The Devil’s Advocate: Baudelaire’s Cat as the Daîmon of Erotic Mysticism in Les Fleurs du mal

The cat is for Charles Baudelaire, the poet of Les Fleurs du mal, both a sign and a symbol. In Michael Riffaterre's analysis of the poem "Les Chats," he isolates both meanings, the cat as the living sign of an erotic relationship (Riffaterre 226) and the cat as the symbol of the poet's "mystical communion with the universe" (Riffaterre 223). Between these erotic and mystical meanings lies the cat as daimon, that Greek concept of otherness that sometimes was portrayed as an interpretive conscience, a mediator acting as a guardian according to Hesiod's Works and Days or sitting on one's shoulder visible only to those one encounters (Arendt 180). Baudelaire the poet has a special daimonic vision insofar as the poet has insight into the daimon described by Hesiod as unseen by the one being influenced (Jaeger 52). The poet likewise literally sees the cat with its need to "watch ... [and] demand to be watched" (Riffaterre 227), thus leading the poet to be self-reflective as a consequence of this communication with the daimon. The word daimon has also been confused historically with demon or devil and is thus linked with the evil that generates Baudelaire's vision for flowers or objects of beauty and delicacy. In a post-Levinas world, we learn from Alain Finkielkraut that love is the basic model for ethical relationships "le Mal procede d'abord d'une volonte de punir l'Autre de son intrusion dans mon existence" (Finkielkraut 145). Hence, the poet looks for allies in this insight into the ethical consequences of Evil. The cat is such an ally to be reckoned with in the quasi-religious rituals that are Baudelaire's poems. While Georges Bataille speaks, out of inspiration from Baudelaire, about the need for a fundamental connection between religious ecstasy and eroticism (Bataille 1987 640), a contemporary of T.S. Eliot, Arthur Symons, comments that Baudelaire's poetry is "an eternal Mass served before a veiled altar" (Eliot 1932 62). Baudelaire's poems indeed create the ambience for Catholic ritual, the Mass, as a memento for Baudelaire from his father, Jean-Francois, who was a defrocked priest (Pichois and Ziegler 50). The role model for moving the sacred to the profane was thus already set for Charles. Jean-Francois, the ordained priest, became a teacher of Latin and Greek rhetoric. His son the poet was then sympathetic, almost symbiotically, with "un pretre a qui on arracherait sa divinite" (OC (1) I 338). The poet conducts his poetic ritual before a "veiled altar," that is, one decorated as in a Black Mass. This ritual does not invoke a Romantic Satan, "a symbol of revolt and heroic energy" (Hyslop 80). Instead, the poet calls forth, as in his "Les Litanies de Satan," what he would later call "le plus parfait type de Beaute virile" (Baudelaire 1949 22). This virility is in contradistinction with feminine wiles that threaten him because "la virilite de Baudelaire cherche a se confondre avec la feminite" (Bassim 12). Satan incarnates the poet's male sexuality, testosterone, driving the poet internally while eroticism leads the poet toward women who threaten him with emotional death and the chasm of self-destruction in his impotence (Antoine 97, n. 39) prior to being rejected by them. More than the Romantic myth, Baudelaire's Satan is the poet's salvation (Milner 10) as the artistic incarnation that the erotic drive leads to more. The poet has a larger mystical vision wherein his personal chasm is matched by an external abyss that promises escape in the company of others who are similarly rejected. This duality of chasms is developed by Pierre Guiraud as the opposition between a "gouffre marin" and a "gouffre terrestre" (Guiraud 1958 80 ff.) in Baudelaire's poetry. The unity of this opposition is also important to understand because the mystical vision of the poet seeks a refuge in the encompassing beauty of poetic art. And there is the rub because Baudelaire's misogyny tells us that this is a "beaute malade"(Anderson 27) and that we must search for the disorder of this sexual ideology in its apparent order. …