fleurs du mal.txt

Otherness in L'Invitation du Voyage

According to the ancient myth, the beautiful Hyacinth was loved by Apollo.  In competition at Mt. Olympus, Apollo threw his discus with all of his might.  In order to impress Apollo, Hyacinth ran to catch it.  But the spiteful Zepherus changed the course of the disc and killed Apollo's beloved Hyacinth.  In the wake of his death, Apollo did not allow Hades to claim the beautiful youth.  Instead, he used his coagulating blood to create a new life, in the form of a flower.

This tale of death and life, of separation and coming to be is exactly Baudelairs focus in L'Invitation du Voyage.  It is no wonder then, why Baudelaire begins his poem with the familial relations of sister and child.   One must see one's family as essentially similar.  Not only is there one of the strongest emotional attachments between the various familial ties, but one owes the existence of one's life to one's parents and caries this family name throughout the course of one's life.

By the fourth line of the poem, it is clear that Baudelair is not limiting his scope to familial relations only, but instead extending it to his lover.  Unlike the family, the lover cannot provide the same consistency with which the family can.  The sameness which was felt in the womb is no longer.  One can view the process of "growing up" as one grand realization that the world is other.  At the end of the process one realizes that it is not only the lover which is other, but the family, and all of existence.  

Although it may at first appear that Baudelaire is addressing a lover, one must recognize that he is addressing himself; and by reading the poem one must address one's self just as Baudelaire is addressing himself.  One is confronted with the question:  "How can I find the same in the other?", which is the same as asking, "How do I live in the world?"   Baudelaire's existential conundrum yields that there is no beauty, no truth in the other.  Living in the world is inconstant, dark, trecherous.  Where can Baudelaire find beauty, order, luxury, and calm anywhere but there, there in his esprit, in his ame.  One falls asleep and feels the sameness in dreaming, but upon waking, one deludes oneself into believing such nonsense until one is shocked into the truth of the matter, that is, the otherness of the world.  Thus, when the otherness appears in the progression of familial relations to lover, he commands the reader to dream, i.e. to internalize one in one's self.  The command to dream also has a secondary command bound up with it:   Wish for a unity of same and other.  This command to dream, to wish, is thus the invitation to voyage: to fall asleep, to look inside the self to see the external, the other as same.  It is only in the soul in which that far off orient, that other, must be unified.  That orient is the splendor of human existence, and what is so mysterious about it is that this orient cannot come about by living, but by an inward process of the soul turning into itself.

The move Baudelaire has made is one of external to internal, of self for other to other for self.  In the last stanza, it is no longer his self or mind-spirit which can reach this orient.  Rather, it is now the world, i.e. actual existence which is this orient.  One thus cannot be satisfied with the picture that Baudelaire has so far painted, of self for self.  But whether Baudelaire merely recognizes this as a progression or whether he has fulfilled this progression in actuality, i.e. if the abstract now has content: this question, for now, will be left open.  The progression, though, should be recognized, and Baudelaire himself recognizes this progression.

The orient, which in this poem embodies the duality between same and other, resembles Baudelaire's lover.  She too must be seen as same and yet other, just as the familial relations have come to be seen.  His lover in life has trecherous eyes, yet at the same time is idealized in his memory, and must be so, since his memory is the internalized idea of her.  He has idealized her much as he has idealized this yet undiscovered Orient of milk and honey, so to speak, of which he dreams but is yet internalized, and only an actuality in non-being, i.e. an actuality in wish only.

But one must not see the poem as simply a progression from the external to internal.  In the second stanza, although the scene is set within a bedroom, everything which is present internally holds an external signification.  The furniture shines as do the rocks, polished and smoothed out by time.  The mirrors are infinitely deep as is the expanse of the sky.  The contradiction of internalizing one's self in one's room has becomes evident.  The most rare living flowers mix with the scents of the amber, which preserves the dead.  Living internally only is not to live.

Hence the whole poem must be recognized as a progress of wish: from external to internal, and finally as a unification of the two as a sameness, yet with the two existing as distinct and contradictory.  This can be seen quite clearly in the last stanza:  the sun coats the fields not at midday but at sundown, the sleeping vessel move to the ends of the earth despite the fact that the vessels are sleeping, and the world falls asleep in the warm light of the sun fading into nonexistence precisely when it is not the warmest.   But despite the fact that Baudelaire recognizes his greatest wish, this progression of the soul, he has not actualized it.  The night, the internal, still overshadows the external.  The two as one still only exist as a dream, as a hope at best.  The two suns of which are seen at the beginning of the poem are still seen in the end.  He has been unable to unify the beloved, the Hyacinth as Apollo did, in living through dying, and in dying through living.  With the repetition of the couplet, Baudelaire can do nothing but comfort himself in the hope that he will find that "there" which is "so mysterious" to him

The most that Baudelaire can do is to invite us, as he invites himself, to voyage.