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

Reading Ross Chambers’s book, one has the clear feeling that it has already become a classic not only within Baudelaire studies, but, more widely, within studies devoted to modern poetry tout court. The volume develops through six chapters, divided into three parts outlining, respectively, ‘discrete but also actively interactive’ (p. 61) phases of Baudelaire’s aesthetic evolution, in their relation to ‘the question of modernity’, ‘understood as an experience of alienation from the (supposedly) natural’ (pp. 140–41). This ‘atmospherics of the city’ is described as ‘the subliminal awareness of a certain dimension of particularity, otherness, or strangeness’ in what is otherwise ‘recognizable as ordinary, familiar, or not worthy of special attention’ (pp. 1–2). The backdrop of Baudelaire’s writing is the deafening environment of modern Paris — the Haussmannian city under construction (and under destruction), with its crowded streets and its social unrest. How to respond, or react, to such a context? The brief, comforting illusion of a possible ‘harmonian fetishism’ (p. 21), or a ‘fetishizing aesthetics of ideal(izing) beauty’ (p. 18), in other words, a ‘necessary harmonizing of noisy everyday ugliness’ (p. 6), is soon replaced by Baudelaire’s acknowledgement of — and alliance with — such noise and chaos, governed as it is by the transcendent power of le Mal. After such painful ‘awakening to noise’ (p. 7), the initial idealizing fetishism is thus substituted by allegory, as an ‘agent of disalienation’ (p. 21), where disalienation is to be read as a sort of inescapable awareness ‘of the power of alienation’ — a bitter coming to terms with ‘a human inability to know’ (pp. 54–55; original emphasis). Baudelaire’s later poems, such as those forming the core of ‘Tableaux parisiens’, are thus permeated by the consciousness of a transcendent malign disharmony and its noisy everyday manifestations. The last step of Baudelaire’s aesthetic evolution is represented by the urban prose poems forming Le Spleen de Paris, where ‘urban encounter ceases [ . . . ] to have allegorical significance’ (p. 117). In this sort of ‘metropolitan diary’, allegory is replaced by irony, and the poet disappears, leaving the scene to pure textual noise (of time, of change). Readers thus become sorely aware of the uncomfortable Hegelian paradox of the ‘unknowability of the familiar’ — the very unreadability of the everyday — and feel the sorrowful burden of human incapacity to know. Chambers’s study is a work of scholarly brilliance and writerly finesse in which almost every sentence reads like a thought-provoking quote-to-be, both because of how beautifully it is put, and because of his ability to defamiliarize what we (mistakenly) thought to be familiar. The argument develops gracefully through a balanced blend of close reading and contextualization, through which readers will be able to re-experience, under a novel light, some of Baudelaire’s best-known texts, and to re-appreciate, with a fresh eye, some of their most typical themes and tropes. In short, Chambers’s book is one of those books you wish — with a touch of envy — you could have written yourself. A must-read.