Author: Dean Kyte

Dean Kyte is a Melbourne-based writer, filmmaker and flâneur. The author of “The Melbourne Flâneur” and “The Spleen of Melbourne”, he is a craftsman of fine literature who writes prose poetry and literary noir fiction about contemporary Melburnian life. Dean is also a translator of French literature, specializing in the poetry and prose poetry of Charles Baudelaire. His new book of translations, “Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments: Selections from ‘Toxic Blossoms’ and ‘Parisian Spleen’”, will be published by Dean Kyte Press in June 2025. In addition to publishing his own work, Dean provides Bespoke Document Tailoring and Artisanal Desktop Publishing services to Australian and international clients via his website, https://deankyte.com.

By on 3 Comments

Félix Bracquemond, “Frontispiece for ‘Les Fleurs du mal’” (1857), 26.4 × 18 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Félix Bracquemond, “Frontispiece for Les Fleurs du mal” (1857), 26.4 × 18 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The title of Charles Baudelaire’s only completed book of poetry has remained an inscrutable rebus for English translators, despite the simplicity of the title’s formulation—two nouns, one concrete, one abstract, the definite article in its plural form, and a preposition implying possession of the concrete noun by the abstract.

This simple phrase, ‘Les Fleurs du mal’, presents no obvious difficulty to translation, and yet it has confounded generations of English translators for over a century, almost all of whom have collapsed in defeat on the prosaically literal, unpoetic phrase ‘The Flowers of Evil’.

In his indispensable commentary Baudelaire’s Tragic Hero: A Study of the Architecture of Les Fleurs du Mal (1961), D. J. Mossop states that a literal rendering of the central metaphor of the title might be ‘Poems (i.e. works of æsthetic beauty) written on the subject of evil’.

But Mossop is only stating half the problem.

We see at once from Mossop’s account what the basic problem for the English translator has been—the fact that the concrete noun ‘fleurs’ (literally, prosaically, ‘flowers’) is doing double service as an abstract noun in this context—but not that the second term of the equation, the abstract noun ‘mal’—traditionally interpreted by the English-speaking peoples in an absolute moralistic sense as ‘evil’—is also doing double service in its meaning.

Baudelaire’s original intention was that his collection should be published with an allegorical frontispiece, and his friend and publisher, Auguste Poulet-Malassis, gave the commission to the engraver Félix Bracquemond, who executed a number of designs based on Baudelaire’s specifications, including the variation above.

The image was to show an allegorical figure that was both skeleton and tree, rooted to the earth, and surrounded by the Seven Deadly Sins in the form of seven weedy flowers.

None of the variations that Bracquemond produced satisfied Baudelaire, and the closest that a graphic artist would come to realizing the allegorical device that Baudelaire envisioned would be in 1866, when the poet’s idée fixe was revived by Félicien Rops and applied as frontispiece over his last, brief collection of ‘scraps’ and banned works, Les Épaves.

Félicien Rops, “Frontispiece for Les Épaves” (1866).
Félicien Rops, “Frontispiece: The Waifs (Les Épaves)” (1866), 16 × 10.2 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

In addition to the emblematic intent behind the formulation ‘Les Fleurs du mal’, Baudelaire’s chosen title must be understood in light of the prefatory dedication of the collection that he makes to his ‘master and friend’, Théophile Gautier.

In her 1994 biography of Baudelaire, Joanna Richardson shows that the precise wording of the dedicatory device was carefully worked out and ratified by Gautier in collaboration with Baudelaire.

On 9 March [1857], he [Baudelaire] sent the patient Malassis ‘the new dedication, discussed, agreed and authorised by the magician, who explained to me very clearly that a dedication should not be a profession of faith – which also had the fault of drawing attention to the dangerous side of the work.’

— Joanna Richardson, Baudelaire (1994, p. 210)

As elliptical and ambiguous as the title itself, the dedication to Gautier has been the source of over a century of contention as critics have wrangled over its wording, some seeing in it Baudelaire’s propensity for base flattery towards a well-placed confrère, others his talent for the most cynical satire, laughing up his sleeve at a man of letters, powerful in his day, now diminished in history’s eyes as compared to the lowly poet supplicating Gautier for his critical protection of the work.

But in lieu of the unsatisfactorily realized allegorical image that Baudelaire intended to serve as frontispiece to the collection and explain the meaning of its title, this emblematic invocation of the ‘poète impeccable’ Gautier, whom Baudelaire calls the ‘parfait magicien ès lettres françaises — perfect magician in the field of French letters’ (my translation), is the key for the English translator to properly interpret the meaning of the elusive and enigmatic phrase ‘Les Fleurs du mal’.

Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire’s senior by a decade, had been his co-researcher in the poetic effects produced by drugs when they had both been living in the hôtel Pimodan on the île Saint-Louis in the 1840s.

In “Une collaboration Gautier-Gérard: L’Étude sur Henri Heine signée de Nerval” (1955) Jean Richer revealed that, during those years, Gautier wrote a substantial part of Gérard de Nerval’s critical study on the poetry of Heinrich Heine, in which the Baudelairean notion of ‘correspondences’ found its entry into French literature from the German Romantics.

Nous préférons vous offrir un simple bouquet de fleurs de fantaisie, aux parfums pénétrants, aux couleurs éclatantes.

We prefer to offer you a simple bouquet of fantastical flowers, with penetrating scents and flamboyant colours.

— Gérard de Nerval, “Les Poésies de Henri Heine”, Revue des Deux Mondes, Nouvelle série, XXIII (1848, p. 224 [my translation])

In that short statement we already perceive the essential traits distinguishing the poems that Baudelaire will begin to lay before the public over the next decade.

The metaphorical notion of the poem as being a ‘flower’, a proportionate, symmetrical form with its regular lines of syllables branching from a single axial stem of text, an exquisite, exotic miniature that emits an æsthetically pleasing quality to the ear, one that is sonically correspondent to the pleasing scent and colour which strike nose and eye, was thus well-established in the Parisian literary milieu by the time Baudelaire embarked upon Les Fleurs du mal.

Across the Channel, we can trace an etymological line between the Middle English ‘poesy’ (imported from the French ‘poésie’) and ‘posy’, a small bunch of flowers, a nosegay or ‘bouquet’, to use Nerval’s term for the collection of works he selects to translate from Heine.

And it should be noted, in passing, that the Greek origins of their common cognate ‘poiesis’ emphasizes the ‘artificial’ nature of the poem: it is a ‘creation’, a ‘production’—a work of art, in fine, that rivals the natural beauty of God’s creation.

The archaic meaning of ‘posy’ dating from the Middle English period of Norman influence is both ‘poetry’ and an ‘arrangement of flowers’. It is also, in this obsolete usage, ‘an emblem or emblematic device’—just like the allegorical image conceived by Baudelaire as a frontispiece for his collection and the dedicatory device he worked out in collaboration with Gautier.

There should therefore be no reason why generations of English translators, with hardly an exception, should all have collapsed in defeat upon the gauche and unpoetically literal phrase ‘The Flowers of Evil’ to translate the invocatory formula ‘Les Fleurs du mal’.

Once the ancient relationship between the concrete and abstract senses of ‘poesy’ are seen, half the battle in understanding Baudelaire’s cryptic intention with this phrase is won, and the possibilities for new, more accurate essays on the esoteric meaning of the formula increase substantially.

However, the wearisome literal-mindedness of the English-speaking peoples in seeing only ‘flowers’ in ‘fleurs’ is as nothing compared to their unsubtle Protestantism, which insists on seeing nothing but absolute evil in the second term of the equation, ‘mal’.

Given Mossop’s explanation, that Baudelaire’s poems are ‘works of æsthetic beauty’ that correspond with the floral products of divine craftsmanship, the Gordian way that all comers have attempted to square the impossible circle in their minds, blasphemously affirming that concrete examples of God’s handiwork can only be, in the condensed way Baudelaire expresses himself in this phrase, Satanic masterpieces, appears to me not only the consequence of the absurd materiality of the English language, but of our gross, wrongheaded Protestantism as English-speaking peoples.

Baudelaire, to be sure, is the most absolute moralist in poetry since Dante.

But, as Mossop puts it, ‘One’s attitude may be no less moral when one is conscious of the evil that is within one, than when one is conscious of one’s own virtue and the evil of others. One may be none the less against evil, for being aware that part of one is for evil…. Similarly, Baudelaire’s complex attitude … is not the simple attitude of being “against evil”, nor is it the equally simple attitude of being “for evil”: it is the complex attitude of being “against evil including the evil part of himself which is for evil”.’

The simplistic theology of a Luther or Calvin cannot hope to cope with the Catholic subtlety of such an involuted moral argument.

Baudelaire very clearly bore the physical stigmata of a fall from moral grace.

If he did not contract syphilis from his first sexual encounter with a prostitute at the age of eighteen, within a few such encounters, he was certainly carrying within himself the seeds of a slow-acting poison that would eventually cripple him, degrade his mental faculties, and render the most peerless singer of the French language in the last 200 years almost mute.

Thus, for Baudelaire, the condition of ‘badness’, of ‘wrongness’ signified by the word ‘mal’ is not so much moral as physical:—it is from his embodied experience of ‘doing ill’—‘the evil part of himself which is for evil’—that the ‘malady’ du mal proceeds, not from the absolute, abstract condition of Capital-E ‘Evil’ that almost all previous English translators have simplistically settled upon.

As the wording of the emblematic device dedicated to Gautier reveals, when Baudelaire calls the poems gathered in his collection ‘ces fleurs maladives’, he is not referring, in the first instance, to the absolute moral principle that encompasses all that is ‘bad’ and ‘wrong’, from sin to error.

Baudelaire’s first concern is with physical health.

Dean Kyte takes you inside The Melbourne Edition of his new book of Baudelaire translations, Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments, explaining the meaning of Baudelaire’s dedication to Théophile Gautier.

The titles of both of his major collections of prosody refer explicitly to the physical state of ill-health as the correspondent analogue for mental health, and the psychosomatic caduceus, the involuted double helix of the mind-body problem, the homeostatic regulation of the temporal, outer man by the eternal, inner person and vice versa, lies at the centre of Baudelaire’s conception du mal.

Hence, Baudelaire dedicates to the perfect magician Gautier ‘ces fleurs maladives’—‘these unhealthy, sickly, unwholesome flowers’—but also these ‘evil poems’, these perverse creations, these artificial ‘paper flowers’ whose ‘badness’ or ‘wrongness’ is inextricable from their formal beauty as poetry.

These are ‘fantastical blooms of imagination’—flamboyant, pungent effusions, as per Nerval—that are themselves ‘sickly’, and which induce sickness—malady—in the reader.

In 1857, the very year in which Baudelaire first published the bouquet of ‘unwholesome flowers’ he presented to Gautier, the pre-Freudian psychiatrist Bénédict Morel published his pioneering Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles, morales de l’espèce humaine et des causes qui produisent ces variétés maladives.

In that work, Morel proposed a simple definition of human degeneration, one that would be frequently cited throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.

… [L]’idée plus claire que nous puissions nous former de la dégénérescence de l’espèce humaine, est de nous représenter comme une déviation maladive d’un type primitive.

… [T]he clearest notion we can possibly form of the phenomenon of degeneration in the human species is to represent it to ourselves as an unwholesome deviation from a primal type.

— Bénédict Morel, Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles, morales de l’espèce humaine et des causes qui produisent ces variétés maladives (1857, p. 5 [my translation])

According to Max Nordau, who would adopt Morel’s definition, it is this derivation from a basic, healthy type of man that produces the ‘stigmata’—that is a technical, not moralistic term, Nordau assures us—of physical and intellectual degeneration.

The leading cause of this ‘unwholesome deviation’ from basic health, according to Morel, is poisoning—addiction to narcotics and stimulants, such as alcohol and tobacco, which alternately depress and excite the human organism, and the consumption of polluted foods.

Nordau, writing forty years after Morel, adds another etiological factor to these ‘noxious influences’ in his Degeneration (1895)—‘residence in large towns.’

Under the conditions of modern, technological capitalism in these great ‘machines à vivre’ taking their model from Paris, Walter Benjamin’s ‘Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, man, according to Nordau, ‘breathes an air charged with organic detritus; he eats stale, contaminated, and adulterated food; he feels himself in a state of constant nervous excitement, and one can compare him without exaggeration to the inhabitants of a marshy district.’

‘No matter which party one may belong to,’ wrote Baudelaire in 1851, ‘it is impossible not to be gripped by the spectacle of this sickly population, which swallows the dust of factories, breathes in particles of cotton, and lets its tissues be permeated by white lead, mercury, and all the poisons needed for the production of masterpieces…; the spectacle of this languishing and pining population to whom the earth owes its wonders, who feel hot, crimson blood coursing through their veins, and who cast a long, sorrowful look at the sunlight and shadows of the great parks.’ … Baudelaire supplied his own caption for the image he presents.  Beneath it he wrote the words: ‘La Modernité.’

— Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”, in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (2006, pp. 102-3)

According to Nordau, these poisonous environmental conditions attendant on modern life in great cities produce a ‘fatigue’—an escalating ‘burnout’ of the human organism—an hysterical malady that places increasing wear and tear on the brain and tissue of each successive generation of human beings undergoing the ordeal of modernity.

‘The resistance that modernity offers to the natural productive élan of an individual is out of all proportion to his strength,’ Benjamin writes, and, as Nordau notices, in no place on earth were the nerves of human beings more frayed in the nineteenth century than in Benjamin’s capital of modernity itself—the epicentre of a political revolution that, in its continuing aftershocks, had become a social, cultural, and artistic revolution.

It was in this poisonous atmosphere of addiction, fashionable excitation, debased victuals, and political volatility that Charles Baudelaire was born and lived almost all of his brief, unhappy life.

Les Fleurs du mal are therefore not, as generations of English translators have so crudely rendered them, ‘The Flowers of Evil’.

In their exoteric aspect, the ‘allegorical image’ Baudelaire intended by that title, Les Fleurs du mal are emblems of malady, of a physical debility which is correspondent with a mental degeneration and vice versa.

As stigmatized derivatives of a primal, healthy type ‘before the Fall’ of modernity, it is only in this sense that these exotic, poisonous cultivars, weedy, unnatural blooms that Baudelaire has nursed in the hothouse of his soul—itself formed in the ‘artificial paradise’ of Paris—should be regarded as the products of an absolute immorality.

The skeletal Tree of Knowledge depicted by Rops—Science in its essence—unbandages man’s eyes from the blissful ignorance of God’s Nature.

When we enter the condition of modernity, we enter an artificial paradise, a fallen place of our own making, seductive and yet poisonous, in which the generations of Adam who work in the big cities bear the marks of Science’s guilty knowledge on their bodies and in their brains.

In its exoteric dimension, the title ‘Les Fleurs du mal’ might better be rendered, as I have chosen to do so, as ‘Toxic Blossoms’: these are creations of poisonous beauty that throw us back on the secondary paradox that arises from the primary fact of their being:—From whence does the Good, the True, the Beautiful really proceed?—from God, or from the Devil?

You’ve just been reading the first draft of a ‘chapterlet’ from the critical monograph on Baudelaire which will form the introduction to my forthcoming book of translations of Baudelaire’s poems and prose poems, Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments: Selections from Toxic Blossoms & Parisian Spleen.

All 51 pieces in the book—33 poems, 17 prose poems, and 1 short story—are now complete.

As I put the final touches to the book, my last task is to complete a 10,000-word critical monograph on Charles Baudelaire in which I explain how, in his life and work, he both prophesies and embodies the decadence, decline, and degeneration of modern man that we are now experiencing all throughout the West—and particularly in the Anglosphere.

Pre-order your copy using the links below.

By on

Édouard Manet, “The ship’s deck” (c. 1860), oil on canvas, 56.4 cm × 47.0 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
Édouard Manet, The ship’s deck (c. 1860), oil on canvas, 56.4 cm × 47.0 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Croyez-vous que vous soyez le premier homme dans ce cas ? Avez-vous plus de génie que Chateaubriand et que Wagner ? On s’est bien moqué d’eux cependant ? Ils n’en sont pas morts. Et pour ne pas vous inspirer trop d’orgeuil, je vous dirai que ces hommes sont des modèles, chacun dans son genre, et dans un monde très riche et que vous, vous n’êtes que le premier dans la décrepitude de votre art.

Do you think you’re the first man to have been laughed at? Have you more genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner? Have they not been made fun of? They haven’t died of it. And so as not to puff up your pride too much, I will tell you that these men are models, each in his own field and in a very rich world, and that you—you are merely the first in the degeneracy of your art-form.

— Charles Baudelaire to Édouard Manet, letter of 11 May, 1865 [my translation]

Baudelaire’s recognition of a incipient degeneracy in the art of Édouard Manet would be the most significant remark, either public or private, that the poet would make on the work of his painter-friend, and, indeed, Baudelaire’s slighting comparison of Manet to another personal friend whose genius, by contrast, he had been the first man in France to recognize—Richard Wagner—is telling. As Spengler observes: ‘Between Wagner and Manet there is a deep relationship, which is not, indeed, obvious to everyone but which Baudelaire with his unerring flair for the decadent detected at once.’

It is an enduring mystery of criticism why Baudelaire, so sensitively attuned to the etiolation of forms that would, in time, mark itself out as the pathological trait of modern art—and so quick, moreover, to perceive the chthonic correspondences between his project of a modern, urban poetry and the work of artists in other media whose formal æsthetics bore similarities to his own—should have signally failed to see that it was Manet—not Constantin Guys—whom future historians and critics would deem to have embodied Baudelaire’s own notions of modern artistic heroism, as the quintessential ‘Painter of Modern Life’.

Beaucoup de gens attribueront la décadence de la peinture à la décadence des mœurs. …

Avant de rechercher quel peut être le côté épique de la vie moderne, et de prouver par des exemples que notre époque n’est pas moins féconde que les anciennes en motifs sublimes, on peut affirmer que puisque tous les siècles et tous les peuples ont eu leur beauté, nous avons inévitablement la nôtre.

… [N]’a-t-il pas sa beauté et son charme indigène, cet habit tant victimé ? N’est-il pas l’habit nécessaire de notre époque, souffrante et portant jusque sur ses épaules noires et maigres le symbole d’un deuil perpétuel ? Remarquez bien que l’habit noir et la redingote ont non seulement leur beauté politique, qui est l’expression de l’égalité universelle, mais encore leur beauté poétique, qui est l’expression de l’âme publique ; — une immense défilade de croque-morts, croque-morts politiques, croque-morts amoureux, croque-morts bourgeois. Nous célébrons tous quelque enterrement.

…

Le spectacle de la vie élégante et des milliers d’existences flottantes qui circulent dans les souterrains d’une grande ville, — criminels et filles entretenues, — la Gazette des Tribunaux et le Moniteur nous prouvent que nous n’avons qu’à ouvrir les yeux pour connaître notre héroïsme.

…

La vie parisienne est féconde en sujets poétiques et merveilleux. Le merveilleux nous enveloppe et nous abreuve comme l’atmosphère ; mais nous ne le voyons pas.

Le nu, cette chose si chère aux artistes, cet élément nécessaire de succès, est aussi fréquent et aussi nécessaire que dans la vie ancienne : — au lit, au bain, à l’amphithéâtre. Les moyens et les motifs de la peinture sont également abondants et variés ; mais il y a un élément nouveau, qui est la beauté moderne.

Car les héros de l’Iliade ne vont qu’à votre cheville, ô Vautrin, ô Rastignac, ô Birotteau, — et vous, ô Fontanarès, qui n’avez pas osé raconter au public vos douleurs sous le frac funèbre et convulsionné que nous endossons tous ; — et vous, ô Honoré de Balzac, vous le plus héroïque, le plus singulier, le plus romantique et le plus poétique parmi tous les personnages que vous avez tirés de votre sein !

Many people will attribute the decadence in painting to the degeneration of customs. …

Before we investigate what the epic side of modern life may be and prove, through example, that our era is not less fruitful in sublime motifs than antiquity, it may be averred that since every age and nation has possessed its proper beauty, we, inevitably, have our own.

… Has it not its beauty and its native charm, this oh-so-maligned suit? Is not the suit essential for our age, suffering and bearing upon its very shoulders, puny and black, the symbol of a perpetual mourning? Note well that the black suit and frock coat have not merely their social beauty (which is the expression of universal equality), but also their poetic beauty, which is the expression of the public spirit:—an immense cortège of undertakers – political morticians, romantic embalmers, middleclass funeral directors. We are all of us celebrating some sort of burial.

…

The spectacle of fashion and of the countless floating existences which circulate in the bowels of a great city—crooks and whores—the court reports and tabloids prove to us that we have merely to open our eyes to meet with our brand of heroism.

…

Parisian life is abundant in marvellous and poetic subjects. The marvellous surrounds us and suckles us like the air, but we do not see it.

The nude, that object so dear to artists, that essential ingredient of success, is just as common and indispensable as it was in antique life: in the bed, the bath, upon the stage. The means and the motifs of painting are equally abundant and varied; but there is a new element—modern beauty.

For the heroes of the Iliad do not come up to your ankle, O Vautrin, O Rastignac, O Birotteau!—and you, O Fontanarès, who haven’t dared to recount to the public your chagrins under the tail coat, funereal and wracked with sobs, that all of us wear. —Nor you, O Honoré de Balzac; you, the most heroic, the most original, the most romantic and poetic of all the characters you have drawn forth from your heart!

— Charles Baudelaire, « Salon de 1846 », Curiosités esthétiques (1868, pp. 193, 194, 195, 196-7, 198 [my translation])

It is clear that Baudelaire sees the essence of modern beauty as crime—committing le mal.

The heroes of modern life, far superior to the strong men of antiquity, are the decadent, elegant criminal masterminds of the Balzacian social network of the city, the dandiacal flâneurs for whom the funereal uniform of the black frock coat is a democratic disguise that allows the artistic observer to take the total measure of the urban scene, du grand monde au demi-monde.

L’ordre social, l’action de la société sur l’individu, dans les diverses phases et aux diverses époques, ce réseau d’institutions et de conventions qui nous enveloppe dès notre naissance et ne se rompt qu’à notre mort, sont des ressorts tragiques qu’il ne faut que savoir manier. Ils sont tout à fait équivalents à la fatalité des anciens ; leur poids a tout ce qui était invincible et oppressif dans cette fatalité ; les habitudes qui en découlent, l’insolence, la dureté frivole, l’incurie obstinée, ont tout ce que cette fatalité avait de désespérant et de déchirant : si vous représentez avec vérité cet état de choses, l’homme des temps modernes frémira de ne pouvoir s’y soustraire, comme celui des temps anciens frémissait sous la puissance mystérieuse et sombre à laquelle il ne lui était pas permis d’échapper, et notre public sera plus ému de ce combat de l’individu contre l’ordre social qui le dépouille ou qui le garotte, que d’Œdipe poursuivi par le Destin, ou d’Oreste par les Furies.

Social order—the action of society upon the individual—in various phases and during various epochs; this network of institutions and conventions which catches us in its toils at the moment of our birth and is only broken at the hour of our death, furnishes the mainspring for tragedy which the dramatist need only know how to manipulate. These institutions and conventions are perfectly equivalent to the ‘destiny’ of the ancients; their gravitas possesses everything that was invincible and oppressive in the ancient notion of ‘fate’. The customs that flow from them—insolence, frivolous cynicism, stubborn unconcern—is replete with all that ‘fate’ had in it to inspire heartbreak and despair: If you truthfully depict this state of affairs, modern man will tremble from his incapacity to extricate himself from it just as the man of ancient times used to quiver beneath the obscure and sombre power from which he was forbidden to escape, and our modern audience will be more moved by the individual’s fight against the social order which seeks to strip or strangle him than by Œdipus pursued by Destiny, or Orestes by the Furies.

— Benjamin Constant, « Réflexions sur la tragédie », Revue de Paris (1829, p. 136 [my translation])

Echoing the insight of Benjamin Constant nearly two decades before him, Baudelaire is of the view that urban crime is the sole field of heroism available to men possessed of any spirit of adventure in modernity.

And artists—whether of word or paint—are the supreme outlaws, the supreme non-conformers to the social order.

The dandy-flâneurs, those ‘æsthetic terrorists’ of the bourgeois order who act in resolute defiance of the safetyist constraints of the law—who seek to break the social network of the civilized community binding them to impotence from birth to death, and who refuse to serve the metropolitan machine in the slavery of ‘gainful employment’, preferring instead what I call ‘productive indolence’—those elegant, artistic, criminal souls, deserters of their society but drawn like moths, by grace of their macabre curiosity, to it—to be the ironic witnesses of its criminal beauty, its crime against humanity—are the only heroes in modern life equal to the ancients.

Manet, a dandiacal flâneur as given as Baudelaire to Balzacian survey of the great machine à vivre that was the modern metropolis of Paris, wore the uniform of the fashionable man about town for his undercover excursions into observation of its many strata and facets.

Baudelaire had no lack of opportunities to observe Manet at this idle labour and know that, with the appropriate changes being made, Manet’s visual style and technique was the counterpart to his own literary approach to the modern urban scene of Second Empire Paris.

As two dandy-flâneurs, the poet had often been the painter’s Balzacian bosom companion—the Paul de Manerville to his Henry de Marsay—on sketching expeditions to the jardin des Tuileries.

With his black stovepipe, his exuberant black silk bowtie, his prematurely greying locks and his Satanic profile, Baudelaire would more than once provide Manet with the subject for a snapshot-like sketch that, in its curious caricatural indefiniteness, would trace with ‘vague precision’ the smeary mark that Baudelaire would leave on the margins of the vast, Balzacian tableau of modern Parisian life, a figure in the background, like Vautrin, only afterwards to be recognized as the absolute centre of the cultural scene for the whole nineteenth century.

Édouard Manet, Musique aux Tuileries (1862), oil on canvas, 76 cm × 118 cm, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. (Baudelaire’s portrait is circled in red.)
Édouard Manet, Musique aux Tuileries (1862), oil on canvas,
76 cm × 118 cm, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. (Baudelaire’s portrait is circled in red.)

Thus, as David Carrier, summarizing the position of critics who have lamented Baudelaire’s stunning failure of perspicacity in appreciating the revolutionary rôle that Manet would play in the art of the future, regretfully puts it, ‘it is embarrassing that a great critic failed to see the value of the work of a friend.’

‘It has been alleged,’ writes Joanna Richardson, ‘that Baudelaire did not appreciate Manet at his true worth. … It might indeed be said that Delacroix concealed the modernity and the stature of Manet from him.’

Baudelaire was caught up as a partisan in the great controversy that would preoccupy French art during the second third of the nineteenth century, and which would only retrospectively appear to history as a minor theatre of conflict, a very distant skirmish from the front lines of avant-garde battle that were then drawing themselves behind Manet and in opposition to his sure sense of what constituted modern beauty.

This was the great contest between the primacy of line—precise, classical draughtsmanship as personified by Ingres—and the vibrancy of colour as the expression of romantic emotion, and personified by Baudelaire’s enduring hero, Delacroix.

Manet resolved the problem of line and colour in a novel way that nevertheless looked back—with ambiguous irony—to the classical models claimed by the two masters. Manet’s lines, as in Olympia (1863), were often gross in their salience, an infantile perversion of Ingres’ tin-type kind of design, his fields of unbroken colour vibrant but inharmonious to sensibilities that admitted that Delacroix, despite his lack of draughtsmanly clarity, achieved something poetic and musically suggestive in his tonal arrangements.

In « Le Peintre de la vie moderne », Baudelaire would call genius ‘childhood wilfully, skilfully regained’, and in the novelty of Manet’s visual style, an apparently infantile—even imbecilic—degeneracy of facture that was, in fact, meticulously laboured over as a way of expressing the spectacle of modern Paris in its marvellous, poetic welter of instantaneous impressions, the painter proved that he possessed the ‘lively sense organs and the analytic spirit which enable him to impose order upon the sum of visual materials unconsciously amassed’ which Baudelaire ascribed to Guys.

Manet was half a generation younger than Baudelaire and was thus somewhat removed from the pitched contention between neo-classical line and romantic colour: Born on 23 January 1832, Manet was ineluctably destined, like Baudelaire, to be pilloried by the establishment in his lifetime, shunted to the margins of Parisian society as a stubborn madman one could do nothing with, only to become posthumously influential, lionized for the moral determination of his conscientious rebellion against the artistic mores of the Second Empire, vindicated as the most intransigent stumbling-block upon which the future edifice of modern art would be founded.

January 23rd is a sinister and potent date.

The Sabian symbol for the third degree of Aquarius, coinciding with the Sun’s transit through it on this date, is ‘A deserter from the navy’: That image symbolizes the rebellious—indeed, criminal—abandonment of a rigid, hierarchical structure, an established institution, an ark-like architecture that is designed to safely carry one over ‘le gouffre’ (to use a word we frequently encounter in Baudelaire’s maritime poetry)—the bitter abyss, the hellish, mazy chaos of the waves that are ever under man’s feet.

In his refusal to serve a structure he sees as foundering, the rebellious deserter who jumps ship chooses to become an uncompromising outlaw of society.

In their youths during the 1840s, both Baudelaire and Manet had been forced by their respective families to quit what the older man’s stepfather called ‘the slippery streets of Paris’ and take long, exotic sea voyages—brutal separations designed to quell the rebellious desires of their hearts for poetry on the one hand and painting on the other.

Manet had been forced on a voyage to Rio de Janeiro by his father—a judge—to qualify for induction into the Navy. Manet studiously failed the entrance examinations twice, his non-conforming Aquarian spirit refusing to submit to his father’s authority as it would later refuse to submit to the established judgments of the Académie des beaux-arts.

In the end, by his strategy of ‘compliant resistance’, going along with his father’s dictates while secretly sabotaging them by his intransigent determination to do nothing but become a painter, Manet would get his own way and be allowed to enter to atelier of Thomas Couture.

Baudelaire’s stepfather, the maréchal du camp Aupick, ‘violently disturbed’ by young Charles’s avid pursuit of ‘the perdition of the streets of Paris’, would bundle the aspiring poet off to India, hoping that the exoticism of the East would return a matured young man inclined to read law—or at least, as mother and stepfather muttered between themselves, privately recognizing that they were up against a similarly stubborn case, a poet who would write of honourable subjects and not the ambulatory muses of the Parisian streets.

Baudelaire jumped ship in Mauritius, and within eight months would be back on the ‘slippery streets’ of the capital, returning, as Manet would do some seven years later, as indissuadable from the mad career pathway he was determined to pursue as when he had left, but bringing to his vision of the modern Parisian spectacle all the decadent exoticism he had absorbed in Cape Town, Mauritius, and Réunion.

Thus, January 23 is a date that portends criminal rebellion, the radical overthrow of all monolithic structures of orthodox ‘right thought’ designed to float us, as in an ark, safely over the raging sea of life.

On the same date in 1862, his friend Manet’s thirtieth birthday, the forty-year-old Baudelaire would do what he would hardly ever do in the pages of his Journaux intimes, and mark this fatal date as a dark and potent inflection point in his life.

J’ai cultivé mon hystérie avec jouissance et terreur. Maintenant, j’ai toujours le vertige, et aujourd’hui, 23 janvier 1862, j’ai subi un singulier avertissement, j’ai senti passer sur moi le vent de l’aile de l’imbécillité.

I have cultivated my hysteria with relish and dread. Nowadays, I always feel vertigo, and today, 23 January 1862, I suffered a singular presentiment:—I felt the wind of the wing of mental degeneration sweep over my being.

— Charles Baudelaire, « Mon Cœur mis à nu » (1864, p. 130 [my translation])

And on the same date 121 years later, in the wastes of Australia, I would enter this world of ennui.

You’ve been reading the first draft of the second ‘chapterlet’ in the critical monograph on Baudelaire which will form the introduction to my forthcoming book of translations of Baudelaire’s poems and prose poems, Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments: Selections from Toxic Blossoms & Parisian Spleen.

This book is on the verge of being born and will be out before Christmas. I urge you to purchase copies in your choice and quantity of formats now using the payment buttons below, with invoicing for shipping to occur when the first batch of orders goes to press at the end of this month.

By on

Édouard Manet, “Olympia” (1863-5), oil on canvas, 130.5 cm × 190 cm, musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Édouard Manet, Olympia (1863-5), oil on canvas, 130.5 cm × 190 cm, musée d’Orsay, Paris.

L’usage social de la liberté littéraire deviendra de plus en plus rare et précieux. Les grandes démocraties de l’avenir seront peu libérales pour les écrivains ; il est bon de planter très haut des poètes drapeaux comme Baudelaire.

On pourra les agiter de temps en temps afin d’ameuter le petit nombre des esclaves encore frémissants.

The social use of free literary expression will become increasingly rare and precious. The great democracies of the future will be very illiberal for writers; it is therefore good to plant poets like Baudelaire upon the highest eminences as standards.

We will be able to wave them from time to time so as to riotously rouse the small number of slaves still trembling for freedom.

— Guillaume Apollinaire, introduction to L’Œuvre poétique de Charles Baudelaire (1924) [my translation]

In May of 1865, the talk of tout Paris was the scandal of the Salon, the inclusion of Édouard Manet’s Olympia in the annual exhibition of painting and sculpture held by the Académie des beaux-arts. Two years earlier, Manet had been in the thick of an agitation, his provocative canvas Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe serving as a convenient standard behind which a group of disaffected artists could rally, petitioning the Emperor, Napoléon III, in protest at their rejection by the jury. Now Manet was at it again with something that had been accepted by the jury but which was—if possible—even more outrageous a slap in the face than his Luncheon on the grass had been.

Manet had expected trouble, but from a different quarter, his other entry in the Salon of that year, a history painting showing the Saviour being insulted by the Roman soldiers, going unremarked as compared to Olympia, an uncompromising nude of a contemporary Parisian prostitute so offensive in her frankness that she excited embarrassed ridicule from visitors to the Louvre when she did not actually excite physical attack. Manet, a naïve revolutionary with an earnest desire for the respectability of the Académie, was nonplussed. He wrote his friend, the poet Charles Baudelaire, who had frequently covered the Salon as an art critic of exquisite though outré tastes, seeking guidance and reassurance.

Je voudrais bien vous avoir ici mon cher Baudelaire, les injures pleuvent sur moi comme grêle…. J’aurais voulu avoir votre jugement sain sur mes tableaux car tous ces cris agacent, et il est évident qu’il y a quelqu’un qui se trompe.

I very much wish you were here, my dear Baudelaire, for insults rain on me like hail…. I should have liked to have your healthy judgment on my paintings, for all these cries grate on me, and it’s clear that someone is in the wrong.

— Édouard Manet to Charles Baudelaire, undated letter of early May 1865 [my translation]

The 44-year-old poet was then in Brussels, where he had been for over a year, escaping his Parisian creditors, attempting to sell the rights to his works to Belgian publishers, giving scarcely attended lectures on modern French art to the uncultured Bruxellois, drinking heavily, and roundly hating the place, which he condemned in poems and pamphlets. Sick, penniless, within a year of suffering a mysterious crisis that would leave him partially paralyzed, almost mute, and barely sensible, two years away from his death, Baudelaire had little time for Manet’s complaint. Hearing without sympathy his friend’s lament from the capital of fashion and culture, on 11 May, 1865, Baudelaire fired off an exasperated epistle from the Godforsaken Belgian backwater to the man whom future generations would acknowledge to have been the reluctant, unfairly crucified father of modern art.

Croyez-vous que vous soyez le premier homme dans ce cas ? Avez-vous plus de génie que Chateaubriand et que Wagner ? On s’est bien moqué d’eux cependant ? Ils n’en sont pas morts. Et pour ne pas vous inspirer trop d’orgeuil, je vous dirai que ces hommes sont des modèles, chacun dans son genre, et dans un monde très riche et que vous, vous n’êtes que le premier dans la décrepitude de votre art.

Do you think you’re the first man to have been laughed at? Have you more genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner? Have they not been made fun of? They haven’t died of it. And so as not to puff up your pride too much, I will tell you that these men are models, each in his own field and in a very rich world, and that you—you are merely the first in the degeneracy of your art-form.

— Charles Baudelaire to Édouard Manet, letter of 11 May, 1865 [my translation]

Those last, emphasized words would be prophetic, not merely of Édouard Manet’s destiny to embody the title that his friend had incorrectly or churlishly ascribed to another, lesser artist, to be ‘the Painter of Modern Life’, but it would equally be prophetic of the destiny of Baudelaire himself: By the end of the century, this poet, mocked and derided in his lifetime for his own pretensions to academic respectability as a troubadour of prostitutes, would be regarded by the physician and social critic Max Nordau as having been the fountainhead of degeneracy in modern life and the chef d’école in the Decadent movement of modern poetry, and early in the next century, T. S. Eliot would declare that modernism in poetry had definitively begun with Charles Baudelaire.

What you have just read is the proposed first ‘chapterlet’ of the critical monograph that opens my forthcoming book of translations drawn from the works of Baudelaire: Malediction, Blasphemies, Laments: Selections from Toxic Blossoms & Parisian Spleen.

With 96 per cent of the poems, prose poems—and fiction (!)—of Charles Baudelaire now translated and in place, Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments is on-track for release before Christmas.

Pre-orders for the book in three formats—the hardcover dust jacket “Melbourne Edition”, the Economy Softcover version, and the PDF eBook—are now being accepted at an early-bird price.

Select your choice and quantity below to secure your copies in the desired formats, with invoicing for shipping to occur when the first print run occurs in a month’s time.

By on 2 Comments

Taking you line by line through the last three verses of Baudelaire’s « Les Phares », Dean Kyte explains the paradoxical relationship that damnation has to praise in Baudelaire’s thought.

My new book of translations drawn from the works of Charles Baudelaire, Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments: Selections from Toxic Blossoms and Parisian Spleen, is fast coming to press.

And in today’s video on The Melbourne Flâneur, I take you inside the softcover version of the book as I explain—with due reference to Baudelaire—the rationale behind my choice of such a bitter and pitiless title.

As I say in the video, what appears on its face to be a title utterly alienating in its satanic vituperation is in fact the highest possible homage that Baudelaire can render to God’s majesty, and the proof of his most fervent belief, as a heretical Catholic, in the Supreme Being.

Thus, at a plutonic hour of human history where faith in God and human goodness could not be more ridiculous, I too assert, in taking this title, my quixotic faith in what is highest in man by ‘praising with sharp damnation’ what is lowest in our species, we irredeemable children of the tribe of Cain.

For there must no longer be any doubt in our present year, even to the somnambulistic billions who would make ‘the Woman Question’ and ‘the Jewish Question’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries suddenly ‘the Human Question’ of the twenty-first, that Baudelaire’s apocalyptic prophecy of modernity—a veritable ‘Age of Iron’—has now properly revealed itself in our day.

The time could not be more right for the apparition of this book.

One hundred twenty-one years to the very day of my birth, Baudelaire writes in his journal that ‘today … I suffered a singular alarm: I felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.’

Charles Baudelaire is the Alpha of the dandy-flâneur, the man, in modernity, who still seeks to be a ‘man’—to live heroically in the strength of all our human frailties and the humility of our profound limits—and I am the Omega, the decadent result of two centuries of societal degeneracy in the West, the last quixotic figure, in the armour of my hat and suit, to intransigently ‘hold the faith’ in that utterly discredited, unconscionable project of embodying ‘Homo Occidentalis’ in all his risible nobility.

So, as a mad Aquarian, an avatar of the New, destiny has elected me for a task, chers lecteurs;—to be the ‘postrunner’ of this great fallen angel of modernity, this great albatross of a luciferic intellect who found his wingspan so vast he couldn’t walk easily among us, and interpret to the Anglosphere, as an evangelist after the fact, the poetry and prose poetry of Charles Baudelaire.

And I’m pleased as punch to advise you that Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments is on the verge of seeing the light of day.

I explain the origins of the book’s title in the video above, but here below, I am posting for the first time the line-up of fifty pieces I have selected from Les Fleurs du mal and Le Spleen de Paris to take the field as the Baudelairean ‘dream team’ and represent our poet.

So, here we go…

From Toxic Blossoms (Les Fleurs du mal):

  • “To the Reader” (« Au Lecteur »)

From “Spleen and Ideal” (« Spleen et Idéal »):

  • “Blessing” (« Bénédiction »)
  • “The Albatross” (« L’Albatros »)
  • “Elevation” (« Élévation »)
  • “Correspondences” (« Correspondances »)
  • “The Venal Muse” (« La Muse vénale »)
  • “The Faithless Monk” (« Le Mauvais moine »)
  • “Illfated” (« Le Guignon »)
  • “Past Life” (« La Vie antérieure »)
  • “Beauty” (« La Beauté »)
  • “The Ideal” (« L’Idéal »)
  • “The Giantess” (« La Géante »)
  • “The Jewels” (« Les Bijoux »)
  • “Hymn to Beauty” (« Hymne à la Beauté »)
  • “You’d let all mankind dally in your alley…” (« Tu mettrais l’univers entier dans ta ruelle… »)
  • “With her raiment, sinuous and nacreous…” (« Avec ses vêtements ondoyants et nacrés… »)
  • “The Possessed” (« Le Possédé »)
  • “An Apparition” (« Un Fantôme »)
  • “I make a gift of these verses to you so that if my name…” (« Je te donnes ces vers afin qui si mon nom… »)
  • “Vespers” (« Chanson d’après-midi »)
  • “Spleen” (« Quand le ciel bas et lourd pèse comme un couvercle… »)
  • “Warning” (« L’Avertissement »)

From “Parisian scenes” (« Tableaux parisiens »):

  • “The Sun” (« Le Soleil »)
  • “The Swan” (« Le Cygne »)
  • “To a Passerby” (« À une passante »)
  • “Evening Twilight” (« Le Crépuscule du soir »)

From “Wine” (« Le Vin »):

  • “The Soul of Wine” (« L’Âme du vin »)

From “Toxic Blossoms” (« Les Fleurs du mal »):

  • “Epigraph for a Condemned Book” (« Épigraphe pour un livre condamné »)
  • “The Two Wellbred Girls” (« Les Deux bonnes sœurs »)

From “Rebellion” (« Révolte »):

  • “Litanies of Satan” (« Les Litanies de Satan »)

From “Death” (« La Mort »):

  • “A Connoisseur’s Dream” (« Le Rêve d’un curieux »)
  • “The Journey” (« Le Voyage »)

I have selected fully one-fifth of the total number of poems published in the three editions of Les Fleurs du mal which Baudelaire, and then his mother, saw through the press.

At least twenty per cent of every section of Les Fleurs du mal is represented in Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments, and because Baudelaire’s poetry collection is a psychological novel with a narrative order, in selecting at least a fifth of the poems from every section, I have taken care to choose those works which I think best highlight the themes of that section and carry the overarching drama forward.

The figure of one-fifth includes the six pieces that were struck from the first edition as obscene, banned in France, and were only subsequently available in Belgium among Les Épaves (1866).

One of the censored poems, « Les Bijoux », is included, and as you can see, that piece, which I published in my first collection of Baudelaire translations, Flowers Red and Black (2013), is listed in orange.

With the exception of « Spleen », the titles in orange are works from the earlier book which are still in the buffer awaiting revision.

As this post goes to press, I am about to start revising « Spleen », which I also translated in the years preceding the publication of Flowers Red and Black but declined to include in that book, so this poem will see the light of day for the first time in Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments.

And the word ‘revise’ in this instance basically means ‘completely rewrite’.

While I was translating Baudelaire’s short story, « La Fanfarlo » between February and April, instead of working on the few remaining poems I have left to translate, I began to revise the pieces from Flowers Red and Black, but in every instance I found myself writing completely new translations of these existing poems.

So it’s going to be interesting when I look at “The Jewels” again in a couple of weeks, because this is by far my most well-known translation of a work by Baudelaire, the piece that often cliched sales of Flowers Red and Black. Is this poem going to run true to form with the rest of the book and am I going to see the text in a whole new light?

What I can tell you for certain is that a revised version of “The Jewels” will include a translation of the newly revealed ninth verse that was discovered in 1928, written in Baudelaire’s hand, in a first edition of Les Fleurs du mal which he gave to a friend but only made public when that copy came up for auction in 2019.

You will also notice that, in the list above, there are three titles in red: « Le Cygne », « Les Litanies de Satan », and « Le Voyage ».

These are the last outstanding selections from Les Fleurs du mal that I am yet to translate. They’re Baudelaire’s most famous poems; they’re among my longest selections, and they’re going to be the greatest tests of my interpretative abilities.

So that’s Les Fleurs du mal. Now let’s look at what you can expect to read from Le Spleen de Paris.

From Parisian Spleen (Le Spleen de Paris):

  • “To Arsène Houssaye” ( « À Arsène Houssaye »)
  • “The Stranger” (« L’Étranger »)
  • “The Artist’s Confiteor” (« Le Confiteor de l’artiste »)
  • “A Troll” (« Un plaisant »)
  • “Twin Suite” (« La Chambre double »)
  • “The Buffoon and the Venus” (« Le Fou et la Vénus »)
  • “At an Hour after Midnight” ( « À une heure de matin »)
  • “Crowds” (« Les Foules »)
  • “Invitation to the Journey” (« L’Invitation au voyage »)
  • “Hungry Eyes” (« Les Yeux des pauvres »)
  • “The Magnanimous Gambler” (« Le Joueur généreux »)
  • “Sozzle Yourself” (« Enivrez-vous »)
  • “Windows” (« Les Fenêtres »)
  • “The Port” (« Le Port »)
  • “Lost Halo” (« Perte d’auréole »)
  • “Anywhere Out of the World ” (« N’importe où hors du monde »)
  • “Epilogue” (« Épilogue »)

One-third of the total number of pieces from Le Spleen de Paris will be featured in Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments, including Baudelaire’s prefatory letter to Arsène Houssaye—which ought to be considered a prose poem in its own right—and the poem that Baudelaire appends as epilogue to the collection.

I was convinced that these two pieces—which I had no previous intention of translating—needed to be included when I was in Brisbane in December. Reading Sonya Stephens’ insightful little book Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony (2000) at the State Library of Queensland convinced me that these were inescapable framing texts.

And you’ll notice we have one text in red: « Le Port ». After I complete the revision of « Spleen », that short, pretty little prose poem is next on my list.

So, if you’ve been keeping count, chers lecteurs, you’ve clocked 49 pieces and I promised you fifty. What’s the big 5-0?

“Fanfarlo” (« La Fanfarlo »)

The translation of Charles Baudelaire’s only known original short story is now complete.

The longest, most ambitious translating project I’ve undertaken in any language was completed to my satisfaction at the end of last month after 134 hours and seven drafts of work.

A task I approached with trepidation and misgivings, thinking I would be merely giving the reader a ‘bonus’ text that was still going to cost me time and sweat, I now believe to be one of the major selling points of Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments.

One of the reasons I think this version of « La Fanfarlo » will last for quite a long time as an introduction to what is, for English readers, an overlooked part of Baudelaire’s œuvre is my decision to include footnotes to the text.

I found that there were three types of instance where a footnote would aid the reader’s understanding, the most important being the occasional footnote that takes you inside my process as a translator, shows you clearly what the French is and how it can be variously interpreted, and what ultimately informed the choice I’ve gone with in the text based on my intimacy with Baudelaire’s typical modes of thinking and expression.

So, 86 per cent of the poems, prose poems—and fiction—of Charles Baudelaire that you will shortly be reading in Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments is now locked in.

And this week, apace with my final revisions and translations, I pulled out my trusty essay plan and began plugging in points and sources for the last remaining major task before this book goes to print:—my contribution, an 8,000-word critical monograph on Baudelaire that I hope will serve to honourably introduce the man, the myth, the œuvre to the English-speaking world.

What I’ve written about Baudelaire on The Melbourne Flâneur, I’ve written off the cuff.

But what I write in the critical monograph introducing Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments, I intend to be my definitive statement on Baudelaire—at least for the next ten years, when I will have doubtless more translations of his work to offer the English-speaking world.

When I published Flowers Red and Black in 2013, I had no idea that people would see such a close connection between Baudelaire and myself, as parallel lives across centuries, souls who cannot take quiet desperation.

I am truly the ‘mon semblable, mon frère’ (‘my double, my brother’) whom he salutes in the last line of the very first poem of Les Fleurs du mal, « Au Lecteur »—a fraternal spirit of revolt.

What I say about Baudelaire in the critical monograph will be the fruit of some seventeen years of working intimately with the thoughts of a literary mind that is as much a black mirror to my own as Edgar Allan Poe’s was to Baudelaire’s.

And I intend it to stand the test of future times and tastes as Baudelaire’s critical essays on Poe have proven their lasting value as perspicacious insights into that poor unfortunate’s life and work from a fraternal spirit who knew the horror he was experiencing only too well.

I am now taking pre-orders for Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments, and I invite you to get onboard now.

The price point I am looking at for the softcover version advertised in the video above is $A32.00, exclusive of shipping.

(For my American readers, that’s approximately $20.50 in your yanquí dinero.)

For that price, you’re going to receive:

  • A 180-page illustrated softcover edition with pages printed in full colour
  • Autographed and wax-sealed by me as a guarantee of authenticity
  • Handwritten, personalised inscription from me to you
  • Complementary custom bookmark

My proposal to you is to purchase now to guarantee your copy at that price point in the initial print run, and after I go to print, I will invoice you for shipping.

And by pre-ordering, you will also join the community of consumers who have already committed to purchase Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments. I’m sending emails on a monthly basis to my readers, staying accountable by keeping them up to date with my progress towards publication—and taking them inside my Artisanal Desktop Publishing process, the joys and vagaries of writing, designing and publishing this book with exclusive content not posted here on The Melbourne Flâneur.

So, avail yourself of the order form below and book your ticket to Cythera on the Baudelaire boat.

“Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments” [softcover]

Personally signed, sealed and inscribed by author. Comes with custom bookmark. Pre-order your copy and join an exclusive community of readers anticipating the release of Dean Kyte’s new book!

A$32.00

By on

Two prints of Munch’s Madonna, variously tinted, hung sidebyside in square frames of blond wood.

The creamcoloured shade of a standing lamp overlapped the bottom lefthand corner of one.  The Madonnas hung in the corner of the room, perpendicular to the bookcase.  The room had been furnished in dark wood.  An armchair upholstered in a fabric with a foliate pattern stood under the leftmost Madonna, beside the standing lamp, angled away from the door.  The door stood open, framing the two Madonnas, the armchair, taking the morning light from a source beyond the jamb, the standing lamp, a radio, vase, and a framed photograph of a man.  The room appeared to be an office or study.

The room stood empty.

***

A shadow rippled over the jamb.

The standing lamp was on, casting two blank patches of light on the wall. The lefthand Madonna, in the waist of shadow described by the sections’ eccentricity, was tenebrously illumined, while the righthand Madonna, between the flaring curves’ divergence, lay in mottled darkness.

The shadow retraversed the jamb without crossing the open door.

The room stood empty.  But the warm light and mellow shadows allowed for the subtle play of reflected movement to ripple over the glossy panels of the open door.

In another room, a light flicked off.

— Dean Kyte, “Two Madonnas”

Flânerie is an altered state, and as such, like all means and strategies we use for ‘getting out of ourselves’, from drunkenness to drugs, the strategy of seeking novelty in familiarity which is the psychogeographic praxis of flânerie may be filed under the head of the ultimate altered state:—poetry.

Going, with Pascalian ennui, out of his room for the millionth time, unable, in his boredom, to stay quietly in it, the flâneur seeks transcendent poetry in his (re-)encounter with the Joycean ‘reality of experience’—the banal prose of everyday life.

As a young writer learning my craft on the Gold Coast, still innocent of the beautiful French language to which I have subsequently consecrated my life and having only the barest concept of ‘flânerie’ as the thing that I was doing, the adventure of ‘going to the movies’, navigating by train, bus and foot the odyssey to distant cinemas to report on a film for one of the magazines I was then writing for, was the focusing object which directed the rudderless wandering of my dérives to and from the church of the cinema.

The religious experience is also a poetic altered state. So too is the revelation of light before us in the secular, platonic cave of the cinema.

From critiquing to doing, from the theoretic pleasure of receiving the revelation and then evangelizing about the experience for an audience of readers to the active æsthetic frisson of shooting footage on grainy video or Super 8, of recording location sound or cobbling together an imagined Foley after the fact, of mounting images and sounds beside each other and discovering new relations of significance refractory to human language, and finally, sometimes, as in the example above, writing the script after the film or video has been made, and finding, in the voice-over narration, another layer of meaning embedded invisibly in the visible;—this is, in rough summary, the altered state of embodied poetic praxis I call ‘flâneurial cinema’.

In the flâneurial video above, we have a study in stillness and subtle change:—two shots, taken more or less from the same setup, at different times of day and observing the interaction of light—natural and artificial—with a typical Melbourne interior—a California bungalow utterly characteristic of mid-twentieth-century domestic architecture in an inner-city suburb such as Brunswick, where this footage was shot.

It took me about eighteen months of staring at that peaceful domestic image in idle moments after I had made the video, entering and re-entering the two-dimensional ‘paradis artificiel’ I had created out of footage I had shot, sound I had recorded, other effects that my eye ‘heard’ in that paradisal stasis for me to ‘see’ with my inner ear the invisible text—the voice-over narration—embedded, buried in the banality of the visible—the reality in the actuality of that videographed experience.

Written in the style I call the nouvelle démeublée noire—the ‘unfurnished, dark short story’—the style I have been developing over a number of years, based on the French Nouveau Roman, to explore specifically fictional offshoots of the flâneurial prose poetry in The Spleen of Melbourne project, “Two Madonnas” is my modest hommage to a film I encountered far too late in my life for it to influence me as flâneurial filmmaker and videographer, but which I reverence as a writer, and which has deeply influenced how I approach words, not images.

In 2022, Sight and Sound, the house journal of the British Film Institute, conducted its eighth decennial poll of the world’s top film directors and critics to discover what these eminences thought were ‘The Greatest Films of All Time’.

In 1952, De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (1947) got the guernsey. For fifty years, from 1962 to 2002, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) was unassailable—and uncontestable, even. Then, in 2012, after thirty years of steadily closing in on Kane, rising up the ranks of critical opinion, my personal favourite, Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), the classic film of flânerie, claimed the top spot.

It had taken so many decades to dethrone Citizen Kane, for critical opinion, conservative and slow to change, to shift even slightly, that I think I was not alone in believing Vertigo would be safely returned in the 2022 poll as the Greatest Film of All Time.

But out of nowhere, a dark horse vaulted 34 places up the rankings from its entering position in 2012 to knock Vertigo off the top spot and Citizen Kane into third place—Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), directed by Chantal Akerman (1950-2015).

Despite my adoration of Vertigo, I was surprised—shocked, even—but not at all displeased by this result, for Jeanne Dielman (as this three-and-a-half-hour domestic epic is more frequently called) is the clearest example I can point to of a ‘flâneurial film’.

There are two currents in the cinematic tradition, the narrative and the experimental, and very early on—way back in the first decade of the twentieth century—the narrative current, which is a pseudo-literary, theatrical strand, not properly cinematic at all, foreclosed decisively on the experimental, which is intent upon investigating the native æsthetic properties of the cinematic apparatus itself.

As Laura Mulvey wrote in her appreciation of Jeanne Dielman for Sight and Sound:

Interest in gender in cinema and the objectification of women has gathered momentum, especially as awareness of the misogyny inherent in the industrial mode of production—what we call ‘Hollywood’—has become widespread. Perhaps as the oppression of women in the film industry has attracted attention, fuelled by the #MeToo hashtag, so has the oppression of women on the screen itself, in its fictions and inscribed into film language.

— Laura Mulvey, “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles”, Sight and Sound, Vol. 33/01, Winter 2023, p. 88

The film’s dramatic elevation in esteem does speak to the political moment, post-#MeToo, and, coming from the theorist who has given the world beyond film studies the much-abused concept of the ‘male gaze’ inherent in the cinematic apparatus—with all the dubious ‘visual pleasures’ that the Hollywoodian exploitation of the feminine spectacle affords us in mainstream narrative cinema—this is a perspicacious insight into how cinematic form and content intersect and interact in an unusual and inseparable way in Jeanne Dielman.

Directed by a 25-year-old Belgian auteure and made with an almost all-female crew, Jeanne Dielman is both a political statement on and experiment in the material conditions of the art-form, and as a narrative emerges indirectly from the material conditions of the feminist experiment, as a productive consequence of the plastic properties of film form itself, I was not at all displeased to see Jeanne Dielman overtake my favourite film, because even more than Vertigo, Jeanne Dielman is the flâneurial film par excellence.

In one of the most cited articles on The Melbourne Flâneur , “Are there flâneur films?”, I stated unequivocally that it is in the character of the films themselves—that is, in their plastic form rather than in their ostensible narrative content—that the flâneurial resides.

Moreover, in advancing the theory behind my praxis, as an auteur who is seeking a new form of poetry embodied in the prose of quotidian life and inscribed through a new graphology of film, video, and audio, I have brought to your attention Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘chronotope’—the ‘time-space’ of narrative.

In “Two Madonnas”—as in Jeanne Dielman—we have what might be termed the ‘domestic’ chronotope, a necessarily ‘feminine’ configuration of space and time that determines the kind of narrative that can emerge from the physical co-ordinates of a homely interior, whether it’s a suburban bungalow in Brunswick or a centre-ville apartment in Brussels, and the temporal co-ordinates of such a space in our day or in the mid-1970s.

The chronotope is the first formal constraint that limits the range of permissible content that may emerge in the sensemaking apparatus we call a ‘narrative’, that device which meaningfully interprets, for human beings, the configured co-ordinates of a particular space at a particular time in its history.

What I’m calling the ‘domestic chronotope’ is necessarily ‘feminine’ because it deals with the enclosed, sheltered space and with private life—spheres of peaceful retirement from the madding throng that are symbolically governed by the feminine.

The wide-open world of the street and public life, places and occasions of action, are necessarily masculine. These are the sites of flânerie and of the flâneur pur-sang, and as sites of action—visible, observable action—these are the kinetic sights that narrative cinema constructed on the Hollywood model prefers because they present visual pleasures as photographable and photogenic as the so often exploited (and exploitable) spectacle of the feminine.

I saw the films of Michael Snow and Jonas Mekas—they opened my mind to many things—the relationship between film and your body, time as the most important thing in film, time and energy. Seeing their films gave me courage to try something else, not just to make money. Before I went to New York, say in 1968, I thought Bergman and Fellini were the greatest film-makers. Not any more, because they are not dealing with time and space as the most important elements in film.

— Chantal Akerman, cited in Marsha Kinder, “Reflections on Jeanne Dielman”, Film Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 4, Summer 1977, p. 2

Could it be that the fourth dimension—not the length, breadth and depth of matter—is the essential subject and material of the cinematic medium?

And could it be that invisible time, as the essential subject and material of the art-form, has to be represented indirectly, as material space and spatial relations in order to make itself visible—registrable—on the plastic medium of film?

When we talk about ‘relations’, we begin to talk about another one of those concepts, like sheltered space and the private life, that is symbolically governed by the feminine principle.

The narrative cinema is one of visible kinesis. It’s a masculine cinema that appeals to our conscious, rational minds as linear cause and effect—the chatter of ‘discourse’, of superficial, ostensible ‘content’.

If ‘relations’ exist in this masculine cinema, then they are too often of the type which feminist film theoreticians decry—unequal, conflictual competitions for dominance: Duke Wayne and Monty Clift sending each other spectacularly flying with big, kinetic punches.

The narrative cinema has looked naïvely, instrumentally at material, representable objects in space, manipulating them as ‘actors’ and ‘props’ personifying fictitious ‘dramas’ while remaining, in its single-minded conscious concentration on the visible, the superficial spectacle, stubbornly blind to the invisible time that unconsciously governs these objects’ relations with each other as fluid patterns, subsisting, dissolving, reconstellating themselves continuously.

If the feminine governs these subtle temporal relations, then these physical ‘bodies’—a soup tureen containing cash, potatoes to be peeled, dishes to be washed, but also babies, people in stores, men ringing at the door, a son—exude their unique ‘energies’, their magnetisms of attraction or repulsion, into space.

Jeanne Dielman and the things of her environment are all in a subtle yet dynamic interaction with each other as an abstract pattern of relations, one that, through an experimental rather than narrative lens—which is to say, through a properly cinematic investigation of brute matter rather than through an exploitative operationalization of it for pseudo-literary, theatrical ends—cinema is capable of making visible to us in the medium’s initial form as actualité.

The actualité, the uninflected, static shot of undirected reality, is the basic building block of experimental cinema, and as primordial cinematic form, I propose it, in my own praxis, as the basic building block of a renascent, ‘flâneurial’ approach to filmmaking and videography.

The marvellous poetry of life—Joyce’s ‘reality of experience’—that is couched in the banal prose of the quotidian is made transcendentally manifest by the actualité, and yet it’s a form with which audiences, deranged by their identification with the conscious mind, all the melodramatic chatter of narrative ‘content’ they had absorbed from the stage and the nineteenth-century novel, had grown bored by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century.

The flâneurial film reclaims boredom, reclaims ennui as that privileged Baudelairean condition of profound, fruitful creativity, by leveraging empty time and undramatic space.

Appropriating two terms from Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961), I have discovered from my own experience that there are two strategies by which one flâneurially chances upon marvellous novelty in the midst of banal familiarity: the rotation and the repetition.

The rotation is the singular altered state that takes us wholly out of the prison of Proustian habit, into a higher, broader consciousness of our unified relation with the cosmos and affording us the vision of a new life.

It is towards this fundamental breaking of the patterned cycle of stultifying habit that Jeanne Dielman is tending over the course of its three-and-a-half hours: Two novel events occur in rapid succession at the end of the film that break the pattern of established material relations decisively, and the final seven-minute scene is Jeanne confronted with the vision of her ‘New Life’—albeit she is gazing into the abyss of what I call ‘the Noir Place’.

Jeanne’s interior autonomy is complicated by a presence from outside, a hint of a parallel, perhaps film noir-ish universe: a blue neon light flashes continually into the sitting room, its penetrating beam hitting a glass-fronted case that stands directly behind the dining table. Almost invisibly, the flashing light unsettles the interior space, like a sign from the unconscious pointing to a site of repression.

— Mulvey (2023, p. 87)

The repetition, by contrast, is the conscious attempt to engineer a flâneurial rotation—to repeat the transcendentally novel experience, often with diminishing returns, for there tends to be a half-life on the transformative power of rotations.

The domestic space is a site of both rotation and repetition in Jeanne Dielman, and if the form of the film is tending ultimately toward a rotation that breaks Jeanne’s flâneurial pattern of regulated wandering decisively, it does so through a triple cycle of repetition, as we return, with her, to chronotopic sites of flânerie established in the first revolution of the quotidian cycle.

In repetition, familiarity preponderates over novelty: If we regain something of the initial rotatory force of our encounter with the reality of experience, that ‘something’ tends to be a subtle variation upon the first experience.

In Jeanne Dielman, the scopic pleasure of flâneurial repetition—Mulvey’s ‘visual pleasure’—tends to be more a pleasure for us than for Jeanne: The subtle variations in her (re)-encounters with the stultifying reality of her domestic experience in the second and third revolutions of the established cycle are like imperfect, degraded ‘impressions’ stamped on the plastic film form, and as our flâneurial regard wanders with leisure over frames which have ceased to scopically engage us as sites of novelty, the subtleties of these imperfect variations on the first, rotatory revolution gradually begin to acquire a freighted suspense driving towards a decisive shattering of the pattern.

Adding to the list of aspects that escape the reductions of the plot, a careful form of attention is demanded by Jeanne Dielman, since the film provides a kind of audiovisual detox from our usual privileged viewing position.  Our problems begin when we try to treat time and space as external to the ‘action’, when in fact they are protagonists with as much importance as Jeanne herself.  Akerman found her gaze in the cinema when she encountered Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) and La Région centrale … (1971), and space has never operated as background in her films since then.  When we try to provide a plot for Jeanne Dielman we tend to focus on changes in Jeanne’s psychology, unable to convey the drama of sunlight, shadows, emptiness and fullness through which the film ‘takes place’.  Akerman deletes the full range of devices through which a film can be said to interpret the surface of the world and inflect it with levels of significance, leaving a flat unaffective style of filming.  Suddenly, actions take their full duration with no intervention.  There are no close-ups or zooms, no camera angles or camera movements, and our position in relation to Jeanne remains at a neutral distance.  Similarly, there are no point-of-view shots to show us what she is seeing, or to promote identification or indicate significant narrative information, to heighten emotional intensity or comment on the characters or situation.

— Catherine Fowler, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (2021, p. 11)

And when we speak of Jeanne Dielman, possibly the most opaque character in cinema, it is impossible to avoid talking about the equally opaque Delphine Seyrig as the performer of this flânerie, the flâneuse who guides our scopic dérive across the frame and through this abstract, architectonic, chronotopic sculpture Akerman has fashioned from the brute material of time.

There are two definitional dimensions to flânerie, the activity of walking and the passivity of idle being, and both are privileged in this feminist experiment that depreciates masculinist histoire.

To walk is to march; to march is to protest: the flâneur protests, in his idle wandering, the unbearable conditions of technological, capitalistic modernity, and Delphine Seyrig, who would be radicalized by her participation in Akerman’s feminist experiment, protests constantly and eloquently, through the clipped sounds of her brisk footsteps, against the technological, capitalistic model of Hollywoodian narrative cinema with its exploitative male gaze.

In retreating back to the housewife in the kitchen and insisting that we share time with her and pay attention to how she lives her life, Akerman exposes how the patriarchal system works, thereby insisting that we remember the lives of those who can’t just drop everything and walk in the streets. … [B]y reintroducing the personal, we can understand the retreat to the housewife not simply as a gesture against patriarchy, but also as giving space to Akerman’s aunts and mother as a particular generation of Jewish women who had survived the Holocaust and were untouched by feminism. 

— Fowler (2021, pp. 54-5)

Seyrig is, of course, one of the most seraphically ethereal beauties in the history of the art-form, and as far as her acting chops go, it might be fair to amend the claim of Henri Langlois that ‘il n’y a que Louise Brooks’ to say that, in cinema, there is only Brooks and Delphine Seyrig; no other actresses count.

It might also be fair to say that her performance in Jeanne Dielman is easily the equal—and possibly even superior—to Falconetti’s performance in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928), for it is not a performance—an abbreviated simulation of action in the mode of narrative cinema—but an embodiment of every single action that Jeanne carries out, in the experimental mode of the actualité:—every dish she washes is actually being washed by the seraphic sphinx, Delphine Seyrig.

Dreyer famously tortured a performance out of Falconetti that has become definitional as the gold standard for female acting in the cinema, and Akerman similarly—though more subtly—tortures a performance out of the ‘grande dame’ Seyrig through domestic slavery, such that she transcends the definition of ‘performance’, embodying actions, carrying them through to their material ends as actualité.

I think it’s a very important film—a new step forward—not just for me, but for the history of film-making. I usually take an interest in the form or style of the films I act in; yet I realize that as an actress, I’ve been expressing things that are not my own, but others’. I feel a much greater involvement in this film. It’s not a coincidence that Chantal asked me to do it. … I can be my own size. It changes acting into action, what it was meant to be.

— Delphine Seyrig, as cited in Kinder (1977, p. 6)

I don’t invoke the comparisons to Brooks or Falconetti as the definitional silent screen actresses—and thus the definitional screen actresses tout court—frivolously: Catherine Fowler, in her monograph on Jeanne Dielman for the BFI Film Classics series, tells us that Seyrig frequently turned to actresses of the silent screen for inspiration in how to physically interpret her parts because, from their forced reliance purely on embodied action, without the advantage of Seyrig’s beautifully musical voice to aid them, she learnt ‘how gestures should always be carried out to their end point’.

Jeanne Dielman is essentially a silent film—which I also consider to be a fundamental criterion of a renascent flâneurial cinematic form—and Seyrig’s charming contralto and perfect French hardly aid her in interpreting Jeanne, who is as much pure body performing motion in space as the ‘labour-saving devices’ of domesticity whose operation enslaves her.

As Fowler (who devotes an entire chapter of her monograph to analyzing the omnipresent Seyrig’s performance) observes, the comédienne’s unusual interest in the plastic ‘form’ and material ‘style’ that the abstract temporal sculpture of a film takes is reflected in this almost ‘dancerly’ basis of the physical body completing a motion in space.

And as a physical structuring device for Seyrig’s psychological interpretation of her characters, I would argue that this ‘embodied’, almost choreographic style of acting is itself a fundamentally ‘feminine’ approach: The ‘brute matter’ of the beautiful female form is generative, through the embodiment of action, of the invisible psychology of actorly performance, as opposed to a more rational, masculine approach which starts from the ‘inside out’, reading interpretatively between the lines of superficial narrative content.

The physical structure of the female form in a chronotopic crystal lattice of space/time generates the type of fictional narrative that can potentially emerge from these actual structuring constraints.

Fowler, citing examples from Seyrig’s pre-Dielman filmography, convincingly shows how embodied feminine shapes—the fashionably gauche asymmetry of A’s poses in L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), Fabienne Tabbard’s seductive helicoid convolutions upon herself in Baisers volés (1968)—are as determinative of how Seyrig interprets the narrative text of a script as the physical form of the spatio-temporal chronotope is determinative of what kind of narrative can emerge from the embodied forms of an actual environment.

Surveying several of Seyrig’s most iconic performances of desirable characters lends insight into her method.  Turning back to Jeanne Dielman now, we should note how in those previous roles Seyrig’s gestures and movements responded to the spaces that surrounded her….  Seyrig brings this minute attention to the mise en scène that surrounds her to the character of Jeanne Dielman.  However, in order for Akerman’s vision of Jeanne as a non-seductive presence to succeed, Seyrig will have to find new shapes for her body, ones that continue to draw our attention ….

The close attention to gesture and to the movement of the body in space have the potential of taking us away from the narrative progression, to a world of movement, space and bodies. … [W]hen playing Jeanne, Seyrig firmly avoids creating … pleasurable and inviting shapes with her body; instead, her abiding posture is that of standing with her feet together. …

Most strikingly, while as ‘A’, Francesca, Fabienne and the Countess, Seyrig’s gestures were able to flow, extended by her costumes and graceful poses, as Jeanne, her movements—largely standing, walking, bending—are strictly regimented, and her gestures are designed with as much economy as possible.  This template is perfected on the first day, so that we notice its gradual derangement on days two and three.

— Fowler (2021, pp. 67-9)

In materially ‘doing the things’, in carrying out the actual actions of peeling potatoes and washing dishes, carrying these banal, quotidian gestures of domesticity through to their end point, Delphine Seyrig collaborates with Chantal Akerman as co-auteure of Jeanne Dielman to sculpt on film a visible record of invisible time.

The completely unforeseen elevation of Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles to the canonical, crowning position as ‘The Greatest Film of All Time’ until at least 2032 does not displease me as it has enraged so many others.

I think there’s something in the argument that Akerman’s death in 2015, so soon after the previous Sight and Sound poll, when her film first entered the rankings at No. 35, had something to do with Jeanne Dielman’s dramatic rise in critical opinion.

Remember that it took Hitchcock’s death in 1980 to provoke a widespread critical reappraisal of Vertigo in the 1982 poll, starting its slow climb up the rankings as a potential challenger to Citizen Kane.

Akerman’s death in 2015 as much as the #MeToo campaign in 2017 has certainly helped to put feminist issues and this quintessential feminist experiment in the material affordances of the cinematic art-form top of mind.

But those rusted-on partisans of narrative cinema, with its exploitative, consumptive male gaze and its juvenile fixation on ‘content’, unsophisticated thinkers who deride Jeanne Dielman’s current pre-eminence as another contemptible example of élitest wokery, are wrong in their obtuse, reactionary objections and fundamentally misunderstand what the film’s elevation means both politically and æsthetically.

I am not arguing for Jeanne Dielman as a feminist film; I am arguing for it as an experimental film, as a flâneurial film, as a fundamental æsthetic investigation of the material sensemaking affordances of the cinematic art-form, and thus film’s native capacity to produce rotation and repetition, to take us out of ourselves, out of the prison of our habits, to induce an altered state, a vision of a broader, higher, new life through the Joycean confrontation with ‘the reality of experience’—the transcendent, marvellous poetry of life that lies invisible but ever-present in the banal, quotidian prose of our visible material structures and circumstances.

In our deranged conscious identification with anthropocentric ‘stories’ in which mankind is the romantic, action-taking hero of the cosmos, we have been blind, as a species, for too long to the unconscious, feminine experience of the embodied structures of life that surround us daily.

In 1973 I worked on a script [« Elle vogue vers l’Amérique », the precursor to Jeanne Dielman] with a friend of mine, but it was too explanatory—it didn’t come from within myself. I got money to do it, but after awhile [sic] I realized it was not good. One night, the whole film came to me in one second. I suppose it came from my memories of all the women in my childhood, from my unconscious. I sat down and wrote it with no hesitation, no doubts. The same was true when I made the film. I did it like a bulldozer. You can feel it in the film. I knew exactly what to shoot and where to put the camera.

— Chantal Akerman, as cited in Kinder (1977, p. 3)

When I saw Delphine Seyrig checking her do on the cover of the Winter 2023 issue of Sight and Sound and knew we had a new winner, I felt another profound ‘oui’ from the cosmos that, as a writer, a filmmaker, a flâneur, I am on the right track in my literary, my cinematographic, my videographic, my audiographic experiments.

‘C’était presque écrit comme un Nouveau Roman : chaque geste, chaque, geste, chaque geste — [Jeanne Dielman] was almost written like a New Novel: every gesture, every motion, every action,’ Akerman told The Criterion Collection shortly before her death.

The Robbe-Grilletian re-investigation, from first principles, of the material structures of postmodern life that surround us daily which I have been undertaking in The Spleen of Melbourne project and its fictional offshoot, the nouvelles démeublées noires of The Melbourne Flâneur, is the way forward to ‘finding something new’—realizing the Baudelairean ambition ‘pour trouver du nouveau!’—a new common mythos in literature and film that can unite us all.

We discover the content that will mythically sustain our souls, as a globalized civilization, in the future by committing ourselves to a fundamental investigation, without pre-conception, of the actual forms of life that surround us now.

And, moreover, for the degraded and dead English language, utterly incapable of yielding further sense without massive renovation and renouvelation, the re-investigation of new sensemaking forms and structures, verbal and visual, that already exist in our actuality will come, as the diasporic Francophone Akerman demonstrates, not from the moribund Anglosphere, but by turning our eyes and ears to the structures of sense being made of brute reality in the French-speaking world.

To support me in my flâneurial investigations, I encourage you to purchase the soundtrack of “Two Madonnas” below.

By on

Dean Kyte walks you through the dust jacket for the hardcover edition of his new book of Baudelaire translations, Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments.

June 2025 sees the scheduled release of my new book of translations drawn from the works of Charles Baudelaire, Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments: Selections from Toxic Blossoms and Parisian Spleen.

As I explain in the video above, the book features one-fifth of the total number of poems published in the three editions of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857), plus one-quarter of the prose poems from Le Spleen de Paris (1869).

But in addition to the 47 poems and prose poems I’ve selected as representative examples of Baudelaire’s flâneurial philosophy, as a bonus, I’ve also chosen to translate the M’sieu’s only work of fiction—“La Fanfarlo” (1847), adding significant value to this volume as a complement to the selections I have made from Les Fleurs du mal and Le Spleen de Paris.

At nearly 11,000 words in the original, “La Fanfarlo” is the most ambitious translation project I have undertaken in any language.

For the past month, I’ve been deeply engaged in hewing out a version of the source text in English, and as this post goes to press, I’m immersed in the third of five drafts, approximately half-way through the process of bringing this story to life in English.

The value of “La Fanfarlo” is chiefly documentary: preceding the bulk of Baudelaire’s œuvre as presented in the first two parts of Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments, this ‘long short story’ will retrospectively show the 25-year-old poet first rehearsing the ideas and turns of phrase we recognize more brilliantly expressed in the poems and prose poems.

Published in January 1847, the story is a fictionalized account of Baudelaire’s first meeting with the Creole actress Jeanne Duval (c. 1820—after 1862), the Haitian beauty the poet would call his ‘Vénus noire’, and who, as his muse and mistress, is the recognizable inspiration behind at least four of the poems I’ve translated in Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments:—“Les Bijoux”, “Avec ses vêtements ondoyants et nacrés…”, “Un Fantôme”, and “Je te donnes ces vers afin que si mon nom…”.

Jeanne Duval is ‘la Fanfarlo’ of the story’s title—an exotic dancer who has her hooks sunk deep in a Parisian dandy, M. de Cosmelly.

This gent’s wife, Mme. de Cosmelly, is a minor aristocrat from Lyon, where, in her innocent girlhood, she was once friendly with a rakish young man who has grown into Samuel Cramer, Parisian poet-about-town, a dandy-flâneur who is clearly Baudelaire under another name.

“La Fanfarlo” begins in imitation of Balzac’s novella “La Fille aux yeux d’or” (1835), with Samuel crossing paths with Mme. de Cosmelly in the jardin du Luxembourg.

But then it morphs into a curious variation on the plot of Choderlos de Laclos’ epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), with the virtuous Mme. de Cosmelly—who is like a strange combination of the marquise de Merteuil wrapped in the girlish wile of Cécile de Volanges—plotting with Samuel, who fancies himself a novice vicomte de Valmont.

Mme. de Cosmelly engages the poet to take Fanfarlo off her husband’s hands and thus deliver him back into the amorous arms of his neglected wife—who gives Samuel to believe that she will bestow her gratitude upon him in the appropriate way.

As I’ve been working on translating this story over the last month, I’ve conceived of “La Fanfarlo” in several different ways. One of them is as a prophetic manifesto of Baudelaire’s artistic intent as a poet.

At the time the short story was published, Baudelaire was beginning his career as a journalist in Paris’s artistic milieu. While a few of the poems that would later appear in Les Fleurs du mal had been published in Parisian newspapers, Baudelaire was mainly known for his two lengthy reviews of the Salon exhibitions in 1845 and 1846.

In fact, the cover of Le Salon de 1846 advertises the imminent publication of the work that, eleven years later, would see the light of day under the allegorical title of Les Fleurs du mal.

Conversely, in “La Fanfarlo”, written in the months after Baudelaire’s Salon review was published in May 1846, his hero’s one claim to literary fame is as the author of a juvenile collection of sonnets—Baudelaire’s speciality—published under the equally inscrutable and difficult to translate title of “Les Orfraies”.

Le lendemain il la trouva, la tête inclinée par une mélancolie gracieuse et presque étudiée, vers les fleurs de la plate-bande, et il lui offrit son volume des Orfraies, recueil de sonnets, comme nous en avons tous fait et tous lu, dans le temps où nous avions le jugement si court et les cheveux si longs.

Samuel était fort curieux de savoir si ses Orfraies avaient charmé l’âme de cette belle mélancolique, et si les cris de ces vilains oiseaux lui avaient parlé en sa faveur ; mais quelques jours après elle lui dit avec une candeur et une honnêteté désespérantes :

— Monsieur, je ne suis qu’une femme, et, par conséquent, mon jugement est peu de chose ; mais il me paraît que les tristesses et les amours de messieurs les auteurs ne ressemblent guère aux tristesses et aux amours des autres hommes. … De plus, j’ignore pourquoi vous chérissez tant les sujets funèbres et les descriptions d’anatomie. Quand on est jeune, qu’on a comme vous un beau talent et toutes les conditions présumées du bonheur, il me paraît bien plus naturel de célébrer la santé et les joies de l’honnête homme, que de s’exercer à l’anathème, et de causer avec des Orfraies.

The next day, he located the lady, her head inclined by a gracious and almost studied melancholy towards the flowers of the parterre, and offered her his volume of Raptorsongs, a collection of sonnets of the type we have all written and read in days when we were so short in judgment and long in hair.

Samuel was most curious to discover if his Raptorsongs had charmed the soul of this beautiful melancholiac, and if the cries of these dreadful birds had spoken to her in his favour.  But a few days later, she told him with a disheartening candour and honesty:

—Monsieur, I am merely a woman, and consequently, my judgment is a thing of small worth.  But it appears to me that the passions and distresses of you authorial gentlemen hardly bear resemblance to the loves and sadnesses of other men. … Moreover, I know not why you so cherish funereal subjects and anatomical descriptions.  When one is young, when one has, as you do, a great talent and all the presumed conditions for happiness, it seems to me much more natural to celebrate health and an honest man’s joys than to practise anathema and to declaim in piercing cries.

— Charles Baudelaire, “La Fanfarlo” (1847, p. 9 [my translation, third draft])

Thus, the piercing cries of birds of prey which form the discordant music of Samuel Cramer’s sonnets in “La Fanfarlo” will, a decade later, become the ‘noisome posy’, the ‘toxic blossoms’—which is how I have chosen to translate Les Fleurs du mal in Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments—and the title Baudelaire devises from Cramer’s recueil is prescient in its sinister ambiguity, anticipating the multiple insinuations that other translators have unimaginatively reduced to the literal phrase of ‘the flowers of evil’.

Baudelaire is barely commenced upon the project that will become Les Fleurs du mal. Yet he anticipates the critiques that will be levelled against his poisonous bouquet and rehearses them in “La Fanfarlo” by placing them in the mouth of Mme. de Cosmelly.

He also articulates his rebuttal—the rebuttal he might have given at his future obscenity trial—by ventriloquizing his self-defence through Samuel.

Madame, plaignez-moi, ou plutôt plaignez-nous, car j’ai beaucoup de frères de ma sorte ; c’est la haine de tous et de nous-mêmes qui nous a conduits vers ces mensonges. C’est par désespoir de ne pouvoir être nobles et beaux suivant les moyens naturels, que nous nous sommes si bizarrement fardé le visage. Nous nous sommes tellement appliqués à sophistiquer notre cœur, nous avons tant abusé du microscope pour étudier les hideuses excroissances et les honteuses verrues dont il est couvert, et que nous grossissons à plaisir, qu’il est impossible que nous parlions le langage des autres hommes. Ils vivent pour vivre, et nous, hélas ! nous vivons pour savoir. Tout le mystère est là.

Madame, pity me—or rather, pity us; for there are many brethren of my kind.  It is the hatred of everything—and of ourselves—which has led us to these lies.  It is out of the despair of impotence to be noble and beautiful through natural means that we have so bizarrely farded our faces.  We have so applied ourselves to over-refining the human heart, we have so abused the microscope so as to study the hideous growths and shameful warts with which it is covered—and which we inflame with pleasure!—that it is impossible that we should speak the language of other men.  They live to live, and we, alas!—we live in order to know.  The whole mystery lies in that.

— Charles Baudelaire, “La Fanfarlo” (1847, p. 10 [my translation, third draft])

This eloquent plea is, moreover, perspicacious to an extraordinary degree in that it reveals Baudelaire’s total awareness of his malady—his absolute inability to make his way in the world as either man or poet—so young in life. Through Samuel to Mme. de Cosmelly, Baudelaire throws himself upon the mercy of a future court of public opinion just as, following the adverse finding against him at his obscenity trial, he would seek the clemency of the Empress Eugénie.

In another of its dimensions, I see “La Fanfarlo” as rehearsing elements of the future ‘novel of realistic intrigue’—which is the umbrella term I apply to all subspecies of the crime novel, from the detective story to the spy thriller—any work of genre fiction that depends for its motive upon the revelation of a concealed truth.

Baudelaire is a proto-noir writer: his flâneurial ethos, drawing on the contemporary influences of Balzac, Eugène Sue, and Poe, braids the æsthetic strands of Gothic fiction and Romanticism with the emergent rational sensibility of science characteristic of the over-civilized city-man that, later in the nineteenth century, will produce the novel of realistic intrigue as the quintessential literary investigation of modern, metropolitan life.

I will go further than this and posit that Les Liaisons dangereuses is a proto-crime novel—perhaps the first crime novel—and specifically a proto-roman noir.

Noir as a literary and cinematic æsthetic rather than a genre in its own right is a stylization of the genre of realistic intrigue so as to produce the humane mood—the experiential atmosphere—associated with the commission of true acts that demand dissimulated concealment.

Which is to say that rage, fear, greed, melancholy, remorse—the whole gruesome psychology of cardinal sin associated with crime—are the transcendent subject of noir rather than the plot-based mechanics of the generic mystery or detective story.

In the pre-revolutionary epoch described by Les Liaisons dangereuses, well before Napoleon instituted the world’s first official police force in Paris to regulate public morals, ‘crime’ is a purely moral, ethical transgression rather than the legal matter that the generic novel of realistic intrigue will make of the humane dilemma to commit or not to commit.

Thus, understood in this way, Les Liaisons dangereuses—which we know from some illuminating notes that Baudelaire read with avidity—is a prototypical work of crime fiction, and, more specifically, of the stylistically abstracted and æstheticized variant on the novel of realistic intrigue we call the roman noir.

One of the archetypal tropic situations of noir—one which we see repeated in Baudelaire’s life, in his poetry, and in this single short story he chooses to commit to paper—is the triangular configuration of a man uncomfortably posed between two women, the good, domestic, ‘Madonna’ type, and the whore, the bad girl, the femme fatale who lures him into crime’s moral morass, the emotional place of wrongdoing where noir resides.

In “La Fanfarlo”, Baudelaire rehearses this archetypal trope of noir which we will recognize, a century later, more properly worked out in the romans noirs of David Goodis or in a movie like Pitfall (1948).

Even if she has a vestigial quality of the marquise de Merteuil, we may imagine Mme. de Cosmelly, ‘virginally maternal’, as pre-emptive of the presidential Apollonie Sabatier, to whom Baudelaire would later dedicate some of his most tender and reverential odes to women in Les Fleurs du mal.

As viewed from Samuel’s perspective, she is described throughout the story as a ‘femme honnête’, in spite of her Machiavellian trickery. In the parlance of the day, a woman’s ‘honesty’ is a function of her sexual purity—and as continently amorous wife, Mme. de Cosmelly is set up in distinct contrast to Fanfarlo—the femme fatale kept by her husband, incontinently available as a ‘fille publique’ upon the stage.

As per the triangular sexual dynamics that René Girard will later brilliantly identify as characteristic of the French nineteenth-century psychological novel, in “La Fanfarlo” Baudelaire sketches out the tropic plot of the later noir thriller, and it is precisely the æsthetic emphasis on the triangular structure of the psychological motive forces beneath the superficial mechanics of the plot that distinguishes noir from the generic crime, mystery, or detective story.

The moral dimensions of crime, the consequential human interest element of ethical transgression—beyond the bloodless legal mechanics of justice—that are implicit in this triangular structure of diverging, equivalent, but oppositional psychological forces, the ambiguous positioning of Samuel Cramer between Mme. de Cosmelly and Fanfarlo, between madone et putain, is what, I think, places this story in the primordial region of the nascent novel of realistic intrigue.

As primitive femme fatale, la Fanfarlo contrasts as a Dabrowskian ambivalent ambitendency in Samuel’s desires with the madonal/maternal Mme. de Cosmelly.

As a transparent disguise for Jeanne Duval—the second most important woman in Baudelaire’s life after his mother—the description he lavishes on Fanfarlo is the first sketch of the Baudelairean feminine ideal we will later recognize in the pages of Les Fleurs du mal—a totemically Orientalist representation of the fetishistically artificial femme fatale—literally ‘noire’ in her glorious négritude.

Elle fut accusée d’être brutale, commune, dénuée de goût, de vouloir importer sur le théâtre des habitudes d’outre-Rhin et d’outre-Pyrénées, des castagnettes, des éperons, des talons de bottes, — sans compter qu’elle buvait comme un grenadier, qu’elle aimait trop les petits chiens et la fille de sa portière, — et autres linges sales de la vie privée, qui sont la pâture et la friandise journalière de certains petits journaux. On lui opposait, avec cette tactique particulière aux journalistes, qui consiste à comparer des choses dissemblables, une danseuse éthérée, toujours habillée de blanc, et dont les chastes mouvements laissaient toutes les consciences en repos. Quelquefois la Fanfarlo criait et riait très-haut vers le parterre en achevant un bond sur la rampe ; elle osait marcher en dansant. Jamais elle ne portait de ces insipides robes de gaze qui laissent tout voir et ne font rien deviner. Elle aimait les étoffes qui font du bruit, les jupes longues, craquantes, pailletées, ferblantées, qu’il faut soulever très-haut d’un genou vigoureux, les corsages de saltimbanque ; elle dansait, non pas avec des boucles, mais avec des pendants d’oreilles, j’oserais presque dire des lustres. Elle eût volontiers attaché au bas de ses jupes une foule de petites poupées bizarres, comme le font les vieilles bohémiennes qui vous disent la bonne aventure d’une manière menaçante, et qu’on rencontre en plein midi sous les arceaux des ruines romaines ; toutes drôleries, du reste, dont le romantique Samuel, l’un des derniers romantiques que possède la France, raffolait fort.

She was accused of being brutal, common, devoid of taste, of wanting to important into the theatre some customs from across the Rhine or beyond the Pyrenees—castanets, spurs, heeled boots—quite apart from the fact that she was as bibulous as a grenadier, that she bore too much affection for small dogs and her concierge’s daughter—and other such dirty laundry drawn from her private life which are the daily lifeblood and confections of certain small newspapers.

They would oppose him with that particular tactic of journalists, which consists of drawing comparisons between unlike things—an ‘ethereal dancer’ – always habited in white – and whose ‘chaste movements’ could not disturb the peace of any conscience.  Sometimes, Fanfarlo would direct very loud tears and laughter towards the stalls in finishing off a leap above the footlights;—she would even dare to walk in dancing.  Never would she wear those insipid gauzy dresses which permit everything to be seen and nothing to be imagined.  She was fond of stuffs which made a sound—long, crunchy, sequined, metallic skirts that it was necessary to raise very high with a vigorous knee; clowny blouses.  She would dance—not with earrings, but with pendants hanging from her ears;—I might almost dare to say, with chandeliers.  She might willingly have fastened to the bottom of her skirts a host of bizarre little dolls—as the old gypsy women who tell your fortune in a menacing manner do, and whom one encounters at the height of noon under the arches of Roman ruins;—all kinds of amusements, moreover, over which the romantic Samuel—one of the last Romantics that France possesses—went very much mad.

— Charles Baudelaire, “La Fanfarlo” (1847, pp. 22-3 [my translation, second draft])

Thus, expressionistic to a Germanic degree, Fanfarlo primitively anticipates Sacher-Masoch’s Wanda von Dunajew, the gilded, metallic, mineral divine slatterns of Klimt, the deformed, degenerately angular mutant beauties of Schiele, and the utterly artificial fräulein flappers of Wedekindian Weimar Kinema.

As in the developed film and roman noir, Samuel falls prey to the fatal woman—but the fatality of la Fanfarlo’s arachnid trap is ‘les Limbes’ of common-law marriage. Just like the bohemian Baudelaire, a sexual liberal who was more than a century ahead of his time in his interracial proclivities, Samuel commits the only scandal available to the sexually un-scandal-izable French by ‘living in sin’ with his mistress.

In an original re-inversion of the later canons of law and order inverted by noir, Baudelaire’s hell is that of bourgeois convention and respectability, as Cramer succumbs to what he considers the ‘maladie d’araignée’—the ‘spider sickness’—of pregnancy.

In fine, the ‘bad girl’, Fanfarlo, leads the fallen hero off the straight path of art and into the inferno of domesticity as the father of twins rather than dangerously liberating him from the impotent prison of the hearth.

In the character of Samuel Cramer, so scrupulously delineated in the opening pages, Baudelaire curiously anticipates archetypal figures of the later, established genre from Sherlock Holmes to Philip Marlowe—and even to James Bond.

When Baudelaire is writing “La Fanfarlo”, the detective story is still so new a genre as to not even have that name. Indeed, the whole idea of a ‘detective’, that quintessentially flâneurial professional who can only bud up under conditions of late-civilized, urbanized modernity, is still yet to be fully articulated in the collective imaginary.

Baudelaire’s poetic hero, Edgar Allan Poe, writes the first detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”—set, significantly, in Paris—in 1841.

The first, plagiarized translations into French of Poe’s short story are published in the Paris newspapers in June and October 1846, and an ensuing lawsuit brings the name of Poe to the attention of the Parisian public for the first time—and doubtless to Baudelaire’s.

It is perhaps not insignificant that Poe’s detective, Auguste Dupin, is a chevalier—a knight—in the Légion d’honneur. In a conspicuous non sequitur diatribe to Mme. de Cosmelly, Samuel rails against the chivalrous, medieval romances of Sir Walter Scott, comparing them very disfavourably to the modern, psychological approach taken by ‘nos bons romanciers français’.

And yet, as Francis S. Heck observes in his article “Baudelaire’s ‘La Fanfarlo’: An Example of Romantic Irony” (1976), in his short story, Baudelaire burlesques the chivalrous romantic plot of a novel by the ‘ennuyeux’ Scott—just as he is burlesquing Les Liaisons dangereuses.

In some sense, as a dandy-flâneur, as a free-floating, mobile agent in the social scape of Paris, the poet Cramer fulfils the as yet undefined rôle of a private detective: He is charged with a secret mission by his Dulcineac ‘client’, Mme. de Cosmelly—the typical society dame who will later come through Sam Spade’s and Philip Marlowe’s pebbled glass door, setting the Scott-like plot of a detective novel in motion.

And like Spade or Marlowe, in the meta-ironic style with which Baudelaire limns Samuel Cramer, this knight-errant going forward in his lady love’s service with a Valmontian ethical flexibility and a latitude of action to guide him through the social strata of Paris is more than usually quixotic.

The popular notion of a ‘private investigator’ of confidential matters that Poe first posits with the archetypal figure of C. Auguste Dupin not yet being articulated as a definitive ‘type’ in the physiognomy of modern urban life, Samuel Cramer nevertheless fulfils the prototypical rôle of a ‘private inquiry agent’, an unofficial investigator in Mme. de Cosmelly’s behalf, and a champion in defence of her domestic interests.

But even as we first encounter Samuel, Baudelaire’s description of his digs overlooking the jardin du Luxembourg, in one of the most fashionable quartiers of Paris for a free-floating social aspirant allied with—but not quite of—the élite, foreshadows Sherlock Holmes’s ‘rooms’ at 221B Baker Street in Marylebone.

Un jour chaud et doré se précipita dans le cabinet poudreux. Samuel admira comme le printemps était venu vite en quelques jours, et sans crier gare. Un air tiède et imprégné de bonnes odeurs lui ouvrit les narines, — dont une partie étant montée au cerveau, le remplit de rêverie et de désir, et l’autre lui remua libertinement le cœur, l’estomac et le foie. — Il souffla résolûment ses deux bougies dont l’une palpitait encore sur un volume de Swedenborg, et l’autre s’éteignait sur un de ces livres honteux dont la lecture n’est profitable qu’aux esprits possédés d’un goût immodéré de la vérité.

Du haut de sa solitude, encombrée de paperasses, pavée de bouquins et peuplée de ses rêves, Samuel apercevait souvent, se promenant dans une allée du Luxembourg, une forme et une figure qu’il avait aimées en province, — à l’âge où l’on aime l’amour.

A warm and golden light rushed into the dusty study.  Samuel admired how quickly the spring had come—in a matter of days, and without warning.  An atmosphere, mild and steeped in pleasant scents, opened the portals of his nostrils, a fraction of which, having mounted to his brain, filled him with dreams and desires while another licentiously stirred his heart, stomach and spleen.  He resolutely snuffed out his two candles, one of which was still twitching atop a volume of Swedenborg while the other was guttering above one of those shameful books whose perusal merely profits spirits possessed with an immoderate appetite for truth.

From his lofty solitude encumbered with papers, paved with books, and peopled by his dreams, Samuel would often glimpse, strolling in an allée of the Luxembourg Gardens, a face and figure that he had loved in the countryside at the age when one is in love with love itself.

— Charles Baudelaire, “La Fanfarlo” (1847, pp. 4-5 [my translation, third draft])

In that brief but vivid sketch—in which we also recognize Baudelaire’s own tastes for the occult, alchemy and esotericism, to which his poems and prose poems give ample testimony—the Faustian magus style of Samuel’s chambers is not dissimilar to Dupin’s muffled bibliothèque or Holmes’s platonic realm of pure rationality, where the science of the chemistry kit is perfectly reconciled with the art of the violin.

As a primordial essay at the archetypal hero of the novel of realistic intrigue, Samuel evokes Holmes in his domain as much as he evokes Bond in his person.

In one of his mythic dimensions, the figure of James Bond accomplishes a modern type that has its first clear personification in the Romantic figure of Lord Byron.

We know that Baudelaire, as the latest poet of Romanticism, was deeply impressed by Byron’s heroic example—as were many of his contemporaries across the Channel, including his friend and mentor Delacroix, who interpreted some of Byron’s verses on canvas.

On the whole, the Parisians, adopting the mode of dandyism that had commenced in London, were much more receptive to English trends in the nineteenth century than the reverse, the islanders displaying their usual xenophobic suspicion for Continental fads, particularly those originating with the frivolous French.

As a translator from English, Baudelaire, like his contemporaries, was deeply immersed in cultural trends across the Channel and held a deep reverence for the well-worked consumer products of English artisanry and manufacture, which appeared to him, as to his cronies, to represent the nec plus ultra in good taste.

Of course, Ian Fleming’s James Bond is an utterly slavish advertisement for the sophisticated English gentleman, and a significant part of the charm of the Bond novels as examples of the genre of realistic intrigue resides in the inclusion of actual ‘marques’—brand names that testify to Fleming’s exquisitely snobbish good taste.

I contend that a straight line can be drawn from Lord Byron to James Bond that leads through Sherlock Holmes and passes equally through the character of Samuel Cramer as an entity clearly emulative of Byron but anticipating the refined, recuperated dandyism of Bond.

Bond completes the Byronic Übermensch that Sherlock Holmes would appear to be, except for his absence of heart, his invulnerability to the fairer sex. In the modern English literary tradition where chivalry is gradually sublimated to the modern project of science, commerce, engineering and empire-building, Byron, the heroic Romantic, a nobleman kicking against all these bourgeois pricks, ultimately becomes Bond, the romantic Hero, eminently middle-class but an aspirant to democratic nobility via the meritocracy of dandyism.

Samuel Cramer, who is as much a pseudonymous disguise for Charles Baudelaire as James Bond is for Ian Fleming, is this Byronic Übermensch burlesqued: The poet, quixotically hobbled by his romantic spleen, is charged by Mme. de Cosmelly as her agent in the secret mission to break up her husband’s affair by seducing la Fanfarlo.

And, uncannily, just as Bond, true to his cryptically middle-class origins, is not even an Englishman at all, being the product of a Scot out of a French-Swiss woman, so too does Baudelaire make a point of Samuel’s exotic mixed heritage, imparting the soupçon of something extra to the je-ne-sais-quoi of his dandyism.

Samuel Cramer, qui signa autrefois du nom de Manuela de Monteverde quelques folies romantiques, — dans le bon temps du Romantisme, — est le produit contradictoire d’un blême Allemand et d’une brune Chilienne. Ajoutez à cette double origine une éducation française et une civilisation littéraire, vous serez moins surpris, — sinon satisfait et édifié, — des complications bizarres de ce caractère.

Samuel Cramer, who, in days gone by,—in the good old days of Romanticism, that is,—signed some romantic fantasies with the name of Manuela de Monteverde, is the contradictory issue of a pale German and a tanned Chilean woman. Add to this double origin a French education and a literary culture and you will be less surprised—if not satisfied and edified—by the bizarre complications of his character.

— Charles Baudelaire, “La Fanfarlo” (1847, p. 1 [my translation, third draft])

Like Bond, who continues to impersonate the perfect Englishman in the imagination of a public ignorant of Fleming’s antecedents for him, Samuel’s mixed heritage is operationalized by Baudelaire to contrast—or exotically harmonize—a traditionally phlegmatic, Northern – even ‘masculine’ – side of this idealized version of himself with a more spontaneous, Southern – ‘feminine’ – side.

One could argue that Bond’s superheroic success at every endeavour is at least in part a function of the reconciliation of masculine and feminine, of rational and responsive elements of ‘race’ in his character: he unites the ‘imperturbable’ Scot with the sophisticated French-Swiss and—like nineteenth-century dandies in Paris such Baudelaire and his creation Cramer—effectively ‘passes’ for an Englishman.

So, in many ways, “La Fanfarlo”, as a work contemporary with Poe’s detective stories, written alongside the very birth of the genre of realistic intrigue that defines the modernity that Baudelaire himself would give the name to, is a fascinating exploration of primordial forms and structures in the Zeitgeist of mid-nineteenth-century Paris.

The work is by no means a success: Baudelaire demonstrates that he has no particular talent for fiction as he has an indisputable genius for poetry and the kind of perspicacious philosophical observation that comes through in his critical writings.

Though this work may not be great fiction, it is a subtle and penetrating study written in a suggestive and æsthetic style which would not have seemed out of place in the nineties. It is chiefly interesting now because, with rare insight and a singular power of self-analysis, Baudelaire has studied his own personality in the person of Samuel Cramer the hero; it does not show enough experience and diversity of knowledge of human nature to be great fiction.

— Enid Starkie, Baudelaire (1933, p. 130)

After “La Fanfarlo”, Baudelaire’s career as a fictioneer would be solely restricted to the handmaiden’s rôle of translator as he threw himself with holy zeal into the mission of setting versions of Poe’s extraordinary tales before the French public—versions that are still considered definitive, and which are studied in French high schools today.

“La Fanfarlo” tells us an enormous deal about Baudelaire—about his life, about his relationships with women—in a medium—that of fiction—he would never again explore in his own behalf, and thus, it throws a documentary sidelight on the vision of his character I have traced in Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments through my selections from Les Fleurs du mal and Le Spleen de Paris.

This ‘long short story’ will thus add considerable value to the volume as a unique document that throws another facet of interpretation upon the poems and prose poems.

With the completion of the translation of “La Fanfarlo” next month, I will be ready to open the doors to pre-orders of Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments in a variety of formats ahead of its release in June.

You can register your interest in being notified when I am ready to accept down payments for pre-ordered copies of the book by entering your email address into the registration form below. That will put you on the mailing list of prospective collectors, and I will send you the first ‘chapterlet’ of the introductory monograph I am writing for the book to give you a taster of what to expect in June.

Front cover image of the softcover edition of “Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments: Selections from ‘Toxic Blossoms’ and ‘Parisian Spleen’”, by Charles Baudelaire, translated and edited by Dean Kyte.

Dean Kyte’s new book of translations from Baudelaire, Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments: Selections from Toxic Blossoms and Parisian Spleen, is on track for release in June.

To register your interest in buying a copy and receive exclusive monthly updates delivered to your inbox, enter your email below.

When you sign up, Dean Kyte will send you the first chapter of his critical introduction to the book!

Go back

Your message has been sent

By on 2 Comments

In this prose-poetic video essay, the Melbourne Flâneur returns to the city where his love of flânerie was born.

Brisbane, David Malouf exclaims exasperatedly in Johnno, is a city that ‘would have defeated even Baudelaire!’ ‘People suffered here without significance,’ he writes. Where hell is Sartre’s bourgeois autre, Brisbane is too middling, too mediocre even to be a suburb de l’Enfer, ‘[a] place,’ in Malouf’s avis, ‘where poetry could never occur.’

For Johnno, for Malouf, – for his Brisbanian Dante without even the dignity of Ravenna to suffer in, – it’s a city whose very soul is soullessness, characterized by the ramshackle, makeshift nature of the place.  Exiled from the empire of Western Europe, no classicism could possibly take root in this muddy colony of the maddog English.

And yet all my spleen with la vie de l’ennui en Australie was born in the ideal of this sultry river city, swampy Venise of vaporous, féerific CityCats plying gauche rives of odiferous mangroves.  And all mes désirs de Paris were born of mes flâneries to the Dendy, the Valley, to Indooroopilly or Rosalie in search of movies and thumbedthrough bouquins de seconde main.

City of ferries like Venice, city of bridges like Paris, like our national epic, the story of Brisbane is yet to be chanted. The civic classic sinking its piliers et poutres into Brisbane’s shores will sing l’esprit of contingency, of ersatz imperfection, and even of mouldy ugliness, of baudelairean putrefaction!

— Dean Kyte, “O Brisbane! O Baudelaire!”

Welcome back, chers lecteurs, to another year of investigating the æsthetic philosophy of flânerie here on The Melbourne Flâneur.

The Christmas/New Year period found Your Humble Servant sweltering in higher latitudes than the name of this vlog implies as I returned to my home city of Brisbane for the first time in over five years.

I spent seven weeks in the River City over December and January, and after what was probably the longest period of absence from it in my forty-year intimacy with Briz Vegas, when I stepped out of the chantier that has been dug from the defunct Roma Street Station, I felt like I was finally seeing the city in which my first flâneurial balbutiements were babyishly burbled and trébuchements were trippingly taken in its true, very reduced dimensions.

Sensation curieuse!

Even when Brisbane was the hellish destination that lay at the other end of a homeward journey that began at the gare du Nord, not even then did I feel, with all my desolate weeping at the sight of our Venetian-style City Hall—the most beautiful in Australia—that Brisbane is a very strait and provincial place.

It is not that my experience of the world has grown that very much larger in five years of absence from Brisbane, but that I became thrillingly aware that, in an exile from Paris I expect to be a permanent removal from the most vivifying spectacle I have ever beheld, ‘down under’, in the infernal antipodes of culture and civilization, what might be called ‘the lessons of Paris’ have at last been absorbed into my vision of the local scene during the last sixteen years of my literary life.

In fine, it is my eyes—the scope of my vision and the cognitive lens of the French language that I apply over everything—that has grown that much larger in the absence when Melbourne, as the local analogue for la vie parisienne, has been the concrete structure mediating the theoretical construct of applied flânerie on Australian soil, and has primarily occupied my vision, both physical and mental.

It is not a slight to Brisbane to say that I found the first city of my experience ‘smaller’, less abounding in absorbing, diverting novelty than in the days when I used to live on the Gold Coast and some of my first expeditions in flânerie involved weekends in Brisbane searching for the altered states of experience that movies, books and art—the ‘culture’ I was in thirst of—represented for me.

I still have affection for it. But I’ve travelled so far in my thinking now from those days in my twenties when, like the ‘hero’ (?) of David Malouf’s great Brisbane novel Johnno (1975), I was so desperate for a better life than South East Queensland could offer, that I just had to chuck the whole place up for a jaunt to the Mecca of flânerie itself.

Among the kilo or so of books I decided to bring with me on my expedition back to Brisbane was Johnno. I wanted to read it again ‘in situ’, to have the actual locations Malouf describes—and which are so familiar to me, despite the very different Brisbane of his day—before my enwidened eyes.

For it’s the case that the Brisbane of Malouf’s wartime childhood and post-war youth was just hanging on in my own, in the Bjelke-Petersen eighties and Wayne Goss nineties. Even then, it was ‘so sleepy, so slatternly, so sprawlingly unlovely!’

Johnno is so sensual a book that you might say that Malouf manages to poetically capture and convey something impalpable yet inhering about Brisbane—its ‘aroma’, perhaps—the way a fragrance lingers—for an ‘old Queenslander’ like myself—in an old Queenslander like the one in which I was staying in Aspley, throwing me back into childhood memories of my great-aunt’s home in Red Hill.

That’s perhaps not a surprise because this short novel, which has become a ‘classic’ of Australian literature, was published less than a decade before my birth. The city of the sixties Malouf describes in the later pages is definitely the ‘beautiful one day, perfect the next’ Bjelke-Petersen bog of glass, steel, bitumen and bad paving I remember from my enfance in the eighties and nineties.

It was the same all over. The sprawling weatherboard city we had grown up in was being torn down at last to make way for something grander and more solid. Old pubs like the Treasury, with their wooden verandahs hung with ferns, were unrecognisable now behind glazed brick facades. Whole blocks in the inner city had been excavated to make carparks, and there would eventually be open concrete squares filled with potted palms, where people could sit about in Brisbane’s blazing sun. Even Victoria Bridge was doomed. There were plans for a new bridge fifty yards upstream, and the old blue-grey metal structure was closed to heavy traffic, publicly unsafe. There would eventually be freeways along both banks of the river that would remove forever the sweetish stench of the mangroves that festered there, putting their roots down in the mud….

It is a sobering thing, at just thirty, to have outlived the landmarks of your youth. And to have them go, not in some violent cataclysm, an act of God, or under the fury of bombardment, but in the quiet way of our generation: by council ordinance and by-law; through shady land deals; in the name or order, and progress, and in contempt (or is it small-town embarrassment?) of all that is untidy and shabbily individual. Brisbane was on the way to becoming a minor metropolis. In ten years it would look impressively like everywhere else. The thought must have depressed Johnno even more than it did me. There wasn’t enough of the old Brisbane for him to hate even, let alone destroy.

— David Malouf, Johnno (1998, pp. 206-8)

I have a friend who reminds me of Johnno, but I ought to be careful what I say, for I’m sure that return fire could be made and that several of my friends probably think that I am Johnno—the discontented dilettante spewing spleen about the cultural desert de l’Australie, constitutionally incapable of getting on with life or along with people.

‘Johnno’ is Edward Athol Johnson, but for my readers abroad, he’s Harry Haller or Holden Caulfield; he’s the type of stifled rebel who doesn’t march to the beat of a different drum because he cannot even get in step with himself.

All that differentiates Johnno from those more famous examples is that he’s an Aussie—given to larrikin pranks with a long fuse, and feeling, from the distance of the infernal antipodes, the unreachability of the ‘culture’ he associates with Europe even more profoundly than an American might do.

An utterly characteristic gesture is that, when he departs Brisbane for darkest Africa to have his Heart of Darkness experience in the Congo, at his last meeting with the novel’s sensible, cissy narrator, it is Johnno who gives Dante the going-away present of a volume of Rimbaud.

He fancies himself a voyant whose vision is narrowed, unfairly hobbled by the unspeakable blahness of Brisbane, but even when he gets to Paris, improbably impersonating a Scottish English teacher since the French won’t entrust their sous to someone with an Aussie accent, Johnno finds himself trapped in the same ennui as in Brizzy.

Johnno’s whole life is the abject and undigested lesson that I learnt on my first unhappy day in Paris:—the realization that you port your troubles as a fardeau with you; that putting a fresh landscape before your eyes doesn’t fundamentally change you or your destiny; and that if you are miserable in Brisbane gazing at the Skyneedle, you will be just as miserable in Paris looking balefully at Notre-Dame.

… [U]nless the police were making one of their periodical raids (which they did every time there was a bomb blast or a murder under the trains at Châtelet, [the rue Monsieur-le-Prince] was as quiet and suburban as the Parc Monceau.

I got used to the raids. Like everyone else I would tumble out of bed at the first sound of the armoured car swinging in over the cobbles, and by the time the first hammering came on the door downstairs would be out on the landing with my passport, while Johnno shouted from the landing below: ‘Twice in a week, this is! It’s driving me crazy. You can see now why I wanted to get out.’ But when the uniformed officers arrived with their tommy-guns at the ready he was desperately eager not to give trouble. His student permit had expired several months ago, and if they had wanted to the police might have arrested him on the spot. But they were after terrorists, not petty violators of the civil code. They returned Johnno his papers with yet another warning, turned over the bedclothes while one of them covered him with a tommy-gun and the other went through the motions of a quick frisking, and it was over. Then my turn. And the others further up. Generally after a ‘visitation’ Johnno’s nerves were too shaken to go back to bed, and after three or four minutes of futile argument I would agree to go out with him and walk until dawn. We would stroll along the silver-grey quays where the tramps slept, stop and have coffee at one of the all-night bars, play the pinball machines whose terrible crash and rattle, in those early hours, had a more violent effect on my nerves than any flic with his toylike tommy-gun.

— Malouf (1998, pp. 166-7)

That’s the other thing about Johnno. Although he wants to put a bomb under Brisbane and claims to hate Paris, he’s a coward without the Rimbaudian convictions of the true æsthetic terrorist—which is what the dandy-flâneur essentially is in his explosively, kaleidoscopically light-filled heart of darkness.

Where Johnno boasts to Dante, in Brisbane, of consorting with a spy and assassin who ‘look[s] and act[s] like a bank clerk’, he hasn’t that true saboteurial spirit that Flaubert counselled—that one should be bourgeois in one’s habits so as to be radical in one’s art.

Johnno hasn’t any art, apart from the lie and the prank. His poetry and performance art is acting out a fantasy of rebellion against the very staid existence that he is just as pathologically adjusted to as Dante.

Both have what might be called a ‘free-floating discontent’ that manifests itself in a way that is superficially divergent but is actually, in terms of the deep structure of the novel, regrettably convergent.

It’s one of the weaknesses of Malouf’s book—which comes out in the overdetermined yet dribblingly vague and unresolved third act—that it’s ultimately not clear what moral he intends for us to draw from the mémoire of unlikely comradeship between this odd couple, who do not really contrast with one another, nor undergo any complementary inversion of rôles.

Rather, I think Malouf fumbles intuitively and yet artlessly into some clumsy irresolution about the character of Australian life, its vacancy, its makeshift nature, which is particularly potent in the psychogeographic character of Brisbane itself.

It’s hard to put one’s verbal finger quite on it, but there’s a certain abortive character to Australian life, a kind of unconscious will to failure or a dread of success that manifests in the irresolute half-lives of vacancy that both Johnno and Dante are more or less resigned to—and which mars even the best books of our literature, as it mars this one.

Perhaps more than any city on this continent, Brisbane sunnily manifests this blankness of temperate sameness which inspires Malouf/Dante to say that it is a city so deprived of the light and shade of spleen and the ideal—the blanc et noir possibilities of flânerie—that ‘[i]t would have defeated even Baudelaire!’

I don’t dispute this; I utterly repudiate it.

The whole intellectual history of my life disproves Malouf’s contention: As bitter and sinister an orchid as Baudelaire can spring up in these climes to stalk its streets and milk it of its healing poison.

Johnno may kick senselessly against the pricks of Brisbane and Dante may resist them with quiet desperation, but neither of these characters have that largeness of vision, that structural scope I indicated at the beginning of this article, to see Brisbane in its just proportions and its proper place in the broader context of modernity.

The vision and experience of Paris can fundamentally impress itself upon neither of these characters—eminently Australian in their unformed, ersatz natures—and it cannot fundamentally remold and refine them for the ironic æsthetic appreciation of the local scene en Australie because neither Johnno nor Dante, despite their hungry reading, have even a tentative hypothesis for an æsthetic lifestyle such as the one I formed in my splenetic traipsings through Brisbane and took with me to Paris, intending to prove or disprove my æsthetic theory there.

In fine, neither of these characters are really flâneurs—and yet Johnno is a flâneurial novel, and not just because Johnno and Dante spend most of the book ambling through its pages.

I liked the city in the early morning. The streets would be wet where one of the big, slow, cleaning-machines had been through. In the alleyways between shops florists would be setting out pails of fresh-cut flowers, dahlias and sweet william, or unpacking boxes of gladioli. After Johnno’s sullen rage I felt light and free. It was so fresh, so sparkling, the early morning air before the traffic started up; and the sun when it appeared was immediately warm enough to make you sweat. Between the tall city office blocks Queen Street was empty, its tramlines aglow. Despite Johnno’s assertion that Brisbane was absolutely the ugliest place in the world, I had the feeling as I walked across deserted intersections, past empty parks with their tropical trees all spiked and sharp-edged in the early sunlight, that it might even be beautiful. But that, no doubt, was light-headedness from lack of sleep or a trick of the dawn.

‘What a place!’ Johnno would snarl, exasperated by the dust and packed heat of an afternoon when even the glossy black mynah birds, picking about between the roots of the Moreton Bay figs, were too dispirited to dart out of the way of his boot. ‘This must be the bloody arsehole of the universe!’

— Malouf (1998, pp. 116-7)

Johnno is, for one thing, a great novel of place, which is why I wanted to read it again ‘in situ’ when I was up in Brisbane last month.

What Walker Percy, in his equally flâneurial novel The Moviegoer (1961), called ‘certification’—the ‘making real’ for a reader of a place he already intimately knows—is one of the deepest pleasures of regional literature.

Malouf paints with a looser brush than I generally prefer. It’s one that he handles adroitly when it comes to Brisbane and sloppily when it comes to Paris, which he limns in a curiously dull palette by comparison, and not, I think, by deliberate design, since the whole novel falls very badly away into busy incoherence when the action relocates to the Continent.

But the first two-thirds set in Brisbane are sketched with a colourful impressionism that is, as I said above, ‘aromatic’ of the city’s vibe even today, and Malouf treats a place that both Dante and Johnno regard as irrecuperably ugly as though it had the poetic dignity of Paris.

He certifies the city with les détails justes—with the names of streets and suburbs, with the presence of pubs that are still trading and where yours truly has sat and written, and even set some of his own scenes, drawn from his flâneurial vie in Briz Vegas, in their beery bosoms.

As a flâneur pur sang, the proper names of places, of streets and suburbs, of correct geography that allow for certification, carry an incantatory quality for me, and I sense that, for anyone unfamiliar with Brisbane, Malouf’s petites touches of impressionistic precision would enable a similar kind of ‘certification by proxy’.

Arran Avenue, Hamilton, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, the World. That is the address that appears in my schoolbooks. But what does it mean? Where do I really stand?

The house at Arran Avenue is the grim, three-storeyed brick house my father built for us in one of the best suburbs in Brisbane. Arran Avenue is a narrow dead-end street that runs straight into the hillside, with houses piled steeply one above the other on either side and bush beginning where the bitumen peters out into a track. The traffic of Kingsford Smith Drive is less than fifty yards away but cannot be heard. The river, visible from the terrace outside my parents’ bedroom, widens here to a broad stream, low mudflats on one bank, with a colony of pelicans, and on the other steep hills covered with native pine, across which the switchback streets climb between gullies of morning glory and high creeper-covered walls.

— Malouf (1998, pp. 68-9)

The afternoon before I was due to book out of Brizzy, I took a flânerie, first by ferry, then by foot, to see this mythical Arran Avenue in Hamilton, wondering if I could find a house that geographically matched Malouf’s description.

He’s right about everything: Kingsford Smith Drive, which is six lanes of roaring non-stop traffic from Pinkenba to Albion Park, is almost silent as you pass up Crescent Road alongside the high-built old Queenslander on the bluff overlooking the river.

Arran Avenue is in sight of it, a mere 75 metres away. Dante/Malouf’s street is an arcing one-block spur off Crescent Road that shortly ends in the cul de sac of some richard’s driveway.

I didn’t think I would have much luck finding a three-storey, river-facing, brick-veneer house that must be at least seventy years old, but the déco frontage of no. 19—presently up for sale, if you’re interested—fits the bill of Malouf’s description.

You might still see the river from the third-storey balcony over the shoulder of the house facing no. 19 if you stand on tip-toes.

“19 Arran Avenue, Hamilton, late afternoon”, photographed by Dean Kyte.
“19 Arran Avenue, Hamilton, late afternoon”, photographed by Dean Kyte.

That is certification, and there is an example of flâneurial writing right there for you, chers lecteurs: If you can draw an accurate bead on an actual location from the author’s description of it, you’re dealing with something in the flâneurial line.

In one of the most significant of its dimensions, flânerie, I have discovered in my rootless, restless wandering of a country I have only grudgingly learned to love, but which I would still blow up tomorrow with all Johnno’s anarchistic antipathy towards it, is a form of embodied poetry.

As I have amply demonstrated in flâneurial films and videos like the one at the head of this post, flânerie is the application of the lens of a poetic vision over prosaic actuality: the flâneur makes the spleen of his prosy existence in Brisbane bearable by finding, through John Grierson’s ‘creative treatment’ of the documentary matériel of his life, the poetry in his banal actuality.

It’s this that Malouf manages to partially do in his novel—viscerally, with respect to Brisbane—and which both of his characters fail utterly to do. Their oppressive apprehension of ennui in Brisbane leads to spleen, but the manifold novelty of Paris does not necessarily lead either Johnno or Dante to find the Baudelairean ideal ‘du nouveau!’ there.

La vie parisienne est féconde en sujets poétiques et merveilleux. Le merveilleux nous enveloppe et nous abreuve comme l’atmosphère ; mais nous ne le voyons pas.

Parisian life is abundant in marvellous and poetic subjects. The marvellous surrounds us and suckles us like the air, but we do not see it.

— Charles Baudelaire, “Le Salon de 1846”, Curiosités esthétiques (1868, p. 198 [my translation])

Likewise, in the sultry, fuggish atmosphere of Brisbane, the milk and honey of poetry may yet be found by a soul that is not ersatz and barely sculpted, as if modelled in wet clay, but rigorously limned and scored, the æsthetic architecture of his life—the code by which he is determined to truly live—vigorously worked out.

Readers, I commence a new year on The Melbourne Flâneur with an important annonce: This year I begin rolling out The Melbourne Edition of my collected works, starting with a new volume of translations of the poetry and prose poetry of Charles Baudelaire which I intend to serve as the complement and counterpoint to my own work in The Spleen of Melbourne project.

Front cover image of the softcover edition of “Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments: Selections from ‘Toxic Blossoms’ and ‘Parisian Spleen’”, by Charles Baudelaire, translated and edited by Dean Kyte.
A preview of Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments: Selections from Toxic Blossoms and Parisian Spleen, by Charles Baudelaire, translated and edited by Dean Kyte.

This new book, whose layout and design I finalized last month in Brisbane, is scheduled for release at the end of June. It features one-fifth of the total number of poems featured in the three editions of Les Fleurs du mal which Baudelaire (and then his mother) saw through the press, and one-quarter of the prose poems from Le Spleen de Paris.

At the time of writing, I have translated 89 per cent of the poetic and prose-poetic content I intend to include as a representative selection of Baudelaire’s æsthetic philosophy of flânerie.

And as a bonus that bridges his poetic and prosaic œuvres, I have decided to do a brand new translation of the only work of fiction that Charles Baudelaire is known to have written, “La Fanfarlo”. As one of the last tasks remaining before I bring this book to print, I will commence drafting that translation this month.

With a substantial critical monograph on Baudelaire and full-colour illustrations, Maledictions, Blasphemies, Laments is going to be a very handsome volume in both its hard- and softcover formats and a valuable introduction to the work of the first philosopher of flânerie.

To register your interest in purchasing one of the first copies in June, I invite you to avail yourself of the contact form below and join the mailing list as I send out monthly updates to my readers.

Go back

Your message has been sent

Another way you can support my work and keep abreast of developments is by purchasing the audio track of “O Brisbane! O Baudelaire!” featured in this post via my artist profile on Bandcamp.

Using the link below, for $A2.00, you can become a fan of your Melbourne Flâneur on BC and stay in the loop as I drop new tracks and merch.

By on

Block Court, Collins Street, evening.
Shot on Kodak Ektar 100. Shutter speed: 30. Aperture: f.2.82. Focal range: ∞.

“Office at night”: A ficción by Dean Kyte. The tracks below are best heard through earphones.

The year 2024 has been a landmark literary year for your Melbourne Flâneur.

Among the many achievements, after four years of patient plotting, planning, and pre-production, a formal commencement was made on production of the forthcoming Melbourne Flâneur podcast, an offshoot of The Spleen of Melbourne project which began to manifest itself during the epic Coronavirus lockdown of 2020.

“Office at night”, track 11 on The Spleen of Melbourne audiobook, was written while your Melbourne Flâneur was dodging the CV all over NSW in the winter of 2021. It is one of eight ‘experimental previews’ for the podcast I wrote, recorded, and sound-designed during the years of pre-production as I got a progressively firmer handle on both the literary and the auditory ‘style’ I am going for in the podcast.

I’m calling that style (at least in its auditory aspect) ‘audio noir’—although such a term is not the best French.

But I believe that I have found in the soundscapes cobbled together from the more than 400 recordings I have made all over Melbourne, Victoria, and points even further afield in the last two years, an auditory approximation of the pseudo-documentary style of post-war film noir, adapted, in its turn, from the pseudo-documentary principles of Italian neorealismo.

The ‘Italian connection’, the conceptual influence of a ‘new realism’ in cinema, derived from the documentary, on the fictional audio project that has emerged as a sub-project of the prose poems on The Spleen of Melbourne album, is a key theoretic base in my thinking, for in its literary dimension, as narrated texts intoned over these cinematic soundscapes, the style I have developed for The Melbourne Flâneur podcast has its ‘French connection’ too:—the post-war Nouveau Roman.

Over the past fifteen months, I’ve been taking you, book by book, through the work of the novelist who—along with my dear, adored Henry James—has shared with the Master co-regency as the chief stylistic influence on the podcast.

His theoretic principles ‘towards a new novel’ I have applied in experimental previews such as “Office at night”, and have eventually mastered and perfected as, in 2024, I wrote the first four canonical episodes of this dark documentary on contemporary Melbourne life, of which “Office at night” is an ‘interstitial episode’, taking place halfway through the series.

In 1963, the novelist in question, Alain Robbe-Grillet, was at the height of his international celebrity and his influence on Western culture.

In the ten years to that date, from the incomprehension that greeted his first published novel, Les Gommes (1953), Robbe-Grillet had quickly taken the citadel of French literature, going from dismissed madman to dean and spokesman for a diverse school of avant-garde French writers, many of whom were, like Robbe-Grillet himself, published by Les Éditions de Minuit.

The literary press of Paris, for want of a better term, said that the Minuit school of novelists were engaged in the project of writing a ‘nouveau roman’—a ‘new novel’—and the term, pejorative at first, signalling a definite break with the pre-war tradition of the French psychological novel that had come down from Balzac, stuck to the group.

Robbe-Grillet seemed the most iconoclastic of the Nouveaux Romanciers to the critics—and he was also the most charismatic, the most good-humoured in taking and batting back broadsides, and the most gregarious, showing a generosity towards the work of his fellow novelists exceedingly rare in a writer, taking their part and arguing the collective case of the group.

This movement from margins to mainstream-adjacent put Robbe-Grillet in a powerful personal position, both in French letters and, as the cachet of being a cutting-edge French novelist has a profound modishness for the Anglosphere, eventually globally. It led Robbe-Grillet to pen a mystifying screenplay for Alain Resnais in 1961 and, in 1962, to make his début as a filmmaker, becoming one of the few novelists in history to have a second career as a film director.

Robbe-Grillet’s coup was accompanied by the publication in the French press of a small corpus of articles in which he tentatively put forth the case for a new kind of novel that diverged radically from the French tradition and was adapted to the actual conditions of post-war life.

In 1963, with his star at its apogee, Robbe-Grillet collected these essays in a single volume, which he published under the title Pour un nouveau roman (For a New Novel).

Ces textes ne constituent en rien une théorie du roman ; ils tentent seulement de dégager quelques lignes d’évolution qui me paraissent capitales dans la littérature contemporaine. Si j’emploie volontiers, dans bien des pages, le terme de Nouveau Roman, ce n’est pas pour désigner une école, ni même un groupe défini et constitué d’écrivains qui travailleraient dans le même sens ; il n’y a là qu’une appellation commode englobant tous ceux qui cherchent de nouvelles formes romanesques, capables d’exprimer (ou de créer) de nouvelles relations entre l’homme et le monde, tous ceux qui sont décidés à inventer le roman, c’est-à-dire à inventer l’homme. … [E]n nous fermant les yeux sur notre situation réelle dans le monde présent, elle nous empêche en fin de compte de construire le monde et l’homme de demain.

These texts in no way constitute a theory of the novel; they merely attempt to clarify some evolutionary lines that appear essential to me in contemporary literature. If, in the course of many pages, I voluntarily employ the term ‘Nouveau Roman’, it is not to designate a school, nor even a defined and established group of writers potentially working in the same direction. It is simply a term that conveniently encompasses all writers seeking new novelistic forms capable of expressing (or creating) new relationships between man and the world, all those who have made up their mind to invent the novel—which is to say, to invent man. … [I]n closing our eyes to our real situation in the current world, [the systematic repetition of past novelistic forms] prevents us, at the end of the day, from constructing the world and the man of tomorrow.

— Alain Robbe-Grillet, « À quoi servent les théories », Pour un nouveau roman (1986, p. 9 [my translation])

Thus, for Robbe-Grillet, the Nouveau Roman is not a new ‘genre’ of novel (in the sense that we Anglophones [mis]understand the word ‘genre’) but an essentially earnest attitude of certain authors dissatisfied with the outmoded tropes of the great nineteenth-century psychological novel.

In Robbe-Grillet’s view, all authors who strive to break out of the moribund formulæ that have come down to us, generation after generation, from Balzac;—all writers who seek to grasp a ‘new reality’ rather than a ‘new realism’;—are fundamentally engaged in the project of writing a ‘New Novel’.

Before he became a novelist, Alain Robbe-Grillet was a scientist, an agronomist. For him, rather than being a defined genre of postmodern, avant-garde fiction, the Nouveau Roman, in its experimental capacity, is a ‘recherche’—a scientific investigation, but also a search, a quest.

The ‘chercheur’ (the scientist, but also the novelist as seeker, as querent) is engaged in an investigation of the world of today, of man’s relationship to the world of modernity, of his relationship with other people, and ultimately, under the conditions of the post-war moment, with himself.

Mais nous … qu’on accuse d’être des théoriciens, nous ne savons pas ce que doit être un roman, un vrai roman ; nous savons seulement que le roman d’aujourd’hui sera ce que nous le ferons, aujourd’hui, et que nous n’avons pas à cultiver la ressemblance avec ce qu’il était hier, mais à nous avancer plus loin.

But we … whom [the critics] accuse of being ‘theoretical novelists’, we do not know what a novel—a ‘real novel’—ought to be. We only know that the novel of today will be what we make it today and that we are under no obligation to maintain its resemblance to what it was yesterday but to push ourselves further still.

— Alain Robbe-Grillet. « Nouveau roman, nouveau homme » (as cited in ibid, p.115 [my translation])

The form of this scientific investigation into the current circumstances of postmodern life is ultimately reflected in the ‘form’ of the novel itself, in the individual form that each ‘new novel’ takes, shaped as it is by the writer’s earnest, intellectually honest attempt to ‘discover’ its form.

And I have certainly experienced this with the nouvelles démeublées—the ‘unfurnished short stories’—I have written, attempting to assiduously follow the theoretical principles Robbe-Grillet outlines in Pour un nouveau roman.

I have alternately called nouvelles démeublées noires such as “Office at night” ‘literary crime fictions’ as I have attempted to articulate to myself how the form of these ‘New Short Stories’ operates as a function of their function.

These are not necessarily ‘crime fictions’ in the way we understand the genre of ‘crime’. Rather, as the nature of the mystery story is to discover a hidden truth in the fabric of the text, the nature of the literary investigation I am engaged upon in the nouvelles démeublées of The Melbourne Flâneur is essentially scientific, detectival, as I probe ‘the mystery’ of their essential form, attempt to dynamically discover, in the course of writing each story, what the ‘shape’ of that final story actually is as an image, as a rotatable, circumnavigable, eminently flâneurial mental object hanging abstractly in conceptual space.

The principle of ‘unfurnishing’, of taking successive couches of description out of the texts, leaving only the resonance of their traces, reorganizing the sub-imagery of the total tableau, reveals radically different ‘shapes’ and ‘forms’ from draft to draft as the short story condenses progressively to a sharp, pregnant point.

Robbe-Grillet implies that the social-scientific art form of the novel is consubstantial with the shape of man himself. To construct a new novel that accurately describes our actual conditions post-modernity is to build the abstract, conceptual form that reflects the man of today. As it advances ‘plus loin’, that current form goes beyond outmoded constructions of the human identity, culturally engendering the world and the human being we are becoming and must become to surmount the existential crises of post-modernity.

Moreover, the Nouveau Romancier, particularly the New Novelist of the Robbe-Grilletian type, concerned exclusively with a scientifically rigorous description of the phenomenal world, is in creative search of himself.

He searches for himself in the lines and pages he writes without preconception of what the novel that reflects him must be, and as such, the essential question of the scientific investigation that the Nouveau Roman represents originates from a fundamental research question about the self.

Il sent la nécessité d’employer telle forme, de refuser tel adjectif, de construire ce paragraphe de telle façon. Il met tout son soin à la lente recherche du mot exact et de son juste emplacement. … Et lorsqu’on lui demande pourquoi il a écrit son livre, il n’a qu’une réponse : « C’est pour essayer de savoir pourquoi j’avais envie de l’écire. »

He feels the need to employ a particular form, to refuse such an adjective, to construct this paragraph in a certain way. He puts all his care into the slow search for the exact word and its precise placement. … And when we ask him why he wrote his book, he has only one response: ‘I wrote it in order to try to understand why I felt like writing it.’

— Alain Robbe-Grillet, « À quoi servent les théories » (as cited in ibid, p. 13 [my translation])

Why do I write? Why do I feel like writing this? Why do I want to write it in this way?

The Nouveau Romancier, in seeking honestly to grasp the reality of the present moment, is in search of himself, of his own actuality as he writes the work, and in placing every word, building every line and page, he dynamically constructs his present self in the present as he creates the novel, and, as the shaped artefact of a book that others will read in a ‘future present’, he is also culturally constructing the consciousnesses of tomorrow by his honest research into his own.

In fine, the Nouveau Romancier, in creating a new literary form of present-day novel, is inventing himself. He is also inventing the audience of the future who are bored with the moribund paradigms and formulæ of today’s generic entertainment, of phony ‘realism’, of didactic moral education in books and movies that are still beholden to the creaking mechanics of the nineteenth-century psychological novel.

I feel it myself most profoundly: A new audience is struggling to be born—in the Anglosphere most especially—and having lived for a century under the tyrannical cultural imperium of the United States—which effectively staged a coup, dragging the English language across the Atlantic and installing it wholesale in New York and Hollywood—readers and moviegoers keep frustratedly looking to America for mythos when the myth of America is effectively exhausted and irrelevant to our present postmodern conditions.

And yet, when I read the nouvelles démeublées from The Melbourne Flâneur at côteries and gatherings, shorn of their ‘audio noir’ soundscapes so that these ‘unfurnished short stories’ are merely bald, naked texts dependent upon my delivery for their effect and impact, I have seen people sit up straight in their chairs the way a dog will twist its head when you make an unfamiliar sound.

A profound signal is being sent to them.

The dark, brutally inhuman vision of human beings walking the streets of Melbourne as objects in an expressionistic world of objects—of architectural structures, like the office at night, that signify in the phenomenal plasticity of their material forms—seems to speak to people of the future we are presently living.

I’ve even tried this on the street a few times, experimenting with the stories’ ‘stopping power’ in live streetside performances, and have been myself surprised to see people utterly arrested and fascinated by the images being built in their minds of a Melburnian world they recognize from their actual experiences, but which is made expressionistically new.

So, what I have drawn from Robbe-Grillet specifically? What stylistic techniques peculiar to his brand of the Nouveau Roman are particularly crucial in disrupting outmoded ways of seeing the world and our relationship to it in stories?

Firstly, as we have seen throughout this series, and as Robbe-Grillet makes explicit in several essays in Pour un nouveau roman, description, which is generally deprecated in novels, conversely occupies a very privileged position in Robbe-Grillet’s novels.

The rôle of description, as an essential narrative tool in the novelist’s arsenal of æsthetic strategies, has become even more diminished in the twenty-first century than it was when Robbe-Grillet was publishing these articles in the mid-twentieth, with postmodern novelists typically receiving the utterly bogus advice, derived from screenwriting practice, that they should ‘show, not tell’.

In my article on the collection Instantanés (1962), I wrote that the salient rôle played by description in Robbe-Grillet’s work as a unique strategy for advancing the story linked these short stories to the imagistic practice of prose poetry.

And as, in the suite of nouvelles démeublées which comprise The Melbourne Flâneur, and which are derived from the prose-poetic praxis of The Spleen of Melbourne, I am concerned with reducing each story down to a singular, crystalline image like the one in “Office at night”, what ‘plot’ emerges from the concatenation of these images, what ‘human drama’ may be inferred from the conceptual arrangement of them as a cinematic sequence, is significantly reliant on the documentary description of streets, buildings and other concrete structures, patterns of traffic and patterns of behaviour that are typical of contemporary Melbourne life.

Then too, Robbe-Grillet identifies time as the novel’s real subject since at least 1900. The apperception that time is of a materially different quality under conditions of modernity is a fundamental subject for a new novel to address honestly.

However, Robbe-Grillet’s stylistic approach to time is typically undoctrinaire. He employs time in a technical, grammatical sense.

As I wrote in my article on Dans le labyrinthe (1959), the French present tense is as characteristic of Robbe-Grillet’s style as the imperfect is in Flaubert’s version of a ‘new novel’, and the conditional mood is characteristic of Proust’s take on same.

In English literature, the present tense is not generally used as the default operational tense of an extended narrative. We are used to novels written in the simple past tense, with the past progressive being subbed in, à la Flaubert, to change it up a little. To read an extended narrative written in the present tense in English often feels uncomfortable.

In French, however, employment of the present tense in fiction is not uncommon and feels natural. As an æsthetic strategy, however, Robbe-Grillet, takes stylistically foregrounds the present tense as much as he does description, and the two are linked.

The perception of time, the instability of what appears to be solid, is a key quality in modern literature, and chez Robbe-Grillet, this takes the form of a ‘self-effacing description’, one that appears both to write itself, to build itself up, and to ‘rub itself out’, to demolish itself as it is read.

Given the ‘étrangeté’, the foreignness of the present tense in English narrative accounts, and the fact that the style I have developed in The Spleen of Melbourne and The Melbourne Flâneur is so heavily inflected by my identification with French literature, resolving the question of tense in describing the Melbourne of my actuality has been an interesting one.

I have found that there are certain very specific uses—two, in fact—to which the English present tense can be put in fiction without the short story sounding as though it is an assignment stodgily produced by a creative writing student.

Where, for instance, there is a certain ‘shallowness’ in the décalage—the necessary lag—between an event occurring in real-time and the account given of it, the present tense in English can be surprisingly effective, lending a documentary effect to a narration which, having been written, clearly takes place in the past.

So, in my literary experiments following Robbe-Grillet’s principles as set forth in Pour un nouveau roman, an honest intellectual investigation directed simultaneously inward and outward—outward to the world, seeking to accurately describe its phenomenology in order to go inward to myself, describing my flâneurial experiences of it—I am doing my best to renew the novel via the short story—‘to Make Literature Great Again!’

On répète, de l’extrême droite à l’extrême gauche, que cet art nouveau est malsain, décadent, inhumain et noir. Mais la bonne santé à laquelle ce jugement fait allusion est celle des œillères et du formol, celle de la mort. On est toujours décadent par rapport aux choses du passé : le béton armé par rapport à la pierre, le socialisme par rapport à la monarchie paternaliste, Proust par rapport à Balzac. Et ce n’est guère être inhumain que de vouloir bâtir une nouvelle vie pour l’homme ; cette vie ne paraît noire que si — toujours en train de pleurer les anciennes couleurs — on ne cherche pas à voir les nouvelles beautés qui l’éclairent. Ce que propose l’art d’aujourd’hui au lecteur, au spectateur, c’est en tout cas une façon de vivre, dans le monde présent, et de participer à la création permanente du monde de demain. Pour y parvenir, le nouveau roman demande seulement au public d’avoir confiance encore dans le pouvoir de la littérature, et il demande au romancier de n’avoir plus honte d’en faire.

We repeat that, from the extreme right to the extreme left, this new art is unhealthy, decadent, inhuman, and dark. But the ‘good health’ on which this judgment is based is that of blinkers and disinfectant—that of death. One is always decadent in relation to the things of the past: reinforced concrete as compared with stone, socialism as compared with absolute monarchy, Proust as compared with Balzac. And it is hardly ‘inhuman’ to want to build a new life for man: this life only appears dark if—perpetually boohooing over faded colours—we do not strive to see the new beauties that illuminate it. What today’s art offers to the reader and moviegoer is, at any rate, a way of living in today’s world and participating in the permanent creation of tomorrow’s world. In order to arrive at this place, the new novel only asks that the public maintains its faith in the power of literature and that the novelist no longer feels shame about creating it.

— Alain Robbe-Grillet, « Du réalisme à la réalité » (as cited in ibid, pp. 143-4 [my translation])

Where the old formulas of books and movies designed to ‘entertain’, ‘educate’, or ‘tell the truth’ about life in antiquated forms are dead—and are felt to be dead—in the West, the Nouveau Roman, among writers of good faith and goodwill, is an essentially creative, participatory enterprise of research in which readers—unafraid of the radical ambiguity of our times—‘complete’ the unfurnished work presented as a sincere investigation into self and world by the author.

And thus, as Robbe-Grillet says, the only sincere ‘political engagement’ the Nouveau Romancier can have is the engagement he shows in his enterprise, in the rigour of his research for a new self and a new world, in the intellectual honesty with which he asks himself the question: ‘Why do I write this?’

Redonnons donc à la notion d’engagement le seul sens qu’elle peut avoir pour nous. Au lieu d’être de nature politique, l’engagement c’est, pour l’écrivain, la pleine conscience des problèmes actuels de son propre langage, la conviction de leur extrême importance, la volonté de les résoudre de l’intérieur. C’est là, pour lui, la seule chance de demeurer un artiste et, sans doute, aussi, par voie de conséquence obscure et lointaine, de servir un jour peut-être à quelque-chose — peut-être même à la révolution.

Let us thus restore to the [Sartrean] notion of ‘engagement’ the only meaning it can have for us. Instead of being of a political nature, commitment is, for the writer, the full awareness of the current problems in his own language, the conviction of their extreme importance, the will to resolve them from within. For him, there lies the only chance of remaining an artist and, doubtless, by means of obscure and distant consequence, also of perhaps one day serving something—maybe even revolution.

— Alain Robbe-Grillet, « Sur quelques notions périmées » (quoted in ibid, p. 39 [my translation])

I am deeply conscious of the moribundity of English, its absolute inability, after more than a century of degradation, to convey meaning.

When the meaning of the good old-fashioned English word ‘woman’ has to be litigated in the House of Commons, you know that the language I am writing and you are reading is effectively dead.

Thus, in the prose poetry of The Spleen of Melbourne project and the nouvelles démeublées of The Melbourne Flâneur that have emerged from it, written with respect to the principles of the Nouveau Roman outlined by Alain Robbe-Grillet in this book, I am doing my level best to reform, to renovate—to renouvelate—English by bridging the Channel, reconciling it, in one of its lines of descent, with French.

I am creating the language of the future, enacting a one-man revolution that will one day be the lingua franca of literary Franglish.

The feedback in response to my experiments ‘towards a new short story’, wresting literary English out of the cold dead hands of the Amerloques and dragging it, by force of my own will, down under, at least encourages a tentative hypothesis pointing in that direction.

To support my efforts to make literature great again, I invite you to purchase a copy of the “Office at night” single. If you’re in the States, you might be particularly interested to hear what noir sounds like ‘down under’, in the most Parisian city on Australian soil.

“Office at night” [CD single]

Personally signed, sealed and gift-wrapped by the author. Price includes worldwide postage. Purchase the physical CD and get bonus MP3 versions of all the tracks!

A$18.45

“Office at night” [MP3 single]

Get the main story plus 2 bonus B-sides and a 4-page PDF booklet featuring Dean Kyte’s noirish Melbourne street photography. Worldwide delivery within 24 hours.

A$4.95

By on 2 Comments

Dean Kyte presents a literary crime ficción in the style he has developed based on the Nouveau Roman.

—I just think—…  Miriam abruptly swallowed her whispered words.

Al’s lips pressed more tightly together as he watched the needle indicating the floors sweep down.  If only Miriam were…—somewhere else.

Roberts staggered past them and swayed uncertainly in the lobby.  Verna was now very far away from him.

To Verna, he thought.

—Dean Kyte, “Crisscross”

Today’s video on The Melbourne Flâneur, “Crisscross”, represents an experimental departure for me, as I fling myself into new flâneurial territory of æsthetic investigation. I return to my pseudo-Cornellian, Conneresque roots, where the only ‘making’ of the film I can claim, in this instance, lies in the editorial realm of pure montage.

Three shots of second-unit stock footage mounted and hence tenuously related to each other, and an elliptical narrative in the nouvelle démeublée noire style which that short sequence seemed to suggest to me in a flash of inspiration;—C’est “Crisscross”.

I don’t know anything more about what’s going on in the conte than what the artifactual text (understood as the totality of image, sound and word) suggests, and this is the ambiguous, mysterious essence of the style of ‘literary crime fiction’ I call the nouvelle démeublée noire, based on the theoretical principles of the French Nouveau Roman articulated by Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Dans les constructions romanesques futures, gestes et objets seront là avant d’être quelque chose ; et ils seront là après, durs, inaltérables, présents pour toujours et comme se moquant de leur propre sens….

In future novelistic constructions, gestures and things will be there before they are something; and they will continue to be there afterwards, hard, immutable, ever-present and as if mocking their own meaning….

—Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Une voie pour le roman futur”, in Pour un nouveau roman (1963, p. 20 [my translation])

I continue my ongoing deep dive into the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet with a saunter through the eminent Academician’s collection of short stories, Instantanés (Snapshots, 1962).

Chers lecteurs with long memories may recall that I have already addressed the subject of Instantanés in a previous post on The Melbourne Flâneur—“The cinematic writing of Alain Robbe-Grillet”, published en pleine pandémie back in January 2021.

That post is one of the ten most popular in the lifetime history of this vlog. Its ongoing popularity, racking up exponentially more page views every month, testifies to the interest I have succeeded in arousing—especially among nos amis aux États-Unis—with my modest crusade to rehabilitate the reputation of a once influential, now unfashionable, French novelist and filmmaker.

When I first wangled a French copy of Instantanés off Amazon as one of my reads during the pandemic, The Spleen of Melbourne project was not only starting to crystallize under the imaginative constraints and pressures of lockdown, but it began to kick tentatively into a new phase.

In fine, at that time, diverging from the main channel of the prose poetry I was then writing about Melbourne’s Parisian underbelly under the influence of Baudelaire, a specifically fictional—as opposed to prose-poetic—sub-project began to emerge as an offshoot of The Spleen of Melbourne.

Elements latent in the prose poems I had written up to that time began to take on a new clarity and definition and began to demand a more analytic rather than lyric treatment.

I went straight to Robbe-Grillet and the short stories of Instantanés as sources of advice and inspiration on how I should practically proceed in treating these short pieces which I instinctively knew would owe a debt to the theoretic principles of the Nouveau Roman.

Robbe-Grillet’s world is neither meaningful nor absurd; it merely exists. Omnipresent is the object—hard, polished, with only the measurable characteristics of pounds, inches, and wavelengths of reflected light. It overshadows and eliminates plot or character. …

If Robbe-Grillet’s fiction, with its timetables, careful inventories of things, and reports on arrivals and departures, owes anything to the traditional novel, it is to the detective story.

—Encylopædia Britannica, “Alain Robbe-Grillet”

And hence, what I variously call ‘the Jamesian/Robbe-Grilletian style’, the ‘literary crime fiction’, and the ‘nouvelle démeublée noire’ was born as a sub-project of The Spleen of Melbourne.

More than four years on from those stuttering experiments ‘pour une nouvelle nouvelle’ (to coin a particularly unidiomatic Gallicism), it seems a good time to reinvestigate the six nouvelles Robbe-Grillet collects under the head of Instantanés.

This concise book is a pivotal work in quite a literal sense:—like a hinge, Robbe-Grillet’s whole career turns upon it.

Instantanés recapitulates in miniature the chosiste style and technique of the 1950s novels I have analyzed in my previous articles in this series and which form the basis of what I call—(with a reverential nod toward fellow Anglophonic Francophile Willa Cather)—the nouvelle démeublée or ‘unfurnished short story’, since the idea of a ‘Nouvelle Nouvelle’, or ‘New Short Story’ written in the style of the Robbe-Grilletian Nouveau Roman, doesn’t make a great deal of sense in French.

Moreover, in the final short story of Instantanés, written significantly after the other works in the volume, at a time in the early sixties when Robbe-Grillet’s public and critical reputation as a writer and filmmaker is at its absolute peak, he gives a tantalizing—and not altogether palatable—preview of his direction of æsthetic travel from this point forward to the end of his career.

In the last novel we examined, Dans le labyrinthe (1959), Robbe-Grillet had begun to diverge appreciably from the quasi-noirish, chosiste style of his first three novels. The first five stories of Instantanés—“Trois visions réfléchies” (“Three Reflected Visions” in Bruce Morrissette’s translation), “Le Chemin du retour” (“The Way Back”), “Scène” (“Scene”), “La Plage” (“The Shore”), and “Dans les couloirs du Métropolitain” (“In the Corridors of the Métro”)—date from the years between the publication of Les Gommes (1953) and Dans le labyrinthe, and display the cold, hard, objectival style that initially brought Robbe-Grillet to the attention of the French reading public as a savantic freak of literature specializing in an inhuman kind of novel.

But in those same years, through a succession of literary prizes and laudatory appraisals from perspicacious early critics like Roland Barthes, Robbe-Grillet had succeeded in finessing himself from the margins of French literature to become the absolutely central and dominating figure by the end of the decade as the veritable ‘chef d’école’ du Nouveau Roman.

At this point, at the end of the fifties, Robbe-Grillet’s public and critical reputation catalyzed into an international fame that transcended the Francophonic world. With American interpreters and translators like Bruce Morrissette and Richard Howard as his champions, he conquered the States and thus the English-speaking world.

Yet, at the height of his international fame as a quintessentially French, high-brow novelist of a new type, in the next few years, Robbe-Grillet’s schedule of literary production declined, and instead of releasing a new, critically anticipated novel in the expected year of 1961, he went the conventional route of the commercially successful novelist and became a screenwriter.

It is in that year that Alain Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad, based on a script by Robbe-Grillet, was released, and Marienbad became a global cause célèbre—‘le dernier cri’ in the phenomenon of the inscrutable European art film.

It was on the back of Marienbad that Instantanés was released, and if we see in the film not merely a lossless translation to cinematic form of Robbe-Grillet’s literary principles of chosisme as demonstrated in the short stories of the fifties, we can also see the generative influence of Marienbad reflected darkly, thematically forward in the last fiction of Instantanés, “La Chambre secrète” (“The Secret Room”), linking Robbe-Grillet’s new line of æsthetic experimentation, as commenced with Dans le labyrinthe, to the style of his films and novels in the 1960s.

As The Spleen of Melbourne project has advanced and developed simultaneously on two fronts which I regard as distinct—prose poetry and short fiction—Instantanés has remained as seminal a text for me with respect to the latter as Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris (1868) is with respect to the former.

And as I now begin to rehearse the ‘scripts’—the cold, hard, objectival nouvelles démeublées of the forthcoming Melbourne Flâneur podcast written in a French-inflected, English version of the chosiste style of Instantanés—for audiences as part of my market testing for the podcast, I am surprised to hear how that bitterly analytic and inhumane fictive style sounds for my listeners like my lyrical, multilingual prose poetry!

It was not long after I released The Spleen of Melbourne CD in 2021 that I began to seriously interrogate myself as to whether Robbe-Grillet’s short stories in Instantanés, with their maniacal descriptive exactitude, could in fact be considered ‘petits poèmes en prose’.

Une idée folle, parbleu!

Description, deprecated by fiction as merely a utilitarian means of setting the scene for human drama, is elevated to a significant tool and strategy for forestalling and preventing the emergence of narrative in the prose poem.

As many listeners of my audio tracks note, as in Robbe-Grillet’s short stories, description plays such a salient rôle in my prose poetry that it overwhelms the human element, forcing what might become ‘characters’ in a story into the background, as mere figures in a landscape, pregnant with its own drama operating on longer, inhuman timelines, and thus unobservable by the anthropocentric eye.

While Robbe-Grillet might not have been personally hostile to poetry, he is hostile to the pathetic fallacy of poetry’s necessarily anthropocentric view of the objective world of things in his prose.

Narrative is the fallaciously selective structure that human subjects impose as a Foucauldian ‘grille’ over an objective world whose mathematical variety is beyond the regulation of our senses and cognition by incalculable orders of magnitude.

To put it unkindly (and I don’t think Robbe-Grillet would disagree too profoundly with me in this dismissive analysis), the mechanistic structure of faulty logic we call ‘narrative’ is a despicable form of ‘magical thinking’ whose evolutionary utility to human beings as a sensemaking heuristic has been over since at least the end of the Second World War.

In the nouvelles of Instantanés, Robbe-Grillet, by his maniacal technique of emphasizing static description and deprecating human agency, manages to forestall and prevent the emergence of narrative—of anthropocentrically observable cause and effect—more successfully than he is able to do so in his novels.

This is because the nouvelles of Instantanés share with prose poetry the fundamental criterion identified by the scholar Suzanne Bernard in her seminal—and monumental—work on the subject, Le poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours (1959)—which is to say, these short stories are exceedingly brief.

Bernard identified the criterion of brevity as one of the few discernible essentials in this hybrid, interstitial genre of literature emerging from the French prosodic tradition in the nineteenth century.

Pedro Baños Gallego of the University of Murcia tested Bernard’s criterion by assessing the work of four nineteenth-century prose poets following Baudelaire’s trailblazing example and found that of all the criteria for the form suggested by various critics and scholars, brevity was in fact the most reliable trait for identifying a potentially poetic text written in prose.

Voici quatre auteurs qui représentent quatre manières assez dissemblables d’envisager la création du poème en prose. En laissant de côté leurs différences quant aux choix de thèmes, lexique, syntaxe ou distribution des paragraphes, nous observons qu’ils vont tous converger dans la recherche d’une certaine longueur dont les limites ne sont pas trop floues. Après la lecture des quatre recueils, il nous semble que la frontière établie entre les trois – quatre pages reste toujours présente pour eux. Même si c’était l’époque de l’éclatement du genre et de l’expérimentation technique, où le corpus des œuvres s’adhérant à l’étiquette « poème en prose » faisait preuve d’une hétérogénéité notoire, voici la constatation empirique de l’existence d’une conscience collective concernant, du moins, la longueur des textes.

Here are four authors who represent four quite different ways of considering the creation of a poem in prose. Leaving aside their differences concerning the choice of themes, vocabulary, syntax or paragraphing, we observe that all converge in their search for a certain length whose limits are not too vague. After reading the four collections, it seems to us that an established limit of between three and four pages remains a constant for these authors. Even if the late nineteenth century was the period in which the form—and technical experimentation with it—burst upon the scene, where the body of works adhering to the designation ‘prose poem’ displayed a notable heterogeneity, here a collective consciousness concerning, at least, the length of texts is empirically observed.

—Pedro Baños Gallego, “À la recherche des traits fondamentaux du poème en prose” (2019, p. 91 [my translation])

Three to four pages is the rough equivalent of 1,000 words, and thus, the threshold at which the static image of the prose poem undergoes a phase shift and the dynamism of narrative begins to enter the equation is round about the point where the prose text is accepted to be a ‘short story’—more specifically, what is nowadays termed ‘flash fiction’.

Except for the three quasi-independent vignettes which comprise both “Trois visions réfléchies” and “Dans les couloirs du Métropolitain”, the six short stories of Instantanés exceed this thousand-word threshold, but not by very much, with no work in the collection attaining even 2,500 words.

Thus, Robbe-Grillet largely manages to maintain the poetic ‘tension’ that scholar Yves Vadé saw as a peculiar property of the prosodic prose text, a tension of ‘stasis as image’ that fundamentally countervails against narrative’s prosaic drive towards dynamism, resisting its urge towards action, and thus the perception of human drama in the environment.

When we look at Marienbad, one of the first things we are struck by is Robbe-Grillet’s obsession with static tableaux, the mannequin-like poses of the actors, a signifying structure that appears prominently in no less than three of the short stories in Instantanés—“Le mannequin”, the first of the vignettes in “Trois visions réfléchies”; “L’escalier mécanique” and “La portillon automatique”, two of the vignettes in “Dans les couloirs du Métropolitain”; and “La Chambre secrète”.

According to Baños Gallego and Yves Vadé, ‘ekphrasis’, the detailed description of a work of visual art, was once a standard device in poetry, and as the ancient lyric poet Simonides of Ceos observed: ‘Poetry is a painting that speaks; painting, a silent poem.’

Since Baudelaire’s time, the relationship of prose poetry to photography has been remarked on by critics, and as a specifically modern, urban, poetic form, the poem in prose grew apace with the French—and specifically Parisian—revolution in photography during the nineteenth century.

Just as Baños Gallego finds a firm limit to the extent of the poem in prose, it seems more than structurally coincidental to me that the ‘flash fiction’ of Instantanés should take the ekphrastic concetto of the prosaic ‘snapshot’ as their literary analogue: The operative conceit of the ‘cliché’—(in both its French and English senses)—aligns Robbe-Grillet’s cinematic/literary project in this collection with the poetic tradition of ‘word-painting’ that Baudelaire’s direct and acknowledged influence, Aloysius Bertrand, invokes in the subtitle to his seminal collection of urban prose poems, Gaspard de la Nuit (1842).

Indeed, “La Chambre secrète” is entirely a deceptive exercise in pseudo-cinematic ekphrasis, and I would go so far as to say that “Scène”, with its theatrical aping of both painting and film, could also be considered an exercise in same.

Robbe-Grillet differs, however, from the poet in prose in that the function of description in the very elevated rôle he gives it in his fictions is essentially constructive: ‘Je ne décris pas, je construis’—‘I do not describe,’ he says, ‘I build.’

Here is explicit, definitive negation—by the author himself, no less—of Robbe-Grillet as a potential poet in prose: If description is a key tool and technique in prose poetry, Robbe-Grillet’s denial that he describes but rather ‘builds up’ a painterly image, as he does explicitly in “La Chambre secrète”, purely out of the material of words divorced from their referents, is a significant repudiation.

In this final nouvelle of the collection, written (one imagines) explicitly for the volume, Robbe-Grillet starts down a pathway that is appreciably different from the æsthetic parcours of the fifties charted by the first five stories and developmentally intercalated with the novels we have already investigated.

Where chosisme was Robbe-Grillet’s initial approach to a potential ‘New Novel’ and ‘New Short Story’, an explicit attention paid to the physical properties of objects and structures in the world without regard to their significance to human beings, in “La Chambre secrète” Robbe-Grillet develops a technique that is ancillary to the chosiste approach in Le Voyeur (1955), more significantly developed as a major branching from that path in Dans le labyrinthe, and, I suspect, was concretized by the kinetic affordances of cinema during his collaboration with Resnais on Marienbad.

Thus, rather than fictions that seek to forestall or prevent the emergence of a human-centred narrative by focusing as hard as possible on the world of things, in “La Chambre secrète”, we assist at a miniaturized, altogether more satisfying repetition of the experiment Robbe-Grillet undertakes in Dans le labyrinthe, watching as the text appears almost to ‘generate itself’.

Language and a certain poetic concatenation of ideas (which the poem in prose is perfectly poised to navigate and negotiate in its interstitial relation to both forms) work quasi-autonomously in this final nouvelle to generate a phantasy implied in Le Voyeur and Marienbad but now made explicit for the first time in Robbe-Grillet’s œuvre.

As Ronald L. Bogue makes clear in his article “A Generative Phantasy: Robbe-Grillet’s ‘La Chambre secrète’” (1981), a run of complex puns in the French serves, like a stream of consciousness, to progressively displace ideas produced in the ekphrastic description of images along tangential lines that ‘build up’ a unitary image in the most literal sense.

Bogue proposes the intriguing possibility of a coherent interrelationship between all the disparate texts in Instantanés written by Robbe-Grillet over an eight-year period, culminating in the tableau of “La Chambre secrète”.

I think this is unlikely, but as Roy J. Caldwell, Jr. argues in “Ludic Narrative in ‘La Chambre secrète’” (1993), in this final story, the operative conceit of the snapshot that Robbe-Grillet has employed to unify the disparate texts of the volume now becomes his modus ludens with the reader.

Doubtless inspired by his recent collaboration with Resnais and his own foray into filmmaking, whereas, in the preceding nouvelles, Robbe-Grillet has presented each story as reducible to a singular image (or triptych of such images), in the final and most ambitious story, the work is ‘composed’ of a montage of snapshots: It’s almost as if the earlier stories train us in how to read the last one as Robbe-Grillet prepares to go in a new direction in the sixties, abandoning chosisme for the auto-generative sado-erotic phantasies he dishonestly imputes to the novelistic and cinematic texts themselves.

L’écriture de Robbe-Grillet est sans alibi, sans épaisseur et sans profondeur : elle reste à la surface de l’objet et la parcourt également, sans privilégier telle ou telle de ses qualités : c’est donc le contraire même d’une écriture poétique.

Robbe-Grillet’s writing is without defence, lacking thickness and depth: it remains on the object’s surface and scans it evenly, without privileging any of its qualities. It is therefore the very opposite of poetic writing.

—Roland Barthes, “Littérature objective”, in Essais critiques (1964, p. 30 [my tranlsation])

I think this is undeniably true, and when I take the authoritative negation of Barthes along with denials made by the author himself, I have to rationally accept that Alain Robbe-Grillet is definitely not a poet in prose.

Yet, when it comes to the nouvelles of Instantanés which have been such fruitful sources of investigation in my own æsthetic parcours during the last four years, still I cannot shake the irrational feeling that, despite their coldness, their objectivity, their inhumanity, these short stories are so close to prose poetry as to be virtually indistinguishable from it.

Too many of the six pieces—“La mauvaise direction”, “Le Chemin du retour”, “La Plage”, and even “La Chambre secrète”—as much as they are ‘contes’ in the strict sense, take place in such abstract spaces (‘space’ as understood here as including the temporal dimension) that, as examinations of pre-existing structures in the environment that signify, they exist more in the kind of platonic, ideal world of the Rimbaudian illumination, the Kafkaesque fable—the various fragmentary territories taken in by the prose poem.

And even in those works which I have translated to refine my understanding of Robbe-Grillet’s style as I develop a French-inflected, English equivalent for the nouvelles démeublées of The Melbourne Flâneur, the purely mechanical structures of the Parisian Métro Robbe-Grillet describes—and which I recognize from my own experience of them—seem surreally, marvellously transformed by the flâneurial regard playing over escalator, tiled corridor, and possibly malfunctioning automatic gate.

As a sub-project of The Spleen of Melbourne, the chosiste pieces of The Melbourne Flâneur are moving ahead: In addition to writing new episodes, I am now designing soundscapes for the nouvelles démeublées, cobbled together from the more than 400 documentary recordings I have taken all over Melbourne during the past four years.

And as I begin to share the finished short stories in live readings, testing the market for a documentary on contemporary Melbourne life written in the objectival style of the Nouveau Roman, I am gratified to hear that there is curiosity, interest, and even a little excitement about this project—including a small knot of interest emanating from locations in Canada and the U.S.

I am still some distance from being in a place where I feel comfortable to begin releasing episodes on a regular basis, but if you are among those interested in speeding me along, the best way you can show your support is by purchasing the audio track below.

You can name your own price at the checkout and you can also opt in to become a fan of your Melbourne Flâneur on Bandcamp, where I will begin releasing episodes in due course.

By on

Before the former Colonial Bank in Euroa, the Melbourne Flâneur confronts the image of himself in the form of a fellow refugee from modernity.

Occasionally in mes flâneries, I meet the image of myself, bemisted in the palimpsest of signs.  I turn a corner at random in that grey hedgemaze of clouds which is our labyrinthine reality and find an uncanny anachronistic icon reared high against the sky, holding itself aloof above the fog of everyday ways we stumble and blunder through.

I love the statuary that old architecture makes, these dépassé neoclassical deities mutilated by time.  I remember seeing a painting by Russell Drysdale once—Hill End, painted in 1948, the portrait of a dilapidated bâtiment abandonné.  Two storeys of wounded brickwork, a peeling plaster peau, two doors to nowhere and a wroughtiron balcon, like a jetty projecting into air, presented the proud proue of its profile to the pitiless chastisement des éléments australiens, a fulgurant hellciel of merdescent orange grimacing under the bloodmauve nuages.

Such is le flâneur, heir apparent to a vanished patrimony, un visionnaire de l’invisible.  Rimbaudian dreamer in search of his bohemia, he goes, battered bateau ivre, réfugié de la modernité, holding the holes of his tattered dignity together, this aristocrat of the gutter, as he stumbles parmi les épaves, le nez en l’air, his eye anchored in the stars.

Undulant Ulysse, I port my only arm, la rame de la caméra, à l’épaule.  Avec ça je peins l’image blême—à peine visible—de moi-même que je vois dressé dans le bleu brumeux.  And like Albert Ryder, pale cavalier and blue pilot across many a dark, moonlit bar, je vois—là-haut! là-haut!—my eternal home, au-delà des nuages qui passent, marvellous vagabonds like myself.

I remember being affected by the vermiculated detail of the end brickwork of the façade, abutting nothing, in the Drysdale, as though a whole row of these hôtels had formed un rue-mur parisien, a barricade against the barren Australian hellscape, and now only this last brick existed in that invisible wall, fort of imported European sophistication and tradition, an antique stumblingblock, a toe of that colossus, les restes melted into airy ruins.

C’est moi, la dernière pierre d’un passé dépassé.

—Dean Kyte, “Ma Bohème”

The annual mountain of administrivia associated with running a small enterprise surmounted, I warmly welcome you back, chers lecteurs, to another financial year of splenetic, prose-poetic rants, rambles and ruminations on French literature, film, and the æsthetic philosophy of flânerie in an Australian context here on The Melbourne Flâneur vlog.

And I commence to cudgel your eyes and ears anew with my Baudelairean clairvisions of Spleen and the Ideal down under by humbly submitting as Exhibit A in my literary crimes against English, seeking to rebridge la Manche and reconcile it with French, the cinepoem above, hybridgeously digital and co-written in the colourful light and movement of Kodak Super 8 film.

“Ma Bohème”, an entry in The Spleen of Melbourne project, explores the intersection of art, the shiftless rôle of the dandy-flâneur drifting amidst the ruins of modernity, and the pastoral extension of Melbourne beyond itself into country Victoria—all themes I recently shared with The Hague-based Romanian flâneuse Patricia Hurducas in an interview on her Substack blog The Flâneurs Project.

In “Walking in Melbourne with Dean Kyte”, we discuss these and other topics, including my own history with the notion of flânerie, my relationship with Charles Baudelaire, my love of Bellingen, and what, in capsule form, my æsthetic lifestyle philosophy of flânerie contains and entails.

I heartily recommend you to check out not only Patricia’s interview with me, but her interviews with other flâneurs from Amsterdam to Vilnius, from Austin to Vienna, and even from exotic Kuwait-City.

For regular readers, viewers and auditors of The Melbourne Flâneur, I think you will find The Flâneurs Project a refreshing complement to this vlog: Whereas I deal with French language and literature and Parisian culture in these pages, and my name has become linked with Baudelaire’s as a translator and interpreter of his work, Patricia speaks German and is versed in the Berlin current of flânerie represented by Walter Benjamin.

She also completed a Masters of American Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin, looking at those Amerloque authors within what I call the ‘flâneurial corpus’ of literature.

In the small world where certain men and women walk about their cities in sousveillance of the Balzacian comédie humaine, Patricia has been a post of observation in the field long tracked by my flâneurial radar.

I have been aware of her work for some years now, and as one of the leading feminine entrants into the field of psychogeographic urban exploration, I have looked seriously at her work as a potential source for an article I intend to write one day when the subject is a little less politically fraught; viz.—Is female flânerie even conceptually—let alone practically—possible?

We touched tantalizingly on this delicate issue in a recent Zoom call I had with her, and in the half-hour or so where time zones in two hemispheres happily, conveniently collided, I felt an interesting shift inside myself as I listened to Patricia relate to me her own history and experience of flânerie as a young woman from post-Communist Romania ambling about the cities of Western Europe.

I knew that Patricia would be a good source to cite and refer to when the furore around what a woman actually is dies down a little and I can diplomatically put what I still expect to be a controversial argument a little more piano piano.

So allow me, dear readers, to earnestly buttonhole you and urge you to show some support to Patricia at Substack, where you can subscribe to follow The Flâneurs Project.

And as we commence our sixth year of exploring French literature and flâneurial cinema together on The Melbourne Flâneur, batting steadily towards a century of posts on this vlog, if you want to show some support to me in my ongoing work, today is the best possible day to do it—for today is Bandcamp Friday!

Bandcamp Friday was an initiative started by BC in March 2020 to support artists on the platform during the pandemic. It’s been so successful that they have kept it going, with $120 million being given directly to artists and labels by their fans to date.

For today only, you can download the soundtrack of “Ma Bohème” in your choice of format for $A2.00 using the link below—or you can name your own price at the checkout—and Bandcamp will waive their share of the revenue and pass all the pognon directly on to your Melbourne Flâneur.