Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
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November, 1968
Page Five
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Page Six
November,1968
November, 1968
Page Seven
warmth of spring and rebirth,
awakens Spandrell's smouldering
algolagnia: he indulges in a curious
emasculation fantasy which is, of
course, a direct negation of [D. H.]
Lawrence's 'phallic consciousness.'"
Huxley's words in the crucial passage are as follows: "'Oh, the foxgloves! cried Connie. . . . Spandrell
followed her. 'Pleasingly phallic,' he
said,, fingeringone of the spikes of
unopened buds. And he went on to
develop the conceit, profusely.
Raising his stick he suddenly began
to lay about him right and left,
slash, slash. . . . 'Down with them,'
he shouted, 'down with them.... Do
you think I'm going to sit still and
let myselfbe insulted? The insolence
of the brutes! . . . Damn their insolence! It serves them right.'"
This extraordinarypassage springs
from several Baudelairian sources.
One thinks of the letter to Fernand
Desnoyers which Baudelaire wrote
to serve as a preface to his poems
on twilight: ". . . vous savez bien
que je suis incapable de m'attendrir
sur les vegetaux, et que mon ame
est rebelle a cette singulibre Religion nouvelle, qui aura toujours,
ce me semble, pour tout etre spirituel, je ne sais quoi de shocking.
... J'ai meme toujours pense qu'il
y avait dans la Nature, florissante
et rajeunie, quelque chose d'affligeant, de dur, de cruel,-un je ne
sais quoi qui frise l'impudence." But
most pertinent is the "piece condamnee" entitled "A celle qui est
trop gaie," which reads in part:
Quelquefois dans un beau jardin
Ou je trainais mon atonie,
J'ai senti, comme une ironie,
Le soleil dechirer mon sein;
Et le printemps et la verdure
Ont tant humili6 mon coeur,
Que j'ai puni sur une fleur
L'insolence de la Nature.
From what has been set forth in
this paper, from various rapprochements of detail already noted in
Miss Temple's article, from others
I could add to hers if there were
time to do so, I conclude that the
life and work of Baudelaire furnished Huxley one of the major
themes for his novelistic symphony.
And it must be borne in mind that
against Spandrell and his nihilistic
hatred of life, Huxley sets the figure
of Mark Rampion, a sort of transposed D. H. Lawrence, under whose
spell Huxley was when he wrote
Point Counter Point and Do What
You. Will. Thus we have among the
major characters a fictionalized
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Page Eight
November,1968
Baudelaire and a fictionalizedanti- effet,il est d6fendui l'homme,sous Huxley does not bother to refute
Baudelaire.
peine de d6cheanceet de mortin- Baudelaire's arguments explicitly,
In an unpublishedpaper which tellectuelle,de d6rangerles condi- though he must have been quite
he has generouslymade available tions primordialesde son existence familiarwith the texts concerned.
to me, A. E. Carter shows how the et de rompre l'6quilibre de ses But he does referto "artificialparaSpandrell-Baudelaire t y p e re- facultes avec les milieux ou elles dises," and he does cite a phrase
appears in later novelsby Huxley-- sont destinies a se mouvoir,en un fromBaudelaire'sessay on laughter.
Mark Staithes in Eyeless in Gaza mot,de derangerson destinpour y So, even in the midst of very un(1936), Will Farnaby in Island substituerune fatalited'un nouveau Baudelairianor indeed anti-Baude(1962). You can take my word, I genre."In The Doors of Perception, lairian ideas, fragmentsof Baudethink,that he proves his point. I Huxley expressedpreciselythe op- laire break through.
And that in fact is more or less
to devotemy positepointof view: "To be shaken
would like, therefore,
conclusionto showinghow Baude- out of the ruts of ordinarypercep- the point. That Baudelaire should
laire and Huxley looked at the tion,to be shownfora few timeless have influenced Swinburne and
question of the mind-expanding hoursthe outerand the innerworld, Wilde adds nothingto his glorydrugs,an interestwhich,as every- not as they appear to an animal theywere, so to speak, predestined
one knows, greatly preoccupied obsessed with survival or to a hu- to absorb somethingfromhim. But
Huxley in his last years and to man being obsessedwithwordsand it is an extraordinarytributethat
which he devoted two long essays, notions, but as: they are appre- Baudelaire's presence should have
The Doors ofPerceptionand Heaven hended, directly and uncondition- impingedupon a mind which, on
was fundamentand Hell. To bringthe matterto a ally, by Mind at Large--thisis an mostfundamentals,
in
with
to
disaccord
his own.
value
inestimable
of
two
to
have
but
ally
we
experience
compare
head,
JAMESS. PATTY,
essential quotations. Baudelaire everyoneand especially to the inVanderbiltUniversity.
wrotein Les Paradis artificiels:"En tellectual."In his essays on drugs,
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