Rhetorics of transformation in Rimbaud's Illuminations.

Kerr, Greg (2010) Rhetorics of transformation in Rimbaud's Illuminations. Dix-Neuf, 14 (1). pp. 20-32. ISSN 1478-7318

Abstract

This article considers the figure of the poet as described in the second of Rimbaud's lettres du voyant as a 'multiplicateur de progrès'. The poetic 'multiplication' to which Rimbaud refers is not intended to reflect a calculated conduct, but to suggest an uncontainable, multidirectional activity that is at variance with the uniform spatio-temporal patterns of 'Progress'. Rimbaud's Illuminations consistently reappropriate, fragment and redeploy a progressive or utopian rhetoric common to many nineteenth-century popular movements and doctrines of social reform. For Rimbaud, this rhetoric of social transformation holds a peculiar potential to solicit an economy of residual energies and the latent forces of the collectivity. It thus serves an important constitutive function in the Rimbaldian prose poem, projecting a highly suggestive vision of physical and social interaction and a miscellany of slogans, catchwords and images of social harmony that Rimbaud fragments and redeploys to catalyze the processes of imaginative ferment.