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Poe’s Memory
Adam R. Rosenthal
MLN, Volume 130, Number 4, September 2015 (French Issue), pp. 863-878
(Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2015.0061
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/610609
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]Poe’s Memory
❦
Adam R. Rosenthal
Et aux séductions d’une beauté singulière il
joignait une puissance de mémoire poétique
merveilleuse, avec la faculté précoce
d’improviser des contes.
“Edgar Allan Poe, sa
vie et ses ouvrages” (2: 258)1
Poe, éprouvant peut-être le sinistre
pressentiment d’une fin subite, avait désigné
MM. Griswold et Willis pour mettre ses
œuvres en ordre, écrire sa vie, et restaurer sa
mémoire. Ce pédagogue-vampire a diffamé
longuement son ami dans un énorme article
plat et haineux, juste en tête de l’édition
posthume de ses œuvres. –Il n’existe donc
pas en Amérique d’ordonnance qui interdise
aux chiens l’entrée des cimetières?
“Edgar Poe, sa
vie et ses œuvres” (2: 298)
1
Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) 2: 258. Henceforth
references to the Pléiade edition will be given parenthetically in the text by the volume
and page number.
MLN 130 (2015): 863–878 © 2016 by Johns Hopkins University Press864 Adam R. Rosenthal
I.
In 1852 Baudelaire published his first major study of Poe in the Revue
de Paris, under the title, “Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et ses ouvrages.”2
Although by all accounts Baudelaire’s knowledge of Poe was extremely
limited at this time, his devotion to the man and his work is here already
apparent.3 Baudelaire lauds Poe’s genius for recounting stories and
dedicates nearly a third of “Edgar Allan Poe” to the recapitulation of
Poe’s tales. W. T. Bandy has shown that to make up for the lacunae
in his knowledge of Poe’s œuvre, Baudelaire relied heavily upon two
published works, both supplied to him by an American lawyer living
in Paris. These two texts would form the factual—and to some extent
also critical—basis of the 1852 “Edgar Allan Poe.” They consisted
of an obituary by John Reuben Thompson, first published in 1849,
and a longer review of Poe’s life and works by John Moncure Daniel,
published in 1850.4 Despite these borrowings, “Edgar Allan Poe” is
generally recognized to be an integral piece of Baudelaire’s critical
work; indeed, one that betrays in Baudelaire an already keen insight
into Poe’s literary talent.
When, however, in 1856 it came time to publish Histoires extraordi-
naires (the first collected book volume of Baudelaire’s Poe transla-
tions5) and with it an introduction to Poe’s life and work, Baudelaire
declined to republish his earlier piece—although he had initially
Henceforth to be referred to as “Edgar Allan Poe.”
2
To date Baudelaire had translated “Mesmeric Revelation” (July, 1848), although by
3
the end of 1852 translations of “Berenice” (April, 1852), “The Pit and the Pendulum,”
(October, 1852), and “Philosophy of Furniture” (October 1852) had also appeared.
According to W. T. Bandy, Baudelaire was familiar only with a few of Poe’s stories, but
with none of his poetry, nor any of his longer prose works by the time “Edgar Allan
Poe” was published in March of 1852. W. T. Bandy, Edgar Allan Poe: sa vie et ses ouvrages
(Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1973) xxxiii.
4
John Reuben Thompson, “The Late Edgar Allan Poe,” Southern Literary Messenger
(November 1849): 694-97. John Moncure Daniel, “Edgar Allan Poe,” Southern Literary
Messenger (March 1850): 172-87. Daniel’s piece, written as a review of N. P. Willis, J. R.
Lowell, and R. W. Griswold’s posthumous edition of Poe’s works, The Works of the Late
Edgar Allan Poe, with Notices of his Life and Genius (New York: J.S. Redfield, 1850), is the
more heavily drawn on of the two works. On numerous occasions Baudelaire translated
directly from Daniel’s piece in his own. For a full account of his borrowings and the
history of the work’s composition, see W. T. Bandy’s edited edition, Edgar Allan Poe:
sa vie et ses ouvrages. For a helpful collection of all the corresponding materials and
Baudelaire’s sources—albeit in French—see Claude Richard ed., Edgar Allan Poe (Paris:
Editions de l’Herne, 1974).
5
Baudelaire’s Poe translations had been collected and published as “Histoires ex-
traordinaires” in Le Pays from July 1854 to April 1855, but it was not until the 1856
publishing of Histoires extraordinaires by Michel Lévy frères that they were consolidated
in book form.M LN 865
intended to do so. And while the 1856 introduction, “Edgar Poe, sa
vie et ses œuvres,”6 still draws heavily on the former essay, Baudelaire
explains in a letter from July 10, 1855 to Emile-François Templier that
he finds the 1852 text “plus qu’insuffisante,” and that he intends to
undertake major revisions. These revisions are, in retrospect, fairly
easy to account for.7 Baudelaire had been exposed to so much more
of Poe’s work in the four years following the first essay’s publication
that it would have been more surprising if his views hadn’t evolved.
In terms of content, the subtraction of the lengthy summaries that
compose so much of the first essay and the addition to the second essay
of various defensive passages shielding Poe against the aggressions of
his American critics account for the better part of Baudelaire’s major
changes. It is easy to imagine that, as to the former omissions, the
growing popularity of Poe and the placement of the second essay as
an introduction to a volume of his works had obviated the need for
synopsis. And as to the latter passages, it seems probable, if not likely,
that the persistently defamatory tone of early American criticism had
necessitated—at least as far as Baudelaire was concerned—additional
defenses on Poe’s behalf.8 If, however, these differences are relatively
easy to account for, still others prove more difficult.
One of these more troubling differences is that of the texts’ inscrip-
tions of Poe’s memory. Surprisingly, and in spite of their rather stark
divide on this point, this feature has all but been neglected by the
numerous studies that have been dedicated to the two works.9 The
oversight is all the more remarkable when one considers that their
6
Henceforth to be referred to as “Edgar Poe.”
7
As concerns the need for revisions Baudelaire himself explains in the same letter
that, “D’abord il y a des erreurs matérielles, et d’ailleurs je sais maintenant beaucoup
de documents nouveaux,” Baudelaire, Correspondance (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) 2: 317-18.
8
To this end, see Baudelaire’s letter to Sainte-Beuve on March 26, 1856, concerning
the relation of his preface to Histoires extraordinaires (“Edgar Poe”) to that of Nouvelles
histoires extraordinaires (“Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe”): “La première préface, que
vous avez vue et dans laquelle j’ai essayé d’enfermer une vive protestation contre
l’américanisme, est à peu près complète au point de vue biographique,” Baudelaire,
Correspondance (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) 1: 344-45.
9
Although W. T. Bandy’s work on Baudelaire’s Poe essays is in most other respects
exhaustive, he makes no mention of their divergence concerning the portrayal of
Poe’s memory. Pichois, in his commentary, also neglects the issue, as does Salines
in her treatment of the two texts in Alchemy and Amalgam: Translation in the Words of
Charles Baudelaire (NY: Rodopi, 2004). The majority of readers take “Edgar Poe” as a
mere rewriting or revision of “Edgar Allan Poe,” which also explains why one rarely
finds both texts collected in the same volume in English translation. Two exceptions
to this rule are: Joan F. Mele, Fatal Destinies: The Edgar Allan Poe Essays (Woodhaven,
NY: Cross Country Press, 1981), and Lois and Francis E. Hyslop, Jr., Baudelaire on Poe
(State College, PA: Bald Eagle Press, 1952).866 Adam R. Rosenthal
divergence on this point constitutes one of the more powerful and
philosophically interesting articulations of either essay. Of course, crit-
ics have not completely missed the intriguing mnemonic commentary
contained in the essays,10 but both discussions of memory in Baudelaire
and discussions of Baudelaire’s work on Poe have failed to register
the mnemonic gap between the two texts. In fact, they have failed
to register—before it even becomes a matter of a gap—the central
role that memory plays in both, and the manner in which each text
develops, expands, and even distorts the sense of mémoire well beyond
the restricted sense of a faculty of the mind. Baudelaire’s Poe texts
force us to consider such an expansion of sense, and it behooves us,
in reading them, to ask what broader implications they hold for any
notion of memor- or memorial- ization.
Despite the differences in how Poe’s memory is characterized in
each essay, then, what remains consistent is an established continuity
between the psychic or intellectual capacity of his memory, and the
character of the written, inscribed or historical memory of Poe. Each
text, in characterizing, parodying, and to some extent mythologizing
Poe’s memory, brings into relief this elemental feature of the man
and his work. And they thereby concretize an almost metonymical
continuity between, on the one hand, the memory of the man, the
memory that Poe left behind, or what we might otherwise call Poe’s
legacy, and on the other hand, the memory employed by him, Poe’s
memory, his power or faculty of memory or memorization.
What is here called “Poe’s memory,” then, refers to something
never named as such in either of Baudelaire’s essays, but rather that
towards which both texts initiate us to think. It indicates, through
the productive slippage of its double genitive, a concept of memory
broad enough to encompass both the faculty and the remainder.
For in both of Baudelaire’s texts the two contrasting senses of Poe’s
memory are presented and are rendered inextricable, as though the
psychological or cognitive faculty of memory or recollection were
not merely another sense of mémoire, opposed or in distinction to the
archival notion of an inscribed trace of the departed (mémoire), but
necessarily bound to the latter, indicative and even prescriptive of it.
The possibility of the archive is, in other words, made to stand and
fall with the memory of the man.
10
See, in this respect, Elissa Marder’s “Women Tell Time,” for a provocative discussion
of memory in “Edgar Poe.” Elissa Marder, Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of
Modernity (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001) 49-51.M LN 867
Although there may not appear to be anything so astounding in the
supposition that the capacity for recollection in the mind (anamnesis)
might relate to the substance or substrate upon which a memory is
inscribed, remembered, forgotten, or half-effaced in the world or in a
text (hypomnesis), here the strength of their binding cannot be taken
for granted, if only because the fact of their binding seems to take
precedence over all other considerations in the essays. Nor, for that
matter, is it possible to determine whether text is taken as a figure for
mind, or mind as a figure for text. In each essay there is no separa-
tion between what befalls faculty and inscription, mind and text, or
cognition and history, such that one might almost be convinced in
reading the two works that rather than two attempts by Baudelaire to
eulogize a man named “Poe,” Baudelaire’s Poe texts actually served
as theoretical explorations of a mnemonic structure. What adds some
degree of credence to the latter interpretation is that the two essays
do not merely repeat the same mnemonic refrain, but differ axially,
as though the first presented the “original” or prelapsarian model of
a technically perfect mémoire—and archive—and the latter the “fallen,”
or postlapsarian, repetition of the first model.
The two senses of memory11 (as cognition and history, faculty and
archive, or anamnesis and hypomnesis) are thus inextricable in both
texts, but whereas in “Edgar Allan Poe” perfect recall reflects a per-
fectly preserved archive, in “Edgar Poe” the necessity for a mnemonic
supplement coincides with the slow erosion of the written, and a desa-
cralization of the borders protecting the dead.12 This allows at least
for the preliminary observation that “mémoire”—and above all Poe’s
mémoire—far from a stable or autonomous faculty, or even simply a better
and worst faculty, in these texts bears the weight of the concept of the
sign itself. For (subjective) memory and textual inscription are here
coextensive. And if an absolute presence of the subject to itself seems
to correspond to the character of inscription and writing employed
in “Edgar Allan Poe,” an unreliable and manipulable character of the
written, conversely, will appear to contaminate that very subject in
11
This is not to say that there are only two senses of memory, but rather addresses
the pervasiveness of the two meanings of mémoire here named. For a genealogy of this
notion of memory and a discussion of some alternatives, see Jean-Pierre Vernant’s “Mythic
Aspects of Memory.” J.-P. Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks (NY: Zone, 2006).
12
The notion of “perfect” recall or “perfect” memory is highly problematic. It here
refers to the conceit, betrayed by “Edgar Allan Poe,” in a complete receptivity without
limits. Among other difficulties with this notion is that it assumes that what is remembe-
red was itself originally fully present, and thus susceptible to a form of absolute recovery
or retention. It is precisely this assumption that “Edgar Poe” will draw into question.868 Adam R. Rosenthal
“Edgar Poe.”13 Moreover, if there is a gap between the expressions of
memory in each text it is because their subjects—“Edgar Allan Poe”
and “Edgar Poe” respectively—ultimately refer less to the external
body of a person, than they do concepts of an as yet undetermined
mnemonic structure. To that end, the instability of that which goes
by the name “memory” indicates that memory itself here names less
a faculty of the mind, than a certain play of the signifier—we could
also say trace—as it becomes fixed in Baudelaire’s texts.
II. Edgar Allan Poe
The articulation of “memory” in “Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et ses
ouvrages,” although centering on the figure of Poe, also penetrates
through the selection and representation by Baudelaire of Poe’s tales.
Thus Poe’s power of memory empowers his writing, where one also
finds represented mnemonic capacities in line with Poe’s own. If the
central problem of both “Edgar Allan Poe” and “Edgar Poe” is the
disparity between the virtuosity of Poe’s talent and the recidivism of
his drinking, “Edgar Allan Poe” is content to leave these apart—like
two systems operating in the same body, but whose activities never
coincide, and as a result neither aid nor detract from one another.
The concept of memory that undergirds Poe’s brilliance in “Edgar
Allan Poe” and that he possesses as both his greatest blessing and curse
is that of a too powerful, or infallible, receptivity. But if Poe’s recall
verges on the absolute—or, at the very least, the super-human—so
too does the character of inscription generally, which is represented
as being equally infallible. The memory of the subject implies the
subject’s memory, hence what we might call “psychic inscription,”
implies textual—or graphic—inscription. It is precisely the general-
ity of this mnemonic mark, then, that must be attended to in “Edgar
Allan Poe,” registered as it is on numerous levels of the text, beginning
with the opening reflections on literary guignon and ending with the
closing remarks on the author’s epitaph. The nature of memory, or
perhaps we could say, its automaticity, is perhaps best summarized by
Baudelaire’s characterization of Egaeus from “Berenice”:
Voilà les dents installées dans la tête de l’homme. Deux jours et une nuit,
il reste cloué à la même place, avec des dents flottantes autour de lui. Les
13
One could also, following Derrida, call this the “fatherless” character of writing,
insofar as it cannot speak for itself, and lacks the authority of the logos. On the problem
of writing as “fatherless” and the Platonic division between anamnesis and hypomnesis,
see Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981).M LN 869
dents sont daguerréotypées dans son cerveau, longues, étroites, comme des dents
de cheval mort; pas une tache, pas une crénelure, pas une pointe ne lui a
échappé. (2: 281; my emphasis)
Describing the mortifying moment in which Berenice ceases to exist
for her cousin as a familial counterpart—as she is displaced by the
idée fixe of her teeth—Baudelaire himself fixates on the nature of her
reinscription in Egaeus’ mind. The gap between the metaphorical
and literal is here troubled as Egaeus’ brain [cerveau] functions as a
photographic black box. Is it merely like a camera, or does it become
one? Although Berenice has long since left the scene, it is not only
Egaeus’ mind, but also his person, or body, that remains fixed in place,
as though for the extended duration of an exposure. Whatever the
precise status of these figures in Baudelaire’s account, memory here
has become subjected to the technical precision and specifications
of daguerreotype.
“Berenice,” of course, was first published in 1835, in the Southern
Literary Messenger, while Daguerre’s first successful experiments in
Paris only took place in 1838 or 1839. The anachronistic character
of Baudelaire’s reading, then, only accentuates further the formative
influence of this mnemonic trope on “Edgar Allan Poe.” For, as we
shall see, memory—in both senses—comes to operate in this text just
as Egaeus does: as though through the lens of a photographic apparatus,
fixed steadfast in place, and attentive without judgment or bias.14 But
also dead, to the precise extent that it remains resistant to change or
the vagaries of time.
III.
Baudelaire opens “Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et ses ouvrages” with a
now famous proclamation: “Il y a des destinées fatales; il existe dans
la littérature de chaque pays des hommes qui portent le mot guignon
14
Certainly, we must also credit Baudelaire for his reading of “Berenice.” For if its
violence consists in superimposing over Egaeus’ condition a technology that will not
yet have been invented at the time of its writing, Baudelaire’s misreading will be no
less productive for its anachronism. The passage from the already-dead bearing of
Berenice’s teeth, their liminality as non-living supplement of the living, to Egaeus’
fetishistic materialism, his ability to abstract absolutely from a complex whole to a
single point, certainly heralds the mortal shock of photography as Benjamin and then
Barthes will describe it. If anything, Baudelaire’s exposure of “Berenice” renders visible
something uncannily photographic already at work in Poe’s tale. As Barthes explains,
“it is frequently the function of the great books to achieve in advance what technology
will merely put into execution.” Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” The Eiffel Tower
and Other Mythologies (NY: Hill and Wang, 1979) 8.870 Adam R. Rosenthal
écrit en caractères mystérieux dans les plis sinueux de leurs fronts”
(2: 249). Predestination, a longtime preoccupation for Baudelaire and
a topic that recurs in his “Conseils aux jeunes littérateurs” (1846) as
well as in “Morale du joujou” (1853) is here at its most damning. No
longer an alibi, as in “Conseils,” nor a partially determinative factor, as
it will be in “Morale,” destiny here proves ineluctable, and this neces-
sity, we could say, is part and parcel of the ineffaceable character of
the sign that will also distinguish memory. Poe, like Hoffmann and
Balzac before him, is condemned by his genius, and this sentence,
while mysterious, is nevertheless quite legibly inscribed in characters
on the forehead.
If “guignon” is a characteristic of a type of literary man, and one
that traverses both national borders and linguistic frontiers, Poe’s
character is, following Baudelaire, more singular still. For, with the
indelible inscription on his forehead is paired a superlative membrane
in the head: this substrate with an uncanny capacity for retaining in
inscription what comes to pass—memory, in short. The first hint of his
superior ability comes forth not in Baudelaire’s observations, exactly,
but in a citation of Poe’s “biographical” narrative “William Wilson.”
Explaining the troubled early life of Poe—who, according to Baude-
laire, was made an orphan by the death of his thespian parents, adopted
by the wealthy Richmond businessman Mr. Allan, and then left by him
at a British boarding school during a trip to Europe—Baudelaire culls
from Poe’s tale testimony of this life at the Stoke-Newington school.
“Tous les contes d’Edgar Poe,” Baudelaire explains, “sont pour ainsi
dire biographiques” (2: 254).15 Inserting then the opening passages
of Poe’s narrative, Baudelaire relates through that text’s narrator the
story of his prodigious childhood memory. Unlike the memory of
most, the narrator explains, as a child his was already of adult power:
Encore faut-il croire que mon premier développement mental eut quelque
chose de peu commun. En général, les événements de la première existence
laissent rarement sur l’humanité arrivée à l’âge mûr une impression bien
définie. Tout est ombre grise, tremblotant et irrégulier souvenir, fouillis
confus de plaisirs et de peines fantasmagoriques. Chez moi, il n’en fut point
ainsi. Il faut que j’aie senti dans mon enfance avec l’énergie d’un homme
ce que je trouve maintenant estampillé sur ma mémoire en lignes aussi
15
Although the above observation and the text of “William Wilson” are taken directly
from Daniel’s essay, “Edgar Allan Poe,” (174) their inclusion in Baudelaire’s essay remains
significant insofar as they come to participate in a system of articulations surrounding
the nature of Poe’s memory. Again, this was a system of articulations that Baudelaire
would go to the effort of removing from “Edgar Poe,” and which thus bore at least
enough significance to later be worthy of excluding.M LN 871 vivantes, aussi profondes et aussi durables que les exergues des médailles carthaginoises. (2: 257) These childhood experiences are stamped in the memory like exergues on Carthaginian medals. In both cases, and despite long gaps of time, the value and identity of the pieces remain clear. We might say that the exergue itself—as the model for memory—is only the reverse side of a coin, whose obverse is the equally indelible guignon, written in the folds of the forehead, and whose sign also names a kind of debt. Both inscriptions, resistant to the vagaries of time, ensure that sooner or later all such obligations will be fulfilled, and enforce a certain correspondence between inscription and value, or subject and history. When in 1822 the young Poe returns home to Richmond, the text of “Edgar Allan Poe” continues, to his remarkable physical agility and litheness was added a power of “poetic memory”: Il était dès lors un jeune homme très remarquable par son agilité physique, ses tours de souplesse, et aux séductions d’une beauté singulière il joignait une puissance de mémoire poétique merveilleuse, avec la faculté précoce d’improviser des contes. (2: 258) Elegance of the body is here matched with that of the mind. If a “marvelous poetic memory” is to be understood as one’s capacity for retaining and or recalling verse, this is already paired with the untimely [précoce] faculty for improvisation.16 But no sooner does this become manifest than does Poe’s fatal penchant for dissipation, which marks the beginning and the end of his time at the University of Virginia and ultimately engenders the end of his life as well. To understand Poe’s temperament and to come to terms with his frenetic alcohol- ism, Baudelaire contends that Poe drank in order to forget. Out of place in America and isolated among his peers, “[Poe] traversait la vie comme un Sahara, et changeait de place comme un Arabe.” Baudelaire goes on: Poe fut presque toujours seul, de plus, l’effroyable contention de son cer- veau et l’âpreté de son travail devaient lui faire trouver une volupté d’oubli dans le vin et les liqueurs. Il tirait un soulagement de ce qui fait une fatigue pour les autres. Enfin, rancunes littéraires, vertiges de l’infini, douleurs de ménage, insultes de la misère, Poe fuyait tout dans le noir de l’ivresse, comme dans le noir de la tombe; car il ne buvait pas en gourmand, mais en barbare; à peine l’alcool avait-il touché ses lèvres qu’il allait se planter au comptoir, et il buvait coup sur coup jusqu’à ce que son bon Ange fût noyé, et ses facultés anéanties. (2: 271) 16 In Daniel’s text this capacity is described as “his musical recitations of verse” (175).
872 Adam R. Rosenthal To give pause to those faculties that made him great, to annihilate his memory and to embrace, for a while, the silence of the tomb, for these reasons Poe drank. Not as a gourmand, but as a “savage.” To regress, in other words. And if he drank in order not to work, such interruptions nevertheless did not disrupt his poetic production: Il est un fait prodigieux, mais qui est attesté par toutes les personnes qui l’ont connu, c’est que ni la pureté, le fini de son style, ni la netteté de sa pensée, ni son ardeur au travail et à des recherches difficiles ne furent altérés par sa terrible habitude. La confection de la plupart de ses bons morceaux a précédé ou suivi une de ses crises. (2: 271) Crises his binges may have been, but ones which were reserved for the times preceding or proceding the labor of writing. Thus goes the final word on insobriety in “Edgar Allan Poe.” Drinking to still an overactive memory and marked by an ineffaceable “guignon,” Poe was condemned by his genius. Fittingly, Baudelaire concludes his piece by proposing an epitaph for Poe, thereby closing “Edgar Allan Poe” with the final word on his life: “On pourrait écrire sur son tombeau . . . ” Baudelaire begins, and then exhorts those who, like Poe, sought infinity and for this had to pay the price of a relief afforded only by debauchery. “Pray for him,” Baudelaire goes on, and “Poe’s purified being [son être corporel purifié] . . . will intercede for you” (2: 288). IV. Edgar Poe If a certain incontrovertible confidence in the character of the mark characterizes inscription in “Edgar Allan Poe,” from that in Poe’s head to that on or of Poe, in the form of his curse and then epitaph, something will have irrevocably changed for “Edgar Poe.” Like the former, “Edgar Poe” will also put forth a single image of the conditions inhabiting psychic memory and textual memory, but if this former image can be said to be daguerréotypé, that put forth by the latter is of a more retrograde sort. No longer quite so merveilleux, memory in “Edgar Poe” will at once suffer the punishments of time, and require a supplement to secure its operations. Like “Edgar Allan Poe,” “Edgar Poe” begins with the question of destiny: Existe-t-il donc une Providence diabolique qui prépare le malheur dès le berceau,—qui jette avec préméditation des natures spirituelles et angéliques dans des milieux hostiles, comme des martyrs dans les cirques? Y a-t-il donc des âmes sacrées, vouées à l’autel, condamnées à marcher à la mort et à la gloire à travers leurs propres ruines? (2: 296-97)
M LN 873
Employing many of the same phrases he had in the first text, Baudelaire
once again raises the question of predestination. Nor does his conclu-
sion here differ. Poe was condemned by a “rare et singulier tatouage:
Pas de chance!” (2: 296). But whereas an unhampered confidence in
the first essay appeared to reassure that these questions were merely
rhetorical, here a certain contingency of the mark will sow new seeds
of interrogatory doubt.
Of all people, it is Poe himself who first poses the question of mémoire
in Baudelaire’s “Edgar Poe.” Foreseeing that his life might soon come
to an end, Baudelaire recounts, Poe allocated to Griswold and Willis
the following posthumous tasks: “[M]ettre ses œuvres en ordre, écrire
sa vie, et restaurer sa mémoire” (2: 298). All that follows might be
summarized under the heading of restoring, or saving, memory. What
does it mean to save memory? To rescue memory—from itself. If
mémoire needs saving, it is because it has already been lost. And this
loss, in “Edgar Poe,” is not merely a contingent one, but constitutive
of memory itself, the repercussions of which will be seen in all facets
of Baudelaire’s text. If Baudelaire ended “Edgar Allan Poe” on a
testamentary note, sealing his own text and that of Poe’s life in the
same gesture, “Edgar Poe” confronts an incontrovertible afterlife of
Poe that will find its way back into Poe’s life itself—if “life itself” there
still is. To put this another way, a certain body of Poe will remain, or
be left over, in “Edgar Poe,” whose vestigial character troubles the
possibility of ever closing off—or even condemning—Poe’s life in an
account. Hence Baudelaire’s new emphasis on Poe’s “cadavre”:
Quelques-uns ont osé davantage, et, unissant l’inintelligence la plus lourde
de son génie à la férocité de l’hypocrisie bourgeoise, l’ont insulté à l’envi;
et, après sa soudaine disparition, ils ont rudement morigéné ce cadavre
. . . ” (2: 298)
Not having been raised to the summit of an “être corporel purifié,”
Poe here remains as a corpse, and this corpse necessarily opens his
memory to a certain possibility of sacrilege and, in turn, saving. Memory
can—and must—be rewritten, because the grave itself, embodied, is
no longer safe:17
Ce pédagogue-vampire [Griswold] a diffamé longuement son ami dans un
énorme article, plat et haineux, juste en tête de l’édition posthume de ses
17
It is no longer safe, nor a safe. On the motif of the safe and the tomb or crypt,
see Derrida’s preface to Abraham and Torok’s Le Verbier de l’homme aux loups, entitled
“Fors.” Nicolas Abraham; Maria Torok; Jacques Derrida, Le Verbier de l’homme aux loups:
cryptonymie (Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1976).874 Adam R. Rosenthal
œuvres. —Il n’existe donc pas en Amérique d’ordonnance qui interdise
aux chiens l’entrée des cimetières? (2: 298)
The language and imagery of the graveyard, of decay and of decom-
position, are here much more prominent than they were in the
former text. In many ways this is just what makes “Edgar Poe” more
recognizably Baudelairean than “Edgar Allan Poe.” The concern with
what happens after death, with the life in death, with the death of death,
in other words, is a marked feature of the Fleurs du mal, which shares
with “Edgar Poe” its macabre mentality. Take, for example, the final
stanzas of “Le Vampire”:
Hélas! le poison et le glaive
M’ont pris en dédain et m’ont dit:
“Tu n’es pas digne qu’on t’enlève
À ton esclavage maudit,
Imbécile!—de son empire
Si nos efforts te délivraient,
Tes baisers ressusciteraient
Le cadavre de ton vampire!” (lines 17-24)
If the dead are always only one step away from revival it is because
the limit between life and death is no longer assured: a situation that
affects the poet no less than his amours défunts. In the realm of memory
this means that what one saves is already a corpse, and that one res-
cues this body only by disturbing, or unearthing it from its sepulchral
sleep. No memory, therefore, without some violence, nor without
the possibility of further dismemberment. One can see similar motifs
playing out in “Le Squelette laboureur” and “Remords posthume.”
In the latter poem the desecration of the body in death is the point
of departure. Moreover, it is just this knowledge of death: of a life
haunted by death, and a death haunted by life, that the poem takes
as the central difference between masculine—or poetic—knowledge,
and feminine stupidity:18
Lorsque tu dormiras, ma belle ténébreuse,
Au fond d’un monument construit en marbre noir,
Et lorsque tu n’auras pour alcôve et manoir
Qu’un caveau pluvieux et qu’une fosse creuse;
18
See also “Une Charogne,” and “Spleen II” for other explorations of this same motif
in the Fleurs du mal.M LN 875
Quand la pierre, opprimant ta poitrine peureuse
Et tes flancs qu’assouplit un charmant nonchaloir,
Empêchera ton cœur de battre et de vouloir,
Et tes pieds de courir leur course aventureuse,
Le tombeau, confident de mon rêve infini
(Car le tombeau toujours comprendra le poète),
Durant ces grandes nuits d’où le somme est banni,
Te dira: “Que vous sert, courtisane imparfaite,
De n’avoir pas connu ce que pleurent les morts?”
—Et le ver rongera ta peau comme un remords.
Set uncharacteristically in the future tense, “Remords posthume”
projects the present unrest of the poet into the afterlife of his lover.
As though positing a knowledge beyond knowledge, or a refrain set to
repeat beyond the limits of the poem, the final, haunting line of the
last tercet serves at once to link life with death and to name the non-
closure of the latter. If the worm can bite like remorse, it is because,
ultimately, the decomposition of the body and the atrophying of the
psyche are not independent activities. At the same time, the dash that
renders all this an afterthought heralds a movement without end, for
which “saving” (in the absolute sense) is at once what is most needed,
and most excluded.
All this to say that the implications of the motifs of the corpse, of
the desecration of the body and the non-closure of death, are far-
reaching for Baudelaire’s conceptions of poetry, history and even
sexual difference. To return to the argument of “Edgar Poe,” how-
ever, and the implications of all this for the portrayal of memory in
that text, Griswold is accused, by analogy, of vandalizing Poe’s grave.
That “pedagogue vampire,” having defamed Poe in an article set to
be placed at the head of his posthumous works, thereby de-faces the
man whose memory he is supposed to save.19 Thus, from the corporeal
bearing of his body to the face of his works to the man himself and
his memory, no element is left untouched by this corrupting force.
By placing his hateful article at the head [juste en tête] of Poe’s post-
humous works Griswold gives new face to the man while defacing a
tombstone that, we may observe, was only itself a first elaborate act
of prosopopoeia. Already a restoration, this tombstone is constructed
19
The article referred to is the “Memoire of the Author,” written by Griswold and
published at the beginning of his posthumous edition of Poe’s works. Rufus Griswold,
The Literati: Some Honest Opinions about Autorial Merits and Demerits, with Occasional Words of
Personality. Together with Marginalia, Suggestions, and Essays (New York: J.S. Redfield, 1850).876 Adam R. Rosenthal on the possibility of its desecration and is therefore powerless against Griswold’s violence. While, then, the memory—or legacy—of Poe plays a prominent role in “Edgar Poe” from the very beginning of that text, the ques- tion of Poe’s faculty of memory is almost entirely absent. With the removal of the citations of “William Wilson” and the mention of Poe’s “mémoire poétique merveilleuse” cut from the text, the topic of Poe’s faculty does not even appear in “Edgar Poe” until its second to last section, or part three. No longer something to be flaunted, the topic of Poe’s prodigious memory arises only with that of his alcoholism: “De cette ivrognerie,” Baudelaire begins, “célébrée et reprochée avec une insistance qui pourrait donner à croire que tous les écrivains des États-Unis, excepté Poe, sont des anges de sobriété,—il faut cependant en parler” (2: 313-14). Addressing the topic of Poe’s drunkenness, then, Baudelaire begins by restating the refrain of his earlier text: “[I]l est naturel,” he explains, “de supposer que ce poète jeté tout enfant dans les hasards de la vie libre, le cerveau cerclé par un tra- vail âpre et continu, ait cherché parfois une volupté d’oubli dans les bouteilles” (2: 314). Poe drank, that is, in order to forget. But if this explanation proved satisfactory for the text of “Edgar Allan Poe,” here it is no longer persuasive. Baudelaire condemns its “deplorable simplicity,” and in this way dismisses his earlier position. Much more likely, or at least more sophisticated, Baudelaire counters, is the view that Poe drank not to forget, but, on the contrary, to remember: “Je crois que dans beaucoup de cas, non pas certainement dans tous, l’ivrognerie de Poe était un moyen mnémonique, une méthode de travail, méthode énergique et mortelle, mais appropriée à sa nature passionnée” (2: 315). The shift from memory-disabling to memory-enabling is a calculated one in “Edgar Poe.” Citing again the evidence that Poe drank both before and after the composition of his greatest works, Baudelaire is here careful to note new implications of this doubleness: “Remar- quez que les mots: précédé ou suivi, impliquent que l’ivresse pouvait servir d’excitant aussi bien que de repos” (2: 315). Hence, no longer merely independent of the composition of his works, or a sedative capable of calming the tempestuous effects of a too proactive faculty, the alcoholic consumption preceding or following the labor of writ- ing now penetrates through or into it. And this consequence follows directly from the essence of Poe’s poetic labor, as it was born out of and habituated to the vicissitudes of insobriety: “[I]l existe dans l’ivresse non seulement des enchaînements de rêves, mais des séries de raisonnements, qui ont besoin, pour se reproduire, du milieu qui
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leur a donné naissance” (2: 315). The self-sufficiency of the precocious
mnemonic phenom in “Edgar Allan Poe” has given way to a mémoire
with a lack, in need of excitants, drugs or supplements to recreate its
dream-like, even drunken, trains of thought. Whereas other authors,
Baudelaire commiserates, make use of written notes, “[Poe] avait
appris à boire”:20
Le poète avait appris à boire, comme un littérateur soigneux s’exerce à
faire des cahiers de notes. Il ne pouvait résister au désir de retrouver les
visions merveilleuses ou effrayantes, les conceptions subtiles qu’il avait ren-
contrées dans une tempête précédente; c’étaient de vieilles connaissances
qui l’attiraient impérativement, et, pour renouer avec elles, il prenait le
chemin le plus dangereux, mais le plus direct. (2: 315)
If drunkenness might have been replaced by the use of notebooks, it
is no less the case that Poe’s memory—like all mortal memory—was
in need of external supplementation and stimulation. More to the
point, it is because it was never “perfect” or complete to begin with,
never self-same or entirely present to itself, that his memory required
these restoratives.
The opening of Poe’s memory to its other—to excitants, which here
represented what “cahiers de notes” were for other authors—likewise
meant a certain susceptibility to contingency. Not only to that which
ultimately killed him, but within the regular economy of its function-
ing, to an encounter with otherness. What Baudelaire here calls “vie-
illes connaissances” were “rencontrées,” stumbled upon or happened
into, during drunken visions. On the opposite pole, on the level of
the memory left by Poe, this openness or fragility is registered as an
encounter with writing itself: with the language and rhetoric of Gris-
wold—and in turn Baudelaire—and the play of a name that, precisely
because it needs saving, can always be further tinged, tarnished, or
otherwise reconfigured to exclude one of its figures.
If “Edgar Poe” rewrites “Edgar Allan Poe,” it does so with the full
awareness of what such an act entails, as both violent and restorative.
There is also, of course, something deeply satisfying in this latter text,
which, while professing a much bleaker outlook than the former, nev-
ertheless also embeds into its very fabric the logic of supplementation
that it purports. If it must confront the non-closure of memory, then,
at the very least it gains the supplementary recompense of affirming
20
On the bearing of Baudelaire’s argument about mnemonic stimulation for his poem
“La Chevelure,” see Marder’s “Women Tell Time.”878 Adam R. Rosenthal
this unsettling structure by unwriting the first text’s assurances. Of
course, for this very reason, nothing can preclude yet another text
from coming along and unwriting this latter. This would perhaps be
another way to understand “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe.”21
What then can be said about memory—and particularly “Poe’s
memory”—after reading “Edgar Allan Poe” and “Edgar Poe”? In their
engagement with the mnemonic, Baudelaire’s works at one and the
same time displace the limits of mémoire and contrast two irreconcil-
able visions of its functioning. If, on the one hand, it appears that the
vision put forth in “Edgar Poe” is to dominate in Baudelaire, setting
the standard for his major work Les Fleurs du mal, it is nevertheless also
the case, on the other hand, that both a certain slippage of memory’s
photographic perfectibility was already at work in “Edgar Allan Poe,”
and that within the Fleurs one can find traces of this absolutist mne-
monic vision. To the contrary, if the double perspective on memory
in “Edgar Allan Poe” and “Edgar Poe” renders something intelligible
for Baudelaire’s work in general, it is only that memory, far from a
stable category, faculty or even concept, remains deferred, not yet
present to itself, or still to come.22 Through its semantic ambivalences
as well as its conceptual constellations, memory becomes in turn the
border, or passage, through which various aspects of writing, history
and aesthetics are given shape.23
“Remembering” memory in Baudelaire would therefore call for
an act of reading that can no longer, in any simple sense, be called
“memorial.”
Texas A&M University
21
Published in 1857 as the preface to the second volume of Baudelaire’s Poe transla-
tions, Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires. “Notes” is the third and final extended commentary
Baudelaire would write on Poe and his works. I say “perhaps,” because “Notes” lacks
the mnemonic bent of the former two texts. It would have to be shown whether, and
in what way, “Notes” represents a “reading” of the one or the other.
22
In his Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Derrida has described the structure of this
“to come” as an “impression,” in his discussion of the notion of the archive in Freud’s
writings on memory. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996). This impression or notion does not attain to the
clarity of the concept, but unlike mere pre-knowledge it falls short for essential reasons.
One should—and I have here attempted to do just this—ask a similar question for
Baudelaire’s notion of memory.
23
For another discussion of the interplay among writing, aesthetics and history in
Baudelaire, see my “The Gift of Memory in Baudelaire’s ‘Morale du joujou,’” Nineteen-
th-Century French Studies 43.3-4 (Spring-Summer 2015): 129-43.You can also read
