Studies in Sensory History

Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris

Aimee Boutin

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780252097263
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Beloved as the city of light, Paris in the nineteenth century sparked the acclaim of poets and the odium of the bourgeois with its distinctive sounds. Street vendors bellowed songs known as the Cris de Paris that had been associated with their trades since the Middle Ages; musicians itinerant and otherwise played for change; and flâneurs-writers, fascinated with the city's underside, listened and recorded much about what they heard.
 
Aimée Boutin tours the sonic space that orchestrated the different, often conflicting sound cultures that defined the street ambience of Paris. Mining accounts that range from guidebooks to verse, Boutin braids literary, cultural, and social history to reconstruct a lost auditory environment. Throughout, impressions of street noise shape writers' sense of place and perception of modern social relations. As Boutin shows, the din of the Cris contrasted economic abundance with the disparities of the capital, old and new traditions, and the vibrancy of street commerce with an increasing bourgeois demand for quiet. In time, peddlers who provided the soundtrack for Paris's narrow streets yielded to modernity, with its taciturn shopkeepers and wide-open boulevards, and the fading songs of the Cris became a dirge for the passing of old ways.

CHAPTER 1

Aural Flânerie

The Flâneur in the City as Concert

Nineteenth-century urban experience often is apprehended through the figure of the flâneur. The flâneur is a mythic type that emerges in the late eighteenth century in urban sketches and panoramas such as Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris and persists in the work of nineteenth-century writers and artists examined in this book, including writers and journalists Honoré de Balzac and Victor Fournel, poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, as well as artists Jean-François Raffaëlli and Charles-Albert d’Arnoud, better known as Bertall. The flâneur is usually a man of leisure, but in less frequent cases, a flâneuse strolls through the city as well. He or she saunters through Paris, on foot, unhurried, attentive to everything on offer, and familiar with all little-known attractions. In the course of his meanderings, the flâneur encounters peddlers, hawkers, acrobats, street musicians, and beggars; whereas the average bourgeois pedestrian would ignore (sometimes willfully) the social outcasts who embody their anxieties about pauperism, flâneurs are increasingly fascinated by the underside of Paris, as it exposes the precariousness of modernity. As such, the flâneur serves as a focal device for organizing the wealth of the city’s sights and sounds into a panorama that presents the attractions in an orderly narrative.

Notwithstanding its modernity, the flâneur’s panoramic approach to the city links him to earlier representations of urban types, such as the Cris de Paris. While predating modern configurations of poverty and social marginality, the Cris figure early modern class biases and sensory experiences of the city that continue to act upon nineteenth-century perceptions of urban experience. The continuities and discontinuities between the traditional Cris and modern panoramic literature are one of the subjects of this book.

Attuned to the popular tradition of the Cris de Paris, the flâneur understood the city as a melodious space that orchestrates different, often conflicting sound cultures. The aural dimensions of flânerie have too often been ignored by the critical tradition that mythologizes the flâneur as the icon of a visually inflected modernity. The flâneur was popularized as a theoretical construct by the writings of Walter Benjamin on Charles Baudelaire in particular, and on Paris in general in the nineteenth century.¹ Following Benjamin’s paradigm, much twentieth-century critical writing about the flâneur positions him above the fray rather than in the crowd, accentuates his visual mastery of the urban spectacle, and emphasizes his moral detachment from what he sees. The flâ- neur’s superiority is predicated on the command of his visual abilities and the impassivity that keeps objects of sight at a distance. Moving beyond this visual framework forces us to rethink the flâneur’s sensual immersion in the city.

What sounds emerge out of the city clamor to strike the ears of the flâneur with special stridency? How do different flâneurs and flâneuses react to these sonic encounters? Which noises are so intrusive as to undermine the flâneur’s aloofness? From the type’s early formulations by Honoré de Balzac, Auguste Lacroix, and Victor Fournel, the flâneur is attuned to the city as concert or as cacophony. The art of flânerie consists in transforming the empirical confusion of city sounds into a unified musical composition.

Walter Benjamin’s approach to the flâneur, which has been so influential to the contemporary understanding of the type, has tuned out the aural dimensions of flânerie. This toning down of city noise follows Georg Simmel’s sociology of the senses, which privileges the eye over the ear in the modern metropolis. As a result, the Benjaminian framework has restricted how we make sense of the flâneur. Prevalent visual constructs in flâneur theory, such as the city as readable book and “capital of signs,” and as kaleidoscopic spectacle, have aural counterparts. Writings on the flâneur, especially Honoré de Balzac’s Physiologie du mariage and Victor Fournel’s Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris, represent the city as a musical score, and as harmonious or cacophonous concert. As we listen to the flâneur’s encounters with street musicians, we can better account for the range of reactions to street life and urban sounds. Fournel’s writings offer an exceptionally rich appreciation of the aesthetic experience that can move the flâneur who can listen to the city streets. Aural flânerie² describes walking in the city as a multisensory embodied experience rather than a disengaged spectatorship, making the artist’s contact with the sounds of the city a formative creative experience. An understanding of the flâneur conceived as bathed in a multitude of sounds and sights rather than as an untouchable mobile gaze enriches our definitions of modernity.

Walter Benjamin Gives Half an Ear to Flânerie

Though the flâneur is a nineteenth-century character type firmly anchored in his age, many students and scholars of flânerie—today—first run across this ever-popular icon of modernity in the writings of Walter Benjamin. As revisionist critics Martina Lauster and Margaret A. Rose have shown, however, Benjamin underplays the significance of the pre-1850 social caricatures and physiologies that originated the type by reading the flâneur in a distinctly twentieth-century analytical framework.³ Benjamin’s metaphysical concern with the flâneur’s disembodied, alienated gaze is absent from the earlier material, more clearly intent on describing how the flâneur senses the city.

Critics are divided as to Benjamin’s sensitivity to sound. As others have pointed out, Benjamin’s autobiographical and travel writings suggest a man “finely tuned to sound,”⁴ but also one for whom city sounds disrupt the free flow of the imagination. The Berlin Chronicle frequently evokes childhood memories about the unsettling quality of the city’s constant noises—voices, cries, doors slammed shut, rattling coaches, and military bands—but as Gerhard Richter argues, noises also function as enabling mnemonic triggers in autobiographical writing.⁵ Referring to passages in “One-way Street” on Seville, Marseille, and Freiburg, Fran Tonkiss remarks on how Benjamin “souvenired sounds from different places, composed urban vignettes as if they were aural postcards.”⁶ Of Freiburg Minster, Benjamin writes, “A town’s most specific feeling of homeliness is associated . . . with the sound and the gaps between strokes of its tower clocks.”⁷ Given his aptitude at evoking a sense of place through sound in these texts, it is surprising that, as Lutz Koepnick notes in Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture, Benjamin “takes little notice of the fact that nineteenth-century urbanization and industrialization also resulted in an equally diverting and disruptive cacophony of sounds.”⁸ There are inconsistencies as well among the number of references to city sounds in his notes in The Arcades Project, the lack of recognition of the disruptive potential of noise in his essays on the flâneur that Koepnick signals, and the tactile ability and aural acuity he attributes to the flâneur.⁹ There seems to be a tension in Benjamin between presenting flânerie as “intoxicated” embodied experience and shutting out sensory data to better focus on theory formation.

Benjamin’s approach to the sensorium was influenced by Georg Simmel, whom he cites twice in the notes on the flâneur in The Arcades Project. Simmel’s “Sociology of the Senses” follows the traditional hierarchy of the senses by privileging the eye over the ear, and both sight and hearing above the “lower” senses (smell, taste, touch). His sociological approach is innovative in that it accounts for the role of bodies in social interaction. “That we get involved in interactions at all depends on the fact that we have a sensory effect upon one another,” writes Simmel. “Every sense delivers contributions characteristic of its individual nature to the construction of sociated existence; . . . the prevalence of one or the other sense in the contact of individuals often provides this contact with a sociological nuance that could otherwise not be produced.” Simmel’s essays, however, present the changes to the modern urban sensorium in a largely negative light. The segmentation of the senses causes disorientation as “one who sees without hearing is generally much more confused, helpless and disturbed than one who hears without being able to see.”¹⁰ He shares this aversion for modern noise with Theodor Lessing, who wrote a full chapter on the exceptional vulnerability of the ear as compared with the eye, and who campaigned against noise pollution in his manifesto “Noise—a War Cry against the Loud Clatter of Our Lives” (1908).¹¹ The often-quoted claim that the modern city impairs hearing is crucial to the thesis of Simmel’s most renowned essay, “Metropolis and Mental Life.” The ear is figured there as a passive defenseless organ as opposed to the eye conceived of as a shield.¹² Urban overstimulation—in the form of noise, discontinuous and unexpected impressions or “shocks”—accompanied by the hypersensitivity of the city dweller results in neurasthenia. Desensitization acts as a coping mechanism, Simmel contends, and leads to a loss of sensory acuity among metropolitan inhabitants that he refers to as a blasé attitude.¹³ Benjamin’s ambivalence toward city noise can be directly linked to Simmel’s influence, though it also resonates with a general trend among early-twentieth- century intellectuals who campaigned against noise.

In The Arcades Project, Benjamin adopts the theory of shock experience, but his more positive approach differs from Simmel’s negative view.¹⁴ Shock experience can reawaken the senses of the blasé, anaesthetized city dweller. Benjamin’s flâneur seeks out the “intoxication” of the senses by actively drowning the senses in sensory overload. Citing Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin famously evokes the motif of the kaleidoscope to capture the rapidly changing sensations experienced by the modern stroller as a unified scene controlled by the viewer:

Moving through this traffic involves the individual in a series of shocks and collisions. At dangerous intersections, nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession, like the energy from a battery. Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy. Circumscribing the experience of the shock, he calls this man “a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness.”¹⁵

Benjamin remembers Baudelaire’s use of the kaleidoscope in his discussion of Edgar Allan Poe’s flâneur in “The Man of the Crowd”; Poe had himself referred to the flâneur’s state of “electrified” intellect at the beginning of his story.¹⁶ The kaleidoscope, an instrument invented by Scottish physicist David Brewster in 1817, which became an object of curiosity and entertainment in Europe in the 1820s, quickly acquired cultural currency and assimilated metaphorical meanings.¹⁷ As Catherine Nesci outlines, the term connotes the shared restlessness, fragmentation, and variation of the modern metropolis and the flâneur who perceives it,¹⁸ and, as such, the instrument is associated with other protocin- ematic gadgets-cum-metaphors such as the magic lantern, the daguerreotype, the diorama, and the panorama, apparatuses that are also used to connote the flâneur. Moreover, he is frequently associated with spectators at diorama and panorama expositions.¹⁹ In fact many scholars use the flâneur as “shorthand for describing the new, mobilized gaze of the pre-cinematic spectator.”²⁰

The privileging of the flâneur’s camera-like visual faculty enhances the myth of his intellectual detachment. The flâneur—the “unseen seer,” like the detective to whom Benjamin compares him—is “partout mais nulle part” as Janin eloquently put it in Un hiver à Paris.²¹ The visionary invisibility of the flâneur may be the result of predominantly visual paradigms that privilege the distinctive features of sight, namely spatial distance, at the expense of the other more proximate senses (a paradigm shared by some nineteenth-century writers and the critics who read them).²² Positioned at the inception of a protocinematic genealogy that emphasizes its central role in the society of spectacle and specta- torship, the flâneur is seen as a capital player in the remapping of the sensorium, which, as Jonathan Crary examines, compartmentalized the senses and, notably, dissociated sight from touch at the beginning of the nineteenth century.²³ The separation of the senses is considered by many a defining trait of modernity. The critical success of compelling metaphors such as that of the kaleidoscope accounts for the visual-focus of studies on the flâneur, but the privileging of the eye over the other senses obscures even the references to other senses in these stock metaphors. For example, the magic of the kaleidoscope results from the interaction between hand and eye. Read in its Baudelairean context, the kaleidoscope has an added tactile dimension because of its discursive association with electric energy and shocks. Making sense of the flâneur as a man in the crowd amid a kaleidoscopic reservoir of electric energy restores the type’s full sensory perception. Getting in touch with the flâneur’s sensory experience can move us beyond the myth of the detached disembodiment of the flâneur.

Physiology of the Flaneur’s Auditory Acuity

Knowing Benjamin’s bias against noise, it makes good sense to return to the primary materials that originated the nineteenth-century type: the physiologie, social sketches of character types, “literary guidebooks” in this vein, whose importance Benjamin had generally dismissed.²⁴ In some of the early-nineteenth- century descriptions of the flâneur, such as those in Nouveaux Tableaux de Paris and in Le Figaro, the flâneur seeks out the heightened sensations offered by free urban entertainment—outdoor puppet shows, the morgue, public lectures, university courses, museums, libraries, curiosity shops, altercations and riots, fires, and floods. Huart’s Physiologie du flâneur builds on the metaphor of the city as book: the flâneur reads the city as if it were a sensuous book. Using his sense of taste and touch as well as sight, he reads all the “delicious posters, red, yellow, white, green, poppy, that wallpaper all the walls of Paris.”²⁵ The flâneur may be a “perspicacious”²⁶ close reader, but he is also an avid conversationalist, eavesdropper, and attentive listener. In Jouy’s Nouveaux Tableaux de Paris and in Le Figaro, the flâneur is frequently said to engage people in conversation.²⁷ In Paris ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Aural Flânerie: The Flâneur in the City as Concert
• Chapter 2. Blason Sonore: Street Cries in the City
• Chapter 3. Sonic Classifications in Haussmann’s Paris
• Chapter 4. Listening to the Glazier’s Cry
• Chapter 5. “Cry Louder, Street Crier“: Peddling Poetry and the Avant-Garde
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index