Flip open the cover of Charles Baudelaire’s “The Flowers of Evil,” or “Les Fleurs Du Mal,” and you’ll take the first steps of a journey into the unknown. This collection of poems explores the darker sides of consciousness, while finding a redemptive path towards grace through beautiful verse.
A seminar called “Death, Desire, and the City: Baudelaire’s ‘Flowers of Evil’” will trace this path with the guidance of Isabel Sobral Campos, a scholar at The Brook Farm Institute for Critical Studies. The course will be held at the Cambridge Community Center, with four sessions extending from May 7-28. Students will read Richard Howard’s translation of the work. Knowledge of French is not a prerequisite to enroll.
Campos says that she was drawn to Baudelaire because of his troubled relationship with the modern world.
“‘Les Fleurs Du Mal’ was a big part of my dissertation,” explains Campos. “I originally got into Baudelaire because he had a connection with a certain relationship to belief that comes out of a particular experience of Christianity.” The poet navigates metaphysical voids through his writing and finds God to be an unstable figure.
Baudelaire also had a critical eye for the fractured nature of urban life. Adds Campos, “He really captures the experience of the alienation of capitalism, industry, crowds, and a sense of rupture of belief systems and grand narratives, the systems of meaning.”
Called the first Modernist and credited with founding French Symbolism, the poet approaches his subjects with a dreamlike, often imaginative lens, dwelling upon both melancholia and the power of aesthetics.
He offers us a contradictory bouquet of evil flowers, placing value on that which embodies sickness and decay, suggesting that something does not need to be morally “good” in order for it to be truthful. The book was considered to be scandalous when it was first published, and that shock value was central to Baudelaire’s concept of art, according to German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin. Campos will explore evolving interpretations of the poems by Benjamin and other later thinkers, such as Georges Bataille and Jean-Paul Sartre.
The course will closely examine several of Baudelaire’s most notable poems. One of these is his opening piece, “To the Reader,” in which he invites perusal of the collection’s lyrical, magical assessment of the world’s sin and vice, while making his audience complicit, referring to the reader as his double, or “twin.”
In another poem, “To a Passerby,” the poet describes how he sees a luminous woman walking through the streets of Paris, lamenting that he will never encounter her again and expressing the fleeting, ephemeral nature of city-life.
One of Campos’ favorites, “The Swan,” conjures the image of a swan that has escaped from its cage, only to find itself displaced among dry pavement and dust. In this way, Baudelaire represents vanished Paris, a memory of a lost, cherished land.
The collection of poems is broken into different sections, including “Spleen and the Ideal,” “Parisian Scenes,” and more. Campos remarks on the overarching themes and the structure of the incantatory masterwork.
“He has this long section called the ‘Spleen and the Ideal.’ It’s a very pessimistic book, all along,” says Campos. “It is about that existential dread and the sense of dizziness you feel when you recognize that there’s freedom and that the world is governed more by injustice and corruption, than anything angelic. The ideal here is definitely art, definitely love. Then you dive into the ‘Parisian Scenes.’ And this is where people read Baudelaire negotiating history and the modern world, making art and the beauty of life so difficult.”
Ultimately, the collection concludes with the notion that the author and his reader are like voyagers, seeking discovery and endlessly pursuing the fathoming of what is new. To Campos, the denouement of the book, which ends with a section titled “Death,” captures the idea that we don’t need to be afraid of what we don’t understand, and that mortality delivers revelations to us.
“It is this notion that you go to this unknown,” says Campos. “The unknown is inside you. The unknown is certainly death, but there is a sense that there is something after that. What that is, is not comforting… It’s not redemptive… It ends on this note that there is a continuation, whatever that is, wrapped in mystery.”
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