When I first read Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, I was struck by the beauty of his meticulously crafted sonnets. But when I wrote my own short story collection, Evil Flowers, I wanted something different. I wanted texts with a looser texture, with a zigzag structure, with digressions and different voices interfering with each other’s narratives. I wanted bursting fits of aggression, sudden and far-fetched associations, and I wanted slow rivers of thought.
So why did I choose to include Baudelaire in my work? It all started when I was looking for a Christmas present for my younger brother. I had studied comparative literature at the university of Bergen and was in a strange state of mind. I had been writing poems and suddenly knew that life was an illusion that needed to be torn down, but still, that there was something burning, living, and breathing, an objection, a protest.
I picked up Baudelaire’s Prose Poems instead of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations and read the preface, which included a poem by Richard Brautigan about Baudelaire called “The Flowerburgers, Part 4”. This poem spoke to me; it was the kind of hamburger stand I’d been looking for with my poems. It was very clear to me: I needed the lost halo, and I needed the flowerburgers, and I needed the irritated question from the people demanding hamburgers.
Baudelaire is the first visionary, king of poets, a real God! He disrupted the stability of the common sense of a classical hierarchy of truth and beauty. His angry gaze on the author portrait taken by Etienne Carjat in 1863 entered my life and changed my writing forever.
In Rimbaud’s “Letters of the Seer”, he wrote that inventions of the unknown demand new forms. He added his own poem “Squattings”, which follows a monk in a monastery squatting over his chamber pot and struggling to relieve his body from its excrements—until he is finally relieved. This poem is a caricature of modern poetry, criticizing the dissonant relation between form and content.
I think that literature has to offer society a protection against our own overproduction of order. Baudelaire’s expression in the photograph really says that we must give dirt if we see dirt. His essay “On the Essence of Laughter” describes how to make a caricature by exaggerating the defining traits. The laughter created by the caricature is not merely an effect; it is an art.
So would Baudelaire object to being a reference in my texts? I don’t think so. Even though wisemen tremble when they laugh, real gods do not. In my work, Baudelaire is both doing what he once did when he was alive and writing; disrupting the stability of the common sense of a classical hierarchy of truth and beauty. He is creating the very essence of caricature that he so luminously describes himself in his essay.
Evil Flowers is about finding something else altogether and creating a protection against our own overproduction of order. It is about using literary references to create something new and exciting. It is about understanding that literature has to offer society something that can’t be found anywhere else.
