Dire « Adieu » au « Génie » Le sacré des lointains chez Rimbaud

This article seeks to scrutinize Rimbaud’s “Adieu” and “Génie” by putting the prose poems into dialogue – a dialogue also already announced or created by an editorial tradition that arbitrarily placed “Génie” at the end of Illuminations, thereby infratextually affiliating the text with Une saison en enfer’s “Adieu”. Rimbaud deploys a stylistics of parataxis here, one that allows the poet to grasp in its materiality and impose order on a mystic form of experience. Saying “Adieu” to (the) “Génie” is thus one way of articulating both humanity’s necessary separation from – and no-less necessary address to – the divine.