The Arcades Project - Operi

pIe, for themselves and their partners in guilt, so as to gain the momentary
illusiou of having escaped beyond the control of their own gentle and scrupulous
natures into the inhuman world of pleasure:' Marcel Proust, Du COte de chez
Swann, voL 1, p, 236,4"'-One might also think here of Anatole France's note on
the Baudelairean erotic, Ye t one is justified in asking whether every sadism is
structured like this one, since the concept of evil to which Proust relates it seems
to exclude awareness. Sexual intercourse between human partners (in contrast to
that between animals) includes awareness, and would thus perhaps also include a
more or less high degree of sadism, Baudelaire's reflections on the sexual act
would therefore carry more weight than this Proustian apologetic, [J89a,3]
On the subject of the ragpicker, compare the conditions in England described by
Marx in the section ""Die moderne Manufaktur," in Das Kapital «vol. 1,) ed.
Korsch , p. 438). [J89a,4]
Proust on the allegories by Giotto in Santa Maria delfArena: ""In later years I
understood that the arresting strangeness . .. of these frescoes lay in the great part
played in each ofthcm by its symbols, while the fact that these were depicted not as
symbols (for the thought symbolized was nowhere expressed) but as real things,
actually felt or materially handled, added something more precise and more literal
to their meaning, something more concrete and more striking to the lesson they
imparted. And even in the case of the poor kitchen-maid, was not our attention
ineessantly drawn to her helly by the load which filled it . . . ?" Mareel Proust, Du
CBte de chez Swann (Paris), vol. 1, pp. 121-122.'"'' [J90,1]
In Baudelaire's theory of art, the motif of shock comes into play not only as
prosodic principle. Rather, this same motif is operative wherever Baudelaire
appropriates Poe's theory concerning the importance of surprise in the work of
art.-From another perspective, the motif of shock emerges in the "scornful
laughter of hell"488 which rouses the startled allegorist from his brooding.
[J90,2]
On information, advertisements, and feuilletons : the idle:r!89 must be furnished
with sensations, the merchant with customers, and the man in the street with a
worldview. [J90,3]
Apropos of "'Reve parisien," Crepet ( Conard edition [Paris, 1930], p. 463) cites a passage from H letter to
Alphonse de Calonne: "Movement generHlly implies noise, to the extent that
PythagorHs attributed music to the moving spheres. But dream, which separates
things and hreaks them down, creates the new. "490 Crepet further cites an article
whieh Ernest Hello published in La Revue franfSaise of November 1858, under the
title ""Dn genre fantastique" , and which Baudelaire
would have seen. Hello writes: '"In the symbolic order, beauty stands in inverse
proportion to life. The naturalist thus classifies nature HS follows: animal kingdom
'"
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