 I love French. I study French all through school. I never took any other language but French. So this is going to be an experience for me. I'm Jay Fidel on Think Tech and we're talking about Community Matters and we're talking with the Louis Bousquet who is chair of the French, I get that right, chair of the French department at UH Manoa. Yeah, that's good. Okay, good enough, eh? Yeah. So we are so delighted to have him and I'll tell you the background. I had an argument with my brother and we were trying to figure out who was the one in the 19th century that wrote all this dark poetry and I said to my brother, no, it's LaRoucheville Co. My brother said, no, you're wrong. It's not LaRoucheville Co. It's Charles Baudelaire and he was right and I remembered in college when I studied, I studied under a really wonderful French teacher. We studied Charles Baudelaire a lot. However, it's been a long time so I thought I'd refresh on that with you, Louis. And I want to find out more about Charles than I knew before. I want to find out about his dark poetry. I want to find out how it's relevant or interesting in our time here in COVID, here in the world, which seems to be, you know, dissembling in front of us. So is he a good person to study, Louis? I was afraid that you were asking me if he was a good person, which would have been a very American question to ask. A good person to study, for sure. He's a very interesting character. He's a tragic figure, like most of us French artists from the 19th century. He died rather young. He was around like 46, I think, and he died of syphilis. You know, it's not a good death. So, and his work is, you know, surprisingly enough very modern. He's very appreciated. Actually, he's the, I think, the most appreciated 19th century French poet today. So he's very relevant. And I think, yes, he's a very interesting guy to learn about. Well, you know, the thing about it is that I remember this from school way back when is that he was dark. He was into drugs. He was into all the depression things. And I have a recollection that his syphilis, you know, gave him dementia. I guess it does that. So he was not really cogent there at the end in his late 40s. But he wrote about these dark things. And I looked him up and he talking about sex, death, lesbianism. I don't think that's too dark now. Metamorphosis, whatever that is, depression, urban corruption. You know, we're talking about the beginning of the Industrial Revolution because they had one in France too. The loss of innocence, alcohol, drugs. What a life. I mean, it doesn't sound like things are working out really well for and he had trouble with his family too. I remember that. So where does that put him on the scale of Romantics? Well, to tell you enough about me, Jay, you know, yes, that's, that's where he put, I mean, you know, it's not so dark, actually, you know, if you look at it from a, from a modern standpoint, is, you know, actually, I think what makes him so, so modern and that's every, every aspects that you just described it succinctly is, is very much what, what a modern human being has to, has to face today, you know, a drug is, is prevalent in our society. Sex seems to be an obsession. We are all a bit depressed. We have to face this post-industrial world in which we don't really, you know, know what to do or to survive. You talk about lesbianism and everything. Those are human experience. I mean, you know, he's, he's, what makes it dark is that he died rather young and he had this disease. But let's say that he was healthy, he will be, you know, a great contemporary poet, you know, he will be someone that he could have his series on Netflix and everybody will love it. You know, you know, it strikes me that when all this is really saying is that he was, he understood, you know, the reality of his time, which, which, you know, it's not so great. This is around the time of Les Miserables. It was things were not particularly stable in France. He lived in Paris, you mentioned. So maybe he was really being honest. And is the honesty, is the honesty big part of this for him? Yes, yes, I think that's that you struck an important part of his work and his persona. It was like he was indeed a true artist in the sense like maybe the modern sense that he's someone that really expressed without trying to hide anything and without hiding behind his heart, his art was expressing his experience and what it, what it meant to be a young man. And then later an older man in a big metropolis like Paris in the myth of the 19th century, which was a very transforming time, you know, it's a France just a change of its regime, you know, 50 years prior to that, there used to be a king that was ruling and a society that was rather protected. We have today this very dark vision of, you know, aristocratic times, but the reality was that there was a pact between the king and the aristocrat and the common people. And the pact was that the king was supposed to protect the people. If, you know, did he do it? You know, it's up to discussion, but what happened? No bless oblige. No bless oblige, exactly. Exactly. And the problem was that the no bless kind of stopped to oblige, you know, people started to become less interested in their duties and maybe more in the pursuit of their own pleasure. But at the end, the 19th century is a century where the common people is abundant, you know, he has to fend for himself and there is no more super power, super structure to protect that person. And so from both their standpoints, we're looking at a person that lives in the city. He's not a peasant. He doesn't like nature. He bores nature. But from his standpoint, you know, to be a man in the city is, in the 19th century, is to be thrown in a chaotic world without much order. It's a time there's a bunch of revolution taking place. France is looking for a stable regime, so it oscillates between monarchies try to come back and then the republic and then there is the second empire. So, you know, but there is kind of stuck in these troubled times, even participate into a short-lived revolution. And he gives us all those images, those slides, like a painter with words, talking about his experience, the experience of a human being in a big city and in a rather modern big city because Paris is transforming very fast. And in some ways, we could say that Paris stopped transforming at the beginning of the 20th century. Eventually, you know, everything remains the same. There's no more space. The people don't build much. But towards the mid 19th century and the end of 19th century, it's a time where Paris, the structure itself, osmanes are to build like big avenue and so on. And so Baudelaire is a witness to that. And he gives us a very intimate perspective, a very, I mean, unlike the word, but honest perspective, if you will, like a perspective where he really shares what the tribulation that he's facing and also a disenchanted perspective because that's maybe another aspect of why Baudelaire is so interesting today and maybe so appreciated because Baudelaire is very much translated into modern times, very much the figure of a loser. He is a pathetic figure. He doesn't have money. He lives on the stipend that's is given to him. The stipend is controlled by a lawyer that makes sure it doesn't spend too much. So basically, he constantly has to beg for money. This is his family. His family was tightening the purse strings on him. Yeah, he lost his father. He had a very interesting father. There was an artist and a man that came from the, you'll say a blue color, man, if the term apply. But his father died when he was six years old. And his mother, that was a 30 years younger than the father. The father was in his 60s. His mother remarried and she remarried with a military man. And there was a bit of a psychology called shock for the young Baudelaire that were never able to live up to the discipline and the expectation of that new father. And eventually the father sent him away. He had a short trip. He went to the Indian Ocean. We're not sure if he went to India, but he went to what's today La Réunion to French iron. And when he came back basically, he started to spend his inheritance from his father. And he spent so lavishly that his new father, his stepfather decided to take the money away from him and to use a lawyer that was in charge of controlling the money. So basically for the rest of his life, because he refused to work and he decided that he wanted to write for a living. He never made a sense out of his writing. He had to beg for money and he was thus tied to a life of humiliation and a pathetic life, you know, because he didn't have any power whatsoever. Why does this remind me of love OM? Although it wasn't exactly in the same time. It's living in a garret. It's having friends around. You hopefully Baudelaire had friends who you shared your art with and you suffered through the cold winters. I mean, do we have another La Bohème in Baudelaire? La Bohème is, I will say, it's a bourgeois concept. It's this romantic idea of the artist that lives with nothing and survives thanks to the help of his friends. And this is a very, can I say, you know, it's a nice perspective for the reality that was much more drab. But yes, indeed he was living kind of a Bohemian life and the aesthetic aspect of this life never escaped him. He was perfectly aware of the fact that he took pride in not, you could say, selling out and always refusing to follow the bourgeois path, which will have been simple for him. You could have started to work you know, for anyone and have a little bit of money. But no, yes, he lived like most of his contemporary and you're right, he had plenty of friends. He lived like them, you know, with very little money and, you know, mostly spending time with the prostitutes, you know, because it was a time when there was not just, you know, a relationship like that between men and women, you know, you were either married or you were not, you know, you were not available, so to speak. So basically, he lived this kind of life, for sure, yes. Before we go forward, I want to go, I want to go into the thing about the French Revolution. He was born in the 1820s there, and by the time he was, you know, a teenager thinking about things, it wasn't even 50 years since the revolution had taken place. And I know from my own experience that there's a strain in French culture and French social perception, historical perception that looks back, as you were talking about the Noblesse Oblige, looks back before the revolution with a kind of nostalgia. Those were the good old days. And I'm sure that people in the 1830s and 40s and 50s, it wasn't that much later than the French Revolution. Some of them anyway, maybe many of them were looking back with nostalgia at the French Revolution. Where do you think that enters in his thought? Was he a modern person having rejected the monarchy, or did he have a kind of nostalgia for it? I mean, the monarchy, I'm not sure. I don't think that he was regretting the time of privileges and so on. I think that he positioned himself, I mean, Modelaire is considered as this, if not romantic, you know, this dramatic aesthetic persona, you know, that was always looking for beautiful things and for a unique perspective. So in this sense, he's a romantic. And romanticism is very much this nostalgia for a time of great ideals that were, you know, given to the, you know, there is this whole reinvention in the 19th century of the Middle Age. You know, they start to dream about the Middle Age. You think about, you know, behind me, there is this gargoyle. The gargoyle were added by Violet de Duke. There was not any gargoyle, not to them, the Paris, but Violet de Duke added this gargoyle because he felt that they looked medieval, you know. So in some ways, Modelaire is the same. He has this ideal of a time where, you know, great ideas and feelings and sentiments existed. And you find that in his poetry. It's where he doesn't look so modern. There is a very strong feeling of the past and of an idealized past that seemed today a little bit old fashioned, if not, you know, completely antiquated. But what pervades that perspective is the fact because there are a bunch of artists that wrote in this kind of tone and their poetry today is absolutely impossible to read. It sounds ridiculous. But what's very strong about Modelaire is that he brings this failure, this corrupted element to it. And this corrupted element is very much, you know, this idea that we are all fallen from Eden, that we don't understand what's taking place. And we cannot hide behind great words or great ideals anymore because they don't work. You can understand that through his relation to religion and God. He was very much a Catholic in the old sense of the terms. He was afraid of hell and he had a very strong sense of guilt. He talks about sins and he talked about corruption and everything. But it is not a superficial perspective. It is not just an ideological perspective because he brings it to his own metaphysical experience. The fact that he encounters the world, the world, he has desire, he has fears, he suffers and he puts everything in perspective through this language, this romantic language that talks about God, that talks about the demons, that talks about the flesh and so on. But this is very modern from this perspective because it's our perspective. He's aware that religion is not everything and the corruption is everywhere in Catholicism. He's aware that we cannot hide behind God anymore because God is nowhere to be found. Human beings are left alone and the political system is of no help either. So in some ways it pushes this difficult, this humiliated experience to the brink until he died basically because he finished his life in an absolutely pathetic manner. He went to Belgium to try to find an editor because he couldn't find anyone to edit his poetry and Belgium at the time was a hotbed for contra façon meaning that people that were editing work that didn't belong to them. So he went to Belgium and he couldn't find anyone to edit him and he eventually died. I mean he didn't die in Belgium but he had some some stroke in Belgium and he had to be brought back to Paris and he died like a few months later. So everything has a meaning in the sense that he really paid with his own suffering and his own life for all those ideals, those nostalgic antiquated ideals. So what I get among other things from that description is that probably had very strong feelings, very strong emotions and he was, tell me if I'm right about this and he was introspective. He was able to analyze those emotions. He was able to analyze them so he could write about them. A passionate man. So passionate, I guess it comes with the territory so to speak. Like poetry you need to exalt your passion in order to get something of interest. But yes he was extremely critic. He was innately critic. He looked at his own life and at the world surrounding him with a very pressing eye, with a very intelligent eye. And it is through the art of poetry that he was able to find a path to plow forward. Because what's very interesting about Baudelaire's work is that there is no real books. I mean he really published one book. It's The Flower of Evil and he's been working and reworking it until the end of his life. So his work is an ongoing struggle for meaning, for to try to understand the world. But at the same time if he uses his rational sense he's very much a poet. So the picture, the slice, the vignette that he takes are impressions. And impressions that have to deal with emotions, the senses. The smell is very important. Like when he smells something, suddenly he sees a lot of images that are coming to his mind. When he hears certain music, certain sound, obviously when he sees things. And then he transcribes that into poetry. But you're right, he had a very, very clear, piercing eye and a very strong intelligence. He was almost like most of those great artists. They are like a god ruling over their own universe and nothing escaped their gaze. He has this very strong, stronger view and perspective. That said, Louis, I really wonder if we could put him hypothetically, Zola Esquise, put him hypothetically in the present time and let him examine COVID with us. Let him examine all these things that are happening that are existential threats. How would he fare? Would he find a residence, a self pity in that? Would he find the same kind of strong passion dealing with these risks and threats? How would he behave himself? How would he think? I mean, it's hard to say, but the way what we can say is that he never shied away from the pain, the decaying body. He has a very strong fascination. He has a fantastic poetry called Ayune Sharon, where he goes for a walk on the countryside with a woman and they encounter a corpse that's in the process of decaying filled up with maggots. He looks at it in detail and he describes it. At the end, he turns his gaze towards the woman that he loves and he says to her, what's incredible about that is that's what you're going to turn into. Your beautiful face is going to turn into a skull eaten away by the maggots. To go back to the COVID, I'm sure that he would have heard about the terrible descriptions about people choking to death and being unconscious. I'm sure that he would have brought those images and potentially connecting them with other classical images of hell and eternal damnation and so on. Yes, there is no question Oh wow, very interesting. I wanted to look down into the generations of poets in the latter part of the 19th century. My understanding is, and you mentioned this, is that Baudelaire had a big effect on French poetry, I suppose, and French literature. He influenced a lot of French poetry for years to come. Can you talk about that? Who were the people who followed him? I'm not sure. There is something about Baudelaire that is by no means he can be characterized as the leader of a certain way of writing or type of poetry. After Baudelaire, you find almost no poet's writing like Baudelaire. I mean, Baudelaire has a style, a so-called classical style, that stops with him. He was already, I would say, pushing it. People don't write like that anymore. The time has changed. When you were talking about Zola, there is this desire to get closer to reality and in some way find words that were more common than all those very adorned, very poetic terms. I mean, you could find. You could make the case. There is some movements that are close to that. If we look for people, I think, surprisingly enough, I think if there is an artist that is the most influenced by Baudelaire in some ways, it won't be a poet, but it will be a writer and it will be Marcel Proust. Marcel Proust at the beginning of the 20th century, you know that he was this absolutely fantastic artist that tried in his own way to understand what the human experience meant. It was all about the memories. Actually, there's a very strong old fact of the sensual aspect. You remember Proust with the Madeleine. He smells the Madeleine. He remembers his father. The T-Madeleine. Yeah, yeah. Ray Scherstet, Don Perdue. Exactly. So Proust talks about Baudelaire and Proust is very, very impressed by Baudelaire. Proust has this idea that Baudelaire is very much a pathfinder and he is a key to understand modernity. The other author I'm thinking is the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. Walter Benjamin really talked a lot about Baudelaire and he is the one that said that what was most surprising about Baudelaire was the fact that his work didn't get old at all, that he was so modern in spite of everything, when most of the poets of the time had completely disappeared and were almost impossible to read, that Baudelaire was so modern and so such a classic. Yeah, that's so interesting and I guess the lesson there would be is you can't judge somebody by the way people react to his work during his lifetime. Sometimes it takes dozens of years, dozens of decades before people appreciate the value in that. And that's the most rejoicing part about it. It's in some ways the revenge of the losers. The people we look down upon today are going to be the greats of tomorrow and the other ones are going to be completely forgotten. So is Baudelaire treated as a great French poet? Today for sure. There is still a little bit of snowbizm. There's always snowbizm in French society and then in the circle of for literary circles. But I think today without any discussion he's considered as the greatest 19th century poet. Oh wow. So the last thing I wanted to do with you, Louise, I pulled out, this is in English. I don't know if you have the French. It's one of the poems of the evil flowers, fleur de malle, which is, you know, even the term fleur de malle gives you a smell, doesn't it? Evil has a smell, a special. It's just like Proust, you know, nostalgia and breakfast has a petite Madeleine. In this case, evil has a smell. So I'll read it in English now. And I like your comment about how this works. What kind of prose, what kind of poetry are we talking about here? What's the quality of his writing, the quality of his choice of words and all that? Regrettably, this is English. Folly, depravity, greed, mortal sin, invade our souls and wrack our flesh. We feed our gentle guilt, gracious regrets, that breed like vermin, glutting on foul beggar's skin. Our sins are stubborn, our repentance faint. We take a handsome price for our confession. Happy once more to wallow in transgression. Thinking vile tears will cleanse us of all taint. It goes on like that. Quite a ways it goes on like that. I mean, it's not the kind of thing you're going to make into a musical. I'm not sure about that. That could be done, you know. You find his taste, I mean, he's very dramatic and you find his taste for the corruption of the flesh and in some way, certain complacency towards this spectacle. But there is this very strong or so strong redeeming message, the religious message. It's all the image that it is through sin and through decay that you can find the light. You can find some kind of truth and there is some redeeming qualities to it. I mean, if you look at today's world, we always have this almost stereotypical stories from person that fell very deep, that fell into drugs and procrastination and seeing a lot of women and suddenly they saw the light and they were able to clean themselves out almost miraculously. And that's basically that poetry. There is something redeeming in our fallen condition. That is it. There is something redeeming in our fallen condition. But he never redeemed himself, did he? Sadly enough, he didn't. But that was not his purpose. His purpose was to write beautiful poetry. Is there any more than succeeded in that? Well, it's really interesting to look through the eyes of a poet to see the world because in all of us, you can correct me on this, but in all of us there is a poet. In all of us there is someone who can be introspective and see the world differently, like Baudelaire or Proust, and who can examine every detail and be so oriented to a detail that we have another reality around us, a better reality, a deeper reality. And so, gee whiz, are people studying Baudelaire these days, Louis? Yes, they are. They are. They are still studying Baudelaire for sure. Yes. I mean, I won't say that they are like huge group of people doing it, but yes, of course, you find very vibrant Baudelaire studies in France and in the Francophone world. Well, we should have that in Manoa too, you know? So who knows, after this video, after this talk show, maybe they'll be lining up at the door there in the French department. I'm sure they will. Miles around to find out more about Baudelaire. Yes. Well, we'll give you a call there. Thank you very much, Louis. I really appreciate this discussion, and I hope we can do it again, maybe with Marcel Proust, if you like. Okay, yes. Whenever you want, Jay. My pleasure. Thank you so much. Louis Bousquet in the French department at UH Manoa, helping us understand maybe something that we should be conscious of in today's complex and sometimes depressing world. Aloha.