In his History of Oracles, one of the major texts of the early Enlightenment, Bernard de Fontenelle proposed applyng a sort of Efficient Markets thesis to God:
“For I conceive that God only speaks to man to supplement the weakness of their knowledge, which is not sufficient for their needs, and that everything that he doesn’t say is of such a kind that they can learn it themselves or it is not necessary that they know it. Thus, if the oracles were given by evil demons, God would have taught us this in order to stop us from believing that it was God himself doing this, and that there was something divine in false religions.”
Like the efficient market thesis, which claims that all current information is reflected in the prices of financial commodities, God, in Fontenelle’s view, only gives out information to humans if they need it – having endowed them with reason for all their other information needs. Efficiency is the most secular of concepts, for it quickly purges any disturbance in the community of discourse, whether that is God or evil demons.
But if we upset the whole notion of efficiency, or decide that efficiency is not co-extensive with rationality, but that the latter must encompass our passions, then the oracles return. They return as poetry.
But not just the word itself – the great poets in their lives seem surrounded by a cloud of meanings and symbols that they cannot escape.
Or so I have been thinking, thinking about Baudelaire. In 1864 Baudelaire, seriously ill with the syphilis that was already effecting him, made a trip to Belgium to make money as a lecturer, of all things. We have the testimony of a Belgian writer, Camille Lemmonier, about Baudelaire’s conference about Theophile Gautier, who he called, with some depth of irony that may not even have been irony, “my master”.
The lecture was to be given to the Cercle Litteraire et artistique.
“Le Cercle littéraire et artistique occupied the gothic palace across from the Hôtel de Ville. Its rude and historic architecture, since renovated as a jewel of great price, a shrine exquisitely ornamented, sheltered at the time some businesses selling grain and others selling birds. All the ground floor and the basements had been given to them. This was one of the activities of the Grand Place. But the stage floor was reserved for the Cercle. One climbed onto the porch, then went up a steep staircase. A door opened, which was that of the conference room. It was there that Baudelaire was supposed to speak. »
Already, the idea that Baudelaire was giving a talk on Gautier in a run down building, the ground floor of which was devoted to grains and the wares of bird catchers – Baudelaire, some of whose greatest poems – The Albatross, The Swan – made exactly that correspondence between the poet and the captured bird – is too too suggestive. Lemmonier, a young writer, was late for the conference. He thought that everybody would be there, all the writers of Brussels, all the fans of poetry.
“I glided into the room. It is still, after all these years, a subject of stupor for me, the solitude of that great vessel where I feared to be able to find a place and which, even up to the shadows of the rear of the room, showed lines of unoccupied benches. Baudelaire spoke, that evening, to twenty auditors…”
He spoke for some time, fulfilling his contract, without a doubt.
“At the end of an hour, the poverty of the audience became still more rarified, who judged that the vacuum around the magician of the Word could be emptied out even more. There only remained two benches – which were lightened in their turn. Some backs slumped with sleepiness and incomprehension. Perhaps those who remained were moved by charity. Perhaps they remained like a passerby who accompanies a solitary coffin into a cemetery. Perhaps, as well, they were the doormen and the officials of the building, who were constrained to remain at their posts by a ceremonial duty.”
Where Baudelaire went became Baudelairian – it was his curse, his mystique, his afterlife. Benjamin references Lemonnier’s essay a number of times in the Passages and reads into it the idea that the audience couldn’t believe that Baudelaire was heaping praise on Gautier, thinking that he would reveal, in the end, by some sarcasm, the hoax. I am not sure about this reading. I wonder if the audience even knew who Baudelaire was – although the trial of Fleurs de Mal for obscenity might have made his name known even in Brussels. Lemonnier was young and hip: he knew of both Baudelaire and Gautier. But the whole scene in the floor above the birdcatchers, in the dark and damp building, ends as a sort of foreshadowing of Kafka’s The Trial.
« The poet didn’t seem to notice the desertion that left him speaking alone between high, dimly illuminated walls. A last word swelled out like a yell : I salute Théophile Gautier, my maître, the great poet of the century.” And his rigid figure bowed forward: he made three bows as though before a real audience. Rapidly a door closed. Then the night guardian took away the lamp. I was the last to remain as the night closed in, the night where, without echo, the voice of this father of the Church of literature had risen up and then been snuffed out.”
That’s a great ending. One almost expects Baudelaire, the morning after, to be taken by two guards out to a quarry in the Brussels suburbs. There he’d be stripped of his suit, stretched out on the ground, and while one of the guards held him down, the other would thrust a butcher knife deep in his heart and turn it there thrice, while Baudelaire would say “like a dog”, as though the shame of it would outlive him.
