Alchemies of modern experimentation in writing: Leopardi, Baudelaire, and the distillation of wine symbolism.

BEFORE nineteenth-century realism and naturalism exposed it as an instrument of social and economic destruction, wine--at the center of table culture, social decorum, and religious symbolism--was a recognized and lauded substance of transcendence. This alchemical converter furnished poets and philosophers with an image to designate a rite of passage, from sickness to health, from consciousness to dream, from the tangibly human to the spiritually divine. Early nineteenth-century Italian and French poets embraced this tradition. Giacomo Leopardi praised wine for its ability to heal the body and spirit, to inspire unprecedented poetic articulacy and God-like omniscience (Zibaldone di Pensieri). Charles Baudelaire celebrated wine's capacity to reverse situations, "changer la taupe en aigle," with all the metaphorical implications of blindness giving way to sight ("Le Vin," Oeuvres 214). Given the equally important influence of each poet on his respective national literature, Leopardi's fragments on wine in the Zibaldone di Pensieri make a relevant comparison with Baudelaire, whose poems are perhaps more readily associated with theories of intoxication. (1) Although both poets assimilate traditional alcohol mythologies and connect them with an experimental writing process that we might call modern, a closer look at the ways in which Baudelaire goes beyond these myths reveals a significant historical shift in the literary treatment of wine. For Leopardi, wine is a substance of vitality and rejuvenation, and the Zibaldone emphasize wine's effectiveness for restoring bodily vigor and physical health to the sick poet. More than just an antidote to pain and melancholy, wine is an elixir, an alchemical potion capable of inducing elevated mental states, augmenting human vision, and increasing understanding of universals--all this without severing the human connection to reason and language. Combining magic with an element of rational control, wine becomes instrumental to poetic vision, invention, and expression. For the French poet, too, wine is a "substance de conversion," to borrow Roland Barthes' expression (Mythologies 74). Although Baudelaire never understates wine's transformative and inspirational potential in either the prose poem, Du Vin et du haschich, or in the wine poems of Les Fleurs du Mal, he nonetheless relegates wine, along with other stupefiants, to the realm of artificial paradises, and the later poems mark his shift in thinking about alcohol. Not only do they anticipate surrealism in a tableau of oneiric images that border on hallucination, testifying to the poetic avant-gardism that many have discussed. (2) They more importantly disclose the century's changing attitudes about alcohol, and announce naturalism by distilling (taken here in the double senses of purifying and extracting essential or true meanings) a critique of modern urban society.

Let us now turn to this distillation of wine symbolism. The example of Leopardi shows wine to be a transmutative substance capable of generating creative, visionary impulses. In the Zibaldone, wine is also a substance of transcendence, which for Leopardi is first and foremost a physical matter: "Il vino e il piU certo, e (senza paragone) il piU efficace consolatore. Dunque il vigore; dunque la natura" (Zibaldone 324-5: 127).3 More than a mere consolation, wine offers a means of getting beyond the invalid body and back to bodily "vigor" and "nature." It is widely accepted that Leopardi's ill-health and physical deformities exercised an influence on his writing. According to Benedetto Croce, favorite expressions in the fragments, such as "Enemy Nature" illustrate this link between the biography and the verse. Abandoning the earlier, eighteenth-century pastoral images of nature, Leopardi describes the menacing cloud which "Enemy Nature" casts over life, reminding the poet of his infinite smallness in a harsh and dangerous universe, as if the infiniment petit of Pascalian Jansenism had returned to haunt nineteenth-century Italy. (4) Surely Leopardi's preoccupation with the body, "bound down and overpowered by a brutal force" (Croce 117), can be likened to the spleen of later French poets, who also describe a degenerate and atrophied body, that tragic by-product of modern rationalism. If, however, the body has the potential to bounce back vigorously in the Leopardian imagination, perhaps it is due to what Max Horkheimer calls the inevitable and uncontainable revolt of nature: "the sole way of assisting nature is to unshackle its seeming opposite, independent thought" (127). Unshackling or uncorking--either gesture is a symbolic move towards the body's recovery.

Recovering the body, however, is only the beginning. Leopardi's case prefigures a tendency, also observable in Baudelaire's poems, to combine conscious anti-religious ideology with sublimated theological symbolism. The alchemical experience replicates a dialectical process whereby the body acts as both a departure point and storehouse for metaphysical experience. Wine, insists Leopardi, elevates human vision to a "higher place," permitting us to see and perceive the universe "come da un luogo alto e superiore" (3269-70: 817). Whatever skepticism or revolt against theology we may associate with Leopardi must therefore be reevaluated in light of this cult of the body set in motion through alchemy. Francesco De Sanctis, observing this duality in Leopardi's writing, called it a "metaphysics" of the "aridly true, the real," in which the poet was able, without fully quitting the realm of realism, to envision an imaginary paradise accessible to the inebriated artist (943). Written between 1823 and 1827, during the years just following Baudelaire's birth, the Zibaldone strikingly unite the two kinds of correspondances we commonly associate with the French poet: on the one hand, the "horizontal" synesthesies, fusing together disparate sensorial experiences and facilitating the discernment of "una moltitudine di oggetti tutti insieme rappresentantisegli" (3269-70: 817-8); and on the other, the "vertical" link between the sensory world and the extra-sensory, philosophical, poetical experience grounded "principalmente nello spirito" (4286: 1148). Leopardi's multitude of objects lose their familiarity when viewed from this superior perspective, only to gain "la novita" (3270: 818). Human vision, attaining omniscience reminiscent of the divine, can suddenly apprehend an infinite universe. For Leopardi, therefore, wine is a material link to the spiritual, as suggested by the recurrent parallelism of "corporale" and "spirituale" in the Zibaldone.

Eulogies placing wine side by side with the celestial are not uncommon in poetry. In his essay, "Le vin et la vigne des alchimistes," Gaston Bachelard suggests that wine is a "poetically salutary" image because it is a substance which condenses into its materiality all the suggestiveness of dream (323-4). The grape-bearing vine, a living, earthly body which maintains a year-long discourse with celestial bodies--the sun, the moon, the stars, the comets--realizes an archetypal stature as it links human life with the heavens through a continual process of cultivation and renewal. At once a "substance" and a "substantif " in Bachelard's view, wine embodies the linguistic and poetic: "comme nous avons besoin de ces substantifs primitifs pour parler, pour chanter" (313). At the heart of the relationship between language and the gustatory act is the organ which unites them, as Gian-Paolo Biasin, writing that "the human mouth is the ambiguous locus of two oralities," has pointed out (3). Michel Serres plays creatively with this ambiguity in Les cinq sens, where he differentiates between the speaking and knowing mouth, the "bouche-parliere" and the "bouche-sapience" (166-7). In Serres' conception, the site of language and speech production is both distinguished from and confused with the site of Epicurean gustatory experience. Taste, purely esthetic, is ultimately anterior to language; and while it is the necessary precursor to knowledge, it is inextricable from it. Joining this double orality is sapiens, the present participle of the Latin sapere--to know, to taste. Alcohol consumption, Serres reminds us, need not be a process of systematic inebriation. Less volatile drinking practices place wine amongst the other nourishing substances into the domain of gastronomical art. To paraphrase Serres, wine can be a gustatory aesthetic rather than an intoxicating anesthetic. In this view, wine shifts into focus as a substance of taste and knowledge, an instrument of language and writing capable of nourishing poetic inspiration and artistic expression without damaging the nerves.

In the wine fragments of the Zibaldone, Leopardi makes no reference to drunkenness. The achievements of "forza" and "vigore" on the one hand, and revelation on the other, are never characterized by a loss of self-control. Here, whatever talent wine might possess for strengthening the body undergoes a kind of sublimation which relegates wine to a purely ideological or, along the lines described by Michel Serres, aesthetic dimension. The emphasis is always placed on a balance between first, the good physical health induced by wine-drinking and second, the spiritual and intellectual flow arising out of it, as the following two excerpts suggest.

   Il vino [...] produce uno straordinario vigore o del corpo tutto o
   della testa, non pur giova all'immaginazione, ma eziandio
   all'intelletto, ed all'ingegno generalmente, alla facolta di
   ragionare, di pensare, e di trovar delle verita ragionando [...]
   all'inventiva ec. (3552-3: 886)

   Il vino, il cibo ec. da talvolta una straordinaria prontezza
   vivacita, rapidita, facilita, fecondita d'idee, di ragionare,
   d'immaginare, di motti, d'arguzie, sali, risposte ec. (3881-2: 981)

In both fragments, human intelligence reaches a level of extraordinary acuity, which expresses itself in an increased capacity not only to imagine, think, and reason, but also to better formulate witticisms, arguments, judgments, and rebuttals. The end result is language production, and whether we conceive of it in the form of speech or writing, the connection with wine is undeniable. Serres' notion of a gastronomical aesthetic is foreshadowed in the way Leopardi equates "il vino" with food, "il cibo": wine has come a very long way from being regarded as a mere means to intoxication.

In contrast, Baudelaire's concern in the wine cycle of Les Fleurs du Mal centers on the problem of drunkenness, which may surprise readers remembering that the poet promoted inebriety in the Petits poemes en prose: "Il faut etre toujours ivre" ('Enivrez-vous' 125). Drunkenness in this particular poem, of course, is a figure of speech referring to any mental departure from the temporal world, and by means including, but not restricted to, alcohol: "Il faut vous enivrer sans treve. Mais de quoi? De vin, de poesie ou de vertu, a votre guise. Mais enivrez-vous." In Les Fleurs du Mal, wine is no less praised for its capacity to inspire poetry than it was in the Zibaldone. However, recalling the naturalist critique of the later nineteenth-century novel, Les Fleurs du Mal is also fundamentally concerned with socio-historical questions, and modern societal problems are brought to light through the wine metaphor. I do not wish to overlook the element of critique in Leopardi's wine fragments and have suggested that the Italian poet's preoccupation with restoring the corporal life-force through wine-drinking represents a vehement outcry against the eclipse of bodies brought about by exacerbated post-Enlightenment reason. To suggest, moreover, that Baudelaire's critique is more modern would perhaps overstate a distinction. Nevertheless it does come across as strikingly more "naturalist" as the French poet takes on "the real challenges of his time--the experience of great cities, the implications of bourgeois ascendancy, the spread of democracy, the promise and threat of revolution" (Seigel 97). Themes such as class struggle, republicanism, capitalist exploitation and urban industrialization are taken up in "Le vin des chiffonniers," the poem to which we will now turn. Thus Jerrold Seigel's assertion that political issues are absent from Baudelaire's writings (106) invites reconsideration.5 While Baudelaire's own expressed feelings about his involvement in revolutionary affairs might support Siegel's claim--he referred to his days on the barricades, for example, as his "intoxication in 1848" (qtd. in Seigel 107)--the poems themselves suggest otherwise.

Walter Benjamin has shown that "Le vin des chiffonniers" reflects an issue of hot political debate at the time: the tax on wine and the toll houses set up at the entrance of larger cities, an economic maneuver which sent the prices of wine soaring in France and which forced the urban working population to seek cheaper alcohols on the outskirts of cities. The "vieux faubourg" of the poem's first stanza may be understood in this light. Other elements of the poem strike us as "socialist" in tone and reveal a Baudelaire engage. The poem's drunken ragpicker effuses glorious projects. He preaches and dictates laws which punish injustice and mean-spiritedness at the same time that they defend and uplift society's victims, whom we can only assume are people just like him, suffering from pauperism, overwork and general neglect. Harassed, chagrined, ground down by labor, tormented, beaten down, bending under the burden of the piles of rags they collect: the poem's descriptive vocabulary, which culminates in the "vomissement" of the giant metropolis, underscores the deleteriousness of the ragpicker's position. This socio-naturalistic landscape of household strife, exploited labor-power, big city life and Parisian debris reminds us of Zola's urban marketplace in Le Ventre de Paris.

Baudelaire not only targets the plight of the lower classes, but also idealizes the ragpicker by equating him with the poet: "On voit un chiffonnier qui vient, hochant la tete, / Buttant, et se cognant aux murs comme un poete" (5-6). A few lines further along, the ragpicker-poet is drunk on virtue, recalling the third term of inebriation mentioned in "Enivrez-vous" and reestablishing equivalence between the poet, the virtuous man and the plain drunkard. Wine functions as an equalizer, erasing distinctions between individuals. This equalizing is underlined on a more general level in Baudelaire's poem by expressions which define the ragpicker according to his membership in a collective social entity: "l'humanite" (4); "les victimes" (10); "ces gens harceles" (13); "suivis de compagnons" (18); "au peuple ivre d'amour" (24); "ces vieux maudits" (30). In short, Baudelaire embarks on a social crusade by painting a portrait of this proletarian milieu and adopts a cause simply by "singing" about it.

The question of song brings me to my final point for the discussion of this poem. In "L'ame du vin," the first in the 5-poem ensemble, the voice of wine offers up a fraternal song to his proletarian addressee, "un chant plein de lumiere et de fraternite." In "Le vin des chiffonniers," on the contrary, the voice of wine is suddenly characterized by military exploits and traits of royalty that compromise its position as proletarian Savior. A song of warmth and brotherhood in the first poem is replaced by a song of exploit in the second; the earthy relationship between wine and the worker in the former gives way in the latter to a deafening and orgiastic display of banners, bugles, cries, drum-rolls, glory, frivolity, monuments to military triumph and monarchism, and last but not least, gold and enormous wealth--in a word, capital. In the end, our understanding of Baudelaire's poem must be informed by wine's complicity with capitalist production during the Second Empire. Baudelaire's praise of wine as a tool for igniting reverie and sensorial exploration has another side whose tone is far graver, anticipating naturalism, thematizing proletarian solidarity, and foreshadowing revolt.

It comes as little surprise that an epoch which perceived itself to be ailing should seek relief in both real and symbolic intoxication. Wine had been used throughout history for medicinal purposes before it came to be consumed for pleasure. But if alcohol possessed curative properties that some literary minds extended to their own conditions as artists, nineteenth-century naturalism demonstrated a different side of alcohol consumption. Dispensing with many of the celebratory myths about wine, the naturalist novel viewed alcohol as an addictive and crippling poison, analogous to less mainstream narcotics like opium and hashish. With the rise of European temperance movements, the development of medical science, and the conditions of industrial advancement, attitudes toward drinking shifted, as the coining in 1848 of a new pathology, alcoholism, suggests (Barrows 17). Alcohol consumption now belonged to the realm of medical professionalism and diagnosis. The examples of Baudelaire and Leopardi illustrate how the wine metaphor can at once combine a socio-ethical or political motif with the visionary ideal of the modern poetic imagination. When Benjamin pinpointed Baudelaire's "metaphysics of the provocateur," he was referring to this duality and innovation. Leopardi, advocating for the body in a highly repressive Risorgimento Italy, shares in this innovation and provocation. Wine mythologies and the study of alcohol in literature largely enhance our understanding of the complexities of literary culture and social history in the nineteenth century. As Brillat-Savarin has so succinctly phrased it in his Physiologie du gout: "cette soif d'une espece de liquide que la nature avait enveloppe de voiles ... est bien digne de fixer l'attention de l'observateur philosophe" (149).

WORKS CITED

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974.

Bachelard, Gaston. La terre et les reveries du repos. Paris: Librairie Jose Corti, 1948.

Barrows, Susanna and Ronald Room, Eds. Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern History. Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: U of California P, 1991.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957.

Baudelaire, Charles. Oeuvres completes de Charles Baudelaire. Paris: Louis Conard, 1917.

--. Petits poemes en prose (Le spleen de Paris). Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1967.

--. Les Fleurs du Mal et autres poemes. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964.

Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: NLB, 1973.

Biasin, Gian-Paolo. The Flavors of Modernity: Food and the Novel. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1993.

Brillat-Savarin. Physiologie du gout. Paris: Rene Julliard, 1965.

Burton, Richard D. E. Baudelaire and the Second Republic. Writing and Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1991.

Croce, Benedetto. "Leopardi." European Literature in the Nineteenth Century. Trans. Douglas Ainslie. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924: 111-130.

De Sanctis, Francesco. "The New Literature." The History of Italian Literature. Trans. Joan Redfer. Vol. 2. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1959. 833-947.

Horkheimer, Max. Eclipse of Reason. New York: Continuum, 1992.

Leopardi, Giacomo. Zibaldone. Vol. 2 of Tutte le Opere. Firenze: G. C. Sansoni Editore, 1969.

Rimbaud, Arthur. Complete Works, Selected Letters. Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 1966.

Seigel, Jerrold. "The Poet and Dandy as Bohemian: Baudelaire." Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life 1830-1930. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. 97-124.

Serres, Michel. Les cinq sens: philosophie des corps meles. Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1985. 161-254.

(1) The connection is important for a less obvious reason. Because no English translation of the Zibaldone exists, the Italian poet may be less accessible to English readers than the widely translated Baudelaire. Readers can, however, look forward to the English translation currently in progress at the Leopardi Centre housed at the University of Birmingham (U.K.). Funded in part by the Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani, the expected completion date for the "Zibaldone Project" is 2010. See http://www.leopardi.bham.ac.uk/.

(2) Rimbaud famously called Baudelaire le premier voyant, referring to the visionary dimension of modern poetry, a dimension which presupposed improving upon older, particularly Romantic, styles through formal invention and innovation. Rimbaud attributed this quality to Baudelaire in his letter of 15 May 1871 to Paul Demeny (Complete Works 310).

(3) All references to the Zibaldone indicate the line location in the Sansoni edition; page numbers follow the line location.

(4) Without making the link with Pascal explicit, Maurice Muret's early twentieth-century study of Leopardi discusses the notion of "l'infiniment petit" which Leopardi takes up in his own writing. See La litterature italienne d'aujourd'hui (Paris: Perrin, 1906) 257.

(5) Indeed it has, in Richard D. E. Burton's study, where Burton links red wine directly to "red politics" (Baudelaire and the Second Republic).