Synaesthetic Correspondence and Spiritual Perception in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal

The “Correspondances” of Baudelaire has long been a classic example of poetic synaesthesia, but the scholarly literature tends to either read the sense-transitions as deft stylistic flourishes or as a general outline of a Symbolist doctrine. This article enquires into the manner in which the cross-sensory language of Les Fleurs du Mal transforms embodied perception into symbolic and spiritual language. In order to analyse the data qualitatively, a qualitative semantic–semiotic analysis was carried out in fourteen passages from ten poems which were purposively selected. Passages were identified as having a source sensory domain, target sensory domain, horizontal correspondence between sensory modalities, vertical correspondence from sensation to an evaluative or metaphysical value, evaluative polarity, and symbolic function. The four operations that are identified are sensory reciprocity, embodied transport, sacralization through liturgical and metaphysical language, and profanation through decay, violence, and intoxication. Olfactory–auditory correspondence is highly represented in the sample, but cannot be supported with a collection-wide frequency. But more importantly, sensory fusion is constantly becoming a threshold between body and soul: perfume is “singing,” the soul is “drinking” colour and sound, and sacred objects like the temple, the censer, the Te Deum, the divine gaze become caught up in corruption, opium, blood, and mortality. The synaesthetic discourse of Baudelaire thus does not address the sacred–profane dichotomy. It makes that tension palpable, and demonstrates the spiritual perception that is produced by the modern poetic language of unstable embodied signs.