Couple of comments on Robin's highly interesting examination of Rimbaud's city
writing.

At the time of the Orgie, it was no longer true to say that "Paris", in the
sense of Commune, was the entity it had been, tremulously, for a few weeks
following March 26 (or March 18, really). At the beginning of May, before the
Versailles troops finally invaded the gates, electoral support for the Commune
had largely fled and its central councils had been forced to gerrymander
districts and change the electoral rules in order to get enough
representation. After the bloody week at the end of May, what did give the
city a "unity" of the kind a poet might see was its suffering, the bodies
literally buried in public streets, the memories of the central fires still
hot. Surely the grandeur and tragedy of the event partly explains Rimbaud's
view of the city as a "whole", as much as any more socialistic sense of a city
made into a communality for a couple of months. Granted the interest of
Robin's analysis, the light of a little more hellfire might need to play
across it!

Robin's comments on the Illuminations seem just and accurate. The Commune had
been virtually obliterated; the embourgeoisement of Paris was beginning to
recover its momentum; the right wing was in charge of the assembly. Most of
France had a sense of a terrible danger averted.

In addition to any "maturing" and change of consciousness in Rimbaud, there
was, simply, a different subject matter for poetry.

France did not quite have yet that kind of factory life which would produce a
full proletariat in the Marxist sense -- that was a decade or so off. But
industrial pollution was certainly a topic: for example, even as a young
doctor the future WWI premier, Clemenceau, had attacked the use of white lead
in paint factories.

Verlaine, of course, played a very minor bureaucratic role during the Commune
-- safely hidden. But he had married the daughter of the prominent Montmartre
educationist, de Fleurville, who in a few months time was to take his career
in both hands by writing a letter defending his fellow-teacher, the "red
virgin" Louise Michel before the military tribunals. Louise was at Verlaine's
wedding, it seems.

In fact, Verlaine appears as a much more sympathetic literary figure at this
time than the likes of Flaubert or Gauthier or Edmond Goncourt, to mention but
three, who were not slow to rant and rave as fiercely as any other bourgeois
at the communards as they underwent their final tribulations. What did
Rimbaud actually do? Perhaps we may forgive his "Orgy" as the work of a young
man, but the attitude in it is vampiric: feeding off the blood of arbitrary
street executions.

Well . . . it seems it's "Trash Rimbaud" time. Not sure I want to do that
very thoroughly, not at this stage of his life.

Doug


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