Water is the only drink which truly appeases thirst;
and it is for this reason that one can only drink a
fairly small quantity.
—Jean Anthelme
Brillat-Savarin
A man who drinks nothing but water has a secret to hide
from his fellows. . .
—Charles Baudelaire
-
The pages which follow offer a preliminary inquiry
into the relationship between Charles Baudelaire's
writing on drugs and Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's
writing on food. As we will see, Baudelaire's attitude
towards Brillat-Savarin was dismissive to the point of
open contempt. At the same time, Baudelaire's most
sustained philosophical study, Les Paradis
artificiels—described by Michel Butor as
Baudelaire's "fundamental work on the nature of
poetry"(15)—begins with a chapter on "The Taste
of the Infinite" ("Le Goût de l'infini"), thus
situating itself from the outset, however ironically or
unintentionally, within the rhetorical field of the
Physiology of Taste's "Meditations on
Transcendental Gastronomy." Without concerning
ourselves with questions of influence, which in this
instance are trifling at best, is there some deeper
pattern of historical development we can discern in
this unlikely conjunction? My argument will experiment
with the idea that in both Brillat-Savarin's
Physiology of Taste's and Baudelaire's
writings on drugs, here represented by his pivotal
essay "On Wine and Haschisch Compared as Means for the
Multiplication of Individuality ("Du Vin et du hachisch
comparés comme moyens de multiplier
l'individualité"), the consumption of substance,
rather than subserving the economy of the healthy body,
becomes human only insofar as it vehiculates an
excess of desire. I would also tentatively
suggest, following Denise Gigante's lead, though my
story angles off in a somewhat different direction,
that this progressive transformation of the consuming
subject into a figure of human perversity, partially
occulted in Brillat-Savarin1,
spectacularly displayed in Baudelaire, may be
correlated with stages in the emergence of consumer
capitalism. Coming between the two, Honoré de
Balzac offers indications as to how this process
happens.
Savor and Savoir
-
Though initially published at the author's expense
in 1825, the Physiology of
Taste's2
quickly gained wide recognition not only as an
authoritative disquisition on the pleasures of the
table but also as a significant contribution to the
world of letters. Thus we find Balzac writing the entry
on Brillat-Savarin for Michaud's Biographie
Universelle in 1835 and attributing the
Physiology's rapid success—of which he
was a keen and interested observer—to the "savor"
of a prose style which he goes so far as to compare
with those of de la Rochefoucauld and La
Bruyère. As evidenced by the number of editions
which appeared throughout the 1840s, Brillat-Savarin's
standing as a writer continued for some time to grow
apace, strengthened now in part by the association with
Balzac, just as Balzac had earlier traded on the
success of the Physiology of Taste's in
publishing The Physiology.
-
Not surprisingly, Baudelaire did not share in the
general admiration, his allegiance to the older Balzac
notwithstanding, though he seems to have drawn some
inspiration from Brillat-Savarin by taking him as a
target of abuse. Thus his brief 1851 essay "On Wine and
Hashish Compared as Means for the Multiplication of
Individuality," begins with an insulting reference to
Brillat-Savarin, "[a] very famous man, who was at the
same time a great dolt" (377), followed by a
misquotation from the Physiology of
Taste's—"Noah the patriarch is said to be
the inventor of wine; it is a liquor made from the
fruit of the vine"3—whose
banality and insufficiency he proceeds to devote
several paragraphs to mocking:
And then? Then,
nothing: that's it. Leaf through the volume, turn it
every which way, read it backwards, upside-down, from
right to left and left to right, you'll find nothing
else on wine in the Physiology of Taste of
our most illustrious and most respected
Brillat-Savarin: "Noah the patriarch" and "it is a
liquor. . . "
[. . . ] How altogether
digestive. How very explanatory [. . . ] (377-78)
-
To better understand why Brillat-Savarin receives
such rough treatment at Baudelaire's hands, we will
first need to examine more closely the focus of his
attack. Like the misquotation, Baudelaire's claim that
the Physiology of Taste has nothing else to
say about wine is something less than accurate, but
neither is it entirely wide of the mark. Other
references to wine do occur here and there throughout
the book, usually in the course of an anecdote, but
there is far less on the subject than Brillat-Savarin's
reputation as the classic French authority on the
pleasures of the table would lead one to expect,
especially when compared with the pages devoted to such
items as coffee, chocolate, truffles and turkey (a
legacy of Brillat-Savarin's years of exile in
America).
-
On a casual reading, the comparative omission may
seem yet another reminder, if one is needed, of just
how idiosyncratic and unsystematic a book the
Physiology of Taste4
can be. Thus while the meditation "On Thirst" is
followed, logically enough, by a meditation "On
Drinks," the connection between "On Drinks" and the
succeeding meditation "On the End of the World" is more
elusive. Similarly, one understands why the long
central meditation "On Foods" is divided into two
parts, the first on foods in general, the second on
special kinds of foods. But why it should be capped
with a meditation on "The Theory of Frying" is more of
a puzzle.
-
Examined more closely, however, the limited
attention Brillat-Savarin pays to wine is an indication
of the contradictory role played by excess in the
economy of his discourse. On the one hand, the mere
pleasure of eating, "the actual and direct sensation of
a need being satisfied," which is common to humans and
animals alike, must be distinguished from the
specifically human "pleasures of the table," "the
reflective sensation which arises from the various
circumstances of occasion, place, things and persons
accompanying a meal," and which emerges distinctly only
once hunger and appetite are satisfied —thus, in
Brillat-Savarin's analysis, typically with the second
course (162-163).
-
On the other hand, "gourmandise" defined by
Brillat-Savarin as a "passionate, reasoned and habitual
preference for whatever is agreeable to the taste"
(130), must be distinguished from sheer gluttony and
voracity, with which, however, it is regularly
confused, beginning with the fact that the same word is
used for both.5
Here it is Brillat-Savarin who has consulted his
references in vain:
I looked through all the dictionaries under the word
Gourmandise, and I was not at all satisfied
with what I found. There is a perpetual confusion of
gourmandise properly speaking with
gluttony and voracity: from which I
conclude that the lexicographers, however worthy
otherwise, are not among those amiable
savants who nibble with grace a wing of
partridge au suprême and then wash it
down, pinky raised, with a glass of Laffitte or clos
Vougeout.
They have forgotten, utterly forgotten, social
gourmandise, which unites Athenian elegance, Roman
luxury and French delicacy, which disposes with
sagacity, executes with savoir-faire, savors with
energy, and judges with depth [. . . ]6
As we shall see, however, in the very act of
distinguishing the gourmand from the glutton, the
depiction en vignette of the gourmand also
combines savant, savorer, and Savarin in one
overdetermined figure, in a process of rhetorical
condensation of which the glass of wine is ultimate
repository. Unlike the gross excess of the selfish
glutton who eats everything, the "fine excess"
(Keats) of the "social" gourmand is characterized by
discrimination, discrimination in what he eats and in
the way that he eats. Indeed, the very analysis of the
act of dining into four distinct
moments—disposition, execution, savoring, and
judgment—is such an exercise in discrimination.
These discriminations are energetic—"il savoure
avec energie"—because they are the expression of
a force of desire that, like labor power in Marx's
theory of surplus-value, is in excess of the
requirements of self-preservation, which is also why
they are essentially social in character—and at
risk of being confounded with gluttony. The
proliferation of discriminations represents a
channeling of the surplus of desire which in the
glutton manifests as excessive appetitive into the work
of reinforcing and elaborating a symbolic code.
-
These discriminations are also self-reflexive,
"réflechie," a feature which is the mark and
mechanism of their refinement, but which also points to
the fact that the gourmand's energy of discrimination
is directed back on and embodied in the activity of
consumption rather than being placed in the service of
another aim. In partaking of his meal, the gourmand
savors his own knowing exercise of taste, his
savoir and savoir-faire. His powers
of gustatory discrimination differ from the common not
only in degree, differentiating a subtler spectrum of
qualities than others are capable of detecting, but in
kind, since every perception of difference is
compounded with a perception of his own heightened
sensibility—heightened because thus
compounded and made available to itself for enjoyment.
The activity of the gourmand transforms food into an
object of refined knowledge, and the process of its
consumption into the cultivation, exercise, and display
of that savoir, but by the same token that
savoir becomes bound up in the object of
gustatory enjoyment, an inextricable part of the
savor of food. That the gourmand, amiable
savant, is pictured as nibbling on a partridge
wing (itself related to the arm which raises it to the
diner's mouth) au suprême (mark of
invested expertise), thus with the expertly prepared
food neither completely inside or outside the mouth
even as it is consumed, a circumstance that works to
prolong the process of eating and its attendant
pleasure, emphasizes this ambiguity.
-
Just as its practice is reflexive, the
discourse of gourmandise is characteristically
the self-savoring discourse of the initiate, an
expansion into the arena of linguistic
performance—the realm of knowledge
proper—of the specifically reflective pleasure
that distinguishes the gourmand's experience of eating.
To distinguish semantically between "gourmandise" in
its proper application ("la gourmandise proprement
dite") and the common understanding of "gourmandise" as
gluttony one must partake in the gourmand's powers of
discrimination—unlike the lexicographers, but
quintessentially like Savarin, whose prose, in
portraying the gourmand's enjoyment of his expertise,
takes pleasure it itself. Savarin sait savourer et
savoure son savoir. The circularity of this
relationship can be read as both a sublimation of the
pleasure of eating and a regressive transformation of
the written word into a repository and source of oral
pleasure. The elegantly managed glass of Lafitte or
clos Vougeot with which the gourmand washes down his
morsel of partridge au suprême,
represents both the distillation of savor that defines
him and the inherited threat of imbalance that
accompanies it.
-
The association of wine, not simply with excessive
consumption, but with an exorbitant circuit of desire
that attaches to the very logic of gourmandise can also
be read in the distinction Brillat-Savarin draws
between "latent or habitual thirst," which serves to
replenish the loss of bodily fluids and thus
participates in the natural economy of the healthy body
and "factitious thirst," which, like the pleasures of
the table, adds a uniquely human dimension to the
cyclical processes of consumption:
Factitious thirst, which is specific to the human
race, comes from that innate instinct which leads us
to seek in drinks a force not put there by nature,
and which comes about only through fermentation. It
constitutes an artificial pleasure more than a
natural need: this thirst is inextinguishable,
because the drinks one takes to appease it have the
unfailing effect of causing it to arise anew; this
thirst, which ends up becoming habitual, makes for
the drunkards of all countries; and it almost always
happens that the impotation ceases only when the
liquor is lacking, or when it has vanquished the
drinker and put him out of action. (118)
The difference in kind, especially as it correlates
with the subdivision of the section on drinks into
"drinks" and "strong drinks," stands in marked contrast
to the difference of degree between "appetite" and
"large appetites," which latter tend to be associated
not with unregulated excess but with the prowess of the
"well-constituted" man (51). Neither entirely
artificial, since "factitious thirst" comes from an
"innate instinct," nor simply natural, since "strong
drink" contains a power that is not "put there" by
nature but the product of human effort, the addictive
cycle which binds them together is the demonic double
of the healthy reflexivity that joins the "passionate,
reasoned, habitual preferences" to the objects which
gratify and sustain his discerning tastes.
Brillat-Savarin's analysis of "factitious thirst"
registers, while localizing as a danger confined to
drinking, the possibility that the cultivation of
gustatory refinement, rather than constituting a
distinctly human enrichment of the balanced cycles of
organic life, might operate a parasitic expropriation
of those processes by a kind of mechanical desire whose
workings tend to exhaust and ultimately vanquish the
subject.
-
Finally, that the topic of wine or, more generally,
strong drink functions for Brillat-Savarin as something
of a negative space within the discursive economy of
the Physiology is also suggested by the
following curious footnote appended to the title of the
"Ninth Meditation: On Drinks":
This chapter is purely philosophical: the detailed
enumeration of the different kinds of drinks cannot
enter into the plan I have formed myself: there would
be no finishing. (124)
The note is curious since no similar concern had
impeded Brillat-Savarin from devoting the entirety of
the sixth meditation to a long and detailed, though of
course highly selective, discussion of special foods
[63-111]). It is thus yet another indicator of the way
in which the Physiology's pursuit of
distinction is shadowed by a threat of excess. It also
offers further evidence of how the "containing" of that
threat is integral to Brillat-Savarin's establishment
of the "theoretical bases of gastronomy."
Epicuri de Grege
-
An early and enthusiastic admirer of
Brillat-Savarin, Balzac clearly understood his wish to
divorce the theory and practice of the higher
gourmandise from any association with waste and excess,
though he also seems to have found it difficult to
honor that wish straightforwardly. Thus, writing the
entry for the Biographie Universelle mentioned
earlier, he assures his reader in a tone of devoted and
protective eulogy, "It would be far from the truth to
imagine that Brillat-Savarin's gastronomic sincerity
degenerated into intemperance. He formally declares, on
the contrary, that those who get indigestion or become
inebriated do not know how to eat
(aphor. 10). He everywhere distinguishes
between the pleasures of the table and the pleasure of
eating." But the classical reference with which Balzac
then continues, "In a word, he may take as his motto
Horace's Epicuri de grege, but let none add to
it the sad spondee which ends the hemistich," is more
unsettling, since it mainly seems devoted to playing,
through negation and elaborate periphrasis, with the
possibility of referring to its subject as "an
Epicurean pig."7
-
A related oscillation between homage and satire
figures prominently in Balzac's supplement to the
Physiology, his "Treatise on Modern
Stimulants" ("Traité des excitants
modernes").8
Solicited in 1838 by Charpentier, who had published
that year a new edition of both the Physiology of
Marriage and the Physiology of Taste,
Balzac's treatise first appeared as an appendix to
Charpentier's reprinting of the latter a year later, in
1839.9
In the "Treatise," Balzac pays tribute to
Brillat-Savarin as "one of the first to have remarked
on the influence of what goes into the mouth on human
destinies" (326), and thus as having opened up the
field of knowledge to which Balzac's appendix makes its
supplementary contribution.10
That there is already an element of tongue-in-cheek in
this way of characterizing Brillat-Savarin's enterprise
would not necessarily undercut the indebtedness, since
what Balzac claimed to admire most of all
about Brillat-Savarin's writing was its combination of
a goodheartedness with a comic undercurrent, "le
comique sous la bonhomie" (Biographie
Universelle 537). Indeed, the treatise as a whole
may be seen as an exercise in writing in the mode of
Brillat-Savarin, but in a more exaggerated fashion.
Thus we find the same heterogeneous mix of
philosophical disquisition; "scientific" reportage on
the nature and effects of different kinds of
"alimentation"; extended "illustrative" anecdotes,
whether personal or on the order of "lore," (such as
the story of the English convict who, in the interest
of science, was given the choice of being hanged or
subsisting on a diet of nothing but tea, and who, in
consequence of the latter, grew so thin and diaphanous
at the time of his death that "a philanthropist was
able to read the Times, a light having been
placed behind the body" [310]); and expert guidance on
proper techniques for the preparation and consumption
of particular foodstuffs. Throughout Balzac's treatment
is sufficiently broad that his editor Charpentier feels
obliged to alert the reader in a prefatory note to the
fact that the treatise is a "satire"
(393)—whether of contemporary manners or of
Brillat-Savarin is never entirely clear.
-
The comparative exorbitance of Balzac's writing, in
which ghastly burlesque supplants the diverting
anecdote and the sage maxims of the gastronome take a
lurid turn ("Inebriation is a temporary poisoning"
[314]; "To smoke cigars is to smoke fire" [322]) is
obviously of a piece with Balzac's thematic focus on
exorbitant forms of consumption, that is, forms of
consumption that do not subserve the economy of the
healthy body.11
Thus Balzac emphasizes from the start that "The excess
of tobacco, the excess of coffee, the excess of opium
and of spirits," the three principle subjects of the
treatise, "produce grave disorders and lead to a
precocious death" (308). Though the valuation remains
the same—excess is bad for you—the shift in
attention effectively displaces Brillat-Savarin's
axiomatic emphasis on the connection between taste and
good health: "Taste, which is stimulated by appetite,
hunger, and thirst, is at the base of several
operations whose result is that the individual grows,
develops, sustains itself and repairs the losses caused
by vital evaporations."12
-
A revisionary, critical tendency emerges as the
treatise develops and further narrows its focus. Balzac
announces in the beginning of the "Treatise" that he
will deal with five substances: l'eau-de-vie (which he
appears to equate with spirits in general), sugar, tea,
coffee, and tobacco. However, sugar, which
Brillat-Savarin treats at length, comes in for only
scattered remarks, and the discussion of tea is limited
to the story of the diaphanous convict and a more
analytic paragraph at the end of the section on coffee.
By contrast, several pages are devoted to coffee on
which matter "Brillat-Savarin is far from complete"
(404). And with regard to tobacco, Balzac finds
Brillat-Savarin even more remiss:
It is astonishing that Brillat-Savarin, in taking as
the title of his work the Physiology of
Taste, and after having demonstrated so well the
role in its pleasures of the nasal and palatial [sic]
cavities, should have forgotten the chapter on
tobacco.(411)
Both remarks obviously anticipate the form of
Baudelaire's complaint.
-
As has already been suggested, the shift in focus
does not simply supplement Brillat-Savarin's normal
gastronomy with an abnormal gastronomy, adding to the
Physiology of Taste a chapter on pathologies
of taste. Rather, it signals a reorientation of the
discourse as a whole. The scope and basis of this
reorientation are especially apparent from Balzac's
introductory "theoretical" sections, which mimic in
abbreviated form the "grave elubrications"
(Brillat-Savarin's phrase), which make up the first
forty pages of the Physiology. From the start,
Balzac makes it clear that his physiology is
concerned at least as much with the production of waste
as with the consumption of food:
Our organs are the
ministers of our pleasures. Almost all serve a double
function: they apprehend substances, incorporate
them, and then return them, in whole or in part,
under one form or another, to the common reserve, the
earth. These few words are the entire chemistry of
human life. The experts will have no trouble
digesting this formula. (307)13
The bouffonnerie of these remarks
notwithstanding, they prepare a line of argument that
is more explicitly initiated with the dictum that, "For
social man, to live is to expend oneself more or less
quickly" (ibid.) and which is then developed throughout
the treatise. Whereas for Brillat-Savarin, leisure and
wealth allow for the further accumulation of
gastronomic pleasure (45), for Balzac the more man is
freed from serving his basic needs, the more he is
driven to expend his surplus energies in the
pursuit of excess. "The less human force is occupied,
the more it tends to excess, borne there irresistibly
by thought" (ibid). One can question whether Balzac's
theory of surplus psychic energy represents an
improvement on Brillat-Savarin's psychological (and
economic) ideas. What matters for our purposes is the
way in which it explicitly reconceptualizes a theory of
managed consumption as one of managed excess.
The Wine Talking
-
While Baudelaire makes no direct reference to
Balzac's treatise, there is good reason for thinking
that it served as one source of inspiration for the
essay on wine and hashisch (and consequently, Les
Paradis artificiels). First of all, the mocking
attack on Brillat-Savarin as a celebrated fool which
launches the essay is answered at the conclusion of the
same section by a sympathetic evocation of the
late-earned success of "our dear and great Balzac," who
had died a few months before the essay's publication
(379).14
The juxtaposition of the two figures makes particular
sense if we suppose that Baudelaire had the treatise in
hand as he was writing, a circumstance all the more
possible since they were regularly published
together.15
Secondly, the association of Balzac with "modern
stimulants" would have been reinforced by his presence
at a hashish soirée in Baudelaire's lodgings in
1845, an occasion recalled by Baudelaire 15 years later
in Les Paradis artificiels
(438-439).16
Thirdly, and most significantly, the claim by both "On
Wine and Hashish" and Les Paradis artificiels
that drugs throw out of balance the "equation between
organs and pleasures" ("Il n'y a plus équation
entre les organes et les jouissances" [393, 420]) is
closely related to Balzac's thesis in the treatise that
"All excess is based on a pleasure that man wishes to
repeat beyond the ordinary laws promulgated by nature"
(307), a thesis which is explicitly identified by
Baudelaire in the essay as the theme of Balzac's La
Peau de chagrin (393).
-
Whether or not Balzac's treatise exercised any
direct influence on Baudelaire's essay, it offers a
valuable intermediate case for thinking about the
relationship between Brillat-Savarin's writing on food
and Baudelaire's writing on drugs, since it shows us
the former in the process of becoming the latter. Some
perspective on the larger historical context of this
process may be gleaned again from Balzac's entry in the
Biographie Universelle, where he mourns
Brillat-Savarin as the representative, not exactly of
the ancien régime, but of a class that preserved
its memory:
Their pleasures were stamped with that je ne sais
quoi of that earlier time which conserved the
distinction of manners and ideas, even as our youth
forget everything (là où la jeunesse
oublie tout); these traditions of elegant pleasure
are passing away, and our current ways will not bring
them back. It is thus a sad advantage to have known
these old men seated astride two centuries, who have
taught us all that our own has lost in amiabilities.
The nostalgia of this reflection has the same
structure as Balzac's satiric gestures of tribute: it
amplifies while repeating a sense of dislocation that
already defines the historical situation of
Brillat-Savarin, who seeks to adapt courtly distinction
of manners—manners that are memories of
themselves, even as he acquires them—to the
context of a post-revolutionary bourgeois economy. This
is the same historical moment that Denise Gigante
describes in Gusto with a more forward-looking
emphasis:
By disseminating upper-class cuisine and etiquette to
an enlarged, bourgeois clientele, gastronomers in
part help to maintain the elitist social codes of the
ancient régime. Yet, the very publication of
these taste rules performed a democratizing function,
giving the nouveaux riches access to a previously
exclusive sphere of cultural distinction and the
cultural tools necessary to distinguish themselves
with it. (xviii)
-
Yet. . . as Balzac writes in 1835, 1848 is already
looming: "la jeunesse oublie tout." Brillat-Savarin
preserves the memory of the ancient regime sufficiently
to enact some version of its manners. Born at the
beginning of the new century, Balzac only preserves the
memory of Brillat-Savarin. Born a generation later
(though the child of a father who was in fact
Brillat-Savarin's exact contemporary), Baudelaire's
stake in 1851 is in confronting the bourgeois
pretensions to which Balzac retains an ambivalent
attachment with claims of equality and difference so
radical they simply put out of operation codes of
intersubjective differentiation. Thus Baudelaire's
"defense" of wine in "On Wine and Hashish" begins by
addressing itself to the false feelings of superiority
of which Brillat-Savarin has been made the
spokesman:
Wine resembles man. We will never know how far it is
to be prized or scorned, loved or hated, of how many
sublime actions or monstrous crimes it is capable.
Let us not then be more cruel towards it than we are
towards ourselves, and let us treat it as an equal.
(380)
The equating of man and wine, here based on their
shared and limitless capacity for both good and evil,
is a central theme of the essay. The idea is presented
later in similar terms, ". . . I have said that wine is
assimilable to man, and have agreed that their crimes
are equal to their virtues" (382), and it underlies
Baudelaire's subsequent assertion that when a "true
doctor-philosopher" appears he will (in implicit
contrast to Brillat-Savarin and his "false masterpiece"
[378]) "undertake a powerful study of wine, a kind of
double psychology in which wine and man will constitute
the two terms." Developing the idea yet further,
Baudelaire allows that "he would not be surprised
should some reasonable minds, seduced by a pantheistic
idea, attribute to wine a kind of personality"
(387).
-
"Attributing to wine a kind of personality" is in
fact precisely what much of the first part of
Baudelaire's essay does. Thus, the admonition to "treat
wine as our equal" is followed immediately by a prose
rendering of the early poem, "L'Âme du vin," an
extended prosopopeia in which wine, from within its
"prison of glass" addresses to man, in "that voice of
spirits which is only heard by spirits"( "cette voix
des esprits qui n'est entendue que des esprits"), a
"song filled with brotherly love" (380). To understand
what happens to the identification of wine with excess
in Baudelaire's essay we will need to reflect further
on this figuration, which, in recognizing wine as man's
equal by conferring on it the power of speech,
transgresses a rhetorical limit which shapes both
Brillat-Savarin's Physiology and Balzac's
"Treatise."
-
A consideration of the next section of Baudelaire's
essay, this time a prose recasting of "The Ragpickers'
Wine" ("Le Vin des chiffoniers"), can guide us in that
reflection, for here again the personification of wine,
and more specifically the figure of wine speaking or
singing, plays a governing role, though this is not so
immediately obvious. Rather than directly attributing
the power of human speech to wine, the passage works by
implicitly identifying the unfolding in time of the
ragpicker's movement and song with the flow of
inebriation. The ragpicker's song of triumphal progress
("'Forward! march! division, head, army!'[. . . ] Now
he compliments his army. The battle is won, but the day
was heated. He passes on horseback under triumphal
arches." [381-2]) as he picks his drunken way at night
through the debris of the city's day is not only the
effect of wine, but the analogue of
its transformative passage though the individual human
body and the collective body of humanity. The
underlying analogy approaches explicitness with the
concluding sentences of the passage, where the latent
figure of the voice of wine also surfaces:
Wine, like a new Pactolus, rolls through languishing
humanity an intellectual gold. Like good kings, it
rules by serving and sings its exploits through the
throat of its subjects. (382)
-
Wine flows like a transformative
river,17
but also and especially it sings like a king
through a voice that is not its own. Since the
appropriated voice of the king's subject is clearly
that of the ragpicker, who in playing the part of the
beneficent king "swears solemnly that he will make his
people happy," the entire passage becomes a different
kind of dramatization of "the wine talking."
-
Coming just after the attack on Brillat-Savarin,
Baudelaire's initial call for the "equal treatment" of
wine seeks to reverse the condition of neglect to which
it is consigned in the Physiology of Taste, a
condition it shares with the ragpicker-king of "Le Vin
des chiffoniers," obviously, but also with Hoffman and
Balzac, who in Baudelaire's accounting only in their
latter days began to enjoy commercial success
(379).18
The underlying analogy is threefold: to consume wine or
to abstain from its consumption is to welcome into or
exclude from the body politic an outcast which is also
to grant or deny representation within a symbolic
order.
-
The manner in which Baudelaire's writing brings wine
into the field of "medical-philosophical" discourse
from which Brillat-Savarin had excluded it, however,
goes beyond any metaphor of organic or political
integration, for it is precisely because the power of
wine always has the potential to exceed itself, for
good or evil, that it deserves to be treated as an
equal: "We will never know how far it is to be prized
or scorned, loved or hated, of how many submlime
actions or monstrous crimes it is capable." The
prosopoepia does not transfer an attribute, voice, from
man to wine, based on some stable common measure or
principle of equivalence (of the kind, for example,
proposed by Brillat-Savarin's famous fourth aphorism:
"Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you
are" [1]). Casting the relationship between wine and
man as intersubjective gives rise to an extended series
of specular reversals and equivalences summed up in the
figure of the king who "rules by serving." But this
same substitution by means of prosopoeia of a
symmetrical intersubjective relationship for one that
is precisely not intersubjective is itself an
exorbitant rhetorical imposition.
-
An object-lesson in the production and management of
quotidian surplus-value, the discourse of gastronomy,
like its pleasures, is constituted by a tendency to
excess which, at the same time, it seeks to regulate as
an exercise in good taste. Baudelaire's "Essay," like
Balzac's "Treatise," exposes that underlying tendency
both through stylistic exaggeration and by taking the
consumption of excess as an explicit theme. Unlike
Balzac, however, whose satiric heightenings, however
broad, remain within the limits of what Baudelaire's
refers to in "The Essence of Laughter" as "signifying
comedy," based on intersubjective relations of
superiority and inferiority, Baudelaire's "absolute" or
"hyperbolic" comedy, in transgressing those limits,
holds up to the prosaic discourse of gastronomy a
phantasmagoric, poeticizing, mirror in which the voice
of the other talks back.
|
