Histoire extraordinaire: Essai sur un rêve de Baudelaire

by Michel Butor

The distinguished novelist and essayist Michel Butor has written one of the most remarkable critical studies of recent years. In Histoire Extraordinaire he discusses the three stages in the life of Charles Baudelaire and relates them to his three important works and the three major factors in his inspiration: Les Lesbiennes and his mistress Jeanne Duval; Les Limbes and the revolutionaries of 1848; and, finally, Les Fleurs du Mal and Edgar Allan Poe. Gradually, Butor's 'spiralling' technique reveals the links between poetry and sexuality, poetry and revolution, and poetry and suicide in the work of Baudelaire.

256 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Michel Marie François Butor was born in Mons-en-Barœul, a suburb of Lille. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, graduating in 1947. He has taught in Egypt, Manchester, Thessaloniki, the United States, and Geneva. He has won many literary awards for his work, including the Prix Apollo, the Prix Fénéon; and the Prix Renaudot.

Journalists and critics have associated his novels with the nouveau roman, but Butor himself long resisted that association. The main point of similarity is a very general one, not much beyond that; like exponents of the nouveau roman, he can be described as an experimental writer. His best-known novel, La Modification, for instance, is written entirely in the second person. In his 1967 La critique et l'invention, he famously said that even the most literal quotation is already a kind of parody because of its "trans-contextualization."

For decades, he chose to work in other forms, from essays to poetry to artist's books to unclassifiable works like Mobile. Literature, painting and travel are subjects particularly dear to Butor. Part of the fascination of his writing is the way it combines the rigorous symmetries that led Roland Barthes to praise him as an epitome of structuralism (exemplified, for instance, by the architectural scheme of Passage de Milan or the calendrical structure of L'emploi du temps) with a lyrical sensibility more akin to Baudelaire than to Robbe-Grillet.

Reviews

[Eric Byrd · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Tell a dream, lose a reader,” the dictum of Henry James that no one has been able to source, does not apply to Baudelaire. His dream of the brothel-museum, from which he awakened early on the morning of 13 May, 1856 (after Jeanne Duval noisily shifted a piece of furniture in the next room), and which he immediately set down in a long letter to Asselineau, has so far enjoyed two of the best readers, received 170 pages of analysis from Michel Butor, and, forty years after that, 25 pages from Roberto Calasso, in La Folie Baudelaire, despite Calasso’s feeling that to claim to possess keys to the dream “would be most indelicate,” would show “a kind of metaphysical lack of tact.” Well, Butor had no such tact: he confidently traced the incidents and decor of the dream to Baudelaire’s writings on Poe, and to his various attestations of identification with Poe, in a host of poems, letters and notes (the book Baudelaire brings to present to the brothel-museum’s madam is the first volume of his translation of Poe’s tales, Histoires Extraordinaires). Butor’s readings are persuasive, though in following them one reads a lot of Poe and Baudelaire side by side - a comparison unflattering to Poe. Many critics have made this point, but Calasso made it best:

This dream should be contemplated first of all as if it were a story. An amazing story. Perhaps the boldest of the nineteenth century. In comparison, Poe’s Extraordinary Tales have an antiquated, timid ring, the narration reveals itself to be compliant with certain obligatory cadences and a certain high-flown use of adjectives. Instead Baudelaire’s dream is austere and sinewy, the prose run through by nervous lurches and surges.

Exactly. Poe is still in the stylistic orbit of Washington Irving (not a bad thing), while Baudelaire's dream anticipates Joyce.

This book gets a fourth star for being dedicated “To Jeanne’s insulted beauty.”

[Davide Calò]

Il breve sogno descritto da Baudelaire racconta di come la sua posizione contorta lo abbia portato a sognarsi a disagio, con il suo membro fuori dai pantaloni e scalzo all'interno di una sorta di museo orrorifico pieno di simboli geroglifici, artefatti egiziani, belle donne e mostri e di come uno di essi comunichi con lui raccontandogli di come sia difficoltoso vivere in mezzo a delle donne così belle con un disagio di un'appendice enorme e pesante costantemente legata alle sue membra. Tralasciando il testo di Butor per un istante, l'immagine del sogno racconta di come Baudelaire, a mio avviso, veda sè stesso e di come si senta a disagio, in fin dei conti, nei confronti dell'ambiente, dell'incomprensibile e del sesso desiderato circostante. Questo disagio è così forte che fa sì che l'autore veda sé stesso come un mostro dalla protuberanza ingombrante e difficile da portare che mostra solo la delicatezza dell'argomento del proprio sesso per Baudelaire stesso, argomento di cui parla veramente poco.
Passando, invece, al testo di Butor...

[Sam Gilbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Butor on Baudelaire on Poe. It’s quite enthralling to follow the track of a first-rate creative mind as he explores the mind and reception of a second-rate artist. Butor, in my view, was CB’s peer, his “La modification” a great work of imagination and craft. EAP was a sometimes tedious, sometimes gripping writer of eerie tales and a middling poet. Butor makes outstanding use of CB’s correspondence and published essays—and a few poems—to track the poet’s shifting and steadfast sensibilities, political commitments, aesthetic, linking them to his biography (esp. his relations w. mother & lover).

An artfully crafted, brilliant examination framed by a dream extracted from one of Baudelaire’s letters.