Paper on Arthur Rimbaud: Thoughts
How to describe the importance of Rimbaud? How does one even begin to make a layman grasp the enormity of what this kid did, (and he was a kid)? No other western author has ever done what he did, not at his age—not even Shakespeare comes close. As Toronto Star Columnist Hans Werner stated it, (rather succinctly), ("With A Season in Hell, Rimbaud virtually invented the prose poem, and the book went on inspire - among many others - the likes of Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Jim Morrison, playwright Antonin Artaud, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe"). In a list impressive but which somehow fails to even begin to list the number of prominent individuals fascinated and inspired by his inner turmoil and artistic brilliance.
The work at the epicenter of his brilliance is the vivid prose poem, A Season in Hell, a collection of prose stories and poetry detailing the inner conflicts and suffering that he underwent in that time period, driven by his fiery and scandalous, (for upper class Victorian Paris), relationship with the poet Paul Verlaine:
A Season in Hell is the record of a long and furious struggle and a tragic failure. ``Me! Who told myself I was a seer or angel, exempt from all morality, I've come down to earth, to look for a duty and hang on to wrinkled reality. Peasant!'' It's Europe's-- the West's -- greatest 19th century poem, though it really belongs with those that followed it in the 20th and were enabled by it: Rilke's Duino Elegies and T.S. Eliot's Waste Land. (Peter Robb, pg. 10)
For effect the quote of Rimbaud’s self-disgust is bolded. That poem, one of his last works, forebodes one of the literary worlds greatest mysteries and biggest tragedies; that so great a poet would abandon his work at age nineteen and flee—the rest of his life spent making a bourgeois living as a trader in Africa, something which certainly brought him money and freedom if not happiness. It did not spare him however; he would die of a cancerous knee, (which he delayed operation on for a month while settling his affairs in Ethiopia).
In one of the famous pieces of A Season in Hell Rimbaud writes, ("I listen to him turn infamy into glory, cruelty into charm. ‘I belong to an ancient race: my ancestors were Norsemen: they slashed their own bodies, drank their own blood. I’ll slash my own body, I’ll tattoo myself, I want to be ugly as a Mongol; you’ll see, I’ll scream in the streets. I want to go mad with anger").
We read such brilliant statements as ("I dreamt crusades, unrecorded voyages of exploration, history-less republics, stifled wars of religion, upheavals of custom, displacement of races and of continents: I believed in all the sorceries").
They are crucial to catching the essence of Rimbaud, ("From these continuing conflicts, Rimbaud creates the strange and moving beauty of his poetry, which Marcel Raymond has described as a "Dionysian dance"." pg.1, Enid Peschel). The inner conflict is what creates the stunning transcendent beauty of his work.
But just what is this conflict? From what can such a conflict arise to tear apart an individual? It is difficult to cut to the heart of Arthur Rimbaud because his life is so mythologized, or, more recently, by biographers wishing to cut his life out dryly in black and white and explain his actions. This new group has begun completely cutting out any romantic notions of his life in heading the opposite extreme of trying to turn him into an ordinary middle class French boy seeking to establish himself in the bourgeois, (albeit obnoxious and wild in his manner).
This fascination is one of the enduring appeals of his work; even today it continues to drive research and adulation for this romantic hero, (leading one such biographer, Robbs, to sardonically remark, that if the bullet Verlaine shot him in the wrist "ever emerges, it will probably become one of the holiest relics in modern literature").
However who can be blamed for such idolization after reading such lines as ("I have withered within me all human hope. With the silent leap of a sullen beast, I have downed and strangled every joy. I have called for executioners; I want to perish chewing on their gun butts. I have called for plagues, to suffocate in sand and blood. Unhappiness has been my god." Pg. 219), the sheer power and beauty of passages which he shows again and again. ("And now I am on the beaches of Brittany....Let cities light their lamps in the evening; my daytime is done, I am leaving Europe. The air of the sea will burn my lungs; lost climates will turn my skin to leather. To swim, to pulverize the grass, to hunt" Pg. 221).
The best such description of Rimbaud’s appeal from an academic and societal level lays out, in extensive terms, how:
Nothing could be more natural than that our time should
have made Rimbaud one of its special heroes. We have been
aware of ourselves as living in -- perhaps living through -- an
age of anxiety, and identified him as typically anxious. The
heroes of our fiction have been alienated figures, and we know
that Rimbaud's alienation was deep. We have honored, above
all, those who have shown themselves capable of pronouncing
a total refusal of the world in which we have no choice but to
live, and written down Rimbaud as one of the most exemplary
of such révoltés. (Rimbaud's Poetic Practice: Image and Theme in the Major Poems, Pg.201, Frohock)
But what can lead to such suffering, how can a person feel as much as Rimbaud did in his poetry? That is what we think every time we just have to stop reading A Season in Hell and marvel at the level of anguish and brilliance and imagery that its prose contains.
They say that only the dreamer can be hurt; that he who expects nothing is never disappointed, never frustrated, and never unhappy. Rimbaud was the penultimate dreamer, his ambitions could be barely be filled by the written word:
A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessence’s. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions; he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!
Rimbaud was aflame, he desired to light up the world with his own brilliance, and elsewhere he describes himself and his goal to be a ‘seer’ and a prophet and describes poetry as the ultimate way of understanding the self and changing the self.
Therein we return to what has fascinated us for so long; how does the young poet who wrote the above passage grow into the shrew middle-aged man, (an African Arms dealer who was also fond of giving idiosyncratic Arabic sermons on the Qur’an on the streets of Addis Abba and only not killed for heresy because he was considered insane and thus killing him was reproached by the Qur’an), who would later reply, to a business colleague who suddenly made the connection that this was the same Rimbaud now afire in the Paris literary establishment and asked him about it, confused as we are today, and Rimbaud scowled and said his writings were "A bunch of hogwash."
I feel the answer lies within the statement just quoted, the destruction of the self. A Season in Hell amounts to that destruction and at the same time the brilliant transcendence that cuts right to the heart of humanity, to some unfulfilled dream that burns in the heart of every human being.
Rimbaud is a late romantic, but his work is not romantic—it veers off from them, his work is filled with a self-realization of his romanticism, drenched in a pessimism, his pain is a pain rife with disappointment and disillusionment—the world is rarely so pretty as we envision it and the cost of having a beautiful imagination is to constantly see how ugly the world really is and that is what fuels the biting disenchantment of Rimbaud’s poetry and his vile behavior, (so revolting that the Paris bohemians kicked him out).
The constant torment of such vision would inevitably drive a person to repent and flee himself, and not be tortured with images of true beauty behind every gray stone and dull green forest of the world.
Whatever happiness that Rimbaud ever discovered in life was fleeting, until finally he fled emotion all together, becoming the cold, calculating, technical businessman of his last eighteen years. There is a tragic glimpse of this in A Season in Hell, brief, fleeting, but encompassing at once all of his hopes and dreams of happiness and bittersweet disappointment and underlying depression that he as a poet could never escape, ("I used to think that we were two happy children free to wander in a Paradise of sadness" Pg. 230).
Regardless of what may have driven Arthur Rimbaud to write the testaments to human suffering—the insights of self-desire and grandeur, to achieve all that was humanly possible, to feel all that a human could feel—he was, as Henry Miller put it, ("Pure Dynamite....He restored literature to life"), and in doing so his own predictions became true, ("So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnamable"), but indeed it was not Rimbaud the man who was destroyed, (no he lived on for eighteen more wandering years), no, Rimbaud the poet was destroyed, but what a glorious and burning specter it is, his destruction, flaring through every vivid sentence and shining through every phantasmal image human turmoil within A Season in Hell; a photo of this spectacular supernova of destruction and creation.
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