LES AVEUGLES / THE BLIND BY BAUDELAIRE & INFLUENCE ON JAMES JOYCE IN ULYSSES

XCII. – LES AVEUGLES

 

 

Contemple-les, mon âme; ils sont vraiment affreux !

Pareils aux mannequins ; vaguement ridicules ;

Terribles, singuliers comme les somnambules ;

Dardant on ne sait où leurs globes ténébreux.

 

Leurs yeux, d’où la divine étincelle est partie,

Comme s’ils regardaient au loin, restent levés

Au ciel ; on ne les voit jamais vers les paves

Pencher rêveusement leur tête appesantie.

 

Ils traversent ainsi le noir illimité,

Ce frère du silence éternel. O cité !  

Pendant qu’autour de nous tu chantes, ris et beugles,

 

Eprise du Plaisir jusqu’a l’atrocité,

Vois ! je me traîne aussi ! mais, plus qu’eux hébété,

Je dis : Que cherchent-ils au Ciel, tous ces aveugles ?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

XCII. – THE BLIND

 

 

Look at them, my soul ; aren’t they awful !

Like mannequins ; slightly ridiculous ;

Terribly singular like somnambules,

Canes darting about in a darkened world.

 

Their eyes, where the divine spark is gone,

Since they look to the distance, remain raised

To the sky ; you never see them looking at the ground

Stooping almost dreamily their worn-down heads.

 

They cross unlimited space in this manner.

These brothers of the eternal silence. O city !

While everything about you sings, cries, laughs,

 

Addicted to pleasure to the point of atrocity,

See!  I trail behind also ! but, even more dazed then they,

I say : What do they look for in the Sky, all of those blind ?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While translating the above poem Les Aveugles by Baudelaire, which appears in the Tableaux Parisiens section of Les Fluers Du Mals, I couldn’t help but think of James Joyce and in particular chapter 3 of Ulysses in which Stephen Dedalus apes the blind walking across Sandymount Strand.

Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and

Shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A

very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the

Nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible.

Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetle o’er his base, fell

through the Nebeneinander ineluctably!   I am getting on nicely in the dark.

My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it, they do. My two feet in his boots

are at the end of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet

of Los demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand?

Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie kens them a’.

 

Won’t you come to Sandymount,

Madeline the mare?[1]

 

What is really interesting about Joyce’s passage above is the reference to ‘nebeneinander’ which the Annotations to James Joyce’s Ulysses assure me is a reference to an essay published in 1766 by Gotthold Ephrain Lessing in an essay titled Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie ( Laocoön, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry) in which Lessing makes the case that each art has its limitations in terms of expression, painting, for example should concern itself with space, imagine a landscape painting by Claude Lorraine,  for example, in which perspective is so important, whereas literature is more temporal;  The Iliad attempts to tell the story of the famous battle in various stages of succession, for example. For Joyce such views must have appeared so antiquated, which is why we can see him joking at Lesssing’s expense, and to all traditionalists, in the passage above. Joyce was clearly inspired by Rimbaud’s famous cris de guerre calling on the systematic deregulation of the senses[2] ‘Le Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.’ This is a really interesting line of enquiry in terms of Joyce scholarship, as this was to become in Finnegans Wake a whole area of exploration which Joyce in Ulysses is merely hinting at in comparison. Vico will take over from where Rimbaud got started, in terms of linguistic interplay on the sensory front, this is a whole area of research in itself, but suffice it to say that here in Baudelaire’s poem Les Aveugles we have a beginning or port of entry into the genesis of Dedalus’s game of blindman’s bluff, as it were!

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[1] Joyce, James: Ulysses, Edited by Hans Walter Gabler With Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior Afterword by Michael Groden, The Bodley Head, London, 1993, p.31.   

[2] Rimbaud, Arthur: Rimbaud – Complete Works, Selected Letters, Translation, Introduction and Notes by Wallace Fowlie with the French Texts, The University of Chicago Press, 1966 ( First Edition), p.306.