What did Rimbaud mean by dérèglement of the senses? Trouble ahead, for one thing, as he intends to deregulate language:
“He does go on to speak of the unknown (l’inconnu), objective poetry’s aim, which can only be attained by the ‘systematic disordering of all the senses‘ (his italics)” (Sorrell, xvii).
And not just language, but in an iconic spirit of rebel without a cause, to untangle from his life predicament: family, school, country and war, literary ambition, expectations – but relatively quickly then even his newly chosen lifestyle, as he heads out for the territory, leaving any predicaments for others to unravel.
But in one meaning, his derangement of the senses is not difficult to understand, and gives the reader an assist to unusually difficult writing. Sorrell provides a few clues in his Introduction to the collected poems:
“In synaesthesia an effect normally received through one of the senses is experienced directly through another. Thus, in Baudelaire’s sonnet perfumes sound as soft as oboes” (XX).
But in my copy of Baudelaire’s “The Flowers of Evil,” Richard Wilbur translates the line in question, from the poem titled “Correspondences,” as follows:
“Perfumes there are as sweet as the oboe’s sound” (12)
The perfumes don’t make sound, literally, and don’t directly sound like oboes; perfumes smell sweet, and that sweetness is compared to the soft sound of an oboe. But can we smell sweetness? The perfumes are also
“Green as the prairies, fresh as a child’s caress”
Baudelaire’s poem relies on a poetic device, metaphor, nothing new there. We might say: The grapes were as plump as purple; or, my eyes drank a sour finish as I watched the falling leaves through a broken window; or, I heard summer leaving as the night filled my eyes with silence.
In Baudelaire’s poem, taste relies on smell, and smell doesn’t function as well if taste is lost. Without smell or taste, the brain tries to find some other way to experience the missing sensation. Victims of the Covid virus might understand this from the experience, the strangeness, of losing one sense but not the other. Metaphor becomes a compensation for something lost in translation.
And the Baudelaire poem points to McLuhan’s idea of a sensorium, any one sense not dominated by any of the others:
“Like dwindling echoes gathered far away
Into a deep and thronging unison
Huge as the night or as the light of day,
All scents and sounds and colors meet as one.”
And what does McLuhan say? From Chapter 9, “The Written Word: An Eye for an Ear” in “Understanding Media”:
“Consciousness is regarded as the mark of a rational being, yet there is nothing lineal or sequential about the total field of awareness that exists in any moment of consciousness. Consciousness is not a verbal process” (87).
We might reread then, Rimbaud, and consider his idea of derangement, with McLuhan’s analysis of media in mind:
“The same separation of sight and sound and meaning that is peculiar to the phonetic alphabet also extends to its social and psychological effects. Literate man undergoes much separation of his imaginative, emotional, and sense life, as Rousseau (and later the Romantic poets and philosophers) proclaimed long ago (90).
It made sense then for Rimbaud to suggest the way to recover the imagination was to derange the senses.
“Today the mere mention of D. H. Lawrence will serve to recall the twentieth-century efforts made to by-pass literate man in order to recover human ‘wholeness.’ If Western literate man undergoes much dissociation of inner sensibility from his use of the alphabet, he also wins his personal freedom to dissociate himself from clan and family (McLuhan, 90).
But we hasten to remind that Rimbaud gave it all up as futile, poetry and his idea to derange language. Nevertheless, he might still sit at the head of a poet’s table (Ashbery’s, for example), even as he ended his own poetic meal with a sour finish.
“Language extends and amplifies man but it also divides his faculties. His collective consciousness or intuitive awareness is diminished by this technical extension of consciousness that is speech.
Bergson argues in Creative Evolution that even consciousness is an extension of man that dims the bliss of union in the collective unconscious. Speech acts to separate man from man, and mankind from the cosmic unconscious. As an extension or uttering (outering) of all our senses at once, language has always been held to be man’s richest art form, that which distinguishes him from the animal creation” (McLuhan, 83).
Metaphor allows for looking at one thing, an object, or some sensory effect, and seeing something different. That’s how much poetry works, anyway. And when we compare two disparate objects, we fancy we learn more about each. Still, one wonders at that “richest art form,” and whether or not it’s worth the trouble it creates (Rimbaud apparently thought not), and that’s the sour finish to this post.
“Arthur Rimbaud: Collected Poems.” Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Martin Sorrell, Oxford University Press, 2001.
“Charles Baudelaire: “The Flowers of Evil.” Selected and edited by Marthiel and Jackson Mathews (1955, 1962) – Rev. ed., New Directions (NDP684) 1989.
“Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.” Marshall McLuhan, 1964, McGraw-Hill.
The Coming of the Toads 