Consciousness and Its Discontents

While Darwin’s extensive studies came to troubling fruition with the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, a disturbing consciousness of contemporary life had already begun to prod personal complacency in France. Charles Baudelaire had been writing for a long time as a commentator on painting and art, as well as a brilliant but inconsistent poet. In 1857 he published his collected poems in the landmark volume called Flowers of Evil (Les Flours du Mal). Where Darwin looked at the variety of nature and was both intrigued and puzzled by the data before him, Baudelaire looked at the city and its desperate inhabitants, thieves, beggars, prostitutes and even people of style, jumbled together in the labyrinth of the modern city. And as he looked at the kaleidoscope of the external world, he also relished the shadows and furtive desires of his own consciousness. For reasons of censorship, the edition of 1857 was issued in only a few copies, and Baudelaire expanded the work giving it its more permanent form in 1861. As the title to Baudelaire’s collection suggests, the traditional concepts of beauty, form and nobility of both art and human ideals could no longer be separated by him from human error and harm. Where Darwin calls into question the traditional understandings of the creation of human nature, Baudelaire celebrates human diversity, decadence and conflict. Wordsworth essentially redefined modern poetry as the story of the poet, of himself, of the human being in search of an artistic and a moral achievement. Baudelaire also defines poetry as the story of the poet, but in this case the poet is conflicted, inspired, nasty and disquieting as an example of human nature. Baudelaire’s reorientation of art and consciousness may not have immediately had the great impact of Darwin’s theories, his influence is in some way just as enduring. If the poet is a conflicted figure of good and evil, of strengths and weaknesses, of achievement and failure, does he not in uncanny ways reflect the reader? Baudelaire first, and as we have noted, T.S. Elliot later, speaks as the psyche in crisis and addresses the reader as “Hypocrite reader, my double, my brother”.