An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise by Ross Chambers

Author:Ross Chambers [Chambers, Ross]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780823266739
Google: pS8gngAACAAJ
Publisher: Fordham UP
Published: 2015-09-15T23:08:10.628603+00:00

“Les sept vieillards”

The mutual interference of the oneiric in the everyday, like that of the ordinary in the uncanny, produces in the city a permanent expenditure of energy: a reverberation of noise like that so amply signaled, in line 12:2 “Le faubourg secoué par les lourds tombereaux,” by the line’s rhythmic regularity (3–3/3–3), its repeated vowel (“faubourg,” “secoué,” “lourd”), its association of b and r (in “faubourg” and “tombereaux”) in a way reminiscent of the words “brume” (line 6) and “brouillard” (line 9), and finally, of course, by the presence of the word “tombe” in the “tombereaux” that are themselves reminiscent of the revolutionary Terror. In this respect, the line functions as a first fulfillment of the implications of the opening chiasmus: “Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,” which furnishes in its opening syllable, and the mouillement of its first word, much of the phonetic and even thematic material of the lines that follow. What intervenes, however, in the poem’s three opening quatrains, is on the one hand the vision of a city become waterlogged to the point of extremity—its air space invaded by “brume” and “brouillard,” its streets become “canaux étroits” brimming with mystery, the houses simulating “les deux quais d’une rivière accrue”—and on the other the narrative corresponding to this “décor semblable à l’âme de l’acteur,” the account of the poet-speaker’s soul, similarly penetrated by debilitating noise in the form of an invasive lassitude, a loss of moral energy. The city’s atmosphere, clogged with watery particles as it is crowded with people and dreams, itself exerts a deleterious effect on the morale of one who—in this respect not unlike the poet of “Le soleil,” fencing his way “le long du vieux faubourg”—seeks to resist the power of its entropic liquefaction, and to refuse or ignore the significance of its anonymous, fragmented and fragmenting multiplicity, the meaning of its threatening omnipresence as the weather of the “fourmillante cité.”

When the first of the spectral old men suddenly pops up, then (lines 13–17: “Tout à coup, un vieillard . . . / M’apparut”), his apparition signifies the final disintegration of the subject’s remaining will to resist the all-penetrating atmosphere, that is, the moment of his disalienation, when a certain cosmic state of affairs can no longer be ignored or denied. This “spectre en plein jour” appears, then, as a kind of condensation of the ambient atmosphere or an emanation from out of its damp fogginess, as is suggested by the match of the color of his rags with that of the “ciel pluvieux,” and by the prevalence—in the description of his appearance (which “aurait fait pleuvoir les aumônes” were it not for the evil gleam in his eye, with its “prunelle trempée dans le fiel”)—of a lexicon of dampness and saturation (lines 14–16). The angularity of his physique, meanwhile—it makes him look “cassé, son échine / Faisant avec sa jambe un parfait angle droit,” while his stick gives him the appearance, and the clumsy gait, “D’un quadripède infirme ou d’un juif

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