City of Noise by Aimee Boutin

Author:Aimee Boutin [Boutin, Aimee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252080784
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2015-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

The Demonic Effects of Stridency

The differences between the two poems’ transpositions of the cry and circuits of communication tell us a great deal about how sound is conceived. Hous- saye’s poem is grounded in the assumption that the sounds stand in for real things or people as properties of those sources, and accordingly the poem describes the subject’s interactions with his surroundings. Instead of adopting a realist standpoint on sounds, Baudelaire’s poem explores the sensation of sound as a mental construct and the behaviors sounds elicit. It is interesting that the speaker invites speculation about the cry’s relationship to the crier by evoking, in the poem and in the dedicatory letter, the city’s thick fog and dirty atmosphere that would make the crier hard to see but easy to hear. The sound the poet actually hears is less relevant than the effect the sound has on the listener. The opening of the poem sets the focus not on the material or substantive world, but on the mysteries of the mind, the “impulsion mystérieuse et inconnue” (1:285; “mysterious and unknown impulse” [13]), the energy, the forces that motivate people to act. In fact, the digressive structure of the narrative, in which the story of the encounter with the glazier is delayed by a series of anecdotes about impulsive behaviors, should be read as a means of frustrating the process of interpretation.66

One of the forces in the poem that leads the speaker to act is the devil, who also appears in verse in Les Fleurs du mal, and who reflects Baudelaire’s strong interest in Edgar Allan Poe’s work. Demonic figures also make appearances in other prose poems such as “Les Tentations ou Éros, Plutus et la Gloire” (The Temptations, or Eros, Plutus and Fame) and “Le Joueur généreux” (The Generous Gambler). Baudelaire’s poem parodies the ambiguous content in Hous- saye’s text. “La Chanson du vitrier” falls far from its apparent target—to write a poem about Christian charity and fraternity—and instead conveys an implicit violence and cruelty, even Satanism, toward the working class.67 Like Mephistopheles, the narrator befriends his victim to secure his downfall. The satanic surfaces again as repressed content in Houssaye’s poem in the comparison of the glazier to Jesus Christ and Niccolò Paganini. On the one hand, Houssaye turns the glazier into a kind of Christic figure deprived of manna by the public, who is crucified at the hands of the bourgeois narrator; the more enigmatic comparison to Niccolò Paganini on the other hand could refer to the violinist’s extreme virtuosity that some thought resulted from a pact made with the devil.68

Moreover, in panoramic texts about the glazier and other street criers, allusions are made to the violent, fantastic, and sinister overtones of the cries. Indeed, street cries surface in childhood memories, which can easily be infused with superstitions dating back to times immemorial or with the fantastic and the magical. These associations are all the more powerful because criers are often heard in the early morning hours, while the

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