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The Crux of Rimbaud's Poetics
by Eric Mader-Lin
[Unfortunately all diacritical marks have been effaced in this online
version.]
Arthur
Rimbaud--the meaning of Arthur Rimbaud's work--has periodically haunted me
since I first read him in translation at age 16. Around a year
after that first reading the following lines appeared in my high school's
literary magazine over the name Delahaye:
O, to be a mad
poet!
I want to be a mad poet!
Smear my
summer legs with blood.
Let me vomit the countryside.
I want a fat
grey catfish in my head.
There's a dozen dusty holes in my chest.
I signed this bit
of juvenilia with the name Delahaye after the friend of Rimbaud's youth Ernest
Delahaye. (N1) I too considered myself a friend of Rimbaud.
At
university, I initially took up the study of French in order to get closer to
Rimbaud and his project. I majored in Comparative Literature and eventually
finished a Masters in French. During those seven years of study, my
interests in literature moved in different directions. No longer
studying French mainly for Rimbaud's sake, I translated prose poetry from
Max Jacob's Le Cornet a des--a work I still consider to be of
unique importance--and read Flaubert and Baudelaire. For a while I thought of continuing
with French in the PhD. program, intending to do research on Rabelais (a writer
for whom Rimbaud had contempt) or another of the great writers of the late
Medieval or early Renaissance period. I didn't continue with this PhD.
Through
these years of study, I read and reread Rimbaud as well. I read into the
criticism on Rimbaud. My experience here was always the same: Rimbaud
criticism, Rimbaud's readers over the decades, had missed the essential. Though
I often got a better grasp of other writers through study of the critical writing on them, in the case of Rimbaud it was usually the opposite. I felt my understanding of his work was not changed in any significant way, and that even critics of great insight when it came to other writers' work seemed capable only of writing banalities or irrelevancies when they took up the task of reading Rimbaud. The adolescent poet from Charleville was the great literary casse-tete.
Rimbaud's
critics have generally misplaced the crux of his poetics. They’ve generally
ignored the contradiction from which all that is perilous in his work arises.
Though the recognition is general that this work constitutes a kind of
"brilliant disaster," the basis of both the disaster and the
brilliance has yet to be traced. What’s more, it is doubtful that Rimbaud himself
ever understood the contradiction that became the necessity of his writing.
Rimbaud's writing was coeval with his struggle against this contradiction.
I take it as
evident that the essential forces in Rimbaud's project had already consumed
themselves before the writing of Une Saison en enfer. The Saison
is thus a belated work in Rimbaud's career, in the sense that it
was written after the fact. I will go so far as to say that
the Saison is best considered as a work written by someone other than Rimbaud: it is no longer Rimbaud as the poet of necessity we best know him to be. The
Saison is a relatively weak collection of texts; we may consider it the
first book of Rimbaud criticism written in a biographical mode. Many such books
were to follow.
The question
of the Illuminations is more problematic. Doubtless some of the
Illuminations antedate Une Saison en enfer and are thus to be
considered part of the essential work of the poet Rimbaud. More of them,
however, are clearly belated texts written by a man whose fatigue is a symptom
of his loss of calling. Most of the Illuminations were not
written by the great poet Rimbaud, but rather by a hand that couldn't stop
writing. This is not an unprecedented occurrence in the history of literature: the hand continues to write even though the tragic necessity that once
compelled its writing has already reached its crisis and is finished. I believe
most of the Illuminations to be writing of this sort. This
isn’t a judgment based on a distaste for prose poetry--I am, in fact, greatly
interested in prose poetry--but rather on a reading of the
poems themselves in the context of Rimbaud's other work.
What can
this strict paring away of Rimbaud's oeuvre mean? My
meaning will hopefully become clear in the course of this essay. For now, I
will sum up the above remarks on the different stages of Rimbaud's writing with
an analogy. If--and this merely for the sake of illustration--we were to
consider the name Rimbaud as the title of a classical tragedy, it would be
necessary to place much of the writing ascribed to Rimbaud after Act V.
I have
posited two Rimbauds here: the poet who started writing at age 14, and the poet
who started writing with Une Saison en enfer. Two things
are curious in this regard. First, I believe the greatness of Rimbaud, his
significance for us, would be absolutely intact had the Rimbaud who started
writing the Saison never existed. The greatness and dignity of
Rimbaud the poet would perhaps be even more difficult to avoid than it is now.
Second, I believe that if we had only the texts of the Rimbaud who started
writing with the Saison--if somehow all of the texts that antedated the
Saison were lost--we would not on any account be able to trace out what
had been essential in Rimbaud's earlier work. We would know that this earlier
work existed, but we would not be able to infer its greatness: we would not be
able to reconstitute the necessity of this earlier work. This latter
observation further emphasizes what I’ve suggested above: namely, Rimbaud
himself did not fully grasp the stakes of his poetics. The later Rimbaud was a
rather weak critic of the early Rimbaud.
How
disabling, then, must have been the poet's fatigue in those later years!
To be abandoning writing, to have lost all hope in his writing, and yet to be
incapable of grasping the contradiction that both characterized that writing
and forced its "failure." But to mention here "the great fatigue
of Rimbaud" automatically puts me on guard. Such a formula makes one
susceptible of being targeted as one who is indulging in le mythe de
Rimbaud. I don't deny there is a "Rimbaud myth"--how could
it be otherwise? But I don't understand Rimbaud as being the
willful founder of this myth. Creating legends about himself was not Rimbaud's
concern. Rimbaud was not an occultist mountebank, but a young man of great faith. When this faith was dashed, his despair and fatigue were equally great.
This despair and fatigue blighted the rest of his short life.
What, then, is
the contradiction at the base of Rimbaud's project? I believe Le Bateau ivre offers the
most direct access to a perception of it, and I will eventually show it at work
in that poem. Nonetheless, to bring the contradiction more fully to light, it
is necessary to return first to Rimbaud's formulations of his poetics.
Rimbaud's
poetics is somehow tied up with alchemy. He writes eventually of an
"alchemy of the word," and one of course finds everywhere in his
poems allusions to the alchemical process. The struggle to effect an alchemy of
the word is one of the determining struggles of Rimbaud's work. But in itself
it is not the crux. Rimbaud presents his poetics, his theory of the voyant, to
his friend Paul Demeny in the now famous lettre du voyant:
Car Je est un autre. Si le cuivre s'eveille clairon, il n'y a rien de sa
faute. Cela m'est evident: j'assise a l'eclosion de ma pensee: je la regarde,
je l'ecoute: je lance un coup d'archet: la symphonie fait son remuement dans
les profondeurs, ou vient d'un bond sur la scene.
...
Le dis qu'il
faut etre voyant, se faire voyant.
Le Poete se
fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonne dereglement de tous
les sens. Toutes les formes d'amour, de souffrance, de folie; il cherche lui-m'me,
il epuise en lui tous les poisons, pour n'en garder que les quintessences.
...
Il est
charge de l'humanite, des animaux meme; il devra faire sentir, palper,
ecouter ses inventions.... Trouver une langue; --Du reste, toute parole etant
idee, le temps d'un langage universel viendra!
[For Iis another.
If brass wakes up a bugle, it is not its own doing. This is clear to me: I'm a
witness at the flowering of my own thought. I watch it and listen to it. I draw
a stroke of the bow, and the symphony makes its stir in the depths, or comes
upon the stage in a leap.
...
I say it is
necessary to be a voyant, make oneself a voyant.
The Poet
makes himself a voyant by a long, immense and rational derangement of all
the senses. All the forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches
himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences.
...
He is
responsible for humanity, for animals even. He will have to make
his inventions smelt, touched, and heard.... A language must be found. Moreover,
every word [utterance] being an idea, the time of a universal language will
come!] (N2)
Here again, cited
for the thousandth time, is that locus classicus of modern poetry, the lettre du voyant. We have encountered it so many times we finally become indifferent to
the meaning of its formulae. The first thing we always remark upon reading over
these lines is that the process of Rimbaud's poetics is quite explicit. One could "easily" become a disciple of Rimbaud by taking up this project
step by step. The very explicitness of his formulae has perhaps rendered his
poetics somewhat opaque. For what is not explicit are the implications of this
project. And we have become so used to reading mere restatements of it that we neglect to think through what these implications might be. What
is the philosophy it implies? I would say even: What is the theology implied in
Rimbaud's theory of the voyant? What would the universe need to be for
Rimbaud's project to bring forth the results he so fervently hopes it will? It
is only through questions such as these that we may approach the young poet's
thought.
Rimbaud
wanted to steal from the heart of the unknown the quintessences of words and
things. He wanted to attain the grammar, vocabulary, and alphabet of a universal
language. He was correct in recognizing that such a language could overturn the
world, and could make himself, and the poets, responsible for and to all
beings. (N3) But he was confused as to the source from which this universal
language was to come. To say that it was to come from the unknown is not
enough.
What is this
confusion? It can be stated in very clear terms. Rimbaud couldn't decide if the
quintessences of the universal language were to be received by him as the gift
of some Other or if, rather, they were to be created by him. This confusion
amounted to a fundamental contradiction in Rimbaud's thinking about the sources
of his own power. Between the two primary terms of the confusion--reception of
the quintessences from an Other; creation of the quintessences by
himself--there was in fact a third, mediating term: namely, discovery in the
scientific sense. But it is evident that for Rimbaud the poet, the Maker, this
third mediating term could not bridge the gap between the two primary terms: the
notion of discovery in fact seems to have only confused the issue.
This is to say that the processes of modern science and the particular rhetoric
of science in the nineteenth century offered no solution to Rimbaud's dilemma.
Rimbaud's was too strong a spirit to be satisfied with the solutions of
nineteenth-century scientific progressivism. Though the language of discovery was indeed
taken into Rimbaud's work more or less under the register of occultism, it
nonetheless remained convincingly "scientific" enough to constitute
for him a veneer under which the more important contradiction became harder to
read. In other words, the heady prestige of the very word discovery--once
included in Rimbaud's project--made it easier for him not to worry about the
more important bases of that project.
Rimbaud's
indecision as to the true origin of the quintessences--an indecision that
vacillated between the two poles of an Other on the one hand and his creative
self on the other--remained the determining contradiction at the heart of his
work. In order to properly place the meaning of this, we need to consider how
this contradiction relates both to the European history from which it stems and
to Rimbaud's own project as a poetic project. The poetic aspect of Rimbaud's project
is best understood through his philosophy of language.
I am aware
that I have begun using the term quintessences in a rather
eccentric manner here. I do so because I see it as the most direct way to
articulate Rimbaud's thought. This thought holds together around a philosophy
of language, and it is Rimbaud's philosophy of language that ultimately renders
my eccentric usage of the term quintessences viable. What
is Rimbaud's philosophy of language? We need to state this philosophy of
language as succinctly as possible.
Though it is
never explicitly stated, there is clearly something in Rimbaud like a doctrine
of quintessences. This doctrine has its place in a philosophy of language. As
follows:
1) Rimbaud
believes language is capable of seizing the quintessences of things.
2) This is a
potential in language that needs to be tapped.
3) The
voyant is the only one capable of tapping this potential.
4) To tap
this potential in language is to approach creating the "universal
language."
5) The
universal language is capable of transforming the world.
6) The
universal language is already somehow latent in language as potential.
7) The
voyant, as expeditor of the universal language, is a divine being.
Here, in a few
positive statements, is Rimbaud's philosophy of language. It is not, as it
stands, a necessarily magical philosophy of
language, though it does owe much to 19th century occultism. As regards this
latter, however, I do not think that Rimbaud believed in a lost Adamic language
as the Kabbalists do. His idea of the power in language was not founded on the
supposition of something precious that had been lost, but rather on the
supposition of things that were there to be found or created. These things to
be found or created would give the voyant the power to transform the world.
Rimbaud’s notion of the approach to these things was a religious one, and it
formulated itself in a kind of praxis: "one must make oneself a
voyant." Rimbaud's philosophy of language was not fundamentally magical,
but was rather what I would call dispensational.
Whence came
to the poet the quintessences that would give him his due powers? Was he their
creator or did he rather receive them as gifts from some Other? Rimbaud tells
us that "If brass wakes up a bugle, that is none of its own doing."
And yet is it not the willful activity of the would-be voyant that fashions
this bugle? If not, how then does the brass "wake up" a bugle? Who or
what had been at work while it "slept"? I know that Rimbaud uses the
metaphor of the bugle to explain being "born a poet," and that in
fact he is not speaking of waking up as a voyant. The poet is born, the voyant
is self-created. This much seems clear. And yet Rimbaud's metaphor of the bugle
is characteristic in that it plays the powers of an Other against the powers of
the self that is "created." This va-et-vient between the
two poles leads directly to the basic contradiction. The famous "Je est un
autre" is of importance here as a formula seemingly uniting the two terms
of the contradiction by means of the strongest of verbs: the verb to be. "The I
is another," writes Rimbaud. That it was linguistically
possible for Rimbaud to make this identity did not mean, however, that he was
on the way to overcoming the contradiction it indicated or even that he realized
this contradiction as the fundamental problem of his poetics. Rimbaud's great
faith in his project meant that he was too driven, too occupied, to step down
to the level of such realizations.
I have hinted
above that Rimbaud's project implies a theology. The term theology is
appropriate. Rimbaud is a poet whose significance becomes clearer if one
considers him in the context of western religious thought. Though not a
religious poet in the common sense of the term, Rimbaud was evidently concerned
with something like salvation. Once we admit the possibility of uniting the
name Rimbaud with Christian salvation--and this is a possibility certain to be
scorned by many of Rimbaud's enthusiastic readers--we move closer to placing
him in the intellectual and spiritual context within which and against which
his writing developed.
How is it
possible that men can be saved from the death and damnation resulting from the
Fall? The death of Christ in atonement for the sins of man makes this salvation
possible. But the question of the means by which the saving power of Christ's
death is given to individual men--and the related question of who is to receive
this saving power--became crucially important in the theological controversies
that took place in the early centuries of Christian history. Several things
need to be clarified as a basis for understanding these controversies. First,
it is necessary to understand that according to Christian thinking man's
essential relation is to God and man's essential concern--the stakes of his
life on earth--is salvation. According to Christian tradition, we are saved by
a power, a power that comes from God, and that power is called grace. Our
reception of this power only became possible with the death of Christ. The
coming, death, and resurrection of Christ inaugurated a new dispensation: the
channels of divine grace were opened up, overcoming the Fall. These were basic
elements of doctrine established by the early Church. Important questions, however, remained undecided--or at
least the formulations remained sufficiently unclear to allow for continued
debate. Can grace be earned by us
through our acts? Does more of this grace come to us as the reward of our acts?
Or is grace rather an entirely gratuitous gift from God which we can never
deserve regardless of our acts, being, as we are, irremediably fallen through
original sin? The signal importance of these questions in Western thought lies
in their implications for the understanding of man. Those who inclined toward
the former idea of grace (that grace can be earned through acts) also inclined
toward a more positive or humanistic idea of man. For such believers, man's
works have a certain value to God, and God will reward those whose works are
just with His gift of grace. Those, however, who held the latter idea of grace
(that grace cannot be earned or deserved) also tended to hold a more
pessimistic idea of man. For these
believers, a man's works can do nothing for him, for man is as nothing to the
grandeur of God. Who, after all, is man to demand payment for his works?
The most
optimistic position on this question, or at least what we might call the most
humanistic position, was taken by the British monk Pelagius (fl. 400). Pelagius
did not in fact believe in original sin. For Pelagius, we are not fallen until
we actually commit sins ourselves. Fallenness is not a given of our being as
man: it is something performed by us individually. Following the ascetic
example given by Christ, we can, according to Pelagius, avoid falling. The idea
that fallenness is not given in our state but is rather performed individually
has its counterpart in Pelagius' idea of human goodness: for our goodness, and
thus our justification before God, is also performed by us individually.
Pelagius' thinking comes together in a theology that affirms man's ability to
effect his own salvation: man achieves his own salvation through his good
works, through his adherence to the example set by Christ. This theology--and
it has taken many forms over the centuries--is called Pelagianism, and it is
one of the arch-heresies.
Augustine
disagreed with Pelagius on nearly all these points. For Augustine, man could
not look to his own powers for salvation. In fact it was man's selfish looking
to himself, his selfish desire to eat of the forbidden fruit, that caused his
fall in the first place. How then shall he look to himself for salvation? The
Fall is of course the origin referred to in original sin, and Augustine helped
formulate the Church's understanding of original sin. We are born into original
sin, which is to say: we are congenitally unable to turn our gaze to God and
away from ourselves. But since God is the ground of being, our gaze turns away
from God only to see nothingness. Original sin is thus man's fall into
nothingness. Physical decay and death are only the most tangible forms of this
nothingness: all the evil and degradation we suffer on this earth arise from it
as well. Salvation from this nothingness can only come with man's being lifted
up into the plenitude of the Being in which he is truly grounded. But how can
this being lifted up come about through man's efforts? How, in short, can
salvation be accomplished by a creature that has fallen into nothing and is as
if irremediably blinded to the ground of his own being? For Augustine, it
can’t. It is only God's own will that is strong enough to lift man out of
nothingness. God's saving grace is the reality of this will, and grace can be
neither deserved nor earned, but is rather a gift. Augustine's
position on this question defined the orthodox position of the Church against
what was henceforth rejected as the Pelagian heresy.
Augustine is
clearly more pessimistic than Pelagius as regards the question of man's powers
in relation to the divine. Even more pessimistic than Augustine, however, were
the thinkers that adhered to Gnosticism. But we needn't consider Gnosticism
here. The important point is that Augustine and Pelagius between them defined
the two poles of the West's understanding of the spiritual powers of man in
relation to the spiritual powers of God. Either salvation is to be effected by
an individual's own will, by his own powers, or it is to be wholly a gift from
God, a gift in relation to which man can only wait and pray.
To say that
Pelagius and Augustine defined the two poles of Western theology is to hint
that the problem of their controversy was never really resolved. This is in
fact the case. In the Reformation the controversy became important again, with
the Protestants representing an Augustinian reaction against a Church that had
begun to put, they felt, too much value both on individual works and on its own
role in the dispensation of grace. But even long before the Reformation the
same issues were raised in different religious controversies. The Cathar
movement that sprang up in southern Europe in the eleventh century represented
a flourishing of something like Gnosticism or Manichaeism and thus promulgated
a theology even more pessimistic than Augustine's. And after the Reformation,
the Enlightenment, particularly with its spiritualized ideas of the Progress of
Man, represented an anti-Augustinian reaction in favor of what could be
considered a kind of secularized Pelagianism. In Enlightenment thought
salvation is recast as historical salvation: the promised Paradise is a future
society in which man will live in peace and equality. The important thing to
recognize in these different historical conflicts is that the West's thinking
about the being of man is a thinking inscribed across the controversy between
Augustine and Pelagius. It is thus a question here of one of the ontological
grounds of Western spiritual life.
The poet
Rimbaud has a singular place in relation to these questions, one I am undertaking
here to define. For Rimbaud incarnated this theological controversy in an
unprecedented way. Not a representative of one of its poles, he rather embodied
the controversy as such. This was possible because of Rimbaud's great and
paradoxical faith and because he was on the verge of a theology entirely new.
That he didn't think of himself as a theology student matters little. He was
evidently a spiritual being with pressing--very pressing--spiritual concerns,
and such is in fact the basis of all significant theology. The theological
controversy sketched above is the background of the contradiction at the base
of Rimbaud's project. Rimbaud’s is a specifically theological problem.
Rimbaud was
a poet writing in a theocentric universe. He nonetheless could not decide where
divinity resided. Was he himself God? The answer was Yes. Was God a
transcendent Other? The answer was also Yes. This double affirmation would seem
to make Rimbaud a mystic: a mystic of a particularly heretical, though not
unprecedented sort. And yet Rimbaud was not really a mystic, for he was not
content with a mystic unity with the Godhead, or at least not if this unity was
to be understood as in any sense quiescent or static. Neither was he looking
for a grace assuring his personal afterlife in Heaven. Rather, Rimbaud’s
imperious desire to change the world led him to the Divinity as the source from
which the quintessences were to be received, the quintessences here being the
key to a transformative power. And yet, as I've indicated, the question of
whether these quintessences were to be received or somehow created was not
definitively decided. The poet's work thus arose on the basis of a vacillation
between these two poles.
In his
idiosyncratic manner, then, Rimbaud incarnated a permanently unresolved
contradiction in Western thought. And he was a strong enough spirit not to seek
to resolve it himself. What is meant by this? Just the following: Rimbaud had
such faith in his calling and in his method that he did not feel the need to
seek a resolution. Indeed, he did not seem to recognize the contradiction as a
problem. That the crux of Rimbaud's greatness is an unresolved contradiction
should not really be understood as an oddity, however. After all, Shakespeare's
Hamlet, the greatest of our modern dramas, gives us the tragedy of a
prince whose tragic flaw seems equally his incapacity to resolve a
contradiction. The character Hamlet and the man Rimbaud share such incapacity
even as they share a prodigious gift for intellectualizing. Rimbaud differs
from Hamlet in that Rimbaud believed he had a divine work to undertake: he had
a divine calling. Hamlet had no such calling. Or rather, Hamlet's calling, if
we should call it that, was merely spectral and gruesome, the grudge of a dead
father. Fuller being is not to be attained on such grounds, if fuller being can
ever be attained through vengeance.
I have
indicated that the singularity of the contradiction in Rimbaud's project is its
theological character. Yet there’s another contradiction that might be
mentioned here, because it is both relevant to Rimbaud's project and to poetry
in general. It is in fact that old aporia at the roots of Western poetic
thinking, one that Rimbaud necessarily inherited with his literary education.
Simply put: Does the poet receive his verses from the Muses--i.e., by divine
inspiration--or is he rather an artificer who fashions these verses himself
through his own mastery of the techniques of poetry? This problem will be seen
to parallel the theological one, and in fact this one, like the other, is never
definitively resolved. Poets and thinkers of the classical world asserted that
the poet and his work could be understood in both manners, and there have of
course been many formulations in favor of one or the other side. The two camps
go on debating well into the nineteenth century, finally rallying under
Classicism and Romanticism respectively. In terms of his literary learning,
Rimbaud was of course part of the culture of this debate. But we can guess that
he himself, during the period of his project, would not be likely to seek a
theoretical resolution of such a debate. The poetic contradiction, to the
extent it was perceived in a literary-artistic register, would necessarily seem
of less pressing concern to him than what I am calling the theological one. In
other words, why would he bother to turn his head in its direction? Rimbaud's
work was going to transform the world, after all. His was a different register. These latter poetic debates,
in his eyes, were the stuff of versifiers. They did not concern the
voyant.
I have
always read Le Bateau ivre as the poem that most obviously
figures forth the stakes of Rimbaud's work. It was in this poem more than
anywhere else that the poet came closest to actually banging his head against
his own fundamental indecision. Thus there has always been a certain pathos
surrounding this poem for me. For it was here that the young Rimbaud could have
grasped the basic gestures of his quest: it was here that he could have read
the contradiction that determined his eventual "failure."
That which
is most basic and evident in this poem is also that which is most
revealing. What happens in Le
Bateau ivre? In the form of a
boat, the poet figures his own movement toward the status of voyant. The boat
of the poem is simultaneously a metaphor of the poet and a personification of a
boat. Inanimate, the boat is thus passive, but it is simultaneously active in
its function as metaphor for the poet. Ostensibly set adrift, does the boat
suffer the sea as a vast and sublime force, or does it rather orchestrate the
sea through its own powers? Are the glorious visions it undergoes impressed
upon it by the forces of otherness, or are they rather created out of bits of
flotsam and jetsam? It is impossible to decide. The drunken boat is both object
and subject of its own poetic derangement.
Just as
Rimbaud's theory of the voyant projects an attack on the integrity of the self,
so does Le Bateau ivre begin with the massacre of the haulers who guide
the boat:
Comme je
descendais des Fleuves impassibles,
Je ne me sentis plus guide par les haleurs:
Des Peaux-Rouges criards les avaient pris pour cibles,
Les ayant cloues nus aux poteaux de couleurs.
[As I was
going down impassible Rivers,
I no longer felt myself guided by haulers!
Yelping redskins had taken them as targets,
And had nailed them naked to colored stakes.]
The boat speaks
as an "I." It is clear that before the action of the poem, the boat
had felt itself "guided by haulers." The construction is in the passive
voice, and the image is one of perfect passivity. The peaceful state of being
guided by the haulers--of being, in the Christian metaphor, one of the
flock--is broken by the attack of screaming redskins. The redskins constitute a
furiously active force invoking both the extreme otherness of a totemic culture
and all the Romantic depictions of the primitive vigor of native Americans. The
haulers are no match for such vigor. They are "nailed naked to colored
stakes" in an image that evokes American Indian sacrificial rites as well
as the Crucifixion. We may also justifiably read the story of the haulers as a
kind of allegorization of the process of "derangement of the senses."
Presumably undergoing tortures at the hands of their captors, the haulers are
properly deregles.
In the
second strophe, the boat admits that it had always been "insoucieux de
tous les equipages [indifferent to all crews]." The massacre of the crew
thus represented a desired liberation in that it set the boat adrift: no longer
a carrier of merchandise, the boat is to be carried off by the Rivers:
"Les Fleuves m'ont laisse descendre ou je voulais [The Rivers let me go
where I wanted]." Consider the verbs here: the boat is without crew, thus
technically a shipwreck, but the Rivers let it go where it wants. The poet
didn't write: "The Rivers transported me to the unknown" or "The
Rivers carried me where they would." The verbs imply rather
an active will on the part of the boat; and this active will contrasts with the
passive image of a boat without a guide. The boat's willful activity will only
increase up until the twelfth strophe.
In the third
strophe, we read that the boat "runs":
Dans les
clapotements furieux des marees,
Moi, l'autre hiver, plus sourd que les cerveaux d'enfants,
Je courus! Et les Peninsules demarrees
N'ont pas subi tohu-bohus plus triomphants.
[Into the
furious lashing of the tides,
More heedless than children's brains, the other winter
I ran! And loosened peninsulas
Have not undergone a more triumphant hubbub.]
There is an
unavoidable contrast here between the active verb courir (run) and the passivity of the participle subi (from the verb submit, or undergo). But does the last verse of this strophe really imply a passive state
on the part of the drunken boat? We must remark that the boat undergoes "triumphant hubbubs." Thus in the context of a grammatically passive voice
the potential of active force is reconquered through the adjective triumphant. It is as if the "I" of the poem boasts of having suffered a glorious
thrashing. Rimbaud's boat must be simultaneously beaten
and triumphant: object of force and subject of the same force.
In the
fourth strophe, the boat tells that it "danced on the waves"--an
active verb of personification--but in the fifth strophe we read that the boat
lost its last tools of rational navigation: its rudder and grappling hook.
The sixth
strophe continues the contradictory shifting between active and passive voice
in the words devorant and infuse. It is
interesting that both words can be understood to refer either to the je or to le
Poeme de la Mer: either the je is infused with stars (as I would
guess) or the Poeme de la Mer is infused with stars; either the je
devours the green azure or the Poeme de la Mer does. Ascription
here is grammatically undecidable. Does this indecidability suggest an identity
between the "I" and the "Poem of the Sea"? If it does, it
reinforces a reading of the poem hinted at above: the Sea in Le Bateau ivre can be
understood either as a sublime force of otherness or as a force orchestrated by
the "I." Does the latter possibility undermine the Sea's sublimity?
Everything I've stressed in this essay indicates that such a question is
unanswerable in the universe of Rimbaud's project.
Naming the
Poem of the Sea, the sixth strophe also witnesses the first unfolding of the
delirious images to follow. The delirious activity of the boat opens onto a
visionary activity as the merely human je of the personification sinks
away in the form of a pensive drowned man. Is this visionary activity truly
active or is it rather passive? It seems it would be somehow other than either
of these categories, yet just how it is other is not discernible in the poem.
Perhaps the following offers a clue: in the eighth strophe, the verb savoir is
introduced: the boat knows. Knowing is somehow neither active
nor passive. This knowledge, however, gives over into a series of things seen
rather than into the creative act of God. Perhaps the knowledge suggests the
imaginations of a creator God just before the act of creation: for the things
seen are certainly creatures from a menagerie as yet uncreated; they are
creatures of fantasy:
J'ai heurte,
savez-vous, d'incroyables Florides
Melant aux fleurs des yeux de pantheres a peux
D'hommes!
[I struck
against, you know, unbelievable Floridas
Mingling with flowers panthers' eyes and human
Skin!]
The verb savoir
is the apogee of this poem. It represents a
potential that needs to be activated. But the movement from the verb savoir to the verb voir--effected across the
paradoxical line "Et j'ai vu quelquefois ce que l'homme a cru voir! [And
at times I have seen what man thought he saw!]"--represents a stepping
back down rather than another step up in Rimbaud's project. How, after all, does
the potential of knowledge become active? The strophes following the verb savoir
demonstrate an attempt to realize the potential
of the verb through other verbs: "J'ai vu..."; "J'ai
reve..."; "J'ai suivi..."; "J'ai heurte..."; and then
again: "J'ai vu...." In the fifteenth strophe we witness the first
recognition of the failure of this anaphoric series of attempts: "J'aurais
voulu montrer... [I should have liked to show...]." This is no longer the
triumphant voice of one moving upward. Certain of the project's goals have been
reached, others have not.
The boat's
visionary quest has unmoored it not only from the mercantile world, but from
the world of created things. It is likewise obvious, beginning with the sixth
strophe, that this visionary quest has unmoored it from the surface of the sea:
the sea and the sky become indistinguishable in a series of movements where up
and down no longer have meaning. Whether or not this constitutes a kind of
primal Chaos--a return to the time before the Deity established the firmament
between the waters above and the waters below (Gen: 1:6)--is uncertain. The Old
Testament is elsewhere present in Rimbaud's Poem of the Sea in the thirteenth
strophe, where we find a Leviathan rotting. What is certain is that the boat's
visionary quest remains grounded in the visionary: the boat
never attains to the status of one who might reestablish the firmament by
saying the words of the universal language: "Let there be...." The
possibility of this saying is explicitly deferred to the future through
recourse to the language of alchemy. The first unmistakable reference to
alchemy comes in the fifteenth strophe with: "J'aurais voulu montrer aux
enfants ces dorades / Du flot bleu, ces poissons d'or, ces poissons chantants.
[I should have liked to show children those sunfish / Of the blue wave, the
fish of gold, the singing fish.]" The poet would have liked to be the one
to bring this gold to others. The first reference to alchemy thus hints at an
initial failure. In the twenty-second strophe, this failure becomes a deferral
of the Work to the future. The "fish of gold"--once swimming in the
relative proximity of the blue wave--are now felt to be a million golden birds
as yet unseen: "Est-ce en ces nuits sans fonds que tu dors et t'exiles, /
Million d'oiseaux d'or, O future Vigueur? [Is it in these bottomless nights
that you sleep and exile yourself, / Million golden birds, O future
Vigor?]" The divine Vigor, the true goal of Rimbaud's project, is not yet
attainable, but is somehow understood to be in exile.
I have
undertaken a more complete reading of this poem than was perhaps necessary for
my purposes. It is the first six strophes, which allegorize the contradiction
at the base of Rimbaud's project, that are of most concern here. For in those first
six strophes we encounter most clearly the contrast between the boat as subject
of its movement and the boat as object of its movement. This rhetorical
indecidability figures Rimbaud's indecidability in relation to the divine
source of his powers. The poet’s dilemma becomes legible as a rhetorical
movement back and forth, a va-et-vient that becomes impossibly
dizzying and that is thus partially responsible for the step into the visionary
universe of the central strophes of the poem. This visionary universe is
pre-active: it is the Chaos from which the Work must spring.
I have
suggested both that the verb savoir is the apogee of the poem and that
the central strophes can be understood as the imaginations of a Deity about to
create. The central strophes bring forth the fabulous creatures of fantasy. But
fantasy as an activity is necessarily less powerful than divine knowing. For
divine knowing is the root of being. Divine knowledge need only be spoken to
become creatures. Thus the movement from the verb savoir to the
strophes of fantasy can only be a stepping back. It was in the verb savoir that
Rimbaud could have moved closer to his goal. For fantasy only becomes knowledge
with the actual external being of fantasy's objects. Thus it is only the Deity
whose fantasy becomes knowledge through the will implied in the "Let there
be...." This is to say, ultimately, that fantasy is a less than divine
activity: for the fantasies of God would be so easily turned into realities
that they wouldn't properly be fantasies. The voyant hasn't yet the vigor of
such a will: he creates in the realm of fantasy: how his fantasies become
realities is as yet problematic: it is a matter of divine Vigor.
But Rimbaud
had a prodigious faith both in his calling and in his method. This means there
was an immediate importance to his every word, his every act. Rimbaud's words
were uttered on a world stage about to reveal itself as such. The spiritual
economy of the contradiction--of the back and forth movement between the
activity of a Creator and the passivity of a creature--handed the poet over to
a visionary universe in which objects of fantasy were always on the verge of
spilling over into reality. For the voyant who is not certain at what moment he
will become actually divine is likewise uncertain as to the status of his
poetic creations. His is a solipsistic universe that is expected at some point
to become no longer so.
The latter
remarks are true as descriptions of the working of faith in Rimbaud's project.
Nonetheless, they overstate the case. As I've indicated above, I don't think it
likely that Rimbaud actually believed in a magical potential in language. He
did not believe language could bring forth objects ex nihilo. This means
that the remarks in the previous paragraph are true in an allegorical rather
than a literal sense. They are after all remarks written under the aegis of a
poem that figures forth the poet's progress toward his goal. But if these
remarks are not literally true, what, then, is the divine functioning of the voyant's
universal language? For if it is not expected to transform the world
immediately as would a magical formula, how is it to transform the world?
I think the
answer to this question can be found in the lettre du voyant. There we
learn that the universal language necessarily functions on the basis of the
participation of others. The poet's task, according to Rimbaud, is to be a
"multiplier of progress." If the universal language is universal in
its power to seize upon the quintessences of things, it is also universal in
its power to seize upon the will of men. The universal language will be known
as such in that it will speak the words of a new dispensation: it will receive
(or create) and then speak words of such compelling power that they will
immediately be felt to be the words of a new Law of relations between men and
things. This is what I mean by Rimbaud's dispensational thinking. Rimbaud
imagines the power of this new language in the following lines from the lettre
du voyant:
Cette langue sera
de l'ame pour l'ame, resumant tout, parfums, sons, couleurs, de la pensee
accrochant la pensee et tirant.... Enormite devenant norme, absorbee par tous,
[le poete] sera vraiment un multiplicateur de progres!
[This
language will be of the soul for the soul, containing everything, smells,
sounds, colors, thought holding on to thought and pulling.... Enormity becoming
normal, absorbed by all, [the poet] would really be a multiplier of
progress!]
Here it is not a
question of the power of language to transform things immediately, but rather a
question of the power of language to transform men's relations to things. In
line with both Western religious tradition and the progressive thought of his
century, Rimbaud knew that a transformation of the world meant first of all a
transformation of men. Parting ways with his century, however, he understood
that the keys to the transformation of man were hidden away somewhere in the
Divine.
The
existence of the Deity is not in doubt in Rimbaud's universe. And there is no
question in Rimbaud of polytheism. Rimbaud's is an essentially monotheist
ethos. This is not to say, however, that the poet was a Christian by
default--as if we could say Rimbaud was a Christian by his mere fulminating
against his Christian milieu; or that he was a Christian by his unavoidable
intellectual and cultural inscription in Christian civilization. These latter
factors are of enormous importance in defining Rimbaud, but finally we must
recognize that Rimbaud's thought made significant breaks with Christian
thinking. Rimbaud would found a new religious dispensation in which the very
being of the Deity was shared by the voyant. The radical hubris of such a
theology needs to be recognized. It is not merely a matter of inspiration or of
possession, but rather a matter of "being of one substance with the
Father." In the Christian dispensation, it is the Son who is of one
substance with the Father. In the Rimbaldian dispensation, it is the Voyant.
But does the Voyant suffer for the sins of mankind? There is something of this
in the Rimbaldian asceticism. What else could be the meaning of Rimbaud's
assertion that the poet is to become "responsible for humanity, for animals
even"? It is the suffering of the Voyant, the rack of
tortures, that allows him to receive/create the universal language that will
transform (redeem) the world.
Unlike the
mystic under the Christian dispensation, the voyant under the Rimbaldian
dispensation does not seek an ecstatic union with God in the sense of a
being-gathered-up in a loving embrace that redeems his sinful state and the
incompleteness or fallenness of the historical world. The voyant cannot be
merely the recipient of such gifts of love. It is rather the case that the
voyant seeks a union with God in the sense of sharing in the divine power of
creation and redemption. Born a poet, he must make himself a voyant. This
self-recreating through ascesis raises the poet to the powers of the Father.
The poet actually attains to the capacity of creating the world. What can this
mean? In Rimbaud's sense, this can only mean transforming the world,
or recreating it.
Though I
will not here go into the reasons why I think this is so, I would say the
doctrine of creation ex nihilo does not seem apposite to Rimbaud's
thinking. At least it is a problematic doctrine in the Rimbaldian dispensation.
I would say that for Rimbaud there is no being higher than the Father, but that
the Father is to a great extent something like the Demiurge of Gnostic
thinking. There would be no Satan in Rimbaud's dispensation because all satanic
qualities would necessarily be embodied in his uncanny Creator God.
I have here
made explicit the theology I think is implicit in Rimbaud's project. All of
this would be well for that project, except for two things. The first is that
Rimbaud does not consistently stick with this theology, but rather depends on
the Christian theology as well: redemption, vision, the quintessences are to be
a gift from some Other. For the quintessences are always already there in the
form of something like the Platonic Ideas. How is one to create them? They
rather come to one as vision. This is the contradiction again. The poet may
"[squeeze] his dazzled eyes to make visions come," but the vision is
essentially something that comes or that is received. And the quest to receive
vision is not an activity of the same grandeur as the creation of the world
through speech. ("And God said, 'Let there be light!' and there was
light.") Thus in this respect the Voyant is not of the same order of being
as the Father. For one cannot imagine God the Father undertaking an ascetic
quest for visions. God may sacrifice Himself out of love for man, but God does
not sacrifice himself in order to receive visions. How then is the Voyant of
one substance with the Father?
The second
reason the dispensation sketched above does not bring Rimbaud's project to
fruition is the following: Rimbaud did not in fact attain to the universal
language; he did not in fact transform the world. (N4) The movement of
Rimbaud's project necessarily reached its crisis when he realized the
historical world was not being transformed; he was in fact hardly gaining
followers. Rimbaud the man was becoming physically and mentally exhausted, and
even if his preternatural literary ability remained intact--and this is
questionable--his faith was limited. He perhaps felt by 1873 that his best work
was behind him, and that it had accomplished nothing but the texts themselves.
Obviously texts themselves were an insufficient achievement for a man with
goals like his. Perhaps his faith in his vision was in some respect lacking.
Faith can move mountains, we are told. But Rimbaud could not move the people of
Paris; he was not recognized and hailed by those who would have been most
likely to hear the necessity behind his words. How could this be?
Before we
conclude Rimbaud's faith was lacking, we must take into account the following:
it is one thing to have great faith in God--a faith that endures through all
one's own failures and the failures of the world--and quite another to have
great faith in God when one believes the substance of that God is shared by
oneself. For in the latter case, one must oneself live up to the attributes of
God. If or when one doesn't, one's faith is necessarily dashed. It is this
dashed faith that led Rimbaud to abandon his project. By the time of Une
Saison en enfer, it is clear that Rimbaud had already passed over to an
acceptance of the world untransformed.
I will
repeat that Rimbaud did not abandon writing simultaneously with the abandonment
of his project, but instead allowed his hand to continue with its automatic
writing. But automatic writing--that activity soon to be made
"revolutionary" by the Surrealists and psychoanalysis--what is this
next to the faith of the other Rimbaud, the Rimbaud of 1871? Of course Rimbaud
was not a theorist of automatic writing in the surrealist sense. But I believe
it is significant that nothing of the nineteenth century so resembles the
Surrealists' work as certain of the Illuminations. Whereas the
Surrealists raised such writing as a banner, I believe Rimbaud knew it for what
it was: a writing of despair and hopelessness; a writing beyond the end of
writing; a merely automatic writing. The hard polish of these
prose gems does not put them on a par with Rimbaud's earlier work. For their
hard polish is their main virtue: it is almost all they are. Rimbaud had
obviously become truly and finally a spectator of the workings of his own mind:
merely a spectator. He composed these workings into a series of little theater
pieces, each separate from the other. Some of the Illuminations I would
exempt from this judgment. Some of them, we know, were written before Une
Saison en enfer.
Over the
past several decades there has been a critical effort to
"demythologize" Rimbaud. We are reminded by critics that not all of
Rimbaud's ideas were new for his time: he borrowed much from Romanticism and
from messianic progressivism; he borrowed language from nineteenth-century
occultism. The point these critics try to make is that much of Rimbaud's
thought, and many of his themes, were already there before him: he needed only
take them up. I think this approach is fundamentally misguided, and that it
represents mainly a desire on the part of criticism to reduce Rimbaud to the
status of a literary figure who can be dealt with in historical art-critical
terms. At the same time, we are told by these critics to read the poems not as
earnest attempts at transforming reality, not as the traces of an essentially
spiritual quest, but rather "for what they are": that is to say, we
are to read them as poems: documents in a literary history
whose main interest lies in their having been influential on later literary
figures. The earnestness of Rimbaud's project becomes of secondary importance
to what European poetry became because of his revolutionary literary
innovations. Thus the demythologizers focus on what came before Rimbaud and
what came after Rimbaud because they do not want to concern themselves with the
thornier issue of the significance of Rimbaud. Or rather the significance of
Rimbaud, to the extent it is found in his writing itself, becomes synonymous
with a rhetorical-poetic study of his technical virtuosity in relation to his
literary forebears, on the one hand, and his literary progeny on the other. Of
course Rimbaud's writing, at the technical level, is of the greatest interest;
his writing, at the technical level, is a crucial element in his project. But
to say this is also to say that I cannot separate "the poems themselves"
from what I know to be the singularity of Rimbaud's spiritual make-up. I do not
think the poems themselves would be there at all were it not for Rimbaud's
spiritual quest. I can cite as evidence of this the fact that once Rimbaud's
spiritual quest had reached its crisis, there was no more poetry to come. There
is no poetry from the thirty-year-old Arthur Rimbaud because by then his faith
had long since run out: his faith was so far in the past that he didn't even
have the desire to write illuminations any longer. And as far as the
question of what themes and ideas Rimbaud borrowed from his contemporaries--the
occultism; the progressivism; the Romantic Satanism--I don't as a reader and
student of literature need any reminder of this from the critics. In other words,
Rimbaud's singularity remains intact. The point is not what he borrowed from
the generation before his, but rather what he managed to fuse these diverse
borrowings into at the age of sixteen.
In an early
essay on Rimbaud, Maurice Blanchot wonders if there is anyone "who will
ever prove to us that the lettre du voyant was more
than an adolescent dream." (N5) Of course the lettre du voyant is an
adolescent dream. And so what? The point is that Rimbaud's project is an
adolescent dream on the part of an adolescent of supreme intellectual and
poetic powers, an adolescent, moreover, who incarnated in himself the most
problematic aspects of the religious experience of Europe. Rimbaud made the
spiritual struggle of Europe his own, and he rewrote that struggle according to
his own grandiose perception of his calling and his powers. As an adolescent
dream, Rimbaud's project embodied a necessity that raised it to a level
unattainable by the literati. This is why for so long we have been such weak
readers of Rimbaud and his significance. We’ve sensed something there, yet
couldn't put our finger on it. We begin to suspect it’s all just theater: the
enticements of a very gifted mountebank. We ignore the works for a time; and
then, when we return to them, we sense again something essential, something not
explained by mere virtuosity. What can that something be? Rimbaud began a
project that remains unfinished. The basic lines of his understanding of the
necessity of the poet and the poet's language must be traced in the light of
the theological contradiction from which they stem. Though every individual
word I speak or write may have been spoken or written a million times before
me, this does not prevent me from receiving or creating in some novel
combination of these words a universal language capable of overturning the
world.
--------------
NOTES
1. A
"friend of Rimbaud's youth"? This is perhaps redundant. Were not all
Rimbaud's friends friends of his youth?
2. I have modified
the translation by Wallace Fowlie. Below I will use his translation,
unmodified, of Le Bateau ivre.
3. The
assumption of the possibility of a universal language in Rimbaud's sense does
not necessarily presume an understanding of words as symbols somehow positively
holding their meaning. I do not think Rimbaud believed there are hidden
syllables which, once uttered, would somehow magically transform reality. This
is to say that the possibility of a language capable of overturning the world
is not annulled by post-Saussurean linguistics. One need only consider, by
analogy, how much of the world Marxism overturned in order to verify the fact
of language's potential.
4. Though
perhaps he came close. How shall we know?
5. Cf.
"The Sleep of Rimbaud" in Maurice Blanchot: The Work of Fire, tr.
Charlotte Mandell, Stanford University Press: 1995.
---------
*** A NEW LIFE OF RIMBAUD ***
Hats off to Graham Robb for giving us the definitive biography of
Arthur Rimbaud. Robb has woven much well-balanced scholarship into a hard-edged
narrative of the poet's life. As an example of the biographer's art, the work
is a marvel of concision: in over 500 pages, one finds barely a paragraph off
track.
Check
out this book at Amazon.com.
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Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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This page is at http://www.necessaryprose.com/
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