It is “Au lecteur”, to his reader, that Baudelaire dedicated his 1857 anthology Les Fleurs du mal. The corrupt and shadowy corners of Parisian society were laid bare by Baudelaire’s pen, in all its malignant glory. Baudelaire balked at the blatant poverty and suffering that plagued post-revolutionary France. But above all, he condemned the hypocrisy that disfigured his contemporary world: “hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère”. You, reader, dare not deny our fraternity; you, reader, also see the bludgeoned man and cross to the other side of the street; you, reader, are as guilty as I. Baudelaire has much to teach us about our own capacity for compassion and our own hypocritical tendencies to “turn a blind eye”. But the blind eye of conscience is not immune to poetry, nor to art, nor to music. This, perhaps, is what is meant by the peculiar poetics of suffering—the peculiar notion that art enables our empathy to prevail.
Baudelaire’s poetry is unrelenting in its refusal to deny the culpability of each and every one of us. It is the human condition, he reminds us, to sense others’ suffering only in the periphery. We relegate it to the blurred edges of our vision, to the ephemeral flicker, or else it might consume us. W. H. Auden spells this out in his poem Musée des Beaux Arts. “About suffering they were never wrong,/The Old Masters: how well they understood/Its human position”. To one old master he directly points us. Brueghel the Elder lines the halls of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, but to find his infamous depiction of Icarus one must venture to the Old Masters’ Museum in Brussels. The scene is georgic, the ploughman tills the field, the pilgrim gazes into the distance. But where is the eponymous Icarus with his waxen wings? He is but a protruding left leg, a meagre splash that mars the otherwise mirror-surface of the sea. He is anonymous. His flight, his cry, his fall go unnoticed. Or perhaps, we do observe the splash, then turn back, preoccupied: the fallout worse than the fall. Auden says it too: “How everything turns away/quite leisurely from disaster, the ploughman may have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, but for him, it was not important”. It was not important.
If Auden had written his poem today, might he not have substituted Icarus for a face-down Syrian boy on a beach? Would the forsaken cry not have belonged to Alan Kurdi instead? It was not important. His red t-shirt splattered the front pages for a few weeks and then faded with the next day’s news. The Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy wrote of her friend, the war photographer, whose lens had captured Napalm Girl. “The children running in a nightmare heat… a stranger’s features… a half formed ghost”.
These images touch us, move us, bring distant, far-away hellscapes into crisp focus. Yet, the reader remains immune, impassive as their “eyeballs prick/with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers,” writes Duffy. Our compassion holds us momentarily in aspic, our reality shattered, for an iota, then it is gone.
Suffering, it seems, can be measured in miles because the further from home, the more abstract it seems.
Love thy neighbour. But who is thy neighbour? We mourn the Holocaust, Srebrenica, even to some extent Ukraine, because they unfolded or unfold still in Europe’s backyard. We will remember them. Yet suffering has a proximal value. Our hearts go out to you, but those self-same hearts are tethered to home, to country, to continent.
Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère. My brother, my other, you hypocritical reader who sheds a tear and then turns the page because it is not your story, it is not your suffering. Baudelaire’s poetry leaves no room for misgivings. Meet your eye in the mirror, he demands, and ask yourself: have you not done the same? I have.
Perhaps, then, we are capable only of momentary empathy when a distant reality is thrust into view. When we are face to face with a picture of someone who we neither know nor resemble, is it our responsibility to bear the brunt of their suffering? These questions are valid, and they plague those of us whose common love of humanity and hatred of injustice strives to cross those borders. But our lives are leagues apart. Perhaps, it is an untenable maxim that we can only empathise in part. Our capacity for compassion is, all too often, compromised by our location.
But Baudelaire wrote his poetry for a reason. A photographer stood on a Turkish beach for a reason. Breughel painted Icarus ignored for a reason. Art, poetry, photography, even journalism: they don’t produce peace treaties, or explain centuries of religious animosity. They don’t build asylum shelters, or heal bullet wounds. But they do allow us to feel, for a split second longer, the compassion that might otherwise elude us. And this split second, it is vital. The poetics of suffering—it is apparent everywhere we look, and in every word we read.
To conclude, anecdotally, let us turn not to Baudelaire but to a man who loved his verse. Jorge Semprun, a Spaniard, who met the eminent French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in 1944 and forged a fast friendship with him. Jorge Semprun recounts in his memoir L’écriture ou la vie the final moments of his friend’s life. In lieu of a prayer, he reads to Halbwachs some lines from Baudelaire’s poem Le Voyage. “Il sourit, mourant, son regard sur moi, fraternal”. Semprun takes the lines of Baudelaire, which accuse the reader of negligence, and extracts from them one essential ingredient: fraternity. In those final moments, he impresses upon his friend what remained of human compassion, of brotherhood, of love.
This is what poetry, art, photographs, paintings, all the media we too often label frivolous can achieve. They are, in fact, the invisible hand that crosses borders, builds bridges, spans centuries, and ignites that guttering spark of collective humanity that our world so direly needs. Each, in their own way, paraphrases what Baudelaire attempts to teach his reader and what we must remind ourselves of in these tumultuous times. Au lecteur—my reader—you hypocrite: you call me other, when really, you are my brother.
Written by Ursula Gerhard, Edited by Rosey Holland
Photo Credit: Pieter Brueghel, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (c. 1555-1558)
