Les Yeux de Paris: the act of looking and the visual in Baudelaire’s prose poetry

Bachelor Honours - Bachelor of Arts (Honours)A finely-dressed man stands at the balcony of a Paris apartment, gazing at the city. Gustave Caillebotte’s 1875 painting Jeune homme à la fenêtre captures the man from behind and the viewer cannot see his face. He invites the viewer to observe him but he defiantly hides his identity. There is another figure in the scene, framed in the window and whom the dandy’s steady line of sight appears to meet. An unidentified woman stands on the empty boulevard, wearing a fashionable draped bustle skirt in a dark colour in contrast with the pale architecture. She is unaware of her audience, but through this framing and the eye sight of the man at the window, the viewer is drawn to her. Other artworks of the era show the streets of Paris writhing with activity but here all distractions are removed; the lone man gazing at the lone woman on the street is the only interaction, the only sign of life in the work. Whereas the man is safe in his anonymity, a willing and active observer, the woman becomes an exposed art object, unwillingly gazed at and evaluated not only by the man at the window, but the artist himself and the multitude of art gallery visitors who continue to gaze upon her. The painting is an urban landscape and a portrait of two strangers, a man looking and a woman being seen. One is placed on the streets and the other above them, tucked away in his own, contained piece of the city. The piece is also an artwork about the nature of selecting, containing and framing of objects essential to the artistic process, and the inherent hierarchy of the artistic gaze which searches and judges. Several of the concepts in Caillebotte’s painting can be found in Charles Baudelaire’s collection of prose poetry, Le Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en prose, published posthumously in 1869. Both are defined by the act of searching and looking for art’s sake, relying on this hierarchy of the dominating voyeur and dominated object. The following thesis discussion is concerned with the visual processes and the narrator’s gaze in the work. It is of great significance that Baudelaire engaged in both poetry and art criticism; the two are intertwined and at times interchangeable. Given the focus on the visual register, as well as Baudelaire’s active role in the art world, the discussion of the visual processes and themes of the prose poetry alongside nineteenth-century fine artworks serves to establish new inter-disciplinary connections. The collection’s themes and innovations frequently overlap with those being made in fine art during the same time, and although a historical reading of the texts is not the focus, together they serve to contextualise the role of the artist and his gaze, the nature of the modern city and artistic poetic priorities at the time. Baudelaire’s own influential art criticism can be seen as a theoretical outline for his own creative pursuits. In Baudelaire’s prose poetry, the visual register, fine art and concepts of modernity intersect with the written word, and the collection can be seen as a literary incarnation of a visual act