Moments of happiness are without laughter; only operettas and films portray sex to the accompaniment of resounding laughter. But Baudelaire is as devoid of humor as Hölderlin. In the false society laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness....
— Horkheimer and Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception"
Without ascending to the questions of happiness, laughter (and delight, pleasure, desire) that haunt especially Adorno's aesthetics via their negative apparitions, I wish to pause only to notice that Baudelaire and Hölderlin are the only poets mentioned in the length of the landmark essay. In this way, despite its claims on radicality, the essay stands at the median of modern aesthetic philosophy, Heidegger to Deleuze, Benjamin to de Man, for which those same two poets must always be exemplary.
This is not to say that the pair are not astounding, signifcant, and particularly generative for philosophers of language and experience — of course they are. And yet, Baudelaire and Hölderlin share with Sex Pistols and Eyes Wide Shut the quality of being more interesting to read about than to read (or listen to, or watch). There is a suggestion in this about what critical accounts are less able to engage (again Adorno is exemplary), but there is also a sense that the aperture on what lyric poetry might yield is disastrously narrowed for even the most acute of philosophers — narrowed and pointed obscurely into a certain historical depth. One thinks, in corollary, of Lukács — always the absolutist case — and his inability even to figure lyric poetry tout cour as historically substantial: a true moment of comedy which inevitaby returns upon its author, in this case when Lenin, meeting Lukács, dismisses his dallying with culture entirely.
But the very unreadibility of the modern lyric (which, per Poetry magazine, is its own fault, natch, though their periodization of when things went off the tracks can't account for this particular history) remains as a powerful horizon for the most far-seeing critics interested in aesthetics and literary historiography. Franco Moretti, in the extraordinarily lucid and insightful introduction to his newly-reissued signal volume Signs Taken for Wonders, nonetheless joins the queue (in which Frederic Jameson is a notable and generous absence). After writing of tragedy's role in the age of absolutism, of the value in "a study of sexual prohibitions and certain dream symbols deriving from them" for understanding a time's literature of terror, of the relevance of the second industrial revolution to science fiction, he proposes that not all historical knowledge is necessarily pertinent to literary analysis:
The Second World War — to take a strident example — does not seem to have much usefulness for literary periodization or interpretation: this does not, obviously, make it a secondary episode or one without enormous explanatory power in other areas.
He could just as easily have said, "I have not made a reading of my century's lyric poetry" — and perhaps he does say so, insofar as the only poet he mentions twice in this introduction about literature (as opposed to the novel alone) is also the only poet he mentions once: "Baudelaire"...
Posted by jane at January 16, 2006 09:36 AM | TrackBack