« Le Bateau ivre » en archipel

This article offers a cartographic interpretation of “Le Bateau ivre,” drawing on the critical category of the “archipelago” developed by Caribbean writers at the end of the 20th century. This new mapping occurs first in the rhythm of the poem’s quatrains: inventing a kind of “geo-prosody,” the poem undoes the old continental Order at the level of the alexandrine, so as to conceive of its world’s space-time in a way that is open to chaos, multiplicity, and unpredictability.