I’ve detected at least a dozen discreet urban themes into which the prose poems can be classified and re-classified.

And as per Baudelaire’s boast to Houssaye, if a thematic parcours of Le Spleen de Paris were attempted, one could create a conceptual city—perhaps an almost infinite number of conceptual cities—based upon the combinatorial and permutational arrangement and re-arrangement of the prose poems.

‘Commerce and fashion’, ‘urban types’, ‘the revolutionary spirit’, ‘sounds’, ‘food’, ‘animals’, ‘crowds’, ‘women’, ‘cafés, libraries, shops’:—In these content niches, into which the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris can be endlessly categorized and re-categorized, Baudelaire prototypes an implicit modern city from the specific parts of his experience of Paris in the middle years of the nineteenth century.

The implicit Paris of the prose poems is one which we can still recognize today, wherever in the world we are. It is perhaps no coincidence that in the last line of the last prose poem on The Spleen of Melbourne CD, “Milton, when a youth”, I invoke ‘the labyrinthine banality of my habitual solitude as a flâneur in the grand green maze of a great city in the late afternoon.’

Melbourne is not invoked specifically in that line, and indeed, in the prose poem, set in the Carlton Gardens, I disturb my female companion by volubly evoking passionate memories of afternoons passed idly in Paris’s Tuileries Gardens: The two places and times merge momentarily for me, and in ‘the grand green maze’ of time and space linking the suburbs of my life across a universal city in two hemispheres, the city of Paris is implicit in the explicit city of Melbourne.

Paris, as Hemingway said, is ‘a moveable feast’: if you’ve had the good fortune to live there as a young man, you carry it with you wherever you go for the rest of your life.

And thus, Baudelairean Spleen—le spleen de Paris—that ‘bilious melancholy and choleric sorrow’ that modern urban life engenders in us, is equally, for the Parisian flâneur displaced to antipodean climes and damned to walk, as a refugee, down-under in search of his heart’s home, ‘the spleen of Melbourne’, the most Parisian city on Australian soil.

It is urban spleen tout court.

You can purchase your own copy of The Spleen of Melbourne audiobook below. As I say in the video, every copy of the physical CD comes personally signed, wax-sealed as a guarantee of artistic authenticity, and gift-wrapped by yours truly. If you choose to purchase the digital album, you’ll also get a bonus track not on the physical CD itself.