My hypothesis is that, during the second half of the nineteenth century, precisely when time was asserting itself so insistently and oppressively, as is emphasised by Darwin's, Clausius's and Schopenhauer's work, space replaced time as Man's primary experience of Being-in-the-world. If Rimbaud fails in his attempt to kill time, through a kind of frantic acceleration, he will, on the other hand, be the first to capture time in space, in a poetic space made up of simultaneity and reversibility. Mallarme, then Valery and Apollinaire will make this new space, truly phenomenological, the locus where the self (the author's as well as the reader's) be able to effectuate itself, on the way to self-discovery--thus announcing the twentieth century, during which writing will largely derive its meaning from being the space where the self can literally invent itself.
