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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