SWERVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (11)

By: Joshua Glenn
August 5, 2021

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite unfinished masterworks, legendary obscurities and cherished almost-weres.

Baudelaire’s memo. Click on image for closer view.

LE HIBOU PHILOSOPHE

Twenty-odd years ago, while researching a never-to-be-completed history of “outsider intellectuals,” which would have begun with a teenage Charles Baudelaire’s expulsion from lycée, I came across a memorandum collected in Gallimard’s Baudelaire: Oeuvres complètes. Dated 1852, Baudelaire’s note to a fellow arts critic, Champfleury, envisages a periodical of literary, art, and music criticism that would promulgate the anti-bourgeois political aesthetic that he was later to name “decadence.” But the journal, Le Hibou Philosophe (The Philosopher Owl), like its namesake, would never see the light of day.

The memo begins not, as those familiar with avant-garde movements would ordinarily expect, with a manifesto, but with a discussion of type treatment. A single typeface should be used, we read, plus “I’m not a big fan of printing certain items with a thinner font than others.” The medium, that is to say, is the message. Unlike those contemporary publications whose capitulation to the imperatives of the marketplace was rendered all too evident by what McLuhan would later call “hot” typographic stratagems designed to compete for consumer attention, at the level of form Le Hibou Philosophe would emulate the dandy — whose “cool” elegance served as an implicit rebuke to bourgeois vulgarity.

At the time I came across this memo, I was embroiled in a financially ruinous, futile effort to prevent the demise of Hermenaut, an owlishly philosophical journal that I’d struggled to fashion into a consciousness-altering mechanism — to paraphrase what I recall as Baudelaire’s description of his poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal — designed to operate simultaneously at the level of form and substance. So if I seem to be reading overly much into a scribbled note about type treatment, it’s because by that point I’d spent a decade fretting over just these sorts of details.

The memo lists a few writers that the journal would celebrate — including Gautier, from whom Baudelaire had absorbed lessons about dandyism and art for art’s sake; and Maistre, whose advocacy of social hierarchy informed Baudelaire’s politics. A much longer list names those contemporaries about whom the journal would publish hit pieces — for example, the critic Planche (“radical exhaustion, nullity and cruelty of impotence, style of fool and magistrate”), and the popular novelists Alexandre Dumas fils (“sales pitch style”), and Eugène Sue (“stupid and counterfeit talent”). There are notes about publicity efforts, too: We must, Baudelaire urged Champfleury, cultivate “propaganda friends.”

I don’t sympathize with the Decadents’ misogyny, orientalism, and antidemocratic elitism. However, Le Hibou Philosophe, in what may be my creative misreading of Baudelaire’s memo, was intended to be more than merely a journal. It could have been a seed-crystal around which might have grown a community of anti-bourgeois litterateurs dedicated to the subversive precept and practice of what the poet Laforgue would later articulate — in an essay on Baudelaire which itself was never completed — as “bored uselessness in the middle of this devout and industrious century.” This aim is one with which I sympathize, and which motivates me still.

***

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

SWERVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (11)

Categories

Tags