Much attention has been lavished on the commonplace in recent years, and it would be futile, not to say unoriginal, to attempt another rehabilitation of the cliché as an expressive literary device. Neither would it be particularly profitable, in a short study, to analyse the manner in which a poet such as Baudelaire exploits and renovates literary stereotypes. The very definition of the stereotype poses several problems: when does a certain figure become a cliché? Is the writer aware of its status as a cliché, or is its use associated with a particular intertext? The commonplace under scrutiny here bears only a distant relation to the literary cliché, and provides a more reliable basis for textual analysis. The word will be taken principally to designate a type of figure generally recognized by speakers of a particular language to express a particular truth, whether explicitly, in the form of a saying, or implicitly, in an expression.

In the case of Baudelaire, the use of such figures has been noted and studied primarily in Le Spleen de Paris. Baudelaire himself draws attention to this feature of his prose poems, and his exploitation of popular sayings or expressions is often overtly satirical. In some ways, this renders the figure less interesting stylistically; the reader is invited in an obvious manner to make sense of the distorted saying or to consider the philosophical or moral implications of a certain expression. In Les Fleurs du Mal, on the other hand, the more discreet presence of these figures creates more curious effects. I hope to show, in fact, that the poetic commonplace may well be counted as one of the trucs which make up the 'mechanism' of Baudelaire's verse poetry. Certainly, in Fusées, Baudelaire indicates the poetic potential of the lieu commun as a figure that is in some way both universally understandable and strangely provocative: 'Profondeur immense de pensée dans les locutions vulgaires, trous creusés par des générations de fourmis'.

This phrase, which is itself aptly reminiscent of a popular saying, of the 'many a mickle makes a muckle' variety, plays on the idea of usure: the wearing away and polishing of a phrase can eventually become the digging-out of a whole mine of possible meanings; the triteness of the 'time-honoured' precept hides a capacity to astonish, to faire rêver. Furthermore, this figure is apparently distinguishable in some important respect from other elements of figurative language. The obvious difference between a commonplace and an image invented by the poet is that the commonplace already exists as a linguistic unity. The task of the poet who wishes to exploit a commonplace, then, as Baudelaire's Fusées suggests, is practically the opposite of the task which faces the inventor of a symbol or an allegory. Instead of beginning with a particular meaning in mind, the starting-point, as for the reader, is a set of signifiers, and the poet's job is to unravel the message or messages they contain, to explore these 'trous creusés par des générations de fourmis'. This is presumably the aspect of the commonplace which Baudelaire, in the Salon de 1859, finds 'excitant' or 'fertile'. Rather than establishing links between two or more elements, thus expressing a subjective unity, the pre-existing commonplace produces a series of associations: hence the emphasis laid by Baudelaire on the multiplicity and objectivity of the figure—'rendez-vous public', or the 'générations de fourmis'. In examining Baudelaire's use of this figure in Les Fleurs du Mal, I shall show how this excitement may also be a feeling of unease, and how the digging of the ants is also an undermining, an inverted construction.

Perhaps the most straightforward way in which Baudelaire exploits clichéd or popular expressions is to use them as providers of a theme. Une charogne, for example, is based on the vulgar sense of charogne as a slut, the 'femme lubrique' of the second stanza. (This might explain why Baudelaire uses the indefinite article in his title.) The analogy developed by the poet between his mistress and the rotting carcass is already implicit in the popular image, though even this small example shows how he explores the less obvious connotations of the expression. The superficial comparison is between a piece of animal meat and a woman considered only as a body, but, as the poem reveals, it also suggests a more 'fertile' connexion between Eros and Death.

Similarly, A une Madone derives its theme from the saying, 'dresser un autel à quelqu'un'—to put someone on a pedestal: 'Je veux bâtir pour toi, Madone, ma maîtresse, / Un autel souterrain au fond de ma détresse.' The entire poem is a detailed expansion of an apparently innocent saying, the very banality of which heightens the irony of the poet's eccentric adoration. Although the sadistic climax of the poem appears to be a mocking inversion of the reverence expressed by the original saying, Baudelaire's development of the image reveals its inherent blasphemy.

This is obviously a common poetic device which is technically related to the fable. Certain Fleurs du Mal could in fact be considered as peripheral examples of this genre: Les Hiboux, or even Le Voyage. The poems I shall examine, however, often take as their starting-point or have as their 'intertext' an idiomatic expression, the content of which tends to be psychological rather than moral, implicit rather than explicit. La Cloche fêlée, for instance, plays on the slang meaning of fêlé. A more interesting example is Le Vin des amants which uses the analogy of horseriding to express the feelings of freedom produced by intoxication:

Aujourd'hui l'espace est splendide!
Sans mors, sans éperons, sans bride,
Partons à cheval sur le vin
Pour un ciel féerique et divin!

The adage evoked by this image, and perhaps its origin, is 'bon vin, bon éperon'. Both nouns occur in the first stanza, though (if we assume this transformation to be deliberate) the cliché is cleverly altered ('sans éperon') and its original meaning thereby intensified.

When used as a source of particular images rather than general themes, the device becomes even less obvious, and all the more effective. The visual elements of the popular saying are emphasized, thus concealing the idea it normally expresses. This can be achieved, as in Le Vin des amants, by the syntactic separation of the elements to which the idea is habitually attached. In Spleen I, for example, the verse, 'L'âme d'un vieux poète erre dans la gouttière', exploits the phrase 'un poète de gouttière', suggesting a starving Bohemian and a mediocre poet, contributing thus to the general sense of dilapidation and sterility. The same effect can also be achieved, as in A une Madone, where 'dresser' becomes 'bâtir', by substituting certain words of the original expression: 'Avec ses vêtements ondoyants et nacrés, / Même quand elle marche on croirait qu'elle danse.' The intertext here (admittedly more a literary cliché than a popular saying) is, 'Même quand l'oiseau marche, on sent qu'il a des ailes', and it serves to emphasize the light and graceful step of the woman. In these verses, of course, the idea is explicit even in the modified expression, but an element of (perhaps unconscious) surprise is introduced when, instead of a bird, a snake appears in the following line. A striking example of this can be found in the first quatrain of Le Mort joyeux: 'Et dormir dans l'oubli comme un requin dans l'onde'. The adapted cliché is, of course, 'comme un poisson dans l'eau', its similarity to the new image stressed by the fact that the original phrase would also have occupied a hemistich. The transformation of poisson into requin adds to the idea of comfort in a natural habitat a sense of peril and latent power.

The examples given thus far could be characterized in the following way: first, the visual imagery of the popular expression is developed, and gives rise to, or becomes part of a more complex series of images; the usual meaning of the expression is thereby concealed, but is none the less present as a discreet echo. Secondly, this usual meaning may be affected by an alteration of the expression, and certain connotations, normally unrecognized, become apparent.

Other images, however, which also recall the usual sense of the figure, actually seem to contradict or undermine it ironically. My first example is the third stanza of Au lecteur; it opens with a peculiar image which, perhaps because the second hemistich is more immediately interesting, has received little attention: 'Sur l'oreiller du mal c'est Satan Trismégiste / Qui berce longuement notre esprit enchanté.' The image of the pillow, associated with the idea of lulling, and in the context of sin, hypocrisy, and the 'washing' of 'stains', creates an echo of the saying 'Une bonne conscience est un doux oreiller'. Here, however, the perverse implication is that 'Une mauvaise conscience est un doux oreiller', and this clandestine modification of the commonplace adds, presumably, to the 'hypocritical' reader's sense of unease.

In the same poem, another popular saying is employed for its imagery whilst its usual application is slightly altered: 'Nous volons au passage un plaisir clandestin / Que nous pressons bien fort comme une vieille orange.' 'Presser l'orange' (or 'le citron') means to exploit thoroughly and unscrupulously, the best-known use of the phrase being Voltaire's complaint that Frédéric II had 'pressé l'orange' and was preparing to 'jeter l'écorce'. In Au lecteur, however, it is unclear who is exploiting whom: even while squeezing the juice from a 'plaisir clandestin', Man is being squeezed by the Devil. Moreover, Baudelaire brilliantly adapts and intensifies the figure simply by adding an adverbial phrase and an adjective: 'bien fort' and 'vieille'.

My third example is taken from the fourth Spleen poem: '—Et de longs corbillards, sans tambours ni musique, I Défilent lentement dans mon âme;' (my italics). As in Au lecteur, it is possible to consider the figure (usually 'sans tambour ni trompette') in its literal sense: a procession may well be expected normally to include drums and music. But the same characteristic ambiguity is also produced. The conventional sense of the phrase would be 'without making any fuss'; in the poem, however, the connotations are different, suggesting the silence of captivity and despair; the idea of discreet efficiency has become that of monotony and dread.

These various adaptations of locutions vulgaires are, generally, forms of verbal humour. (In the terms of Baudelaire's essay on laughter, they might indeed be described as 'satanic', the idea of personal superiority springing here from the individual's correction of a time-honoured and apparently universal perception.) Nowhere is this more evident than in the most extraordinary images of Les Fleurs du Mal, those images which Laforgue termed 'comparaisons énormes'. Such images frequently imitate the sort of joke which depends on a literal interpretation of a proverbial expression, a form of humour which Baudelaire seems to have practised. In Spleen II, the likening of memory to a 'gros meuble à tiroirs encombré de bilans' has a perfectly banal origin in the expression, 'avoir la mémoire encombrée'. As in Une charogne or A une Madone, this figure, with its 'profoundeur immense de pensée', provides the basis of the whole poem. Similarly, in Sed non satiata, the exotic imagery is continued and subtly justified by a verse ('Quand vers toi mes désirs partent en caravane') which, as Claude Pichois indicates, derives from the expression, 'faire ses caravanes' (to lead an adventurous and dissolute life). In Réversibilité, Baudelaire plays on the figurative meanings of comprimé and froissé to create the strange image of 'les vagues terreurs', 'Qui compriment le cæur comme un papier qu'on froisse'. Finally, yet another 'comparaison énorme' which seems almost humorously to imply its own deflation is that of the gorge-armoire: 'Ta gorge triomphante est une belle armoire' (Le Beau navire). Graham Chesters points out, in his interesting analysis of the metaphor, that it 'has a respectable English equivalent in the dual meaning of the word "chest"'. But it also has a somewhat less respectable equivalent in French in the application of an 'armoire (à glace)' to a sturdily-built person. This gives added resonance to the epithet, 'triomphante', and stresses the masculine attributes of the 'majestueuse enfant': her neck is 'large et rond', her shoulders 'grasses', and her arms 'se joueraient des précoces hercules'.

The effect of this humour is to deflate the conventional image, to reveal its literal absurdity, and then, on this foundation, to create new images which indicate the profound truth of the determining figure. The elements composing these images can be all the more disparate for being anchored in a generally recognized expression, even though this expression may not in every case be present in the reader's conscious mind. If we take into account the other verses quoted thus far, which also demonstrate the poetic potential of the commonplace, we might tentatively define this operation in terms of Jean Cohen's conclusions in Structure du language poétique (1966), and see it as a typical activity of the 'mécanisme de fabrication du poétique':

La poésie .. . ne détruit que pour reconstruire. . . . L'absurdité du poème lui est essentielle, mais elle n'est pas gratuite. Elle est le prix dont il faut payer une clarté d'un autre ordre. Dans et par la figure, le sens est à la fois perdu et retrouvé. Mais de l'opération il ne sort pas intact.

Cohen's statement that the sense does not emerge intact from this operation leads to the more disquieting aspect of this use of popular expressions. In one respect, it is clear in some of the examples cited that the normally-accepted meaning of the figure is changed. In other cases, such as Baudelaire's 'comparaisons énormes', the meaning is apparently intact, though less evident. In view of the image from Fusées, it may not be overly pretentious to say that meaning in general, rather than one particular meaning, is somehow disturbed or undermined.

What I have termed the deflation of the determining popular expression consists in treating the expression above all as a linguistic structure. This is particularly apparent in those verses which invert the original order of the metaphor or which separate its constituent elements. At the end of Remords posthume, the poet tells his mistress: '—Et le vers rongera ta peau comme un remords.' The personification of remorse implicit in the phrase 'rongé par des remords' is made explicit here by the changed mood of the verb and by the introduction of the worm itself. In Au lecteur, the expression 'nourrir des remords' is spread over two verses and, at the same time, disguised by the separation of verb and object: 'Et nous alimentons nos aimables remords, I Comme les mendiants nourrissent leur vermine' (my italics). A curious example of this, which will be mentioned again later, occurs in Spleen IV:

Quand la terre est changée en un cachot humide,
Où l'Espérance, comme une chauve-souris,
S'en va battant les murs de son aile timide
Et se cognant la tête à des plafonds pourris;

Quand la pluie étalant ses immenses traînées
D'une vaste prison imite les barreaux,
Et qu'un peuple muet d'infâmes araignées
Vient tendre ses filets au fond de nos cerveaux, (my italics)

The image of the last two verses quoted seems to verge on the surrealistic: what logical connexion can there be between these spiders spinning webs in the brain and the mental state called spleen? The 'infâmes araignées' appear simply to be vague symbols in an impressionistic état d'âme, evoking, for example, evil intent and the Fates. And yet, present perhaps on an unconscious level, linking image to theme, is the expression, 'avoir une araignée dans le plafond' (Littré gives: 'Se dit d'un homme bizarre et un peu fou'). The plafond has been replaced by the cerveau itself, but this other concrete element of the image is introduced in advance in the 'plafonds pourris' of the preceding stanza. Significantly, Corbiére uses the expression in a similar manner in his Baudelairean pastiche, 'La Pipe au poète'. It is tempting to see in such images evidence of certain ruses which give Baudelaire's poetry its sense of an enigma half-perceived, an unspecified truth underlying the text, but one for which an everyday formula exists.

These figures, often identifiable by their structure as much as by their meaning, would provide interesting material for a Freudian reading of Baudelaire, and it is unfortunate that Leo Bersani entirely neglects the subject in his Baudelaire and Freud (1977). Images belonging to the collective unconscious, dulled by usage, are transformed and disguised in such a way that they regain their power to appeal to the unconscious. Obviously it is important that this alteration should not be directly concerned with the sense of the expression, but rather with its structure and constituent elements. If the transformation is explicit, the effect is lost, and the irony operates on only one level. (The verse in Femmes damnées, 'On ne peut ici-bas contenter qu'un seul maître!', is an example of this, as is the ironic title of 'Un voyage à Cythère': according to Littré, 'faire un voyage à Cythère' means 'se livrer aux plaisirs de l'amour'.) This is a technique familiar nowadays to advertising companies. In Baudelaire's time, the perception underlying this exploitation of popular expressions had not been formulated, and yet the disturbing and 'exciting' implications of psycholinguistics are certainly present in images such as that of the 'infâmes araignées': that our realities are inextricable from the structures of language. The truth that is half-perceived (in this case, madness) is not only expressed through language; it depends entirely upon language for its subjective reality, and it is perhaps for this reason that Baudelaire's use of the device seems often to be associated with the evocation of a disturbed state.

One might at this point object, with hindsight, that the use of certain images is deliberately ironic. On one level, it is true that Baudelaire's manipulation of these figures has a parodic quality which resembles Flaubert's use of idées reçues. Irony preserves the integrity of the writer who is painfully aware that his language is inevitably a sociolecte, imbued with the notions of a society he despises. This is probably true, as I shall show, of a poem like La Muse vénale. It seems to be the case also that there is a conscious attempt on the part of the poet to surprise and disturb the reader. There is, of course, a certain pleasure to be derived from denying what are generally held to be self-evident truths. No doubt the distortion of popular expressions in Au lecteur, for example, underlines the assertion that social conventions hide unpleasant and complex realities. This can certainly be said of the more eccentric images of Le Spleen de Paris. As J. A. Hiddleston indicates, 'They often have a palpably refutable quality until the mind of the reader, fascinated by their explosive force, comes to an understanding of a deeper reality' (Baudelaire and 'Le Spleen de Paris', 1987). . . . Figures in the verse poetry which might be included in this category have a more subtle and muted effect, whilst displaying a skilful misapplication of the familiar expression: the 'vieille orange' of Au lecteur, for example, or the phrase 'sans tambours ni musique' in Spleen.

These images are in their way as disturbing as those to be found in Le Spleen de Paris. The adaptation of a known figure renders the familiar strange and the strangeness of the altered image curiously familiar. The reader's unease is increased by what might be called the discreet irrelevance of the generative figure. But there is evidence of something more than a desire to confuse the bourgeois. This dislocation of habitual forms of discourse expresses an insecurity about language and the convention of 'reality': an insecurity hinted at in the image in Fusées.

Significantly, the use of popular figures in Les Fleurs du Mal frequently coincides, as suggested, with an expression of poetic impotence, of the meaninglessness of life. La Muse vénale provides the most flagrant and uncomplicated examples:

Il te faut, pour gagner ton pain de chaque soir,
Comme un enfant de chœur, jouer de l'encensoir,
Chanter des Te Deum auxquels tu ne crois guère,
Ou, saltimbanque à jeun, étaler tes appas
Et ton rire trempé de pleurs qu'on ne voit pas,
Pour faire épanouir la rate du vulgaire.

The tercets are principally a series of commonplaces: 'gagner ton pain', 'jouer (or 'donner') de l'encensoir', 'faire épanouir la rate'. These verses are thus both a description and a concrete example of the humiliating work of the venal muse as defined in line II with its monotonous sounds: 'Chanter des Te Deum auxquels tu ne crois guère'. The phrases 'de chaque soir' and 'Comme un enfant de chœur' highlight the picturesque elements in the clichés, but, being inessential to the general sense, they also appear simply to allow the insertion of the cliché into the alexandrine. These images have retained their original meaning and form; the poetic imagination (or the muse) has failed to transform the commonplace.

Another, more subtle example of a familiar image used in a 'negative' context to undermine any transcendence of physical realities is the opening of Obsession, the poem which immediately follows the Spleen poems:

Grands bois, vous m'effrayez comme des cathédrales;
Vous hurlez comme l'orgue; et dans nos cœurs maudits,
Chambres d'éternel deuil où vibrent de vieux râles,
Répondent les échos de vos De profundis.

The hemistich 'Vous hurlez comme l'orgue' echoes the expression 'ronfler comme un orgue'. As with the spinning spiders, the two parts of the image are separated, and the effect is more insidious than in La Muse vénale: the word 'ronfler' does not appear but is hinted at in the 'Chambres .. . où vibrent de vieux râles'.

Perhaps the richest example of these figures which not only are associated thematically with the failure of the imagination but are themselves examples of this failure is the fourth Spleen poem. As Michael Riffaterre has shown, the comparison of Hope to a bat is an inversion of the stereotype, Hope being represented here by a symbol of despair. This image is followed by a popular expression, 'battre les murs' ('to stagger along like a drunkard'), which is enriched by the adverbial phrase, 'de son aile timide'. The mention of the wing serves moreover to recall another expression which evokes incapacity: 'battre de l'aile'. The third stanza opens with the surprising image of teeming rain which 'D'une vaste prison imite les barreaux'; here again, there is a development of a cliché: 'il pleut des cordes' or 'il pleut des hallebardes', both forms of which, when recalled in the light of Baudelaire's alteration, have connotations of confinement and punishment. Two further images have already been considered: the 'infâmes araignées' and 'sans tambours ni musique'. Finally, yet another cliché is developed in the fourth stanza:

Des cloches tout à coup sautent avec furie
Et lancent vers le ciel un affreux hurlement,
Ainsi que des esprits errants et sans patrie
Qui se mettent à geindre opiniâtrement.

In this case, the interetext is 'errer comme une âme en peine', echoed by 'errants' and the synonym, in this context, of âme: 'esprits'. (The word âme, in fact, occurs in the second line of the following stanza.) In this way, the idea of damnation is given further confirmation. As in La Muse vénale, the clichés on which this poem is based suggest stasis and dull repetition, but, like the 'trous creusés par des générations de fourmis', they also express a certain instability, inviting the reader to search for a hidden truth, a truth which sometimes turns out to be a common saying.

The insecurity evoked in these poems through commonplaces is, then, not simply thematic, and the overt satire of the prose poems is certainly absent. The hidden cliché frequently emphasizes the explicit meaning, but, as I have shown, it can also add another element or dimension to the poem. The profondeur of these verses constructed on popular sayings might be seen, or sensed by the reader, to be linguistic in nature. Baudelaire's perverse or even comical use of them suggests a world in which 'philosophical' or 'spiritual' realities are, essentially, lexical patterns which may reinforce the supposed truth, but which can just as easily contradict and undermine it. The popular saying, used as a poetic figure, does indeed appear to have particular properties distinct from those of a symbol or an allegory. It is undeniable, on the one hand, that intertextual reminiscences, to quote Alison Fairlie, 'succinctly relate individual insight to a wide range of significance in . . . time and space'. But it is also true to say that, by means of the device I have examined, common perceptions are related (and contrasted) succinctly to individual experience, thus undermining both the validity of these perceptions and the ability of the individual to assert and formulate a truth coherently. The semantic 'depth' and instability introduced into the poem through these locutions vulgaires show that language indeed is a form of prison: in the sense not only that it tends to coagulate into clichés but also, more specifically (as Baudelaire more clearly suggests in Le Spleen de Paris), that reality exists or can be perceived only through patterns of language.

As I deduced from Baudelaire's praise of the locution vulgaire, this device is not merely a safeguarding, through irony, of artistic integrity. That this is so is suggested particularly by the fact that many of Baudelaire's most extraordinary images can be understood in terms of popular sayings. The poet, in these cases, is surely not inviting the reader to confess the stupidity of conventional wisdom, but rather to grasp, through the 'respectable' equivalent, the scandalous truth—a wisdom which lies deeper than social conventions, but which is latent in the popular expression.

Moreover, whilst the popular image is used to underline and reinforce a psychic reality, in most cases it is exploited in a way that tends to confuse the levels on which that reality is commonly thought to exist. We see, in Les Fleurs du Mal (to recall Jean Cohen's conclusions), both a demolition and a development of the consecrated expression or saying. No doubt any trite formulation of an idea invites contradiction or deflation: one might think of any shaggy-dog story, or, for example, of Eluard and Péret's 152 proverbes mis au goût du jour. But, with Baudelaire the apologist of lieux communs, the cliché is dismantled in order to allow its evocative power to work on the reader's mind. It is developed not only in the sense that its picturesque or philosophical potential is exploited but also in the sense that the structure of the figure is displayed.

Baudelaire, of course, has contributed to dictionaries of quotations and proverbs his share of sayings, many of which have the same 'profondeur de pensée' he perceived in popular expressions. Perhaps, however, he was equally original in his exploitation of existing expressions. By exploring the relations between words in recognized patterns, he shows, with the excitement that is the mark of truly interesting poetry, that the universal contains the exceptional, and that these locutions vulgaires, whilst neatly encapsulating centuries of human experience, do not necessarily bespeak, as might a symbol or a correspondance, a comforting whole, but rather the universal presence of 'l' exception dans l'ordre moral'.