The following is a very short and rather weak article, written in
response to an invitation from Richard Price, editor of Southfields
magazine, to "do something on Baudelaire in London" for a "special"
issue on urban themes. Baudelaire never made it to London, so I
secreted the following instead. (Sending it to the list `cos Doug
and, I think, Douglas want to read it, and Alison might read it and
see that it dovetails quite well with her own readings of the same
material.)
A QUESTION OF PITCH: RIMBAUD IN THE CITY OF PROSE
Voila les quais, voila les boulevards, voila
Les maisons sur l`azur leger qui s`irradie
Et qu`un soir la rougeur des bombes etoila!
>From the second stanza of Rimbaud`s furious "L`Orgie parisienne, ou
Paris se repeuple", the above lines point out the sites (sights) of
the founding, flourishing, then violent erasure of the Paris Commune
(26 March 1871 - 28 May 1871) to those citizens who fled for the
country at the first sign of trouble and now return as tourists in
the aftermath of the semaine sanglante of Theirs` battalions`
reprisals. Later, a figure, "Le Poete", will hurl invective at the
gawping, cavorting crowds of voyeurs, and introduce the metaphors of
"la Femme" and "la putain" for the City forced to suffer their
unwelcome attentions. He goes on to predict the final destruction of
her parasites in a future and beautiful "convulsion".
The opening quote`s use of the preposition "voila" and the fact
that it is being used to reintroduce the addressees to a familiar
landscape made unfamiliar by events which had unfolded in the
vicinity assume the space described enjoys a certain stability, that
it is the same place before, during and after the Commune, its
identity relatively secure in time no matter what happens; whatever
else they disagree about, the speaker and the tourists he excoriates
know where they are. The "Femme/putain" metaphors` corporealisation
of Paris insists even more clearly on a unitary identity for the city
as it embodies the maltreated insurgents and their revolutionary
struggle: the collective identity of the Communards is transmuted
into the great Female essence of Paris-in-revolt. Finally, the
figure of "Le Poete" as public conscience, prophet and clarion,
instrument of the Future proclaiming an inspirational call to violent
action, emerges, obviously enough, from a belief, first of all, that
there is a Poet, and, secondly, that the Poet has an absolutely
central, absolutely vital role to play.
The question is: how does Rimbaud get from "L`Orgie parisienne,
ou Paris se repeuple", an admittedly delinquent version of a
traditional poetic form, to the "representations" of the city in his
prosepoems, the Illuminations, where all of the above assumptions are
absent or thoroughly undermined?
Two or three years on from the collapse of the Paris Commune
(no-one has been able to establish reliable dates of composition for
any of the Illuminations, which is one of the most clear-cut reasons
why any discourse on or around the prosepoems is either speculative
or obviously wrong) none of the prosepoems which display a
recognisably urban theme indulge in the personification evident in
"L`Orgie parisienne" and one potential explanation is the atomisation
of the collective which, in the earlier verse-poem, sanctioned the
practice of endowing Paris with a human form. Consequently, the
passionate engagement and conviction of the speaker in "L`Orgie
parisienne", the pertinence of the anger of his very public address,
has no place in the urban Illuminations which tend to be in a dry,
unforthcoming prose: agony or ecstatic promise being reserved, in the
later work, for resolutely internal monologue, or spoken to an
unnamed companion as a domestic epiphany behind closed doors.
Invocations of a popular revolutionary tendency are conspicuous by
their absence (1), the result, perhaps, of coming up too many times
against what the speaker of "Solde" calls "la probite infernale des
masses". In section V of "Enfance", an unhappy transient ("Qu`on me
loue enfin ce tombeau, blanchi a la chaux avec les lignes du ciment
en relief, - tres loin sous terre.") seeks release from the gloom and
squalor of the basement he inhabits, in the bowels of a "Ville
monstreuse", through acts of fantasy and imaginative speculation:
"Aux heures d`amertume, je m`imagine des boules de saphir, de metal.
Je suis maitre du silence. Pourquoi une appearance de soupirail
blemirait-elle au coin de la voute?" In "Ouvriers", aural and
chemical pollutions from an industrial town tail a couple as they
take a walk in the suburbs, provoking an emphatical but interiorized
cry from the male partner who dreams of escape to more conducive
surroundings, "l`habitation benie par le ciel". In both cases, the
city-scape, identified now, by implication, with the interests of
property owners and the manufacturing industry, is a backdrop which
forces escapist strategies from the speakers: they clearly don`t
belong where they find themselves.
"Ville" and "Villes II"(2) foreground the concept of urban
modernity, and the lack of rapport between inhabitants and their
surroundings. The speaker in "Ville" provides an equable,
informative description of his metropolis in terms which communicate
a sense of estrangement before the symbolic violence of the
authoritarian architecture and the twon planning, as well as the
homogeneity of experience which it imposes on the populace. The
descriptions in "Villes II" are more difficult to mobilise as a
critique. A tourist gapes at the incredibly huge and elaborate state
buildings and their arrogant functionaries, in a way that suggests an
alienation and dispossession before the signs of Authority similar to
that in "Ville", but as many other noticings are seemingly neutral or
unashamedly admiring:
Le haut quartier a des parties inexplicables: un bras de
mer, sans bateaux, roule sa nappe de gresil bleu entre des
quais charges de candelabre geants. Un pont court conduit a
une poterne immediatement sous dome de la Sainte-Chapelle.
Ce dome est une armature d`acier artistique de quinze mille
pieds de diametre environ.
Nevertheless, an intermittent failure of the tourist`s language or
judgment before the inert views and facades recalles the passivity of
the observer who watches from his window in "Ville" if both
perspectives are seen as functions of the speakers` circumscription
by more powerful forces. E.g.
Impossible d`exprimer le jour mat produit par le ciel
immuablement gris...
and his bafflement in "le haut quartier";
C`est le prodige dont je n`ai pas pu me rendre compet: quels
sont les nivaux des autres quartiers sur ou sous l`acropole?
&c.
"L`Orgie parisienne" and its speaker were about the city, in the
sense that they encompassed it as their subject or content, or
believed that they did; in the urban Illuminations, the city,
de-animated, impersonal, is about the speakers, it surrounds them, it
is bigger than they are. In a work as heterogeneous as "Villes II",
its heterogeneity making it particularly resistant to the kind of
thematic criticism brought to the others, we could even say that
there is a feeling, not that the work is about (concerns) the city,
but that the city is about (surrounds) the work, the city being a
register in stone and glass of the passage of international capital
and of history, systems within which literary production is also
enmeshed. "Villes II" enacts its own circumscription in the
speaker`s imperfect knowledge, the text`s equivocality, and the
consequent inability of the reader to do more than temporarily settle
on provisional meanings.
The journey from "L`Orgie parisienne" to "Villes II" is also the
journey from poetry to prose. In May 1871 Paris was the Commune; for
Rimbaud, it was also the literary capital, where writers` reputations
were made, if they were made. By the time of the Illuminations the
leading Communards were dead or dispersed, and Rimbaud had managed to
alienate (if not physically attack) the majority of the literary
figures he had made contact with through his connection with
Verlaine. The intimacy of the relationship between the speaker of
"L`Orgie parisienne" and Paris has become, in the prose works, a lack
of rapport evident in the speakers` exclusion from intimacy, their
internalised exile. If we risk suggesting a homology between the
experience of his characters and the biography of Rimbaud, it is
tempting to view the shift into prose by a great poet as a banishment
of the poet "inside" his own writerly practice (3), or at least a
tactical withdrawal in the wake of the defeat of all expectations.
The banishment or withdrawal admits the impossibility of continuing
to write in the style of "L`Orgie parisienne", admits the possibility
of writing the last great works, Illuminations and Une Saison En
Enfer.
CODA
Moon and horn, a darker blue throughout, who recalls the
pitch in any poem of Rimbaud`s? (4)
To be understood, Clark Coolidge`s rhetorical question asks that the
word "pitch" be defined; it evades final comprehension because it
does not set parameters for the word`s definition (see OED, 2nd
edition, pp.915-921).
Who recalls the act of setting down in any poem of Rimbaud`s?
That is, its composition, or just the poem`s fixing upon a place,
settling?
Who recalls the act of plunging head-foremost in(to) any poem of
Rimbaud`s?
Who recalls the place you are stationed in any poem of Rimbaud`s?
Stationed by the poem, or where you locate yourself in relation to
it.
Who recalls the degree (acute or grave), the frequency in any
poem of Rimbaud`s?
Who recalls the [sales]pitch in any poem of Rimbaud`s?
And so on. Coolidge reminds us that the problem is also one of
recollection. The critic pursuing a thematic approach writes a
career as a chain of causes and effects, forging (literally and in
every sense) links to construct identities for poets and texts which
are, ultimately, fictitious. The links are forged by the critical
intelligence then discussed as if they were necessary, to avoid
implicating the forger. If the question is "WHO recalls the pitch in
any poem of Rimbaud`s?", the implication is that no-one does; every
Rimbaud critic, even as they raise their hand in response, would be
wise to recall Coolidge`s caveat.
Notes:
(1) The final paragraph of the first section of "Jeunesse",
("Represnons l`etude au bruit de l`oeuvre devorante qui se rassemble
et ramonte dans les masses.") could be viewed as the exception to
this rule. "Jeunesse" as a "whole", however, may dramatise the very
trajectory we are trying to trace if the sentiments of the above
quote are the naive effusion of what the third section calls
"L`egoisme infini de l`adolescence", rejection of which might lead to
the solitary hallucinations of the conclusion.
(2) The Illuminations contain two poems in prose both called
"Villes". This discussion follows the classifiaction into "Villes I"
and "Villes II" in the Wallace Fowlie edition. The gorgeous chaos of
techno-mythical simultaneity in "Villes I" - its relative distance
from any "real" urban signified - bracket it with the more intensely
private, visionary works and not with the more "naturalist(ic)"
"Ville" and "Villes II".
(3) A tentative proposition (difficult to justify if we consider all
of the poems in prose), suggested by a passage in OF GRAMMATOLOGY,
Jacques Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press, 1976),
p.287: "Philosophy is the invention of prose. Philosophy speaks
prose, less in excluding the poet from the city than in writing."
(4) from "Mary or Marie: Some Versions of his Version", Clark
Coolidge, EXACT CHANGE YEARBOOK #1, Carcanet, 1995, p.314.
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